Keeping A Secret

I wrote ‘Keeping a Secret’ after doing a bit of research into coding information into human DNA for another project. I’m writing a short story that I would like to submit to the BBC’s Short Story Competition, and I stumbled across this new article:

Clicky clicky linky!

It was the last line that really brought this story into view. I read that and thought, ‘Damn, that’d make an excellent story.’

053 – Keeping A Secret

“Well now,” the gang leader said. “I think you have some explaining to do.”

Like a shark circling its prey, Dragon Head Liu moved into my field of vision. We were in the only lit part of the warehouse, a circle of light shed by the single bare bulb that showed me little more than the Triad leader’s massive shadow. Other figures waited just beyond the light. I could hear them breathing, moving around. There was some sort of incense burning, sickly-sweet.

I moistened my cracked lips, tasting blood from where his ring had struck me. “I have the information you sent me for.”

“Give it to me.” His voice was deep, heavily accented.

“It’s safe. Secure.”

“Where?”

“Encoded into my skin.” I held my breath. Would they believe me?

Humble Bundles and Books I've Read Recently

I was able to snag a Humble Bundle book deal a little while ago (actually, it was Sue that spotted it!) and downloaded it to my Kindle before going to Sweden. I'm a big fan of the Kindle, by the bye, and I've found that it makes such a difference to packing weight.

I read a couple of books while I was out there. On the flight out, I read the entirety of Arcanum 101: Welcome New Students, by Rosemary Edghill and Mercedes Lackey which is a fun book set in the present day, but one where magic, elves and arcane happenings occur. It was brief but interesting; most of the books in the humble bundle were on this sort of topic, and there are lots of shared ideas, or common points from which they draw. I think it was a quirk of the formatting on my Kindle that the shift from the first character's point of view to the second's was something I had to read over twice, to pinpoint exactly when it happened.

I probably could have gotten more reading done actually during the week, but in the end I only read Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton and found it really inspirational. He details some of the things that lead from where he was, pretty much known only for being in Star Trek TNG, struggling to get more acting parts and finally putting two fingers up at it to focus on writing. I know I haven't had anything like that sort of struggle, but it was kind of comforting to read about someone else going through some of the same questions about trying to get into writing full time. I'll definitely be reading the other Wil Wheaton book that came with the bundle, The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

I read Sunstorm on the way home, by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. It's excellent, but then I've come to expect that from both authors. It was also exceptionally handy as research for Noctis Point, set as it is on Mars, the Moon and Earth. I got the idea that there was a bigger world here, on the scale of the Xeelee by Stephen Baxter, which I suppose makes sense. The FirstBorn give the impression of that kind of all-knowing power. Certainly, for anyone looking for a nice solid sci-fi adventure that can be read in about five hours, this is a good option. I finished it actually on the Underground, pulling in to Brockley station, which works just fine for me.

Recording has started for Pocket Fiction, my new project. This is slightly procrastination for Noctis Point but not really, because I have lots of other things I could be procrastinating on, like making cakes for the next NomCake outing or, y'know, preparing work for the new term that starts in about twelve days.

Eek.

Sweden and back!

I've just come back from a holiday in Sweden with John Aggs, Nana Li and my wife Sue. We went to Visby, Gotland, and it is beautiful! We were blessed with the weather as well, only one day of rain and it was the day we'd 'planned' for there to be bad weather. All it meant was umbrellas, a museum and some writing/drawing at home!

And believe me, there was a fair amount of drawing, writing, or talking about either going on. We must have talked for hours each about our projects, picking out potential plot points, filling in plot holes, renaming the entire thing in my case, and generally being creative. Sue quite rightly said that it felt like a week-long brainstorm.

I did actually manage to get some writing done, namely replotting the entirety of what is now called Noctis Point. 'Psy-Clones' was a stupid placeholder name, and it's gone for good now. Some of it is familiar; since I last posted about it, I've actually done a fair amount of work towards making the psych powers have rules and actually work. I can now answer questions like 'Why can the Moon be terraformed in your book when it doesn't have an atmosphere?' and 'Where does the half-light drive come from?' and 'What is the Machine doing out beyond Pluto?' which is nice. The new plot is tighter, and starts with more of a bang.

