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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 9 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 9

I woke up for the second time in less than twelve hours on the bed inside the guest room with a pounding headache. I opened my eyes and saw a tiny bit of pale light leaking in through the blinds on my right; it looked like it was just after dawn. My lips were cracked and dry and when I sat up my chest muscles flexed and all the events of the previous day came rushing back. I could hear Lacey’s voice in my head, telling me I’d made a horrible mistake. I heard something stirring on my left and I looked to see Doctor Valentine dozing in a chair with his arms folded across his chest. He looked cold, tired, more vulnerable than I ever imagined he could look. I almost couldn’t blame him for almost killing me.

I got out of bed and went to go brush my teeth. I wondered what my play was here. I had owned it for less than a day but the microchip in my head was responsible for two, blackout experiences already. Still, it wasn’t like I could just leave. I signed up for this. I knew there were risks. But I had also felt the accelerated healing on my neck. I wanted to know how to control it, because even if it hadn’t worked perfectly, I knew I had the power to gain strength without working for it traditionally.

I turned on the light in the restroom and I looked at myself in the mirror. My face was a mess but that was exactly the last thing I noticed. My arms were huge, like twin towers of sculpted muscle. I had chest muscles that were so big that the collar of my shirt pulled tight against my neck. I could see the V-shape of my back from the front. The transformation had worked. My shirt hadn’t ripped like I had hoped, but I struggled to take it off as I tried to get a better image of new body.

I could see the striations of my shoulder muscles, like thick cords cresting the socket joint. My belly was segmented into six, defined blocks. I looked away from the mirror at my forearms and I found I couldn’t even fit my hand around my wrist. I could trace the lines of all the veins in my arm, and my skin was so tight that I could barely pinch it together.

Despite how strong I looked, I found my range of motion was pretty limited. I flexed and the light danced off the contours of my new muscles, but I could barely lift my hands above my head and I couldn’t reach past my knees when I bent my back forward. I couldn’t turn my neck past my shoulder and I almost fell a couple times as I was moving because my legs couldn’t balance the weight.

I must have been staring at myself for a while, because Doctor Valentine snuck up while I was still examining myself.

“What do you think?” he whispered and I almost fell over, startled.

I laughed nervously. “It’s incredible. It worked.”

“Yeah.” He nodded solemnly and then went silent, avoiding eye contact.

“So how did you fix it?” I asked, knowing he probably felt guilty from before.

He met my gaze through the mirror as he spoke. “With the accelerated growth process, every muscle in your torso started expanding all at once and that sent your system into shock. Your nervous system kicked into overdrive and started contracting every muscle to test the connections, but the growth continued so rapidly and for so long that there was no time for you to rest. Your initial reaction to hold your breath was what caused the problem. Once you tightened the muscles in your neck, your nervous system wouldn’t let go until I forced it to. I hijacked signals from your sympathetic nervous system to stop the contractions. I also killed the original signal there, but I can only guess what would have happen if your muscles kept growing.”

Explaining the situation seemed to relax him. I tried to take it in, but it was hard to focus because I was too busy sneaking glances at my reflection in the mirror to listen.

“Bailey, I promise you I won’t let that happen to you again.” He said my name and I snapped to attention. “I was too excited. I didn’t think about all the possible outcomes. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “Hey, it worked. As far as I’m concerned this was a win. I thought you’d be happy.”

He shook his head. “The ends don’t justify the means here. You’re not some expendable test subject.” He looked away from our reflections and faced me. “You’re my partner now. I need to earn your trust. We both need to understand what’s going on when we start an experiment.”

His eyes were unwavering. He was being way too serious so I tried to change the mood. “What do I need trust for when I have biceps like these?” I flexed.

He chuckled. “I mean, obviously, you can’t keep the transformation. We have to return you in a normal state.”

“What? Why?” I asked defensively.

“It’s a little conspicuous don’t you think?”

“I’ll just tell everyone I did pushups over break.” I made a pleading face.

He shook his head. “We need a control sample anyways. We can do some strength tests today, but we will have to reset before you go home.”

I frowned. “Fine, but we better be working towards laser vision.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

School was canceled due to the snowstorm, so I spent most of the day with Doctor Valentine doing some tests with my new body. In the basement laboratory, the doctor had machines that could measure my vital signs, and after breakfast he attached cold, metal stickers to my bare chest that monitored my performance as we went through the tests. We found that with just the muscle I had gained in the short minutes of the transformation I could generate about as much force in a punch as a trained boxer. I could comfortably lift about three times as much as I used to, and I wondered how much stronger I would be if we had let my muscles grow even a minute longer.

Still there were plenty of downsides mostly due to the fact that I wasn’t accustomed to my new body. I fatigued very quickly and my balance was terrible so that when I threw my strongest punch, I basically tripped into the target dummy and gave myself a head injury. The doctor patched me up with the Time’s Mirror healing commands, and by the end of the two-hour session I was pretty much ready to be done with the giant muscles.

Before we went upstairs for lunch, the doctor set the Mirror to return me to my normal state based on the back-up copy of my original DNA. The restoration process was only ten minutes of tingling while my body reabsorbed and redistributed the muscle mass and it was much less painful than the building process. When it was over, I was back to my normal self.

I was mentally ready to be done for the day, but after lunch, Lacey threw a change of workout clothes at me and told me to meet her in the basement. I put on the grey, hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants that were a size too big. When I looked at myself in the long mirror in the guest bedroom I was immediately infused with inspiration to punch frozen meat and drink half a dozen raw eggs.

When I met Lacey in the basement, Doctor Valentine was scrolling through the data he had gathered from our tests and the machines around the room were spinning loudly so he barely noticed me. Lacey led me to the door that was opposite the room where I had been cut open and turned into a cyborg the night before. She opened the door and revealed a rectangular room with red, padded squares arranged in a smaller rectangle on the floor about three feet in from each wall. There was a punching bag in one corner and some free weights on a rack against the opposite wall; there was also a strange, wooden contraption with three arms and a leg that looked like it was out of a martial arts movie. Other than that, the room was free of clutter and looked to serve for tumbling or sparring practice. The walls were wooden but even from outside I could sense that the room was quiet and soundproof. I stepped inside, and Lacey closed the door and the sound of the whirring laboratory machines went silent.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

Lacey stepped onto the padded surface and began stretching her arms. She was wearing skin tight sweatpants and a zip up hoodie but her feet were bare. She motioned for me to join her.

“My dad wants me to teach you how to control your body.” She instructed me to cup one elbow with the other hand and guide my arm across my body back and forth to engage my shoulder. “He said something like ‘Time’s Mirror is a thought experiment, but he needs to know how his body works first before he can comprehend what is changing. Why don’t you teach him, Lacey? It’s not like you have anything better to do.’ Pff.” She did a mocking impression of her father.

“He really said all that?” I asked, switching arms.

“Pretty much.” She sighed. “I guess the murder in Savannah will have to wait until after your training is complete.”

She directed me to stretch one leg straight out ahead of me, and she rested my foot in her hands to help me balance.

“So you’re going to, like, teach me transcendence?” I asked jokingly. “Like the ‘know yourself in the face of doubt’ kind of stuff?”

She smiled. “My sifu was really into meditation for clarity, but I think we’ll take a more measured approach.”

“Wait, so you actually know kung fu?”

“Oh, I know a lot more than that.” She winked at me. “But we have to start with the basics.”

We finished stretching and she sat down cross-legged and patted the floor in front of her to indicate that I should follow. I mirrored her and she looked me directly in the eyes, her unwavering, emerald irises peering into my soul. She went silent, and for about a minute my eyes darted between the equipment around the red room to the purple of her sweatshirt then back to her unblinking, green eyes. I was expecting her to direct me, or for something to pop up and hit me on the head to test my reflexes, but nothing happened. I looked at the way she was sitting. She had her back straight up, her hands resting on her legs with her fingers lightly interlaced. Her breathing was the only sound I could hear; her belly was the only thing I saw moving. There was a way about her breathing, a sort of effortless rhythm that pulsed with the movement of her abdomen. I focused harder.

She was showing me how to breathe. In through the nose, expanding your stomach like you’re making room for the air. Out through the mouth, contracting your stomach like you’re expelling everything from your lungs. In. Out. In. Out.

I saw her looking at my shoulders, and I noticed that my upper chest was moving much more than hers. I tried focusing on breathing out of my belly instead of out of my rib cage and I actually felt the difference in quality of breath. She smiled and then closed her eyes, keeping the steady rhythm of quiet ins and outs. I joined her.

Goddamn. Who knew breathing could be fun?

Over the next couple of weeks, I spent every waking moment thinking about Time’s Mirror. When I was in school – which was only occasionally because I skipped at least one day a week to spend it with Doctor Valentine and Lacey – I daydreamed about transformations we could do and practiced my thought commands. A couple people caught me doing the strange, memory dance, but I tried to pass it off like I was just twitching, or comically demon-possessed. I’d meet Doctor Valentine after school and he would take me through more scientific analyses of transformations we could do with the Time’s Mirror and once in a while we’d actually do one. He made good on his promise that he was never going to let a near-death experience like the muscle growth happen again, and he made sure both he and I knew every scenario that could happen before we changed something in my DNA. I began to long for the days when we could just jump into the action without the prep work.

One of my favorite things Doctor Valentine taught me was how to control my own biorhythm. I could use Time’s Mirror to play with the levels of neurotransmitters in my brain, and the doctor helped me figure out the functions of each of them. I could regulate cortisol and melatonin to find restful sleep, or I could make histamines to stay awake for days at a time, I could drown in a dopamine high, or I could relax with a boost of serotonin. I was a walking cocktail of chemical reactions that changed my mood depending on what setting I chose for the day. The saying, “hormonal teenager,” didn’t even begin to describe what I could do to myself.

Lacey continued my training to help me gain control of my physical body. She took me through a series of different martial arts, trying to find a good one that fit. The diversity of the different styles: from grappling judo to striking karate to free-flowing taichi kept my body confused and sore as I worked muscles that rarely worked. I could use the Time’s Mirror to soothe the soreness, but Doctor Valentine suggested that the healing command might reverse the training so I probably shouldn’t use it aggressively.

Lacey’s training was routine only in the time that we spent each day: twenty minutes of breathing, followed by thirty minutes of Lacey showing me the forms and stances for the style of the day, and finishing with about an hour of sparring where my mentor would demonstrate all the different ways she could kick my ass. She was good. I always ended up on the floor, and the doctor refused to let me patch my bruises, saying that each one was a lesson.

One particular day, I found myself caught in between both Lacey and her father for a practical exam where Doctor Valentine wanted to pit his unhuman creation against his cute, albeit very skilled daughter.

All my life I had been told never to hit a girl, so when Lacey was in front of me, circling me menacingly, saying “just hit me you sissy,” I experienced a bit of what the psychologists like to call “cognitive dissonance.” It wasn’t unusual for Lacey to taunt me during our practices, but I had a harder time concentrating with Doctor Valentine watching over us. Our previous training regimens included a lot of close quarters grappling and I always got a little flustered when she showed me on her body where I was meant to place my hands in the execution. But she seemed to have opted away from showing Doctor Valentine all the precarious positions of my hands on her body since we were boxing that day.

The concept of boxing always seemed fairly simple to me: hit the other guy until he’s down. But there was a subtle grace to the sport that I only recognized when Lacey was teaching me the boxing form. Chin down, elbows in, jaw clenched, face your opponent at a slant to give them less area to hit, stand on the balls of your feet for mobility with one foot in front of the other. Generate power from your rotating your hips and twisting your arm as you aim straight at your target.

There was even more nuance in combat. Lacey postured aggressively, dancing around me in a circle, shifting her weight unpredictably except for when she approached to send explosive punches at my face. Whenever she came forward she would change her stance suddenly so that her back foot came front, purposefully giving me a tell that the fist on the same side as the new leading foot would throw a jab followed quickly by a cross punch from the opposite side. Sometimes it was right then left, I noticed more often that it was left then right. My forearms were aching from where she had been hitting me repeatedly to try and break my guard. Even through her padded gloves the impact was enough to make my arms feel like they were about to snap with each strike, but I still couldn’t find the courage to throw a punch back at her.

She came in again, and this time I tried stepping towards the right and throwing a hook aimed at her side. She read through my lumbering movements easily and deflected my punch upwards, following with two, quick blows to my exposed chest and a right hook to my chin. I fell to the padded surface of the training room with my jaw feeling displaced and my ears ringing.

She took a step towards me, but just stood over me, and I looked up at her with a pained expression on my face. Her posture relaxed and she had a lopsided grin on her face like she was about to start laughing.

“Finally decided to take a shot, I see.” She extended her hand and helped pull me to my feet.

“You could have told me the rules before you started hitting me,” I said sullenly, rubbing my jaw.

“Oh, where’s the fun in that?” She took a step away from me and removed her gloves to redo her ponytail while the doctor came over from where he was standing at the edge of the room.

“Okay,” he began, talking to me like he was coaching me on how to win the next round. “It’s obvious that you’re no match for her in a normal state. I’m going to dull your pain signals and increase the elasticity of your tendons and ligaments. It should make you quicker and more resilient. Don’t be afraid to take a hit if you can give one back.”

He seemed completely unfazed by the implications of his words as he busily scrolled through commands on GRegg.

“You’re not scared that I’m going to hurt her?” I asked tentatively.

“Why would I be scared?”

“She’s your daughter.”

“So?” he said dismissively. “It’s training. You have to focus on trying to hurt her. You probably won’t.”

He finalized his commands on GRegg. “Sending the signal.”

I sighed and sat on the floor and waited for the shock to touch down. I felt weird. I liked Lacey. I didn’t want to hit her even if it was part of the training and even if she had hit me without reservation. I looked over at her. She was stretching, breathing, striking at the air.

I felt the signal run through me, like electricity gathering in my spine and then dispersing outwards through my fingers and toes. When the sensation passed, the difference was immediate, my arms felt limber and my legs felt loose. I felt flexible and acrobatic just from popping up to my feet. I punched at the air in front of me and my motion was fluid, less rigid than before. I tested a high kick just for fun and found I could almost reach a vertical angle. I exhaled excitement. This was pretty cool.

Both Lacey and Doctor Valentine watched me, intrigued. Lacey stepped back in the ring with me and we continued where we left off. She started circling me again, but this time I took Doctor Valentine’s advice and tried to see her as my rival in training instead of the girl I maybe had a crush on. I matched her movement, keeping my distance, not allowing her to dictate the action. She came in with the same tell as before, stepping forward with her right foot and a jab. My reaction time was still too slow to keep up with her speed and she connected with the first blow, but I was able to clumsily brush away the second. It didn’t hurt my forearms as much this time and I knew the pain suppression was active. She disengaged and resumed circling me.

She dashed towards me, and this time I focused on the spot where she seemed the weakest. I aimed a kick at her shin when she stepped forwards and the force was enough to send her off balance. She rolled past me and wheeled angrily.

“Hey!” she exclaimed. “No kicking.”

I ignored her. This was kind of fun when I could find a weakness.

She came in again, this time without any of the circling. I kicked at her foot again, but she twirled towards the side, swiping at my leg with her gloved fist, and then sending all her momentum in a punch that collided with my chest. The force knocked me back a little, but I barely felt the weight of her glove. I quickly brought my leg down and threw a punch at her face. I felt my glove connect with her cheek and she moved her body with the line of the punch to reduce the impact. Now she was the one kneeling on the ground but when she raised her head I saw a wild look in her eyes.

“Bailey,” she seethed. “I’m going to break that leg.”

“Come and try,” I said presumptuously, returning all of her previous taunts.

She stood slowly and started circling me again. This time she didn’t move with the light feet of a boxer. She stalked me like a tigress, looking for an opening to go for the kill. I tracked her movement, remembering to keep my feet pointed towards her.

She pounced, keeping her body low. I went for a front kick to keep her out of range of using her fists. She caught my heel with her wrist and pushed up, sending me off balance as she spun into me and struck at the back of my planted leg’s knee. I fell backwards and felt the air knocked out of me. She was on top of me in an instant, one knee firmly pressed right below my rib cage and her other leg twisted around both of my legs so I couldn’t leverage them. She started pummeling my face relentlessly and I instinctively put my hands up to protect myself, but she had already broken my nose. I could feel blood dripping from my nostril, though the pain suppression was still working so I barely felt it.

“LACEY!” I heard Doctor Valentine shout. “Quit.”

She was deaf to his command and through the gap between my forearms I could see her face filled with rage as she continued to rain blows onto my guard.

“LACEY!” Doctor Valentine shouted again and he rushed towards us. “STOP!”

The doctor put his hands on her shoulder, but Lacey shook him off, sending an elbow into his gut.

“Xiaohu!” Doctor Valentine spoke in a foreign language. With the word, Lacey stopped mid-strike with her fist raised in the air.

She got off of me slowly, and I lowered my arms. She stood and turned to her father and glared at him. He glared back and they stared each other down for a couple, tense seconds.

“Li kai,” he commanded.

Finally, she breathed a primal growl and she left, slamming the door behind her.

I put my head back against the mat and pressed my arm to my nose. Warm blood continued to flow and I could taste iron in my mouth. I breathed in short huffs, knowing I had broken the rules and I deserved everything I got.

Doctor Valentine sent the wound healing signal on GRegg, combined with a reset process to turn me back to normal. I sat quietly for the ten minutes it took to finish and guessed we were done for the day.

“You okay?” He asked, helping me to my feet.

My nose had stopped bleeding and the blood on my lip was starting to dry. “Yeah,” I said quietly.

“She’s under a lot of stress.”

“You don’t have to apologize for her.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Standing with his back against the wall, he spoke gently.

“I know you’ve probably wondered what we’re doing here and why we act the way we do.”

I licked at the blood on my lip. “It’s crossed my mind once or twice.”

“I guess…” He paused, looking unsure of how to begin. “Well I guess it’s time I told you everything. My story starts almost twenty years ago.”

TO BE CONTINUED!

#novel #YA #sci-fi #independent

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 8 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 8

In all the time that I spent with Doctor Valentine there was never a situation more difficult than trying to work through setting up the algorithms for the Time’s Mirror with him. I grew up with computers, and I considered myself fairly adept at learning how programmers designed their digital interfaces, but there was nothing as confusing as the first time I experienced the Time’s Mirror’s thought commands.

“Stop thinking,” he said for about the twentieth time.

“I can’t stop thinking,” I retorted. “It’s in the name isn’t it?”

“You have to only focus on one thing,” he said, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated as the minutes flew by and he continued to repeat himself time after time. “Come on, we’re just setting up a password.”

“Oh my god. You do it.” I was almost shouting. I had to put the headpiece on again to do the second round of calibration, and I could feel it about to shake loose of my head as I writhed with annoyance.

“How do you expect me to do that?” He matched my intensity. And, yeah, it wasn’t like he could hack into my brain and show me, which made it even more frustrating, because I didn’t have anyone who could guide me on how to do it correctly.

We were setting up a series of commands that would trigger when I would picture an object or imagine a feeling. We had to set up ten different commands and the idea was that thinking about the same thing would trigger the same, unique brain wave. So far it wasn’t working.

We tracked ten objects to use as commands and assembled a list, and then we combined items on that list to construct different processes for the Time’s Mirror to follow. At this point we had deconstructed and rebuilt the list three times already, because I was never able to log in again once I had created my thought password. We liked to call it a pass-idea.

“Try one more time,” he said.

“Fine.” I rolled my eyes and thought of the pass-idea. Butterfly-ostrich-igloo. I looked up at him and with an expression that said “What?”

“Nothing.” He shook his head and sighed heavily. “Let’s try it again.” He started tapping a rhythm on the keys that I was beginning to commit to long-term memory.

I put my head in my hands, honestly just wanting to give up at this point.

“Okay,” he started. “Try working an action in with the thought. Link a physical motion to your thoughts, like sign language.”

“This is so pointless,” I said to myself but just loud enough for him to hear me.

“One last time,” he promised. “Close your eyes and try to recall emotional memories instead of small objects.”

I indulged him and shut my eyes, tilting my head slightly downwards. Doctor Valentine’s clear voice washed over me as he read through the list of commands again. The commands were associated with “key-word” emotions that were supposed to help me picture things better.

“Calm,” he said.

I tried to focus on a deep memory associated with the word. I felt myself return to the first time I visited the ocean with my parents as a kid, and subsequently placed two fingers against my forehead to link the action.

“Happy,” he continued after a moment of drumming keys, and I thought of this fantastic song that sent my feet on air when I heard it. I put two fists in the air and started bobbing my head to an imaginary beat. More drumming.

We kept on in this fashion, with him uttering a single word that sparked a thought and produced a physical motion in me. There were a couple more before he said “Angry,” and I saw neighborhood bullies throwing rocks at a one-eyed cat and my emotion flowed into my middle finger that slowly extended into a beacon of disrespect.

Finally, we finished with “Love.” I recalled an image of a tiny home in the brutal cold of a Wisconsin winter. It was the memory of me with my extended family on my mother’s side sitting around a fire and sharing in the most ubiquitous sensation of the word. I interlaced my fingers and pulled my hands into my chest and I felt the warmth of my palms above my beating heart. I opened my eyes after another moment, knowing we were finished.

