Aida Zilbergleyt

ha-ha, wicked! I enjoyed the idiosyncratic conversation between Tom and Aida. Would love to learn more about the protagonist's parents (were they cursed?) and keep reading, in general.

Chapter 1 Truth—a hurricane There is no hiding from it This is not my storm . . . Switch. He is now in a body of a military scientist. He feels her anxiety, her hands tremble as she tries to uplink to her shuttle, but the remoter doesn’t establish connection. The screen is frozen, she taps it––no use. She turns the remoter around to open the lower panel to see if the circuit board is somehow damaged from high humidity. Instead, she sees its serial number. Cold fear twists her guts––they gave her an old-issue remoter; it will never uplink. She starts running. She's running at the top of her speed, praying to get to her shuttle in time. She was so naïve, she scolds, "it's just obstructive sticks and grass," her commanding officer said, dismissing her. They were never going to listen to her even if she filled the whole judicial system with evidence of the planet's intelligent life. And what a magnificent sentient life it is! Back in the forest, a group of tiny winged creatures formed a small golden cloud. They touched her. It was a touch of healing kindness. She felt so much love, there were no words to describe it. An old scar on her hand, an improperly healed bone-fracture, a collection of other injuries from endless combats all healed within moments. They let her see their forest-city. It’s simply magical––suspended and interconnected delicate cylindrical pathway, woven out of something silky and luminescent into mind-bending, complex, mathematical patterns, running for miles and miles… She's running out of breath, whizzing. The shuttle is within reach. It's almost dawn. She falls, gets up––a few more steps. Her palm slams against the door, she throws herself inside the shuttle, and crawls toward console. Panting, with barely moving from exhaustion fingers she struggles to connect her remoter––it holds everything she discovered about the species––to the upload unit. "Destination," finally, asks the ship’s AI. She holds her breath, her throat is dry and burning, its muscles spasming: "Every open channel in the universe," she rasps on exhale. Panting again, gulping for air, then steadies her breathing and her voice: "Subject: ‘Ghorhya is annihilating a civilization to open-pit-mine their planet.’ Send and keep the feed live." She gets out of the shuttle, looks into its exterior camera, and waits. The mission is at dawn. It is dawn––she's hopeful. She'd gladly go to jail for this if they only listen to her. She knows she's ruining reputation of all Ghorhyans but she couldn't see it any other way. There is ringing in her ears. Her knees feel week. From the forest, thousands of agonizing thoughts of pain and despair flood her mind. If these magnificent beings had vocal cords, their screams would’ve stripped away the planet's crust. She wants to say this to the camera but she can't move or open her jaws anymore. She cries instead. Her tears and blood are running down her cheeks, falling on her starting to scorch skin of her recently healed hand. She can't hold herself upright anymore and lets her body fall on the ground with a thump. The pain is excruciating. In her mind, she sees magical winged creatures melting one by one in agony. In my next life, her mind pledges, I shall punish each and every one of you–– She doesn't finish her promise. Her brain and body turn into goo. Switch. Locus is now in a white-purple chamber of some humanoid lizards. Everyone’s so tall––he's in the body of a child; the boy has just run into the chamber. His parents are being nailed to the wall limb by limb. He turns away, breathing heavily, getting sick and petrified at the same time. He wants to wail, but his heart becomes too large with pain, stealing space and air from his lungs, stealing his voice. He closes his eyes and asks gods to help him rescue his parents. Agonizing scream of his mother reaches his ears. He turns back to look. A thin, purple device with a metallic lasso enters one of her eyes. The man who works the tool smiles, then rotates it with an unhurried, deliberate motion––the eye's calcified nerves crackle with a sickening sound; its cavity spouts the purple fountain. The man's long, blue tongue snatches the eye from inside the lasso and sends it into his mouth with lightning speed. He eats the eye noisily, then leaks the lasso tool until it's clean. The boy starts running to his parents, but someone catches him by his robe. "The royal seal, where is it?" another man demands. "There will be uprising," his father pushes his voice out with effort, then spits out blood and teeth. "You'd wish then to never be born.” His mother moans as she has no strength left to scream. The