Adam woke with the sound of screaming still ringing in his ears. Last night’s riot had been a bad one, so bad that celestial enforcers were called in to help “deal” with some of the worst people, the people with past records. He got up and walked through his small apartment to the food preparation area. He poured some boiling water into one of the dehydrated breakfast meals, eggs and bacon. “I know that eggs used to come from chickens” Adam thought to himself “but what the hell lays bacon?”
Earth had died long ago, the air much too toxic in most places to support life, and the weather extreme. Lightning was constant because of the pollution in the air and some storms raged for 90 days, flooded cities and killed millions. Earth hadn’t always been like this, once in the past it was clean and prosperous. But in the late 21st century, they came. Like a plague from the sky they crushed all human resistance. Humans were now slaves on their own planet, slaves to the beings known as the celestials.
Fruit and vegetables were grown in orbit, either on the moon or in great orbiting stations; everything else was created from base elements in giant vats heated by the earth.
Humans were limited to living in levels 800 down to level -200 where the temperatures were as high as 50 degrees Celsius.
Adam gathered his materials for work and ran out the door, he walked down the hall, turned left once, right twice and entered the HSTS. The High Speed Transit system was a maze of tubes and tunnels running throughout the city, without it to city would die, walking would take days and only the celestials were allowed to have personal aerial vehicles.
The HSTS pulled up to the platform, Adam saw a group of hollow eyed men in a line with 6 armed guards. These men were criminals, rioters, thieves. They were forced to work in the mines, to dig 100 meters a day or die in the process. Adam was lucky, he was the mineral expert on the crew, no digging for him, and he just had to point them in the right direction.
The intercom sounded “All yellow level personnel, proceeded to lift 27, all green level personnel proceed to lift 13.”
Adam watched as the convicts shuffled into the lift as he made his way to lift 13, the high-tech mag-lift was quiet and fast as he descended into the darkness of east wing mine.
The mines were a dangerous place, the temperatures were as high as 50 degrees, and if a cave-in ever occurred, you would only be dug out if the metals were worth your life. The mines were essential for just about everything, iron and other metals to construct the buildings, carbon to create food and phosphorous to fertilize the great greenhouses of the moon. People died in the mines, always a flow of new, inexperienced workers.
“Morning!” the Forman greeted Adam “the nigh-crew dug another 50m, found some interesting metal you should look at”
Adam kept walking down the tunnel until he got to the dig site; he found a group of workers crowded around some dull thing on the ground. For a second, Adam thought that they had lost another worker, but as he got closer he could see it wasn’t humanoid.
“It fell though the ceiling” one of the workers exclaimed “gave Jonson quite a scare”
Adam walked forward and saw a dull piece of metal, not an ore, but a solid piece of machined metal, “did someone put this here?” Adam asked, “Because there is no way that this could have formed naturally”
“How do you know?” argued one of the workers.
“Nature can do a lot of things, but it can’t rivet metal together, and it can’t write in Celestin”
Adam looked at the strange symbols; he wondered how this metal had made it one and a half kilometers into the earth, and what it was made of, being strong, yet so light.
“Should I bring this metal to the surface?” asked Jonson.
“No, let’s just move it off to the side, I would like to study it in more detail” Adam said calmly, he picked up the mysterious piece of metal and carried it back to the hollowed out area by the lift where he had his workshop.
The metal proved difficult, it would not bend no matter how hard he hit it, none of his acids had any effect and when Adam touched it to the tabletop grinder, the high speed wheel exploded, the metal probably saved his life, stopping all but a few of the pieces that flew his way, without a scratch as usual. Adam went home exhausted, but exhilarated at the same time “what could this strange metal be?” Adam thought as he rode the HSTS “And where did it come from?”
Three months later…
“It was official, the war had begun”, thought Ba’kell, a young Celestin, “the most oppressed are rising, all of the mistreated laborers are fighting back, I warned them of this”
He turned his head to scratching at the door, just as he moved towards his rifle the door ceased to exist. Ba’kell was thrown back 15 feet across the room, only his chair stopped him from going farther. He looked up as shadowy figures swarmed into his room, he couldn’t move his legs and he could see a piece of his door embedded in his shoulder. Red started creeping into the corners of his vision and his entire body felt broken, and just as one of the shadows detached itself from the group, he blacked out.
