Project 3 — Short Story
Chris McSwain
“Please.”
Her synthetic purple irises glimmered in the dim, dual moonlight of Phobos and Deimos, far above the tallest peaks around. Every part of her face begged him to change his mind, eyes, nose, mouth, and all, begging for anything to change. Not even the faint lines at the edges of her cheeks and ears, a left-over from manufacturing, was free from her tender expression.
“We could walk on Jupiter’s moons… We could scrape past Neptune on our own ship! Imagine what we could do… Just… Let’s get off this dusty crater and finally be free.”
She took two steps back and swung her arms in a wide swoop as if to catch something buzzing around the air. She leaned in closer, the smell of floral perfume escaping from the collar of her parka. Marco looked away, attempting to escape the question, and scratched behind his ear. The hazy lights of the ‘CenturyTex™ Agricultural Complex GV-62’ blinked on the other side of the crater.
“Come on, let’s live life.” She sighed and pulled back. She faced the horizon, then leaned against the steel antennae’s support. “It honestly hurts to watch you waste your life.”
Marco looked at the reddish Martian soil beneath his boots. “I don’t know Tess, we have no money. How would we even get a ride? Not a lot of ferries let untethered synths hop on either.” He held a shrug for effect, then dropped it, awaiting a response. “Plus I’ll only tie you down. You’d be better off alone up there.”
She opened her mouth a touch, about to say something but closed it and looked away. Facing down for a moment, her lips pushed up towards her nose, pursed. Her eyebrows wrinkled in the middle, in the way she always did when she was about to say something big.
Without moving, still looking at nothing in particular, she murmured, “We’ll never make any money if we stay here… and we need that money to get away…” She looked up to match Marco’s gaze. “If we never get away, we’ll never, ever go anywhere or do anything.” She looked deeper into him. “We’ll always be slaves if we don’t at least try… so let’s just try.” She hesitated for a moment. “And once we get some money saved up, we’ll fix what Wells did to you.”
Marco’s eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. “That dream sounds nice until you’re starving to death, sitting in the outskirts of Tarrin.”
Tess leaned back with defiance. “Well then let’s just not go to Tarrin. Plenty of other places in the galaxy. We could find work somewhere,” She pointed around towards the night’s stars.
He rolled his eyes at this, “Just go without me if you hate this rock so much.”
“This is your dream, remember?” She retorted.
He sat silent and looked away at his shoelaces.
After a few seconds, she moved in closer and put her arms around him. “C’mon… We can figure it out…”
He remained still. “Was,” he mumbled in her ear.
She paused for a moment, confused, then sighed and squeezed tighter, “I still love you. That fucking chip he put in your head won’t stop me.” They sat together for a few seconds in silence; the only noise was the sound of the martian air gusting through grass.
“The old me is dead, Tess. Those dreams died with me.”
“No,” she shook her head. “You’re still here. Just that thing is… blocking some of you” Tess’s eyes going glossy, her voice wavering: “Just… let’s-”
“We can’t.” Marco stopped her, himself holding back from the emotions already rushing over him. “Please, just go and don’t look back.”
She shook her head even harder now, her whole body moving along with it. “No… No! I’m not leaving without you. I love you.”
“No, you loved the old me. I-I don’t know if it’s your programming or your…” Marco’s voice trailed for a second. His hand made its way up her back. “You… go see the solar system, the galaxy too. And…” His voice croaked, tears welling up, but his eyes were focused forward in determination. “Come back for me once only when you know you can fix me.”
Sheer bewilderment washed over Tess, momentarily spinning her away from the circumstances. “Wha-”
At that moment, before she could respond, he turned her settings to standby mode, her whole body and mind freezing in place. On her face showed the beginnings of shock, only then noticing his hand on her back’s control port. Slowly, her face and body fell into a neutral position, the only evidence of the events just seconds beforehand were the tears still in her eyes and on her face, and the watery snot dripping from the nose. For a few moments, Marco wiped them away just before releasing himself; sobbing first over, then into her shoulder, making the broken, hiccuping, whimpers no man could bear to make, much less show to anyone. He sat there with her “sleeping” body for a few minutes, and then a few more, and a few more after that. He only hoped he wasn’t holding her there for the last time.
So this is the first time in quite a while when I genuinely feel as if I’ve spent it all, throwing all of my heart into this piece. I did try to make the story good, start right when it’s getting interesting and hopefully keep it that way until the end. I hope it wasn’t too much emotion for one scene, I know a lot of movies take a while for you to feel for the characters so i don’t know if it’s really long enough for the reader to truly connect. This one is a lot better than project 2, the writing is a lot more compact and a lot more purposeful, since not a lot could be taken out and have the same story.
I’m not sure how I came up with the concept for this story. Well, the original one, I mean. In the original concept for the story, it was just the two sneaking some romance inside the agricultural factory of sorts, but this idea was way back months ago. When I started the prewriting for this project, I decided that there needed to be some sort of tension throughout the conversation, or else the story would be pretty boring, so I turned it into a bit of an argument. The original concept had the story being set in a chilly plant-growing room, but I swapped it to outside because… I actually don’t know why I did that. I just thought it would make a bit more sense maybe if they were outside? But anyways, something about this reminded me of the replicants from Blade Runner, so I put it on mars and gave it more sci-fi, and we have the final setting.
For this project, I really focused on keeping the plot steady and the pacing good, since I realized my previous project had a bit more of a “meh” story and I had the beginning drag for so much of the story that the end was practically nonexistent, so for this story, I started in the middle of the conversation, sort of similar to a Tarantino movie. With this one, I made sure to set up everything beforehand, like the hand on her back was mentioned in passing a paragraph before the turning-off, and the fact that she was an android was set up way back in the first paragraph. I did more planning too, starting with a cool concept, giving it the main theme of freedom, and a good amount of love in there just as any good story requires.
Since I actually wanted the reader to empathize with and like the characters, unlike my previous short story (with the serial killer-type guy,) I tried to give the characters some heartfelt moments, which turned out to be the entire story. I also made sure to keep the plot short, having only a single scene without too much fluff on either side. The ending was especially difficult, as I truly wanted to continue it onwards, but then it would’ve ruined the story by dragging it along. If this was a novel, I would start the next chapter from the point of view of Tess waking up somewhere with some sort of new environment after a timer or something had been fulfilled, and I would explain what had happened within the next one or two chapters, but since this is a short story, I didn’t have that luxury. I at first tried to write a short epilogue to try to explain it a little bit, but that ended up being far too long, and it muddied the story so I scrapped it, ending it off right after the climax.
After writing the first draft, I set up some things better, tweaked the dialogue a bit, the usual, but I was thinking I made things too melodramatic. I was thinking the emotional stuff was a bit too much around the 75% mark, (it didn’t really make all that much sense) so I toned it down, keeping the climax of the emotion till the very very end.
