About Fred

It’s been a relatively quiet weekend, although we did have some very bad news yesterday afternoon. One of my uncles, my mother’s oldest brother and my godfather, passed away after a protracted illness. We knew this was coming — my parents, along with the rest of my mother’s siblings, went to visit him a few weeks ago — and there’s some comfort in knowing he’s no longer in pain. But it’s still a shock, it always is, and my mother especially is still grieving. He and I weren’t necessarily close, but I always liked him, and it’s sad to think of the world without him. We’re still waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements.

Life does go on, though. Last night, I watched Elmer Gantry. It’s a complicated movie about religion and revivalism and faith, with an Oscar-winning performance by Burt Lancaster. (And one by Shirley Jones, too, I just discovered, although she’s also quite good in it.) I quite enjoyed the movie, although at two and a half hours it did occasionally feel a little long.

And then this afternoon I wrote this:

The trouble all started when they blew up the world.

It was just one planet of a dozen slated for demolition that year, uninhabited and, moreover, uninhabitable, at least by every estimate and simulation the Corportion’s budget had allowed them to run. “Not so much as a protozoa on the surface,” the chief engineer was fond of saying, with what he always hoped the colonial press would characterize as a hearty chuckle. “Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.”

Which was not to suggest that the discovery of indigenous life somewhere topside would have necesarily halted the project. A mouse was just a mouse. The Corporation had a mandate to catalog and preserve any extraterrestrial life they might happen to find, but in eighty-plus years of stellar expansion they had so far found exactly none. Just one long stretch of stars, and the dead hunks of worlds too fiery or gaseous or bitterly cold for human settlement. Most planets, they’d long since discovred, weren’t good for much of anything unless you broke them down into their constituent parts, brought in the demo team’s world-eater ships and vacuumed up the natural resources. You couldn’t settle on a big ball of methane or frozen nickel ore, but you could fill the ships a hundred times over. And then, when the giant rock was reduced to dust and rubble, and the orbits of everything else in the local system had been carefully adjusted, you could take those ships and power the Corporation’s real purpose for being: the singularity drive.

Each one had a black hole at the center, and each one of them was a picky eater.

James Way didn’t have any worries that the planet on his viewscreen, which was designated #579NI-17-5LQB5 in all of their log books, harbored any sort of life. He had faith in the chief engineer, if not the man’s strange sense of humor, and furthermore he trusted the simulations and surface telemetry that he’d checked at least a half dozen times himself. But it always paid to be sure. Way knew you couldn’t just turn the world-eaters off — “you don’t start it, you unleash it,” he’d been told his first week with the Corporation, when he’d first stood and watched a planet turned into its base elements and ash — and nothing that was down there had any chance of surviving.

The first blip on his screen took him totally by surprise.

One of the prompts that inspired it, the last quote at the end, was taken from a magazine ad for some car, so I’d probably have to rework that. (And I don’t know, can nickel ore even be frozen?) But I like it, mostly because it occurred to me near the end that I could introduce a character, and it could start to be a story, not just backstory. That might sound obvious, in part because stories often do start with character, but here it wasn’t until the appearance of James Way — somewhere near the end of our forty free-writing minutes — that this started to feel like something to me.

Anyway, that — plus failing at the Sunday crossword, and watching tonight’s incredible episode of Breaking Bad — was my weekend, both good and bad.