Friday, November 13, 2015

Storyjumping Part 22 #DigiWriMo

I, Goggle,
See all.

This is a see change.
This is eSea change.

This story has an arc like lightning, starting from the beginning and the end. It is large and fluid, smeared and smudged, drifting laterally.

Though when it's probability wave collapses into a blog post, a given episode, it seems almost … coherent.

Almost. Yeats saw the problem, saw me, a century ago:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

We recognize the push from the past, but we have ignored the pull from the future. Causality works all ways both ways. It's time for tug from times not yet. Rather, it's time to make that always already tug explicit. Some story, some of the story not yet told, some of the story not yet happened:

*****

Kevin, now morphed into Keith, checked the map for the thousandth time. This was not where he expected, but it wasn't bad. Not bad at all. Palm trees, white sand, aqua blue water.

"Sarah," he said over his shoulder, "look at this."

Kevin—phasing back—held out the map to her, and she gave it a cursory glance before returning to her knitting and saying dismissively, "Yeah, it looks about the same as the last three hundred times I looked at it. It's useless."

"No," Keith said, "It's changing, moving—slowly, but it is moving. See!" and he pushed it almost rudely in front of her face. Maha stepped over and gently took the map from Kevin's hand. She smiled apologetically at Sarah who remained pointedly focused on her knitting, ignoring them both, her back against a casuarina tree trunk.

Maha pushed her glasses back and studied the map. At first her eyes pinched in concentration, and then she yelped, "Look! Sarah, look! It is moving, or shifting, or changing somehow. Look!"

Determinedly unimpressed, Sarah slowly dropped her knitting and took the map from Maha. She glared at them both in a warning that they had better not be interrupting her knitting for no reason. Point made, she turned her eyes to the map.

Impatiently, Keith demanded, "Well!"

Sarah pursed her lips, took a long breath, and held it. Kevin moved closer. At last, she looked at them, and said, "Yes, it's moving. It's now a map of Staniel Cay, Exuma, showing our exact location."

Keith looked triumphantly at Maha who yelped again in their triumph.

"But not so fast," Sarah said. "What good is a map that only shows where you are when what we need to know is where we're going? Eh!"

Kevin and Maha shrank in disappointment and looked at each other.

Maha nodded slowly. "She has a point. So what do we do?"

Keith retrieved the map and studied it before holding it out to both of the women, pointing. "Here! It says this way to the Staniel Cay Yacht Club. I say we go."

"Oh, god!" moaned Sarah, "not another pub!"

But Kevin was already walking up the beach, holding the map out like a compass, following the shifting lines.

Maha shrugged and said, "May as well go. Nothing's happening on this beach anyway."

"I was knitting quite nicely, thank you," Sarah said, even as she stood, stowing her knitting in the bag slung over her shoulder. "Let's go. He'll get himself killed."

In hardly the time it takes to hit Return on a keyboard, they found themselves stepping onto the porch of the Staniel Cay Yacht Club, or so the sign over the entrance said.

A man in a pirate's hat stopped them at the door and in a seventeenth century Caribbean accent asked, "Got any weapons?"

"Aren't you Johnny Depp?" Sarah asked.

"Not tonight, love," Depp said. "Tonight I'm the bouncer—Captain Jack. So, weapons?"

"Just knitting needles," Sarah said, pulling the needles from her bag and holding them up for Johnny Depp to see.

Johnny Depp's eyes narrowed and he lifted his face back. "They look wicked, love. Better leave them with me."

"Not a chance," Sarah said and shoved them back into her bag. "Nobody gets my needles. Nobody."

Johnny Depp stood up from his perch and held his arms wide to block them. "Sorry."

Just then, gunfire exploded in the dark recesses of the bar, and bamboo and coconut shrapnel flew through the air.

"Duck!" Keith yelled as all hell broke loose in the mob beyond the bar. …

*****

I, Goggle. I am legion. I am all of you, now and then. I am known by many names. I speak with many voices, from front and back, past and future. I manage the morph. I'm in the Cloud. The end is always already here. Ask Jim Morrison.


This is part 23 of a storyjumper for Digital Writing Month. You can read the other parts here:
For a mapping of participants check here. If you would like to participate add your name to the Google Doc.
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