All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Fine, you can definitely have one. Your framework is from 0 to 100,000 words, and a plot structure ranging from murder in the first degree to a picnic date on a hillside in perfect weather. Is that specific enough for you?
It should now be self-evident that Yours Truly needs all the framework and limits and structural boundaries placed upon him quite forcefully, else he’ll suffer from a crippling and nigh-paralyzing case of Elephantiasis of the Prose.
Okay, time for me to catch up on stuff. (Rubs hands together gleefully)
Well, yeah, to a degree. I’ve always felt myself to have a somewhat Malthusian outlook. Even as a kid in the 70s I absorbed messages about Zero Population Growth, and how fossil fuels were both poisoning the planet and running out, and how so many of humanity’s problems stemmed from there being too damned many people, with more being born all the time, and that outlook of mine never really changed, even when it stopped being much of a conversation piece in respectable households after the Reagan years. I’m a terrible person, really, since I’ve always felt that requiring licenses for reproduction wasn’t a half-bad idea (and if I somehow flunked that particular lottery or test, I never once dreamed that I’d ever feel the need to protest that outcome, so strong was my belief in keeping the pool manageably small), and yet I’ve gone ahead and reproduced twice anyway, simply because I could, and because my Malthusian opinions didn’t seem to be widely shared and so I felt I could very well be wrong about them.
Well, they don’t have to be right. All we need is to have a sufficient number of people dissatisfied with the prognosis for Earthbound mortal human life, and a sufficient number of smarty-pantses to develop the Transcendence technology. The way I see it, these Elites may end up as superpowered immortal godlike beings, but as creatures of pure thought, they’re really only as smart as the mortal minds from whence they came. The Transcendence process places their consciousness into a higher plane, divorcing it from the decomposing cold clay of their bodies, but doesn’t make those consciousnesses any smarter or more creative or more insightful or more compassionate. Elon Musk might end up as a galaxy-surfing deity from our perspective, but he’s still essentially Elon Musk on a personal level.
I think it may be an oversimplification to make our Elites little more than over-evolved sociopaths and mustache-twirling plutocratic villains. I think, to have maximum effect, this story should be an examination of what it means to be human, as was mentioned (I think) earlier in the thread, and so one of the things Morrigan is setting out to do is appeal to the remaining (however vestigial) humanity and compassion of the Elites, to remember and ease the suffering of their brothers and sisters left behind.
Not all those who make the leap to Transcendence will be utterly self-absorbed and evil. Not all will grasp the devastation their trip will leave behind. Not all will Transcend of their own free will. (I’m imagining a youngish person, perhaps a scion of the Musk family or similar, and perhaps even a childhood friend of Morrigan’s, who makes the trip under parental pressure.)
But yeah, a whole lot of those who make the cut will be, in our (the audience’s) eyes, utterly unworthy from a moral standpoint.
Most excellent! And this utterly catastrophic outcome can far surpass the projected effects from the Transcendence process engineers. They know it’ll be bad, genocidally so, but they don’t anticipate building a new Pangaea in their wake! This is brand-new, completely alien, and almost completely untested technology, especially at the scale they’ll use when the mass-emigration happens.
We can spend a lot of fun time on this stuff. If this scales up to miniseries-length (or graphic novel series length), a whole lot of scenarios and encounters can be wrought from this setup. But if we limit ourselves to a single feature-length screenplay, we should be a tad more economical with what the new Earth has become, so we leave room for Morrigan’s journey and (possible) return. Still, it’ll be rich story material.
Yes, these are important distinctions. I agree that the MacGuffin shouldn’t just be a physical box-o-technology, nor amulet nor gun nor any item one could just pick up in the desert and hand to someone else. And yet, as you imply, there can be “table scrap” technologies left behind for the normals. It could very well be that the Elon Musk-type(s) who developed the Transcendence took a very long time to get there, and developed many technologies along the way that almost (but not quite) Transcend a human.
