Null Paradox Seth

The concept for Victoria & Seth, the second book and third music album in the Null Paradox steampunk multiverse, is about the character’s sometimes serene, sometimes tumultuous relationship. A series of Storytimes shares the background of both characters.

 

Null Paradox: Victoria & Seth

If Victoria’s persona is defined by her ten steps of grief and grieving, Seth’s is determined by who he is:

• Shy
• Prefers to stay in the background
• Smart
• Calm
• Confident
• Resourceful
• Driven by his agenda. Several of them

Null Paradox: Seth

Seth is a self-made young man from a poor background, driven by a dual motivation to regain the love of his life, Victoria, and seek revenge against those who killed Grace, his friend.

Shy and reserved, he prefers to stay in the background while dedicating most of his time building steampunk equipment in an attempt to bridge the communication barrier between his universe and parallel universes.

His intelligence, resourcefulness, and determination fuel his single-minded focus on finding solutions, often at the exclusion of everything else in his life.

However, when Victoria ghosts him due to her suspicion about his pursuit of revenge, Seth’s anger intensifies, sharpening his focus and leading him to instruct The Bully to uncover the truth about Victoria’s disappearance.

Null Paradox: Seth Zero and Physics

Like most Null Paradox characters, Seth lives in the same multiverse as Victoria, Gertrude, Grace, and The Bully.

Physicists describe the multiverse as an object that contains all possible universes. At its core, the Null Paradox multiverse is the same, but how we navigate the infinite permutations of each universe within the multiverse is different.

In Null Paradox, the characters perceive life as a series of tiny hops from one universe to another stitched together to create the life they experience. This is facilitated by a machine briefly described in the first book (Gertrude & Grace), which plays a more significant role in the upcoming second book (Victoria & Seth).

To keep things understandable, the primary Seth is Seth Zero.

There are infinite versions of Seth, including Seth One.

While the essence of Seth remains the same, there are significant variabilities in his relationships and actions. 

And if you linearly align his timelines, Seth One experiences events before Seth Zero. 

But unlike Victoria, Seth Zero suspects the nature of the Null Paradox multiverse and wonders if there’s a way to communicate between them.

 

Seth One

Seth One is further along in his understanding of how to communicate between the infinite permutations of himself. That’s primarily because Victoria One isn’t as accommodating to Seth One in their relationship as Victoria Zero is to Seth Zero. In short, Victoria One ghosts him much earlier than Victoria Zero.

He needs to evolve faster because his primary motivation is finding her.

Fortunately, Seth One is more introspective than his stubborn Seth Zero counterpart.

With a little outside help, he realizes that he and Victoria may have a common enemy. In his minds-eye, a common enemy is a perfect way to rekindle their relationship.

That’s the good news.  

The bad news is that he may be fighting the wrong enemy.

This brings us to a future story about The Bully.

Courtesy of my work with the MidJourney AI, here’s a glimpse of a Seth One. This image is based on photographs of Darius M. Thompson playing the role of Seth with the background photos from a photoshoot I did at AllSaints in Chicago, Illinois.