Centurion Six: Inspirations and Background

If you’re wondering, a lot of the Centurion Six story was inspired by the guys in my office and our many discussions on topics far and wide, especially those that have to do with international finance and the value of a person’s work in an age where anything and everything can be accomplished by robots.  Or, to put it another way, how will anyone afford to buy anything when all of society’s work is performed by robots that’re owned by the nation’s Capitalist classes?  What’s the future of a consumer-driven society whose members’ work is mostly irrelevant—and therefore worthless?  My friend Zahid, whom we call Zee, brought the idea up a few months ago, and we’ve been discussing it ever since as a kind of running thought experiment.  I threatened at the time to start writing a story about it, and now I have actually started… though not, perhaps, as it pertains to the core issues. 

So… how long will it be before we’re all replaced by hyper-intelligent robot-monkeys?  I don’t personally know, but given the relentless march of innovation over the past two decades, it seems somewhat inevitable.  What we’ll all do to earn money after the robots are doing all the work is anyone’s guess.

And then, too, I don’t think I’ve made much of a secret of the fact that a lot of this story was inspired by some recent stuff out of Marvel comics.  I was specifically inspired by the company’s Avengers vs. X-Men event, and then too, I spent some time reading some of the old Avengers tales from the 90s and early 00s in preparation for the opening of the Avengers movie.  After awhile, what I specifically started asking myself was this: What happens next?  Presumably Marvel’s going to wrap up AvX pretty soon and get down to the business of re-ordering its universe in preparation for the Next Big Event, which has already been announced as the Age of Ultron or some such thing.  So all the fictional folk who’re currently fighting will have to make peace and go back to being friends, and I started wondering how something like that might work in the Real World.  I mean, you just can’t turn that sort of thing off, can you?  In reality, wars end, and life goes on, but folks hold grudges.  Sometimes grudges become feuds, and the feuds carry over across generations. 

So in addition to worrying about the killer robot-monkeys of tomorrow, I also started to worry about how Captain America’s kid would relate to the inevitable—but as yet inconceivable—child of Scott Summers and Emma Frost.  Would they get along?  And if they did, what would their parents think?

For better or worse, these are the thoughts that keep me awake at night.  Ultimately, it’s these kinds of things that fire me up, that get me thinking and writing, dreaming at odd moments on the subway and whatnot. 

That probably makes me a geek, but that’s okay.  I can live with it.