Novel update…preview of early chapter
So, the novel is coming along. Will have it done by September, then off to the editor…cover design, formatting…copyediting back and forth…then shoot to have it out by Christmas on a Kindle near you. That’s the plan, anyway!
Since people are awesome enough to regularly ask how it’s going, I wanted to share a preview of what’s down on paper in the first portion of the book.
It’s sci-fi, so there’s that. I wanted to see if the opening chapters could explain what the heck is going on without a lot of prologue, so let’s see if it works here by not giving any intro. You’re welcome!
It’s raw at this point. And you might find a couple of typos or poorly written sentences. We’ll consider those proof of your genius if you can catch ’em all!
All rights reserved and all that lot.
===DRAFT===
Eve laced up her boots and sat on the table in her assigned examination room of the infirmary. After a few hours of tests, questionnaires and waiting, she was running thin on patience. However, the leisurely chatting of the civilian attendants in the hall told her she’d have a little while longer to sit.
Eve looked around the room for the ninth time, looking over the posters warning service members about the dangers of STDs, the upcoming flu season and being watchful for signs of suicidal thoughts.
Three young corpsmen slowed their walk as they passed her room’s open door. They looked up at the sign that said ‘Pre-Deployment’, then to Eve.
“Afternoon, chief,” one of them said, smiling.
Eve forced a smile and wave. They continued on, watching her as they passed. She couldn’t tell the rank—couldn’t tell if the men outranked her. She didn’t care. Neither did the medical types, usually. They seemed pretty casual around each other, a welcome break from the more hard-nosed components.
A nurse came in with a data pad. Eve sat up. The nurse walked straight over to the room’s terminal, entered in some commands and walked out again. Eve breathed deep and sighed. The air was freezing and odorless—almost unnaturally so.
The rooms were bright with dingy light from the fixtures. The whole infirmary seemed old and worn out. Floors seemed musty. Shelves looked a bit dull and worn. Eve remembered when the clinic first opened, it was after her third deployment—maybe fourth. She wasn’t sure.
“Afternoon, Chief Technician…Roel? Is that how you pronounce it?” a woman said as she entered the room, her eyes fixed on a data pad of her own. She wore the uniform of a doctor and Eve was able to spot rank, thankfully.
“Yes. Afternoon, ma’am,” Eve said, sitting up.
The doctor walked over, sat at the terminal and faced away from Eve as she scrolled through the data.
“I’m sorry things have been taking so long this morning,” she said vacantly. Eve was sure she wouldn’t hear any response. “Looks like we’ve been putting you through all the paces this morning,” she continued.
“Pre-deployment screens, yes,” Eve said.
“Exciting, yes?” the doctor turned around and smiled wide-eyed. “The reason we’re here and all, right?”
“Sure,” Eve said.
“No no, I’m serious,” the doctor got up and closed the door, then returned to her terminal chair and looked Eve in the eyes. “We are honored every day for our part in service to our dronemasters.”
“Dronemasters?” Eve asked with a slight laugh. “Command is back to calling techs dronemasters again?”
“Look,” the doctor leaned in. “I spend most of my days dealing with people trying to get on light duty or out of muster or recovering from something they picked up from a one-night stand. It’s good to have a real reason to come in to work. People notice when we send a technician off to the fight. There’s a buzz in the air. People go out to see the carriers launch. Reminds them why we’re all these billions of miles from home.”
The doctor slapped Eve’s knees and spun back around toward her terminal. “So live it up a little. Soak in the hero worship. You’re the only one of us who will ever get close to actual combat.”
Eve had heard this speech before nearly every deployment of her career, each from different doctors saying it as though it was the first time. There had been other adoring stares and curious onlookers then too, whispering about deployment and all. But it was more for them than for her—this feeling like they were doing something that mattered. To Eve, it was another deployment. One closer to the end of her conscription. Nothing more.
“It looks as though your brain scans came in…” the doctor said, her voice drew out in to a strange echoing. “Who ordered those?”
Eve caught a shiver and noticed the cold again. She was always cold these days. She wondered why? And the echoing? Sounds often seemed to echo into nothingness. Eve looked at her hands. The scene faded in and out slightly as if she was about to faint.
Was something wrong? She seemed to feel fine apart from the cold. Was she sick? She looked to the doctor, but the scene had slowed, like a vid playback on half speed.
