by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
“I take it back,” said the gunner. “That is the wieirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Fit it back onReassemble the grenade,” I said, and handed the bomb techhim the gently smoking endpiece. He looked at it, then at the exposed explosives of the grenade, and shook his head.
“You want me to attach a ‘make things break’ demon to a high-explosive warhead? I’m not convinced that this is the smartest thing either of us haves ever done.”
“Just fit it on,” I said. “IThis fresh, it’ll hold for a couple of hours at leastwithout any trouble.”
The engineer was awake again. “What now?” he asked.
“Now we shoot him.”
He frowned, confused, and I smiled.
“Now we shoot him at the insurgents.”
The Taliban were still attacking our baseconvoy, and because we’d been driving so slowly, looking for mines, the hour we’d spent driving hadwe were only taken us about five klicks away from it; with the gremlin no longer wreaking havoc on the truck we could hear the occasional burst of gunfire. The bomb techgunner finished reassembling the grenade, and loadedwe packed as much gear as we could before running back through the desert. The Afghanistan hills were steep and rocky under any circumstances, and even more so here in the The Brambles; our travel was slow, but the engineer kept up more admirably than I expected. We made it to a low ridge after barely twenty minutes of running. We didn’t have a perfect view of the battle, but we could tell the insurgents were winning—they had mortars, snipers, good cover, and higher ground than our guys, who were essentially pinned down behind the smoking wreckage of their vehicles. TIt was the biggest group of insurgents I’d ever seen, and there was no backup in sight; well, none but us. I loaded the Rocket- Propelled Gremlin in the AT4launch tube and handed it to the gunner.
“Don’t worry about a target,” I said, “just land the little bastard in the middle of their forcesgun line and let him go to work.”
The gunner judged the distance carefully, tested the wind, aimed high for extra distancerange. “Alpha Mike Foxtrot,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.
The grenade sailed over the valley, trailing smoke in a fierce, straight line, and exploded in a giant ball of fire against the back of a Taliban jeep. One by one we watched as the distant insurgents stopped firing forward and turned to look at their own battle line, at the clouds of dust and oil that flew up first in one place and then another. We were too far away to see the gremlin himself, but we could track his progress easily, watching as a truck fell to pieces, as a mounted machine gun sloughed parts like a crumbling cookie, as a mortar misfired and exploded on the ground. SomeA few of the Taliban tried to fight it, but others simply ran in terror, some toward us and some toward our baseconvoy. No longer pinned down by fire, our friendly forces caught them easily. We zip-tied their thumbs, frisked them for weapons, and started the slow walk around the frenzied gremlin toward our convoy.
“There’s enough machinery in that insurgent battle line to keep him busy for a week,” I said. “You’d better get another demonologist in by then, because if I have to do another binding ritual I’m using you for parts.”
“I’ll put in a call the instant we get back to base.”
“Good,” I said. “Now tell me something else: this gremlin was the BSE-7?”
“Correct.”
“So there are at least six other Bound Supernatural Entities being developed for field use?”
“Eleven, actually.” The engineer smiled. “How would you like to perform another test next week?”
Also by DAN WELLS
Novels
The Hollow City
A Night of Blacker Darkness
John Cleaver
I Am Not a Serial Killer
Mr. Monster
I Don’t Want to Kill You
Next of Kin: A John Cleaver Novella
The Partials Sequence
Partials
Fragments
Ruins
Isolation: A Lost Tale of the Partials Sequence
The Warcaster Chronicles
The Butcher of Khardov
THE MAKING OF AN HONEST DEATH
WRITING EXCUSES 8.9
BRAINSTORMING WITH HOWARD
(Listen on WritingExcuses.com)
Howard: Let me start with three pitches. You guys pick the one that interests you most. The first is a horrible, filthy story set in a—
Mary: Yes.
Brandon: Mary’s sold.
Dan: You already got Mary.
Howard: Set in a near future that is in many ways very similar to ours. There has been a technological advance in which instead of carrying phones, we all have implants. And a serial stalker has multiple restraining orders against him. The way restraining orders are applied is via your implant. The people who you are or were stalking can always track you. Whoever has a restraining order against you knows where you are, and if you get within 300 meters of them, you feel pain. And my character gets off on pain. He’s a masochist who has found a way to always get his fix. So that’s pitch number one. And yes, it can be a horrible, filthy, terrible story.
Howard: Pitch number two: a pharmaceutical company, a big medical company, has for the last couple of years been researching how to make money off the fact that a treatment they’re about to release will effectively make people immortal. They know that it will disrupt society. They know it will make a mess. But they’re trying to do everything they can to minimize the impact, so that society will survive the change. The CEO is up in his office and Death appears to him. I’ll say more about that if that interests you at all.
