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Symptomless Coma
Mar 30, 2007
for shock value
We've got novel threads, we've got the six-word thread, the sub-1000 thread, we've even got Thunderdome for the brave and the foolish. But for anyone who fancies the challenges of:

-Multiple scenes
-Multiple viewpoints
-Beginnings, middles and ends
-Character arcs yes I know all pieces should have this, shh

...what do you have? You have this. Anything over 1000 and under... let's say 5000, but it's open for debate. Same rules of the game as anyone else: try to critique as much as you write, :siren: be constructive, :siren: use it as an opportunity to read outside your usual. And given length, try and avoid full line edits unless you really, really want to.

Perhaps it will turn out that nobody has mid-length stuff they want critiqued, but I'd welcome the practice. Let 'er rip.

Solutions 1 & 2 (3500w)

Chloe downloaded the recipe from - well, if she told you, she’d end up on a register, but it wasn’t the usual. What made it scarier was how many of the ingredients she already had: butter, water, bicarbonate of soda, a nutmeg, mercury, white spirit, the dregs of Charlie’s Calpol. She had to go to the big Benson’s out of town for the white spirit. It was great fun going where Daniel had never taken her when they were still together. They had hired people for that sort of thing, and why double up? On the shop floor she teased the rough angles of expensive timber, daring them to splinter her keyboard-smooth fingers. She stood at the end of the paint aisle, an ocean of paint parted for her to pass, and she marvelled at the choice, at the secret poetic outlet that must be hidden in painters everywhere. Veldt Green. Cream. Pearl White. Forest Green. Forest Fire. Berry Purple. Carbon. Charcoal. Night. Which was weird, because every Night on the estate in which they’d been put was a different dirty orange, though surely they’d soon have to repeat before Charlie got old enough to have to go to the school and fend for himself.
She bought a tiny tin of Rose Red, because buying white spirit without paint felt suspicious and anyway, who knew what she might do with her unleashed talent and time? Assuming the recipe worked. Checking the printout in the kitchen while the stove heated up, it had seven five-star reviews, and a single one-star review. She hadn’t clicked on that to read it, because there were always skeptics, and if regaining her position at Ferndale LLP was about anything, surely, it was about pattern-matching, not getting into a flap about every little anomaly. Once she’d drunk it, she’d see everything for what it was, anyway. That was what one review said, and 9 out of 12 people had found it Helpful.

Calpol. The chromed fridge door’s reflection cased the room as she shut it, took her in. She’d aged six years in as many months, around the eyes, in strands of whitening hair. Or Moonlit Wisp, as Benson’s would’ve had it. No Daniel had meant more than just double shifts with Charlie. It meant no time just as spectator, just a constant animal-trainer’s brief to encourage and yet contain a precious two year old. He had drawn her a graph, his first, and she’d stuck it to the fridge. In wobbly crayon, a parabola described a deep dip in the centre. There was an x at the lowest point. “Mummy,” he said when he handed it to her. So, for Mummy. Or of Mummy. Through the kitchen radio, an economics professor said something about children growing up for jobs that hadn’t even been invented when they were born.
“If that’s true,” said the interviewer, “what should we be teaching them?”
“How to make connections,” said the professor, “between people and things. And how to think.”
Thinking was the thing. Daniel had thought their way to a two-bedroom house in the sub-suburbs, within the catchment area of a good school for Charlie; he’d thought his company to mergers and takeovers and happy investors; thought her, quite reasonably, out of her job and into being a full-time housewife. Finally, like the answer to an equation, he’d thought his way through the clasp of his PA’s bra, one late night at the office too many. This little kitchen, Chloe’s ongoing battle with the roaches, Charlie’s uncut hair, everything was the outcome of Daniel’s design, whether he meant it to be or not. The white spirit made patterns on the surface of the spumescence; just another logical step in things.