Was this cryo? It might be. Yes, yes it was. Eve remembered it now. She was in cryosleep, on the way to another deployment. Moreover, she was dreaming in cryosleep—something that was not supposed to happen—something the doctors always said was impossible because of the temperatures—about processes and brain waves. But Eve had been dreaming in cryo for several deployments.
She had tried to talk about it during checkups and pre/post deployment tests, but no one seemed to take it seriously.
“…I’m sorry?” Eve said, back in the dream, noticing the doctor had turned as if waiting for an answer.
“Yes, I see you do drift off. Does that happen often?” the doctor asked, eyes back on the screen.
“Does what happen?” Eve asked.
“Daydreaming, your mind going somewhere else, does it happen to you a lot?”
“Sometimes yes,” Eve said.
The doctor started typing something. “How often?”
“What did the brain scans say?” Eve asked. “Is there a problem?”
The doctor kept looking at the screen away from Eve.
“Is there a problem?” Eve repeated the question.
“What?—Oh, nothing you need worry about. Nothing that will stop the mission,” the doctor said.
“It’s the Gloom isn’t it?” Eve asked.
“What?” the doctor seemed surprised. She turned around from the terminal and looked at Eve.
“I’ve been in service what—21 years? About nine or 10 of it awake. I’ve heard the rumors about the old techs—how the Gloom erodes our brains, slowly burning us out.”
“What rumors?” the doctor laughed, “Who here have you talked with?”
Eve sighed and stretched her legs a bit. “No one here. Techs don’t see much of each other. But I’ve talked about the it before—“
“—Yes, it’s been noted in your records that you’ve brought it up—a preoccupation about this ‘Gloominess’ or whatever the fear mongers are calling it. There’s nothing to it. Quantum interfacing is harmless with the right equipment and medications.”
“But I dream.”
“What?” again, the doctor was surprised. She looked a little shocked, like Eve had mentioned something off limits.
“I dream in cryosleep, and it reminds me of the Gloom. There has to be a connection,” Eve said.
“Nonsense. It’s impossible. Nobody dreams in cryosleep. The brain can’t achieve the levels of—“
“—Enough!” Eve raised her voice. “I don’t see the damn point of all this talking, all these questions, if no one ever listens to what I have to say! I go through this before every damned mission. I answer them the same, I answer them differently and nothing changes. All I get is looks from you people and the same pills.”
The doctor’s eyes narrowed a little. “You have been taking your pills, right? Because that might explain why—”
Eve put her hand to her forehead, the headache was back. “—Yes, yes, blue pills for the implants, yellow pills for my synapses. Yes. But they don’t stop these damned headaches.”
Silence. Eve took a second and calmed down. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t mean to get angry.”
“It’s alright,” the doctor said. “Nervous about the deployment, I bet. Well, and ready to get out of the infirmary too. Ha!”
The doctor didn’t seem phased at her outburst. Eve sat quietly while the doctor worked, then asked, “About the headaches…the headaches are worse too.”
“You find a boyfriend during this in between time at the expedition station?” the doctor asked, ignoring Eve’s comment.
“What? No,” Eve said, annoyed. “Techs don’t mingle much with the troops. You know that.”
“No. Some do. And it would be good for you to find a good lay while you’re here. Plenty of guys would be putty in your hands after some war stories.”
Sex? The doctor was pushing Eve to have sex? She frowned and shook her head.
“Or women, if that’s your thing,” the doctor continued.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Every body needs some body, as they say.”
“I’m fine,” Eve said.
“Look, the scans say there’s nothing wrong with you…,” the doctor paused. “Headaches happen. Just keep taking your anti-rejection pills for the implants and the synapse invigorating medication for the best data throughput.” She paused, then said, “…But I do think it would do you good to find some companionship. Being on deployment out there alone with naught but drones would be taxing for anyone—even just once—let alone for however many deployments you’ve been on.”
“Seventeen,” Eve said. “I’ve been on 17.”
“Quite right,” the doctor smiled.
The scene seemed to fade out slowly. Eve remembered this happening many times before. Much of dreaming in cryo was slow and plodding. Dreams seemed to build themselves up in parts so that the light then colors then shapes then voices all arrived separately, as if thawing out from her mind.
Eve wasn’t quite sure how long she had been in cryo. Transit times to and from deployments could be anywhere from several weeks to nearly a year. While in the dreaming scenes, time seemed to move along normally, the interim periods of darkness and muffled light and sounds could very well have been days or weeks for all Eve knew. In fact, it’s how Eve supposed those first few years of her non-dreaming cryosleep passed. But somehow, her mind grew around this long slumber and adapted to expressing itself while in cryo—like her implants allowed her mind to adapt to perceive the Gloom, the workspace of the quantum technicians.
