I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing fiction. I've got several idea started, and I need some guidance on which to persue first. Perhaps you all could help. Of the three vignettes below, which would you most like to see finished? Submit your vote in the comments below. Sometime this week, I'll start working on the one that has the most interest.
Strange Little Loops
I should be dead, and judging by the looks on the faces of everyone else in the room, the fact that I'm not is a bit of a problem. My consciousness should be implanted in my spare body on Mars right about now, and my original body, the one I was born in, should be flat lined – stopped heart, no brain functions, just waiting to be put on ice. But I'm still sitting in downtown Cleveland, buckled into the very comfy transference chair, wearing the big, blue transference helmet, and the machines that would have plunged needles and tubes into my freshly dead body in order to put it into suspended animation are precariously poised, unsure of quite how to react.
Over at the operator's console, both the green and the red light are on, and the guy standing behind it is scratching his head and looking very worried. The woman who bucked me into the chair is staring at her tablet and frowning.
"I'm due in a meeting on Mars in three hours," I said, "is there a problem?"
Interview
God is terrifying. I don’t mean existentially – though the concept of an omnipotent being that has the power to destroy your soul at any second is pretty hard to swallow – I mean personally terrifying. The dude has seven heads, three of which breathe fire, two of which have eight eyes each, and one of which is always screaming blasphemous lies at the top of its lungs. Plus, there are the tentacles that seem to have a mind of their own and the blistering heat that turns anyone who gets within fifty feet into charcoal. Terrifying.
Satan, on the other hand, looks like he could be your grandfather and he’s always carrying an extra beer – which conveniently seems to be whatever brand you like best.
Now, tell me who you’d rather sit down across the table from to do a one hour interview with. Seven headed scary guy? I doubt it. So, guess who gets stuck with that assignment? I don’t even speak Aramaic, for crying out loud.
The Last Page
Jack had the remaining secrets of the universe written down in a notebook. It wasn't anything fancy – just a normal college-ruled composition notebook that he'd picked up at a local drugstore for $1.29. At this point in the history of humanity, there weren't that many secrets remaining – there was quite a lot of knowledge to be found, to be sure – but the big things – the underlying, fundamental secrets of the universe were few in number, and they invariably reduced to fairly simple equations. In total, it took fifty-three of the hundred and twenty pages of the book to record them all.
The secrets had been revealed to him, whole cloth, in a dream just the night before. He'd awakened, grabbed the notebook out of a pile of unused junk on his desk, and begun writing. At the time, he'd felt a little bit like a prophet: not responsible for the contents, but responsible for delivering the message.
His only regret, as he sat in seat 14B, was that the notebook was currently in the backpack stashed under the seat in front of him. The one he was now bracing himself against as the plane hurtled uncontrollably toward the ground. He wondered just how long it would take for humanity to rediscover the secrets on those pages. Ten years, a hundred, a million? Would there even still be humans by the time they found them all? Especially the last page – the one that tied all the rest of them together. How long would it be before that one was produced again by the mind of man?