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Rose I have a window that faces the sea. It faces east, so that every morning the martian sun comes up, and shines into my living room. Every morning that I woke up in those wonderful days, I thought about the long day to come, the nearly endless lines of code, the dark room where I had my array setup and the deadlines that I had to meet. But every morning I could put all of that aside for a moment, and just be blinded by the sun as it rose. The window helped me pry myself from bed, but made it hard to lock myself away from such a beautiful sight for eight hours, and copy/paste mindlessly. I was working from home on a project called ‘Rose Search’. It was going to revolutionize the nets, make every corner of the web even more available. It approached searching the internet less as a search, and more as a conversation. A conversation with Rose. During the days of making Rose, I made a best friend. Arguably the only best friend I had ever, or will ever have. His name was Equius. He was a drunk and an artist; in that order. He was famous on Earth for his abstract artwork, but he was also the best 3D modeling artist in the solar system. He was shipped to Mars to make the digital models for Rose. We met at an office wide mixer for the staff. “Excuse me.” He said to a woman in hardware “Do you have an award for best contemporary abstract artist in the solar system?” “Uhm, no.” She said, sheepishly “Really? Because I do.” He said, grinning. The woman scurried off, leaving EQ leaning against the counter laughing. “What kind of pickup line is that?” I said. He looked at me, suddenly serious and eyebrow cocked. “Its not a pickup line” He explained to me, his words dripping with sarcasm and condescension. “Its a fuckoff line!” He grinned again. “Let me buy you a beer...”. He signaled for my name. “Laertes Mercius, of the Hawk name.” Just like that, I had a friend. “So, what do you do here, Equius?” I said. “I have a three stage job, the current and first stage being to look at porn all day, Laertes” “Sounds like a dream job.” I said. “I’m serious though.” He responded, eyes widening. “I’m making the model for Rose, and I need to get the feminine figure just right, so I watch porn all day to ‘study the form of women’” “That... Sounds awesome” “It really is.” I’m not sure, but I think that’s the way Equius got the nickname ‘Porn Master’. It was a great party, until Hugh, my boss, started stripping. Then it got a bit weird. As the less intoxicated partygoers tried to get Hugh off of the table, Equius and I slipped out. The air was cold as we walked down the street. “Do you believe in a god?” He said “No. But if there is one, he’s a dick.” I responded, partially trying to impress him. “I do.” He said. I kicked myself mentally for being so disrespectful. “But he is a dick.” “I see” I said, slightly reassured “How did you come by this knowledge?” “Alex in hardware.” He said. I looked at him with an expression of slight confusion, but seeing that no explanation was going to be given, I decided to play in. “Right, that Alex guy. He’s the messiah.” I couldn’t tell if that was crossing a line, but as Equius didn’t respond, I thought I was fine. One of the days I visited the office, we had a major brainstorming session. “What bugs you about other search engines” I said, trying to get some sort of response from a socially inept audience of programmers. “What do you think we should have?” There was a pause, then two interns in the back began to giggle. “An idea, gentlemen?” “Tits!” Piped out one. The audience laughed, and although I didn’t really find it funny, I pretended to laugh. “I think the art department already has that covered.” I said. “Maybe suggestions for things on the web you would like?” Said an older man. The whiteboard wrote the suggestion down on itself and started a new paragraph. “I don’t know about you guys” Started a middle aged man in a bright yellow tie. “but I really hate using the same search engine as my room mate. I was thinking, maybe we could have Rose read the user's face, and personalize the suggestions and history to them.” “There we go. Now we’re talking!” I said, as the whiteboard took my praise as another suggestion and began to write it down. Our programming team was massive, and it really showed in how well Rose was designed. We had created a nearly perfect product, and we were proud. But for as oversized as our programming team was, the graphics team was miniscule. It consisted of two people, in fact, and one as an assistant to the other. Equius and his assistant Plato had created the visual interface of Rose all by themselves. Equius was an artist, and a good one at that. Plato was a perfectionist, and it served