This dream space was very similar to the Gloom, dark and cold. Perhaps it was the similarity that made dreaming possible.
The Gloom was unofficial nickname for the never used official yet unwieldy term: Mentally Constructed Visual Representation of the Quantum Space. It was where quantum technicians went to perform their repair duties on the intricate and evolving data centers of modern combat drones—a sort of trance-like state where technicians would use their implants and visors to peer into the circuits and hardware of drones to “see” the pathways of electricity and information as patterns and structures of light and color held aloft in an infinite cold black world.
It was where techs like Eve spent much of their time during deployment, repairing and pruning down the reasoning functions of the always-evolving intelligences of modern drones. Where machines could repair many aspects of themselves—replace limbs, weapon systems, armor plates, they could not, by design (and thankfully by the limits of their nature) fix or alter their programming.
Interfacing with the quantum space to fix the drones’ quantum algorithms required a human mind. Machine programming would break down and scramble when brought into the data stream of the quantum space.
As if by accident, the human mind, when properly implanted with processing nodes, could not only make sense of the raw chaos of data of the quantum space, but also rendered it with poetic simplicity. Light and color in patterns against blackness. Order, and chaos. Data and information, flowing in streams and structures, like blood through veins and organs. Technicians would “see” a program in the Gloom—see its structures and its components, and with the help of attendant drones and tools in the real world to aid the tech’s sluggish physical responsiveness while in the trance, could perform feats of unparalleled technical panache.
Quantum technicians were the only reason any human was required near the front lines of the Former United States’ galactic holdings at all. The need for repairs in the Gloom was the only thing that kept humans in the game.
Where most of the FUS citizenry didn’t care where its drone militaries gained their victories, so long as it kept their domination of space intact, those who paid attention knew that quantum technicians were the key.
Some considered this human inclusion in this advanced technological process providential—nearly divine. Techs were a sorts of shamans of technology—highly trained, undergoing years of painful training and implantation, to become amongst the most celebrated professions of the new age.
Techs were responsible for crafting the programs and data structures that kept the FUS world-dominating AI-managed economic organizations running. Techs shaped and molded the very natures of the algorithms of these entities. They tended to do very well for themselves—at least the ones heralded as war heroes did.
But Eve was a conscript, forced into service along with thousands of others too poor or convicted of too many crimes to be of any use to the emergent FUS corporate and national governments.
Eve’s crowning achievement was in her long fight to gain acceptance into the quantum technician program. The price was a much-extended term of service and constant disdain from her more nationalistic superiors. But she was confident in a more comfortable life at the end of it all—if it ever ended.
She seemed to drift for a while more in the blackness. Perhaps for days…weeks. Some dim steams of blue shimmered in the distance. It might be the beginnings of the next scene. She put her grasp of seconds and minutes out of her mind, pushed out the constant cold and just was. She’d become very practiced at being at peace here. She smiled, the frozen air biting at her teeth as she breathed deeply.
Another scene never came. After a period she opened her eyes in the dream again, some flashes of light came through in the distance.
But something was different. She could feel herself being slowly pulled toward the flashes.
She was waking up.
===DRAFT===
###
Three parts. Not musical, though.
Part 1: The Absence
Admittedly I had blogs I wrote in my head during these last few weeks. Well, okay, not “written” but had the gist of them hammered out during the work day. I’d get home, often exhausted, and would look at the blank web browser. I’d think, “Should I go to the blog and hack out a few paragraphs?” “Naw,” I’d then think, “I don’t want to get into it.”
“It” being talking about life. “It” being talking about work. There are those from work who read this here blog in ones and twos, to be sure. Not that I had anything bad to say about people—it doesn’t get a person anywhere to bash people outright, especially from under the skirt of the Internet (yes, she’s a lady and she’s sexeh). It’s just the whole conundrum about writing about work. Should I? What else should I write about, then? Work has kind of been most of my life. I don’t have any exciting hobbies. I can only try to play softball (note to self, write post about softball).
What else is there to write about other than work? Social media theory? Ha! I hardly get any chance to read, let alone comment on that sort of stuff now that I’m in corporate America. There’s too many meetings to go to. And, honestly, when I get home, logging in to Google Reader and seeing the 1,200,000+ unread items is depressing. I’ve heard others talk about that. It’s one of those features I think actually dissuades people from using Google Reader. Maybe I should write a note. Like they could flip the feature around and talk about how the two posts I read today was a full 100 percent more (ZOMG w/ exclamation point) than the previous day’s reading. That sort of thing might get me out of bed in the morning in the hopes of getting around to Google Reader right before I get back into bed.
