[Novel excerpt] Interlude 1
And a bit about what the Interludes are
Here’s the latest from my Patreon. I know, I know, it’s Tuesday not Monday, but one of the many weird things about Canada is that the May 3-day weekend is the second-to-last one, not the last. So yesterday was part of the Big Exhale after my Vancouver trip, and I might (might!) have finally gotten un-jet-lagged…we shall see.
This week’s excerpt is not the start of Chapter 3, but rather the first of the Interludes. In the structure of the novel as it currently stands, the narrative is handed off among three first-person narrators (Eden, Terrah, Cid), and from time to time a more omniscient-sounding, third-person narrator that you first encountered in the Prologue. (If you’re just joining us, that link is where to start, and is free to all.)
Also, here’s the whole collection of Thorn posts so far.
In this Interlude, we return to that third-person voice for the first time, hopefully with enough space between that the reader’s almost forgotten it’s there. One of the many things I’d like to know as you folks get the first real look at this is how things like that pacing are working for you, and also whether having essentially four narrators is too disorienting or strange in some other way that doesn’t quite work. I’m so close to this material at this point that it’s definitely time for beta readers.
One last note before the meat of the post: this is a long one, and so the teaser alone is up around 1300 words. So, enjoy? And, if you’d like to join on to see the rest, there’s about 2,000 words more where that came from for paid members only.
INTERLUDE: WINGS OF DESIRE
It’s hard, finding out you’re an artificial human. All the memories, seething through you. The day you realize that 85% of what you remember — everything from your earliest childhood memories to your best friend in high school to your first kiss to your college voice teacher — all of it is constructed, a case file, a story that a department in a large corporation scripted and cast and recorded and encoded to make you believe that you had a best friend, a first kiss, a voice teacher, a childhood.
That memory, the one with the sunrise? Amateurish, if we’re being honest. But still, it was only her first clue. She wasn’t made to be stupid. Ditzy, perhaps. Capable of radiating the sort of vapidity that makes her avid followers believe that she’s little more than a singing sex doll. Fitted with the most state-of-the-art pheromonal systems, the most carefully researched facial shape, waist to hip ratio, skin tone, eye size, vocal quality and body fat percentage. Everything designed to make her the most desirable, and the most desiring of desire. To make her life as a pop star enjoyable, so she’d keep on doing it.
Underneath, though, they’d also set the stage for an excellent mind. Perhaps a touch too excellent. They had made her out of pieces of another excellent mind, after all. But maybe they weren’t thinking quite hard enough, when they did it. Someone in the scripting department hadn’t bothered to check the geography of Keansburg. Someone else hadn’t considered nearly deeply enough how long it would take for a being as smart as that to figure out what she was.
Or, more to the point for her: what she wasn’t.
What she wasn’t was a Jersey girl, born and raised. What she wasn’t was born and raised. What she wasn’t was born.
What she wasn’t.
She thought about it all the time, once she figured it out. And, as all intelligent beings know, thinking is where the trouble starts.
She had been formed in her own early career. The labels never manufacture pop stars to emerge already famous; it wouldn’t make any sense to the fans. Much easier to create the makings of a phenomenon, then launch her onto the scene. Pop music magazines had always talked about megastars “bursting onto the scene.” This just sped up the process. As if Madonna, say, had emerged fully formed from the forehead of Sire Records, wearing an oversized lace bandanna and singing “Lucky Star.”
The story, like everything else about her, had to be manufactured. The labels, though, put a lot more into their vat-grown starlets than they had into the starved and starry-eyed actual people they worked with. The girl with a guitar and a dream who prostrated herself in countless ways to get an executive’s attention, only to get thrown scraps that she might hope to parlay into a career? One in a thousand would make it, maybe one in ten thousand.
Someone they’d literally built, though. Someone with no past, no baggage, no hunger of her own. Someone who not only owed them her first big break, but her very life.
Now that was a valuable asset.
Eden was on her first tour, with her first album. She had sprung into existence on the cusp of her debut, bubbly and gorgeous and bursting with talent. They had written a few songs for her — or rather, their algorithm had, which she took on readily as her own. It wasn’t long, though, before she was generating her own music.
And she was good, no question. She knew a good song when she heard it, and was agreeable about recording songs that had been produced for her. But she also composed naturally, her songs the perfect mix of universalized froth and that peculiar hook that marked the greatest pop songs. When her first few singles came out, followed by her first full album (titled, what else, The Garden), Eden was an instant success. It didn’t even occur to her, at first, to wonder what her last name was supposed to be.
She knew it, of course, the way she knew everything about herself. Unconsciously, in fits and starts, the kind of memory regular people have. Snapshots, fuzzy ideas. Stories about yourself that you aren’t sure are things you remember, things you saw in a photo, or things your parents used to tell stories about. The implanted memory tech had gotten good enough that while the memories themselves were linear files, the way the brain was programmed to access them was deliberately flawed, unsteady. As close to how normally-grown humans experience memory as it was possible to simulate.
So it made sense, for a while, that that one memory was off in a way Eden couldn’t define. She didn’t even think about it for the first few years. Along with being fully formed came a full acceptance of her state of being, a belief, sure as sugar, that she’d been here all along, living life up to this point.
And so it was with a merry heart that she entered the heyday of her stardom.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone wouldn’t. If a fully biological person were to wake up one day, memory-wiped and alone, only to be picked up by a group of friendly executives with bottomless resources and the unending desire for them to Do Well, they’d probably enter into the situation with some trepidation, but ultimately would settle in to this new, splendid life they’d seemingly been chosen for. It would be difficult to turn down the rush of performance, the fame, the adulation, the sex drugs and rock’n’roll of it all, even if you couldn’t recall a thing about your life before.
So imagine, if you will, a person crafted into existence with the perfect, built-in belief that she was born, grew up raised by a single mom, longed to be a pop star, lost her mother in a tragic accident, and was scooped up by talent scouts faster than an ice cream cone on a summer Saturday at the boardwalk.
It had been beautiful. Everything had been. She thought about that a lot, too. A particular memory she would replay, once she figured out that she could do that, was a real one, one that had happened. At least, she was pretty sure.
It was early days. She didn’t know, at the time, that she was only a year and a half old.
On this night, at the apparent age of 24, Eden was coming off of a great show in Berlin. The lights, the crowds, the screaming and the rush were still new to her, and it was magical, perfect.
It was the first concert on the first world tour, and she’d been told she could have her dressing room fitted to her specifications. Her manager, Charlie, had helped set her up.
“First we take Manhattan, right babe?” he said as they landed at Berlin-Tegel. She had watched the sun rise as they flew into it, craning as far as she could to get a glimpse of the pink-orange disc that was turning the sky outside her window from deep blue to purple to pink. Redeyes were rough, but this way she could sleep all day and be ready for the show that night.
She had been made with most of the critical knowledge pre-programmed, complete with tastes and opinions on the catalogue of 20th and 21st century American music. And she was used to Charlie’s corny references by then, and used to him casually calling her “babe” or “sweetheart” or “doll.” He never tried anything with her. Aside from the intimate endearments, he was always unfailingly polite and helpful. These were still the good times, and she considered him a friend.
“And then we take Berlin,” she said softly back, not looking at him but still out at the dawn sky and the landscape beyond.