by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
How smart, though? Can it predict our behavior? Has it been observing us, and learning about us? If so, it must know that Wollreich’s team won’t just shut the project down. It might even know that they’d blame me and my team, and shoo us out of the office to the far side of the soundproof doors. . . .
Both cups are poisoned.
I draw my pistol and turn for the office door.
“Everybody, my position.”
It doesn’t matter what the brain trust decides. What matters is that they gather where they can be separated from their security. And if I’m wrong? I hope I am wrong, really.
I fumble the number on the keypad and get an angry beep. That’s something I should have practiced more.
“Roger. All call to forty. Hang in there, boss.” Right in my ear.
I fumble the number again, adding a forty right in the middle. I definitely should have practiced this more.
On my third attempt the door unlocks with a click. Weapon up, I throw the door open to the sound of screaming.
There is a shadow in the middle of the room, a shadow swinging a scythe.
The Intruder is ready for me, lunging. That scythe is swinging my way, and I have no doubts at all regarding its lethality. But unlike that damned keypad this is something I’ve trained myself to do. I focus on the center of mass, and squeeze off my first shot.
The Intruder staggers at the impact, lunge interrupted. My pistol returns to position, the recoil compensated for by rehearsed reflex.
I squeeze off the second shot just as the scythe swings into view, missing my face by inches. The round strikes the elbow joint, which explodes in light and sound, like a flash-bang grenade, but made out of purple and bells.
It’s not blinding or deafening, but as I squeeze off my third shot, the headshot, I realize that my target is not where it was supposed to be. The Intruder has tucked and crumpled into a dark heap, and my third shot spalls into the bulletproof glass of the window.
I step into the room, sweeping for threats. Wollreich is crouched behind the end of his desk, the opposite end from where the panic button is concealed. Michel is under a chair in the corner. Kurtzman, Lee, and the two biologist types are all sprawled unmoving and bloody on the floor.
“Cole! What—”
Wollreich is cut off by a burst of static noise, and by more screaming as the room starts to fill with shadows.
I dive toward Wollreich and feel a tug at the collar of my suit. The shadows resolve into two more Intruders, scythes swinging.
My Glock 30 has a ten-round magazine. Seven of those rounds remain. I double-tap the nearest Intruder, and then put a third round through its pale face. It drops. I hip-check Wollreich to the ground as I spin toward the second, only to find a third much closer, the one whose scythe must have grazed my suit collar.
Double-tap, and one to the face. That one’s down too.
Taking nothing but headshots is a trick for video game junkies. That’s not what I’ve trained for, but the last Intruder’s pale, dinner-plate-size face is an easier target than its shadow-shrouded center of mass, and I only have one round left.
I focus on that face as the Intruder rushes me, and then I fire. Its head rocks back, those weird arm and leg joints splay out almost spiderlike, and then it drops motionless.
I eject the empty magazine and reload. Reflex. I step around the table. Wollreich and Michel are fine, but the other four are slashed up and lie completely still. They look cold, like they’ve been dead for hours under the fresh blood. Those scythes must do more than just cut.
“My God, Cole . . . How did you know?”
“Strong hunch, but I d idn’t know anything. I was ready for you to fire me for barging in.”
There is another burst of static. It’s coming from the shuddering lump of darkness that is the original Intruder. That’s right, I missed its head. But I did hit something important, because it hasn’t teleported out of here.
I step over to it and put my foot on the scythe blade.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
There’s more static, and then it clears and we’re back to an auto-tuned Christopher Lee.
“We are the Angels of Death. We shepherd you to—”
“Oh, shut up!” says Wollreich. “You’re no shepherd! You murdered four people!”
I still don’t have a read on this thing, but I’m pretty sure it’s lying.
“Talk,” I say, gesturing with my pistol.
It hisses with static, and then speaks.
“We number in the millions. Your deaths sustain us. Our population has grown with yours, alongside yours. If you stop dying, we starve. If we cannot pick up fallen fruit, we will have to shake the tree.”
It’s telling the truth. I’m sure of it. Maybe there’s more to my gift than the ability to read facial cues.
“You’re done shaking trees. We know you’re out there,” Wollreich says.
“You know nothing. We can strike anywhere, at any time. We can see you, from our side. There will be a brief, bloody war, and then we will shepherd the rest of you more carefully. This will not be the first time we have culled in order to feed.”
“Except this time you tried to negotiate,” I say. “There are a lot of us, and we’re smarter and tougher than we’ve ever been. You tried diplomacy and subterfuge because war is expensive.”
I should know. I was in Afghanistan, fighting an actual land war in Asia. I smile.
Failalo shouts into my headset. “Cole! Intruders in the data center! They look like Death, sir.”
I can hear gunshots in the background. Gunshots and screaming. “Grab your stuff and stay with me, gentlemen,” I say to Wollreich and Michel. “We’re not done.”
This war is going to be more expensive than the one in Asia, but I think this time I may actually get to save the world.