I'm also super excited to be starting a new project: audio books. I'm going to be reading chapters of Poisonroot and putting them up on YouTube and the iTunes store, basically as a way of getting my work to more people. These podcasts will be going up on a dedicated channel, which I'll blog about when it's populated a little.

I love the world of Poisonroot, and I'm not leaving it yet. For a start, my D&D group wouldn't let me suddenly transport them into the sci-fi world of Noctis Point, I'm sure! Second, I feel there's more stories to be told in Ehrian, perhaps not about Trip but definitely more stories. I'm going to read some of my short stories too, and anything that's been published on this blog (and therefore can't be published in print). And now that I've actually written about it, I have to do it!

I read a couple of books while I was away, which I'll go over briefly in tomorrow's post, but I just wanted to post to say that I'm not dead, and very excited going forward from here!

Lack of posting recently

I'm finding it a little hard to post some things on the blog since I'm now actively trying to get things published. I can't publish anything here that I want to see in print elsewhere, basically. So today is a good example; I've written a short sci-fi piece in the Psy-Clones world, but it's standalone and could totally see publication somewhere. So I can't put it here.

Instead, I'd like to talk briefly about what I'm reading at the moment. My wife and I are reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne as a kind of 'book at bedtime' thing. It's fairly long, so it's slow going, but enjoyable. There are some hilarious sections though; it's something I recognise about Verne's writing that he obviously had things he particularly enjoyed, or knew a lot about. The parts of the book where he can talk about those in great detail are terminology-heavy and slightly detract from what's actually going on. Three pages about the polyps in Captain Nemo's display case is plenty. Of course, nothing so far has beaten the description of weapons on board the ship, including a 'duck gun with exploding balls'. We're so mature.

After that, we really want to read Sabriel by Garth Nix (apparently soon to get a long-overdue Kindle edition). I read it a few years ago and really enjoyed it. I love the idea of old tech in the far future, or our tech viewed through post-apocalyptic eyes.

I've been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov's Robot short stories, mainly in Robot Visions and Robot Dreams. Some of the stories are simply brilliant, none of them entirely dated. Of course, some of the descriptive elements are dated, but the stories themselves are solid gold. This includes my all-time favourite Asimov short story, 'The Final Question' which is about entropy. I honestly can't say much because I'd ruin the ending, but I think that this, and stories like this, have a lot to do with my own writing.

Psy-Clones Timeline 3/3

Inspiration for this timeline came from a variety of sources. I've been reading a lot of Asimov and Arthur C Clarke recently; several nationalist parties enjoyed success in the recent European Parliament Elections; I read an essay on what the state of government might be in the near future; finally, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past, which is awesome.

Mars Base 3, known as MB3 to all, became a hotbed of psychic training and research. Within ten years, the first psychs had developed into a society based around research. They developed cloning technology that worked, and used it to improve the calibre of their trainees. The facility was run by a dumb-AI that was incapable of attaining sentience. It was in charge of all mechanical aspects of MB3, the cloning, food production, weather control… everything. It was also live-storing everyone’s psyche in case of death, which was a realistic threat in psych training. It would then clone a new body for them and restore them, complete with memories up to the second of death. In reality, the computer was able to do all this by peer-to-peer sharing the information in the minds of every other psych, using their brains as parallel processors. Only the upper echelons of the teaching staff were aware of this, however.

Psy-Clones Timeline 2/3

Again it was to be a scientist that provided the next step in the chain. Frederic Rawlins, an American by birth, finally succeeded in 2078 in doing what humans had been dreaming about for decades, creating the Halflight Drive. Designed to travel at half the speed of light, it suddenly made space travel en masse a possibility again. Terraforming robots were created, algae was redesigned and ships were constructed in space. The newly-completely space elevator, linking the defunct International Space Station to a small island in the Atlantic meant that materials could be taken up with increasing regularity. Within a year, with public fervour behind it, the first major mission to Mars left. Half an hour later, it arrived and began the long process of terraforming. It would be a process that would take over two centuries to complete. The construction of three habitable cities on Mars, connected by long straight roads, was begun. Ships were sent on exploratory missions to all planets of the solar system, now completing journeys in days that should have taken years, and mankind’s understanding of the universe expanded.