He tapped a few more commands and then took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “Make a password out of three of these.”

He handed me the computer, which showed a list of each of the motions I had made next to the associated emotion. I scrolled through the list and familiarized myself with each of the commands. Then I focused my mind, trying not to think of anything else, closed my eyes, and I pressed down on the ‘Enter’ key.

In the very near future, I was going to become intimately haunted by every single one of these emotionally-linked memories and these actions would be as natural to me as breathing. But in that moment, I chose the three emotions that I enjoyed the most. I brought my two fingers to my forehead to Calm my mind. Then one finger slid down my face and flicked an imaginary tear across my cheek as I recalled the particularly rousing Sad memory of the final hours of a beloved cowboy and his roughest-toughest family of misfits. Finally, I crossed my heart in Love, and then I let my hand slide down onto the keyboard and tapped the ‘Enter’ key once again.

“All right,” the doctor said. “Try it again.”

I repeated the motions and replayed the memories, and then I opened my eyes.

Doctor Valentine was monitoring GRegg and it took a moment, but he finally looked up and smiled. “We’re in.”

GRegg’s interface was fairly simple. There were two categories of signals that the Time’s Mirror could send – one was for natural signals and the other was for correspondence with the thing the doctor called veritase. The first experiment we did was to see if we could use the Time’s Mirror to accelerate the healing process to repair the cut on my neck, and for this we only needed the natural signals.

“You have access to every biological process that is triggered by a neurological signal.” Doctor Valentine explained. “Sometimes you just have to get creative with it.”

He began to take me through the scientific process of finding a solution. “First: Identify the problem. We have two issues here. One deals with the small, superficial holes around your head, and the other is the deep cut that might have caused significant damage to muscle tissue as well as the skin. The holes will heal naturally in a matter of days without much risk, but the surgery wound is a high priority right now. Our goal is to see if we can shorten the time it takes to heal.

“Second: Theorize a solution. For this we need to know more about the healing process. There’s a step your body goes through known as the inflammatory phase. This is the stage of healing where your body gets rid of things that are in the wound that could cause problems. It’s an important step, but it takes time, and it’s not necessary if we assume a completely sterile environment and a clean surgical process, like you experienced. Your body is in this stage right now, but if we force it to skip it, we can reduce the healing time by a couple hours. Of course, it takes several days to heal a minor cut, so those hours don’t really mean much.

“After the inflammatory phase comes the rebuilding process. One of the biggest players in rebuilding tissue is collagen. Collagen is a protein that gives shape to your skin and muscles; cells called fibroblasts are responsible for building the intricate collagen matrices that become the framework for your skin. The rebuilding of the skin and tissue is the longest part of the healing process, but if we have more worker cells we can work faster. Fibroblasts are made through a process called EMT.

“Third: Search the database for the brain signal that will trigger the solution. Each of these signals is linked to a series of thought commands, but you’ll probably only memorize one command out of every hundred possible. We’ll mostly utilize GRegg for this step.”

I selected the natural signaling option from the home screen and then scrolled through a list of long-winded names and alien-sounding words until the doctor pointed out one that was titled ‘Epithelial-Mysenchymal Transition.’ On the side of the list was a bar that stored shortcuts and the first one on that list was a process called ‘Wound Healing,’ but the doctor told me to ignore that for now.

“Finally: Select a part of the body to target.”

A screen appeared that showed the outline of a human body with a target marker that I could control with the directional buttons. I flipped the digital man around to his back side and focused in on his neck. I selected this area and a message screen popped up saying the signal was transmitting.

The doctor said there was something working and I took his word for it, but I didn’t feel the magical healing sensation that I imagined. He admitted that it was a poor starting place for presentation, but it represented the reality of our situation. He told me that everything is bounded by the amount of time it takes for a biological process to happen and nature has to run its course.

Then he told me that this was the future and nature was stupid, because he was going to make my body work faster. He directed me to select the ‘Wound Healing’ process from the quick bar and said this was one of the complex routines he programmed that showed how the Time’s Mirror could allocate the body’s resources to accomplish a single task. I repeated the steps, but this time chose the new signal.

After about a minute of staring at the ‘processing…’ message I felt a heat emerge on the back on my neck. It was just a tingling sensation at first, but I found myself imagining in my mind that the deep tissue was healing, and then I thought I could actually feel it. It felt like the skin and muscles were creating friction, starting a fire as they weaved themselves back together.

I sat almost completely still for five minutes, hardly able to focus on anything else, and when it passed I could feel the tightness of the stiches inside my skin. The heat dissipated and the tingling passed, and I felt different. Whole, maybe.

It wasn’t until the burning feeling was gone that I became aware that the doctor was leaning over me and looking at the back of my neck. “Fascinating,” he whispered.

“What?” I asked.

“I didn’t expect it to go half as well as that.”

I was too shocked to be shocked by his comment.

“So it worked?” I put my hand on my neck and I felt the stitches but no indication of a tear in the skin or even a hint of any scar tissue.

“Yes.” He sounded moderately enthused and I could feel his eyes studying my neck. “How do you feel?”

“I feel a little tired, I guess. Also hungry.”

He grunted and then commented to himself, “Hmm, possibly a side effect of the accelerated metabolic process.”

“Or it’s because we haven’t eaten yet,” I offered.

He cocked his head. “That could be it. Let me remove the stitches and we’ll go.”

When Doctor Valentine and I entered the kitchen, we found Lacey waiting patiently at the dining table, looking at her cell phone while the sound of something simmering on the stove, and the smell of something herbaceous and savory filled the air. She looked up as we came in and stood up quickly.

“About time,” she said, moving towards the stove. “Bailey would you help me?”

Doctor Valentine excused himself to the restroom and I walked over to help Lacey. She opened the oven and instructed me to take out the warm serving plates and arrange them on the counter.

“So?” she asked, handing me a pair of oven mitts. “How was it?”

I shrugged. “Oh, super secret. He made me promise not to tell anyone what happened in there.”

“You are so full of it.” She began plating a bed of pasta in each of the bowls, followed by a brilliant red sauce packed with brightly-colored vegetables. “I’m serious, though. How do you feel?”

“Why are you asking?”

“I’m just…” she paused. “Curious.”

I watched her top each plate with a glistening filet of fish and delicately garnish with a bay leaf. She seemed overly hospitable; I couldn’t place my finger on why it felt so weird.

Doctor Valentine returned, and I left her question unanswered for the time being. I helped her move the plates to the table and we all sat down. For a strange moment we all just stared at the food like we were each waiting for the other to make the first move.

The doctor spoke first. “Are you religious, Bailey?”

“Not really,” I confessed.

He nodded. “As you will, then.” He motioned that it was okay for me to eat. My mouth was watering at the smell and I had my fork in my hand to plate to mouth as quickly as if I had been starved for a month. The fish was tender, the pasta had the perfect bite, and the whole dish came together with harmonious flavor. It was the kind of meal that demanded respect in savoring each bite, but the experiment had left me so famished that I could have licked the plate clean in an instant.

Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lacey and her father clap their hands together and close their eyes and my manners kicked the hungry animal out of my head. I forced my fork back down to the table and even stopped chewing the food already in my mouth while I waited for them to finish. It wasn’t the traditional prayer like we had at my grandparents’ house: twenty seconds to a full minute of thanking God for all the little things that came to mind. It was three seconds’ silent meditation and then they were ready to eat. I resumed shoving food into my face while I listened to their conversation.

“Did you ever figure out that combination to that old safe in your room?” asked Lacey.

“No,” said Doctor Valentine. “I can’t even remember why I even locked it in the first place.”

“If I recall it was because you didn’t trust Georgia.”

“I think you’re right. With how long we’ve been gone, I figured she would have just taken the money and never show up to work.”

“You have to admit she did a pretty good job.”

“Yeah, though I’m pretty sure she’s throwing some interesting parties over here. I found some strange stuff in my bedroom. Mm, by the way, you really did a number on this dish, Lace.”

“Thanks, Daddy.”

We ate in silence for a bit until I finished the food on my plate and thought I’d try to make conversation. “You know, you two are surprisingly normal.”

Lacey and her father looked at each other and shared a laugh, then Doctor Valentine said “It’s been quite a while since anything has felt normal for us, but I suppose when it comes down to it we have to eat and sleep like everybody else. Finding you gave us a chance to settle down for a moment, so thank you for that.” He paused to acknowledge me. “Are you still hungry?”

“I made extras for you,” Lacey said, reading the look of hunger on my face. “Help yourself.”

There was that feeling again. Just a tiny itch in the back of my head that was telling me something was off. I ignored it and I went over to the stove and scooped a large serving onto my plate with not even a fraction of the grace that Lacey had demonstrated earlier.

“So what’s up with the prayer?” I asked as politely as I could when I returned. “You don’t strike me as the type.”

Doctor Valentine looked thoughtful as he chewed his food. He wiped his mouth with a napkin before he spoke. “It’s easy to forget that you need to consume something else’s life in order to continue living yours. Lacey and I have been on the brink enough times to see that clearly. In some ways you’re responsible for the legacy of the thing you’re eating, so remembering them is the least you can do.” He touched his face, looking almost embarrassed. “I probably sound like a hippie to you right now, but this is another thing I’m trying to bring to light with my project so maybe someday I can properly show you what I’m talking about.”

I chewed my food a bit slower as I listened to him. Swallowing, I almost thought I could taste the difference with his philosophy in my head.

“I think I kind of get it,” I said. “That’s why some people become vegetarians.”

He chuckled. “What’s the difference between the legacies of a trout and a tomato? Does not a vegetable work just as hard to live as any animal? But I suppose that’s the general idea I’m trying to get at. Empathy for all life, not just your own kind.”

Lacey and the doctor finished their food quietly and then Doctor Valentine looked at me. “I know you need to rest, but if you’re up for it we can try an experiment tonight.”

I felt much better from before and was excited to see what he had in store for me. I told him so and he excused himself from the table and told me to meet him in the basement after I finished eating.

When he left Lacey propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm, making a show of watching me eat. I was somehow still starving and she watched as I shoveled food into my mouth, though I did my best to chew with my mouth closed.

“Curious,” she whispered.

“What?” I asked, mouth half full of pasta.

“I told you I was curious and you didn’t answer me.” She made a pouting face. “What’s it like having the power to save the world?”

She was making me nervous with the way she was looking at me. I shouldn’t have been nervous given our brief, but complicated history, but I felt butterflies when she was staring at me like that.

“If I’m being honest, I can’t tell the difference.” I tried to focus on the food instead of on her eyes. “Speaking of, do you guys have like a help desk? Oh, and what’s your refund policy, like in case I drop it in the toilet?”

She began to giggle her way through a response. “Sorry, sir. We can’t return any of the brain matter we harvested during surgery. We do offer a replacement but we can’t be responsible for any change in IQ.”

She started laughing at her own joke and I started laughing at the way she was laughing.

“So where did you learn to cook?” I asked when she settled down.

She shrugged. “Oh, a street vendor here, a trash can fire there. Where most people learn most things.”

“Most people would say they learned from their mother or something.” I was being an ass. I knew I was being an ass. I said it anyways.

“My mom died when I was twelve,” she said plainly, still looking at me with a smile.

“I’m sorry,” I said, still an ass.

She shook her head. “Don’t be sorry for me, Bailey. People only die when you forget about them.”

“I’m sorry, Lacey,” I repeated as sympathetically as I could, and I leaned forward. “But that was really cheesy.”

“Oh, shut up.” She pushed me back against my seat, laughing again. “It got a twelve year-old through her mother’s death.”

“Well it sounds like your dad’s variety of cheese, so I guess I can’t blame you.”

“Hey! Don’t give him credit for my work.”

“Oh, god. How do you two live like this, spouting depressing catchphrases for every situation? You guys really need someone to keep you in check.”

“Well I guess it’s a good thing you’re here now.” She smiled serenely and I felt more butterflies in my chest. “Thanks for listening, Bailey.”

She stood and picked up the empty plate from in front of me. “You should go downstairs. I wouldn’t want to hold up the world’s only hope for revelation.”

I nodded and stood and was about to go downstairs when I started to think about those damn rom-coms that my mother liked and I remembered telling myself that I’d never be so stupid as those clueless male leads to let the question float around for a full hour of screen time before getting anywhere.

“Lacey,” I started, but I felt the nerves responsible for that stupid hour of every love story and I almost couldn’t finish. She looked at me, and I knew I had to say something. “What am I to you?”

She thought for a second, starting the sink and applying soap to a sponge. “I suppose you’re that boy who I kissed once when I was young and stupid.”

“Have there been many of those?” I asked.

She turned away from me, and said “None who stayed.”

When I got down to the basement Doctor Valentine was dashing around the lab, gathering equipment and tools near one of the computers.

“What’s up, doc?” I asked, approaching him.

“Ah, Bailey. Are you ready to get started?”

“What are we starting?”

He smirked. “Well that is up to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your potential is nearly unlimited. Name something you’ve always wanted your body to have and I’ll tell you if you can have it.”

“Laser vision,” I spouted without thinking.

“Uh, no,” he stated firmly.

My spirit deflated. “Can you give me super strength?”

“Sure.”

I frowned. “Are you sure we can’t do laser vision?”

“You’re talking about looking at something and causing it to ignite.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

I lowered my head, completely defeated. “Fine, just make me really strong, I guess.”

Doctor Valentine smirked his mischievous smirk and he was almost shivering with excitement. He sat on the stool next to the computer and started typing away while he muttered his thoughts aloud.

“Repress myostatin, GDF-8, enhance GH-1, IGF-1, cyclin proteins for mitosis. Target torso: chest, arms, back. Execute rapid transformation.”

He finalized his commands and then removed GRegg from the wired port of the computer. “Okay!” he announced. “It’s done. Turn on the Mirror and I’ll send the signal now.”

I had to think for a second what he was talking about, until I remembered the grueling process we had just gone through to set up my pass-idea. I performed it, including the motions as I thought of my linked memories and when I looked up Doctor Valentine told me that it was successful.

“You ready?” Doctor Valentine asked with a glint of excitement in his eyes.

I nodded.

“I’m targeting your torso. Little pinch.”

I nodded again preparing myself for something – I wasn’t sure what, though I had a mental image of my muscles flexing and expanding until my shirt ripped to shreds. I thought I had better leave it on for effect.

I saw Doctor Valentine push a few buttons on GRegg and I closed my eyes and tried to focus on feeling the change.

I waited.

Nothing happened.

I opened my eyes.

I opened my mouth.

“Did you—”

Then it touched down, and compared to the tingling fire on my neck before, this was a raging lava inferno that seared through my chest. I involuntarily winced my eyes shut from the shock. It developed first like the tense fatigue two days after a hard workout, but in the instant that I knelt to the ground to try and nurse the sore areas with my hands, my arms started to feel like they were filled with acid and I couldn’t even move them through the pain.

Then I felt something unfamiliar. It was like all the muscles in my arms and chest and back were expanding, stretching, peeling away from my bones, while at the same time somehow clenching, compressing, clamping my insides down with such tension that I started to convulse.

I tried to take myself out of the moment, holding my breath, waiting for it to pass. But it continued and when I exhaled my final breath I found my chest so tightly tensed that my lungs refused to expand. I started to panic as I opened my mouth and tried to suck down air, but my throat felt like a drinking straw in a vice grip and I couldn’t breathe.

“Shit.” I heard Doctor Valentine say.

“SHIT!” he repeated more alarmed, and I knew something was very wrong.

I was vaguely aware that he was pounding furiously at the keyboard and I knew he was trying to reverse the process or do something that would help. I felt hot, my head on fire from lack of oxygen and I felt myself fading. I rolled onto my back, hoping I could get in a better position to free my lungs from my bulging muscles, but my whole upper body was flexing so I was stuck in a compressed sit-up position. I’m going to die, I thought to myself, I’m going to die and laser vision isn’t real. I closed my eyes, and the last thing I saw was Doctor Valentine rush over towards me, and as I faded I felt his hands trying to relax my muscles so I could breathe.

TO BE CONTINUED!

#novel #independent #YA #Science fiction

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Week 7(8?) Update

I took a week off without posting anything here because Chapter 7, as you can see is a monster clocking in over 6000 words. I still needed to do a lot of edits on the writing and the previous week was very bad for me in terms of sleep schedule and available time to work on the project. As it turns out, I got maybe one day out of the exchange and I did most of the work in essentially one week. Most of the week I wasn’t able to properly record, because my voice just didn’t have the range for Doctor Valentine, and what I did record was inefficient and subpar. I want to get my characters to blend fluidly instead of the track sounding like an argument with myself.

I wasted a lot of time on video games and I’m not at all proud of that. I’m also very tired, still trying to export at 11PM on my due date. I have hope for next week, because the chapter is probably two-thirds the length of this one. I still have to finish blocking one scene and probably do rewrites as I go. That’ll have to wait until tomorrow though, because as usual I have committed a full day on my day off to the project and I’m very very burnt out. I’m glad I have a product to release this week and I’ll continue to work hard to boost the quality of production and content in the weeks to come.

Read

Soundcloud

YouTube

Yay,

Embers

#empty promises #ramble #sleepy

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 7 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 7

Doctor Valentine didn’t talk about his project for the rest of the day. He reiterated that he wanted me to think about it, but after that he dropped his passionate presenter’s persona and asked me if I wanted to see some of the gadgets he had developed that were unrelated to his experiment. He seemed pretty friendly when he wasn’t trying to impress, and he asked me personal questions about my family and school.

He’d actually heard of my mother from her work, and he said he might have a copy of her first novel lying around somewhere. He told me that Lacey was fascinated with adventure fiction when she was younger, and she had read some book reviews that pointed to my mother and convinced him to buy a copy so she could read it.

While it wasn’t anything special, it still surprised me that Lacey and I were connected obscurely by that story. My mother’s first novel, The Pinwheel Carnival, was a story of loss and renewal set in World War II America where girl meets boy and spends one short day creating a lifelong memory. I guess the difference between me and Lacey was that she read the book of her own choosing when she was nine, whereas my mother had shoved the first draft into my hands when I was five and watched as I try to read it. I was too young to understand it, but since I was the closest available thing to her target audience I had to do. Looking back, that was probably the tipping point where I became her primary focus group and personal monkey.

Doctor Valentine finished showing me a laser pen he had created that could mark on a piece of paper ten feet away, then he checked his watch and saw that it was nearly six o’ clock. He didn’t want my parents to worry, so he brought me upstairs to send me home with Lacey.

Lacey was reading in the sunken garden when we arrived on the first floor. She looked relaxed as she shut the book and looked up at us, but she was clearly waiting patiently for me to return because she was wearing her coat again. I had this weird moment where it felt like she was my mother waiting for me to finish my appointment at the dentist’s office.

“How was it?” She stood to meet us and it looked like she was talking to me, but Doctor Valentine answered instead.

“Fine,” he said. “Bailey will come back tomorrow with an answer. You can take him home for now.”

“Okay.” She nodded her head. “I’ll pick up dinner on my way home.”

“Drive safe, hon.” They kissed one another on the cheek and then Lacey walked towards the door. I started to follow her, but the doctor put his hand on my shoulder to say one last thing to me.

“I can’t force you to make a decision, Bailey,” he began. “But ask yourself what you really want in this life. If you can believe me, I promise you this project will give you the power to make an impact in this world.”

He let me go after that and Lacey held the giant door for me to go outside and get into her car.

Lacey and I drove back through the complex ring of houses, past the gates and Jerry the doorman, and back onto the main road without saying a word to each other. Finally, I tried to break the silence.

“So,” I said.

“So?” she asked after I didn’t follow up.

“I don’t know. I thought I would come up with something to say.”

She didn’t look like she wanted to talk, but she tried to entertain me anyways. “What did you think of my father?”

I thought for a second. There was a lot to say about him, even though I had only known him for two hours. “He was very persuasive. Like you said.”

More silence.

Our dynamic had changed drastically over the course of that first day of our meeting. I wanted to make her laugh again, but all I could think about was what her father had said. I wanted to talk to her about it, but talking about it made it feel real, and I wasn’t certain that I was ready for that.

“Tell me it’ll be fun,” I finally said.

“What?” She looked at me with a curious expression.

“Tell me it’ll be fun,” I repeated. “Tell me I’ll get rippling muscles and six-pack abs, and one day the Army will recruit me and I’ll lead a one-man mission to save the world. Tell me I’ll fall in love with the beautiful assistant who claims she’s uninterested with me at first, but we all know there’s a spark between us and then we go through two hours of ‘will they, won’t they’ romantic tension until we finally kiss for the first time in the rain. Tell me I die valiantly, ultimately perishing in the light of my new found power, because the world just isn’t ready for a superhero. Tell me it’ll be fun.”

She stared at the road and I couldn’t exactly tell her expression. It looked like she was trying not to smile, and when she spoke, her voice cracked slightly in amusement.

“Let me just start by saying that if you’re thinking of doing this because you want to get the girl, you’re definitely doing it for the wrong reason.” She gave me a look. “But I think you are fun, Bailey and wherever you go and whatever you decide to do I think you’ll take your creativity and imagination with you.

