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no one knows what it's like to be the bad man
So this is just a little snippity thing for a friend of mine, involving a character that I'd like to get around to writing one of these days. Enjoy it for whatever it's worth.
Terra Incognita
The detonations wake him up at night, and he lies in bed and listens to things falling apart -- the scream of metal folding in on itself, the crack and crumble of walls made out of brittle plastic and old stone that the heat and cold have pried almost into pieces already. He used to be able to sleep straight through the sounds of war. He's lived here all his life, after all.
Jason gets out of bed and rolls open the grills over his windows to get a view of the runway outside his apartment building. Headlights hurt his eyes as they veer past, and he rolls them back shut except for a small slit to press his eye to, and then he feels like a fucking moron, lurking in his dark apartment with his eyeball against a bolthole, like fucking Quasimodo. Like a coward.
He can't stop looking, though. He's lived here on V137 for a couple of years now, and before that he grew up five blocks down, on the corner of V140 and S10. He's been up and down these runways since he could walk; he knows where the arcades are, how the armored bank trucks always run twenty minutes late. He knows the good delis and how to read the graffiti to find the good drugs and how to read the patterns of the crowd to figure out if there's police presence in the area. This is his home.
He can't stop looking until he sees something he recognizes.
What he should do is, he should get the fuck off the Grange. He runs his hands over the stubble on his head, and then he can't help sliding his fingers around to the base of his skull, tracing the tender scar tissue that arcs up over his ears. He's going to have the scars forever because plastiskin costs money, and he had his head cracked open on the government's dime, so it was no-frills. Put this over your face, breathe in and out, watch that lamp -- as if he was going to watch anything but the hands in the gloves and the glint of the knife. Jason clasps his hands behind his head and breathes deeply, in and out. Fucking coward, that's what they've made him.
He was the meanest, craziest, most fearless son of a bitch in Borough Twelve, maybe on the Grange. Now he can't leave his apartment, for fear that he'll get lost in his own neighborhood, because when he looks out the window, he knows where everything is, but he's never been there.
Off the Grange. He could get work in one of the mining colonies on the deep-space belts, or he could go inward, find a land-job on the Moon. They swore to him that his records were sealed, that nothing he did before could be held against him now, so what he's got is the dictionary definition of a fresh start. He's a whole new man, after all. The old Jason Stokes is -- what? Floating in a jar somewhere, en route to a medical school where future psychocriminologists will study him and say, so this is what the brain of a threat to the public good looks like.
He doesn't know that's how it works. It's probably nothing that simple, nothing like one piece of a brain that you can carve out and be done with it. He knows fuck-all about neurology, but he assumes it's complicated.
It would be nice to think that whatever they did to reinvent him, at least it wasn't easy. The old Jason Stokes, after all, it wasn't like he was a good guy to know, but at least Jason had been him for twenty years. Maybe it was good that he was gone now (Jason thought it was probably good that he was gone now, but of course he'd think that, wouldn't he? He'd been rewired to think it was good to be like this, bad to be like that, and that was called a conscience, or a capacity for empathy, and he gathered it was something other people were born with, but his was brand new, fresh-minted and still with the shine of unuse on it), but he wouldn't have liked to believe it was too easy to erase him.
So he's a coward now, but on the other hand maybe he has a right to be, having died once and knowing what it feels like. It leaves you out of place, a stranger to your own memories, an alien on your own ground, and he doesn't like it. He feels fragile. He is something that can be annihilated, and he knows it now. It isn't like he can be the same as he used to be, when death was just a rumor to him, something that happened to other people when they got on his bad side.
Jason holds his hands up toward the light panel, squinting at his wrists, because he would fucking swear to god he can feel something around his wrists, some bruise or abrasion from where they cuffed him to the operating table. He swears he can still feel it, but there's no redness, no mark at all. It's all in his head, he figures. It's been months, after all, that he's been in restraints -- at the courthouse, in the psych ward, during his failed therapy, back to the courthouse, maybe two months in the system, give or take; the drugs dulled his sense of time. Maybe it's not strange that he can't quite believe he's free to go now.
But he is free. He's served his sentence on the business end of a scalpel, and he's okay now, he's rehabilitated. He may feel like a monster, with his scars and his strange fear of the open spaces he used to love, but the truth is that a monster is what he was before. What he is now....
Well, he knows what they tell him he is. They tell him he is Jason Stokes, a citizen, a man with no job but no criminal record, either. They tell him he's free. They tell him good luck, try to stay out of trouble, here are the contacts for some therapy you can't afford if you find yourself having trouble adjusting. If he finds himself having trouble adjusting.
At this rate, he'll be lucky to find himself anywhere at all.
If he gets off the Grange, at least he'll know why he can look out his window and not see a damn thing he's ever known.
Terra Incognita
The detonations wake him up at night, and he lies in bed and listens to things falling apart -- the scream of metal folding in on itself, the crack and crumble of walls made out of brittle plastic and old stone that the heat and cold have pried almost into pieces already. He used to be able to sleep straight through the sounds of war. He's lived here all his life, after all.
Jason gets out of bed and rolls open the grills over his windows to get a view of the runway outside his apartment building. Headlights hurt his eyes as they veer past, and he rolls them back shut except for a small slit to press his eye to, and then he feels like a fucking moron, lurking in his dark apartment with his eyeball against a bolthole, like fucking Quasimodo. Like a coward.
He can't stop looking, though. He's lived here on V137 for a couple of years now, and before that he grew up five blocks down, on the corner of V140 and S10. He's been up and down these runways since he could walk; he knows where the arcades are, how the armored bank trucks always run twenty minutes late. He knows the good delis and how to read the graffiti to find the good drugs and how to read the patterns of the crowd to figure out if there's police presence in the area. This is his home.
