Artistic License / Empress Theresa

Empress Theresa is known for its many inaccuracies.

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• Biology:
  • The final chapter is filled with numerous questions caused by Theresa putting the entire human race into a 600-year coma.
    • In that time, Theresa has 420 children, meaning that at a minimum she would have to have been pregnant for 315 straight years, becoming pregnant immediately after the last child is born.
    • Absolutely nobody aged during the 600-year coma, and no explanation is given for this.
    • Theresa functionally found immortality in her children. Excluding herself (her immortality can be handwaved by the phlebotinum that is HAL), the children don't have their own HALs and therefore are immortal just because Theresa had the power to keep the human body from ageing and growing, yet they suffer no apparent adverse effects despite being conscious and therefore certainly requiring nutrition to fuel their bodies and perform any tasks.
  • At one point, Theresa is bleeding in the ocean and attracting sharks, which HAL turns into chum, attracting more sharks and repeating the cycle endlessly. However, shark blood actually acts like shark repellant-no other sharks would've been attracted to the carnage.
• Economics: At one point, Theresa materializes an immense pile of gold and silver, selling the gold at $50 per ounce and the silver at $5 per ounce, believing that the benefits it would bring to nations would be unimaginable. In reality, flooding the market with so much gold and silver (and later diamonds) would make them completely worthless thanks to basic laws of supply and demand. For real world examples of how flooding a market with precious metals can go horribly wrong, see the case of Malian King Mansa Musa, or the Spanish Empire deciding to bring mountains of New World gold back to Spain. In addition, diamonds themselves are only valuable due to artificial scarcity, and are particularly susceptible to devaluation.
• Geography:
  • While Blair talks about how they all thought Theresa was dead and how they were planning her funeral, he relates that they were to play a soulful instrumental version of Danny Boy "for the girl descended from the Irish" and that "Great Britain was proud to bring one of its own home for a final visit." Ireland is not a part of Great Britain or the United Kingdom. While Northern Ireland is a part of the UK, it isn't specified what part of Ireland Theresa's ancestry comes from. Not to mention that Theresa is an American-born and raised citizen and therefore has nothing to do with either country in the first place.
  • At a meeting with delegates from the Middle East, Theresa hands out a series of pictures depicting the deserts in places like Egypt, Iran, Libya and Iraq, explaining that their lack of mountains is what makes their countries so hot. The Middle East is not made up of solely deserts and in fact actually has a great number of mountains. The aforementioned Iran actually has mountains over 10,000ft tall and many of the countries in question have monsoon seasons that help cool the air.
• History: At one point Theresa finds the fresh hair and preserved skull of Joan of Arc and presents it to the French, who openly weep with joy. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake and reduced to ash, and the ash was scattered over the ocean, a fact that the book brings up and brushes off as a falsehood. There is absolutely no way that Theresa would have found a full skull complete with cranium and jaw, and certainly no hair given that Joan of Arc died in 1431. Interestingly, the author wrote a (very bad) essay arguing that Joan of Arc died via smoke inhalation, suggesting that this was Author Tract.
• Marine Biology: Theresa's tampering of Earth's fragile ecosystem warms the oceans and decreases their salinity. There's no mention of marine organisms dying en masse.
• Medicine: After falling thousands of feet into the sea and surrounded by sharks and being declared dead for two weeks, Theresa is pretty much brought back to life simply by warming her up. Her saltwater and blood-soaked clothes haven't even been cut off in all this time. Also, as she was considered dead this entire time, she would have had nothing to eat or drink the whole time either.
• Military:
  • The cover of the book shows a woman in a US Military General outfit, with patches on her shoulder suggesting she's a 5-Star General (a rank she is outright given in a later chapter for no reason other than to assure that she is able to hold dictatorial command over a reformed North Korea without argument). Even if one was to ignore the fact that by the time the book had been published, the rank of 5-Star General had all but officially been retired^note the last person to hold said rank, Omar Bradley, died in 1981, as well as the fact that the rank was never held by a woman, the color of the jacket and cap would suggest she's supposed to be a General of the Air Force or Army^note she can't be an Admiral of the Navy, since they wear white caps and black jackets, and her rank alone means she can't be in the Marines, since there's never been a 5-Star General of the Marine Corps in the history of the branch, and such a rank doesn't exist in that branch. However, there are elements in the cover that make it impossible to tell which branch she is supposed to belong to:
    • Her outfit is closer to the one worn by a General of the Air Force^note it's possible that this is the branch she's supposed to belong to, given the headset she's shown wearing; however, she would need to be wearing Pilot Wings on said outfit, as said wings are a requirement of any member of the airforces that flies (and it's not possible to become such a high rank without having flown). Additionally, the background around her shows tanks and riflemen training. The Air Force does not use tanks, and even if said riflemen are supposed to be paratroopers, paratroopers fall under the command of the Army in the US Military, not the Air Force.
