Neural Pulse, Pt. 2 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Jing’s voice, which belonged to the type of neighbor who would occasionally show up offering a tub of food, invaded my helmet as if the xenobiologist had hunched over my ear.
“Can you help me?”
He had climbed the steps to the cargo compartment and was gripping the handle like the lid of a stubborn jar refusing to open. When I approached, Jing descended the steps and moved aside.
“I’ve never worked with one of these vessels before.”
I released the safety mechanism on the handle and slid the door open with a single pull. In the circular hollow, like the inside of a can, the containers waited stacked and secured with taut netting.
“Don’t worry. Nobody is born knowing.”
Jing laughed politely. I gave him space while the xenobiologist removed the containers one by one and gathered them several paces from the ship. When he crouched beside a container, I stood up next to him.
“Have you done this before?”
“I’ve been transported to many planets.”
“To an uncivilized one?”
He lifted his face to smile at me.
“That’s new.”
He sank one knee into the sandy earth and opened the container’s lid. Inside he had organized smaller containers and measuring instruments. I recognized a thermal camera.
At the top of the ladder to the cabin, the hatch to the depressurization chamber had closed. I surveyed the ship’s surroundings. Dozens of meters up the slope, the previous landing had carved descending tracks in the hillside, like the drag marks of some deep-sea monster across the abyssal floor.
“Have you seen Halperin leave?”
Jing, who was emptying the container and arranging the instruments on the sandy ground, looked up in surprise, glanced around, and shook his head.
“I’m in the cabin,” Mara said over the radio.
I bit my lower lip and took a deep breath. I climbed the ladder. Turned the hatch handle, yanked the hatch open, and entered. As hissing sounds enveloped me, I waited for the chamber to pressurize, then I opened the door to the command cabin.
Mara, seated at the control panel with her helmet and gloves on, was refreshing on a monitor the frequencies used by the station. I approached until I could distinguish the profile of her face through her helmet lens. The curvature magnified my friend’s features in a way I had never seen before, a face from which strangers expected to receive the same candor with which they treated her, but it belonged to a nervous creature.
I leaned on the upper section of the control panel.
“I suppose you’re checking to reassure yourself.”
“For now, we remain invisible.”
“With luck, we’ll return to the hangar stuffed with artifacts, long before anyone notices the ship is missing. Some days they don’t even bother to inventory the old burners. They think nobody would pilot them.”
“After that first landing, I understand.” When Mara stood up, her features twisted as if seized by a gut-wrenching cramp. “I hope we’re lucky as you say. I thought I would acclimate when we reached the planet, but my nerves are getting worse.”
We passed through the decompression chamber and descended the ladder. Jing was emptying the second container. We advanced toward him, but Mara lagged behind, contemplating the vast stretches of walnut-brown earth as if she had awakened in the middle of the night in some unknown bedroom. The landscape was crisscrossed by layers of hills and mountains that faded into purplish hues with distance. The mountain peaks jutted out bone-white like splinters.
Clustered around the xenobiologist were containers and gauges. I nudged a metal box with the toe of my boot; on its top surface, a display showed rows of numbers and codes.
“I can’t imagine what half of this stuff is for.”
“Routine equipment,” Jing said.
“But you haven’t come to explore a cave bordering on a colony, Jing. Time is pressing. By now we should be heading down toward the dome.”
Mara hurried to the closed container and opened it. She pulled out a Geiger counter. Crouching, both scientists focused on readying the equipment. Each piece of gear they set down on the sandy ground kicked up a cloud of dust that the limited gravity was slow to settle.
If only I could rub my face. I paced about ten meters away from them, longing to scout the crater alone before the two scientists appeared at the crest of the slope lugging their gear. The waiting chained me, and I pictured a hangar employee stopping before the burner’s vacant spot and reporting its absence to his superior.
“Got a moment?” Jing asked.
I approached. The xenobiologist had gotten to his feet, and from that angle, the star’s light highlighted the gray strands at the side of his head, where his black hair was still thick. With his right hand, Jing brandished an electroshock spear. Extending fifty centimeters up from the handle was an iron-gray shaft terminating in two prongs like a snake’s fangs.
Jing handed me the spear. I hefted it, turning it over as light glinted along its polished shaft.
“Planning to wake them from hypersleep?”
“It looks abandoned from the outside, but maybe someone keeps watch in shifts. Security measure. Even if we just came to say hello, no one invited us.”
I raised the spear and pressed the button. A crackling arc of sky-blue flame leaped between the prongs at the tip. When I released the button, the arc vanished, leaving a wisp of smoke that dissipated in the breeze.
“The charge will run out,” Jing said.
