A false image of his brother sat across from him, on the couch. “All right,” said the image. “Give me the names again, the ones to keep an eye on.”
The Plowman had begun to think of his brother as “Ichabod,” but that was just a convenience. He could no longer pronounce his brother’s real name either.
The Plowman stretched before he answered, brown work shirt pulling tight across his massive shoulders, then took a sip from a glass of cola. “Well, there’s the second-stagers, Sinclair and Grove.”
“I mean the other ones.”
“Right, but Sinclair and Grove are the ones who’ll generate the most data, so concentrate on them. As far as the first-stagers go, you’ve got Vessler—”
“The government guy.”
“Right. And through him Jorden—”
“The woman. With the green eyes?”
“Quit interrupting me. Yeah. And, uh, Charles—” he squinted and tapped one temple. “You know, the kid with the head thing.”
Ichabod smiled. “The head thing. I admire your mastery of idiomatic English.”
The Plowman frowned. “Vessler and Jorden and Charles, and maybe Ned Fields, marginally. And that bald cop.”
“Zach Feygen? He’s not a subject.”
“I know, but it’s likely he’ll affect the experiment. At least he’ll affect Sinclair.”
Ichabod shrugged. “All right.”
The Plowman eyed his brother. Ichabod employed his usual projection: a tall, gaunt man, dressed in a black suit from somewhere around the turn of the century, with lank black hair hanging past his shoulders. The Plowman couldn’t fault his brother this bit of imaginative self-indulgence; he didn’t much like the armored, yellow-eyed body he himself had been given, but it did at least look human. At least he could blend in here, to some degree. For his brother’s actual body the same could not be said.
Ichabod’s projection, seated on the Plowman’s couch, wrinkled up its forehead. “Listen...I know I agreed to this, but it’s making me twitchy. Have you double-checked? If I steer Grove toward Atlanta... Won’t that just screw things up?”
The Plowman rolled his eyes, a shimmer of gold. “Do you want to stay here? Do you like the assignment that much? No? I don’t either.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. If the results are tainted... If—”
“Grove would have encountered Sinclair anyway. I have double-checked. One little nudge won’t affect the results.”
“If they’re tainted, we’ll have to do it all again.”
The Plowman scowled. “They won’t be tainted, all right? Plus it’ll speed things up considerably. Just do this, okay?”
Ichabod shimmered and turned a brilliant blue—“Right, and I can hear you explaining it now,”—and abruptly became a mirror-image of the Plowman. In the Plowman’s voice Ichabod said, “Oh, well see, I’m sorry about the setback, it’s just that I got a little homesick.”
The Plowman said, “Stop it.”
Ichabod continued, “So I thought I’d cut a few corners, get the job done faster. Sorry if my selfishness caused any problems—screwed up any plans, got anybody killed."
The Plowman said, “Hey. Cut it out.”
Ichabod shimmered again and flashed back to the gaunt man. “You know I don’t like this.” He jerked a thumb skyward. “I don’t want to hang up there any more than you want to be stuck down here.” Ichabod glanced upward briefly, his eyes long-focused through the ceiling, and said, “I’ll need to go soon. I’m almost out of range.”
His brother watched him pointedly. Ichabod put up his hands and said, “Okay, all right, I’ll go along with you on this. But you’d damn well better be correct.”
He stood, as though preparing to leave, and absently waved one non-corporeal hand through a lamp beside the couch. “The entire experiment still peeves me. Unstructured like this, just reach down and hit the switch—it’s like giving a gun to a little kid.”
The Plowman shrugged. “I’m not the one who designed the protocol. They want to know what the psychological effects are, in an unguided environment. See if the humans can handle this stuff.”
Ichabod shook his head. “That’s what I’m talking about. Unguided. It’s supposed to be unguided.”
“Will you please relax?”
“And as far as how the humans are handling it, what kind of conclusions are we supposed to draw? With reactions as varied as we’ve gotten from the second-stagers? I mean, come on, look at the differences between Sinclair and Grove.” He glanced up through the ceiling again. “I’d be interested in hearing what Matt Sinclair would have to say to us if he found out what we’d done to him, and why we did it.”
“Just Sinclair? Not Grove?”
Ichabod shook his head. “Nah...not Grove. I don’t think the homicidal little twerp could come up with anything worthwhile to say. Oh—hey, gotta go. Talk to you later.” As he twitched and faded out, Ichabod said, “You’d better be right about this.”
# # #
The Plowman drained his cola and took the empty glass into his kitchen, where he rinsed it and put it in the drainer. The experiment was going well; the humans his brother had altered thus far, the first-stagers, had succeeded in organizing and policing themselves without any outside assistance. Now two second-stagers—Simon Grove and Matt Sinclair—were 99.763% likely to meet (with Ichabod’s help)...and would most likely kill each other.
