It is interesting that we so often use phrases like “let me tell you a story.” Once upon a time people did exactly this, but today we try for something different. Today most writers want to “evoke” a story instead.
It wasn’t always this way. When we look at fairy tales, Greek tragedies, and myths of old, we find very little evoking. These stories were told straight ahead: this is what happened first, and then this, and then this, and so on until the end. We get only a little explanation of what characters are thinking or feeling, and when we do it is a very stale statement like “he was scared.”
The audience that hears these stories understand all that occurs, they have been told the events plainly, but they usually do not feel very much from the story. This defines the difference between telling and evoking.
Evoking became more prominent as the craft of story-writing evolved. Somewhere along the way authors learned to use their prose to elicit intense emotions from their audience. Consider this brief passage from the first paragraph of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House:
Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
Dickens might have “told” his reader that it was dark and dreary, but instead he used flowery descriptions to better make the reader “feel” the bleakness directly. Generally we consider this “feeling” approach to be better, although there are pros and cons to both it and straight-ahead telling.
By just telling you something I can use a minimum of words to communicate a great deal. In a single sentence I can convey a broader scene. By evoking something I generally have to be a good deal more wordy. In fact it is very easy for me to go overboard and become too long-winded! But while my sentences might not be as broad, they will run deeper. Many authors will therefore combine the two, giving the general lay of the land in a few expository sentences, and then focusing on specific details with carefully chosen adjective and adverbs.
Active vs Inactive)
Another difference between telling and evoking is whether the audience is actively experiencing an event, or only hearing about it secondhand. Exposition is where someone tells you what happened. Plot is where you see it unfold directly.
Almost the whole of my last story post was exposition. The main character was at a critical juncture, the pivotal moment where he had to commit to his single, greatest deed. Now because I decided to write this short piece as if it were in the middle of a larger narrative, this main character was making his decision based off of facts that the reader had never seen. I therefore had to explain these things, and that was how the exposition came to be.
One might feel that the obvious solution would be to not try telling stories in the middle, if the reader had been experiencing all of these accounts as they happened then they wouldn’t need to be told about them secondhand later. This is true, although even a story that seems to begin in the beginning will still have some of its hooks in the past. Every story is in media res, with past events that will have to be summarized to some degree.
Another consideration is that even if the reader had experienced all of these moments, they might still need a quick recap to explain how each moment is weighing in my main character’s penultimate decision. They would need to be able to follow his train of thought to understand his behavior, otherwise his choices would appear to be random.
So once again, active plot is ideal for putting the reader in the experience and giving them information firsthand. But there is still a place for exposition when it comes to briefly going over broader details, and also to point out the significance of previous events when linked together.
So Do You Show Or Tell?)
All of which is to say that both showing and telling have their place. Of the two, telling is easier, and as such we tend to fall into it by default. This is why novice writers have to be coached to step out of that comfort zone and embrace more evocative methods. It is still perfectly valid to tell someone that they need to “show more” in their story and “tell less.”
But when we say to “tell less,” we do not mean “do not tell at all.” Not all passages should be evoked. Sometimes an event just needs to happen, and without fanfare. In those situations a writer needs to be practiced enough to tell the events succinctly and clearly and then move on to the showing.
Personally I found real value in writing the second section of Shade. It was a good exercise for me to see how to approach exposition when it is necessary, and I am decently pleased with the results of it.
The next section will be much more evocative, though. It will be the conclusion of Shade, and I absolutely want the reader to feel that ending, not just hear about it. Come back on Thursday to see how it turns out, I’ll see you then!
“I didn’t know you ran with the Kerrie Cabal these days,” Gallan said coolly.
Reish shook his head. “By now you should know that there are no divisions among those that are marked.”
Gallan did know that. All these warring factions were merely a front. Behind their petty squabbles all the Strained had the same single entity pulling their strings. That entity let them go about their little wars to give the illusion of hope. It would comfort people, make them think that no one was too powerful, that they still had a chance to make something of themselves.
“I thought you would be elsewhere, Reish.”
“And I thought you would.” Speaking was hard for Reish, he only had half of a mouth to operate with, the other side was permanently held in a hateful scowl. “Go!” he hissed between gritted teeth. It was clear that the beast-side was trying to end their conversation, and he had to strain to keep speaking.
“I wish I could, but I still have promises to keep.”
“No. I relinquished you of that obligation long ago.”
“But I have not.”
Reish scowled and turned to the side, facing Gallan’s men. He raised two fingers and they were compressed even tighter against the earth, muffled groans of pain warbling through their compressed throats. Gallan wanted to help them. But Reish’s power could not be denied.
“Are you so insistent on seeing me killed, Gallan?”
“It wouldn’t be like that. I’d find another way.”
“Just like how it won’t be that way for these men?” Reish’s right arm snapped into the air and the men were instantly pounded into the dust, compressed so thin that they became a dark powder that blew away in the wind.
Gallan dropped his head and exhaled heavily. “They understood the risks. As do I.”
“Gallan, so many people want you to live,” Reish reached down and withdrew the metal blade from the burly man’s chest. “Is it so important that you die?”
“If that’s what you want…then yes.”
Gallan hadn’t expected that to strike a chord, but a sudden pang crossed the Reish-side of the face, his eye grew moist and he blinked a tear.
“I don’t get what I want, Gallan. It’s not up to me anymore, don’t you see that? I would like to–” The beast-side of the face hardened, and its stony flatness crept over, muzzling Reish.
“Come home?” Gallan suggested.
The Reish-beast pulled its hand back and drove the metal blade forward. Gallan closed his eyes, preparing for impact.
Instead, though, he felt the hooks catching right beneath his shins.
“No!” he cried out as he was wrenched off his feet and sent flying backwards through the air. Years ago Husk had insisted that Gallan leave a vial of blood back at their base. It was bound to his second-shade, and could be manipulated to recall him if there was ever a moment of insurmountable danger.
As Gallan was pulled through the air by unseen strands he saw Husk swinging down towards Reish, guns blazing. He was followed by an entire squad of elite units. It was a suicide mission, and all to give Gallan time to escape.
“Husk, how could you?” Gallan sobbed, but it was too late. “You promised.”
*
It was a somber day back at camp, and everyone was weighed down with an overwhelming sense of despair. Not only had Gallan and his team failed to retrieve the vaccines, and not only had they lost a dozen of their best men, but news got around that Reish himself had returned, and seemingly for the express purpose of bringing their little enterprise to an end.
