National Novel Writing Month: Day 1

      So today was the first day of my first time to participate in the annual National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. It's a cool international initiative to get writers writing by creating the voluntary and intimidating deadline of committing 50,000 words of fiction to paper (or more likely, to the hard drive) in just 30 days. While such a grueling pace is unlikely to produce the most polished of prose, it's a wonderful exercise for excessive putzers like me to simply WRITE IT DOWN, STUPID. You can always go back and fix it later.
      The NaNoWriMo website offers scads of resources and support for participants, even opportunities to get together with--or merely interact online with--other enthusiastic writers in your area or around the world. You can share your work, or your growing word count, or nothing at all with other participants, but even after one day I've found that a high bar, even a totally arbitrary one, will likely be a good thing for my writing. I've dusted off a story idea I've had lying around for ages, and I made more progress on it today than I have in years of staring at it in my "must get to someday" file. Today's count: 1,535 words--a little short of what I'll need to crank out each day if I want to end up w/ 50,000 on November 30th. I won't be posting the whole blessed thing daily, but I've added today's work after the "Read more" jump below--what will be the Prologue--for anyone foolish enough to be interested. It's tentatively titled "Working for the Man," and although it's still in the early throes of its infancy, please remember that this is still copyrighted work.

Working for the Man--Prologue

      If Dr. Marian Gates had believed in heaven, that is where she would have been standing. She gazed out over an expanse of lush, high grass, the seedy green tips of which shimmered yellow as the wind bent its tops in rolling waves. Further in the distance, a stand of droopy trees, maybe some ancient form of willow she guessed, bobbed their heads at a small clear pond, its edges bearded with algae. It was hard to get a sense of scale because the whole panorama was overarched with the deepest, bluest sky she had ever seen, stippled here and there with a few thin clouds, the bright sun lower in the sky than she had expected. The air was so clear she could make out that the leaves on the droopy trees were serrated, though perhaps they were a mile away. Then her vision blurred as her eyes teared up.
      She had done it. She was really here. When people heard the name Gates from now on, their first thought wouldn’t be “Bill” but “Marian.” She would be the most famous scientist, the most famous person on the face of the Earth. She wished her old adviser Dr. Gerald Newmark were here, just so she could see his jowls quiver in disbelief and his slopey shoulders slouch even further in defeat. She giggled, like hiccups, then shouted, “I’ll waste no more time on your crackpot theories, Ms. Gates!” to the open sky.
      After a moment she collected herself and began to follow the checklist that she had run down so many hundreds of times in simulation. Air regulator first; it was all green lights and feeding her a steady supply of late 21st Century air, though she longed to tear it off and breathe deeply of what she guessed was the much purer, sweeter air all around her now. No time, and the bio team would kill her when she got back. She rapidly unpacked the tech kit with the muscle memory of a thousand practice runs, completely at home in her snug biohazard suit, and began collecting data. She thrust the holographic camera’s tripod into the soft grass and pressed a pad, which sent it telescoping above head level to start its automatic run. Then came the magnetic field detector to determine her precise location without any satellites available for GPS. Next, the sample kits—soil, grass, air. The water was too far away, so that one would have to wait till next time.
      Only after all the equipment was up and running and the samples were collected and stowed did she allow herself to turn and examine the portal. There it stood—or rather floated—a small perfect circle seemingly cut right out of the fabric of the air, three feet above the ground and just wide enough for her to crawl through while pushing the tightly bundled tech pack ahead of her. The floating circle shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow, like the surface of a bubble, and from it emanated a deep bass hum, like the bundled coil of a suspension bridge thrumming in a high wind. There was the slightest bend to the light around the perimeter, like looking through heat haze.
      She circled the portal to the right, watching as its face seemed to wane into a thinner and thinner crescent until, at the exact moment her line of sight crossed the circle’s plane, it completely disappeared. Her breath caught, and she instinctively hopped back a few steps to make the hole re-appear. The microscopic time holes she had created in the lab had also had zero-depth, but they had all been formed on flat horizontal surfaces; seeing it on this scale and suspended in mid-air was uncanny and disconcerting. Especially since she knew if that hole disappeared for real, she’d have about a 30,000-year wait for the rescue party. The team back at the lab would almost certainly never be able to hit the exact same moment in time and space with another portal again.
