stories

I want my stories to be published. I wonder if the bohr and hesienberg sketch would work as a drabble.

I want to write a story about a person learning to use NVC. maybe in the science fiction musical universe, the dread pirate roberts clan descends on a dead earth outpost that suffered a cataclysmic deity encounter – scorched or frozen – and there’s bits of human dna scattered amidst the nitrogen ice. there they resurrect 21 century humans complete with fragmented memories of their life, to serve as irregulars in an insurrection army, a desperate gambit to turn the tide against a better funded and stronger enemy. the dawn people are worse than cannon fodder and they are trained to operate simplified versions of advanced spiritual technology as best they can. One resurrected recruit, Thomas Socks IV embarks on absorbing the fundamental premise of the underdog’s culture, based on NVC and Abraham. He’s surrounded with concepts and situations that don’t make much sense to him, and he is at a total loss amongst these evolved peeps, but through optimism, luck and dogged persistence, he begins to get the jist and become functional. This would be a device for allowing the audience to get gently exposited.

Another would be recruiting from a planet bound culture, as in this island earth. Busting in on the jackal culture and just offering pay in various irresistible forms, recruiting only the most gifted. Again Thomas Socks having passed the rigorous tests, STILL struggles to overcome his life long indoctrination and grasp the concepts.

They were very straight up about it. A desperate cause, chance of return very slim, your family’s cared for, financially secure. Chance of victory and safe return is under 30%, but for those who return wealth beyond avarice. Only the most gifted are chosen. Now I know plenty of dudes and gals who left their kids in charge of spouses, brothers or grandparents and made the trip. The dregs of society were welcome, if they could pass the aptitudes. Lots of folks washed out after the initial interview. We were never told why. Those that passed the interviews were asked to play games. If you could play the games, then you disappeared into the real training, never to be heard from again, except the occasional letter and video post. If you couldn’t play, you washed out. The games were pretty simple, and shelves of books were published offering the lowdown on beating the games but no one who actually played came back to tell whether the books were worth the silicon they were instantiated on.

Then I made it through. I passed the interview and could play the games. And I was asked to keep this record of what happened to me after, so that I could eventually pass the history on, in case we actually survived the melee and came home.

What I found out was that 30% wasn’t exactly a lie, but it might as well have been. We were up against superior funding, firepower or as the Jirs say, over magicked, and far outnumbered. Actually, the Jirs themselves had beaucoup magic, far more effective magic than their opposition, but the practitioners were lacking, hence recruitment off our rock. But we truly are primitives, hardly able to wield the most rudimentary of their tech. Only the most gifted of us get the basics and we are already a population of the select. .05% of the best earth could offer. They say that if they had 20 years to train up some kids, they would be near primo, but the ethics of that would be very tough to parse and even with time bending they can’t scrape together an extra two years, let alone 20. So… a year of intense immersion for teens and young adults, plus a handful of oldsters then off to the far dark we go, to stand against gods. were basically absolutely fucked, but hi ho, that’s not the useful thought for the cultivation of magic so i will unplug it’s power and think of it no more. Instead, the audaciousness of becoming 100 times more of the man I so far am, finding the wealth that’s right here spread before me and mine and ALWAYS has been. That’s where we start and to even have a week of near to full awakening would be worth another 20 years of fog and groping, so a whole year awake is wealth beyond avarice indeed. I’m gods, we go to die, but what a life we’ll have until then and death itself a reboot only, no ending. And maybe, with a biggish smile we’ll pull off a miracle and emerge whole and hearty, to return. what will we be to our families and friends then? Something unfathomable. but we can return. That’s the 30%. A inferior but cunning force making a desperate gamble automatically has at least a 30% chance of victory, according to cosmic statistics. The universe smiles on fools, drunken with the righteousness of their cause. If we were slightly better equipped and prepared, our chances of victory would plummet. That’s the news that we got after playing the games and passing through the training event horizon. Goodbye Earth, for now or forever.

Yeah and the ethics of recruiting mercenaries from a backward half evolved gravity trap? They were scrupulously honest, i mean they did their best not to glamorize the scenario, just offered the incentive and told the bleak truth in detail so there was no chance of misunderstanding. Even so, folks who signed on just couldn’t possibly make an informed decision, we were missing fundamental concepts, great holes in our paradigms. So was that ethical to recruit us? Hey, they came asking for help, they offered an alliance. It’s an age old trope, we loved the romance. Like living a Kirosawa movie. Humans basically operate on the fuck it principle, so the recruits as a rule felt like it would have been unethical not to ask us. Maybe that’s why we could play the games, the games were intended to sort for ethically appropriate cannon fodder. Out of an entire planet, so few of us. I guess there’s not so many heartsick dreamers running around as one might think.