Layne sat in his dad's laps, arms wrapped around across his shoulders from behind. Comfortable and safe, but it was a gesture of personal affection his Dad seldom showed. The sort that only happened in private moments, behind closed doors. Usually with his Father, and no one else around.
It wasn't that Halcyon Thurston was an unloving or distant parent. Just that he came from a species, a culture, that discouraged contact. Discouraged admitting emotions or expressing them in any way. He was Phrontian at heart, even though science and happenstance had changed his physical body into something closer to Earth-Human than anything else; but the expectations and norms of childhood still carried sway. Still dictated his actions. And Layne's parents had made no bones about that. Layne could remember numerous times when his Father had explained "Dad isn't comfortable with that," or "It's okay Layne, but we need to be aware that Dad comes from a culture where that's not something you do in public, so don't just hug him without permission."
Layne had learned early on that love didn't have to be tactile to still be felt. Which was why he found himself filling with a certain world-shattering kind of fear only children know. When the fundaments of all you know changes and the heroes and gods become mortal. Because his Dad held him close, breathed shallowly, spoke softly about how their little family came to be. Because his Dad was not curt or "efficient" or "accurate"; but gentle and patient and careful, elaborating far beyond the needful explanation. Because Layne could feel the hot tears land, every so often, in his hair. And all Layne could do was be there. Place a hand on his dad's wrist where it rested on his collar bone. All he could do was be his Father's son in his Dad's arms.
This is absolutely not in-line, but a sort of "short story" I'm writing honestly because its interesting and making me write in this universe. I'm also slowly learning that I write in a really round-about way, and that's why I fall off of projects??? So here's something that may one day be part of whatever form this project takes in its final state?
Everyone thank @tracle0 for the brilliant idea!
(And reblog their post while you're at it!!)
But it was also that 72 hours that made ignoring things I didn't want to deal with sound like a normal idea, instead of questioning whether the station was about to cave in, or - more relevantly - if I had company.
I turned down the last corridor to the "surface access lift". Caught something in the corner of my eye, glanced half-heartedly and shrugged. More rattling, but really what didn't in Earth Central. The "up" button was already lit on the lift panel, which was less the gravlift it should have been, and more so an elevator system some extremely driven agents managed to "procure" the night before a local hotel demolition, sometime in the 80's. My head slowly started questioning, through the murk of exhaustion, as the elevator made its sharp, echoing 'ding'. The sound set my sluggish nervous system on fire, hair on end, banishing any thoughts that tried to form as the florescent light poured out of the elevator into the dark hallway, illuminating me and the flood of dust and lint in the air as I stood somewhat dumbly before it. The dawning anxiety you get when you realize you're dreaming washed over me as I squinted into the light. Slow thoughts percolating poorly through exhausted synapses and pseudo-cells, as I tried to either decide I'd already passed out and was dreaming, or if what I'd seen was real.
The elevator door shut without anything leaving the car, my eyes still locked on where the 4-or-so foot tall figure stood behind the door. Was it even a figure? A street sign? A diamond-shaped head on a stick-like body with a single eye seated off-center of the face that managed to blink at me once before the door shut between us.
Another moment passed with me squinting at the elevator door. "Autex, proximity bio scan." My voice echoed back to me metallically off the deck plating of the dark, empty hallway.
The interface voice of the Autex slurred in my head as it read off a litany of diagnostics and repairs it was initiating on my body, as my consciousness fell out of my grasps, and my body fell to the ground. Half-thought questions about the blinking street sign, the Autex, and my impending concussion floated lazily in the dimming murk between my eyes.
"Belvedere Thurston, you are Summoned by the Triumvirate of Founders," a voice like tar and leather echoed in the hallways, and the last thing I saw, squinting through fading vision, was a "Road Work Ahead" sign with a mustache and one, off-center, eye leaning over me.
I'm not good at interpreting symbolism. If you tell me there a duck, its a duck. Its not the flash of whiteness or freeness or flexobility to be in land air or lake. Its a duck.
