The Opening Scene

As it stands...

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Dear Writer,

It’s been a pretty great week. Ian had time off from work, so it was really nice to have him around, even though I myself spent much of the week in admin mode, running around to get my car officially registered and refinanced, and getting my life together and the house cleaned for when, after the holiday week, I got back to business with The Book.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to write a book, and to be at this stage where I can finally see the finish line and know it’s going to work… it’s pretty exciting. I’ve tried to write a novel in the last few years, got some 40k in on one that was never going to work but I kept hacking away at it anyway, and now… here I am, on track to have this thing done (I hope) by January, when I can send it off to my agent and start planning the next one.

But now, as I am (somehow) still feeling full of pie and gratitude, I’m gonna get back to work on it, so I figured this would be as good a time as any to share the opening scene with you all. I’m not at the point where I’m looking for critical feedback yet, so if you leave a comment, make sure it’s a “What’s your favorite part?” response.

Also, if you celebrated last week, I’d love to hear your favorite part of that, as well!

Mine was that it was a Friendsgiving, that our wonderful friends hosted, and that one of the friends at the table was brave enough to be honest about her struggle to feel a lot of gratitude after what had been a really tough year. We were able to empathize with her and support her in being all, “This year fucking sucked!” and I just absolutely adored her honesty and willingness to be real.

Okay. I’m off to write. Here’s the scene:

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Nothing Is Ever Always (working title) - Chapter 1

You would think that breaking the universe is something an ordinary person couldn’t do casually, but you’d be wrong. So many of the truly world-cracking moments come from ordinary people just doing ordinary people shit and then, one hasty and often stupid choice later…

…crack.

There is an argument to be made that, in this context, I am not exactly an ordinary person, and you’d be right but… fuck it.

You wanna hear the story or not?

I admittedly wasn’t at my best the morning I decided to connect Olivia Nguyen with her dead mother. It was biting cold for October, so I was still shivering when I’d gotten to my office; I’d woken up from a nightmare that I could neither remember nor shake; and I’d forgotten to fill my coffee that morning, but still took my tumbler with me to work, and accidentally choked on an unpleasant sip of the last dregs of yesterday’s coffee.

But, if I’m honest… I probably would have made the same decision anyway.

“I’m sorry, Professor Strand.” Olivia Nguyen sniffled, and then broke into outright sobs. She was a sophomore, or maybe a junior, from… somewhere… with a hint of a New England accent and a fondness for tight ponytails and dark, loose-fitting clothes. She was in my History of Witchcraft class this semester, and took my Introduction to Feminine Mythology last year, and I just told you pretty much everything I knew about her.

She swiped at her puffy eyes with her fingers. “It’s been three months. I thought I’d feel better by now.”

I nudged my tissue box across the desk toward her so she could mop up. Students cried in my office all the time, usually for inane reasons, like freaking out that their paper wasn’t good enough or trying to play on my sympathies so I’d go easy on the shitty midterm they’d taken while both hungover and still a little bit drunk.

Nguyen, however, was not that kind of student. The majority of my female students were usually so beaten down by the time they got into my class that they tended to start every question with, Um, I don’t know if this makes sense, but…? Not Nguyen. Her hand shot straight in the air at least once per class, never a hint of apology in her tone, and even when she was wrong, she was at least interesting about it. The kid was a thinker, and I’d liked her.

This fall she showed up in my class again, but she was different. Subdued, distracted, late papers. I’d called her into my office for what I’d intended to be a quick wellness check, and that was when her weeping and my regret began.

“So… you and your mom were close?” I guess that might seem like a strange question to ask a grieving kid, but some people had shitty mothers that weren’t worth grieving a whole lot. The universe is a testament to infinite variety.

“No,” Nguyen said. “We never got along. The last time I talked to her, I told her that I couldn’t wait to get back to school and away from her. I didn’t even say goodbye when she left for work that day.” She looked up at me, her eyes filling again. “She was a really good driver. You don’t think good drivers are gonna die in a car accident, you know? I figured she was just too stubborn to die. Like, ever.”

Nguyen shifted on the little wooden chair on the other side of my desk and cried harder, which somehow made my casket of an office feel even smaller. Spelier College had a beautiful campus, typical of a spattering of nineteenth century upstate New York liberal arts colleges, all stone and wood and high ceilings and shameless pomposity. Instead of properly renovating the interior of Harper Hall—where they’d stuffed me—to meet the needs of the times, they just used laughably thin interior walls to carve four faculty offices out of what had originally been one. And I was lucky; a professor who worked out of a storage closet in Bettinger had almost gone apoplectic when he walked into my office and he saw that I had an actual window.

