NaNoWrimo 2015: Day 1
Prologue
Why couldn’t we live closer? she thought, turning the dial in vain to find the station. The old radio just wasn’t having any of it. All she heard was static. Then, finally! Muffled voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying. She continued fiddling with the knob. Try as she might, the voices wouldn’t get clearer. Stupid machine! she thought. With a frustrated grunt, she switched off the receiver. Guess she better try her luck at the library. There had to be something she hasn’t read yet.
Chapter 1
Carolyn was a gal with a perfectly respectable life. She had a respectable job, and a nice house, if small. A respectable savings, thanks to a small sum she inherited from her respectable parents when they passed. Her brother Barclay got most of the money, of course, but they provided a respectable amount to be sure she was taken care of. All that was missing in her life, it seemed, was a respectable husband.
In her younger days she didn’t care much for boys. Horribly uninteresting creatures. Then there was the war. All the boys left, and Carolyn threw herself into the work of a cryptologist, doing her part for the war effort, decoding enemy transmissions intercepted and brought to her and hundreds of other numerically inclined individuals in hopes of having them decoded before it was too late to act on the intel. The effort showed promise at first, and every code cracked gave insight into how their own code could be modified to avoid decryption behind enemy lines, but as their own encoding became better and better, the enemy, it seems, had devoted as many resources, if not more, to the same effort. Thus every day was a new challenge, each message harder than the rest. Perhaps for every fifty messages, Carolyn cracked one, but that was enough to keep her going, and far more than most other newly dubbed cryptologists cracked in twice the time. Her efforts earned her one of the highest awards granted to a civilian in war time. But that was then.
Now, the war was over. The men were home, those that were left anyway, and Carolyn was stuck behind a terminal listening to the blips and blops of messages converted into dashes and dots; then sent by wire over long distances, conveying “important and urgent messages” like the weather in Terraceburg (Rainy as always, big surprise), and the latest sportsball scores. Sure, technically it was coding, but nothing like she used to do. The same twenty-nine combinations of blips and blops over and over. Different orders, but nothing new. There was no challenge, no excitement. Nothing was on the line. Sometimes, despite her best efforts, she would zone out during part of the transmission and miss some of the letters. At least then she would have the challenge of filling in the gaps to be sure the message retained its meaning. Like a child’s word game.
Indeed, there was really nothing for Carolyn to look forward to anymore. An empty home, a meaningless job. Her remaining family halfway across the country. While she didn’t miss the rations, or the air raids, or the reports of the dead, it was nice to have a purpose, to do something worthwhile. Maybe if she had a man. She certainly wasn’t getting any younger. Her workmate Ellen reminded her of that often.
She sighed as she pulled on her gloves and fussed with her hair in the mirror before the door. She didn’t think she looked all that bad, but then what did she know about women. Just another day, she thought smoothing her skirt once more before walking out the door. Yet another day in hell.
The train pulled into the city promptly at half-passed eight as it did every day. Carolyn got off, walked briskly through the station and down the sidewalk a block and a half to Wrycliffe Tower, where the Smythe & Co.’s Telegraph systems was located. There was a small telegraph post in her own town, but working there had been the slowest, dullest month-and-a-half of her life. Not much traffic between the small, sleepy suburb and the outside world. The city was farther, yes, but at least there were no shortage of messages coming to and fro. No hours of sitting idly watching paint dry. Taking the stairs to the fourth floor, she was in no hurry after all, her shift didn’t start until nine, she walked into the foyer and headed for the frosted glass door with her company’s name pressed on in black letters.
The office itself was nice enough. The trendy shapes and colors of the furniture and décor contrasted sharply with the smooth stone walls and ornate, carved wood trim of a century ago. The building was a tribute to the engineering marvels achieved in the last century, but this was not a time for looking back. This was an era of progress. The great research efforts and vast resources pumped into the war effort jump-started industry and rolled out modern infrastructure through much of the country. This momentum continued, still subsidized in part by the government’s Veteran reemployment act, and efforts to rebuild areas devastated by the fighting. Money flowed into the economy, and it seemed there would be no stopping this runaway train to the future. Carolyn must not have bought tickets though. Her life seemed to be standing still. There were no new opportunities for her.
She walked through to the back of the office and entered a smaller room humming with the sounds of electronic equipment. She sat down at her station, placed her bag on the floor beside her, then reached for her headphones. A fresh pad of paper sat in front of her, ready to take down messages as they came in. A few minutes later, Ellen walked into the room. “Good morning!” came the cheery voice behind her. Carolyn waved absently in her direction, trying to appear as if she were in the middle of decoding a message. She wasn’t though, and Ellen wasn’t fooled. “Boy what a weekend I had,” she said her voice sounding as if merely the recollection of it brought her short of breath.
Carolyn continued pretending to do things while Ellen prattled on about some party she went to, and some man she met. “He was just awful,” she would say with a giggle, clearly indicating that such roguish behavior was anything but. Carolyn actually liked Ellen. She was a reliable individual who actually had a decent head on her shoulders when she chose to use it. She was a good five years younger than Carolyn, but seemed to have at least a decade of youthfulness more than Carolyn ever had. That plus her light hair, petite build, and extra large eyes gave her the ability to have all the fun she chose, provided she was discrete about it. She was the perfect example of someone who found joy in her surroundings. She belonged in this world. Far more than Carolyn did.
“So how was your weekend?” she asked, clearly determined to get Carolyn to engage socially one way or another.
“It was… fine,” Carolyn said. Ellen was not deterred.
“Oh, come on!” she coaxed. “I told you about my weekend. Fair is fair. You must have done something the past three days.”
“Well, I went to the grocery,” she started. “They were out of greens, well they weren’t completely out, but I like the ones with the red stalks, and the ones they had looked all wilted and were browning at the tips…” It was Ellen’s turn to zone out. She tried to look as if she were paying attention. She nodded now and then and said things like “they didn’t!” and “isn’t that just the way…” but Carolyn wasn’t fooled, anymore than Ellen was fooled by her apparent busyness. They have had interesting conversations before, but Ellen believed smalltalk was as natural around the office as paper or desk chairs, and Carolyn just wasn’t any good at it. Luckily, the number of messages began picking up, and both could focus on work and leave the other to her own insecurities.