Mara appeared at his side. She had clipped an array of meters to her suit’s belt, among which I recognized a multimeter and a Geiger counter. She had mounted a camera on the thick, reinforced fabric of her left sleeve. It would record whatever she pointed at. The woman hid her nervousness behind an expression carved from milky quartz.
Jing programmed an empty container to follow him. He slid a pry bar through a loop on his belt and clipped on an electric screwdriver. He walked closer, each footstep kicking up a plume of dust. The container trailed the xenobiologist like a dog.
“Ready?” I asked.
As they nodded, arctic blue reflections slid up and down their helmet visors.
I marched towards the edge of the hill, tapping my suit’s shoulder with the electroshock spear.
“Let’s go say hello to those aliens and dismantle their house.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
In case you’re thinking, ‘This is shit,’ I must admit that the beginning of the story is my least favorite part of the six novellas I wrote about ten years ago, and this scene in particular may be the most boring. It makes me cringe to think that the judges of a couple of contests read it. So if you have gotten anything of value out of this scene, the story only improves from now on, as far as I remember.
This story is something of a homage to two stories: first, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, my favorite novel as a teen. Second, the first novel I ever attempted to write: a disastrous, almost-incoherent tale about space marines doing dodgy shit, which I started when I was fifteen or so and eventually abandoned when I was twenty. I dreaded to read any excerpt of those manuscripts (I rewrote the story several times, as I had no fucking clue what I was doing), because they mainly displayed my psychotic state in that miserable period of my life.
A few years ago, as I cleaning out stuff from my youth, I threw away all my remaining copies of that manuscript. A stark contrast with an instance when I was nineteen in which I forgot a corrected manuscript in a neighboring city and I nearly had a mental breakdown until I managed to get it back. Discarding stories that don’t work, and that may even poison your current writing if you let them in again, is a way of growing as a writer. I think so, at least.
Although I thankfully remember little of those years, I recall I used to be a bit of a pantser (writing without a clear map), which I have abhorred since. Every scene in a story functions effectively only in relation to the broader constellation of planned scenes. You won’t fix it in post, trust me; by then, the words will feel carved in stone. These days not only I keep chronologically organized notes and Excel files with scene lists, but I have also adopted the “manga series” style of nailing a scene in one shot, which forces you to make all individual parts compelling in some way.
Jing’s voice, which belonged to the type of neighbor who would occasionally show up offering a tub of food, invaded my helmet as if the xenobiologist had hunched over my ear.
“Can you help me?”
He had climbed the steps to the cargo compartment and was gripping the handle like the lid of a stubborn jar refusing to open. When I approached, Jing descended the steps and moved aside.
“I’ve never worked with one of these vessels before.”
I released the safety mechanism on the handle and slid the door open with a single pull. In the circular hollow, like the inside of a can, the containers waited stacked and secured with taut netting.
“Don’t worry. Nobody is born knowing.”
Jing laughed politely. I gave him space while the xenobiologist removed the containers one by one and gathered them several paces from the ship. When he crouched beside a container, I stood up next to him.
“Have you done this before?”
“I’ve been transported to many planets.”
“To an uncivilized one?”
He lifted his face to smile at me.
“That’s new.”
He sank one knee into the sandy earth and opened the container’s lid. Inside he had organized smaller containers and measuring instruments. I recognized a thermal camera.
At the top of the ladder to the cabin, the hatch to the depressurization chamber had closed. I surveyed the ship’s surroundings. Dozens of meters up the slope, the previous landing had carved descending tracks in the hillside, like the drag marks of some deep-sea monster across the abyssal floor.
“Have you seen Halperin leave?”
Jing, who was emptying the container and arranging the instruments on the sandy ground, looked up in surprise, glanced around, and shook his head.
“I’m in the cabin,” Mara said over the radio.
I bit my lower lip and took a deep breath. I climbed the ladder. Turned the hatch handle, yanked the hatch open, and entered. As hissing sounds enveloped me, I waited for the chamber to pressurize, then I opened the door to the command cabin.
Mara, seated at the control panel with her helmet and gloves on, was refreshing on a monitor the frequencies used by the station. I approached until I could distinguish the profile of her face through her helmet lens. The curvature magnified my friend’s features in a way I had never seen before, a face from which strangers expected to receive the same candor with which they treated her, but it belonged to a nervous creature.
I leaned on the upper section of the control panel.
“I suppose you’re checking to reassure yourself.”
“For now, we remain invisible.”
“With luck, we’ll return to the hangar stuffed with artifacts, long before anyone notices the ship is missing. Some days they don’t even bother to inventory the old burners. They think nobody would pilot them.”
