Back to Basics

“And then what happened?”

Wordlessly, I turn the book around and show him the next page.

“It’s empty!”

I nod and take my father’s fancy old fashioned pen, dip it in an inkwell, and present it to him.

“And then,” I say, finding the room suddenly a bit blurry, “the father passed the book down to his son, who wrote the next chapter, and the one after that, and the next half of the book.”

“But I don’t know how to write, dad!”

“Start, I say,” remembering what my father said to me. “with the basics. With the noun and the verb, the person and the place and the action. Start there.”

#

Next week, he asks for me to read the story again, and I do, from the very beginning. It’s my story, one that I’ve written for him from the time that he was born, and it explains about his mom and I, writes out our dreams and wishes and desires. It explains our lives and our hopes for him, and the second half of the book is for him, his dreams and wishes, his life.

When I finish reading though, he simply thinks for a moment, and then he nods, and says, “Thanks, dad!” and rolls over, without writing anything. It goes like this for three more weeks, and I start to wonder. Did I ask him too early? When did my father ask me? What if he doesn’t want to do it? It’s enough that I do the only thing that makes sense to me.

#

I show up at my dad’s doorstep the day after, looking uneasy, and he reads me like — okay, I won’t say it. But he sits me down, and he asks me how things are going, and it all comes out of me in a hurry, about how nervous I am, about if I did something wrong, about the tradition and if there was anything I forgot.

He says nothing, simply takes out an old, beautiful, leather-bound book, and flips to exactly halfway through the book. And then he waits, and finally, after reading the page over three times, do I get it.

“...You wrote the first line!” I exclaim, and he nods.

#

The next night, I read my son the story again, and finished where I normally did. And then I paused, and took a pen, and I wrote, ‘His story starts here, with the dream of becoming an astronaut.’

And then I passed him the book, and watched, and waited. And he takes a pen — a space pen that we got from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum a year ago — and puts it to the paper, and starts to write.

#

When I turn sixty, I get a phone call from my son, who invites me over for my birthday. When I get there, all my friends and family are there, and we have an incredible time celebrating the years and reminiscing on old times. He asks me to stay the night, in the guest room, and I do; it’s there that he breaks the news.

“She’s pregnant, dad,” he says, and I smile, and pat him on the leg. And I ask, as gently as possible, “Do you still have it?”

He nods, and reaches over to a chest that is on top of a bookshelf, and he brings out the book. Our book. And he pages through it, and he smiles, and I wait, and then he asks.

“How do I teach him, dad?”

“Start, I say,” remembering what my father said to me. “with the basics. With the noun and the verb, the person and the place and the action. And don’t be afraid to help him with the first line — much like you helped him with the first part of his life.”

I've got a rock

It was my first time reporting in a wartime environment.

I was staring down at the orderly rows of protesters slowly winding their way up the street, waving signs that said “Let Us Be Free!” and “Our Voices Will Be Heard!”, from a balcony of the hotel, one that I thought would be deserted, given the demonstration going out on the streets. But then, a voice from my left.

“Disgusting, aren’t they?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, turning to face the man. Average height, average build, black, curly hair, dark brown eyes, a red power tie. An unpleasant face is what caught me the most, with a mouth that looked like it hadn’t smiled in the thirty or so years he had been born.

“They are sheep to slaughter,” he answers. “And too stupid to realize it. Do you know what the difference between a riot and a demonstration is?”

I shrugged, not really interested in continuing the conversation; besides, the leaders of the protest were almost in contact with the police line.

“It isn’t, as commonly held, when someone throws a bottle, or a rock, or when the guns start firing. That’s just the illustration of the turning point, the start of the death toll. But it’s a riot before then. You can spot it by the attitudes that the two sides have. The rocks that protesters carry, the guns that the soldiers finger, even when they’re told to stand down. A riot happens the two sides hate each other, intensely, and want the other side to fail and to die.”

“There are plenty of Western sources of history where the people peacefully demonstrate an unpopular government, though,” I countered, watching as the shopkeepers started closing down their shops. It seemed unnecessary to me, as the march was still heading peacefully past these shops.

“And plenty more where a flower planted into the barrel of a gun was shot back, with lead, into the protesters’ faces,” he responds darkly, and I frown. “It’s the truth, and you’d best believe it. There, see — it begins.”

And I see a guy reach out, and throw a rock at a policeman. He is hit, and once the others see blood, they take it as an automatic order to stand ready, their guns — rubber bullets, the government said — pointed at the opposing line.

And for a moment, everyone pauses. The protesters, the soldiers, the bystanders. Everyone freezes, and watches, and waits.

