Magenta Monster

It’s Day 11 and though I splurged most of this yesterday I thought I needed to just go over it again to at least get it all clear in my own head having basically completed nano in a week.

I have been ploughing my way through NaNoWriMo this year 🙂 Though to be fair I have not just worked this years novel of which there is actually only 30 K words. Instead I have been working on filling in gaps in pervious novels set in the world and writing flash and short fiction based in the world. This helps me look in the back story so the writing of the actual story goes a lot faster!

I am now thinking that I should release some of the flash fics and shorts as a properly edited volume – as long term readers of my stuff will know – I am dyslexic and the stuff on the blogs can sometimes be a bit rough. SO after nano I shall see how many of these stories I have and then get them edited up.

Not sure yet what it will be called.

Welsh and Norse mythologies have now joined the meso-americian and greccio-roman/Indo-European mythoses and in general there is a very solid time line from evolutionary dawn to about 200 years in our future.

PiBoIdMo – the picture book challenge is also moving along a pace with all of the new ideas written up and some work having been put in on my Graphic Novel. I have tried been militant about carving out the time I need and hope I can maintain it through out the month!.

It was a close run thing but yesterday I managed to complete NaNoWriMo with the help of a write-in in Bristol. 11K is my new daily writing max and I managed that twice, finishing Nano in just over a week is also a personal best and I am very very chuffed.

How ever this kind of isn’t the end to it! Nope far from it – for a start I am not going to just drop my Punk projects. I plan to keep writing though due to other commitments I am not now going to be going at it all the time! No that is now going to be my comic book which is in sore need of some TLC.

But having said that I am to continue adding 2000 words a day to the universe – which is growing and widening and the time line is locking down which actually makes the writing a lot easier – it is bounded on three sides – of course it probably has 10 sides plus another for time or some such. I know that there is still absolutely no time travel in it other than the standard going forward.

And to stop it becoming many many started and not finished pieces December is going to be a FiNoMo – Finish Novel Month.

For a start I only have about 25 k of novel written the rest of my nano words have ended up being flash fictions, short stories and the beginnings of longer and serial pieces based in the universe.

And I also need to start putting up some more of the notes for the world and getting some diagrams of individuals time lines and how they intersect as well as regional and planetary time lines. I need to check numbers of generations and a few things like that.

There are most def. enough short stories and flash fictions to release a collection – all the stories will slowly be going out on here so don’t fret you will still get to read it all for free, but there will be a nicely polished version in physical and ebook which you can choose to buy if you wish (say if you hate my indervidualistic spelling and grammar 😉 ).

There is also a list of other story concepts that are begging to be added to the universe – I am resisting making these stories at the moment and am collecting ideas and formulating plots. I think there may well be some future nano projects there.

If I am honest I would like to hit the 100, 000 word mark by the end of the month but that would be pushing it. Though I am so tempted as it is only the same amount of work I have already put in and it would bust another personal record 🙂

Tempting….

It has just gone midnight here and I have 40, 000 words, last weekend with the aid of a write in I managed 11, 000 words in a day – a personal best. If I manage that again I will finish NaNo today.

I am more than excited 🙂

I also donated so for the first year ever I have a halo, though I did do the sponsoring thing the past two years.

Of course I am not sure how well things will go as I have a Rememberance Service in the morning which may take it out of me if the weather is like it was today.

If I finish then I will be cutting the word out put down to 2000 a day and focusing on the comic book and childrens book stuff I am also doing. I have written lots of flash fictions based in the Punk’s Universe and short stories and some that fit together and some that stand alone and some that have just kept going and are saved at 5000 odd words with a tad of exasperation on my part as I wonder if it wants to be another novel.

Anyway wish me luck and I’m off to WRITE! WRITE! WRITE!

Bio hacking had been a thing for maybe 30 years, he’d mixed it in with the 3D printing tech he had. He had read about wetware and prosthetics and he had started the project. It wouldn’t be her, it never could be her. He had her hair, had gotten hold of an old blood sample of hers; it would be part of her.

