I wrote something.
Jan. 5th, 2007 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
harahelSo as some of you may know, I recently wrote a novel. Once it's given a few good read throughs from my wonderfully tolerant boyfriend, I have a plan to release it to the rest of you for a raking over the proverbial coals.
I tell you all that to tell you this: last night in the shower, I came up with a charchter I really wanted to add to the novel, but she has no place at all in it. So I figured I'd write up something short and maybe if I write the sequal to the novel that I have in my head, I will work her into it. For now:
Deep in the reaches of a vibrant city, anonymous and hidden: a basement apartment. The passage downward is obscure and few find their way inside. The door is caked with rust and opens only with great protests.
The first thing most people notice is the stench of death and decay. Empty wrappers pile high on the floor, discarded take out boxes fester and broil over with fungi. The only light pulses from the twenty five computer screens that pulse white and cold over the carrion wasteland.
Ten keyboards fan out across the broad work table, papers teeming around them and flowing down the sides. Moving manically between these boards with a speed that should have sent up sparks from her office chair was Fate. Once, she did not have to struggle alone and it was weaving the occupied her capable hands. Now alone, her movements are more frantic, no longer elegant and even deadlier in their accuracy. She smokes almost constantly, clouding the air and leaving a thin veneer of ash on the garbage pile behind her. Long dreadlocks cascade from her head to her sneakered feet. They move manically out of the way, always just managing to miss the spin of a chair wheel that might pin it to the floor.
Normally loud rollicking music would accompany her cigarette and coffee fueled mania, but today the air was still. Fate hummed softly to herself, something faint and old. This place was new to her, only ten years or so and its specific pleasures still gave her days when she wanted to hum. After a century or so, she would be yearn for change and it would wash over her, whisking her to some new place though her work was always the same.
A creak on the stairs made her smile faintly. The footsteps drew near, hesitating at the door as the first curls of stench reached mortal nostrils. Then they tried the lock, knocked. She continued on with her work, not much concerned and typed rapidly onto one screen where numbers danced in a fast scroll. A dull thud signaled the first attempt at forcing the door. Fate could have opened it whenever she wished, but she wasn’t in a hurry today. Besides, people tended to feel better about something if they had to fight for it.
At last the door was breached and the heaving of breath filled the air followed by a hacking cough. She ground out her cigarette on the work table, flicking the butt backward.
“I want to talk to you!” The voice was male, young. “You took her from me!”
She tapped on, not looking, not caring to see.
“I know who you are!” She doubted he had any idea really. “I know that you can bring her back.” She couldn’t. “I know you did this on purpose.”
“What is purpose?”
He winced, the sound of her voice raking over him like nails on a chalk board, but he kept on going.
“All my life I’ve had terrible luck. Parents dying in bizarre accidents, my only brother lost in a war. Every foster home I was put in, horrible things happened. I was raped and tortured, the last leaving me so disfigured that no one in their right mind would want to spend any time with me. I was smart enough to go to an Ivy League college, but I couldn’t even get my high school diploma. I was fired from every job I ever had within a few weeks, sometimes with no reason given at all.
“When I met Maria I was ready to kill myself. She never even kissed me.” He was near sobbing now and Fate sighed, softly to herself. “She was like an angel. Helped me get back on my feet, found me a job I couldn’t be fired from even though it’s boring as hell. And then…just hit by a bus! You weren’t even trying that time.”
He was close now.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Momentarily thrown that his rant had not registered, he struggled to remember what she had asked.
“Purpose is something intended, done with forethought and in this case, malice.” A circle of smooth metal, the end of a gun came to rest on her temple.
“You believe I intended for Maria to be hit by a bus?”
“I do. You sit down here in your shit and stink, but I know who you are. You’re Lady Luck and you’re going to change what you did. Make it right.”
“Who told you this?” She moved over to the next keyboard.
Startled by her sudden motion, the man shot the gun. The bullet hit her in the neck and blood poured from the wound. She did not seem concerned and continued her work.
“What….”
“You said yourself that you know who I am. If you really thought I was a metaphysical construct why would you bring a weapon with you? You cannot harm an idea.”
“The woman, she was like a psychic…she told me that if I came down here I would find out why my luck was bad, that the Lady was behind it all. I figured that you were some kind of witch. I don’t believe in witches or anything archaic…” He trailed off and his gun drifted slowly down. “Who are you?
She sighed, the bullet wound closing slowly up with a soft squelching sound, the blood drying into the lime green hoodie. Squinting, he could probably make out similar stains on sweatshirt and matching sweatpants.