“But I honestly can’t tell you that this will be fun. Because I don’t know. You’re the first person who’s shown an interest in participating. This is the closest my father has ever gotten to a volunteer, and you would be the very first test subject. It’s a bit of a mystery as to what will happen, but you’d get to experience that mystery with us.”

Her statement concerned me a little. “I’m the first person to…”

Lacey read the sound of my voice and understood my issue. “You’d be the very first, yes, and because of that I can’t guarantee perfect safety. I probably don’t need to give you any more reasons to say no, but there’s a small chance that you might not survive the implementation process. That’s how it is. You can still walk away. No one would stop you; no one would hold it against you.”

I directed to her to make a couple of turns and we made our way into my subdivision and through the winding streets until I pointed out my house. The scenery paled in comparison to the luxurious Paradise Gardens, but I felt glad to be home.

Lacey stopped in my driveway, but kept her engine running. She turned towards me as she gave the last of her speech. “I can’t make this decision for you, Bailey. I know my dad will say that you have a chance make a difference or some other evocative stuff like that, but the truth is that this might be a huge waste of your time. But you told me you wanted adventure, and all I know about that is sometimes you have to take a leap.”

She looked me right in the eyes with an expression that what she was about to say was important.

“Above all else, make sure you’re doing this because it’s what you want. Not for me, not for my dad, not because you think the world needs you to do it. Don’t undervalue the privilege to make decisions for yourself.”

She stopped talking, and there was such weathered sincerity in her voice that made me feel like she so much wiser than I was. She didn’t seem to want to say anything more about the subject, which left a little bit of tension in the air. I quietly reflected on her words while I waited for her to kick me out of the car.

She didn’t, but after a couple of awkward seconds I remembered something that would help us to leave on a bit of a brighter note. I tried to subtly change the subject. “Your dad said you knew my mom.”

“Sorry?” She sounded pleasantly confused that we weren’t dwelling on the serious topic.

“My mom is Morgan Prince,” I said, trying not to sound like I was name dropping. “He said you read one of her books.”

“Oh.” Her eyes got wide with recognition and she grinned. “Yeah, I remember. That was a nice story. I’d love to meet her sometime.”

“You can come in if you want,” I offered.

“Uh…” She looked like she was seriously considering for a second, but she shook her head. “No. I don’t think I should.”

“Right.” I grinned sheepishly, feeling a little embarrassed. “Some other time.”

I put my hand on the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. Call me whenever; I’ll be around.”

I nodded and patted my pocket where I had put the piece of paper that she had pressed into my hand that morning. I got out of the car and she waited until I entered my house before she left.

I decided not to talk to my parents about my extraordinary day, at first because I thought they wouldn’t believe me, but then I started to think that even if they did believe me I would rather keep my little secret to myself than get advice on how to deal with it. Instead, I sat in my room and scribbled homework answers to give the impression to my teachers that I had tried, and I thought about Doctor Valentine, and Lacey, and Paradise Gardens and how romantic it all seemed. I had called for adventure; I had wished for ambition and now here it was. It seemed stupid to not jump at it, damn the risks or the unusual circumstances.

The snow didn’t come that night, either. The skies looked pregnant, ready to burst as I waited at the bus stop the next morning, but the grey clouds labored long enough for school to still be in session. So I went, and I wandered the hallways and I tried to stay awake in class and I joked with friends. And I reaffirmed how tired I was of it all. I wanted to call Lacey and pull the fire alarm and publically declare that I would never come back. But that was a pretty standard midday meltdown for me, and I managed to get through the whole day without letting it show.

I called Lacey as soon as the bell rang to signal the end of the school day, and I texted my mother to say that I was working on a project with a friend, and within the hour I was going through the gates of Paradise with Lacey and then following her up the steps to the Valentine castle, and finally sitting across Doctor Valentine in the basement laboratory.

“I couldn’t sleep last night,” I admitted to him.

“I keep Chaucer on my nightstand. Romantic poetry always puts me to sleep,” he joked.

“I think I’m too old for stories before bed,” I said.

He scoffed, dismissing my attempt at ridicule. “What’s on your mind?”

“I kept thinking about what you said,” I started. “I know you told me what you wanted to accomplish and all the things I could become if I followed you, but you never said how you plan on doing it. You said you wanted me to think about it, but I don’t think I can make a decision until I know what you actually want to do with me.”

I had been planning that speech for the whole day. I decided I would need to show at least a little responsibility for my actions, even though what I really wanted was to have him jam a needle into my arm and turn me into a fire-breathing, death-defying, doom machine.

He smiled when I finished, which surprised me a little. He seemed happy.

“Good,” he said suddenly. And then he leapt to his feet. “GOOD!” he exclaimed and he clapped his hands once, very loudly. “You are exactly the person I need. I’m gonna astound you. Sit right there.”

He hurriedly pulled up some slides on his computer and rolled down the projector screen again. He was breathing harder as he began his presentation. He stood in front of the projector screen and he gestured with his hands excitedly as he talked. His voice remained calm and decisive, though he spoke quickly.

“This project is called Time’s Mirror. It is my legacy; my greatest invention; my hope for the advancement of society. Yesterday, I told you it was what you could become, and with my technology I want to transform you into it.”

The first image he brought to the screen was a top down view of a brain.

“Time’s Mirror begins here: in the mind. As much as this is a genetic experiment, it is a thought experiment. Your brain allows you to make conscious decisions about how you respond to your environment; and the Mirror will upgrade your brain’s potential to let you decide how your body changes to help you in any situation. This is your command center, and you are the pilot, but it’s time to get you a new ship.”

The slide changed to side by side picture of a normal brain cell: artistically rendered like a sprouting potato that had a long, segmented tail, compared to a similar shape with a circuit board in place of all the original parts inside the potato head.

“This is the design for the Time’s Mirror command center. I was able to manufacture a cellular body that could accommodate a microchip. The implant structure is based off the master DNA sequence, with all the antigen fingerprints so your immune system will see it as one of your own cells. It attaches to your neural network to interpret explicit signals from your own thoughts and it can artificially replicate any natural signal to trick your body into doing exactly what you want it to do. The real component is about a hundred times bigger than a nerve cell, but it functions similarly by tapping into the power structure of your own body. It connects to a number of synapses in your brainstem to receive signals from different parts of your brain and it gets nutrients from your bloodstream. This way we can use sodium-potassium channels to generate power to run the microchip and you’ll have a fully charged, sodium-ion battery as long as you’re getting proper nutrition.”

Doctor Valentine changed the image back to the top down picture of the brain and several points on the screen lit up with a yellow glow to indicate spots of interest.

“Eight transmitters are implanted along different points on your skull. These will emit electromagnetic resonant frequencies in response to signals in the surrounding area, which the Mirror chip then interprets. They don’t need batteries to operate so they attach to your skull. Like I said before the Mirror microchip attaches to your brainstem at the back, here.”

He pointed at the base of the picture where one of the yellow spots pulsed ominously. I raised my hand like I was seeking help in a classroom. He nodded at me.

“So you want to drill holes in my head to put metal thingies on my brain?”

He slowly bobbed his head up and down. “Yes and no. I need to perform some minor neck surgery to implant the Time’s Mirror chip, but the transmitters sit just under the skin and you won’t be able to feel them.”

I said exactly what was bothering me. “Lacey told me there was a chance I could die.”

He frowned. “Death is always nearer than you think. I’m a practiced surgeon, you can trust me that I’ll get the surgery done safely.”

“But you haven’t done this operation before. How do you know you can do it?”

“It would appear that I need to have a talk with this girl about discretion.” He sighed and tried to speak comfortingly. “Bailey, there are many more moving parts to this that you might not survive, the surgery is one of the only controllable elements. Will you at least let me talk benefits before we do a risk analysis?”

I took a deep breath and conceded.

“Okay, then.” He continued his presentation, changing the slide to feature a repeating animation of the double-helix structure of DNA being unwound and then pulled into its separate strands by a featureless blob labeled ‘V.’ Then the blob removed part of the sequence to, what looked like, either shuffle around the code or replace it with entirely new data.

“The reason we need something that replicates brain waves is because the thing that allows you to manipulate your DNA is a synthetic enzyme that I was able to develop that can be programmed to respond to electrical signals. The enzyme is DNA polymerase, helicase, transcriptase, and many more all in one functional protein. This means it can create new DNA to fill in genes you’re missing, or edit your existing blueprint to fix genes that don’t behave how you want them to, or isolate and turn off genes to prevent diseases like cancer. With this tiny protein you gain complete control of your genetic makeup. This is veritase: the protein that will allow you to process the truth.

“For you to experience a full body transformation, every cell in your body needs to be able to respond to your will. As you can imagine, I would need to inject a solid ton of veritase into your blood to ensure full coverage, but since it is a natural protein instead of a machine, your body can be taught to synthesize veritase by itself. We only need a single cell to accept the veritase. Then I can program that cell to make more and ship it out to surrounding cells and then repeat the process to completion. It’ll only take a couple of hours from start to finish of this process.”

He changed the slide again to another animation, this one showing a cell expanding and bulging and finally splitting into two.

“There’s risk in this stage too, but it’s not as obvious. We need a plan for if we change data and something goes wrong. The solution is to use veritase to suspend your cell development in the interphase of mitosis. In this stage your DNA naturally replicates itself and for a little while you have ninety-two chromosomes in your cells instead of forty-six. At this point your cell is supposed to split, but if we use veritase to lock up one set of chromosomes we can refer back to that one like a backup copy. If something goes wrong with our test case, then we just reverse the process by restoring the data. Each of your cells will now have two nuclei instead of one, but it’s really just a cosmetic change and I promise no one will notice.”

I squinted at the animation, thinking maybe if I stared harder his words would make more sense, but it was too vague to help me understand what was going on. I made a face at him to let him know I was too dumb to listen to this.

“What’s bothering you?” he asked simply.

“I thought you got superpowers from getting struck by lightning or falling in acid. I still don’t get what this means for me.”

He walked towards me and pulled out a stool to sit in front of me, blocking my view of the looping video. He scratched at his temple as he began to speak.

“Say for a moment I created this protein that gave me complete control of DNA. Do you know what the easiest way for me to experiment with it on humans would be?”

I shook my head.

“The easiest way would be to take an embryo, a one to eight-celled, pre-developed creature, and inject my veritase in each cell. Through pre-natal development all the way to maturity, I’d be able to control every operation. I’d be able to design that person exactly how I wanted. Do you know why I didn’t choose to do that?”

“Because you needed me, right? Or my DNA sequence at least?”

“No. When that baby developed to an age where it could accept the Time’s Mirror microchip, I could make it so its immune system wouldn’t reject it. The reason I wouldn’t do that to a child is because he couldn’t decide for himself if he wanted it or not. What value is there in a sentient subject if he never understood all the nuances of choosing his own path? I need someone who gets the desire to know the answers to things, or the longing to leave a mark on the world, or the pressure to achieve something useful.

“I need you for your imagination. When I look into my Mirror all I see is the indecipherable language of Life, but if you break through this looking glass, maybe you can see all the things we could have been and all the things yet to come. All I want is for you to share with me what you see. The risk is there. We can talk about risk all day. But if you’re willing, Bailey, to get struck by lightning or drink radioactive fallout to get almighty power, what’s a little surgery to you?”

I suppose you can already guess by the fact that I’m still writing this that I agreed to let him use my body, even if I didn’t fully understand what was going on. So let’s just skip ahead a bit.

What happened next was the loopy, drug-filled deconstruction of my conscious mind. I remember Doctor Valentine leading me to one of the side rooms in the basement that was conveniently an operating room, and I remember sitting down in an apparatus where my back angled forward so that my forehead rested on a curved bar like at the eye doctor’s. I remember him sticking a needle in my back, and then I remember an overwhelming blackness. Then I woke up some time later lying completely paralyzed on a soft, plush bed in an unfamiliar room.

My eyes were wide open, but I didn’t remember opening them, or even closing them. My hands were stuck at my sides; my chest was compressed tightly; and my head was pounding with something that was probably pain, but I couldn’t be sure. My senses were so dulled and my vision was so blurred that I couldn’t make out anything but pale, distorted colors in the room. It took me several moments to sense that there was someone sitting next to me. And I thought I could hear a voice, but there was a ringing feedback in my ears that threw a thick blanket over everything.

After another moment I tried blinking and I felt air moving in and out of my nose. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the sounds in my head and concentrated on my headache to try to control it. My hand twitched as I felt something brush slightly against it. Someone else’s hand, soft and gentle. An angel had come to guide me to heaven, I thought.

And then the hand moved to my shoulder and gently rocked me, a rhythmic sequence of three shakes and then a pause. Shake. Shake. Shake. Pause. Shake. Shake. Shake. Pause. It made me feel like sleeping. Then the distant voice shouted and the ringing came back so violently that I felt myself sit straight up and grab my head and let out an anguished croak. But when I touched my hands to my temples, flaming hot waves of agony erupted and spiraled through my brain.

I opened my mouth as if to breathe out my anguish as fire and I found that stretching my jaw helped a little, but it was like my head was filled with pressurized gas and the gas was trying to explode free of the confines of my skull. The pain seemed to gather on the back of my neck and I tried to imagine that point in my mind’s eye, disappearing and fading away.

I breathed deeply and the burning sensation slowly dispersed outwards but left me with a soft pounding that spread out through my entire face. It felt the worst right below my eyes, like the muscle was wrapping my face tighter and tighter with each pulse until my cheekbones were cutting through my skin.

Another moment passed and the soreness relaxed a bit so that I could open my eyes and the fog went away and my ears popped so Lacey could get through to me.

“Bailey,” she whispered. “Are you all right?”

Her knee was on the edge of the bed and one of her arms was around my shoulders. I reeled forward, feeling my stomach suddenly lurch into my throat and I felt like I was about to throw up. My tongue felt too big for my mouth, and my throat was dry.

As I came back in control of my senses, I noticed that there was a thin piece of fabric separating my hands from my head. I tried to disregard that for the moment.

“What happened?” I rasped.

“You made a horrible mistake.” She stood up and walked across the room, and when she came back she pushed a cup of water into my hands. I was still leaning forward so I just craned my neck down and lapped at the liquid like a dog. I could sense her standing over me and I heard her sigh.

“You could have died, you know.” She sounded a little concerned.

“Are we sure that I’m not already dead?” I moaned, gripping my forehead. “What’s on my head?”

“It’s gauze. Don’t fiddle with it.” She grabbed my hand that was reaching to pull at the bandage. Her fingers were cold and felt soothing as they pinched my hand to protect me from myself. “How do you feel?”

“Oh, fine,” I said ironically, “I feel just fine.” The pain surged again and I winced for what felt like eternity. When I rallied, I looked around the room. The walls were blue with a brown trim molding. A picture of a sailboat hung on the wall near the door. The room was vaguely ocean themed, which seemed strange for the landlocked castle, but the cool colors were easy on my eyes which helped a little with the seasickness.

“Where am I?” I asked groggily.

“Guest room,” she said.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly eight.”

“I have to get home,” I said, realizing my parents would probably think the worst.

I tried to move out of the bed, but she put her hand on my shoulder. “You can’t go looking like that. Also, it’s snowing pretty badly. You should call and check in. I’ll get my dad.” She left and I slowly propped myself into a sitting position to pull my phone out of my pocket.

I had a text from my dad from thirty minutes before I woke up asking where I was. I downed the last of the water and set the cup on the floor next to the bed. After that, I pressed the touch screen on my phone a few times and I could hear the dial tone. My dad picked up after the fourth ring.

“Hey, Bailey.” His voice was cheerful.

“Hey. I wanted to check in.” My head was still spinning and I had to think through every word.

“Yeah, we were wondering where you were.”

“Sorry, I got lost in this project.”

“That’s not a problem, but it’s snowing really hard. Can you ask your friend if you can stay at his house for the night?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “But it’s a ‘her’.”

I could almost feel his eyes lighting up from several miles away and my brain started to hurt again as I realized my mistake. “Oh. It’s a girl friend?” he crooned excitedly. “Well, definitely ask then. In fact, let me talk to her parents if you have any problems.”

“Oh my god, Dad.” I started to feel really embarrassed, but that made my head throb so I tried to stop thinking. “I’ll ask. Please don’t get involved.”

“Involved? Wouldn’t dream of it.” He chuckled. “But I do need to ask you a few questions for your mother.”

“Okay?”

He paused for fake dramatic effect before spouting “Is she cute?”

I sighed. “Mom needs to know that?”

“Yes. Also: What’s her name? and Are you dating, yet? and – this one is especially important, I need to know to report to your mother – How big are her—”

“Bye, Dad.” He was like a teenage girl. I pulled the phone away from my ear, but then I heard his distant voice change tone.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “Seriously, call me if there’s a problem.” He paused for a second before he continued “I was going to say ‘ears’ you know. But if you want to talk details, I’m listening.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Bye, Dad,” I repeated.

“Have fun, kiddo,” he said, and I could picture him winking at his cell phone.

I ended the call and stared at the door with nothing particular on my mind. I felt exhausted, and my eyelids started to droop so that I was dozing while sitting up, my years of schooling actually going to work for me.

It was about five minutes before the doctor came in and cleared his throat so that I snapped to attention. He was carrying a briefcase which he set down on the foot of the bed.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“My brain feels like fire,” I admitted. “But I guess I’m not dead.”

“Surgery was a success,” he replied. “You need to rest; I’d love to keep you overnight to check on your condition in the morning, but I don’t know what your parents would think.”

“My dad wanted to ask if I could stay. This weather’s good for that at least.”

“Excellent. Then I want to do a little bookkeeping while Lacey makes dinner.” He opened the briefcase so that the back of the top panel faced me and I had to wonder what he had inside. After a moment he produced some alien-looking headpiece that had a wiry frame and metal nodes positioned at different intervals. It formed at the front in a triangle piece that was supposed to sit right in between the eyes like a helmet from a fantasy land. A cord connected it to the briefcase to relay data.

“This will track your brain waves while we calibrate the transmitters inside your head.” He gave the headpiece to me, and flipped the briefcase around to reveal a monitor screen that was beginning to boot up and a keyboard that was situated in the bottom portion of the case.

“Do we have to do this now?” I asked. “My head is killing me.”

“Trust me. After we get this out of the way it’ll hurt less.”

I didn’t see how that was possible, but I took the headpiece and pressed it onto my head. It pinched at my skull and I felt the wrapping around my head drift up slightly.

The doctor began to debrief me as I sat uncomfortably. “The implant should be ready to go and your body should have completed the process of making veritase. How does your neck feel?”

I thought about the trauma I just experienced. “Fine,” I answered curtly.

He picked up on the sour tone in my voice. “Right. Well, the good news is that we can fix it. Bad news is we have to do some set up before we start.”

The computer in the briefcase finally booted up and the screen showed a brain from an overhead view with a dialog box on one side.

He lifted the briefcase carefully and brought it to the side of the bed, explaining as he walked. The cord attached to the headpiece danced playfully in the air. “We’re going to give a definite signal from distinct areas of your brain to set up the transmitters’ triangulation.”

Doctor Valentine pulled over a chair that was in the corner of the room and sat with the computer-briefcase on his lap; he typed a few things into the keyboard and then began to instruct me.

“Okay, close your eyes and just listen and respond.” I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of his fingers tapping on the keyboard. When he finally spoke it was clear and deliberate. “What is thirty-five multiplied by twenty-nine?”

I imagined writing down my calculation, putting together the single numbers and adding the sum. It didn’t come out very quickly. “One-thousand five?”

“Thank you.” My answer was wrong, but it seemed he was looking for something other than correct multiplication. He asked me two more basic math problems before he moved on.

“You’re in your bedroom at home. Enter from the door, look around the room, and tell me what you see.”

I imagined myself pulling on the brass door knob and stepping inside my room. “I see the walls – they’re a deep shade of red – and the carpet is a shade of off-white that matches the ceiling. The bed is full size, unmade because someone once told me that bed bugs like to sleep in made beds. My desk is in the corner near the window with my computer tower tucked underneath. My clothes are on the floor, but it’s a livable mess, my closet door is open with all the clothes I don’t wear inside. Under my bed—”

“That should be enough,” the doctor interrupted. He typed a few things on the keyboard and then we continued.

“Okay,” he said. “Now open your eyes and describe what you see.”

I opened my eyes but didn’t do what he asked. “What’s this supposed to do?”

He looked a little annoyed that I interrupted him, but he explained calmly. “Your occipital lobe interprets information from your vision; this test will calibrate the transmitters to retrieve the signals from that part of your brain.”

He tapped some commands into the keyboard to reset the calibration and then instructed me to do the same thing again. This time I complied.

“There’s a window to my right with white, shear blinds; it’s pretty dark outside, maybe just past twilight. The walls are a navy blue color and there’s a picture hanging by the door that shows a boat at the end of a dock, but it seems to be one of those visual illusions where either the boat could be really close or the dock could go on forever. There’s a man sitting next to me who’s examining me. He’s wearing a white lab coat even though he’s at home and he’s a little intimidating, but I try not to show signs of fear because I know that he’s just a big softie at heart.”

