Cipher - Planning

This is going to be something a little different. Cipher is a new series and I’ve never had a chance to talk about the planning process as I start a series, so this might be interesting. This does technically skip over the earliest stage, but Cipher has been in my head for well over a year now, so that’s complicated.

What Is Cipher?

Right now, it will be akin to a harem cyberpunk detective series. I don’t plan to do more than 3 books right now, but that’s mostly because this is a passion project.

For a lot of reasons, I don’t expect this to sell that well. Harem is a genre that largely relies on the same tropes in different settings, and this book doesn’t include a bunch of foundational tropes such as the overpowered alpha MC or some sort of power progression. At the same time, cyberpunk is kind of a disaster zone of a genre, and I’m not going to pretend I’m writing a serious detective novel. The mystery elements here are closer to the mysteries I use in my other books.

But I love the setting and the ideas. There’s an old concept of “one for me, one for them” when it comes to creating stuff. While I do try to enjoy everything I write, Cipher is very much “one for me.” If it does better than expected, then that’s good, too. But I’ll mostly use this as an opportunity to avoid some writing tics I’ve forced on myself because of the genre.

To answer the question: Cipher will be a series that explores a near future cyberpunk world with sentient automatons, island cities run by rich plutocrats that became the government they ran away from decades ago, and a neural network that connects everyone and pervades every aspect of the work. It lets me write a lot of fun stuff from a simple base, and have hot robot girls, some silly anime tropes, and my own spin on cyberpunk at the same time.

Inspirations

First, the elephant in the room. Cyberpunk.

From a marketing perspective, cyberpunk is a zombie genre. Everybody knows what it is, its elements are in a lot of fictional works and pervade games, but there isn’t a base of people interested in buying/reading it. A lot of trend-chasers abandoned ship after Cyberpunk 2077’s… questionable launch.

That’s not to say cyberpunk can’t sell, but it won’t sell itself. A simple demonstration of this is to look at the category on Amazon and notice that it’s one of the many casualties of self-published category spam (in this case, mostly of extremely popular litrpgs that should have stopped spamming categories a while ago).

Fortunately, I’m largely targeting the harem market and, to a lesser extent, weebs (of which I am one, if you somehow hadn’t realized). The inspirations for Cipher are mostly cyberpunk anime, rather than the modern cyberpunk genre.

This is great for me, as I’m eschewing a lot of “foundational” cyberpunk tropes, at least what’s left of the modern genre. I’m explicitly not writing an anarcho-capitalist theme park with a grungy layer, bopping darksynth, and wanton violence in every corner. They’re fun, but also pretty shallow as they were born in the 1980s—it’s always amuses me when cyberpunk blindly includes Japanese everywhere because that was a thing in the OG books (Japan’s Lost Decades).

My direct inspirations are primarily Japanese, with some Chinese material. Japan writes a lot of cyberpunk and scifi stuff that is heavily reflective of society in general. China has an insane amount of post-apocalyptic stuff that blends with cyberpunk (techwear fashion is a great example of this).

The dolls are a clear nod to Girls Frontline, but they behave much more like actual androids—hence why they come in models and all look the same. I’m keeping the mecha musume to a minimum for now, but it will likely show up with military dolls.

Thematically, Psycho Pass and Ghost in the Shell are probably the strongest influences. GitS probably lines up superficially, due to the android and police parallels, but I’m not exploring self identity and human consciousness. Psycho Pass fits better if you understand the series better than “cyberpunk with a social credit system” – I’m more interested in the Sibyl System and the way it influences all society in the series.

Finally, I’ll give a nod to Va-11 Hall-A (Valhalla). Great game, and even if it’s not a thematic fit, I love the mood it creates. While I certainly can’t create that sort of comfiness, it’s a reminder to focus on the slower moments to draw people into the series.

A Struggling MC

Nick breaks a lot of rules of harem MCs, but I’m being careful not to make him irritating. To me, he doesn’t break any of what I’d consider “golden rules.” But I do suspect he’ll get strong pushback if this series gets any liftoff.