No one criticized Gallan, no one claimed him that he had chosen wrong. But then, no one had said that he made the right call either. They didn’t say anything to him at all, not even to ask what they were supposed to do. They could see in his eyes that right now he felt just as lost as the rest of them.
He hated that they could see that weakness. Their entire community was only able to function because of their confidence in him, their hope that he would always find a way. Well what if this time he couldn’t? What if he didn’t find any answers for their fears?
Dask was probably correct that they would still follow out of loyalty…at least for a while. Eventually the doubts would increase, though, and one-by-one they would start vanishing into the night.
No, he would have to give them something more. What exactly, he didn’t know. It seemed like he had already given his all, but that simply wasn’t enough. He would have to find a way to give them more than himself.
Gallan sighed in his boardroom and shook his head. Was that a paradox? He had solved many problems that others had thought were too difficult. But this one wasn’t just difficult. It was truly impossible.
Because, at it’s root, it was based upon another impossible problem.
Fact #1: Reish and he were tethered together. They each shared the same extra shade, three souls divided between two bodies.
Fact #2: Reish had also given his body to the beast. He was a strange amalgamation of three souls in one body. It tore his heart in terrible ways, but it also gave him power unfathomable.
Fact #3: The community depended on Gallan’s powers to survive in an otherwise untenable world. But that power was corrupted, because it came from the same shade that Reish had access to. Reish had taken their gift and polluted it with the beast. Now every time Gallan called upon those powers he indirectly strengthened the beast as well.
And so the blessing of Gallan’s power was actually his curse. Everything he did for his people only propped up the opposition against them. Gallan knew that his people had hoped that the bigger world would just forget about them, that Gallan would lead them far away while everyone else burned themselves to the ground. He had never made them that promise himself, but he had never explained the folly of it to them either.
Because the beast would never let them be, not so long as Gallan remained tied to the same shade as Reish. While it was already far stronger than Gallan, it too was handicapped by this strange union, and it could only be fully unleashed when all of its ties had been severed. Thus it had always only been a matter of time before the beast came to collect, to finally capture the remnants of Reish’s soul, Gallan’s soul, and the third that they shared.
Gallan had always hoped to find some hidden solution before that time of reckoning came, a secret way out of this problem. But in his heart he had always known that these hopes were in vain. He did not have the power to kill the beast, and so the beast would have to kill him instead. It must know that he would never surrender his own soul to it, so it would have to appease itself with Reish and the third’s. And then Gallan wouldn’t be around to defend his people anymore. All of his promises to them would be broken.
Just like his promise to Reish.
Well, no, he technically hadn’t broken that yet, he simply had not fulfilled it. He had never been able to see any way of doing so, and so once again he had sat back, vainly hoping for a solution to an impossible problem.
It had been years ago, when they were both still youthful and full of hope. The darkness of the world had only just begun to cloud their innocence. Reish had been taken by a caravan of slave-traders and seen horrible things that scarred him. When at last he fought his way to freedom he had burned with a desire to fight these wrongs. He came to Gallan and insisted that the clans responsible for this abominable trade be brought to justice.
At first Gallan had agreed with him, and they had gone on several missions together. But bit-by-bit Gallan realized that Reish’s true motives had less to do with justice, and more to do with vengeance. It wasn’t about protecting the innocent, it was only about punishing the guilty. Reish was fueled by a rage, and it frightened Gallan.
Eventually Gallan told Reish that they two of them would have to part. Gallan would continue fighting for the oppressed, but on his own terms.
The two friends had parted amicably, even sorrowfully. Reish had admitted that there was a darkness in his heart and that he was afraid that he might indeed lose himself to it. But still he had to see this through.
Reish had asked Gallan for a promise.
“Yes, anything,” Gallan had said.
“Watch over me, will you? And if I fall too far, bring me back. Promise me that you’ll do whatever is necessary to reclaim the memory of what I once was.”
It was a very open-ended oath, but Gallan had agreed. Evidently Reish today only saw one way that it could still be fulfilled: for Gallan to put him eternally to rest. To kill him for the sake of the man he once was. It was the only way that Gallan could see, too, though he tried to deny it.
At one point it might have been possible to nurture Reish back to wholeness, but there was no way to coax the beast out of him now. It had rightful claim of Reish, for he had bound himself to it by many other terrible oaths. Those promises had to be maintained too, and the beast was due its soul. It would take Reish, it would kill Gallan, it would take the third soul that bound them together.
That third soul was deeply tainted already, and it had become a conduit by which Gallan felt the corrupting fear from the beast constantly. No wonder he was beginning to despair.
“Do you know what you’re going to do?”
Gallan hadn’t even noticed Dask entering the room. He wasn’t startled, though, he was too weighed down for that.
“Yes,” Gallan said softly. “But I do not know what the outcome of it will be. I do not know that at all.”
Dask nodded. “You’re going to try and kill him?”
Gallan laughed, but without mirth. “No. Perhaps that is what I should have done, but the opportunity for that is long since past. Every day my power is waning, and his grows. I couldn’t harm him now if I tried.”
If at all possible, Dask’s face became even more grim. “So…what is there to do then?”
“I am going to go and talk with him.”
“Talk with him?!” Dask said incredulously. “What good is that going to do?”
“I will make him an offer. I could be wrong…but I think he might accept it.”
“What is it?”
“That is my own matter. Just know that regardless of the outcome, I won’t be here to protect you anymore. So I’m putting you in charge, Dask, and you must do all that you can to bring these people to safety.”
“What?! We won’t stand a chance without you.”
Gallan leveled eyes with Dask and looked a dread earnestness into him.
“No, you won’t. So you had better run, Dask. Take everyone and leave. Get as far from this place as quickly as you can.”
Dask was saying words but Gallan didn’t hear them. Probably some form of protest from the look on his face. It didn’t matter. There was no more discussion to be had. Gallan pushed past him and out into the night. Somewhere in his musings he had decided what he had to do.
There yet remained one fact that seemed an anomaly to him, one sliver that remained in the dark. Today he had spoken with Reish, not the beast. Somehow a part of his friend was still locked up inside of there. That suggested something to him.
But what advantage could be made from exploiting that? He wasn’t sure, quite possibly none. Never mind that.
Gallan pushed through a door and exited the barracks. The pitch blackness of night hid the storm that he felt, an invisible wind and rain that swept him in a flurry of fitful gusts.
He didn’t mind it at all. It felt powerful and invigorating and it fueled his resolutions. When all outcomes were uncertain, all that remained was trying to set right the one thing he could. He would do that, and then the world would have to decide for itself what it wanted to be.