“After that first landing, I understand.” When Mara stood up, her features twisted as if seized by a gut-wrenching cramp. “I hope we’re lucky as you say. I thought I would acclimate when we reached the planet, but my nerves are getting worse.”
We passed through the decompression chamber and descended the ladder. Jing was emptying the second container. We advanced toward him, but Mara lagged behind, contemplating the vast stretches of walnut-brown earth as if she had awakened in the middle of the night in some unknown bedroom. The landscape was crisscrossed by layers of hills and mountains that faded into purplish hues with distance. The mountain peaks jutted out bone-white like splinters.
Clustered around the xenobiologist were containers and gauges. I nudged a metal box with the toe of my boot; on its top surface, a display showed rows of numbers and codes.
“I can’t imagine what half of this stuff is for.”
“Routine equipment,” Jing said.
“But you haven’t come to explore a cave bordering on a colony, Jing. Time is pressing. By now we should be heading down toward the dome.”
Mara hurried to the closed container and opened it. She pulled out a Geiger counter. Crouching, both scientists focused on readying the equipment. Each piece of gear they set down on the sandy ground kicked up a cloud of dust that the limited gravity was slow to settle.
If only I could rub my face. I paced about ten meters away from them, longing to scout the crater alone before the two scientists appeared at the crest of the slope lugging their gear. The waiting chained me, and I pictured a hangar employee stopping before the burner’s vacant spot and reporting its absence to his superior.
“Got a moment?” Jing asked.
I approached. The xenobiologist had gotten to his feet, and from that angle, the star’s light highlighted the gray strands at the side of his head, where his black hair was still thick. With his right hand, Jing brandished an electroshock spear. Extending fifty centimeters up from the handle was an iron-gray shaft terminating in two prongs like a snake’s fangs.
Jing handed me the spear. I hefted it, turning it over as light glinted along its polished shaft.
“Planning to wake them from hypersleep?”
“It looks abandoned from the outside, but maybe someone keeps watch in shifts. Security measure. Even if we just came to say hello, no one invited us.”
I raised the spear and pressed the button. A crackling arc of sky-blue flame leaped between the prongs at the tip. When I released the button, the arc vanished, leaving a wisp of smoke that dissipated in the breeze.
“The charge will run out,” Jing said.
Mara appeared at his side. She had clipped an array of meters to her suit’s belt, among which I recognized a multimeter and a Geiger counter. She had mounted a camera on the thick, reinforced fabric of her left sleeve. It would record whatever she pointed at. The woman hid her nervousness behind an expression carved from milky quartz.
Jing programmed an empty container to follow him. He slid a pry bar through a loop on his belt and clipped on an electric screwdriver. He walked closer, each footstep kicking up a plume of dust. The container trailed the xenobiologist like a dog.
“Ready?” I asked.
As they nodded, arctic blue reflections slid up and down their helmet visors.
I marched towards the edge of the hill, tapping my suit’s shoulder with the electroshock spear.
“Let’s go say hello to those aliens and dismantle their house.”
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in the collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho.
In case you’re thinking, ‘This is shit,’ I must admit that the beginning of the story is my least favorite part of the six novellas I wrote about ten years ago, and this scene in particular may be the most boring. It makes me cringe to think that the judges of a couple of contests read it. So if you have gotten anything of value out of this scene, the story only improves from now on, as far as I remember.
This story is something of a homage to two stories: first, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, my favorite novel as a teen. Second, the first novel I ever attempted to write: a disastrous, almost-incoherent tale about space marines doing dodgy shit, which I started when I was fifteen or so and eventually abandoned when I was twenty. I dreaded to read any excerpt of those manuscripts (I rewrote the story several times, as I had no fucking clue what I was doing), because they mainly displayed my psychotic state in that miserable period of my life.
A few years ago, as I cleaning out stuff from my youth, I threw away all my remaining copies of that manuscript. A stark contrast with an instance when I was nineteen in which I forgot a corrected manuscript in a neighboring city and I nearly had a mental breakdown until I managed to get it back. Discarding stories that don’t work, and that may even poison your current writing if you let them in again, is a way of growing as a writer. I think so, at least.
Although I thankfully remember little of those years, I recall I used to be a bit of a pantser (writing without a clear map), which I have abhorred since. Every scene in a story functions effectively only in relation to the broader constellation of planned scenes. You won’t fix it in post, trust me; by then, the words will feel carved in stone. These days not only I keep chronologically organized notes and Excel files with scene lists, but I have also adopted the “manga series” style of nailing a scene in one shot, which forces you to make all individual parts compelling in some way.
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