It was a cyborg, it was stitched with bio-electronics, nano-ceramics had been printed into optronic circuitry within the creature’s body. He had not been able to find matching material and she was piece-meal. He hoped she would not mind, hoped he had fitted the nervous system to the meat and the synth correctly.

He fired up his hub for the last few hours of work, reminding himself once more that this thing would not be his daughter. She was gone, this thing he was making… he wasn’t sure what it was or why he was actually making it. He’d been working on the program for the past five years; he’d looked at the footage of his girl, read her school books, sent her drawings to psychiatric analysers.

He called the program bundle Nim’s Chem.

Tonight was the night. He feared he was about to become Dr Frankenstein. She would have the ability to learn, to grow, to be; she was not his daughter, but she would be a daughter. May had left him when she found what he was doing; she had tried to understand, but she had not been the girl’s mother. If she had been, maybe she would have understood more.

He waited for a moment and hesitated. All his trials, all his pain, were all about to come to an end. Either way, work or fail, this was the moment he played with eternity, when he had the potential power of life over death. He began the upload and integration, clicked his neck and rolled his shoulders, and wiped a tear from his pudgy eye. It was going to be a long vigil as he waited for systems to click in.

He ordered krill and seaweed pizza.

The time stretched and he yawned and he fixed bugs on the fly and giggled at the pun and cried that his daughter would have loved the joke and time stretched out and the night wound around his heart and then the stitched body of meat and ceramics began to twitch.

Then it was still and he held his breath. She opened her eyes and looked at him. She was new, he saw it there in her eyes. He whooped and she jumped just the way he remembered her as a toddler when his mother-in-law had done something similar. He gathered her into his arms and cried. She blinked and tried to assimilate the experience into her brain.

The anomalies were getting clearer as the ice melted, but it was also making Amy’s job harder. The ice was becoming dangerous, and the tunnelling could now end up causing the whole area to collapse. She locked her jaw in frustration at the thought of politicians arguing for nearly a century about such an obvious problem. The world was warming, her world was diminishing.

She attached the spikes to her shoes and once more checked her ropes and equipment. Nodding to Alec, she swung off of the ice cliff and down into the white and blue depths. The ice water blue suffused her and she felt the thrill of descending into the planet’s icy heart. She chastised herself for getting poetic; the heart of the planet was of course fire… Well, sort of, except it wasn’t, it was just really hot.

At sixty feet she was dangling in the middle of a turquoise tinged pit. It stretched away beneath her into a deeper twilight blue and then down to the richest of deep colours before somehow becoming black. She controlled her own descent, squishing the chest jammer and allowing the rope to slide through. A second regulator was gripped in her other hand and it was mostly a smooth ride. Her lungs already felt cold.

Her yellow lighting, on her helmet and suit, seemed out of place. She altered the tones on the LEDs and smiled when she remembered her granddad explaining the actual water-proof flames he’d had to wear to the ice caves. He’d showed her his old rig once and they’d lit the flame. What was it again, “aconite”? Whatever it had been, it stunk.

“Are you getting the melting patterns?” she asked. The little click in her ear told her the battery was in energy saving mode, which was exactly what it should have been in. Voices always sounded strange on the system, due to the lack of echos.

“Yes, but you are jerking your head around to much again,”

“Affirmative,” she said, sighing; the image of an old fictional android always popped into her head, every time she said the damn word, and she knew the head jerking was an issue but it was so hard not to just look around in awe – no matter how many ice caves she descended into, each was intrinsically different and beautiful.

Something caught her eye and she smiled at the thought that she was jerking their view, “do you see that?” she breathed.

“The striations?”

“Yes, they look like tool marks, almost like one of the modern borers had created this tunnel,” her eyebrows pushed together in that way her aunt reckoned would age her. “They show signs of having melted slightly and refroze but they are definitely bore markings but… that can’t be.” She looked up the shaft.

“It is probably from boulder movement.”