Although the State had been born of totalitarian control, that control had been relinquished at the right time, and the people now had hope, the promise of a future. China’s regime crumbled from within as public pressure, and the vision of how much better things were in the old countries of the US and UK, finally enacted a toll. The leaders were assassinated and a temporary government was instated. They immediately reached out to the State for aid, and were accepted.

Russia, now in control of most of Europe, found that it was alone. Stubbornly, it held on to its independence, focusing on the technology that it had always had a penchant for: Robots.

Cutter, now calling himself the Emperor of Earth, focused the planet’s sights on space.

Psy-Clones Timeline 1/3

I've split the timeline into three parts because it became quite long and winding.

Starting from within the next ten years, this is a timeline for PsyClones (which is still a working title, but it's growing on me. It's a bit silly though.)

By 2045, most factories only had a small human contingent of engineers as robot workforces took over. Even the factories that made the robots had automated assembly lines. More than that, robots were used in mining operations, undersea oil drilling and farming. One of the major robot-creating countries was Russia, beginning by using cheap human workforces and then switching as soon as possible. Unemployment, steadily rising in all countries over the previous decades, hit an all-time high. With it came mass homelessness. The areas most strongly hit were the US, which suffered a massive population boom, and Europe. China became the most tightly-controlled country in the world, as they were already closely controlling population. By 2050, it was clear that humanity was close to consuming itself. While large portions of the world’s overpopulation had been moved to relatively barren areas such as Central Australia and parts of Africa, most of the democracies of the world had elected leaders who promised harsher controls and management. Police forces were given more power in most countries, becoming repressive.

045 - Illusion

Another Psy-Clones-setting 100 themes work. These are all short and deliberately display a photo, a moment in time. I should really concentrate on creating fully-encapsulated short stories, because it's something I find challenging.

045 - Illusion

Alex sat on the single hard chair, concentrating. In his mind, he could hear the lesson, his tutor’s voice quiet, hypnotic. 

“Picture a box.”

He furnished himself with a cardboard box. It wasn’t much. The bottom was sealed with brown packing tape.

“Into the box, place your thoughts about where you are.”

One by one, he tuned out his surroundings. Into the box went the hum of the terminal, the quiet hiss of the clone tube, the sound of music in another room, other people breathing.

“Place your thoughts and feelings from the day.”

This was harder. Visualising the events as solid objects helped, but even the small victory of still being alive this late in the day was something Alex desperately wanted to hold on to. It was some minutes before he felt composed enough for the next stage.

044 - Two Roads

Also, Psy-Clones! I've been playing around with the world a bit and I've created a timeline. Worldbuilding is so much fun. I should do some actual writing sometime!

This is #44 of the 100 Themes, which takes place in a lecture room on Mars Base 3.

“There are two roads on Mars,” Dr. Judd said, pointing at the projected map, “and it’s likely to stay that way until the terraforming is complete.” Alex watched as his tutor highlighted the two thin supply routes, making notes on his own pad.

“Now. They’re dead straight, see that? Anyone care to tell me why?”

“Robots,” Alex said, not even looking up from the pad.

“That’s right,” Judd said, wiping sweat from his bald pate. It was stifling in the classroom, thirty bodies packed into a space designed for half that. “In the early days of the Empire, before the Singularity, remote-operated robots were sent here. They had the capability to construct things like roads and the habitation domes that you live in today.” The display switched to stock video of old worker drones, crawling over Martian soil like giant beetles. In front, they consumed dirt, stone, dust. Behind them, like a snail trail, a road was slowly laid.

“Of course, once the Machine Threat awoke it snatched up the drones, leaving the habitations almost complete. Earth was able to send labourers to finish the job.” Dr. Judd paused and loosened his tie. The windows had been opaqued so that they could see the holo more easily, but already Alex could hear someone snoring at the back. The quiet squeaking sounds of gum being chewed rose over the hum of the projector.

“You haven’t answered my question, though,” Judd finally said. “Why are the roads dead straight?”

Psy-Clones - The Machine Threat

In my imagined future world, there is an AI operating out in Pluto's orbit. It's basically a human-built AI that put two fingers up at humanity and now sends machines to destroy us. I'm really amused by the idea that the biggest threat is something we ourselves create.

Other characters: Alex is possibly my main character's name. He's seventeen in this story, a relatively weak psychic. Hendricks is a researcher at Mars Base 3 and Alex's mentor in non-psychic research.

