Writing and F3, 1 Year On

It’s been just over a year since the meme finally filtered down to my neck of the tubes with Patterns in Traffic, my first piece of flash fiction. Donning my hypothetical writerly hat in recognition of this milestone, I’ve been trying to root the memetic microfiction in something of a broader context, both in terms of my personal writing experiences and the insights I’ve taken from participating in Friday Flash Fiction.

I can’t really remember my motivation, but I gave NaNoWriMo a shot back in November 2004, producing something I can now recognise as an overwritten dérive of a pseudo-fantastical Venice. The Doge’s Gate – endearingly awkward, with infodumping a’plenty, terrible dialogue, a foul-mouthed Italian waitress, and an ill-judged authorial cameo (37k).

The following spring (April 2005) – despite not studying English or, indeed, anything remotely Englishesque – I managed to blag a place on an undersubscribed 6th form writing course, run by the Arvon Foundation at Totleigh Barton, in the depths of Devon. Viewed through the rose-tinted goggles of nostalgia, this was one of the best weeks of my life. With spring sunshine, good food, and a surfeit of cows, I managed to produce a couple of pretty good poems, a staggeringly vast quantity of really bad poetry, and the first part of a nifty short story in which the MC escaped an abusive mother-daughter relationship … in favour of adventure-with-a-capital-A.

Moving the clock forward to the start of my second year of university (November 2006), I tentatively dipped my toe back into the literary lake of NaNoWriMo. With the additional support of a diverse, vigorous, and broadly likeable bunch of Brightonians (including Kay, Shebit, Alabaster, and Shaun), I made it to the 50k milestone with Illyria - the fantastical offspring of Shakespeare and a thinly-veiled critique of American imperialism. This tale covered theatrical insurrectionism, messenger pigeons, cultural relativism, covertly trebuchet assembly, sheep, swamps, and yet more awkward dialogue.

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F3: ‘There Is No Lion’

Another short drip-drip-drip of story, following on from The Landsberger Vats.  And, yes, there’s still a fair bit more to come.

THERE IS NO LION

In the depths of the structure, darkness reigns. The air hangs heavy with perfumed solvents and anti-bacterial agents; a wall against the tide of microbial invaders. Stumbling through the door, I drop to my knees, gulping down a lungful of fumes. Extending a hand for support, my palm clings to a floor of moist linoleum. A corridor of halogen pulls my gaze right, towards the lobby proper; the harsh orange standing stark against the gloom. To the left, a bank of terminals and, yes, more biometrics.

Struggling against the polished plastic to stand, I carefully jog over to the terminals. Running an index finger down the main panel, the screens flicker into life – projecting an arc of colourful graphs and schematics onto the dull black wall. Struggling to push aside the noisy and useless with my outstretched hand, I search for the suite. But I’m sweaty and trembling, and the terminal ignores my gestures as sign language through a fish tank.

Realising the futility of my flailing, I give up. My irises are on the system, and – shit – my alibi is watertight, but my body is in revolt. My mouth is a featureless desert, and I’m swallowing dust. Then, echoing down the corridor’s plastic veneers, the thud of approaching footsteps. I’m not getting any feedback from my lower extremities; casualties of hypertension. Now is hardly the time for pre-fight nerves, but something in the mammalian recesses of my consciousness remains convinced that – providing I avoid any sudden movement – the lion won’t see me.

There is no lion. The footsteps are those of a broad-shouldered man in epaulettes and doc martens; a man whose eyes harden as they alight on my frozen form. Now he’s yelling; his red face the conduit for a torrent of angry German. I don’t have time for this. Searching for a solution, my mind flits back to the broken heart of a thwarted victory; back to the ugly plastic mats and vapid smiles of London. Uncorked, a flood of years-old anger pulses through my muscles, springing me from my paralysis. Through a dark fog, I watch distantly, as my right leg traces a gentle arc through the air. Meeting upper chest, my toes buckle within a battered converse sneaker. As the warm sting of pain spreads up through my foot, I wince, tumbling past the guard and down the corridor.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

F3: ‘The Landsberger Vats’

More from Stockholm Syndrome, following immediately from Welcome to the Umweltzone.  There’s one more chunk from Red’s perspective to come, one from Simon’s, and then a couple of sections from the perspective of their “quarry”.  Unless I get distracted.  Either way, I’m really getting into the characters here, despite the fact that my writing pace has been glacial.  There’s probably too much swearing, and the cuts between stories are less intentional than a matter of me running out of time.  And because it’s supposed to be quite tightly structured, I’ve had to go back and edit some of the previous segments.  Still, at least it’s here … and, as ever, crit and comments encouraged;

THE LANDSBERGER VATS

Muttering into my collar, I urge Simon to keep the mark distracted.