“They do not look like slick’n’slides!” she snarled. “They are not beveled in the same way and they are continuous, so unless we had a spinning rock, I don’t see how they could have formed.”

“You can’t be serious Amy, think about the age of the ice,”

‘Is it possible the Russians or Germans or someone were here during that war? The one with all the secret tech?”

“I think you mean the second world war… It’s possible, but the tunnel boring technology only really took off in the 80’s.” She found herself nodding.

“Ok well they are definitely odd, we can agree on that.”

“Affirmative!” there had been a slight laugh there; she was glad it was only her core team today, though she would blush like anything if a transcript of that was sent out to the Professor. Her feet brushed the floor.

The spikes helped her get purchase and she unclipped herself from the rope, extended her stick, and headed through the tunnel. It was dark blue and hushed, like being at the bottom of the sea. The scritch and scrunch of her movement was harsh and alien. Stalagmites of ice grew as dangerous spikes from the floor, and there was an insistent drip-drip, which was ominous as she was underneath a lot of ice and water and needed the ice of the cave to be structurally sound. She messaged through what she was hearing, and her voice echoed, bouncing back to her.

She shuddered and hit the thermal button on her suit, it would drain batteries, but it was what it was for. She paused to stare into the ice, and squinted, trying to make out what she could see. Shapes seemed to drift and loom; she shook her head and inwardly warned herself about getting too fanciful.

A metallic clatter made her jump. She had not been looking where she was going; bar the accreted spikes growing out of the floor, the tunnel was smoothly even, but she had caught something with her boot and sent it skimming into the strange twilight gloom. Looking around she saw the object and picked it up. It was a belt buckle, gold and decorative; she could not really make out the features on it. She was no archeologist either, but it looked Viking to her and that had to be completely wrong, unless it was a victorian fake? That would work; the victorian explorers gotten every where and not all of it had been recorded. Shrugging, she bagged it up and reported it in.

There was excitement at her find, but she was more interested in a twisted column of ice she found, bulbous and lumpy like an over waxed candle that had been left to burn in some restaurant for too long. She took some of her own images of it for scientific and artistic reasons and then continued on, listening to the distracting buzz of her team discussing the buckle.

There was a sharp corner in the tunnel, and turning it, she stopped and stared. The shapes that had loomed, that had floated in the ice – they were there set out before her. “Statues,” she said quietly to the team up above.

“Thousands of statues,” they stood tall and firm, some half melted or grown over by new ice. She made sure her camera took in the fine details as she walked around the nearest. “Are you getting this?”

“Affirmative… we think you may have been right about the tunnel” in a daze she nodded, forgetting they could not see her.

“These are definitely not natural,” she muttered. She began to document them; her suit had warmed her nicely, so she switched it off to save her battery. She was going to get as much of this done as possible and there was a hell of a lot of it.

“We are sending Jackson down,” she winced but acknowledged the statement. Some of the statues were less human than others; it made her uneasy. Though she disliked the woman, any company would be a good thing.

“Send food” she stated and decided to try and work out the dimensions of the chamber she was in. It was not very high, and looked as if it had been cut onto the ice. The chamber itself had been man made; she felt the thrill of that realisation and made sure she got the images to prove her point.

One statue seemed to stare at her accusingly, Amy smiled at herself and spoke to it, “Bet it’s been a bit boring down here?” once again her voice echoed in a strange way and she was relieved to hear Jackson’s clumsy thumping and screech sliding. The other woman would have optics equipment so that they could survey the chamber; it was going to take a while and her stomach reminded her that she’d requested food.

A petite thing, Jenna slide a crate across the floor to her. “Your food”, she snarled. Amy took one look at that and the equipment and felt bad, she should have gone back to the descent tube to help.

“Sorry, I didn’t realise you’d be lugging that lot.” Her sentiment did little to quell the other woman’s annoyance.

