Scribblers' Haven discussion

Hey there companions,

My name is Diogo and I am an unpublished author who loves Science Fiction and writes mostly in that genre.

I would like to share with you the introductory words of my last space opera short story, just for the kicks you know?

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"Avast yer bloody scallywags, ye have crossed captain Blackjack's path for the first and last time. Prepare to be boarded." Blackjack was gazing at the video feed behind the white mist formed by suspended fluid droplets inside Rising Star's regulated atmosphere, thrilled by his recent discovery. He had been exploring this isolated sector for a few months now but such activity had been more of an excuse to get some time off the piracy stuff than a scientific expedition per se. He had used those months to update his stellar charts with high resolution scans; not a high priority objective, granted, but it was better than just sitting around smoking shiva cigars and listening to oldie but goodie tunes. And, although he was the person in the Galaxy he most enjoyed spending time with, he was starting to crave some other forms of human interaction. Maybe, he had thought to himself moments before his discovery, he could make a quick stop at the Siddhartha system on his way back. He had smiled at the thought of talking again to that shaman lady, "Ahoy old squire, I was in the neighborhood so I fancied paying ye blue faces a visit." The last thing he expected to find during his exploration, though, was a drifted Machinist ship this far away from their usual routes. He was used to find, every now and then, an automatic probe, but that thing was a genuine deep space ship with full life support, independent hyperdrive and, the Captain could hardly believe, a full set of solar sails. It had been decades since those gearheads had ceased to send manned vessels like that outside their usual, heavily protected routes. After a considerable loss of manned vessels cannibalized by his kind they had decided to use only automatic probes in hyperdrive missions into the depths of the Galaxy. Those would be designed to gather a specific set of data and be left either to be found by pirates or to be lost indefinitely in the deep space. They had simple design, thus, and low booty value. The Machinists themselves would only travel between their colonies via the safe hyperways. Those were the vessels worth to catch, but they had hidden themselves deep under their automatic defenses. It had been tough times to pirates, forced to find new ways to capitalize like dealing exotic Siddhartha products or hacked Machina tech, free to be used by any castes and undetectable by the monitoring systems, with Machinists in the black market. But now he had stumbled on a ship capable to suddenly end his vacation and put him back in pirate mode. Blackjack would never have thought, given the present situation, to get such a nice catch; so much tech just sitting out there, waiting to be cannibalized.

"A nice catch," the Captain repeated the words out loud. It brought back memories from the past, memories that hadn't been touched in so many decades. His conscious mind was suddenly flooded by images from his childhood fishing attempts at the subterranean lake back in Acropolis. His grandfather would occasionally take him in those weird green caves crowded by cyberchimp workers so he could learn about where all their food came from. They would spend a whole day by the lake fishing their own meal. Their job, the old man had explained, was to throw the lure at the lake and then manage to wait until some fish would bite it. On the first fishing day his grandson got really disappointed as nothing seemed to happen at all; they just sat there still holding their fishing rods as the little child got progressively bored and started to gaze at the cyberchimps tending the garden around the lake. On that very day his grandfather managed to teach him the importance of patience, a lesson that had stuck to his character throughout his entire life so far. He could still remember their dialogue, although Blackjack recognized he must had filled in most of the words as his former self probably wouldn't be able to hold such complex words in his young mind. The wisdom and emotional content of the message, though, remained the same, rooted deep down in his unconscious mind.

"Why would anyone want to do this? It's so boring", the little chubby child complained to his grandfather while tossing a rock in the lake.

"Well that, my little grasshopper, is due to something called sporadic reinforcement" the old man quietly answered while holding the fishing rod still.

The child laughed at the complicate word. "Spor..for..ment? What's that? A new cyberchimp model?"

"No, not at all." The grandfather laughed vividly at his grandson's remark. "This is a psychological phenomenon. We animals are conditioned by our surroundings in several different ways. Sporadic reinforcement is one of those ways. We tend to repeat determined behavior if it presents us with a small probability of success. We are bound to repeat an act if there is hope the next time we do it we will finally get our reward, in our case a nice catch. It's a much more powerful driven force than a lever that will feed you every single time you pull it. Such a device will always going to be there at your disposal, you figure, so you will only bother to pull it when you are hungry, not an instant before." The old man gazed at the staring expression of his grandson's face. He knew he wouldn't be able to grasp most of his words, but he knew more than anyone else the untapped potential a child's mind had. The little fellow was way brighter than the other kids of his age, and he liked to think his words had a great deal to do with that. His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a fish biting the bait. Grandfather and grandson excitedly worked together to pull their reward out of the water.