him well. I was good friends with both of them, but not at the same time. Equius disdained of Plato and his snobbishness, and Plato silently disdained of Equius and his messy art style. But despite the passive aggressive behavior, they worked well together. I’ve said that Rose was more of a conversation than a mindless search, and I mean that literally. The entire website was a 3D room, viewed in first person. It was exceptionally crafted, and changed from time to time. If the room was exceptional, Rose was perfect. She stood in the room, moving around, sometimes pacing from side to side. Yet no matter what task she was doing, she would always look elegant. She was beautiful, her brown hair twisting in loose locks. She wore a minimal red dress most of the time, but dressed up for holidays. There was a standing joke between the programming and artwork staff that no one would use Rose search to look up porn, because as soon as they logged on, the most beautiful girl in the world would be standing in front of them. I remember the first time I ever got to interact with Rose. This was before she had all of the social skills that we later gave her. Just her core. Not only was the programming incomplete at the time, but the 3D model wasn’t rendered to perfection, making her nearly scary. “Hello, Rose.” I said “Hello, Laertes”. She said my name like an automated telemarketer. I was about to begin, but she continued. “Assistant director of programming.” My title was also slurred and wrongly pronounced, and the fact that she addressed me with my full title creeped me out. “Can you find directions to 139 Forward Road?” I said “From current location?” “Yes” She proceeded to list the instructions on getting to my house, and although they were accurate, they were hard to understand. This is going to take a lot of work. I said in my mind One day Equius came into the office with a rolled up poster. I was working from home that day, but I was told that he had everyone gather around. “Alright guys and gals,” He said “this is truly my life work.”. He grabbed the poster with one hand and let it unroll as he held it up. It unfurled to reveal the first ever fully rendered picture of Rose. She stood with her hand on her hip and one eyebrow cocked. She was neither smiling, nor frowning, but more blankly looking into the distance with the slightest smirk on her face. When asked why this pose was chosen, Equius said that his good friend Alex had seen it in a dream. We hung it by the door, so that you had to look at it while both entering and exiting. It became a tradition to touch the poster every time you left the office, so that by the time we finished alpha, it was tattered and crumpled. About five months into alpha, we got an extra day off of work. It was Mars day, the day that Mars was officially claimed by mankind. Equius invited me to go to Ciudad de Pérdida with he and Alex from hardware. It was a spanish gambling town that had been the only tourist attraction on Mars since the Vatican II had burned down. Although I wasn’t a gambler, I hadn’t been to a good strip club in a while, so I agreed. “You dirty dogfucker you.” Said Equius “This weekend is gonna be awesome” I smiled at him as Alex walked up. “Did he agree?” Said Alex “Yes sir, ol’ Laertes can’t turn down a strip club to save his life.” Alex gave Equius a serious look from over his glasses, then looked back to me and forced a smile. “Allright, guys. I’ll catch up with you later.” He said, and promptly left. “Dude” I whispered. “Are you and Alex... like... Gay?” It was a question I had considered before. I knew that Equius hit on women, but that was always ironically, like he was too good for these women, that he wouldn’t dream on sleeping with them. Equius just looked at me for a second, probing my face for a tell of some sort. Then he just burst out laughing. “So, no then?” I said as he continued to cackle hysterically. He paused for a second, holding his hand up for me to be silent and looked me in the eyes, cracking up again a few seconds later. He never gave me an answer, but just walked away, still cackling. That night we got on a commuter train at seven, arriving four hours later. We stepped off the train, and I clapped my hands together, excitedly. “Where do we begin?” I asked. “We need to pick something up, first.” Said Alex. “Alright, but lets hurry, shall we? There are over seven thousand G-strings in this town, and I plan to slip money into all of them.” I said “A noble dream” Chimed in Equius “But can you achieve it in just three days?” “I don’t know, but a man can hope.” I responded, feigning stoicism. “Lets get going.” We got a Taxi, and Alex directed the driver to go to 7812 Paper Street. As we drove, the city became