All right, so what I'm looking for here has to do primarily with your reactions to the characters. What made you like/dislike them? What felt natural/unnatural? Secondarily, I'm wondering about setting and plot. What questions do you feel like were alluded to but not answered about the setting? If this was the beginning of a 250-page novel, are you interested in the plot and setting enough to put in the effort required to make it to juicier action? Muchos gracias, amigos. You're my heroes (and I'm not kidding, especially in the cases of those who are actually approaching the ends of novels!)
Fall
There was, as Connnor awoke and unhitched his sleep harness, a distinctly electric smell to the air. He closed his eyes again and took three deep breaths. His hair stood on end, his toes burned and tingled as his racing heart flooded blood back into his legs. Still not fully in control of his still-stiff muscles, he drifted into the right-hand wall at an awkward angle. His nerves sparked a brief wave of glorious natural pain from his skin to his brain when he made contact. He basked in the sensation and as he rubbed the sore spot on his forehead he laughed aloud. As he did, he felt the indescribable joy of feeling his diaphragm contract and his vocal chords focus air into a jet. His chest and sinuses shook from the force of it, and he had to laugh again, more heartily than the first time. A glowing blue light forced him to squint while his pupils slowly contracted. He was alive again, fully alive – and this time, he would stay alive. Today was the day that he left Ark behind forever, with its sleeping thousands, and would enter a real world.
The door of his cryo-pod hissed as it depressurized and opened. Connor pushed gently off of the pod wall with his still-tingling toes and drifted out into the chrome access corridor. Even after half a dozen times, entering the corridor was disorienting as down suddenly became left in the two-man wide rectangular passageway. But Connor adjusted after just a moment and took hold of the ladder on the far wall quickly and pushed himself down, where the dim arrows were pointing to “Departures.” The corridor's dim, unblinking light followed him down at a distance of about ten feet before and behind. Lower, the arrows indicated that he should go down as far as he could see.
As he descended, he twisted to look through the dim light at dozens of capsules that whizzed by. In just a few seconds, he passed no less than one hundred lives still peacefully asleep, unperturbed by the nightmares that might wait for Connor on the planet surface below –
The surface below –
Panic.
Conner was suddenly falling. He frantically grabbed the nearest ladder hold with his right hand to catch himself before he hit the ground, but he didn't give himself enough leverage to slow down. With vicious force, he slammed his cheek, ribs, right leg down against the ladder-holds, dislocating his shoulder in the process. Connor screamed and let go, which sent him bouncing slowly over to the other side of the corridor. He twisted his arm around until it popped back into place, crying out again from the pain of it. He curled up, clutching his ribcage as he tried to force his breathing down from hyperventilation. Spheres of blood stood suspended around him and on his sleep suit as he drifted slowly between the four walls until he came to rest on the left-hand side, by now tearing up with the pain of it. His whole body burned and his head spun long after he had stopped moving himself.
As the pain slowly subsided into a sharp ache, Connor wiped the blood from his mouth with his left hand and tried to control his breathing. Wiping as much of his blood on his slick sleep suit as he could, he used his fingertips to slowly bring himself in reach of the ladder again. His still-throbbing ribs convinced him that he had better not try to uncurl himself. One-handed, he slowly pushed himself down again, past the dark screens which hid lifelessly sleeping faces. Connor shivered at the thought and tried to focus instead on getting himself down, rung by rung, meter by meter.
* * *
There was only one other member of the landing group launching in Connor's shuttle. As he approached the airlock on the “floor” of the corridor, readjusting his perception of up and down back to the way it was when he came out of the cryo-pod, he paused to check one last time for blood. Looping his foot in the ladder rung, Connor patted his face down and his sleep suit. Then he rubbed the drops of blood between his hands into dust. He tried to see his reflection in the chrome walls, but the light was too dim and he was starting to feel ridiculous. Gazing up the eerily dim corridor one last time, with its hundreds of sleeping souls, Connor slowly turned himself to face the door below him – in front of him – and waited as the door scanned him, glowed green briefly, depressurized, and retreated into the walls. He pushed off the sides with his good arm and drifted through to the narrow corridor leading to the docking bay.
As he slowly drifted along, occasionally pushing himself forward against the side rail with his good arm, Connor tried to prepare himself to meet Adán Castillo face to face. Connor didn't like him much in the net, and he couldn't imagine that he would like him better in person, but he would know him in person. The idea made him a anxious, but it also had an attractive idealist element that led him to ignore the butterflies in his stomach. Between those and the clobbering he'd given himself in the stomach, he felt as if he wanted to vomit, but of course there was nothing in his stomach to eject. His progress was slow, and he began to wonder if Adán would assume he had quit at the last moment and initiate the launch sequence without him. It seemed like something he would do in the net, where he was brash and bold in stories and often played the villain, once as a Colombian drug lord with a taste for torture during a six-month super-novella that had gained some notoriety. Connor had seen him around, but he hadn't ever played with him, and he didn't relish the idea of spending the next two weeks solely in the company of a man who clearly enjoyed acting out complicatedly sadistic plots, even if he was working from a script.
The corridor ended, another door opened, and Connor found himself in a small alcove opening into a brightly-lit room about 50 meters square. Its walls were smooth and white and contained twelve little alcoves, each numbered in red and the words “Ready for launch” above the door. (Up was apparently followed with the column, so it was sideways to Connor.) The walls had little other ornamentation other than the occasional cross-shaped hand hold. A bright red column, about two meters in diameter and covered in hand holds, ran horizontally to Connor in the middle of the room. At the very center of the column were four user interface panels and some other equipment which intended to hook into your sleep suit, presumably to give departing personnel an opportunity to release their bowels before takeoff. Rule number one of Ark, especially in reality: nothing wasted. If you took your business out of Ark, there was that much less to support the tens of thousands of souls that it kept alive, Connor realized.
