Finding Yourself

[dalecoz]

I hesitated to start a new thread her, having been on the forum only since last night, but I need to get reactions on the beginning of a new novel from people who aren't familiar with my "Snapshot" concept. This is from the beginning of what hopefully will become the second novel in my Snapshot series, but it is entirely stand-alone, sharing only the universe and some secondary characters with the first Snapshot novel. I think of it as sort of a personal alternate history by other, rather strange means. This project is still in the very early stages so what you see here is very subject to change.

One thing I've never gotten right in all my writing: how it feels to know you're going to die. Yeah, only a true writer would think something like that when he's helpless, waiting, with minutes of life left, but I can't help thinking that if I somehow manage to get out of this I'll be a better writer. I’ll know how waiting to die really feels.


But getting out of this. That's the issue. Weaponless. Hands and feet zip-tied to a heavy chair which is bolted to the floor. In a locked room with a sturdy door. No one knows I'm here. A shot to the back of the head and the famous Simon Royale will disappear just like his sister did forty-eight years ago, maybe even to the same place.


I'm a writer, so much so that even now my mind insists on putting together the story that brought me here. Mistakes. Obsession. When my mind grabs onto something it can't let go. Not something I control. I can distract myself for a while with my writing, but I always turn back to the event that made me and is now my undoing.


In the privacy of my own mind, I can admit something that I've never allowed to slip out to anyone, not even at my most drunken moments of candor. I wanted my sister to go away. And she did. I didn't cause her to go away. The fifty-four year-old part of my mind understands that, but the seven-year-old that still lingers in me will never stop believing that my childhood wish, hidden deep in my mind, was what made Cynthia Royale go away and never come back.


Cynthia Royale. Seven years older than me. Always better. A better singer. A harder worker. Not just pretty but at age fourteen flowering into beautiful. Tall. Long, raven black hair. Striking gray eyes. A smile that always made my world better. The Royale who got all the attention and all the compliments. The Royale who was going to be a famous actress. She always got the lead in the junior high musicals and was rapidly moving up in the high school acting scene her freshman year.


Most times I was happy to be the Royale who wasn't in the spotlight, the one who read or sat quietly on the sidelines. And I couldn't have asked for a more caring big sister. She made time for me, listened to me more than mom and dad did, took me along whenever the social pressure against having a seven-year-old brother along wasn't too heavy.


I loved her. I still love the memories of her. But I wished her gone, just once, and a week later she took a walk and never came back. Police found no trace of a body. No indication that she ran away. No clue as to where she went, not for forty-eight years. I became the famous Royale. Fame is lonely.


Then, in a minor footnote to a world-shattering event, I found a way to follow that very cold trail and it led me here, to a lonely death. My author’s mind insists on retracing my path here, so here is my story. Keep in mind that it will almost certainly be unfinished, interrupted by my death.

[dalecoz]

Weeks earlier: Yes, I'm afraid of flying. White knuckle flyer. I don't like trusting my life to so many hands. Pilot. Maintenance crews. Parts manufacturers. Random birds that could suicide into the engines. A lot of things that could go wrong when you send tons of metal and flesh and clothing hurtling down a runway and into the sky.

Ironic. The great Simon Royale, master of terror, is afraid to fly. I fly regularly, though. Overcoming your fears is the mark of a man in control of his emotions. I hate flying coach more than I hate flying in general--rarely do it. Usually don't have to. Best-selling author here. The real Simon Royale. The one who you've almost certainly read if you're a reading person, and even if you aren't a reading person you've probably seen the movies or one of several TV-series based, at least in theory, on my books.

Real. That's the whole point of this exercise. Unless you've had your fingers in your ears yelling ‘Nope! Nope! Nope!’ the last eight months, you know there is a small question as to me really being THE Simon Royale. I assure you that physically, legally and morally I'm the real deal. I am molecule by molecule identical to the Simon Royale who supposedly is still back on Dirtball Earth. I have his DNA. I have his memories. I am as much him as anyone in this version of North America is who they appear to be.

Yes, we're all copies, exact replicas of the people back home, just as North America is or at least started out as, an exact replica of North America back on Dirtball Earth as of mid-afternoon on Halloween 2014.

