Water Fall: Three Way Switch

Posted by natechen on September 23, 2013

Seven Weeks, One Day before the Michigan Avenue Proclamation

Circuit

Picture this tableau. There is a man, well dressed and handsome, standing in the center of a group of people in the middle of a vicious argument.

To his left, Heavy Water tries to restrain an African American woman almost as tall as he is with one hand while still keeping a hold on the large box slung under his arm with the other. He is having little success in keeping the woman from pushing past him, more in keeping ahold of the container. For her part, Grappler is more interested in yelling at the younger woman, who is safely seated on the other side of the table the rest are standing around, than messing with Heavy. Elizabeth Dawson, daughter of a U.S. Senator but better known to us as a hacker who goes by Hangman, leans back in her chair and fiddles with a tablet.

Who is this man, and how does he come to be so calm when in the presence of these very dangerous, experienced criminals?

His name is Simeon Delacroix, and on those increasingly rare occasions where I stray into my public identity he is my office manager. When I function as a criminal mastermind he serves much the same purpose but without a title, as “office manager” does not inspire quite the same degree of respect from the hard types he sometimes deals with. In addition to doing all the things a normal office manager is expected to accomplish, Simeon is also expected to keep all of my employees from engaging in criminal acts against each other.

At this particular moment, Simeon is wishing he was on vacation. His job is full time and very demanding. His pay, while generous, is not exceptional and the other benefits are impressive but rarely used. For example, he has not had a true day off outside a few holidays for three years. Perhaps he is resenting the employer that puts such incredible demands on his time. Perhaps he is merely daydreaming about taking an attractive lady strolling along the beach.

Well, to tell the truth I’m not sure if he was thinking about a vacation or not. I do know that when I walked into the middle of the scene, still rubbing the remnants of my disguise makeup off my face, he was paying almost no attention to the argument going on. Of course, since I could hear Heavy and Grappler shouting before I even got in the room, it was no surprise. In fact, those two argue all the time, so Simeon and I have gotten used to tuning it out. I had just given Hangman credit for enough sense not to join in herself. But apparently she had.

“-has no right to tell me how to run a job,” Grappler was saying.

“Easy,” Heavy said, trying to get her to sit down. He threw Simeon a pleading glance, but he was busy with the book he had in his hands. Then Heavy caught sight of me and said, “Hey, boss.”

I knew a cue when I heard it, even if I had absolutely no idea what was going on. “We don’t look as ready for immediate action as I usually like to see things when I plan for immediate action.” I placed a hand on Grappler’s shoulder and she backed off a bit, then I glanced over at Hangman, then finally at my office manager, who’s failure to diffuse the situation was truly mystifying. Simeon usually breaks out in hives whenever anyone’s speaking in a voice louder than a whisper, I make light of his distraction now but at the time I was seriously worried because he didn’t pick up on Heavy’s cue, or mine, and picking up on cues is part of his job. “Mr. Delacroix?”

“I’m sorry?” He flipped the book closed and looked up. “I didn’t hear you come in, sir.”

“I noticed.” I waved my hand around at the table. “It doesn’t look like we’re doing much here.”

“Well, sir, that’s something of a point of contention at the moment.” He hefted the book he was holding. “Ms. Dawson has provided me with a very unusual document. After consulting it I decided it would be best if we waited to show it to you before we went our various ways.”

“Really.” I took the book from Simeon, then glanced over at Hangman. I wasn’t sure what I found more amusing, the obvious relief Simeon showed at finally finding someone who was as comfortable being referred to by her real name as by an assumed working name or that Hangman had zeroed in on him as the weak point of the group on their first meeting. Or that she had apparently thought this far in advance and had something prepared with which to prove herself to the rest of the group, which was what I assumed was going on.

I looked down at the book, which was a largish ledger like you might still find for keeping accounts in some office supply stores, and flipped it open. As I did, Hangman said, “You’ll find the part starting on page sixty three particularly interesting.”

“Now listen-”

“Quiet please,” I said, cutting off Grappler before she could get a full head of steam. Hangman had repeatedly exceeded my expectations before demanding, quite forcefully, to join our ranks. This is not the usual method for joining my inner circle. I was particularly interested in what it was she would bring to the table, and at the same time a little wary of someone who was shaping up to be a bit of a loose cannon. At the same time, Grappler is a very good burglar, a reasonable accountant and very decorative, but she’s not a great judge of character. For example, she married a serial killer. I was not interested in hearing whatever problem she had with Hangman, it would probably just give me a headache and I wanted my full attention to be on sorting out how best to incorporate Hangman into my inner circle without compromising the very tight schedule I was running.

The entries were dated, and it only took a page or two for me to recognize the pattern to the dates. This was a record of all my major crimes for the past six years, nearly three quarters of my career. I looked up long enough to give Hangman a skeptical look. “You can’t have been following me this long. You were what, sixteen when this starts?”

“Seventeen,” she corrected me. “And about a third of what’s in there was reconstructed after the fact.”

“I see.” Looking over a complete history of my activities was not exactly a pleasant endeavor. I’ve had my share of miserable failures, and like so many people do I made the bulk of them at the beginning of my career. To make matters worse, most of the entries were followed by a brief analysis of what went wrong with the operation in question. I also felt I had been incredibly petty in my early days. A large part of that had been deliberate. I knew I would need operating capitol and I preferred to keep legal my activities totally separate from my illegal ones, so funding one lifestyle with the other was out.

In short, I had needed cash and with Heavy’s connections finding simple, profitable employment for my talent had been easy. But it had also been beneath me and seeing it written out in ink didn’t make me feel any better about it.

That only lasted about a year, and thankfully, while Hangman was an expert hacker and information gatherer she was not omniscient and her information from that far back was spotty. By page sixty three I had moved out of establishing basic infrastructure and into the important crimes. It was my second major move against the U.S. Government, my first made with the current long term plan in mind, and it also marked a turning point in my relationship with Project Sumter and their foremost agent.

The plan had been simplicity itself: Try to steal an Apache helicopter using a very elaborate hacking program and remote control device that only functioned because of the way my innate ability to manipulate electrical circuits interacted with magnetism while, at the same time, Heavy, Grappler and a handful of others stole a set of improved armor plating intended to upgrade Army vehicles in Iraq. The helicopter theft would provide a distraction more than significant enough for Heavy’s team to break in and escape and, in the event that I could actually get away with the vehicle, the Apache would make a nice addition to my motor pool. Perhaps as an interesting paperweight.

In practice, helicopters are difficult to fly, a fact I proved by nearly smashing my stolen Apache four times in the space of three minutes, difficult to maintain and not particularly subtle. It’s not as if you can repaint an attack helicopter as a delivery vehicle, after all. But given the base we were stealing from and the level of competence the Air Force in the region could be expected to show, I honestly didn’t expect the chopper to stay in the air more than ten minutes. I overestimated by about seven, but I also hadn’t been counting on Special Agent Double Helix being able to create an updraft so powerful it could toss a helicopter like a stray leaf. I hadn’t even known heat sinks existed at the time. But Hangman had managed to gather all these details together and reached a surprising conclusion.

“You think we could have kept the helicopter intact.”

I didn’t say it as a question and Hangman knew better than to take it as one. “You failed to utilize your greatest strengths in that job. And that’s not the clever distraction or the ability to manipulate electrical circuits with your talent. It’s your skill in information warfare. Why did that base even have working radar when your job went down? You were aware of the existence of Project Sumter by that point. Why didn’t you tap the Army’s communications and watch for their arrival?”

I shrugged. “Perhaps because keeping the helicopter was not a priority of mine?”

“Fair enough.” She leaned forward and gave me an amused smirk. “But that’s been a consistent failing in your operations ever since. For some reason you seem to want to establish your criminal self and your hacker self as separate. That’s a weakness, Circuit, and I don’t know why you have it but you need to deal with it. But as bad as that is, it pales in comparison to your phobia of Helix.”