Holding on to a hand hold to his left, he surveyed the room, looking for a sign of Adán, but the room looked as if it had been undisturbed for the centuries since Ark left the Solar System. The thought made a shiver run through him, which made his ribs ache a little. He pushed himself gingerly toward the panels at the center of the room, but in his caution he pushed off too weakly and it took him what felt like five minutes to get to the red column, but he was able to easily stop himself with his good arm and his legs. “I need access,” he said as he hooked his feet in the hand holds and pushed himself upright. His voice felt dry and he coughed to clear his throat. The user interface panel drifted toward him until it was in front of him.
He was looking as if through a door into an office with a young man sitting cross-legged on the floor behind a short desk. Behind him, there was no wall, and the office looked out onto a tropical beach where some people were playing in the surf. The young man smiled a broad smile and bowed. “What can I do for you, Connor?” he asked, pushing aside with a pair of fingers a few windows of work to the air at the right side of his desk.
“I'm looking for Adán Castillo. We were both supposed to launch from here. Do you know where he is?”
The young man looked thoughtful for a moment and then, motioning for Connor to wait just a second, started to check something in one of the windows he had pushed away. Before Connor could respond, the young man nodded and jerked his head toward the wall across from the one where Connor had entered. “He's already here, in port C8. Also, before you go, you look like a wreck. I can have a medical exam ready for you in the shuttle.”
“Is that really necessary?” Connor asked, putting on his best healthy grin. The headache, the aching joints and muscles were a very unpleasant novelty, and honestly he wanted nothing more than to slip into a virtuo bath and basking in warmth while his body was slowly healed – but that would mean going into virtuality and postponing his arrival on the planetary surface, neither of which seemed worse than aching for a while.
“I'm afraid so. You'll remember what kind of g-forces your body underwent in training, and that was in virtuo. The planet's gravity would do quite a number on your insides if you've got any internal damage, and besides, as soon as you reach the surface, you've got a lot of work to do.”
Connor grimaced and rubbed an eye. “All right, fine. Hey, listen, what's your name?”
The young man smiled amicably. “Jan. Nice to meet you.”
“Well, Jan, excuse me for being rude, but what do you know about internal injuries?”
Jan's eyebrows raised just a bit, but his smile stayed fixed. “Same way you do, Connor. It's in the public domain.”
“But have you ever had internal injuries, or even a bruise before? I mean, have you ever spent enough time outside of virtuality to get hurt?”
“That's kind of a silly question. No one has, but everyone has plenty of experience playing in scenarios to know what it feels like. In fact, as far as I know, you're the first person to show those kinds of injuries for centuries.”
“Jan, let me tell you, even the dull ache I'm feeling in my ribs right now makes scenario injuries look two-dimensional, but you know what else? It feels really good. It feels good to breathe.” Even so, Connor had to shift his ribcage a bit to take the pressure off of the sore side.
Jan's smile finally faded and he tilted his head and narrowed his eyes just enough to be inquisitive. “Are you trying to brag about causing yourself physical deformity?”
Connor stood up a little straighter, soreness notwithstanding. “No, I'm just saying I might know something about it that you don't. You don't even know how it happened, so don't tell me you can diagnose me through a virtuo panel.”
Jan suddenly seemed a good deal older as he looked out incredulously from beneath his eyebrows. Probably virtuo had shifted to change his appearance, but the knowledge didn't soften the intimidating effect very much. “Well, let's see, you slammed into a ladder, crushing your right side. Judging by the speed that would have been necessary to cause the bruises on your face and pull your right shoulder out of its socket, your dull ache might be cracked bones and you are not cleared to enter the atmosphere with a compromised internal frame. That can lead to permanent damage, and you're not allowed to hurt yourself permanently.”
“How did you know–”
“How many ways can a person hurt himself on Ark? You've been favoring your right side this whole conversation and you rubbed your eye with your left hand. It doesn't take a detective. The only question is what made you forget months of training.” Jan paused but Connor didn't have anything to say to that. Jan blinked and softened his tone slightly. “C8. He's been waiting the fifteen minutes it took you to limp your way here.”
Connor nodded and averted his eyes. “All right. Thanks. Access ended.” Jan nodded cordially and pulled his windows back to the center of his desk. The tropical vision faded and Connor was alone again in the big, empty, white room. He pulled up a bit with his toes on the foot hold to keep from drifting too much, but he over-corrected and drifted the other way. He swung back and forth for a few minutes until he was able to put his thoughts back in order.
Then he carefully pulled himself down to the column and scrambled hand and foot to the other side and pushed off carefully towards C8. He paused at the hatch and tried to shake the thoughts out of his head, but that hurt. Then he took a deep breath, but that hurt too. He closed his eyes and smirked ironically.
The question that really bothered him, though, was that he couldn't tell if Jan was a person or a program. The thought that somebody's arrogant creation could order him around, even in reality, even after he had escaped the virtual world, left him unsettled.
Finally, he opened his eyes for the retina scan, the hatch depressurized, and Connor stared into his dim, painful, realistic future.
It took him a second to realize that he was staring at the docking passageway. Grateful that no one was watching, he pulled himself in and onward to the shuttle.
