Day Twenty-Five
Now that they’re accepting official winners at NaNoWriMo, I’ve been accepted! Here is my little image thingy:
On top of that, I’ve also replaced the icon in the links section to a winner’s icon.
On top on top of that, the title for the novel has been determined. Call it Faceless. And now, onward to finishing! A little less writing tonight since I have a headache and massive carsickness after coming home from seeing Borat, but… well, you win some days, you lose some days.
Word Count: 57,152
It should not have seemed so odd to him that she was packed and ready to go to the airport as soon as he met with her at her shop. He had already stored his luggage in a taxi outside the Hospiten and was paying the cab driver to wait. Her luggage was far heavier than his; he assumed it was stuffed with various feminine items and possibly a few boulders between the clothes. They did, however, manage to get the bags securely to the taxi and were able to leave promptly for the airport.
The line was not long for their flight, nor was the airport busy in general, even though it was just outside a major city. In very little time they were aboard the plane, waiting for it to take off. Walters was feeling odd again, but he hadn’t been on a plane in a while either, so it could very well have been that he was nervous to fly. This shocked him even further, because he was not a nervous fellow – this type of thing he had thought would be the sort of activity he would look straight in the eye and grasp by the horns. Next to Carpenter, however, he was absolutely terrified of the plane taking off.
The plane began to move. It was a short flight, especially so because they were moving west, against the spin of the Earth. All his fears washed away in the instant after takeoff. As though he were but a child, he sat staring out the window, watching the objects below shrink, getting smaller and smaller with each passing second, moving further towards oblivion.
He felt even further disoriented, but could not determine why. He held an open palm to his forehead, resting upon it after taking out the tray in front of him and laying it out. Carpenter seemed not to notice that he looked sick. Walters rethought that traveling with her was safe, especially if she didn’t even glace at him while he was feeling as he was. He simply read her book and, when she wasn’t doing that, used a PDA she had brought with her to do what he supposed was organizing more data about MARS and the man they were about to visit.
During the flight she would have told him the man’s name, but decided against it, figuring that they should meet together. There was also a greater purpose for her intentionally leaving some information out. She wanted to shock the information into Walters, to let him know the true extent of his situation. She wanted to tell him what he didn’t know as best she could, and this could only be done by not telling him anything at all. When the plane landed, he had still not been told anything new about the man in the dome house. He carried the files with him in a carry on sack, but did not read them further. Neither one stated the name of the person, but the lifespan section told who was alive and who was dead. He deeply wished that the original man was alive, but even if he had been he would have been far too important to randomly visit, according to the files at the very least.
She had arranged housing with MARS and the motels in the surrounding area as well. It was incredibly easy with her connections. Walters hadn’t known that she had planned the trip so efficiently, even if it was only for a few days. The question had come up of why to stay more than a single day in this new city, but was answered that expense made it more worthwhile to stay, even if seeing the man they were looking for only took one day.
The town was certainly dusty on the outside. The view outside the airport displayed a town that was almost desert-like. For the Midwest this should have been nearly impossible, but there it was, the strangest of all cities, the most deserted area of the town. As one neared the center of the town, coming closer to MARS and the city square, the grass became greener, areas were more tended to, and life was less sparse. But out here by the airport, the departure area of the town, one could see no trace of the life that filled the city and its shops and its people in their curiously shaped homes.
There was a taxi line outside of the airport filled with people itching to reenter the city, aching from the dry golden-yellow landscape. Such people wanted nothing more than to return to their normal life in the city, or to commence activity as a tourist and get the grand tour of MARS and all of its wonderful research on alteration. This was much more easily said than done, and many tourists were turned away from MARS when larger research projects were going on, and the workers could not be disturbed by tours. However, most stations across the country offered some sort of touring option. The GSS wanted its customers to have a good idea of the work that went into perfecting the technology they had come to know as commonplace, irreplaceable, and infallible.
It truly became apparent how liberal the town had become as Walters and Carpenter neared the center of commerce. The odd shaped homes looked even odder shaped in person. The domes looked like stone and wood igloos, with the entrance jutting out in front. Each suburb of homes was scattered about the golden landscape with patching of grass growing in between, signifying the life that was so near to it. It made the entire area look tribal, as though they were Inuits who had overcome the harsh cold to move to warmer climates. Some left their homes – they were all normal people, in no way related to any sort of tribe. That is, they were normal people as far as the word “normal” could apply in this type of situation. Some were inhuman, as Walters would have claimed, and yet Carpenter would have called them magnificent, only wishing she had been the one to design such a Genome.