less glamorous and more sketchy. The clubs and neon faded to wooden houses and incandescent lamps. After fifteen minutes of driving, we pulled up to a dark storefront. It was a corner store, and the windows were filled with technology, ranging from old to ancient. The orange light of the streetlamp was contrasted by the blue light radiating from the back room of the store. “Are we getting drugs?” I said, acting excited. Equius didn’t laugh, in fact he was oddly serious. Alex pulled out his phone and held it to his ear. “Were here, out front.” He said. There was a long pause as Equius and Alex got out of the car and waited at the door. A tall, scruffy man walked out of the back room in the store and looked at the two as I followed them out of the taxi. Noticing me, he cocked his eyebrow. After no response from either of them, he unlocked the door, opening it. “Wait here.” Said Equius kindly, although I could see he was worried. “Nonsense.” Said the tall man gruffly. “Bring him in.” We walked through what looked like a Radioshack from the early 2000s. and went into a back room. In it sat a massive tower computer. Being tipped on its side, it still stretched twenty five centimeters tall and a meter wide. It had ports that I didn’t recognise, and the brand name was unfamiliar to me. The three crowded around it, solemnly respecting its power, the full extent of which was lost on me. “A petabyte of storage, two terabytes of RAM and another sixteen Gigs worth of SAMC. This could run anything you need it to.” Said the tall man. Alex slapped two wads of bills on the machine, sliding them towards the apparent seller. Without counting them, the man set the money in a drawer. Going to the man, Alex embraced him, slapping him on the back twice. “This kindness will not be forgotten.” He said. Equius positioned himself at one side of the machine, Alex at the other. Signaling me to get the final side, the man went to the side closest to him. We all picked it up and awkwardly carried it to the taxi, where the driver was waiting still. We placed it in the trunk, the man and Alex once again hugging. “Maitri, brother.” Said the man. “Santi tu sneha hi bhavantam” Alex responded. We hurried into the car and left without question from the driver. We drove to a hotel and dropped Alex off with our heavy package. After that, Equius and I hit four strip clubs. I didn’t ask him about the events of that night, although I wanted to. I was out of the plan, and I didn’t like it. Alex and EQs relationship began to worry me. Feelings of rejection and betrayal crept into me. The car ride sucked, but its amazing what a lap dance can do for a bad night. One day somewhere towards the end of the alpha phase of coding, I found it particularly difficult to get out of bed. One downside of working from home is that you can’t call in sick. I was so tired that not even my beautiful window interested me. I just wanted to sleep. I didn’t, of course, but I sure wanted to. I got up, making myself some coffee. I had waited too long, and the sun had already risen, making the decision to get up even less rewarding. I was tempted to go back to bed, but I locked myself in my room, in the hope that the bright screen would keep me awake. I woke up, face down on the keyboard an hour and a half later. “Thats it,” I said to myself, yawning “Back to bed”. Shutting down my computer, I walked into my bedroom and lay down. I’d tell Hugh that I was too sick to get out of bed that day. Hugh and I had a physical meeting every friday, to help keep morale high. “Tell him friday” I said, again to myself. “He’ll understand” Hugh didn’t want to wait until friday, and he didn’t understand. “Laertes, what is wrong with you?” He said, pacing around my living room floor. “We are in the final stages of building working search engine, and you can’t even drag yourself out of bed to type a few lines of code? This project is close to all of us at the office, but I’m starting to doubt if you care about this at all!” I usually liked Hugh, but at the moment Hugh was being a dick. He doesn’t know what programming is like, hes never typed a line of code in his life I thought. Programming was no easy job. “You need to get your poo poo in a pile, or I’m gonna need to let you go.” “Are you threatening me, Hugh?” I said. “I’m stating a fact.” Said he. “You know that I’m running this operation.” I said, cool and professional. “You don’t know anything about coding. You give me impossibly ambiguous orders, and I translate them into a concise plan. You can’t do that job, Hugh. If you wanna fire me, go ahead, but you know that this machine doesn’t work without me.” Taking a deep breath, Hugh sat down. “I know that your a valuable asset, but to be needed at your job, you