“Now hold on!” I had expected an interruption soon, if for no other reason than Grappler’s having a hard time holding her peace for very long, but I hadn’t expected one from Heavy. He’s usually pretty quiet at strategy meetings. For once he looked downright angry instead. “You’re obviously pretty smart, since you got the boss listening to you, and he has been for a while. But you’ve never seen what it’s like to have that guy in your face. He turns up everywhere!”

“That’s not his doing,” Hangman said, waving the objection off. “Project Sumter has a whole department devoted to analyzing your activities and sending the right man to thwart them. I suspect they keep sending Double Helix because his ability to sense and manipulate heat gives him an extra way to locate the strange electronics you keep cooking up and get rid of them.”

“The man can burn paper just by standing nearby when he’s pissed,” Heavy said, thumping his box on the table for emphasis. “I mean, did you even get near Diversy Street after the punch-up there? You could smell the asphalt melting for miles! I don’t think he’d even die if you lit him up with a flamethrower.”

“He does need to breath,” I put in. “I’m sure the smoke would get to him eventually.”

“Look, I know that Helix is like a boogieman for you guys. I’ve seen a lot of the stats, even if I’ve never personally been there to see him ruin something. But I don’t suppose any of you could tell me the background and qualifications of the three man support team that’s been with him for the last five and a half years? Or what any of the other Midwest Sumter talents are capable of? Did you even know the name of the woman you killed last week before you went to her funeral?” Hangman shook her head. “Thanks to that, you need to know all that and more.

“Before, there was one Project agent and his team looking for you between other major cases. One team, and you thought it was bad enough that you built dedicated countermeasures for him into practically every plan you’ve cooked up in the last six years. There are fourteen operational teams assigned to the Project’s Midwest district. Do you even know the codenames for the talents in them? And there are seventy-nine talents employed by the Project nationwide.”

“We’ve had our hands full with one,” Grappler snarled. “Why would we want to pick a fight with all the rest?”

“Like it or not, you’ve got one,” Hangman snapped back. “They’ll throw everything they can at you, for no other reason than you killed one of their own. If you aren’t ready to play with the big leagues then it’s time for us to dig a hole, crawl in and pull it in after.”

I could tell that this conversation was going to be a lengthy one, and since Hangman was still seated I decided to join her and took one of the empty chairs. Setting the book to one side, I laced my fingers together and said, “There’s a lot to what you’re saying. Let’s concede that not everything I’ve done has gone as well as I’ve hoped. What does? But you don’t sound like you want to pack up and go home – in fact, as I understand it you no longer have one to go back to.”

Hangman laughed bitterly at that, which I thought more than a little sad. Why a politician wouldn’t encourage talents like those Senator Dawson’s daughter obviously had was beyond me, but his loss was my gain. Since she didn’t seem about to add anything else, I went on. “You obviously think there’s something you can add to the equation overcome most of these problems. Care to share it?”

The look on her face suggested she’d like nothing better. She reached out and thumped one hand on the book. “This is basically it. But I’ll summarize, because these are busy times, and it’s a long book.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t look as bad as some of Davis’ engineering reports,” I said lightly.

“There’s one major difference between you and Project Sumter. Know what it is?”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I would think ideology.”

“Personnel management,” she corrected. “Although ideology is a big factor in that.”

“Explain.”

“Project Sumter talents don’t work alone. They work in groups, with highly trained support personnel to assist them in using their talent to it’s maximum. They have analysts who are on the scene with them, sorting out clues and picking up on things they might be missing. And they have oversight agents, to keep them from making rash decisions and keep them on task. You have… well, you. You think that should be enough, because you want to prove talents don’t need normal people looking over their shoulder half the time. Problem is, you can’t beat a well coordinated group working alone.”

Hangman shrugged helplessly. “About half the problems you face in the field could be overcome if you just had people to help you with the higher thought functions, rather than relying on the abilities of these two,” she waved at Heavy and Grappler, “to think on their feet. They’re not bad at it, but with you taking point in the field most of the time and no one to coordinate between you and them things spiral out of your ability to control more often than not.”

“Granted.” I felt no shame in admitting to it, I had puzzled over the issue many times in the past with Simeon. “But, at least for the next month or two, Simeon needs to maintain my public face and there’s no one else I trust enough to do such a job. We don’t have the resources of Project Sumter, we can’t simply pour over the HR files from a dozen government agents and ask for the ones we want. Of course, I’m sure there’s more too it than that, but the basic principle remains. How would you propose to solve this little problem?”

“She wants to do it,” Grappler put in. “Apparently she thinks she’s qualified to tell everyone what’s best now that she’s in.”

Grappler hadn’t really approved of the idea of adding another person to the inner circle at all. I wasn’t about to try and explain my reasoning to her, of all people, so I’d just tabled the matter and went about my business. Sooner or later that was going to become an issue, but I didn’t have the time to deal with it right that minute. Which made things even worse, because Hangman’s idea had merit. I hadn’t reckoned on having her as a resource at my disposal when I formulated the current version of the Chainfall plan two years ago. I shot a glance at Simeon. “How soon do you have to be back in the city?”

“Three days,” he said, his thoughtful expression suggesting he was already tracking with my line of thought. “But I could stretch it to four, if we’re willing to take a hit to public sector earnings in the third quarter. I’ll have to miss a few meetings. And you need to be back within six, don’t forget that.”

“I remember.” I thought for a moment, drumming my fingers absently on top of the book. “Then let’s do this. Hangman will have a trial run as control agent-”

“What?” Grappler shouted.

“-for me,” I said, as if nothing had happened. “Simeon, you’ll go up north with Heavy and Grappler on their little run. Hangman and I will go west, and get ahold of our objective there. We’ll compare notes, see whether adding a control operative had any benefits at all and go from there.”

“You sure, boss?” Heavy gave our newest addition a skeptical look, then glanced back at me. “That’s an awful lot riding on one job.”

By which he meant I was the only one who knew what all the puzzle pieces in the grand plan were. At least, that’s what he assumed. I was quickly coming to question such ideas now that Hangman was more than a shadowy presence on the far side of an Internet connection. What’s more, I was the only one who was really committed to the idea of picking a fight with the government, the only one who felt that it was time to end the hiding, the lying and the endless belittling of our talents. But a glance at Hangman reminded me that once again, that might not be entirely true. I could tell by the look on her face that she wanted in. And I was not at all opposed to giving her a shot. “I think we’ll be fine, Heavy. But your concern is appreciated.”

“If you say so.”

That was Heavy-speak for extreme skepticism. “If nothing else, there’s no way that Simeon could go out west with me and get back in time for his other obligations. Hangman has to come with me or the timing won’t work. And as has already been noted, I’m used to having many things in the air.” Heavy looked about as serious as he ever got, which is more serious than most people would give him credit for, but he nodded to show he understood. I could, and would, watch my own back. “Good. Now, get going. We’re running behind as it is. Hangman? Grab anything you can’t do without for the next week and meet me in the garage in ten minutes.”

Instead, she met me at the door, the shoulder bag she’d brought with her when we first met in person a few days ago slung over one shoulder. “Ready when you are, boss.”

I gave her a quick once over. After a brief stint as a wannabe streetwalker she was once again dressed like a pert and perky college student, Her straight brown hair pulled into a ponytail over one shoulder, her face, while attractive, now all over missing persons files going out nation wide. At least her ability to gather information and extrapolate on it still appeared to be working full force. “Then come along. And don’t call me boss, only Heavy does that and only because I can’t make him stop. Do you know what we’re doing next?”

Hangman shook her head. “All I’ve managed to gather is that you’re buying up real estate and 3D printing equipment. So far the connection between the two eludes me.”

“Ah.” I allowed myself a small smirk, it was nice to know I could keep a few secrets. “Well, in that case you’re in luck. This is actually an excellent test case, since in many ways it duplicates your own example a few minutes ago.”

Her face scrunched up in confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

“We’re going to rob from GI Joe, Hangman. The Army itself.”

“Of course.” Hangman laughed. “It’s just like you to get someone shot at by the end of their first week on the job.”

“Relax.” I waved the thought off. “If everything goes well they won’t even get the safeties of their weapons.”