“See? They’ll stand down now,” I say, hesitantly, hopefully.

And then he sneers, and the sound of firing — with live bullets — starts, and the screams of the dying, and I stare, transfixed, as the crowd begins to panic, some fighting back, some running away. I lean over the edge, and only as I feel his hand on my back do I realize that I shouldn’t have trusted him.

“Go, then,” he said, “join your sheep,” and I was falling.

#
 

There are only flashes of the riot, short clips I remember intensely, bright splashes of colour in the darkness. There is my landing, when I hit three, four people, and they all go down in a pile, and others start stepping over — stepping on — us, in their haste to get away, to run from the bullets, the advancing figures. I roll; I feel someone kick my back, harshly, and I do not know if it is someone under me or someone running away. I feel scrabbing on my face and I close my eyes to the gouging, feeling the nails, the claw of a hand trying to find something to grab on to, and finding nothing but my mouth. I almost bite down, almost, choking on his, her, someone’s fingers, but I wrench myself away, instead.

I remember being hauled up by two bystanders, a man and a woman, who make sure I’m on my feet before moving away, helping others, helping those fallen, even though they were in danger of being trampled themselves. And as I watch, one of them does go down, bowled over by a man running away, and then they are lost, swept away—

I cling to a pole in the crush and see a soldier firing into a man crawling away, hitting him in the back; I watch as the blood comes out of the neat hole in his back, and then, as he turns over, I see the gaping maw that was his stomach, and I vomit, down, into the crowd, into the street that is becoming slick with sweat and blood and urine and vomit.

And then I look up, and see as the man cries out for mercy, and I see the soldier raise his gun again, pointing at the man’s head, and another soldier knock the gun out of the way, calling for a medic, kneeling beside the man. The first soldier stands there for a second, and then takes off his helmet... and then falls, a bright mist coming out of the side of his head, as a pistol finds him, blowing his brains against the side of the street. And yet, the medic still keeps working, doing the best he can for the protester, even as gunfire continues around them, even as he starts bleeding from the ear, a direct hit from a rock that dazes but does not stop him—

I remember having a rock on my hand, and seeing a soldier on the ground, and seeing it bloody. He is knocked out, and there is a girl standing over him, a girl who has a rock in her hand as well, and she is hitting him with it, hitting him in the helmet. And then she kneels, and takes the helmet off, and raises the rock, and her saying, this is for my brother, you bastards—

I remember hauling the soldier upright, and dragging him towards his own lines, my hands empty, my face bloody. I remember snarling, snarling, as if I were an animal, at the protesters that came near. I remember the captain snapping his fingers, his uniform clean and pressed and as if he had just come from a parade, telling me to get out of his sight, that he could have me shot but he wouldn’t, because I had sided with the right people. I remember saying, sir, yes, sir—

And then going back into the fray, because what else could I have done? I had seen enough, perhaps, for a million stories, but there were still children bleeding out, fathers and sons and daughters and sisters that needed help.

The story could wait.

#

It’s hours later before I stumble back to my hotel, but I do manage to get there, battered, bloody. I stumble into my chair, curl up into a ball, and start shaking, trembling as the sobs come and don’t stop, as the images start replaying themselves across the inside of my eyelids.

And it’s there, an hour after I get back, that I open my laptop, that I start typing, knowing what my job was, knowing that I had to refute him, knowing that I had to tell the world. I remember the bystanders, the medic, the soldiers that would not take innocent lives, the protesters that just wanted to peacefully call for change.

And I write. I write my fucking heart out, take all the pain that I’ve just witnessed and try and put in all the hope that I’ve seen and I write to change the world.

Even in the darkest corners of the world, there is hope...

winding down

The family called me Paul and I accepted the name easily, even though it came from my description — Personal Automaton, Utility and Labor. Sure, there were those of us named with more wit — Jeeves and Lurch, for example — but there were also ones that were referred to as Scrap, Dumbbot, and, other, less polite words. In light of the possible variance of owners, I had a good family.

When I was produced, it was during the first Outer Giants Bubble, and I only stayed in stasis for three weeks after the Awakening Process; my family had put their money in the right stocks, and came out ahead of the explosively bullish market. They decided to stay with a relatively small plot at home instead of the vast tracts of land they could had if they went off-planet — which might have had something to do with the news about the convicts and forced immigrants the Nations were shipping out — and ended up getting a three square mile plot of land, just south of Mount Kilamanjaro, only about two hours flying distance from the Saharan Starport.

It was an incredible view, one that, yes, even one an automaton could appreciate.

