Okay, in my evolution to find a style that will let me write stories that span more than one day, I’m experimenting with my crap draft. Instead of writing paragraphs that make sense, I’ve decided to write thoughts and snippets of conversation and text. They’re not fully formed or in a readable format, but they’re the first step in my writing process. I usually aggravate over these paragraphs and with a sharp knife and extra words, I change them into readable and almost story-worthy words. I’m going to save myself the aggravation today, and post what I have.

I’ve warned you of bad writing before, but what you’re going to see, if you don’t press the back button now, which I highly recommend, is crap. Had I any ego, I wouldn’t post it. But, as should be apparent if you’ve read some of my other entries, I enjoy bad writing.

Story Idea: With technology replacing people in jobs, only one job will remain for people: creation—the sharing of their creative self. That is until technology gobbles that as well.

Story Idea: There are three garbage cans, one after the other. The closest one is full. Watch as three people walk over to the cans and decide whether to put their garbage in the full can, or one of the further cans. Talk about fascinating and interesting!

Quotation by Laurie Anderson, as spoken to NY Times Magazine, 30 January 2005: “A schlump is someone who doesn’t care about anything and who is just protecting their own turf, which is getting smaller and more meaningless, and then they disappear.” “I’m more worried about turning into a schlump than into a prune.”

And now onto my useless notes and dialogue.

Notes: Philosophical discussion of decline. Apathy is the first symptom. Conflict disappears, weakness. Jake is the one who sees this. Cini is of the new generation, the one that grew up without conflict in their life. She’s apathetic, she does her job, but doesn’t love doing it. She’s robotic and disinterested. So, why does she do it?

Following this through, Jake proves the point. He’s not going to retire without a pension—there are no pensions. He’s retiring according to the regulations, but they’re not enforcing them. There is no disagreement. If he wanted to stay on, he could. No one would argue. People do their jobs, but they use minimal efforts. It’s a depressed time.

When the ghost ship arrives, Jake decides to break with routine; he goes against the regulations and engages the PSS Lucille in a conflict with the pirate ship.

***

“The navy wasn’t always like this,” Jake said. “There was a time when we were the envy of the world. Where kings would come to us and kneel, saying, ‘you bow to no man.’ Those were the days, my friend. Those were the days.”

Silence. Cini returned to reviewing the trajectory response, and Jake checked his messages. “The world is changing. You wouldn’t know what it was like before, but it was different.

“Do you think the people inside a civilization—do you think they know when it’s in decline?”

“What are you talking about, Captain?”

“Our civilization, Cini. Our people. We’ve changed over the years. We used to fight, we used to worry about things, important things to some, frivolous things to others, but at least people thought about the things. We even argued—we argued in the congresses, the governments, even the navy had arguments. Today, we accept things and it’s considered bad manners to discuss things that might descend into an argument. When did that happen, Cini?”

“It’s for the good. We used to spend such a large part of our life arguing amongst ourselves. I’ve seen those holovisions. There was conflict and hatred and disagreement. People weren’t civilized. What we have today, Captain, is civilization. I would never want to return to those dark ages.”

Jake sighed quietly. He remembered when the younger generation had been rebellious. He grew up rebellious, and if he hadn’t joined the navy, the rebellion would have spilled over to his adult life. Conflict was on the way out even when Jake was as a child. There had been too many wars, too much death. People lost their taste for violence in any form. They called it a golden age, an enlightened age. They had many names for it. Who were they? Jake had to think about that. He wasn’t sure who they were. It was everyone, he supposed. The commentators, the media, the government, everyone had the same epiphany seemingly at the same time. Conflict was out of fashion. There were no more disagreements. You did things and they were judged, but you didn’t worry about what people thought about them.

The alert sounded. Cini’s posture straightened and her fingers danced along her control. “An unidentified ship has matched our trajectory and is approaching us from behind. Attempting to hail it.”

Jake pulled up the visual display and the ship appeared. It was a large, gray battle cruiser, much smaller than Lucille, but traveling toward them at a high rate. The ship was dark, except for the blue plasma from the engines, no lights could be seen in the ports. Jake feared it was a ghost ship.

“No response. The unidentified ship is firing its maneuvering rockets and pulling into our trajectory.”

“Pirates?”

“It’s too early to speculate, but there’s a good chance, Captain.”

“Radio our situation to Earth.”

“The ship is jamming our transmissions. We’re receiving a response.”

An empty control room appeared on the holovision. “This is Ghost Ship Program version 15.43. We have initiated sub-program 4.78a. Please comply with the published specifications. The counter has begun and you have nineteen point twenty nine minutes to respond. This transmission will repeat every nine minutes until compliance or detonation.”

“Transmission ended, Captain. I’ve pulled up the specification and the accepted response criteria. Shall I begin compliance?”

“Hold a second, Cini. Have you scanned the ghost ship for signs of life or explosives?”

“That’s not part of the procedures. They want the cargo—we give them our cargo, and we go on our way. This is a solid response to the conflict, Captain. We’ve done it this way for the past five years. It’s an accepted risk.”

“How do we even know that this is a ghost ship? If people were onboard, they wouldn’t risk blowing up. If not, we can still comply with the procedures.”

“It’s a deviation, Captain. If we deviate from the established procedures, the program is set to execute. This is the way things are. I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

They weren’t pirates in the ancient sense of the word. The ghost ships began appearing five years before. The ships were maintained by the asteroid colonies on the outskirts of the solar system. After leaving the Solar Empire (have to think of something better than that), the colonies were able to subsist on their mining industries, but the Empire stopped buying from them, and the colonies became desperate. They hit upon the ghost ship idea after a few failed attempts at real piracy. Here was a completely automated, computer-controlled ship that didn’t mind blowing itself up when disobeyed. The colonies even published the procedures and source code for the ghost ship. The community contributed code to the ghost ship to make it more robust, and after its second year, it became a problem for the Empire. The Empire, but that time, didn’t want to worry about problems—conflict was already out of fashion. It set up procedures to pay off the colonies during ghost ship raids, and as long as its losses were acceptable, which they seemed to be, the Empire didn’t worry about it.

“We’re flying in a warship. For god’s sake, Cini, why do you think we have warships? You can’t think they built these Planetships for the cargo runs they now send us on. Look at the weaponry display.” Jake pushed the alert button and the weapons status display appeared. They built the PSS Lucille for one purpose: war. She had undergone many changes in the last three-hundred years, but her weaponry never changed. It was built too deeply into the Planetship’s systems.

Cini laughed at Jake. “You don’t understand, Captain. We’re beyond that now. We’ve ‘evolved.’ You should understand that better than most. You were there for the Plowshares War. We fought that war to end all wars, and we won. Davis Hesas, the last great thinker, he said it beautifully, “the way to change the universe is to remove all conflicts.” And that’s what we did. I grew up in a utopian society. Our civilization has reached that point, Captain, because we believed it was reachable. The era of the warship is gone.”

“Be careful, Cini. You’re treading close to a conflict.”

“That’s not a disagreement, Captain. That is the correct answer. Davis Hasis taught us that to avoid conflict, we must identify conflict and always have the right answer. That’s how you avoid it: you present the universally accepted correct answer. Just as if you asked me how fast this can flies, I will give you the right answer; if you ask me why don’t we fight anymore, I give you the correct answer.”

“You would have been a brilliant debater, Cini.”