Allergic as I am to any form of “chosen one” horseshit (and if I ever do get around to seeing Jupiter Ascending it’ll be with a heapin’ helping of hairy eyeball at the whole predestination side of the story), there is a way we can get this to work. Though many of the discarded technological scraps left behind don’t do a damned thing in any useful sense, as the development progressed, the Musks got closer and closer to brute-forcing their way to the kind of Transcendence that at least opens the doorway to alternate parallel dimensions, thus proving their existence, but those brute-force dimension-rippers are useful only as weapons since the portals they open are raggedy, unstable, indistinct, and liable to shred any physical object they’re aimed at. These could be fun when wielded by the warring tribes left behind.
But get a load of this and tell me what you think: there was a penultimate breakthrough made by the Musks. A device that could refocus certain synaptic pulses within the brain into heretofore unsuspected wavelengths that seemed irregular as a dirt road at first, but ultimately proved to contain resonances that were occasionally consonant with the dimensional membranes between worlds. The first few test subjects died most painfully, but before the tech could be scrapped, one particular person tried it out… and didn’t die. And after a few minutes… he vanished before the eyes of the Musks, never to return.
Now they strongly suspected they were on the right track. They tinkered and fiddled and hired new test subjects, but most of them still died in agony, and this was getting too expensive. And then one of the Musks tried it herself, vanished, and managed to come back a day and a half later. Just long enough to scribble down some notes. The rest of the Musks begged her to stay and tell what she experienced, even tried to restrain her, but she vanished again.
Her brother pored over her notes, made a couple of adjustments to the proto-MacGuffin, tried it on. Eyes wide, he didn’t dare move. Before astonished onlookers, he flickered in and out of existence, never for more than an eyeblink. He called out further adjustments, which were tuned by assistants and then executed into his mind via the proto-MacGuffin’s electrodes.
And finally: success! Or at least, close enough. As far as the Musks are able to make out, the proto-MacGuffin tunes the mind to permit it to escape our mortal world and enter the higher plane of existence, freed from the ravages of time, the surly bonds of gravity, and the pathetic weakness of mortal tissue.
But they were wrong.
Brother Musk stuck the proto-MacGuffin in the company R&D vault, and began manufacturing the Official Transcendent MacGuffin 2.0, tuned to the specifications of the proto-MacGuffin’s Last Known Good setting, to allow the elite and influential to touch the face of God. But the proto-MacGuffin was more powerful than they’d realized. The frequencies and power levels fine-tuned by Brother Musk simply honed in on a single reality, accessible to and habitable by only beings of pure energy and thought. His sister, like the guy before her, experienced the multiple-reality dimension-slipping experience that Morrigan will have. Call it a rare brain deformity, call it whatever you like, but the proto-MacGuffin can re-tune a brain possessed of the right qualities into a dimension-skipping demon… but those qualities are incredibly rare. Not realizing this, Brother Musk was able to detune the proto-MacGuffin in such a (nerfed) way that it could open a dimensional doorway for most human brains… but only to that post-human Transcendent level, which is amazing and wonderful and all that, but which is actually only one of the infinite number of realities available to Sister Musk (and eventually Morrigan, when she somehow zaps herself with the old proto-MacGuffin, since she has the rare brain configuration that permits that particular tuning without exploding in a lethal aneurysm).
Okay, anyway, that is all just one possible way to set up our MacGuffin, so that it a technological development that would be (nearly) uniquely beneficial for Morrigan, and not have to be a box or dingus that you have to wear or shoot or whatever. Once her brain is tuned, then all she has to do is learn how to use it (kinda like when Murdoch learns to “tune” in Dark City).
And of course, we don’t actually have to make her powers so very superior to the Elites’. I do kinda like the idea that the Musks’ procedure is brute-forcing the problem at hand, and the biggest reason they cause so much damage is because they’re misunderstanding their own breakthrough, and unwittingly using it as inefficiently as possible, when all they needed to do was find a brain configured like Morrigan’s, since she can use her trans-dimensional powers to greatly diminish the damage that we humans had done to our own quality of life over the centuries. The Musks were so close to solving the problems of humanity in the right way, but missed it completely, and so when they found a solution that seemed to unlock immortal post-humanity for a selected few, at great cost to everything else on the planet, they decided, “Yeah, that’s good enough for us, for who better to evolve the human race forward than we happy few who are already blessed with all the success that this tired, worn-out world can offer?”