So all that to say, by the time a few days got between me and blogging, the gap sort of fed itself. It was like seeing how long it took for a flickering candle to eventually sputter out, or a car to run out of gas. Ok I don’t do that. Maybe not that example. Or it was like seeing the sun fully slip under the horizon. Better, yes. I watched it, saw the days compound and sort of just let things go.
Pretty bad of me, right? Well, that’s the thing about the Internets, people are jerks.
Part 2: The iPad
So, as an impulse, I bought an iPad a couple of weeks back. Don’t think I did it to prove I was alive or whatever shopaholics claim is the muse for their condition. I just sort of decided to buy one. For me, the build-up was a two day process. I heard how frikkin’ amazing the damn things were from clergy, coworkers and nature itself (Dreamed about an otter using an iPad. That was my sign. Otters, dude. Yeah.). I arrived at work the next day, decided to get one and bought one that evening.
Didn’t make a big production out of it. I didn’t make an announcement. Didn’t update my Facebook status. Didn’t see the need to really call it out. I guess part of that was my embarrassment at claiming I would not get one—that I already had a Kindle, a laptop and a will to live, so an iPad just didn’t do anything for me. And yet, maybe I needed a new type of will to live. Maybe I needed a media consumption “will to live”. I heard an iPad would reinvigorate my love for interacting with rich content—which itself sounds both intriguing and revolting in a “is this where I am in life?” sort of way.
Now, for my remaining two readers’ (hi Mom, Dad!) benefit, iPads are a pretty big deal where I work. We are a company that is absolutely infatuated with hip buzzwords like “innovation”, “synergy”, “thought leaders”. And our hearts are in the right place, but sometimes it’s a bit much. We develop apps for iPhone and iPad like it’s our job…which it is, but regardless, our company has an almost unhealthy love and indirect endorsement for Apple products. iPhones and iPads are handed out to leadership and select managers/leaders like candy. Scores of directors, VPs, AVPs, SVPs, EMGs, DSKWEs, EWKWOIJGDOSDIs and whatever else walk around the building with their issued iPhones, iPads and wax eloquent on how their lives have morphed into living technological haiku, all because of the tech-kensei status bequeathed to them from the very POSSESSION of such implements of awesomeness. The ‘tic tic tic tic’ of iPad keystrokes is a five point palm exploding heart technique on my soul!
So of course I wanted one! JEEEZ!
And it is pretty cool, except for the part where I may not be allowed to use it at work. We’re reeeeeeeeeally sensitive about keeping all corporate things confidential. Not to be confused with military intelligence classification. I have a government clearance. That’s easy breezy. They just hand those out. Doesn’t count. Our policies are moar hardcorez! Nothing can be trusted!
So I may be asked to not ever bring in my personal iPad to work at some point. Which is a bummer, since all the cool leaders and managers and anyone worth a damn have theirs to get ahead in life. The plebes fail.
Part 3: The End
Of the post. Ah, that was cheap, wasn’t it? Okay, scratch that.
New Part 3: The Beginning
As you may or may not know (again, to my readership…Mom, Dad), I was hired at my current gig to be the chief blogger, senior community manager and corporate conversationalist. Fancy words for “Guy who writes, trains and empowers others to participate in social media.” Dunno if all that will come to pass. There’s an awful lot of day-to-day grind stuff that needs doing. And new stuff shows up every day—all that “life” and “news” stuff that bubbles up. So, there’s no real way to get on top of it.
There is hope, though.
There’s an unfilled position for someone to be the “communities and collaboration” leader…which, to those paying attention, sounded exactly like the job I was hired to do. This one will get paid a lot more money, though, so I’m hoping maybe I’ll be under that person? Or maybe I’ll be reassigned? Regardless, one way or the other, I won’t have to fret about not doing the job, because I’ll either be doing it for the person it charge of it or letting someone else do it. There is a third option, to be revealed by God’s providence, but those are the cards I have at the moment. Pocket threes and someone raised before the river. Jerks.
And, as a parting shot, please don’t take the cynicism for unhappiness. That’s just my shtick. I’m cool with whatev. I’m happy not babysitting troops—not worrying they’ll get swindled at pay-day loan spots, not get tossed in the slammer, not piss hot, not lose accountable equipment. I do miss the manager/leader stuff sometimes, and look forward to the day when I can be a leader in the normal world and not have to counsel someone for being the “phantom pooper.” But for the moment, I’m fine with life sans fecal crises.