Adam sat on his couch, feeling lethargic after a long day; the shaft he worked was now down more than 12 kilometers from the surface, cooling suits with an oxygen supply were required because of the pressure and heat. It was unknown to him why they were told to keep digging this deep; it was hard and expensive, with little to show for their troubles. The metal down here was poor at best, fissures everywhere and heat damage to most of the rock. They had lost two men today when part of the ceiling fell.
The news reports flashed by on the screen in front of him, a dull mechanical voice announcing each. “3 people killed in labor riot.” “Terrorist attack on HSTS, 20 killed” “celestial officer missing and supposed abducted by rebel forces”
“Our world is falling apart at the seams” Adam thought to himself, “I don’t know how much longer the world can handle the stress
Ba’kell opened his eyes to a dark room, he tried to move his arms, but they were tied behind his back. Out of the darkness came a blinding flash as a door was opened and more shadowy figures, humans, scrambled into the room. They were thin, ragged and terrifying. One split from the group, the leader he assumed, and strolled up to him.
“You Celestin scum” the human said in a rough tone “You living a life of pleasure while we, the original inhabitants of the planet are treated as slaves.”
In the crowd, a voice called out “Make an example of the beast”
“Yes” the leader said “we will punish our oppressor, you, Darby, remove his mask”
As the one called Darby approached, Ba’kell tried to stop him, he felt the seals loosen and suddenly, his face, his lungs, his eyes were filled with molten lead, burning and heavy. The crowd gave a collective scream; Darby threw the mask to the ground and the crowd shoved each other out the door. As he slowly died in agony, the lone Celestin cried out, for help, for mercy, and for pity.
To be continued
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125,020 Literary Works • 672,731 Reviews
Awesome! I love, love, LOVE the story line. I wrote a story recently kinda like this. It is called "The End", It is about the end of the world too. I can't wait to read the next part!
Because Adam is talking about the past, lays should be laid. There should also be a comma after chickens and after himself.
Spell out numbers. Flooded and killed should be flooding and killing to keep the sentence in the same verb tense.
To avoid having a run-on sentence, change the comma after this to a semicolon or period.
There should be a comma after sky.
A comma should be after -200. 50 should be spelled out. Celsius should be lowercase.
This is another run-on sentence. Change the comma after door to a period or semicolon. There should also be a comma after twice.
System should be capitalized since it is part of the name. The comma after city should be changed to a period so the sentence isn't a run-on sentence. There should also be a comma after days.
This is another run-on sentence. There should either be a capitalized as before the or the comma after platform should be changed to a period. 6 should also be spelled out.
100 should be spelled out. There should also be a comma after day.
This sentence needs to be reworded so it isn't a run-on sentence.
There should be a period after sounded.
There should be a period after lift and as should be capitalized.
The comma after place should be a period. 50 should also be spelled out.
The comma after everything should be a colon.
The word, and there was should be before always so the sentence isn't a fragment.
There should be a period after Adam. The should be capitalized. Because the second sentence is a run-on sentence, the comma after 50m should be changed to a period and the word I should be added before found. There should also be a period after at.
There should be a comma after ceiling, a period after exclaimed, and a period after scare. Gave should also be capitalized.
The comma after metal should be a period and did should be capitalized. Because should be lowercase and there should be a comma after naturally.
There should be a period after Celestin.
The comma after side should be a period. There should also be a period after detail and a period instead of a comma after calmly. In addition, you are missing a few words before area.
This is another run-on sentence. The comma after difficult should be a semicolon or a period. You should probably also make another sentence after effect instead of using and.
There should be a period after time and what should be capitalized. There should also be a comma after HSTS and and should be lowercase.
The comma after begun should be inside the quotation mark. The comma after Celestin should be a period and the should be capitalized. There should be an and before all. The comma after back should be a period. There should be a period after this.
Towards should be toward to stay in past tense.
15 should be spelled out. The comma after room should be a period and only should be capitalized.
The comma after room should be a period or a semicolon. There should also be a comma after legs.
This is a run-on sentence. It should be split into two after one of the and.
12 should be spelled out. The comma after surface should also be a period.
3 and 20 should be spelled out. The period after riot should be a comma. There should also be a comma after killed and a period after forces.
