Emperial Teal Atreides-Piett ([info]emperial) wrote,
@ 2007-11-03 22:57:00
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NaNoWriMo

50000 / 50000 words. 100% done!

Excerpts follow in the comments.

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Excerpt 1
[info]emperial
2007-11-04 03:43 am UTC (link)
The Commander pulled herself up quickly, sliding against the bed as if rising from dark, silken waters. "Then treason we will have." She propelled herself forward, so far that she was over his lap and their pointed noses pressed together. She bit his lip fiercely. He returned the gesture by bleeding his alien blood, a taste of foreign matter.

A moment later, she withdrew, and he watched her with eyes rebellious. "We have the means and the motive," she said simply. "We need only the opportunity."

For that, she had infinite patience.

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Excerpt 2
[info]emperial
2007-11-04 03:46 am UTC (link)
Deep in the heart of Deity Command, alarms were blaring. Klaxons rang in the ears of the scientists and technicians, disturbing the infant subjects of their experiments. Guards in thick acrysteel armor shaped to robotic silhouettes rushed in from all corners in perfect unison, guided with mechanical precision by the puppeteers who controlled the bioforms within. They were soulless automatons, conscripted from the ranks of Command's victims, both willing and unwilling volunteers. All life forms were equal in the calculations of Deity Command, but only in the sense of their usefulness as tools to be wielded.

The voice of the puppeteer-masters broke over the din of crying children and confused scientists. Their tongues rolled over one another in undulating song, weaving a mixture of command and suggestion that bound the minds of their followers to them. In fierce growling and sinister whispers they demanded, "Tell us. Tell us."

The scientists cowered and jabbered, but through the many-minded filter came the requested information.

Disgust and dismay spread through the collective consciousness. A thousand minds reeled and hissed with anger. "The child, the prophecy. The progeny of a thousand generations.

"He has escaped."

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Excerpt 3
[info]emperial
2007-11-04 11:25 am UTC (link)
When the Commander looked up again, it was not the lazy appraisal of a predatory cat but the decisive head-whip of a snake. "You think paths can change?"

Kagawa had to be careful lest he draw the personal ire of his patron. His hands were tight against his bent knees and he forced himself to relax them. Anger was potent only when properly channeled. "No, but I think Antipov is human, and humans can lose sight of what's important."

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Excerpt 4
[info]emperial
2007-11-05 06:36 am UTC (link)
There were no discernible controls as yet; the entire device was hooked up to a salvaged computer terminal displaying a mixture of Greek, Roman, and Cyrillic characters, the indecipherable multilingual code which Dr. M used to disguise his work in plain sight. M and Antipov had languages in common. Antipov studied languages because it interested him, M studied languages because he hated not knowing what people were saying around him. M's was an obsessive, paranoid thirst for knowledge, borne more from fear than love. Sometimes Antipov pitied him for that, since he himself loved learning for the sheer sake of it.

Releasing Antipov's hand, M scurried to the console and began picking letters out on the broken keyboard. His fingers moved like a marionette on strings, spasming and jerking, and he mumbled instructions and encouragements to himself in his native Magyar.

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Excerpt 5
[info]emperial
2007-11-06 06:25 am UTC (link)
CyberlordK [042210.0314]: Im working on a very important project and it is imperative no one from communications finds out about it.
CherryPoppin [042210.0315]: because we cant keep our mouths shut.
CyberlordK [042210.0315]: That and other reasons.
CherryPoppin [042210.0315]: Like what?
CyberlordK [042210.0315]: Like I wont tell you.
CherryPoppin [042210.0316]: u clearly want me 2 know because ur talking about it

Kagawa considered that carefully. Parsons was, despite his total inability to use the instant messaging system in a responsible fashion, a very astute observer of human nature, even Kagawa's.

