January 27, 2004
The Anatali universe wasn't an accident, but I sure didn't set out to create it. Back then I was 24, single, cooking at Chili's and content to whine about girls in my private journal. I didn't have a blog and hadn't written for an audience since middle school. T'was a dull winter filled with of booze and unrequited love. Then came another average night of surfing my normal haunts.
I was reading on Space.com about the End of the Universe—phantom energy, dark energy, and dark matter. One sentence spawned these years of effort and all that came with it:
"5% of the universe is comprised of visible matter, 25% is dark matter, and the other 70% is dark energy."
That was badass. I loved hearing the visible universe existed on such a small scale in comparison to this mysterious force that dominated the cosmic landscape. It possessed the scope of religion without the dogma. Dark energy was an infinite resource that science would eventually exploit, no matter the cost. I immediately wrote a history of the future for the sake of writing it.
While I've always been interested in science, astronomy and the future, I've never been thrilled about science fiction literature. I enjoy it much more visually. The part that compels me is the progress of humanity over the centuries and that theme: "no matter when or where, humans will always be humans." What inspired the actual story was a goal of expressing that inescapable humanity, and the challenge of writing a science fiction novel that I would like to read. If it weren't for that day I'd be writing romantic comedies and horror (A:Survival is more of my natural direction).
So in twenty minutes, two thousand years passed. It was now 4128 A.D. (my previous house number). Anatali Corporation was born; a virtuous, yet misguided empire who believed they were advancing mankind. The name Anatali was fabricated. It rolls off the tongue when you say it a few hundred times.
The next part was inventing the characters. That started with CC (Calvin). Everything else (the political landscape, the station itself) came later.