Sep 11, 2016

I am now well into the second rewrite of the book. When I say rewrite, I really mean it. The whole thing is getting rewritten from scratch. The plot has really crystallized, and I’m really at home with each of the characters.

Part of making the story tighter has also meant consolidating the secondary characters. I’ve eliminated one big sub plot, a love story among two of the supporting characters that was very interesting, but frankly took away from the main arc of Joel and Sylvia. Eliminating this "distraction" from the overall plot, has allowed me to make room for more action.

The book is now broken up into three acts, each defined by ruminations on the future history of the Mona Lisa, and 1980’s pop songs.

Act I: Ciao Bella, song: Karma Chameleon by Culture Club

After the solar storm of April 15, 2301 botched the Mona Lisa’s teleportation from Rome to New York, da Vinci’s masterpiece was gone forever. A globally cherished artifact destroyed—along with hundreds of people unfortunate enough to be on, or in the path of motor-powered vehicles in the vicinity of Italy at the time.

A solar storm is what it sounds like: a generic term for increased activity in the Sun. In this case, a massive solar flare, followed by something called a colossal coronal mass ejection. That’s a fancy way of saying gargantuan electromagnetic solar shitstorm. A solar flare is initiated by the sudden release of energy stored in the Sun’s corona, causing the Sun’s plasma to heat up to tens of millions of degrees, accelerating and spewing out all sorts of radiation, resulting in a solar eruption. One way to think about it is to imagine an Earth-sized zit popping on the Sun’s forehead. Okay, that’s a pretty gross visual, but now it’s in your head, and out of mine.

In this particular solar storm, the energy from the corona eruption also caused an equally devastating coronal mass ejection which is a much slower-moving, billion-ton cloud of plasma. This cloud floated over Italy at a very unfortunate moment.

A more powerful electromagnetic pulse than mankind could ever hope to tame, the solar energetic particles hit the Earth with such force they ionized the sky, creating a vast cloud of energetic electrons that bounced around inside the atmosphere destroying electronics and fusing conductive wires everywhere.

Back then, when they teleported something, atomic sections of the object in transport were destroyed—cleared—concurrently along with their confirmed intact arrival at their destination. When the teleportation process was complete, the place of origin was officially deemed clear of the teleported object, and the item at the destination was henceforth considered to be the original.

By the time the people in charge realized there was a mistake in their teleportation protocol, nothing could be done to save the Mona Lisa. Rows of atoms perfectly replicating centuries old masterstrokes suddenly unravelled into nothing. The painting dissolved into a cloud of worthless gray quantum foam.

It wasn’t for a lack of redundancies, it’s just that black swans don’t play by the rules—and this one was a particularly petulant pen.

Prior to this travesty, most of the religious types were ambivalent to teleportation. It was a form of freight, not transportation. The very notion of organic teleportation was considered a fool’s errand, a technically impossible farce, owing to the fidget problem: living things fidget, so a good real-time atomic model that could accurately predict and transmit what they’d do next was still a scientific wet dream.

Nonetheless, some of the most orthodox religiosos could be found picketing in front of one location or another prior to the first public exhibition of teleportation. The devotees’ qualms with teleportation basically boiled down to two main arguments:

First, there was something to do with forbidden fruit. Bible thumpers had been generally grumpy about the practical commercial manipulation of quantum foam. Quantum foam is the stuff the universe is made of, so I guess their point was we shouldn’t have been messing with God’s Play-Doh.

The second divine umbrage, raised by an interfaith leader named Roberto Shila, was a more succinct channeling of the Tower of Babel story, which had oft been espoused to be an anti-technological omen. Shila’s zealous interpretation of the story was that the Babylonians had embraced their understanding of science and its workings under the premise of altruism, or at least an attempt to prevent another forty day and forty night flood, to the extent that they felt they would be able to spar with God on his turf. To Shila’s ilk, teleportation was basically a new flavor of the Babylonian stairway to heaven. In other words, teleportation was worse than us playing with God’s toys—it was us playing God.

Neither of those gripes were particularly novel at the time, nor unique to teleportation, as both were previously cited in admonition of genetic engineering, connected implants, and medical nanotechnology. So they were largely ignored by the general public other than a few journalists looking for “both sides of the story.”

But that all changed after the Mona Lisa disappeared.

Sure, accidents happen all the time. On that unfortunate day boats sank, drones crashed, trucks collided—all with invaluable souls and cargo on board. Any vessel in which the Mona Lisa might have otherwise been travelling would have also been devastatingly impacted by the same solar flare. But witnessing something so globally precious fade into nothing in real time sure had a lasting effect on people.

Ciao, bella.

Act II: Isleworth, song: Bette Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes

The Mona Lisa, as I grew up to know it, was a painting which was once known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa, the authenticity and history of which was once fraught with contention.

Shortly before World War I, an English art collector discovered a Mona Lisa "lookalike" in the home of a Somerset nobleman in whose family’s possession it had been for nearly a century. This discovery led to the conjecture that Leonardo painted two portraits of Lisa del Giocondo, a.k.a. The Mona Lisa: The infamous one destroyed in the aforementioned da Vinci Exhibition, and the one discovered in Somerset and then brought to Isleworth, where it eventually came to be known as the "Isleworth Mona Lisa."

The story goes that da Vinci began painting Mona Lisa in 1503, but left her unfinished. Then, in 1517 a fully finished Mona Lisa painting surfaced in Leonardo’s private possession shortly before his death. The latter painting is believed to be the same that was destroyed in 2137. Based on this contradiction, supporters of the authenticity of the Isleworth Mona Lisa claim it is the first iteration of Mona Lisa, made at least partially by Leonardo 10 years before the “actual” Mona Lisa was painted.

Adding heft to this theory, in 1584, the same century in which the Mona Lisa was painted, an art historian named Gian Paolo Lomazzo wrote about "della Gioconda, e di Mona Lisa” (the Gioconda, and the Mona Lisa). Since "La Gioconda" was sometimes used as an alternative title for the Mona Lisa, the reference implied that these were, in fact, two separate paintings, with the Isleworth Mona Lisa being the younger version of her more famous sister.

What I’m getting at is that these days when people go to a museum to see the Mona Lisa, they’re really admiring the Isleworth Mona Lisa, despite the plaque beneath it which explains in detail that the two paintings weren’t the same, and especially since the memory of the elder portrait’s destruction is so etched in our collective memories.

Yet ask any ogler standing before her, and to them she’s still the Mona Lisa.  Just as it was for me growing up.

So does that mean the painting formerly known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa is now actually the Mona Lisa?

Act III: La Giaconda, song: Bizarre Love Triangle by New Order

Many believe that much of the Mona Lisa’s charm is wrapped up in her mystery. Her enigmatic smile is emblematic of the notion that she and Leonardo da Vinci are hiding secrets from the viewer. Efforts at solving this mystery or puzzle have largely focused on the identity of the sitter, who is generally accepted as Madonna Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, hence Mona (short for Madonna) Lisa or La Gioconda (the feminine Giocondo).

But the beauty of the Mona Lisa isn’t who she is, the painting’s symmetry, or lack thereof. It’s not the color composition, or the brush strokes.

The beauty of the Mona Lisa, the reason it endures, in whatever medium, is the mystery that encapsulates the smile that greets us, it beckons us to ask one fundamental question: who are you?