polymorphikos
Scrofulous Fig-Merchant
This is really just the start of a novel or novella that I'm currently writing, and, even though it doesn't have much literary content, I was wondering if anyone could read it and tellme what they thing about my style, and how I handle Cabot as a character. The start of 1 is very clunky, but thank you anyway.
PROLOGUE
The project was spectacularly unique for the fact that it would not show a single result whatsoever for two thousand years. What was even more strange was that a major company had agreed to back it.
Carlos Luis Pedro Del Castro, the founder and CEO of SolCo, the first of the trillion dollar corporations, was a man obsessed by the future. It was his dream to live forever, and this had been the driving force behind almost one hundred years of determined efforts to accumulate wealth and power and all the medical progress that these things entailed. All the medicine and surgery in the solar system, however, could not prolong his lifespan much more than one hundred and fifty years.
Del Castro realised the inevitability of a fate that was distant, but not to him. He invested instead in the Jonah Project, the landmark experiment to circumvent the forces of time and let a human being survive into the future by artificial means. The project was a success, but it was too late for Del Castro.
On the eve of the launch of a ship that would orbit out in the asteroid belt for two millennia, bearing a singe man into the distant future with his body and mind dead in all but name, Carlos Luis Pedro Del Castro’s hundred million dollar heart gave out, and he died in bed surrounded by hopes of a destiny that would never be his.
CHAPTER ONE
Time passed. Rivers ran dry and broke their banks. The seas rose and fell and rose again and filth choked the earth only to be expunged by the cleansing hand of things being left alone. Forests and deserts exchanged places in a shifting war of vegetation, first the one army and then the other marching out in solid ranks precursed by the unfaithful, janus-like ally of the open, sun-scorched savannah.
In the night sky above stars blossomed into novae, and great smears of light were painted across the sky only to fade away as physics took its part. The stars themselves turned in their places, and the horoscope was thrown into disorder as the working of the universe cast shame on the devices of man.
In the asteroid belt, a single metal cylinder floated unhindered in orbit around a mastodonian asteroid.
Antonio Cabot woke up in a plastic tube filled to brimming with thick, gelatinous fluid. He gasped for air and struggled amidst the cables and pipes, but in a moment the suspension liquid had drained away and Cabot was left floating amidst a forest of support connections, wiping traces of the substance from his eyes.
The cell in which he was housed had been designed, purely for psychological reasons, with clear walls, and through them Cabot could see the hazy outlines of a bunk and a computer. The bio-mechanical couplings disengaged themselves from extremely personal ports and slid away into the walls of the cell, and with a crack those self-same walls folded away into the floor. Cabot was left drifting n the middle of the tiny recess, walls at either side and a broad opening to the fore. He pushed with his leg and glided with unimpeachable grace out across the floor, grasping a strap with one hand and arresting himself , then pushing “down” (or towards the floor, at least) to the computer terminal that rested behind a pair of foot harnesses on the floor.
The self-replicating nanobotic gases that had filed the ship, repairing and preserving it, had retreated into their storage canisters. Atmosphere had been returned to the few areas meant for human habitation, and ancient software born by aethereal micro machines had reformed itself into numerous devices to fragile to survive even in the unchanging environment of the ship.
Cabot reviewed diagnostics through a DiNU, the direct neural uplink that gave him full information of the craft’s condition and whether everything was online and accurate. He didn’t have any particular fears about this, however, as the control systems would have left him in stasis if any dangerous problems had been detected.
Stretching and scratching away flakes of dried gel, Cabot made his way back to the recess and hit the shower function. At once the walls reformed, and a fan in the floor began to suck, drawing him down onto the grate. Water poured out of the ceiling in delicious rivulets that ricocheted off of him only to be caught in the pull of vents and dragged away to the recycling unit. Scrubbing himself thoroughly, he began to think about his situation.
It was an odd one, and little doubt. He’d expected Del Castro to be sitting in this temporary coffin, waking up to realise his life-long dream. Thankfully, it could be said, Del Castro had succumbed to the ironic rule of fate, and Cabot was in his place. It was a position both enviable and insane. The number of problems that could have occurred from the moment the nanobotic preserves had been ingested by his body until he awoke were too many to easily list. Now he was here, what kind of reception could he expect?
Cabot was a well balanced, optimistic person with a habit of accepting a situation and letting himself try and work it out rather than letting it overwhelm him. He likened it to judo. Cabot also had few friends or relatives and a forward-looking, dreamer quality to his psyche that made him likely to suffer more excitement and curiosity than fear and regretful depression when he arrived.
Now here he was, as eager as he’d ever been, several hundred thousand kilometres out from lunar orbit. The ship had been set to carry him to Earth before he awoke, and he had a day at most before the ship entered into equatorial orbit and began her survey. It had been decided in the interests of cautious commonsense to avoid broadcasting the Brunhilde’s presence to the world until Cabot was sure that some maniac wouldn’t shoot him out of the sky.
His shower, traditional chamber of contemplation, complete, Cabot let the cell open up and then went back to the DiNU. He plugged himself in and let the Brunhilde’s sensoria wash over him.