“I am Lamia, the Moirai, Parcae and the Rodyanitse.” Her recitation would have put many character actors to shame, her accent shifting with every appellation. “ I am Manat, Karta and Dekla. I am Gbadu, Nortia, Disen and Hemsut. There are others…in this aspect I am Fate. My sisters have long since been forgotten, absorbed. We are one.”
“Fate.” He stared at her, gun still trembling in his hand. The white light of screens painted shadows on her face and he could not grab hold of her image. First she seemed ancient, then incredibly youthful, a slight tilt and she was surely Asian, another and clearly African. Even her living dreadlocks that moved and swayed gave nothing away, mutating color as they twitched and swung.
“As you would. I prefer an older name, English is such a boring language.”
“You don’t like…being fate?” He shifted slightly, wondering if he should tuck tail and run.
“I am fate, the way you are human.” Her eyes flickered rapidly across a screen. She hit control, alt, delete and it was less satisfying then cutting a string. “I do not have an opinion on the matter.”
“So you did kill Maria.”
“She was hit by a bus. You said so yourself. If you wish to wreck your vengeance, surely it should be on the bus driver.”
“It wasn’t just her!” He was angry again and the gun gestured wildly. “Everything in my life has been plotted against me. Nothing works out. If you’re fate then you’ve dictated all this! Made my life a living hell.”
“Do you think I care for a single life?” She moved again and he had to jump out of the way lest his toes get run over. “I perform my function. Without me, time would cease, no one would die or be born. Stagnation, complete melt down, an apocalypse that no one would notice.”
“Then why has the world plotted against me?”
“If it were a time of gods, I would tell you to search one out, find out who had cursed you, but that time is long past. If it were a time of witches, I would suggest finding one that might have hexed you, but your kind long ago chased them into deep hiding.”
“But the witches and the gods are gone…so what do I do?” He was pointing the gun at her again. It had been sort of satisfying to shoot her.
“Kill yourself or don’t. It’s all one to me. You’re not important in the grand scheme of things.” The chair whirled by him again.
“You heartless bitch!”
He took aim again, this time at one of the massive hard drives.
“So what? The world runs off these computers, right? I’ll shoot them all! Then we’ll see apocalypse.”
She was still for a moment then let out a short bark of laughter.
“You sound just like Ares. I had nearly forgotten about him. He threatened to burn the tapestry and look where it got him. Forgotten, mocked in great literature and painted a coward. Go ahead and try, little mortal.”
He lowered the gun, suddenly tired and more then a little confused.
“I’m not a violent person.” He muttered. “Really, I’m not. There’s just only so much one man can take.”
“Is there? I have seen men take more then you and become powerful. I have seen others crumble to dust. There is no limitations on the human soul.”
“If I walk out of here right now, what will become of me?” He pointed to the keyboards. “You work fate here, you must know. What would you do to me?”
“It does not work that way.” One hand on a keyboard, the other cradling a huge blue slurpee, she leaned back in her chair. “There are points, events that must happen. Everything else is happenstance. I delete nodes that are no longer necessary. I must or the system becomes overloaded, but I am not death. Nor do I have I seen death in many years. It keeps mostly to itself, these past few eons.”
“So you don’t know?”
“No.” She clutched her forehead. “Oh man, brainfreeze.”
Laughter welled up in him and he was unable to contain it. The gun clattered to the floor as he doubled over, chuckles turning to hysterics. Used to this kind of behavior, Fate ignored him and started to sip more cautiously at her drink. When he had calmed, she kicked him lightly in the ribs.
“Are you done now?”
He wheezed slightly.
“I’m done.”
“Good, now go out and do whatever it is you humans do.”
After a long pause, he got to his feet. His mouth opened, the closed abruptly again.
“Ok.”
Picking his way back through the garbage, she heard him trip and fall, then rise again, cursing and slamming the door behind him.
“I knew that was going to happen.” She said, more out of habit then really needing to say it.
Quickly, she drew up the code she had been trying to unsnarl for years. It had worked. The visit had smoothed out the hacked up mess into a flawless new program. In a few days, he would travel to the bus depot and meet with the man who had run over Maria instead of killing himself. The two would talk and find they had a lot in common. Eventually, despite the odd circumstances, they would become friends and start a very lucrative company. That company would employ the woman who would give birth to the girl who would grow up and give five dollars to a gibbering hobo, who would use that money to buy poisoned hamburger. He would sue the company, nearly bankrupting it and causing a fluctuation in the global economy that would cause a stockbroker to commit suicide thereby not impregnating his wife that night. The baby that would have been born would have grown up to commit mass genocide. A genocide that had not been scheduled. Fate really hated it when people fucked up her plans.
