#niklioni

[niklioni]

End of the World

Most people believed that technology would be completely gone. That we would be thrown back to the stone age. While there was a long stretch of chaos, especially for those nations that were dependent on technology for their everyday lives, most of the world just ticked on over. Kept moving along.

The hardest part of the micro-nova, was what it did to the planet. Earthquakes, massive storms, volcanoes -- Those were minor compared to the polar shift. It had been happening for decades. The magnetic north pole had been wandering slowly, until it wasn't. The last decades, it sped up. And then the south pole started moving. When they met near the southern tip of India, the sun had already gone nova, and loosened the magma layer, so the realigning of the magnetic field in that location brought with it a cataclysmic shift of the earth's surface, aligning the new poles north and south with the solar magnetic field. Kind of like when a magnet FLIPS explosively to line up with another magnet.

The floods were the worst. Electricity was gone, with most wires being used as conduits for all that solar energy, which immediately melted and oxidized them to uselessness. After the dust was gone, the stars were the brightest things in the night sky again. When the floods came, people were in the dark, no information from major news systems to warn them, no cars to take them to places that could be considered 'safe'. So much of the human population was destroyed. Waves higher than the majority of continents washed back and forth across the land, washing away whatever taint mankind had put in place. Much of the earth was changed overnight.

The freeze afterwards brought another insult to injury. Almost nobody was ready for it. A flash freeze of the entire planet. Global warming was not a worry anymore. It didn’t last long, since all that debris that had chokes the sun had been blown away but it was long enough to turn the planet white. 

People, when they live in one spot for long enough are used to the weather in that location. Well, with the polar shift, the sun came from another corner of the sky in the morning. Equatorial countries had no clue how to handle the cold. It was something they never had to deal with. Canada was in for a rude awakening when summer rolled around -- for the next twelve thousand years.

Now I say all this to let you know how bad it was. The United States was split in half, a body of water now running from Lake superior to the Gulf. Half of Texas was gone. Just gone. Under water. The hill country to the mountains were amazingly fine, though with the change in weather, we had many flooding events until the green had taken over.

And now we come to the mountains. Ah the mountains. I recall that several decades before the event, billionaires, having failed to control the population, began building mountain bunkers. I get the feeling that they knew more than the average human. Though I doubt they had altruistic ideals when they did this, they did save humanity in many ways.

They bought STUFF. They had all sorts of stuff. Computers, cars, machines to make computers and cars. That was the biggest thing. They had information. They had stuff.

And they were impressively weak about security.

Once people found out where they were, these billionaires were no obstacle. Scientific minded folks gathered together and hired those of like mind and with abundance of survival skills, and headed out to take the first of these compounds. Since there was no technology working, and rich folks do rely on it, they were infiltrated, and if not convinced to cooperate, detained.

It was no more than a week after the floods and tremors stopped, that news was filtering through populated safe areas about needed supplies. Things needed for everyday life without hospitals and internet and grocery stores with food shipped from thousands of miles away. A caravan of survivalists was travelling the routes selling antibiotics, and sutures, and needles, and shovels. There were books with basic information about pumps, smithing, farming, hunting, butchering. Recipes for those without spices. They were a godsend, though likely not the ones the people wanted. They were well armed. They repelled many people. They earned respect for their space and people learned to respect their lives.

They traded these things with people who had things like vegetables, meat, lumber. Scrap metals and glass were also accepted, though they preferred such things already in billet form. It packed easier, and the horses here still new at pulling the wagons, so they didn't want to overburden them.

The books, they sold few copies. They claimed they wanted to have enough for every community, and it would be a good idea for people to share the information with their neighbors. They set aside time to teach those who wanted to learn, but they knew what would happen. They understood human psychology. The information would never be shared. At least while the ones who had bought the books had died.

I was in one of those communities when they had come through. I listened to their spiel, listened to them as they read the simply written text of the books, and watched the aftermath when they left.

Half a day after they had continued down the old roads, chaos erupted. I stayed way back once I heard the first grumblings. I got on my horse and rode out of town and camped, watching the town center with an old scope. The four who had bought the books and gear were mobbed. They were killed and their stuff taken from them. SO much gunfire erupted, that I was rather amazed there was that much ammo in the town. The books were left on the ground, torn to shreds. The most valuable thing those people had purchased, thrown to the mud like trash.

I understood at that point that this town was a loss. I was certain that within a year, it would be nothing but old bones, the carcass picked clean by the wild dogs that roamed the hills. I picked up my camp before it got dark, and headed East to the Rocky Mountains from what used to be central Texas. Austin was north, Waco was south, and there was a long ways to go.

