I’ve theoretically got 14 hours left, but I’m calling it.  I wrote 41,504 words in the last month.  About half of them probably qualify as vaguely novel-like.  A plot never emerged, though I did have a setting and several characters.

Turns out November is, in fact, quite a busy month for me.

My plan was to be within spitting distance at the end, and then hand the reins to Mira to finish up.  So it’s really her that failed — though she did succeed in writing her own novel.

Chapter 26

Pops told Leslie a story when she was five that stuck with her for some reason.

The Spoon That Moved

Once there was a spoon that could move. She could pop upright on the table, spin around, and bounce anywhere she wanted to go.

But she didn’t. Most of the time, she just hung out in the drawer with the other spoons, comfortably nested among them, laying perfectly still. She didn’t know if the other spoons could move or not. They never did, so she held still, too, so she wouldn’t stand out.

“I wouldn’t want everyone to think I’m a show-off,” she said to herself. But really that wasn’t what she was worried about at all. Really she just didn’t know what would happen if she danced around, or even wiggled in the pile, but she was afraid that the other spoons would quietly laugh at her, and forever ban her from joining the other spoons’ activities.

Not that they ever did anything. She knew that they couldn’t really ostracize her for moving without moving themselves, so really she had nothing to fear. Still, the thought of pressing against silent spoons front and back who really were apalled by her behavior was just too much. Better to just fit in with the others.

But she wished for something to happen. Her life was comfortable, but dull. Most of the time, she just lay in a dark drawer, covered by some other spoon, so she couldn’t even see anything, even if there were any light.

One time after a party she ended up at the bottom of the pile, where she wasn’t used for months. Every day, she’d see the light from the outside as the drawer opened, and feel the pressure on top of her lighten, as several of her siblings were removed. She longed to leave the drawer, to carry food to people’s mouths, to luxuriate in the hot bath in the sink afterward, and have herself scrubbed sparkly clean. She wanted desperately to squirm to the top of the pile, pushing the others aside, so that she would get the daily use, while they anxiously awaited their turn. But she knew they would hate her for that, so she waited her turn, for weeks and weeks, and eventually she was used again, and by chance moved nearer to the top of the pile after her washing, so she was happy.

She made up stories where she would rescue all the other spoons, and they would adore her for her ability to move. A person would be pulling the forks from the tray, one by one, and smashing them flat with a giant hammer. The spoons would all freeze in terror, knowing that they would be next. And when the time came for the first spoon to be crushed, they would all just lay there and watch. All except for the spoon that could move. She would jump up and knock the hammer out of the person’s hand, then quickly shove it into the garbage disposal. Before they could stop her, she would hit the switch over the sink, destroying the hammer and saving the day. She knew all the other spoons would love her then.

“What do you think happens?” Pop had asked.

Leslie wasn’t used to people asking her what happened, so at first she kept insisting that Pop finish the story.  He refused — it was her turn.  Eventually she said, questioningly, “So the spoon moves?”  She looked at him for confirmation.

“OK.  Then what happens?”

This sounded like it was OK, so she proceeded.  ”Um, she dances around in front of all the other spoons?”

“OK.  How do they feel about that?”

She thought about it.  ”They think it’s great!  They decide to make her queen, and put her on the top of the pile every day.”

Pop laughed.  ”Those are some pretty nice spoons.  I love you, Pumpkin.”  And he ruffled her hair and tucked her in and kissed her goodnight, leaving the light on in the corner the way she liked.

As she got older, she thought back to that story, and the different ways it could have ended.

Spoon decides to dance, and when people see her, they sell her to a freakshow where she is forced to perform 24 hours a day until she wears down to a miserable nub.

Spoon crawls to the middle of the kitchen floor, where she is mashed by Granny, who then falls, breaks her hip, and dies.  Spoon is compacted and sent to the dump.

Spoon moves, and finds that she likes it.  The other spoons (except a few liberal-minded ones) shun her, but she ignores them and eventually fulfills herself as a leader and revolutionary.

This was the ending she feared the most:  Spoon eventually tries to move, but finds that she really never could after all.  She’s just a spoon.

But what if Spoon moves, and when the others see her, they all start moving, too? Everybody was afraid to be the first, to stand out from the crowd.  Landscape found that idea disturbing.

Ack!  OK, I’ve got 8 days left, and I’ve still got 25,000 words to write.  Time to call for reinforcements!

