-23 January 2024:
Doyle stopped to straighten his tie. It was habit, nervous habit, but no one noticed how much he looked like Nigel Hamlin. They would if anyone saw him; then, if anyone saw him it was over. He slinked around a corner, trying to stay where the shade matched his suit. His eyes darted from side to side, scanning the adjacent halls. His destination, the door at the white hall’s end. Solemn, he reached for the door handle and slipped in.
“In other news,” the television said, “President Hamlin will deliver his first state of the union address since re-election tomorrow. Rumors say there are some important-” The television stopped.
The room, now totally dark, sat quiet for a moment. Doyle ducked behind a high back chair as a man rose from the couch opposite the television. His arm held wide, he yawned. He strode across the deep blue carpet in-crested with an eagle. His eyes drifted to a sheet that lay on his desk.
Recently, a large amount had been withdrawn and earmarked for the Replicator Project. Originally, he had been a heavy advocate of the program. Despite the expense, the agents produced had yielded tremendous results. Though intense genetic surgery, an agent had infiltrated Al-Qaeda and replaced bin Laden. The same with Jong-il. World peace might just be on the horizon, but he never gave approval for a third Replicator.
The man walked behind his desk and sat. He sighed, laying his head on his folded arms, wondering why he had chosen this profession before the exhaustion of a country overtook him.
-24 January 2024:
Cameras flashed, Congress clapped uproariously as their President stood before them. He straightened his tie and resisted the urge to smile as he said for the first time, “My fellow Americans…”
So my headline was "The Third Replicator," which definitely had a sci-fi twist to it, but I decided to lean more on the conspiracy theory edge with only a twinge of the science fiction. As the story unfolded in my head, I decided to actually skip over the climax, saying only what comes just before and after because I've always been a fan of the Hitchcockian ideal that was is not seen is far more unsettling than was is.
ReplyDeleteNicely done, Jonathan. It seems, too, that the ellipsis eliminates what would likely be a lengthy explanation of how whatever happens happens, refocusing on attention to that how rather than its ultimate implications, as your current draft does. It's a really great solution. I like, too, that the television is a character here, which seems appropriate. I wonder if it might have an even larger role, as a kind of narrator, a storyteller, in its own right. Given that, I feel like the piece really takes off there, with the television, in the sense that it feels tighter from that point forward. Certainly some important details are folded in before this, but the first paragraph feels a tad bloated with extra gestures, both in terms of narrative and words. And with as tightly as we've been following the other characters, that paragraph starting "Recently" seems to come out of nowhere; we lose the sense of who is the subject of this piece: is it the television, Doyle, Nigel Hamlin?
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