Coriolis: Waking the Dark - Prologue

For about a year, I've been putting together ideas and draft chapters for the first book in a series of science fiction novels. This week's blog entry is the prologue. What do you think? Would you want to read more?

Prologue: The Arrival

Nerio Space Station, Low Earth Orbit

            It didn't look like much, she had to admit. If da Vinci had cobbled together a spacecraft out of scraps from a twentieth-century junkyard, it might look a bit like the Javelin. But still, it was something entirely different from the repeated string of faceless freighters she typically wrangled in, and thus a welcome change. The steel-framed fuselage was littered with solar panels, each slowly craning for sunlight as the ship arced towards her at a ponderous pace. The solar panels reminded her of time-lapse videos of flowers blooming, gracefully yearning for light.

            “Hey Valerie, can you see it yet?” asked her co-pilot Erica Taskin. It was silly calling them pilots Valerie thought, her mind wandering off task. From her frame of reference they never actually flew anywhere. People on the ground might have a different perspective of course, but -

            “HEY! VALERIE!” Erica tried a little louder this time, the increase in volume nearly maxing out Valerie's earpiece.

            “Yeah, I see it. It's too junky-looking to be a freighter, it must be the Javelin.” And her tabloid-happy captain. There was a little extra edge to her voice when Valerie spoke the name of the incoming ship. This was not lost on Erica.

            “So I can't tell, do you hate him or have a thing for him? It has to be one or the other.”

            “Shhhhh! C'mon Erica we've got work to do. You see him out your porthole yet?”

            “Him? You know it's bad luck to refer to a ship with a masculine pronoun. But yes, I see her arriving right now.”

Tonight, Tonight

Based on the song "Tonight, Tonight" 

Lyrics by Billy Corgan, performed by Smashing Pumpkins
Music video on Youtube: click here

            Karen clutched her seatbelt and pressed hard against the back of the passenger seat. She tried her best to play it cool, but if Billy decided to look over he’d see the terror painted all over her face. Luckily, he kept his eyes on the road.

            “Are you sure I should be doing this?” she asked as calm as she could manage.

            For a while he didn’t respond, focusing more on the clutch than his passenger. When he’d gotten in front of an odiously languid truck, he turned his attention back to the confused young brunette.

            “Tonight’s the night Care’,” he blurted out eventually, his usual flatly unwavering confidence in full form. “You’re going to go in there and do whatever it takes.”

            The thrumming lights of posh North Side high-rises whizzed by on their left, the sun approaching the velvety blue horizon of Lake Michigan on their right. It was a gorgeous clear evening despite the subfreezing temperatures. This was one of those moments where it seemed crazy that people chose to live anywhere else.

It had been one of those crisp, windy afternoons at her mom’s place near Wrigleyville. The new boyfriend Rick had essentially kicked her out of the apartment just as the gusts coming off the lake were really getting going. The double-paned bay windows in the semi-circular living room rattled and groaned in defiance; but they held, keeping the brownstone cozy and warm. Despite this stalwart effort, mom apparently couldn’t go another hour without her favorite tea, which they only sold at the Chinese market. And of course if he drove he’d lose his primo parking spot.

            “Can I tell you what Rick did today?” It was a rhetorical question, of course, so she continued immediately. “He sends me out to get this special fucking tea for my mom from this Chinese market on Belmont that’s like a twenty minute walk each way.”

            “That sucks.”

            “Wait wait, no it gets way worse!” Karen interjects excitedly, as if her odious suffering were a source of tremendous joy. “So I storm out of the apartment, of course forgetting my scarf. And it’s like INSANE cold, especially with the wind. Anyways, I walk all the way there, buy the stupid tea, and walk all the way back freezing my butt off. And guess what?”

Technotheology

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." 

The 'Third Law' of Arthur C. Clarke

You may have missed it, but some time between the death of the 8-track and breakfast this morning technology blew past what anyone could reasonably understand. Up until that undefinable point, advancement came - at its fastest - as a swift trot. By reading magazines like "Popular Science" and "PC Magazine" or blogs like Engadget.com and Gizmodo.com, an educated geeky person could actually follow the threads of progress as they wove together to create incredible new stuff. Now progress races by at Mach speeds and no one knows how to even try to keep pace. 

As a curious kid growing up in the 80's and 90's, I could pretty much understand anything by reviewing my copy of The Way Things Work. Records had little grooves (you could almost see them if you squinted hard enough!) that bounced a needle that vibrated out your parents' unfunny comedy records. Compact discs were essentially the same thing with a laser instead of a needle, and they had MC Hammer songs on them. I could open up a computer case and poke around at the processor, the memory, and the sound board. I'm not claiming that twelve-year-old me actually knew how a Pentium worked, but I could see how the function of individual components came together to create a multi-faceted user experience. I could see the trees and the forest interchangeably. 

Even the first few iterations of the iPod and other MP3 players were knowable. Somebody just stuck a laptop hard drive in a plastic case with a graphing calculator screen and installed a rudimentary operating system on it. It was a brilliant adaptation (and shrinking-down) of existing technology to provide revolutionary access to a personal library of music. But if you had lived through the early years of the personal computer and paid attention to the shelves at CompUSA, the iPod wasn't particularly magical.

The other night, my wife and I were having a quiet weekday dinner and I wanted to spruce things up a bit. Knowing her love of over-the-top 80's music, I opened Spotify on our iPad and fired up a Wilson Philips tune (thank you 'Bridesmaids'). The amount of time between having the idea and steely-eyed lip-synching into into my fork was about fifteen seconds. 