pain is excruciating, the child knows––the eyes are the most sensitive part of the body. She loses consciousness. His father tries turning his already blind face toward his wife, but an executioner's sword lands on his neck in a blink of an eye, his head, as if in a deliberately slow motion, is falling off his shoulders. The boy’s heart contracts. A powerful wail of anguish breaks out from his small body. He tries to turn away but cannot. Someone's bloody hands are holding his body firmly, holding his head, urging him to watch. The boy’s mind labors to comprehend his parents’ suffering and demise. And, as his heart would always remain small, his bloodthirsty soul pledges revenge––brutal, haunting for generations, revenge. Switch. In the middle of vast courtyard, Locus sees a young man, barely out of his teens, naked. His body is bruised; he’s bearing his weight on one leg, the other is broken; his face, bloody and swollen, is unrecognizable; his head is high. Something is written on his stomach with feces, but Locus cannot read it. The young man’s outstretched arms and legs are tight at the wrists and ankles. Locus follows the ropes––the four ends are fastened to four horses. The horses shift from one leg to another, their riders are whispering something into their ears. The horses snort in anger. They are restless, eager to run––they’ve been in stables for too long, getting prepared for this moment. But the ground-men are holding the beasts down by their bridles. The men's muscles are bulging. Locus tries pushing through the crowd to free his lover, but he can't––he's immobile. Agonized, he labors hard to feel and move his limbs so he could rush to his beloved, seize him in his arms, and run, run run...! But Locus’ consciousness can only watch, it cannot change the past. The executioner lifts a long trumpet to his lips, and feels his lungs with air. He blows. Locus bellows and turns into light-dust. Switch . . . Locus's horrendous recollections invaded his sleep, shamming as his dreams. These were not his memories, but hundreds of thousands of souls’ his body was made up of who remembered. They remembered everything, and they pushed their anguish through a protective membrane of Locus’s Guiding Soul, trying to get out. Soon, these pseudo dreams appeared with increased frequency and without interruption or a chance of waking up at their culmination or conclusion. Engulfing and merciless, they latched onto him like parasites, slowly moving through his souls’ many pasts, exaggerating the most painful moments with grotesque and ruthlessness, as if in some sick stage production. At first, he would witness a thousand of executions from afar; or tortures––through a lock hole or some fluky slit within an impenetrable structure. He'd be far enough not to see details or tortured bodies––unmoving, yet with a whiff of life and consciousness. Then, with a sudden stroke of fate, as if switching to a different set of eyes, Locus would see same executions and tortures in slow motion and up close. The nearness reincarnated the memories of overwhelming stench of excrement, vomit, and blood––its metallic taste lasted in his mind for eternity, it seemed. He fought hard to wake up. It is someone else's reality...snap out, Locus bellowed countless times. But the nightmares kept him a prisoner. Even when he tried altering the dreams just slightly, his truth-seeking consciousness sabotaged his efforts at every turn, restoring the treacherous path of the terror. Next, he attempted at taking control over the body his consciousness occupied, but like a marionette, he was the one who was forced to watch and watch, and watch. And, when he couldn’t take the painful specter any longer, his consciousness, filling to the brim with hot, sickening light, combusted into light-dust or supernova. The explosion would break the pattern—and new recollections commenced right away. As Locus was about to witness more atrocities, he suddenly found himself scrambling away from the event horizon. He got too close. His first impulse was to figure out if it was him, in his own body, and whether he should continue the fight. But self-preservation forced him to throw a quickly concocted antigravitational bolt into the beast's mouth; and, as soon as its pull eased, he dashed out of its grip and into safe space. Locus swore. For a long time. Yes, he was him and in his own body––no any other soul within him swore like he did. The black hole almost got him. That never happened before. He could navigate around and even within event horizon with a masterful precision and never get caught. Not like that. To be fair to himself, he was thrown in that space against his will. Was that how the High Council informed him of new assignments now? Yanking him out of his hibernation and into the battlefield with the black holes? . . .

1. THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Love's, protagonist, mission is to heal Callers and not be caught by the Dark Guardian, Locus. But if caught, defeat him. 2. THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT Locus, the Dark Guardian, can’t stand biologicals of any sort. He treats them as batteries, with no discriminating between children or adults––it is just a flash that emanates energy. Aggrieved and angry, Locus wishes to be left alone. But when forced into a world of living, he becomes a destructive force; when enraged, he leaves nothing in his stead. Locus insists that he is rather misunderstood. 3. CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE Current title: The Fledgling (don't like it) Possible titles: Guardians’ Persona Grata or Cosmos Is My Cage Note: I wrote haiku poetry as an intro to each chapter, so the Cosmos is my cage is the line from my haiku 4. DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES Micaiah Johnson "The Space Between Worlds" Rebecca Roanhorse "Trail of Lightning" * In both novels, the protagonists are young women who mature too quickly because of their past hardships, present personal challenges, and loneliness. But they adopt, they’re fluid. My protagonist, Love, has to adopt on the spot. How? She forces herself to question her actions, her beliefs, her aspirations. She’s willing to change her attitude and the way of thinking. * "Trail of Lightning" is written in both speculative (the flood, drastic changes to Earth’s postapocalyptic landscape) and urban fantasy genre, while "The Space Between Worlds" is a speculative (multiverse and doppelgängers) and sci-fi novel. My novel is also a cross-genre novel––speculative and urban science fiction. Note: I Googled "urban sci-fi/science fiction" but only got results for "urban fantasy". Should it be "atmospheric science fiction"? * As in my novel, there are mystery lines unfold throughout both stories and protagonists’ journeys. The mystery must be solved, if not the lives will be lost. 5. CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT My logline: A half-truth was whispered in someone’s ear, unleashing a chain of events that forced a desperate, guilt-ridden human into an alien conflict and enraged Dark Guardian into destructive mode of epic proportions. 6. OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS My book's conflicts are. PRIMARY: As she was growing up, Love was told that her purpose was to serve the Dark Guardian for the rest of her life. Now she is running away from him, and she intends to keep running at any cost. Who wants to be a slave? SECONDARY: Darius blames himself for the death of many women, and his guilt is eating him alive. He admits to himself that he is a time-bomb. SECONDARY: Driven by a need to survive, Locus devours humans’ energy and hurts people with no comprehending or consideration that he’s hurting sentients––be it children or adults or pets. But when he sees a tortured, undercover cop inside drug-dealer’s dungeon, Locus feels a deep connection to that tortured sentient, because cop’s torturing and sacrifice is unjust––sadism is indulgence of psychopaths. Locus is enraged by it. The key here is unjustified cruelty, because from Locus's perspective, that he inflicted pain on people in the building earlier isn't a torture but his need to feed to survive. 7. THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING SETTING 1: my first chapter opens with the character witnessing atrocities on different worlds. Each world is unique in its socio-economic, cultural, and technological development. SETTING 2: the character wakes up inside the asteroid that carries him through space. The asteroid is infested with creatures and things which distract the character from his task and he almost misses his destination. SETTING 3: the characters are in Bronx, in the old shed that barely stands fighting gravity; they jump on to a roof of the construction-in-progress building to finish what they started in the shed. SETTING 4: the characters are at the Brooklyn Army Terminal during the night, first outside, on the parking lot, then inside the atrium with all kinds of spooky shadows and forms. Sure enough, the glass ceiling of the atrium cracks and breaks down with the heavy shards falling on to the characters, they’re trying to outrun the deadly glass-fall. SETTING 5: the character is inside an old, shabby apartment building with barely working lights, weird smells, dirty walls and floors. There, rats and cockroaches are having a party. SETTING 6: after midnight, the characters are on the dark alley that leads to NYU dorms. It’s hard to see as the street lights are off due to energy saving time-out. A cop materializes out of nowhere. SETTING 7: the characters are inside NYU lab, packed by a very expensive bio-engineering tech; the lab is monitored and they have to get out just in time not get caught on camera. SETTING 8: the character is inside a psychopathic drug-dealer’s layer––a basement level of an abandoned chemical plant outside NYC. It’s a poorly lit place with several fire-protection-industrial-metal doors located on opposite sides of the basement, a dozen of sinks, metal shelves and tables, etc., and a chair in the middle of the room, under a single lamp. The floor around the chair is stained with old and fresh blood. SETTING 9: the characters are inside a mechanical car, Triumph TR7, and as the car’s instruments are being exposed to electromagnetic energy, they start misbehaving, but not breaking. SETTING 10: a nested story inside the novel takes readers into an alien world called Lapeya, where a larva-like creatures live inside an ancient forest surrounded by endless Oceans. 1. THE ACT OF STORY STATEMENT Love's, protagonist, mission is to heal Callers and not be caught by the Dark Guardian, Locus. But if caught, defeat him. 2. THE ANTAGONIST PLOTS THE POINT Locus, the Dark Guardian, can’t stand biologicals of any sort. He treats them as batteries, with no discriminating between children or adults––it is just a flash that emanates energy. Aggrieved and angry, Locus wishes to be left alone. But when forced into a world of living, he becomes a destructive force; when enraged, he leaves nothing in his stead. Locus insists that he is rather misunderstood. 