But poetry is equal measure symbolism and emotion and truth. So I'd like to build the skills that let me intuitively say the duck is a symbol of something not said. Which means I need to go through a lot more poetry, and with a deconstructive eye.
I'm very novice to this, a poetic philistine. So if I'm missing something important, please feel free to correct me. I'm open to respectfully proffered advice, and I'd appreciate the input from the more experienced.
Unnamed Space Opera Project
@gods-and-punks | @cheshire-castle-library
2,933 Words
Bel woke from a horrid nightmare, fleeting with every gasping breath as his consciousness wrestled with the grasping arms of the dim dreamscape, and the warmer than he'd like sunlight streaming into his bedroom from the crack in the curtains. There was more sun than would make sense for an early morning, and somewhere in the back of his always-on mind, he stored that little tidbit of information; just like he stored the exits, the defensible positions, the location of civilians and security cameras, and where he could be out of line of sight from the “uninitiated”.
As his mind was freed from the tendrils of sleep, he came to grips with the dream. More of a memory, twisted by stress and the lateness of the night before. It was the first summer he spent with his Uncle, the summer his life changed. His uncle had a conversion van, and was "fondly known” as the "family vagabond" back then - traveling town to town, busking and taking up odd jobs, not yet ready to settle down and decide what he wanted from his life. Well that wasn't the truth, not even remotely; and Bel felt the lies in is bones. Not what they told his mother - all the excuses over the years - and not what his dreams spun them to be.
Bel's body still stung and tingled from the disconnected sensations of the dream from his body that paralyzed him as he woke, his brain awake with pain in a part separated from the body that could actually do something about it. The dream was a wash of suffering, but in that dull way that somewhere inside you know it's not actually happening. The difference between a dream where you feel the need to pee, and actually wetting the bed. It amazed Bel how the brain could soften memories like that so they don't cause the same scars you get when they happen.
A decade ago at that point, he'd been left unattended in his uncle's conversion van, all of eight years old, and he'd found something he shouldn't have.
It was in a time when Bel's parents were "having trouble", but not the kind of trouble normal people have. Not the "making ends meet" kind of arguments, not the "12 hour work days" kind of stress. Somehow it was "what yacht should we buy to maintain appearances", "who is this floozy", "which one of us married into which family"; and at the time Bel didn't fully understand it. How could he? He was eight! But he understood some of it - more than his parents would have liked - and he'd asked, in that way children can in all innocence, questions regarding the nanny and his father; and everything exploded.
Suddenly there was no nanny, which was a lesson in instant loneliness for Bel; and suddenly "Mommy and Daddy need to go out of town". And so, unceremoniously, Bel found himself in the care of his Uncle. His uncle who was all but disowned for his "lack-about ways", his uncle who was the laughing stock of the family for living in his van and being a "drain on society" and was absolutely ignored by the media. His uncle who, under any other circumstances, would never be allowed within a city block of Bel without supervision due to his mother's distrust (read as "inability to control") for her own older brother.
But her brother wouldn't "seduce her husband", Bel assumed, looking back. As if it weren't her hateful tantrums that traumatized both Bel's father and the nanny enough that they could take solace in each other. Bel felt guilty for thinking that. That was his mother, and regardless of the ways she treated him, he couldn't help but love her. Live with her. Figure out how to appreciate the parts of her that were good, and figure out how to almost not internalize the screaming. That's what his father eventually did, he was sure. After that summer, his parents had never been closer. The tantrums cooled down - not completely gone, but who can really discipline a rich daddy's girl politician's daughter?
But his parent's weren't the only ones who came back from that summer changed. At one point, he'd been left in the van, told "don't touch anything" as if that means anything to an 8 year old but "go find the thing I'm terrified you'll find", while his uncle ran into a little shop somewhere in Nevada for a few minutes. Of course Bel was too young to think about how suspicious it was that his uncle had parked the van behind that little shop. That shop which was the only one not boarded up and abandoned in the who ghost town of a shopping center.
