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I’ve been blocked for quite a while now making any substantial progress on Unpack My Heart. For some of that while, I was also completely blocked from doing any kind of writing, in part because it felt like a betrayal of my novel to work on anything else. A common piece of advice to aspiring writers is Write!, write anything as long as you don’t lose the habit of regularly expressing yourself in prose, if prose is your thing. (If necessary, some suggest, copy out examples of good writing that you admire; at the very least it will help attune your inner ear to good writing.) So, I forced myself to resume capturing ideas for other characters and stories in my notebooks and eventually was unstuck as far as writing in general goes. When last I gathered a list together, I had over thirty story concepts I had spent at least a few paragraphs in my notebook exploring.
Unpack My Heart is itself the confluence of several story ideas, which I worked and reworked until I could see a complete story arc that contained sufficiently interesting characters. I have explained some of this before in e-mails to my friends. But no other mix of situation and characters has yet jelled to the extent that Jacob, Melinda, Amy and Jill did. There are several contenders waiting in the wings, however and I’d like to describe one of them.
I’m currently thinking through a story whose creative process I have decided to stop and capture, in a way and at a time that I did not for Unpack My Heart, It is a science fiction story, the genre that everyone thought would be the one I would write in. Here below is my description of the on-going evolution of something I’ve recently conceived and spent a few weeks playing with. Laid out below, more or less in the order I’ve thought of it all, is the succession of ideas for plot and characters I’ve tried out in my head. Some of this has produced actual writing, all short pieces of narrative, as I further explored these possibilities. Mostly this has zipped through my mind exactly in the same way that I formulated the ideas behind Unpack My Heart before I started the actual writing.
This is all to the best of my recollection, which isn’t exact. It has also necessarily been cleaned up to a degree that it was not while flitting through the old neural net in order to be presented to anyone outside my head in an intelligible manner.
I don’t know if you have had the experience of working with customers using your product in a highly secure environment, but from time to time I have, at least on the periphery. You see, or hear of, such absurdities as the delay introduced because all the error messages and diagnostic information you need are being hand edited by the security apparatus in order to remove all references to actual data values or even field names used in queries. (“The query fails.” “What’s the query?” “We can’t tell you, but fix it now!”) Highly secure sites also have regulations that permit you to bring in a laptop or, say, a new disk, but won’t permit you to bring it back out with you, ever. And so on.
Anyway, the hero is a young man in his late twenties (sometimes I make him a little younger, sometimes a decade older) working for a software company providing statistical analysis software. He is recently divorced or never married, has no children and has been poring his energies into his work in lieu of a home life. He’s not unhappy, consciously, but has been finding that he is increasing bored with, well, everything. He’s available when the need to send someone on-site to handle a problem with a customer with strict security needs. When he leaves, he doesn’t yet know his final destination or other details.
The project using his company’s product is one deep in the USAF and our story takes him to the Directorate for Development Plans Area at Groom Lake, NV (popularly known as “Area 51”). While he is driven to distraction dealing with anally secretive types, developments are occurring around him in the super-secret project that will push him into the heart of things.
The chief of security sees, where others do not, a potential external threat and orders the hero to be sent into hiding. A new character, a special security officer, is specifically assigned to protect this man. She resents what she views as baby-sitting duty, but makes the best of it by taking him to a remote mountain cabin (a vacation place owned by her family) and thus makes do with her forced “vacation”. All is more or less quiet until a hit squad shows up. This is the basis for the “My Dear Captain” excerpts. A romantic interest develops between the two, of course. But as I unfolded the story, I realized nothing fundamental was being resolved and I couldn’t see where the characters were going to end up. (The incestuous twins who made an appearance were an interesting diversion, but they didn’t go anywhere either.)
A minor variation I tried was having the security officer becoming suspicious of her own chain-of-command; it was on her own initiative that she spirits the hero away immediately before, as it happens, Groom Lake gets nuked. All the hero knows is that he didn’t volunteer to be part of any of this; he just wants to go home! A third major character is introduced as a local woman who lived in the nearest civilian village. She had the misfortune to be looking in the wrong direction when the bomb went off and was blinded. Here the romantic interest is between the man and the blind woman, with explorations of the affects of pity and of self-pity. I never did come up with a resolution that explained what was so dire as to justify using nuclear weapons that wouldn’t, in the end, also squash the trio like bugs.