I really shouldn’t have said that, but it was done before the thought occurred. And really, what was the worst that could happen?

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Genrely Speaking: The Detective Story

Posted by natechen on September 20, 2013

For the first time ever, an episode of Genrely Speaking ties back to a previous installment! No longer a handful scattered categories, the genres are beginning to link up and a picture forms. The game’s afoot!

Yes, the detective story is a branch of the mystery, and thus a close cousin of the police procedural. But at the same time, they’re very different kinds of stories, as well. The sleuth is a classic trope of modern literature, and has been in use pretty much since it was created by Edgar Allen Poe. In many ways, the sleuth was the first superhero, slicing through tricky problems with his superior intellect to set difficult situations to rest.

Indeed, the super sleuth has much in common with later superheroes. His abilities dwarf those of the people around him, and he is usually highly admired and in much demand. In fact, Batman is sometimes characterized as the world’s greatest detective, and it’s considered a part of his “powers”. Great detectives may not be as flashy as superheroes, but that’s one of the things that’s helped them find wider acceptance. It’s easier to read about a snappily dressed sleuth who solves real, understandable crimes and not be laughed at than it is to read about a man in spandex who fights dinosaurs (or something).

But the other thing that gives detective stories their respectability is the fact that they are, in many ways, a kind of puzzle to exercise your mind. While you don’t have to read them that way, just wading through them should sharpen you a little bit. In theory, at least.

The hallmarks of the detective story are a little something like this:

1. A central character who is absolutely, no holds barred, brilliant. This character is the detective, and these stories demand that he stand head and shoulders above the rest of the crime-solving crowd. All stories want something special about their main characters. Detective stories need a main character who is good at solving mysteries.

It doesn’t really matter if they’re good at anything else. In fact, Adrian Monk and the Sherlock Holmes from CBS’ Elementary both need significant help with some (or all) aspects of their life. But in the sole arena of crime, the detective must reign absolute. Whether it be Holmes’ merciless logic, Hercule Poirot’s deft use of psychology or Monk’s obsessive need for order, the detective can somehow pierce through every layer of deceit to find the person who committed a crime. And, perhaps just as importantly, they have to do pretty much all the work themselves.

It’s not that there can’t be supporting characters who help the detective. There can, and should, be such characters. But they serve more as foils for the detective’s brilliance, by not understanding how the sleuth arrives at his conclusions they show how ordinary people don’t make the same connections the detective does. Take Poirot’s Chief Inspector Japp. He’s a competent detective, has to be or he wouldn’t be Chief Inspector. He can do all the leg work for a case, knows all the typical causes for crime and deftly handles multiple cases at once. But when confronted with the really devious problems he can’t seem to match Poirot. Which nicely brings us to the next hallmark of the detective story.

2. Crimes that feature a level of complexity and planning that far surpasses the norm. The detective is brilliant, and so the problems he tackles have to be worthy of his attention. They must challenge his intellect and, at the same time, that of his reader. After all, if part of the purpose is to challenge the reader with the puzzle of the murder, it needs to test our brains. Of course, complex crimes are more interesting as well, to both the detective and the reader. While a drive-by shooting is no doubt a crime and definitely a tragedy, it’s rarely going to lead us on a long, twisting crawl through the lives of the victim and his associates or the mechanics of the killing that eventually culminates in a brilliant set of deductions that pins the crime on the least likely suspect. In short, detective stories need unusual crimes, and so unusual crimes they will have.

Note that, while the crime in mysteries is almost always murder, or leads to murder, there are a few instances, particularly in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, where the crime was a theft or kidnapping of some sort.

3. The detective figures things out through the use of his brain, not legwork or chance. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that there’s no legwork needed, but the detective usually has a sidekick or plucky assistant to help with that. And there are elements of chance in the story, but they never help the detective – if anything, it’s the addition of some chance happenstance to the murder scenario that makes the situation so difficult to suss out.

The point of the story is that the sleuth is solving the crime through his superior crime-solving method. Chance is cheating and legwork is a way to fuel the deductions, not something to replace them. Of course, in real life oftentimes all you really need is to do enough legwork without breaking any rules that will hinder the DA from prosecuting, which is why most super sleuths are private detectives rather than actual policemen, and why the police procedural is a genre in it’s own right. This also let’s the reader “check his work” as he tries to solve the mystery on his own.

3a. The rule of fair play. Unlike the above, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but you find it much more often in detective stories than you do in pretty much any other kind of mystery. The rule of fair play simply states that all the facts the detective uses to solve the case have to be made known to the reader, to give them a shot at solving the mystery before the summation scene. Fair play mysteries are the ultimate embodiment of the detective story as a puzzle for the reader.

What is the greatest weakness of the detective story? There are two. First, the overly complex crimes can defy belief. After all, who’s going to kidnap someone, kill them, then demand a ransom while staging an alibi when they could just mess with the victim’s brake lines and be done with it? The second is that the highly cerebral nature of the crime solving can take a lot of time from other aspects of the story, cutting into character development and side plots. While that’s hardly fatal, both the heavy intellectual emphasis and the lack of time for other matters might loose some readers. This is why so many modern detective stories are hybrids, including elements of comedy, romance, suspense, ect.

What is the greatest strength of the detective story? Mysteries are incredibly addictive. The quirks detectives bring to the table make them very interesting and people never seem to get enough of them. Also, with so many moving parts there are countless possible combinations of method, motive, alibi, ect to make one mystery different from the next, so they franchise well. But perhaps most of all, the detective himself is quite enduring. The best, Holmes, Poirot, Ms. Marple, Monk, are well known and enduring. And really, what more could an author ask for?

While the detective story is a very demanding genre to work in, the rewards are quite high as well. It’s a genre that offers an enthusiastic, if sometimes critical readership and the promise of a lot of work to come. If you enjoy reading them, there’s sure to always be something for you.

Cool Things: Casablanca

Posted by natechen on September 18, 2013

It’s time for another classic film. I first saw Casablanca some time when I was in middle school, perhaps even earlier. I knew it was a cultural landmark, considered by some critics the greatest movie ever made, period. I know that I watched it and, even at a young age, enjoyed it a lot. Later, when I was in college taking my Introduction to Literature course it would be used as an example of film as literature. I had watched Casablanca many times in the years between my first viewing and college, but I still found the film to be enjoyable. But I was surprised, when the film reached it’s climax and the twists were coming fast and furious, almost the entire class gasped when the plot took a particularly dramatic turn. I thought everyone should have seen this film already. I mean, it’s a classic, right?

Well, just like plenty of people have never listened to classical music it seems plenty of people don’t watch classic movies either. But even if you never watch any other black and white film let me encourage you to watch Casablanca.

Plot summary time – Casablanca is a film set in World War II. It begins with the murder of two German curriers carrying important documents, which will help a famous member of the anti-Nazi underground, Victor Lazlo (Paul Henried), escape to the United States. The Nazis, working together with Unoccupied France, are aiming to keep him from “spreading lies” outside of Europe.

Events come to a head at Rick’s, owned by Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). As a U.S. ex-pat, Rick feels he has no stake in the political conflict playing out at the tables of his cafe. But it turns out he has a personal one when Lazlo is accompanied by Rick’s old flame Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman). He’ll have to sort out his loyalties and feelings before all is said and done.

On the face of it, Casablanca could turn out to be a horrible movie. It’s got a lot of trite plot elements – love triangle, club owner, Nazis. But the writing is brilliant and develops the main story, and a wealth of side stories, in a staggeringly short period of time, maintaining dramatic tension with aplomb. Of course, the tension may hang together simply because the writers didn’t have an ending until right before it was filmed.

Casablanca is a classic in the way it shows the conflict in its characters. Rick’s not the only one who doesn’t know how to deal with the situation. Practically everyone but the hardline resistance members and Nazis seem to be of two minds about what they want – respect or profit, romance or cause, a dozen or more conflicts plague the characters and they never come out with pat answers. We see them struggle and bobble them right up until the end.