“Mummy, is that dinner? I’m hungry.”
Charlie tiptoed down the safe path on the tiles to the fridge. Him being able to talk had made it easier, but harder too; yet another thing to reason with, and one that was so much harder to delay and disappoint than the debtors.
“No dear, it’s just an experiment for mummy’s work. To help her concentrate on things. Dinner is your favourite!”
She held up a packet of Micro Noodles, chicken flavour. They’d been five for five at the garage by Benson’s.
“It’s not my favourite!”
“I know love,” and she swallowed but you won’t eat anything else, will you?
“Here,” she said, “come help Mummy with her work.”
He picked the rest of the safe path - a little thinner near the stove where the cracks spread themselves out - and fell into her arms. Heavy boy, now. What did they put in those Micro Noodles? Better not to know. She passed him the wooden spoon.
“Now, stir carefully. Round and round-“
“-And round and round and round and round and round and-”
A toddler’s singsong. His chanting described her map of the world; eighteen-hour days. Only the responsibility of holding him kept her from falling asleep where she stood, that and how important the mixture was. She couldn’t afford another bottle of white spirit on the month’s pay, couldn’t afford another lapse of judgement on the job. “We are delighted to welcome you back,” Alana had said, and pushed a blonde curl from that unblemished face, “just as we were devastated to see you go.” She continued in their shared corporate dialect, as meaningful and meaningless as Charlie’s songs in the creche. “However, there has been another drive for efficiencies in the company, thanks to the restructuring. We’re applying the same analysis principles we use on the market, to ourselves.”
A nightmare. When she was first there, the young lads in data retrieval, ex-army contractors, had loved nothing more than to heap loathing on any company that wasn’t worth investing in. They were all in charge now, too. The last blobs of Calpol finally disappeared in the mixture.
“Is that my medicine?”
“Yes, Charlie. Mummy needs it. Now we have to let it simmer.”
“Ssssssimmer.”

With the stove turned down - thank goodness, with the gas rates - Chloe carried Charlie back to the hall, almost tripping over the can of paint, squeezing between stacks of box-files containing Daniel’s notes, still unretrieved. She winced as she put her foot in something moist; damp curdling up from the hall floorboards. She was just about to tuck Charlie into his cot with the sides cut off when the doorbell sounded. Daniel? She picked Charlie up again, hefted him like a shield, and went back to the hall.
Sam Islander looked cross, as he had for a month. The conversation was the usual: It’s been a week. I know, it’s been hard for me, I’m sorry. Look, I have to feed my family too, did Daniel not leave you anything?
She thought about showing Sam the corridor of box-files. Some kindling.
Charlie stirred.
She patted his head, “It’s okay, sweetie. I’ll put you to bed in a minute.” She turned to Sam. “I just need three more days. It’ll change in three days, I promise.”
He looked the boy up and down, and tugged at his collar to make room for his expanding neck. “I’m on your side, girl. Just trying to do right.” Was blushing as she shut the door, his door.
Charlie in bed, time for one last check. The solution had been cloudy but now, as the recipe said, the surface took on a shiny chroma like an oil-slick. Neurotoxins will separate from the liquid at large. This surface is a carcinogen, and must be given eighteen hours to evaporate. Eighteen hours, and then two days with her homegrown supply of Occam, to fix it all. The kitchen lights flickered, hacking up a thick gob of power.



“Bye, Mum!”
At the plastic gate of the creche, it always became Mum, as though he were already more capable of letting go, older and more competent. But to Charlie, Magpie Gate was more than a second home. He so loved his creche that when the downsizing of Chloe’s life was complete, it had been the only thing that didn’t change. When she released him at 7:30 every day and he ran over to his friends - the first time he’d been able to let go of his stuffed Warren Bear - without a backward glance, she knew she’d done right in this one thing, if nothing else. If there was any influence that might give him a chance to make good his life, it lay there amongst that mass of colourful, soft shapes, cardboard books, of stimulating and simple data. Chloe had struggled to reorient her life as an adult, grafting on the skills she’d need for knowledge work. Charlie would have it built in, would have something better.
Subject to Terms and Conditions. Kindly Mrs. Shovellor was tapping her on the shoulder.
“Miss Holland-“
“Ms.”
“Chloe, I’m sorry.” The supervisor smiled sweet in the mouth but harsh in the eyes, as though Chloe were just another child wetting herself in the ball pit. “Your accounts were paid up to this month, but not beyond. It’s not policy to take them for free.”
As though he were capable of playing an expert witness, Charlie chose that moment to look over at them, and wave. As she waved back, Chloe hissed, “is it your policy to break a little boy’s heart?”
“With respect, Ms. Holland, that isn’t up to us. We’ll need something from you by next week.” And before Chloe could retort, Mrs. Shovellor swept up a little girl who’d caught her finger in the gate and walked off, cooing soothing words.
Chloe checked her phone: 8:05. Even the clock-on times would be factored into her evaluation at Ferndale. She took one last look at Charlie. He’d found a crate of plastic blox and was carefully balancing them on one another, building something precarious and wonderful.

