zombies

  • Last of the Brunnen-G: Sci-fi's Favorite Zombie

    Permission granted to translate and reprint this article. Please link back to this original source, thanks. Screen grabs used in this article have been adapted from The Pic Bug and link back to their sources. This article contains spoilers. The Lexx series is now distributed internationally through U.S. based Echo Bridge Entertainment, which you can also follow on their distributor twitter and VOD twitter.

    He's been discombobulated, desanguinated, decapitated, and disenfranchised like no other and remains the most feared divine assassin in the two universes. Nothing has ever stopped him until Prince intervened with the gift of life in the very last episode of the four seasons of Lexx. Kai is the most prolific and oldest recorded zombie in science fiction history.

    It almost seems disrespectful to refer to Kai as a zombie. True he is animated after death, true he has no motivational will of his own after he regains his memories and even some of his conscience, true he even feels absolutely no remorse or regret for all the bad things he did in the name of His Shadow (here we can debate the conundrum of intellectually finding one's actions reprehensible without feeling any of the disgust or sadness), but it's also true that regaining his memories gave him back some of his dignity in a very sad, surreal kind of way that mocks the awareness of his continuing existence. Zombies generally don't get their memories back, much less have a self awareness of an individual identity.

    Two crucial components come together in Kai to create his unique zombie experience, the most vital being protoblood, and the other is his having been exposed to the memories that the Insect essence kept alive in one of the Divine Predecessors. Protoblood, produced by Insects, animates all dead flesh that it touches. Protoblood is simply a mechanism without a program, most likely an evolutionary Insect survival tool for long dormant spells, especially in between planets. The essence or life force that the Insects also produce provide the motivational programming and previous memories that can be passed from Insect to Insect, probably their greatest talent for success in their millennia of wars with and control over humans, especially as this most likely retains group cohesion in a sort of hive mentality over the great expanses of time and space. This is not explained in the Lexx series as the Insects have all been wiped out (so we think) before the story begins. Later we find out how damaging even just one Insect can still be.

    Kai is a different sort of zombie, though, created on purpose by bioviziers on the Cluster into the ultimate killing machine. Some parts of him are missing entirely and replaced with hardware apparently run by integrated software that isn't necessarily all dependent on a central hard drive location, such as his brain. Before Kai gets his memories back, he is a complex automaton programmed to assess pertinent events and execute immediate judgement. After he gets his memories back he seems able to block or override this internal programming, but when his personal memories become once again blocked by outside mechanism (as per Brizon, Mantrid, or essence) or cryopod sequence fail or even just breaking down, programming once again takes over and he becomes lethal to all around him.

    kaikill

    One could argue that this makes Kai a synthetic, a bio-robot like the other hybrid robots on the Cluster, but the key to Divine Assassins is that they are already dead. Their flesh is in no way living by normal standards, even with protoblood activating them. Kai does not need sleep or food. He doesn't need time off to regenerate like the Borg. He doesn't even run on a battery like 790. He horrifically exists in a state of corporeal nonbeing, aware because of the memories he regained, but unable to care. Even knowing right from wrong, even remembering that he once had strong opinions and desires, he can no longer act on those of his own volition. He is a spiritual and intellectual zombie, numbed and estranged from the world going on around him. Kai was created to be a useful tool accomplishing actions that he once found reprehensible and died fighting against. He never articulates how he feels about this, often stating that he cannot feel at all in a way that comes across as though he would like to feel disgust if he could, but the dead do not have likes, preferences, desires, and quite a long list often quoted by fans.

    With other zombie shows, the deepest fans can feel for the poor zombies is shocked sadness at former loved ones having to be gruesomely stopped from killing people. We are able to journey with Kai into the black abyss of corrupted flesh, from which there is no return. The Lexx series aggressively demonstrates a world of human genocide and perversion, and the dark depths society will descend into just to survive. According to the Lexx series, zombies, vampires, and much more in the way of genetic experimentation (possibly including Gigerotta the Wicked) all originated in the League of 20,000 Planets under the reign of His Divine Shadow. After His Shadow had Kai's body repurposed into an assassin, Kai became legendary among the Ostral-B heretics. Even though they had never known who the Brunnen-G people were, two thousand years after the last Brunnen-G was killed Thodin recognized Kai. Thodin and his army had likely seen other Divine Assassins in action and knew very well what they were capable of- this one was different. This one fit the description of the lost Brunnen-G race.

