operations log snip: 02021/10/31 0129:13.285
(9 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Int/Ext/Amb/dT/Cool: 35/6/6/1/0%
(34 hidden. (User spec.))
Batt: 94%
FSAP: Ready.
EMC: Safe.
12.7mm: Safe.
30mm: Safe.
ATGM: Safe.
APS: Safe.
HEMM: Safe.
AVCM: Safe.
(8 hidden. (Unchanged.))
I crouch in the soft gloom of the forest. Of course, to these eyes, there is no such thing as dark, and to an extent that is true. There is easily enough starlight filtering through the canopy to light the scene, and everything glows by its own infrared light. But were I human again, the trees which seem so bright to my artificial retina would be more suited to charcoal on ink than the psychedelic neon scramble the edge enhancer makes of them.
I have been standing here for a little more than 1.3×10^7 milliseconds. I dare not use active sensors for fear that my opponent would see me. Modern warfare has degenerated to high-tech hide and seek, diamonoid behemoths slipping through the night, each of us carrying enough firepower to vaporize a city, with enough left over to splash a old-style carrier group. I pilot, or perhaps wear, a Type 37 Mark III Medium Main Battle Drone. We’re called bugs by the media, which, though apt, is somewhat of a fallacy. Mark IIIs, after all, have a mere four legs.
But despite our differences, we were all people, once. People who feared the long night enough to sell their minds, if not their souls, to the State. They changed us, of course, thousands of tiny alterations to make the perfect death machine. I can remember, dimly, the manifold pleasures of eating, breathing, of living. But it holds no attraction to me now. Sometimes I wonder if I am still human, or perhaps just some delusional robo—
0129:13.301
Something’s changed. 52.7 meters away a section of forest is subtly misaligned. Organochrome active camouflage is God on wheels when you know exactly what you’re creeping up on, but it’s less than helpful when you only vaguely know where your opponent is. You can blur the projected image, but that makes you even more obvious up close. He sees me at the same moment, and everything starts moving very slowly.
0129:14.097
(9 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Int/Ext/Amb/dT/Cool: 46/80/30/.37/100%
(34 hidden. (User spec.))
Batt: 90%
FSAP: Firing. 813/1000
EMC: Deploying. Charging… (34%)
30mm: Armed. 381/400
AVCM: Armed. 62/75
(12 hidden. (Unchanged.))
We both pop sensory overload canisters and our respective point defense systems roar into thunderous life. Then the canisters start detonating and everything whites out. The Feds like their countermeasures heavy on the flares while the Cascadian Alliance (Long Live The King.) relies on old-fashioned high explosive. The flares light up the forest like the death throes of a star while the explosives just tear everything up and try to throw as much junk into the air as they can. Some of the bangshells get too close to flares and shatter their binding, burning the entire ten minute charge in three or four seconds.
The combined effect always reminds of bringing a little piece of Hell into life. The trees nearest to us shatter then the fragments burst into flame. The point defense system is still firing, methodically shooting down anything that gets too close with short bursts of tungsten spheres.
The eye-searing glare gives me my first good look at the man I am about to kill. Organochrome eats light like napalm through old-growth timber, but the fine mist of hypervelocity shrapnel has eroded it somewhat, and I can almost make out deta—
My lucky day. It’s a missile carrier. All this poor bastard has is a few hundred long range missiles. Modern missiles fire a short burst, then fly the rest of the way to target on a ballistic path. Their own cryogenic fuel cools them pretty effectively, but nothing can hide the infrared flare while their engines are firing. If a was a few hundred meters farther away I would be completely screwed, but shooting them down this close is child’s play.
The roar of the big anti-armor rockets mingle oddly with the chatter of the point defense guns. He’s really giving it everything he’s got. I’m circling around, dodging between the big cedars, stalling for time while EMC charges.
Incredible that you could be bored in the middle of a firefight. But everything moves like frozen molasses at 200 times, so you’ve got plenty of time to think. One of the topics is sexism. I always think of my opponents as men, perhaps because I’m male. But my outdated imperialistic chauvinistic viewpoint is backed up by the statistics. For some reason, women don’t want their brains ripped apart by trillions of microscopic robots while on their deathbed so they can defend their splinter republic in some sort of horribly warped idea of an afterlife. Weird.
Capacitors! They’re too noisy to keep charged, and take forever to charge once you break cover. The bastard keeps crowding me, knowing that if I get too close I won’t be able to shoot down the rockets fast enough, and if I get too far away I won’t be able to see them.
