Double Take
Chapter 31
“People write books because of injustices.”
—Victoria Matthews, FHHS: A Science Fiction Drama in Eight Acts
THE WALK WITH RACHEL invigorated me so much that I was out the door Monday morning before anyone but Pey was awake.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Get me the cereal, please.” I paused to retrieve her cereal, bowl, and milk.
“I’m going for a walk. I won’t be gone too long. I just want to walk.”
“Do you want me to come with you in case you fall?”
“Naw. I don’t want to squash you! I’ve got my cellphone and I’ll carry my cane in case I need something to lean on. Okay?”
“KK. Be careful, J.”
I headed out for my stroll. Monday was supposed to be even warmer than Sunday and since it was President’s Day there was no school so I could take my time and try to get a feel for the neighborhood. It had a similar feel to the V1 neighborhood but it was definitely different. It wasn’t just the year and make of the automobiles. It wasn’t just the color of the houses. These weren’t pre-World War II era housing. These were houses that had dishwashers in the kitchen when they were built. They had more electrical outlets than appliances. They had computers and televisions.
They didn’t have phones. Not for the most part. I didn’t know anyone who had a landline.
Most of the houses were unfamiliar but occasionally I would pass one and think, Jim Robertson lived there. Moved away after sixth grade. Or, German shepherd that likes to chase bicycles. Be careful. Mostly, though, they didn’t ring a bell. The streets weren’t laid out on a perfect grid like the prewar neighborhood I grew up in. The names were familiar, but a street V1 knew that cut out of the neighborhood to the main thoroughfare turned out to be a V3 cul-de-sac. It was very confusing and my mind just shorted a lot of it out. I started thinking about my story.
I’d read Maass’s book and loved the idea of character development. I’d started to jot down notes about characters I thought would play an important role. I’d not gotten as far as names. I had names that were more functional than real. Pilot, engineer, captain, doctor. That sort of thing. I had an idea about how they all interacted but would a thousand people on a space ship be enough to populate a new world? And did I really want to write hard science fiction if I was focused on characters? And how could I weave the story of what was happening on earth with what was happening on the colony ship?
For the first time in my life, a character spoke to me.
I was so surprised that I jerked my head around and looked behind me because I thought someone had actually said something. I nearly stepped off a curb, which even though there was no traffic could have injured my weak leg.
“What?” I said aloud.
“If you would be quiet, I could tell you what it was like.” I stood at the corner transfixed by the voice in my head.
“We trained for ten years. Some, much more since the first cadets started training when they started building the geosphere. It took twenty years to construct out of materials mostly mined in the asteroid belt or the moon. They’d been mining the belt for ten years before they started construction. When I was ten years old, the vessel was already visible as a new star, a hundred thousand kilometers from earth. By the time I entered candidate school, it was a moon.”
I was fascinated. I tried to ask a question, but this character was ignoring me. He just wanted to tell his story. I needed to get home and start taking notes.
Of course, before I got home, my phone rang the distinctive trill of Rebeca.
“So, we thought we could all go up to Glenbrook,” Beca said as if I already knew what the first part of the conversation was. “We can bum around the mall for a while and maybe go to a movie. You’ve had two days with Rachel. The rest of us want to have some fun, too!”
“I was… uh… planning…”
“You still like us, don’t you, Jacob?” she pleaded.
“Of course I do!”
“You don’t have to pay for anything! Mrs. Long said Joan could pick us all up in the Audi. You can have shotgun. We’ll pay for lunch and a movie and everything. Can you be ready by eleven?”
“I think so. I’m out for a walk and have to get permission from Mom and Dad. I’ll call you in half an hour. Okay?”
“I’ll wait for your call. Please come with us!”
“I will if I can,” I answered. I guess I didn’t sound enthusiastic enough.
“Please?”
“I will,” I said. “I’m on my way home now.”
It was no problem with Mom and Dad. I didn’t even need to do a sales pitch. They expected that I’d do something with my friends on the holiday. Em was already out and Pey was going to spend the day with one of her friends. Neither Mom or Dad had the day off. Businesses didn’t count President’s Day as a holiday. It was just banks, the post office, and schools that were closed. They were almost ready to leave for work when I got home.
I guessed I would have to wait before I started writing down all the stuff Pilot had told me. I called Rebeca back and told her I’d be ready at eleven.
And we had a great time.
None of us were allowed to stay out after we’d had dinner because it was a school night and we were all supposed to get a good night’s sleep. I felt like a king. It was pretty cool to walk around the mall with four pretty girls. I don’t know how they decided who was going to walk with me and hold hands as we went. It seemed like it was a different girl each time we moved from one store to another.