Far away, while filing up a cargo of recently collected fruits, a cyberchimp watched with his telescopic view an old man holding a dying fish while a small child danced around him. When the old man dropped the fish and started to tickle the child, making him laugh out loud, the cyberchimp got puzzled by that awkward behavior. Neither his brothers nor his makers had done anything like that around him before, not even in his wildest dreams, but somehow that gesture seemed strangely familiar to him.

"Sporadic reinforcement", Blackjack repeated his grandfather's complex words over two hundred years after he first had heard them. Sporadic reinforcement was what kept him tossing the lure at that lake so many times waiting for his reward. His behavior tailored by the uncertainty of success; the incapacity of leaving the lake knowing that any time he could be graced with a big fish. Blackjack smiled at the irony when realizing that, after that huge time gap filled with such mesmerizing number of casual connected events which he knew as his life, he still was out there, tossing lures and waiting, just like he did so many times in the distant past with his grandfather. Suddenly the Captain realized that that was something he had done his entire life, hopping from one lake to the next, expecting to catch some interesting fishes every now and then. This time, against all odds, he had managed to get a really big fish in a apparently empty lake. Grandpa would be proud; that was, indeed, a nice catch.


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I would love to read some feedback from you all. Thanks for the attention.

Diogo

I <3 Sci-Fi! I'm actually teaching a sci-fi course this semester...not sure if my students liked it, but I did. :P

I always think of sci-fi as very cerebral, so I like the psychological element. I also like the changing perspective (Adult Blackjack-->Child Blackjack-->Grandfather-->Chimp-->Adult Blackjack). Is this a constructed universe that you write stories within, or is this completely standalone? Jut curious. :)

That's great Liz! That was kind of what I shooting for, so reading it from someone who knows the business (you teach the damn thing) is quite rewarding. Thanks!

It is, yes, part of an Universe where many short stories of mine and unfinished projects take place in. The captain is sort of a recurrent character. :)

That's great Alexis, I really appreciate your thoughts on it. Thanks. The changing POV indeed was quite the experiment; I am glad that, apparently, I got it right.

Yes you are right about the piratey name; also I was inspired by Bob Dylan's song Blackjack Davey. :)

Hey there felows...

here there is another short story introduction

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It all began when I first moved to my individual loft in Acropolis campus. Back at those days I was beginning to adventure myself into the wild waters of neurocybernetics. I had a hot shot project which had just been received a grant, thus my privileged situation which entitled me all the privacy I wanted. It was good to perform my research from home anytime I felt like it, wearing anything from long pajamas, tank top and panties or plain old bare-skinned, depending both on the temperature outside, which was always hot as hell or warmer, and my mood at the time. Despite my special non-shared abode I was still entitled to the student individual energy quota which meant I couldn't run my laboratory equipments and the AC all day long and, if I had any intentions to sleep at night, I would had to face Galapagos heat during some times of the day with nothing but fans to help me with the heat dissipation. Given that situation, the long pajama was the least used option.

My advisor was the famous Dr. Munroe. Yeah, you got that right, The Munroe; the very same man which envisioned the Machina Quantum Neural Network and, along with Powell, had solved Earth's Great Triple E Crisis (ecological, economical and energy for those of you missing a historical bone) from the 40's. You can imagine my excitement when I got the chance to meet that legend. Unfortunately, things didn't go as well as I had expected. Those stunts he pulled were a long time ago. Acropolis was already preparing for its thirty years foundation celebration when my project was accepted. The Munroe had a very different attitude from what I expected someone as revolutionary like the Munroe in the historical files ought to have. He wasn't much enthusiastic about trying out new ideas, often dismissing mine and other students' thoughts for being way too wild. We were working in Neurocybernetics for Machina's sake, he had to be bold and all. But no, Munroe's days of boldness were gone. Now he spent most of his time doing boring research. Word on the streets was that he had had a nervous breakdown some years ago and that now his only real interest was a virtual cat emulated by a quantum neural network he ran at home.