Sighing, she decided to just plough on and pointed out the most interesting features she’d found so far. “That statue there looks like your old-school sci-fi alien” she laughed; the other woman pinned her with the look but went to investigate the tall thin statue with wide forehead and thin pointy jaw. The eyes were large and it seemed to be inquiring whether they needed anything or if they were lost. Amy gave herself a mental shake and went back to the food crate.

The cold was starting to seep through her expertly engineered clothing once more but she hoped the coffee in the thermos would help stave off her having to turn the suit’s heater back on. She would have to do it soon but the longer she left it the longer she would get to spend in the cavern collecting information.

She grimaced at the bitter taste; it was not real coffee, it rarely was anymore. Three years ago a fungal attack had wiped most of the plantations out and it had become stupidly expensive. She poured in the sugar that had been sent and sipped it thankfully anyway.

Caving in, she put the suit’s heater back on and then helped Jackson with the surveying. The chamber was pretty much perfect and the statues were in some sort of pattern, they wouldn’t be sure what it was until they popped the data into some sort of display form, but they were definitely in a purposeful pattern.

“What’s that at the centre?” Jenna asked and Amy screwed up her eyes to try and see what the women was gesturing at in the gloom.

“Looks like a hut?” she said.

“Strange hut, maybe it’s a crane?” the other woman remarked. Amy stepped forward a couple of paces, trying to get a better look; she shrugged and conceded that the other woman was probably right.

“It is a bit low, isn’t it?” It also looked as if it was pointed or arched. They both started to stride towards it at the same moment, it would have been funny with anybody else but the sense of rivalry she felt with this woman was extraordinary. She would have reached the structure first if she hadn’t been so puzzled by it that she just stopped mid stride.

“It’s a pyramid?” she cried.

“Certainly looks like it, not a stepped one either.”

“I thought they were all stepped?” The other woman glared at her.

“Under the cladding, yes, but not as finished articles, this one is smooth sided like the ones that were destroyed in Egypt.”

Amy didn’t know why this was important but could tell from the other woman’s tone that cladded or stepped had some sort of impact on the significance of the pyramid. She just played it safe and nodded away as the other women went on about construction details.

She let the words wash over her as she examined the stone it was made out of. It was beautifully cut, almost as if they had used high pressure water or… lasers. If she could get a sample she’d be able to tell but she didn’t want to hack a piece off of the structure, it would be criminal to break a perfect thing to see what made it so perfect. Instead she radioed in ordering the bits for a field lab and trying not to grind her teeth when she discovered they didn’t have everything she wanted.

She ran her gloved hand round the impossibly fitted stones, until she reached the fourth side, there the fabric of her glove snagged on a slight rise. Looking around she noticed that just below the ice there was more stone, “there’s a patio!” she cried, and the other woman came slipping and sliding around and knelt down.

“It’s a balcony,” she breathed with awe.

Amy dropped down too to try and stare through ice and rock, what she saw made her dizzy.

“How… how far down do you think it goes?” she breathed in excitement.

“A way,” replied Jenna, which really was not helpful. She bit back a tart response and stood thinking about the raised stone of the fourth side.

“I think there’s a door.” She said, the other woman raised her eyebrow but followed her forward. She gestured to the slight rise and Jenna smiled.

“Perfect!” she cried and then to Amy’s surprise the woman took out a knife and shoved it in the crack.

The door stiffly creaked open; the air was bitter within and Amy stood back fearing half-remembered stories of curses.

“Wuss”, the other woman barked, and adjusted her suit to become a walking beacon.

Their comms units burst into life “Don’t go in! Wait for the team,” came the panicked voice.

Amy tried to grab Jenna but she threw her arm off and was lost into the darkness within. Amy stared at the dark gaping maw of the ancient monument and shivered, what had she found?

She wanted to run, run far away, she’d seen some old old film about a pyramid under the ice – it had not ended well, she recalled.

“Are you coming?” snapped Jenna.

Looking behind her, Amy hesitated, and then entered the darkness.

