Doppelganger - another fragment

Lest you fear I've forgotten it, Doppelganger is one of the projects that was interrupted by the intrusion of my little cyberpunk/noir piece. When the muse strikes you have to get it down, but the truth is that (for me at least) most pieces take work and grow slowly like crystals in a cave. The seeds come hard and fast, but it can take years for me to have anything much to show for it. It seems to be Doppelganger's time, as I have been making steady (if slow) progress. I thought I'd share another scene from it as it progresses - caveat: obviously this is a work in progress and there will be editing and revision before I'm done. There are parts I'm not entirely satisfied with, but I plan to avoid doing too much detail work before the whole thing is done.

As the afternoon relaxed into streams of golden honey in the west, Atys stood before the mirror in his chamber trying vainly to arrange the traditional new suit of clothes that his father had presented him to wear at the masque proclaimed for his eldest son’s naming day, along with the even more traditional advice and admonitions. He was struggling with the laces of his doublet, trying to force them to tie evenly and fall perfectly against the green velvet as he imagined they should. He was failing even as he had failed to straighten the seams on his hose, and to buckle his baldric with the properly debonair flourishes he had seen on other young gentlemen, and the frustration of knowing that he would look a fool on his first foray into society had slowly risen to burn in his dry eyes.

Atys cursed in a manner his father had specifically forbidden not an hour before and jerked at the lace he had been gradually working into an irretrievable knot. In the mirror, he examined himself critically and his frustration puddled into despair. Looking up from his misarranged clothes, he met the eyes of the Other staring out at him, lips curled in a sneer.

“Are you going to cry now?” the other asked, and Atys swallowed heavily to stop from doing just that.  The bark of laughter the Other had swallowed sounded uncomfortably close to a retch of disgust, and seeing the curl of his lip and the wrinkle of his nose in the mirror was too much: Atys blinked and the tears brimmed over, burning the shame into his cheeks.

"Oh, how manly," the Other sneered. "No doubt father will be very proud."

"Shut up!" Atys snuffled as he scraped the tears away with both hands.

The Other's sneer twisted into something more ugly: "What did you say?"

Atys looked away for a moment, unwilling to face what he saw in those eyes. Rough fingers caught his cheeks, squeezed painfully. "Did you dare something, boy?" He looked back at the mirror, and winced as the Other's fingernails dug deep for a moment before releasing him. "Do you actually think you're worth something?" Atys's shame grew as he saw the hunch of his shoulders, watched himself creep:

"No, please, not today - it's my name day." His voice trailed off as he saw a sneer join the rage on the Other's face.

"Not today? Especially today you pathetic whelp. Today you make your debut as a gentleman." He spat to show what he thought of that. "Gentleman! Hah! And your father has spared no expense for his precious boy. An infant who stands here weeping because he can't tie his own laces." Atys cringed when he saw the terrible grin on the Other's face - hungry and implacable. His voice was soft and dangerous:

"Oh yes, my lad. Especially today."

A cyberpunk fragment

[edited for readability - the Blogger Android app is hopeless]

This is a fragment that intruded as I was working on another project and then kept me up last night. It's the beginning of a story that has been simmering at the back of my mind for a while but hasn't really gelled - suddenly the plot seems to be spooling out, so maybe I'll take a stab at outlining it and fleshing out the scenes that I already have in mind once I'm done with what's on my plate. It seems to want to be a cyberpunk story, or at least noir SF, which is a bit of a divergence for me. Should be an interesting project if it doesn't die on the vine like so many other ideas.

For now, I hope you enjoy what there is:

I could tell you to the minute when I fell in love with her.

Her face was painted in flickering green from the monitor, eyes flashing like the LED telltales all around us. She pounced in a sudden flurry of activty, fingers flying across the interface. Then just as suddenly she slumped back, relaxed.

"We're in." She was whispering as though they could hear us - echoes of primal hunting instincts.

I hunched forward to peer at the code as though I knew what I was looking at. I felt more than saw her knowing smirk. She shook her head almost imperceptibly and I found myself intensely aware of how close she was. Suddenly awkward, I straightened.

"Good," I said, trying to sound official, trying to retain a bit of professional dignity.

She grinned at me, teeth and the ports on the side of her head gleaming in the half dark. "Thanks," she replied brightly, running one hand over her scalp in a self-mocking parody of preening.  I turned away to hide my flush in the half shadows.

"How long before we can activate?"

She shrugged, white shoulders twitching up and pulling the matte black vest tight in ways I found myself uncomfortably aware of. "Could go any time - we're plugged right in. Depends on how you want to play it."

I nodded, shrugged on my jacket, straightened my tie.

"There are other parts to this - I'll be in touch when we're ready to make our move."

She shrugged again. "I'll be waiting."

I turned back at the door, meaning to offer some trite bit of advice or a stuffy admonition just out of reflex, but the words died on my tongue. I'd caught her stretching. The way she lounged there among the boxes and lights, like a tiger in a cable jungle, dangerous but captivating.

We'd been working together for weeks on this strike - me sneering at her street tough pretensions, while she poked at my stuffy suit demeanor searching for the sore point that would make me blow my cool. We'd been this close before - closer when I'd squeezed into the cable conduit to help her braid in a tap - but it had always been just business, just another contract. But in that moment it washed over me all at once and I knew I wanted to end with more than just a phone call to say "go."

