Today I’ve been thinking about who my main villain should be. Many ideas came to my mind. Since the day I for first time started to think about writing this book I imagined that the villain won’t be that much important for the story, that the biggest enemy—or villain if you like—would be the main protagonist’s battle with addiction and his ‘old self’. And yes, I still think that is something to build on, but I cannot make it the main focus of the story. It can be nice for the first act/book (depending on how many ideas I will have) but then it will be nice to put into a story an enemy that represents some specific characteristics reader can hold onto. At first, I thought it can be just some group of smart-ass rich guys that are in the lead of FAANG but then another idea came to my mind.
When I thought about the world as it is (in the story) the environment is much more healthy than it is in the real world. Yes, there are massive cities but they’re all extremely clean and everywhere outside the cities is restored nature. The world feels like paradise outside the city. So I wondered how this could’ve come to be. What have we done as a species that we’ve reversed the total destruction of nature we’ve been doing for so many years?
And then an idea for the main villain came. At first, I thought about some kind of super smart AI that got out of control but then I decided that it will be better for the story to put some human face on it. So it will be a man, a genius, an absolute leader of the FAANG. His idea was to save the world, the nature. His philosophy is that there are just way too many humans and they do way too many things. Unlike people before him, he knew it will be stupid to try to kill half the population on Earth by force. So he did it much smarter. He became one of the richest people on earth at a very young age and thanks to his persuading skills he was gaining power and the support of important people at extreme speed. He in a matter of few years bought all the technological giants and put them under a FAANG. Also during this time, he was developing two major important things. The Hub, a digital world/social network to keep people isolated inside the digital world and Neuralink, a chip people will have inside their heads to have access to the hub at all times. His idea was to keep people as much in the online world as possible. By that, they won’t need that much space in the real world. They can move into smaller houses (later literally one-room cubicles with only basic necessities) and by that make space for nature to thrive again. He also invested an extreme amount of money to develop the green industry. Most of the things in the time of the story are moved by electricity that is generated by some cool green source.
All of this is cool, but there’s still one thing to handle. There are still way too many people (10+ billion when he started realizing his plan). But then again. It’s stupid to just kill them. No, he was smart. He thought in the long term. He thought in terms of generations. He just made sure people will breed much less.
As all the industries became automated, people were no longer needed to maintain the world so he could unleash all the power of the Hub and close most of humanity inside of it. By that, people stopped meeting in the real world and stopped breeding. The population collapse was inevitable and from 10 billion just in 2 generation population dropped to 2 billion. The only people who are breeding are chads, the neatly selected group of people living in the centers of cities, the rest of the people are condemned to barely survive on a Universal Basic Income as there is no other way (easy) to make money and spend their days inside the digital hub.
Of course, as I said this process took 2 generations which means it wouldn’t make much sense that this person would survive, at least as a normal human, but he managed to upload his consciousness onto a cloud so he’s now this all-knowing entity inside the Hub making sure all the people are hooked. That’s how will the main villain be shown, but for most of the story, there will be another kind of villain, his grandson. He will be broken as he was manipulated into killing his own father. In the eyes of his granddad, his father was weak as he wanted to limit the hub, so the people would be less addicted and start living in the real world a little once again. Granddad didn’t like that and got his ambitious grandson on his side. Now his work is to hunt down outliers that have managed to disable their Neuralinks and by that become untraceable. We get to know him pretty much and maybe at the end of the story he may even turn on the side of the Hero so they can together defeat this entity from the Hub, free people of it, and start a new world.
I took here probably a lot of inspiration from The Last Airbender I’ve watched recently, but to be honest, it’s just too good of a template to not get inspired by that. It’s so good it even makes me want to make POV chapters so I can give this villain more space, otherwise, I worry I won’t have enough time to build him, but then again, it may probably seem extremely weird to have at one chapter our hero fighting his own mind to not ‘jerk off’ again that day and go outside instead and then in the next chapter you will jump in the skin of villain doing some epic action filled shit hunting outliers.
The best combination will probably be that the main chapters will be in a POV of a hero and then always after some specific block either a prologue or the epilogue will appear that will be in a POV of a villain, at first there will be just a lot of talking and build up, not much of an action, also by that I can show to a reader that there’s actually much more in a story than just a guy trying not to jerk off and once the hero will join the outliers we can finally see our villain in action as well, it can also be cool to just see a hero not knowing who the fuck is this guy but the reader will already have some kind of an idea.
Really the more I think about it the more I want to dive into the aftermath of waking up. First I wanted the story to focus purely on waking up from the addiction of the Hub and becoming an outlier but now to be honest, I think this could just be the beginning of the real story. Story of, first escaping from a villain and then, turning him on their side and overthrowing the main villain which is his grandad as an AI inside the Hub.
Also, some moral questions can be asked as what the outliers will do will be actually pretty harmful to nature which means that it may even seem that the villain is in the right. That he does the good thing.
Yep, there’s a lot to uncover before I even start to seriously write. If you’re interested in more. I do a proof-of-concept short-stories series about a different person in this world, which will as well join the outlier so you can check that.
Also the main idea of the story is now very different that was in the previous update. The will be no diaries for sure. I’ll update you on that very soon.