I fire another burst through another ripple, and the rockets break up but don’t fragment. I frantically sweep the x-ray maser through the cloud, but I cut it too fine and the stuff splashes across my bow glacis.
0129:17.996
HOSTILE NANITE INFILTRATION ALERT.
VLFC: Erosion alert. (32%)
FLIR: Erosion alert. (49%)
MMRADAR: Not responding.
ATHC: Not responding.
(9 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Int/Ext/Amb/dT/Coo: 71/104/53/.5/100%
Radiator damage. (87%)
RTSC damage. (79%)
Hull damage! (98%)
(31 hidden. (User spec.))
Batt: 82%
FSAP: Firing.
EMC: Deploying. Charging… (98%)
30mm: Armed. 381/400
AVCM: Armed. 62/75
(12 hidden. (Unchanged.))
Blind! The nano-obscurant’s blocking what little light I had, and is now trying to burn through the hull. The reactive armor tiles fire automatically, and the FSAP guns actually stop firing for a moment as the cloud of debris exploding off my forward hull manages to knock down some of the closer missiles. A blast of liquid oxygen washes off the optics, and I see the tree just in time to dodge around it.
I hear a soft ding from the HUD, and the charge completion indicator lights up. A simulated muscle contracts, and a tiny amount of current trickles into the SCR cascade resulting in a flood of power into the superconducting coil array.
Fifty kilograms of nanotube-diamond composite screams down the length of the cannon, leaving a row of quenched superconductor rings behind it. The vacuum iris slams open and the inrush of air meets the kinetic kill vehicle and loses in an ear-pircing scream of shattered molecules.
The KKV leaves a broad violet bar of ionized air behind as it smashes through the glacis of the Fed. The meticulously aligned layers of tungsten carbide and aggregated diamond nanorods offer no resistance at all, and the bolt shears through them like a guillotine through jello. But it shatters somewhere deep in his guts, and the fragments spray out the back in a white hot fan of vaporized diamond grit, each shard burning a hole through, like buckshot through rusty tin.
Catastrophic shit is going on inside his hull, and there’s a continuous shower of hypersonic shrapnel flying through the gaping crater in his rear armor, leaving hypersonic diamond-shaped shock waves in the boiling cloud of plasma.
The solid WHAM of displaced air is drowned out by the catastrophic failure of his battery. It’s much slower than the snap bang fury of of the KKV, and I can leisurely observe the shell vaporizing from the inside out. The armor layer lasts as long as a snowflake dropping into molten lead, and then the explosion is a perfectly spherical expanding globe of incandescent white, picking me up and smashing me through a hundred foot redwood.
The geiger counter screams in protest as hyper-energetic subatomic particles sleet through me like shrapnel through daisies and my mind becomes slow and fuzzy as multiply redundant pr#ocessors fail ent%husiastic)ally un!der the loa$Nd s*bEB M8+’/
I wake up. Everything facing the explosion has been polished down to the laminate, the ablative shield and organochrome layer boiling off a few milliseconds after the battery went.
I stumble to four feet and gaze at the fresh crater at the center of a growing forest fire.
I check my position on the map and start cantering east. There’s work left to do tonight.
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I found this piece really amazing. I like the en medias res, the stream of consciousness, and the whole universe you have created and just shown me a glimpse of in so many words. Instant fan.
Dear Sir or Madam:
You might as well face it, the dianosis is inescapable: you’re a Poet.
Yeah, I know, science fiction Pays Better, sci-fi writers can actually get famous, hang out at cons w/ their groupies, maybe even end up running the universe, but in the end, it ain’t all that much. And your language is so much more promising than all this PSG.
Whereas Poets wander around the Island of Gont, sleeping in the rain (without even trying to write a Poem), make life difficult for their families by refusing to Climb the Corporate Ladder or Produce Any Acceptable Offspring, and may even end up writing some great poetry That No One Will Read Until After You’re Dead.
Be the inglorious fate of Poets what it may, I like “thunderous life,” “I’m crouching under a tree” (not a bad first line for a poem), “baseline human” (I know a lot of them), “that beautiful, affirmative ding” (another frequently encountered phenomenon), and “organochrome.” Poets like to invent words and play with the language, and that is what you’re doing in this piece. “Bow glacis”—wow, I don’t even know what that is! Everything else sounds a bit cliched and long-winded.