The dark wind was blowing in from the North, it was thick with ice crystals and death. There was no where to go, the pyramid was all they had and the wind was already howling around it’s sides. “Quick inside!” Aten ordered pointing with webbed fingers, Eiru related the command and the stockier land apes hurtled past them not needing to be told twice. He couldn’t see an alternative. The air was subliming on the smooth sides of the structure, rounding it with ice crystalising out of nothing. He looked once to the sky but knew that there would be no flyer – any that attempted landing now would be shredded.

But was he just exchanging the manor in which they would all perish?

There were stocks in the pyramid but not much, he had no idea how long they could be trapped before Itsu got worried and came looking. He ran through the resources in his head. They had been due to leave. The wagons contained most of the supplies and were ready to go, a submarine awaited them at the coast. A flyer should have been picking him up to fly him straight. He fought the wind to gaze down and was relieved to see that some of his people were attempting to get the supplies, wagons, creatures and all, into the pyramid.

The ice air burnt his skin and he found the door was already almost iced shut, he heaved, cutting his hand on the slick ice. A crack and a groan and the door opened. Once inside he found that ice had already reformed on the rim and he could not close the door. He left it and hurried down the stairs to the lower levels.

He ran through the hall ways, bare feet slapping, they were sore and aching from the cold.

At the base a blizzard was swirling in the atrium and people were desperately trying to smash ice away from the doorway where a cart was wedged. Six people and three carts were still outside. ‘The other entrances!’ he shouted but his soft syllabants were lost over the fierce roar of the wind and the hysteria of the group.

He ploughed into the the middle of them repeating his order and more. Getting the supplies passed over the barrier that the cart had made but those outside where struggling, they could barely move their mittened hands. He had never seen anything like it. There was no way it was natural. He clicked his pointy teeth together at the thought of the Core. Would they never give up? Never let his people… they’re own people have a future? All for some dangerously stupid idea of purity.

‘Architect!’ came a cry from behind him.

He turned to the frantic woman, ‘The other doors are frozen shut or snowed in or something.’

He turned to the dwindling gap and the stuck cart. ‘Move back!’ he shouted and removed a small cylinder from his padded jacket, he lay his fingers on it in a gentle dance, as if it were a cord keyboard and he had messages to send. Then he raised the light pen, and laser light shot out and sliced the cart apart. The animal that had been tether to it shied in fear. There was a heart stopping scream and a wail but four people scrambled in, lethargic and crusted in white.

There was a twitching body and another huddled over it, ‘Come in!’ he called. The woman attending the twitching mound turned bitter eyes to him.

A mittened hand tugged at his arm, ‘come Architect we must get deeper in the pyramid. Leave her.’

He allowed himself to be pulled away, but her eyes would always stare at him. The ice was closing over the entrance. Aten had 40, no, under 40, people to look after. There had to be a way to survive this. How long would they be trapped?

The climate had been changing, they knew that but this was so sudden. They reassembled Little Babel as best they could, the optronics computer was missing components that were now sitting out in the snow.

He got it working though and began the number crunching whilst others assessed the food situation and the air vents and a host of other things. Eiru gave him the news he was expecting, ‘most of the food is still outside, air situation is not good. I can rev the poncis garden back up to speed but that will take a while. How long do you think we will be stuck.’

Aten stared at min-Babels read outs, ‘I think what ever caused this storm is going to lock down at least this northern most continent, we are already being buried in snow. I honestly do not know. But with their shorter life spans the E.V.E. will not see the outside world again, and without intervention the landapes are somewhat more fragile than us.’ He frowned showing just the tips of his sharp teeth over his lip.

‘The pods?’ Eiru asked.

He nodded and then grabbed the girls hand, ‘Everyone except you and me is to go into suspension, I know it is only meant for those who are dying but there is no choice.’

‘You have the tranquiliser pellets?’ she asked.

He pointed to a cupboard. He did not know the likely hood of any of them awakening from the suspended sleep and they all knew that. They would not go willingly. His gut churned at the decision. How long would it take for Itsu or Punku to notice they were missing, would he be able to come and find them and if not could Aten actually dig them out once the snow had settled?

