R.I.P. Bellum 9

Tonight I finished deleting an an entire central character to my science fiction novel, The Suicide Collectors. His name was Bellum 9. He was a nanobot, which is a very small robot, and he resembled a fat silver beetle. I've removed him at the suggestion of my agent and most of the New York sci-fi editors in New York. Already I can tell this is a good move for the book, makes it grittier and cooler and, somehow, more lonely. Bellum's dialogue was never easy to write and I never really mastered his voice, maybe because he truly had an alien voice being a machine, after all. But I did really like him and I've spent a long time with him and I think he at least deserves this little blog funeral.

EXCERPT ALERT:

“The Despair, I mean. Why do you think it happened? You say you’ve interviewed all these survivors, taken down their histories. If you had to do a diagnostic analysis, what would you say brought all this on? Was it the Collectors?”

Bellum blinked.

“I believe there were many factors leading to the Despair. You see, human civilization had reached a point where scientific acumen was increasingly exponentially, and as a result old ways of thinking were being rapidly stripped away. The existence of God was disproved when the spiritual region of the brain was located. The rich began engineering their children into better, faster meta-humans. Machines replaced many manual jobs, and soon multitudes of people found themselves unemployed, useless in a capitalistic society. In short, everything became strictly material. It was a gradual process, but when human beings realized their scientists were telling them they were simply matter, and that they could prove it, the last illusions of magic were sucked out of humanity’s paradigm. Unfortunately, there was nothing there to replace the magic and a vacuum arose in the collective consciousness of humankind. If you weren’t rich enough to pursue immortality, or at least the illusion of it, there was really no point in going on any longer (especially if you were poor, as many were, and could not attain even a tolerable existence in the physical realm). So many people simply gave up hope and ended their lives, perhaps hoping that their scientists were wrong after all, and that with one last desperate toss of the dice they could prove it, too.”

Norman yawned.

“That’s a pretty good theory, Bell. Why didn’t you say any of this before?”

“You never asked.”