In the wake of relay delay, my eyes are slowly pulled skyward. The vats stand in defiance; attempting to dwarf me beneath its towers and buttresses. I’m having none of it.

“I’m trying to kick out the cameras.” I add, turning my attentions to the building.

Cloaked in an ugly green-grey moss and sodden with rainwater, the sodden ziggurat teeters in the wind and rain. A crumbling heap of shipping crate, canvas, and reclaimed aluminium. The original structure is long dead – its skeletal frame buried beneath the tide of impromptu additions.

“It shouldn’t take long.”

Someone saw the need for surveillance: a hundred orange dots in the rapidly fading twilight. My left hand is closed tight on the custom incendiary. Swallowing a shudder, I second guess myself – thieving a glance at the bitch’s simple grey plastic; tasting the latent saline of her binary incantations.

I pull the pin.

A moment of majesty and unfolding exuberance, then I’m struggling for light and oxygen in a torrent of data. For the first time, I panic; swiping desperately at the flickering images that pass before me.

One hundred and five cameras, seventy-two of which are dummies. “Now, that’s interesting,” I think, stumbling backwards. Even so, she could have … scratch that, she should have warned me. But there’d been no hints, just bitter lemon and inexpertly applied mascara. Three hours of stilted conversation beneath a charcoal sky, and this was her repayment.

Synapses firing, my stomach abandons me to the imagined gravity of a chasm of burnt copper. My ears decompress.

“Remind me why we’re doing this, Red.”

The lunchbox bounces Simon’s disembodied words into the depths of my skull.

“A pile of cash?” I ask, managing a grimace as I sweep the overclocked image of a well-dressed woman leftward, out of my line of sight. Then my mind turns to our client; the quarry’s sister. Rising nausea meets the pink blush of guilt in an awkward melange.

“A way of ensuring the long-term mental health of a deeply unstable woman?”

My words sound hollow. Simon gets the text, but the guilt will linger. As the bitch’s trojan overwhelms the ziggurat’s compound eye, I’m distracting myself with the light show; watching the algorithms relinquishing our quarry’s data as they commit my irises to memory.

Grace Diaz. Spanish software developer. Suite 121-B.

For a second time, I swallow.

“You tell me?” Somewhere in the translation from brain to voice, cutting comment becomes half-hearted question. The choices are Simon’s, and his alone. My role in this situation is strictly professional.

Right?

Its task complete, the incendiary is burning itself out – a vortex of flame dissolving back into the velvet cover of dusk. The remaining orange lights flicker and die. Pulling myself up from the damp concrete, I shake the raindrops from my jacket. Composure regained, I begin to trace the boundary of the premises, searching for an entrance.

“Deeply unstable.”

Initially, I take the words for an echo.

“She doesn’t seem unstable.”

Well, shit.

- – - – -

I’m running. In recent years, and in my line of work, this has been something of a recurring motif.

In the background, seeping into my awareness from the edges inward, I’m eavesdropping on the continuing stand-off.

“Unstable? Who’s unstable?”  There’s something in Grace’s line of questioning … something in her tone of voice.  Something familiar, with a shape I can feel forming in the back of my throat. Something that I realise just before Simon.

“Damn it!”

My yell echoes off the concrete. Pigeons scatter, soaring sideways into the darkness.

I glance behind, but the plaza – if that’s what it is – is abandoned.

“Simon, can you hold her a little longer?” Sod the whispering; my voice is loud, urgent. But, of course, he knows what he’s doing. It’s his fucking vocation, after all, and God only knows how I’m supposed to spur him to new heights of bullshit by asking nicely.