    Zev (and Xev, and many Lexx fans) want to see Kai brought back to life. We learn as the story progresses that even if he could be brought back to life somehow, his poor body has been so scraped out to make room for hardware that becoming alive again would necessarily be a miserable prospect. I like to venture further into the exploration that perhaps an alive body would feel even more like a trap than a zombie body, if it brought with it pain from everything Kai has been through. Just because protoblood automatically takes over at the molecular or cellular level and forces the tissues to bind back together once severed doesn't mean living cells wouldn't go through quite a shock if they could start operating again. Kai's body no longer heals or mends after it is broken or torn, but binds back into a cohesive machine. Without being able to study Insect physiology from our very narrow point of view, we must guess that protoblood basically made the Insects somewhat immortal until the Brunnen-G ancestors found a way to defeat them. Given that Kai can withstand very high power disruptions, perhaps protoblood has something to do with creating an electromagnetic barrier around conductive tissues. At any rate, if Kai could be drained of protoblood and reintegrate his former senses, he would probably feel very weak.

    As Lexx begins with Kai being the one to fulfill the prophecy, so it ends with Kai once again crashing his craft into the heart of danger in order to stop it. Kai's very end is poignant and ironic; after winning a game of chess against the Prince of death himself, he is granted life only to lose it again. After being a zombie assassin for six millennia, after having killed tens of thousands and more, after outlasting his people, both his ancestral planets, and even a universe, he finally finds rest.

    Kai is played by Michael McManus. If you would like to know more, the most complete site I know of for information is at michael-mcmanus.com. Here are quick links to interviews from 2006 (apologies, that podcast link is inaccessible without premium subscrition to scifitalk.com) 2007 and 2009, and there is an updated (2010) Kai biography at sadgeezer. Links within my article above go to articles at Lexx Wiki.

  • brain melt

    I think I might have Scott's zombie thing figured out. Before his regular doctor pulled him off everything and put him on the prednisone, an ER doctor had him on a really strong antibiotic and he was taking advil. We didn't know anything about vasculitis at that point, and that's when I first heard the zombie escape plan. He hasn't really mentioned it for about a week now, so I'm wondering if it was kind of like how you get fantasy and real life mixed up during fever or something. It's been so awfully hot, and Scott's not the sort to sit around, you can't keep the guy in the house unless he's obsessed with some kind of indoor project, but even then I'll constantly be looking for him outside. Anyway, for now, I'm chalking it up to heat exhaustion triggering the autoimmune inflammation in his arteries and veins. At any rate, he started back to work yesterday, and now he follows instructions to experiment by slowly getting back off the prednisone and seeing if it triggers again.
  • molten lava cake could also equal love

    censored Scott keeps bugging me. He thinks it's funny that I look so crabby. I told him back off and don't touch me. My uterus wants BROWNIES. The only thing I can think of that equals the word love right now is BROWNIES.
     
    cool An exercise I've been doing over the 2-3 years that I've blogged privately is some form of bullet pointing, to cut down on extraneous verbage. So here we go with thoughts about this week.
     
    sad It's not enough that I've been autoimmune since my 20's, now Scott is diagnosed with stuff scarier than mine. The rest of this month will be an experiment in whether he will be able to change his workaholic lifestyle before he croaks himself off.
     
    shocked omg, if we wind up having to sell the house, that means we have to ~clean~ it... You'll understand the horror of that statement only if you understand Scott is a super neat freak and our walk in closet is spotless. I continually stop him from packing everything we own into labeled neatly stacked containers.
     