CherryPoppin [042210.0317]: use a parentheticle
CyberlordK [042210.0317]: HYPOthetical
CherryPoppin [042210.0317]: weva

It never ceased to amaze Kagawa how Parsons could appear so smart and well-spoken in person, yet when relegated to instant message the man sounded like an idiot teenager.


~~~
When you run into writer's block, you can always solve it by having your characters conduct a poorly-typed instant message conversation. Zing!

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The Other Excerpt 5
[info]emperial
2007-11-06 06:31 am UTC (link)
Every so often, Heller would slam his hand down on the table at a meeting and make some bluntly-revealing statement that rankled the egos and cowed the loyalists and just amused the handful of people who did not fall into either category, but today was not one of those days. Today he had only contempt for the whole process, and dismay at the thought of repeating it again a week from now.

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Excerpt 6
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 03:49 am UTC (link)
It was not so much a cell as a concrete box, windowless, and with only a chair and a table bolted to the floor. The prisoner slept in one corner and defecated in another. The room stank of human waste, but the puppeteer-masters were oblivious to the stench, operating as they did from such great distances, merely controlling the bodies of the guards remotely. They could if they chose inhabit these vessels, but they never did so. The risks involved were too dangerous.

They sent the guards in, five total, roused the prisoner and dragging him to the table. The puppeteer-masters had forgotten to feed him recently and he was disoriented with hunger. They would feed him after the interrogation. They needed him alive.

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Excerpt 6a
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 03:50 am UTC (link)
"Tell us tell us where do they keep the children the orphan children." Words came spilling out of the guard's mummified mouth like dry branches tumbling over one another.

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Excerpt 7
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 04:02 am UTC (link)
"General Heller." She said it aloud because she liked to say it, the combination of his name and title evoking a mental image of fiery destruction. General, raise Hell, burn them to the ground. It was such a perfect name she wished she could have had it for herself instead of the name they had given her. While she truly despised the concept of being named, some names, she perceived, were better than others.

General Heller was marginally aware of the connotations people attached to his name. He was perfectly content to allow such dramatic notions to flourish in the minds of others. These ideas only served to enhance his military reputation as ruthlessly effective, willing to burn straight through almost anything.

She had come today to visit Heller in his office, the small, yellowed little box he used for reviewing files in private. It was much too small a space for a man or his importance, but, except for filing, Heller rarely used it. There were no personal touches or even decorative elements of an impersonal nature. It was just a desk, four walls, and a door flanked by two frosted windows through which trickled a feeble yellow light. A lamp on the desk was the room's only source of internal illumination. There were stains from coffee mugs on the table and a coffee stain pattern on the floor. An empty mug sat on the desk on top of a manila folder. The room smelled dry and sterile.

He replied to the Commander the same spirit with which she had addressed him, a simple statement of her title, but without the dramatic emphasis she gave to his. It was merely a formal politeness to greet her. He did not look up from the reports he was reviewing. "You need me for something?"

The Commander's lips curled into a vicious smile. Heller was so stubborn, so obstinate. She liked that about him. Most everyone else treated her like the supreme leader she was, with reverence and respect and, above all, fear. Not Heller. His apathy fell short of contempt, but it was still a powerful disdain for any of the ritual formality properly accorded her station.

The Commander seated herself on his desk, aware that sometimes her lank was advantageous. Under the rumpled jumpsuit she wore it was impossible to tell her legs were too thin and bony. They looked only long and slender, an open invitation for eyes to wander along. She put her hands behind her and rolled her shoulders back to accentuate what little breast she had. Heller's tastes were known to her from both observation and reputation.

Heller, of course, ignored the Commander's indelicate advances. He was too far beyond the politics of it all to fall for this type of cheap trick. "I don't have all day," he informed her, even though technically his whole day and the next one -- and one after that -- all belonged to her. He tugged a file folder out from under her derriere.

Miffed, the Commander said icily, "I have a task for you. As your exemplar, not your Commander. A personal favor."

Heller dropped the file back onto the messy pile he had started. He had only pulled it out from under the Commander to physically illustrate his displeasure at being disturbed for any reason. Now that he knew it was about something unrelated to his service to her in his professional capacity he was even less amused by her presence.

