Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

The Things We Lost Along the Way - (Nov 8, Friday)

We forgot the stars, the sky.

We left behind cold, drunken evenings in an alleyway, passing around bottles of cheap wine and cackling at our clandestine cleverness. We lost the spontaneity of running up against one another in the street; of not being able to do anything but smile at what stood before you. We forsook climbing trees and jumping boulders; the unpredictable run of water, and the comings and goings of rains.

We abandoned sunlight.

We cut ourselves off from the silence and the noise of a natural world.

In their place: predictability. Always the same place, and the same schedule, day in and day out. Sure, we are able to rove, but there is only so much originality to be found in the built-to-order architecture of the 'Dos.

There are evenings, when he is alone in his bunk, and the lights have been turned down to a soft amber glow. There are times where, when he finds himself in the most silent watches of the night (most silent but ever with the white hum of cyclers and power systems), he opens himself to The Wild.

Up in that mile-high tower, perched on the head of a pin overlooking the curvature of the world, they try to flee from what the world below has come to, but it plagues them still in their darkest, quietest hours. The daily vitamins prescribed to curb Fever ebb, and the light, hardly noticeable haze that typically insulates their minds thins.

Is it the first inklings of a psychic evolution in the human physiology? Is it an unintended consequence of the over-engineering of the monstrosity creatures and plants that spread across the streets below? Is it a hallucination? Is it a mass dream, shared by every one of their dozing minds?

The Wild comes to them when they dream. Their days are spent busily trying to draw purpose from a caged life, actively trying to pretend that all is right and ordered with the world. Measured. Scheduled. Denial-filtered. In their nights, the caged frustration flows freely. No one knows if it is an unnatural side effect of the vitamin cocktail, or if it is a naturally occurring savage state that they would all exist in were it not for the cocktail. No one talks about it, because why would you: why choose to face the darkness within you, which unfolds itself every night from the crevices where you try to stow it; ratty, fabric, bat-like wings spreading wide. Or maybe those membranous projections are monstrous ears, their delicacy enabling the hearing of The Call from far, far below.

The Wild runs savage through the minds of the dreaming.

Maybe it's a link that we ourselves engineered. The progenitors of the monstrosities that stalk The Wild were once our own Feed species: Livestock that we pushed over the genetic brink to more quickly feed a rampantly growing population. How much testing was really done on the modifications we made? How much did we really understand of the consequences of all that genetic modification; of what lasting impacts there may be of consuming that fevered flesh.

What if the call of The Wild that comes to us every night is a link we forged in eating that meat, back before the conversion to algae-grown nutrients.

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GAAARRR! The frivolity of last night definitely had an impact on my productivity today, and after riding ahead of the average-word-count wave, I think I'll have slipped under today.

Today's bit is fairly random. I kind of forced myself to start writing it on the way to work today, though I wasn't really feeling it. That being said, there's something in all this Wild stuff. I had always intended for The Wild to just be the physical ruin of the streets outside the MegaDos, infested by all kinds of giant, mutated animals and grown thick with GM plantlife. This is the first time I was struck by this idea of the Wild somehow calling out to people in the MegaDos in the night, and, frankly, it scares the crap out of me...which means it is right >:)

Though I haven't got the steam today, I look forward to exploring this further....