From the Desk of a Writing Ronin

Grr. Argh. Can’t focus on story when distracted. Bad draft going here for now so I can hate it and make it more cohesive later. Based on an iO9 writing prompt with this image:

The creaking noises that accompanied the late-night mechanical movements of the USS Lusitania moaned louder and louder into Nimoy’s ears as the hour grew late. With each passing moment, he felt as if he could identify the individual components making each sound, feeling the pulsing breath of the spaceship move with every beat.

He wished he couldn’t. He needed every ounce of his mental capacity to solve the problem before him, not to tell him more about the ships he’d designed. He sighed and lowered his head to the table, wondering if maybe just a little sleep might provide the answers…

…But then a new sound came to him: Boots, leather, and dangling metal, mixed with the smell of polish and a recent shave. He sighed and propped himself up, creaking his aged shoulders and trying to remember which branch of the Armed Forces preferred this particular type of boot. Too light for Marines, too heavy for Navy…

The bulkhead to his cabin unlocked, then opened, as a black-suited young man stepped through. Nimoy grunted. Of course. “Intelligence.”

“You here to whisk me away spook, or threaten my family?” The old shipmaker growled. “Because the last time you tried the latter one, Your bosses discovered that they shouldn’t threaten the man who designs the hidey-holes on their Indictor-Class starships.”

The Intelligence agent paused, holding up his hands. Nimoy took the moment to glance him over quickly, appraising the formal uniform, the holstered sidearm, and the file he carried at his side. Of course, just an errand boy. He almost felt bad for accusing him. The young man raised his hands, one of them bearing the ID of a low-level spook codenamed “Stewart.” “I’m simply on an errand, Mister Levitz.”

Nimoy looked back down and tried to ignore him. “If it’s a delivery leave it with the ship’s inventory master.”

“We’re the intelligence service, not the postal service, Mister Levitz.” Nimoy had to give the kid credit, he had a quick tongue. “We’re in the business of retrieval and gathering, not delivery.”

But not that much credit. “Go away kid. Go flash your badge somewhere else. I’m busy.” Nimoy went back to his notes, randomly observing that he was more deaf to the ship’s motions now.

“It is your work that I’m here to…educate myself on, mister Levitz.” The young man—-Stewart—-peered at Nimoy’s desk with curiosity.

That bothered Nimoy the most. “Eyes off the prize, kid, before I rip em out. I didn’t get to build that little rockhopper that got you aboard this ship by letting people look at my work.”

He bought that one—at least, Nimoy thought he did. The young man’s uncomfortable shuffling made Nimoy wonder why the spooks would send a kid like him. It put the old man at ease and on edge simultaneously, already burdened by the mysteries on his desk—he didn’t need the mysteries of the Branch that loved to keep them hovering over his head as well.

“I’m here,” the young man said. “To inquire about your…latest contract.”

Nimoy chuckled. “This research expedition, you mean?”

The man nodded. Nimoy pondered the best way to explain. “I guess that doesn’t make a bunch of sense to you intelligence folks, does it? Real research, I mean. Why anyone would take time off from a comfy contract job that paid ten figures to vanish into the black of space?”

“You were…difficult to track down,” Stewart admitted.

Nimoy smiled. “I suppose you could say I’m looking for God.”

Stewart raised an eyebrow at this. “Your file lists you as an avowed Aetheist.”

“You know the old Watchmaker story?” Nimoy asked, glancing at the myriad of charts, papers, and diagrams about his table. “That old logically flawed tale that somehow passes down from generation to generation?”

“You find a watch in the desert, sitting on a rock. You identify the watch as having a creator, given its complexities. The rock, you do not, given how simple it is. The analogy is supposed to assume that a human being, being similarly complex, also has a creator.”

Nimoy arched an eyebrow. “The way you put it, I’d say it sounds like you’re an atheist too.”

“Spent too much time in the black to assume otherwise.”

Nimoy nodded. “Well then, let me ask you. What happens when you stumble through the desert, and instead of finding a clock, you find a giant set of gears?”

Stewart frowned. “Then…by the theological argument…you’ve found the watchmaker’s components…so you’d be looking at human arms, or organs?”

The boy had a wild imagination. Nimoy liked that. Still wrong though, still stupid, but he could work with that. “No, my boy, you’d wonder what they made, and what they fueled.”

He flicked on a holographic display and began pulling up images. “CASEY, please show Intel Officer Stewart what we’ve been working on.”

A soft humming came to life as a the display came to life. The intelligence officer narrowed his eyes. “Actual gears? But….wait.” his eyes flicked across the display. “What is this? A concept rendering? Are you designing some—-“

“No m’boy,” Nimoy grinned. “I came out to the black of space and found something the likes of which you’ll never see in your offices back on Earth…”

The image showed a planet orbiting a mid-sized star, with image displays of the surface revealing a city built on gear-like foundations—unlike other, long-abandoned planets found throughout the cosmos, this one glowed with life.

