Paradisi Chronicles: Trevor Clark

Daily Diary, Tuesday, October, 17, 2023, Day 1142:

Brief Check-in: So, after three days of not writing (for a variety of reasons), I am starting to feel confident I will get something done today. As usual, when there has been a break, I find myself looking at my outline, rereading the last scene I wrote, to get up to speed. And today, as I am doing this, I am getting excited about writing the next couple of chapters. So maybe the break was ultimately good. And I wanted to share this morning's photo, which in addition to having both a spider and a skeleton (both common decorations this year), but more importantly it has a raven and a sense of humor!

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Now for the fourth post that provides some Paradisi Chronicles background, in this case about Trevor Clark, one of the main characters in The Stars are Red Tonight. As a reminder I am currently posting this, chapter by chapter (chapter 4-5 will be up next week). Once I have put all ten chapters up, we will then republish this novella as an ebook. If you wish to read the first post about the Paradisi Chronicles, click HERE, or if you wish to start reading the novella, click HERE. Comments, likes, and shares are very welcome.

Trevor Clark:

Born in 2067, Trevor Clark was 25 in 2092 during the events of the Stars are Red Tonight. His parents had fairly good tech jobs in San Francisco when he and his younger sister Tamara were born. But then in 2072, when he was five and his sister was two, the Big One, the massive San Francisco earthquake, destroyed the city.

Displaced, his parents began to move up and down the coast, looking for steady work. During the mid-twenty-first century, cities in the United States had begun to build walls--and in some regions where the environment had become unbearable because of climate change—domes. In time, no one could come within the city limits of most places unless they had a special citizenship ID. And to get that ID as adults, you have to have proof of employment in the city. Trevor’s parents couldn’t find permanent jobs, so they would work for a season or two, at manual labor, then they would have to move on. As a result, Trevor and his sister spent most of their days alone, doing school work on line, and Trevor was pretty much responsible for raising his sister. He was good with computer systems, primarily self-taught, and because they were so poor, he learned how to hack systems to he could download games for both of them.

In 2086, when he was 19 and his sister was 16, his parents were killed in some sort of mysterious toxic spill. Because he was over the age of 18, he was considered an adult, and the compensation the company offered him for his parents’ death was a job within the company, which was when he started working at WelCo in Seattle. This gave him and his sister citizenship IDs. By 2092, he had been working in the insurance call center for a couple of years. In 2088, when she turned 18, his sister married a man from their apartment building and moved with him to Boston. She was killed by one of the periodic hurricanes’ that hit this city in 2089. 

Physical characteristics:

Trevor’s mother was Puerto Rican, his father Irish, and this gave him an unusual combination of reddish-brown hair, dark skin, vivid green eyes. He was tall and moderately fit from shooting hoops with friends, although most of his free time was spent hacking and playing video games.

Personal characteristics:

Naturally very protective—care-taker. First as an older brother, then after his parents died, more like a parent to his sister, and then he was protective of his room-mate and Bobby. He felt responsible for their problems and not being able to fix them. But the pain of this caused him to close down and try not take life seriously, not expect much from life or anyone. He had simple tastes, his dream had been to get a tech job that would help him make the world safer designing emergency warning systems, robots to handle dangerous jobs. Much to his disgust, the closest he got to this was selling health insurance to senior citizens.