Not everyone dies, some people become symbols.
/I’ve been working on this character off and on for the better part of a year. It was really important for me to get this one right. I’m still very new with iRay renderer and character modeling in general. It was important to me to create renders for this character because of what he means to the Amaranth Chronicles: Deviant Rising. Xander is, arguably, the man that sets the entire story into motion. Early in the novel we see him as the captain of a vessel from the frontier world: STR1-FE or “Strife” as he and the other people who live there refer to it. He commands the vessel, the Deviant Rising, and is on a mission from Strife after rallying a group of people wholly against the United Planets of Earth and the monitoring technology they are trying to force. This technology is considered an “invasion” not just of the frontier colonies but an invasion of personal freedoms literally capable of monitoring thoughts through a mandatory piece of hardware the user wears on their ear. On Earth, this technology is as ubiquitous as cell phones and laptops are to us, but the worlds of the frontier see this as a way to control their way of life. This technology is called “The Helix Network”. Early in the book, Captain Pacius’ mission is to take the STR1-FE shipment of Helix earrings and throw them overboard in a widely traverse area of space as a form of public protest. Captain Pacius never anticipated such a violent response from the United Planets of Earth.
AI generated images of Xander Pacius though the years.
Chris said it the best when we were writing this character, “What makes Xander so capable is that he’s lived twice as long in a career that kills men half his age.”
Captain Pacius was inspired by literary characters like Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Jimmy Raynor from StarCraft. Everything from his physical attributes to his character-feel and nobility, this man is one part dignified commander and one part roughien leader. While this character archetype is familiar in American literature and entertainment, I once knew a man like this that forever changed my life.His name was William Pacius and he taught 3D Modeling and Animation at Ohlone College in Fremont, California back in the mid-2000s. I knew I needed a person like this to kick off the events of the story.
Will was a very cheerful but fairly unassuming man. He loved teaching and loved working with young people. The first time I met him was when I was feeling frustrated about my formal education. I had attended Ohlone two years before followed by a brief stint at Cogswell Poly Technical and didn’t feel like either had much to offer me. I had been playing with 3D Studio Max since I was a teenager, and the classes I was finding just didn’t match up with my personal skill level. That’s when my friend, Dan Tritton, asked me to attend a class taught by a new teacher at Ohlone who was, apparently, a big deal in the industry. I was very young back then, in my early 20s, and I think I had an image in my head about how “big deals” were supposed to show up. Will was a fairly modest man with a nautical-looking beard and a beer-belly that made him seem like the fun uncle that showed up for the neighborhood BBQ. His overall friendly demeanor and unpretentious look did not match his overwhelming energy and impressive intelligence - at least I thought at the time. Will had a very particular way of inspiring his students, and I think it often made some of the traditional teachers at Ohlone nervous. Will was less about structure, creating a lesson plan that would teach basic concepts that would teach everyone equally, and more interested in tapping into each individual person’s capacities. His classes usually started with some sort of lesson with ⅔ of the remainder of the class time working independently while he walked the room and helped us individually. I remember once showing him a model of the vehicle I had modeled and he looked and said, “That’s great, but can you build it again with half as many polygons and stick it in Unreal Engine.” I remember, at the time feeling a little confused and saying, “Yeah, of course.” To which he replied, “Great, that’s your homework assignment.” He didn’t provide a traditional classroom experience and didn’t give traditional homework assignments. But, by the end of the week, I had built the vehicle, another kid had textured it, another had animated it, and another had programmed its behavior and then we had a fully functioning dune buggy racing around in Unreal Engine. It was easy to be skeptical of his approach, but hard to argue with the result. It wasn’t long before he was teaching us more than 3D modeling and animating. He convinced the school to begin to offer a series of game design courses and a small group of about 30 of us started to rally around him, enrolling in every single class he taught. This man’s charisma was magnetic and his passion for everything from 3D modeling to motion capture was palpable. I remember when the rumors of his previous careers started to pop up. Evidently, he had been the motion capture technician on the animated series Starship Troopers: Roughnecks, had worked for years at Cogswell Poly Tech, and had been one of the founding members of Pixar. So it struck a contrast when we found out he had also been a Catholic priest. To say this man’s resume was impressive is an understatement. As we got to know him he had lived a very complex life before the modern age of graphics. One night, after class, when a handful of us decided to stay to work on a project, somehow it came up that he used to manage a staff of engineers that airbrushed things out of satellite imagery that would be handed over to Terra Server and Google Earth. He mentioned everything from people’s faces to classified government locations even to unidentified flying objects. He said, “You wouldn’t believe how many little round disks are flying through the air.”