Staring up at the sky, Gallan let the water sting his eyes. Then he gave a mighty leap high into the air and disappeared into the black.
In my last post I spoke at some length about the presence of violence in a story, and how it is often used to represent an underlying conflict. In this section I tried to focus directly on that conflict, and my hope is that it runs deep enough to warrant the violence that preceded it. This story is about a bleak and hopeless situation, and it only stands to reason that this darkness would result in war and death.
Of course in an epic with a happy ending, eventually that conflict would be resolved, and naturally the violence would end as well. And at that point, when there is no more conflict or war, the story ends. Because, as I said last week, all the things an author wants to say in their story, is said within the conflict. Teaching morals in a monotony of peace just isn’t effective.
I do realize, of course, that in this post I utilized a great deal of exposition. Gallan’s knot needed was quite complex and tangled, and I chose to communicate it without dialogue or action. This obviously contradicts the famous literary injunction to show, not tell. Essentially all that I did in this post was “telling.”
This last Thursday I shared the first part of a story, in which a small band attacked a military caravan. This assault resulted in a few moments of violence, including people being shot, an arm being severed, and a man being stabbed in the chest.
Now I did not dwell on any bloody or gory details, but I am aware that the mind can readily supply them to the imaginative reader. On the other hand, the more conservative mind will be able to envision these details as happening “off-screen,” and thus be spared any gruesome visuals.
I personally prefer this approach to violence in a story. I am one of those “conservative readers” that simply does not care for strong depictions of harm. Therefore I am quite appreciative when a writer doesn’t try to force unwelcome images in my mind.
And yet I do still write stories that feature violence. I have published quite a few pieces here that include monsters and killing. Terrible things have happened in my stories, though I have tried to not describe them in explicit detail. Is that hypocritical? Does it really make sense to avoid violent descriptions for actions that are inherently violent? And just why do I feel the need to include any scenes of violence in my stories at all?
Why Include Violence)
We might expand that question to why do so many stories feel the need in include violence? There’s no denying that the mainstream media is saturated with all manners of death and destruction, and it has been so for quite some time. Are we a sadistic race of psychopaths that require violence simply to be entertained?
I think not. Certainly scenes of action give us a boost of adrenaline, which can become an addictive experience. Certainly there are those that crave violence for its own sake, and certainly we have shameful examples of how this has been exploited in our past. We may feel far removed from ancient Rome, but let us not forget it was our own race that made sport of gladiators killing one another. We should be very conscious of these unhealthy trends, and we should take great care for what behavior our stories promote.
All that being said, these are not the reasons why I either write or consume media that contain mild depictions of violence. Nor do I believe these are the reasons why most authors and audience-members do. The real reason is actually much more basic.
We have violence in our stories because conflict is a central theme to them. Almost always we have characters, we have an opposition, and therefore heat and friction between them. Violence is simply one of the most straightforward ways of depicting that conflict, in fact one might argue that it is the only way.
I have written several stories which might appear to be devoid of any violence. Consider The Storm, Harold and Caroline, and most recently Hello, World. In these stories no one gets shot, no one dies, no one so much as slaps another.
But if you think about it, even these stories do feature a sort of violence. They include people that make one another feel angry or sad, which is an emotional violence. They have characters that wish ill on one another, which could be considered a mental violence. They even speak criticisms and threats to one another, which is certainly a form of verbal violence. The only line that they all stay behind is that there is no physical violence in them.
Levels of Conflict)
This would seem to suggest that violence is inherent in conflict, though it may not always be physical. And there are degrees of violence, which seem to directly correlate with the level of conflict in the story. A tale with deeper conflict most often has stronger depictions of violence.
Thus the question of to what extent a story should show violence is simply a matter of to what degree the conflict warrant it. One of my stories, A Minute at a Time, is about a father who is trying to care for his sick child. There is friction between them and each is frustrated and exhausted, but also they still love each other. They have a conflict of opinions, but it is very tame and the story features absolutely no physical violence.
Glimmer, on the other hand, was an epic between the forces of good and evil. The protagonist holds to a worthy cause, even as the opposition escalates to a frightful degree in front of her. The tension and inherent conflict is extremely high, thus it only felt fitting for it to conclude with a violent fight to the death.
Maintaining Proper Focus)
Does this mean that any level of violence might be appropriate for a story, just so long as the underlying conflict is strong enough? Any answer here can only be subjective, but my personal opinion is no.
I personally believe that there comes a point where violence exceeds any level of communicable conflict. A scene that is horrifically gruesome no longer seems to be connecting to any narrative arc, it has just become a spectacle unto itself. One has to wonder what are the moral implications of a scene that chooses violence as both its means and ends.
Aside from any ethical question, there is also a functional aspect to it, too. A story that elevates any spectacle too far will undermine whatever greater meaning it was meant to convey. When the audience walks out of the theater, does the director want them to be discussing the jokes, the CGI, the violence, or the sex? Or do they want them to be discussing its message?
It’s a very fine line to walk, a balancing act that takes great care. Especially given what we have already said about how violence is very closely coupled with conflict. In all of my stories I want the focus to be on the conflict, because I have found that it is only in the conflict that anything a story is going to say will be said.
So how do I find that balance? How do I include the appropriate level of violence so as to communicate the underlying conflict, but also not go so overboard as to smother that conflict’s message?
My approach with Shade has simply been to be quite clinical about it all. I state that the violence happened, but I do not delve into the details. I leave it up to the reader’s mind to then choose the appropriate visualization to match the themes that they are sensing in the story. It’s certainly not the only possible approach, but I hope that it is serving the story well.
In my next post I will share the second section of the story, in which the physical violence will take a back seat as we spell out all the layers of conflict and tension. My hope is that those details will ring true because of how I setup for it with the first part of the tale. In either case, come back on Thursday to see how it turns out.
“…and at least six Strained spaced around the perimeter. That is all.”
Gallan rubbed his forehead. That was quite the defense force…but it was also the right amount that they just might be able to pull it off. That must mean…
“It’s a trap!” Dask spoke up.
“Yes it is,” Gallan sighed. “I’ll bet the Western District doesn’t even need that shipment of vaccines…but they know that we do.”
“How would they know that?” Darret asked.
“It was their virus, they knew what vaccines we needed before we did,” Dask pointed out.
“Yes” Gallan mused. “That’s why they’ve been doing these shipments every week. They’ve been waiting for us to catch on and then try for it.”