His situation is awful: poor, missing a critical link to society, and with a Sword of Damocles over his head. But like with Nathan, I chose resilience as his dominant trait. However, where Nathan is kind of a noble hero becoming a pragmatic one, Nick is someone with a thick shell who will find himself suddenly in a very odd social circle of awkward robots, a burned out detective, and various other characters introduced over time.

Beyond Nick’s social development, there are two other key aspects: his material progression; and his actual skills and ability.

Progression-wise, Nick can’t become stronger, start destroying robots, or hacking the Gibson. His progression is from becoming someone who lives in a borderline slum in a dead-end job to something much better. That means time needs to be spent in his home surroundings, and others need to visit. Sometimes, that will mean there will be downtime or forced breaks that show off his day-to-day life instead of just an investigation.

The other aspect is harder, and is another reason casual readers in the genre will get pissy. Nick will be heavily reliant on dolls to do a lot. Sure, he’ll be a talented Cipher, but his combat skills will be limited. The Archangels are war machines and can do a lot of things he can’t. So there’ll be a lot of him bossing them around, or rubbing up against their desire to do their own thing.

Ultimately, I feel that Nick will be a fairly relatable MC. At least, depending on if you’ve dealt with corporate nonsense or worked an office job.

The Dolls (Robots)

Acting as both the harem and a major element of the world, the dolls are a lot of fun to create and write.

They’re also horribly unrealistic, but who cares.

In-universe, I separate out mainframes from dolls, but I’ll consider them to be the same thing here. They’re all basically AIs. There are also non-humanoid robots, such as self-driving vehicles, automated factories and kitchens etc. They’re significantly less intelligent, however.

A key element is that the mainframes are equivalent to big, fancy supercomputers. They’re an homage to the old idea of super intelligent AIs in big boxes like Watson and Deep Blue. This provides a bunch of useful justifications for office work (as working from home continues to be a contentious topic), limiting access to truly powerful AIs, and the increasing automation of skilled jobs.

Mainframes will have humanoid appearances called “interfaces”—Helena doesn’t have one (yet) because she was crippled by the military. These interfaces mean that mainframes are effectively anthropomorphized versions of the algorithms that run today’s companies.

By contrast, dolls are all the other automation. They replace a lot of visible jobs that don’t have obvious replacements such as self-driving cars—waiters, security, maids, door-to-door delivery, etc. They’re presently fairly uncritically by Nick (and sometimes he’ll argue for them, as a native of this period), because I expect the reader to be able to see a world full of robots doing all the jobs and think for themselves.

The Archangels are considerably more sinister, despite being 99.9% of prospective harem members. Their explicit objective is to better understand society so they can better “interpret” their orders.

However, they’re also a great vessel to do fun things with. They share a collective consciousness, but also don’t have a fixed set of morals. That means Nick can shape them, creating individual personalities like Chloe, and instigating shifts in their perception of the world. At the same time, they will attempt to shape him, as Rie is explicitly trying to do.

A final word on the intelligence of the Archangels. I expect a few people to be annoyed that they’re not as super intelligent as they’re supposed to be. This is partly because there needs to be a plot, so they can’t solve everything themselves. But it’s also intended to make a point that AIs tend to make rash, and sometimes foolish, judgments. Youtube’s AI algorithm is no doubt vastly more complicated than ever, but it still makes pretty massive fuck-ups on a regular basis that need human intervention to fix.

A clearer example of this would be in a comparison to a Death Note chapter. In it, L presents Light with photos of some victims and asks for his interpretation. Light does a huge internal monologue about how he’ll avoid giving himself away, and then declares a couple of possible solutions. L then adds fake evidence and tells Light that he’s wrong – causing Light to argue that he was right based on the evidence he had.

That’s how AI acts. They’re never wrong. They’re always right, based on what they made their judgment on (at least if they’re forced to make a decision, as they usually are).

Of course, it’s partly my job as the author to make this clear. I might clean up some of the earlier investigative chapters to alleviate some of the annoyance. But it can’t ever go away completely.