WRITING AN HONEST DEATH
HOWARD TAYLER
It started with an idea. What if something perched, like a predator, between human beings and the afterlife? What if it fed on us as we went toward the light? What if that trip was actually dangerous?
Then, of course, I began thinking about the ecology of such a system, and how these predators would die off if we made a leap forward in life extension.
We brainstormed that idea a bit during an episode of Writing Excuses, and my first draft of the story had the CEO as the viewpoint character. It was kind of tongue-in-cheek, and began as follows:
When the guy dressed as Death showed up in my office I did what any sensible person would do. I punched the “security” button on my comm center and said “eviction, please.” I hadn’t seen how the costumed freak got in, but I was going to watch him leave.
But the farther in I got, the less compelling the protagonist was. CEOs are very interesting people, but a large portion of their work involves thinking and then talking to people, so this story was going to end up being all dialogue, and was feeling kind of expository. Kind of like “Hey, I had this clever idea, and my CEO character is here to tell you about it.”
So I drafted it again with the bodyguard as the viewpoint character, and suddenly I had solutions to several problems. First, I no longer needed to be as smart as a CEO who is managing a brain trust of expert futurists. Second, I now had somebody onscreen who had a reason to have stuff explained to him. And third, I had guns.
This volume contains a draft of the
story which did not yet have its ending in place. We critiqued that version during an episode of Writing Excuses (for which you also have a transcript), [I think it doesn’t, but for the ebook we’ll put hyperlinks in]and the upshot of all that stuff is that when I reached the end of that draft I still had a problem. Specifically, I had no reason for the Intruder to ever be honest. Nobody was in place who would explain my spooky Death-as-a-predator idea to the reader, and that had been the whole point of the story.
And that, ultimately, was what led to the fix. I began working backward. Why would the Intruder spill the beans? Possibly because it was injured and angry. But if it were injured, why wouldn’t it teleport home? Probably because its teleporting widget got damaged.
So I wrote the Intruder’s closing dialogue. From there I began reverse engineering the Intruder’s actual plan, which I’d already figured had to do with getting all of the right people in one room, but which didn’t seem to scan correctly until I began thinking about just how expensive a war is.
From there I had two more hurdles to clear. The first was our main character’s motivation, and the second was the order of events that led to him leaving the room. I’ll start with that second one: the solution was simple. I grabbed a couple of blocks of text and moved them earlier in the story, and then wordsmithed the seams. The motivation though, that was more difficult.
Then I remembered something a friend of mine told me about his decision to join the military, and his disillusionment upon leaving. That rang true, and the moment I wrote the words “save the world” in Cole’s mini-biography I knew I had the payoff for my ending. All I had to do then was tie it to something in the middle, and oh! A land war in Asia was waiting right there for me.
The process I’ve described here seems like the sort of thing that should have taken about a week for 7,500 words. Thanks to the despair inherent in the realization that a story is broken forever and cannot be saved but my friends need it for the anthology and maybe I could write something else but that’s cheating and this is so haaaaard . . . thanks to that, An Honest Death took about eighteen months to go from idea to finished product. The writing sessions where I broke through the blocks and fixed things? Those lasted about four hours each.
Also by HOWARD TAYLER
The Comic Space Opera
Schlock Mercenary
Short Fiction
Flight of the Runewright
Fall of the Runewrought
Extraordinary Zoology
Scrap Ante
Mouths to Feed
Call of the Caber
THE MAKING OF SIXTH OF THE DUSK
WRITING EXCUSES 8.16
BRAINSTORMING WITH BRANDON
(Listen on WritingExcuses.com)
Brandon: I want to try brainstorming another story for me to write, using something from the writing prompt at the end of last week’s episode: “psychic birds.” The idea of a little bird that you keep on your shoulder—that gives you some sort of psychic or magical bonus because of how it evolved—is fascinating to me. We mentioned keeping away hunters. When the bird is on your shoulder, the hunters that sense for empathy, emotion, or mental thoughts can’t find you; you’re invisible to them. I also thought of all sorts of other birds, such as ones that give you ESP to let you see when your eyes are closed—different breeds of birds on a planet where humans have landed. Where can we go with that? We need a plot.
Mary: The way I approach things like this is to first do a little bit of worldbuilding. You’ve already got some of how they’re used, but who’s going to be most at jeopardy from this? I start tossing out things like: You’re going to have bird trainers. You’ll have bird breeders, users, brokers. You’re going to have a restaurant owner who has to deal with people coming in with birds that will poop on the floor. I just start tossing this type of thing out there.
Brandon: So, I’m interested in an explorer who has a psychic bird. I like the idea that this is a frontier sort of thing.
Dan: When you talked about human settlers who have landed on a planet and have adopted these native birds, the first place my mind went was: Do the birds still work when you take them off the planet, and do they then become a galactic commodity that everybody wants?