Anyway, Munroe's uninterested disposition allowed me to spare some time to work on a project of my own. I had this crazy idea once in the lab about using nandroids to interface the limbic system of mice. Munroe had already done research on manipulating inputs and outputs of mice's nucleus accumbens in order to remotely control their behavior by conditionally stimulating their pleasure center and he hoped to treat depression and artificially induce placebo effects in humans using the same technique. But one day at the lab it stroked me that the best brain signal emulator that could ever exist was another brain. I wrote an algorithm that would, roughly speaking, send the outputs recorded by the nandroids in a brain directly to the input of nandroids located in a different brain. By this means I hoped to get a total synchronization between two cloned mice's reward systems. And that was precisely what I got. The two entangled mice were put inside a Skinner's box and learned how to cooperate between themselves in order to optimize their mutual feelings of satisfaction. While the control group, another pair of cloned mice with identical genetics, would compete against each other for food in a destructive way by preventing their companion of pulling the levers to get their share of food, even though they had already eaten, the entanglement pair would not only let their companion to get the food but would even develop an advanced sense of empathy towards them, bringing the food themselves and even presenting some kind of companionship when their counterpart would develop symptoms of depression. Needless to say I was amazed with the results and rushed to show them to old Munroe, with the hopes of extending the experiment to the human realm. How naive I was. The stupid sap regarded my experiment as an amused curiosity, at best, and forbid me to go along the human experiments, alerting me for the dangers of bringing down the barriers of human individuality or some shit like that. I should have known the old man didn't have what it takes anymore to reach a breakthrough at that magnitude. He was a spineless bag of old bones living from the glories of the past, nothing more than that.

So there I was, working for a couple of months in my spare time directly from my personal loft, away from old, outdated eyes, in my very own human limbic system interface device. The nandroids I had stolen from the lab had already multiplied themselves to more the amount I needed, the software had been completely rewritten; it was all good to go. As I was in need for were a human guinea pig and a dopaminergic stimulant I decided to kill two birds with the same stone and told Hank I needed to see him. Hank was my weed contact. Cannabis weren't illegal or anything like that in Acropolis since its foundation. The reason I needed Hank was because Munroe, that ignorant fascist fool, didn't let his students to use it. He thought it would lower their productivity. So he had stated harsh punishments for any students caught buying any products in a hemporium. A stupid, middle age mindset if you ask me. I couldn't even buy myself a skirt made of hemp, had to buy that low quality cotton shit which would tear apart weeks after I got them. That's who Munroe had turned himself in, an old fashion moron. But I digress. As I was saying, I needed a dopaminergic stimulant to raise dopamine levels in both subjects' limbic system in order to catalyze the signal synchronization. I would feel much safer using a natural herb which humans had been using as medicine and spiritual aids for more than ten thousand years already than using a synthetic drug like we used on the mice in the lab. Hank was my contact for getting it, so I called him over with the hopes of turning him into a human guinea pig, along with myself. The stage was set for the most bizarre experience I had had so far.

thank you very much

I really appreciate this Alexis

it's really inspiring to hear such a thing from some one like you

oh well, you seem to be much more literate than me and to get such kind of audience to like your words (especially when such words are a little out of their favorite ballpark) is flattering as hell to a writer. :)

That goes to Liz as well; maybe not the "out of favorite ballpark" part though.

This is the intro of yet another short story; it's sci-fi as well, but it's the soft kind, with little hightech notes, some vanilla and spicy as well. It takes place in my homeland, Brazil.