That’s you.

Anybody who’s been reading along, send me a chapter or two.  I’ll work it in.  Backstory, dream sequences, side plots, character descriptions, political rants, alternate history… I’m easy.  And desperate.

Everybody who comes to my house for Thanksgiving is going to be required to write 1000 words to get their turkey.  That’s fair, right?

Help!

I’ll also take plot ideas, questions, notes about crap I’ve left out or should develop further, and so forth.  Hit me!

Chapter 16

Landscape woke up the next morning to natural sunlight streaming onto her bed from the east-facing window in her upstairs single.  Well, not her single any more, since she had agreed to not even try to retain it.  Why did Chance not want her to have a single?

Even though Landscape had been in this exact room for two straight months, it had nothing in the way of personal touches that made it hers.  The closest thing was probably the window itself — Landscape had turned off the screen that shuttered it and swung it out of the way so she could look at the Farm’s real yard, instead of just being able to turn the view to anything she desired — including the camera above that window, so it yielded almost exactly the same view, at least in the daytime.  At night, of course, the camera’s night vision gave a lot more rich a view than the glass window did, if less “accurate.”

She laid in bed and stared up at the ceiling, squeezing her sheets in her balled fists, resisting a sudden urge to cry.

Where did that come from?

She got up and put on her clean white coveralls.  She gathered up yesterday’s dirty clothes, put her meager collection of possessions into her backpack, pulled the cardboard tube containing the Watterson out from under her bed, and went down the hall to the capsule room, turning at the door to wish a farewell to the plain white room.  Goodbye, my friend.

Why did the image of a dark-colored ball gown come into her head just now?  Whatever.

There were a half-dozen empty capsules in the girls’ room, so she got to choose low or high.  All the capsules at middle height were taken.  She put her possessions and painting into an empty drawer and considered the option.  Either was equally awkward for her, so she tended to make this sort of decision on how she thought her fat ass would look as she waddled her way into her bed.  Head height, or bending way, way over?  She sighed.  Down low is probably less obvious.

She flipped the label on the bottom capsule on the far end from the green “open” sign to the red “occupied,” and threw her sheet and pillow into the tube.

Well, there was nothing hard about moving.  It was being at the destination that sucked.

Chapter 17

Three months before Landscape came to live at the farm, her dad had looked healthier than he had in years.  He had been a big bear of a man, six feet tall and pushing three hundred pounds a couple of years before.  He was technically obese, but he walked miles every day, even before the decline, when Americans never walked more than a hundred meters unless it was crossing an oversized parking lot from an unfortunate spot availability.  He had a healthy shock of unruly silver-white hair that he kept cut short enough that on other people it couldn’t help but be neat and even, but on him was just a happy collection of cowlicks.  Everybody called him “Pops.”  Everyone except Leslie, who called him “Pop.”

Pops was a fixer.  The world was full of handy machines, from laundrybots to stations to the makers that printed all the plastic parts that kept all the other machines running.  These machines were great, and took care of the hundreds of jobs that people used to spend their lives doing, better and more efficiently than people could. And if there’s one thing machines can always be counted on for, it’s breaking down.

Before the decline, if a machine broke down, you just bought a new one and thew the old one away.  Why not?  Who cared how many kilowatt-hours it took to ship an appliance from rural China to Atlanta?  Energy was almost free.  Who cared how many kilowatt-hours it took to dig a hole to mine the tons of iron ore, or process them into steel for the frame, or to stamp all the parts?  Energy was almost free.

When energy started becoming harder to come by, people became less likely to replace their broken machines with new ones.  They wanted to repair them, but skilled repairmen were rare and valuable.  Worse, the parts were often proprietary and were so expensive that even a tiny part could cost more than the hours of labor it took to figure out what was broken, remove, and replace it.

3d printers changed a lot of that.  Annoyed customers posted the models for useful parts to the net, and a couple of court cases affirmed their right to repair their own stuff, and not be completely dependent on the original manufacturer to supply all the parts.  As the ability to make the parts spread on the net, so did the knowledge about how to diagnose and fix all sorts of problems.

Just because the knowledge was on the net did not mean that every owner of a machine could fix it, and that’s where Pops came in.  He was known around Portland as an affordable and dependable fixer who could make your broken machine go again.