“That’s probably enough,” he said.

“Really? I feel like I could go on.”

“We can continue that later if you like. That’s enough for the calibration portion.” He set down the computer-breifcase and motioned for me to take the headpiece off. “Do you feel okay to continue?”

I nodded, feeling a little better now.

“We still have to set up the thought commands, but I thought you might want to see exactly what we’re going to fix.” He leaned over me and removed the bandage wrap. Then he sat back in the chair to let me examine myself.

I touched my hands to my forehead, but didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary except for the stretch marks left by the gauze. But as I traced two semicircles around my head with one finger from each hand, I noticed a little hole hidden in my hairline. It was small as a needle point, but it seemed to go deeper through the bone. I remembered one of the nodes of the alien headwear was positioned right above the hole, and I assumed one of the transmitters was burrowed within.

I moved my fingers around my scalp and counted seven or eight of these holes; I remembered Doctor Valentine said eight transmitters. And when my two scouting fingers came together at the back of my neck I found a line of stitches running the length from the tip of my skull to the first bump of my spine. I immediately identified this as the source of my raging calamity and I found myself feeling sorely unimpressed.

“It doesn’t feel that bad,” I said. “Why did it hurt so much?”

“You might have experienced some side effects of the sedatives,” he explained. “That and your body’s natural reaction to a deep cut would probably be enough give you a headache.”

“It felt like there was a little guy in there burning things.”

“You’re being dramatic. Anyways, we will be able to use Time’s Mirror to make sure it heals quickly, and we might even be able to remove the chance of scarring.”

“How’s that?” I asked absently.

“Time’s Mirror hijacks your brain signals to communicate with veritase, but this also means it can send natural signals to anywhere on your body, including your hormone receptors. I originally brought the prototype for the experiment to a division of the military so I could get funding. I pitched the design as a thought-controlled assistant unit that could send natural signals for accelerated wound healing or pain suppression for soldiers in combat. A soldier in a tight fix could use the Mirror to forcefully pump adrenaline into his system for a temporary steroid, but your body is actually quite good at doing that, so I wouldn’t recommend that specifically. For our situation, we can make your body allocate resources so you can quickly go through the healing process.”

He produced a school-bus yellow device out of his lab coat pocket. It was a small contraption that looked like a rounded smart phone. He handed it to me.

At a glance it was an oval-shaped screen, four cardinal buttons surrounding a central select button below the screen, and a sliding power switch on the right-hand side. It fit easily in my hand but the strange shape of it made it feel like it could slip out of my grip at any moment.

“This is the remote assistant that communicates with your Mirror. I designed it for the situation that a person couldn’t focus long enough to send a thought command; this would work instead. Its name is GRegg, the Genetic Recombination egg. It displays all of the functions of the Time’s Mirror and lets you execute those functions remotely. It’ll be your bread and butter for the experiment, unless you forget to charge the batteries. Go ahead and turn it on for now.”

I flipped the switch upwards and the screen came to life. A display message popped up that read “Time’s Mirror not active. Please enable to continue.” I blinked a couple times and read it again before showing the screen to the doctor.

“Right. The only function GRegg can’t do is turn on the Mirror. This is for in case it falls into the hands of a person who wants to fry your brain, you will continue to have complete control. We have to set up an algorithm to activate the Mirror. So let’s do that now.”

The doctor went back around to where he set down the computer-briefcase and picked it up again. He opened it and starting typing away while I stared at the strange egg in my hand and revisited the real world to ask myself where I was supposed to go from here.

I reached a conclusion fairly quickly. There was no way I was going to be able to explain this to my parents.

TO BE CONTINUED

#self-publish #novel #YA #Sci-Fi

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Week 6 Update - On Self-Motivation

So what happens when you leave 8 hours of work for day before you have to upload? You don’t release until thirty minutes before deadline. This project has demanded that I remain self-motivated. That was the only way I could get things done, because for as long as I was pursuing his I didn’t have someone looking over my shoulder telling me to get shit done. The result this week however, was my poor time-management skills took over and I fell asleep when I should have been working and had to rush to eat and drink and make sure the edit came out acceptable. Which, this chapter recording was acceptable, though I think the content is exceptional. Part of the reason was because I had to transition between three different characters and I didn’t really have much time to ensure their vocal idiosyncrasies and smooth transition between voices. My goal for tomorrow is to schedule recordings and edits for the rest of the novel so I can make sure I have a daily task which will keep me accountable and on track to finish in time. Within the next couple chapters I also have to write additional scenes that I have just barely started to plot in my head, so the “wait til last minute thing” is definitely not going to work.

Read.

Youtube.

Soundcloud.

Embers

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 6 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 6

Lacey and I went back down the spiraling staircase to the first floor and into the hallway. From there we found the stairs to the basement behind one of the very few doors in the house – I’m pretty sure that the Valentine castle, even though it was twice as big as the average house, had half as many doors. Upon opening the door, the sound of a dozen, whirring machines resounded up the stairs. It sounded like an entire factory of workers lived in the basement.

When we reached the landing at the bottom of the stairs, I was surprised to see that there was almost an entire factory in the basement. Several, complex machines were sectioned off all along the walls of the room like the bookshelves in the library. In the middle of the ring were three long tables with expensive looking equipment organized neatly on each of them, but there was only a single, concentrated man who was wearing a white lab coat and was gliding back and forth between three different monitors with sophisticated looking software running on each of the screens.

“Dad!” Lacey shouted across the room to get her father’s attention.

“Just a sec, hon.” The man wrote something into a notebook, but I didn’t know how he could concentrate with the constant noise of the machinery running in the background.

I looked around as we walked into the middle of the room. The ceiling lights were long, fluorescent tubes and the walls were painted grey. Two doors looked at each other from opposite ends of the room. The design was a lot less romantic than the rest of the house but it fit the atmosphere.

“Hey Lace, did you ever manage to—Oh. Hello?” He turned to talk to Lacey and noticed a stranger standing with his daughter. I recognized him as the man in the photo on Lacey’s desk. Short, brown hair that was greying along the edges and distinct facial features; he looked just a shade older than the man in the picture. His posture was strong and he was only a couple inches taller than me, but as he came closer I felt small standing next to him.

“Did you go hunting?” he asked Lacey. His voice was deep and rich and his smooth tone provided a small mask to the insinuation that I was a piece of game to be hunted.

“Dad, this is Bailey,” Lacey said, avoiding the question.

“Lacey, we’re here to restock, we don’t have time for another Brooklyn incident.” he replied, and I started to sense an argument about to erupt.

“Oh, come off it,” she said. “He’s a match.”

“You found one?” He looked surprised, but after a moment he seemed to reconsider his emotion. “Never mind that, we don’t have time. Put him back where you got him from.” He turned around to continue working.

“Come on,” Lacey prodded. “You know how lucky this is. He’s even on board.”

He wheeled and looked his daughter in the eye. “You told him already,” he stated, accusingly.

“Yes. But I thought you said you could finish the first part in a week.”

“I can. But it would take another couple months to fine tune it. We can’t just take him with us.” His gaze shifted to me, his green eyes scanning. “Can we?”

The awkward situation grew increasingly awkward as Lacey’s father began to examine me. I had to look away as he undressed me with his eyes. The standoff continued for a while before Lacey snapped him out of it.

“No. We can’t,” she said. “But you keep telling me to worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.”

“Hard to argue with myself,” he admitted.

“Yeah. So you want to try that introduction again?”

He looked longingly at his equipment and then back at me. After letting out a heavy sigh, he stepped over and typed some commands into the keyboard and the machines gradually stopped whirring. The silence that followed made me feel very exposed, comparatively.

“Doctor Valentine.” Lacey’s father extended his hand. I shook it.

“You’ll have to forgive us. This operation does not run as smoothly as it should.” He made a face at Lacey. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“Bailey.” I said with moderate confidence. I was beginning to think I’d started a new chapter in my life where the people I met didn’t react when I introduced myself, but some things never change. Doctor Valentine’s response was subtle ridicule which told me he didn’t share his daughter’s filter.

“Are your parents a spiteful sort of people, Bailey?”

I considered the possibility for a moment, but I knew it couldn’t be true. “They thought it was important for me to overcome some trials early on in my life,” I said.

He thought for a moment and then gave a lopsided smile that looked kind of like approval. “Oh, I smell another Brooklyn incident with this one, Lace.”

“Dad! The job.” She sounded embarrassed.

“Okay. Okay.” He turned his head to address me. “I don’t know how much my daughter has told you, but I’ll start with a short presentation. Excuse me while I set some things up.” He walked away and went to rummage through some drawers.

Lacey faced me. “Sorry about him,” she said. “He’s a little crazy.”

“Don’t apologize. You prepared me for plenty of crazy.”

She laughed. “I suppose I should be sorry for myself then.” She looked almost bashful. “No more games here. I’m not going to try to make your mind up for you, but I promise that if you stick around you’ll have that adventure that you wanted.”

She had a look in her eyes that made me believe that she was telling the truth.

“I have some things to finish up so I’m going to leave you two alone for a bit, okay?”

“You know, when I got in the car with you I thought you were trying to kidnap me. Turns out all you wanted to do was leave me in a basement with a strange man.”

A smile broke her face, but she didn’t respond to the comment. Instead, she gave me a piece of advice. “Be careful around him.”

I cocked my head. “Isn’t he your dad?”

“Just keep your wits,” she cautioned. “He can be more persuasive than I can. And I have breasts.”

“I find that hard to believe,” I said, thinking about the last few hours. “The persuasive part, I mean.”

She smirked. “You’ll see, I’m sure. Just remember that it’s your decision, and it’s up to you to make sure it stays that way.”

She disappeared up the stairs after that and I looked towards the doctor who was still preparing his presentation. I pulled out my phone and sent a quick text to both my parents that I was at a friend’s house. By the time I sent the texts, the doctor called out that he was ready.

“Lacey left?” he asked as I approached.

“Yeah. She said she had something to do.”

He looked at me like he was studying me and I felt strangely aware of how I was standing. “Want my advice?” he asked.

“Okay?” I said, but I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Be careful with her.” His voice was serious, but it felt like the standard dad-to-daughter’s-guy-friend protocol. But then he said something off script. “She’s not to be trifled with.”

“Isn’t she your daughter?” I raised an eyebrow at him. This family was clearly not normal, but I had known that from the start.

“Yes, and she makes me proud every day of the week. But you really shouldn’t mess with her, and I’m not just saying that as her father.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. Usually, when you tell a secret you’re not supposed to stop halfway through, because that means your secret-holder has to make up fanciful tales in his head to try to fill in the holes.

“You’ll see, I’m sure.”

I guess the common denominator between this father-daughter pair was their wanting to keep me hostage to a million unanswered questions. Doctor Valentine dismissed the subject and pulled out two lab stools, inviting me to sit next to him. He dimmed the lights from a dial underneath one of the tables. A white screen lowered from the ceiling in front of us and the blue light from an overhead projector lit up the screen.

“Let’s start with what Lacey told you.” He said it plainly, but I didn’t realize that it was supposed to be a cue for me to answer until he was staring at me blankly.

“Oh.” I stammered. “Well she said you were working on some genetic experiment and that she knew I was a match because she kissed me – she explained that part, but I’m still not sure what she meant.”

“Ah.” He seemed excited. “The Clairvoyant’s Kiss: learn everything about your victim’s genetic history with a simple lipstick. Imagine a litmus test, you know that paper that changes color according to the – no wait. Don’t imagine that, it’s nothing like that. I don’t have time to explain it. It’s just a compound that responds to a certain genetic code.” He paused, and looked a little frustrated that he couldn’t explain his invention in lay-terms. “Is that all she told you?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Okay.” He sighed. “Well I guess we start from the beginning. This is the presentation that I used for my pitch meetings, revised slightly, so some of it might be over your head.”

“Good to know,” I said, sarcastically.

“Don’t interrupt,” he said shortly. “We’re going to fill the entire basic genetics section of a college-level Biology course in thirty minutes.”

I almost groaned before I realized where I was.

The doctor pressed a button on a remote clicker that he produced and a dazzling picture of shining stars in outer space popped up on the screen.

“Life,” he started philosophically. “The perpetual question. An inevitable product of the growing universe? the invention of an alien race? or the handiwork of a divine Maker? A million theories for a million observers. Ah, life.” He breathed, and I thought about his words.

“That was the first draft of my introduction. Useless words.” He fake spat in disgust. “Let’s talk real. Life is super-duper. Fantastic miracle in the middle of a cruel cosmos: breathe, eat, have sex, die. Hooray. The real question is sentience. This thing.” He tapped the side of his head. “What are we doing here? Why can we, and why do we, feel the compulsion to observe? And why does it seem like humans are so damn special when it comes to this?” He clicked the button and a new slide of the double-helix shape that I recognized as DNA appeared.

“DNA. It holds the building blocks of all life. It is the recipe for creating the proteins that make up every living thing on this planet. You want an almighty power that has a personal investment in your life? It is in your veins, in every fiber of your being, in every cell that lets you be the thing that you were born to be.

“DNA tells a story. It holds the secret to your life and the secret to every living thing around you. It says what color your eyes are, and how big your ears look, and even estimates when you die. We call the indicators for these secrets, genes. And I want to show you how genetics can answer my question.

“Everything that has life is made from DNA. That’s why some people believe that we have a connection with monkeys and dinosaurs and flowers, because we do. Life began from DNA, and life gave birth to intelligence, and intelligence sired the comprehension of morality and it breathes urgent fire onto curiosity. Which might make you think: if we go straight back to the origin of it all – right down to DNA – can we find where that curiosity comes from?

“Have you ever wondered why humans were chosen as the bearers of conscious thought? Why can we fight our instincts when most animals have to obey?” He looked at me, a long shadow cast over half of his face with the other half lit by the blue light reflecting off the projector screen. His expression was curious, and he seemed to really want to engage me.

He continued with a more intrigued tone, like he was bouncing an idea off me. “If consciousness really can be born from DNA, then maybe it was just a roll of the dice to see which species developed it first. Maybe instead of being a moody, teenage monkey, you could have been a moody, teenage fish attending fish university and discussing racial equality among plankton and rebel shark terrorism. Or maybe there is something uniquely special about human genetic structure; maybe sentience isn’t a product of genetics at all. To find the answer, we have to do science.”

I saw a strange, ecstatic glint in his eyes, but it could have been a trick of the light. His instructor’s voice returned as he pressed his clicker, and the DNA on the screen transitioned and unraveled to form a straight line that cut the screen horizontally.

“DNA is made of four, different bases which pair predictably to form a sequence. This creates the blueprint that makes up the living organism: two strands of identical data, with one just the inverse of the other.” The image on the screen was color-coded so you could see that red always paired with green and yellow always paired with blue; I was familiar with the concept from Biology class.

“The order of these pairings determines what is made from the code,” he said, “and these four bases make up all DNA that exists or ever has existed. Four bases – four building blocks that, when you shuffle them around in a certain order, construct the entire skyline of the vast and varied Tree of Life. I see beauty in the fact that, over the history of all life, DNA has never changed languages; the recipe for creating life has consistently been passed down for countless generations spanning trillions of new species and different life forms.

“I believe that if we can become fluent in this language, we can solve many of the problems that we have as individuals and even as a society in general. It’s a fairly new endeavor in the science community, only a century or two in the making, and technology has greatly helped our efforts in this field. But I have found a more dynamic solution to experimentation that I hope will forward development by decades.

“Imagine a person who can freely modify his DNA sequence. This man would be able to lift the limit that contains the size of his muscle cells to gain super-strength; he could increase the number of photoreceptor cells in his eyes to have super-vision; he might even be able to boost his genetic immunity to diseases to live a longer life. He would be a super-man.”

I could feel my heart start to race as I found myself fantasizing; I barely noticed that he was luring me in like a cultist lures his devout followers, enticing me into his way of thought with promises of grandeur.

“Well, I have developed a safe and effective way of creating that super-man. I have created a device that will allow a person to manipulate his DNA just by thinking about it. This would let us dive into a human’s genetic code to isolate and modify genes that might answer my questions about sentience.

“This is where you come in. You could become the super-man, and all I would want to do is observe. If you’re interested I can tell you how it works, but if you’re not I suppose this is just a waste of your time.” He looked at me, appearing very relaxed as he propositioned me. “What do you say?”

This is one of those moments which I look back on and just feel silly for being so easily manipulated, but at the time I remember being so enthralled by what he had to say, and I wanted to know if he could teach me to shoot laser beams out of my eyes. I was like a child, snatching at a trinket you put just out of his reach with no regard to whether it’s safe or not.

It barely took me a second to respond. “Tell me more.”

Doctor Valentine smiled, and the shadow covering half his face made the expression look almost sinister. It only lasted a moment, though, because he turned back to the screen and continued his presentation.

“Okay, then. Let me leave you with a little demonstration. I’m sure you’re wondering why we picked you, or how we picked you. Lacey told you that you were a genetic match for what we want to work with, but I’d go so far as to say that this project was made for you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Every person’s genetic sequence varies slightly,” he explained. “Tiny differences in the blueprint determine what you look like and other various nuances that make you a unique individual. That’s why DNA testing can be used for crime scene analysis, because there are indicators that are usually different in every person.

“When I constructed my project, I used a baseline of a random sample of human DNA. I calibrated everything based on this specific sample, but that turned out to be a mistake, because to safely experiment, the genetic sequence of the subject would have to be nearly identical to the master sequence. I had no idea who supplied the DNA I used so I’ve spent five years looking for people who could be matches, and more importantly, matches who would be willing to volunteer.”

He pressed the button on his clicker and the projected image dissolved and reformed. Then I was staring at my own face. Or someone very nearly identical to me. The peach-colored face was looking straight ahead against a plain, white background. He had short, light brown hair, lightly brushed to one side, and brown eyes stared at me as I studied the image. He shared my jawline, with steep slopes coming down to form my chin. The lips were pressed tightly, the edges curving downwards in a slight frown that seemed almost as natural as when I looked at my reflection in the mirror. The only noticeable difference was that I had a dimple in my nose where I’d broken it when I was a kid and ran head first into a flag pole and the boy in the image had what I assumed my nose would look like if I hadn’t broken it. I could tell it wasn’t just a computer edit of a photo Lacey could have snapped of me and prepared for this magic trick.

I tilted my head as if to get a different angle of the flat image. “Whoa,” I heard myself say. “How did you do that?”

Doctor Valentine explained. “This is the predicted appearance of the test subject we need. It’s calculated from the blueprint of the master DNA sequence, and it shows us an estimate of the appropriate test subject. The image is assembled from an elaborate database that I personally collected of reference images and genetic samples, and this is only one of the tools I created to help my experiment. It’s just the tip of what I have to show you, but I hope it helps you see that I’m not kidding about this.

“Right now you have a choice to make. Lacey and I won’t be able to stay here for very long, so you will need to decide by tomorrow. But if you choose to join us, I can give you power beyond anything you ever dreamed of and together we can solve one of life’s greatest mysteries. In exchange you will have to fully commit your time and your body to this project. I know this is a lot to take in all at once, and I want you to really think about what we’ve talked about today before you give me an answer. You have the opportunity to be something great, because the core of this project is you. You can be the catalyst for revelation. You can reveal our past and provide a glimpse into our future. You can be Time’s Mirror.”

Boy, did he know how to make a guy feel special.

TO BE CONTINUED

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Week 5 Update

I got a new tablet in the mail. Planning on doing some handdrawing for the cover. Having a lot of fun right now. I ended up failing on this week for waiting until the last day to record. I did some editing during the weekdays, but refused to record. I think my method is fine because it makes sure my voice is consistent throughout the recording, but it would cut down on some of the last minute rush it I did it earlier in the week. I spent probably 6-7 hours on this chapter total, ending up with 12 minutes of content. I lost a bit of time when my editing software crashed and I failed to save, but it wasn’t much. It was mostly my failure to read words properly that made it so hard to edit. Also this dog that I’m taking care of likes to bark outside at nothing at all and he goes on for hours without ceasing. It makes it hard to think or sleep or edit sound recordings. I had something else to say, it’s gone now.

Read here.

Soundcloud.

Youtube.

Enjoy,

Embers

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 5 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 5

Despite its medieval-looking exterior, the Valentine castle had a modern, decorative feel. The entire first floor was completely exposed, using all the space like a warehouse with the only interior wall running perpendicular to the left of the entrance. A sunken area in the middle of the room was filled with greenery and a comfortable-looking, L-shaped sofa; a floating wall off to the right side of the room sectioned off an area for the kitchen and a dining table and chairs were positioned immediately behind. A wooden staircase in the sunken area directly ahead of the entrance coiled around itself and spiraled into the ceiling. The left side of the room featured only a single hallway and a lot of blank space on the white-and-reddish-brown-checkered wall.

Lacey held the door open for me to walk into the lion’s den. The heavy door closed behind me with a resounding thud that echoed in the open room. I looked around, noticing that the ten-foot door went straight up to meet the ceiling, and that the second door that Lacey hadn’t touched was actually just a wall painted like the twin to the other, but it had no hinge.

