[OT] [Story] The tide of Progress

[primitive]

Very good writing Dogscoff. Given up on posting stuff at speculativevision ?

Have you any idea at all about a plot ?
There must have been a very good reason for letting a city be domed/drowned instead of just moving it, so that should be explained at some point. Can't wait to find out why

[dogscoff]

Still very much incomplete, not sure where it's going, and nothing to do with SE4. Comments appreciated as always.

**************

Honn set his feet on the platform and tried to discern whether the movement he felt was due to the water beneath it or some residual effect of the long flight down from orbit. Just as he decided that the deck was steady and the swaying was actually caused by his quivering legs, the shuttlecraft behind him lurched into the air, setting the floor into undeniable motion. The wedge-shaped vehicle laboured vertically up to an altitude that seemed to please it, then paused to correct balance and heading before finally accelerating toward the magnetic launch-ramp on the equatorial mountains to the south.

As the deck steadied itself on the calm waters, Honn looked to the horizon for stability. The harsh, jagged red mountains he remembered from his childhood were slightly softened by haze, and coloured with a salad of yellows and greens. The sky was a queasy salmon pink that reminded him all too well of the shuttle's in-flight meal, smeared with thin, mayonaise-coloured clouds way, way up in the upper reaches of the thin atmosphere. The sun looked too small, insignificant next to the blazing orbital mirror that hung in the sky above it. 'Two hundred years on Earth has made me soft' he reflected with a smile, then shivered as an icy breeze disregarded his light clothing completely and tore across his skin. After two months aboard ship, it was a refreshing sensation. He saw the other passengers all suppress an impulse to tear off their breathing-masks and gulp down a few bracing lungfulls of fresh air. It would have killed them of course: The martian atmosphere might be warm enough and thick enough now to support liquid water and exposed skin, but it was still nothing short of poison to breathe. It would take those plants on the distant mountainsides another thousand years at least to process all the planet's carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and locking the carbon away in wood and soil. He wondered first whether he would live long enough to see people breathing unmasked under this sky, then he was shocked to find himself wondering if he even wanted to. His stomach still churning, Honn followed his fellow passengers- mostly reporters and eminent scientists- to the submarine dock.

The transit subs were exactly as he remembered them. The scrubbed but still-visible graffiti on scrubbed but still-dirty grey metal, the scratched windows, the grime of cigarette ends and fast food worked into the seat covers by a thousand wretched hands and feet and arses. He was disappointed to find that he still hated it. He had hoped- desperately hoped- that his revulsion at the thought of returning to this place would be drowned out upon arrival by an overpowering wave of fond nostalgia. No such luck. The sub doors closed with their familiar clunk, and then nothing but a supressed hiss as around 16% oxygen, 80% nitrogen was pumped into the tiny tube along with some argon, CO2 and other trace gasses, including that stale smell that was the ghost of a million sweaty commuters. Then the inevitable gasps and sighs and sudden but subdued bubbles of conversation as the atmosphere lights came on and everyone removed their masks at once. For most of these people, this would be their first visit to Mars. The masks, the submarine, the lights of the domes beneath them almost lost in the murky red water, all of it was a novelty to them. To Honn Donniter it was just an ugly flashback.

One thing that had been added since he Last rode the subs was a commentary. Whether it was laid on specifically for today's offworlder guests, or whether all travellers were treated to it he didn't know, but he listened with an unsettling mixture of pride and loathing.