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"Welcometoriodejaneirotheweatherisgood35degreesclearsky. Its08:32pmlocaltime.Thankyouforfliyingwithus..." Josh could barely make any sense out of the gibberish the stewardess was saying through the aircraft sound system. It was like a child was reading out loud words unknown to her. He knew that the knowledge of the English language was, yet, rare among Brazilians, but that ignorance coming from a stewardess in an International flight really scared him. If things were worse than he had thought before, what he now suspected the situation to be, his job could turn out to be way harder than Josh had anticipated. He shrugged and prepared himself to face the tropical climate.
Josh strolled through the airport, after collecting his luggage, pretending to be an American tourist. He had a part to play and he might as well start right now. He decided to have a meal in one of the airport restaurants, as he was starving to death. He had never cared too much for airplane food. However all places he tried were crowed with people watching some soccer match that was playing on every TV set. Josh imagined it was the equivalent of a Super Bowl final but here people cheered for their teams in an even louder and hysterical way. He wouldn’t be able to eat with all that noise, so he took a cab instead to his hotel. There he could have a proper, quiet meal. The cab driver was listening to the match on the radio so he didn’t need to work hard on his tourist part. Acknowledging Josh was a foreigner passenger the driver left him to his own thoughts, shouting at the radio as the match went on.
After checking-in at his hotel in Copacabana and having his meal, Josh decided to go out looking to score some weed. He needed to clear out his mind before the complicate job he had ahead of him on the next days. He knew it was a hard task though, as commercializing the dried flowers of that herb was still illegal in that country. He could have brought some of it with him but he was afraid of drawing unwanted attention on the airport for simply indulging himself on an unneeded habit of his. But being on that undeveloped country had made him very uneasy already and, after all, it was part of the job act like a foreigner tourist. And foreigner tourists in Brazil surely liked to get high.
Josh spent a few minutes gazing at different gift shops, handcraft tents and buying some crap souvenirs, miserably failing at his quest for the illegal herb. He then noticed he was being followed. At first he dismissed the feeling as pure paranoia. No one over there knew who he was after all. His instincts seldom had failed him though, so he thought he probably was been following by some pickpockets. He had been warned against them, how they could smell foreigner wallets from miles away. Josh decided to lose them in a friendly way, no need to dirt his hands or draw unwanted attention now, simply entering in the first crowed indoor place he saw. "Copacabana Disco" read the neon lights at the entrance. He had to drop in a trash can the little pistol he carried on his right ankle, as he thought he would be searched for sure by the securities. When that didn’t happen he felt silly and naked. He would be counting only on his bare knuckles for security until he came back to the hotel. Josh was damning himself for his stupidity when he first saw her. There were lots of beautiful women underdressed in that joint, but it was that amazing brunette with such pale skin which caught Josh’s attention. She was wearing a black dress which revealed a great deal of her strong, smooth thighs and the wholeness of her back. Her gorgeous ass was wiggling like none Josh had seen before to that strange mix of electronic beats and drummer patterns that were playing. The look on her face expressed how hypnotized she was to the rhythm while dancing, the same way the sight of her naked back had hypnotized Josh. She had a snake tattooed there, its skin colors changing and its tongue moving as her body serpentines. It probably was one of those luminescent ink tattoos powered by bioenergy extracted via nandroid clusters from her spinal cord. Josh had never thought that kind of stuff could be so beautiful. They made eye contact for a brief moment, which made his heart nearly stop beating. She had a devious look at her face, like she was that serpent looking for a defenseless prey. His sexual fantasies were suddenly interrupted by the sight of the two men entering the Disco. Damn it, Josh thought to himself, those fuckers followed me here. I gotta find a way out of this mess.
Josh hid himself behind the central bar and analyzed his foes. There was a tough, tall fellow with a bulging eye and a short, thin one with a scar on his left cheek. Scarface looked like the brain of the group, while Bulging Eye were clearly the muscles. He decided to go hide in the bathroom while he planned how to handle the situation. The place was a mess. Josh entered one of the stalls and climbed down the toilet so his feet wouldn’t be visible under the door. He could hear Bulging Eye and Scarface entering the restroom and evacuating the place with aggressive words and probably a gun. It would have to be a quick fight. Good thing they were talking loudly, probably telling Josh to leave his hideout, so his scan software could render the sounds received by his ears and pinpoint the sources location directly onto his visual cortex. Scarface was standing at the entrance while Bulging Eye searched the stalls. Josh analyzed the door’s hinges. They didn’t seem to offer much of a resistance. Bulging Eye had searched the last stall before the one he was in. His adrenaline gauge reached critical readings. It was showtime. The whole thing took less than seven seconds. Josh rushed in the door with his right foot, pushing Bulging Eye head into the mirror. Then he rotated himself and the detached door, positioning it between him and the thugs, preventing Scarface from firing his weapon. After taking some distance, Josh then charged against the door leaning on the disoriented Bulging Eye, taking them down while gaining the higher ground over Scarface, projecting himself towards him, disarming him with a left kick and knocking him out with a foot delivering Josh’s whole momentum on his chest. Finally, turning to Bulging Eye, who was already rising himself along with the door on his back, Josh delivered a kick on his chin which would give him a long nap and a headache from hell by the time he woke up. With his attackers out of the game Josh went for the gun thrown in one of the stalls. To Josh’s surprise it was his own pistol he had discarded in the trash can. What goes around comes around, he thought to himself. Then, with adrenaline still running throughout his system, he wondered about the unconscious men on the floor. They probably weren’t ordinary pickpockets. Most likely they were Tony Maneiro’s thugs sent after him. Shit, his presence there had been leaked. Josh left the restroom worried over the possibility that his mission had been compromised.

