The Story Behind the Story: I Think, Therefore I Die (#SFWApro)

My swords-and-calculus story, I Think, Before I Die, is now out at Swords and Sorcery. It’s an interesting example of several different ideas all falling into place together.
I’d read a nonfiction book, Descartes’ Bones, which discussed, among other things, that Descartes had believed the same principles of logic he applied to philosophy and religion would work on medicine. Apply logic to the body and humanity can solve such problems as illness, injury and death, attaining physical immortality.
That immediately started me thinking: What if Descartes had taken his research further? What if he had a fellowship of disciples dedicated to continuing his research? Given the hostility of the 17th century to both reason (if Descartes could prove the existence of God through logic, didn’t that imply God could be logically disproven?) and dissection (which might ruin the physical resurrection of the body at the End Times) such a sect would be repressed and outlawed in many places …
And so we start out with my protagonist Hugh of Essex. Swordsman, womanizer but still a devoted Cartesian, knowing how to shift along the Cartesian axes of reality from place to place, limited ability to regenerate, searching for more truth. Unfortunately, the search has him landed in France, where he’s locked in jail as a heretic. And then a beautiful woman arranges his release, with a special mission in mind …
And here I stalled. What was the mission? And then, out of nowhere, I got the answer: “I want you to kill the Man in the Iron Mask.”
Of course, that idea raised a host of others, starting with why? And then, reading Evil in Modern Thought, I found an answer. Gottfried Leibniz, one of the developers of calculus, believed in a perfect calculus that could state any idea as pure math. As such it would be impossible to say a lie, any more than you can make 2+2 equal 5. Of course, it was only theoretical … but what if someone developed it?
Worse, what if someone came up with a twisted version, one in which everything he says sounds absolutely true and logical, even if it isn’t? Such a power would, as they say, be too dangerous to leave in human hands …
And so Hugh with his mastery of Cartesianism sets off to face the Man in the Iron Mask and his devil’s calculus. The revelation of the man behind the mask isn’t original with me, but one of the many suppositions that circulated over the century (for an excellent look at the subject, check out The Man Behind the Iron Mask by John Noone)