EP1 How It All Began
Share
Transcript:
Hello, everyone. I am Aon Alta. I adopted Jack. He was my service dog. This is our story. Welcome.
I am a visual artist, mostly working in painting, sometimes sculpture. I work in the visionary art space. A lot of my work has been described as sci-fi or imaginative realism. I like to think of it as "more than real." My series of paintings that I work on now are based on my story about Jack the Space Dog and Aon's adventures in space.
We're going to let you into the studio and see what it's like to run a professional art studio and be a working artist. This is my opportunity to let you into my world — more than just seeing my paintings. This is my project: Jack the Space Dog.
I was asked to talk a little bit about how the Jack the Space Dog project came about. So I'm going to do a lot of repetitive painting here today, and talk a little bit about it.
You can see Aon Alta and Jack in most of my recent paintings. It's an adventure about Aon and his German Shepherd, Jack the Space Dog, and their attempts to save existence itself — which sounds like a big goal, and it is. But it's really a metaphor for how my German Shepherd, Jack, saved my life.
I adopted Jack when he was 11 years old, so he was already a very old dog. He was my service dog, and he lived to be 15. While he was very old, it was easy to forget how old he was — you just never could tell, other than the gray around his muzzle.
One Saturday morning, he got up from behind the couch and he was a little wobbly. I honestly thought he had laid down on his leg funny and it had fallen asleep. So I took him outside to get him walking around a bit. Normally he would run to the front door, run outside, and jump off the retaining wall — which is what he had just done that same morning. Instead, he walked outside really slowly and just sat down in the front yard. That was pretty unusual. I thought maybe he was just tired, so I tried to get him to walk back inside. He got about halfway and laid down, and I had to carry him back to his bed.
We described the symptoms to a good friend who was a vet. She said, "You can take him to the hospital, but he's had a heart attack. There's just nothing to do for him." About an hour or two later, Jack was gone.
I don't think everybody will understand, but some people will. Losing a furry family member like that — when they've not just been really close, but have also made a big change in your life — is something else entirely. I needed a lot of change at the time. Jack really was a best friend and a loved family member in so many ways.
For months after he was gone, Jack was locally famous because he was so friendly and he went with me to a lot of places. Everybody knew Jack. And so everybody asked about him, and it was still really raw and really hard. I would start to say his name and it would just catch in my throat. Even now, two years later, I can talk about it — but it is very hard.
For months I struggled with it. I'd come home at night. My husband and I would be making dinner, and Jack would usually be trying to lay at our feet, looking for anything that might transition from the counter to the floor. He wouldn't be there, and we would just cry. I'd dream about him at night. I couldn't sleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night, something would remind me of him, and I'd cry. My husband would get up at night and walk by the bed — his habit was to reach down and scratch Jack's ears — and he would do that, and Jack wouldn't be there.
So one night I was having trouble sleeping, and I finally fell asleep and had a dream. In the dream, I was floating in the void of space. There were stars everywhere, as though I was just floating out there like a satellite. Off in the distance, I could see a little light moving toward me. The light got bigger and bigger, and it flew past me so fast. The light looked much like the group of rings — three rings making a sphere — that you can see featured in several of my paintings. It went flying by me, and right behind it, like he was chasing it like it was a game, was a very cartoony version of Jack. He was flying through space with his tongue hanging out, that big dog smile. He looked at me as he went past. It felt like him.
When I woke up, it wasn't just that the experience had given me an idea for Jack the Space Dog. When I woke up, the whole story was just in my head. The whole thing was there — like I had read a 16-book novel and remembered all of it. All the information, all the stories, all the characters, the plot, the story arc, everything. And it felt like, while Jack had given me so many gifts in his lifetime, this was his last parting gift.
I was trying to find a way to still feel like I had Jack around, even though I knew he was gone. I was also having a lot of trouble helping other people understand why it was so difficult — what Jack meant to me and the way that he changed my life. The story is a story of him and me, set in a mix of fantasy and sci-fi, which has always been a big influence on me. I watch a lot of anime. I read a lot of sci-fi fantasy books. It felt like an opportunity — the story was the answer for other people to know Jack, to eventually come to love Jack the way that I did, and then to understand what it was to lose him. Not because I just want everybody to feel my pain. That's not the idea. I just want people to be able to understand.