My job was simple: keep everything in working order. As utility and labor, I was to keep the grounds, make sure the electricity and plumbing was operating correctly, and fix any mechanical flaws. Though I was expected to interface with humans and thus given a humanoid shape, I was designed primarily for strength and constructed from the best materials for moving and shifting, though with some dexterity for manipulation. I would never reach the level of fine motor control that the Children And Toddlers series required, but I could reliably lift a car or two over my head without any problems — which, as I found out, is quite a trick.

The first five years were wonderfully mundane. My master and mistress simply wanted me to keep everything presentable, and I did, trimming grass near the mansion, keeping the gardens healthy and free of pests, and doing occasional maintenance work inside the house. I had time to maintain myself, and there were the other, non-sentient bots — lawn-mowing machines, trimmers, and others that I could instruct to do much of the work. When I had an issue with a servo or more complicated electronics, I could take it to my owners and they would call in a specialist and get it fixed promptly. I was not loved, no; but I was respected, and I did a good job, and that was enough for me. I could say nothing wrong of them.

It was the sixth year, though, where things began to change. And it was the twelve years after that which I most enjoyed, where I thanked my makers for allowing me the experience of happiness.

For in the sixth year of my service, Robert and Ashley were born.

They were twins who brought my owners much happiness. I thought I understood their feelings, despite not being programmed for empathy; it was a matter of successfully procreating, and doing so in an aesthetically pleasing and symmetrical fashion. When they were babies, I would see them when their mother took them out into the backyard, and go about my work, and from time to time, I would notice that they were watching me, too. When Robert was about four years of age, he solemnly came up to me and said “Good morning, Paul,” as if we were friends — or, perhaps, equals — and then promptly instructed me to build him a fort.

I did, using the logic that my owners would want me to serve their children, and constructed an elegant, if old-fashioned fort out of the spare lumber that I had been collecting for construction purposes, and positioned it in the back yard as Robert wanted it. It had two towers, and a wall that was almost six feet tall, and I was proud of my abilities to do such a thing.

When I finished, an hour later, he came up to me and hugged my leg, and said, “Good job, Paul,” and I understood that I would serve Robert as I had served my master. Even though his mother scarcely allowed him to play in it, the fort stood for years as a reminder of our first real interaction, and set the tone for how we would interact. I would build obstacle courses for him, and clear jungle with him, and scale mountains; I was his protector, his knight, his lieutenant.

I was proud — yes, an automaton can be proud — to help him in any way I could.

Ashley was different; she was a girl, of course, and young, and far less prone to asking me to do things, though she greeted me warmly every time we saw each other. It was in her tenth year when she first asked me to do something for her — and it was not a building she wanted, but rather something from the books she had been reading: a garden, a secret garden, a maze of hedges with a secure center that only she and I would know. Inside would be her sanctuary, her place of refuge, and she returned to it time and time again in the years that followed.

And so my owners became my family.

Across the seasons and years, Robert and Ashley sought out my company often, regaling me with stories I would listen to and giving me requests I would fulfill. The family’s land became dotted with their creations: buildings and miniature reproductions from pieces of literature, fantastic geometry from their imaginations, and I built it all. Some were designed for the company of their friends and some for their own solitude, in times when they didn’t even want to see each other, but even then, I would be allowed into those refuges; perhaps because I had built them, perhaps because I had been their guardian ever since they were children.

The Master and Mistress understood my relationship with their children, and never bade me to take them out; instead, they simply asked for me to go to them, and keep them company, and make sure they came to no harm. In those years, I understood what it was like to be a friend instead of just a servant, to be asked instead of required to do things, even though my code would have required me to do it just the same.

But a few words — a question, instead of a command — makes all the difference.

And then they left.

It was the seventeenth year of my service; the twins’ twelfth birthdays, and it was the Centennial Collapse. There was an issue with formerly high-value resources that were suddenly irrelevant. Technology had jumped, and those in that sector had not seen it coming, and were caught flat-footed.

My family had been in that business, and very quickly went from being comfortably well off to being paupers. There were talks to sell the land, but Robert and Ashley protested against it, and the Master drew upon what money he had left to ensure that the land would stay in the family, even if it meant that they could not stay with the land, as there were no more jobs on Earth for my owners’ specializations. They — my family — would have to leave, to seek their fortunes in the stars, and they would leave me here to watch over everything, until they returned.

I understood the logic behind it, of course; my duty as a PAUL was to keep the lands and mechanics pristine; I would have no place on a starship where there were self-regulating systems to keep everything clean, and there was not enough money to refit me for one of the other planets.

