Writing Challenges
This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from nother Mike: The skeletons playing in the park were a surprise.
My first thought was yet another segment of "NPC's" -- Toni's called in some markers and is getting some help from the hacker community to get Sierra free of the Harness, enable her to escape her overbearing father.
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Dead Man's Party
Today's clue was a song. Like all the previous ones, it appeared innocuous on the surface, and only after considering it carefully would Sierra be able to discover the hidden meaning that would direct her to yet another tool, another key to unlock another bit of her freedom.
Except what could be the secret meaning behind a song about a party in the land of the dead? Could it in fact be a warning, even a threat? Make it clear that the sender knew how close she'd come to dying, how easily her life-support systems could be shut down? Or just a cruel reminder of how her modifications of the Pirate Island code had resulted in the horrific deaths of so many of her friends among the pirate kittens when a pair of developers had dropped in on a busman's holiday?
All through math and social studies classes Sierra had mulled over it, as Mrs. Hartwell had droned on about long division, about city services and public goods. She looked around at her classmates, wishing she could talk with them.
Except they were all NPC's, she was sure of that. And no doubt programmed to report any questions beyond the most routine and mundane.
It was too bad she couldn't connect with her actual classmates, run things past them. But they'd have their own lives, and after all these years of going their own ways, why would they want to put themselves out for someone they might barely remember, who was frozen forever in the life of a nine-year-old girl because her parents couldn't let go. Including a father who had lawyers and judges and even an Illinois state senator in his pocket.
No, she had to solve this puzzle by herself, just like she had all the previous ones. Somewhere out there was a surprise just for her, and she needed to find it.
#
All the way through lunch Sierra mulled over the song. Might the clue be somewhere other than the lyrics? Maybe something in the video - which assumed that there was an official music video for it? Or maybe a cover version that she needed to find?
Recess was a welcome relief. For the first several days after her father had put the Harness on her, there had been no recess - which only served to ram home the fact that all her classmates were NPC's, intelligent agents designed to simulate human interaction, but without any humanity.
As she ran out onto the playground, she had to quick suppress an urge to stop and stare. No way had there been a cemetery just down the street from her old school, or a stretch of open parkland.
But there it was, and a dozen skeletons dancing in the grass between the tombstones and the boundary fence. This had to be part of the clue, but how was she supposed to interpret it?
She called up her new Little Brother software, making sure that "Mrs. Hartwell" or any of the other teachers, who might not be NPC's, were monitoring her. Then she turned it on the dancing skeletons.
Yes, they were NPC's, but so far as she could tell, they were not put there by her father, or by any hostile agency. Maybe this whole thing wasn't about instilling fear into her, but instead were here to point the way out of her parents' obsessive dream world.
She went through the various pieces of software that she'd found over the past several days, recalled the secret "mirror" function in her new faceware. She wasn't sure how long the ghostlike image would remain, but she could hope it would last long enough to let her get away.
Now for the really tricky part - modifying her avatar. There was a trick to minimizing the sensory feedback of a non-human avatar so it wouldn't result in psychological confusion. She'd heard stories of people who'd played animals in the earliest implant-based games coming back to themselves and finding their human bodies repellant, even horrifying.
No, she didn't want to start thinking she was supposed to be an animated skeleton and end up with no homely place for herself except someone's horror game storyscape. But if she could keep it up long enough to slip away unnoticed and untraced before someone saw through her mirror "ghost," she'd be happy.
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It's rough, but it's another piece I can work with.
And then I thought of another idea -- how about yet another tale of the Voting Dead? After all, this is an election year.
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Skeleton Dance
Back home in Southern Illinois, this kind of weather in November would be unremarkable. But up here, the winds off Lake Michigan would usually be icy cold, driving everybody off the parks between it and Lake Shore Drive.
Given this was my second year up here, I was determined to make the most of this last little bit of pleasant fall weather before the full force of a Chicago winter came roaring in. So I was walking along the lake shore, admiring the slender branches of the now-barren trees against the background of concrete and glass towers, like skeletal hands reaching for the gray cloud deck overhead.
And then I noticed the movement among them, flashes of ivory. Surely it had to be just my imagination.
But no, there really were skeletons dancing among the trees. Curious, I approached them. "Isn't it a little late for Halloween?"
Their jawbones clattered in skeleton laughter. "We're just having a little fun before we have to return to our coffins until the next election."
That was when it hit me - today was Election Day. As a student, I'd mailed my absentee ballot back home to Gallatin County weeks ago, so it had completely fallen off my radar.
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As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.
My first thought was yet another segment of "NPC's" -- Toni's called in some markers and is getting some help from the hacker community to get Sierra free of the Harness, enable her to escape her overbearing father.
