NaNoWriMo

Well, as we all know, November is National Novel Writing Month. The last two attempts at literary glory never made it past 10,000 words. But here we go.

The Next Great American Novel
(c) 2009

The bell rang and Josiah was off, out of the gate. He could hear the beeping of the countdown timer on his wristwatch signifying how much time he had left before the chasers were released. An electronic beep came from his wrist and he knew he was screwed. He knew he was screwed before he even got into this mess, before he even landed on this strange and distant land. He knew he was screwed when the flash of lights took him away from his home planet. He could trace it all back to the night he had gone out to tend to his hydroponic fields of hyper-corn.

The growing season that year had been a good one, and the famines in the Central Republic States of Lesser Europa had helped increase demand. Aid agencies the world over were buying up all available stocks of hyper-corn to feed the skeletal peoples of Lesser Europa (in the news, they were pejoratively referred to as "twigs," in addition people from that region spoke a strange dialect of American). Anyway, life couldn't have been going better for a central farmbelt grower of hyper-corn.

But that night was unlike any other. The usual gale-force winds that came from the north had stopped and an unnatural stillness filled the air. Josiah walked over to where the chicken coop used to be where there now stood a large structure of steel and glass that vaguely resembled a greenhouse, but more squat and glowing with a warm orange light. He scanned his thumb and went inside the airlock where he zipped into a hermetically sealed suit. He went through another doorway, this one separated with only vertical strips of clear rubbery plastic. As he checked on the nutrient broth pools, and even the poultry protein ovules seemed to quiver with fear in their petri dishes at the aberrant weather behavior. The backlit glow of the petri dishes cast odd shadows against the ceiling as Josiah paced up and down the rows, methodically checking for molds or other infections in the incubation room.

He liked to think in the incubation room. There it was warm, warmly lit too. The orange light and the gentle humming of the fans pushing the lazy hot air through the room made him feel as if he were in the womb. He could close his eyes, and almost taste what it felt like to be suspended in amniotic fluid. In the room, he liked to think, and he liked to not think. There he could watch the embryos develop with complete involvement, abandon, or disinterest. Whatever he felt he projected into the nutrient broth. On a good day he was feeding America. on a bad day, he was another embryo in a cup, to be consumed or flash-frozen within a metric week of spawning.