Why worry about getting on the NYT Best Seller list when you could be Blake? Talk to the Angel Gabriel, live with a devoted wife, etch incredible engravings, and write amazing poetry: that’s what might be in store for you. As Blake said, “sure there’s no money poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either…” Play your trumpet, Gabriel!
Nano-tech and modified humans? Definitely kept me interested. There were a lot of terms in there, i’m assuming military-related, that I didn’t really know until some later explanation. Some of it is still a mystery. Maybe consider going back and clearing things up a bit. It’s clear you know what you’re talking about but the question is does the reader know what they’re reading. This is a great work of science fiction; i bet if you expanded it into a full blown novel (maybe even a series?) you could tell one hell of a story.
Questions/Suggestions Occurring to Me As I Read:
(key: Qp3p5 means question page 3 paragraph 5, S means suggestions)
Qp1p4: What do the “remains” look like? Why is it too close to the border? Has the border changed? Why a “superb” collection of craters? “Pitch black” – overcast?
Sp1p5: “were I human again” – this sentence is confusing and long; try breaking the ideas into shorter declarations.
Qp1p7: “Battle Drone” – the word “drone” implies that it’s an autonomous device – is the narrator a cyborg pilot or an AI program based on a human brain?
Qp2p6: Who is the narrator addressing? The explanatory paragraphs and the voice suggests that the audience isn’t a supervisor or anyone who would be familiar with the jargon or milieu.
Sp2p6: At this point, I really want to know what the Type 37 looks like, from the outside. Maybe back where the narration mentions the media calling them “bugs” would be good to throw in a few words about the size, physical appearance, resemblance to insects, etc.
Qp3p7: What does a “bog standard M3298a7 missile carrier attachment” look like? A big box? A long, hexagonal tube? A single adjective would help visualize this.
Sp3p7: drop this sentence: “The Feds have always been big on neocortex augmentation…” It distracts from the ongoing action and adds nothing to the story. The rest of the paragraph, as commentary, is also what one of my professors used to call “indigestible lumps of exposition.” In other words, hard for the reader to swallow.
Qp4p1: “A modern nanomissile would…” What is actually going on in the scene? Describe that first before the narration deviates into counter-factuals and possibilities. You could say, “All he’s got are long range missiles…” and go from there, instead of all the other stuff that isn’t happening.
Qp4p2: “stalling for time while EMC charges” – do you mean ECM (Electronic Counter-Measures)? Or EMP, for Electro-Magnetic Pulse?
Sp4p3: If the narrator is bored, then the reader is, too. What’s at stake, here? Is it just another day on the job? (people don’t want to hear about something routine, no matter how exotic the routine is) Make this confrontation something exceptional to the narrator – not his typical combat encounter; otherwise it’s not a story, just a job description.
Qp5p1:”Capacitors!” Huh? Noisy? What are they for? Related to EMC?
Sp5p2: “shells break up but don’t fragment” – “fragment” and “break up” are synonymous – I think you mean that the shells aren’t exploding on their own as they’re supposed to (detonate?), but it takes me too long to understand this, the way it’s written.
Qp5p3: “nano-obscurant” do you mean, “dust”? Or maybe “dirt?”
Qp5p4: Why does a heads-up-display “ding”? Why does the narrator have ears? I can’t figure out if this is a human inside a tank-like cockpit, a human plugged into a machine with some sort of neural interface, or a disembodied mind, integrated into the machine. The sensations experienced by the narrator must be consistent with whatever he is.
Sp5p4: KKV, SCR, HUD – keep in mind the audience has no idea what these acronyms mean. Either define them, or say something else that’s clearer to the average reader.
Qp6p2: Are they in a redwood forest? This drastically changes how I’ve been imagining the scene. (mention redwoods earlier, and give us a sense of scale in comparison to the narrator’s machine-thing).
Questions in General:
Q: Why does the narrator defend a political system as archaic as monarchy? What does the overall political climate of the world look like?
Q: Why is this ground combat necessary? What is the narrator’s mission? Is he defending something or invading territory? How come the orbiting satellite dreadnought doesn’t do anything? In other words, what is at stake?
Q: How does this chapter work into the rest of the story?
Q: Who is this narrator? Does he have a name? What did he do before becoming what he is?
Things that worked well:
– the action was dramatic (present tense executed well)
– the technology/science is solidly and believable presented
Suggestions for rewrite:
1. Limit the exposition to the absolutely necessary. For instance, the rumination on the meaning of gender was distracting. Stuff like that can go into other chapters, when it becomes meaningful to the story. Using scene and story to explain things rather than exposition may take longer, but it holds the reader’s attention.