More than that, Casablanca entertains. Where so many movies could wander into melodrama or preachiness, Casablanca concentrates on making sure we enjoy every step from beginning to end. From Claude Rains’ fantastic performance as Louie, the Prefect of Police, to the musical battle between Lazlo and the Nazi Major, we smile, we laugh, we are engaged.

Casablanca is a great movie for the writer, as well. The characters are well built, introduced and developed. The dialog is good and the dramatic tension is great, deliberate or not. The next time you need a film for the weekend you could do much worse than this classic.

Water Fall: Ashes to Ashes

Posted by natechen on September 16, 2013

Seven Weeks, One Day before the Michigan Avenue Proclomation

Helix

Normally I don’t leave funerals too mad to see straight. But burying Mona Templeton, my friend of four years and wife of a man who had been my friend for even longer, after she was killed in the line of duty a week before was not a normal experience. Sometimes life seems monotonous, but death – that’s different every time you see it. The fact that Mona was dead was bad enough, the fact that she had been killed by what is known, in official government circles, as a conspiring traitor but we field agents tend to call a megalomaniacal asshole just made it worse. On top of that, since Mona’s job was as a field analyst for a government agency that doesn’t technically exist, she couldn’t even be given public credit for all the great work she’d done. It’s not just a case of waiting until the files are declassified before the truth is told, the Federal Government’s official stance was that nothing we did would ever be made public. Being an unsung hero may sound romantic, but when one of your friends become one it looses some of that shine.

But the real kicker was the whole Senate Oversight Committee, that nonexistent government body overseeing our nonexistent government office, putting in an appearance. They stood around and looked stricken, shook hands with the family, mouthed platitudes, gave a dozen and one offhand lies to explain their presence. Then they came and shook hands with me. Told me they were sure this tragic situation would be handled soon. They had every confidence in my ability to see things through. As if they had any idea what the real situation was. As if I needed any encouragement to find Open Circuit, who had been slipping away from me for eight years, who had just killed my friend and fellow agent.

It’s not like I didn’t lay them out on the ground because I wasn’t angry. Or because I had a weird sort of mutual respect/dislike society going with their ringleader, Senator Brahms Dawson. Or even because, for all their inability to see the forest for their egos getting in the way, they were still United States Senators and technically due some sort of respect for that.

It was because Mona and Darryl Templeton, and their families, deserved better than that.

I took hold of that reason, simple but sturdy, and wedged it between myself and my temper and somehow made it through the memorial service. But as soon as it was done I stalked out of the funeral home and into the parking lot, where I found the first luxury car around and kicked it’s tires until my foot hurt. Then I sat down on the sidewalk and sulked. Throwing a tantrum wasn’t helping any, but my dad said it never did so maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise.

“You’re lucky all the security guards are inside.”

The voice barged into my thoughts, prompting me to come back to reality. I looked up to find a tall, athletic African American man, my former boss Robert Sanders. We went way back, me and Sanders, and the memories were not exactly fond ones. “What do you want, Sanders?”

“To talk to you,” he said, taking a seat on the curb next to me. “Although I’m regretting it more every second.”

“So make us both happy and go away.”

“You know sidewalks outside funeral homes are built six inches higher than standard?” He fished around in one of his suit’s jacket pockets and pulled out a lighter and a package of cigarettes. “It makes it easier for men to come out and cry on them.”

I snorted. “Really?”

“I just made it up.” He tapped out a cigarette. “You listening now, or you want to go break your foot on another tire? I can wait.”

“Since when did you start smoking again? I thought you gave it up.”

“Since Mona died.” He flicked the lighter and a flame popped into existence.

Unreasonably annoyed by it, I reached out and stuck my finger into the flame, barely hot enough to register as a dip in the flat, low expanse of the surrounding temperature. Thanks to my native gift with heat, instead of getting a nasty burn I forced the temperature of the flame back down to a moderate seventyish degrees, extinguishing it. “Don’t use Mona’s death as an excuse for your bad behavior.”

Sanders shot me a look that was pure venom. I met him with my normal sour face. For a minute, to anyone passing by, we probably looked like we were about to start pounding each other. In fact, for a brief second I thought that’s what it was going to come to, and I was okay with that. At five foot three, one hundred and thirty pounds, I was easily loosing to Sanders in terms of reach, weight, muscle and to be honest, probably skill. However I could also bend a two inch thick bar of iron with my bare hands just by forcing it to melt, and he couldn’t. Being able to push the thermometer around has its perks.

But whether he just wanted to avoid third degree burns, he was still a little more into the spirit of the occasion than I was or he was just too tired for a scrap, after a minute or two of glaring Sanders threw his cigarette on the ground and tucked his lighter away. “You know, I said I wasn’t in the mood for this today.”

“To who?”

“I gave it up for Mona, you know.” I assumed he meant smoking, as the statement didn’t really apply to his mood.

“I didn’t.” I thought about that for a second. “Wait, wasn’t that two years ago? Or have you been on-again-off-again when I wasn’t looking?”

“I didn’t know you cared enough to pay attention, Helix.”

“I don’t.” We were dancing around some issue that Sanders obviously wanted to avoid but I didn’t know enough to guess at what that was, so I played along.

“It was actually almost three and a half years ago.” He fidgeted for a minute. “She said I couldn’t stick with anything and I wanted to prove her wrong.”

“So you quit smoking for three and a half years.” I stared at him for a minute. I knew Sanders had been interested in Mona back when she joined the Project. There wasn’t anything unusual about that, Sanders was interested in just about any woman that joined the Project. But Mona already knew Darryl at the time and most of us considered their marriage just a matter of time. Until that moment I’d never suspected Sanders had been any different. “That’s a little bit extreme, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. I guess.” He forced a weak smile. “But that all’s probably pretty boring to you, isn’t it?”

And now he was concerned about me. I wasn’t sure how many more shocks my system could take, especially since I was pretty worn out as it was. So I got to my feet and motioned for him to do the same. “Come on Sanders, you need to get the heart moving. There’s obviously not enough blood going to the brain right now.”

“Funny.” He slowly climbed to his feet anyway.

“Like you’ve been doing any better.”

“My jokes are usually good. Yours never are.” He was still subdued but some of the usual animation was coming back into his features. “Helix, I need you to back us up on something.”

“Alright.” Sanders wasn’t my boss anymore, but he’s entitled to a certain amount of solidarity just because, like me, he’s been doing this job practically forever. Still, there are certain questions to be asked. “Who’s us?”

“Darryl and I. We need you to help us convince the Senate Committee to-”

“Hold up.” I cut him off with a raised hand. “We are talking about the Committee headed up by Senator Dawson? The man who hates me? Who’s handpicked protégé joined Project Sumter and got me as a watchdog to make sure she wasn’t causing mischief? That Committee?”

“That’s the one,” Sanders said with a grim nod of the head.

I laughed in disbelieve. “Sanders, where in all that did you hear anything that makes you think those people are going to let me convince them of anything?”

“Because you’re the talent with the highest case closure rate and most talents discovered in the Midwest. If we go by talents found, you’re highest in the nation, at least on active duty. Darryl’s head of the Midwest Analysis department. I have the most seniority among field team oversight agents.” I snorted but Sanders pressed on before I could say anything more. “At least as soon as the paperwork goes through and I am officially oversight for Gearshift, that new guy you found a couple of weeks ago. The Committee isn’t a monolithic group, Helix, there’s only one other senator firmly on Dawson’s side. One usually sides with Voorman and two waver back and fourth. Getting Teresa into the Project used up a lot of Dawson’s political capitol, if we push now he’ll have a hard time standing up to three very senior agents if we present a united front.”

That actually sounded legit. Sanders is better at political manipulations than I am, in fact he’s been the point political agent for Michael Voorman, our Senior Special Liaison, since he made Senior Special Agent, so I was willing to take his assessment on faith. Not that I was about to admit that. So I adopted a skeptical tone and said, “Right. What exactly are we convincing them to do?”

“Let Darryl join one of our field teams and participate in the hunt for Open Circuit.”

“What?”