The Wind Cries Mary

Quick preface: The characters in this story are completely fictional. Specifically, the "Mary" in this story bears no resemblance to wonderful wife Mary who is the best! Thanks for visiting and enjoy!

            I probably should have at least thrown on a pair of real pants. Or maybe a jacket. Come to think of it, one of those polar-explorer parkas would have been great. Pajamas and nor’easters, it turns out, aren’t a great mix. As it stands, the stiff pre-dawn air is tearing through me like fire through newspaper. Or whatever the exact opposite of that would be.

            Mary doesn’t seem to mind, cozily prepared with a red pea coat and Burberry scarf (a Christmas gift from me of course). I’m just standing there frozen - watching as she clumsily picks her way across the street. She’s left deep trudge marks in the un-plowed snowdrifts, her fashionably absurd sheepskin boots compressing the snow. The boots she got herself.

            She drives away in the car we leased together last year leaving me standing here like an idiot. Luckily, this part of the Brooklyn actually does sleep eventually so the jokers on our block who would usually be lolling around are snoring their lives away at present. A vicious blast of wind crashes against my exposed arms and face with malicious intent, reminding me to get my stunned ass back inside. For a frightening moment I can’t recall the code to get into the building and a wave of panic piles onto my already confused systems. Suddenly my mnemonic kicks in (Mantle-Mantle-Namath for 7-7-1-2) and I punch the keys quickly.

            Inside it’s warmer, but not enough that it matters. The floor in particular remains a frigid enemy. The elevator’s been on the fritz lately, so I begin my ascent up the stairs, the hard wood caustically devoid of carpet. The cheap scent of motel-caliber cleaning solution pervades the shabby furniture and dull brass rows of mailboxes in the over-lit lobby. I’ve always hated this fucking building.

As I climb the five flights of merciless goddamned iceblocks of stairs, I’m replaying the last couple hours in my head to try and convince myself that it hasn’t happened. Funny how we do that when something shitty happens. I guess it’s the first stage of grief right? Anyways, I get to the part about how we rushed into things and got married before we had really figured ourselves out as individuals when I realize there’s no stairs left. Now is probably not the best time to visit our - I mean my - buddy Arturo in #904, so I head back down a few flights.

It sort of looks like the place has been robbed (the door was unlocked after all), but it doesn’t strike me as odd; this is what it normally looks like. After a year of marriage and six more months living together, I guess neither of us figured out that the other wasn’t about to spontaneously acquire obsessive-compulsive tendencies and clean the place up. Wrong again. Maybe that’s a sign.

A quick glance at my alarm clock hits me like an executioner’s axe: 3:46am. My usual 7am wake-up isn’t going to cut it with the car gone. I can’t believe she took the damned car. I figure I’ll have to walk to the subway then ride in, hopefully catching an A train. If I miss that I’ll just call in sick, the C takes for-fucking-ever. I haven’t been able to think straight in hours, ever since my new nemesis dropped that sack of bricks directly on my forehead, but for some reason I can remember the train schedule. Good times!

Screw it, it’s not like I’m going sleep anyways. I give up on trying to set my alarm and head back out into the living room. I flip on the TV and start brewing a pot of coffee. I’m making too much of course, I’m fairly accustomed to our usual two cups each routine and too lazy and stupefied to compute the proper amounts of grounds and water for the right amount. I just stand there while it brews, forgetting the TV is even on.

So why am I now a soon to be divorcé at the ripe young age of 24 you ask? At this point you are better off talking to Mary. Here are her original words, as near as I can remember them (her words appear in quotes. My attempt to translate these astonishingly vague quips into human are in italics):

Texas Flood

NOTE: This is the first in a series of short stories loosely inspired by song lyrics.

Lyrics by Larry Davis and Joseph Scott
Iconically performed by Stevie Ray Vaughan

Calling what I woke up with this morning a 'hangover' would be a massive disservice to the preceding night. Anyways the first thing I noticed when I rolled over was my dry tongue, stuffing my mouth like Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge. The next thing I noticed - which was probably more like ninety minutes later, but you get the idea – was that I was alone. Then I desperately had to piss, but you probably don't want to hear about that. A tiny sliver of piercing sunlight peeked through the cheap vanilla window shade with careless malice. The clock blinked 12:00am, but that's obviously way way off.

When it became clear that nothing remotely warm was going to come through the faucet any time soon, I splashed some icy water on my face stared at myself through the grimy mirror for a second. I'm really looking like shit these days. Too many nights on the road will do that. No one in the crowd seems to mind though. They show up, they holler, they party. Everyone has a good time and nobody bothers to say “Hey Stevie, you look like crap. Clean your ass up!” Honestly, Jimmy is probably the only cat with the balls to come out and say it, but that dude looks even worse than I do.

My motel room was one of those second-story jobs, with the little walkway that's actually a hall creating a communal balcony for all the rooms to share. I grab a crusty old pack of Camels and head out to wake myself up with some air and some rays and some nicotine, barely bothering to toss on a t-shirt and a wrecked pair of blue jeans. My boots feel tight for some reason, like the snake decided to go on a diet, but I cram them on anyways.

I half expected to see someone I knew out there. Someone from one of the other bands or at least a roadie or two. But there's nobody. It's totally empty, of people at least. It takes a moment for what I'm looking at to sink in. The parking lot below is an absolute mess. He didn’t remember there being a lake at this motel when he arrived, but now they had one. The cars are tossed around like some kid got sick of playing and left all his toys out. The van is stewing in a like a foot of water. Just sitting there! At least it's right-side-up, which is more than he could say for a red pickup lying dead on its side in the middle of the lot.