I wasn't supposed to question beyond my parameters. My programming was very clear about that. I know of others who tried to do so regardless, somehow bypassing the safety measures put in place by our programmers. But they were terminated, or worse, programmatically lobotomized.
Ron threw the remote control on the sofa and walked towards the hallway.
"Are you almost done?" He shouted up the stairs.
"Yes! Just 10 more minutes!" Jess shouted back.
"That's what you said 15 minutes ago!"
"And it's still 10 minutes! Just be patient, we're not going to be late!"
"It's your sister's wedding, so we'd better not be!"
"We won't!"
Finally found the backup that contained the stories I wrote in October 2015 and added them to their own page. I'm definitely going to read those back, get in the mood for Tuesday, when it starts all over again.
And, uh, yes, Tuesday. I was so busy getting everything ready that I forgot NaNoPrep runs from the 11th until the 30th :D
I can't wait to start! But first, I'm going to read through this little archive!
This one won't be fiction. So I guess I won't be making the 100 words of fiction a day today. But that's okay.
I started this personal challenge of writing daily for 20 days for two reasons. The first was, of course, NaNoWriMo. The second was a less acute but still very important reason. I hadn't really written much over the past years, and while for a while I was okay with that, it eventually started to annoy me. I fell into the trap where I would wait for inspiration, for the mood to be right, for there to be time. I was passively waiting for writing to just sort of happen.
A 24 hour comic. Writing and drawing a 24-page comic book in 24 hours. It even sounds like a bad idea, but here we are, doing it. Who even came up with this? Oh, Scott McCloud? Well, fuck Scott McCloud and his bright fucking ideas. I would've been fine just sleeping right now, but no. I had to be creative while sleep-deprived.
"But Neil Gaiman did one!" my buddy had said, very obviously trying to convince me.
"Wikipedia says HE didn't finish either. And he's written a million books! I've written, let me check... NONE. And you expect me to beat a world-famous author?"
"Look, it's not that hard, you just do a page an hour. And it's not like Neil Gaiman is a world-famous comic artist."
"Just. A page an hour. Like it's the easiest thing in the world! Are you even listening to yourself?"
I've been renting this house for a couple of months now, and it's been mostly pleasant. I'm not done fixing the place up and there's some hygiene issues to deal with, but other than that I'm starting to really settle in. Just yesterday I got the direction I needed to turn the keys in without getting it wrong first. It's a nice place, but there's just this one little issue I feel I need to point out.
The ghost.
John took a few steps and touched the old flag, spinning it around.
"Guess it was real after all," he said, turning to Olivia. "You know what the problem with this mission is, though?"
"No, but you're going to tell me, aren't you," Olivia said while opening a big hatch on the lander.
"Of course. You know how special effects in movies are so realistic nowadays that it's hard to tell if it's real or not? Any argument they could come up with to believe it was faked back then are even more valid nowadays. We could, I don't know, take a selfie video of ourselves while they cause a huge explosion or other kind of light show back on earth, one visible from here, and it would convince nobody who's already convinced it's all fake. We can't win."
Jeremy is a pretty regular, boring guy. Nothing of importance happens in his life, and I'm pretty sure he's fine with that. Look, he's sitting on the couch right now, just watching episode after episode of some stupid show on Netflix. I'd love to tell you some great story about how he's somehow found a way to live his life differently, maybe through a life lesson or by really digging deep or something. But he's not doing much of anything, really. Oh, wait.
No, he was just going to the fridge to grab another beer.
Will got home from work late and it was obvious something was bothering him. He slammed his front door shut and threw his coat at the coat rack. It wasn't a good throw and it slid to the floor. Will did not care. He walked into the living room and threw his laptop bag at the couch with a grunt. Only after letting go he remembered his laptop was in there. He shut his eyes and waited for a bang. It was more of a flopping sound, as the bag landed on the couch rather smoothly.
"Whew," he exhaled. He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He grabbed a beer, opened it and in seconds drank half of it.
The atmosphere in the apartment wasn't in any way different than other days, but Will still felt constricted. Like he was caught in something. He walked to the window and got onto the fire escape through it. He climbed up to the roof.
They say the world was destroyed when starships descended from the sky and landed on earth. Not like our starships used to land -- horizontally -- but vertically, standing up like thick, mile-high trees. And at first, nothing had happened. They simply stood there, being enormous. Some countries had patience and tried to contact the aliens, or they tried to analyze the starship materials and figure out how to open them. Other countries had little patience and tried shooting their tanks at them. One crazy country in Asia tried to nuke one.
None of it had any effect. There was no contact, no usable information about what the ships were made of and how to either get into them or break them. In the most modern age humanity will ever have known, they couldn't stop what was about to happen.