Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: General Battuta on December 14, 2009, 01:10:00 am
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I am putting together my submissions for this year's Dell Magazine Awards. The winner gets published (sorta) by a real, honest-to-god, top-flight, high-reputation science fiction magazine. Last time I applied I made it up to second place.
Help me keep going! Encouragement, critique, reactions, I don't give a crap. Just make me keep putting words down.
This is my first start for this year. The problem I am having with this story is with the psychology. I have to create this whole hackneyed construct where the Firewall residents are bad at desensitization. I think instead I will just use simple combat stress. Tell me about combat stress!
untitled one
In the cherry-colored imminence just before dawn, the MAST team crowns Bordola township with a circlet of gunships.
Feigning curiosity, Ranvier watches the quarantine go up, the town and the gunships made surreal in the bleached green tincture of night vision goggles he borrowed from the gear of a temporarily dead lieutenant. Ranvier does not like this business, but his disgust is buried deep in a casket built of InSec conditioning. His own feelings on the matter of quarantines and purges are secondary to the needs of his assumed persona. He is who he must be: Ranvier, civilian observer, ingenue from behind the Firewall. Here to rubber-stamp the ongoing effectiveness of MAST Six Two Six.
The gunships circle at five kilometers. They fire salvoes of red flares into the grass around the town, marking the quarantine line. Somewhere in that village of six thousand, people are waking up, rubbing sleep from their eyes, groggily parsing the red wildfire glow that rings their home. Ranvier wagers that inside one minute the panic will begin.
Shortly after that, the MAST teams will have to shoot people. It is inevitable. Ranvier needs to see this happen. His mission is to figure out why they are still shooting people, and more importantly, how. He is clear on step B of the process, from trigger pull to bullet impact. It is step A, from the order through the trigger pull, the part that happens inside a soldier's head, that he is interested in.
The whisper of a footstep behind Ranvier: dry grass snapping under the tread of a boot. In spite of a proximity sense honed by years of training and no small measure of technology, he allows himself no reaction. When Major Vauban touches his shoulder, he startles, the reflex as convincingly spinal as a patient kicking beneath a doctor's mallet.
The grip on his shoulder firms up. You can tell a lot from a reaction like that, Ranvier knows. Some people flinch away from fear, because they know that fear is a prelude to aggression. Others - rare people, command people - clamp down on fear and ride it out. These are the kind of people who break wild horses and keep terrified soldiers in line.
"Easy there," the Major says. "I didn't mean to interrupt. Would you like to watch our sweep from inside the TOC? I think a few of my people would love to show off." His fingers are strong and sure, and they squeeze once before release, as if to leave firm paternal fingerprints on Ranvier's malleable civilian shoulder blade.
In another age, Ranvier decides, Vauban would have been a Caesar: born a warrior, made a king. Or, to draw from another extinct influence - this man had the mandate of Heaven. He fumbles with the night-vision headset, stripping it off over ragged lank hair. "This is all very impressive, Major Vauban," he says - breathlessly, excitedly, oh so deceptively young. The body he wears is barely out of its twenties. "Are you sure I wouldn't miss anything from inside the - the talk, you call it?"
"Tactical operations center," Vauban explicates, his grin self-deprecating. "The military loves its acronyms. And I can assure you, Mr. Ranvier, that you will see very little from out here. The TOC integrates data from our gunships, helicopters, satellites, and soldiers into a single coherent picture."
"Is that so?" Ranvier opens his eyes wide with frank curiosity. He wishes that he had possessed the forethought to be a woman on this mission; unless Vauban is gay or very paternalistic, a female body would suit these tactics better. "I was under the impression that information technology was restricted on this side of the Firewall. With the obvious exception of your neural safeguard system, of course."
"Restriction breeds innovation, Mr. Ranvier." Cocky half-smile, hands holstered in pockets like a gunfighter waiting to draw. Vauban has weaponized his body. "Shall we?"
"Lead on, Major."
He follows the dun digital checkers of Vauban's battle dress uniform into the TOC: prefab huts and canvas pulled like a scab over the bloody red light of field monitors and the sussurance of tactical chatter.
"TOC, Vampire Two-One." A gunship calling. "Four foot-mobiles approaching perimeter, grid hotel hotel six one."
Ranvier gets a chill, an honest-to-God old-fashioned chill, all the way from the base of his spine up through his scalp. He is from inside the Firewall, as all these soldiers once were. La-la land, paradise, The Bubble. They grow up soft inside the Firewall. Violent death is an uneasy thing.
A woman with a shining bald scalp and brutalist cheekbones whispers into a throat mic. "Vamp Two-One, TOC, sonic the targets, over."
