I literally just wrote this just now. Just looking for a little feedback. It's a reworked idea from a story I started last year.
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and froze in place. The wind whistled around me buffeting me as, step by harrowing step I made my way through the harsh white landscape. The cold seeped through every layer of my thick insulated snow gear penetrating my bones, sending old aches coursing through my body. Then I saw the cave. A slight overhang in the otherwise formless landscape. Icicles hung from the roof of the cave, their size varying, but mostly large and foreboding. Stumbling, my legs failing me at this last hurdle, I crawled the last few feet to the entrance. My body screamed at me to stop; but this was too important. I had to reach that cave. I had to find the cauldron. I reached around behind me, my hand a shaking, shivering mess, and grabbed determinedly at the pick-axe looped to my utility belt. I’d need it to shatter the large, thick icicles blocking the entrance to the cave.
…
I wasn’t always such a gung-ho explorer, in fact, I was a slightly overweight office worker when this all began, back when I was just another cube monkey in a world full of cube monkeys. Then the call had come.
It was a Monday, just like any other Monday. I’d ridden to work on my busted up, rusty old, trusty mountain bike, the one I’d ridden to work on for the last ten years, and when I arrived, I parked and locked it to the bike rack at the back of the office building in a tight alleyway, just big enough for the small delivery trucks that serviced our office.
I should say that I work for a company that deals in secrets. Not the kind that you keep from your parents, the petty white lies you tell your better half, nor the kind that have little effect on the natural order of things. No, my company, the one I work for dealt in the big secrets. The ones that mattered. Truly mattered. If these secrets were leaked to anyone, they’d be the kind of world shattering secrets that you can’t come back from.
I worked in the magic, mystical and mythical artefact department. Cube monkey five in a group of ten other cube monkeys that were all supposed to keep records and file manila folders full of highly confidential files into long storage cabinets. These were the hard copy files. There was also the computer backups. No two computers were networked. No computer had access to the internet. No computer had any sort of networking capability whatsoever. You could say They, the collective They, the ones who signed our checks and gave out the orders around here, were paranoid. You could say that, but no-one did. We all knew the consequences of secret sharing.
I’d witnessed it first hand, well, kind of.
Cube monkey four, my ex-neighbour, Peter Qinkaid, had just last month, on a late night bender revealed every secret he knew to an agent of Them. An old and ancient enemy of They, Them had been slowly but surely stealing secrets from They for years. If only to say that They had less secrets than Them.
Anyway, as it turns out, when you go spilling every secret to your corporation’s rival, They don’t take very kindly to that sort of thing. Within a day of Them stealing Peter’s most secret secrets, he had been “taken care of” by the upper management. And everyone knew that meant he’d been sent to The Farm.
What happened at The Farm and what became of the people sent there was unclear. What was clear though, was that no-one ever came back from The Farm and those who were sent there were never heard of again.
And then, on that normal ordinary Monday, as I parked my bike and rounded the alleyway to head into work, Peter Qinkaid, dishevelled and wild-eyed, stood before me in a raggedy torn up duster jacket, a pair of patchy, brown trousers and bare feet.
“Pete, ah, um, hi…?” I said.
I held out my arms in front of me and spoke as calmly and evenly as I could.
“Wh-what are you do…”
Pete laughed, a quick, high pitched scream of a laugh, and reached inside his jacket, his hands moving quicker than I could follow, from inside his torn up duster, he pulled a shiny black can, a can I’d seen before. Every They worker carried the same can. It was a can of Forgetter. Inside of which was a powerful dose of sleeping potion. Strong enough to induce a coma if enough of it was released. It allowed us to defend ourselves from those who would attempt to steal our secrets. No two workers kept the same secrets. Every person had their own personal store of secrets to file and enter into the system.
The mist from Pete’s Forgetter spray fanned out from the plastic cap atop the can and hit me directly in the face. It filtered up through my nostrils and in through my gaping mouth, stinging my pores and hitting my eyes, which instantly began to droop and sting as well. The spray had a nasty taste of stale fish as it hit my tongue and the last thing I recall before waking up hours later in a barn of some sort, is my whole body spasming violently, before abruptly shutting down and slumping forward.
When I woke in the barn, I felt groggy and my vision blurred.
“Welcome to The Farm old chum!” Pete’s voice said from somewhere nearby.
“Pete? What the hell is going on? Why am I here? Why did you come back? How did you come back? No-one comes back from here.”
“Ha! That’s what They tell you! That’s what They want you think. The truth, the crazy, messed up truth, is that The Farm is just a regular old farm. There’s no otherworldly happenings here, nothing out of the ordinary. Just some farm in the middle of nowhere.”
“What about security? Don’t They have guards out here?”
“Oh yes, Joe, They had so many guards, so many,” my vision was clearer now and I could see Pete over to the left of where I was lying half propped up on my elbow. He was shaking his head as he spoke, his hands twitching in sync. “You see, Joe, it took so long, so many guards, so much to do, things to take care of, don’t you see? They had to die, all of them, even the others, the ones who’d been sent here before. I couldn’t let them go, I had to poison them all. Otherwise they’d want to come. Otherwise I couldn’t escape. Otherwise…”
“Come? Come where, Pete? What’s happened? What have you done?”
