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!