About then, I took one of those IQ tests up on the web, and afterwards was staring at the advertising pop-ups still cluttering my desktop. Such web site droppings have become all too unavoidable. I brought together in my mind the offers claiming I had won a prize with the puzzles I had just solved and came up with the following idea:
A clever intelligence officer hits upon the ploy of taking representative samples of the highly complex messages her unit was tasked with deciphering and covertly gets the public to unwittingly help. She masquerades the task as an elaborate set of abstract puzzles to be solved and publishes them on the Internet in the guise of a contest. Each round offers a cash prize for the first respondent to solve that puzzle correctly. The difficulty of the puzzles, and the size of the award, rises steeply. The initial rounds represent elements of the unknown language that were already understood, but the final round includes aspects of the problem for which no solution was known. The officer is looking for potential recruits and, who knows, someone might even provide the insight that would lead to the answers that had been eluding her team.
She is flabbergasted when, in the final round, multiple, correct and complete solutions were returned. The hero, of course, is one of the half dozen "winners". The officer arranges all the winners to be flown to a common site for a publicity show where they would be declared the grand prize winners and would receive their checks. After they arrive, she effectively kidnaps them and removes them to an isolated locale.
The messages, it seems, do not originate from this world.
At some secluded site, perhaps Groom Lake again, the nature and origin of the “puzzles” is revealed. The recruits are asked to join the project as civilian volunteers. The story progresses mostly as a team-building tale and as an examination of the clash of cultures between the civilians on one side and their military superiors (which is also suspiciously akin to the clash between engineers and their managers). Various unusual, even spooky, events occur, depending on which of my other story ideas with a Groom Lake setting I wanted to tie in. Events at the base itself transpire to separate our main characters from the world (or the time) they knew. The mystery behind the alien language is ultimately solved.
Yawn. Okay, so --
In yet another variation, the intelligence officer is part of the signal corps of yet another highly secret intelligence service (is there any other kind?) specifically tasked with investigating these extraterrestrial communications. The setting in this version is a secret center disguised as a small, private college in New England. The evening after the hero arrives, but before a full debriefing scheduled for the next day, the Special Forces of another shadowy organization attack the campus. This other group either wants control of the information for itself (for its own unspecified but sure to be power-hungry ends) or it quite simply deems the very existence of the project as too great a danger to the country, or the world, or themselves. The intelligence officer and the hero escape the massacre. But I was still stuck coming up with an interesting place for them to go or how to ultimately tie up the opening plot.
So, in the next major version, she is not from this world either.
In this take on the female lead, the intelligence officer represents an extraterrestrial effort keenly interested in deciphering an alien (even more alien, that is) language. She is on our world to recruit locals with an aptitude for the task, as she was once recruited from her own world. The Internet contest is again her clever ploy to find recruits. This time she doesn’t take them away to a secret government base; she takes the conscripts off-world entirely. Humans turn out to be exceptionally able at interpreting the structure of the language and the hero is in a class by himself. (Literally: the humans are taken to the world hosting the school for such intelligence officers).
The storyline at the school centers on adjusting to being conscripted/abducted, about adjusting to being the “new kids on campus”, and the special problems of the hero being held at arms length even by the other humans (on account of his savant facility with the mysterious language). We begin to learn the origin and importance of these messages: they are the communications of a semi-mythical race whose rise predates the current civilization. Or perhaps they showed up suddenly out of nowhere a few centuries prior. What I was firm on was that they where unimaginably powerful, but an almost unknown quantity with respect to their nature, history, motivation, and goals.
In an unprecedented move, killing machines representing this other civilization (which I eventually named the Skolt) attack the school and all but a handful of the humans are killed. We will learn Earth was attacked as well. The survivors are thrown together, and after the initial attack is repulsed, are soon whisked away by one of the (few, surviving) combat officers stationed at the school. En route to a safe haven, the hero is (as are we) filled in on the essential history of the conflict and along the way gets to meet some more obviously non-human aliens, including a species that specializes as the medical technicians for all the other races.
