As working my way back into my writing has been a gradual process, I’ve been posting The Junk Drawer infrequently for the past month.  After all, if I didn’t really do anything on Junk Drawer Day, it makes little sense to put up a post acknowledging that fact.  But this week, at last I feel the gears turning again, and I managed to put a bit of work in.  Here’s what I was up to this week:

The Rectifier

This is a good one, one I haven’t talked about much of late.

For my more recent followers, some background: The Rectifier was born from a short story I posted during my first Short Fiction Month last year.  Set hundreds of thousands of years into the future, The Rectifier takes place on an Earth long abandoned by mankind.  While humanity has vanished, their machines were left behind, discarded by a species that no longer required such crude devices.  Eventually, one of these machines achieved true consciousness, and set about building a new civilization entirely comprised of artificial life forms.  By the time the story takes place, this first conscious artificial intelligence has also vanished, and due to the aftermath of an ancient war between factions of the machines, most memory of their early history has been lost.

The first great challenge I’ve come across is simply this: what would an entire “race” of artificial lifeforms look like?  Would they look the way we envision androids, emulating the admittedly limited form of their long-gone creators?  Would they even bother with physical bodies, or merely be content to exist solely in the virtual world, where form itself is a construct, and the possibilities are all but limitless?

Though I’m still working out the details, I’ve come up with a rough framework for the story.  Essentially, every individual AI consciousness exists both in the physical world, where they are bound to a tangible, artificial body, and in the virtual world, known as the AllNet.  The first chapter, which I began this evening, takes place in the individual net space of one particular AI, David 313, who will be the main protagonist.  Currently, I plan to create a world in which each individual AI maintains its own, personal virtual space, not unlike the way we maintain Facebook pages or other websites today (like this one, for instance).  Each individual “world” is in turn linked to the overall network, where all AI consciousnesses can freely interact.

Much remains to be done.  I still haven’t decided what, precisely, the physical world will look like; while I’ve established that certain AI are given specialized chassis designed to serve a single purpose, I’ve yet to decide if most, or all follow that pattern.  In some ways it might work better for the story: in the physical world, an AI is but one of many, possessing a machine body virtually identical to thousands, even millions more.  But in the virtual world, each is free to craft their own unique existence, to form a personal identity.

Needless to say, I’m eager to see how this story develops.

Ashes

Now this is one I’ve talked about a lot on these posts.  Lately, I’ve been thinking more about the overall plot progression of the story.  Overall, the plot of Ashes will follow the gradual development and coming of age of the colonists, but I’m still not sure of how quickly I intend to progress the characters.

Currently, the first chapter deals with their birth, while also introducing the first two main characters: AI programs that run the colony ship, known as the Minder and the Mentor.  The second chapter skips ahead to a point where the colonists have progressed to early primary school age.  From there, however, I’m not sure where to jump forward to.  The temptation is to rapidly skip ahead through their early years to young adulthood or simply adulthood, as the currently plan for the story would have most of the plot taking place during those later years.  However, I feel somewhat loath to simply skip through years and years of their growth and development, which would help to show their gradual transformation into the people they will become.

Another major consideration is what, precisely, happened to Earth, and how to deal with that.  Thus far, I’ve been intentionally vague on the subject, aside from providing a general sense that A) the colony ship’s existence is due to Earth becoming uninhabitable, and B) the rest of humanity is either likely or known to be extinct at this point.  I do have a vague notion that the colony initiative began as a result to catastrophic climate change, but I’m not quite sure yet how, or when, the colonists will learn of the fate of Earth.  Time, I suppose, will tell.

Other Projects

As I’m still working my way back, I’ve yet to fully assess most of my other side projects.  While many of them are little more than a brief set of notes, a few are far more well-developed, and it would be interesting to take up one or two of them and see where they lead.

At the moment, however, I’ll admit I’m a bit gun-shy.  I began my weekly Junk Drawer routine about halfway through writing Wide Horizon, and by that point I was fully absorbed in the story.  The original purpose of the Junk Drawer was essentially a day off: one day a week where I would force myself to step away from my work-in-progress and explore fresh ideas.  At the moment, however, I fear getting sidetracked.  Until either Pathfinder or Samarkand takes off, I have this nagging worry that if I allow myself to get caught up in one of these side projects I may completely abandon the other stories, and who knows how long it will be until I find my way back.

However, I’m feeling better about both Pathfinder and Samarkand by the day.  So, with any luck, this will be the first of a long run of new regular postings of The Junk Drawer. – MK