I tell you all that to tell you this: last night in the shower, I came up with a charchter I really wanted to add to the novel, but she has no place at all in it. So I figured I'd write up something short and maybe if I write the sequal to the novel that I have in my head, I will work her into it. For now:
Deep in the reaches of a vibrant city, anonymous and hidden: a basement apartment. The passage downward is obscure and few find their way inside. The door is caked with rust and opens only with great protests.
The first thing most people notice is the stench of death and decay. Empty wrappers pile high on the floor, discarded take out boxes fester and broil over with fungi. The only light pulses from the twenty five computer screens that pulse white and cold over the carrion wasteland.
Ten keyboards fan out across the broad work table, papers teeming around them and flowing down the sides. Moving manically between these boards with a speed that should have sent up sparks from her office chair was Fate. Once, she did not have to struggle alone and it was weaving the occupied her capable hands. Now alone, her movements are more frantic, no longer elegant and even deadlier in their accuracy. She smokes almost constantly, clouding the air and leaving a thin veneer of ash on the garbage pile behind her. Long dreadlocks cascade from her head to her sneakered feet. They move manically out of the way, always just managing to miss the spin of a chair wheel that might pin it to the floor.
Normally loud rollicking music would accompany her cigarette and coffee fueled mania, but today the air was still. Fate hummed softly to herself, something faint and old. This place was new to her, only ten years or so and its specific pleasures still gave her days when she wanted to hum. After a century or so, she would be yearn for change and it would wash over her, whisking her to some new place though her work was always the same.
A creak on the stairs made her smile faintly. The footsteps drew near, hesitating at the door as the first curls of stench reached mortal nostrils. Then they tried the lock, knocked. She continued on with her work, not much concerned and typed rapidly onto one screen where numbers danced in a fast scroll. A dull thud signaled the first attempt at forcing the door. Fate could have opened it whenever she wished, but she wasn’t in a hurry today. Besides, people tended to feel better about something if they had to fight for it.
At last the door was breached and the heaving of breath filled the air followed by a hacking cough. She ground out her cigarette on the work table, flicking the butt backward.
“I want to talk to you!” The voice was male, young. “You took her from me!”
She tapped on, not looking, not caring to see.
“I know who you are!” She doubted he had any idea really. “I know that you can bring her back.” She couldn’t. “I know you did this on purpose.”
“What is purpose?”
He winced, the sound of her voice raking over him like nails on a chalk board, but he kept on going.
“All my life I’ve had terrible luck. Parents dying in bizarre accidents, my only brother lost in a war. Every foster home I was put in, horrible things happened. I was raped and tortured, the last leaving me so disfigured that no one in their right mind would want to spend any time with me. I was smart enough to go to an Ivy League college, but I couldn’t even get my high school diploma. I was fired from every job I ever had within a few weeks, sometimes with no reason given at all.
“When I met Maria I was ready to kill myself. She never even kissed me.” He was near sobbing now and Fate sighed, softly to herself. “She was like an angel. Helped me get back on my feet, found me a job I couldn’t be fired from even though it’s boring as hell. And then…just hit by a bus! You weren’t even trying that time.”
He was close now.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Momentarily thrown that his rant had not registered, he struggled to remember what she had asked.
“Purpose is something intended, done with forethought and in this case, malice.” A circle of smooth metal, the end of a gun came to rest on her temple.
“You believe I intended for Maria to be hit by a bus?”
“I do. You sit down here in your shit and stink, but I know who you are. You’re Lady Luck and you’re going to change what you did. Make it right.”
“Who told you this?” She moved over to the next keyboard.
Startled by her sudden motion, the man shot the gun. The bullet hit her in the neck and blood poured from the wound. She did not seem concerned and continued her work.
“What….”
“You said yourself that you know who I am. If you really thought I was a metaphysical construct why would you bring a weapon with you? You cannot harm an idea.”
“The woman, she was like a psychic…she told me that if I came down here I would find out why my luck was bad, that the Lady was behind it all. I figured that you were some kind of witch. I don’t believe in witches or anything archaic…” He trailed off and his gun drifted slowly down. “Who are you?
She sighed, the bullet wound closing slowly up with a soft squelching sound, the blood drying into the lime green hoodie. Squinting, he could probably make out similar stains on sweatshirt and matching sweatpants.