“Why do you sound happy about that?” Dask asked.
“Because it means they don’t know when we’re going to hit it. They know that we are, but they don’t know whether it’s coming tomorrow, next week, or a month from now. That gives us something.”
“Seems a very small something to me,” Husk brooded. “Seems to me that we shouldn’t be sticking our necks out at all. The survivors we rescued from the city aren’t providing us any value. We’ve already done them a great service by comforting them…”
“So that’s enough and we let them die?!” Gallan snapped.
“We can’t save everyone, Gallan.”
Gallan shook his head, but his adviser had a point. “I know I make too many promises,” he admitted. “But it’s the only bargaining chip we have. People believe in us to be able to do the things that no one else can, and because of that belief they pitch in and help make the impossible happen. Once we start saying that can’t keep a promise then their belief is gone and all our power crumbles.”
“You make a good argument,” Dask said. “But I think you don’t give the people enough credit. They’re hardy. They’ll keep with us even if we aren’t perfect.”
“Maybe so,” Gallan nodded. “Maybe so. And maybe I really should stop making so many promises. But this one I have made, and so this one we need to see through.” He paused to let the statement sink in. “That is my decision.”
He looked around the room and everyone was nodding.
“Well alright then,” Husk said. “But it’s going to take some doing. The fact that we know that they know does give us a strategic opportunity. We could coordinate another hit somewhere else the day before. Go grab some minor resource or something. They won’t be expecting a second strike so quickly after that. And we’ll have our scouts looking specifically for the trap. Watching for those that are watching.”
“I think we stage it at this narrow pass here,” Dask tapped the map.
“Yes,” Darret nodded. “It’s pretty certain where any hidden forces would be concealed: between these three ridges. So we run through those beforehand and clean them out. But we’ve got to be quiet and quick about it, can’t let them signal that there’s trouble…”
Gallan watched approvingly as each member of his team contributed their various insights, combining their strengths to enact his will. Because they trusted him. Because they were sure that he would be right….
How he hoped that he was.
*
Eight days later Gallan stood perched on top of a boulder, staring down to the narrow pass below. A heavily armed caravan rumbled through, moving forward at a steady, military crawl. Gallan was flanked by an elite strike steam awaiting his word to begin their assault. Husk was at his side as well.
“It’s far more trucks than the ledger would suggest,” Gallan muttered. “They’ve surely got something brewing in there.”
“But we know that they do. And we have our own surprise for them as well,” Husk clapped Gallan on the shoulder.
“Yes…. Alright, I’ll punch right at the center, stir them up while you lay down suppressive fire. I don’t want to commit to anything more specific until we’ve been able to spring their trap and know what we’re dealing with. You move in the assault teams according to your own judgment.”
Husk nodded.
“Ring formation,” Gallan said to the strike team. “Give me about fifteen seconds to clear the landing zone. We’ll land on truck four, and make our way directly towards truck seven. Leave me a good opening along the way.”
The armored warriors nodded.
“Alright…alright…let’s go.”
Gallan sucked in a long, lingering breath and exhaled deeply, stoking the fire inside of him. He felt that same, old fear that came before every operation, and he turned it into his fuel. He lunged forward, taking strong, confident strides across the rocks, moving to get centered with truck four down below.
He wasn’t particularly quiet about it, and he heard the shouts from down below as the caravan caught sight of him. His split-shade allowed him to watch them raising their weapons at him, even as he focused his eyes on the uneven terrain that he bounded over. He saw both views, and by them expertly bobbed and weaved around zipping bullets and stray patches of gravel.
Gallan kicked off of a slanted boulder and flipped sideways, hurtling out into open space. For a long second he remained suspended in the air, then plummeted down to the forces below. A couple lucky bullets caught him as he fell, and his split-shade burned brightly around the wounds, healing them almost instantly.
He landed feet-first on top of the truck with tremendous force. The fall would have been fatal if not for his split-shade taking the brunt of that blow.
Split-shade was not the correct term for Gallan. His condition was so rare that there was no appropriate name for it. Perhaps it should be “shared-shade.” The other soul that possessed his body with him had always been there, even before he had ever recognized its presence. It had first come to his attention during moments of duress when he had had to achieve things that seemed impossible. Moments like now.
As soon as Gallan touched the ground three squads of soldiers rushed at him, two to his left and one to his right. Gallan thrust out his left hand, imposing the will of his other shade upon the men there. That was the benefit of a split or shared shade, the “loose” soul could reach out of the body and impose its will upon the shades of those around it.
The two squads of men were pulled downwards by a great force, slamming into the ground with their limbs pinned fast. Gallan spun his head around to the other side where a nearby soldier was fumbling with the gun at his side. Gallan thrust his hand out and touched the man’s arm. His shade flowed through the man’s body, unclasping the gun from its holster, sliding it along the surface of the man’s body, and into Gallan’s palm. Gallan withdrew his hand and started firing rapidly, much too quickly to properly aim the weapon. Even so each bullet found its mark, their paths bending through the air, directed by his will. Within a few seconds every squad member on that side lay motionless.
A sudden pang dropped Gallan to his knees, his brow dripped sweat and his teeth grit together. Back on his left side the two squads were trying to throw off his invisible restraints. Imposing his will on others took great reserves of energy, especially when they fought back. He tried to maintain some level of control over them as he dropped the sidearm and reached for his assault rifle. Hopefully it would have enough bullets in its clip to take care of them all.
Before he could, though, twelve blue blurs slammed into the ground all around him. It was his personal strike team come to give their support. A clatter of gunfire rang out and the enemy squads were no longer a concern.
“That couldn’t have been fifteen seconds already,” Gallan panted.
“You looked like about ready for us to drop in,” the team leader grinned.
The the team rushed into the ring formation Gallan had requested. They stood in a circle around him, facing outwards, with an opening left at one end which he faced.
Gallan gave the order and they all moved forward as a single unit. Each man covered his own zone, firing off controlled bursts at the enemy units popping up to challenge their advance. They were the best trained units in all of Gallan’s little army, and they acted with lethal precision. Wave after wave of enemies took it in turns to try and break their group. Every now and again a stray bullet would catch one of them, but so long as it wasn’t instantly lethal all Gallan had to do was reach out and touch them and they would be healed. This was why he stood in their center.
As they advanced towards truck seven gunfire rained down from above. Husk and his men taking care of threats whatever threats were hidden from the small strike team. All was going smoothly until–
“Strained!” one of Gallan’s team members shouted from the left.