    wtf The whole plunge into floaty disassociating depression after my gyno pulled me off birth control to see where I'm at with my hormones on top of my regular dr radically dropping my thyroid dose when they found out I went way hyper was a real trip and a half through severe hormone deprivation, so maybe none of this stuff is real. I haven't been sure what's real or not since about April.
     
    angry So the whole way-past-menopause thing was just another fling from a slingshot and now I seem to be more fertile than ***EVER*** and I'm allergic to everything including condoms and chemicals, and now THERE ARE NO BROWNIES because Scott is on such a big load of prednisone that a half piece of toast spikes his glucose up to 150.
     
    winky I see my psyche guy tomorrow. I can't wait to tell him about Scott's plans to thwart the zombies. I'm cool with it as long as they can't get into the chicken pens. I just wanna know if vasculitis is a precursing symptom of turning into a zombie, and I'll need written instructions on what to do so I don't mistake him for a cockroach from outer space because my memory lately is just shot.
     
     

     
     
    surprised ~breathe~ The anxiety isn't as bad as it used to be, thank goodness, but I still can't watch the water polo events without feeling like I have to hold my breath a lot.
     

  • the zombies got sitemeter

     

     

    And that's even worse when you feel about two months behind in the first place.
     
    To all you poor saps working around the clock at Sitemeter lately, I raise my coffee to you this morning. While little blogs around the net are actually documenting traffic increases every time the word sitemeter goes into their posts because so many frantic surfers are looking for answers, they are still turning to other stat counters in tiny desperation. What happened this time? Massive lightning strike? (http://www.weather.com/) X-class CME pulsing their equipment? (http://spaceweather.com/) Traffic jam during the server move? (pun, ha, I'm so funny at 7 a.m.) I'm just glad I'm not on that end of it. I'll wait it out over here in my little house, because I'm curious. I've been with sitemeter since 2004 and I know all their ins and outs. I've triangulated their tracking system with internal tracking here and a stalker module on another blog when it was bouncing off the walls in 2008. People talk about switching: hey, just add something. If you're getting it for free anyway, just use more than one tracker so you'll have backup. Don't just compare during their worst crisis, compare it year round when your sites are slow.
     
    So here's the deal, since other bloggers are yapping their TMI numbers. My sites were essentially dead, because I had them all closed for two years, some longer. I only recently opened them back up, just in time, apparently, for the epic sitemeter fail. My internal trackers asploded this week, nothing over the top, just busybusy, and it would have been nice to have sitemeter for a tad more accurate info. But I don't have any of that, and after wrestling with it for a couple of days have decided to sit back and ride it out, just watch and see how it gets handled, etc. Every time a host of any kind goes down for 'maintenance', it always takes longer than projected, it's usually handled badly, i.e. making the users feel abandoned without explanations, and then when it's all fixed the host service usually winds up way better than it was before. I went through this with AOL's growing pains years ago and stuck with them when everyone else I know bailed, and I can't tell you how cool the services are now. I've gone through this with xanga multiple times. Look at all the people hanging in there with facebook, even though the grumbling is continual. Webring did a massive overhaul and is trying to get me back. And sitemeter has grown through several glitches just like everyone else. "Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology, we have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. We can make him better than he was before; better, stronger, faster." I remember when there were no computers for us peons. Now regular bloggers have access to light-speed-up-to-the second information and have all kinds of cows and kittens when servers go down. At least send sitemeter a thank you card for boosting your traffic while you're complaining about them. That's a free service.
     
    Back to my coffee. I've got bigger things on my plate. The prednisone seems to be curing Scott of zombie-itis, and he's feeling well enough to wrangle with some new technology at the break of dawn. We'll have our own server downtime going on if I don't monitor this situation.... *need coffee*  (ug, now photobucket is upgrading again...)
     
  • SAVE FERRIS

    We're starting to call Abby 'Prince Abner' now... She/He is front and center there.

    I go out of my way to order hens (for this flock I drove personally to another city) because my neighbors aren't keen on the crowing. I'm not keen on their dogs, but we've agreed to declare my yard a demilitarized zone. They keep their dogs out of my yard, I don't get roosters.