Major Vauban nudges Ranvier and points him towards a hive of flatscreens dangling from a hinged frame like a carbonized orrery. The monitors take their feed from the lively gunship's sensors: black and white thermal like a pre-war noir piece, green numerals and codes baked into the surface of the image like something bacterial. Four tiny people run across open fields away from the town. Ranvier sees pigtails on the littlest one.
"Sonics on."
"We're warning them to turn back," Vauban explains. His arms are loose at his sides, his stance casual. He nods at a corporal who glances his way. Calm seems to pool off him.
Ranvier's stomach is knotted. The family on the screen must think they can slip out in the dark, unseen, unaware. The sonics are very focused and very powerful: when they hit all four tiny figures fall into the grass, beating at their ears, trying to shut out a voice from God that resonates in the bones of their skulls. GO BACK TO YOUR HOMES, the voice will boom. YOUR TOWN IS BEING SWEPT FOR VIRALS. IF YOU ARE CLEAN, YOU WILL BE BROUGHT TO SAFETY. GO BACK TO YOUR HOMES.
Ranvier tries not to think about the little one with the pigtails. Like the soldiers around him, like most of the seven billion people who live outside the Firewall, these people are wearing safeguard trawls - they would not be potential viral vectors otherwise. But the fact that they are potentially contaminated means they will never be resurrected. If they die, they are lost.
"How's the rest of the perimeter?" Vauban asks.
"Green-green-green-green-green," the calls come back.
"Smooth."
One of the tiny figures bolts, away from the village, towards the ring of red flares. A long scarf or blanket trails behind him, her, it - an adult, at least, an irrational mercy to Ranvier. Activity explodes across the TOC. "We've got a runner," the gunship calls, electronically flat, intensely unaffected.
The woman with the brutalist cheekbones hesitates, mouth pursed around the first syllable of the hardest thing she has been trained to say.
"Nail that ****er," Vauban cajoles her. The camaraderie of obscenity. The easy dehumanization of the little thermal blob on the flatscreen.
For just a moment Ranvier's perfect cover rebels, and then he has the surge of nausea locked down tight in the place where he keeps all his morals and memories and other complicated dangerous things.
"Weapons free," the woman with the headset says. "Vampire Two-One, weapons free, sanction all of the targets."
"Vampire-Two One copies, cleared hot, engaging by thermal, target is one-zero-five meters minus quarantine, time is oh-four-one-six. Twenty millimeter is...loud."
Dust puffs around the tiny running figure like a monochrome eclair. The scarf shreds apart into the blossom of shrapnel and flesh. The gunship walks the stream of shells onto the other three figures and the dust sweeps out to fill the screen.
"Clean up that image," Vauban murmurs. "Come on, Lieutenant, you've done this a thousand times before."
"Sir!" she says. Her hands are trembling. It takes her a moment to screen the dust out of the picture. Ranvier decides to look away before he can discriminate dust from body parts.
"Was that strictly necessary?" he asks Vauban. "To kill all four of them?"
"No," Vauban says. "But it was the best call. If she was a viral, the whole family likely was. Captain Cunningham, please signal the Ospreys to begin the sweep."
The woman with the headset, the one who talks to the gunships, has started crying silently onto her keyboard.
Ranvier pounces on his chance. "Major," he asks. "Is that woman all right?"
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The Bordola sweep is still ongoing, six hours later, when Ranvier finally sits down to interview Lieutenant Tamara Cheyhard. She is calm, her eyes almost empty in a way that speaks to Ranvier of a recent emotional release. Major Vauban packed her off to the medics immediately after her breakdown, quietly frustrating Ranvier with his noble insistence that she be given time and space to compose herself.
"Lieutenant Cheyhard has been clearing gunship kills for nearly nine months," he had said. "I think you can appreciate how difficult that becomes. You do not become 'desensitized' in a job like this; you become exhausted, disillusioned, or sick. You feel personally responsible for every potentially innocent person you have killed. Lieutenant Cheyhard has lasted longer than most. She deserves a moment under no one's scrutiny but her own. We all need moments like that, don't you think, Mr. Ranvier?"
Stonewalling, in the most benevolent and protective way. Ranvier's senses had screamed to him, for the first time since his arrival with the Six Two Six: this man is hiding something.
And now, finally, time alone with Lieutenant Cheyhard. The first soldier to betray some sign of the psychological stress Ranvier is hunting for.
An involuntary eidetic flash of the briefing, brought churning to the surface by semantic association even though the memory was two bodies and eleven days old: we need to know why MAST Team Six Two Six suffers no psychological casualties. We are concerned that Major Vauban has implemented unethical protocols amongst his command. We are concerned that MAST Six Two Six may have suffered viral contamination of a new and subtle kind.
Ranvier folds himself into a canvas chair across a dented wooden table from Lieutenant Cheyhard. She looks back at him with blank disinterest. Her remarkable cheekbones buttress a plain face of uncertain origin. Her body is custom-built, military-issue, grown in a vat rather than in a womb. She has been killed in action recently, Ranvier deduces; her skin is too baby-smooth to be more than a few months out of vat.