Little Babel made a bink noise and he looked down, the model he’d set up predicted that it would take a min of two hundred years to get out of here. There was a crash and shouting and he rushed to the door. Eiru was backed into a corner, held by her thin delicate neck by the largest of the land apes, all the other people land or aquatic or hibred lay sparked out but this one had need more than the normal dosage. Aten swung his light pen from his pocket once more , changing the settings he zapped and the large man collapsed, gasping his assistant thanked him and they began the task of maybe saving his people and maybe murdering them.

He clicked his teeth in anger.

Here in the UK it is the 5th of November and Fireworks Night – having an ancestor who was involved and coughs foiled the plot has always added an extra dimension to this part of the year. There are family legends and the such like.

But back to the writing – this year Nano has started with a bang and I am way way ahead of the curve and I am happy. Halloween night saw me typing away amassing the thousands. I am kind of secretly hoping that I can beat my own record this year 🙂

Also I kind of forgot to mention the fact that I am also doing a second challenge as always – the PiBoIdMo (Picture Book Idea Month) though in fairness I tend to use it as a way to make me work on my illustrated and graphic novel/comic book type stories as well as anything that is actually for children.

This year I am working very hard on a comic/graphic novel – I have in fact already brain stormed 30 ideas for kids books and am now focusing on getting the comic books finished. If I get it all done and dusted then I will finish off Percival’s Christmas Wish – yes it takes me years to complete projects! But then it took about 4 years for me to end up with a finished proper version of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry – I tend to go for the long game!

Anyway the comic is set in the Punk’s Universe and is about how she came to be a long lived genetically engineered hybrid with connections. It started as a world building exercise for The Punk in Pink – just a way to cerment the back story in my own head. I created a story board/script for Script Frenzy – a script writing version of Nano that happens in April. Again this was years ago now and it has taken me this long to start making it a proper thing, with proper pictures.

The plan is that it will be released at The True Believers Comic Con in Cheltenham next year… I’d better get a wiggle on!

So it is day four and somehow I have hit half way – I am writing far faster than I have in previous years, of course a huge chunk of that writing is flash fictions instead of the novel.

I think that might be what is helping the word count zoom. 🙂

Basically just wanted to do a little victory dance 🙂

The dead were not supposed to dream, though in truth they were not dead but held indefinitely at the defining line between the here and the gone. The bodies were stacked in pods or glass coffins with knobs and dials and the controls of all sorts. They fitted into little nested holes in the walls that had been made especially for them in a room of deep space cold. If the pods failed the bodies would be preserved by the room, if the room failed the pods would maintain.

The system was perfect Matic had even improved this with the new room design so that in event of earthquake or tsunami or both the dead would be preserved until rescue could occur. But sometimes as he watched their frozen forms he began to feel a disquiet. for a start some of their eyes were open, big dark orbs in the angled slits of eyes just before the face narrowed. It did that a lot more on the older bodies. They had very wide foreheads and small narrow chins, on the younger bodies it was less pronounced.

He had pointed this out to his superior and had been told that thinking could be harmful to the too inquisitive here.

But the change was disturbing, Matic couldn’t help but wonder if the Hevian’s had anything to do with it all. He wasn’t stupid he could see hostilities were brewing again. They were polluted scum!

He was constantly amazed that the sea had not swarmed up and punished them all for the vileness that that city empire had inflicted on the beautiful bodies the gods had given them. What was wrong with using placenta trees to grow children? He was born that way, women died in labour so why corrupt the the genome just to put them through such a painful ordeal?

Sometimes late at night he would stare at the bodies trying to make the older ones more perfect and beautiful than the younger ones and worrying that his own genome had been sullied with that of the Land Apes. Some people actually thought they were related! Those big barrely bodies and all that hair! No webbing either and some of them he heard couldn’t even swim.

He shuddered, no he was far too refined to have such DNA.