Stewart was taken aback. “But…if this isn’t human…then first contact protocols need to be invoked, the articles of design need to be referenced, the Council itself—-“

“So that men older than myself may poke at the existence of foreign life? That we may debate the issues and ethics of first contact? To put it bluntly my boy, I’m not interested in that.” Nimoy sat back in his chair and watched the hologram. “I must confess, as silly as it sounds, I’m more interested in the watchmaker here than the watch.”

“What?”

Nimoy pointed to the gears. “You stare at the fires, and the buildings, and the life below, but for once I granted the rare opportunity to see how life connects—-literally, in this case. And here, I need to find out what it fuels. I need to find out why someone would create a city like this.”

“I need to know why the gears are turning.”

Where to begin?

I will now allow thirty seconds for you to find me and punch me in that face for that joke.

…Thirty…

….Twenty…

…Ten…

…Five…

….Okay time’s up. Thank you for not punching me in the face. Unless you did, well then thank you for continuing to read my work, which I must start with humor here for I approach…treacherous territory.

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Blech. I kind of hate vacation.

No, actually, I think I kind of hate summer. Summer’s never been a fun time for me. Most people go to the beach, have BBQs, wear swimsuits and look fantastic. I spend hours putting on sunblock so I don’t burn, put on layers of clothing despite the heat and sweat it out either in the fields or (when I was younger) at some summer camp I couldn’t fit in at.

Exotic vacations haven’t exactly been extremely affordable since I didn’t come from a rich family, and since all of us had to work summers were just times in between the periods I would be doing something really productive with my life—the school years, or the transitions from one point to another. So I’ve never bought into the “freedom” part of it, even when I was glad to be out of school, and I’ve bought into the “let’s all go to the beach and have fun in the sun!” even less.

So, summers—and vacation times in general—-are often points where I have to stop and think. To sit up on a high perch and flip a knife over and over in my hands, waiting for something to happen. My whole world’s stopped because everyone’s off celebrating, and I can’t make myself excessively productive. And truth be told, when vacation time swings around, I usually do need some kind of rest. Despite everything I’ve tried, I’m not exactly a god. Just a man who gets tired and needs a break the same as everyone else does.

But I recharge fast—give me a day, maybe two of real honest relaxing, and I’ll be back on my feet in no time. Problem is, the rest of the world isn’t, and I’m just left surrounded by silence.

Yeah, silence. Not the fun Silence either, that looks like creepy uncanny valley aliens and wants to ask a question based on a bad pun. The kind of silence where you sit at your desk and go “well now what?” as you gaze at an open internet browser and wonder what you should do. Find a job? Watch a funny video? Write something? The problem is, all of the above are correct answers, and there’s no real objective for you to meet.

The silence makes you sleepy. It makes you gaze out the window at a beautiful day and forget for a second that the planet is spinning at thousands of miles an hour. That’s nice, for a little bit. But if you’re like me, you grow anxious. You start to feel the spin again, and you feel the aching in your bones—the urge to just do something.

But you can’t, because there’s hand forcing you to stop. You can’t, because all your friends are off relaxing while you’re ready to get back in the game. You can’t, because according to the world, this is the time to stop—-and breathe.

I got told earlier this year I needed to become comfortable with the silence. I’m plenty comfortable with it. I just wish it didn’t last so friggin’ long.

So if the silence bugs me, you’d figure I want to hear the noise right?

….Wrong.

I’m not fond of the noise. Not noise in general, mind you, I’m actually very fond of sound, and sound as a concept. Sound is cool, sound is dynamic, moving, changing, and flowing. Sound is the shifting noises as you pass from one room to another, as you change environments, goals, objectives, that’s sound. Noise is something else.

Noise is what people try to fill silence with, but it has no meaning. Noise is what a lot of people find fun, and that’s all right with me. Everyone’s got the right to pursue happiness, and if that’s what they want, then hey, who am I to stop them?

…but I just don’t like the noise.

I’m not fond of loud speakers, crashing sounds and screaming people. Well, I am, of course, when it’s a great concert, but not when the point is to distort the sound and meld it into noise—to break down all the barriers and just create a wall that destroys all thought and triggers pure pleasure centers in the brain. To most people, it’s fun. To me, it’s destructive, obnoxious, and boring.

Remember how I talked about sound earlier? Go somewhere that’s not a padded room and listen for a few minutes. Sound is dynamic and changing. It shifts almost on a minute-to-minute basis, and it’s absolutely incredible that our brains can perceive so much of it without going utterly mad—we hear it, and depending on our emotions, select out the most important parts of it. Some of us will listen to all of it, identifying all the information we need, and others just tune it out, listening for one thing in particular.