Life goes on, even if you’re a copy. Books get written and sold, though only to North America. No overseas market. No overseas for that matter. Just invisible walls in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Money flows in, though losing a big hunk of my market makes that hurt. Money flows out. That part didn’t change much. People die. Babies get born. Does it bother me that we're all in a North America-sized snow-globe in an apparently artificial universe? Sometimes, but no more than the fact that we're all going to get old and die someday. Death, taxes and being stuck in a copy of North America instead of the real thing. Just one of those inevitabilities that one accepts lest one start baying at the moon.

The real problem and the huge opportunity with cactus spines in it: We're not the only copy of North America sitting in an artificial universe. Whatever being or beings made the North America copy in 2014 also made one in 1953 and gave us a way to fly to it. And yes, that other Snapshot really exists, whatever the fundamentalists and flat-Earthers say. A whole new North America where no one had never read a single one of my books until a few months ago. My backlist is all brand new to an audience in the low hundreds of millions of English-speakers. And because karma is a raging hormonal bitch, there is this tiny little problem selling book one to all those readers. That problem is also an opportunity, a chance to solve the mystery that has haunted me for forty-seven years.

[dalecoz]

Sacramento airport. I've gone through security. I have my carry-on, laptop and boarding pass. Most of the people in the waiting room are from my copy of North America. We've taken to calling it US-2014, which I'm sure the Canadians and Mexicans and Central Americans love, since they came along for the ride too. Yes, we Americans can be a tad chauvinist.

I do see a few people from the other North American Snapshot--US-53ers we call them, or just 53s--easily distinguished by their clothes, haircuts and the way they move. A set of differences most of them can't see or can’t change, even if they wanted to, which most of them don't. If you think we're the ugly Americans, you haven’t met many US-53ers. They're far worse. Arrogant. Lean. Hungry. Grasping. Ready to take the name I've built up over decades and use it to sell otherwise unsellable tripe.

I’m sure you’ve heard about that last bit. Yes, US-53, the other copy, also has a Simon Royale. Yes, he also writes books. No, he isn’t really an author, not really. True, he has written books, the kind that he sent to every publisher in his version of the US and then, since self-publishing is almost unheard of in his version of the US, he put them in a trunk when nobody would buy his undoubtedly crap offerings. And they sat in that trunk until a fly-by-night US-53 publisher saw my sales figures from our US and realized that they had a potential money machine if they could sign him on and ride my coattails. That’s not going to happen. That’s part of the reason I’m here in Sacramento International, the less important part. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them the other Simon Royale’s books are the reason I’m getting ready to fly into a place even fly-over-country folk would consider fly-over country. When I say that, I’ll be lying.

Simon Royale from US-53 isn’t really me. Granted, his parents were the US-53 version of my parents. Granted also that he was born almost exactly the same day I was--March 24, 1960 instead of March 25. And yes, he looks a lot like me, almost as close as an identical twin, though the chances of him having my exact genes are close to zero. Millions of little swimmies going after the same egg. After seven years of different life experiences from mommy and daddy, what are the chances of the same sperm making it to the egg first both on Dirtball Earth and on the 1953 copy? So close to zero we don’t need to worry about the possibility. A dot with as many zeroes to the right of it as there are stars in the galaxy. Same egg and same father? Maybe. Still not all that likely, but it probably happened. Which means I’m suing my half-identical twin from an alternate reality for rights to my name and the book sales that go with it.

Is that screwed up enough for you? It’s more than screwed up for me, but it will get weirder. Just wait until I tell you where I’m going and what I really intend to do when I get there.

[dalecoz]

"Is that Simon Royale?" Ella Smoot was three people behind a guy who certainly looked like the famous author when she boarded the plane to Madagascar-24M, the stretched, North America-sized version of Madagascar from twenty-four million years ago, give or take a couple million. She didn't really ask the question of anyone in particular, but the Reverend Julius Butcher craned his short, heavily-muscled neck and looked over the crowd at the tall, lean man ahead of them.

"Why would Simon Royale be flying coach?" the pastor asked. He looked more like a cage-fighter in street clothes than a pastor, with his powerful upper body and a scarred brown face that reflected his mostly American Indian ancestry.