The back-story I worked out, as told to the hero, was: a millennia old and still on-going interstellar war is slowly being waged. An apparently ancient yet almost unknown race, the Triill, in part through the proxy of an automated warrior race, the Skolt, are in conflict with a confederation of newer humanoid worlds loosely bound together under a militarily-organized umbrella that was less than a unified government but more than a space navy. I still haven’t made up my mind what I want to call it, but here I’ll use Confederation Defense Council, the CDC. The Triill have never been seen and have left no significant artifacts traceable to them, but their existence has been inferred through the interception of communications between them and the Skolt. The Skolt communicate in an artificial and highly structured language, a combined means of programming and data reporting. Amongst the huge volumes of Skolt communications are rare intercepts having a markedly different structure; these are assumed to be true Triill-to-Triill communications. The Triill language is complex and not yet understood, although considerable resources are devoted to unraveling its complexities.
Outside the core worlds of the CDC, are a vast number of pre-contact, technologically still-developing worlds. Some of these will, at the proper time, be contacted and brought into the CDC. Some will be judged unsuitable, and left to their isolation. Not a few will destroy their own budding civilization, even to the point of their own extinction. Many worlds are monitored but a sort of Prime Directive is in effect. This is not for the benefit of the pre-contact worlds, although they do so benefit, but rather for the self-protection of the CDC. Strategies of early contact and direct intervention were tried in the early centuries of the CDC, and were disasters for both sides.
The Triill War is not waged in the clash of great space fleets or through other space opera clichés; indeed there is very little that could be characterized as a battle at all. The skirmishes with the Skolt are an indirect consequence of the activities of the CDC and have the status more of unavoidable accident than of battles in a campaign. The primary purpose of the CDC is intelligence gathering, not fighting. The attack on the school was truly unprecedented. The continued Skolt action to come will be equally so.
From time to time, decades and sometimes centuries apart, the Triill attack a world and completely sterilize it of intelligent life forms. Their criteria, and their motive, are completely unknown. The worlds chosen are always pre-contact, although the CDC would be utterly unable to defend one of their own worlds should it be attacked. The means of destruction is a planet-wide blanketing of neutron weapons, launched from space or perhaps materializing in the atmosphere directly over the targets. The higher life forms are killed, but the structures and other artifacts are more-or-less preserved. (There is an unavoidable amount of collateral damage, plus uncontrolled fires and other subsequent natural events progressively destroy what remains.) No attack had ever been directly observed by the CDC and that had been learned was from forensic examination of dead civilizations. These examinations were complicated by the irregular patrols of the Skolt, who attack and destroy any intruders they find on a sterilized world.
To increase the chances for the human survivors, they are separated from each other and scattered about the fleet or taken to remote ground stations. The effects of being isolated from each other and the hazards of learning to live in an advanced, somewhat alien, and occasionally hostile environment all take their toll; one by one the humans die from accident, suicide or continued Skolt action. When only a handful are left, the survivors of Earth are gathered back together again and more carefully hidden on a pre-contact world parallel to our own, close enough that English is spoken and the broad strokes of culture are recognizably American, though clearly more conservative and with a surprise twist here and there (for example: women never won the right to vote).
The survivors avoid frequent contact with the natives by living in a rural location at the edge of a wilderness area. Their cover story is that they are “foreign” tourists on an extended vacation, and only occasionally go into town for supplies and some relief from the boredom. (This was all arranged by pre-contact agents of the CDC, who front themselves as a travel agency and have experience in such local matters as arranging bank accounts and counterfeiting any necessary identification or records.) Of the five survivors, four pair off into couples and the hero is again the odd-man-out. He increasing spends his time alone, in the forest, working on the problem of the Triill language, and wrestling with his new circumstances.
Ultimately, he escapes his CDC protectors (wardens?) and tries to start over, working to establish a new life for himself in this altered version of his home world. When he is found again, by the combat officer who was sent after him, he learns the others have been killed. There is treachery, or at least a security leak, within the CDC, but its scope and nature aren’t yet known. His next destination, chosen by the officer for its “purloined letter” quality, is a world already destroyed by the Triill.
Something is rotten in the state of the CDC now our main characters are being used as bait by the powers that be in an attempt to flush out the source of the security leak. Because of doubts about this view of events and because of the continuing danger from the Skolt (and implicitly the Triill), the characters will be sent only “expendable” worlds. I toyed with making the race of the MedTechs the behind-the-scenes agents. But I could never satisfactorily work out their relationship to the Triill.