The Machine Threat

“In the mid twentieth century, mankind rejoiced as we gave birth to our greatest achievement: true AI. It was hailed as an end to infighting, a unifying force for humanity and, in the event, it was.” Hendricks paused and sipped his coffee. “Just not in the way we envisaged.”

Alex put the remains of his sandwich down. “How so?”

“Jeez, don’t they teach you anything at school these days?” Hendricks tutted and shook his head. “You know what AI is, right? I mean, we have one here at MB3.” 

Alex nodded.

“We’d just come to the end of a decade of war. Resources were getting slim, but technology doesn’t stop improving. It was a combined international research team, with a crapload of private funding, that managed to get the resources together and ship them into space.”

Psy-Clones - The Psy Ops

These are all largely working titles for now. I might come up with something far better, probably will, and when that happens I'll track back through and edit things like this.

Anyway; the state of play on Earth, and on its colonies on Luna and Mars, is that the regular police force has been supplemented with specialised psychic troops whose main mission is to find awoken psychics.

The Psy Ops - known as the PO to most - are specially trained psychics. They fall into the middle group of gradings at Mars Base 3; those too weak to go on active duty on the front lines, but strong enough to withstand training and the predation of their classmates. Officially, they exist to bring in sixteen-year-olds who have manifested psychic powers. Everyone with psychic gifts must be registered at Mars Base 3 school where they will be trained and monitored. They have immunity from prosecution and the power to enter any home. They are generally not corrupt, however; MB3 does a good job of weeding out those who are not loyal. They also gather information on dissenters, machine sympathisers, and ensure that they are brought to justice.

There are POs in every city on Earth, in the slums on Luna and in both Mars Bases 1 and 2.

POs are dressed in black leather with reflective helmets. They wield small pulse rifles, designed to fire a ball of plasma which can be tuned to stun or kill.

Group: The Psy Ops (POs)

It wasn’t even dawn when they crashed through the front door. None of us were up; I got to the top of the stairs about the same time Dad came out, dressing-gown flapping out behind him. There were men downstairs, in the hall. Shouting.

Something itched at the back of my brain. I crept down the stairs and peeked around the wall. There were three men in black, two of them wearing helmets that had curved mirrors hiding their faces. The third had short black hair and a scar down the right side of his face. All three had small guns.

“What the blazing hell d’you think you’re doing?” 

Universal Remote

This one's a bit silly, but I've put it up because it served as a writing exercise. This isn't a finished story, isn't something that I will edit, but it's an idea nonetheless.

Mum came in and snatched the remote.

“Hey!” I shouted, making a grab for it.

She kept it out of arm’s reach. “You shouldn’t watch so much, you know,” she fussed. “Rots the mind. There’s a world out there. You should get some fresh air.”

I turned and stared out of the window. It had been howling a gale all day and raindrops splattered onto the glass, giving everything a melted look. As I watched, one lonely passerby was battling to reach the bus shelter, clutching an inside-out umbrella.

“Have you seen the weather-“ I began, but she was already gone, taking the remote with her. I flumped back down into the armchair and stared at the screen. “So unfair,” I muttered.

040 - Rated

Another Eve and Tic story. This one developed the idea that Eve lives in a post-human world, a place where we, as the Antecedents, left some of our technology and our iconography, and that's about it. I really like this idea; I've read a couple of things set in this kind of post-human world and they're always fascinating. I love new, fantasy-inspired, looks at current technology. It's also handy to clear another of the 100 themes off the list. This project's hanging around like nothing else.

040 – Rated

Sprinting for the inner chamber, Eve gasped out “Tic, what’s ahead?” Her boots echoed off the stone walls, undoubtedly announcing her presence to von Due, but that didn’t matter now. There was some sort of vivid blue light emanating from the doorway at the end of the corridor: it could already be too late. A humming sound was getting louder the closer she got.

“I’m only picking up the energy ahead; it’s masking everything else,” Tic warbled. “It’s like staring into the sun- eek!” Suddenly he was frozen in mid-air, lightning crackling over him as he screeched in agony, and then he dropped to the floor, motionless.

As Eve turned to look at what had happened, she tripped over something hidden in the darkness and tumbled headlong into the chamber ahead. Slid to a stop at the foot of a short flight of steps.