============================================================================================
Dead Man's Party
Today's clue was a song. Like all the previous ones, it appeared innocuous on the surface, and only after considering it carefully would Sierra be able to discover the hidden meaning that would direct her to yet another tool, another key to unlock another bit of her freedom.
Except what could be the secret meaning behind a song about a party in the land of the dead? Could it in fact be a warning, even a threat? Make it clear that the sender knew how close she'd come to dying, how easily her life-support systems could be shut down? Or just a cruel reminder of how her modifications of the Pirate Island code had resulted in the horrific deaths of so many of her friends among the pirate kittens when a pair of developers had dropped in on a busman's holiday?
All through math and social studies classes Sierra had mulled over it, as Mrs. Hartwell had droned on about long division, about city services and public goods. She looked around at her classmates, wishing she could talk with them.
Except they were all NPC's, she was sure of that. And no doubt programmed to report any questions beyond the most routine and mundane.
It was too bad she couldn't connect with her actual classmates, run things past them. But they'd have their own lives, and after all these years of going their own ways, why would they want to put themselves out for someone they might barely remember, who was frozen forever in the life of a nine-year-old girl because her parents couldn't let go. Including a father who had lawyers and judges and even an Illinois state senator in his pocket.
No, she had to solve this puzzle by herself, just like she had all the previous ones. Somewhere out there was a surprise just for her, and she needed to find it.
#
All the way through lunch Sierra mulled over the song. Might the clue be somewhere other than the lyrics? Maybe something in the video - which assumed that there was an official music video for it? Or maybe a cover version that she needed to find?
Recess was a welcome relief. For the first several days after her father had put the Harness on her, there had been no recess - which only served to ram home the fact that all her classmates were NPC's, intelligent agents designed to simulate human interaction, but without any humanity.
As she ran out onto the playground, she had to quick suppress an urge to stop and stare. No way had there been a cemetery just down the street from her old school, or a stretch of open parkland.
But there it was, and a dozen skeletons dancing in the grass between the tombstones and the boundary fence. This had to be part of the clue, but how was she supposed to interpret it?
She called up her new Little Brother software, making sure that "Mrs. Hartwell" or any of the other teachers, who might not be NPC's, were monitoring her. Then she turned it on the dancing skeletons.
Yes, they were NPC's, but so far as she could tell, they were not put there by her father, or by any hostile agency. Maybe this whole thing wasn't about instilling fear into her, but instead were here to point the way out of her parents' obsessive dream world.
She went through the various pieces of software that she'd found over the past several days, recalled the secret "mirror" function in her new faceware. She wasn't sure how long the ghostlike image would remain, but she could hope it would last long enough to let her get away.
Now for the really tricky part - modifying her avatar. There was a trick to minimizing the sensory feedback of a non-human avatar so it wouldn't result in psychological confusion. She'd heard stories of people who'd played animals in the earliest implant-based games coming back to themselves and finding their human bodies repellant, even horrifying.
No, she didn't want to start thinking she was supposed to be an animated skeleton and end up with no homely place for herself except someone's horror game storyscape. But if she could keep it up long enough to slip away unnoticed and untraced before someone saw through her mirror "ghost," she'd be happy.
===========================================================================================
It's rough, but it's another piece I can work with.
And then I thought of another idea -- how about yet another tale of the Voting Dead? After all, this is an election year.
===========================================================================================
Skeleton Dance
Back home in Southern Illinois, this kind of weather in November would be unremarkable. But up here, the winds off Lake Michigan would usually be icy cold, driving everybody off the parks between it and Lake Shore Drive.
Given this was my second year up here, I was determined to make the most of this last little bit of pleasant fall weather before the full force of a Chicago winter came roaring in. So I was walking along the lake shore, admiring the slender branches of the now-barren trees against the background of concrete and glass towers, like skeletal hands reaching for the gray cloud deck overhead.
And then I noticed the movement among them, flashes of ivory. Surely it had to be just my imagination.
But no, there really were skeletons dancing among the trees. Curious, I approached them. "Isn't it a little late for Halloween?"
Their jawbones clattered in skeleton laughter. "We're just having a little fun before we have to return to our coffins until the next election."
That was when it hit me - today was Election Day. As a student, I'd mailed my absentee ballot back home to Gallatin County weeks ago, so it had completely fallen off my radar.
===========================================================================================
As always, if you'd like to participate in Odd Prompts, just send your prompt in to oddprompts@gmail.com to be assigned a prompt of your own. Or if you're not up to the commitment of trading prompts, you can always check out the spare prompts and see if any of them tickle your creativity.
In the meantime, keep writing.