Embellished outline

A capstone advice was “get your hands dirty early”. This is a story exactly about that — mitigating procrastination and getting shit done. How does the story go? (Alternatively, this is the story of how lotus (an invasive spacies) came to Mars.)

  1. Prologue:
    1. Grandma’s handwritten recipe that uses all parts of a lotus: roots, petals, stalk, beads.
    2. Grandma’s VISA application to come visit Sam on Mars, processed after 5 years delay.
  2. Introduction:
    1. Afternoon on Mars. Sam is in the third supermarket. She’s looking for lotus. She can’t find it. It’s really hot, she’s tired. She appears calm and logical, but it upsets her because she really wanted to make grandma’s favourite lotus soup before her grandma arrives from Earth. Most importantly, she’s upset because she hasn’t seen grandma since childhood and now she’s in such a different life stage, both of them.
    2. Also Sam has only seen lotus on Earth when she was very small. She forgot what it tastes, looks, smells like. She is just using grandma’s sketch and voice memo to find lotus. Grandma has told her a lot because she loves lotus very much, making food with it, making silk out of it, cultivating it, copying sutras about it.
  3. Rising act (optional)
    1. It was sun showering (drizzle without clouds) outside so Sam was able to think and decide what to do. Sam calls a “wise person” who, based on her contacts, secretly cultivates something that sounds like a lotus based on grandma’s sketch.
  4. Rising act:
    1. Sam gets back on the bike, intending to go to her lab. She works at a nanomaterial lab doing computer simulations there.
    2. This is the fun part: she takes the drawings by grandma. finds the formula for making the separate parts from other plants. draws a blueprint out of rotational symmetry and the dynamics it should make with the weight. designs some mechanism for how it could float. designs how the roots can grow out into the ideal shape from just some simple instructions by making an ant-maze like container mold. 3D prints some imaginary parts with food material or plant fiber. grafts them with hot glue or spincoating in the lab. sped up the system to take 3 years into 2 hours because time was running out. (Sam is always so impatient because she is optimistic of more effective ways that can also reduce amount of problems from happening (see some problem statement in the book she reads, engineering mindset).
    3. She peels away her Frankenstein flower super fast. Rain absorbed into the flower and made it bulge. she fell down into a construction pothole and the ugly flower broke into thousands of pieces and flowed quickly with stormwater into the drains.
    4. As Sam scrambles to pick up the fragments in the puddle, she cries and makes decision about what to do next. Time is running out. She is torn because if she doesn’t find it she doesn’t know how else to show grandma that she cares about her, so much that Sam has been escaping grandma’s affection and control for the past how many years. Yet when she considers getting back and finding an easier gift, her stubbornness makes her persist.
  5. Climax:
    1. Sam gets back on the bike, intending to go to the forest. The hurricane is picking up. She sees lightning flashing over the lake surface. She bikes faster and runs off the road into the chipped ground on foot. She arrives at the lake and starts circling it. She sees some lilies at the centre. She takes off clothes and swims. But there was a lot of mud and kelp dragging her. And the rain was pouring so hard she physically cannot go any further. She tried so many times, choked on water and breathed very hard. She picked up a lily as a backup. She gets back to the forest exit to the road drenched.
  6. Falling act:
    1. Sam gets back on the bike, rushing home. In the rain and dark everything blends together, and the ground (sand, mud) lifts up and moves. She bikes so fast she could not swirl. It was very pleasurable. She was remembering and preparing for seeing grandma again. Flashes of fear in wanting to give advice to grandma, wanting to escape from grandma’s wails “don’t forget me”, being unsure about how she is in conflict between her lab mission and her family life. These concerns visualise into theatrical scenes or role-plays in her head, collaged from Grandma’s notes and memos.
  7. Epilogue:
    1. Sam arrives home slightly after grandma is already at the door. They get inside, settle luggage.
    2. Sam pulls our her “lotus”, looking apologetic. Grandma pulls out her lotus — she sneaked some from her Earth porch! They cook the soup together, as the first meal of many they’d make over the time that follows.
    3. This is the story of how lotus (an invasive spacies) came to Mars.

Prologue close-up

  1. grandma’s sketches, recipes, voice memos

the recipe is abstract like a prophet, leaving a lot of room for operational interpretation in the fabrication experimentalist in the wet lab. how to make a life? that’s the Frankenstein question.

the recipe is abstract like a prophet, leaving a lot of room for operational interpretation in the fabrication experimentalist in the wet lab. how to make a life? that’s the Frankenstein question.

  1. grandma’s VISA application letter. include that the request is granted also because the orbits aligned to be possible for travel. (one of the many external constraints on them meeting.
  2. [put this here or in appendix or no where?] the story of Altair and Vega (See appendix)

Introduction close-up