by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
Mary: This is one of those scenarios where I feel like the bad guy’s plan is too complicated. “I need to convince them to not do this”? Up to the point of “Let’s stop this,” that plan all makes perfect sense. The plan of “Let’s kill all of these guys” is, forgive me, really really stupid. Because if you can materialize anywhere?
Brandon: You can just smash up all their computers and their equipment, for one thing.
Mary: Then you materialize in their bedrooms at night and kill them in their sleep. Smother them with pillows.
Brandon: Or you materialize in their bedroom while they’re going to sleep and say, “I’m Death. Let’s prove it. Go and lock yourself in any room you want, and I will appear there. I can prove to you I am Death, now stop what you’re doing.”
Howard: See, that’s one of the problems I’m up against, because I was trying to define—for lack of a better term—a power set. Why don’t they just materialize everywhere? What is the cost for them of materializing and dematerializing? It’s got to be something beyond the risk of being seen. I also did some research into death imagery, and I wanted to play with the fact that they look like our classic representations of Death. That’s cool. But those classic representations are in the last 800–900 years, so either they haven’t always been around, or this isn’t what they’ve always looked like. But once I start opening all these cans of worms, the story gets bigger and bigger, and that’s not what I wanted.
Brandon: I think you’re just fine saying they discovered our plane right about the time these depictions of Death started appearing. That solves a lot of your problems there. But the bigger problem is how do we end this? Eric, you’ve been quiet for a bit, and you’re really good at this stuff. Do you have any advice?
Eric: Part of the problem is, how is the main character going to be involved in solving this problem?
Howard: I hadn’t actually gotten around to describing that. The way I’d imagined it is that the main character, whether he is disarmed or sent from the room, realizes, “Oh, this is a scenario that someone has potentially planned for. Those people are now all in that room without protection, and I’ve identified a threat that can materialize anywhere. I need to be back in that room.”
Brandon: I think Mary’s argument that they can materialize in the bedrooms at night is really a big deal for this story.
Mary: This may be one of those places where you actually have to rejigger your middle a little bit. It might be that this big scene that we have happening in the office gets shifted to a bedroom.
Brandon: Right, or you can rejigger it so that their experiments with the immortality stuff involve the creatures’ home plane. Because of the science that’s going on in this lab, this causes the creatures to manifest here. They have broken open this plane, so it’s not just chemical. This changes your story a lot, but it gives you a connection there. But that’s me, I’m looking for a magic system explanation; this is what I do. Then fixing it is a matter of “If they can only manifest here, what do we do? Anywhere we’re going to use this they manifest, so we come up with a solution that causes that they can’t manifest where we’re doing our research.”
Howard: The original version of the ending, that leapt to mind as the story came to me while I was driving, is that there is a fight and we realize that we can kill them. We somehow realize what their plan is and that their numbers have bloated hugely as our numbers have gone up, because there is so much food. Now there are maybe millions of them who can appear at will, and will need to in order to eat. So we are going to give humanity immortality, and now we need to arm you because you’re going to have to fight for it.
Brandon: That’s a cool ending. I like that.
Howard: I just need to figure out how to get there.
Mary: You don’t have to work so hard to get there. All you need for that ending is for your alien to appear, and for there to be a firefight, and for the alien to be killed. That’s all you need. You already have everything in place, so you don’t need to get your good guys out of the room, don’t need to do—
Brandon: You need to do a “find out” on the alien. Have your good guy make the call, “I’m going to go to his house at night; one of these things is going to show up and I’m going to shoot it in the head” or something like Mary suggested earlier, which could be a valid way to go about this. The discovery that needs to be made is that these are aliens, and this is what they do.
Mary: If you want to do something with—have them look at the tape and notice, “This thing occurs right before he appears. This gives us a warning signal.” Rather than have our guy push a panic button.
Howard: Was that UV scatter? I forget.
Mary: If UV scatter is happening, or look at the way he’s looking at things. “We suspect that he’s only seeing in this spectrum,” or something.
Brandon: Right, and the other thing that you have going on here is that it looked right at the camera, so it saw them. What can it see and what can’t it see? Can it see you because it was watching the room and it didn’t get distracted by this thing? If you palm the thing and stick it somewhere less obvious? If there were two cameras and it only spotted one of them, it tells you something about the alien that you can use. You need some sort of information about the alien that can be exploited.
Mary: And something in our main character’s area of competence, which would be about threat assessment. If all the scientists are looking at it and saying, “Well, it’s alien,” and he says, “Screw that, this thing doesn’t have binocular vision,” or something.
Howard: And that’s exactly what I’m trying to set up. He approaches this from a threat assessment angle. They come close to threat assessment when they’re talking about game theory and trying to understand what the motivation would possibly be for this sort of a scam.