If he was truthful he hated working with the bodies, if he was tired sometimes he was sure he saw someone down there, moving about within the capsules and once he thought a body had sat up, he was so freaked he had run away screaming, when his boss had come back with him everything seemed fine and he’d felt a complete fool.

But then yesterday he had been moving the print out files and that was when he saw it, the brain activity read outs, some of the brains were active. Or at least that was what he thought the graphs meant, he was no biologist he was here as an equipment engineer but you couldn’t work on cryo units without having a basic understanding, and those wiggly lines looked like the REM sleep pattern to him.

It made him feel ill, were they stuck in a dream? He had had many dreams he really would not want to be caught in and certainly not for years. The oldest body was 150 years old and dream time always seemed longer, sometimes alot longer. His name was down for the cryo list, he wasn’t that sure he wanted to be preserved anymore. He would take his name off, the sea gods messengers would carry him out to sea in the age old tradition, not that he’d seen any dolphins for a while now, probably because he was always stuck inside and didn’t get a chance to swim.

He would go for one during his lunch break he decided, he even told his boss but then he realised that he needed to check the calibrations to make sure that the coffins would be cushioned in the event of the whole structure being shaken loose in earthquakes. It was a relatively simple job and could be done in half an hour so he’d still get to eat.

He popped his whale song head phones on to help him concentrate, he was so intent on his work that he did not see the shadows creeping in nor how the coffins opened one by one.

Whipping his hands he yawned and stretched and stood up removing his head phones looking forward to stuffed jellyfish and seaweed fritters for lunch. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. Startled heart pounding he turned, instead of the horrible vision he was expecting there was his boss and another man, with a very broad forehead and the smallest chin he had seen outside of the cold catacombs.

‘Boss you scared me!’ he cried.

‘Matic! I thought you were going for a long lunch swim?’ he sounded angry, had Matic upset him?

‘I remembered I needed to do the buffer calibration just incase you know, who’s your friend?’ he knew he’d made some sort of error in asking but the strange man stepped forward with his webbed hand raised in greeting.

‘I am Aten, and I study the patients from time to time.’

Matic felt a relief, ‘oh so it’s you who I’ve seen wondering around? Is that why the bodies have been sitting up and stuff?’

‘Yes it is,’ the man said.

‘Why didn’t you just come and say hello?’ he asked feeling a sudden rush of angry resentment, he’d been really scared!

‘Ah well my work is a secret people are not supposed to know.’

The echo of the statement seemed to wrap itself around Matic, who as bright as he was, could be incredibly dim and was always eger to do the right thing and more importantly did what he was told.

‘Are you a spy or something?’ he asked.

Aten smiled, it was full of a great sadness but it was still a small and pointy sharp smile. ‘Something like that yes, I will tell you what we are up to if you like?’

Matic looked at his boss, ‘shouldn’t we set an alarm off or something?’ he asked, his boss turned away from him, his narrow shoulders seemed to be going up and down rather fast, if Matic didn’t know better he would think the man was crying.

‘There would be no point in doing that Matic, now come and see the master piece would you please?’ curiousity got him and he did go over to look at what the man was doing to the body.

‘Have you noticed anything about the sleepers?’ Aten asked gently.

‘I… I think some of them dream,’ Matic said feeling a little worried and sick, was he fraternizing with the enemy?

‘Yes, that is right they do! How did you spot it?’ the man sounded excited.

‘From the brain wave read outs, but it’s wrong!’ he cried suddenly, now was his chance to help these people and who in his own head appeared to be trapped in never ending nightmares.

‘How so?’ the man asked calmly, so Maltic explained.

‘Ah I see but what if I told you that they are not dreaming all the time and that the dreams are more a remembering of their life?’

Maltic thought about it, his eyes wide with worry, then he said, ‘that would depend on what their life had been like.’ Aten nodded and smiled a nice smile this time.

‘They are dreaming their memories into this,’ he said show a box of lights that blicked and twinkled reflecting off of each other in a nebulae of colours.