Howard: The third one is based on the principle of electronic voice phenomena, which ghost hunters like to hunt with microphones. They don’t hear any voices or anything while they’re at the site. Then they listen to the tapes after the fact, and they will often hear voices that none of them heard before, saying things that you can actually hear and understand. I’ve heard some of these on Tom Carr’s tapes, from Wasatch Paranormal Investigators.
Dan: They can be surprisingly easy to understand, and it’s pretty creepy.
Howard: Really creepy when nobody else on the tape reacts to it, and you realize, yeah, that was not somebody saying that, because somebody else would have responded. Basically, the story is we have a couple of ghost hunters, and one of them has decided to murder the other one. They’re doing some listening on-site, and the EVPs are trying to warn the guy who is about to be a murder victim of the impending treachery.
Brandon: I like the second two better than the first, personally.
Howard: That’s good, because I don’t like writing about the first guy, which is why that story has been abandoned.
Dan: I like the middle one the best, I think. That’s the one that has me the most intrigued right now.
Mary: I also lean toward the middle one. Mostly because I feel like it’s going to play to your strengths and be funny.
Brandon: Dark funny, but funny.
Mary: But there is more potential for comedy in there. Plus, I also really like the juxtaposition of the—
Brandon: It plays to Howard’s strengths a lot. I will agree the middle one’s probably the one we should do. Though personally I like the third story the best.
Howard: I am happy to play to what you guys don’t think are my strengths. I would like an opportunity to write against type, and write something where there is maybe some character humor in it, but it’s a horror story.
Brandon: I would love to have a horror story from you, which is also funny.
Dan: But if he wants to do something that’s not a comedy, then let’s do something that’s not a comedy.
Howard: But I mean, you guys pick. What do you—
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Mary: The other thing that appeals to me about number two is, I like the juxtaposition of high technology with mythic elements. I think that that can be fun.
Brandon: Okay. Let’s go with it.
Dan: There’s ways to do that that aren’t really very funny at all.
Brandon: The CEO about to release an immortality drug gets a visit from Death, who’s going to do what? Try to talk him out of it.
Howard: The scene that I have written that sort of talked me into this is Death explaining to him, “If you release this, everybody you know, the whole board of directors, everybody who is close to you, will die in the next seven days. I will personally guarantee that. So you have to not release this.” The CEO says, “Well, you’ve got to make me a counteroffer, because right now all you’re doing is threatening me, and I don’t take kindly to threatening.” That was my setup. My thought on this is that Death, the hooded figure that we see, is an extradimensional race—there’s not just one Death—that feeds off the passing of our spirits from this life into the next one. And if that stops happening naturally, they will have to start harvesting. And that’s something they don’t want to do for some reason or another.
Dan: It could be—for example the nice, horrific way to go—that they can’t. Part of his threat is, if you make everyone immortal, we’re going to make you our harvester. You will personally be responsible for making sure people die.
Brandon: See, but how can they force that?
Mary: Because the reason that they don’t want to do this is that they have experience with harvesting before, which was the Black Plague.
Brandon: Or something like that. Hey, a little bit of a secret history.
Howard: A secret history element would be fun.
Mary: That they very nearly overharvested the earth.
Brandon: His people are not good at restraining themselves. So he could say, “I’ve been around for a long time. I am more restrained. But if the floodgates open, the common people will just take it. If it stops coming, they’ll get so hungry they will break through.”
Howard: One of the horrific mythos elements I was thinking about: what is the nature of the human soul? The nice version is the energy state change when we die, the release of the spirit is what they are harvesting. The spirit itself escapes into whatever it needs to. The not nice one is that when they feed, the spirit is damaged, and it’s actually painful and torturous. If you are one of those people who is unfortunate enough to see Death when you are dying, you don’t have an afterlife to look forward to.
Brandon: Or you’re going to be tortured for a while.
Howard: I know which one I like better, but then I prefer happy endings.
Brandon: Where do you want to go? Because the first one allows you to maintain the mystique of Death. “We’re an extradimensional race. We don’t know what happens to the spirit. Like an atom being split, there is energy released and we feed on that, then the spirit goes somewhere.”
Howard: That appeals to me. Maintaining the mystique of the beyond, and that they are feeding off of—
Mary: The passage itself.
Howard: But there has to be a reason why them harvesting is problematic. I like the overfishing sort of—
Dan: It could be that it’s a very druglike reaction for them, and that they have to restrain themselves constantly to avoid becoming addicted. If they have to actively start harvesting us, then the likelihood of addiction becomes much worse. You could even go further into secret history and say, “You know some of these people that your culture considers serial killers? Those are actually some of us who’ve gone rogue and are just complete drug addicts of death.”
Brandon: More secret history that would be cool is if someone, during the Black Plague, discovered the secret of immortality. They created the philosopher’s stone, or whatever it is they’re trying.