Earth, I decided, was the first world destroyed after it had been discovered. Earth provided the only example of an extant species, a planetary civilization not already dead, but one of the few singled out for sterilization. All the other dead worlds were explored as archeological digs. There were 183 previously identified sterilizations, as the dead worlds were known, covering a time period stretching back almost 20,000 years. Prior to Earth, the most recent discovery was a world sterilized only a few decades before. The battle commander’s last duty assignment was scouting that world and this is where she takes the hero. . (If Earth weren’t still radioactive, they would have gone there. I briefly considered planting them on the Moon, but I didn’t want to deal with space suits and other issues. Apologies to “Oscar”.)
At the point when the hero arrived on the sterilized world, I made the next major revision to the storyline. I dumped the entire plot involving other survivors by eliminating them in the school attack; only he and the battle commander escape. Then I backed up even more and eliminated the school interlude completely as well. Instead, the hero was still in Earth orbit when the Triill attack occurred. He and the others were in the custody of CDC forces at that point. The Skolt attack, but do not completely destroy, the transport the humans were on. He was in sickbay, separated from the others, and thus strictly by chance happens to be the only human to survive.
I eventually came to view the CDC as organized into several branches, of unequal size and clout. The details keep changing as I shuffle things around. One service is the contact corps, which finds and monitors new civilizations. A second is the archeological corps, which studies the sterilized worlds. This represents the crème de la crème of the CDC. The smallest corps is the armed service, which handles transport for the other services and provides protection, or at least advice, in the rare event of a run-in with the Skolt.
So, where were we? Oh yeah, the hero and now sole survivor of our late, lamented Earth is placed in the custody (and safe keeping, in theory) of an archeological unit, which is assigned to the most recently sterilized world I had in mind earlier. He is still the outsider, a civilian dragged along by a close-knit pseudo-military / paramilitary team, and an “alien specimen” to some degree in the minds of the others. Most human sub-species, it seems, are xenophobic; the exceptions being the core worlds of the CDC. The dozen or so members of the unit are all that remains of the larger group originally being transported, and have their own losses to cope with and other adjustments to make. I recast he battle commander character as a lieutenant attached to the archaeological unit in the role of Skolt defense specialist. Although I have used the term military organization to describe them, and a hierarchy of ranks is observed, the style of living and working in the archeological branch is very informal and more like the pecking order in a very relaxed university environment.
The unit settles into a farmhouse on the outskirts of a large community (a ghost town, remember) that will serve as base of operations. The hero both accepts and protests his outsider status by setting up housekeeping in an old-fashioned field tent that he pitches inside the adjoining barn. The lieutenant is also an outsider, although to a much lesser degree, coming both from another world than the others and from another branch of the service. She holds herself apart a little on the basis of both of those differences. This places her in a position to better understand, though still remain emotionally detached from, the hero. She lives with the others in their communal arrangement. All the others are from the same world and share backgrounds more essentially similar than essentially different. They are a gregarious bunch, with frequent touching, shared duties, common meals, and shared showers (and also a small number of shared beds) as part and parcel of the essential glue binding them together, a sensual espirit de corps. Some scenes here are jabs at the marriage equals one man plus one woman debate going on here in MA (and elsewhere).
I played with having only the lieutenant and the unit captain speak fluent English. The service members CDC all use a common tongue; many will also prove to have an aptitude for languages that the hero does not. Thus I get to explore this aspect of his isolation as well. The overall sense of loneliness and loss, having been forcibly and suddenly taken from his world combined with the impossibility of his ever returning, and the local distance he can’t seem to close with the close knit, insular even, unit he is thrown together with, all eventually force him to leave the encampment and strike out exploring on his own. This is without permission, of course, and he doesn’t forewarn them. There follows his explorations and discoveries along the littered highways and in the abandoned cities. I had some fun imagining scenes like his interpretation of alien fashions or his delight in exploring the equivalent of an alien toy store.
While “camping out”, the hero has a vivid dream in which a ghostly native of this planet visits him to explain some of what he has seen and to describe his/her/its experience on their planet’s last day, the day of the Triill attack. The native was an expert dancer, a revered profession for that world, but still only at the beginning of his/her/its career. The hero is also left with some insight into the nature of the Triill and a hint that the Triill themselves could be long extinct, or some how “passed on”. The dream ends with a warning that the Skolt are near.