The first floor only had a single, giant, circular window for exterior lighting, positioned on the wall closest to the kitchen. A crystal chandelier hung in front of the staircase and I realized that it was spreading some of the focused light from the window.

“It’s pretty bright from just after noon until dusk.” Lacey caught me staring. “That window is basically a magnifying glass positioned to steal the sun. You can’t even look out of it, it gets too bright. The room looks really cool during a clear sunset, though.”

I gaped for a little longer before she finally asked “Want the tour?”

“Yes?” I answered warily. “I’m still not sure what I’m doing here.”

“Patience, grasshopper,” she said gently. “All will be revealed.” She took a couple steps down into the sunken den and waved at me to follow. “Come on.”

“Bathroom down that hall,” she pointed to the left. “Also, Guest Room A, stairs to basement, and secret, hidden walkway.” I walked with her to the staircase in the middle of the room and we started to climb, Lacey two or three steps ahead of me. I counted three and a half fairly tight revolutions before an opening appeared for the second floor. The staircase continued to climb, but we stepped off into a magical land.

The second floor was a library. Literally, a library. Bookcases were arranged in a ring around the walls and thousands of books were stacked to the ceiling and all along the room. Several, plush sofas and chairs filled the space on the auburn carpet and pointed outwards towards the bookcases. Two skylights indicated a more open area above us and the lights on the walls shone at the perfect dimness for a day spent trapped in a book. A door on the west wall broke the perfect ring of bookcases.

“Welcome to the Hall of Dreams,” Lacey announced. “Hundreds of human legacies on these bookshelves, and thousands of lovely stories. To your right, a bathroom, complete with a bath for a relaxing read for the goddess within you.”

She let me walk around for a little bit. The ceiling of this room was a bit closer than on the first.The staircase had become encased inside a wooden column that shot up like the support of the building. The stairs were now hidden from three sides and on the opposite side from the entrance to the second floor was a giant television screen that hung about halfway up the pillar. One of the sofas was out of sync with the rest, facing inwards towards the TV instead of outwards towards the books. A remote control was built into the sofa’s armrest along with several ports used to connect devices to the TV. It was the couch potato’s ultimate dream.

Lacey came up next to me and whispered. There was something sacred about being surrounded by books that forced you to be quiet. “Kind of out of place, huh?”

“It’s like chocolate cake on a desert island,” I marveled.

“Ah, technology: Killing literacy rates since the turn of the century. But, the acoustics are amazing in here.” She shouted this last part to show me the way sound exploded around the couch. “Maybe we’ll come back. Let’s keep going.” She tugged on my arm to revive me.

We climbed the stairs until the pillar stopped and we emerged through the floor of the third story. Again, the room was completely open and the ceiling was lower still than on the second floor. The staircase became a hole in the ground with no safeguard to keep you from tumbling down the steps. I stepped carefully so as not to fall through and noted that this floor lacked the symmetry of the previous ones.

The entire southern wall was a giant window divided into several square panes. It mostly gave a view of the stone wall of Paradise Gardens’ barrier, but, walking closer, you could see beyond the wall into the evergreen forest that was just south of Paradise’s perimeter. Two square rooms, one slightly bigger than the other but with doors facing each other, cut into the two corners of the window wall. I assumed both were bedrooms and that the long room behind me was another full-sized bathroom. On the eastern wall was a hanging ladder that probably allowed for roof access so someone could perform maintenance on the giant, chess statues.

Lacey signaled for me to follow her and we approached the bedroom on the left. I peeked out the window to look directly down; we were about twenty feet up and the clear glass made me feel as if I was in danger of falling. Lacey coughed to get my attention and I saw her holding the handle of the door and inviting me to enter.

“Where are we now?” I asked.

“My bedroom,” she answered, mysteriously.

“Well this has taken a turn, hasn’t it?” My heartbeat started to speed up.

“Are you saying it’s out of sequence for the girl who introduced herself to you by kissing you to now be inviting you into her bedroom?” She smiled. “Don’t worry. I don’t plan on taking you to bed in the middle of the day while my dad is home.”

“Your dad is home?” Several thoughts started to flood into my mind all at once, the most dominant one being what this situation looked like to a concerned parent.

“Shh.” She brought a finger to her lips. “Let’s just get to know each other before I have to push you down the rabbit hole.”

“I still can’t tell if you want to kill me or not,” I whispered.

“When I finally tell you who I am you’ll see how ridiculous that theory is.”

“Are you planning on telling me before or after you eat me?”

“I’m not trying to eat you.” She nodded at the door. “I’ve been trying to show you, Bailey. I’m still in a strange position here.”

“Somehow I’m not getting that.”

She sighed. “If hindsight is 20/20 then foresight is 20/200. You’ve been a good sport up until now, and I promise this is going somewhere. All you have to do is step inside.”

I looked in the room. I was staring at a desk, and couldn’t see anything else around the door. This was the adventure I was looking for, complete with the castle and the pretty girl, but there was something really off about it.

“I still don’t know if I can trust you,” I said, only half-joking.

“Then we turn around and I take you home. I am not a witch; I am just a girl. But my life demands a little secrecy, and I need complete control of this situation. This is the last barrier. Come in if you want.” She went in through the door and disappeared past my view.

I closed my eyes and took a breath. I was still crazy from my morning depression and I was confused by the whole situation. She was just a normal person, what was I thinking would happen? That she’d turn me into a frog? That her room was booby-trapped and I’d be shot through by a thousand arrows on entering? It was an unusual situation and I wanted something unusual to happen, but maybe she was just a really intense girl. I gathered up my thoughts and walked through the door.

“Boo!” She popped out from behind the door and I stumbled away and into the wall. I swore a little under my breath and tried to smile, but she just laughed and made a sympathetic face like she was watching a puppy learning how to swim.

“Jeez, you need to relax a little,” she said. “You’ve been so moody since I met you.”

“I’m sorry, weren’t you the one who refused to talk to me for the first half hour of our relationship?”

“Shut up.” She extended her hand and helped pull me to my feet.

I looked around the room. The walls of her room were mostly white with a decorative purple trim sketched neatly along the tops and bottoms. A queen-sized bed was positioned between two nightstands, one supporting a lamp and the other a digital clock; its ornate headboard was governed by the friendly faces of the lovable cast of an old, long-running sitcom.

A white door with brass handles marked the closet. The desk that I had seen from outside had a laptop computer next to a photo of a younger Lacey in a close up shot with her parents.

Lacey took off her coat, folded it horizontally, and then draped it over the chair in front of the desk. Underneath, she was wearing a red sweater with a scooping neck line and white jeans. She sat down on the edge of the bed and started to take off her boots. I wasn’t sure how to react to a girl I had only just met who was technically undressing in front of me so I looked more closely at the picture on the desk.

The photograph showed Lacey’s parents kneeling on either side of her in a sunny, outdoor location. Lacey’s dad had a serious face, but he was smiling fondly at the camera. He shared Lacey’s green eyes, curious and intelligent, though they were a shade darker than hers. The older woman was Lacey’s mother and she was unmistakably beautiful in every way possible. She was captured with her face pointed towards her daughter and her mouth slightly open like she was whispering a secret. Lacey couldn’t have been more than ten years old in the picture, and she was laughing with a great, big grin on her face. She seemed so full of that sheer, childish happiness that I could just barely picture in the girl that I was with at the moment.

I felt Lacey creep up next to me and I turned to face her.

“Nice picture,” I said. With her boots off, her eye line was not where I expected it and I was staring at her forehead when I turned to look at her.

“Thanks,” she said softly. I began to feel a little more relaxed as she pulled out the swivel chair from in front of the desk and motioned for me to sit while she stood to speak.

There was a moment or two of silence, while she gestured with her hands and moved her mouth, but no sound came out of her. It was like she was still trying to plan what she wanted to say, and I could tell there was some kind of inner dialogue going on inside her head. It was different from the confident, assured way she had acted before, and I was starting to see that she was a real person who could stumble and be ineloquent just the same as me.

“What if I told you I could change your life forever?” she began and then she paused like she was expecting a response.

I laughed a little when I realized what she was doing and I asked sarcastically “What is this? An infomercial?”

She pouted, annoyed. “One day, you’re going to want to tell someone this story and I’m going to laugh because you can’t find a charismatic way to say it.”

I smiled, but tried to refrain from laughing out loud. “You can just say it. The suspense has been exhausting.”

She blinked a couple times before issuing a warning. “It’s really weird, and I guarantee it won’t be what you thought it was.”

“Oh, and I had plans to meet the Queen today.”

She ignored me, taking it to mean I was ready to listen. She spoke clearly and deliberately, as if her words were rehearsed.

“You’ve been selected as a human test subject for a genetic experiment. An experiment designed to manipulate a person’s DNA in order to increase longevity and fight genetic diseases. The test group is very selective, currently requiring a nearly identical DNA sequence to a specific master set. Participation results may increase lifespan and prevent genetic predisposition to cancer. Risk level is moderate.”

She took a deep breath after delivering the speech. “That’s the pitch,” she said. “Ask questions as you will.”

I blinked a few times trying to take in everything she said. Test subject. Genetic experiment. DNA. I was asleep in science class again and dreaming about bad sci-fi. I looked at my hands and saw the birthmark between my thumb and forefinger. No. I was awake. I was actually living the bad sci-fi.

I looked at her to see if she was joking with me, but the tone in her voice told me she was serious, and the look on her face reinforced the reality.

“Okay.” I slowly began to process. “So you’re a genius, revolutionary scientist? Definitely not the time travel thing, then?”

“I’m afraid not.” She made a face. “Not either of those actually. My dad is the genius; I just help him collect the innocent lab rats.”

“I see.” I scratched my head. “So you guys just, like, run a testing facility out of your basement or something?”

She looked away for just a second and then back at me. “Yep. That’s pretty much how it goes.”

“Weird,” I muttered.

“I warned you.”

“Hold on.” I finally processed what she had said. “How do you know I have the right DNA sequence or whatever?”

“My lipstick,” she answered.

“Huh. Pretty neat trick.”

She elaborated seeing that I wasn’t satisfied. “Some chemical my dad engineered. If I kiss you and your lips turn blue, you’re a match. It also comes in a powder for a touch-based scan, like a handshake, but that’s so much less interactive.”

“It’s just you and your dad, then?”

“Yep.”

“You know how shady this sounds, right?” I asked. “An underground operation run by two people, one of whom is a teenage girl. Shouldn’t you guys be working with a government budget if you can cure cancer? And isn’t testing on people really frowned upon?”

She thought for a moment. “There are some… complications that forced us into this situation,” she explained. “But you’re right. There are some ethical dilemmas with conducting genetic testing on humans; however, I can assure you every precaution is taken when we perform the actual experiment.”

She sighed. “Listen, I’m just the pretty face for this whole thing. My dad is the brain. Just hear what he has to say about this project, and if you don’t like it I’ll take you home. Deal?”

Less than four hours ago, I had no idea who this girl was. Well, technically I still didn’t really know her, but four hours ago I had been wishing that I could find some kind of self-fulfillment. And now I was presented with an opportunity to learn that maybe my destiny was to be a test subject to further the goals of science. Why shouldn’t I give it a shot?

When someone asks me later where my life turned completely wrong, I’ll point them to this moment.

The moment I said: “Okay.”

TO BE CONTINUED!

#self-publish #YA #novel #Sci-Fi

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Week 4 Update

I had a dental scare this week. This one tooth in the back of my mouth has been aching for like weeks when I eat sweets, so I figured I had a cavity and should probably get it checked out before it gets worse. I made an appointment at the dentist, called my mommy, made sure my insurance wouldn’t cover it and was all ready to pay 200+ for a filling. After about an hour of waiting and twenty minutes in the chair, they did x-rays and the doctor came in and said you have a bit of a void in between your teeth, but no cavity. He said I needed a cleaning, but that would run me a hundred bucks and if I wanted it today I’d need to wait another 40 minutes; charged me 50$ for the x-rays and I decided I would try to do better cleaning my teeth. On the way home I bought floss and I started going to town on my teeth. If it bleeds it’s getting better.

Anyways, I’ve been failing on this whole audiobook thing. I mean, I was able to release today, on schedule, and I’m really excited for this chapter because it’s the first one that something actually happens in, but I don’t record during the work week and I save everything until the last two days which is not good for my voice and sanity and free time. I’m going to try to force myself to read and edit during the week, but I’ve also been writing more scenes for later chapters so that takes some of my time as well. I can write at downtime during work, but I can’t record, so when I have time I should focus on that. I’ll let you know next week how that goes.

Anyways read here

Youtube

Soundcloud (I did not know they only allowed 3 hours of upload, I may have to make multiple accounts to get the full thing up here)

Embers, out!

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islandofkiwi-blog · 8 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 4 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 4

So I lied to you. Well, half-lied. That was, in fact, my first encounter with my mystery girl that I mentioned earlier; I did, in fact, fall in love with her and revel in her glorious features, or whatever, but it wasn’t at first sight. I was a zombie, and I knew why I had become a zombie – I was a broken shell of a person and in no way was a likely-just-as-broken-teenage girl going to help me with that. I like to think I was smart enough to know that trying to fall in love was exactly the wrong way to go about solving my problems.

Anyways, I wanted tell the story that way because it makes for a better memory, and also because I genuinely couldn’t wait to talk about her. In reality, I don’t remember why I stopped in the hallway. I don’t remember being astounded by her appearance and I only remember feeling confused as to the reason why a girl who I didn’t know wanted to kiss me. There was a lot of eye contact, and she did have really beautiful eyes, but the important thing was that I woke up from my moody reflection after that.

Back to the story.

I wasn’t planning on calling the girl even though the piece of paper she stuffed into my hand after stealing my lips had ten, neatly drawn digits on it. I figured she was probably crazy and I wasn’t going to get anything more than the tease if I went looking, so I took it as a sign that I was supposed to lighten up and I moved on with the rest of my day.

Instead of pretending to count the number of tiles on the floor, I responded to a passing “Hello” after my next period class, which, incidentally, I had ended up being twenty minutes late to – I got off with a soft scolding from the teacher because my friends had seen how dead I looked and figured I was probably spilling my guts into a toilet for that missing time.

Being depressed all day made me a little tired, and by the end of the day I was really just looking forward to a nap on the bus ride home. But as I finished packing books into my locker, I saw her again out of the corner of my eye. Brown hair, green eyes, her mouth moving as she talked to someone next to her; but she was looking right at me. She was talking to multiple someones, actually. Popular someones. I didn’t recall seeing her before that day, but if she was new to school she was adjusting very well.

As soon as I accepted her gaze, I couldn’t stop myself from looking at her. She was like a cobra, sending out a hypnotic siren’s charm with nothing but her eyes, and even from across the hall it was enough to make my heart skip out of rhythm. I am going to miss my bus, I thought to myself. She lifted her index finger to point at me, flipped her hand around, and then curled her finger into a fist, beckoning me to follow.

She turned around after that and started walking away. She was wearing a white overcoat that flared at her mid-thigh and twisted fluidly behind her as she walked. She carried an air of nobility around her, something about her perfect posture that screamed ‘runway model.’ The people who had been talking to her looked over at me and then back at her, watching her leave with confused expressions on their faces.

The entire chain of events felt extremely pretentious, but there was something so primal about the way she executed it that put an image in my head of me getting ravaged in the back of her car. The shroud of mystery surrounding her, alone, was enough to make me follow.

I followed her out to the parking lot, twenty paces behind her the entire time. I was starting to feel wary, but I didn’t want to be the idiot who prays for adventure, gets hit over the head and beaten sideways with it, and then doesn’t go chasing after it. Then I started a debate in my mind whether following a stranger home was the right thing to do. I began to picture a scenario where she would take me back to her cave for her children to eat, or try to sell me into slavery, or suck me into another dimension where I would have to fight my way through evil wizards to find my way back home, but that made me feel almost just as idiotic.

I attributed my disregard for simple stranger-danger safety to my mother’s talk of chasing life with a stick of dynamite; I didn’t want to disappoint her.

My mystery girl stepped into a bright crimson, luxury sedan and waited for me to walk the twenty paces to the driver’s side window. I could make out her face through the tinted glass. She was still just staring at me, but her stare seemed less intense now. She held one hand on the steering wheel and waited patiently for me to do something.

“Hi,” I said, not really sure what to say, but trying to avoid getting into her car without at least knowing her name.

She cocked her head, but kept her eyes locked on mine. Then she nodded at the passenger seat to signal for me to get in. I heard the click of the door being unlocked.

I went around to the other side of the car and opened the passenger side door. The car smelled like her, and I could see the color in her face. She was really pretty .

“Hi,” I repeated, still not stepping into the car. She rolled her eyes, playfully, trying to assure me that she wasn’t trying to kidnap me, and motioned again with her head to get me to close the door. I got in the car against my better judgment.

I buckled my seat belt and she turned the ignition, still completely silent.

“Do you have a name?” I asked, after an uncomfortable moment.

She raised an eyebrow at me like I was stupid.

“Okay, yeah.” I nodded to acknowledge my stupidity and tried again. “Do you want to tell me your name?”

She shook her head silently and backed the car out of the parking space.

I kept trying. “Do you want to tell me anything?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Are you mute?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“You know they say that playing hard to get just makes you come off as a tease, right?”

She winked at me.

Conversation was going nowhere fast. We joined the queue of cars that were trying to turn onto the main road. I had the time between our position and the stop sign to roll out of the car and call a friend for a ride if I really started to feel uncomfortable. Until then, I tried to force an expression out of her that I could actually read.

“Well I guess you would say ‘Who says that?’ and then I would say ‘No one really, I just read it online,’ and you say ‘You believe everything you read online?’ and I say ‘Not everything, just the stuff that comes from .net domain names and reputable sources like they teach us in English class.’ and you say ‘Well did you get that from one of those?’ and I say ‘No.’ and, hey, I’m just trying to have a conversation, you feel free to jump in anytime.”

She smiled and it was the first time I saw the white of her teeth. I smiled, too, feeling moderately accomplished that I had broken off a bit of the shell of her armor.

“So,” I continued as we pulled up to the stop sign, “I really like that color—”

“Oh my god, you’re ruining it.” She finally interrupted. Her voice was deeper than I expected, but it was pure and rich.

“She speaks,” I said. “But what am I ruining?”

“You know. Bring a guy home without saying a word. I was on a roll.”

“Is that a thing?” I asked.

“I’m about to make it a thing.”

“So we’re definitely going to your home, right? Not an abandoned warehouse?”

“I could always live in an abandoned warehouse, you never know.” She smiled again. “Actually, I’m surprised that you even got in the car with me. Isn’t there a thing about strangers and cars?”

“I—” I stopped midsentence. I was almost about to start flirting with her, but I still wasn’t completely convinced that she wasn’t a lunatic. “I have a thing with adventure.” I finished. “Can’t say no.” And I quickly realized that now I sounded like a lunatic.

She looked at me curiously for a long moment and I thought we might crash into the car in front of us since she wasn’t focusing on the road, but when she turned back ahead we were still cruising safely.

“So what is your name?” I asked after a moment of silence. “I’m only asking because I don’t think we should be strangers.”

“A name does not an acquaintance make,” she said, introspectively, but when she spoke again she sounded more cheerful. “But, tell you what. I’ll tell you my name if you can follow a few rules, okay?”

I blinked a couple times. “I’m confused. Why can’t you just tell me your name?”

“I’m in a curious position. It requires me to have a little guile.”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t know what that word means, but you’re like a spy?”

“No.” She sounded moderately intrigued.

“The daughter of a foreign national looking for a hook up?”

“No.” She shook her head.

“Okay, you’re going to have to help me out, because—Wait.” I snapped my fingers, “I got it. You’re my wife from the future and you traveled back in time after my tragic and untimely death to spend a few more years with me. Of course technology has advanced so far that you can have the looks of when you were sixteen, but I have to tell you that I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment right now.”

She was quick to react. “I hear the time-continuum is pretty unforgiving to travelers trying to interfere with the past, so it’s probably not that.”

“Probably, you say.”

“Definitely,” she corrected.

“Okay.” I leaned back, feeling comfortable enough to let down my guard. “Well it would explain the kissing as the first thing you decided to do.”

She looked at me. “You didn’t like the kissing?”

“I don’t know. It just felt kind of—dead.”

“Huh. Well it tends to feel like that when you’re kissing a corpse,” she remarked.

“Ah, well we know I, at least, can stay in character,” I said, pompously.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Oh come on. You were playing that silent, crazy chick and you knew the mystery was exactly what I wanted. But here you are all chatty, telling me you’re from the future, whereas, I didn’t break my zombie man even while you were forcing yourself on me.”

“Isn’t that a little iro—Wait. What?” She was almost laughing. “Who are you?”

“I’m not so sure myself,” I said, plainly. “Seeing as you chose me, why don’t you tell me?”

“I’m not quite sure who I chose, either, now.”

“Well, it is a little late, but we could start with introductions.”

“Fine,” she relented. “But you first. We’ve got to teach you some manners.”

“Man-ners,” I repeated, emphasizing each syllable deliberately. “I’m sorry, I was raised by wolves so English is not my first language.”

“Well that does explain a lot.” She smirked, but then went silent, signaling that I should stop playing around and make a decision.