The Earth was large in the distance, the terminator visible from this angle of approach that segmented day from night. He knew that it would gradually shrink away until the entire globe was in darkness as he cut across the sunlight’s path.
Behind the Earth was the brilliant blaze of white light diffused in part by the atmosphere of the Earth and illuminating the narrow halo of soft blue.
Across all this moved the silhouette of the moon, making its gradual way to the terminator and looking like a big, black egg.
Egg? Cabot gasped. The moon was an oval slightly irregular along one edge, clearly the original sphere with an immense piece of its mass shorn away. The sensoria expanded and defined, and many lumps of stone ranging from the size of a building to that of a country came into view, floating along around Earth on various orbits and glittering faintly at the edges where they caught the light.
“My God,” mouthed Cabot, and looked on in shock. He lost all track of time in observation of those strange chunks of selenite, and asking himself what unfathomable cataclysm could have done such a thing. “Perhaps a meteor,” he thought, and in doing so he looked at the shards of the moon and prayed that none of them had fallen to Earth. The ship hadn’t detected any traces of spaceflight, although numerous radio signals were being received, transmitted in some incomprehensible coding system. He wasn’t surprised, not after the moon, and especially not considering all the time that had passed. If anything, he wondered if spaceflight and radio were necessary anymore.
After many, many hours had passed, and Cabot had gone to bed in his bunk only to awaken with excitement until he finally forced himself to swallow a sedative, the ship’s alarm roused him with a klaxon announcing entry into a low-Earth equatorial orbit.
Cabot sprang up eagerly, expecting to be bombarded with radio messages demanding his identity and what he was doing floating above the airspace of whatever nation happened to exist at the moment. The radio transmissions were as routine and enigmatic as before. Cabot had the ship’s cook make him a meal of soup and coffee from the mineral caches and then sat down at the DiNU.
They were in an extremely rapid orbit, with a total circuit time of thirty-seven minutes, and already five minutes in. He had the radio-scanner scour the surface, creating an ever-growing map of the world in his mind. He was unsure of the locale over which he passed, so he abandoned the radio-scanner to the automation and used infra-red and visual in conjunction. Traceries of light and heat cut their ways through a cold landscape, and brilliance clustered together in small enclaves brimming with warmth and illumination.
The terminator was nearing, and suddenly Brunhilde moved from inky blackness to the glare of the sun with the moon and shards painted in stark whites and greys all around. Chunks of stone floated hither and thither on endless circular voyages, and miniscule dust particles hung about them and shone like diamond clouds.
If you hated it, then I apologise for wasting your time. Thankyou.
[edit by I, Brian - just neatened the text and remove formatting issues from pasting in
]
PROLOGUE
The project was spectacularly unique for the fact that it would not show a single result whatsoever for two thousand years. What was even more strange was that a major company had agreed to back it.
Carlos Luis Pedro Del Castro, the founder and CEO of SolCo, the first of the trillion dollar corporations, was a man obsessed by the future. It was his dream to live forever, and this had been the driving force behind almost one hundred years of determined efforts to accumulate wealth and power and all the medical progress that these things entailed. All the medicine and surgery in the solar system, however, could not prolong his lifespan much more than one hundred and fifty years.
Del Castro realised the inevitability of a fate that was distant, but not to him. He invested instead in the Jonah Project, the landmark experiment to circumvent the forces of time and let a human being survive into the future by artificial means. The project was a success, but it was too late for Del Castro.
On the eve of the launch of a ship that would orbit out in the asteroid belt for two millennia, bearing a singe man into the distant future with his body and mind dead in all but name, Carlos Luis Pedro Del Castro’s hundred million dollar heart gave out, and he died in bed surrounded by hopes of a destiny that would never be his.
CHAPTER ONE
Time passed. Rivers ran dry and broke their banks. The seas rose and fell and rose again and filth choked the earth only to be expunged by the cleansing hand of things being left alone. Forests and deserts exchanged places in a shifting war of vegetation, first the one army and then the other marching out in solid ranks precursed by the unfaithful, janus-like ally of the open, sun-scorched savannah.
In the night sky above stars blossomed into novae, and great smears of light were painted across the sky only to fade away as physics took its part. The stars themselves turned in their places, and the horoscope was thrown into disorder as the working of the universe cast shame on the devices of man.
In the asteroid belt, a single metal cylinder floated unhindered in orbit around a mastodonian asteroid.
Antonio Cabot woke up in a plastic tube filled to brimming with thick, gelatinous fluid. He gasped for air and struggled amidst the cables and pipes, but in a moment the suspension liquid had drained away and Cabot was left floating amidst a forest of support connections, wiping traces of the substance from his eyes.
The cell in which he was housed had been designed, purely for psychological reasons, with clear walls, and through them Cabot could see the hazy outlines of a bunk and a computer. The bio-mechanical couplings disengaged themselves from extremely personal ports and slid away into the walls of the cell, and with a crack those self-same walls folded away into the floor. Cabot was left drifting n the middle of the tiny recess, walls at either side and a broad opening to the fore. He pushed with his leg and glided with unimpeachable grace out across the floor, grasping a strap with one hand and arresting himself , then pushing “down” (or towards the floor, at least) to the computer terminal that rested behind a pair of foot harnesses on the floor.