As soon as his uncle was out of sight, closed into the windowless backdoor of the yellow-brick building, Bel started his mission. He'd noticed something a few days earlier, but his uncle had the same eyes in the back of his head that Bel's mother had; and caught him three times when the boy tried to get to it. The van was smaller than expected on the inside, and Bel was no stranger to the jabbing jokes his family made about the "conversion van" and "converted to a shoe box"; which didn't completely make sense to Bel at that age. But in those thicker walls, there were panels that didn't match. Outlines like there should be cabinets if you could just figure out how to get the doors open.
The inside of the van was the worse texture of blood-orange faux fur, covering everything in scratchy nylon fibers that made the van retain smell so badly that when the van gets hot is always smells like Burger King onions. The back seat was a large mattress dressed in clashing and equally potent colours of green and purple; and if you lay on your back and look at the abnormally low roof, there was a square seam in the orange hanging fur that could be seen only by the way the fur parted strangely around its perimeter.
Standing on the mattress with his arms over his head, the kid started working tiny kid fingers around the seam, trying to figure out how it comes out and in what direction. He discovered that there was some kind of lip around it, if he pressed hard enough against the orange fur. He traced all along it. Square but with rounded corners, like there was some kind of box buried in the lowered ceiling. He started pressing against the bottom most panel, pressing both hands and trying to push it up. Nothing. He tried sliding it like one of his dad's wooden puzzle boxes. Nothing. But then his hand slipped into something odd. There was a pocket in the fur lining, and something under there. It was just big enough for his hand to fit in there - not thinking about how this would be too small for his uncle's hands. Inside was something smooth and glassy, and not quite as cool as you'd expect. He tried to worry it out, but it wasn't a knob. In truth, it was a DNA scanner, that made use of tunneling electrons to scan an appendage pressed to it; but Bel wouldn't come to know that for several years yet.
The scanner did its job, boring a stream of entangled electrons into the child's hand almost undetectably - sans a little warmth - and reading the interactions from the paired electrons within the device, doing complex analyses to determine whether the user is similar-enough genetically to the keyed operative. Like most of Terminus' technology, it was designed by an Phrontan engineer - the Phronta being widely regarded as the most intelligent race in all of Terminus Space. They were also the most prolific single culture to create quality of life and security devices in the entire territory. Unfortunately, they were also raging bigots, with equal measure of eugenics and genetocentrism. Any race younger than 10,000 generations is considered "under developed". Any culture that hasn't managed sustained space travel is considered unintelligent. And therefore any race suffering both is beneath study. "It would change too much between now and when the race was actually developed. What point would there be?"
And so the scanner read the 25% genetic likeness of a nephew to his uncle, and erroneously deployed the container - an error that is now rectified, and a certain Phrontan engineer ostracized for making an error that every other Phrontan would have made; but such is the Phrontan culture.
The lowermost panel, which Bel had previously been pressing on, began to descend in a controlled way. The boy leapt out of the way, bonking his head on the windowless wall of the conversion van. Once he'd reclaimed himself, he turned to see a tray suspended from poles into the cavity of the van's converted back seat. The fog of a freezer billowed around the tray, and a small metal box - black with pink circuit lines tracing around its edges - sat in the center.
Now why his uncle was hiding a puzzle box inside the not-so-secret compartment of his van was beyond 8-year-old Bel; but he'd seen things like this sitting on his father's desk before, and he was suspiciously good at getting into them. To the point that his father had replaced all the boring shiny objects inside the one's at home with hard candies! And since Bel's mother hated the idea of her son on sugar, it was a secret between the "men" of the house. Good for the flexibility of a growing boy's mind and a form of quiet resistance against the neuroses of a spoiled débutante.
Bel took the metal up in both hands and sat hard on his rear, knowing the mattress would cushion his fall. A quick glance here and there to make sure his Uncle wasn't going to catch him, and then he started at it. Tiny finger tracing the circuit lines, trying to find seams to work off of. Bel was behind most of his class when it came to spelling and maths, and his impatience was the bane of everyone but his now ex-nanny; but Bel had an incredibly sharp kinemorphic intelligence. Of course that's not something schools measure, so its possible only his father really understood Bel’s early mastery of fine-motor control.