The chatter was caustic in Pareto Square. Hungry young quants waited for Ferndale-approved food, and analysed colleagues. Even their half-hour lunch away from the desk was another, backlit form of the same work.
“Archer? He’s percentiles away from what he wants,” said one, “but he won’t get it.”
“Why?” said Chloe. The quant grinned.
“Because I have something on him.”
The little crew of analysts closed in to hear this. Information was good, but secrets were better, so long as you could keep them fresh, could stop them drifting up from Pareto Square, bouncing around Ferndale’s glass towers that boxed this little courtyard in. Sunlight bounced down the shaft like a mirror-box, like even God fancied going short on the future of poor Archer.
The quant muttered. “He takes.”
Chloe started, then caught herself. Many people did take something to gain a little edge, but they usually hid it. Evidence was fetishized at Ferndale.
“It’s soooo simple-simple,” he said, and rocked his chair back, “I should’ve thought of it before. You know the company confirms average accuracies of predictions the day after they’re made, right? Well, I found a way to back link each prediction’s result to the minute it was made.”
His hands were running all through his hair, fidgeting like he couldn’t get his thoughts to come out in the right shape, fast enough.
“A minute-by-minute analysis of Archer,” he hissed, “shows him making his best predictions straight after going to the toilet.”
He thumped his place, ruckling the tablecloth. And everyone was leaning in, asking the quant for analyses he could run on rivals they could destroy and heroes they could learn from. Chloe leaned in to, on the tip of her tongue formed: me. Do me. It might have told her something about the difference between now and three years ago, when she would have been the boss of them all. But now, it would be suicide by bar graph.

In the afternoon another batch of reports bubbled up from Asia, and were promptly deposited on her desk by Alana. “Plenty of chances to prove yourself,” she motivated. The papers spread up and out; every bit of information referenced another. She closed her eyes and ran her hands along the desk’s edge. The subtle grains in the metal, cracks and roughnesses - like the woods in Benson’s it was data that she could feel, but she couldn’t feel the path that she and Charlie were on. Her phone vibrated, sending shivers down the desk: Charlie not well. Pls collect. -Mrs S. The message connected with the papers on her desk, webbing together like the cracks in the kitchen floor. At the bottom of one lay a redundancy notice; another, Sam Islander shaking his red head and turfing them out.
Focus; there was a simple solution, a safe path. The cooled batch of Occam at home, one long night’s homework, get that quant to analyse her performance tomorrow and leave it out for Alana to find. As she tidied files into a box for the long night at home, the young bucks on her floor were already plotting the evening’s activities. It was Thursday, the new Friday, and an analyst knows the value of fun to the decimal place.



“And what did you do today, sweetie?”
If Charlie had been ill at Magpie Gate, he didn’t show it in the car. That was a kindness to her. He held out a multicolour pyramid in crepe paper signed Charlie.
“Well now, isn’t that pretty?”
“Mummy!” He admonished. “It’s informational.”
The traffic had seized up, as it always did where the cars divided into the thousands that had to live in the slums and the hundreds that did not, so she took a look. Indeed it was; a base of green showing a few vegetables, but mostly soya; yellow buttresses for grains and pulses; a centre of carbs, wheat, and above it, an oily fish of some kind.
“They let me copy a real one! I didn’t know you could eat them. Then I asked where Micro Noodles went, and Nathaniel laughed at me. Why?”
“Because Nathaniel’s a little bastard,” Chloe allowed herself.
“Ummmmm.” Charlie’s face made an :O. She grinned.
“It’s Mummy talk. Let’s get you into bed, terror.”