"You drink coffee?"

The question hung there out of place while she blinked at me over one of those smooth, white shoulders. She was frozen in the act of reaching for something, as startled by the invitation as I was. She cocked an eyebrow:

"Depends."

I scowled, sure this was another set up, that she was going to slap me down like a hundred times before. "On what?"

Her teeth flashed in a grin that for a fraction of a second seemed shy. "You buying?"

I relaxed. "Yeah. You coming?"

The grin grew: "Yeah." She winked at me, then pushed her chair out from the console, plugged herself in, and rolled to join me at the door.

Watching her cross the room, I somehow knew it was the start of something. But if I'd known what, maybe I would have had coffee alone.

Compulsion

Does this ever happen to you?

As mentioned, my writer's block finally ended and last week I did a bit of work on the projects I have had going for a while now.  Nothing special, but I was making progress - and not very much of that either due to real life interruptions etc.

Then it hit me.

I woke up at the usual time (or maybe a bit earlier) on Friday, and was poking through the news while drinking my coffee as I usually do.  I came across a reference to this story:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/27/us/maryland-church-fire/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

The tale seems obviously related to some gangland violence and I was just about to dismiss it as tragic (horrific actually) but a few days old with no new details - so probably not that important in the wider scheme of things - when a voice in the back of my head said "what if..."

What if it wasn't a gang hit? What if the world was more interesting, and the explanation was more mysterious...more sinister?

I popped the URL into an email to my brother (with whom I often exchange commentary on interesting news stories) along with a speculative paragraph proposing the scene of a burning man stumbling into a church as the opening to a movie, with the tag line "imagine a movie..."  Then I hit send.

Boy, was that a mistake.

Ten minutes later, I'd already written a sketch of the first couple of scenes in "replies" to my first email. Half an hour later I had another scene sketched and sent off, with more bubbling in my head - I couldn't stop thinking about it!

On the train, I sketched out a couple more on my phone, emailed those too so that I could be sure they wouldn't be lost.

At work, I used my morning coffee break to add to it.  At noon I wolfed my lunch, closed my office door, and spent 45 minutes pounding out a couple more scenes. Now I was starting to get a good sense of the characters, their back stories and their names (which just came to me!).   In fact, all morning I stole a minute or two here and there to open the growing file and just pop in a couple of bullet points, a fragment of conversation, etc.

Sadly, circumstances kept me from doing any more on it for the rest of the day and evening, but I still couldn't get the story out of my head.  I zoned out during a meeting and had to ask the presenter to repeat something because something about a photo in his presentation slides forced me to start thinking about what the villain looked like, which made me think about his role, which made me think about his past...

Again, life intruded and prevented me from doing anything significant with the story over the weekend, though I did manage to splice the fragments together and clean them up a bit.  In the roughly 6 hours I was working on it I got 9 pages of sketched out screen play, which I think would probably make about 40 minutes of movie.

The ideas are still coming fast and furious.  I already know in general terms how the story unfolds, how it ends, and even how it might continue after that. I already have vivid images of the villain and the wise mentor (both of whom have yet to make an appearance in what I've written).

The tale has taken over my mind and my life.  If this momentum continues, I'll be done the first run through by the end of this week and be ready for fleshing out - at which time I'll have to decide whether it will stay a screen play or transform into ordinary prose.

So, does this ever happen to you? Do odd stories in the news, or events in life suddenly take over and consume you - compelling you to write them?

Doppelganger

[edited to correct a typo I hadn't noticed before, and to regularize formatting]

One of the reasons for the reboot of this blog is the reboot of my writing, which has long lain fallow due to a variety of life events.  Thus, without further ado I offer you a snippet of something I started working on this week, a sort of warm-up piece I am tentatively calling "Doppelganger":

Cybele’s slippers whisked across the flagstones too softly for him to hear over the chuckling water, and the constant murmur of his own voice echoing in the shadows of the bath-house. He had no idea how long she had been there when her voice broke into his private anguish:

"My god, what have you done?"

He jerked his eyes up to her, and the terrible grin that twisted his face made her flinch no less than the rasp in his voice when he answered:

"You’ve taken the words out of my mouth, sister."

She shook her head, rosebud lips moving silently and she stared wide-eyed and unblinking at what he had done.

"And it seems I've taken yours as well."

He glanced down, pressed his fingers deeper into the sticky mess as hot life pumped out and coiled across the floor. His heart clenched for a moment with rage and triumph and fear, and he looked back up at her.

Her pose had changed - now the fingers on one hand stretched out in a twisted claw that seemed unable to decide whether to reach out to him or to fend him off, the other was twisted into her skirts as though desperate to pull them up to cover her eyes, to shut out the bloody scene. Her lips still worked silently, and the horror on her face made his heart clench again at the realization that he was the cause of it. His throat tightened, the tears were hot on his cheeks, and his voice was thin and plaintive as he tried to explain:

"I've fixed it, sister - he can never hurt you again."

He had just a moment to realise that the hand he'd reached out toward her was the one that clutched the gore-soaked knife before she screamed.

Sort of Halloweeny at this point, but all is not quite what it appears.  Perhaps I'll share more scenes as I get closer to completion.