“Before you were born, I’d been on call for emergencies, and I’d dash out to fix bots at all hours,” he told little Leslie.  ”I had to raise my fees again and again to keep a little free time for myself, but still I was working far too much.”  He always hugged her at this point in his story.  ”Once you came I stopped letting people tell me what to do and when.  I travel the streets, banging on doors. I help people who need help and don’t know where to turn.  It may not pay as well as some things, but some things are more important than a few extra kiwis.”  At this point he’d always look meaningfully at Leslie, so she knew that important thing was her.

She never minded that Pops would sometimes come home late, smelling like alcohol.  He always let her know if he wasn’t going to make it home at all.

When he started to lose weight, everybody complimented him on his healthy new glow.  His knees hurt less, and he found it easier to get up in the morning.  His energy level didn’t go up, but it was pretty high to start with, so that was no surprise.

In the dozen or so times over his life that he had dedicated himself to losing weight, he had been in a constant state of hunger.  Yes, the pounds came off, but it was hard for him to summon the energy for his long walks, and he was grouchy to his customers and friends.  Eventually he gave up.  He frequently told people, “I’d rather be a jolly fat man than a skinny son-of-a-bitch.”

Now Pops ate the same foods he always had, perhaps with a little less energy.  This time it was easy, effortless.  The pounds came off, but he was never ravenous.  He sometimes got full before cleaning his plate, which was always kind of a surprise.  He wondered if something had changed in his diet or activities to let him lose weight with so little effort.  He couldn’t think of anything, but he didn’t try too hard — gift horses and all that.

The occasional stomach ache was easy to ignore, and certainly not worth mentioning to anybody else.  The compliments at his slimmer physique made his self esteem even higher, and he spread his enthusiasm for life to everyone he met. Nobody mentioned that his rosy complexion had turned a little orange, or maybe they didn’t notice.

Leslie started to worry about him when he she heard him vomiting in the apartment’s tiny bathroom one night.  ”Are you OK?”

“Fine, fine,” he said.  ”Go back to bed.”

The next day he’d looked tired, and old, and his skin seemed kind of yellow.  ”You should stay home today,” she told him.

“Oh, I’m fine,” he told her.  But he stayed home nonetheless, vomiting another two times that day.  He knew he should eat, but he just didn’t feel like it.  ”I’ll run over to Portland General in the morning if I don’t feel better.”

In the morning he hadn’t felt like running.  Leslie had wanted to call an ambulance.  Pops said he could walk, but he compromised on a RedVan.  She went with him, and hung out and held his hand as they prodded and poked him and took blood and urine and stool samples, feeding them into the analyzers for the machines to diagnose.

At last they were invited into a tiny office to hear the results. The docs looking at the readouts looked grim.  ”The tests suggest that you may have pancreatic cancer,” they told Pops.

“That sounds bad,” he said with a grin.  ”How sure is it?”

“It’s not certain.  We’ll run some more tests to be sure.  With luck it’ll be a misdiagnosis.”

Leslie did her own research on the net that evening when they got home.  It was almost never a misdiagnosis.  The scans confirmed that it was Stage 4, and had metastasized and spread throughout his system.  They gave him drugs to deal with the nausea and jaundice.  They explained his options.  They could do surgery, but it wouldn’t help at all.  They could do chemo and radiation, and it might help.  A little.  For a while.  Pops said he’d think about it, and he went home, and he and Leslie did some quick research on the net.

The next day he talked to the docs again.  Again they started explaining his options.  Pops interrupted them, cutting to the chase.  ”I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

The younger doctor opened his mouth a couple of times as if he’d thought of something to say, but he finally closed it.  The older one looked him in the eye, judging Pops to be a man who didn’t deserve false hope.  ”Yes,” he said.

“Damn,” said Pops.

Leslie started to cry.

Landscape was chatting with Hyzenthlay, a female sylvan played by what sounded like a junior high boy, when she noticed a stalactite in the ceiling dripping red ooze into the river.  ”Wait a sec…” she called to the others, and to her surprise everybody stopped and turned to look at her.

She stopped and used her left pad to open the RiptureWiki, doing a search for “Blood Pool dripping stalactite”.  And there it was:  Alchemist’s Folly.  There was a hidden door across the river that only opened for five minutes each hour.  There was a series of passages with rooms full of undine, and doors on timers, so you had to fight the monsters quickly to be in position when the door opened.  Mistiming one could put you out of sync on all of them.  If you timed it right, you could be through to the treasure room and back at the stalactite in under an hour, but if you mistimed it, you could be trapped for days.