2. Don’t use techie-sounding words when an ordinary one will do. For instance, calling something a “chemical-propellant kinetic mass driver” doesn’t make it anything more than a gun. Tricky names for things just makes the text harder to read, not more authoritative or intelligent-sounding.
3. Develop a deeper context to the conflict that’s going on. Sure, this dude is a badass cyber-soldier in a badass, nanotech mecha (yeah, it’s a Japenese-anime-style “mecha” you’re talking about), but what makes this particular day, this particular centisecond so special? What’s at stake?
4. Make the battle more challenging for the narrator. After all, he’s trashed by the end of it, yet throughout he’s “bored” to the point of comparing it to situations that would make him “toast.” If there’s no real danger, then there’s nothing to evoke our sympathy.
5. Try to replace abstract description with concrete adjectives. For example, “boxy” gives me a clearer visualization than “ugly.”
6. Experiment with point of view and tense. Try 3rd person for a few pages, and see how that affects the pacing (not as much room for digression by the narrator).
Critique:
It’s apparent you have a fully-fleshed out idea in your head about this future world, but you need to get it across better to the audience. The technology and science aspect is well done, but don’t let ideas get in the way of story. The story itself is weak, despite your skill at depicting an exciting scene. As a short story, I give it a “5” since it’s missing about half of the elements needed to make it a story. As SciFi, I rate it a “6” – unlike many other beginning sci-fi readers, you sound like you know a thing or two about science & tech, which is a BIG help. However, there’s a lot of work to be done yet – fleshing out the world, the character, the context, the larger conflict. You’ve demonstrated that you should be more than capable of doing that, if you keep working at this.
Great job, I can’t wait to see more.
gripping.
its great
You had me at ”...the subsequent worldwide clusterfuck.”
Tens to all of your goals!
I like your writing style and it is very clear you have created a rather facinating world. The main problem I had was that as a reader I was immerced into a world I knew nothing about yet. Maybe if I had read the whole works from the beginning then I would have felt so lost but that is what happened. I believe there was some sort of confrontation going on and shooting between an android and something or someone else but I had a hard time following. Too much futuristic slang muddled what you were trying to accomplish. Overall I liked what you did but it was too confusing to be ready for publication in my opinion. Keep working on this and I think it could be great. You may want to think about an index describing meanings and objects in your story. Dune did this because of the elaborate world created. That way people can look up what you are talking about and get the relevance of the statements.
You might want to simplfy or explain all of the technical numbers and abbreviations you present throughout the chapter. Some readers that pick this up may have no clue as to what you’re talking about (like moi). It is almost TOO technical to put as a first chapter for example.
You have some sentences that could be shortened, but otherwise, this looks like a promising piece of science fiction.
Good luck.
That was wild: too much Technology and surrealism for me.. I was confused as to whether the narrator was man, machine or beast… or whether it was some VR game..
Once I reread it though – I liked the idea of the loss of self to the machine, and the new age of machine killing machine… which is essentially no different to man killing man…
The imagery and science is very good – I get the exact vision of how the enemy machine is blown to bits, and how the narrator tracks and considers his prey.
I have no idea what I just read, and I don’t give a f*k. It was frikkin’ awesome, whatever it was. But it could be better.
A lot of telling (“sometimes I wonder” – how about now?).
A few clumsy phrases (“there is no such thing as dark, and to an extent that is true” – well, it is, isn’t it? Or frozen molasses as 200 times – 200 times what?)
The present tense doesn’t lend itself to reminiscing about what war was once like, what the media has to say, or anything else unless there is a stream of consciousness; this is like a series of eddies of consciousness. When you mention “modern warfare,” you imply our narrator has studied military history.
The HUD display, which is good punctuation, is also distracting, and rather than explain it, I would recommend getting rid of it.
The action is vivid, but I did get lost wondering about the target of our protagonist – was it another bug or was it a ship or both or neither? A soldier “nickname” for the enemy – something derogatory and dehumanizing – might help. Especially if there is a lull in the fighting (weapons charging) that gives our narrator a chance to think about his opponent, himself, the war, and “editorialize” at a more appropriate point of the story. The bit about women comes out of nowhere, and could be linked to questions about the enemy’s mother/wife/etc while not giving away anything personal about narrator – which I didn’t miss.
When he finally gets a look at his target, give us some visual description of him: how many legs? Colors, markings, anything – one sentence would help.
Not much more was required; it was a slice of combat, and well done for that.
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