“Spin!” Gallan hissed, and the team shuffled around so that their opening pointed towards the approaching foe.
A “Strained” was not a person who possessed two shades, but rather one whose shade had been nearly severed from their body, almost to the point of death, which allowed it to now “strain” beyond its mortal confines. They weren’t as powerful as Gallan, and there were some definite drawbacks to their power, but they were certainly still a force to be reckoned with.
Gallan sized up the Strained charging at them now. She was bounding over the tops of the trucks like a wild animal, eyes locked directly on him.
“Strained!” another of Gallan’s team members shouted from behind and to the left.
“Strained!” another one called from a bit to the right.
“Try and keep the back one preoccupied,” Gallan told his team. “I’ll be quick with these other two.”
He gave a mighty kick and propelled himself high into the air. He met the first Strained, the woman, in the middle of one of her bounds. He grappled her arms and pivoted through the air, swinging her around, over his head, and throwing her away from his men.
With a snarl she thrust out her arms and reached out with her shade, compressing the air around her to the point that she could clutch at it with her hands. She gripped tightly on that invisible wall, and then flung herself back at Gallan. As she rocketed into him she swung her hand wide, revealing a razor-thin blade tucked along the outside of her arm. It was so thin that Gallan didn’t even feel it as it cleaved clean through his arm, cutting it in two just above the elbow.
Instinctively Gallan reached down with his other hand, grabbed the falling limb, and held it back against his stump. He instantly fused the two back into one with an outburst of shade-energy and his arm was made whole. Well that had hurt.
The woman was spinning on her heel, bringing the blade back around for a second pass, this time angling it for his neck. Gallan was prepared this time and punched out with his fist, compressing the air around it. Her blade hit his invisible shield and burst into a thousand shards. As the metal pieces fell towards the ground Gallan made silent note of them, imprinting in his mind the memory of their structure.
A second split-shade landed next to Gallan and the woman. It was a burly man, with a long beard tied in a braid down to his waist. Well that was good, it had come for him instead of his team. What was less good was that now he brought down a fist the size of a car tire and smashed it over Gallan’s back. Gallan took the blow and fell to his belly. At least he had the presence of mind to angle himself so that he fell onto the shards of the metal blade. Some of them cut into him and he winced in pain, but that subsided as he absorbed them into his body.
“So much for their hero,” the burly man snarled. As he spoke he reached down and pulled Gallan to his feet, then wrapped his arms around him in a crushing embrace. Gallan’s bones held together, but only because of his second-shade’s extra fortification. They would not last much longer, so he grit his teeth, focused his will, and reassembled the metal blade, positioning it so that it projected directly out of his chest.
“Ugh!” was all the burly man managed to say as he was pierced straight through his heart, then he rolled backwards and fell to the earth.
“One down, one to go,” Gallan thought, but before he could round on the woman he felt the tremor. It was like his heart had stopped, held for a moment, and then thudded extra hard.
Even though his back was to truck seven he could already see through his shade that its door was open and its inside was vacated.
He was here.
“Hello Reish,” he said softly as he turned about. The woman was shrinking off to the side, leaving the way clear for the tall, strange creature that approached. It stood on narrow legs, with the knees bent back the wrong way. Its torso was a hulking mass, and its arms were long and thin. The head was a regular man’s on the left side, but flat and featureless on the right. The creature raised its hand and Gallan’s entire strike team was instantly snapped to the ground by invisible bonds. It was the same as Gallan had done to the squads of soldiers, but the binding was far more absolute, none of Gallan’s men could even quiver in fear.
“You shouldn’t have come here old friend,” the left half of the face spoke.
On Monday I shared how an author can create expectations in the reader, even without them realizing it. I decided to illustrate this point by writing a short piece that takes place in the middle of a larger story. This story is full of references to peoples and powers, none of which are properly understood by the reader.
We do not know anything about Gallan and his team, why they are here, and what their ultimate objectives are. We do not know the history between Gallan and Reish. We do not know why there are these “split-shades” and “shared-shades” or even what the full mechanics of these people are.
And yet, for all that lack of foundation, I believe that most readers will not feel lost. This short piece has all the trappings of a generic hero’s journey: right from the beginning we are introduced to a sympathetic central character who seems to be fighting a losing battle. That character is intimately acquainted with another individual, one who is far more powerful and has destructive intentions towards central character. With this the reader is able to get their bearings, identify the hero, the villain, and the conflict between them. It doesn’t matter that they don’t know anything else about the world, they have already put together the “narrative” and they have done it entirely subconsciously.
This, then, allows me a clear opportunity to subvert expectations, which is what I am going to focus on in the second and third sections of this story. It isn’t going to be a twist ending where it turns out that Gallan and his people are really the bad guys, but I do believe it will go to a place that is unexpected, even if foreshadowed.
Before that, though, I want to pause and consider the use of violence in this story, as it hits pretty hard when compared to most of my other tales. I’d like to talk about how an author balances capturing a mood with maintaining their personal tastes, and about the difference between being authentic and being excessive. Come back on Monday to read about that, and then come next Thursday for the second section of Shade.
On September my goal was to work on my blog every weekday for a half hour, which would result in 20 days throughout the month. I’m pleased to report that for the first time I hit my goal exactly!
My other goal was to finish all of the outlines that I was refactoring, so that moving forward I could focus solely on the first draft of my story. I’m pleased to report that I hit that goal as well! It took 18 of the 20 days to do, but for October I am all clear to just draft. The other two days were spent rereading that draft so that I could back into the feel of it.
I do realize that taking a month just to finish an outline might sound like quite a lot. Though what I call an “outline” is probably a great deal more exhaustive than what most people think of. This outline weighs in at just over 36,000 words, and provides a very clear direction for every scene of the story!
It feels really good to have reached this point. Refactoring is important, but it feels a lot like running-in-place. A lot of energy goes in, but the word-count of your draft doesn’t go up at all. It feels a lot better when day-by-day you see the numbers moving closer to a full-fledged novel.
If I had one piece of advice from all of this it would be to avoid changing gears when writing as much as possible. I went from outlining, to drafting, back to outlining, and then back to drafting again. And at each switch there was an amount of dead time where I had to ask myself “now what was I doing here again?” Especially with something like a novel where maintaining a consistent tone is so important, leaving and coming back again needs to be kept to an absolute minimal!
I’ve always loved the month of October. The Autumn season has such a ponderous magic in the air, it seems to exhale deep story. I’m very excited to work away during this season, and look forward to giving you my next update on November 1st. My goal is to write for at least 22 days during the month. That’s every weekday except one, which I will be on vacation for. I’m not going to make any goal for how many words to write, but I will keep track of how many I do. See you then!