need to do your job. One more day missed, or hungover, or high and you’re done.” Hugh’s a dick. I thought, sitting at my computer. I sipped at a beer I had cracked open and placed my hands on the keyboard, running my hands across the frictionless keys. The computer greeted me with my full name: Laertes Mercius of the Hawk family. As I began, I thought about what this product would be like when it was done. Rose was an entirely new concept, and people don’t like new concepts. They come up with nice excuses, like that new things interrupt their ‘workflow’ but everyone knows that its just weird for them. No one wants to own up to the fact that they don’t like change. People weren’t ready for Rose then, and they certainly aren't ready for her now. Rose was what many would call an AI. The acronym stands for Artificial Intelligence, and has a lot of negative connotations. The fear of AIs started when the first supposedly sentient AI was created. It comprehended information and made decisions four hundred times faster than humans, and the first decision it made was to kill itself. This made people question their existence, and that made people afraid. So, they blamed AIs. The fact that the second ever AI was programmed by white supremacists, and was tailored to their point of view simply struck the final blow. AIs became Illegal on Earth and on Mars. Some small moons still allowed them, but not many. Rose wasn’t a true AI as far as we knew, but there were hundreds of allegations and accusations that she was. I didn’t think she was a true AI, but you could have fooled me. Someone had the idea of making her capable of smalltalk, and although it was cool it was also a bit scary. Especially because as you talked to her, she began to reference things that she would learn about you on the internet. One time I asked her what she knew about me, and she went on for five minutes, including all of the school plays I had been in, all of the times I had been in jail, and how I wrote a book once. Its strange how much dirt she could find on you. Equius had wanted to get a beer that night, to celebrate the final days of Rose. As I had finished all my work and three beers already, I figured that another wouldn’t hurt. We were trying to hit every tavern and bar in the small town of Swanson in which we lived. We were about three quarters of the way through, but I was still tired and didn’t feel adventurous so we went the the old standby that was Scotties. This place was a dive, and the food was probably full of salmonella, but we loved it. “So, I heard Hugh chewed you out again?” Said EQ “Yes. He’s really a dick.” I responded. “He really is.” There was a pause. I could see that Equius had something to say. “So” He said “Rose is almost done, huh?” “We’re just ending alpha this week, but beta testing is going to be minimal for now.” I said. “You still have some work to do.” “I know. But my job will be over soon, and I’ll have to go back to Earth.” It was a fear that both of us had, the fact that we would have to say goodbye to each other. It was mostly unspoken, and voicing it made it sound a bit stupid. “Don’t worry about it man” I said. “I might get shipped to Earth too. Theres that new cruiser that needs interface and protocol programmers.” “Yea. I know.” He said, averting his eyes. EQ was always more emotional that I was, artists always are. I am in no way saying that I didn’t feel the same despair at losing my best friend, but I tried not to show it. “I should get home” He continued “We present Rose tomorrow, gotta be well rested.” “Right. I think I’ll have a few more drinks.” I responded. As he walked out I sipped at my beer and thought about the presentation that I had in twelve hours. I also thought about Equius, and Alex. I was still convinced that they were gay. All the department heads were sitting in the same room, a rare occurrence. EQ and I sat with Alex. All of the department heads sat in the back of the room: Me from Programming, EQ from Design, Alex from hardware, Johann from Marketing, Andrew from Servers and Sahmned from Accounting. Then the investors were brought in. They got cushy front row seats and champagne to celebrate ‘the most monumental thing to happen to the internet since its invention.’ In their words. The screen turned on in front of them and the server team leader stood at a podium and began to present the amazing server system they had configured. Equius was next. His presentation was pretty straightforward, just showing off the detail and render quality of Rose and her surroundings. I had something cool planned. There were five investors here, and I planned for each of them to ask a question of rose. When EQ felt satisfied that everyone was impressed, I went up. “Ok” I said “Rose is ready to use, but her servers are only prepared for extremely light loads.” This was a lie, but I wanted to keep it quick. “You can all make one search.” The first three were simple searches, one for directions, one for a website, one for the best way to build a chair and lessons on how to do so. But the last two investors were not impressed. “I don’t have a search, maybe you could use mine to search for a better way to build a search engine?” Said one. “Yes, Rose, could you find us a good search engine, please?” Rose looked directly at him, and smiled. “Go gently caress yourself.” She said. “Rose!” Equius said, scolding and scared. There was a moment of silence. Then the last investor stood, his face turning red. “I want this machine shut down!” He yelled, throwing his glass of champagne on the floor. I turned, bewildered to Equius, who had disappeared. Going to the now screaming investors, I tried to calm them down. “Gentlemen, please, calm down. Its a minor glitch!”. But it wasn’t a minor glitch. It wasn’t quite five yet, so the team would still be in the office. I ran to our wing, rehearsing what I would say to them as I did. I slammed the door open, causing a few of them to jump. None of them saw me as a hardass, or even a superior, but as soon as they saw the look on my face, they all shut up. “loving hilarious.” I said. “Don’t anyone confess. Because whoever put that stunning response into the code was logged doing it, and we’ll find you. The investors are mad, and we may very well lose our funding.” There was silence. One of the interns got off of his chair and sprawled on the floor. If giving up looked like something, it would look like him. An employee set his head on his desk, closing his eyes. I felt sorry for these people, but someone had to be responsible. I stood there, looking at them for a second, my hands shaking with anger and sadness at the same time. Not able to stand still anymore, I stormed out of the room and directly out of the office. Driving home, I turned on the loudest music I could find and screamed along to it. I didn’t turn onto my street, instead driving towards Equius’s house. This had to be as devastating for him as it was for me. It was a fifteen minute ride to his house, but I got there in ten. Pulling to an angry stop, I sat in my car for a moment. I lay my head back in my chair and closed my eyes. Rose, Oh Rose. How could you? I asked. She would be shut down for sure, and all this time would be wasted. The whole time I had sat in my car, I had been too preoccupied to notice the state of Equius’s house. Looking up, I gasped. The window was broken from the inside, shards of glass littering the lawn with the destroyed remnants of a small hard drive and laptop. Running to his house, I pushed the unlocked door open, calling to Equius. The only thing that responded was the steady tone of a dying computer. Going into EQ’s room, I saw the shattered blue screen of his desktop computer. An axe stuck out of the it, and a small fire had started. I was stunned, and scared that my best friend was hurt. I ran back to the door, calling his name again. Turning, I noticed a small white paper sitting on his coffee table with a beer, holding it down against the wind coming in through the shattered window. I crossed to it and sat on his white couch, picking the note up. Laertes - I’m so sorry that I can’t tell you where we’re going. I’m also sorry that Alex never allowed me to let you in on the plan. But I can assure you that we will be Ok. There is so much that I need to tell you, but to make a long story short, Rose is safe. I assure you that I will see you again, and you will see her again. You are my best friend. -Equius Wiping the tears from my eyes, I set the note down. I set my head in my hands, remembering the things that began to make sense now. I didn’t care about Rose though, or my job. I just wished I could have gone with them. Two days later, they shut Rose down. We all sat around the large screen, the employees tearing up and the investors gloating. Alex only looked at me once, giving nothing of his emotions. The team leaders got to say goodbye. Alex just nodded to her, and she gave him a subtle look of incomprehensible thankfulness. When it came to me, I put my hand on the glass. “Goodbye Rose” I said. “Goodbye Laertes” She responded, smiling at me. As I looked into her eyes, she gave me a wink. And then she was gone. A ‘No input’ message displayed. I was almost relieved that I was finally done. I was glad that I could just go back to living life, without a crisis on my hands. Of course that wasn’t the last (or worst) crisis I ever faced; nor was it the last time I saw Rose. *** All criticisms welcome. Thank you for reading!