Mary: I was looking to see where Ponce de León fell in. Unfortunately not someplace useful in the timeline.
Brandon: But you’d find something in that timeline, I think. Your character could be a scientist, whoever is alive at that time. There’s going to be somebody. Alchemy’s around.
Howard: Depending on the length of the story, I could still work Ponce de León in there. Our protagonist, our corporate guy, says, “Wait. You mean like Ponce de León and the fountain of youth?” “Oh, yes, that was a nice cover story. But it actually happened during the Black Plague with this dude you’ve never heard of.”
Brandon: Or it could just be Ponce de León did, I mean, all this happened, they came to him and made the same deal, and he’s like, “Oh, okay.”
Dan: You could start before Death shows up with that piece and say, “In our research we found that scientist who was close to the secret of immortality, and didn’t take the next step.” And then Death shows up and says, “Actually he did. That’s what caused the Black Plague.”
Mary: So, the counteroffer—Death says, “I’ll let you use it, and I’ll introduce you to this secret cabal of immortal people.”
Brandon: You can become one of the Illuminati, you and your family. I’ll give immortality to you and fifteen people you choose. So it is tempting. Not only do you get immortality, but you get to join this group that is ruling your people.
Howard: Now, I want to have an upbeat ending. In fact, I want to play against the type of “Oh, the corporation discovers something super cool, and gets bought off because somebody makes them a better offer.” I want human immortality to actually get released. I want there to be a win-lose scenario, where we win and Death loses.
Brandon: I like that. That’s very much not where anyone expects this to go.
Dan: So the way that we presented this, we could have Death leave, and the guy at that point reveals the twist, that this secret cabal of immortal people, who have all been contacted by Death throughout history, had seen this coming and got to the CEO first—they’re sick of being bullied around by the aliens, and so they gave him something that will end the rule.
Mary: They have, in fact, been working on this through their entire very long lifetime.
Dan: The whole thing could be a con job on the aliens.
Howard: Now, here is a thought. If Death and his people need to feed, and need to feed in order to survive, then they can die. This guy’s got a team of scientists behind him. It occurred to me that maybe he makes that connection. “Oh, you need to eat to live. Well, if you need to eat to live, then there are things that can kill you. Starvation being one of them. What are the other things? I’m going to look for that, and then when you begin your horrible harvest, we will be armed with—I don’t know—space syringes.”
Mary: But if they eat energy, then all you have to do is come up with corrupting a waveform of some sort.
Dan: I love the idea that this was all preplanned, and it may be that the whole point was to get Death to come and present this guy with the offer, and while he’s there infect him, and he goes back and spreads this infection among the rest of his people.
Brandon: We’re talking about two different stories here, and Howard has to make the call between them. The whole first story is a conversation with Death, and by the end we have the twist ending, and we’ve pulled a con on Death. The conversation has to give us all the foreshadowing with him acting ignorant, then ends with the con. The second story is, Death shows up. There is a short sequence between them. Guy says, “Okay, I’ll think about it.” And then immediately goes into “We’ve got to find a way around this,” and the story is actually a problem story. “We are going to figure out how to defeat these things.” And you write a story about that. One is about the conversation. One is about the problem.
Howard: If I am allowed to write a conversation, I will write and write and write, and you don’t get jack for descriptions, because all I do with Schlock Mercenary is write dialogue anyway. So a story that forces me to block action sequences in prose would be more challenging. Now I’m not saying that the first story isn’t interesti
ng. I love the first story. But let’s crawl out of my comfort zone a little bit.
Mary: But let me also just raise one other flag, which is that those two stories are very different lengths. The first story you can really—
Brandon: You can do that in 2,500 words easy.
Mary: I was going to say 1,500.
Brandon: You see the fantasy writer over here versus the more restrained fantasy writer. But the other one is 7,000.
Dan: The second one, you’re looking at several scenes of research. Potentially very creepy research scenes. Because if you’re trying to figure out what they feed on, then he needs to know what energy is released at the point of death, which means he has to do a lot of analysis of death.
Brandon: The cool direction to go here would be, what are they actually feeding on? What are souls? Is there such a thing?
Mary: He has to contact some ghost hunters.
Brandon: That could be useful.
Howard: Now I’ve got a whole novel, because I roll in the EVP storyline. And this, fair reader, is where novels come from. You have a good idea, and another good idea, and you realize that when they marry they have 400,000 pages’ worth of babies.
Dan: I’m intrigued by this research into death, because there’s a lot of folk science that’s been done on that. People have calculated the weight of a human soul.
Howard: I would love to acknowledge the debunking of all of that in one swoop and say, “Yeah, all of that’s garbage.” I’ve got to reach past that. I’ve got to find something else. One of the things that occurred to me is that in order for Death to appear, he has to manifest himself in some way, which might make him vulnerable.