Brandon: Using the theme of the story, I kind of like the ending being him rushing in someplace and shooting the thing, just because it matches the first scene so well.
Mary: It could be, “Clearly this thing wants to talk to you.” The only time this thing appears is when this room is empty or when Wollreich is in it by himself. Let’s set up a scenario where—
Brandon: You could have a “Let’s interview the alien” scene where it says, “All right, we’re going to talk.”
Howard: I like that because part of what that can give me is a scene break in which a lot of the discussion among the brain trust—
Mary: Happens offstage.
Howard: Right. One of the problems I had is that I wanted all of this information to be revealed, and I wanted to show instead of telling. But I had too much information for one character to have it all, and too many characters for a short story to work. But if I can roll that offscreen and have somebody say, “Wollreich, we need you to be in the office by yourself, here’s the list of questions, and let’s see if this thing comes in.” And our hero has not told anybody that his threat assessment is “When this thing appears, I’m going to let Wollreich start talking, and then I’m going to kick down the door and shoot it in the head.”
Brandon: And see if it dies. We do have to wrap up; hopefully this was useful for you. You can see, this kind of story is really hard to give feedback on in a writing group, because it’s not done. It’s the same sort of problem we had with my story where my ending was not the right ending, and we kept searching for it and it was through the session that I got closer. But it’s tough. We’ll have to see how you do.
Howard: This discussion has shown me the corner I had painted myself into is shaped differently than I thought it was, and the part that I thought was a wall might be a door.
EDITS: AN HONEST DEATH
HOWARD TAYLER
The chirp in my earbud means that Sinclair Wollreich has pushed the panic button in his office. I slide my sidearm clear of its shoulder -holster and point it at the floor in front of me in less than a second. Barry and Mohammed have theirs out and down as well, and the three of us run for
the office door. I nod at Barry, who grabs the door handle and pulls the door open, stepping clearback as Mo and I sweep straight into the room.
In, and to the left. My side is clear.
“Clear,” says Mo, and I reply, “cClear!”
I can hear Barry swings in behind and between us, a third set of eyes on a room that is empty except for our boss.
Mister. Wollreich looks pale, like he’s seen a ghost, or maybe just jumped back onto the curb after being missed by a bus. Other than that he looks fine—middle-aged, and a little soft, but dressed to the nines in a suit that costs more than my car.
“What is it, sir?” I ask.
“It’s . . .” hHe glances around, still wearing that I-dodged-a-bullet-but-maybe-there’s-another-one-coming look., and tThen he turns and looks me in the eye, and for only the third time in the eighteen months I’ve worked for him, he lies to me. “It’s nothing, Cole. Just a drill.”
Mo makes that noise that means he’s barelymouths the word “inconceivable,” quoting The Princess Bride in order to stifleing a stream of blasphemy.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “Let’s finish like it’s the real thing, then. Mo, take the corners. Barry, window. I’ll check the desk.”
“Cole,” Wollreich addresses me again, “It’s okay. I just wanted to see how quickly you guys could get here. I think you took four seconds.”
Liar. Also, that was seven seconds, at least. I don’t know what he’s hiding, but my brain is already spinning scenarios. Something scared him, something he thought we could protect him from, but by the time we arrived it was gone. Or maybe it had never been here. Maybe Sinclair Wollreich hallucinated something frightening, and is now covering up for that hallucination. That . . . that makes a lot of sense. He doesn’t strike me as the hallucinating type, but he is the head of a pharmaceutical company, so maybe he’s on something.
Regardless, he pushed the panic button, and that means I don’t get to stand down until I’m sure he’s safe. He lied to me, very uncharacteristically, and that means his safety may be in question from an unusual angleworries me.
“Sorry, sir. You’re feigning duress pretty effectively. We have to finish the sweep, and put our eyes on everything.”
Barry looks at me from behind Wollreich, and I nod. Eyes on everything is his cue for some impromptu misdirection. He holsters his weapon, pulls a chair over to the window, and steps onto it as if to check the upper frame. He balances poorly—deliberately poorly—on the chair, and begins to fall.
“Oops, watch out!” he says as he corrects and jumps clear of the tipping chair.
Wollreich turns, and also steps clear.
Mo, in the far corner of the room, reaches up and sticks a cam-dot on the spot where the molding joins the ceiling, a position where it can see the entire room while remaining almost invisibley unobtrusive.
By design, Wollreich’s office has no cameras in it by design. I objected to this on general principles a year and a half ago, but backed down. Now it does have a camera in it. Just because I backed down doesn’t mean I didn’t plan for contingencies.
“First day in the new shoes, Barry?” asks Mo.
“Actually, it’s the fourth day, but I’m trying new inserts today and I don’t think I like them.”