Technically, I had half a window, but it was a tall one that went from a foot above the floor to almost the ceiling, which was a good eleven feet high. My office had charm, but between the overloaded bookshelves and my desk, there was barely room for me and one student.

And today, that one student was weeping and snotting all over the place, making me feel even more claustrophobic than usual in my tiny space.

That’s when Rose… who I guess qualified as my closest friend… made it worse by arriving at my door.

“Don’t come in,” I said, but she either didn’t hear or ignored me, both of which were equally likely with Rose. She opened the door and shuffled inside, immediately exceeding the recommended capacity for the room and creating a fire hazard. She pulled her fuzzy fleece-collared maroon wool coat around her pencil-thin body, which was always cold no matter the weather.

“Hello, Elinor,” she said in her too-chic-for-this-place London accent. “It looks like rain, so I thought I’d pop in and pick you up for mass.”

Rose was tall, brown-haired and hazel-eyed, mid-thirties and no doubt built from my code. Most non-player characters—we nicknamed them Extras when we were coding—tend to be boring as fuck, by design. Boring people living boring lives and keeping the world going while the Players run around the game making an interesting mess of things. But not my Rose; she drew liberally from a well of darkly foul language, she collected quirky ceramic animals, and she designed and crocheted cute novelty scarves. I had a Bee and Puppycat scarf on a hook by my front door that was among my most prized possessions.

She was a masterwork in a universe designed to be random.

“I said don’t come in.”

“Oh.” Rose blinked and looked down at Nguyen. “Fuck, kid. What happened to you?”

Nguyen was too overcome to answer, and Rose adopted a wise auntie expression. “Look, I don’t care who he is, he is not worth all this. Get a gadget, have a wank and a glass of wine, you’ll come out fine. You don’t need him, and he’s likely useless anyway.”

“Rose,” I said, warning in my voice. She put her hand over her mouth, completely misreading me.

“I’m so sorry.” She patted Nguyen on the shoulder. “Him, her, them. The point remains… not worth it and likely useless.”

“This isn’t about sex,” I cut in. “Why don’t you wait out in the atrium for a minute?”

“Oh, sure.” Rose leaned over to deposit a last bit of wisdom into Nguyen’s ear. “But hold what I said for when it is about sex, right? Still useful advice.” She stood up straight and looked at me. “We’re going to be late.”

“Father Thomas will notice us more if we’re late.”

Rose’s face lit up at the mention of Father Thomas. I wrote a holy figure fetishism into the personality randomizer with a rarity generation quotient low enough that the reviewers let it through. Extras can’t be harmed and can’t do harm, so it wasn’t like anything I wrote was going to get horribly out of control, and it was the most fun I’d ever had coding, hands down. I was not Catholic by any measure, but I accompanied Rose to Friday afternoon mass every week, just to listen to her whisper inappropriate comments about Father Thomas while his non-existent soul tended to hers.

Father Thomas was definitely not my code. If he had been, he and Rose would have absolutely fucked by now.

“When you’re ready,” Rose said, tapping the face of her watch with her fingernail.

“I’m sorry,” Nguyen said, reaching for her backpack. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your day. This isn’t even about class…”

“Sit down,” I said.

Nguyen sat.

“Go wait in the atrium,” I said to Rose, and she left, shutting the door behind her.

I looked at Nguyen, made my hasty choice, and moved on. “Okay, look, kid. Your mom is fine. She’s just at Base, transitioning out of Game. That’s what all this is; it’s a game. A simulation.”

Nguyen’s eyes widened. “Prof…Professor Strand? Are you okay?”

I sighed. The language filters. I mean, I knew how the protective code worked; I coded it, for fuck’s sake. Because I coded it, it was solid.

But also, because I coded it, I knew how to get around it… a little.

“Sorry,” I said. “Sometimes I speak in gibberish. It’s a minor… brain… thing.” I wiggled my fingers vaguely toward the side of my head. “Nothing to worry about, but let me know if it happens again, okay?”

Nguyen nodded, and it appeared I’d freaked her out enough to distract her for a moment from her grief. Her eyes were still red and puffy, but now dry.

“Your mom is…”—I sighed, forcing myself to utilize a metaphor I despised—“in the afterlife.”

Nguyen sat back, looking disappointed in me, and I didn’t blame her.

“I’m not religious,” she said

“Oh, trust me, neither am I.”

Nguyen glanced toward the empty space by my door that no doubt still held a lingering hint of Rose’s rose-scented perfume.

“Oh, yeah, I mean… I go to mass, but only to watch Rose lust after the local priest.”

Nguyen blinked at me. “Okay.”