Life was hard. Every day consisted of getting up with the sun, setting the kettle on the coals to heat. Splashing some water in my face, and wiping the sweat from my flesh. Brush the horses down, throw last night’s scraps to the penned chickens and ducks, and open the nesting boxes.

 I would have to collect more water today, though it was not urgent. I figured I had enough for a stew this evening, but it was always best to be prepared. So I saddled one horse, and put the yoke on the other. They whuffled at me, excited to get out for a while. Once the cart was hitched, I loaded the empty barrels. With rifle in hand and a pocket full of ammo, I walked the two horses over to the trough.

When I had moved out here, I searched cautiously for other people. There were some settlements, a few isolated cabins, but lots of space. I moved on until I could look from a high place and see nothing of another person in all directions. It was lonely sometimes, but I was more concerned for safety, than for comfort. I was not one for settlements. 

Tractors littered the fields, dead, even though diesel would easily run once the engine got cranked. Even if they removed all the electronics and managed to get them moving, fuel was severely limited. It made sense to use the smallest engine on the smallest field if one was to use them at all, since transportation was as limited as the farm. Why plant more than you can use and trade?

There was also a new phenomenon now. Roving herds of cattle. Wild cattle. I was amazed they survived, considering how domesticated they were -- thousands of years of domestication can do strange things to an animal. Just look at people at the beginning of the 21st century. Dopey, lazy, stuffed into little boxes for more than half of their income to a landlord who never really gave a crap.

I mounted my horse, and tied the leads of the wagon horse to the horn of my saddle, and took the well worn path to the water well. The day was clear and crisp. About mid spring. Snow was still on the ground, but was steadily thawing. The well would be very full. 

Digging that well was an experience for me. There was so much that I needed to prepare before I even broke ground, and there was no guarantee that I would find water at all. I had several shovels, a pick, buckets, rope, and stacked all around where I had decided to dig, tons and tons of stone laying about in piles. I had roughly shaped them all into something brick-like, with two parallel sides. The other sides, I felt, didn’t really matter.

The hardest part of the preparation was the mortar. Sand, in this area, was not a geological feature easily found. Limestone was everywhere, so cooking up lime wasn’t an issue, but sand was absolutely necessary. I was despairing until I remembered that quarries would always have mountains of tailings. Not quite sand, but fine grained rough sided crushed stone. I figured that would be all I needed. It took ten trips to get all that I needed, and still I felt I would need more for other projects, but I was exceptionally tired of making the trip fifty miles there, and fifty miles back. 

[niklioni]

Something is going to happen

Several decades ago, I thought I would be the best writer in the world. I would write a novel that would set the world afire with imagination and drive the creation of several more novels in an even more expansive universe. And then I got lost.

I've never had a drug problem, and though I did spend about 10 months drinking my life and money away at parties, once on the other side of all that, I was still lost. Before i was injured on the job, I could do anything I set my mind upon. ANYTHING. My imagination thrived - not with story ideas or essays, but with plans for building this or that. The intricacies of material strengths flowed through my ideas, along with the processes of preparing all that would be needed to do it all myself. That was a dream never to come true.

I cannot but blame myself for the sad state I was in. I stayed working with the crappy outfit I was with, even though I railed against the proprietor for cutting corners. I wanted to get out, but I was weak. Weak, and depressed, and immobilized by what I thought I Should Do. Expectations. The biggest slayer of dreams. I am not a year past the proprietor's death, and I'm still frozen in place. I cannot move for some reason that cannot bring itself into words in my mind.

I do have dreams still. I have collected knowledge from hours and hours and countless hours of internet searching and rabbit hole travelling about a wide wide range of subjects. Many things that I am certain I could do if pressed, but have never done. Many things I have tried, and though the results were mediocre, were moderately successful, though not exactly useful today.

My dreams are tempered by my knowledge of tomorrow. There are things coming, likely in less than a decade, that will completely change the world. Completely change how knowledge is shared. Change our currency, our governments, our laws. The future is apocalyptic. Revelations, seen through the eyes of a man thousands of years ago who could never understand what he was seeing, makes sense if you can translate his ramblings to current knowledge on astronomical phenomenon.

Can you imagine the day that the sun goes dark? Fire rains down from the heavens? Fire racing across the planet to immediately be frozen as temperatures drop? As the sun stands still in the sky? South becomes East? What would any of these things mean to a man who was only a shepherd? In an age where aluminum was more precious than gold. Iron was a prized metal of war.

How would you respond?

