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Posted By: MrD Oct 27, 2004 - 12:19 pm

this is a very word count restricted piece i wrote for the creative section in the A level english language course from last year. I had to stuff so much grammar in the piece that i think it might have damaged the story. i never got my grade back on this piece because due to a high speed downhill mountain bike crash onto my face i was suffering from a brain injury and lost whole segments of my memory just before my exam and my work is still sat in the examiners office somewhere! i am trying to get it back officially, to see if it's been marked, for my own sanity

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Rear Window


Nose pressed against the transparency of the observation window, feeling the condensation making my nose damp, I watched the receding, wispy ball that we had called home with some sense of loss but more of determination


Don’t get me wrong, I am not against change, in fact I welcome it! But this change was forced on us, we the rightful owners of this world we left behind. Once beautiful and teeming with variety, it now holds the image of oneness. Where once there were plains, valleys, forests, deserts, arctic zones and bustling townships, now everything looks the same, feels the same, smells the same.

This isn’t my opinion, isn’t the view of one individual in the system. It’s there, you can see it’s. It’s not like in the books anymore, or the holos, or impregnated in everybody’s minds since pre-school. Now the image doesn’t match the stored image we all have of home at all. Gone is the variety of colour, of peaks and valleys, smatterings of colours from the artist we knew called nature. Now the predominant colour is a sort of reddish brown, specked with the flares of other craft like ours attempting to boost into orbit. If they aren’t too late. If they aren’t carrying the ‘infection’ with them.

It wasn’t our fault personally, we didn’t come up with the idea, the theory, the practicals in the laboratories. We didn’t submit our results, however tainted by idealism they were. We didn’t have a say in the affirmation to continue the work. We didn’t even understand the potential benefits of the science involved. But when the experiment broke out of control, continued spreading, contacting all matter, consuming and changing the molecules through the security of the laboratories, we still had no say for it was too late.

An idea as basic as the original conundrum presented to the manhattan project scientists. How do you create a self sustaining reaction, that would in actual fact create an excess of results. Here, the group now known to the public in the media as The Doom Group, had tried to create nanobots that would create more of themselves when needed, then inactivate when their job is done, passing out of the body and simple becoming a part of our landfills. But they didn’t switch off, they didn’t stop replicating, they didn’t finish their work.

It is generally thought the nanobots passed out of the test humans into our waste disposal system, they passed along and got through the filtration systems in our sewerage plants. Let loose into the world they were so small that travelling great distances was unthought of. But they simply passed back through our water system, unnoticed, colourless, odourless. Straight into peoples drinking water. There the nanobots found hosts, hosts they were not programmed for. At this point a change in basic programming was forced in the nanobots, a reaction to foreign environments. Since the nanobots ‘talked’ to each other, by touching and exchanging information, all the variety of different environments must have confused the basic programming the nanobots contained, or maybe they got together to share processing power. Quite how they decided they had to act on their own, is anyones guess.

Nature is not logical, nature is not ordered, nature is chaos. The nanobots didn’t know this, they didn’t have the programming to know this. They just had the basic rule of healing, , correcting, fixing problems. They just carried out their orders. With a lack of communication with their creators, let alone the creators knowing they had got out and changed their programming till it was too late, they had spread wide and far before it was noticed. Then the mad scramble to try to figure out what had gone wrong became a log jam in the public eye. Everybody screaming at each other to do something, but red tape preventing actual work being carried out fast enough to be adequate. Even when the scientists announced what they had to do, it seemed too late, satellites in orbit providing horrendous images of a visible spread of the nanobots work, natures landscape being changed, seeming ‘growths’ appearing on the landscapes which previously had been our beautiful landscape.

It was of interest to some groups in a sad way, seeing how our water supply could be tracked, knowing the water we drank on one continent could eventually be passed to another continent. The world CDC organisations quickly pulled out their predictions for viral spread, for natures diseases, then merely changed the titles. At least they found they could do their job properly. Presentation, tracking, preventitive advice. Not that any of it worked though. You couldn’t possibly educate every one of the worlds citizens, couldn’t switch the water plants down, couldn’t stop travel, no more than you could prevent the nanobots spreading via the water table. It was hopeless to prevent.

Of course, the scientists worked feverously in their labs, no longer pristine quarantine zones, safe from affecting the world. With these facts in mind the red tape dissolved, allowing the scientists some respite from their previous controls. But this didn’t make them cheerful, didn’t make them glad to be getting on with their work with no restraints, no ceiling to their creativity. They attempted communication with the nanobots, but the nanobots simple processors wouldn’t allow for communication as they were originally designed within limited size constraints, to only go after one type of cell, one type of disease/virus. So the scientists introduced other matter to the nanobots in an attempt to maybe shift the nanobots priorities, to actively seek out and destroy the material they were introduced to. The nanobots ‘tasted’ the material and added it to their collective knowledge, carried on as they were before, but also went after the new material, seeking it out actively.