That dynamism, that choice, that’s what I thrive on. To process multiple incoming variables and factors, and to make decisions on them on a second-to-second basis. Go left, go right, duck, shift weight, problem solve, accomplish goals, save the freaking world—all on a normal walk on a normal day.

But during vacations, during “down time?” People want to take that away. People want to either sit with no decisions to make, or drown out their senses with noise and alcohol. That’s fine, I got no problem with most folks doing that—but it’s not for me.

Yet, here I am. Sitting around for a week with two options on the schedule before me: Silence and Noise. 

It makes…a void. A void where I don’t feel like I’m getting anything done, like I can’t get anything done. Like my options have been taken away from me and all I can do is just wait. Even any small attempts at productivity are undercut by an inability to build teams, bounce ideas off other people or find any way to get things done in a big picture sense.

In a perfect world—a world I’ll hopefully be able to build myself one day, I’ll get to have a choice about when I’m dealing with silence and noise, and who knows, maybe I’ll want it a bit more. One day, I can walk away from them with no problem. 

…but right now I can’t. Right now I’ve got to sit here, and not just listen to the silence or be drowned out by the noise, but feel like an outsider for not enjoying it. There’s a handful of us who don’t play these games, but still. I’m sitting on a rooftop, watching the party on the street below, and I know if I talk to any of the people down there, they’ll ask me why I’m not enjoying myself.

I’m not entirely sure why. I just….don’t. And somehow I feel wrong for that.

…..

I’m not wrong of course. Just like they’re not wrong for enjoying themselves.

There’s a thousand socio-economic reasons for these cycles. People do need rest, and different institutions and infrastructures have different means for allotting it. People who don’t have as much awareness and perception of their psyche like some of us need it, because otherwise they wouldn’t know when and how to safely stop.

But me, I’m waiting for the sound. I’m waiting for the sound of an engine revving to life, the sound of a text message coming in on the wire, the sound of a problem needing to be solved, of a job needing to be done, of a person crying out for help, of someone who wants to see me. 

Give me a thousand sounds and a thousand pieces of information to suss out. Give me a thousand stories and a thousand souls all needing something. Put my back against the wall, put a ticking clock on my head and throw the odds against me, because that’s where I thrive. 

Because in there, you’ll find no silence or noise. You’ll find me, playing the sound at the center.

Where I said I’d received no recognition for my writing, and therefore I clearly had no cause to give advice on it?

Well I guess that’s a lie. I seem to have won this Park Writing Award thing for my action adventure script about steampunk cowboys and Nikola Tesla’s giant robot.

It could be worse I suppose.

It could be about Nikola Tesla’s giant…..dog.

Either way, I think Cap basically describes how I feel.

Also, random thought, Cap REALLY likes jumping over things. 

So I’m gonna write some fiction.

His name was Io. He was born sixteen years ago under the light of the twin moons, Iris and Solipsia. Solipsia, the light of his people, shined brightest when he gave his first cry, so his Mom and Dad, being like ordinary parents, took it as a sign that he was meant for great things.

When he was young, Io took to scrambling about the village bridges, jumping from platform to platform, clueless to the possible results of a 2,000 feet fall to the cliffside below. Learning the rhythm of his body, he would jump, roll and swing from building to building, oblivious to the cries of his Grandmother, who was surprised to see her raven-haired grandson swinging by window of her jewel-red house.

He knew the ins and outs of every rope swing and bridge around his little village that hung out of the cliffside. Ignoring the Chieftan’s orders and his Grandmother’s pleas, he would spend his childhood and teenage years finding new ways to fling, swing and dash his way from surface to surface, growing more daring with every years as he grew more bored with his old territory.

At present, he was nowhere bored, not so much recalling those simple days of his childhood, but considering the rapid and imminent danger around him. Today, Io was not playing. He wasn’t laying out on the top of the village, taking in the desert sun against his tanned sin, he wasn’t hanging upside down to stare at the pretty girls as they left the schoolhouse, and he wasn’t escaping bullies after dumping water on them from three stories up.

Today, Io’s village was dying, and he was running for his life.

He got a glimpse of his grandmother’s house one last time as the thing attacking his village shrieked a piercing screeching sound and tore into cliffside. Rocks fell and tumbled the walls where his Grandmother had baked Uguam pies for all the people of the village and somewhere in Io’s mind it occured to him that those rocks fell on his Grandmother too.

But he had no time to dwell. He coasted past the falling debris and kicked his way onto a pulley system, designed to haul goods from the lower levels to the upper ones—instead of riding boxes of crates as he usually did, Io clung to the rope for the dear life as he was launched upward—not to safety, but to another set of bridges, ones that weren’t destroyed yet.

Another screech rang in the night, and as Io sprang upward he could see bits of the surface of the creature reflecting off the torchlight of the upper levels. Here, the men of the village ran about, shouting at each other and tossing supplies, heading deeper into the cliffside. 