He can't stop looking until he sees something he recognizes.
What he should do is, he should get the fuck off the Grange. He runs his hands over the stubble on his head, and then he can't help sliding his fingers around to the base of his skull, tracing the tender scar tissue that arcs up over his ears. He's going to have the scars forever because plastiskin costs money, and he had his head cracked open on the government's dime, so it was no-frills. Put this over your face, breathe in and out, watch that lamp -- as if he was going to watch anything but the hands in the gloves and the glint of the knife. Jason clasps his hands behind his head and breathes deeply, in and out. Fucking coward, that's what they've made him.
He was the meanest, craziest, most fearless son of a bitch in Borough Twelve, maybe on the Grange. Now he can't leave his apartment, for fear that he'll get lost in his own neighborhood, because when he looks out the window, he knows where everything is, but he's never been there.
Off the Grange. He could get work in one of the mining colonies on the deep-space belts, or he could go inward, find a land-job on the Moon. They swore to him that his records were sealed, that nothing he did before could be held against him now, so what he's got is the dictionary definition of a fresh start. He's a whole new man, after all. The old Jason Stokes is -- what? Floating in a jar somewhere, en route to a medical school where future psychocriminologists will study him and say, so this is what the brain of a threat to the public good looks like.
He doesn't know that's how it works. It's probably nothing that simple, nothing like one piece of a brain that you can carve out and be done with it. He knows fuck-all about neurology, but he assumes it's complicated.
It would be nice to think that whatever they did to reinvent him, at least it wasn't easy. The old Jason Stokes, after all, it wasn't like he was a good guy to know, but at least Jason had been him for twenty years. Maybe it was good that he was gone now (Jason thought it was probably good that he was gone now, but of course he'd think that, wouldn't he? He'd been rewired to think it was good to be like this, bad to be like that, and that was called a conscience, or a capacity for empathy, and he gathered it was something other people were born with, but his was brand new, fresh-minted and still with the shine of unuse on it), but he wouldn't have liked to believe it was too easy to erase him.
So he's a coward now, but on the other hand maybe he has a right to be, having died once and knowing what it feels like. It leaves you out of place, a stranger to your own memories, an alien on your own ground, and he doesn't like it. He feels fragile. He is something that can be annihilated, and he knows it now. It isn't like he can be the same as he used to be, when death was just a rumor to him, something that happened to other people when they got on his bad side.
Jason holds his hands up toward the light panel, squinting at his wrists, because he would fucking swear to god he can feel something around his wrists, some bruise or abrasion from where they cuffed him to the operating table. He swears he can still feel it, but there's no redness, no mark at all. It's all in his head, he figures. It's been months, after all, that he's been in restraints -- at the courthouse, in the psych ward, during his failed therapy, back to the courthouse, maybe two months in the system, give or take; the drugs dulled his sense of time. Maybe it's not strange that he can't quite believe he's free to go now.
But he is free. He's served his sentence on the business end of a scalpel, and he's okay now, he's rehabilitated. He may feel like a monster, with his scars and his strange fear of the open spaces he used to love, but the truth is that a monster is what he was before. What he is now....
Well, he knows what they tell him he is. They tell him he is Jason Stokes, a citizen, a man with no job but no criminal record, either. They tell him he's free. They tell him good luck, try to stay out of trouble, here are the contacts for some therapy you can't afford if you find yourself having trouble adjusting. If he finds himself having trouble adjusting.
At this rate, he'll be lucky to find himself anywhere at all.
If he gets off the Grange, at least he'll know why he can look out his window and not see a damn thing he's ever known.
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Pros:
- I like this concept; it's not something I expected from the theme (Terra Incognita).
- I keep trying to find an articulate way to say this, and it seems to be beyond me. I'll stumble on regardless. I am, and always have been, impressed by the rhythm of language in your work. There's a flow to it, a cadence that keeps me reading to the end. It's very present here. Good stuff.
Obligatory Con:
- You used the word 'psychocriminologist'! You used the word 'psychocriminologist'! Now we must fight... to the death!
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i really like how he's a coward now, because you go into so many reasons why, and the repetition with twists keep it interesting. i like how before the surgery, he was a man free of everything: morals, fear, etc, but imprisoned by the law, and now he's a man free by the law but imprisoned by all these things invisible restraints he never had before, and how the feeling of restraints on his wrists (or their evidence, which is again, invisible) is one that doesn't leave even though he knows they're not there.
because you mention it in the other post: i actually don't think you need more setting, personally, but i come from a deeply setting-free preference. if people really need to know more than the graffitti and the plastic walls to make a picture in their head, well. what else do they really need to know? i honestly think that you have enough here, but maybe i read more science fiction than other people and am comfortable with a world that looks like ours only slightly different.
i also like that this city that he lives in and knows is one that is falling to pieces all around him, the detonations and everything.
(...okay, so this was probably excessive. hm.)
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I read this before seeing your argument for why it should be science fiction - but I thought, exactly as you did, how could it possibly be anything but.
I've been told that the main thing an introduction should achieve is to entice the reader to be interested enough to keep reading. That being so - you got there, because I would have read more if there'd been more to read.
As far as the details of setting - well, there's only so much detail a small piece can hold. As far as understanding what's going on, unless you begin to draw comparisons - this world is different from where we live now because of - which would be awful, then you just have to put it in a way that the character understands it. I'm not making sense, but I just mean that he's not looking around in those few paragraphs mulling over the differences in housing and living conditions between his time and our time, he's thinking about the change in himself. To provide too much detail on his home would be to begin 'telling' rather than showing. It would also detract from the focus of the thing - which to me was the infinitely interesting and complicated issue of being changed from one person to another and being *aware* of those changes - and you caught me like a fly in sap with that idea.
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