Sinclair...now there was a warhead waiting to go off. The Plowman was very glad Sinclair had the kind of self-control and reserve that he did.
In any case, the encounter would provide volumes of data, which his brother would monitor, record, and transmit to the Plowman for analysis. Then maybe the two of them could come to some worthwhile decision as to which of the altered humans got to stay, and which would be selected for export and utilization.
Unless both Grove and Sinclair proved unsuitable.
The Plowman hoped that wouldn’t happen. The boys back home could make excellent use of the Plowman’s experiment subjects, and the sooner he could give them someone like Matt Sinclair, or maybe even Simon Grove, the sooner he and Ichabod could be done with this place and head out.
If the second-stagers did prove unsuitable...Ichabod would have to terminate them, and start fresh with someone else. Nobody wanted that.
The brilliant gold of the Plowman’s eyes glinted in anticipation.
AUTHOR'S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION
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7 comments:
PROLOGUE – DAN’S NOTES
I’m reasonably happy with the prologue, though I'll need to polish up the dialogue a bit. In the first draft, it was much less clear who the Plowman and Ichabod were and what they were doing. I was trying to set up this intriguing, mysterious situation, with these two bizarre characters involved in some nefarious scheme, in hopes that the reader would be hooked right off the bat. Then I read a book on writing (I pick one up every few months), and found a section that said, more or less, “If you’ve got characters that the reader doesn’t know, doing things the reader doesn’t understand, it’s not mysterious and intriguing. It’s cryptic and confusing and will turn people off.” That made a lot of sense to me.
So I beefed up the amount of information given in the prologue. I hope I haven’t given everything away; I’d like to maintain at least a tiny modicum of mystery, while providing readers enough information to create some curiosity and a few expectations. Sort of like the opening credits sequence of the original Mission: Impossible TV series, where they showed a bunch of split-second flash cuts of scenes from the whole episode. I haven’t decided yet whether I was successful or not.
Reading the prologue, I notice immediately two things that seem to plague my prose: overuse of the word “then,” and an unwarranted fondness of semi-colons. (The one in the above paragraph annoys me, too.) I think I might have been reading The World According to Garp right around this time, and if anybody has a love affair with the semi-colon, it’s John Irving. Of course, he uses them brilliantly, and I don’t write like John Irving, so I should probably back away from them carefully.
I liked where this was going once I got past the first paragraph. I'd make clear that The Plowman was plotting the deaths because it was something personal, or an impersonal part of his job. My brain is probably just damaged but I was expecting some type of revenge to be involved in this prologue or that he's just willing to kill anyone in the way of his goal. I still think it's a good hook for the reader, but it could reveal a bit more characterization in it.
The other nitpick is the discussion of the list of what I'm going to assume are the other characters in this tale. It feels like a grocery list rather than a sense for who these people are. They're just a name that I have zero investment in. Instead of physical descriptions maybe give a character description that the two brothers have attached to them. "The woman with the green eyes" doesn't tell me as much as the nickname "Cutthroat bitch" would.
And for the record, there is nothing wrong with the use of semi-colons. Its a lost art that needs to be revived in modern works.
Hmmm...I don't know if I agree with you 100% on the first paragraph, but I'll think on it. I DO agree with you, however, about the grocery list. That needs some work.
Just letting you know that I'm reading and enjoying.
Also, I use semi-colons like mad these days and repetitious use of anything like that tends to drive me crazy about my own writing, but I hardly noticed it in yours thus far.
I made the mistake of reading Chapter I before the prologue and now having read this , I'm less critical of Chapter I. This is definitely setting the story, piquing the readers interest for the obvious struggle that will center around one of the experiments, we are to learn in Chapter I is Matt Sinclear. My only nit picky thing is the sort of redundant associating of the fact of who the two second stagers For example, in this sentence -"Now two second-stagers—Simon Grove and Matt Sinclair—were 99.763% likely to meet ...." We have already been informed of the fact that there are two second stagers and who they are, so maybe simply inserting a the, or maybe omitting either "Two second stagers, or their names ...
I hope I'm not coming across as a very picky no it all, I am not a write, but a very avid reader. My interest in this story is piqued.
I think it's a brave thing , you posting each chapter for review.
I just finished reading your book and wanted to say thank you so much for spending precious time to create such an awesome story!
Tomorrow is my payday and anything I can find that you wrote is on my shopping list.I actually cried in some parts.
To Anonymous -- sorry I haven't responded to your post before! And nah, it's okay, your criticism is valid. :)
To Aaron -- that's high praise indeed! Thanks! I'm really trying to carve out some time to revise this book and start on the next one, but my freelance career is keeping me pretty solidly occupied (for which I am not complaining in even the tiniest way). :)
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