A note for those thinking of joining Project Sumter or any other secretive branch of the Federal Government’s alphabet soup: No matter how preposterous the things that come up in the course of doing you job, you should not scream when discussing them. Especially in broad daylight while you are standing in a public place.

I grabbed hold of myself and lowered my voice back to a low murmur. “That’s a horrible idea, Sanders! Why would we do that? Why would they let us?”

“Because we’re going to-”

“No, we’re not,” I snapped, grabbing him by the front of his jacket and pulling him down to something a little more like eye level. “Listen, Sanders, they make those rules for a reason. Usually, good reasons, and the rule that an emotionally compromised investigator gets pulled off a case is one of the good ones. Darryl’s wife has been killed. If that’s not emotionally compromised, I don’t know what is.”

Sanders retaliated by grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking, which left me a little woozy since he still definitely had all the reach and mass over me. “I know all that. But don’t you think he deserves a chance to see this to the end?”

“Deserves? Don’t give me deserves, Sanders.” I shoved him back a step, or more likely I pushed and he took a step back to humor me. “Nothing in Project Sumter runs on what people deserve. Talents don’t deserve to hide their whole lives, they don’t deserve to have no future in the ranks than Special Agent just because Abraham Lincoln wanted to make a symbolic point a hundred and fifty years ago. Mona didn’t deserve to get killed in the line of duty. But we’re trying to do things right, and if Darryl goes back out into the field he’s going to miss things, make dumb decisions and possibly even get more people killed. That’s not right, and I’m not going to help you two make it happen.”

“And that’s the end of it?” Sanders shook his head. “Helix, he’s been on your side since the day you joined up.”

“I know. That’s why I’m on his now. Whether he realizes it or not.”

With a sigh, Sanders held up his hands. “I get you, Helix. Really, I wasn’t expecting much different. But I said I’d try.”

A group of four other people were coming out of funeral home, one split off and came our way, the other three went in the other direction. I nodded at them, smoothing my suit out as I did. “We should probably get back in there. People will wonder where we went.”

Sanders nodded, performed a similar check on his own suit and followed me back towards the entrance. As we passed him, the man coming our way reached up, as if to tip a hat he wasn’t wearing, and said in a gruff voice, “My condolences, Mr. Hoffman.”

I wavered a half step, giving the man a closer look. He didn’t seem immediately familiar – I’d remember if I ever met anyone with hair that red. Then he was past me, heading down the sidewalk. The rear door of the car at the end of the street popped open and let him in, then he disappeared from view when it slammed closed.

“Did he think you were someone else?” Sanders asked.

“Daniel Hoffman is the name on this year’s fake driver’s license,” I replied, still staring at the car as it drove off. “But I don’t know why he’d know it.”

“Maybe he knows the Templetons, and they mentioned it?”

“Maybe.” I shook my head and started back towards the funeral home. “Not important right now. Let it go.”

——–

Circuit

I climbed into the back seat of the car, resisting the urge to take my nonexistent hat off. I was heavily disguised with makeup and wig, and that’s pointless if you continue to dress like you always do, so I had given up my hat with reluctance.

“You look strange with red hair.”

I glanced at the young lady who had made the pronouncement. “I would look even more strange if we were pulled over and the police found me with black hair and red eyebrows.” Although I very nearly had to sit on my hands to keep from scratching at the makeup holding the false eyebrows and built-up bridge of my nose in place. Instead, I cleared my throat, trying to get a more normal tone of voice back after the gravelly accent I’d used the few times I’d spoken in the last two hours. “And I’m not sure you’ve really known me long enough to be a reliable judge of whether I look strange or not, Hangman.”

“I’ve been following you a lot longer than you think, Circuit. You look strange.” She absently flipped her hair over one shoulder and began working it into a braid. Even dressed in worn and frankly tacky clothing, the gloss in her brunette hair, manicure on her fingers and general air of good health stood out as hints to her upper middle class upbringing. She was just as out of place in the beat up old car as I was, which worried me as we couldn’t afford any kind of scrutiny from anyone at the moment. There was too much that was too close to completion to deal with complications at the moment.

I leaned forward in my seat to talk to the driver, Heavy Water, a massive African-American man who ran point on most of my field operations. “Heavy, is this car safe?”

“Bought with cash two weeks ago, six states away, boss,” he said without hesitation. “So far as I can tell the closest it’s ever gotten to breaking the law is going a few miles over the speed limit – and I’m not sure it can even do that anymore.”

“That’s fine then.” I sat back in the car seat. “I just wanted to be sure you didn’t use your own unique abilities to find us transportation. Not that I normally object, of course.”

“Sure thing, boss. I know how to lay low.”

Hangman fidgeted for a moment, then said, “So, were you seen?”

“Of course. I could hardly help that.” I gave her a reassuring smile. “But I wasn’t recognized, and I don’t think I will be again.”

“Oh. Good.” She glanced away, but I could see the curiosity eating away at her, so I was prepared for the next question when it came. “What were the loose ends you were taking care of?”

I was prepared for her to ask the question. That didn’t mean I wanted to answer it. For a moment I indulged in cowardice and just stared out the window at the city streets rolling by. Then, finally I said, “I went to pay my respects.”

“To who?”

“A woman who died recently.” The buildings outside were more rundown than when we had started out but as we went along they were slowly improving again. I took a deep breath, reminding myself it was foolish to believe in signs, especially when I only payed attention to those I liked. “She was killed in the line of duty. I didn’t know her personally, but she was a very admirable woman.”

“Oh.” She paused again and I laid my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes. “What killed her?”

“I did.”

Fiction Index

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A Time for Gimmicks

Posted by natechen on September 13, 2013

You may have noticed that the first actual, for reals chapter of Water Fall contains a timekeeping gimmick. Specifically, it references the Michigan Avenue Proclamation and when the narrative is in relation to it. In case you were wondering, that refers to the events of the prologue, which the story itself will make clear in time. The Proclamation is a central even in the book and in the Project Sumter world as a whole. I wanted to start the book with it, to give the opening a bigger impact, but I also wanted the readers to be aware of how the story was stacking up next to it, and I wanted to tell what happened before the Proclamation, and not as a flashback per se. So I settled on “X much time before/after the Michigan Avenue Proclamation” format and decided to just put a note before each chapter. Note that time will pass within some chapters, so one chapter might start two weeks before the proclamation but end only eight days before it.

There’s plenty of precedent for this kind of gimmick to help people keep track of the timeline of a story. A great example would be the TV series 24, where each one hour episode of the series corresponds directly to an hour of the day. At pretty much each commercial break, before and after, a digital clock display would tell you exactly what time of day it was. It was a great way to keep suspense (how are they going to wrap this up before the day ends?) and remind people of where in the day they are (more than just early afternoon).

I was a bit worried about using a timekeeping gimmick, mainly because there was no comparable device in Heat Wave. I also don’t plan on using them in other Project Sumter stories, although that may change in the future. However, the whole point of gimmicks is to get your point across. If they’re doing that, great. If not, then they’re dead weight and need to be cut.

For some writers there’s an automatic desire to cut out gimmicks. Maybe it’s a desire for originality, maybe you just want to avoid the same ol’ same ol’, but if you find yourself bothered by this anti-troperism, keep in mind that these things are your tools, and to be used wisely in the creation of your story, not your enemy to be fought.

While overusing tropes and gimmicks is dangerous, odds are that if you try too hard to be original everywhere, you’re just going to wind up reinventing the wheel at some point, and you might not even realize you’ve done so. Being aware of your tropes and using them deliberately is the best way to make sure you’re avoiding the pitfalls that other writers have already mapped out and experimented with and taking advantage of all the best parts of them.

Writing is an act of creative expression, but if you express yourself better by borrowing from others there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re still going to be expressing something of your own, and there’s nothing on Earth that wasn’t a part of something else before so you’re in good company when you recycle. Don’t be afraid to use a gimmick if it fits.

Jared Black Returns!

Posted by natechen on September 11, 2013

Have you read the Kingdom of Jackels novels? If so, rejoice! (Hey, you! Rejoice!)

