Cli-Fi
John J. Falco
This is the new first chapter that I have been working on for the past two months since posting my other chapter one for this WIP. That one now is the second chapter taking place thirty years from this chapter in 2080. This chapter adds a bit more backstory and mythology to the plot. This isn't the full chapter because it's more than 1500 words obviously, but if you can't tell, it's slowly building up to when the internet goes offline and what Daphne is doing when that happens.
I've been playing with this opening for awhile and I think it works well for a first chapter instead of a prologue, because a lot of these elements will be in the rest of the novel and it sets up the battles as well as the world which Daphne knew and then gets exiled from. There's a very good reason she was in the pod for eight days instead of four hours and that's one of the bigger questions that ties into the mystery of The Disconnect itself. What do you think?
1. Bricked
2050
Her timeslot was intended to last four hours for some sort of research, but it’s been eight days and counting, since she won a coveted slot in an Edupod. Now suffocating from boredom and the fumes that collected into a puddle of sweat that dripped down her spine like a potent IV bag, Daphne Perry was slowly going insane trying to ignore the dampness of the clothes that made her skin break out in rashes all over her body and the itchy tight-fitting cling that didn’t make it any easier to breathe.
From the way her nose was clogged, the way her oily skin felt between her finger tips and how her flesh began to smell like rotting meat, she could tell that her edupod was beginning to reach over capacity. She had never been plugged in this long and she was soon regretting the late-shift timeslot that she had chosen; but a proper education was very hard to come by these days and she needed the time for something she couldn’t quite remember.
Since starting this session she had experienced back-pain, night-sweats, random body parts that swelled up for no apparent reason, spasms, and what she thought was a mini-stroke. That was only on day one. This was not the proper price of a good education, she thought as she recoiled which only added to the floating chunky mess inside the pod.
The pod she was in was not much longer than her own body and it was a snug but comfortable fit. Her outside world was not two inches in front of her face and if she wanted to she could see the boring ceiling of The Registrar with the crisscrossing metal beams that she knew so well, through a bullet-proof semi-transparent square glass that only revealed her dark green eyes to anybody that would look down at Pod #77. Usually however, when she was selected for these missions that were supposed to have much quicker timeslots, she preferred the abstract purple gooey wallpaper-like substance that so encompassed her mind’s eye as soon as she plugged into the complex virtual network.
By the fourth day though, that subconscious screensaver wouldn’t be enough as hunger took over. Her feed wires had gotten clogged and it was getting difficult to eat the mush that The Registrar pushed through, anyway. She had banged on the top of the lid of the pod and flailed around for some time before she realized what she had to do. She made a slit in the black Velcro that snaked around the bed that she laid in which protected the feed wire as well as the quantum light transmissions which helped bring information directly into the brain. With difficulty she found the clog and dug in to the wire so that she could reach some nutrition. She threw the mush into the one inch of water that sloshed around in the pod for strong electrical currents and it was still there.
On the fifth day, trolls tried to hijack her mind. A shocking voice had commandeered her thoughts. “Do not use this method of education! It is too dangerous!” Despite the peculiar situation Daphne found herself in, which for the moment she did agree was technically detrimental to her health, she found that she didn’t share the voice’s concerns about the evils of the so-called Educational Industrial Complex or the machine that she was using.
He was an elder man wearing a grey jumpsuit with overalls. On his left overall he wore a Pin with a red bolded A, which used to be the symbol for anarchism. The whole getup looked like something out of a Russian infomercial. With white hair, gentle blue eyes, and a deep consoling voice, he tried to lure anyone he could away from using the education pods by warning of government conspiracies to control thought-patterns and creepy military experiments.
By the sixth day, her head felt like it was on fire from a massive pounding headache and she was more than ready to drain her brain of all the useless information that the users had consumed for her in the past days. She felt like those hopeless princesses in those old-timey fairy tales forever waiting for her rescuer. Those same stories that she had uploaded to her mind as a kid when the edupods first came online. Things seemed so innocent back then…
Sharing the resources of the mind didn’t seem like such a good idea that moment. Information overload was not fun. No matter what anybody said. As the ugly after-effects of prolonged exposure in the network revealed themselves, she wondered when her session would ever end.