Both the alien in the dream and the medical technicians on the ship were distinctly non-human (but upright, bipedal sorts) and both had some an unexplained but unmistakable interest in the hero. The aliens visiting Earth (and other pre-contact worlds) had been hiding behind cosmetic surgery and other gimmicks. At this point, I decide to make them all much more human in appearance and behavior. In fact, later I will decide they are all genetically human and instead of having them come from different planets throughout the galaxy, I have them all come from different versions of our Earth existing on different timelines (a la Quantum Leap), or different branches of the quantum multiverse (a la Sliders). Abracadabra, I don’t have to explain (or pointedly ignore) how different planets end up with far too similar intelligent species and histories. I now can work my story using people from what amount to merely different backgrounds instead of having to worry about “realistic” aliens. It also meant I could, with a straight face, contemplate a romantic liaison between our hero and the others, or, case in point, have the lack of same be a legitimate issue for our hero; otherwise I would have to leave such liaisons as a mutually recognized impossibility.
The Skolt attack the outpost of the archeological unit. Through the necessary coincidence, the captain and the lieutenant were both away, searching for the hero as a matter of fact. The captain’s motivation was the embarrassment of misplacing the prisoner she was supposed to have in her protective custody. The lieutenant’s training was for this kind of situation (search and retrieval on a world the Skolt might patrol). They find him on the highway. He had not tried to hide his trail, which they were following, and he was retracing his route after seeing the distant nuclear flash in the direction from which he came. These events leave all three dealing with a major, and more or less common, loss.
They hole up in the nearest small city, by a library complex. Having nothing more effective to do while waiting for rescue, they set about doing exactly what archaeological corps was created to do, learn about the culture and knowledge of a sterilized world. The real story is the binding together of the three as they come to understand each other’s feelings of isolation, loss or failure. Specific issues are worked out, such as the hero’s need to be accepted as a peer and not a ward and the lieutenant’s mistrust of intimacy. I considered all the pairings, each possible permutation of the three, but in the end decided they didn’t go there.
Eventually rescue comes. The trio is not returned to any of the core worlds of the CDC but is shuttled around in a continuing attempt to hide/protect them. The security leak device I used in Version 2 I reuse here to explain their being shuffled about.
First stop was an ancient, almost airless world orbiting a bloated, dying sun. My characters ended up in space suits after all. The key event that occurs before they move on was another vision given to the hero, this one coming in a daydream while he contemplated the ruins of what he took to be a temple. Whether there is a spiritual explanation for his insights or if these moments are his subconscious revealing to his conscious the conclusions to be drawn from his intense study of the Triill messages, I don’t reveal and probably wouldn’t make explicit in any narrative. Nonetheless, behind the scenes I am assuming this ambiguity.
The next stop is another Earth clone, this one hosting a divided America, shattered into regional and independent governments. (I have in mind something along the lines of what if the South had won succession.) On this Earth, the West is The Free Mormon state, the South forms the dominant Confederacy and extends northward to include border states captured and held after the South’s victory, the North is a weaker American Union that includes the Atlantic Provinces of what was Canada, Quebec has succeeded, and what is left are known as The Northern Territories. Black slavery was eventually abolished, even on this world; but, returning to an exploration of the themes I introduced in the alternate Earth of Version 2, I introduce female slavery in the specific form of a system of legalized concubinage. The time period is the equivalent of the 50’s, with various anachronisms.
What I’m looking to explore is how exploiting some women (read: any repressed subgroup) has a negative effort for all women. So, the plot question becomes: how does the hero end up with a concubine of his own, in an apparent contradiction to he professes to be his beliefs? I arrange it this way:
In this version, I give the hero more freedom to roam on his own. He is in Pennsylvania farm country, staying at an earlier era’s equivalent of today’s Bed-and-Breakfast. A poor farmer, with too many sons and too few acres, supplements his income by taking borders. (Actually, his wife does, but that is part of the point.) Their one daughter still lives at home. This represents a problem because she is past the customary marrying age (which I peg at, say, 16) and, further, has been increasingly ill of late: some sort of “woman’s trouble”. To cut to the chase, she begins hemorrhaging and only (expensive) surgery will save her life. Her family’s response is to accept God’s will, and prepare for her death. The hero is bent out of shape by this and is appalled to discover he can’t even pay for the surgery himself, local law prohibiting such kinds of “interference”. What is legal, and what the father insists upon, is that he purchase the girl, As her owner, the hero is within his rights (and to a small degree also legally obligated) to protect his “property”. Voila.