“It’s okay, Perry, I know why you’re here.” Grace seems calm, measured. These are the words of someone who knows a lot more than they’ve been letting on. Which means I have a lot less time than I’d anticipated. So, while “Perry” is doing a double-take, I’m killing the two-way. He’ll probably do better without me on the other side of a teleprompt, meddling inexpertly.

I all but rub my face against the biometric scanners. A pneumatic hiss signals the opening of doors, and – chest thumping – I fling myself into the lobby.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.

F3: ‘Welcome to the Umweltzone’

This is the next layer of The Terminal. Very much unfinished, but – since I need lunch – I’ll post the second half next week. And then there’s at least one more piece to come – I really like the characters, so it could easily end up being more.

WELCOME TO THE UMWELTZONE

Pedal to the floor, I race through the liquid mist of post-industrial Berlin. Even in the twilight, silver and green dominate. A world of infinitely customisable architecture – modular units and wind turbines; turf and steel. This side of the wall, Berlin’s heritage was papered over and trampled underfoot. Preservation and conservation were thrown aside; surplus to the orgy of market-humping and wide-eyed commerce. Thirty years later, and this part of the capital is home to a thousand small business enterprises, buoyed by EU subsidies and staffed with caffeine-fuelled graduates of every stripe. Welcome to the Umweltzone.

The Nissan chatters away, exchanging data with Galileo and the other cars and lorries on the German A-roads. Yesterday, it was a hire vehicle; a bullet point on the expenses of the Brazilian account. Today, it’s utterly convinced of its role as an Interflora delivery van, bearing a cargo of vacuum-packed dwarf orchids.

I call it the lunchbox.

It’s monitoring traffic density, ethanol use, meteorological patterns, and the humidity of the simulated orchids. Apparently, I’m entering a pocket of unusually low pressure, part of a diffuse ribbon of bisecting the continent from Stockholm to Nice.

Luckily, the lunchbox isn’t capable of monitoring the integrity of its own information systems. Thanks to Simon, an adjusted p2p nav system is narrowing in on the physical location of our target. Now, we’re just waiting for her to make an appearance in the terminal.

“Is she there yet?” I ask, flicking my eyes to the dashboard chronometer. “It’s another hundred before the lunchbox is in range. At least.”

Allowing for speech/text conversion and a five second lag, I await his answer. My stomach is a knot of elastic bands.

“Not yet. Wish you could this place, Red; it’s bizarre.” The words belong to Simon, but the voice is provided by the vehicle. Distracted by the peculiarities of my own journey, I marvel at the temple to the railway, a great glass box which passes on my right.

Then, the voice of a woman; “What do you think?” With no obvious point of origin, the question fills me with raw panic.

“Stunning.” It takes a moment for me to realise that this response wasn’t me, but belonged to the diver. Definitely Simon; enthusiastic, with the occasional slip signalling his Mancunian origins. Which means … the woman was Rosanna; our target. Her voice sounds a little older than I’d been expecting, but – hell – at least she’s made an appearance.

Relaxing into the seat, I passively stare as the lunchbox indicates right, turning towards Alexanderplatz.

“And I’m on. You ready?” The artificial voice sounds peculiarly urgent. I have to remind myself that it’s a quirk of programming, nothing more. Outside, the square allows an unhindered glimpse of the city skyline, as punctured by the garish lights of a brutal spire; a lingering monster, born of the twentieth century. But the nav says we’re still out of range. Where is she?

“Think I can see the television tower. Give me a little longer?” I hazard, listening to the fawning and simpering of Simon and our target. She sounds younger than I’d been imagining.

Then the lunchbox is turning. A sharp lurch to the right, and the tower recedes into the ashen haze. Looking at the chronometer, I bite my lip. The elastic bands are back, and they brought friends. I can feel the droplets of sweat glistening on my forehead; should have packed the sweatband.

In the background, I’m forced to listen to Simon’s attempts at flirting. It’s excruciating. Frankly, if it wasn’t what I was paying him for, I’d probably have vomited by now.

But when the p2p nav starts blinking, my misgivings evaporate. A reverse-engineering of the girl’s connection protocol finally yields a physical location – Landsberger Allee; a converted hostel, right on top of the railway station.

“Think I’ve found the vats.”

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.