Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for mature content.
Chapter 17: Royalty
Keira stepped out into the filthy concrete courtyard on the ground level of the complex and pulled out a Turkish blend. The antepenultimate one of the pack, it seemed. Lighting it, she dragged the toxic fumes into her lungs and felt the impact immediately as somebody who scarcely ever smoked anything besides as celebration or when she would have many public encounters to do. Besides both being true right now, this also meant she didn’t care or notice how stale the tobacco was at this point.
The MAOIs in the smoke, absent in nicotine vapor, would calm her neuroticism in subtle ways specific to those with her mental dysfunctions that the public health organizations practically deemed an infohazard to document at this point; ways that you certainly wouldn’t hear about in any smoking education literature. Then she would suffer a familiar physical withdrawal she had long since trained herself to endure, and that would be that until the next revolutionary life event.
Plus, her dad hates smelling it on her. She wondered if he had seen the news yet, then noticed somebody staring at her through one of the slats in the fence blocking access to the outside world. The dirt flecked on his face betrayed that he likely didn’t have a safe place to sleep tonight.
“Miss… could you spare a cigarette?” he said, sporting a thick accent but enunciating with care to make sure anyone could understand him.
“Regular or menthol?” she replied.
“Regular or menthol?” he said incredulously, and not as easily understood this time. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”
“Well?”
“Menthol then, I guess.”
Keira internally was relieved, as she was not looking forward to buying another pack of her preferred Turkish sticks and planned to have at least five before the revenge of her sore throat the next day, or more if she really started drinking tonight. She pulled out a slim all-white cigarette measuring 120 millimeters, ringed with green and usually associated with women, and slipped it to him through the slats of the fence. For a second she wondered if he’d reject it for the look.
“Thank you. My god, thank you. Do you have a light?” he said, sticking it between the slats while holding it in his mouth now.
Somebody she couldn’t see yelled something indistinct. She held the flame to his cigarette, and he dragged, and then said quickly, “You better get out of here, miss.”
She did so, as the first people to reach the fence realized that their antichrist was in fact there at that time, enjoying some cancer. As she closed the heavy metal door behind her, the slats started to shake violently and wails erupted, defiant and desperate and confident and righteous and malicious and of all sorts, but all against her in her entirety.
Should she even bother visiting Dad today? She pondered for a moment, then put this concept out of her head. Any day could be the day now.
———
“Do you really think she’s handling this well? Is she really who we can trust as lead with how things are moving now? The directions things are moving in!” a short woman with curly black hair hissed.
“Nancy, do you think I don’t hear you?” Adam said, with tired eyes. They were in a storage closet holding about 200 solid state disks with ten terabytes of capacity each, and two frustrated people at odds. “She’s a nuisance on a personal level. But do you think this is the end? The Thinker is only the start, you know that, and we can’t get any further without the person who got us there to begin with.”
“At what cost? At what cost, Adam? Will she just keep molesting us until we—“ she caught herself. “Okay, harsh word to use, but we all worked on this for years until she came along and blew it all up.”
“At what cost would we have not taken her on?” Adam asked Nancy. “Truly, just curious.”
A knock on the door.
“Guys?” It was Keira’s voice. From her tone, she likely hadn’t been eavesdropping.
Adam opened the door.
“Just a friendly discussion,” Nancy said tersely, and walked past the two of them to get back to her cubicle. Adam left the closet and at last stood up straight, suddenly realizing how much his neck was aching now.
“Didn’t really sound like it when I was approaching,” she said, but not inquisitively. “Alright, well, let’s start working on a public-facing version of this thing we can send out to academic teams for trial.”
———
Time to smoke the lucky one so it isn’t last, thought Keira, boarding the outdoor car of the train to the nursing home her dad could easily afford to find his way out of with a little independence. Unless, of course, that itself was becoming too common an occurrence. Smoking the lucky inverted cigarette last was pathetic, a sign you never used the imaginary charm it possessed for any useful reason until it was just obligatory. But second had now become habit, so perhaps that wouldn’t do at all either. Perhaps the only thing to do was to buy another pack and—
Another old man was studying her curiously. With her cheeks beginning to flush, she realized he wasn’t admiring her beauty but rather wondering why she had been staring at an almost-finished pack of Turkish Royals for 30 seconds straight. She returned his look with a glare and he quickly averted his eyes from the misleadingly-named redhead.
On the bright side, she had developed into a sci-fi princess’s double of sorts, and even a pirate’s bride you could say. She had to give her parents credit where credit was due.
Next chapter: https://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work/Aet%20Lindling/Syboleth-ch-18-Overhead-162033
Points:
Time spent:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
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125,021 Literary Works • 672,739 Reviews
Hopefully pixels enjoys this one, as I’ve been promising better interpersonal dialogue and character development and articulation and stuff since pretty much the beginning now but this is the first time I’m trying to really pay that off.