I don’t know if he was saying ETs are here, but he was so incredibly casual about it that it made us all listen that much harder. Shortly after, he mentioned working as a lab tech in a bio weapons research facility trying to weaponize pathogens. He even said the lab he worked with was rigged to burst into flames even with people inside if there was ever a leak. To say this man had lived a colorful life was like saying the Pacific Ocean was damp. I would, definitely, say William Pacius had inspired me to step outside the comfort zones of my design work. Will often told me he thought I was talented enough to get a job even without a formal education. I remember him saying I needed to start applying to companies, and after landing a job I should get them to pay for my education. He said I was talented enough to start my career now. “Don’t look at education as the barrier keeping you from your future.” He said that to me one night in the lab.
Legends of Will’s classes and even our LAN parties started to form a little culture of themselves. We would all bring our friends to these LAN parties and would be so inspired they would enroll in his classes. That’s why I was remarked, one night, after leaving my math class at the top of the college and headed down to his lab to shoot the shit with the guys and maybe get a little homework done only to find I was the only one there besides Will. He was working on a presentation file for class that night. The school had pushed back on his non-traditional techniques and had forced him to come up with a traditional lesson plan. As a passive aggressive “fuck you” he acquiesced and was building a Photoshop tutorial for editing a penguin into an image of a family standing on an escalator.
“What are you doing?” I asked him, sitting down in the first row.“This is Pen Pen the Penguin and he's our new mascot.” he replied, not missing a beat.
“Like Tux, the Linux mascot?”
“No, like the department head wants me to start creating a lesson plan so I plan to use Pen Pen in every assignment to shut them up.”
I thought it was a hilarious idea, and I wonder how many people will remember Pen Pen the penguin.I had my math book and binder open trying to solve what really was a simple algebraic equation if I had only understood the formulae in the margin. Will came over to look at what I was doing and saw that I was struggling.
“This is not the way you should be learning how to do this,” he said before walking over to the board and asking me to give him the equation.
He wrote it down as it was in the book then drew a geometric shape on the board. For the life of me I can’t remember the equations or what the geometric shape was, I just remember it almost looking like a star of David with a series of circles around it. The points of the star represented one side of the equation and the circles represented some other aspect of it. To my amazement I literally could see the answer to the problem inside this shape when I counted the different geometric parts. I know this is starting to sound like woo-woo, like how people describe alien abductions but just go with the story for a minute. Will explained that this was a form of math called “Sacred Geometry” and that it was a more effective way to teach mathematical concepts to artists. My mind exploded with this epiphany. Suddenly, that one little exercise expanded my world in a way I cannot explain.
“Where did you learn how to do this?” I asked, having no idea of the weight of the story I was prompting this man to tell me. He started to tell me about his days in the military during the vietnam era. He mentioned being part of an operation that still hadn’t been declassified. He and his squad were out in some desert somewhere in the world training the indigenous people to fight against the Russians. Evidently he got pretty close to the people he was training and at some point they showed him parts of their culture. One of the things that he learned from these people was Sacred Geometry. He mentioned that these indigenous people were deeply spiritual and originally didn’t want to fight, but the Russians were being so aggressive with them that America was very willing to get involved militarily. Will told me he was young, very young and thought power flowed from the end of his M16. He remembered feeling invincible and that he was being patriotic, teaching these people how to fight against their aggressor. That was until one morning shortly after sunrise when he had his squad and the trainees out on the top of this sort of desert plateau running drills. They heard a helicopter in the distance, and initially thought it was a resupply drop but something wasn’t right. They weren't expecting a resupply. A Russian attack chopper came up over the edge of this flat plateau and immediately opened fire. He said the chopper was the most terrifying sight he had ever seen.