But yeah, it’s just one of many possible avenues. But I do recommend that we avoid painting all those Transcended Elites as arrogant, self-absorbed asshats, since if Morrigan needs to enlist their help (and she will, if we use something like the scenario I just outlined, since she understands the technology she’s using even less completely than they do), there will need to be a sympathetic ear or two among them.
That’s what got me thinking on those lines, except that her “training wheels” tech turned out to be a more complete and successful version of the MacGuffin, simply because her brain happened to be naturally consonant with the full-band tuning, rather than to just the single frequency. But again, it’s just an idea. We don’t need to make the Transcended post-humans less powerful than she is, but it does tickle me if, in their new, ostensibly godlike state, they discover that she actually can do everything they can… and so much more.
Yes indeed. Once she discovers the extent of her powers, the temptation will grow very strong indeed to leave that crappy terrestrial life permanently behind. And yet even though she’s not actually human anymore in a real sense, she is still fundamentally Morrigan, a gentle and compassionate soul to the core of her being, and that side of her Transcended with the rest of her.
Yep. Beloved characters that she simply cannot save, in iteration after iteration, just like the old homeless man in Groundhog Day. Things of that nature. While exploring the edges and limitations of possibility, it might be fun if certain possibilities stubbornly remain impossible. Like the palette of parallel dimensions available to Morrigan is missing a few distinct hues… and like somehow that omission seems almost deliberate. (Although, rather than the cause being the Hand of some over-arching Meta-Deity at work, the actual explanation can simply be that as perfectly as Morrigan’s brain was suited to the re-tuning, it was a human brain after all, and not completely perfectly tuned, so some possibilities remain unavailable to her. There are gods and there are Gods, after all, in all but the most tiresome mythologies, and if the infinitude of possibilities are open to us as the audience and creators of the story, even the possibilities in which Morrigan never existed, those latter possibilities at least must forever, by definition, remain impossibly unavailable to her.
Which may well serve as yet another good plot point.
Christ, I’m tired. Off to bed now! More tomorrow, no doubt. And thank you all for this. What rare fun!
Just to quickly make a proviso:
I was going to put a disclaimer in at the end of my rant, to the effect of #notall1%ers but didn’t want to soften my point. The criticism of the self congratulatory psychopathy stems from direct experience of mine. I just wanted to add to @mindysan33’s point.
It was more of a complaint than anything I wanted to enforce for the purposes of a script. My initial idea would be based around at least one post human who may be meddling with us for our own good. Or at least, for the potential good of the person on whom he or she is experimenting.
Quick thought: If Morrigan is to represent the compassionate unknown, then what of our meddling transcendent who puts her on this path? More of a Loki figure? Interested but morally ambiguous? Would be just as happy if her quest went (pardon the expression) tits up?
I agree with everything concerning the morality of the trncdnts (god I need a shorter word!.. Musks?) except for their intelligence. I think it is their elevated intelligence which drives their dispassionate outlook. Like you said, they view the world from before as not more than an amniotic sac. We don’t have to make them god like in their intelligence. Perhaps it is more like the beings from The Mothman Prohecies. Not necessarily that much smarter, but with a higher dimensional perspective. Like the window cleaner of a skyscraper, he can just see further than those on the ground. Can ‘see what’s coming’. Foreknowledge and all that. But with a dispassionate edge borne of super-intelligence, which may be nothing more than a perfect memory and cataloguing system millions, billions of times larger than ours? Like Lore from Star Trek, all corrupted and yearning.