I didn’t feel like I was too much of a burden on the girls as we ate lunch in the food court and dinner at Don Hall’s. I didn’t overdo it when I ordered a big juicy burger and fries. I didn’t even have to pay for my movie ticket but I didn’t get to choose the movie, either. Oh well. Small price to pay, I guess. We didn’t make out much in the theater because the girls were all more interested in some dude I’d never heard of who played the romantic lead in a movie I’d never remember the name of. They did, however, switch places half way through the movie, so instead of Beca and Joan beside me during the first half, I sat between Rachel and Desi in the second half.
I was home by seven and had some Geometry homework I had to finish before bedtime.
20 February 2019
Characters are in my head. It’s getting crowded in there. I’ve been jotting things down as fast as I can. Not a story yet, but history and feelings and a little about talent and the shape of the world they live in. It happens at strange times. I was in the middle of Geometry when a character started talking about what certain phrases would mean to a person who had never heard it before.
Take ‘gravity,’ for instance. What would that mean to someone who had a pre-Newtonian mindset? It might only mean something of extreme importance. One of great gravity. So, if you talked about the earth’s gravity, the listener might assume the earth is in very serious condition. Which it is, but is not the meaning we assign to the word in that context.
And people change the meaning of words, especially in a closed society. My friends and I may say medium rare to describe our favorite doneness of meat. But then we are out one night and see a really hot girl and one of us says, “That bitch is medium rare.” In a few weeks, in our little closed society, medium rare becomes the accepted way of saying a girl is really hot. Which in terms of meat, it’s not. Hot. Of course, my little circle of friends disperses and we don’t have our little code words any longer. We might try to introduce a new circle of friends to the term and it might or might not be adopted. But if our closed circle stayed together… was forced to stay together… that term might be standardized and even passed down to future generations who have no concept that once a cool pink center on a cooked piece of meat was considered medium rare.
I think that is how society develops on the geosphere, which I’ve named Athena I. Sometime a thousand years in the future, the denizens might not even know who Athena was and have shortened the name to Thenai. It all depends on what is passed down as a standardized language.
“So, when do we say enough?” I asked. “We’re already falling behind on reviewing the videos. We aren’t grad school students with a research grant. When do we determine that we’ve got enough data to draw conclusions and write a paper?” Beca scowled at me.
“We’ve hardly gotten started,” she said. “Are you punking out already?”
“No,” I said. “And I’m not suggesting that we stop right now. We’ve got ten weeks until the project is due. At what point do we pull the plug and say, ‘Based on X number of weeks observation, these are our conclusions?’ It means how much time are we going to allow for actually writing the report and helping Joan get the animation completed. Which, by the way, I consider a critical component, and we need to figure out how we’re giving her proper credit. And Rachel and Desi, too.” Joan looked at me with puppy-dog eyes as if I’d just patted her on the head. So, I did. “You deserve a bunch of credit for this, hot stuff.”
“I agree with that completely,” Beca sighed. “And that Rachel and Desi deserve credit, too. We wouldn’t be half as far as we are without their help reviewing videos. I’m sorry, Jacob. I thought you wanted to pull the plug right away.”
“No, Kitten. I didn’t mean to sound like that. I’m just feeling a lot of pressure this semester that I wasn’t prepared for. I mean Adult Roles and Responsibilities isn’t that big a deal. Who doesn’t know how to balance a checkbook?” I was shocked silent when all four girls raised their hands.
“What’s a checkbook?” Desi asked. She was serious. Then I realized that I had an ATM card but couldn’t remember ever seeing any physical checks. Or a bankbook or statement.
“It’s uh… a way to refer to your bank account. Balancing it is a way to make sure what you think you’ve spent matches up with what the bank thinks you spent.”
“Why? That’s all done by computer,” Rachel said.
“Well, computers aren’t infallible, you know?” I said sarcastically. I got four equally hostile glares. “That’s not what I was talking about anyway,” I hurried on. “Introduction to Business has a lot more homework than I expected. And I almost missed turning in my Literary Feedback Journal last week. I just want us to have time to finish this project the way we all imagine it.”
The girls were all quiet for a minute, waiting for Beca to respond. Finally, she looked up at me and grinned.
“Yeah. I get it. I get so caught up in just watching the videos that I forget what our real purpose is.”
“It seems like the most time-consuming task after reviewing the videos is doing the animation. Joan? How much time will you need and can we help to speed up the process?” Rachel asked. Joan nodded and pursed her lips.
“If I’ve got good data and can isolate the groups you want, it’s probably three weeks of work to put the animation together. It would be easiest if we only used one lunch period. Then we could tag every participant as a background and change colors on the specific group we’re targeting.”
“But there are different groups in different periods,” Desi said. “Remember that we found no varsity athletes in first lunch period and instead all the ultra-nerds were in that period.”
“True,” Beca said. “But we don’t have to do an animation of everything we discover. That’s probably a footnote to a table of what groups were tracked in each period. I’m seeing where Jacob is coming from. We don’t have time to track and analyze every piece of gathered data. We need to focus on what the purpose of the exercise is.”