There should be a comma after seams. The comma after himself should be a period. There should also be a period and a quotation mark after stress.
The comma after room should be a period. He should also be capitalized.
There should be a comma after opened.
There should be a comma after ragged.
There should be a comma after scum and a period after tone. There should also be a comma after you and planet.
There should be a comma after out and a period after beast.
There should be a comma after yes and said. The comma after oppressor should be a period and you should be capitalized. There should also be a period after mask.
The comma after him should be a period and he should be capitalized. There should also be a comma after loosen.
There should be a comma after ground.
This is an interesting story, and the ending made me want to read more, but there are a few problems with it.
You had trouble knowing where to put commas, periods, and semicolons. One way to help with periods is to read it out loud. If you have a comma where you stopped completely, it should be a period. A good website for commas is Rules For Using Commas. Though it doesn't deal with periods, it should help you realize where commas are that aren't part of the rules.
You also had trouble with quotation marks. One thing to remember that even if you have quotation marks, you should still have a comma or period at the end and at the beginning. Since there are a lot of rules, you will probably need to read Quotation Marks.
At times, you were also telling the reader what the character was doing, but you forgot to show us. This is something a lot of people have trouble understanding, so it would probably be good to read Show and Tell.
For the most part, these are minor problems that with a little editing can be fixed. Overall, I enjoyed reading this story.
Thank you both for the feedback, and i'll be shure to correct those errors, but much of the "info dumps" are very important to the later part of the story, think of some of it as slight foreshadowing to the troubles to come :P
Hullo Tunotoo,
D'you know, I think you've got something here. At the same time, it rather needs to excavated from the extra, the addeds and the somewhat stark series of info-dumps. I've found that often when I first put pen to paper, or, er, fingertips to keys, all manner of detail, jumbled or otherwise, spills out. Oy, by its end, I can often scrape away three quarters. Because in all of the, story comes much clearer in the backbone, the action, and the character, and all the exposition I've set out is already implied to the reader by what's going on.
It makes the explanation rather redundant.
For example:
There in the last paragraph specifically, you explain the mines are dangerous. But simply saying--people died, oy, well, that says it all. And it hits with some force. Though at the moment, its point is blunted by the reiteration it carries from the rest of the paragraph.
Throughout the piece, you have sentences that spring up like that last one: brief, bold, to the point. The rather brilliant thing about your story is that is has dozens of opportunities to use that language.
You have a stark, dead earth. You've a character forced, apparently, to work where people die. All the bloody time.
He seems to have an eye for seeing the things others aren't looking at--which excellent in a protagonist. Use Adam's eyes, da?
This --
...is impersonal, textbook. A reader really hasn't any reason to connect, even though it's a bloody apocolyptic somewhat grotesque image.
What does Adam see? I might try re-writing the above by linking it to an experience he has had--perhaps as a child, he somehow neared the surface, and peered into the ruin of Earth. Or even, maybe, an adult who knew history, and loves his home, told stories to him about how things were, generations ago. Or he was able to sneak a glance at a computer screen, showing the surface, or the moon...
The apt thing about showing, rather than explaining, is that you take out three pins with one ball, da? The reader is shown Adam's character, the story's backdrop, and begins to see the conflict or the plot. ^_^
In the end, Tuno, I believe you have a promising and possible mash-up of material. Yet it's coming out as telling, textbook and removed from immediacy.
I would try cutting most all exposition. As an example, you might take something like this: and change it thus:
Obviously, not in my words--but in yours. You seem to have a good ear for stark statements--such as people died... in the mines. Only they're buried right now. ^_^
I liked Adam's wondering about eggs and bacon--that's the sort of thing that gives the story its soul, you know. Detail. Doing, not telling.
Anyhow,if you've any questions, feel free to PM me, yes?
IMP
Salve!
I am absolutely fascinated with works of this genre. Although, at first, I was kind of confused with the setting until a little later on. But still, GREAT story.
First off, I absolutely LOVE your story line.
Now on to important stuff...
There should probably be a hyphen in between "city" and "without." Also, instead of a comma, you should use a semi-colon in between "die" and "walking."
"Hollow eyed" should be joined by a comma.
"Forman" should be "foreman."
Corrections are in red.
I believed that I've said enough at this point, so I'll just leave it up to others to get anything that I missed.