So it's for me, and it's an interesting story. But it changed my entire approach to painting. I was stuck — I hadn't painted for months, even before Jack died. I was stuck on a painting because, while I had developed this style, this look and feel, I didn't know what it was about. I knew the look was correct, but I had no idea what it was supposed to say. So I'd go to do a painting and I was just adding elements that seemed cool, but they didn't have any purpose. And without purpose, it's hard to know what needs to be there and what doesn't. At least for me, the story is important for every painting. Jack's last parting gift, I think, was to save my art career — because I was at a standstill. I couldn't finish paintings even before he passed.
This is our story, and I'm using the medium of sci-fi and fantasy because the real reason people love Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, the fantasy world — yes, it's interesting and it's fun — but the thing people really get hooked by, the thing that makes one fantasy story cheesy and another epic and poignant, is the story. It's the characters. It's their relationships. It's the aspect of a group of people thrown together who individually don't have the power to make change, but together are somehow more than they would be on their own. They have more power, more ability. They're able to push through things they couldn't face alone.
That was the relationship I had with Jack. I was more because of him than I was without him. I was able to do more, able to be more. I was a better person. He reminded me that this is a wonderful life and a beautiful world.
That is the thing that makes stories compelling. And his story is a compelling story. Our story is an important story to me. So if everybody else enjoys it too, that's just a bonus — because I'm going to paint this either way.
I don't think anybody's ever challenged the validity of whether or not I dreamed this story. I mean, I guess some people might wonder. For my part, I think if you sit with me for an hour as I tell the story — as I do at a painting reveal — there's not a lot of room to question it. And honestly, I don't really care whether or not people believe that I woke up with the whole story in my head. My husband got to experience it firsthand, for good or ill. I woke him up at probably four in the morning — I think he got up to use the bathroom — I stopped him and started rambling about the whole story. I made him sit there and listen for several hours while I relayed as best I could.
When you have the whole concept of something all at once, it's like someone asking you to tell them the history of China. Where do you start? You have all of it, and it's so much. So I did my very best to not sound like a rambling, crazy person — but it was four in the morning, and I did suddenly have volumes and volumes of information in my head. He will tell you. He woke up to an unbelievable amount of information pouring out, a fully fleshed-out story, so much so that I was tripping over myself trying to get it all out at the same time. So I don't care if you believe it or not.
Now, let me tell you where the story actually begins.
The Bumblebee civilization did not come first. The civilization that came first is the planet we get stranded on later — but that's jumping ahead.
Aon's story starts with him getting into a lot of trouble. If any of you are Star Trek fans, there is a concept in the Star Trek universe called the Prime Directive. The Prime Directive says that no warp-capable civilization — one able to travel faster than light — can interfere with or reveal themselves to civilizations that have not yet achieved that. In my universe, the same principle exists, except it isn't just a directive for a federation of explorers. It is a directive for everyone, and it is not optional. It's enforced by prison sentences, confinement, loss of property, and that sort of thing.
Well, Aon is a bright guy. He is an artist, and he also has an eye for what he thinks of as business opportunities. The opportunity he sees is this: the reason people stopped letting others interfere with pre-advanced civilizations is, one, it would change the arc of their development, and two, people tended to plunder them for resources because those civilizations are defenseless — they can't hope to defend themselves against a space-faring civilization.
But Aon thinks that anthropological goods — things like pottery made by a civilization no one's allowed to contact, trade goods, things like that — would be incredibly valuable, because they're something no one else can have. No one can go there. No one can acquire them. In the world of illicit art dealing, that's an infinitely valuable thing. For people who have spent all their money on everything that can be bought, the only thing that has value is something no one else can have.
So Aon, with the help of a friend, has designed a ship that is both small and inconspicuous. He uses deep research into these civilizations from afar, infiltrates the planets, and then lives there for years, observing. Kind of like research — except his research is simply a cover to assimilate into the civilizations using a sort of disguise suit that makes him look like he's of the same race. He uses a translator to speak and sound like them, learns their culture and their ways, and uses their own trade goods to trade among them. He finds the same minerals and resources on the planet and trades for handmade goods from those civilizations. Obviously, this is way out of bounds of what's legal — but what he considers, in his own ethical framework, is simply removing items he has fairly traded for, and then bringing them back to sell to the highest bidder.