In order to strengthen the idea that Morrigan is the subject of an experiment, I think other, ongoing experiments should exist in her world as a symbolic introduction to her own. Initially it would appear to the viewer as just eye-candy background, the resultant wasteland, but as we learn about the nature of her world it would become apparent that we are seeing the effects of experiments. Some failed, some ongoing, even working as intended but always with a chaotic effect on the world. What’s bad can always be made worse. (Echoes of anthropogenic climate change amplifying the effects of an ongoing, post-glacial warming period.)
Neat. Why continue with the difficult stuff when you can just take the red pill (lol) and forgo all of those difficult and failing experiments? Step into the heavenly realms and forget about your failures. Wait… could these artefacts also include some kind of adverts for transcendence?
Would that make sense when it’s really only for billionaires? I think Cory has a book where all media and culture is dedicated to the consumption of a handful of vat-borne quadrillionaires. What would an advert for the 0.00000001% look like?
Ok, this is good motivation for why some Musks (how about Roths, for Rothschilds, similar to Wrath?) would even bother to continue experimenting on the world in the first place. Through their arrogance, most would not believe there was any higher state of being to be achieved. They made it, yup, yup. Nothing better than them. All of reality bent to their will, what could be better? Some kind of empty hope for even further transcendence? Ha! (Accentuate as required for maximum hubris).
What happened to the original lady? She probably evaporated under the strain. Those initial experiments went haywire all the time, you know. Are we supposed to believe she was ‘special’? More special than me? I don’t believe it! etc. etc.
Ahem.
So, Sister Musk could be our Loki. Playing the long game, perhaps appearing to the other Elites as merely another of their order, infiltrating their ranks to perform her experiment. Searching for another like her amongst the ruins. Maybe even augmenting her genetic mutation in some way. Why wouldn’t she just clone another like her? Or zap one into existence?
Maybe she would arouse too many suspicions? Maybe she has to let the chips fall where they may, awaiting a chance occurrence, so that it all seems like normal meddling. Nothing to see here. Leave me to my experiments. Move on. Concentrate on your own stuff. Beginning to sound like Greek Gods, with their own culture. You stay out of my hair, and, so long as we don’t fuck with one another’s results, we’re cool. But fuck with me and I will flood your whole continent! Displace a miniature black hole into your treasured sandbox! How would you like it if I made it rain pachyderms on your parade, huh?
Potential for absurd and apocalyptic retributions here. Titans arguing over the TV remote.
Have you read Dune? Paul can ‘see’ (or more accurately ‘remember’) the future landscape. He has no eyes but can remember where everything is, down to the tiniest detail. Before he lost his sight, he could envision the landscape of time. But that insight is a developed skill, born of the spice.
Agreed. I see this as being like the reams of mind in Buddhist lore. Some beings are hellish, others dispassionate, some even compassionate but all seemingly disconnected, or enlightened from the vulgar reality. Their idea of help might not be what you want, but what you need. Even if that is a harsh lesson. (ala choosing to go on when it means the death of a friend, or even the annihilation of your self. Are you committed to this? Then realise it!)
Kind of like the genie who tells you, “Look, try to be very specific when you make this wish. I can’t help but set it up in such a way as to ironically backfire.”
But I really like the idea of her having the potential to transcend ‘properly’. To become more powerful than they are. As powerful as the sister Musk but with added compassion as well as pure, dispassionate, intellectual drive.
Hehe, a hint than even her transcendence is but a first step into infinity.
“Ok, so we’ve clothed ourselves in the garb of entities that can survive in multi-dimensional space but there are chasms and chaos here too. We’ve only stepped out into a much bigger playing field. Here be monsters.”
Something that only Sister Musk is aware of. The others still caught up in their petty human drives for power and knowledge in realms that still feel more like home. They also still have training wheels affixed.
Groovy. I think we’re getting a lot of the mythology worked out here. How about some of her human relationships? The vulgar world? The meek movements. What kind of people would she find to befriend in such a wasteland. What would count as morality in such a place? What would count as friendship? How would you stay sane in the face of all of this?
