An alternate-historical biopic of America’s most intrepid aviatrix. She’s got a southern accent but you’d be hard pressed to put your finger on it. She fights the Union but the Civil War’s long over. She spits, swears, shoots and flies a jetpack to preserve her idealistic dreams from perpetual interference by big bad bankers and dastardly railroad barons. She’s Lorna Lockheed and she never bluffs. She’s every girl’s hero and every boy’s too. But just who is the famed test pilot that transfixed a generation with her bold rebellion and corporate vandalism? Let’s take a look… Lorna Lockheed is from just about everywhere if you care to ask. Not much is known about her upbringing. Reports suggest she may have been born in 1878 but no indication on where. She has only one real memory of her father. Her mother raised her alone if you can call it that, and the two of them can be found in registries as far removed as Philadelphia, Charlotte, Biloxi, Tucson, and Seattle, among others. Her mother took whatever work she could find, not all of it reputable, and brought Lorna alongside wherever fate would lead.
She has a younger sister somewhere but they aren’t close and by the time she entered the picture, Lorna had already run off on her own. It is unclear what became of her mother or if it had anything to do with why young Lorna ran off on her own as early as fourteen. Around the mid 1890’s Lorna turned up outside Carson City running with a cluster of other like-minded and wayward teens. Led by Johnny Pilotti and Sylvester Stokes, the kids experimented with rocketbikes out in the salt flats where it is believed Lorna experienced flight for the first time. Lorna followed Stokes and a few others to the burgeoning town of Clarebourne where they famously defended aeronautics engineer Damon Kurtzman during the city’s unorthodox 1898 manufacturing strike from a coalition of National Guard airships. They fought back using Kurtzman’s own experimental solo propulsion turbojets and became an overnight sensation. Touting their narrow victory, Clarebourne declared itself free of all scientific oversight from the government, all but seceding from the Union in the process, furthering the march toward industrial independence begun decades earlier by notorious western gunslinger and bank robber Gabriel Glass. It also cemented the city as a haven for free enterprise and innovation for years to come. Stokes and his gang of disobedient test pilots were nicknamed Jetpunks almost immediately, and Lorna Lockheed found herself in the midst of the greatest cultural and political unrest the nation had seen since the Civil War. The upstart New York State Governor responded by forming the First Air Corp out of the National Guard, a fleet of airships, autogyros and aeroplanes dedicated to dissolving and suppressing civil unrest in whatever state or territory should call for aid. But by the time he commissioned Sky Marshall Abraham E. Almstead with the task of subduing the mounting unrest, the Jetpunks were already counter attacking. Stokes may have been the philosophical mastermind behind the Jetpunks’ acts of corporate vandalism, but it was Lorna who stood out as the charismatic face. Quickly and fearlessly she took on the missions no one else could. With uncanny skill, she is believed to have stolen hundreds of thousands in US bank notes from across the south and west, always from the accounts of companies in league with the Governor and publicly opposed to the free science ethos of Clarebourne. When not committing outright theft, she has been seen committing pranks and acts of sabotage, and flying over workers’ demonstrations. Her rallying spirit and zealous antagonism has turned the tide in many heated standoffs, yielding unprecedented concessions from several formerly abusive corporate managers. It was only a matter of time before she captured the wild imaginations of the public, especially among children who idolized her reckless heroics and fancied her a kind of modernist Robin Hood in red leather. But before her fame could spread from coast to coast, she found herself inevitably confronting her would-be captor and unrelenting nemesis, Sky Marshall Abraham E. Almstead, when she shamelessly plundered his own airship only days before New Year’s, on the very eve of the Twentieth Century… Learn what happened next: read Twentieth Century Eve and Other Stories by acclaimed "alternate-historian" C William Perkins.
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