Location

If you read Billions, you probably think I have a thing for tech billionaires building massive cities in the sea to escape the US government.

And you’d be right. I think it’s a cool trope and rich people love private empires and islands.

In this case, it serves a few purposes. By placing the setting outside the USA, it allows me to fudge some of the cultural details. I’m not American, so if I ever write a work based in the US, I’m going to get basic shit wrong. Australia isn’t America, even if we speak the same language. We can’t even agree on what’s a burger, and what’s a sandwich.

Second, an isolated city has a ton of useful purposes for a writer. That’s why Bioshock always uses them.

Third, it fits thematically with the idea of a less-gritty cyberpunk dystopia. Making a new country is hard. At some point, the corporations just became the government and things are surprisingly normal, even if the city is intentionally similar to some sort of corporate ad about what Uber or Amazon dream the world to be.

That’s kind of the point. When I came up with this idea a year ago, I’m pretty sure I had (re)watched Defunctland’s video on EPCOT (go watch it). The cities of Billions and Cipher are vaguely inspired by the idea of Walt Disney as a tech trillionaire. That’s why they’re clean and corporate.

Guns, Guns, Guns

A massive rabbithole for me to go down. I’ve lost ridiculous amounts of time researching guns for writing projects over the past decade. Thank fuck for gun Youtube, as I’m Australian and that makes it a little hard to touch the things.

Which also means I can’t ever be that knowledgeable about them. I’ll tend to skim over a lot of the details for that reason.

However, one of my objectives with Cipher is to keep it relatively grounded. Cyberpunk often goes off the rails when it comes to predicting the tech of the future. Blade Runner took place in the dark future of 2019 (little did they know) and feature perfect humanoid robots, handheld energy weapons, and space colonization.

Ironically, Deus Ex was initially far more grounded, but Human Revolution went a bit crazier. I prefer the feel of Deus Ex, as it better matches history. 1940 was 80 years ago, and New York looked pretty damned impressive. Things will change, but by how much?

That’s why I’m trying to limit the fancier guns. Railguns and energy weapons exist, but they’re bulky and hardly count as man-portable if you haven’t replaced half your body with cybernetics. They also need mobile power sources.

What I am focusing on is the “techifying” of guns. Ironically, this is probably less realistic for political reasons, not to mention that fancy guns tend to be pretty shit. The G11 and AN94 seem great, until you see their insides.

With that said, smart guns with neural/wireless connections, mandatory biometric locks, and bans on lethal ammunition fit the setting. Then there are the ammunition switchers, and the implications they provide when the Archangels don’t use them (because their non-lethal weapon is to hack your brain).

Like I said, tons of fun.

So far, most of my research time was devoted to coming up with a middle-ground for anti-doll weaponry. Dolls are made of polymers, metal, and ceramic, and would be significantly more bulletproof than humans. So how would a police officer take one out, if they don’t have railguns?

That’s where the Lawman came from. It’s basically just a gigantic revolver, big enough to fire armor-piercing sabot rounds that are actually effective. If I hadn’t found SLAP rounds, I’d probably have just had it fire sci-fi HEAP rounds. Hell, maybe those would be more effective. But it’s scifi, so decades of handwavium justify my decision. Most cool cyberpunk pistols are just energy weapons, anyway.

The Altnet (Don’t Call it the Metaverse)

The Metaverse is that thing people love to hate. For the most part, the Altnet is less “you can walk around and say hi to people, and also own some land” and more an alternative internet.

Because Nick isn’t as tapped into the Altnet as those around him, it won’t play a huge role in the first book. He’ll bring it up, and it will be omnipresent as a thing he can’t use and others can. Plus he’ll have Cipher buddies that have a love-hate relationship with it.

I expect to focus a little more on the Altnet in the second book. Right now, I have a trilogy planned (and probably just that). That’s when I’ll iron out more details. For now, know that it’s much more than a VR playground and that it’s different to the Internet you use right now.

What the Hell is a Cipher, Anyway?