3. CONJURING YOUR BREAKOUT TITLE Current title: The Fledgling (don't like it) Possible titles: Guardians’ Persona Grata or Cosmos Is My Cage Note: I wrote haiku poetry as an intro to each chapter, so the Cosmos is my cage is the line from my haiku 4. DECIDING YOUR GENRE AND APPROACHING COMPARABLES Micaiah Johnson "The Space Between Worlds" Rebecca Roanhorse "Trail of Lightning" * In both novels, the protagonists are young women who mature too quickly because of their past hardships, present personal challenges, and loneliness. But they adopt, they’re fluid. My protagonist, Love, has to adopt on the spot. How? She forces herself to question her actions, her beliefs, her aspirations. She’s willing to change her attitude and the way of thinking. * "Trail of Lightning" is written in both speculative (the flood, drastic changes to Earth’s postapocalyptic landscape) and urban fantasy genre, while "The Space Between Worlds" is a speculative (multiverse and doppelgängers) and sci-fi novel. My novel is also a cross-genre novel––speculative and urban science fiction. Note: I Googled "urban sci-fi/science fiction" but only got results for "urban fantasy". Should it be "atmospheric science fiction"? * As in my novel, there are mystery lines unfold throughout both stories and protagonists’ journeys. The mystery must be solved, if not the lives will be lost. 5. CORE WOUND AND THE PRIMARY CONFLICT My logline: A half-truth was whispered in someone’s ear, unleashing a chain of events that forced a desperate, guilt-ridden human into an alien conflict and enraged Dark Guardian into destructive mode of epic proportions. 6. OTHER MATTERS OF CONFLICT: TWO MORE LEVELS My book's conflicts are. PRIMARY: As she was growing up, Love was told that her purpose was to serve the Dark Guardian for the rest of her life. Now she is running away from him, and she intends to keep running at any cost. Who wants to be a slave? SECONDARY: Darius blames himself for the death of many women, and his guilt is eating him alive. He admits to himself that he is a time-bomb. SECONDARY: Driven by a need to survive, Locus devours humans’ energy and hurts people with no comprehending or consideration that he’s hurting sentients––be it children or adults or pets. But when he sees a tortured, undercover cop inside drug-dealer’s dungeon, Locus feels a deep connection to that tortured sentient, because cop’s torturing and sacrifice is unjust––sadism is indulgence of psychopaths. Locus is enraged by it. The key here is unjustified cruelty, because from Locus's perspective, that he inflicted pain on people in the building earlier isn't a torture but his need to feed to survive. 7. THE INCREDIBLE IMPORTANCE OF SETTING SETTING 1: my first chapter opens with the character witnessing atrocities on different worlds. Each world is unique in its socio-economic, cultural, and technological development. SETTING 2: the character wakes up inside the asteroid that carries him through space. The asteroid is infested with creatures and things which distract the character from his task and he almost misses his destination. SETTING 3: the characters are in Bronx, in the old shed that barely stands fighting gravity; they jump on to a roof of the construction-in-progress building to finish what they started in the shed. SETTING 4: the characters are at the Brooklyn Army Terminal during the night, first outside, on the parking lot, then inside the atrium with all kinds of spooky shadows and forms. Sure enough, the glass ceiling of the atrium cracks and breaks down with the heavy shards falling on to the characters, they’re trying to outrun the deadly glass-fall. SETTING 5: the character is inside an old, shabby apartment building with barely working lights, weird smells, dirty walls and floors. There, rats and cockroaches are having a party. SETTING 6: after midnight, the characters are on the dark alley that leads to NYU dorms. It’s hard to see as the street lights are off due to energy saving time-out. A cop materializes out of nowhere. SETTING 7: the characters are inside NYU lab, packed by a very expensive bio-engineering tech; the lab is monitored and they have to get out just in time not get caught on camera. SETTING 8: the character is inside a psychopathic drug-dealer’s layer––a basement level of an abandoned chemical plant outside NYC. It’s a poorly lit place with several fire-protection-industrial-metal doors located on opposite sides of the basement, a dozen of sinks, metal shelves and tables, etc., and a chair in the middle of the room, under a single lamp. The floor around the chair is stained with old and fresh blood. SETTING 9: the characters are inside a mechanical car, Triumph TR7, and as the car’s instruments are being exposed to electromagnetic energy, they start misbehaving, but not breaking. SETTING 10: a nested story inside the novel takes readers into an alien world called Lapeya, where a larva-like creatures live inside an ancient forest surrounded by endless Oceans. ...I forgot to add one more Setting in the 7th assignment. SETTING 11: A hidden galaxy of Time governed by Ak'Krone––Time Guardian. Ak'Krone calls it time-space. The time-space is a fine network of time lines. The time-lines are in constant movement, changing hues as they cross and branch out. As if countless strings of invisible instruments, time-lines burst with sounds and colors as they arrive to a contact with each other. Only Ak'Krone can see and hear these graphic melodies. ----------- Also, I am grateful for these 7 assignments. I've never done anything like that before and thought they were extremely helpful for improving my manuscript. I even experienced a few paradigm-shifts along the way. I'm looking forward to the conference and more learning. Sincerely, Aida