I waved a hand in the air. “Not the point. Here’s the thing; your mother isn’t gone. Not really.” I waited a moment. “Can you repeat back to me what I just said?”

She watched me carefully, clearly feeling weirded out. “My mother isn’t gone, not really.”

“Okay.” I took another breath, choosing my words carefully. “Have you dreamed about her yet?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You will. You only get one dream of the dead, though, where it’s an actual visitation. The rest are just you projecting. But when someone dies, they get one real visit in a dream.” I tapped my fingers on my desk to relieve the tension I was feeling from all this tiptoeing. “Can you repeat that back at me?”

“It sounded like, ‘Put the tiny shoes in the portmanteau because liver damage.’ Are you sure you’re okay?”

Goddamnit. Tie this shit up and go to mass. “Look, just go to sleep, dream. You’ll talk to your mom. You can say goodbye. You’ll feel better. Okay?” Subtext: Now take yourself and your grief and get out of my office.

She shook her head. “I don’t dream.”

I blinked at her. “What do you mean, you don’t dream?”

She shrugged. “If I do, I don’t remember them. I never have. When other people talk about dreams, I don’t really get it.”

This was rare, but not unheard of. Most Players, when delegating their points, choose to spend a few on remembering their time touching Base each night in the form of dreams that are translated into metaphor their Game-limited consciousness can understand… to a degree, anyway. Some players choose to spend those points elsewhere and forego remembering their dreams. It happens.

But saying goodbye mattered, and if Olivia hadn’t delegated any points to dream retention, then she’d never get her goodbye, and the very idea of that made me have feelings.

I don’t like having feelings.

I made the decision on a whim, a wild moment of why the fuck not? even though I knew there would be consequences if I got caught. But I was too old and too tired to watch Nguyen suffer like that when I knew I could do something about it.

Besides, it would just be a little spell, a tiny bit of recoding from within Game. Most likely, Base would never even notice, and if they did, they’d just send someone down to wag a finger at me, anyway. And it’d probably be Darien, who was my actual best friend, and I hadn’t seen them in ages.

The more I thought about it, the more this idea seemed to pose nothing but upside.

I got a quick hit of inspiration, pulled open my laptop and checked my calendar.

“Samhain is tomorrow night,” I said. “Perfect.”

“What’s sahwen?” Nguyen repeated, pronouncing it as I said it.

“Halloween.” Didn’t matter what we called it, just that sunset on the 31^st of October to sunset on the 1^st of November was the time window of the annual big code patch, leaving a space where my mucking with the code would be least likely to be noticed or rectified. My chances would be even better if there was a full moon that night, but it would be waxing and almost full so… good enough.

“You know the clearing in the middle of Ludlow Forest?”

Nguyen nodded.

“Can you meet me there at midnight tomorrow?” Sunset was the earliest possible moment we could pull it off, but midnight was deep enough within the window to maximize success.

“I…” Nguyen blinked, clearly uncomfortable. “I guess so. What am I meeting you for?”

I shut my laptop and looked across the desk at her. “We’re gonna say goodbye to your mom.”

Her brow knit and I could see an internal struggle happening. “I’m not religious. I don’t believe in…”

“Me, either.” I met her eyes so she could see that I meant business. “Witchcraft isn’t magic. It’s coding. We’re gonna patch ourselves an interdimensional Facetime.”

Her eyes widened.

Shit.

“What did I just say?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounded kind of… French? Maybe? Do you speak French?”

I sighed. “Nope.” I got up, shoved my laptop into my worn-out denim messenger bag, and tossed it over my shoulder.

“Look, kid,” I said. “I apparently can’t explain it, so you’re just going to have to take this on faith. Show up, don’t show up. It’s your call. But if you want to say goodbye to your mom, meet me tomorrow at midnight. If you don’t come, I won’t care. Seriously. Your mom is fine and knows that you love her but if you can’t take my word for that, if you need to say goodbye, then I’ll help you contact her for yourself.”

She just stared at me, her blinks seeming to make that piano-tink sound they do in cartoons.

“Okay?” I said as a nudge.

She nodded. “O-okay.”

She got up just as I shuffled through the tiny space between my desk and the bookshelf and there was this awkward moment where I felt like I should maybe hug the kid or something. Be a source of comfort in a cold universe. But I’m not a hugger, so I held out my hand to shake. Awkwardly, she took it, and we shook.

“See you tomorrow,” I said, reaching for the doorknob. “Maybe.”

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All right, so that’s the opening scene of Nothing Is Ever Always. Thank you all for being here for the whole process, and riding through it with me. You’ll be the first to know how it goes…

Everything,

L