As she carried him in - a brisk trot, even though the gangs didn’t seem to be out yet - she noted that yes, he was shivering a little. He had been last night, too. No wonder Sam had left so awkwardly. Charlie was her ally in this, whether he knew it or not. In his little room she shooed the moths away, and tucked him into bed.
“This is just between you and me, little man.”
She reached under the cot to find a shoebox. Inside were the last squares of the for-emergencies-chocolate, and Warren Bear.
“Mummy’s got some things to do, really important things. I need you to trust me.”
Charlie gave a pale smile. She stroked his head, feeling the fire in there. “And we’ll see what we can do about that fish.”
She wanted to leave the door open a crack, but. Moths, and all that.

The liquid’s perfect stillness in the pan made its surface an accusation. There was no more than a coffee-cup’s worth of elixir, but that was more than enough. Polyethanol Quintazepam, said the printout, street name Occam, so called for its effects on sensory input and deduction. Users report heightened awareness to stimuli, and vastly improved cognitive power in comparing and cross-referencing sense-data. Addictive.
Still, for oral administration, thank goodness. She set up everything as precisely as possible, sweeping the plastic trays from the dinner table onto the floor to make way for an exact replica of her desk layout. The stacks of papers looked somehow even greater in the tiny kitchen, as though if left unchecked they could multiply and overrun the space. She moved all unnecessary information out of sight; school reports, utility bills, divorce papers were hidden behind the microwave. Occam is not selective. All sense-data will be factored into the user’s calculations. She found tins of beans, Micro Noodles, brackish water supplies. Ultimately, she realised all her tweaking and rearrangement had become procrastination. At 9:31 PM, Chloe held the cup to her cracked lips. It was cold. The Occam gave off a petrolly-sweet whiteboard marker musk that watered her eyes. The kitchen lights flickered with the dregs of their metered power. From the other room, there was a toddler’s cough.
She pinched her nose, opened wide, and drank it. Drank it all.
And Chloe’s world became every single thing.

The problem/s, she gradually realised, were relatively simple. Companies in Pile A had tiny margins, that is in layman’s terms their overheads had been appropriate for the previous quarter but were being squeezed by the national labour imbalance in their regions which in many cases (though not all) was being caused by the companies in Pile B, primarily Tiger Economy manufacturers committing a kind of labour exchange arbitrage whereby skilled designers could be classed as such for work purposes by virtue of their discipline but classed as unskilled for tax and immigration quotas thanks to receiving their education through MOOCs - see, here was the data miners’ report, that labourers were shepherded into slum bunkers disguised as aid hospitals, where they received video-based training in industrial manufacture while collecting the wages of a common soya-farm labourer; a clever scheme that, and while the obvious answer for Ferndale was to dump Pile A and invest in Pile B, a more elegant solution would be to simply, obviously allow Pile A to fail as Daniel had let her fail, majority takeover and asset-strip those companies and then use the real estate to copy Pile B’s method in its old factories, supercharged by Ferndale’s economies of scale, its slipperiness around international employment legislation, its circular hierarchies that diluted blame to homeopathic impotency, allowing this newly-formed division to produce cheaper, faster versions of - she was hungry - Micro Noodles, soya paste, high-yield grains, SugaTubes, replica Warren Bears, all manner of plastic widgets and even non-physical product that one simply sold metered access to like the flickering lights and the heat and the kid’s childcare which was a fixed cost with an uncertain benefit, a precarious sort of investment in a product which deserved a better life but was distractingly coughing again over every thing everything is everything is connected the corner pieces of a jigsaw / the coloured squares of a puzzle cube in Shenzen / the right key clicked the tumblers of the right lock and everything was solutions, solutions.



Her head was resting on a single sheet of paper that was covered in tiny handwriting. She came to in silence. The word RATIONALISATION rang around her head, a tinnitus of thought. It was there at the bottom of the page, a sum of all the calculation above it - and there was the drug-fueled, perfectly holistic answer to everything.

