The Indebted--Blog of The Web Serial

In the novella The Indebted, the setting was in a debtors slave labor prison camp in the middle of Antarctica where the prisoners worked on green energy stations feeding a power craved world with cheap energy from the last continent to be settled. Obviously, that story was set in a future after the treaties that protect the environment of Antarctica had expired. In that version, the world had united and faced a global economic depression where the “have’s” in the world consolidated power in mega-corporations and sent the hapless people who had created to much debt to prison to work and to die in slave labor under the illusion that they were working off their debt and would someday be free. This novella ended with the protagonist sacrificing his life to start a prison uprising.

This whole scenario will not work for the web series of The Indebted. I examined the story line set on Earth and with the hero living instead of dying, so that the story could be expanded. I also examined moving the story to the Galilean moon of Europa. After doing a lot of research on that promising ice moon, I figured that story was still checkmated. Antarctica made more sense in comparing the two—it had wind and geothermal sources for power. For Eurpoa I had to find a reason why the “powers that be” would build a prison under the ice in a highly radioactive region of space. What would be there that was of such importance to spend the resources on getting even slave laborers there.

As I explored the possibilities and considered what the possible plot lines would be for the story, I have decided to remove the story itself from our solar system. Instead I am setting it on a different world. The world where the story starts will keep the same frozen theme and will be a prison colony. Despite this similarity, the possibilities of where the plot could go and what the prisoners are even doing in the prison changes.

Possibilities mount as The Indebted is rewritten.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for articles, blogs, poetry, and stories I write.