I thought it was really good, but I would add a lot of paragraph breaks. There's a rather large and forboding wall of text there that you could break up.

Hmm, no no I am afraid Ethan is right. There is indeed a very long third paragraph. I guess I missed that using my old text editor and I haven't had the time to go back and give it a second look. Thanks guys, I shall fix that. =)

So I looked for my manuscript to fix the error and found out I had sent an early draft; the recent version had plenty of paragraphs breaks at the beginning. =)

I sent Alexis a copy of the whole thing; if anyone is interested you can drop me a line and I can send it to you too. I am choosing not to make it public on my Goodreads notes because I have plans to publish it soon, along with other works.

So that's it, thanks for reading.

Hey there folks.

I have been busy (thus relatively absent from the internet) lately working on my first novel.

I am publishing it in a serialized this very week. The way it works is like this: the person pays it once for the whole thing and then he or she receives a new chapter every week. I had discovered this place called Lean Pub which does this kind of thing and it seemed quite interesting to me (Dickens did something like that with most of his novels).

Anyways, the preface of the book goes like this:

***

I met this motherfucker through Layla. Apparently she knew some bloody Physicists (from where she must had taken some of her crazy ass ideas about multiple universes, space-time and all that shit) and we all got together to watch the Roger Waters concert The Wall in São Paulo. I must say the bastard had made quite the impression on me back in the time; how many people do you know who works at a freaking nuclear power plant, am I right?

Anyway, when I encountered him for the second time I had already recorded a couple of albums and I was collecting the fruits of such hard work. I had been approached by my agent about a biography project of yours truly. The thought of writing about my life didn't sound so appealing to me though. So when I encountered Diogo at a gig I was performing in the Circo Voador (Flying Circus for those of you who don’t know shit of Portuguese) it was like the stars had been aligned. He told me he had flipped, dropped his nuclear gig and was working as a ghostwriter, trying to pave his way into becoming a science fiction author, his true calling in life as he described to me. I looked at him with pity on my eyes; I mean the guy was delusional, trying to make a living out of science fiction in bloody Brazil. Then the idea hit me. I proposed him to ghostwrite the shit out of my biography. I mean, by that time he had shown me some of his short stories and, even science fiction not being my thing, I really dug his writing style. He was reluctant at first, but then I said "hey man, it's great to follow your passion and all with this science fiction stuff, but come on, this is a real opportunity to you. My agent and the publishing house are all over my neck, nagging me for some fucking words. You had done your share of ghostwriting romance, fantasy, erotica and whatnot; why don't you consider my shit? Let's get motherfucking paid!" My words of wisdom finally got under his skin and he accepted the gig after I agreed to publish the shit under his own name. What can I say? The fucker knew how to negotiate.

So for all of you my fans and haters, I give you a little account of the circumstances which set in motion the chain of events which would, eventually, transform me from a low life software programmer at São Paulo to the crazy fucker you all know and love (even if only in a very deep level, if you catch my drift).

Yours truly,

Ricardo "Dick" Maszkowski, A.K.A. Zig Moz

***

Here is the link to it: https://leanpub.com/alpha-dog

It's free of charge this first week. =)

Hey guys, I decided to share the whole story afterall (the one with the gibberish English at the beginning).

http://db.tt/PTgsUEhL

Enjoy, and don't be shy to send harsh comments in case you feel the urge to. ;)