“They started fifty-cal-ing everyone. Had missiles docked on the side but didn’t even use them. They flew low and made it personal. We scrambled to return fire but it happened so fast. I remember raising my weapon up and going iron sights and the next thing I knew I was flying through the air after it felt like a sledge hammer had shot right through me,” he said.
“You were hit?” I asked.“Worse, I don't even remember hitting the ground. The next thing I know I’m waking up in a makeshift infirmary the indigenous people had set up. Evidently, I was too far gone for the American Corpsman to save, but the people we were training thought every life was worth trying to save, even with my guts splattered across that desert. Death isn’t what you think it is. It's not black, it's not like being asleep. It was like someone had cut the movie reel of my life and then hot glued a completely different tape to the end. Everything just jumped forward four days,” he explained. I remember being stunned by his story. I was literally sitting there speechless with the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
“I spent the next few days in intensive care slipping in and out of a coma. Then they put me in a sort of pod attached to a helicopter with a couple other survivors and tried flying us out to a ship waiting just off the coast. I was fully awake when we started taking fire from the ground and I watched the pilot get hit.”“You got shot down!?” I said. “Yeah,” Will continued, “We plummeted down to the ground. I remember the impact. I had felt the impact of the 50 cal that had launched me into the air, but I don’t remember the pain. The crash though, that I was fully there for. I can’t explain to you the overwhelming pain of suddenly smashing into the ground. My stitches burst and then suddenly in this blinding pain I was trying to hold my gizzards in where they were supposed to be. Last thing I remember was this guerilla fighter type dude walking over with an AK-47. And then the tape was cut again.”“What happened next?” I remember tears were beginning to fill my eyes.“I don’t know. I woke up in the ICU on an american aircraft carrier. Worst part. I was the only survivor from my group. My body healed over time but the worst and most lasting part was the survivor's guilt. It's like, why me? Why did I survive?”
There was this long, pregnant silence as Will Pacius went back over to the teachers desk to continue building his photoshop tutorial. I remember being speechless with everything I had just learned. In that 45 minutes before his class started, my mind had been expanded and the reality of the world, and the role this man had played in other people's lives had suddenly come into sharp focus and I could barely process all of it. I don’t remember much more from the night other than him starting class like normal.
Willam Pacius was more than just a teacher, he was more than a mentor, he was more than just someone who simply inspired people to chase their dreams. This man was something else entirely. Having read this far, maybe now you can appreciate what a blow it was one afternoon when we got a campus wide email that Will had died in his sleep the previous night. It was unbelievable. Our teacher, no, our leader was dead and none of us, Will’s kids, knew what to do or how to take it. I remember the church where we had his funeral was packed. Standing room only. Easily a hundred people had come to pay their respects but I remarked when the pastor asked “Would anyone like to say a few words about this man”. No one stood up to take the mic. There was this awkward silence as if everyone was waiting for someone else to be first. This wasn’t the first time I had lost someone close to me, nor would it be the last. But it was the second time in my life when I watched a pastor take a breath to move on and I knew I would never be able to look at myself in the mirror If i didn’t say something to the room. I stood up and took the mic and told a short story about one night when Will gave my girlfriend, at the time, an epiphany about her character animations. I just remember him telling her something about keeping the character's nose right over his shoelaces and then pantomimed the animation himself. Her face lit up with joy as the epiphany washed over her. Interesting note, she’d later go one to work for Pixar. After being the first to tell a story, the other students came forward sharing stories of their own. I remember Dan Tritton coining the phrase “Where there was a Will there was a way.”
My attendance petered out the rest of that semester and I never went back to college. I had learned all I could at that point and because of Will not only did I now believe in myself, but felt a duty to prove him right and strike out on my own.
When Chris and I began writing the Amaranth Chronicles, I knew we needed a leader that would be the traditional literary hero leading the charge of revolution while also carrying on some of the essence that Will had inspired in all of us at Ohlone College in Fremont, California.
That's when I realized that not everyone dies, some people become symbols.
“William Pacius, we will miss your toasts” - His obituary
I realize neither this post nor the animation are perfect, but nevertheless, thank you for your time…