Maybe the anti-tech marketing material that she was being subjected to on a semi-regular basis had a point. To the other techies, she was nothing but a node to be used and tossed away. Shriveled up and forgotten deep in this network that she now found herself unable to escape and no one seemed to care.
It was not the pleasant experience that she was led to believe that it would be from the folks at The Registrar who pushed her to take this timeslot. Whatever it was that Daphne was selected to do in the edupod, she had long since forgotten it. Every waking hour she felt like she was losing precious brain cells that could be put to better use for the good of the world, but The Registrar didn’t care about that.
By day eight, she remembered something. She had heard stories of her friends getting attacked in this way, but she never experienced it for herself and for research purposes she wanted to and unfortunately she got her wish. She remembered that she was writing a thesis! The puzzling thing was that she felt like she had finished it, and it was finished in that allotted timeslot that seemed so important a week ago. So why was she still in here?
Suddenly, just as she had that epiphany, the lights flickered and her protective screensaver went away and never came back online. What was going on out there? She thought to herself as she saw a bunch of bunch of guards run pass her pod’s lookout point. She banged on the lid, but no one stopped to help her out.
“Warning Hostiles Approaching, System Compromised.” The notification system alerted her.
She heard the heavy footsteps of military boots come closer to her pod. “We need to go in grab the memory core and get out before anyone sees us.” One of the muffled voices explained their plan quite clearly.
Daphne slowed her breathing and remained perfectly still in her pod. It was tight fitting like a cocoon but at least there was no way these normals would even be able to figure out how to open it, unless they had outside help.
So she knew she was physically safe, but what if it wasn’t her body they were after, she thought. What if they wanted her mind? Her mind, which was vulnerable and partially resting outside her body on the various conveyor belt of computer systems that allowed other techies to connect to it and use it to power the network. Peer-to-Peer education was dangerous her mother had often warned, what if she was right?
“What if someone is in there?” Another voice asked.
“It doesn’t matter; she is writing that dreadful paper insulting all of us. We’ll put an end to it, and we need to do it before anybody at The Registrar sees it.”
I've been playing with this opening for awhile and I think it works well for a first chapter instead of a prologue, because a lot of these elements will be in the rest of the novel and it sets up the battles as well as the world which Daphne knew and then gets exiled from. There's a very good reason she was in the pod for eight days instead of four hours and that's one of the bigger questions that ties into the mystery of The Disconnect itself. What do you think?
1. Bricked
2050
Her timeslot was intended to last four hours for some sort of research, but it’s been eight days and counting, since she won a coveted slot in an Edupod. Now suffocating from boredom and the fumes that collected into a puddle of sweat that dripped down her spine like a potent IV bag, Daphne Perry was slowly going insane trying to ignore the dampness of the clothes that made her skin break out in rashes all over her body and the itchy tight-fitting cling that didn’t make it any easier to breathe.
From the way her nose was clogged, the way her oily skin felt between her finger tips and how her flesh began to smell like rotting meat, she could tell that her edupod was beginning to reach over capacity. She had never been plugged in this long and she was soon regretting the late-shift timeslot that she had chosen; but a proper education was very hard to come by these days and she needed the time for something she couldn’t quite remember.
Since starting this session she had experienced back-pain, night-sweats, random body parts that swelled up for no apparent reason, spasms, and what she thought was a mini-stroke. That was only on day one. This was not the proper price of a good education, she thought as she recoiled which only added to the floating chunky mess inside the pod.
The pod she was in was not much longer than her own body and it was a snug but comfortable fit. Her outside world was not two inches in front of her face and if she wanted to she could see the boring ceiling of The Registrar with the crisscrossing metal beams that she knew so well, through a bullet-proof semi-transparent square glass that only revealed her dark green eyes to anybody that would look down at Pod #77. Usually however, when she was selected for these missions that were supposed to have much quicker timeslots, she preferred the abstract purple gooey wallpaper-like substance that so encompassed her mind’s eye as soon as she plugged into the complex virtual network.