They had been introduced to nuclear material, processed nuclear material. When power stations that had been shutdown and made safe, suddenly developed leaks, their concrete walls developing pores where the nanobots went through them, Chernobyl became a living nightmare for people all round the world. The nanobots spread the radiation to their fellow workers, which spread further stage by stage. Killing the nanobots along the way,after a short period of time, it was thought they would all kill themselves like a moth to flame, but the radiation dosage became less and less the further out from the nuclear sources the nanobots travelled.

It was then the nanobots decided to attack all living creatures and not simple the complicated molecules they were designed for, the radiation overwhelmed their logic. Humans and animals started dropping dead everywhere, the general populous panicked, families didn’t just lose members, whole communities were wiped out. There was no point running to safe areas either, nowhere was safe and infected people spread the nanobots to anywhere previously not affected, if there were anywhere by then.

I feel priviledged to have been chosen to leave earth, to escape the destruction and loss of our home. Put into a high, slow orbit where we have the best chance of avoiding strikes by manmade clutter in orbit. We’re going into cold sleep now, our solar panels will provide more than enough power to keep the hibernation units working. We have to be here in the future, we have to be found if another race comes upon our world. We just hope they revive us before attempting a landing, so we can warn them off, they mustn’t be affected by the nanobots to return to their home and destroy themselves like we did.


Commentary


This piece is aimed at the average reader, I could have aimed it at only the pure sci-fi reader, however I decided the subject matter was easily understandable and the content current enough without any great leaps of understanding to be readable by everyone.

I have used the first pronoun in several places in the story to make it more personal to the reader and used the image of our home from space which everyone has in their mind, “impregnated in everybody’s minds since pre-school,” to put that image or our home in the readers mind firmly and play on empathy.

In a world where our race experiments without definite safety factors (you can’t even put all the labs on the moon, the scientists will only knock it out of orbit and wreak our tides/weather patterns), this piece is designed to show how little understanding we have of our actions in science and the dangers we face. In a world where scientific/medical advice is currently reversed from year to year, every educated person knows how real this story could become.

Posted By: Berry Nov 26, 2004 - 04:43 am

Hi Mr D,
I have just read your story and really enjoyed it. Great pace, the first person perspective makes it very real and considering the subject matter personalising the story is priceless. It also left fairly open-ended which allows me to carry on the story in my head even if you do not on paper. I must admit that I do not agree that too much grammar can be a problem. How could it! The story is well written I believe too much fantasy literature relies on its story being removed from our real lives. The result of which for me is 1) it ignores the rules of grammar that gives the writing true form and 2) makes the language oversimplified and dull because it is spending so much time setting up the new world they forget the readers are still in this one. The language is the key to self-expression and is to be found in the subtleties. Being dyslexic this often confounds my ability to express myself how I really want to but that’s another story. Great work.

Posted By: Magus Nov 26, 2004 - 05:16 am

" But this change was forced on us, we the rightful owners of this world we left behind." should be " But this change was forced on us, we, the rightful owners of this world, were left behind."

All I did was add the commss where I saw that they were needed. I also changed that last "we" to "were".

In the next sentence, after "Once" and before "beautiful" there chould be another comma.

"This isn’t my opinion, isn’t the view of one individual in the system." For this sentence I would recommend one of three options.

OPTION A) "This isn’t my opinion, the view of one individual in the system."

OPTION B) "This isn’t my opinion; isn’t the view of one individual in the system."

OPTION C) "This isn’t my opinion. This isn’t the view of one individual in the system."

Personally, I prefer option "B". It keeps the same flow while, at the same time, adding in that semi-colon which helps assist the flow, and also makes it grammatically correct.

I've got to go now. My little 2 and 4 year old cousins are coming over any minute and then we're going out to get the tree. I'll try to finish it today when I get back. If not then, then I'll finish it up tomarrow. From what I read it's very good. Keep up the good work!

Posted By: Caegaraneva Dec 21, 2004 - 03:34 pm

Magus, hate to disagree but the first sentence you changed was right in the first place, though maybe one too many clause modifiers was left out.

"We" weren't left behind; it is as the original sentence says; all after "Forced" is the direct object and modifiers. The "US" is being explained after the comma...US is "the rightful owners of this world". Then, it moves on to one further modifier, which is where it gets confusing. "This World" is the one that "we left behind"
Perhaps a more clear version of the same sentence with the original meaning would be "But this change was forced on us, the rightful owners of the world THAT we had to leave behind." Or something like that.