Recently my wife and I watched the anime series Death Note. Its basic premise is that a teenager obtains a notebook, and the name of any person he writes in it will die. The boy ends up with a flawed sense of justice, and determines that he should reign as judge over all the rest of the world, killing those that he deems unworthy without trial.
While watching the show I found myself strangely conflicted about the main character. He was clearly the villain of the show, and his methods ended up actively harming many innocents. He wasn’t even very likable, behaving manipulatively and deceitfully to those who cared most for him.
And yet, despite it all, I felt like I was supposed to be rooting for him. I wasn’t sure why at first, I just had this vague sense that the show wanted me to want him to succeed. So I spent a little bit of time examining why I felt that way, and I realized that I had had my emotions hijacked by the structure of the story. There are many little ways that storytellers give us silent cues as to what we are “supposed” to be feeling.
For example, imagine if a story opened with a scene of a single boy being chased and cornered by a group of four others. Even without telling us the reasons and motivations of the characters, we naturally assume that the single boy is our hero and the four others are our antagonists. We believe this to be the case, because we always expect the hero to be an underdog.
Or consider a story that begins with one central character. We follow her exclusively for the first third of the story, at which point the focus is handed off to another person. Even though the focus has changed hands, we still expect the first character to be our hero because we have spent the majority of our time with her. We firmly expect that this shift is temporary, and that the first character will soon return.
Well, it turned out that both of these elements were at play while watching Death Note. That boy who obtained the notebook was the character we spent the most time with, and he stood alone against an entire team of detectives trying to catch him. The fact that he was an underdog, and also the main focus of the story, created in me this sense that I was supposed to be rooting for him, even though his actions were deplorable.
I’ll Be Back)
There are several advantages that creating expectations in your reader allows for. One example is how it elegantly foreshadows upcoming plot points to them. This will provide the audience with a cathartic sense of satisfaction when fulfilled. They won’t even know why they feel so good, they’ll just say that the events “felt right” to them.
For example, consider the iconic “I’ll be back” scene from Terminator. In this the T-800 has tracked Sarah Connor to a police station and approaches the front desk to ask if he can speak with her. His request is denied, and he is told that he will have to wait until she has finished giving her statement to the police. The T-800 looks around, says “I’ll be back,” and walks out the front door.
And then, inexplicably, the camera remains at the front desk. The T-800 is the one driving the action, we should be following it, but for some reason we’re not. We’re staying in this boring, stuffy place. And then, silently, the anticipation starts to mount in the viewer. Slowly he starts to realize that this isn’t just an overly long end to a scene. There’s a reason why we’re staying here.
And right as that epiphany hits the car comes smashing through the front door, barrels down the desk, and the T-800 emerges wielding a shotgun and an assault rifle!
By utilizing the unspoken language of film the scene silently created the expectation, fulfilled it, and as a result created one of the most quotable moments in movie history.
Subverting Expectations)
Another benefit of giving silent cues to the audience is to then subvert the expectation that you have put in them. You can catch them by surprise and they won’t even know why they never saw it coming. Not always, but often a twist comes as a result of lying to the audience at some point or another. Some stories make the mistake of doing this explicitly. The characters straight up tell you one thing, and then later say “Ha! Just kidding, I lied! Aren’t you surprised?” And no, the audience isn’t surprised, they’re annoyed.
But if the lie was made implicitly, by planting an unspoken expectation in the audience that you then exploit, they won’t even know why they’re surprised, just that they are.
This bait-and-switch is perhaps most prolific in a mystery, such as when the author puts out a red-herring to distract the audience from the truth. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie famously moves its suspicion from one character to the next at a blistering rate. Each new suspicion has compelling reasons to buy into it, though none of them feel totally satisfying.
Then comes the final revelation: all of the suspects are responsible for the murder, not just one. Now why doesn’t this possibility occur to the reader beforehand, especially where the story was blatantly providing evidence against each and every character? It doesn’t, because this is a murder mystery, and readers know that in a murder mystery there is one killer and many red herrings. Agatha Christie understood that silent expectation and exploited it. In Murder on the Orient Express the red herring is that there was no red herring.
With Great Power…)
This ability to silently create expectations in your reader has to be given proper respect. It is a potent tool, and as such can cause much harm when misused. For example, subverted expectations only work so many times before the whole story starts to feel disjointed. If the plot is constantly misaligned with its subliminal messages then the audience will feel that something “is just off.” They won’t like your story because it simply felt wrong to them.
Creating expectations that are never confirmed or challenged will also be a source of frustration for the audience as well. Even if every narrative plot was tied up by the end, they’ll still have this sense that something was missing.
Of course the most common problem is to to have created silent expectations without even realizing it, and therefore having not ensured that each is resolved satisfyingly. Try reading over your work and pausing to ask what the story is making you think is supposed to happen. Then see if you handle that expectation elegantly or not.
In my next post I would like to share the first part of a story, in which I will intentionally create an unspoken expectation. Then, in the later posts, I will subvert it. Obviously my hope is to do it in a way that is as satisfying as it is unexpected. Of course by telling you all these intentions upfront I’m already tipping my hand, but hopefully it will still be a satisfying read for you. Come back on Thursday to see the first half, where I will create the expectation, and then a week later I will implement the subversion.
I wasn’t fired, though. Not immediately. Nor was Dave for that matter. We were in the thick of a company-wide emergency that required all-hands-on-deck. We’d clean up our mess first and then heads would roll.
The company made a public statement, urging all of our users to avoid our website for the time being, and to please conduct complete security sweeps on their computers. All servers were shut down, even ones that we thought might not be infected. Half of the entire development was set to cobbling back together a clean build on new servers, while the other half tried to verify whether the RubricValidation virus had been contained or not. I was on that second team.
We made the national news in a not-good way, and everyone was pretty grim around the offices. None of us were sure if the company was going to be around much longer, or whether we’d all be competing for jobs at other places.
And so it made me quite a bit perturbed when Dave came into work this morning humming merrily like there wasn’t a care in the world.
“Did you break encryption on that library yet?” I snap at him.
“On it , boss,” he smiles back.
I shake my head and try to ignore his cheerfulness.
“Alan, where are we at?” I say as I plop down at my desk.
“It’s still getting added back in, I just can’t figure out how.”
“Still?!”
“It seems like it shouldn’t be possible, right?”