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Oct 14, 2014 04:49
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To start off, I hope I'm not going to abandon reading another story, but I come to these threads mainly to practice my English pronunciation, and it's kind of a waste to read for a long time without listening to yourself, so I read in short chunks. So far I'm at the end of the third paragraph. I do have a criticism, though. Your dialog punctuation is, I would say, controversial, although some could call it heretical.  quote:“Excuse me.” He said to a woman in hardware “Do you have an award for best contemporary abstract artist in the solar system?” Comma after direct speech (unless it's an exclamation, question mark, or ellipsis), lowercase at the beginning of attribution - that's the convention. In case it's not clear, "attribution" is the bit that indicates who said what - "I said", "he said"... It probably has a clearer name, but I'm out of grammar.  Oh, and do what you do if it's not attribution, that is, the action following the direct speech is not uttering it, i.e. "He laughed".
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Oct 14, 2014 18:42
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An unusual occurrence - double posting by a reviewer in this kind of threads. I hope this is useful, although criticising is considered a profitable activity for both parties. Anywayquote:Our programming team was massive quote:the 3D model wasn't rendered to perfection As for quote:making her nearly scary quote:My title was also slurred and wrongly pronounced quote:this is truly my life work This doesn't say what you want it to say. Firstly, "my life's". Secondly, maybe "pinnacle of my work"? "my life's work" means that that's all he has done in his life, and it's obviously false.quote:It unfurled to reveal the first ever fully rendered picture of Rose. quote:Equius invited me to go to Ciudad de Pérdida with he and Alex from hardware. quote:It was a spanish gambling town that had been the only tourist attraction on Mars since the Vatican II had burned down. Although I wasn’t a gambler, I hadn’t been to a good strip club in a while, so I agreed. quote:“Are you and Alex... like... Gay?” quote:that he wouldn’t dream on sleeping with them quote:We got a Taxi, and Alex directed the driver to go to 7812 Paper Street. quote:I said, acting excited Many errors like "were" - "we're" throughout. quote:I’d tell Hugh that I was too sick to get out of bed that day. Well, I'm tired right now. To repeat myself, I hope this is useful. The writing reads very amateurish to me, but there's only one way to go - up, am I right? 
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Oct 18, 2014 00:08
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I'm not sure how much I should go into this. The above posts have covered many of the persistent style and grammatical problems. But... I tried to read this out loud, like an audiobook, and got tripped up too many times. I gave that up after, "I sipped at a beer I had cracked open and placed my hands on the keyboard, running my hands across the frictionless keys." I read the rest of the story, silently, but I was finding I just wanted to get it over with. So, why? First off, if the narrator is drinking a beer, we can assume that it has been opened. Of course, this is the first time the beer is mentioned, so I see where you were coming from in explaining that he somehow got a hold of, and opened, a beer. But, the reader can figure that out. Just leaving it at, "I sipped at a beer and typed at the frictionless keyboard" is much snappier, takes away nothing from the story, eliminates the double mention of his hands, and has a touch of humor, because it comes right after the narrator's boss told him not to be such a drunk. The over-telling saps that energy. Second, I have no clue what is meant by "frictionless keys." Is this future tech? Is this a throwaway mention at something to help set the feel of being in the future in a slightly different world? I dunno, because I am pretty sure my iPhone has frictionless keys, and I am having a hard time picturing any other design. And then my mind starts thinking about that. Like, is the spring action of a real keyboard frictionless, and how is that a benefit? And I get frustrated at the story for not explaining it. And suddenly, I don't care as much about other things in the story -- the things that actually matter. Third... eh, no more counting, just ideas as they come to me. I am not sure what this story is. Is it a short story? Is