    • And in the case that she's supposed to be a General of the Army, her US tags are drawn incorrectly, she should have more ribbons on her uniform, and she should have a brass disc on the US tags.
  • At one point, while in the UK, Theresa meets with a Royal Air Force “General”. The RAF does not use the rank of General, the equivalent would be Air Chief Marshal.
  • The military surveillance agency employs 400 people in order to keep Theresa under constant supervision. Not a dozen agents and their behind-the-scenes support crew. No: four hundred actual, boots-on-the-ground human beings, at least one of whom must be physically observing Theresa at all times. The large number and the insistence on physically scrutiny is supposed to indicate how very, very important Theresa is, but a real military surveillance situation would involve as few people as possible to avoid the subject's notice.
  • After Theresa is kidnapped by the military (in broad daylight with several witnesses no less), and is brought onto a second aircraft carrier, she discovers that the ranking officers on board did not know that their target was an 18 year-old girl despite the drastic overkill operation at hand, only being told that she is apparently a threat to the security of America. The scene in question also happens to be highly sexist as Theresa believes that the three female officers of rank present were put there by the captain so they could be looked at by the condemned man that they assumed the target to be. Later in the same scene, an officer uses her mobile phone to film Theresa and ask if she has anything to say, an incredible breach of security that would merit immediate court martial at the very least. This is justified as nobody had been given any protocols. Really, the entire operation has practically no security procedures to speak of and no explanations given to anyone who blindly follow along anyway.
• Nuclear Physics: The story claims that "nothing can survive an A-bomb" at one point. However, multiple people survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (one man even survived both), and there are multiple types of animal that can survive enormous doses of nuclear radiation.
• Physics:
  • It would seem that in Theresa's world, fire departments are dispatched to fight fires based on some unexplained technology that detects sudden increases in heat, despite the fact that such a system would be infeasible and far less effective than just responding to smoke or eyewitness reports. ^note By the time a structure fire is emitting enough heat to be detected from a distance using any sort of thermal sensor, it's already going to be well underway. Not to mention most residential fires would emit plenty of smoke long before the heat they generated could be detected from far enough away to provide effective fire department response, and even then, by that time the source of the fire would be obvious.
  • Needless to say, even within the most extreme forms of suspension of disbelief, it is impossible to justify the reasoning for how additional dark matter in the atmosphere is capable of indefinitely halting any and all wind on the entire planet. Climatologists, meteorologists, geomorphologists and experts in the atmospheric sciences could easily refute the book's logistic arguments, yet what really gets the creative juices flowing is in figuring out why the loss of wind would leave the problems it does, how wind could possibly recover on its own through the natural depletion of dark matter in the atmosphere, and why Theresa DOESN'T TRY EVEN ONCE to simulate artificial temporary wind once she's figured out how to program HAL.
  • Also, gravity apparently pushes things down rather than pulls according to Steve the physicist.
• Religion:
  • Theresa says in Chapter 4 that Psalm 23 is "not a standard church prayer". Almost every church uses Psalm 23 at some point in their services, and it's one of the most recognizable prayers in the entire Christian and Jewish faiths. ^note It’s “The Lord is my Shepherd,” if you don’t know the chapter numbers. Considering Boutin is a devout Catholic, you'd think he'd know better.
  • The Prime Minister of Israel declares Theresa to be "the right hand of God" and how an interview between Theresa and the press was the most important interview since Moses came down the mountain. Jews are very respectful about using the name of God and wouldn't throw it around so casually.
  • Theresa's solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict is to create a new island in the Mediterranean and move the entire Jewish population of Israel there in an unsubtle parallel to the Exodus, an idea that is hilariously naïve given the importance of Jerusalem and Israel to both Jewish religion and secular culture.
• Ships: The USS Ronald Reagan does not carry F-22 Raptors (nor does any other aircraft carrier, there's no naval variant of the Raptor), only F/A-18E Super Hornets.
• Space: Jan Struthers says that "a comet will move in a straight line, not a curve", despite comets being well-known for moving in curves and orbits.
• Sports:
  • While playing baseball, Theresa deliberately doesn't throw as fast as she can because she wants to avoid detection. Considering she pitches at 85 mph (for the record, the slowest a Major League pitcher throws is 60 mph) at the age of ten, the idea of her "avoiding detection" is laughable.
  • Theresa's small size is described as helping her throw faster when she plays baseball. In reality, pitching speed has far more to do with upper body strength, the grip on the ball, and how hard it gets thrown. Baseball, particularly in the past, is known as a sport where body size isn't an essential trait for a decent player. A legend like Babe Ruth could get by with a pudgy frame thanks to Baseball relying far more on short-term bursts of speed over long-term endurance.