###
The inevitability of assimilation
Yesterday I was in a meeting (surprise). It involved a group of people on the opposite end of the corporate campus. They were scheduled to support a big upcoming event and needed to be brought up to speed. In fact, some of them were defensive and put out, having been volunteered to provide content, personnel, etc., for an event they had little to no knowledge of.
There was nothing to fear, however, the right people were in the room and quickly alleviated the fears of those not up to speed on what was scheduled. While very beneficial, a full hour was needed to bring yet another group into the fold.
So I started thinking about all of the new workflow augmentation and internal collaboration tools beginning to gather steam. We all have email, but that doesn’t do the job. We all have some sort of document-tracking system, but that’s usually very lackluster. There are, however, better ways to collaborate. There are niftier tools that share notes and side conversations, capture questions, provide achievable and searchable video sessions. As we, society or whatever, move toward more robust and more comprehensive content management systems, we will become not just connected, but beyond that…probably into the realm of assimilation.
Assimilation being merging streams of thought into each other, collaborating and correcting points of view way before they even get to an email or a curt comment said to a coworker under his or her breath. I’m talking about the end game of collaboration, the fusing of intent and talent into the natural mechanics of one corporate entity. This is super connectivity, hyper connectivity, more than just cooler email.
Now I’m not saying we’ll go Borg from the onset, but I think we will have augmented reality screens, speech-to-text transcribers, eye-driven GUI glasses and a lot of the sorts of cool building tools seen in “Ironman” or “Star Trek.” It just makes sense to me.
Because, I mean, we’re already pretty immersed in connectivity. How much MORE “connection” can we have? We all have work cell phones, work email, and the ability to call a coworker or subordinate in the dead of night and get some information about such-and-such document. It may be frowned upon (for now), but the possibility of this sort of normal life disruption is there.
Let’s look at the inherent inefficiency of modern communication, “connected” though it may be.
Person A, let’s say Sarah, has an idea. Sarah has to use her communication skills to take her thoughts, select words to those thoughts and form sentences and paragraphs. Then, like some complicated origami project, Sarah has to fold and build her proposal into a series of lines of symbols on paper or a screen.
Sarah then sends off this idea. Others see her words and paragraphs and decrypt it into their own thoughts and feelings. People routinely misread, skim over too quickly, or perhaps vaguely understand the author’s intent. They then react to this new information in their own ways, internalize it, build judgments and responses.
If collaboration is required, these independent agents, each with their own views and opinions, must be brought together over the course of multiple meetings and briefings, to air their specific interpretations of Sarah’s idea. Unfortunately, each response now starts the process again; and the probability for misunderstanding and gap of intent increases exponentially.
We usually muddle through the ineffectiveness of group thought by having multiple meetings, using humor or charisma to persuade or perhaps brushing aside objections through rank structure and hierarchy.
But all of those steps, and there are more, sure, I believe lead to so much of our life drama and inefficiency as an organization. We can look at the alien nature of an ant hive and scoff, sure, but we can’t argue with the results, can we? Now, I’m not talking about slaving of one to the will of many here, but don’t we think there will be a move toward this direction? I mean, as an evolution of the corporate body?
No? What happens when Google or some whiz-bang company develops some basic assimilative tools, where Sarah, from our example, can virtually be standing over the shoulders of everyone who interacts with her information, to correct or at least better explain her intents in word choice or sequence of ideas? Wouldn’t this be more efficient communication? Isn’t that the end goal of all the email programs, scheduling apps and meetings we hold every day?
What if a company was able to connect the relevant people to the relevant projects and share information to minimize misunderstandings or personal differences? What if managers knew of the obstacles as they emerged, without having to interfere or ask to be “back briefed” on situations? I think of all the video games out there, where the human player assumes the role of some omnipresent commander, able to see the workings of each part of his or her army, training and production, with just a few clicks of a button. It’s the way to be an efficient leader, isn’t it?
So, as a man who understands one can only rage against progress for so long before drowning in the rising tides, I wonder if we’ll look back on ourselves in 20-30 years and think how silly we were to think and feel in isolation. There will probably be a good chunk of us who would welcome this assimilation. It would lead to vastly superior profits and performance, wouldn’t it? Just sayin’.
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Talking Salmons 
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