This works out really well for a long time. He goes fairly undetected — all the way up until he doesn't. While not every civilization considers this a serious infraction, it's really all about who catches you. And he happens to get caught by the wrong group of people, who take it very seriously and are very displeased about it. This results in Aon being disappeared to a sort of gulag for several years.
When he comes back, he's trying to build a new life and figure out what he's supposed to do — having spent most of his time smuggling artifacts. He's a half-self-trained anthropologist, biologist, and scientist, but all of his skills were directed toward one goal. He has to find a different path, and that can be a very lonely pursuit — restarting a life.
Jack is a dog that needs adoption. He couldn't live with his owner anymore and was about to be given up. Aon happened to know the owner and found out just in time. He loved Jack to death the very first time he met him. "No, no, no — that's my dog. If you're not keeping him, I will." He didn't even know how old Jack was until after he adopted him. And even from the very beginning, Jack's age scared Aon, because he loved him so much. He did his best to try to forget about it.
For five long years, in the midst of all these adventures, it was fine. The Jack and Aon story takes place in those five years they had together.
Even after Aon has reformed his ways, he has an extensive map of uncharted — or less charted — areas of space, left over from his previous employment choices. He works as a space courier, doing the same kind of traveling but now legitimately, through remote areas that don't have warp gates. In this universe, nobody has individual warp engines — they have warp gates. You go through a gate, and the gate can only take you to where another gate has been built. That requires no navigation at all. But if you want to go to areas without a gate, you need someone with a star map. The problem with star maps is that stars are always moving — and when you're talking about light years of distance, stars move relative to each other and relative to where you are. Unless you've actually traveled through those areas and recorded them as you went, a star map is useless. And Aon has a massive archive of exactly those travels.
He delivers everything from something an overprivileged mega-tycoon wanted, all the way to sensitive data transfers that need to be done by hand and can't be sent across the galactic net for security reasons. This is what Aon does for a living. He's a glorified space courier. He's good at his job. He has his own ship again — another one he and his friend built together — and that ship is what they're traveling in when Aon first comes into contact with the bugs. The consumers.
Everyone knows the bugs exist. Everyone knows they're out there. But they're so far across the galaxy that it's one of those things nobody really thinks about — yes, eventually they will consume the galaxy, but it's in another solar system, around a different cluster of suns, not on this side. It's hard for anyone to truly internalize. Everybody is concerned in theory, but it'll be thirty generations before they reach this section. Nobody is ever really able to make it feel like a present threat — except for the worlds it's actively consuming.
Aon never expects to run into them. And then, on a delivery, he does.
The thing to know about the bugs is that they are aggressive. They consume everything. They consider anything near them to be their territory, and anything that gets close to be either a predator or an obstacle. Aon comes up on their scans while approaching a planet he didn't know they had already colonized — because they're not supposed to be out that far, because people believe they're keeping track of where the bugs are. And he begins to be chased.
They are an ultra-advanced civilization, far more advanced than his ship — well-designed as it is, cobbled together as it may be. He is being chased.
He built this ship with his buddy Victus. Victus is, to distill it down, an intelligent mushroom. A fungus-based humanoid. He kind of looks like a tall, skinny version of the dancing mushrooms in Disney's Fantasia — except with normal eyes. His race is known for technical savvy, and Victus is an exceptional example. He is an inventor, an engineer of things.
They are tired of using the warp gates. The warp gates are a significant drain on their ability to make money, so their ambition is to create a warp drive — a mobile warp gate that can go to a non-warp-gate area. Something everybody says is impossible. Victus does not think it's impossible, and has in fact built the engine. Which is when they run into the reason everybody says it's impossible: if you don't have a receiving gate marked, how do you have an address for where you're supposed to go? Is it integers? Is it based on stars? All stars are always moving — not just around another star, but around the central axis of the galaxy, and that galaxy is moving around a different axis within the universe. Nobody has a map of existence. They've never used the drive, but they do have it on the ship.
How do you put an address system to all of existence?
Thank you for watching. I'll have new episodes soon. If you're into sci-fi stories, I have a never-ending supply of them. You can help others find these stories by sharing. My Instagram is @AonAlta. My website is AonAlta.com. Adventure calls — and I must go.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pQgo1F5rwc&t=1s
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2ya8jBLqL0Xq62Got3MNce?si=ec93ef7b18f44124
Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/aon-alta/id1829851885?i=1000744197962