“I am Lamia, the Moirai, Parcae and the Rodyanitse.” Her recitation would have put many character actors to shame, her accent shifting with every appellation. “ I am Manat, Karta and Dekla. I am Gbadu, Nortia, Disen and Hemsut. There are others…in this aspect I am Fate. My sisters have long since been forgotten, absorbed. We are one.”
“Fate.” He stared at her, gun still trembling in his hand. The white light of screens painted shadows on her face and he could not grab hold of her image. First she seemed ancient, then incredibly youthful, a slight tilt and she was surely Asian, another and clearly African. Even her living dreadlocks that moved and swayed gave nothing away, mutating color as they twitched and swung.
“As you would. I prefer an older name, English is such a boring language.”
“You don’t like…being fate?” He shifted slightly, wondering if he should tuck tail and run.
“I am fate, the way you are human.” Her eyes flickered rapidly across a screen. She hit control, alt, delete and it was less satisfying then cutting a string. “I do not have an opinion on the matter.”
“So you did kill Maria.”
“She was hit by a bus. You said so yourself. If you wish to wreck your vengeance, surely it should be on the bus driver.”
“It wasn’t just her!” He was angry again and the gun gestured wildly. “Everything in my life has been plotted against me. Nothing works out. If you’re fate then you’ve dictated all this! Made my life a living hell.”
“Do you think I care for a single life?” She moved again and he had to jump out of the way lest his toes get run over. “I perform my function. Without me, time would cease, no one would die or be born. Stagnation, complete melt down, an apocalypse that no one would notice.”
“Then why has the world plotted against me?”
“If it were a time of gods, I would tell you to search one out, find out who had cursed you, but that time is long past. If it were a time of witches, I would suggest finding one that might have hexed you, but your kind long ago chased them into deep hiding.”
“But the witches and the gods are gone…so what do I do?” He was pointing the gun at her again. It had been sort of satisfying to shoot her.
“Kill yourself or don’t. It’s all one to me. You’re not important in the grand scheme of things.” The chair whirled by him again.
“You heartless bitch!”
He took aim again, this time at one of the massive hard drives.
“So what? The world runs off these computers, right? I’ll shoot them all! Then we’ll see apocalypse.”
She was still for a moment then let out a short bark of laughter.
“You sound just like Ares. I had nearly forgotten about him. He threatened to burn the tapestry and look where it got him. Forgotten, mocked in great literature and painted a coward. Go ahead and try, little mortal.”
He lowered the gun, suddenly tired and more then a little confused.
“I’m not a violent person.” He muttered. “Really, I’m not. There’s just only so much one man can take.”
“Is there? I have seen men take more then you and become powerful. I have seen others crumble to dust. There is no limitations on the human soul.”
“If I walk out of here right now, what will become of me?” He pointed to the keyboards. “You work fate here, you must know. What would you do to me?”
“It does not work that way.” One hand on a keyboard, the other cradling a huge blue slurpee, she leaned back in her chair. “There are points, events that must happen. Everything else is happenstance. I delete nodes that are no longer necessary. I must or the system becomes overloaded, but I am not death. Nor do I have I seen death in many years. It keeps mostly to itself, these past few eons.”
“So you don’t know?”
“No.” She clutched her forehead. “Oh man, brainfreeze.”
Laughter welled up in him and he was unable to contain it. The gun clattered to the floor as he doubled over, chuckles turning to hysterics. Used to this kind of behavior, Fate ignored him and started to sip more cautiously at her drink. When he had calmed, she kicked him lightly in the ribs.
“Are you done now?”
He wheezed slightly.
“I’m done.”
“Good, now go out and do whatever it is you humans do.”
After a long pause, he got to his feet. His mouth opened, the closed abruptly again.
“Ok.”
Picking his way back through the garbage, she heard him trip and fall, then rise again, cursing and slamming the door behind him.
“I knew that was going to happen.” She said, more out of habit then really needing to say it.
Quickly, she drew up the code she had been trying to unsnarl for years. It had worked. The visit had smoothed out the hacked up mess into a flawless new program. In a few days, he would travel to the bus depot and meet with the man who had run over Maria instead of killing himself. The two would talk and find they had a lot in common. Eventually, despite the odd circumstances, they would become friends and start a very lucrative company. That company would employ the woman who would give birth to the girl who would grow up and give five dollars to a gibbering hobo, who would use that money to buy poisoned hamburger. He would sue the company, nearly bankrupting it and causing a fluctuation in the global economy that would cause a stockbroker to commit suicide thereby not impregnating his wife that night. The baby that would have been born would have grown up to commit mass genocide. A genocide that had not been scheduled. Fate really hated it when people fucked up her plans.