Jack Cloudie, the fifth novel in the series, has finally come across the pond to our benighted shores. While residents of the great old United Kingdom can read all six books in the series already, we must be content with what we have. And let me tell you, what we have is pretty good.

In Jack Cloudie the Kingdom will go to war, not that that’s anything new, but this time they face the people of Cassarabia and their womb mage creations. This time, the Royal Aerostatical Navy will have to face airships like their own. This time, Jared Black won’t be in his native element, the water. Can they win? More importantly, will we enjoy the ride?

The answer to the second question is an unqualified yes. If you love high adventure, satire or Jared Black, this is a book for you. The cranky old Commodore is back, once again plying his wits, vast experience and exhaustive knowledge of just about everything against the world and the contrary members of his own nation. This time he’s been called in to ride herd over an experimental armored airship, built by the now-defunct House of Quest, that has been sent out to figure out how the Cassarabians are getting the nonflammable gas they’re using in their airships. And he’ll have to do it without one mortal consideration for his aging bones or life of difficulty, so there’s nothing left to do but rail at the world and grumble his way through.

On the other side of the battle lines, Omar ibn Barir, former slave, is working his way through the ranks of the Cassarabian army towards a revelation that will shake his country to the core. Not that Omar ever sets out to do these things. Mostly, he just wants to save the girl and do his duty. But the simplest goals often have the most complex implications.

Like all the Jackelian novels, Jack Cloudie is a rousing tale of adventure. While it does feature the Commodore, he once again sits comfortably in the secondary character line-up, so don’t go in thinking these are the trials of a slightly overweight old submarine captain. Airships, genetic engineering and many other factors come into play. Like all Jackelian novels, Jack Cloudie contains elements of satire, particularly strong in this tale, but as saying more than that definitely qualifies as a spoiler I’ll just say they’re there. Note that, while Cassarabia is a theocracy with weird practices, it is not, in and of itself, the primary focus of Hunt’s satirical guns. So if that kind of thing bothers you or entices you, be aware that it’s, at most, a minor subtheme.

All in all, if you like steampunk, satire, high adventure, airships or Jared Black, this is a novel for you.

Water Fall: Dark Desks

Posted by natechen on September 9, 2013

Seven Weeks, One Day before the Michigan Avenue Proclomation

Massif

I exist in a perpetual haze.

It’s not drug induced or anything and I’m not exactly what you would call absent minded, but I was born with the ability to see and, to a limited extent manipulate, movement. And I mean all movement. For example, the air is in motion. Everyone knows that, but I can see it. Problem is, I have trouble seeing anything behind the air that’s moving.

Other people live with transparent air, unless they happen to be smokers or something, but I’ve never been able to see through more than ten feet of the stuff, and even then most of the details are different in ways that are hard to explain. It’s almost like being in a different world. I can’t drive, reading for more than ten or fifteen minutes gives me a headache and I have a hard time telling people apart.

I’m saying all this so you’ll understand that the day I walked in to the office and realized I could see my desk on the other side of the floor, it bothered me. It was something unusual, and for a person who’s job is half cops and robbers and half spy versus spy unusual is bad. There are thirty-six steps from the door to my row of desks, and my desk is the third down; I knew that for certain because it’s the kind of thing I have to commit to memory as soon as I move to a new office. I also knew it was way outside of what I’m normally able to see with any kind of clarity.

I’d seen that kind of thing before, usually on the shooting range when I let people shoot at me – don’t ask. Bullets create that kind of clarity of vectors when they streak towards their target, which makes it easy for me to pick out where they’re coming from. Which probably meant that my desk was at the center of some kind of constant force, pushing outward. Kind of like a constant wind or a sustained explosion, although what either one of those would be doing at my desk is anybody’s guess. And again, this would not be business as usual.

The upside to all my visual impairments is that I can be virtually indestructible under the right circumstances, which the Project Sumter dossier on vector shifts describes as, “any time the subject has their feet on the ground.” I actually come with training in how to walk so as to maximize my contact with the ground, if you’ll believe it. So I started towards my desk, planting my feet with deliberate care and keeping as alert as possible for any sign of trouble.

Trouble was waiting for me, sitting there with her boots up on my desk and earbuds in, eyes closed and paying no attention to her surroundings at all. She was petite, dressed in beaten up gray cargo pants that might have once been some other color, wearing a formfitting blue tank top and absently tapping her fingers on her stomach in time to some unheard song. The air around her seemed to shimmer and pulse slightly. I stared at the girl, and at the time I didn’t think she could be older than sixteen, trying to figure out how she had gotten into the office and to my desk. We have pretty good security, it took one of the most dangerous criminal minds in the nation seven or eight years to find and break into our offices and that was only because he tricked us into helping him out.

Now I’d swear, with the music on and all, there was no way she should have been able to hear me coming. My wushu sifu put me through a whole series of exercises to stifle the sound my footsteps that are really effective, even with heavy Western shoes on, but almost as soon as I got up to the desk the girl opened her eyes and pointed at my desk. I followed the pointing finger to a reddish blob which I guessed was a folder left there by my supervisor.

Harriet’s worked with me for the last year and a half and she’s developed some systems that help us get around my vision problems. One is the color-priority system. A red folder means I need to read it right away, helping important stuff to stand out from the mess of other papers that wind up scattered around the office. Since Trouble looked like she was content to wait until I’d read whatever was in it before talking to me I picked it up and flipped it open.

Trouble’s photo had been clipped to the top, smiling back at me with a sardonic grin. According to the file, her codename was Amplifier. Under that were places for a lot of personal information that had been redacted, although I did learn she was four years older than I had thought, followed by the codeword for her unusual talent and a brief description. Project Sumter uses the word talent to refer to pretty much any kind of unusual, innate ability to manipulate the forces of nature, usually in a way modern science can’t explain. Unusual was a pretty apt word, in this case, because in four years with the Project, I’d never heard of a wave maker. The file said I could expect her to manipulate the volume and frequency of sound waves, both consciously and subconsciously, so as to maximize acoustics and achieve other effects. That would explain why I could see her clearly, save for that pulsing effect. Sound is air in motion, too, and if Amplifier controlled the sound around her it probably had a steadying effect on the air itself.

The file said she also had unusually sharp hearing, which might explain how she heard me walking up.

I quickly squinted through the next couple of pages, which was basically a brief summary of what Amplifier had been up to since the Project discovered her. The last page was a summary of said discovery. A quick glance at the signature on the bottom confirmed that yes, like the majority of talents in the Midwest in the last five years, Special Agent Double Helix had found her. I flipped the folder closed, mostly satisfied, and waved to get her attention.

Amplifier sat up and took her ear phones out then raised an eyebrow. “I can hear you if you talk, you know. My dad never used to believe that but I would think you guys would get it.”

“Welcome to Project Sumter,” I said, ignoring what sounded a lot like a conversational land mine. “I guess you’ve been here for a few weeks but they keep me running far and wide most days so it’s no surprise we’ve never met.”

She smiled slightly and shrugged. “If you say so. I’m guessing you’re Aluchinskii Massif?”

“That’s me,” I said, sliding into my chair. I thought sitting down might get us on eye level and make things more comfortable but I was surprised to find I was still a good four or five inches taller than she was. So I leaned back in my chair some to get as close to level as possible, keeping care to leave one foot on the floor, and made the best of it. “It’s pronounced like ‘massive’ by the way. The ‘f’ makes a ‘v’ sound.”

“Is that something you have to say a lot?”

I shrugged. “Not really. Most people just call me Al or Massif. It’s never a problem unless people see it in writing.”

“Right. Teresa texted me and told me you and your boss would be filling in for her team. I guess they’re busy today.”

“That’s right.” I briefly sifted a hand through the stack of stuff in my inbox and then gave up looking for what I wanted. “I think Harriet’s going to be out of the office, at least for the morning, so you may just be stuck with me for the moment. I’m guessing you’re applying for a position, based on what I’ve seen, but I’m not exactly sure where in the process you are. Have you gone along on an active field case?”