But still, I — ‘hoped’ is not the right word, for while we can learn and feel and experience, we are not completely human in our programming — I would have preferred to be able to go with my family. Perhaps it showed, because they sent Robert and Ashley out to me, and they looked very solemn, even with what I knew as tears coming out of their eyes, and they said this.

“Will you keep the grounds for us, Paul?,” and, “We’ll be back for you, and we want everything to look as good as it ever did. Can you do that?”

And what could I do but obey- no, instead: what could I do but accept their request?

I kept the ground for over seven thousand three hundred days — for over twenty years — with ten minutes each morning and each night spent looking to the North, for the sign of the family car, or any car, flying over the Mount, carrying my family back to me. The rest of the time, I did my duty, as was asked of me, and I kept the lawn mowed and the plumbing working and the electronics active. But more than that, I kept the castle, the keep, the rose trellis, the obstacle course, and the Escher stairs maintained, and most of all, I watched over Ashley’s secret garden and Robert’s fort.

Every year it was harder, as some of the lesser robots broke down and there was no one to order parts, and no money to pay for them. The lawn took hours to mow, instead of minutes, and the repairs became more and more haphazard as I understood that to repair a small, superficial thing would be cannibalizing resources from a more important repair that I would need to do later. But I kept going, replacing my own servos and parts as it became necessary, accepting some diminished mobility as time drew on and parts grew short.

In the last year, though, I ran out of spare parts, and there have long since been no other robots that I could borrow from. I have been forced to stop mowing the grass; there is too large of a chance for a jam to occur, and I will explain it to the Master when he comes back. I can no longer lift the stones to replace those that crumble on the castle; I hope that Robert will forgive me for that. I will build him another, a thousand others, when he comes back. And her Escher stairs, that geometric masterpiece has collapsed — I no longer have the materials to reconstruct it, to let it hang in the air. But I will build Ashley a million illusions when she returns, as many as she wants.

I stumble often, now, and occasionally must drag myself across the grass with one leg useless. My servos whine, and creak, and they have started to fail.

But his fort and her garden, they will be maintained until I can no longer move.

I will do what they asked of me.

making fire

Once upon a time, I wrote an entry on Making Fire; and in that entry, I paid tribute to the writers that I was competing with then. Today, with that topic once again given, I thought that it would only be fitting to again pay tribute my fellow writers — as has been done in the final rounds of seasons past!

This entry was the easiest to write for me, because it is one that has been on my mind for a long time. I am going to do something slightly different and not link to individual entries, but rather try and paint you a picture of who they are as writers overall, and the magic that they bring to writing.

beautyofgrey  is someone that, simply put, deserves happiness. That to me is the alpha and the omega, and her happiness makes me a bit happier, and when she writes about her suffering, I feel that it is suffering that we should all bear to ease it on her. She has been through a lot, no doubt, and her writing shows that — without, indeed, expoiting it. She talks about difficulties and terrible things that I could never think about facing, but even as she writes to connect to people, to show them the debts of dark hurt and the height of great happiness, it never, for a moment, feels cheap, it never feels that it was written simply to make you go ‘oh no’.

Do you know why that is? It’s because it wasn’t. It was written to connect to people, to inspire and to delight and to show that even in the darkest of times, there is hope. And that’s why she’s the Spirit of LJ Idol, something she fully deserves, and that’s why she should win. There is little more to be said — except that there is a lot(!) more to be said, about her fantastic fiction (and beautiful fables), her ability to weave a tale, her ability to take you to lands that only she has ever seen.

But at the end of it all, I think she is a writer that, with a line, a paragraph, and then, an entry, has drawn you into a world and made you feel what she felt. That is power.

rattsu  takes a different path. She can connect, oh, yes, but her skill, her ability, is in teaching. Instead of drawing you inside, she takes you outside, to everything around us, and shows us what things are, and what things could be. She can write a post on something that we think is very familiar to us — elephants, perhaps — and show us a stunning, incredible other side, one that we would never have known existed without her. She reveals the unknown in the known, and then takes us on journeys to those worlds that we didn’t, letting us be tourists and her playing the part of the intelligent, excellent guide.

It's writing like this that will change the world, really change the world, by changing viewpoints and inspiring action. And that's why she should win.

But(!) she also writes fiction, and she writes it as well as her educational nonfiction, with characters that are incredible and scenes that draw you in. It shouldn't be to anyone's surprise that she's published, and I would only be incredibly surprised if she doesn't continue to be.

Typically, at this point, we've also been told to write a bit about why we should win. But see, that wasn't in this week's topic, so I won't interpret it that way.

These are my fellow writers, my friends, and this is the the incredibly bright, light-giving, life-giving fire that they create.