“Secure the chatter, guys,” I say, scolding them. Part of the act.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Wollreich. His face has returned to normal. “The way you came through that door, you startled me even though I knew you were coming. You guys looked like you were straight out of an action movie—one of the good ones where they get everything right.”
“They never get everything right, sir,” I say. “But thank you.”
“No, thank you, Cole. It’s apparent that I’m not paying you or your team enough. I think a fifteen -percent raise is in order. I’ll send word to HR.”
That wasn’t a lie. That was him committing to the earlier lie with a bribe, which means, if I’m reading him correctly, that he knows I know he lied, and he wants to talk to me in private about why he really pushed the button.
“Thank you, sir,” I respondsay.
“Very generous, sir. Sorry about the chair thing,” says Barry.
“I’ll make sure Barry spends his bonus on better inserts,” says Mo.
“We’ll leave you to your business, sir.” And we do.
Out in the anteroom, which does have cameras, I screen Mo as he sits down at the edge of the camera’s field of vision and reaches around and under the chair. The receiver he plants against the wall looks exactly like a wall -plate.
I check my phone’s Bluetooth list, and “GENERIC HEADSET” appears on the list. I select it, and punch in my phone number, and it vanishes from the list. Just like it’s supposed to.
#
I’ve been in this business a long time. When I started I was twenty-five, and thought that after a tour of duty with the Marines, facing down the occasional rambunctious citizen would be a piece of cake. I wasn’t sure what I wanted out of life, but being shot at less seemed like a good start.
Ten years later I’d figured out that private security guys do tend to get shot at less than combat zone marines, but they still get shot at, and it’s even harder to tell where the shot is going to come from. I still didn’t know what I wanted out of life, but I’d saved the lives of a few people who did know.
I’m forty-four now, and I guess the fact that I’m still doing this means I’m done looking for meaning in my own life, and have settled for protecting the meaning in others. And Wollreich is the best man I’ve ever worked for.
That afternoon, Wollreich calls me into his office.
“Sir?” I ask.
“Take a seat, Cole,” Wollreich says.
I sit, and wait for Wollreich to speak.
“You know that wasn’t just a drill earlier?”
“Yes, sir. Something scared you. What was it?”
“Probably a hallucination. There was somebody in my office. I looked up, sensing movement I guess, and then hit the panic button when I didn’t recognize the intruder. I think he was about to speak, but as soon as I hit the panic button he vanished.”
“Vanished how, sir?”
“Like a screen -wipe.” Wollreich is describing a Power Point transition. I know exactly what that looks like, having been a captive audience for more than a few of them. “Except,” he continues after a moment, “there was some dissolve to it as well. As if, from top to bottom, the interudloper was evaporatinged. Only faster than that.”
He’s not lying to me.
I’m not sure exactly how I know thishe’s not lying, but I think it’s something I’ve been able to do for my entire adult life. Kkind of like how some people always know where there’s a speed -trap. There are cues out there to be read, but I’m reading them unconsciously. It’s not a hundred -percent accurate at first, but once I’ve spent enough time with somebody I’m never wrong.
“I believe you, sir.”
“You believe it happened, or you believe that I saw what I’m telling you I saw?”
“I believe your account of the event, sir. You’re not making this up. I suspect you’re also concerned. Concerned for your own sanity, and for your position here with the company.”
He blows out the breath he’d been half -holding.
“There’s mor
e to it than that, Cole. I’m concerned that this may be a side -effect. How much have you been told about our upcoming product lines?”
“We’re approaching the approval phase of a ‘vaccination’ against Alzheimer’s, we’re in late-stage testing on a Ttelomerase regulator that promises to prevent a large percentage of cancers, and we’ve just gotten approval for an HIV treatment.”
“Very succinct.”
“That’s a summary of what I’ve been told, sir. I can tell there’s something else going on, and that I’m not supposed to be in on the secret.”
He sits back in his chair, steeples his fingers, and purses his lips.
“Are you?So, what Hhave you figured it out?”
“Nothing, sir. ButAnd if you’re about to let me in on the secret, please keep in mind that if the information is valuable enough, a competitor may be willing to kill to get it. You’re paying me and my team quite well, but if you’re sitting on a billion dollars’ worth of information, my threat assessment will change, we’ll have to hire more people, and everybody will get paid more.”
“So be it. Cole, the drug interaction between these three products is going to extend human lifespan, maybe by about an full order of magnitude. Old-age deterioration is going to go away. You and I will live to see the twenty-second century, and I’m not betting against seeing the thirtieth.”
I think about that for a moment. If this is true . . .
“Sir, are you sure this works?”
“Quite sure. We’ve tested it extensively, ingot a lab full of eight-year-old white mice, and we’re three years into some secret trials on in-house volunteers. Including me. We were ninety-five percent sure before we started those tests two years agoI’ve never felt better, and my eyesight has improved as the lenses in my eyes regained their youthful flexibility.”