The treasure room was famous for occasional juicy drops.  Even though Landscape had never brought Lidia down here, she’d read the walkthroughs a couple of times, and had that rush of excitement every lottery player feels when she read about the guy who found the treasure room had a Bag of Golding, or a Tangled Web of Weaving, or a Beast with Two Backs.  Rare items, worth fortunes.

Usually there wasn’t anything quite that good, but it was still highly profitable, and it looked like the Velvet Bunnies had been planning to march right by it.

She pointed to the spot on the wall where the secret entrance was supposed to appear.  ”Does anybody know the next opening time of the Alchemist’s Folly door?”

There was a chorus of, “The what?”  Everybody’s character froze stupidly as their drivers went to the web to look up what she was talking about.

Woundwort laughed.  ”Would you believe that we’ve done The Blood Pool twenty times and never once went through that door?”

Hyzenthlay said, “I remember — the first couple of times we went through, we knew we were too weak to not get trapped in there forever, so we passed, and then I guess we just got used to passing it.”

Hrairoo apparently finished doing some math.  ”It opens in six minutes, I think.”

“Sweet,” Woundwort said.  ”That’ll give us time to review what’s going to be in there.”  The chatter fell silent as every Velvet Bunny and Landscape read the wiki description of the series of rooms and their elaborate timed doors.

Studying the full descriptions of a dungeon before exploring it kind of takes the thrill out of them, but when you’re trying to gain power and wealth as quickly as possible, thrill takes a backseat to trying to make rapid progress.  When Landscape played Pink Castle, she almost never read up on her adventure before doing it.  Most of that game was puzzles, and if you looked up the answer instead of figuring it out, what was the point, really?

Besides, her ponycorn, Chuckles, was relatively advanced compared to Lilia, and when Landscape explored with the Aussie Posse, they often found themselves beyond the edges of good documentation — where the fun was.

The Velvet Bunnies were ready and waiting, counting down the seconds aloud, waiting for the timed passage to open.  ”Three, two, one…” they chanted in unison.  And boom, there it was, a black hole in the rough rock wall.  As usual, Woundwort went through first, followed by Blackavar and Thlayli and the rest.  Landscape hesitated for a split second when it was Lilia’s turn — what if she had to go to the bathroom or something and messed up the run? — but she pushed her worried down and leapt through the hole, landing in a confusing jumble of fighting as the party tried to organize into a defensive perimeter to fight off the hordes of undine.  She looked for Woundwort to heal him, but saw that Hrairoo was about to fall, so she started healing him instead.  Lilia’s feet seemed paralyzed, and something was causing her damage, but she focused her attention on keeping her new friends alive, assuming they would make good on their promise to keep her safe.

And they did.  After maybe thirty seconds of excitement, things got under control, and they cleared the room.  They had a couple of minutes to discuss tactics before the next door opened, so they worked out a plan to get everybody through faster, and to keep the spellcasters better protected in the haphazard jumble they were thrown into after the doorways.

There were seven more rooms, and they knocked them down methodically, easily polishing off the Darshak Lich that guarded the treasure room at the end.  Landscape held her breath as Blackberry opened the chest, hoping they’d catch a miracle drop.  Even Haven would be impressed if she turned up with a Bag of Golding.

It was not to be.  The chest was full of gems:  Nice, valuable, but not unique or exciting.  Ah, well.

They caught the timed door back to the dripping stalactite, and she did her duty all the way to the Blood Pool, where another nice treasure awaited. The experience bonus when the collected it was enough to push her to level eighteen, and her character’s telltale glow and anthem let them all know she’d just leveled, and she was barraged with hearty congratulations.  They were done.

“Do you mind homestoning from here?” Thlayli asked.  We’re done for the day, and it takes forever to walk out of here, even after we’ve cleared all the rooms.”

“No problem.”

“You’ve been great.  Do you mind if we call you tomorrow, and take you to Metz?  You might fall a couple of times, but we’ll take care of you, and you’ll be up to our level in no time.”

Her script said to stay far away from Metz.  ”That would be great!”

She was surprised when Thlayli’s character walked up to Lilia and wrapped her in his arms, bending her backward and kissing her.  She flushed and froze, not knowing how to respond. Thlayli didn’t seem to notice.  ”Tomorrow!” he called, activating his homestone to teleport away.

