Years before my first novel, at the nascency of my original Lost Cactus comic strip, the concept of a nebulous entity pushing and pulling the levers of civilization germinated in my fertile imagination and took root, becoming the overarching force behind the fantastical comic’s backstory. Through 2 comic strip anthologies and numerous short stories, the fictional organization has evolved into the fully-realized extra-governmental powerhouse now bursting from the pages of the just-released The Golden Ellipse – Book One in the eponymous The Powers That Be Trilogy.
A seedling brainstorm takes root in my fertile imagination.
When I started developing a new comic strip set at an ultra-classified, off-the-grid desert base, I determined its rai·son d’ê·tre derived from an omnipresent entity beyond Lost Cactus permeating life throughout every corner of the world. That is what started it all. And you know what? The cascade of events out there in the so-called real world leads me to believe a clandestine group like my fictitious creation may exist. You never know until you know.
Roughly five years back, my seedling brainstorm on who or what best represented this omniscient global body considered a cunning group of movers and shakers bent on world domination—sort of my version of a Star Chamber. This dour bunch of craven bureaucrats proved a little too foreboding for a humorous, albeit dark at times, comic. Next, I toyed with the notion of an alien cabal watching over humankind’s day-to-day existence. However, a devolution into villainy of Bond-like proportions appeared inevitable, featuring undersea lairs guarded by speargun-toting frogmen or orbiting motherships piloted by requisite henchmen and women in shiny metallic suits with V-neck collars and knee-high boots. What fun, like an Austin Powers meets Luke Skywalker mash-up. Manifestations of those ideas would prove a blast to write and draw, but my Lost Cactus multiverse required more nuance and less silver lamé. After round-filing those concepts (okay, I still have them on the back burner somewhere), I greenlit a subtle and more realistic approach of a nebulous organization with a generic name: The Powers That Be.
The lowercase powers that be
The phrase powers that be is commonplace in real-world vernacular. Cast as the generic root cause of all the world’s inequities amid frustrated piques of anger while life spirals out of control: a job loss, a candidate’s defeat at the polls, a stock market drop, a sports team’s collapse, a celebrity’s sleazy shenanigans exonerated; you get the idea.
The expression also serves as a catch-all for anything beyond the purview of your average Earthbound citizen. For instance, the latest model household appliance is a technological marvel to behold (at 12-months zero interest, if your credit score meets with a computerized approval). Yet, your new machine’s complex inner workings are a mysterious tangle of wires, circuit boards, and software lying dormant, watching and waiting, until the ON button is depressed. All the while, these AI masters of espionage embedded within our homes monitor and record our daily lives. For whom do they serve? You guessed it, the lowercase powers that be.
The accelerating rise of machines may foretell humanity’s ultimate demise or herald a transhumanist future if we don’t kill ourselves in the process.
Author’s note: Apologies for swerving off-topic, but for clarity, I wanted to stipulate the conventional uses of the powers that be before closing the loop and separating that common expression from the official name of my creative construct.
Introducing The Powers That Be (PTB)
Akin to the Star Chamber mentioned earlier, but without all of the murder and backstabbing chaos, the PTB is the nucleus of my shared universe. From its Lost Cactus comics roots through graphic novels and epic sci-fi reads—PTB is the enigmatic moniker of a 300+-year-old organization of savvy individuals in league with extraterrestrial allies facilitating humanity’s advancement toward an eventual omega point.
While this long-term beneficent mission percolates through the PTB multiverse, events manifest worldwide—and in the limitless reaches beyond—from the inexplicable and extraordinary to verging on apocalyptic, threatening to undermine the human experiment. The PTB dispatches agents to meet threats before they metastasize from its underground nerve center beneath Crichton castle’s storied yet crumbling facade in the Scottish Lowlands. [2] Taciturn locals look the other way upon witnessing strange occurrences around the off-the-grid site, while the occasional tourist may get an eyeful of something unusual. And yet, while the multilevel complex serves as a virtual headquarters for the clandestine organization, the PTB’s long tentacles extend into boardrooms, parliaments, legislatures, newsrooms, and religious institutions across every continent.
Three centuries of fostering the human condition
Since the late 1700s, the PTB has acted in concert with the likes of Franklin, Edison, Tesla, Marconi, Ford, Curie, Oppenheimer, Jobs, Musk, and Hart [1] to namedrop only a few, shepherding paradigm-shifting backward-engineered advancements to an increasingly tech-obsessed society. In addition to recruiting keen intellects from science and technology, the PTB allies with historical actors like Abe Lincoln, Jack Kennedy, and John Paul II through the years. Note that 2 of these three examples succumbed to assassin’s bullets, while the third narrowly avoided his executioner’s wrath. Thus, not everyone on the planet is amenable to the PTB’s noble status as the ultimate authority shepherding humanity into the future.
Further, humankind is blind to the incredible speed at which our world is changing. The constant din of Earth-shattering upheavals intertwined with technological advancements and mind-numbing displays of human idiocracy regurgitate on a relentless 24/7 loop. At the same time, the nattering nabob ruling class drones onward like the serfdom they represent with hollow promises to fix the potholes and reduce taxes while accomplishing neither. Out of a population of near 8-billion people, a mere fraction of thinkers, tinkerers, and conspiracy-minded individuals—prove mildly curious how a device like a smartphone—found only in science fiction just a few short years ago—became ubiquitous and passé within the blink of an eye. Only next-gen iterations of these same handheld miracles appear to animate the tech-obsessed majority who choose immediate gratification while ignoring the mysterious origins of the glowing screens in the palms of their sweaty hands.
Within the PTB multiverse, they have not seen anything yet. By 2044, the year during which most of the action in The Golden Ellipse transpires, our ubiquitous physical devices have long since morphed into cutting-edge nanotech chip implants and holographic cubes speeding our race toward transhumanism. [3] The Lost Ship and The Blue Spark, the second and third books in the PTB Trilogy, follow the transhumanist thread to its inevitable conclusion and beyond.
A final thought
So the next time you find yourself in line for the trendy gadget du-jour along with seemingly everyone else within a 50-mile radius, turn to the person behind you and say, The Powers That Be is behind all of this.
Cue the slack-jawed vacant stare in reply.
The Powers That Be Trilogy
Starting with the just-released The Golden Ellipse, The Powers That Be Trilogy takes an almost cinematic approach to depict the human condition through the prism of a brave couple pulled from obscurity to join forces with the PTB and save a world teetering between a pathway to transcendence and extinction. As the trilogy moves into Books Two and Three, a sinister alliance of governments and moguls hellbent on supplanting the PTB at the top of the food chain grows more powerful and pernicious. Meanwhile, new threats from a marauding universe loom within our solar system.
References
- Julius Hart, the aeronautical wunderkind featured in the Powers That Be short story, Thundercorp No. 5.
- https://www.google.com/maps/place/Crichton+Castle/@55.8395012,-2.9913551,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x4a327d0cb4c97256!8m2!3d55.8395012!4d-2.9913551
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