I think about these things sometimes, but I know there is nothing I can do about any of it. 'Climate change.' What a joke. It's a Climate Cycle. This is NOT the first time that humanity had to crawl out of the ice and snow to rebuild civilization.

I wonder about those who may be on the ISS when this thing hits. Will they survive? Will the systems be able to sustain that much plasma, or will the batteries explode from the impact? Will the plasma shell melt holes into the space station the way it has made green glass on the surface of the moon in ages past? Would they be able to survive, if the ISS remains intact, for long enough for some land-based system to get booted up and guide them home? Would they even be able to navigate home? Most satellites would be scrap, falling from the sky for centuries to come.

[niklioni]

Sapling

The dappled sunlight reaches longingly toward the bared earth, infant trees sprouting into the solar gaze, only to be thwarted by their parents, who greedily lay a single leaf in the light’s path, to drink in the heavenly nectar. To spite his ancestors, the sprig continues to grow, muscling his roots between the engorged appendages of his predecessors. His limbs climb higher, his roots deeper, starving the slower growing brutes who had denied him sustenance as a seedling. Finally, the behemoths starved and weakened, their leaves wither, and he stands tall, soaking in all the ambrosia he had grown to envy of the older trees. His leaves grew large and his branches strong by the time a new seed had sprouted. He gazed down at the insignificant speck and shook in the wind. “I earned my right to be here. I will not share what it took me decades to acquire!” And the cycle begins again. As it should. This is not a story teaching the merits of sharing. This story is saying, “If you wish to feel the freedom of the sky, you must work for it! There is only so much space on the roof of the forest. If all is shared, all will die.”

[niklioni]

The World ENDED: December 15th, 2012

Yes. My world ended. Lett me explain to you why.

I am forty years old. I have worked in construction until my back gave out. I have flipped burgers, watched my demon child grow up, and been a complete MMORPG addict. I enjoyed television shows, read scifi/fantasy books, and dabbled in computers. While my kiddo made and still does make me happy to be alive, there was always something missing. A drive... a calling to do.. SOMETHING...

I found that during NaNoWrimo... Writing. I had a dream when I was only a kid to write. To make a living writing. NaNo rekindled that dream and it was burning bright. I wrote 133333 words during the NaNoWriMo competition, whose goal was to get you to write 50k words in a month. I didn't write a single word the last five days of the competition. I think I won.

I started on another story set some ten to fifteen years ahead of the story I wrote in November. In a week I filled up one and put down fifteen pages of another 70 page notebook with this story. And then I woke up on Saturday, December 15th with a crik in my neck. I worked it out and it went away. But I had this numbness in my right hand. I chuckled and thought little of it.

Sunday rolled around and the numbness had evolved to include electrical tingling. My ring and pinky ringers on my right hand were decidedly weaker, and that incessant electrical activity.. It felt like I had hit my funny bone, and some perverse god had frozen the most painful sensation and made it permanent in my arm. I was concerned, but not overly so.

Monday and Tuesday rolled through, and my hand, while annoying was not really that bad. The pain had stretched up my arm and back shoulder blade, but I could still handle it. I was concerned, and started getting myself prepared to go get it looked at. My daughter was doing finals that week, so I felt I had to be there for her if she needed me -at least for moral support if nothing else-.

Wednesday was a shocker. I woke up with absolutely no strength in my thumb, forefinger and middle finger. I went to pull up my pants like I normally do with both hands, and they bound up at my knees as I was only lifting with my left hand. My right hand couldn't even grasp the fabric.

I pushed the sense of panic into the back of my mind, I had no time for that kind of childish bullshit. I'm a damned adult. I needed to act like one. My elbow felt like someone was inserting long needles between the joints, but that was nothing to the lack of feeling in my pinky and ring finger. My hand felt dead. Half of it could feel just fine, but had no strength. The other half had only half its normal strength, but dexterity but reduced to an infant's. Still I waited.

Last day of school! I get my kiddo home from school, and immediately prepare to go to the ER. Yeah, I was scared, but the sensations in my arm and hand had not gotten any worse. I couldn't hold a fork to eat. I couldn't use a knife to cut my food. Couldn't zip up my pants with my right hand.

I couldn't write.

I CAN'T FUCKING WRITE!!

Even now, I'm stomping the keyboard with one finger on that hand. It's painful. My elbow is aching. My shoulder hurts. But I MUST WRITE. I Love writing.

But I feel no joy right now. I can't get lost in the story. All I feel is pain rather than the emotions of my characters. I can't develop a proper scene if all I'm thinking about is where I should throw my ONE FINGER to get the right letters on the screen.

My dream is being tested.

[niklioni]

I am going to write...

and then I will post it here!