"I require information on your esteemed friend, the Empress's avatar." It was a tactical choice to refer to Elizabeth by her deific designation rather than her name, an attempt to depersonalize her for the purposes of this conversation. It was much easier to convince someone to act against an ideological opposite than a friend.

"Declined," said Heller flatly, leaning back in his chair with crossed arms and an even crosser expression.

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Excerpt 7 (cont.,)
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 04:02 am UTC (link)
The Commander was never known for being the most controlled individual. She exploded with indignant anger, leaning towards him with a hiss in her voice. "I haven't even told you what it is I want you to do!"

"And if you do explain, will it change my answer?" Heller deadpanned.

The Commander seethed both inward and outward, her flat chest rising and falling with heavy anger. She would not act on it, but she expressed the emotion with every inch of her body. Kagawa was right. She was losing all her pathic followers, ferreted out from under her nose by that conniving little weasel Elizabeth. More than ever she wanted to see the Empress's avatars pay, not only for stealing away her followers, but for the fact that she, the Commander, existed at all.

"You'll regret this," she scowled.

"You owe me seventy-five days of vacation," was his answer.

She fell totally silent a moment. She was lost as to the connection. "What?"

He picked up a file and thumbed through it, pretending to ignore her presence. "I've worked for four years without a single sick day. At fifteen days a year plus the fifteen for the current year, that's seventy-five days available. I'm taking them all."

The Commander completely forgot to be angry for several moments. "You're joking." Min'n might have been secretly hoping to see Heller demoted, but Heller was good at his job, else they would never have given it to him in the first place. He was so good that his departure would create a significant vacuum in the Triumvirate's military structure. Two and a half months seemed an unbelievably large amount of time to deprive the Triumvirate of one of its most influential chiefs.

Heller was nonplussed at her disbelief. "Check the logs if you don't believe me." He sat up suddenly, tossed the file he was holding onto the table, looked at her sharply. "Better yet, spend the next seventy-five days pretending I've stopped existing. That's fully how I intend to spend them."

The Commander just frowned. "How very Black of you," she said, intentionally over-disdainful. It was a very Black thing to do, really, it just happened to be the least useful thing for Heller to pursue at this precise juncture in time. She needed him to help her deal with the Elizabeths, distract the avatars from what she was doing right under their deific noses, not shirk his mortal duties for whatever he thought he wanted to spend seventy-five days doing.

This was one of the problems with her followers. Either they were corrupted by the do-gooder avatars of the Empress, or they were so true to their inner selfish natures that they completely ignored her, or both.

The Commander did something childish. She kicked Heller's leg with her boot, hard enough to bruise him through his pants. He barely flinched. Then she stood. She was taller than him when they were both standing, and she felt absolutely imperious with him still seated, like a towering god. "Fine. Enjoy your stupid vacation. I won't forget this." It was all she could think to do and say, her communication skills sorely lacking in the area of constructive expressionism. She headed for the door.

"Have a nice day," Heller said spitefully after her, and meant it.

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Excerpt 8
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 04:06 am UTC (link)
As he puttered through his workshop, drifting from one half-finished project to another, Dr. M tried to pretend he was something less than desperately lonely for the company of his best friend. True, he worked more when left to his own devices, but without someone to explain things to, there was less fun in it. Even if Antipov never understood a single piece of the science behind M's inventions, M still liked trying to explain them. His analogies to the behavior of subatomic particles or molecular compounds rarely helped. Antipov always listened anyway. The point was not to understand the concepts. It was enough to sit and talk together.

There were precious few people Dr. M trusted. His upbringing among the Illuminati scientists and their genetic engineering projects had not been a stable one. The various test subjects were always encouraged to compete with one another, to prove whose combination of scaled intelligence and strength was the best. Dr. M did not often perform well on the challenges, though he enjoyed a special place in the hearts of the scientists. They tended to identify strongly with his combination of intelligence and physical weakness. Scientists who lived hiding away in basements with their experiments were rarely strong or handsome or wholly desirable members of aboveground society. In Dr. M's grotesquery the scientists saw a mirror of themselves. That was why they allowed him to work with them, a junior researcher, perhaps the most brilliant of them all. They often treated him like a scientific servant, but just as often recognized him for what he was.