"When humankind first came to Mars (the screen shows images of primitive spacecraft and puffy-suited, flag-staking astronauts), those first travellers found an ancient world that was dead and barren, yet filled with an incredible potential for life and industry. (Artist's impression of a post-terraformed Mars, all forests and shining cities) However, the technology of the time (Archive footage of 21st Century cities, dirty, sleazy and overcrowded but apart from the clothes and the hairstyles almost identical to our own) barely even conceived of the monumental projects that would one day arise from the foundations they laid down. (A utopian future woodcutter fells a mighty Martian pine, while his friends, laughing, fish on a wooden lakeside jetty.) They could not have known that their first landing site, directly below you now (all the sub's inhabitants save Honn peer downward through the scratched windows), was to grow from a tiny scientific outpost to a thriving capital city of almost 20 million people. (A series of still images in quick succession, 800 years in 4 seconds, all the way from pressurised pLastic tubes and balloon-wheeled buggies to the awesome Mars Stadium and the ultra-modern Parliament Hall) They selected their landing site in the dried Martian sea bed based on the requirements of the time- they needed a flat and stable area for landing and construction, and a ready source of water, which was to be found beneath the soil as ice. Most of all though, they hoped that this area might yield evidence of a history of life here on Mars. (An actor dressed as one of the original settlers carries out experiments on Martian soil, looks disappointed.) Little did they know that life was not in Mars' history, but in it's future. (More bloody utopian fantasy images, this time of children frollicking in Martian cornfields beneath a gleaming sun and blue sky.) However, when the descendants of those settlers chose to embark upon the T-project, (pictures of the sky-mirror) they soon realised that New World City would be submerged beneath the rising waters of the renewed Martian seas. (colourful diagrams showing the relationship between sunlight, atmospheric temperature and air pressure, the resultant flood of melting permafrost represented by a rising cross-section of blue.) Nonetheless, this brave, pioneer people were not to be beaten, and they began the job of converting the city's domes, built airtight to hold in the vital atmosphere that we breathe, making them strong enough to keep out a million tonnes of newly-liberated seawater. (Pictures of the domes being reinforced and rustproofed, a task that took 150 years and cost more lives than the War of Liberation.) Today, New World City is the pride of all Mars (images in Honn's head of a depressed, bitter people skulking beneath a sunless glass sky) and one of the most prosperous commercial and industrial centres in the worlds." (Memories of starving people running from police gunfire in the rot riots, of parents begging passers-by to take their children into servitude and provide for them, of families suffocating in waste reclamation chambers where they had hoped to find food, of entire communities wiped out in an instant because they couldn't afford proper dome maintenance.)

[Taz-in-Space]

Taz liked what he read - and wants more!

Taz wants to know:

Honn thinks about having lived on earth for 200 years and wonders of he will be alive in a THOUSAND years for martian atmosphere generation - Are all humans now so long lived OR is Honn NOT human?

Also:

Was Honn Mars-born?
Why did he go to Earth?
What did he do there?
Why did he return to Mars?
How ...

(list of 1000000000000000+ questions deleted in the interest of sanity)

[dogscoff]

Honn thinks about having lived on earth for 200 years and wonders of he will be alive in a THOUSAND years for martian atmosphere generation - Are all humans now so long lived OR is Honn NOT human?

Yeah, he's human, but immortality isn't a scientific impossibility, you know. Scientists have already identified the mechanism which makes us age, and if we could just switch it off, our bodies would continue to repair themselves/ keep us young forever. You'd still be vulnerable to violent death/ death by disease, obviously, but not old age.

Anyway, yesterday I changed Honn's immortality in my rewrite of the chapter (for plot reasons), as well as introducing the other major cool concept of the story, changing all the timescales and generally strengthening the chapter, then introduced some new characters and a stack more plot/ background in a second chapter, saved it all to my removable USB gizmo and then went and lost it. I know I had it in my pocket when I left work. I've searched my house high and low, I'm coming to the ugly conclusion that I may have dropped it in a shop/ shop's car park on the way home Last night.

By far the best thing I've ever written, and I frkn lost it...

One Last thing: If I do ever find/ rewrite it, I think this might be the story I use to try to get published, so I won't be making it freely available on the web. I'll happily mail it to trusted shrapnellers on request though.

[primitive]

Good luck on recovering your work.

It's easy to spot the talent in your writing big dawg, so you should give it a shot.

If you need a critic, I will be happy to help out.
If its one thing I'm good at its criticising the work of others

[farstryder]

if you need a proof-reader, i'll happily volunteer. SF about Mars is my fatal weakness, and i'd dally with a bit of writing myself. good luck on recovering your story! i know how it can be to lose something you've worked very hard on...

...why, just yesterday, my cats discovered how to turn on and off the power strip my computer is plugged into...

[dogscoff]

Yay! Found it! (Trouser pocket, hanging up in wardrobe, despite having checked it dozens of times)

I'll be taking applications for beta-readers at the usual email address...

=-)

[geoschmo]

Ooooo, dark.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Yay! Found it! (Trouser pocket, hanging up in wardrobe, despite having checked it dozens of times)

ah. the brownies struck. or maybe the grimlins.

[TerranC]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
I'll happily mail it to trusted shrapnellers on request though.

Very nice...

*Starts hatching piracy scheme*