Narrative-wise, Cipher is basically a fancy way to give Nick a special role that limits who understands dolls.

But as should become increasingly clear, he’s basically a specialized IT troubleshooter. Those skills also overlap with those that help criminals evade the restrictions of Babylon, and that’s why he became one despite his lack of a neural implant.

The more I write and plan Cipher, the clearer it becomes that I’m essentially writing Ciphers from my corporate experience with IT. Allow me to explain.

If you work in a tech company, you probably code and create shit. That’s great, but then people need to use it.

In those end-user companies, most of those people can barely use computers. It doesn’t matter how old the person is, computers seem to cause trouble for almost everyone. I’ve worked with some brilliant people who struggle when a computer is involved. This creates productivity bottlenecks, and very large sums of money are spent coming up with pie-in-the-sky solutions to this.

These solutions usually involve magical software that doesn’t exist, can’t be built, does everything the user currently does across a range of bespoke solutions (and some dodgy tricks that only Dave knows about and doesn’t write down because that’s his job security), and will have an adaptive UI for the future. Oh, and there will be no code or manual configuring necessary – it must be idiotproof.

I worked on a few projects to build this stuff, from multiple perspectives. I also saw a lot of money get incinerated. Despite this, there’s always some new idea, and AI is the current corporate buzzword (a few years ago it was machine learning). Even if those AIs were ever rolled out, somebody would need to configure them and keep them functional.

So a Cipher is, essentially, the power user who keeps these fancy-ass AIs working so the ordinary office workers can do their regular-ass jobs.

And the book will already have some stuff that will feel like bitterness (but isn’t). Detective Hammond will bitch about some heavier topics, because he’s that burned out co-worker you go out to drinks with that is exhausted with life.

Fade-to-black? Harem Size?

I’ll probably keep explicit sex scenes, but I won’t rush them.

The main reason there’ll be (at least one) explicit sex scene is that they’ll be hilarious with the Archangels. Rie and Chloe are the initial harem members. Rie might not be innocent, but she isn’t experienced. And Chloe would be tapped into the Host, which would be hilarious for many reasons.

As for harem size, it’s technically massive. But ignoring the 10,000 Archangels in the hivemind, it’s on the smaller size. That’s because this is only planned as a trilogy.

For now, Rie and Chloe are the primary targets. Ezekiel and Kushiel will each have a focus book. Helena will be a harem member in some form. Other than those five, I have a possible human member, but she might not make the cut.

There are also the regular Archangels, the Tartarus security dolls, and potentially the other police dolls in the future depending on if Nick screws with their programming/hardware much. But while I might name a few, and split them off from the larger whole, they’ll remain ancillary characters. They might be kind of part of the harem, but they won’t receive primary focus.

Fancy Names

To end on a lighter topic, I figured I’d talk about the names in the setting.

All the angelic and mythological shit is intentional. The city is Babylon, the first great city. It’s fancy new robot police officers are the Archangels. Regular police dolls are called Liberators and Custodians. The Spires having names like Olympus and Axis Mundi is the same deal.

I chose Neo Westphalia as a reference to the Peace of Westphalia, which is commonly credited as the birth of modern nationhood and sovereignty. The isles are a brand new nation in a world that strongly dislikes changing borders, so they’d be pushing sovereignty pretty hard.

RTM is vaguely Samsung-ish. That’s why their security doll is called the Guardian G2 – it’s a subtle nod to the Galaxy (and the S2 was their breakout phone).

The Lawman has weird model names rather than a simplified code because it’s intended to sound like a tech product, rather than a gun.

Tartarus speaks for itself, but it’s mythological for the same reason a lot of other names are. Neural Spike is just a fancy tech sounding name.

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That’s everything that comes to mind without spoiling what I have planned for the book. Ask me if there’s anything else you were interested in. I don’t really know if this sort of stuff is of interest, in comparison to the post-release commentary that talks about more specifics of the book. I have the plot and setting worked out by now, other than trying to pace the book and keep it interesting.