I wasn’t bound to her. Not yet at least. The car was reaching the intersection where I could tell her to turn right and leave me safely at my house. We were heading out of town where she could beat me over the head with a shovel and drink my blood and no one would be the wiser.

I wasn’t bound to her. And yet she completely owned me. It was exciting sitting in a car knowing nothing about the person that I was sitting next to, except that she wanted me to go through a checklist before she could tell me her name.

I was a lamb, offering itself to the lion with two words. “Bailey Prince.”

She looked at me, putting my name to my face, and then looked back ahead. “Lacey,” she responded. The name rolled off her tongue, sounding like a whisper amidst the whipping howl of wind and the static buzz of tires on the road. It was elegant and sounded almost foreign in the dull winter of Nowhere, Colorado.

“Lacey Valentine.”

Lacey Valentine was right. Knowing a person’s name doesn’t change anything about your perception of them. She was right about herself, at least, because she continued to give cryptic answers when I asked her personal questions. She was very good at playing me like the puppet I was.

“So, where are we going?” asked I.

“To find adventure,” said she.

And so on. We were about two miles out of town when I realized where she was taking me. There was a secluded neighborhood right on the outskirts of our little town called Paradise Gardens. I heard the community was commissioned by a misguided business man who had a hook for a hand and owned a pet seal; my dad sometimes called these kinds of rumors “frozen bananas.” I don’t know why.

It was a rich neighborhood filled with rich people who didn’t want to be seen or heard. The neighborhood had its own police, lawn care service, and even a fancy wall, complete with a gatekeeper to keep out any unwanted guests. ‘Unwanted guests’ included ninety percent of everybody who came knocking. Several, minor celebrities had summer homes in Paradise Gardens and it was a pretty popular sanctuary for people seeking refuge from the eye of the public.

It was a tradition during prom to try to sneak in through Paradise’s defenses, and go pool hopping or watch the sunrise with your date. But the neighborhood police had recently started working with local law enforcement in order to issue more significant fines for trespassing. This made me wonder what we were doing here, seeing as no one that I knew of lived in Paradise and we were still a couple months away from prom when kids were still willing to foot the bill for a little thrill.

We pulled onto the road leading to the gate. I could see the tops of buildings peeking over the walls and a giant spire rose up towards the middle of the Gardens, apparently some kind of water tower and lookout perch. The words PARADISE GARDENS were carved into the stone that created an arch above the gated entrance. The car slowed as we pulled up towards the watchman’s box.

“We’re going to Paradise?” I asked.

“Don’t worry,” she assured me. “It’s much less appealing on the inside.”

“I’m more concerned about what we’re doing here.”

“I live here,” she said. “I told you I was bringing you home.”

“Who are you?” I marveled aloud.

“Don’t waste your curiosity,” she cautioned. “You’re going to have a lot more questions in just a bit, I’m sure.”

Before I could respond we pulled up to the booth and the watchman peered out. For some reason the booth was situated on the passenger’s side. Lacey rolled down my window and a serious-looking man, sitting level with me, stared into my eyes and down my soul. I glanced over at Lacey and she was smiling. She waved over to the watchman who stopped glaring at me.

“Hey, Jerry,” she greeted him while peering over me.

“Miss Valentine.” Jerry replied with a slight nod.

“The snow comes tomorrow evening,” He talked to her across me. “Make sure to get your essentials before then.” He pressed a couple buttons in front of him and the gate swiveled open.

“No smoking in the Observatory,” he warned me. His voice was deep and commanding. I smiled nervously at him.

“Thanks, Jerry,” Lacey called. She rolled up my window and we pulled in through the gates.

I had never seen such a change in atmosphere like the one crossing the border into Paradise Gardens. The outside world was a barren wasteland compared to the three-mile radius of the giant, circular compound. Everything seemed brighter, even though there were pale clouds covering the sky. Street lamps shone at short intervals down the road and they illuminated the colors of the new world.

What impressed me most was that there seemed to be no sign of winter anywhere. The trees were still full with broad leaves and the grass was still green. I assumed the turf was artificial unless they had planted super-grass that could still be green when it was ten degrees below freezing, but I had no idea how the leafy trees were still full. It was like the founders had paid the sun to work overtime on their little plot of heaven. I could almost hear birds chirping a springtime song, it was so painfully perfect.

We drove about two-hundred feet and then the road branched three ways. The roads on the right and left looped lazily around the inner edge of the circle and led to the main plots of land where the first ring of houses was positioned close to the wall. The road straight ahead ran towards another ring of houses. Both rings centered around the giant spire that I assumed was the Observatory that Jerry mentioned.

There weren’t actually that many houses in Paradise. The plots of real estate were pretty big so the houses were spread out, giving a fairly private bubble around each home. I guess it discouraged interaction with neighbors. Each house was uniquely constructed, and they were very meticulously designed. I saw one with a veranda with walls of glass and a thatched roof, standing on stilts like it was pretending to be a beach house, and one that looked like a princess castle in every shade of pink, with a community-sized pool area in the backyard.

We turned right at the first fork and continued past more luxurious homes until we were towards the back of the complex. We came to a house that towered three stories and looked like a castle made of stone. It had two towers that arose from the front corners and stretched ten feet above the roof, each of the towers served as a perch for one of the two giant statues that looked like the disembodied horse’s head and the castle pillar from a chess set.

Lacey slowed to turn into the driveway that looped in a half-circle around a small mound in front of the house and she parked in the middle of the drive behind a black SUV. Apparently, people didn’t need park in the garage since they didn’t have to worry about their windshields freezing over, because Paradise was suspended in a perfect, alternate dimension.

Lacey looked at me before she nodded and I heard the door unlock to let me know we had reached our destination. Getting out of the car, I looked up towards the chess castle, and wondered what kind of person would want to live in something so blatantly tacky. It was bigger now that I was up close and I was feeling a bit exhausted already, but I was sure that the fun hadn’t even started. Lacey came around the front of the car and waved for me to follow her up towards the house.

We walked up to the front door, or rather, a set of wooden double doors that looked unbelievable heavy. The doors towered about ten feet off the porch, and metal knockers, shaped like lion heads, were positioned halfway up the door at about chest height. Lacey took one of the rings that hung out of one of the lion’s mouths and she looked at me.

“Welcome home,” she said. Then she pushed inwards, forcing the door slowly open.

TO BE CONTINUED!

#self-publish #novel #YA

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islandofkiwi-blog · 9 years ago

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Week 3 Update

I wanted to talk about commitment to the end goal, how nothing gets done unless you’re willing to focus on finishing it, but I don’t really want to right now.

This week I was faced with the question of loglines. I am very aware that I was unable to market my story to agents because I had no sense of how to condense my nuanced (literally the only thing I feel this story had going for it was nuance which doesn’t describe well) story into one paragraph, and reducing it further into one sentence to create a logline was really difficult for me. My story lacks real stakes. It is a story about a boy who wants to experience the world for himself, but he’s unable to because real life gets in the way. Real life is not an exciting villain, I mean, now I’m thinking of all the ways you could manifest real life into a villainous figure, but that’s not the point. The boy faces conflict from one semi-important character who wants to kill him to take away his power. That’s not relevant to the plot, because the story focuses more about the conflict inside the boy’s own mind vs. the effects of the power that he gained and how he uses it to influence the world around him.

In any case, I came up with this one, still tweaking it:

A teenage boy, newly wielding the power to manipulate his body chemistry with a thought, must save himself against a self-righteous madman who will stop at nothing to destroy that power.

Working on this project right now, listening to my own work read aloud, I’m starting to think about how effective this story really is out of a vacuum. I’m in progress of rewriting some of the future chapters and adding additional scenes in to make it flow. That’s something I’ve really enjoyed with this audiobook project, because I’m imposing a time limit on myself to get it done, and I still have the freedom to take it in any direction I wish. But still, these first couple chapters are really rough. If I was a viewer who stumbled on the first chapter, I would not continue to spend my time with the rest, but there’s so much depth beyond the first chapters and that’s hard to express when my point for the first chapters was to show my character’s boring life before everything started. I guess I understand why Exposition does not mean Beginning. I’ve failed to write something for people who need to live in a perpetual state of climax and so I consign myself to not finding success with this story. I’ll work harder on the next one ;) for now I want to finish this because Bailey and Lacey deserve to have their stories told. If by some chance you stumble upon these ramblings and made it through Time’s Mirror in its entirety, I congratulate you and want to thank you.

Chapter 3 read here.

Youtube here

Soundcloud here

See ya,

Embers

#ramble

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islandofkiwi-blog · 9 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 3 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 3

I sat at a bar stool in the kitchen and stared at the blue flames underneath the metal tea kettle. There was something enchanting about the flames, something about the way they danced like tiny, turquoise, teardrop wisps, synchronized in a perfect circle while their slow, swaying shimmy set the world above steaming with life. I reached out my hands and popped opened the lid of the kettle so I could hold my palms over the scalding, silver steam. The warm, wet air lazily lifted up and enveloped my hands and brushed in between my fingers and I imagined I was absorbing the energy of those dancing, blue flames.

The steam was starting to form droplets at my fingertips when my father walked in through the door to the garage.

“Hey,” he said, tossing back the hood of his dark green parka and running his hand through his short, brown hair.

“Hey,” I returned, closing the lid of the kettle and wiping my hand on my pants. “You’re home early.”

“Yeah, work blows,” he said, throwing his coat on the rack by the door.

“Don’t I know it,” I replied, looking back at the blue flames.

“Snow’s supposed to come tonight,” he said, rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt.

“Huh.” I remarked, setting my chin down on the island to look under the kettle at eye level.

He walked over towards the opposite end of the kitchen island where I was sitting and he started spooning tea leaves into a ceramic tea pot.

“You’ve been talking to her, I see.” He whispered the vague pronoun; he knew she could always hear when someone was talking about her.

“How did you know?” I asked.

“You have that look on your face. The ‘EMC’ face.”

I looked at him funny. “Pretty sure it’s called a ‘Eureka’ moment.”

“Ah, so you know it. But not exactly. ‘EMC’ is a trademark classic from your mother. Epiphany, then Meaningless Chore, masterfully orchestrated by your very own, Morgan Prince. She’ll give you a vague life lesson or new outlook on life – because she has one for every situation – and then she sends you on a fifteen-minute assignment to figure out your life. She loves messing with your head, and you always leave feeling like a child. Hell, she might have even guessed your exact predicament without you ever saying so, that’s how much of a wizard she is.”

“Giving away my secrets?” My mother walked through the kitchen door right on cue. “Pretty shoddy on the presentation don’t you think: lot of guess work, flimsy metaphor. I’d be a witch or a sorceress, but never a wizard. Gold star for flattery behind my back though.”

She took a step closer to him, and greeted him “Hello, Darling.”

My dad replied “Hey, Kid,” and they kissed. She was just a couple inches shorter than he was, so they were able to stand like a two-headed, eight-limbed monster-thing when he craned his neck a little to rest his chin on her shoulder. He held her around the waist and we all stared at the blue flames for a short moment, disregarding that adage of the watched pot.

“Bailey is thinking about what he wants to do with his life,” my mother said after a pause.

“Oh, I take the wizard comment back,” my father quipped. “That definitely couldn’t have been hard to guess given that he’s a teenager.”

“Don’t trivialize his situation.” She slapped the hand that was holding her. “Support your son.”

“Not while you’re watching.” He winked at me, a sign I had learned to recognize to mean that he was trying to impart a twisted life lesson. “I can’t show my soft side in front of a woman or I’ll lose my place in Darwin’s Hall of Fame.”

“Oh, please.” My mother scoffed, and they continued to argue while still in that weird, standing, spooning position. “You could literally point at any bunny and it would beat you in a number of survival competitions.”

“What about that bunny out back who keeps falling into that window well? Pretty sure I’d be able to find my way out after the seventh time. And I would gladly take a seat below a bunny. They’re noble creatures.”

My mother shook her head and pulled herself away from him. “Just talk to your son,” she said. The kettle started to whistle and she turned off the stove. I watched the blue flames fade away while she poured the water into the tea pot to steep.

“Bailey, we’re behind you in whatever you want to do,” my father began. “That is unless what you want is to do is be a drug dealer or a dentist.” He had a weird thing with teeth.

“Actually if you would like to get into dental practice reform and tell them they can stop putting cold, metal picks and power tools inside of my mouth I would be very appreciative. Just throwing that one out there.”

I hadn’t said a single thing since my parents had started talking, so I wondered how they knew I just needed a little push in the right direction. They started making dinner and I went to do homework, but mostly I was thinking about my life, because I thought I had finally found what I was missing.

From the time when you’re a kid, barely able to sit on the toilet seat by yourself, to the time you get out of college you’re continually asked one question:

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

A normal kid will answer something like “Doctor,” or “Firefighter,” or “Policeman,” but we all know the real answer for a kid between the ages of seven to twelve is something along the lines of, “Why are you asking me about this? I don’t know squat. Give me another year and I’ll try to figure it out.” And so it goes until the kid sits through enough Parent Career Days and figures out what the internet is and then the answer becomes “Marine Biologist,” or, “Archeologist,” or “Back-up dancer for that one rapper I like.”

For me, somehow or another, I managed to skate by sixteen years of my life and still hadn’t come up with a real answer to that question. And right up until the conversation with my parents I had no idea that I was reaching the stage where that question becomes very important. I had this vague idea that I wanted to make people laugh, or maybe I wanted to help people in need, but somehow I was still at this point of “Hey. Let me have another year and I’ll get back to you.” But the problem with not knowing what you’re working towards means there’s nothing that you can focus on.

The thing that I so desperately wanted was: ambition.

That night was a pretty important for me in terms of sorting out who I really was. I started to think about people way back in the Stone Age. People who were fighting to survive – their purpose was very clear: don’t get eaten. It was kind of weird to think about, because I have the luxury of not having to worry about getting eaten by saber-tooth tigers, yet I struggle to find purpose when there is no saber-tooth to eat me.

As my thoughts shifted to present day, however, I started to think about my lot in life. I had parents who loved each other, which I counted as very lucky, and moreover, they loved me. I had a roof over my head and food in my belly. I had friends that I could vent my problems to and video games to distract myself with. I had a sufficiently functioning brain and a body that wasn’t sick or dying. The only thing I could say was missing was an overarching purpose to it all.

I was beginning to think that I didn’t hate being content, like my mother had thought, it was worse than that. I hated being happy.

And that thought scared the hell out of me.

And so I become aware of my problem, but completely unaware of a way to fix it. The next day, despite, again, the predictions of a terrible snowstorm, I find myself at school scuttling through the hallways like a dejected zombie, not even willing to raise my arms in self-defense as Dylan Clifford slaps me upside the head, and blames me for getting him yelled at in his math class.

My mind is stuck in a sea of thought, which quickly reduces to muddled nonsense as the day drifts by. Depression becomes apathy and it is not until midday that I remember actually being conscious that day.

I am in the bathroom on the second floor next to the Science classrooms and, after heeding nature’s call, I wash my hands – I am a zombie, not a barbarian – and I look into the reflecting glass and I see a wounded man and I think to myself: I cannot help you, friend, but I wish you luck, and I shuffle out of the restroom.

I stand at the brink of the hallway and I become truly aware of my surroundings for the first time. I see a hundred students move past me and, for some reason, I see them differently than I remember ever seeing them before. My zombie state has given me a zombie-radar and I can distinguish the other zombies in the crowd; I notice the lackluster movement of bodies that differ from their excited or determined counterparts. I try to count those that seem to move with no purpose and I find a surprisingly even mix.

I enter into the flow of students and I brush shoulders with the lively few that I see, hoping that I can sap some of their determination for myself. This game provides small interest for my mind and helps me retain whatever sanity I have left. I feel more beast than man now. I have lost connection with my inner thoughts – I passed my class two rooms ago yet I continue to walk.

The number of bodies in the hallway has thinned as people find their classrooms and I find myself close to the end of the hall searching for something that isn’t present. I am prowling the familiar scenery, hoping I might find something that I missed, something that will save me from my depression.

I search until something catches my eye that commands all of the focus that I have left. I cannot walk. I cannot move. I can only stare.

I see a girl and she is more stunning than I can handle. She is an angel on the battlefield where I lie half-dying; a flower in the desolate wasteland that I call my home. Her dark amber hair flows like a waterfall as she tosses it after turning her gaze. Her lips pucker and unfurl like a ship’s sail kissing the wind. The bridge of her nose slopes to a dainty point, and her eyes shine like a pair of emeralds as they look directly at me.

I am still a beast at this point, and true beauty cannot deign to know that one such as me gazes upon her. I look away for a moment, but I have so little will to resist that I find myself staring once again. She, for some humor, continues to look at me. A moment passes, maybe more, and the bell rings to signal class has begun.

The ringing stops and our eyes are still locked. She approaches, but I cannot speak for I am a creature of body only. My senses have deserted me even as she continues to advance.

She stops right in front of me. The heel on her boot allows her to stand nearly eye to eye with me, and her stare is unwavering. I fear she is about to say something and air escapes my mouth in a soft, primal growl. She does not snort; she does not walk away in disgust. She merely continues to look into my eyes as though she wishes to tame the beast inside of me. I can smell her now, her scent, not rough or overwhelming like perfume, but like a forest. She smells wild and intoxicating, yet serene and inviting.

We remain silent, though I begin to feel the beast recede into the awkward boy that I truly am. I know that in moments, if the silence continues, I will have to break the stare and hum a safe song to myself to keep from bursting in flames of shame. Who is this girl, I think to myself, that she can break me with only her eyes? She seems to sense the beast is gone and she cocks her head as if to comment that I am no longer interesting.

But, curiously enough, she moves her hand, palm facing upwards, like she is extending an introduction. Before I know how to react her hand has risen to my face. Her touch is soft and she traces the line of my jaw from my ear down to my chin. I begin to breathe heavier, being notoriously uncomfortable in close proximity to pretty ladies. Her thumb stops on my chin right below my lower lip and grips gently so that my mouth opens in a stupid gape. Her face comes closer to mine and my brain erupts in panic.

I am about to kiss a stranger.

She touches her lips to mine and her hand runs the line of my jaw back up behind my ear. Her kiss feels like velvet against my lips, and her nose pushes up against mine as she straightens her face and her lower lip glides along my mouth. I’m unaware of how to react, so I simply stand in shock, staring at her hair on her shoulder and smelling her scent and feeling my heart pound anxiously in my chest.

As she pulls away our eyes meet once again and I notice that her lips seem a shade of blue, but I can’t be sure that was the color of them before we kissed. She appears to be looking at my mouth as well, perhaps assessing the quality. She smiles, at any rate, a coy smirk, and she presses a piece of paper into my hand. Then she winks once and turns to leave.

I watch her walk away, unsure if I should call after her, but mostly wanting her to turn around so I can look at her face once more. But she keeps walking. She hasn’t made a single sound since I met her, and I happen to notice that she walks so lightly that her boots barely even click against the hard floor.

As she disappears I become aware of myself, but completely unaware of what to do next.

“What…” I say.

TO BE CONTINUED!

#audiobook #indie #self-publish #Time's Mirror

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islandofkiwi-blog · 9 years ago

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Week 2 Update

I’m what’s known as a Meanderthal, because I like to take my time and I’m also a being of lower intelligence. I’m trying to make my pun work. Did it work? Anyhow, I spent a lot of time this week not working on my audio, even though I was trying to resolve to make it my focus. Instead, I played way too many video games and slept a lot. I managed to finish though, on a Monday so that’s good news. Thought I’d write a few words about how I’ve been, done with that now.

Read Chapter 2 here.

Youtube

On Soundcloud now!

#audiobook #Time's Mirror #Meanderthal

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islandofkiwi-blog · 9 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 2 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Chapter 2

School is a cunning trap set in place by a higher power to repress young peoples’ individuality, I theorized morbidly to myself as I strolled down the nearly empty halls, three minutes to the bell, searching for my first period class. I felt trapped inside this brick box, this place that presumed to be a citadel of learning, but felt more like a factory of assimilation. It was an assembly line of teachers unscrewing the heads of their students and filling them with the government’s mandated material. And the more you learned, the more you became like a “functioning” member of society. They made it seem like you were becoming a free thinker, but how were you supposed to think freely with all their rules running through your head?

And the politics. The pecking order and the formation and generalization of human beings into cliques: supposedly constructed and run by the students, but was, in fact, surprisingly similar to the nonsense that went on in the “real world.” It was all a plot to ensure the proper orientation of new blood into the work force. Or maybe high school never really ended; maybe the class structures that teenagers and those who instruct teenagers can conceive and operate is the limit of human organization.

Maybe I was just crazy. No; I was probably crazy. Most definitely probably crazy.

I was spiraling and forced myself to go to Physics. What I wanted was individuality, and I felt like I would never achieve that if I stuck around any longer. I knew what I liked about myself and also what I wanted to change, eventually. What I wanted to know now was that I fit into a bigger picture and I wanted a hint at what that picture was. I wanted my life to have some kind of meaning.