The inner city awaited them and greeted them happily. The taxi let them out just nearby the center of town, which had developed its own pedestrian road, but not entirely protected as the one back near the NSGR was. Cars did move freely about the road, making it extremely dangerous, but for the most part the citizens know where the cars came and went, and navigated around them in unmarked currents, creating a human river that obeyed its own laws of physics. They both became lost in this river, carried by the current to the motel at the end of the road. Carpenter told Walters that she had wanted him to get a feel for the town, since he had never been in this area before – only his wife had, on the trip she recently came home from. If “the town” meant the single strip of road with various pockets of blacktop that had once been a strip mall, then “the town” was easily navigated and memorized, but Walters had a feeling that the town as a whole was much larger and more complicated, and that he would hardly be seeing any of it on this trip.
Even so, that didn’t matter so long as they both got the information they needed.
The room was small and had only one bed, but once again came the gut feeling that it was alright to sleep in a bed with Carpenter. Walters sat on the bed after putting his luggage down and held his hand against his forehead again. It was as though he was experiencing a massive headache, but could not completely describe the feeling as it should be described. Instead, when it was over, he felt as though it had never truly happened, as though the memory of it were washed out along with something else that always felt as though it were more important, but he could not remember what it was to know how important it was.
Carpenter never seemed to notice. She once asked during the trip if he had a headache, to which he responded no – because he did not have a headache – but down the line he began to wonder what she would have done if he had answered yes to that very question. Would she have brought him medicine, or just tell him that everything would be fine? Would she nod and say “alright,” and do nothing more?
The hotel they were staying at was a much older hotel – at least a hundred and fifty years old. The rooms were all different sizes and shapes; the front desk guaranteed that no two rooms were the same shape and size. Feeling a bit cheated, Walters questioned the logic of selling rooms, but was reassured that the greater the price paid, the larger the room would be. Their room was one of the small ones. The ceiling was low, the walls painted ghostly bleach white and lined with paintings and prints. Walters was surprised to find a real oil painting on the left wall, something that modern hotels did not offer. The low ceiling became even lower as it approached the bed, jutting downward at a diagonal as though the roof of the building prevented them from having a perfectly flat ceiling. Walters tapped on the ceiling. It felt as though it were made of concrete, which it most certainly was not, but it was perhaps the most study wood he had felt in some time.
He wondered if it had been recently shapeshifted. A hotel this close to the center of town should have had easy access to that type of technology, and even if there wasn’t a construction group in the area it could very well have been done by the managers and employees of the hotel.
Carpenter informed him later on that construction through shapeshifting was quickly dying out due to the rising expenses and decrease in volume of realistically-sized ATC units. No construction company would be using ATC’s within the next week anymore, and never again would they touch the shapeshifting industry.
Instead, cosmetics industries were taking full advantage of their new privileges with the ATC’s, creating incredibly small shapeshifters for use with general appearance editing. A common and popular item among acne-stricken teenagers, for example, was a special pen-like object that had an ATC embedded within it that shapeshifted any area on the body and rid it of pimples by literally dissolving them into nothingness, a practice that had been perfected long ago. The matter that had become nothingness was usually stored into the ATC, but for the purposes of this specific pen-sized ATC it was not, because the entire contraption was too small to hold all of the matter. This would pose problems in the future, because matter that was not stored released radiation, causing some users of the pen-ATC to feel week and disoriented, and in some cases, sick.
All of these symptoms, however, could be easily cured in any hospital with a simple shapeshifting procedure; a procedure that, if it would have worked, would have been immediately performed on Walters. Carpenter and Reedy had prevented use of such a technique because they knew his condition was out of the ordinary and wished to know all of the details before eradicating it, but more recent developments showed that the condition was beyond the mere shapeshifting of the body, rendering any technique they thought might have worked entirely useless. The foundations that the GSS had set down for shapeshifting – nay, for all of society – crumbled underneath their feet as they watched Walters’s progression.
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