Still, he was expected to compete with the other experiments, bickering for little prizes and pleasantries that mattered to children. He often envied the toys and night lights and candy earned by the others. He could not so much as run down the hall without being winded. In competition the others had only to push him and he would break or fall. Because they so desired those small treats they fought for, they were cruel and hurt one another, even when it was unnecessary. Those with a more ruthless streak knew that a child injured in one game might retain that injury in the next.

Sometimes M would beg favors from the scientists. A candy for solving a theorem, an extra pillow for helping to perfect a formula. His requests were never granted. "Because," they would say to him when he asked (and he asked a lot), "that would not be fair." They imagined the games to possess some type of balance that gave everyone a decent chance, but when it came to the scientific, their supergenius M was the undisputed winner already. The other children did not have a single hope in any sort of purely mental competition. They would not subject the children to that sort of challenge with the results so assuredly predetermined.

The scientists would not help him against the other children or reward him, so he did not trust them, as much as he valued being able to work alongside them and explore the potential of his genius. There was no quid pro quo. Even when he devised ideas to potentially make the games more attainable for him -- robotic exoskeletons, guns, or stasis fields of his own devising -- the scientists denied him.

In that harsh reality, he had trusted only one person. His sister, N. She was his opposite in every way possible. He was the ultimate brain in the group of males, she the ultimate brawn in the females. She could barely speak a whole sentence, but what she lacked in mental ability she made up for in compassion. She was the gentle giant among them, always kind and caring in ways the other children could not be. Her mind was so simple, so pure, she lacked any guile. The other children would take advantage of her and trick her into helping them. She had the least toys and prizes of anyone. She was the happiest despite it.

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Excerpt 9
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 04:08 am UTC (link)
At the threshold between dimensions, Kazuhiko stood on the cusp of infinity. He could almost picture, in his own way, the panoply of a thousand million worlds laid out before him, and the knowledge that he was about to commit himself to just the one.

From here, he still had a chance. He could turn around, run away, go somewhere else and do something else and forget the whole mission. He could carve out a new life for himself on one of countless worlds, pick the world he liked the best, and just live in it.

He could doom them all if he chose to.

The thought had crossed his mind. It was not so long ago that he had wanted to kill everyone around him, smear their blood across the walls for standing in his way and holding him back. It was strange to feel so different now from then. He could not reconcile the person he was with the person he had become. He was better now, in every respect, but his old self would never have agreed with that sentiment. His old self would have seen this new man as weak, dependent, flawed by love and compassion. His new self saw the old as sad and limited, constrained by the emotion of anger and inability to grasp the larger picture.

It was the big picture he had to focus on now. His next step could very well be the first on his way to death, or it could be the first step towards the greatest act of heroism in a thousand million universes. It could be both. He did not wish to be a martyr.

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Excerpt 10
[info]emperial
2007-11-22 04:10 am UTC (link)
"Mhm," agreed the Commander. She was deathly bored already. There was absolutely nothing Ramsay could possibly contribute to the battle plans devised by the Triumvirate's chief tacticians. Science was merely the creation of tools to be used by other, more aggressive individuals, not the ultimate answer to every problem. Worse, the science division was under the personal purview of the Grey Mage, who fancied himself a bit of a scientist. In her eyes, scientists were second-class citizens and soldiers. In a tight corner, she would rather have a single marine present than half a dozen scientists.

The Commander had clearly never been around a university during grant season, else she would have been aware of the petty ruthlessness scientists, despite their general adherence to morals and guidelines, were capable of. The cutthroat competition for funds and grant money could shame the finest soldiers. It was simply a battle fought on a different level, with scars less visible to the naked eye. Ramsay had been in a few such academic scuffles. He usually won.

"...And if you think that's exciting, wait until you hear my idea for the destabilization missile! Pure engineering masterpiece!" He sliced his hands through the air dramatically. "I tell you, I have just been waiting for you and your commanders to come and find me. I think this could be the start of a beautiful relationship for the both of us."

The Commander looked at Ramsay, still displaying an enticing smile. He was so filled with hope and light, a piece of the Empress's path so strong it shone from him subdimensionally. He was completely unaware of the light's presence. "I concur, Dr. Ramsay," she said. She was really looking forward to totally crushing him and the hidden light inside.

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