WIP: LX-2

So for those of you joining me, whatever time that may be, this blog is basically going to be dedicated to me posting snippets of my own writing to get feedback and constructive criticism from the people with whom I share it, and whoever might stumble across it.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to (some of) the many beginnings of LX-2, a sci-fi WIP that I've worked with off-and-on for about three, four years now. I've technically written two out of the four novels, but it's been a few years and let us just say that there is marked improvement in my writing skills since that time. In order to demonstrate this, I thought I might put down a few versions of the opening scene in the book, narrated by a young boy (or an omniscient narrator depending on the version) named Alex. LX-2 is his story. Sort of. You'll get it eventually.

Ver. 1  -

I never thought of the Academy as odd. I didn’t realize that my life there would not be considered “normal.” Sure, the kids never went outside, and yeah, sometimes kids would disappear. But that was all part of the Academy.  Growing up that way, I didn’t even realize that my circumstances should be considered “odd.” So it never seemed odd to me,  not even the fact that all the kids were called “projects,” or that I never knew who my parents were.   Still, I’d never been around adults who didn’t call kids “projects,” and no other kids knew their parents either.  How was I supposed to know that it was weird?  These circumstances, deemed “odd” by most people, seemed more natural to me than “real life.”

No one in the Academy had any true siblings, but there were kids who chose to develop relationships, adopting each other as siblings.  Aside from the mutually adopted siblings, kids generally ended up in one of two categories: the “friendly” kids who were affable but didn’t care to have a brother or sister, and the occasional loner. 

Personally, I like the idea of having a sibling. I even have a brother: Matt. He is officially the coolest kid in the entire Academy, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother. Everyone loves Matt, but no one ever asked him to be their brother. In fact, I didn’t even ask Matt to be my brother; he asked me.  So I ended up with the most awesome brother in the world: Matt. Matt is awesome, even if he is a little bit of a worry wart. While we both had a lot of friends, the bond of our brotherhood ran much deeper. Having Matt there for me meant a lot in a place like the Academy.

Besides those who had siblings, there were the kids who preferred life without a sibling. Most of the Academy kids fell into this category, including my best friends: Ari, Jayden, Ellie and Squirt (whose real name is Ray).  Finally, there were the loners. Few and far between, the loners were usually the older kids who decided to reject any relationships and break any bonds of friendship they‘d forged, figuring that they would be better off flying solo. Generally speaking, the loners were really quiet and would rarely converse with another kid… or they were like Scott.

Scott was a loner among loners. He was a freak; absolutely no one liked him. When he sat down to eat, he got a whole table to himself because no one wanted to sit near him… probably because they were scared stiff of the guy.  Scott was, to put it simply, demonic. He hated anyone that moved, and made sure they knew he hated them. Most of the loners, even bully loners, were nowhere near as bad as Scott. He was the epitome of a bully loner, and everyone, even Matt, was afraid of him. I had a bit of a history with Scott, in addition to being his preferred punching bag.

I guess that’s why, when everything I thought I knew about Scott was turned on its head, I didn't know what to think. After all, it never occurred to me that my tormentor would end up becoming my best friend.

Personally I consider this not bad (trust me, there is bad stuff out there, it's just mostly too old to even retrieve), this was technically the first revision of the story, since the original copy is in a format that microsoft word 2013 can't open (WHERE IS THE BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY, MICROSOFT??? WHERE???) . Most of my terrible writing is in formats I can no longer open, and to be honest its half relief and half frustrating because as bad as those versions were, I got my ideas down on paper. They were  (SUPPOSED TO BE) immortalized. Maybe someday a computer person will be able to rescue them for me. In the meantime I suppose I'll just cry inconsolably at the ideas locked away in terrible stories that i can never re-read.

Ver. 2 - 

The entire world is full of things that need to be fixed. The economy. Political systems. Society at large.

But most importantly, people need fixing.

Not all people need fixed in the same way. Some have small problems, speech impediments, learning disabilities, tone-deafness. Some have problems controlling their emotions, their thoughts, their words. Some people have problems rooted in their very core, their DNA.

My name is Alex. I have a problem too.

I see other people’s problems.

Even from a young age, I could tell when something wasn’t quite right with a person. I knew what the problem stemmed from and what it would do unchecked. But I didn’t know how to fix it, which made me miserable. Even in a place where I had very few interactions with strangers, it drove me crazy. Knowledge of people’s problems shredded my concentration, even though I could do nothing for them—because that was my problem.  I knew when something was wrong, but I couldn’t fix it.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to fix these problems.  Sometimes they could be solved through medical intervention, but I didn’t have the necessary training and experience. Other times, a simple word or gesture might have been enough, but I never knew what to say or do. In other cases, all they needed was a supportive listener, but I didn’t know how to shut up.  

Sometimes, a person couldn’t be fixed because they didn’t want to be fixed.

But that didn’t keep me from wanting to fix them.

 

This version was mostly me trying to understand Alex a little better. I'm not sure where this came from, but I knew i liked the concept. I also thought I wasn't quite there yet, and that I hadn't quite explained everything in the way I wanted it. I felt like it was missing something, so I tried again.
 

Ver. 3 -

To this very day I despise the color gray.

Everything in The Academy was gray: food trays, floors, walls, doors, ceilings, tables, benches, bunks…

It was all gray.

The only brightness in The Academy came from kids’ jumpsuits, which were such a garish orange they made my eyes water. I’d seen pictures of Earth. It was beautiful, a blue sky filled with white fluffy clouds drifting above rolling green grass. And although the clouds were sometimes gray, it was a pretty gray. A natural gray.  The Academy, a lone structure adrift in the coldness of space, was not natural. Neither was the gray.