Why would a best-selling author fly in coach? That was a good question and Ella didn't have an answer for it. She pulled a picture of the famous author up on her smartphone and compared it to the guy ahead of them. Mid-fifties? Maybe. He looked five or ten years younger than that, but money can buy youth, or at least the appearance of it. Blue jeans and a Firefly t-shirt. Deliberately unfashionably glasses. At least Ella assumed that the lack of fashion sense was deliberate. He actually managed to make the glasses look cool, a statement. She turned her attention to her more immediate problem: making sure she didn't lose any of the fifteen aspiring authors from her tour before they boarded the plane. "Like herding cats."

"Authors aren't herd animals," the pastor said. "How did you get yourself in so far over your head?"

It seemed like a great idea at the time. Actually, Ella still thought it was a great idea: Sell want to be writers from US-2014 on the idea of a book tour to the relatively untapped book market of US-53. No e-books there. No personal computers to make writing novels relatively easy and create a gigantic and ever-growing glut of aspiring authors. Ella arranged the tour for an up-front fee that more than covered her costs for arranging the tour, plus a percentage of any sales. And some of them will actually sell books over there. Even if they didn’t, she had invested much of the up-front money in another project that should more than double her money—assuming everything came together right. And if it didn’t? I’ll improvise.

"Not in over my head, pastor, just challenged." Ella studied the pastor out of the corner of her eye. They had run into one another and renewed an old acquaintance on their way to the new US-2014 Snapshot from Madagascar-24M. “It’s not fun if you aren’t dancing on the edge of the cliff.”

"You've grown up a bit," the pastor said, "But you're still in over your head. Last time I ran into you, you were a pre-teen with a mouth that needed soap."

"Last time I saw you, you didn't have the Reverend in front of your name and you were relieving tourists of their hard-earned money. Cryptozoology tours or some such thing. Claiming you could track a mouse across bare rock."

[dalecoz]

"I can track a mouse across bare rock." the burly Indian grinned at her. "And I’m still running my tours, I have to put food on the table. My little church can't do that on its own."

“Guiding their souls and their soles, huh?” Ella spelled out the second type of “sole”. She watched the guy she thought was Simon Royale slide into an aisle seat, checked her ticket and realized that she was several seats behind him. She also realized that someone in her aspiring author tour did have the seat beside Simon. She pretended to check tickets and managed to swap her ticket for the one beside Simon, hopefully without the original ticket-holder noticing.

They'll thank me later if I get him to blurb one of their books.

The pastor apparently spotted the switch. He grinned at her. "Hope he's really a vacuum cleaner salesman with onion-breath."

"That would be karma, I guess." She slid her carry-on into the overhead compartment, then bent over a little more than she had to when she slid into the seat next to "Simon." She didn't notice if his eyes lingered on her cleavage, but thought they probably did.

That's the one thing dad's taste's in women gave me--boobs worth looking at.


She smiled at "Simon", then half-stood in her seat and made sure the rest of her authors made it to their seats. The pastor sat in the aisle seat across from Simon. Which could make some of my potential moves awkward.

She wasn't sure how seriously to take the "reverend" in front of Julius Butcher's name. The Indian had been working as a tracker when they met before and hadn't struck Ella as the pastor type. Of course, I was twelve at the time and probably didn't strike him as the entrepreneur type.

Entrepreneur. Ella liked the sound of that. Not a hustler. Not a con artist. An entrepreneur. Making my fortune by bringing the technology and intellectual property of the two US Snapshots to the people who need them. And hopefully making her first million or two in the process. This is just the start. Seed money. There are thousands of ways to make money moving ideas and technology between US-2014 and US-53. Ella intended to get very rich exploiting those ideas. The random meeting with Simon Royale could play a major role in that. Just a matter of finding the right approach.

[lordroel]

Aug 3, 2017 12:10:36 GMT dalecoz said:

I hesitated to start a new thread her, having been on the forum only since last night, but I need to get reactions on the beginning of a new novel from people who aren't familiar with my "Snapshot" concept. This is from the beginning of what hopefully will become the second novel in my Snapshot series, but it is entirely stand-alone, sharing only the universe and some secondary characters with the first Snapshot novel. I think of it as sort of a personal alternate history by other, rather strange means. This project is still in the very early stages so what you see here is very subject to change.

No problem, every new thread ore timeline is welcome on this forum.