For the past two months my friend Philip Kiely and I have tried to write a novel together about a group of college students who run a semi-popular Youtube channel and discover a hidden community of aliens. We did a lot of planning and had an very detailed plot worked out (I think the plot-map shows that maybe we went a little overboard on that front), but we still couldn’t get the project to work out. Last night we had a conversation about it and realized that, as much as we both loved the story, taking on an expansive collaborative novel as novice writers was like skipping to the boss battle before you finish the first level of the video game. So, in honor of our novel’s untimely passing, I’m posting my prototype for the first scene. I wrote the first draft and Philip cleaned up the prose and made the technology more realistic.
Nick Pecka learned early on that you can never get rich enough that you don’t have any problems, since as soon as you have enough base wealth to cover food and water and shelter, you start making up really silly needs for yourself, like love and self-actualization and the creation of a flying airsoft gun/infrared sensor shaped like a cyclops-bird’s head. Even being around people with enough money to choose their own dilemmas can bring your own needs into a new tier of silliness, as Nick found out when, in March of that year, he had been recruited by his affluent friends and became immediately invested shooting video to chronicle extravagances in engineering such as their flying, shooting, one-eyed bird’s head project. He had spent the summer wandering around the edges of the group working in the abandoned bank they used as the headquarters for their engineering Youtube channel and made vague noises and hand gestures to make it seem like he was helping. He couldn’t help, because making a propeller-headed attack bird requires a lot of engineering and artistic knowledge, none of which his three years of studying Romantic-era poetry gave him.
There was something deeply satisfying in seeing them work. There was Jeff Nash’s technical jargon about PSI and RPM and Brook Gramarosa Ziegler’s artistic jargon about the surreal fusion of organic and mechanical elements and such artistic language that didn’t mean anything from the interns, who were pretty clearly just contributing enough brain power and muscular strength to get paid. It hadn’t been clear to him at first, but after the long summer Nick understood that Teresa Williams wove the whole thing together, synthesizing all the random ideas into a single vision, a single product, a single, supremely disturbing bird’s head. It was subtle, the cutting motion of her hand to stop someone when they were rambling or lightly nudging one idea a little closer to another, but Jeff could see that she was playing them like one of those mob bosses in the in infinite stream of 1920s crime novels he’d been subjected to by well-meaning grandparents while growing up.
“What do you think of Bella’s new hairstyle?” Brook asked, petting the drone’s green mane.
“You’re not really calling it Bella,” Nick said.
“Yeah, the name really speaks to me,” Brook said, “have you been calling it something else?”
“That creepy flying nightmare,” Nick said, “or, Deathbird. Winged felt-of-hell. Birdman Cyclops.”
“You’re just jealous that she looks prettier than you,” Brook said. Nick winced.
After another few minutes of tinkering, Nick had his shots framed and the others had the disturbing thing running. It would look pretty weird if it were just the functional parts: a four propellers sticking out of a mess of metal and plastic, with the lens of an infrared sensor settled just below the rotor and the orange-tipped barrel of an airsoft pistol just below that. But Brook wouldn’t settle for purely functional, so she’d fit a sharp, slightly open beak over the pistol barrel, made the lens look like a single bloodshot eyeball, and covered the rest of it with furry green fabric. The end result was a beheaded cyborg monster, pure nightmare fuel. This was Brook’s surreal style, and by extension had become their channel’s style, which made it a little less family friendly than some of the other builders on the web, but a whole lot more distinctive.
The idea was that the bird’s head would detect signals coming from small circuits inside balloons and shoot and pop them. In its final form, the drone would zip across town and shoot balloons miles apart, but they hadn’t found the time to navigate the legal and moral grey area of sending a dangerous, unregistered, and deeply unnerving automated flying machine out into a highly populated area, so for now they were keeping it to a limited test: four balloons, one in each corner of the bank. The creepy robot wouldn’t have to fly more than a couple of feet to hit each target.
“Hey, wait,” Nick said as the group set up for the initial test. “You know we don’t start until the camera is rolling.”
“It’s not really that important,” said Jeff. “It’s just a quick test.”
“Yeah, but say it goes psycho and shoots Teresa’s head off?” he said. “Don’t you think that’d fit pretty well into the blooper reel?”
“Sure,” Jeff said, “I’ll go get the mop.”
As Jeff headed for the large plastic bin labeled “cleaning” in the stacks against the wall, the interns filled up balloons, Teresa readied the drone, and Nick got the camera trained on Teresa. The lighting was a little too dim, so he propped open the door out into Meredith main street.
“You ready?” Teresa asked. Nick nodded, started the camera, and Teresa turned on the drone.
It rose into the air, then just hung there for a second, rotors whirring but everything else completely still as its turret and eyeball stared Teresa down. Through the high-definition preview lens on The Good Camera, Nick saw little parts began to break away from the machine’s tiny vibrations. The thin material that made up the eyeball cracked, slightly at first, then deeper, so half of the white hemisphere hung off, revealing the mechanisms underneath. The green fabric that made up its skin tore in random spots. The bottom jaw of its beak clattered to the bank’s marble floor.
Teresa turned to the camera, an unusual note of concern in her voice. “Should we-”
Then the drone shot forward. Teresa screamed as the rotor tore a bloody streak across her cheek, more in shock than pain. The rest of the crew was paralyzed as the bizarre little machine went rogue, but, acting on pure adrenal instinct, Nick sprinted after it as it whizzed out the door. On his way out he picked up a second airsoft pistol, one that they’d bought when they considered making the bird head double-barreled. There was something unusually natural in his action, like a machine working just right for the very first time, as he slipped the clip in, cocked the gun, and flipped off the safety in time with his step.
In a few long-legged strides he was out on main street. The drone hadn’t gone very far horizontally, only across the road and over to the next sidewalk square, but it had gained two stories of elevation, going on three, and soon it would be disappear above the roofs and their project would be lost to whatever error in programing the stupid thing was following.
It was still all new instinct for Nick, pleasant instinct, as he stepped out into traffic and raised the gun. The screeching brakes and honking horns and swearing drivers shouting that they’d almost run him over were just background noise, a cinematic score to set the mood. The only sound that really mattered was the sharp pop as the plastic pellet sped from the gun into the drone’s rotor and the crash, muffled somewhat by the drone’s artificial flesh, as it hit the sidewalk.
As Nick approached it, the sounds around him faded from pleasant noise to simply void. His victory was silent, save for the mechanical whirring from the dying machine’s weak spasms. Nick picked it up by the rotor the way you’d hold a freshly caught fish and, smiling, showed it off to his friends, who were gawking from the bank’s open door. In a surprising show of quick thinking, Jeff had picked up the camera and aimed it straight at Nick. Even if he never put the footage online, Nick was glad it existed and hoped that Jeff had caught the badass moment of him standing in traffic and making his perfect shot.
Then a single, slightly wary voice punctured all the glorious silence. “Sir, could you please drop the weapon and the, um, whatever the other thing is.”
“Yeah,” said Nick with a sad smile. “Sure, officer.”
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