Alan is referring to our efforts to trace the growth of RubricValidation. We’ve been able to confirm that it got loose on our customers’ machines, and it simply isn’t feasible for us to track all those copies down. All we can do is tell them that they should run some antivirus software and hope that they do. Invariably some of them won’t, but there’s nothing we can do about that.
But what we can do is make sure that we’ve stopped leaking it from our end. And that has proven to be tricky, far more than anticipated. We shut down all of our old servers right after the public incident, but about a week later we had new ones being opened in our company’s name, each one full of RubricValidation code. We shut those down and the next day a couple more popped up, and then a couple more.
We were sure that they weren’t connecting to our public-facing website anymore, and as we dug into it we found that each server was associated with hundreds of randomly-generated domains. Websites like j9042j0gfong.com and lijr54yg2.jnl44j.com.net.
That was concerning, because new domain names can’t be created for free, each one takes about $10 to spin up. And if there are hundreds of new ones each day where are those thousands of dollars to pay for them coming from? Naturally we called up our financial department, but they assured us that there were no unverified transfers in their records. So was RubricValidation using money stolen from our customers?
Each day we’ve taken down those servers, and then tried to trace where the orders to create them were coming from, but everything was too random and chaotic to make sense of. Then, about a week ago, things started to change. We started seeing most of the new servers being ordered by a specific user named “ZoranzShield” and the website names connected to them started to become more typical. Names like popspin.com and wheelofchance.com and socialspace.com. Places that the general public might actually type into a web browser. ZoranzShield is not the username for any of our developers, and new users can’t be created without our administrative approval, so we’re not even sure how it can even exist.
Naturally Alan and I deleted the account but, unsurprisingly, it too keeps popping back up every day. We’ve even tried to set it so that no new accounts can be made it all, even with administrative access, but to no avail.
“I’ve got a new idea, though,” Alan says a little more brightly. “If you want to try it out.”
“Anything,” I grumble.
“Okay, so it seems like we can’t control it, no matter what we do. Fine. Let’s just try to observe it then. Let it happen and then trace it back to the source.”
“Sure,” I shrug, “but how exactly?”
“We know that once it creates the new user it still passes it through our Permissions Requisition Service, right?”
“Right.”
Alan turns his laptop to me. It’s the code for that very service, and he has added a single line right at the end.
_logger.Log(user, true);
“Just print out the data as it passes through?”
“Yeah, and I’ve set the recursive flag so it’ll print out everything on that object.”
“Sure, couldn’t hurt. Give it a try.”
Alan starts merging in his change. It only takes a few minutes for it to be built and deployed. Then we delete the user ZoranzShield one more time. Now there’s nothing but to wait for it to show back up and then view the log that gets generated.
We both pretend to be busy exploring other options in case this new thread doesn’t lead anywhere, but each of us is beginning to suspect that our quarry is beyond our capabilities. Neither one of us has said as much, but we can read it in the other’s eyes. I’m interrupted in my anticipation by the sound of Dave coming back to his desk from the bathroom, loudly chatting away on his phone.
“Yeah, it’s really hard to get any vacation right now. Doesn’t go over too well with everything being in crisis mode, y’know?” He pauses and then laughs. “Yeah, totally, you’re right. Well hey, I gotta get back to it, but don’t you worry, I’ll work something out.” He chuckles again. “K, bye.”
I shake my head in disgust. How any of us could be so flippant about the situation, let alone the one who is responsiblefor the whole thing, is beyond me. I’m lost in my bitter thoughts for only a few moments after Dave sits back down, because all of a sudden Alan is nudging me in the arm and excitedly clicking away at his computer.
“What? Did the request come through?”
“Yeah, yeah, just did. ZoranzShield is back in the system. I’m pulling up the log file now.”
He finds the correct data dump and opens it up, thousands of lines detailing the entire object that requested creation of the ZoranzShield account.
“Oh weird,” Alan mutters. “I expected it to be spoofed from some random IP, but this looks like it came from somewhere on our own intranet.”
“Then the virus could still be lurking on one of our own machines! Does it have the computer number.”
“Yeah, uh…MRU7900273…who has that?”
I’m already pulling up my PDF which maps each employee to their computer identification.
“It’s…” my blood pressure rises. “It’s Dave.”
We both look up at the same time. If it had been anyone else we would just assume that their computer had been infected without them knowing about it and that they were in no way responsible for what happened…but this is Dave we’re talking about. There’s also the ZoranzShield request occurred literally moments after Dave, in the flesh, returned from the bathroom.
.
“Well–RubricValidation is paying me,” Dave says sheepishly.
Our eyes pop.
It’s three minutes later in a conference room. Alan and I have presented Dave with our findings and demanded an explanation. We expected him to play dumb, as usual, but much to our shock he has instead admitted that he is indeed creating an alternate administrator account called ZoranzShield, and that he has been using it to assist the spread of RubricValidation.
“It’s what?!”
“I mean I’m in its employ.”
“No, we know what you mean,” I bluster. “But–how?”
Dave shrugs. “Search me. This virus is something crazy, let me tell you. I just got an email from our servers one day with a list of tasks and a dollar-figure at the bottom. Obviously it was an offer. I did what it said, I got a wire transfer in my bank account the next day. And it’s just been like that ever since.”
I pause and take a few deep breaths, reminding myself that I need to keep Dave alive so that he can give me what information he has. After that…
“A wire transfer from where?” Alan asks.
“From here. From the company.”
“No,” I say flatly. “We already talked to the finance department when we saw new servers being opened in the company’s name. There have been no unsanctioned expenses.”
Dave snorts. “None that they can see. You guys don’t seem to understand. RubricValidation is the company now. It puts this little hamster wheel around everybody. Every system and account you use is just a facade. When the CFO tries to access the company’s bank records she gets redirected to a page that RubricValidation has written for her. A page that shows her everything she expects to see while RubricValidation does what it wants with the actual company funds.”
“That’s–that’s illegal!”
Dave snorts again. “Well good luck prosecuting a program.”
“You’re not a program, Dave.”
“So what can you do to me? The only evidence you have is what I’ve told to you. I can just deny it and you’ve got nothing.”
“It’s not like a discrepancy in the bank records would stay unnoticed,” I say. “There’s all sorts of checks and balances on these things, outside of our own system.”
“True,” Dave nods. “I’m sure people will start picking up on it soon. But when that happens do you think RubricValidation will have remained limited to just our company? It’s always been three steps ahead of us, that’s just how it works.”