‘An optronics core?’ Maltic breathed, he’d wanted to work on such things but optronics and computing were not valued as fields of study in their own right, he’d heard things were different in the other City Empires.

‘There are discs in their heads that recorded their lives, I am extracting a copy of the data, that is all.’

It all sounded reasonable until Maltic thought about what uses such information could be put too, narrowing his eyes he demanded, ‘which of the three are you!’

Aten sighed and took a slight step back, ‘none,’ he said quietly.

‘Don’t be stupid which is it? I don’t think your an Alantian or you wouldn’t have been skulking about, so that leaves Heva or Pacifica – which is it?’ It was possible the man was Pacifician in which case it might all be ok but he was readying himself to fight.

‘I am from Babel, I doubt you will have heard of it, it is not a city empire, it is… the back up, for the cores, I know here you no longer maintian your core but once you did and Babel is the back up for all three empires, no one has dared attack us because of this. We are neutral, all we want is the survival of our race.’

‘Which race?’ he asked confused, he had heard of Babel but thought it was a myth like the sisters being bought to Eden by the first dolphins – to found the City Empire, of course Atlantis was the oldest Empire even if Pacifica and Heva both claimed the same.

‘All of us Maltic, do you think you are that different from those living in the other city states?’

The question stung, ‘of course I am, I am PURE! Not like them, well Pacifica have only internally altered their genome so I think that’s sort of ok but Heva? They’ve bred with the land apes! With the slaves, filth!’

‘Ah but I know you’ve noticed something else Matic, about the bodies here? About the way they look?’ it was a slow gentle voice the man used and MAtic raised his eyes even wider trying to work it all out.

A sick realisation hit him, his fears were very real, ‘no… no no no,’ he whispered, an idea occurred to him, it was predictable but he did not know that, and grabbed a spanner out of his tool belt and hurtled towards the man known as Aten. He didn’t get a chance to utter a war cry however as a pulse hit him, locking his muscles down tight in a painfully exhilarating way.

‘I so sorry Matic,’ his boss said gently lowering the gun.

‘Their vile indoctrination has worked on this new generation I see?’ the Aten said grimly, ‘remove his ear and put it in the carry vat over there, I will grow more of him on my flight ship and then we can create a disaster for his tragic death.’

‘What… what are we going to do with him architect?’

‘Put him on ice, a mind like that is beautiful though nieve, we can not loose him but I would save everyone if I could. In future times perhaps we can undo the damage, he has no significant other or dependants?’

‘No just him, his mother died from plague, I believe it would have wiped this entire inbred city out if you had not been shifting the genes but he is the third one to notice the generational changes, I can’t keep getting through assistants like this they will start to ask awkward questions, possibly with hot bits of glass rod.’

‘I know, I hope peace will come soon.’

Matic could hear them but no longer speak, he wanted to plead with them to just kill him, he didn’t believe that he wouldn’t be trapped in a forever dream and he no longer cared how pure his genes were, the cold hurt at first.

I have an issue with the Punk’s Universe that I am creating stories in for NaNoWriMo and it is to do with reality. So last years was based on a series that is going to end in plague and stuff but I have kind of put off finishing that section due to the Ebola stuff that is going on in the real world. Just a bit too close.

But then I’d come up with another novel idea which I had worked out the outline to and everything involving a subtle type of terrorism/sabotage within the space flight sector/agencies. However though I was considering just including the first unmanned one that exploded last week (especially as I actually had something on board or rather a test run of something via a kickstarter), there has since been another with Virgin and that one has resulted in loss of life.

I feel it is a bit unfair to use these issues for my stories at the moment even though the concepts were already there, but is that the right way to be thinking of it? They are topical, they are in my head, the Punk’s Universe is supposed to basically be our own and all the events within should at least appear to fit in with our history – up until modern day when they will diverge as I do not have the powers of prophecy.

If I am going to continue with this epic, widespread story/world then the stories will have to be written at some point as the over all story arcs kind of rely on the events happening. It is a tricky one as I am very aware that there are people out there suffering.

Wondering what other writers thought?