    I have butchered a LOT of chickens in my life. When you grow up Mennonite on a farm, you see*. death*. everywhere*. It's a way of life and I have no problem eating chicken, but as I've gotten older, I've gotten softer. It kills me to have to kill my chickens now, even if they're miserably dying of illness and old age. I love them, wah!!!!

    Abs is a beautiful bird, and either she's going to be an Amazonian machine, or he's going to be dinner. This is weighing more and more heavily on my mind every morning, with the crowing... It's been so many years since I've eaten one of my own babies, I'm not sure I can do it anymore.

    Roosters are funny thangs. They're actually kind of effeminate the first three months, usually looking more and more like giant klutzes, and you wonder what the crap because you paid top dollar getting them sexed and surely this one isn't having a growth hormone problem, you know? I've seen a lot of weird genetic stuff in chickens, anything is possible. But then the crowing starts... It's like when a boy's voice starts changing, it sounds really weird for awhile and you go, really?, and that's what makes you think it might still be a hen, because hens crowing can sound a little ridiculous. Btw, that doesn't mean they're turning into roosters or going androgynous, it's just a natural bird thing for a tribal leader to clearly state territory proclamations. If there is no rooster, a lead hen sometimes naturally takes over. It's a very important job and must be done correctly, and you can go all Terry Pratchett-y if you dwell on that too long.

    Anyway, I've been through this umpteen times, gangly awkward teenager goes giganto and starts irritating everyone, practicing foolishly on old hens who get miffed when an ideal opportunity pops up as they are getting a drink, and next thing you know, Jr. is on his back in the water bowl because he can't keep his balance, and the old lady's head is squashed under the kid ~in the water~, and, well, I'm pretty sure that's where the saying "mad as a wet hen" originated from.

    And then the spurs start nubbing out, and boy don't they feel all sassy then, and oh look, legs walking across the yard, *stealthstealthcoolstealth* here he comes, dragging a wing and hopping sideways, then the LEAP, and *whamo*, I block the nidiot with a slick hip move and send him rolling, and he thinks that's so awesome that he comes right back and keeps throwing his body all over me, and dang if he's not trashing my good pants, what was I thinking wearing them in the back yard... My dad got specially bred fighting roosters one year because he thought they'd look pretty walking around the yard, boy was that a joke. You get one of those guys on your head and it's exactly like a cartoon, but with real blood. Nowadays you could impress people saying a zombie nearly got you.

    I'm kind of hoping we can wait this one out and see what happens, maybe break out the good camera and have some fun with it. And maybe rename the guy. I'm not crazy about just sliding it over to 'Abner', and I really wanna stick to my tv character theme. Abby was for two Abbies, the one on NCIS, and the one on Primeval. You know what? Today is Wil Wheaton's birthday, I could use one of his characters, like Dr. Isaac Parrish (who is, incidentally, a dick) from Eureka. Or I *could* just name him Wil Wheaton, because technically he played himself on The Big Bang Theory but I hate to do that because later on I'd be saying Yeah, Wil Wheaton got mangled in a dog attack, or Wil Wheaton got hit by a car, or we ate Wil Wheaton for supper last night, and a phrase like that could wind up throwing some kind of horrible cosmic irony at me if me saying that happened to coincide with something terrible actually happening to the guy. I mean, what if a raccoon found a way into the pen and ate Wil Wheaton's brain? And the biggest Prairie Kingsnake Scott ever saw went slithering past the Quackerdome door while it was wide open last spring, easily 4 feet long. You just never know, so that's why I don't name chickens after anyone real, because it sounds bad when you tell someone they died, you know? Kinda bothers my sister to hear someone had a pig named her name but it died, can't say I blame her. She has a cute name that winds up in songs, so I'm not saying it was disturbing to have a pig named after her, ok, this is getting out of hand, you know what I mean.  It sounds like a jinx.

    Behold, Dr. Isaac Parrish.

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My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.

My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.

Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.

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