The self-replicating nanobotic gases that had filed the ship, repairing and preserving it, had retreated into their storage canisters. Atmosphere had been returned to the few areas meant for human habitation, and ancient software born by aethereal micro machines had reformed itself into numerous devices to fragile to survive even in the unchanging environment of the ship.
Cabot reviewed diagnostics through a DiNU, the direct neural uplink that gave him full information of the craft’s condition and whether everything was online and accurate. He didn’t have any particular fears about this, however, as the control systems would have left him in stasis if any dangerous problems had been detected.
Stretching and scratching away flakes of dried gel, Cabot made his way back to the recess and hit the shower function. At once the walls reformed, and a fan in the floor began to suck, drawing him down onto the grate. Water poured out of the ceiling in delicious rivulets that ricocheted off of him only to be caught in the pull of vents and dragged away to the recycling unit. Scrubbing himself thoroughly, he began to think about his situation.
It was an odd one, and little doubt. He’d expected Del Castro to be sitting in this temporary coffin, waking up to realise his life-long dream. Thankfully, it could be said, Del Castro had succumbed to the ironic rule of fate, and Cabot was in his place. It was a position both enviable and insane. The number of problems that could have occurred from the moment the nanobotic preserves had been ingested by his body until he awoke were too many to easily list. Now he was here, what kind of reception could he expect?
Cabot was a well balanced, optimistic person with a habit of accepting a situation and letting himself try and work it out rather than letting it overwhelm him. He likened it to judo. Cabot also had few friends or relatives and a forward-looking, dreamer quality to his psyche that made him likely to suffer more excitement and curiosity than fear and regretful depression when he arrived.
Now here he was, as eager as he’d ever been, several hundred thousand kilometres out from lunar orbit. The ship had been set to carry him to Earth before he awoke, and he had a day at most before the ship entered into equatorial orbit and began her survey. It had been decided in the interests of cautious commonsense to avoid broadcasting the Brunhilde’s presence to the world until Cabot was sure that some maniac wouldn’t shoot him out of the sky.
His shower, traditional chamber of contemplation, complete, Cabot let the cell open up and then went back to the DiNU. He plugged himself in and let the Brunhilde’s sensoria wash over him.
The Earth was large in the distance, the terminator visible from this angle of approach that segmented day from night. He knew that it would gradually shrink away until the entire globe was in darkness as he cut across the sunlight’s path.
Behind the Earth was the brilliant blaze of white light diffused in part by the atmosphere of the Earth and illuminating the narrow halo of soft blue.
Across all this moved the silhouette of the moon, making its gradual way to the terminator and looking like a big, black egg.
Egg? Cabot gasped. The moon was an oval slightly irregular along one edge, clearly the original sphere with an immense piece of its mass shorn away. The sensoria expanded and defined, and many lumps of stone ranging from the size of a building to that of a country came into view, floating along around Earth on various orbits and glittering faintly at the edges where they caught the light.
“My God,” mouthed Cabot, and looked on in shock. He lost all track of time in observation of those strange chunks of selenite, and asking himself what unfathomable cataclysm could have done such a thing. “Perhaps a meteor,” he thought, and in doing so he looked at the shards of the moon and prayed that none of them had fallen to Earth. The ship hadn’t detected any traces of spaceflight, although numerous radio signals were being received, transmitted in some incomprehensible coding system. He wasn’t surprised, not after the moon, and especially not considering all the time that had passed. If anything, he wondered if spaceflight and radio were necessary anymore.
After many, many hours had passed, and Cabot had gone to bed in his bunk only to awaken with excitement until he finally forced himself to swallow a sedative, the ship’s alarm roused him with a klaxon announcing entry into a low-Earth equatorial orbit.
Cabot sprang up eagerly, expecting to be bombarded with radio messages demanding his identity and what he was doing floating above the airspace of whatever nation happened to exist at the moment. The radio transmissions were as routine and enigmatic as before. Cabot had the ship’s cook make him a meal of soup and coffee from the mineral caches and then sat down at the DiNU.
They were in an extremely rapid orbit, with a total circuit time of thirty-seven minutes, and already five minutes in. He had the radio-scanner scour the surface, creating an ever-growing map of the world in his mind. He was unsure of the locale over which he passed, so he abandoned the radio-scanner to the automation and used infra-red and visual in conjunction. Traceries of light and heat cut their ways through a cold landscape, and brilliance clustered together in small enclaves brimming with warmth and illumination.
The terminator was nearing, and suddenly Brunhilde moved from inky blackness to the glare of the sun with the moon and shards painted in stark whites and greys all around. Chunks of stone floated hither and thither on endless circular voyages, and miniscule dust particles hung about them and shone like diamond clouds.
If you hated it, then I apologise for wasting your time. Thankyou.
[edit by I, Brian - just neatened the text and remove formatting issues from pasting in
]