See if you just wait long enough, I’ll get to your story anyway ^^
Maybe you want to cut this shorter. Feels like the impact could be its own sentence.Let’s see what this chapter of I-helped-create-genAI-and-I-have-daddy-issues is all abt.
Alrighty, direct your attention to this monster of a sentence:
Ok you have more than one of these monsters because the next paragraph also starts with one. I mean that can be a stylistic choice and you’re free to have them and I’m free to dislike the style =D
As someone who knows little abt cigarettes I would have also liked if you’d used some of that length to explain them a bit better.
That said, I do like the beginning of this and I also like that she engages with the homeless person. I like their dialogue.
Ok but she has to buy more Turkish cigarettes anyway since she’s smoking the third last and she’s planning to have 5, right? So why phrase it like that?
LOL “enjoying some cancer.“
I would have liked a reminder of why the people called her the anti-christ. Just a casual sentence. Not a monster :3
Hm I kinda dislike how both Nancy and Adam overuse the phrase “Do you think” in their section. Makes their dialogue seem too generic for my taste.
Waitwaitwait who is molesting ppl and that is a cost they are willing to pay??? That is a strong word to choose here!
Also… blowing the project up? In what way? I’m worried now @.@
Again we have a paragraph of cigarette lore that I don’t get and don’t want to research.
Oh wow ppl really won’t let you stare at nothing for even a minute without making it their business huh?
Alright, I’m not sure what to think of Keira atm but I do like that she didn’t shy away from the person at the gate, even interacted and handed away a cigarette and light (even if it was a girly cigarette, whatever that means).
I’m also curious abt what problem Nancy and Adam have. I didn’t realise that there was anything to worry abt @.@
Woot woot! Next chapter!
I'm glad to see Keira further developed as a person here. Her habits and thought patterns are rendered more fully in this chapter than the previous ones, when she had felt more like a vague idea than an actual person with feelings. For instance, her relationship with smoking feels like a lens into her idea of self-control, ritual, self-expression, etc.
Though, despite the deeper look into her, she remains the same "gist." Like:
This small, precise observation does a lot of character work. It shows Keira’s tendency to catalog, intellectualize, and fixate even in mundane moments. It’s effective because it’s not explained much, as most of her other quirks aren't. Her mindset emerges naturally through diction, especially if readers were around for the previous chapters.
I did feel that a lot of this better articulation paid the price of being a bit too on-the-nose. In past chapters, it was difficult to understand what was happening and who was thinking what; now, I feel a lot of that has been simplified. If you wanted to better articulate and allow for more natural character dynamics, it does work with the downside of feeling less true to the actual story. No Leibnizian monads, that's for sure, but also less density that was earned and fitting.
(In your PM, you mentioned using technical and dense language early on. I agree! Though I feel what you neglected to mention was your chapters are full of dense ideas throughout, ideas that are quite hard to grasp fully because they are philosophical, highly constructed, etc. This chapter seems to find some middle ground.)
Like, within the dialogue, for example:
This whole exchange felt explanatory. Keira uses an inappropriate word because she's a bit estranged from proper social cues, but then she backtracks because, unlike previous Keira, she understands enough to know NOT to use that word. All of this while Adam is just... there.
The dialogue-to-narration is quite balanced, but I do also think that the chapter’s strongest moments come when indirectness does the work. You have a tendency in a few exchanges to clarify these emotions explicitly when implication would suffice more effectively. You don't let the characters talk past each other, nor do you let them have moments where they feel they are simply talking to talk. In a chapter full of cigarettes and not overlord AIs, let them enjoy normalcy!
To be fair, though, this was a very impressive chapter because it isn't so "full of itself" trying to be speculative. Instead of worrying about The Thinker, Keira can enjoy a nice cigarette for once. I wouldn't say the story needs to moralize or explain anything, but I'd much rather prefer scenes like this integrated early on with the hyperliterate, dense mediations on technology and all.
Great work once again!
- pixels
Some amazing thoughts! Thank you as always for your insight. I was quite proud of that use of %u201Cantepenultimate%u201D although I must confess it came out of a facetious using of the most suPerfluous version of penultimate, which if memory serves goes propreantepenultimate and was used by monks to refer to the fifth to last syllable, or in other words here oth-.
As far as the closet talk, your sickness deceives: that%u2019s our first introduction to N. Chao actually, that ain%u2019t Keira. Maybe that%u2019s why the characterization feels a bit odd, she%u2019s accusing Keira of being a molester; not anyone else. I%u2019m doing the thing again where I twistily introduce a foreshadowed character in medias res, though I guess if you haven%u2019t read the belatedly uploaded second chapter yet you won%u2019t yet know which character was a twist introduction in these chapters. (To a reader reading in order, it will hit like a freight train I%u2019m hoping. You%u2019ll see why when you read it.)
Thanks again! There%u2019s plenty more to come.