Her wrist throbbed. Every wall of the kitchen had been touched with calculations and cross-references in the same neat hand. The data she’d worked through on the walls included a diagram of the neighbourhood, the GDP of the economy, Daniel’s unpaid child support - a clever proxy value for another market, presumably. She had to get up close to even read the handwriting. It would be a shame to eventually paint over it, but then with her solution, whatever it was, they’d be moving back to the sub-suburbs anyway.

The answer was in her hand, her very own food pyramid to stick to the fridge. Whatever it would mean to Charlie, she had to show him some token for his night out of her hair. She crept to the hall. Odd - no tin of paint, a shadow of rising damp where the boxes had been. One more half-calculation whispered as she saw Charlie’s open door and pushed through. The cot was empty. The sheets thrown aside, and his moulding aeroplane wallpaper torn down in scraps to make room for more data. She traced the webs of connection along the wall back into the kitchen, and saw the whole again; from a distance, it looked a criminal psychologist’s mind-map. The thickest lines arced round corners behind her, onto the fridge, terminating on Charlie’s first parabola, on the x that represented her.

The facts kept dovetailing. Precarious finances, a boy and a job and not enough time to do either, Charlie getting sick in a neglected house too small for them. Owned by Sam Islander of Sam Islander Properties, who had set a brave example and rationalised away his sense of empathy to do what had to be done.
On the far wall she had gone further back than that to Daniel’s choice, which suddenly seemed understandable: someone younger looking, but also more innocent, for whom more was possible. From all this information a nocturnal Chloe had laid a safe path for her and Charlie so logical that it would have occurred to any observer. She burst outside, screaming.

The sun was harsh and hot on the few bits of data outside. A courtesy note from child services – thank you for your responsible - pinned under a brick. A curl of Warren Bear’s fluff. Signs of a little boy’s struggle: a bright red smear of paint that looked to the passing gangs like the mark of violence, but was to Chloe, the woman who sat in it freshly unburdened and waited for a better solution, a sign she had done something worse.

Symptomless Coma fucked around with this message at 15:19 on May 30, 2014

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Anomalous Blowout
Feb 13, 2006

rock
ice
storm
abyss



It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars.

*
Yo OP, this is a great idea for a thread and I'm gonna post a detailed line-by-line critique of your story, but before I post it:

In order to keep this thread from getting hellishly long, want me to link my critique as a Google Doc link as is common in other threads? This seems prudent for pieces ~3000 words or more.

Or if you'd rather I slap a link up somewhere else, whatever suits.

Symptomless Coma
Mar 30, 2007
for shock value
If you have the stomach to go into detail - and thank you if you do, I'll return the favour - then yeah, great idea.

Anomalous Blowout
Feb 13, 2006

rock
ice
storm
abyss



It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars.

*
Hello Coma! Sorry about the delay on this - intermittent internet access at the moment. I did complete a line by line for you, which you can read here.

Overall: it's not bad. Confusing at points, needs to be about 10-20% shorter. Your characters and their plight rang true to me and you built up nicely to an ending that had a satisfying amount of creeping horror. In the end this story got a lot more right than it got wrong, and that's about all you can ask for in an early draft even if you're a good writer.

If you've got any specific questions about aspects of the piece you struggled with, let me know!

Symptomless Coma
Mar 30, 2007
for shock value
I'm short on time for a few weeks, sadly - so I have long enough to look at the crit and see that it's brilliant, but not long enough to do much about it yet. But it's clued me into a few interesting problems with my style which will help with the thing I'm working on right now. So, thanks!

But now I'm ready to crit.

NEXT PLEASE

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Anomalous Blowout
Feb 13, 2006

rock
ice
storm
abyss



It makes no attempt to sound human. It is atoms and stars.

*
You're very welcome! I liked that piece enough that when you do get a chance to tool around with it, I'm happy to give it another go. There's a real solid foundation to that story and it hits the right emotional mark.

I've got a piece that yours reminded me of that I'll chuck up once I finish things up. You inspired me to go back and finish it and ditch my dumb old ending.

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