A meaning beyond Physics. Mr. Smith, the science guru at our school, was a good teacher. Some might call him a great teacher. He had such a passion for his job, which was very clear right from that first day of the new semester. He bounced around the room trying to teach us something about aerodynamics, because he wanted us all to become rocket scientists and bring humanity to Mars. He made it his mission to ensure that we would succeed in our college careers and he was always talking about our “future endeavors.”

“Future endeavors,” however, annoyed the living daylights out of me. For some reason, it was a well-known fact that what you did today always led up to “something else.” It was that way as soon as you start kindergarten and through grade school and all the way up to right where I was then, and there was supposedly going to be another four years of this leading-up-to-something nonsense.

I was starting to wonder why it takes somewhere between twelve and twenty years of schooling to start making a difference in this world. It was perplexing to me that we were expected to dedicate so much time to preparing for the future when we could be doing something productive right now…

Okay, that was the longest rant ever. This story isn’t about my views on the American education system and I’ll try not to insert any more of my bitter philosophy. The rest of the day went like this…

I slept through the History slideshow presentation; smiled at the pretty, blonde, foreign exchange girl in Spanish whose name was either Melissa or Anissa or something that the teacher pronounced different every time; added to my 3-D cube doodles in English; ate a sandwich at lunch; threw notes across the room to my friend, Derrick, in Math; tried to sketch a picture of the pretty blonde from Spanish in Economics, resulting in the revelation that I have no talent for drawing; hid in the bathroom for most of Gym; and took the bus home, nearly missing my stop because I was dozing off.

I had decided that I wasn’t going to find the answers to my questions in the robot asylum, so I went through the motions like my teachers and friends expected of me and I indulged in the basic pleasures of a simple school day. Home was really the place for self-actualization, anyways; it was quiet and familiar and people weren’t making out against the walls. Plus, my mother was there.

I had a very unconventional relationship with my mother. “Unconventional,” being the best, single word to describe a relationship with her, because she didn’t have a conforming approach to parenting. The best way to describe her was that she was a lioness who, after feeding her cub and raising him until he can stand for himself, kicks her kid out of her pride and goes right back to the hunt.

Her hunt was a never ending journey to tell the perfect story; she was an author and she was constantly looking for a new adventure to inspire her. And the insane, restless feeling that I felt earlier that morning reminded me creepily of the quality that I sometimes resented in her.

As the lion’s cub, I was treated like an animal at times: forced to act out strange scenarios for her writer’s madness. Most of the time, she ignored me to focus on her writing and let me do my own thing, but when she needed help visualizing anatomic positions or she had the sudden urge to do something outside the house, she found some way to turn me into her personal test subject/butler. Since she was a stay-at-home mom there was no end to the experimentation, but I learned to appreciate having her around because she would call me in sick or even finish my homework for me if she really wanted my time. She made sure I knew how to think for myself and when I needed it, I was able to pick at the interesting misfires of her creative brain.

As soon as I opened the front door of my house I could hear my mother tapping away at the keyboard in her office. It was a nostalgic, rhythmic sound that had haunted me ever since I was a kid; I remember falling asleep on the carpet next to the fireplace in the office just listening to the sound of the crackling flames and the mechanical keys of a typewriter drumming a tune, with every beat breathing life into a story.

At that particular moment, however, it spelled bad news for my quest for self-fulfillment, because once my mother was focused in her writing, it was hard to peel her away without a well-reasoned argument. And sometimes even food and sleep weren’t satisfactory reasons.

I left my backpack at the base of the stairs and then knocked on the open office door. The room was organized so that the first things that you saw were bookshelves and the bindings of a hundred books, and the second thing you saw was the woman with her back angled towards the window, her desk positioned so that the rising sun could peek over the computer monitor to remind her it was time to go to bed.

I didn’t expect her to turn around to look at me, but she did, and she spoke with a kind of grace that surprised me, considering she was prone to biting people’s heads off when they bothered her during work.

“Oh. Hey, Bailey,” she said. Her long, golden wheat colored hair fell onto her face as she turned her head and she pulled it up so that I could see the lines under her eyes and on her brow. She wound her hair into a ball and stuck a pencil through the weave to hold it in place. Then she spoke gently, almost like these were the first words she’d spoken all day: “How was school?”

I hardly ever had small talk with my mother, but I played along. “Oh, you know, all work and no play. Are you working for a deadline right now?”

“Mm, no.” She shook her head. “Well, not really. I promised Mayor Johnsten that I’d help him draft a speech for this coming town hall meeting.” She paused and touched her hair to make sure it was staying put.

“If I can give you any advice it’s to never bet a favor on pocket Jacks.” My parents sometimes played poker with the influential people around town. For being a reclusive writer, my mother was surprisingly well-connected.

“He told me to ‘make it pop.’ What do you think he means by that?” she asked aloud, but she was looking back at her computer screen. “How am I supposed to make increasing the spending budget for garbage disposal ‘pop?’ And why is he still trying to get this bill to pass for greener grass? God, he’s probably just screwing with me; I hate men, sometimes.”

She was beginning an inner dialogue that was looking to escalate pretty quickly. I still had no idea what I wanted to say but I knew I had to start before I lost her to her thoughts.

“Hey, Mom?” I started with a pitiful uncertainty that made her swivel around in her chair to fully face me with a concerned look in her coffee-colored eyes.

“Yeah,” she said attentively. “What’s up?”

It seems to me that, in the moment right before you begin to talk about something that you have rolled over continually in your mind, you finally realize some inspiration for the truth. And with the truth being so very often trivial compared to how much time you spent worrying, continuing to ask about the matter would seem foolish. I didn’t realize any truth in that instant, but I still experienced the feeling that my question would just make me look stupid.

I managed to push through my insecurity and I understood that it didn’t matter what I had to say or if it sounded crazy because the same thing that made my mother give me her full attention would force her to be non-judgmental. A mother is a nature-ordained psychiatrist for her child.

“Mom,” I started again, “I think I want to quit school.”

It clearly was not the statement she had been expecting, but her eyes flashed curiosity. She formed a chin rest with the back of her hand elevated by her elbow on her knee and she leaned forward. “Go on,” she prodded.

“Well,” I began, and my thoughts began to take form. I took a seat in the plush chair in the corner of the room. The distance that separated me from my mother made it a bit easier to talk because there wasn’t the looming fear that she would lean over to hit me.

“I don’t think school is doing anything for me – most of the things we talk about in class I already know, and anything I don’t know I can learn by myself in less time than by doing this early morning, full-time student job. So I want to quit. My time could be much better spent and I want to quit.” Not my most eloquent.

She gave a fake nod and added some respectful silence like she was actually considering my plight, but responded quickly.

“Counter-proposal:” she offered, “No.”

I sat with a dumb look on my face and she made sure to speak first before I could protest. “Here’s why: Do I believe you could be using your time better? Yes. Do I believe you have the discipline to sit down and learn the things you’re supposed to? Maybe. Do I believe that quitting school is the answer to solving your boredom and sleep deprivation? Ab-so-lu-te-ly not.

“I can’t lecture you about how lucky you are in this world to even have access to education, because that’s something you would have to go out and see for yourself. But Bailey, before you can go out and see you have to have some degree of self-awareness and knowledge. And that’s where high school comes in.

“Even if you think you can learn everything on your own, high school is still a place where the classes you take can make you very well-rounded. You can learn how to conceptualize mathematic functions that change over time while at the same time considering the brilliance of the master bard. You can find historical evidence of cyclical class warfare on the same day you dissect an animal just so you can see for yourself what it looks like on the inside. More importantly, you have time to discover who you are and what you like and the people with whom you want to share your life. It looks bleak now, what with all the busy work and long days, but it’s up to you to find value in your daily life. That’s not going to change if you decide to pack up now and become one of those people who film themselves sticking things in places they shouldn’t so they can put it on the internet.

“And let me be honest with you, Bailey, unless you have a million-dollar idea that you’re able to complete before you graduate you’re probably going to have to go to college to get anywhere in this world, so finishing high school while it just requires you to show your face in the classroom isn’t so bad.”

As I expected, she killed my not-terribly-well-thought-out idea pretty quickly, but what happened next was a little unexpected because after I said “Okay, fine. I just don’t understand why I’m expected to spend the next six to seven years of my life preparing for my future when I’m ready to grab it now.” she smiled a smile I had rarely seen. Like she was proud of me.

Her voice came out softer, less of a pacifying reprimand and more of a pleased whisper. “You want to drink from the cup of life, and stop waiting for someone to spit in it.”

It wasn’t the metaphor I was looking for, but it seemed to fit. She read the look of agreement on my face and responded properly.

“So what was your game plan, Bay? If I had told you that you could stop going to school, what kind of adventures would you seek?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Write poetry; learn music; I’d try to make people’s lives a little bit more enjoyable.”

Her eyes reflected so much of the reckless abandon that I felt. I could see the same passionate longing that made me squirm, and I knew that she had been in my exact position at some point earlier in her life.

She spoke from experience as a writer, as a creator of ideas, “The biggest thing I’ve learned from my writing career is that you need to live among your audience to truly understand their situation. That’s how you get a perfect story, a perfect song, a perfect rhyme: by being a part of the culture of the people you want to influence. If you want to write for the individual you live in New York. If you want to connect with lonely, cold people you live in Canada. And if you want to hit the masses you go to school.” There was a beat before she chuckled and I grimaced.

“I can see that you’re on to my ulterior motive, but this part is serious.” She slid her chair smoothly over the hardwood floor towards me. Her citrus scent washed over me, and her normally brown eyes looked an earthy shade of red as she leaned in and crossed her hands on my knees. “Whatever you decide you want to do, do it for you. Because the perfect life comes from doing something that you love.”

She watched me reflect for a moment and then pushed herself back to where she had been when I first knocked on the door, saying “Of course, I use the word ‘perfect’ pretty liberally, but you get the point. Now go make your Momma some tea, would you?”

I nodded silently, but I still had this feeling like something was missing and I hadn’t gotten what I wanted from the conversation.

“I just don’t feel happy going through the motions,” I said and I started to walk away, but my mother stopped me one last time.

“Bailey,” she said. “Teenage angst – or whatever it is you want to call what you’re going through right now – manifests itself in one of two ways. Either you feel like you hate yourself or you feel like you hate the world around you. You usually don’t hate either of these things, though, you hate being content. And that’s good; that’s normal.

“Contentment and satisfaction might sound like the same thing – they’re different words for being happy – but they have some delicate nuance to them. Satisfaction is like hiking three miles to watch the perfect sunrise over the ocean: it’s sometimes hard to find footing in the dark, but when the light breaks the horizon you can find happiness after your struggle. Contentment is like sitting in a fishing boat at midday on a stagnant lake: the mosquitoes are swarming but you’re still casting your fishing rod into the water, because what the hell else are you going to do? You’re still happy, because your friends are all inside your tiny little boat, tossing their lines into the water right along with you, and you all wait anxiously for someone to get a catch that might rock the boat a little bit. But that’s not the way a boy should be living, Bailey, you should be chasing your fish with a stick of dynamite.

“Don’t be content with the life you’ve been given, Bailey, be satisfied with the life you make for yourself. All you can do right now is try and find a way.”

She looked back down and started typing again, having inspired herself with her speech. I thought she was going to say something more, but she had entered work mode and I didn’t need to disturb her again. She had given me what I was looking for. A thousand more questions had opened up to me, and I left her office reflecting on the life I had been given, and how I could make it better.

TO BE CONTINUED!

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islandofkiwi-blog · 9 years ago

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Time’s Mirror Episode 1 - A Web Series by Steven Embers

Prologue

Someone once told me that remembering your past betrays your present. He didn’t tell me what he meant, but instead advised me to go home and think about it, which I think is a bit like saying “go talk with yourself about whether or not I actually said something profound, while I wait here and take no responsibility for my words.” I did as I was told, though, and I ended up coming to a conclusion that he was talking about how our memory is often an incomplete representation of any given situation.

Like when the future you remembers the present you he will inevitably forget some of the little intricacies that went into creating that memory preserved in your shared brain. Maybe he’ll forget how cool your hair looked that day, or how you had a bad habit of chewing your nails when you listen to people talk, or (heaven help him) how much that one, trashy, rock chorus influenced you, and in doing so he will unintentionally marginalize the thought of you almost as if he was a stranger observing a story less important than his own.

When I was done thinking about that, however, I started to wonder if the true meaning behind my irresponsible philosopher’s words was that remembering your past betrays you because during that time you stop living in the present and you become a shadow of the person you were in the past; never changing, never growing.

But in the end, I resolved that the saying was just fancy wordplay, as most sayings are, and I thought that whatever profundity this particular cadence of words represented was probably not worth the internal distress I was having, so I chose to forget about the matter entirely.

I never had the chance to ask my mentor what he meant by those words, and he’s gone now so I suppose I will never know, but now I am thinking about my past and his words have resurfaced in my mind like long lost counsel waiting for the appropriate moment to reveal its true nature.

I think the place that I am in right now is something that I will take with me until I die and I desperately want to not misremember even the smallest detail. Yet I feel so close to my experience right now, too close to write about it, because I would rather continue living it. So I’m reflecting and typing and shivering because it’s really cold, and I’ve finally decided that trying to remember the past is not a sin or any other cautionary stigma I created for myself while pondering that old advice, and I should at least try to record the unbelievable journey I’ve taken.

I guess I should start with an introduction.

My name is Bailey Prince. It’s a girl’s name. I was teased for it because I’m a boy and in all the sixteen years of my life I can’t say I’ve ever been comfortable with using my name as a first impression because of an intense reflex of fear of being mocked.

For the few sadistic people, and sometimes for the innocently curious ones who ask me where my name came from, I tell them it came from my father. My mother only wanted one child and my father had always wanted a daughter whose name he dreamt was Bailey. God let one and a half of their two wishes come true, but everyone knows that having half a wish come true is like finding a magic lamp but figuring out that the genie you summon only speaks Arabic and has to use a dictionary to translate what you’re wishing for.

I suppose I can remove any wary doubt by saying that this is not a story about bad names; it just happens to be a circumstance of my existence. But if I were to provide any commentary about the topic to any expectant parents who want to name their kid Seafoam Green it’d have to simply be: don’t.

My name doesn’t really bother me anymore, but I think that’s also a result of this journey, because before all this started I was concerned that maybe my name would be my only gimmick. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t get to be any more interesting than a cross-gendered name, because there’s a limit to how interesting people can be. Like when you introduce yourself to someone, you should be able to summarize all the interesting points of your life in the first fifteen minutes, and when I introduce myself to people we spend the first five minutes discussing my weird name. I thought that maybe if I was born a David or an Andrew I could put my interesting minutes to work by slaying dragons or saving princesses.

When I was a kid I loved adventure stories: the mighty swords and steeds; the fair maiden turned damsel in distress; the unexpected hero and his crucial battle for justice against evildoers. That’s all I really wanted for myself – well, that and a dog, but I didn’t get the dog either – but I didn’t think that it was something that my tiny town in Colorado, wedged in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, could provide me.

And then it was. Not the dog part, I never got that. But one auspicious day, a winter wind swept through town and it brought with it the most mystifying girl and her insanely smart father and together they changed my entire life. This is my story, my memoir, and it will help me remember every pounding heartbeat; every sinking feeling that I was “going to die;” every tear I’ve shed and all the blood I’ve seen; every wonderful, mind-blowing kiss; and, yes, even the boring parts which I’m trying to make not so boring by writing this.

These are my fifteen interesting minutes, and I feel them ticking towards eternity the longer I spend with her.

But we’ll get to my mystery girl in a moment, for now I want to go back to the beginning.

I guess it all starts with…

Chapter 1

It was ten minutes until the New Year at Eva Daniels’ house. A couple dozen of my high school classmates were packed haphazardly into the living room while the television played live coverage from Times Square of a scantily clad popstar’s dance routine of radio’s favorite pop song. The singer looked angelic as a flurry of real snow began to fall on the stage, and she played it off as if the weather was planned into the routine. I was sitting towards the back of the room with my friend Mark Daly, but I could still see the screen over the heads in the crowded room since it was fixed at the top of the wall – sometimes forcing my eyes to see the screen to distract myself when something made me feel uncomfortable.

The night had started okay. It was the third time I’d been invited to Eva’s annual party, but this time had been a little different. While before I had been invited because we were friends going back to elementary school, this year Eva was without a boyfriend, and she made it clear that she wanted me to be her backup kiss at midnight. I had no problem with that, of course, but I also knew that probably nothing could come out of it since we had grown too different over the years so I was basically still there as her old friend.

Mark had found me early in the night and he clung to me like plastic wrap for the entire party, unmovable even when I’d gotten tired of being smothered and tried any subtle way I could to get him to let me breathe.

“Yo, Mark,” I said at ten thirty, seeing his girlfriend glancing in our direction for no more than a second. “Jen is staring at you, man. You better get your black ass over there.”

“Nah, B,” he replied in his lullaby chocolate voice, completely unfazed. “You gotta make ‘em wait for you.”

“Hey, Mark,” I said at eleven, thinking I finally had the key to my human-shaped handcuffs. “Eva said she might want to kiss me at midnight. You mind if I go see what’s up?

“Man, B,” he responded, rejecting my metaphorical key. “There’s no way Eva wants to kiss a fool like you. Get outta with that noise.”

It’s not like I hated Mark; he was one of my best friends since we were kids. But I could sense something was weird about him that night and I would rather talk with him somewhere more private.

“Mark, I’m gonna go to the bathroom,” I said at eleven thirty, even though I didn’t have to go to the bathroom.

“All right, B.”

For a second, I thought I was free, but I made it about three feet away before the sound of his voice stopped me again.

“Hey, can I tell you something?”

I looked at him.

“You’re a good friend,” he said, grinning with his teeth.

I sighed and stepped back towards him. “Okay, what is up with you tonight?”

“What?” he asked innocently. “I can’t tell a brother he’s a good friend?”

I considered myself intuitive or observant at least, and I knew Mark well enough to see that something was bothering him. I actually saw it on his face as soon as he came up to me for the first time that night, but I didn’t want to say anything.

“No, you don’t get to call me a good friend. Not if you’re not going to let me be one. What’s up with you tonight? You haven’t talked to anyone else here.”

I sat back down on the barstool at the back of the room, and I listened to Sara Baker and Tess Newman talk about prom while I waited for Mark.

“Same old Bailey,” he said, taking a seat on the stool next to me. “Never could let anything go.”

I said nothing and let my attention shift towards the live feed from Times Square. They were announcing the popstar’s performance, “right after these words from our sponsors,” meaning “in fifteen minutes.”

“My brother died two days ago.” Mark finally said flatly. There was no anger or sadness in his voice despite the bad news.

“What the hell,” I whispered, too shocked to say anything meaningful.

Mark told his story like he wasn’t part of it. Like he was trying to be as disconnected as possible from the experience, but I could tell he was hurting.

“He was driving home from work on the interstate and it was kind of icy. The car in front of him went into a skid. Bobby hit the brakes but it wasn’t enough. Bobby runs into the other guy’s bumper and the car behind him was tailgating so his headlights are in Bobby’s trunk a second later. Police were there in ten minutes but he was DOA. Bobby was the only one dead. They said he would probably have survived the first impact.”

“What the hell,” I repeated.

“I didn’t want to bring you down. Sorry.”

Everything started to fade away. The sounds of the party dimmed and all that was left was the tragic news and the welling pain in my stomach. Bobby was my friend, even though he was seven years older than me he was my friend. Now he was gone. Mark was my friend, and I hurt for him and his family.

“What the hell are you doing here? You should be with your family.”

He shrugged. “Man, you’re my family, too. My dad said that we all needed to spend some time being alive before we can know what it’s like to be dead. Being here is good. Being with you, B…” He stuck out his fist and I bumped mine into his. “It’s good.”

I looked at him. He seemed to be handling it.

“What do you need me to do?”

“You, Bailey?” He shook his head. “Man, you don’t need to do anything. Just listen to this. You remember that time…”

He recounted the story. I looked at the TV a couple times. I watched the faces in New York. I saw people from every corner of the world gathering to see the spectacle. I began to cry. I cried passive tears without trembling, fighting a public breakdown so I wouldn’t ruin the cheerful mood of the party but still letting myself feel pain. He patted me on the shoulder and it was like he became the outsider attending to my tragedy.

“Damn, B. This a’int nothing to cry over.”

“What the hell do you want me to do?” I said with tears stuffing my nose.

“I already told you. You don’t need to do anything. I’m letting you know this is a new me. The only thing I can wrap my mind around these past few days is that the life you have is so tiny. It changes like that.” He snapped his fingers as he said the word. “In a hot second it’s gone for reasons you can’t even control. Man, you don’t need to cry for me or for Bobby. All I need is for you to laugh with me, because I already decided that I’m not gonna waste any more time on stupid shit. I wanna say what I mean, and do what I wanna do.”

On the television, the singer had finished her routine and out of the corner of my eye I saw Eva Daniels approaching us. I rubbed away the tears under my eyes. It looked like Mark was going to make a finishing statement to his grand speech, but Eva interrupted him.

“Hey, boys.” She spoke in a cheerful, girlish tone. “Glad to see you made it.” Technically, it was the first time she had spoken to me at the party, not counting the subtle wink she had given me at the door.