“Yeah. Something out on Diversy Street, that turned out real weird. We watched a school building for about five hours then there was a big ruckus and Teresa wound up sending me home without even making me sign anything.” She scrunched her nose up, showing an opinion on the Project and its love of documents that I found vaguely nostalgic. Most agents were like that for a year or two before they resigned themselves to their fate. “Anyway, I don’t think it technically counts.”

“No,” I said, doing my best not to wince. The Diversy Street incident had been a mess. and it probably wouldn’t have counted under any circumstances. “Even if it had, you were in the field with Double Helix. He’s notoriously tough as senior talent, he probably wouldn’t have signed off on your first field run anyway. It took me four tries to pass.”

“Pass?” Amplifier tilted her head. “I thought the point was just to make sure we got a good idea of what field work was like. I didn’t realize it was a test.”

“Well…” Technically, it wasn’t. And we weren’t supposed to explain what it was. “Let’s just say there’s more to it than just showing up and looking pretty.”

“Well obviously,” she said with a grin. “You passed.”

“Thanks.” Nothing like a kind compliment to get your day off to a good start. “I can’t really arrange for another trip into the field right now, both because my supervisor is out of the office right now and because I’m kind of in-between assignments myself.” I picked the folder back up and squinted at it some more. “It doesn’t look like we have a complete record of your capabilities. The basic function of most of the known talents is well documented, but between personal discoveries and home made gadgets to help things along, new talents tend to broaden our understanding of talent almost as much as the scientists we employ.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she said. “Do I get to see a list of what you guys know already, or what?”

I tossed the folder back on the table and shrugged. “I don’t think that’s the way it works. The Records department took a complete statement from me, then sent it on to the right parties, who called me in for questions on anything they found interesting. I’m pretty sure it still works that way. Makes it easier to process the results and keeps you from leaving out something you might think is unimportant, but it keeps smart guys from having to come up here every time we find someone new.”

Amplifier hopped to her feet and said, “I guess I should get over to Records, then. I can follow directions,” she added as I stood up also. “It’s not like I need an escort.”

“Relax,” I said, shushing her with my hands. “You actually do. I’m not sure how you got in the building this morning, but you’re not an official member of the Project yet, so you actually shouldn’t have been let in. If nothing else you need someone to go along and keep security off your back. Plus, it’s policy not to let talents who aren’t working for us be interviewed in any way, shape or form without a talented agent along with them. It’s kind of like having your lawyer along.”

“Oh.” She relented and let me lead her across the offices and towards the elevator that would take us up to the large, locked room where our interim Records department was being kept. “Why didn’t Helix ever mention that to me? He was always along for stuff before, but he never said why. You would think that would be kind of important for me to know.”

“Helix is our senior talent in this branch. Unlike most people, he does his job with almost no consideration for possible personal or political complications from doing it, so most people tend to stay out of his way and play nice. Unless they’re really high up the totem pole, he can cause them more grief than it’s really worth. He was probably counting on that reputation to keep you out of trouble.” I called the elevator and then gave her what I hope was a reassuring smile. “I’m going explain things or they’ll waste a bunch of time trying to track him down before they interview you.”

“You just called him a ‘senior talent’ again.” She folded her arms over her chest. “That’s something else he never mentioned.”

“Well, that’s because it’s not really, technically his job description.” I waved a hand absently. “You won’t find it on an org chart or anything. It just means he’s the talent in this branch with the most time in the field. It gives him a little more clout with management and proves he’s worth our respect, too. Most field agents last three to five years before they quit or have to be reassigned to other duties. Helix has been out there for eight, and that’s impressive in it’s own right. Senior talents know more about the way the job works and what kind of things to expect than anyone else, so the regional management, people we call Special Liaisons, tend to keep them near the regional office, held in reserve for major problems that require a heavy hitter. In the mean time, they do a lot of paperwork and other light duties.”

“Gee, thanks,” Amplifier said, looking a little miffed.

“Actually, training new talent is one of the major things that will get a senior talent called out of the office. We’re rare enough, and turnover is high enough, that recruiting and training new hands is one of our top priorities.” The elevator dinged and we stepped out into the Records office reception area, which was basically an over-glorified security foyer.

“So tell me something, Massif Man,” Amplifier asked. “If that’s true, what kind of disaster is going on that pulled him out of the office today? And why did you get left behind?”

“Just Al is fine, really,” I said.

“Right, and you can call me Amp like Jack and the rest of Helix’s team does.” She waited for me to say something and, when she got impatient, leaned against the elevator door and said, “So?”

Since it was clear she wasn’t going to move until she got an answer I caved. “Like I said, turnover in field work is high. He’s out of the office today because he’s attending a funeral.”

Fiction Index

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Sequels

Posted by natechen on September 6, 2013

So I’ve been thinking about sequels lately, for the obvious reasons (starting Water Fall this week) and the not-so-obvious ones (check out next Wednesday’s post for more on that.)

The biggest question most people wrestle with is, how good is the sequel? But for the writer, the bigger question is, what makes the sequel good? In movies, sequel status is almost a death knell. For books, sequels are much more viable and, in fact, the publishing industry usually wants fiction to be serial in nature, rather than a bunch of stand alone novels, since the pre-existing audience makes selling the story much easier. On the other hand, even among books, the first book in a series is frequently viewed as the best, perhaps simply because the ideas and the presentation are fresh and the reader approaches them without expectations, or at least with fewer.

That’s not to say that there are no cases of a sequel being just as good as, if not better than, the proceeding works. But it’s a rare thing, and when it does happen most people are surprised because they recognize that it’s the exception and not the rule. So what are the things that set those rare exceptional sequels head and shoulders above the rest?

Well, as is so often the case, there are at least three main things (probably more, but humans like threes, so that’s how many you get.)

A larger story at work. There are many great examples of this, but I want to be consistent in this post and use something most readers will recognize, so I’m going to pick the classic Star Wars trilogy. The Empire Strikes Back is widely considered the best movie from the trilogy (not by me, but I still feel it’s at least as good as the original, although in different ways) so it’s fair to say it was a sequel that equaled or exceeded the original. One of the things that made it work was the fact that George Lucas wanted A New Hope to feel like part of a larger story. With a galaxy wide rebellion in progress, of which he basically only showed us one small part, it comes as no surprise to us that there’s more story.

Sometimes authors or film makers do a story, wrap everything up, publish and then realize they’ve got bottled lightning as their story just flat out takes off. This can result in awkward sequels getting written, because there was no more story planned for afterward. The simplest way to get around this is to set your story in a world that’s really, really big, with more than enough going on in the background to allow for another story or two. Of course, you can always be planning to slowly spin your stories into one, titanic mythos, as well… Whatever you do, it never hurts to make your world and characters bigger than the bounds of their story,

Excellent use of characters as a resource, rather than an obligation. There is a kind of compulsion, once you have a story you like, to include every aspect you liked about it in the next, especially in terms of characters. This is to be avoided. Your new story needs new characters to stay fresh, and to make room for them sometimes old characters will have to get less screen time, or even catch a bus. The Empire Strikes Back introduced us to people like Lando Calrissian, Yoda and Boba Fett, while the droids and Obi-wan Kenobi got less screen time (although it seems we couldn’t give up Old Ben entirely, even if he was dead…)

Finding the right mix of characters to properly carry out your story is an adventure in trial and error, but as a general rule some kind of re-balancing of characters has to be done. Your main character is probably going to be a constant, although even that’s not an iron clad rule, but new faces have to crop up to give new dynamics to relationships, and old faces have to step back some in order to really make the sequel work.

New developments, as opposed to retreading the same ground. Coyote and Roadrunner do not have sequels, just variations on a theme. The situation must change some from story to story, or people will rapidly loose interest. Star Wars does this particularly well by starting off the second film with a Rebel defeat and chasing them across the galaxy while their heaviest hitter takes a break for self improvement. Then it throws a massive plot twist and a cliff-hanger ending into the mix for added impact. It’s this novel, heavy-hitting formula that makes it so many people’s favorite part of the trilogy. (It’s also only possible because it’s the second film in the set, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Carefully examine the pacing and plotting of your stories, and make sure they’re different from each other. It’s a good rule for all fiction writing, not just stories that are a direct sequel to something else. Also, make sure the plot points themselves aren’t too similar, and that different characters from among your leads and rogue’s gallery are making an impact.