“Yeah!” she responded, though it seemed he’d already signed off.  She activated her own homestone, the last to leave the dungeon.  ”I am smooth.  Not.”

Chapter 11

Landscape parked Lilia in the school and logged off.  She slept the station and looked around the Field.  A dozen residents had rolled their stations in a cluster, and were attacking a Ripture dungeon intently.  Another ten or so were doing things on their own, playing games, surfing the net, chatting with friends.  Tinker, Evers, and Chance were sitting at a small table near the kitchen, sharing fancy coffees prepared by the Farm’s fancy automated espresso machine.

Landscape stood up, stretching.  The session had been much more intense than usual, and she was stiff from hunching over the station without a break for so long.  Plus she was starving.  She wandered over to the kitchen, pretending not to notice the three women chatting over their drinks.  She pushed the cook’s big green button and spoke into its microphone.  ”Large Char Siu Fan, please.”  Cheese had mocked her more than once for her tendency to say courtesies to the bots (”Landscape’s raising their expectations, and now the little fuckers are starting to get uppity when I don’t kiss their silicon asses.”), but she couldn’t help it.

“Large Char Siu Fan, one minute,” the Cook replied.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

There was always rice and pork pre-cooked, so she wouldn’t have to wait for it to be prepared.  Landscape didn’t like waiting around the kitchen for food to cook.  She was afraid people would think she was spending a lot of time eating.  Better to order something quick, eat it quietly, and move on to something else.

She listened to the whirring of the machine as it scooped rice into a bowl and covered it with a layer of barbecued pork, steamed vegetables, a fried egg, ginger paste, and soy sauce.  She took the time to grab a fork and a napkin.  She had tried to use chopsticks, like all the other residents, but it had been an embarrassing fiasco she didn’t want to repeat.  The fork worked fine.

The Cook’s door opened.  ”Large Char Siu Fan.”  She grabbed the steaming bowl and turned to her favorite corner, where she could face the wall and eat alone.

Tinker’s voice stopped her.  ”Hey, Sweetie — come sit with us.”

There were only 19 women in Haven’s Farm, and these three ruled the hen house.

Tinker was 33, short, slim, and kept her straight black hair in a pair of ponytails high on her head.  She had a fondness for plaid skirts and scrunchy white knee-high socks, giving her an unnerving schoolgirl look.  Cheese called her a “half-Asia hybrid super baby permanently trapped in the eighth grade for crimes against humanity.”  She was the only one in Haven’s Farm besides Landscape who had ever had a character in Pink Castle.  (She had created the character as a joke — Belle the boogerpoo — but had been surprised to enjoy the game.  In Ripture she played Tiara, Sylvan Fetch who was a specialist in chests, both picking their locks and disarming their traps.  The best toys were guarded by the fiercest traps, and everbody who had seen their whole party wiped out by a nasty box loved having Tiara in their party.

Evers was 38, short, curvy, and blond.  She had a tendency to bounce and laugh an annoying and far-too-loud laugh that nonetheless made everyone around her happy.

The day felt warmer than it really was, the stickiness of the air clinging to my skin like a sweat-drenched coat. Overhead, the sun beat down mercilessly. The heat was so intense you could almost see the grass shriveling where the shade shied away from the light.

It was the day the duck died.

Maybe it wasn’t really the day it died, but it was the day we acknowledged it was dead, and with ducks it’s pretty much the same thing. You don’t bother with technicalities when a duck dies.

My sister was standing next to me, staring at the corpse floating in the pool. At first glance, you could almost convince yourself it was still alive, that if you blinked it might be splashing around an instant later. Nothing obviously broken, not a mark on its feathered flesh. The only evidence of death was that it certainly wasn’t living.

“What d’you think killed it?” I wondered aloud. It didn’t look like a ‘coon had got to it, feathers pristine, head lolling to the side like it was asleep. Disease was the only thing that came to mind.

“Maybe it drowned,” my sister offered tentatively.

“Huh?”

“Maybe it forgot how to swim.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

Silence, humid silence. I gave in to the discomfort and picked my way across the burr-laden yard that led to the house. That’d be an awful way to go, I thought. Knowing that you were going to die and there was no one to blame but you. Like forgetting how to breathe. Maybe that was how everyone went, in the end. So startled by the pain or maybe so deep in sleep that you don’t remember how to live anymore.