“And originally, that was on how humans clustered together in different areas and changed the geography to match their needs,” I said. “If we can identify two groups that adapt to the geography and two that change the geography, I think we’d have an adequate sample for animation. Below that, we need to figure out what subsets merit a section in our paper and what are, as you said, merely footnotes.”
“God, why did I ever let you talk me into this project?” Beca said as she put her head in her hands.
“Me?” I squeaked. I guess my voice still wasn’t done changing. She looked up at me and grinned.
“What I’m going to say, I know, will sound harsh, Jacob.” Ms. Levy said. It had taken me until Friday to get all my notes down and the story concept written. I’d really pared it down from an epic novel to what I thought was a good-sized short story. “Your idea is fine. Your character development is coming along well, though I question your intent to refer to the characters only by function. People will connect with them more strongly if they seem more human rather than like automatons. Your world-building, as far as you’ve taken it is coming along well.”
“What’s the problem then?”
“You see the beginning of the story and the end, but you are not seeing how much work it will be to get between the two. This could still be the concept statement for an epic novel. I think you are trying to cover too much territory in one story.”
“But it covers a single timeline from when the crew is ready to board until they lose contact with earth. At a quarter G constant acceleration, a time warp could occur within thirty days. That doesn’t seem like it’s such a long time,” I complained.
“Yes, as a timeline it’s small. But you have two very separate points of view here. You have what is happening on the ship and especially in the life of Pilot Two. And over here, you have the entire political history of what is going on back home that ultimately causes their loss of contact. I think you should focus on just one aspect.”
“Even though they are simultaneous?”
“Yes. Narrow the point of view to that of the main character on the ship. What he doesn’t know and what the audience doesn’t know is what has caused them to be suddenly cut off from home. Make the reader suffer through their lack of certainty and ability to only look forward because backward lies only questions,” she said. I sighed.
“I see what you mean, I think,” I said slowly.
“If you want the book to be character driven, let us experience the heartache and uncertainty of the character. Don’t give us an easy escape by telling us what really happened.”
“Okay. I’ll do a new outline and see if I can focus on only Pilot Two.”
“Here is a grid that you may find helpful,” she said, pulling out a sheet of paper and drawing a box with four divisions in it. “I know you are good at math, so this should look familiar. The two rows are labeled ‘What Pilot knows’ and ‘What Pilot doesn’t know.’ The columns are labeled ‘What the reader knows,’ and ‘What the reader doesn’t know.’ Because the story is written from Pilot’s point of view, most of what he knows, the reader also knows or will know when he reveals it. If you adopt an omnipotent structure, the reader will be privy to information Pilot doesn’t know. Uh… say there is an engine failure and the next portion is Pilot trying to figure out what is wrong. It’s a little tidbit but it makes the reader look to see how Pilot is going to figure this out. This last box, though, is what neither Pilot nor the reader knows. This is where all the tension in the story takes place and keeps the reader guessing and reading. If you include all the story from earth control in your short story, this box ceases to exist. The reader knows it all.”
“Wow! I never thought about that. I just figured the reader knew everything the author knew.”
“And why should you know everything? If you don’t know the whole story yet, when you have to write the story from earth control perspective, you’ll have to discover the whys of what you already wrote in the first story.”
I went home with another new perspective on writing.
And a date. I’d been out exclusively with Rachel last weekend and now my other girlfriends wanted time. It wasn’t just time with me, either. They wanted time together. They were developing an interesting dynamic and I wondered if I’d eventually even be a part of it.
“Mom,” I said. It was still hard for me to get that word out of my mouth when referring to the remarkably young and attractive woman in the kitchen. I was having an easier time with Dad because even though he looked young, he already acted old and worn down. I wished I could tell him to get off that damned assembly line and find something he liked to do. It was going to kill him eventually.
“What is it, Jakey?” She turned and put a plateful of bacon and eggs with hash brown patties in front of me. When I was eighty, I’d have killed for a breakfast like this. But that V1 voice kept telling my V3 self how hard it was to be old and fat.
“I was wondering if I could have a party next weekend. Say on Friday night?”
“I’m not sure about having you here with four teen girls,” Mom said. “What kind of party did you want to have?” I had to agree with her inside. The last party where the five of us had been left unattended had been pretty… unpredictable.
“Not just my girlfriends, Mom. I’d especially like you and Dad, Em and Pey, and uh… Francie, and anyone they’d like as a guest to be here, too.” Mom sat down across from me with a crease between her eyebrows.
“What do you have in mind, Jakey? I have a hard time imagining a party that includes adults and relatives as well as your school friends. It’s like…”
“A birthday party,” I finished for her. She blinked, waiting for me to continue.
“There’s no twenty-ninth of the month, but Friday is March first. It will be six months since I woke up.”
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