Of course, there’s no recipe for instant great book, but with these three things in place, sequels begin to look a lot like books that stand on their own, rather than just a continuation of what came before. Once a story is judged on its own merits, the some of the stigma of being a sequel is gone. More importantly, by actively trying to make it as fresh as possible you ensure that the story is as good as it can be on its own merits, thus making it as strong as possible. Which is all a writer can really hope to do, anyways.

Under Siege: Two and a Half Years in Leningrad

Posted by natechen on September 4, 2013

Leningrad (which was and is known St. Petersburg) was the seat of culture in Soviet Russia to the same extent that Moscow was the center of administration. In the late 1930s it was also a city, and in fact Russia was a country, in pain. Brutal purges had swept through the Soviet power structure, particularly in the military circles, and left people reeling. Families lost fathers and mothers and the cream of up-and-coming Soviet leadership was exiled, if they were lucky, or executed, if they were not.

It was also a city literally on the brink of war. There wasn’t a great deal of territory between Leningrad and the Soviet border with Nazi Germany. Although the Winter War with Poland had bought Russia some breathing room, the Russian soldiers along the frontier weren’t at readiness, even though the Wehrmacht was quietly gathering troops there. Most people weren’t concerned, since the Kremlin assured them that any war would be fought on German soil, not Russian.

Hitler had other plans.

On June 22nd, 1941 Operation Barbarossa sent nearly one hundred and thirty divisions of Wehrmacht troops across the border and into Russia. The offensive would grind to a stop just outside Moscow and the people of Russia would be fighting for their lives for years until they could finally begin to push the Germans out. The story of the war on the Eastern Front is a trial that equals and exceeds just about anything that happened in Western Europe, but it remains mostly unknown in the West.

Some part of this is undoubtedly due to the distance between us and the Cold War, which quickly transformed Russia from ally into enemy. Part of it may be a natural tendency to focus on what we’ve done, rather than what others have. Regardless, if pressed to name one major event on the Eastern Front, the vast majority of Americans will mention the battle of Stalingrad. If pressed they probably won’t be able to think of another.

However, until Stalingrad the symbol of Russia under attack was Leningrad. Depending on when you date the beginning and end of the siege, one can say it lasted for anywhere from about 875 to 900 days. Not the longest siege in history, but certainly one of the most destructive.

From the moment the noose drew closed, Leningrad was in peril. The Soviet propaganda insisted that Comrade Stalin and his military chiefs wouldn’t allow the Nazis to last long on Russian ground. In keeping with that line, whether people believed it or not, not many people (especially children) were sent out of the city nor were sufficient supplies for the city brought in. The city couldn’t be made ready for siege without someone being accused of being unpatriotic.

The Nazis didn’t even plan to keep the city once it was captured. It was valuable as a symbol of Russia, and once it was proven Germany was able to take possession of it in spite of the best resistance the Soviets could muster, and once all the propaganda value in Hitler driving down Nevsky Prospekt was gathered, the city was to be demolished and the population dispersed into the countryside, sparing the Third Reich the expense of provisioning the city and ruining the legacy of Peter the Great for good.

Reality turned out a bit different. Operation Barbarossa didn’t quite manage to sweep up Leningrad, but it did manage to surround it. Instead of a brutal occupation followed by swift destruction the city instead wound up facing the more-brutal specter of starvation. Worse, the greatest weapon in the Russian arsenal was a two edged sword – General Winter would not distinguish between friend and foe. With no way to easily transport in fuel for the power plants, winter in Leningrad would be fatally cold.

The last months of 1941 and 1942 would take an unbelievable toll on Leningrad’s people, showing off every facet of human nature.

Bureaucratic brilliance would keep the rations, such as they were, moving to the men and women in the street, while at the same time the same bureaucrats would interfere with the projects Leningraders would rely on to keep them motivated and alive from day to day. Ingenuity would help the people find things to eat long after the official stores of meat and vegetables were all but exhausted, but sometimes that boiled down to trading everything one had on the black market. And that came after all the birds and vermin had been hunted down. Even now, there is debate about what extent cannibalism was practiced. Certainly, many were executed for it.

There were amazing feats done throughout the siege. In the first winter the primary means of supplying the city was a long truck route that wound across the frozen water of Lake Ladoga. The opposite shore was still in Soviet hands and a small town there became a supply depot. Hundreds of trucks wound their way back and forth across the ice round the clock, sometimes under air attack, to deliver the supplies that would keep Leningrad alive. It was hazardous and not just because of the attacks, for with little in the way of landmarks it was easy to get lost. Stories tell of one driver who reached the far shore hours late due to loosing his way, to find a note on the assignment board addressed to him. “Because of you,” it scolded, “five hundred Leningraders will have no bread ration!”

The bizarre and gruesome also reared it’s head. One man would walk to work through the killing cold, unwilling to stay home lest the will to live simply leave him through inactivity. On the way he would stop in a frozen streetcar, where there was always another man sitting. At first, the man thought his companion was simply going to work, just like he was. It took nearly a week for him to realize there was only one living man in the vehicle. In fact, people dead of cold or starvation were everywhere in the city, popping out of snow banks in the spring or just dropping over dead as they passed through the halls of their apartments.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 was dedicated to the city. Though Shostakovich did not care for the Soviet government he felt a need to stand with his country, Russia, greater than man’s mismanagement and in need of the spirit to endure another bitter conflict. With great effort an orchestra was assembled in the city and the piece was performed. Not only performed, but broadcast over loudspeakers and radio, so that the enemy could hear. To accompany it, the General overseeing operations ordered a massive artillery bombardment. In it’s own way, an act of defiance.

When the city finally found itself free of attackers in late January of 1944, what was left was a city transformed. It had entered the world a city of sorrows, struck by many small griefs by it’s own government. It left a city united by sorrow.

The most conservative estimates place the death toll well over half a million civilians dead in Leningrad as a direct result of the fighting or an indirect result of cold and starvation brought about by the siege. Others estimate between 1.1 and 1.5 million. The numbers are inexact in part due to the undocumented flood of refugees into the city from the surrounding area before the Germans encircled it and in part because of the difficulty of keeping any kind of records during the siege.

There was pride in survival, even as the Soviet authorities did everything they could to take what glory there was for themselves and hide the disastrous mistakes they made and their costs. The siege of Leningrad is a testament to human endurance, made all the more amazing because many of the people who lived through it continued and, in a few rare cases today, continue to live in the same city. Their lives are a testament to the spirit of their city and their people.

One Year!

Posted by natechen on September 3, 2013

What do you know! I’ve officially been on the interwebs and making regular posts for one year. That’s quite an achievement if I do say so myself (and I do 🙂 ).

It’s been a rough ride, what with me slowly figuring out how all the buttons and knobs on WordPress work and publishing an entire novel online. I’ve slowly put together a routine and marshaled a decent following. In fact, just last weekend I hit 50 people who follow via WordPress – here’s a shout out to Nhan Pham of Nhan-Fiction, customer number 50! Thanks for following.

The two most active followers would probably be renxkyoko, who appears to share my love of the manga Skip Beat, and L. Palmer, who looks at the world in a wonderfully quirky way. Thanks to them, and all the other people who have signed up for e-mail following or just stalk me via WordPress. I hope to be able to continue writing for many years to come.

P.S. After the initial writing of this on Friday the 29th of August, the fast-changing nature of the Internet came into play – by which I mean that I picked up a new follower. Welcome Marcela Cava Balsa! Hope you enjoy the show.

Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Water Fall: Three Way Switch

Genrely Speaking: The Detective Story

Cool Things: Casablanca

Water Fall: Ashes to Ashes

A Time for Gimmicks

Jared Black Returns!

Water Fall: Dark Desks

Sequels

Under Siege: Two and a Half Years in Leningrad

One Year!

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