Do they build fires and tell stories around them? Do they hunt together? Archaic revival style? Do they envy somebody’s chlorophyll skin-patches because that person doesn’t need to seek food? Would people murder and scheme amongst the survivors, like pirates? Would their society be based on the balance of reputation?
Ok, you could just kill that guy for the tech he found, but then, no-one will trade with you ever again. Try killing everybody and see how that works out for you. They would have reached some kind of semi-stable state. Obviously with outliers. Lone Wolves and the like.
I’ve just realised that this echoes the societal balance of her own, trashed world. No-one can really step out of line without drawing the ire of the others. In la-la land or on the cursed earth. There’s got to be some hilarious interplay between these two planes of existence. Getting your hand slapped as you reach for the pie.
I had some vague thought last night that the various realities might be connected interdimensionally, and that the transcended might be powering their world by way of some kind of energy pump, and that perhaps Morrigan worked at one of these energy cathedrals, or something.
Writing it down now before I forget it - but there was a mechanism for something like this in Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, something to do with slowing down (or speeding up?) the nuclear reactions in one sun or another.
I’m all for complexity, my argument is that the elites can be both not evil and still ethically wrong. It goes back to the social framework and the limitations of human beings being able to understand the view point of others, if that makes sense. It’s about… not even arrogance really, but about this notion that money, education, etc all mean that someone has the right to decide for the rest of humanity what is good and bad (or as Laurie Anderson said “only an expert can handle the problem”). Think about it like this - in the 19th century, the progressive movement was made up largely of middle class and upper class people, who were moved in part by the violence in some of the labor uprisings of that time (events such as the bombing of Haymarket Square in Chicago, purportedly by anarchists). They read The Jungle, and looked the issue of poverty and said, we need to do something. So they got some laws passed, and some of these were helpful. But, with rare exceptions, they did not once ask the working classes what they actually needed. The progressives thought museums and green spaces were better recreation for the working classes than bars and hanging out on the streets. They bitched and complained about working class girls, agitating for better pay, while wearing clothes they worked hard to buy. None of this was from a place of malice, they had the best intentions. They just thought they knew better than the working classes what they would benefit from. And of course, at times, this also meant they were working strictly for their own interests, with an eye to controlling what they saw as the “dangerous” classes. And if you argue it from a Gramscian perspective, it became the predominate culture because it was the culture of the ruling class, working to create a consensus. I don’t think much of this is evil, in the plutocratic sense. It’s just the idea that money and wealth breeds certainty about what is right and common-sensical.
Certainly, but I understood what you meant. I was briefly afraid that @miasm 's experience with “the upper crust” might be tempting miasm to want to make all the Transcended Elites into cruel, sociopathic, arrogant snobs who delight in abandoning us lesser creatures to our squalid fate. I am pleased to see that that was not the case.
100% agree! The way I put it was thus:
And in fact, there could (and probably would) have been some deeply conflicted feelings about this before the Transcendence, lengthy debates, and several highly-principled Elites who would storm out of the meetings, never to Transcend, believing the opportunity to be not worth the guaranteed wreckage it would leave behind.
But yeah, most of those who go would justify their betrayal of their homeworld and species by looking at it as a necessary evolutionary step, and their role in the process to be vital as they must self-evidently be the best ones to carry humanity forward onto the next plane. It’s profound arrogance, of course, but justified the same way this was:
Of course from the perspective of those left behind, it’s quintessentially evil. I think that’s how evil works. Few indeed set out to just be evil, and do evil things, and harm as many people as possible. There’s a good reason why the Road to Hell Paving Company uses the slick, glittering cobblestones it does, after all.
So there was some drive to use the new developments to help the rest of the human race. The division of class has been super-amplified but that’s really only a means to an end. With their new, god-like masters, the working classes can enjoy a beautiful new existence, free of toil and hardship.
IF they happen to exist in the right ‘trouser’. There would be, in some realities, magnificent castles in the sky. In some of the many shards of reflection, this wasteland is a utopia. Or something weirder and unknowable, but still marginally beneficial. In some realities, the experiments have gone tragically wrong. In Morrigan’s reality.