My stories are long, and at time bewildering to me. I've been working on my own universe, with not so unique characters, and lots of plausible science. Science fiction is my genre, and even when I try to deviate from that, I slide back into it like a slimy fish freshly caught from the stream.

So I have decided to start posting some of my stories here. Short stories, excerpts, and some random prose that might find its way onto the page from my feverish wandering mind.

I hope you enjoy!

(Send your friends my way! I love feedback!)

[niklioni]

I always know ways to respond to a role play... I have issues of whether or not it's appropriate...

Like shooting someone in the face for saying hello. Not always the best option.

[niklioni]

WORMS!

I saw some ones RP that said "Everybody hates me. No one understands me" and it brought this song to mind... Enjoy!

Nobody likes me Everybody hates me Just because I eat worms

Short fat hairy ones Long tall skinny ones See how the little ones squirm

Bite all their heads off Suck all the juice out Throw the empty skins away

Nobody Likes me Everybody hates me Cos I eat worms all day

Nobody likes us Everybody hates us Just because we eat worms

Short fat hairy ones Long tall skinny ones See how the little ones squirm

Bite all their heads off Suck all the juice out Throw the empty skins away

Nobody Likes us Everybody hates us Cos we eat worms all day

[niklioni]

Meh.

I went ahead and validated my win.

I've slowed way down on my writing, but my story is blossoming and growing. I'm coming at it from a completely different angle, and a completely new writing style. It's difficult to stick with it, though. I have a habit of running off into tangents and filling the page with details that aren't needed or that weigh the whole thing down.

Role play had ruined my writing.

When role playing, you need to put as much detail into your move as possible, so that nothing can be twisted around against you. It allows you to direct the action, rather than the other person. But when writing a story, you have complete control. No one else is going to come in and say "Okay, the ceiling falls down and kills your favorite character because you didn't saw whether or not that was a load bearing wall and gave a detailed diagram of its structure." You can leave that stuff out. You can let the reader enjoy the 'what ifs' and 'maybe this will happen' while you weave your plot. You can delve into the interpersonal dialogs. You can skim the surface of describing a room without telling the reader exactly what nick-nacks are on the shelf above the fifty year old teddy bear that was owned and passed down through heredity by the mother and maternal ancestors of your protagonist. You don't need to say the brush strokes stood out in stark relief on the painting by Monet which is hiding in the sub basement atmospheric controlled safe where your antagonist put it after he stole it twenty years ago from a museum in Prague. It's just not needed.

To make a story flow, just look around you, and skim the details. The wind is blowing. The grass is dry and dying from lack of rain. Your protagonist feels sad for the poor grass, but is too damned lazy to get up and water. And then cries, moistening the dirt at his feet.

fuckin emo.

But really. Don't get tangled up in the details. But don't ignore them either. It's a balancing act that all writers perform between interest and boredom.

Most of all. WRITE.

Edit in December.

[niklioni]

To write. To dream. To tell the world!

Well.. I'm going to begin writing. Actually, I have been writing for years, but I haven't seriously been writing. So how have I been going?

Crappy. I look at what I have written, the mess of disorganized scenes, the crappy dialog, the research I need to do to even complete scenes, and I want to vomit. I know I can do better. I will do better.

I do, one day, wish to publish what I write, so I keep trying. I just need more practice. I need to be able to put a good idea on the page and not have to go back and rewrite the whole damned thing fifteen times. Write more. Write more.

So, I am considering doing Milwords for 2013... One million words for the entire year. Something like 90k per month, and 2.5k a day. I can do that. I'm a week away from the end of NaNoWriMo, and I have 125k in this crappy novel written in a flurry of disconnected scenes and character creation on the fly. It's not my best work. I love the story behind it, and will eventually write a proper manuscript, but for right now, I think I'm done with it. My mind is too muddled and my writing is too disjointed. So I stop here and decide how I want to go with this thing.

I know I should probably write out an outline. I did, actually, do just that before Nano started. And after the first scene, I was WAY off from it. So far away from the plot I had lined up, that I could not even get close to returning to it. So I pantsed it the rest of the way.

It's not really as bad as I make it sound. I did develop the world more than I ever had before. The characters I love so much have actual histories. They have difficulties they've had to work through. Things that build a real personality. But I'm not in a frame of mind to actually delve into those personalities and see how they would truly react. None of my main characters have a bad side. I think I need practice there.

I need to take one of my good guy characters, and turn him into pure evil. Send him into the midst of his friends and just snipe at them until they hate him. Why do I feel uneasy about this?

You tell me. What would you do?