Mary: Yes, or do they need group collective in order to work?
Howard: We’ve got a frontier planet where for the last fifteen years we’ve had an explosion in the proliferation and use of these birds. How do the birds feel about this? Part of our story is the discovery that there is a bird collective intelligence. I don’t want to say hive mind, but maybe it’s similar to that. Up until now the collective intelligence has felt, “Cooperating with humans and helping humans is good because our numbers are increasing. You’re helping us keep predators away by adding to our senses. But now something that you’re doing is not good for us. “
Brandon: That’s a very cool way to go. I want them to be animal intelligence—I’m just going to throw that out there. I really do like the idea of “Can they work off planet?” and maybe saying, “No, they can’t right now,” but there is a lot of interest in “Can we get these things to work?”
Mary: So then you’ve got a trader who would be very interested in getting them to work.
Brandon: Yes, that’s definitely a possibility there.
Dan: If you have the ESP bird or a mind-reader bird, then whatever galactic government you have, everybody is going to want one of those.
Mary: So we’ve got a couple of possible characters there. The next question to ask is, what are the implications of this?
Brandon: That’s going to depend on the scope. For some reason I keep trying in my head to push this toward fantasy, even though we’ve talked the whole time as if it’s science fiction.
Dan: Going back to fantasy, I love the idea that one person could have several birds, but they can only pick one at a time. So they would have a dovecote or something where they keep twenty different birds and have to choose, “Which one am I going to slot into this mixture?”
Howard: Another possibility is that for whatever reason, you can only have one bird at once, and yet there is somebody who has managed two birds. The second bird is psychically unlinked, but will psychically link to somebody who’s standing close to you, and give you the ability through your bird to read minds. So we have somebody who has broken the rules and has become the worst sort of spy.
Brandon: He’s hacking your bird and you.
Howard: The second bird is a little pocket bird—it’s a baby of the bird on his shoulder, which is why he’s able to do this.
Brandon: I’m liking that a lot. Let’s push this more fantasy. What if it’s a “new world” sort of thing? We’ve discovered these birds. We can’t get them shipped; they die if they leave the continent for some reason. So we can have that whole interplay. We could have an explorer trying to figure out where this new bird came from.
Dan: It could be just that there’s a new breed of bird. If they’re explorers, there could be another tribe or a city where they have bred this new kind of bird that none of the other colonists are aware of yet.
Brandon: Okay, what’s our ending?
Mary: Personally I think you’re jumping way, way—
Brandon: I build my books around endings. When we did the other brainstorming episodes with you, I was always jumping to “What’s the ending? Where are we going?” And I couldn’t really see the story until I saw how it ends.
Mary: Right, but one of the things that I was asking when I was saying, “What are the implications?” is that knowing those allows you to ask, “How can it get worse?” That then becomes “How can we resolve this? What are the possible endings?” One of the other things in looking at possible endings is, what do your characters want? I feel like if it were me doing this, I wouldn’t have enough groundwork laid before I could start jumping to endings. I could have the ending be the bird dies. Or the bird lays a double-yolked egg and for the first time people can have two birds at once. Or the avian flu c
omes and you can no longer carry the bird because it’s going to kill everybody. There’s so many different endings.
Howard: You mentioned avian flu. Maybe our protagonist is a doctor and the bird helps her be a better doctor through recognizing the pain of the people around her. She can more accurately gauge where it hurts, and as a result is a fantastic doctor. Then we have a plague that is sweeping through the city and she is trying to figure out why people are getting sick, what the problem is. Our ending is the discovery that there is a parasite living in the bird poop, and we have to kill all our birds.
Brandon: That just sparked me on something else. What if what’s giving them the psychic power is not the birds but the parasite? So the twist is that we’re using the birds like a parasite. We’re symbiotic with the bird, but this has already happened. The birds figured it out first—it’s the worms that the birds eat. The story can be that when we first catch these birds in the wild it’s great. We get all these powers, but then the ones we raise—
Mary: Don’t have the power.
Howard: The ones we raise don’t work.
Brandon: The explorers all think, “Oh, it must be something about the bird society,” and he’s out trying to find that. And the ending is that it’s the worms, and if we just give ourselves the worms we could actually—
Mary: We don’t need those birds.
Brandon: But then he wonders, “Do I tell people, because the birds are cute and awesome!” I think that’s a cool ending right there, because it plays up the theme of the symbiosis. We’ve created the symbiotic relationship that people love their birds, but—
Dan: It’s really the worms the birds have.
Brandon: Let’s explore this more now. In my mind we have a rudimentary plot. This is what’s going to happen. Where that ending goes I still don’t know, but that’s fine. Whether it is that he or she discovers this and doesn’t want to tell people. I want to work into it that it is a real moral quandary. Maybe we should talk about who the character is. What suggestions do we have? I like the explorer aspect. The question I end up with is that I don’t know if I want a solitary person out there talking to the bird. Maybe I do.