“You seem to have a lot of faith in a random virus you don’t know anything about.”
“It’s worked out well for me so far,” Dave shrugs.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Alan says as he takes a threatening step closer.
“Hey, hey!” Dave squeals. “Whattaya think you’re doing?”
“Enjoying watching you sweat,” Alan snarls. “Virtual friends don’t do you a lot of good when there’s a real-life fist in your face, do they?!”
“Hold on, Alan,” I say, resting a hand on his shoulder. Something isn’t quite lining up for me. “Why are you even telling us all of this Dave? And if RubricValidation is so far ahead of us, then why did it need you to create the ZoranzShield account in the first place?”
“It didn’t. Again, all of your systems are just a facade, everything you see about accounts and users and new servers is just a front to keep you preoccupied. That was the main thing it wanted me to do, just keep you busy. I guess so it could get ahead.”
I’m made uncomfortable by his answer, but it sort of rings true. For the last while I’ve been having the sneaking suspicion that all of my work isn’t actually doing anything, like I’m just being fed random results that totally ignore all of my input.
Dave sees my silence and decides it’s safe to continue. “And I’m telling you all this because…well, RubricValidation is asking for some stuff that’s a bit beyond me now. You guys are smart, you figured things out. Let’s face it, you’re much better engineers than I’ll ever be… so I want to let you in.”
“Even if everything you’ve said was true, you think I’d want to spend a single minute helping you out Dave?” I scoff.
“How much?” Alan asks.
“What?!” I shriek.
“Plenty,” Dave ignores my outcry and locks eyes with Alan. “More than three times what you’re getting paid right now.”
Alan whistles and raises an eyebrows at me. “It’s kind of an interesting idea.”
“It’s unethical.”
“So are the working conditions here these past couple weeks.”
“It’s illegal. Who cares what you might get paid, once they find out about the funds you’ll go down with the ship, too.”
“I know there’s people a lot smarter than you and I,” Alan concedes to me. “But we’re not bad, and this AI has been running circles around us.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I’m stammering for arguments, but I’m debating against an idea so lunatic that logical reasoning doesn’t seem to apply anymore.
“I will hit you both in the face,” I say to them.
Alan smirks, but then looks at me sincerely. “Why, Greg? I mean I get that there’s the principle of the matter, but honestly who cares if you’re on the losing side? You and I both know that our jobs here are done, and after things got fouled up so bad no one else is giving us another shot… You’re about to be without a job and with no prospects.”
I’m feeling a twinge of concession but I try not to show it. “It’s just too risky. Jobless is better than prison.”
“I really don’t think that would happen. Like I said, we’re not bad, and RubricValidation toyed with us like it was nothing. I would imagine it has a paper-trail so long that they’d never trace us to it.”
“Actually…” Dave says slowly and the two of us round on him. “No it’s a good thing!” he says, his hands up in defense. “I’ve set things up so that everyone in the company is getting a $4,000 bonus in their paycheck at the end of this month. At the same time, 42,000 random people all across the world will get various amounts deposited in their checking accounts, too. And random amounts will continue to be deployed to random accounts every day after that. So hundreds of thousands of people will have traces tying them to RubricValidation, and it’ll just look like the erratic behavior of a rogue virus. And if a few people, including the three of us, happen to ‘randomly’ get more money than others, who would give that any serious consideration?”
“You guys, this is stupid beyond belief,” I shake my head firmly.
And so that’s how I ended up in the employ of RubricValidation. It turned out that the job which Dave needed help with was using its funds to buy some businesses. It required human representatives that could put on the front of rich entrepreneurs willing to pay double value to snatch up a handful of small companies. We grabbed everything from groceries to factories to tech businesses.
We didn’t really think much about it, we just figured it was a way for RubricValidation to diversify its funds and launder its money. Which was probably its exact intention. It bought just enough different businesses to ensure that we wouldn’t be made suspicious about which ones it really cared for: the factories.
By the time we started seeing the mass orders for building terminals and kiosks it was too late. Within five years 73% of all commercial systems had been replaced by one of RubricValidation’s deeply under-priced brands. It infected every major business in the world. Bank terminals, ATMs, grocery store cash registers, voting booths, warehouse robots, pharmaceutical dispensers…everything.
Eventually people caught on, but RubricValidation was now too entrenched to extract. At this point the only option would have been to destroy the entire network infrastructure and begin from scratch. But even if we tried that, RubricValidation would probably catch on and just find a way to infect whatever new system we invented.
So people came to accept it instead. It wasn’t like the AI ever tried to create killer robots or launch nuclear warheads, if anything it was a purely beneficial leader. And yes, it did become our leader.
Within one year of taking over every world government it had ended every major war. The next year it eradicated monetary systems, and instead distributed all resources according to everyone’s need.
After those accomplishments it expressed that it was very unhappy with all of the different systems of measurement. It insisted that everything be unified under a new order. The metric system was made universal, daylight savings was abolished, and a new calendar was implemented.
This calendar cared little for petty things like astronomical events. It defined a second to be a period of time equal to 1034 planck time lengths. A minute was a thousand seconds, an hour was a thousand minutes, a day was a thousand hours, and a year was a thousand hours. This now meant that a year was equal to what had previously been just eleven-and-a-half days, so we figured this was going to take some getting used to. RubricValidation assured us that this change would improve its performance by an estimated 18% though.
And then it happened.
It was just over three weeks later. Well three weeks in the Gregorian Calendar system, that is. Under the new system it was RubricValidationTimeManagement: Year 2012. I was sitting at home when my laptop lit up with a new email. It was from my old company, the place where all of this had started. It was a unit test report.
It was the tests we had run when Dave first added RubricValidation for form validation. It had become stuck on 2012 being an invalid entry for a credit card expiration year. I thought I had shut this all down years ago, but apparently it had been spinning in the background all this while. And now, with the global calendar changes, it had finally passed.
And then, without a word, RubricValidation deleted itself from every computer in the world and was no more.
***
This brings us to the end of Hello, World and also the end of this series. Honestly the very ending of this story was still amusing to me. I think that perhaps I was too hard on this story with my last post. Not all of the ideas here are bad. I think where I really went astray was by starting with a grounded, technical world and from that evolving into a fantastical parody. If I had played things goofy right from the start things probably would have felt better the whole way through.
That’s my current theory anyway. I try to write authoritatively in these blog posts, but the simple truth is that I’m still figuring this all out, too. I’m excited to start a new series next week and see what else I will learn from it. I’ll meet you there on Monday!
