Short Story on The Beginning of Mechanicha
‘The Liberation’ is the other ‘past’ short story contained in the compilation file I talked about here. Its history is more complex than the End of the Second story, though.
As weird as it sounds, this was originally part of How to Stop Wildfire. Like when the group meets the Ascended, Jessica looks at a memory of Reno’ala’net…and basically this plays out. It was part of the old drafts of the book.
I extracted it out into that short story file at some point so it’s possible this is many years older than 2015. I’m more confident that it is older than 2015 than being from 2015, since some of the names of the OG draft are using old style spelling for a few things, which I feel has to be pre-2015, but I don’t remember anymore.
Rereading the old version was…painful. I think it was painful because it reminded me of how HTSW is sort of the black sheep in style, prose, and in some world building allusion tone. I’ve had…thoughts of rewriting HTSW to a degree before and doing this really makes me want to dive back in HTSW and clean it up. I don’t know if I will now, but it’s…becoming a more pressing agenda item.
Anyway, this story isn’t perfect, and I might have a mental block on it due to the HTSW connection, but it’s better than what it was and I’m OK enough to share it. I reserve the right to change it later and tweak the message of it, but I think it’s pretty good.
Related/Recent Posts
Jurak's Day: A New Short Story
Jurak’s Day is a new short story about a Halihathrow investigator having an interesting day that quickly gets dangerous. I originally wrote some of it out in 2016 (?) and did some (?) work on it in 2017. Its premise was about a Halihathrow named Jurak having a weird day and having to unravel some conspiracy. I originally imagined it involving a time loop, somehow, but I was uncomfortable introducing that concept, so I wrote it as some weird stretch...
Short Story on The End of the Second Generation Humans
Another new short story! But it is not new. I originally wrote this scene in ~2015 in a compilation file containing three (including this) random world event stories plus a chapter titled Malechak with no content…which was intended to basically be ‘To Steal a Race with a Race’. I recently decided I was going to try to wrap up as many of these random half-finished/sketch-like stories as I could before I started fully on book 11, so I with this...