The hairs on the back of my neck bristled and froze in place. The wind whistled around me buffeting me as, step by harrowing step I made my way through the harsh white landscape. The cold seeped through every layer of my thick insulated snow gear penetrating my bones, sending old aches coursing through my body. Then I saw the cave. A slight overhang in the otherwise formless landscape. Icicles hung from the roof of the cave, their size varying, but mostly large and foreboding. Stumbling, my legs failing me at this last hurdle, I crawled the last few feet to the entrance. My body screamed at me to stop; but this was too important. I had to reach that cave. I had to find the cauldron. I reached around behind me, my hand a shaking, shivering mess, and grabbed determinedly at the pick-axe looped to my utility belt. I’d need it to shatter the large, thick icicles blocking the entrance to the cave.
…
I wasn’t always such a gung-ho explorer, in fact, I was a slightly overweight office worker when this all began, back when I was just another cube monkey in a world full of cube monkeys. Then the call had come.
It was a Monday, just like any other Monday. I’d ridden to work on my busted up, rusty old, trusty mountain bike, the one I’d ridden to work on for the last ten years, and when I arrived, I parked and locked it to the bike rack at the back of the office building in a tight alleyway, just big enough for the small delivery trucks that serviced our office.
I should say that I work for a company that deals in secrets. Not the kind that you keep from your parents, the petty white lies you tell your better half, nor the kind that have little effect on the natural order of things. No, my company, the one I work for dealt in the big secrets. The ones that mattered. Truly mattered. If these secrets were leaked to anyone, they’d be the kind of world shattering secrets that you can’t come back from.
I worked in the magic, mystical and mythical artefact department. Cube monkey five in a group of ten other cube monkeys that were all supposed to keep records and file manila folders full of highly confidential files into long storage cabinets. These were the hard copy files. There was also the computer backups. No two computers were networked. No computer had access to the internet. No computer had any sort of networking capability whatsoever. You could say They, the collective They, the ones who signed our checks and gave out the orders around here, were paranoid. You could say that, but no-one did. We all knew the consequences of secret sharing.
I’d witnessed it first hand, well, kind of.
Cube monkey four, my ex-neighbour, Peter Qinkaid, had just last month, on a late night bender revealed every secret he knew to an agent of Them. An old and ancient enemy of They, Them had been slowly but surely stealing secrets from They for years. If only to say that They had less secrets than Them.
Anyway, as it turns out, when you go spilling every secret to your corporation’s rival, They don’t take very kindly to that sort of thing. Within a day of Them stealing Peter’s most secret secrets, he had been “taken care of” by the upper management. And everyone knew that meant he’d been sent to The Farm.
What happened at The Farm and what became of the people sent there was unclear. What was clear though, was that no-one ever came back from The Farm and those who were sent there were never heard of again.
And then, on that normal ordinary Monday, as I parked my bike and rounded the alleyway to head into work, Peter Qinkaid, dishevelled and wild-eyed, stood before me in a raggedy torn up duster jacket, a pair of patchy, brown trousers and bare feet.
“Pete, ah, um, hi…?” I said.
I held out my arms in front of me and spoke as calmly and evenly as I could.
“Wh-what are you do…”
Pete laughed, a quick, high pitched scream of a laugh, and reached inside his jacket, his hands moving quicker than I could follow, from inside his torn up duster, he pulled a shiny black can, a can I’d seen before. Every They worker carried the same can. It was a can of Forgetter. Inside of which was a powerful dose of sleeping potion. Strong enough to induce a coma if enough of it was released. It allowed us to defend ourselves from those who would attempt to steal our secrets. No two workers kept the same secrets. Every person had their own personal store of secrets to file and enter into the system.
The mist from Pete’s Forgetter spray fanned out from the plastic cap atop the can and hit me directly in the face. It filtered up through my nostrils and in through my gaping mouth, stinging my pores and hitting my eyes, which instantly began to droop and sting as well. The spray had a nasty taste of stale fish as it hit my tongue and the last thing I recall before waking up hours later in a barn of some sort, is my whole body spasming violently, before abruptly shutting down and slumping forward.
When I woke in the barn, I felt groggy and my vision blurred.
“Welcome to The Farm old chum!” Pete’s voice said from somewhere nearby.
“Pete? What the hell is going on? Why am I here? Why did you come back? How did you come back? No-one comes back from here.”
“Ha! That’s what They tell you! That’s what They want you think. The truth, the crazy, messed up truth, is that The Farm is just a regular old farm. There’s no otherworldly happenings here, nothing out of the ordinary. Just some farm in the middle of nowhere.”
“What about security? Don’t They have guards out here?”
“Oh yes, Joe, They had so many guards, so many,” my vision was clearer now and I could see Pete over to the left of where I was lying half propped up on my elbow. He was shaking his head as he spoke, his hands twitching in sync. “You see, Joe, it took so long, so many guards, so much to do, things to take care of, don’t you see? They had to die, all of them, even the others, the ones who’d been sent here before. I couldn’t let them go, I had to poison them all. Otherwise they’d want to come. Otherwise I couldn’t escape. Otherwise…”
“Come? Come where, Pete? What’s happened? What have you done?”
