The Confabulator Cafe

Tag: aliens

  • Composure

    “What’s it’s name?” Britten peered down, bending over with his hands on his knees. His black hair was wild. The garage was chilly but not too cold. Barber had moved his car out into the driveway and Britten had parked right behind him. A single bulb burned in a socket separate from the door opener. One of those twisty, low-energy things. It was enough to see by but not enough to chase all the shadows from the corners.

    “He says it’s Arvo. There was a long string of sounds before and after,” Barber said, “but we agreed Arvo was his name.”

    “Bizarre.”

    “Indeed.”

    Britten stood up and planted his hands on his hips, considered the alien held captive in the chair. He paced back and forth, never taking his eyes off Arvo. When he stopped, he crossed his left arm across his chest then stroked his chin with the fingers of his right hand.

    “I mean, he understands English.” (more…)

  • Pantsing Rules!

    Pantsing. Outside of NaNo, it’s not a word you hear in the common vernacular. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary while writing this post, and the definitions you find there are not what I mean. At all.

    During November, Pantsing is short for, “By the seat of my pants,” which means you’re writing your story with little to no plan, allowing your characters and plot to evolve minute by minute, word by word. (an aside: the phrase is apparently rooted in aviation history. Huh! The more you know!)

    I am not a planner. I am also not a pantser. I’m a middle-of-the-road kinda guy, as previously discussed here on Confabulator. If I plan too much, I lose momentum. But if I don’t plan enough, I lose direction. So I dance down the razor’s edge between the two, and see how things turn out.

    My point for this week is that when pantsing works? It’s fucking awesome. Head-exploding, Bill-and-Ted/Jeff Spicoli kind of awesome.Here’s my example from this year’s story:

    Early, I wanted to describe digging through data in an interesting, visual way. Writing SQL queries does not exactly make for interesting fiction. The first idea that struck me was to describe things as a caver, or spelunker. So, I did. My data miners dive into caves of data, and use their spelunking tools to find interesting tidbits of information amongst the various dross of data.

    Not bad.

    Then I thought, how else can I visualize data? Specifically taking encrypted data and decrypting it?

    Weavers.

    The word hit me, and I typed it. Who are the Weavers? How do they work? I had no idea. Not when I typed it.

    Later, it turned out the Weavers are humans that have gene-modded themselves for low-gravity environments: long, thin limbs, big eyes, thumbs-on-feet kinda thing. And their computers use fiber optic cables stretched across vast chambers. The Weavers, floating in zero-gee, constantly rearrange the fiber optic strands to produce different programs in the computer, much like the original computers. They “weave” their programs.

    It’s totally ridiculous and inefficient, but who cares? The imagery is pretty cool.

    With me so far?

    Okay, so an overarching idea in this year’s story is that one of my original Martian settlers takes it upon himself to create huge, incredibly elaborate alien artifacts. The first is so convincingly crafted, scientists and experts completely fall for it. More artifacts are discovered, and humanity’s all: “Awesome! Totally awesome!” Some humans are so excited about the findings, they…genetically engineer themselves to look like the aliens that must’ve created the artifacts in the first place. Weavers.

    Bing! Headsplosion!

    Eventually, the hoax is revealed. Most people are rightfully pissed off. The Weavers, however, embrace their new forms. They even retrofit one of the fake artifacts and create a working Weaver computer.

    One used by my main character to decrypt a super-secret message.

    A message that might prove that her father, the hoaxer that created the fake artifacts, wasn’t responsible for all the artifacts after all.

    That one artifact, in particular, might be real.

    WHOA.

    That, my friends, is the magic of pantsing.

  • The Dock Worker (Flash Fiction)

    “I think I got everyone.” Abra checks the list again, each genetic family carefully contained in twenty vials per box. “Twenty boxes of Earth-native embryos — you’re all set.” She pats the top box twice and tries to smile at the dock worker’s face as it scans the code on each box, even though she would rather examine its long, multi-knuckled fingers. The debriefing she got at the shuttle port made it clear: don’t stare, and don’t ask stupid questions. Any action that might constitute a risk to the planet will be considered treason, and punished accordingly.

    The dock worker begins to speak, before it seems to remember that it speaks outside her range of hearing. It removes the voice box from its belt. As it holds down a button, it speaks again: “This is accurate.” It waves over another worker with a cart, and a group of aliens appears from seemingly nowhere to start loading up the boxes. “The consortium thanks you for your contribution.”

    “What do you need so many embryos for?” Abra asks before her brain catches up with her mouth and she realizes that it might constitute a stupid question, or a risk to Operation Olive Branch. The dock worker tilts its head at her, and it takes her a moment to understand the twist of its serpentine mouth as a smile. She swallows and barrels on — her platoon was going to have a hundred questions when she returned, so she may as well go for broke. “Some of the guys think that it might be, um, planet seeding? Because that would make a lot of sense. The scientists back home are going wild with curiosity.”

    (more…)