It took mere seconds for Bel to detect the only way this box could open. A nearly undetectable ridge, a way part of the box shifted in a different way than the rest, the way the weight shifted as he rotated it in all directions. He'd barely sat when he found the nondescript panel that slid to one side, releasing the lock it had on an orthogonal panel and then, done. Bel was almost annoyed with how easy the puzzle had been compared to how hard it was to get out of the secret vault. Of course, this wasn't meant to be a puzzle, and in fact was just a locking mechanism that was mildly difficult for larger species to access - the Phrontan being one of the "Decigrade" races of Terminus Space, standing only about 4 Earth inches high.
The metallic walls of the "puzzle" box bloomed open to reveal something that looked a little like a small, grey Brazil nut. Bel was even more confused. All that trouble for something that looked boring. He shifted the weight of the box to sit in his hand, still trying to hold the box roughly the size of an orange up close enough to his face to discern small details. With his left, he poked the object. Nothing strange. Then he tapped it a few times and-
The brasil nut jolted. He flinched, dropping it - case and all - and failing to scoot back further than the van wall, gaining only inches distance as the grey prism melted into a puddle and then collected itself, launching at the boy like a high velocity garden slug. His hands shot up to protect his face, and the angry silly putty slapped against his hand, searing his soft uncalloused skin and making the boy yelp in shock and discomfort. It felt like a hot coal or the wrong end of Gram's cigarette that she wasn't supposed to be smoking around the children pressed deep and deeper into his palm. The boy held his wrist and gasped, every neuron firing in desperation to escape the cause; but it was too late.
The device had initiated an emergency protocol which Uncle Maddok had barely listened to in the briefing. He was permitted to use the device temporarily to defend it against theft, so it was set to activate on opening. And so it did.
The slime made a pin-hole into the boy's hand, squeezing into his veins and leaving traces of itself as it went. Network of nanofilaments traced as this gel dissolved into his blood and found its way through his body in moments - consuming material here and there to self-replicate and perform its function - creating constructs - psudo-organs - that melded with nerves and bone and brain-stem. Bell's screams faded into numbness - his brain flooding distance between the overwhelming sensation of the body and his perception of it.
He found his consciousness in a small, cool room, dark and empty, but not frightening, not lonely. It was a dim fantasy, locking the experiences of the body away from the mind. He looked out of the walls, that weren't quite windows and yet he could see through it - through his eyes. Someone had come to the van - his uncle and some other guys. One with a mustache that Bel recognized as someone his Uncle worked with. The other in a diver’s suit or something. They were fussing over him, picked him up and carried him into the beige windowless door his uncle disappeared into. Was that long ago? Time didn't pass to Bel, no amount of time and yet all of eternity had passed through him.
He suddenly felt so tired, but he watched - enthralled with the sci-fi program playing out through the dark walls of his safe, cool, mental place. A high-tech dentist chair? Lights and tools he didn't recognize. He thought he should be afraid, but he wasn't. Actually he wasn't anything. There were words said around him, but they were muffled. Not real. Not directed towards him. Not important. He was so tired.
"Notice: Host partial compatibility error." The voice was familiar, but emotionless.
A voice inside his room? Who's was it? Bel's mental image of himself stood, looking away from the wall he was seeing through. "Whose there?" Did he say that out loud? Or just in the fog of his mind-room?
"Notice: Autexousious Mutagenic Framework, unit identifying. One zero zero zero one."
Bel peered into the deepest part of the shadow of this room of even and yet no lighting. "Autex?"
"Notice: Accepting host code name - Autex."