As she opened her eyes and looked around, head throbbing, she took in the murals on the walls. There were pictures of lightning and the Antecedent hieroglyph for danger; a flash of white in amongst the blue at the top of the stairs drew her gaze and she staggered to her feet. The noise in here was loud, a hum as loud as that which the College’s own experiments with amber and lightning produced. In here, though, was none of the machinery and looping cables they used. All was stone and dust.

At the top of the stairs a large hole had been cut into the ceiling, a rope hanging down from it. Two torches, their light barely able to be noticed through the dazzle. A dark shadow stood in front of a small niche carved into the wall, in which a silvery object was suspended as if by sorcery. It was from here that the blue light was emanating. The shadow turned, all features lost in the brilliance of the light, and then it took a step towards her, details coming in to focus. The black coat. The suit. The gold pocketwatch, the black wooden cane, the carefully-trimmed white moustache and beard. The eyes that glittered like diamonds.

Katze von Due had beaten her.

Eve and Tic again - The Ten Thousand Year Clock

I've been listening to Stuff You Should Know Podcast through from the beginning, so I'm somewhat behind. There's a good one though, on the 10,000 year clock. It's a lovely idea, essentially that we might one day not be here as a civilisation but there will definitely be something left behind to prove that we were here.

It helped crystallise a thought I've been having recently with both the world of Poisonroot and the Eve and Tic stories, and my wonderful wife helpfully added another facet to it: what if the continent of Ehrian is something like a Pangaea continent, ten thousand years in the future? I appreciate that it wouldn't be time for the continents to actually move, but certainly time for a mass extinction event to have forever changed the face of the planet and for technology to have changed, evolved, moved on from its current wasteful ways. And then Sue suggested that I could use this as a way of including real scientific fact, or inventions, from now as seen through the eyes of Eve and Tic.

So I got straight to it and wrote this. I'd love to submit it to the guys at Stuff You Should Know; they seem like awesome people and it'd be just amazing to get a mention.

Eve and the 10,000 Year Clock

The ticking echoed through the shaft, bouncing off the smooth rock. It was a massive noise, metal and stone clicking together with each shuddering second, and the entire effect was unsettling.

“I don’t like it,” Tic murmured. He was floating as close to Eve’s ear as he could, the tiny purring of his flight barely audible over the clock’s slow heartbeat.

Eve put her hand out flat at about shoulder height and Tic quickly settled on it. Still looking carefully at the mural in front of her, she transferred him to the top of her backpack, leant against the wall.

“This is some sort of blueprint,” Eve said. “Look, here; some of the things we would recognise from clockwork are right here.” She started to point at parts of the diagram. “There are chimes, a winding mechanism, weights for powering it… but if I’m reading this right, it’s massive.”

“It sounds massive,” Tic said. “But why is it here?”

100 Themes 035 - Hold My Hand

A love story, this time, and taking the theme completely literally this time. I really enjoyed writing this one and it's something I'm sure I'll return to. I know a lot of things have been set on Mars but I tried for a slightly different idea here.
Edit: My wife (who has an excellent blog over here) has suggested I make a sequel to this, continue the story. It's swilled around in my head for a couple of weeks and I think I have a solution. It's going to be a bit of an homage but I think I can pull it off.

100 Themes 028 - Sorrow

Another piece for the failed NaNo entry. Meela, as a character, stayed in, as did Richard from the previous Theme.

100 Themes 027 - Foreign

This was originally designed to be a taster piece for my NaNoWriMo 2011 work. Ultimately, I didn't like that and never completed it. It will definitely come here as a short piece, though; it deserves to be finished.


The setting is somewhat more sci-fi than most of my stuff, too; perhaps I tried too much change all at once. Anyway, here it is! This and the next few of the 100 Themes were for NaNo, but obviously with different focuses.

The Grass is Always Greener

I've moved to this blog for my writing, as the previous one was focussed entirely on one project, whereas I've produced a lot more than that over the last year and a bit. So this blog will be dedicated to all my writing, and also for typing up things I've learned through writing.




To get things going, here's a short story that I'm trying to get published. It starts in a decidedly rural setting, but soon descends into a mix of sci-fi, mild horror and a keen thread of black comedy.