“Thanks for having us, Eva,” Mark said calmly. “I almost canceled, but I knew all the cool kids would be here and I didn’t want to lose my membership.”

She giggled. “Well I’m glad you’re here. Can I see Bailey for a second?”

Mark raised his eyebrows in a way that I knew meant he was up to something. “Can I just say you are looking damn fine in that dress, Eva. Is it true that you want to kiss my man Bailey here?”

She looked at me again and I looked back at the TV. The one-minute countdown to midnight had appeared in the bottom of the screen and most of the people in the room were gathering to watch.

Eva shrugged and said “I don’t think that’s any of your business, but I would like to speak with him. Privately.”

“Ah.” Mark made a show of nodding as the clock ticked down. “Okay. I understand, but we’re having a discussion right now and it would be terrible if you filled his mind with girly things while I’m trying to impart some of my wisdom.”

“Excuse me?” Eva said, looking almost panicked. The ten-second countdown had started and everyone in the room began chanting in unison. Ten. Nine.

“You heard me, woman.” Mark said casually. Eight.

“Bailey,” Eva addressed me. Seven.

I started to stand, but Mark put his hand on my shoulder. Six. Five.

Eva took my hand in hers, it was soft and small and a little sweaty. Four.

Mark kept his hand on my shoulder as he got out of his chair and walked around to stand in front of me. It went silent for half a heartbeat as I looked from Mark to Eva and then back again. I wasn’t exactly sure what was about to happen. Three. Two.

“I LOVE BAILEY PRINCE!” Mark announced at the top of his lungs. One.

Midnight, the new year, Mark kissed me right on the lips. He grabbed me forcefully on either side of my face and squeezed my cheeks together so that my lips puckered naturally and he pressed his face into mine. His lips were chapped and rough and smaller than I expected and the stubble on his upper lip rubbed against me and felt strange. My eyes were open and I snuck a glance at Eva during the second Mark was kissing me. Her hand was still on mine but her grip loosened and her eyes got real wide so I could see a bit of shock in her sky blue irises. Mark held his face against mine for longer than I expected and I pushed him away when I thought he was about to stick his tongue in my mouth.

Eva didn’t kiss me after that. She sarcastically wished me “good luck,” and walked away quietly. Some of the other people at the party, attracted by Mark’s loud declaration watched the whole thing and the rumor spread over the rest of winter break that Mark and I were about to be the next hot couple in town. Of course that wasn’t true, but it made for a better story.

Meanwhile, I found myself thinking constantly about how Mark had boldly claimed that he was going to be a new person. Even so close to his brother’s death, he was able to laugh and be spontaneous and not care at all what people thought. The kiss represented something more to him. It showed his determination to experience new things and live freely. He shared that motivation with me and transferred something to me that night, some virus that infected my mind and made every part of me aware of how boring my life was. His actions made me want something more: adventure or purpose or love, something I couldn’t place my finger on but that I felt was missing like a giant, gaping hole in my chest.

As winter trudged along and Bobby’s funeral came and went, I felt more and more frustrated that I couldn’t figure out a way to break out of my sense of inadequacy. I was bored, and half a month later I was still struggling with my boredom.

I opened my locker door on the first day of school of the new year and stared at the worn out bindings of the textbooks I hadn’t seen since last semester. Outside the clouds were grey and there was supposed to be a snowstorm coming, but school continued to be in session despite the predicted bad weather. Returning to my day job made me somehow more frustrated than I had been during the break. Everything was exactly as I left it, though I didn’t know what I expected to find changed.

I started picking at the paint on the inside of my locker, letting my mind wander absently. I held the door with my other arm and swung my body back and forth with the creaking hinge, the repetitive motion slowly rocking my thoughts away.

I was beginning to fall asleep on my feet, when I heard a loud slam on the wall behind me that startled me.

"Well? You gonna give it?” A rough voice echoed off the wall, disturbing peaceful morning. “Or do I have to get The Jock here to shake it out of your backpack for you?"

I turned to see Dylan Clifford, a five foot ten punk that fancied himself a bad boy, standing over a tiny, Indian kid. The bully acted like the over exaggerated representation of an Italian mob boss from a 70’s mafia film. He had the entourage, the saucy accent, and the perfectly rounded vowels to boot. Lacked the charisma, though. Actually, he might’ve been a choir boy if he hadn’t found his place as the power saw in the assemblage of tools at our school.

The Indian boy was a new face, but he’d found himself as prey for the biggest delinquents in the school. I was too annoyed with my thoughts to want to get involved at first, but I figured I needed a distraction and decided to intervene on behalf of the kid’s milk money.

“Hey, Clifford,” I shouted across the hallway and approached the group. Two of his goons tried to stop me in a synchronized move that must have taken months of practice to perfect, but I pushed through them to confront Dylan. He still had his arm against the wall, cornering the boy with the help of his evil sidekick, Rodney “The Jock” Hemsworth.

“What’s the deal here?” I asked, “This little guy giving you trouble?”

“Oh, hey Baby.” One time when we were kids I misspoke my name as ‘Baby Prince,’ and it stuck as one of my many, disparaging nicknames.

“I heard you had a fun time on New Year’s Eve. Deal here is this little twerp won’t give me the answers to the math homework we were supposed to do over break. And I know he has it, because he never forgets to turn it in during class.” He made a threatening motion with his fist towards the kid.

“Wait, hold on.” I moved in between them, “You need answers to freshman math homework? You didn’t fail a grade, did you?”

“No, Princess, I didn’t. I’m a junior, just like you. I’m just taking sophomore math ‘cause they wouldn’t give me credit for my pretty sixty percent last year. And this kid’s one of those… uh, whadd’ya call ‘em…” He started snapping his fingers like he was trying to summon the word.

“Accelerated learners,” offered The Jock.

“Yeah, Rod. That’s it. Accelerated learners.” He took a second to spit a wad of saliva onto the floor. “Some kids are too smart for their own good. They’re bound to get hit by the pecking order at some point or another. I’m doing him a favor.”

I nodded my head sarcastically. “You have a point there,” I said, agreeably, “but this one is my friend and I’m not going to let you torture answers out of him. So here we go.” I tried to pull the kid from the crowd.

Dylan swatted my arm away from his victim. “Hold up, Babe. You can’t honestly expect me to believe that. I’ll give you ten bucks right now if you can tell me this kid’s name.”

He had me. I looked down at the kid then back at Dylan. I knew any hesitation would kill my story, so I responded quickly. “His name is Raj. Can we go now?”

“Whoa, dude. No way.” He looked over at his goons and whispered at them. “That’s not the kid’s name, is it?”

“Oh, yeah? So you actually bothered to learn his name? You’ve really changed, Dylan.” I fake applauded and then grabbed the kid’s arm and pulled him away before any of them could protest. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

I shouted at Dylan over my shoulder as we left. “Your problem, Clifford, is that you have no respect for others. You’d be surprised to know that some people have more to offer you than test answers.”

And by the time I’d finished babbling we’d made it past a corner and disappeared into the crowd while Dylan stared blankly.

I hadn’t exactly thought about what I was going to do after I saved the kid so we just stood there awkwardly for a second or two without saying anything.

The boy looked down at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact with me. I wasn’t able to get a good read on him, so I decided to just walk away. “Okay… well, see you,” I said awkwardly.

I was just starting to turn as I heard his timid voice call out behind me. “My name’s Henry.”

“Oh.” I turned around, but kept shuffling backwards. “Yeah, sorry about that, I was just trying to get you out of there.” I scratched my head but continued moving down the hallway.

I knew it.” I heard Dylan’s shout come from across my shoulder and I whirled around. “Give me those answers, Henry, and we won’t have a problem.” He laughed. “You almost made me forget that I really needed to pass this class, Bailey.”

“Hey, you didn’t call me ‘Princess’ this time.”

“This is too serious for great nicknames. I need to copy those answers before second period.” Dylan made a lunge at the kid, whose favorite form of self-defense seemed to be The Possum because he went limp.

I was a step faster than Dylan, and I grabbed the kid’s arm just in time to turn and run. “All right, man. Just run as fast as you can,” I whispered to him.

I half-dragged Henry behind me, because it seemed like he only knew how to move with the robotic motions of a silicone doll. Luckily, he was only about as heavy as one, too, so I pulled him through the crowded hall and hoped that someone would eventually stop the stampeding group of low-lives. I snuck a glance back over my shoulder and saw Dylan and his posse pushing over anyone and everyone, even the people trying to get out of his way.

My goal was the library. I figured if I couldn’t lose him in a sea of people it would probably be best to take shelter in an open space with adult supervision. We were still in high school, and judging by how hard he was trying to cheat his way through Sophomore level math he still had to worry about the authority.

We dashed down the hallway, rounding a corner before arriving at the library. I checked behind us to see if Dylan was still following us and, seeing a sea of people part the middle of the hallway for him to pass, I assumed he was. I pushed Henry through the library doors and ducked in after him. Hopefully, Dylan would just give up, because my heart was already pounding from the unusual amount of exercise so early in the morning.

The library was an open area with tables in the center of the floor and bookcases lining the walls. At the front of the room were small, study alcoves and a very simple check-out counter leading out to the only door. Some teachers were helping kids with early morning questions in the study alcoves and the school librarian was busy reading a book behind the counter so I decided it was a safe place to stay. I led Henry to one of the center tables and I sat across from him so I could watch the door.

There was silence for a couple moments, during which Henry just stared at the floor and started wheezing to find his breath and I looked at the door behind him waiting for a crazed Dylan to bust into the room and order my execution. Nothing happened and finally, I couldn’t take the silence and had to break the tension.

“So how was your Christmas break?” I asked.

The kid was in worse shape than I was which only made me feel worse. “My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas,” he managed to say through shallow breaths.

“I meant more along the lines of you doing anything special.” I kept one eye on the door while I actually looked at him for the first time since I’d seen him. He had features like a mouse with a nose that seemed to draw any attention directed towards it.

“Why are you asking me this?” He sounded upset.

I shrugged. “I don’t know, really. We’re going to have to wait here awhile though, so I thought I’d try to make conversation.”

“Why do we have to wait here?” His voice started to sound almost hostile.

“I mean, isn’t there someone who wants to kill you out there?”

He looked down, avoiding eye contact. There was more silence before he finally squeaked “Why did you save me?”

I thought for a moment, and felt like I didn’t know the answer myself. I spoke uncertainly.

“I don’t know if ‘saved’ is the right word for it, but it looked like you needed help and I really don’t like Dylan.”

“Oh.” He sat quietly for a second before looking up at me with fairy tale doe eyes. “I thought you might have wanted to be my friend.”

Just so we’re clear, the sparkling eyes is an effect that only animated characters can accomplish. I took one look at him and decided his was a ridiculous theory, but I knew I couldn’t say that to his face.

“It wasn’t really part of my plan,” I stated, but I saw his face get very sad which was almost an effect worse than the doe eyes, so I added quickly, “But, you know, I’m never above making new friends,” which elicited a toothy grin.

Normally, I probably would have melted on the inside when such a childishly innocent creature made that kind of face at me, but somehow all I saw was a mistake of nature smiling at me with unusually large gums and braces restraining a massive overbite.

I shoved the ugly feeling to the back of my brain and forced a smile back at him.

“So how’s school, then?” I decided to give him a chance to let his shining personality break through his rough exterior.

“It’s good. I have straight A’s.”

“That’s… well that’s good.” I couldn’t think of anything more to say and I was suddenly aware that my chair was really uncomfortable.

We sat like that for a good minute and I started to think that the mind-numbing silence was worse than getting beaten up by Dylan.

“So, class is probably starting soon and I don’t want to be late,” I lied. “Why don’t we pick this up some other time?”

“Okay,” he said, innocently.

I stood up and started to walk away.

“Actually,” he stopped me, and I was only two steps out of my seat, too close to pretend I hadn’t heard him. “Can I ask you something?” His voice was shaking.

“Um.” I gazed longingly at the door, but forced myself to sit down because I knew I would feel bad if I just left. “Sure, what’s on your mind?”

“Well, it’s about high school.” He kept stopping after every phrase, like he couldn’t get a complete thought to come out.

“Okay. What about?” I tried to guide him, “Girls? Bad teachers? Did you meet Rocko? Don’t buy whatever he’s selling.”

“It’s just that…” He paused again and I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Well I moved here during the fall and I’ve been here for a semester already, but I haven’t really been able to make any friends. Everybody just seems to stare right through me and the only time people talk to me is when they have questions about homework.”

When he finished, I felt bad about my previous thoughts. First impression, oppression, as my mother would say.

I tried to come up with an answer for him, but it was hard because I knew I would definitely be one of those shameless people asking a freshman for help and I was obviously one of those people who wouldn’t bother to talk to him afterwards.

“I can relate a little bit,” I lied, trying to give him what he needed to hear. “People like to pick on me because of my name; I have a really girly one. Bailey Prince.” I reached over the table to shake his hand and he giggled a little bit which made me smile.

My awful concentration on his physical appearance seemed to melt away as I began to see just a lonely kid looking for a friend. I wanted to inspire him somehow, to help him escape from the natural, defensive shell that always seems to hinder the real, human experience.

“You just have to stop worrying about what people will think about you if you just put yourself out there,” I said. “High school is this time when you’re supposed to figure out who you are. And all your classmates will pretend like they’re so complicated or they have everything under control, but they’re not and they don’t. We’re all the same, us high school students, we’re just looking for love, and direction, and test answers. So don’t be afraid to say what’s on your mind. Because it’s okay to make mistakes. Just, really, don’t buy anything from Rocko; those aren’t the right mistakes you want to make.”

It was cheese straight out of an afterschool special, but I figured everyone could stand to watch a little more, trashy television. I did feel a little pretentious trying to make generalizations about teenagers when I was clearly not any more mature than my peers, but my ego took a back seat as I tried to advise this kid who just wanted to be noticed by someone.

I was about to tell him something about talking to girls when I saw the library door open. I nearly fell out of my seat expecting Dylan to show his face when I had just talked myself into a vulnerable position, but I let out a sigh of relief when the second librarian walked in, whistling cheerfully over the top of his coffee mug.

Henry looked behind him and when he turned back around I gave a lopsided smile to acknowledge how stupid I looked. He giggled again and a warm wave of something I could only call serenity filled my insides. When the moment passed he told me he should probably get to class and I told him I’d see him around. But as I watched him walk away with his uneven gait, I started to realize something.

I was finally ready to accept what my high school years had to offer. I wanted to take my own advice and learn something about what I wanted to do with myself. Mark had planted the seed in my heart, and the conversation with Henry had watered it, but I was letting it take root.

I sighed as I realized that I was ready to leave.

TO BE CONTINUED!

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islandofkiwi-blog · 9 years ago

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A New Start

tl;dr: I wrote a sci-fi novel that I don’t want to fall to the wayside during the long, traditional publishing process so I recorded an audiobook version that you can listen to here (YouTube) or if you so choose you can read here. (blog) This is the beginning including the Prologue and Chapter 1. Hopefully I will upload one chapter a week until completion. Now let’s get down and dirty.

An Introduction

22, male, United... oh this isn’t a profile for a dating website? whatever. Welcome to my little island of insanity! Glad you survived the fall, back button is that way in case this gets too boring for you. But please don’t go. It’s lonely and dark and I hear the lemurs scratching on the outside of my hut in the night. Anyways, welcome! I guess this is the part where I’m supposed to tell you what I’m doing on this island, who I am, how you can know that I’m not going to eat you. I mean that last one is pretty ridiculous, though you kind of look hungry. Are you hungry? You look like you could stand to eat more, anyways. Gods! where are my manners. I’m Steven Embers and welcome for the third and final time.

The Book

What do the lemurs say at night, scratching at my door?

“Let me in, let me in, sir. I fear a deadly storm”

I started writing this novel at sixteen, but I had no idea what I was getting into. I had a falling dream, a vivid vision that I wanted to put to words and sometime later I had a catchy set of sentences that I wanted to use somehow: “My name is Bailey Prince. It’s a girl’s name.” One became the beginning, the focus of my story, my motivation, and the other I wouldn’t get to write for another four years. Initially, I wanted it to be a quick story, I wanted to publish a novel before I finished high school. I lacked both the writing and publishing experience to know that was a pipe dream. Writing itself is not that difficult, I think anyone with an idea and enough motivation to work on that idea could finish a full length novel, but I wanted to do it right. I wanted every plot hole covered, every scene to have motivation, every word to have meaning within the whole. It took me two years to get the character motivation and plot in the right place. I finished a proper first draft at twenty, almost exactly four years since I started writing on the first blank page and I actually thought in my naive, little mind that I was done with the story.

Agenting/Query Hell

I never let in the lemurs. You just have to look at their conniving faces to know they’re up to no good.

I knew a little bit about the query process while I was researching during writing, but I wasn’t prepared and lacked the marketing knowledge to appeal to a savvy agent. I think anyone who has tried to cold query an agent before knows what I’m talking about, but let me use a metaphor to explain to anyone who may not have the background:

Say your work of art is a special snowflake and you are the wind who blows that snowflake onto the front porch of whatever agent you researched who is in line with your needs and has experience with your genre. Now, your snowflake may be the most beautiful snowflake ever created with such nuance and character that no one could resist it, but there’s still the issue that around the front steps of every agent, a ceaseless blizzard blows day and night. Millions (I mean probably millions, who’s counting) of snowflakes are blown in from all around the world, and every agent is expected to sweep the snowflakes off their front porch every day and scour for that special snowflake among a million (again who’s counting) special snowflakes that they can sell to make a living, and that’s all before they can go to work to selling their other, laminated, super-special, chosen snowflakes. The odds are not in your favor, my breezy friend. The only thing you can do is blow and blow your snowflake onto more and more agents steps until you have effectively queried every agent in the world.

I didn’t even make it very far. I queried for about two years and maybe fifty plus with only one positive request among them. I was obviously doing something wrong. My writing sample was weak. My first chapter (ironically the first you will listen to/read should you continue your stay on my island) was/is hilariously weak, and I still have my own issues with it after about fifty revisions. My query letter sucked. I threw away probably half of my potential agents on weak queries alone. My spirit was flagging. The process was probably what I hated most about it, because you send out a query letter that you think has potential and you don’t hear back for a month, maybe more, or maybe not at all, and you’re left wondering if you’ll get any help to revise for the next query which you send out a month of no good news in an endless cycle. Anyways, two years of playing the cat-mouse game, I was pretty burnt out and don’t want to pursue traditional publishing for a number of reasons, one of which I will go into in a bit. I don’t like complaining about this out loud, because I’m not asking for pity and I know my own deficiencies. I mean there’s the chance my work was completely unmarketable but positive attitude, yeah?

I came to this island myself. The lemurs are a product of my own insecurity and that burden isn’t on you. Well, maybe it is now.

The (free) Audiobook

#callanAudible #pleasedontsuebecauseiwantedtomakeabadpun #doesAudibleownthetrademarkonfreeaudiobook #feelsliketheydo

So I decided I didn’t want to do traditional publishing and the main reason was because I knew it would take time to gain a benefactor in an agent or a publisher and then it would take time to get it out to market and that was all time I felt like I didn’t have. The science element in my book made me feel like a mad genius when I conceived it at sixteen. It’s less interesting now that genetics has made leaps and bounds. Seriously, my butthole clenches every time I watch a SciShow update on genetics. I need to share this work before the science catches up and I don’t look like the visionary I am! lol. Giant ego aside, I seriously want to share this even if only a marginal number of people will see it compared to if I had chosen to wait until I had it (and my query letter) polished to a point where it was irresistible. I’m also aware that original content on the internet is so easily accessible, and you can entertain yourself without paying a dime for several lifetimes as long as you have access to the internet. That’s why I’m releasing for free. I don’t want to deal with a paywall restricting any potential audience member I have. This is me releasing six years of work without expecting any kind of monetary gain in return. As far as I’m concerned this story will always be free for anyone to enjoy. I haven’t decided if I’ll give up my creative copyright to let people make money off my idea, but if people like it I assume they’ll find legal ways to re-appropriate it anyways. I will be releasing an audio version on YouTube and a text version on Tumblr every week, so if you like it you can follow the respective places for updates. I’ll be releasing them alongside each other, so if I fail to get an audio version out one week I won’t post a text version. I’m hoping I can get them out every Monday. It’s been my New Year’s Resolution for like the past four years to get published so this is me making good on that however I can.

The recording process has been really difficult not easy as far as prepping my voice and editing it together and doing pickups because I realize later that there was freaking echoes in the room I was recording in. Sigh. I will try to get my act together so I can produce consistently. I’m not a voice actor, or a sound mixer, or anything like that. I’m recording on a middle-range microphone, editing to the ear and just doing it before and after work/sleep. Be patient with me, and I hope you like it.

If you look around, even from the vantage point of my tiny island, you can see a couple billion other islands out there, each with a story to be found or some artwork to be shared. We each blow our snowflakes into the world and hope that maybe one person will like it. We can only blow and pray that someone will pluck our snowflake out of obscurity and pack it into their own, precious snowball of experience and it will be part of them forever.

Keep on dreaming,

Embers

#writing #new years resolution #self-publishing

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