Third excerpt

You know those movie trailers where they show the exciting parts of the movie, then when you see it, you find that the dialogue and half the shots in the trailer aren't even in the movie?
For instance, Star Trek VIII: First Contact, the USS Voyager makes an appearance. In the trailer. It's replaced by, I think an Akira-class starship for that particular shot in the actual movie. It also used scenes from Next Generation and Deep Space 9 episodes, as well as Star Trek VII: Generations.
Yeah, those... The ones where it makes people go "Oh, that's going to be in it?" only to rip that possibility from them.

This is called "Hearing The Silence". It is one such scene--it will not be in the finished short story.

HEARING THE SILENCE

Familiarity is often the basis of love or compassion. Having become accustomed to seeing someone, speaking to someone, communicating with someone, one becomes likely to develop a fondness—a certain type of compassion; a love that exists between the superficial and the sincere, between the plain and the bold, the bland and the profound; but it is not at all lukewarm.

Familiarity became the basis of their relationship; PDM-512-0753 and a human with a name unknown. The human would appear on a once-every-other-week basis, then became more frequent, showing up weekly. At first, the human would stare at PDM-512-0753 for minutes at a time, increasing almost daily until it was spending hours every one or two days. No longer just staring, it would communicate with the machine. One of the first things it said was its own designation: Lorraine. It would speak of situations and struggles it had faced, family, friends, enemies, and yes, even love—especially love. It was overwhelmed, almost obsessed with the topic. For this reason, PDM-512-0753 was fascinated by the creature and its tales of life. Love, it had said, was necessary to live. Like water to a plant, it said. These statements puzzled the machine even deeper so. PDM-512-0753 grew accustomed to this human's presence, and began to understand familiarity.

One day, Lorraine asked why the machine never spoke. It stared at her quizzically before answering “Because you can not hear me.”

Lorraine scowled, “How did you know?”

PDM-512-0753 took a step back from a sort of shock—even the computer could be surprised when occurrences were beyond understanding, but this biological unit understood it. It knew what it had said.

“Query; you are capable of perceiving my communications?”

The human laughed, “More or less; I'm becoming deaf. I read lips.”

There was a brief pause as PDM-512-0753 seemed to scan a memory bank; “Designation: Production Display Model Five-Twelve, Oh-Seven-Fifty-Three, Etude line. Please state my purpose.”

“You want me to state your purpose?”

It remained silent a moment. “Please?” it pleaded in complete desperation.

“But I don't know what your purpose is.”

“Do I have a purpose?”

“I don't know,” the human responded, lifting and dropping its shoulders in a short, quick movement; “Well, bye,” the human said with a wave of its hand as it began walking away.

The machine watched intently as the human departed.


This scene was going to develop into several pages and tie in with the original ending, but it seemed out of place and somewhat meaningless to the story as a whole. Granted, a few more pages would be great to add, this is not the route in which I'm looking to add those pages.

Dialogue... Bleh!

Just an update...

  I'm going to resume working on the robot-based short story soon. Not sure how many people actually read this, so could be just spittin' in the wind here, but nevertheless, I've gotta get that stupid thing finished. I've got a plan for another story and would like to at least get this'n out of the way before continuing with another. Have plans, too, for getting a story booted up--based on NaNoWriMo that a friend introduced me to, but at my own standards and at a time of my own choosing; ie. not in November(too busy of a month here), but maybe March or April, a time when everything is coming to life and the world itself seems to ebb with inspiration, imagination, life and hope.

  Also, been thinking about a major for college a lot. Need to discuss something with someone who already majored in what I want on majoring in(music, possibly composition or production), though it's being recommended that I go for English... Again, something to discuss with someone who has or is majoring in it. The reason I emphasize 'want', when referring to majoring in music, is because the career field for someone who's majored in music seems to be pretty slim pickings. Not that English would have more going for it, in regards to possible careers based on it, it's just that my interests are playing and writing music, as well as writing lyrics/poems(if they can be called 'poems' when lacking so many basic poetic devices) and stories.

  College is something I'm looking forward to, but am also scared senseless by it at the same time.

The Center of The Universe?

I have decided that the center of the universe is wherever we want it to be. I can explain this position in further detail, but I ask you to keep an open mind and try not to label me some sort of lunatic before reading this entire hypothesis.

The universe is large. Vastly large. Any words I can use to describe its size are a severe understatement. To try and figure the center of it is pointless. We don't even know how big the universe is, since all that we can see on the intergalactic scale is only galaxies' whose light is strong enough to reach us and has reached us. Millions of lightyears away are other galaxies. Billions of lightyears away are MORE galaxies. Billions of lightyears beyond those are, likely, though we can't see them, yet even more galaxies. There's no way to see what is beyond that, since the light from it hasn't reached us yet, if it's even enough to be seen from such a distance. It spreads out, best anyone can tell, infinitely. Some will give theories as to why it's limited in size(though the boundaries are indeterminable), or growing(if it's growing, that would imply the universe is bigger than, well, the universe), but the simple fact is that the galaxy that we exist in is not even big enough to be consider one tiny piece of the universe.

Now, I'm going to do some serious hypothesizing here, but my only request is that you try to disprove these hypotheses before deciding they're ridiculous.

You are the center of the universe.
Before you say you aren't, prove that you aren't. Prove the Earth isn't actually orbiting you, the solar system orbiting that, the galaxy orbiting that, and the universe itself orbiting that.
With such a massive scale, it is impossible to find the center, therefore we can be free to each choose the center of the universe in our own perspective.

You are the center of the universe. What do you do now?