alphabet edits—eforemika chen, chosen by @juliettecai
butsometimes, you find yourself standing in exactly the right position, wielding exactly the right weapon to hit back. so i hit. i hit fast and hard and furious. i hit with nothing but the language whispered between circuits and wire, the language that can bring people to their knees. and in spite of everything, i’d do it all over again.
alphabet edits—eforemika chen, chosen by @juliettecai
butsometimes, you find yourself standing in exactly the right position, wielding exactly the right weapon to hit back. so i hit. i hit fast and hard and furious. i hit with nothing but the language whispered between circuits and wire, the language that can bring people to their knees. and in spite of everything, i’d do it all over again.
Hope I see you guys on tour in the next couple of weeks! Warcross is almost here, ahhhh!
I’m going to be joining Marie at Wellesley Books in Wellesley, MA, next Thursday (Sept. 14)! Come out and help us celebrate her brand-new science fiction thriller WARCROSS!
That’s the difference between the real and the virtual. Reality is where you can lose the ones you love. Reality is the place where you can feel the cracks in your heart.
Warcross + Legend Timeline, Headcannons, and Speculations (Wildcard spoilers beware)
OMG so I just finished Wildcard, had my life shook, spent over an hour catatonic (by which I mean reminiscing by looking for nonexistent fanfictions and looking at Marie Lu’s IG posts like the stalker I am). Which culminated into considering what happens between the end of Wildcard and Legend.
Warcross time setting: according to Marie Lu on Twitter, it’s “set *almost* in present day, ie 10 years in the future!”. To make number crunching easier for us, let’s round to 2030.
Based upon that assumption, Hideo (21 years old) was born in 2009 (damn, I feel like a pedophile now that I realize he would only be 9 years old). Emika (18 years old) was born around 2012.
Legend time setting: According to Champion, the Three-Year Flood that eventually caused the formation of the Republic and the Colonies occurred around 2046.
Oof, turns out there’s still quite a bit of action left in our Warcross characters’ lives! By the time the Flood rolls around in 2046, Hideo will only be 37 years old while Emika’s at 34.
Based on the Legend trilogy, a lot of intellectuals and top-thinkers fled for either Antarctica or Africa (the latter if they were from Europe and didn’t live in Norway, France, Spain, Germany, and the British Isles). Considering Emika would have stayed in Japan since she became CEO of Henka Games, and Japan is pretty well known for tsunamis + the fact it’s an island, I think it’s a given that Hideo and Emika must have fled for Antarctica when the Flood hit. By this time, the NeuroLinks must have been well imbedded into the world again after it was reprogrammed, so the question is, what happened to them? The Republic and the Colonies clearly didn’t have them by the time Legend happened, and from how Antarctica is made to sound like this amazing utopia while others pale in comparison, it seems like the other superpowers of the time (China and Africa) also do not have NeuroLinks anymore. Did Hideo/Emika/Henka decide to disconnect or change the link in the process of forming the new government in Antarctica, using NeuroLink as the basis?
And what happened to the Phoenix Riders, Tremaine, Jax, and Sasuke?
Well, let’s see.
Asher Wing — that’s easy. He went back to LA, and then had kids with Hammie (?) or maybe his brother (Daniel) had kids, and then give or take a hundred fifty years, we have Day. Although… that would mean he spent the rest of his days under Republic rule, probably never hearing from his friends again. (I realize this is all a headcannon, but here’s a headcannon of my headcannon: he has an optimized form of NeuroLink ‘cause he’s friends with Emika and Hideo ofc and he can direct link with them and the others!)
Hammie — said she was going back to Houston at the end of Wildcard along with frequent visits to LA. Presuming she and Asher got married and presuming Day descends from Asher’s side of the family and not Daniel’s, she moved to LA to be with him. She also spends the rest of her days suppressed under Republic rule.
Roshan — UK, said he was going back to London at the end of Wildcard. According to Champion, the British Isles still exist, so I’ll assume the UK is going strong. Well, as strong as it can; it’s not considered a superpower anymore.
Tremaine — Presumed to join Roshan in London. We can also assume they got married and adopted kids and then lost touch with everyone after the Flood. Yikes, this is getting depressing real fast.
Jax — Considering her ability to kill, it seems justifiable to say that many people have died by her hand. Thus, as much as it kills me on the inside to say on this, I think Jax ended up with a life sentence at the end of Wildcard, with a parole (since she was basically manipulated into killing) after x amount of years, which we’ll assume never happens, because the Flood happens around 16 years after the events of Warcross. I’m assuming her parole was after 25 years of good behavior. In this case, I foresee two possible outcomes.
THE BAD OUTCOME: Let’s be honest, Japan probably gets flooded real fast because 1) low elevation, 2) ocean!, 3) its a tsunami hotspot. Everyone’s going to be climbing skyscrapers via ninety flights of stairs; no one cares about the prisoners. She drowns.
THE GOOD OUTCOME: No one cares about the prisoners (by which I mean only Jax) except Sasuke and Emika. I foresee Sasuke hacking the codes and breaking her out of prison while alerting Emika to pick her up. Jax goes to Antarctica with Emika and Hideo. So I guess the Flood is a blessing; I don’t think I can bear thinking about Jax spending her entire life behind bars.
Sasuke — seems to be the only person who I’m not sure where he went… he’s literally data, the Internet, a worm, right? So theoretically, as long as the Web exists, he does, too. Of course, the NeuroLink was destroyed/disappeared somewhere along the line in pretty much the entire world. Perhaps the connections of computers between nations were also similarly severed, no longer allowing Sasuke to access every single piece of online information.
Perhaps he is the part of the algorithm behind the NeuroLink seen as a part of life and society in Antarctica in Champion. When June wonders how exactly an action is determined as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, maybe he has a hand in deciding.
Or perhaps, he can access all the computers in the world, and that’s why Antarctica has so much information stored in those cylindrical simulation booths of theirs.
Wildcard may have had a more or less happy ending, but with so many possibilities and the Flood so close by, it’s very possible that our beloved characters’ ultimate endings are more sad than not :C