“TO THE TUNNEL, TO THE TUNNEL!” they shouted, not bothering to look at the beast below. Io, winded from the escape from his bedroom, stumbled off the lift and into the path. One man—his uncle Joth, spun in recognition. “Hey—-Io, Io! Come on, we’ve got to go!”

Io shifted his weight, but before he could take a step, a giant gleaming piece of the creature burst out of the bridge in front of him, and he scrambled to grab on to one of the bridge’s supports. “Uncle Joth!” He shouted, unable to move. “HELP!”

The piece cleared, and Joth stood at the other side of the torn bridge, staring helplessly at the gap before him. Io could see his eyes widening, and he wondered if they shared the same thought: That with the bridge down, there was no way for Io to get to the tunnels.

Joth closed his eyes, muttered a small prayer, and reached for his belt. “Io, here!” With the arm of a seasoned spear-thrower, he heaved a small metal object across the cliff. Io reached out and caught it, feeling the cold, unknown metal slip into his hand like it belonged. As it did, something strange happened. His ring—-a ring of his people that everyone in the village wore—-started to glow. He frowned and looked up to Joth. “What is this supposed to do?”

“It’ll get you to the safehouse in Chronopolis!” Joth grabbed on to the railings as the village shook again, and the wood began to crack. “You can walk there once you reach the desert plateau. It’s gonna be a long walk, but if anyone can make it it’ll be you.”

The creature screamed again, and Io felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He clutched his red scarf tighter as the dust blew around, briefly losing sight of his uncle. And image flashed to him briefly, of his parents crumbling with the dust and wood around them, falling to the valley below. Heart beating fast, he shouted back. “What about Mom and Dad?”

Joth grinned. “Already safe in the tunnels. Don’t worry kid—they’ll be waiting for you.”

“They’ll be waiting for you in Chronpolis.”

Another shriek—the creature had finished claiming the lower village. Joth pointed up to the top of the cliff. “You’d better get going!” When Io didn’t move, Joth began to scream. “NOW KID, NOW!”

Io turned and ran, breathing harder than he ever had before, dust and wood and splinters tearing into his face. He jumped, scrambled and climbed, fingers gripping on every surface as he could as he climbed and climbed and climbed—-

It was a race for the top, but even as the creature blasted through the schoolhouse, the town hall, and the Den, he could see it coming ever closer. If he could get to the top, he might be safe. If he could get to the top…

He nearly died. During one jump, he leapt a jump too far, and felt his heart accelerate as the rooftop slid away from him. Then, the creature’s body lashed upward again, and he found himself bashed by the debris. Caught in the blur of rock, rubble, metal, bone, sand, flesh and storm, he soared upward through the air.

At the peak, he could see Iris and Solipsia gazing down at him—but their gaze only caught him for a moment. He fell down, down, down and all he could think was that he couldn’t bear to look at the village again—-

But he didn’t fly past the village. He landed at the top of the cliff, bashing into the hard dirt of the desert like the debris around him. As the wreckage of his hometown rained down, Io turned his gaze up, and for a fleeting second, he saw the sweeping shape of the beast flying past, wings soaring up in the sky and hawk beak wrenching the old iron bridge up with it. The bridge came flying dangerously close, and as the screaming metal and tearing iron whaled toward Io…

He passed out.

The warmth of the desert sun woke Io up.

He felt it scorching on his face, turning his wounds hot and baking his blood. He groaned and shifted, fighting his tired, hurting muscles and trying to stand up. After a few moments of dizziness and blurred eyesight, he found himself on his feet, staggering through the wreckage.

Io looked to the sun and squinted—-noon. Maybe afternoon, since it was midyear. The desert winds would be blowing fast this year, meaning he could expect a sandstorm or two on his journey. He drew his scarf close around his mouth in anticipation and raised his hood, finding small join in that the debris had done little damage to his tomato-red robe.

As he walked, dozens of thoughts passed his mind—of his parents, his family. His surely dead Grandmother, who he knew could sleep through a thundersandstorm, and would not have woken at the danger. But survival took over soon, and he had two thoughts—-Water, and Chronopolis. 

Water was easy. Water he could find anywhere, even in the desert. Io was of the Solipsids. But Chronopolis…

Io arrived at the top of a dune and gazed out. The city was clearly visible in the distance, its silhouette rising above the blue desert sky like a city-in-a-jar, the tall buildings and massive sprawl stretching over miles and miles. Io knew what he saw was deceiving—between the desert’s tricks on the mind, and the sheer size of the city, he knew he had miles to go.

But as he stared at the city, Io could feel the piece of metal Joth had thrown at him shaking in his pocket. He could feel it pulling toward the city. And so, following a shaking metal rock and his Uncle’s words, he lurched toward the city.

Towards Chronopolis.