A dream I had

[merlinofchaos]

I wrote this up yesterday morning, and want to preserve it somewhere. I think there may be a short story here, with some revisions to turn dream logic into real logic.

Creative criticisms welcome!


In my dream, I was actually reading this as a novella. Sometimes aloud, sometimes following along. AT one point I couldn't find my page in the book.

In the distant future. Earth discovers FTL and joins a galactic community dominated by a race that can send their psyche through specially built conduits and can switch bodies. They use synthetic bodies to do dangerous work. Codename PowerfulRace for now.

Earth is a very, very minor player in this pre-existing galactic community. The conduit technology doesn't work for humans.

Earth ship with very small crew (3-10?) finds a derelict PowerfulRace ship. After doing due diligence, they board and attempt to find out what happened and if they can actually salvage the ship. PowerfulRace ship is huge. They spend some time exploring it, and exploring some of the conduit using bits. At some point there's an accident with the conduits. Two of the humans get zapped. No ill effects seen right away.

Later, the human in charge of the mission gets to the bridge. He starts doing something odd on the console, and then announces that he's venting all lifesupport, but it should be okay, because he's in a pressure bubble. Crewman points out he doesn't have a pressure suit. InCharge guy doesn't seem to get it. There's a countdown, and at the last second Crewman gets through and InCharge guy relents. Then they spend some time trying to figure out why he was doing it. InCharge guy has no explanation. Decide being zapped affected him, and voluntarily hands InCharge to another crewmember.

Someone from PowerfulRace contacts the ship. They're trying to contact someone on the ship. Protagonist (who was other member to get zapped) has a very very very strong feeling that this contact is bad. Other zapped guy wants to answer it. Crew decides not to answer it. They learn other PowerfulRace ship is coming. Both zapped guys think they're going to destroy the ship. Neither can explain why they think this.

Things got fuzzy here. There was action. I can't remember it.

At the end, it turned out that a synthetic PowerfulRace person (i.e, not born but actually created) had been sent to assassinate a girl on the ship, and the girl's boyfriend (who wasn't supposed to be her boyfriend) caught wind of it just at the end and managed to get her safely hidden in the conduits. It accomplished this by killing everyone on the ship.

Since Assassin's mission had failed, it was roaming the conduits trying to complete its work, and also kill the person who blocked it. Boyfriend and Assassin both got zapped out of the conduits, into Protagonist and InCharge guy respectively. Except that the tech doesn't work right on humans; both were reduce to just personality fragments occasionally attempting to induce control but never quite succeeding.

At the end they save the girl, who only shows up for a couple of minutes at the end, who is some high ranking diplomat's daughter, and Protagonist has an awkward scene with her where Boyfriend's memories of her are a bit too strong to bear, and she's in grief because there appears to be no way to get Boyfriend out of Protagonist, rendering him effectively but not quite dead.

They move the ship out of danger, and the novella ends there. Not much of an ending.

Comments

[willowisp.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's really cool. I've no constructive criticism at this point, but I'll let it percolate for a while and see if/what I come up with.

[merlinofchaos]

My biggest issue is the inherent sexism involved with 'save the girl' but I think that can be mitigated by having the Earth crew be split equally male/female. Really it's "save the assassination target" and the target is a girl, I think, because the awkward not boyfriend/girlfriend vision at the end is interesting.

[potato-pope.livejournal.com]

Aliens don't have to have gender.