      She moved back in front of her beautiful portal and stared into its hypnotic shimmering face. It seemed impossibly peaceful in light of the ridiculous storms of energy required to create it and keep it open, a thought that immediately prompted her to check the timer in her heads-up display. This short trial had eaten up every cent of funding they’d been able to scrape together (and more); a few minutes of the field generator at full power was all they could possibly have hoped to afford. But as she hurriedly broke down and repacked the electronics, stroking her gloved hand across the neat row of sample containers in their fitted case, she knew all of that would change. She’d sacrificed everything for this chance—her professional reputation, her marriage, any semblance of a normal life—and won. She’d proved it could be done. She’d traveled back in time, and now all the doubters and scoffers and Gerry Newmarks of the world would fight for the privilege of throwing their money at her.
      As she knelt expertly to bundle and snap the tech pack into its original, compact shape, she heard a noise like bacon sizzling, and suddenly the hum of the portal grew even deeper and much louder. She snapped her head up from her work, but the portal had not visibly changed. It shimmered a few feet in front of her exactly as it had before. Not until a shadow crossed her shoulder and settled just in front and to the left of her did she think to turn around.
      The first thing she saw was a second portal, almost exactly like the first but much larger, reaching all the way from the ground to the height of a tall man. The sizzling must have been the sound of its formation, and she had thought her portal had gotten louder because now there were the two of them, humming together. But this second opening was impossibly big. There was no way the team back at the generator could have found the power to create such a huge portal, especially not with the first one still running. And why would they even try?
      She was so absorbed with the puzzle of the impossible portal that she completely forgot about the shadow, and it took her several seconds to notice the man who was standing just off to her side, directly between her and the lowering sun. He was even more unlikely than the portal because, even allowing for a huge margin of error, her calculations virtually guaranteed she had arrived in an era and location that would have no human population. When she realized he was wearing some sort of costume—check that, a Roman soldier costume—she cut her eyes to her heads-up to double-check her air indicators. All green. If she was hallucinating, it wasn’t due to her air mix.
      The man took several quick steps toward her. In the very brief time it took him to close the distance between them, her lifelong habit of collecting and cross-referencing objective data led her to several astute, but ultimately tardy observations. First, he was very focused on her—he never once glanced at their surroundings or wondered at the two bizarre circles in the air. Second, he looked very fit—she could clearly see the lines of strong muscles in his bare arms and in the powerful legs beneath the line of his…skirt…or whatever the hell the Romans used to call it. He had dark, close-cropped hair, a hawkish nose, and the lined, brown skin of someone who has spent most of his life out in the sun. Third, it was the single most realistic costume she had ever seen in her life. The leather bits were rubbed worn and nicked, the fabric bits were clearly faded and sweat-stained, and there were no buckles or straps that did not obviously serve some purpose in holding the thing on him.
      As he closed the final few feet, he slid a short, bright sword from a sheath at his side, and she saw immediately that it belonged to no costume. No, not at all. It had weight in his hand, and scratches along its length, and it gleamed terribly in the still-bright sunlight. He did not pause until he stood directly over her and looked through the visor of her bio-suit. She had never risen from her knees—despite the breadth of her observations they had all been made in but a few seconds. As their eyes met he looked perplexed for a moment, and she heard him speak. It sounded like, “Femina?”
      She was still too stunned to say or do anything at all, though she wondered why he might be calling her a feminist, and his look hardened as he seemed to put his perplexity aside. He drew back the hand that held the sword and spoke once more. It sounded to Marian like “May pie nitty yet.” But she was pretty sure that wasn’t it.
      Her last thought as his hand came sharply forward again was that none of this was in any of the simulations.

Copyright Peter Waldron, 2009