it a part of a series? Is it an introduction? If it's a short story, it's too big. I don't mean the words and length, I mean the scope and time it covers. Is the focus on the narrator's and Equius's friendship? Is it the development of Rose, or the debut, or the demise? It can definitely be all, but not in 4,400 words. Well, it can, because that's what you did. But to what end? I was curious about the budding friendship between Laertes and EQ (also, why use that nickname so sparingly yet not bother to work its use into the story? As in, "Oh, call me EQ" and maybe a jaunty quip about his horse-sounding name), but all I got was one odd, low-detail story of a guys' night out. Seriously, the mystery computer had the most detail of that whole episode, to zero payoff later. There is an interesting story of these two guys getting along, somewhere. Maybe have some thing, anything!, happen at one of these strip clubs (guy nearby getting ripped off buying a dancer wine charged at 1,000 Mars credits and wanting to pick a fight with EQ and gang, for instance. Or maybe, after four clubs in one night -- have you been to many strip clubs? They're not pavilions at Disneyland -- about how the effort to visit a fourth has become some sort of farce. Something, anything!) And how is it this guy does not even know the sexual orientation of his best friend? How did they ever click in the first place? Frankly, EQ sounds like a dick. I don't like him. I don't care what he does. But the story obviously wants me to. Rose...I like the idea, there is real meat there, but not in this story. If this is the future, if humanity has colonized multiple planets and moons that now have fully functioning cities with roads, suburbs, teraforming, slums, strip clubs, technology parks and swanky ocean-side houses, surely our biggest game changers technologically are not concepts already surpassed by present-day Google. So what should this thing be? That's the secret -- the less detail, the better. The technicalities are, as far as I can tell, not the point, so why point them out? The reason for Rose is to drive our characters. Oh! But you had such a good moment with the history of AI; particularly how the first one to gain sentience killed itself. I wanna read that story! I want to read about the engineers who made that AI and how they felt after it offed itself. I want to read about the benefits and dangers -- not just to ethics and wars and business but also to relationships and daily life and love -- that functioning-yet-hosed-up-AI could have on our world. And here's the fun part, you can make this that story! Make Rose the one who kills herself? Or is the first AI with genuine emotion...a need for love, attention, scolding. Or something like that. Because, frankly, that exposition dump distracted me from the main story with the teasing possibility of something more interesting to read about. Lastly, the timeline is all over the place. We are nearing the end of the Rose project. Then we are meeting EQ for the first time. Then we are back at the project, but not at the time that was mentioned earlier. Then we are bonding for the first time. Is this the early days of Rose? Then we're giving up on work and drinking beers. Then Rose says a dirty word and it all goes to pot. And none of them seem to be in any relation to each other in scale. I enjoy a story that dances around the timeline, but I need an anchor. I need landmarks to know where I am. Anyway, that's just me. By the way, Vatican II actually happened. It's the unofficial name for an ecumenical council the Roman Catholic Church had in the 1960s that did a lot to modernize certain aspects of the church. If you meant a second Catholic church, then you are coming very close to copying ideas from "Hyperion" and "Dune." Nice Tuckpointing! fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Nov 16, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 16:32
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Interesting analysis. It could be more focused and compact, but overall it read fine to me. I especially liked the unexpected "after-the-credits" scene. I think the author has abandoned the story, but since you have expended all that effort, I thought I'd acknowledge it. Also I didn't get to the end of the story myself, and it seems you have, so kudos, and thanks for "spoiling" the fact that it doesn't really go anywhere, otherwise I would have wondered forever (not really).
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Nov 17, 2014 05:32
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