As Bel squinted in the dim fog inside his mind, he caught a glimpse of something shiny, glossy. "Come out here..." He said, reaching into the darkness and grabbing something. A hand? An Arm? He pulled it out of the shadow - not that there was a light source in this imaginarium that could shed light on it; but he could see it now, emerging from the shadow. It was... himself. But pink, glassy. Like the precious glass animals, his mother collected. Delicate and fragile, cracked with some imperfections that traced like the lines of the metal puzzle box that started this mess. Bel momentarily remembered what happened, but it faded as unimportant. Un-real.
"Notice: Host compatibility error resolved."
Confusion flooded his consciousness and Bel's grip on the glassy wrist slipped.
"Notice: Initiating host recuperation cycle. Stand by."
Bel faded into foggy darkness, caught by the glassy doppelganger - though he'd struggle to remember that fact. The Autex recorded the interaction for further data analysis at a later time.
***
Bel woke thinking he was at the dentist. The laughing gas thing over his nose smelled bad - like rubber and chemicals. He flopped an unresponsive arm across himself to drag it away. Nothing in his body felt right. It was heavy and lumpy and both easier and more difficult to move than he remembered. He barely made it upright without pitching over, but he saw his uncle slumped in a chair on the edge of the room. How had a bad tooth made him hurt so much? “Made him hurt”? Did he hurt? What had happened.
It took Bel literal years to make heads or tails of the groggy memories and the "emergency dentist visit" on that first summer he spend with Uncle Maddok. It was dreams like the one he'd just woken from that unraveled the truth, honestly. The brain stores memories in our skin and muscle, as much as in our brain, so even if the conscious mind can't recall the details, our flesh knows what we've forgotten.
Bel roused himself from his seat on the edge of his bed, realizing he'd been sitting staring at the floor with his head heavy in his hands only because of the knock on the door.
"Kiddo? Weren't you going out this afternoon?"
Afternoon? "Yeah, Kari's game is at 1," Bel groaned towards the cracked door.
"Think you missed that, son," his dad chuckled incredulously as he continued down the hallway.
Panic rocketed through Bel’s chest and head, before a sigh pushed it down and he stood to get dressed. Right, that’s why the sunlight through the curtains felt wrong.
Guys this completely changed my writing, heed it. I often do an entire draft just looking at sentence variation and oftentimes the results are absolutely transformative in the difference.
Another kind of diversity we need in writing is protagonists without love interests. Give me adults with full-fledged stories that don't include falling in love.
This is definitely about more aroace protagonists, but also about characters that are just not in a place where they are interested in romance right now or where the story is just more important than any kind of love interest.
I actually managed to finish my novel before deadline! I didn't make the 50k, but i got over 3/4 the way through. I decided that my true first draft was just the process of getting from start to end, so I feel complete and at peace with this. Now I'm working on transcribing this notebook into scrivener where I can break everything up scene by scene and overhaul the work into something a little less stream of consciousness.
Nothing says it's nearly Thanksgiving (USA) like Being behind on NaNoWriMo and Grading! I destroyed my apple pencil over the weekend, so grading has been difficult and taking longer than normal, which is unfortunate. But I discovered the OST to this old movie that has excellent dark academia vibes to it and it's been keeping me going.
Currently Listening to: Goncharov OST
Currently Reading: Beta draft of a friend's magical girl novel
This is where I'm starting at 11:06 pm on NaNo, in a hotel room. I'm not gonna let it end like this, but its going to be uphill for a bit to make 50k i think. As if it hasn't been uphill the whole time. I've never made it this far in a novel before. I refuse to quit, but man my head hurts and I want to still be in the bath.
It's been a long time since I got this for in writing something I enjoyed, and I'm proud that I'm finally making progress on something I really want to do.
I'm falling back in love with writing for my own sake, and it's lovely. I've managed to convince myself that I can't put the right words down if I don't put all the words down, which means this draft is rambling stream of consciousness. I'm certain I've repeated myself, but in that I've found freedom. All I have to do is put down my ideas and notes, and I'm for the first time looking forward to the revision process.
“The uttering of the word reveals how each of us relentlessly creates. Everyone is an artist. Each person brings sound out of silence and coaxes the invisible to become visible.”
— John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World