By the fourth day though, that subconscious screensaver wouldn’t be enough as hunger took over. Her feed wires had gotten clogged and it was getting difficult to eat the mush that The Registrar pushed through, anyway. She had banged on the top of the lid of the pod and flailed around for some time before she realized what she had to do. She made a slit in the black Velcro that snaked around the bed that she laid in which protected the feed wire as well as the quantum light transmissions which helped bring information directly into the brain. With difficulty she found the clog and dug in to the wire so that she could reach some nutrition. She threw the mush into the one inch of water that sloshed around in the pod for strong electrical currents and it was still there.
On the fifth day, trolls tried to hijack her mind. A shocking voice had commandeered her thoughts. “Do not use this method of education! It is too dangerous!” Despite the peculiar situation Daphne found herself in, which for the moment she did agree was technically detrimental to her health, she found that she didn’t share the voice’s concerns about the evils of the so-called Educational Industrial Complex or the machine that she was using.
He was an elder man wearing a grey jumpsuit with overalls. On his left overall he wore a Pin with a red bolded A, which used to be the symbol for anarchism. The whole getup looked like something out of a Russian infomercial. With white hair, gentle blue eyes, and a deep consoling voice, he tried to lure anyone he could away from using the education pods by warning of government conspiracies to control thought-patterns and creepy military experiments.
By the sixth day, her head felt like it was on fire from a massive pounding headache and she was more than ready to drain her brain of all the useless information that the users had consumed for her in the past days. She felt like those hopeless princesses in those old-timey fairy tales forever waiting for her rescuer. Those same stories that she had uploaded to her mind as a kid when the edupods first came online. Things seemed so innocent back then…
Sharing the resources of the mind didn’t seem like such a good idea that moment. Information overload was not fun. No matter what anybody said. As the ugly after-effects of prolonged exposure in the network revealed themselves, she wondered when her session would ever end.
Maybe the anti-tech marketing material that she was being subjected to on a semi-regular basis had a point. To the other techies, she was nothing but a node to be used and tossed away. Shriveled up and forgotten deep in this network that she now found herself unable to escape and no one seemed to care.
It was not the pleasant experience that she was led to believe that it would be from the folks at The Registrar who pushed her to take this timeslot. Whatever it was that Daphne was selected to do in the edupod, she had long since forgotten it. Every waking hour she felt like she was losing precious brain cells that could be put to better use for the good of the world, but The Registrar didn’t care about that.
By day eight, she remembered something. She had heard stories of her friends getting attacked in this way, but she never experienced it for herself and for research purposes she wanted to and unfortunately she got her wish. She remembered that she was writing a thesis! The puzzling thing was that she felt like she had finished it, and it was finished in that allotted timeslot that seemed so important a week ago. So why was she still in here?
Suddenly, just as she had that epiphany, the lights flickered and her protective screensaver went away and never came back online. What was going on out there? She thought to herself as she saw a bunch of bunch of guards run pass her pod’s lookout point. She banged on the lid, but no one stopped to help her out.
“Warning Hostiles Approaching, System Compromised.” The notification system alerted her.
She heard the heavy footsteps of military boots come closer to her pod. “We need to go in grab the memory core and get out before anyone sees us.” One of the muffled voices explained their plan quite clearly.
Daphne slowed her breathing and remained perfectly still in her pod. It was tight fitting like a cocoon but at least there was no way these normals would even be able to figure out how to open it, unless they had outside help.
So she knew she was physically safe, but what if it wasn’t her body they were after, she thought. What if they wanted her mind? Her mind, which was vulnerable and partially resting outside her body on the various conveyor belt of computer systems that allowed other techies to connect to it and use it to power the network. Peer-to-Peer education was dangerous her mother had often warned, what if she was right?
“What if someone is in there?” Another voice asked.
“It doesn’t matter; she is writing that dreadful paper insulting all of us. We’ll put an end to it, and we need to do it before anybody at The Registrar sees it.”
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I will consider your suggestion but for now since I have a beginning that works it's full speed ahead.