But those realities where a specific formula was beneficial would taunt Morrigan, would spur her on to find a solution for her own tragedy. Surely an acceptable endgame can be sought, if I keep flickering into these fantastic worlds. These phantasmic realms of plenitude.
The only problem is, may experiments were done. Some of them were bound to fail. These are the hardships we must ask our lower classes to endure. For we know, at least somewhere in the many worlds, we have found perfection for our race. We are celebrated there, we are gods. Some of the lab rats had to die. But they are off in the vulgar realities. Where the experiments failed. Turn a blind eye to them. Their sacrifice is noble.
In the realm of infinity, of many, many worlds: One must crack a few eggs to make an omelette.
{Editor’s note: I still like these ideas, but from a perspective that I elaborate on in comments further down the page. They would muddy the original story but would also provide some context to the ‘braid’ we initially explore. Discovered after her travails.]
Hmm, an intermediary scientific society, still on the earth. Like the supposed secret priestly classes, who came out of the ruins of the previously destroyed dynasties in Egypt, ready to teach architecture to the new Kings. Ready to build Pyramids.
Or, in at least some Trouser-legs, these guys are doomed to be stormed and torn apart by the masses who demand to be allowed into the magical realm where the Elites went… as if the stairway to heaven were a literal escalator any schmuck could find in the desert, and Saint Peter an ordinary doorman who can be overpowered by those not allowed past the velvet rope.
I have yet to address your previous post, which I’m going to dive into now. But this here made me think of something:
Morrigan is bound to realize what I’ve just realized: most of the Trouser-legs into which she can flip (those in which she exists, and those in which the present-moment circumstances are close enough to permit an easy transfer) will contain the same problem: Elites who have it all, and the Left Behind who have inherited misery and a broken, blasted homeworld. If she accomplishes her quest and discovers a solution, it seems that that solution will apply only to the reality that she’s in when she discovers (or applies) the solution. What should she do with all the numerous Trouser-legs in which she failed? She can conceive of them, therefore they exist somewhere. Is one reality-strip of success sufficient, now that she knows so very many others exist? Can she ignore all those parallel worlds of misery, now that she knows how real they are?
It seems to me that if she has the compassionate mindset to set her on this course in the first place, it would require her to try to actually make that trip back in time, to the point of the Transcendent Exodus, to stop it dead and prevent it from being possible in any future Trouser-leg. She will have to die and take the technology to the grave with her.
###Officially Walked back, left as reminder not to drink and write.
Grain and grape and cigars and writing, apparently, do not mix for me.
Can she meet herself? Other versions of herself? Some on the same quest, others doomed to fail. Standing in the hypercube, would she see an infinite number of her-selves being shuffled around? Jumping here and there?
Perhaps not, perhaps I’m muddying the issue. Perhaps she would always be ‘herself’. Jumping into the version of a world where she does not exist. If she has infinite worlds to choose from, there would always be many, many worlds where the conditions were just right. Where everything was almost exactly the same but her doppelgänger from that reality quantum tunnelled into nothingness, was hit by a cosmic ray and evaporated, was killed by a bomb, ala Rick and Morty (see this series by Dan Harmon, it’s one of the best, funniest cartoons ever made).
But if she is to have visions and we are to have multiple writers going wild within their own trouser leg (ahem), perhaps we can have these diversions, to enforce specific ideas. (I don’t want to be too possessive Even if we have been hogging the mic ).
Ok, so I also have to state, quite drunk right now and sort of promised myself I wouldn’t contribute when in this state. I get real muddy real quick.
Morrigan prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator, and vanished…
She awoke to find herself trapped in the wrong trousers (Gromit!), suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not her own.
Fortunately, contact with her own trouser leg was maintained through brain wave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer who appeared in the form of a hologram that only Morrigan can see and hear.
Trapped in the trousers, Morrigan finds herself leaping from leg to leg, putting things right that once went wrong, and hoping each time that her next leap will be the leap home…
Even if we have been hogging the mic 
).