Metastatic Advance Sear Team members are, without exception, fitted with neural trawls that rip an image of the brain once a day. These scans are transmitted to mobile servers, hauled in the thunderously well-armored infantry fighting vehicles that tail the helicopters and gunships. In the event of a terminal event (oh, the euphemism, elevated so perilously close to art by the military complex), the soldier's personality, memories, and neural pathways are flashed to a waiting clone. She had been, for all intents and purposes, given her own Easter. Some had, in the later days of the twenty-second century, protested that a vital component of the human being was lost along the way. Ranvier supposed that people had once worried about losing important humours during surgery, too.
There had been a time when very nearly everyone on Earth had worn a neural trawl. That brief hiatus from mortality had lasted fifteen years before the first virals began their quiet dissemination through the human population. Six months later, the first strain of Seywald-Tang 2191 had gone live, and twenty-five thousand inhabitants of upper-class Dubai had merged into a ferociously organized and perfectly homicidal hive. They were not zombies. They retained the consciousness and cognition of a normal human being. Someone had simply rewritten their goals and the means they were willing to use to achieve them.
Seventy-five years later. There are no neural trawls inside the Firewall: fifty million people gathered in defensible islands of civilization, fortress cities. The viruses are latent in the remainder of the human population, seven billion scraping an existence from rust and ruin. The Firewall sanctuaries are reclaiming as many communities as they can. The imperative is to save lives, before starvation and disease lead to total demographic collapse. But each reclamation is a messy, lethal process. Quarantine one community at a time. Sweep for viral. Pull the trawls from the clean; kill the infected.
MAST teams run the dual risk of physical death and infection. But they are not fundamentally limited by any of the factors that once restricted warfare. Clone bodies are plentiful. Food, ammunition, medical supplies are all abundant: with their tiny populations and vast industrial bases, the Firewall enclaves produce a surplus. Fuel is a non-issue: the military is the only major consumer of petroleum fuel products. The only limit to the operations of MAST teams is the psychological endurance of the soldiers.
yeargh I shall continue in the morn
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Nice !!! Graphic , clear, pulls the reader into it.
But is it me or mostly all sci-fi stories have end of the world, death dealing catasrophies so to speak :p
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For some reason I thought this topic would be about avoiding mental breakdown and HLPers playing psychiatrist. :p
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Fargh. I am lying in bed thinking about this story and I feel the scope is too big. All this military sound and fury. Perhaps I could find a way to tell a similar idea with a smaller cast; most of my best stories in the past have been kind of locked-room dramas with only two or three major characters.
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For some reason I thought this topic would be about avoiding mental breakdown and HLPers playing psychiatrist. :p
Yeah, I was almost a little bit disappointed to find something far more standard. :p
A very engaging story; I can't help but think that you took at least a bit of inspiration from a certain recent thread. The in media res followed by a more fleshed-out explanation was an effective technique for this sort of thing. I'm not really much for creative criticism, but from a more technical standpoint, I did have one or two issues with word choice...said issues being that I actually had to look up one or two words, which tends to be a fairly uncommon thing based on my generally-broad vocabulary. "Eidetic" was the most egregious offender. :p And even when I didn't have to look them up, there were a few instances where the word choice seemed overly-obscure. I'm not suggesting that you tone things down to a fifth-grade reading level, but perhaps using a few less-esoteric synonyms might help the text flow better.
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As far as I know combat stress / fatigue generally over sensatise somebody to external influences. Repeated exposure to combat and a disciplined mind however can make you ice cold. Getting the heating back on however is a bit tricky.
My own motivation for you is 'keep going or i'll make a BP spinoff campaign voice acted featuring only the Orestes which will involve you to comic effect'.
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I'll need to chew on it for a bit before I can form a quality response. That said I am intrigued.
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I'm not the best person for literary critique, but I think you have a pretty unique backstory there, at least the technological singularity via clones part. You definitely have a solid method of writing, putting a decent amount of characterization into such a small piece is hard to do, for which I applaud you. Try lathering it with sensory details, it helps immerse the reader in the setting.
Keep going, I want more! :P
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I'm worried about those last four paragraphs. I realise you need to show us the world this story takes place in, but all that exposition clumped together kind of junks the pacing. You might be better served by either spreading it out a bit more evenly or finding a way to feed it to us through the main narrative.
It's a really solid premise, though. Good luck with the Dell Awards!
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Agreed, it's an 'orrible infodump.
Probably why I lost momentum.
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The backstory you've got there could almost be applied to a novel. You've really thought out the fine details, and the writing is superb... I really can't offer any unique suggestions... Count another reader hooked, and good luck with the award!