In what the hero considers an appallingly short time, his concubine is discharged from the hospital. He abandons his tour of this world’s North America, and immediately heads back west as fast as her strength permits. In the Free Mormon State, concubines are not permitted to be bought or sold, yet the institution is recognized within its jurisdiction as representing a form of “junior wife”. The hero leaves a message for the others as to his plans and flees to the Northern Territories, where the practice is entirely illegal (and thus the concubine can be set permanently free). But freedom is more than a state of law; it is a state of mind. He settles on the open prairie and sets about teaching her to see herself as independent and the one, by right and not local circumstance, who is to make her own choices.
Soon the captain and the lieutenant arrive, and conflicts arise over the status of the girl. The hero has taken her to his bed and the others object that she is still being exploited, even if with her acquiescence. In the background, the hero is working alone on the Triill language and has a breakthrough. CDC minions arrive to collect the trio, and the girl is left behind (as an illegal alien, as it were). The hero is devastated. He had fallen in love, he realizes.
At the debriefing back at CDC HQ, the hero reveals his insight that “We are the Triill”. What I am vague about, in my own mind still, is what that phrase means.
The captain’s adamant objection that the girl was being exploited by the hero, whether or not he truly loved her, is really my objection, of course. So I set about reducing the inequity by raising her age and eliminating the circumstance where she feels she owes the man her life on top of everything else.
I reverse the order of events that occurred after the three were reqcued. A debriefing occurs first, which is lengthy and highlights the hero’s status as an alien specimen. No final conclusions are reached, but for the foreseeable future the CDC has no need of the hero. He languishes in captivity, coddled in a cushy environment, but is a prisoner in his mind nonetheless. I write the captain out of the picture. She is promoted, which the other two each find curious for their own reasons. (Remember, she did manage to lose here entire unit, after all.)
The lieutenant is, contra wise, reprimanded and demoted by her branch of the service. There is some back story I bring in where she is a adherent of a warrior religion and returns to her home temple-dojo to be publicly excommunicated but secretly elevated in status. She resigns her commission in the CDC, and after pulling in all favors ever due her plus the behind-the-scenes influence she now enjoys, is assigned as a civilian specialist to a pre-contact world that lies somewhere culturally between the one of Version 8 and our own familiar here-and-now. Concubines still exist but the geopolitical scene looks otherwise familiar.
The hero is transferred into the oversight of the former-lieutenant, perhaps after his suicide attempt bolsters her arguments that this would be in everyone’s best interest. She arranges lodging (and all necessary papers, bank accounts, credit cards & everything else) for him on a resort island. (Think: Martha’s Vineyard.) She rents a beach house at one end of the island for a short term (the summer, or a single year). She also rents a concubine for the same period, as his therapy.
He arrives unaware and learns all this by being debriefed, on the spot as it were, by the local rental agent. The agent meets him at the ferry and drives him out to the house. The concubine is introduced matter-of-factly, although the tempest inside the hero’s mind is revealed in the narrative. Her back story is that she was formerly the type of concubine bought (if temporarily) for the purpose producing heirs, but due to an unfortunate birth defect for which she was not genetically responsible and due to the pride of a very rich man, she is sterilized and demoted into the branch of the business that rents concubines for pleasure (i.e., she is forced into prostitution, from our point of view). This is in spite of an exceptional record as mother and wet nurse. Even within her agency this is recognized as unjust, but wealth is power…
I still have the hero fall for her and wrestle with the unavoidable inequities of their relationship. This time, I don’t give him the easy out of immigrating to a free state. She figures out that he is an alien and he still solves the problem of the Triill language, but perhaps now with her help. And I’m thinking they decide to not reveal the secret to the CDC and to simply live out their life hiding in plain sight, as it were.
There is no tenth version. For now, this story sits on my ideas shelf.
© 1997-2005 Roland F. McKenney
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