The only other color in The Academy came from the various kids that lived within the confines of its gray. Skin color, hair color, eye color, at least there was variation somewhere. But it was no more natural than the space station’s glossy gray walls.

I could say my name is Alex, but that’s not quite true. My name is derived from a series number, LX-2. I am what some might call a “project”.  Despite the fact that I considered myself a person, I knew that someday, the LX project would be marked a success, and I would be cancelled. On the other hand, I didn’t intend to stick around long enough for that to happen.  Someone I cared about had a problem I needed to solve. Matt, my older brother, was in trouble. His time was growing really short. 

Living on a space station, there’s no way to escape if you’re supposed to be cancelled. And there’s no room for mercy in the cold emptiness of space.

That’s what the Supervisors, or Supes, wanted us to think. I was going to prove them wrong.  If I could only ever fix one problem in my whole lifetime, it would be Matt’s. He deserved more than 15 years in a floating gray box. He deserved a life.

I needed to fix his problem.  I wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise.

Again, this also said part of what I wanted to say, but still didn't get directly at what I wanted to say. Finally, today, I think I've written up the closest approximation of what I want to be said in the beginning of the book to date. That's not to say I won't re-write it again, because I probably will. But for now, it's the beginning I'm most proud of, and so I'll share it here.

Ver. 4 -

The universe is vast, terrifying, and mostly empty.  That’s what my textbooks say, that the universe is just wide reaches of void, a vast blanket of emptiness with a few flecks of matter, radiation, life – just barely clinging to that expanse of nothingness.

The universe is vast, terrifying, and mostly empty. At least, that’s what most people would say. To me, the universe is full. Full of things that need to be fixed.

A world, destroyed by overpopulation and pollution.

Another world, undergoing the long process of becoming a new home.  

The political ties between the four major continental space stations, frayed by overextended resources and a terraforming process that’s taking too long.

But most importantly, people need fixing.

Not all people need fixed in the same way. Some have small problems: speech impediments, learning disabilities, tone-deafness. Some have problems controlling their emotions, their thoughts, their words. Some people have problems rooted in their very core, their DNA.

My name is Alex. I have a problem too.

I see other people’s problems.

For as long as I can remember, I’d always known when something wasn’t quite right with a person. I knew what the problem stemmed from, what it could do unchecked, but I never knew how to fix the problem.  Because that was my problem, and it haunted me every waking moment. From the moment the earliest impressions of consciousness nudge their way into my mind as I awaken until they gently drift away in sleep, my first conscious thought is always ‘I’m broken and I can’t fix it’. It’s one thing to always be aware of everyone else’s shortcomings, to see them slowly spiral downward, to watch them break slowly in just the way you predicted. It’s another thing entirely to watch it happen to yourself. And the longer I remained aware of an entire world of problems, the more I watched my own psyche fracture day by day with the knowledge that I couldn’t fix the world and therefore I would never be able to fix myself.  

It wasn’t that I didn’t know, on an academic level, how to fix any of the problems that surrounded me on a daily basis.  Sometimes they could be solved through medical intervention, a simple word or gesture, maybe just a supportive listener.  But I didn’t have medical training, I could never find the right words to say or the courage to say something, and when someone needed me to listen all I could hear was the discordant sounds of a world slowly falling apart around me.

But the worst was always the person who wouldn’t be fixed, the person who knew as well as I did that he was slowly falling apart. But unlike me, he didn’t see it as a curse. He embraced it. Welcomed it. He didn’t want to be fixed.

At least, that’s what I always thought.

I wish I could say I didn’t hate him, but he made it easy.

In the early days life seemed so much simpler: opening my eyes when the Supe shook me awake, putting on the garish orange jumpsuit and shuffling down the hall to the where Med Center Techs were waiting, a finger prick, the retinal scan, height measure, weight check, “how do you feel about yourself today?”, and then off to the Nutrition Center.  Every morning the cool gray walls would close in on me, and for a moment the Academy would feel like a giant prison. Then I would remember that everyone I knew and loved grew up in the exact same place. That The Academy was a normal, healthy place to grow up. The panic would subside.

I’d push open the double doors to the Nutrition Center, walk to the nearest dispenser, and punch in my code. I would wait impatiently for it to dispense the correct amount of supposedly nutritious pasty-colored slop. Sometimes if it took too long to connect to the food server I would glance anxiously over my shoulder. Eventually the dispenser would give me my slop and electrolyte water. I would turn around. Try to find a seat. Hope he wouldn’t find me. That he was late today. That he would find a new target.

Then it would start. Maybe I would hear that telltale footstep. The slight squeak of double doors. A harsh breath. Every part of me would freeze and my heart rate would kick into high gear, my breath coming in shorter bursts. I would tense my shoulders, clench my gut. Feel sick even though I hadn’t touched my food yet.

And then the first beating of the day would commence.

I like this version best because it gets at the core of Alex's motivations, helps me understand him as a character better - how do you live as a person who constantly sees the worst of people, but also sees how the worst in people makes them miserable? Do you hate them? Do you pity them? And how do you rectify the person who knows they're destroying their own life and yet continues down that path anyway. It's an interesting, painful, and timeless question. I intend this series to be young adult/juvenile fiction, not sure exactly where on the scale it will end up falling, but I want this series to address questions and concerns about deep, internal motivations and the sorts of questions and fears that real young people have. Questions like 'what do I do when a friend is in a self-destructive spiral,' or 'how do i get along with flawed people,' and even 'how do i come to grips with my own failures?'  I think they're important questions and get at driving motivations behind people's lives. I'm looking forward to continuing this rewrite and delving deeper into those questions that we ask as we grow up, and maybe even finding some answers.