It's National Novel Writing Month! Some of @freewritehouse's freewriters have bravely (or foolishly? Only time will tell...) accepted the challenge of writing an entire novel in one month. These are: @amelin; @botefarm; @felt.buzz; @grow23; @improv; @kaelci; @kaerpediem; @linnyplant; @mariannewest; @ntowl; @stinawog; @carolkean; @byn; @kipswolfe; @bennettitalia; @aislingcronin; @nonsowrites.

Aaaand... I'm one of them.

50,000 words total, which breaks down to 1,667/day.

Ok, enough dillying and dallying. Time to take this bull by the horns! I've got the next two days off, so I'm going to chain myself to my desk and crank out chapters. Not literally, but... yeah. Literally. My goal is to write at least three chapters each day, so that I can get caught up. And hopefully, I'll also have some time to check out what the other NovMad free writers are up to! ❤

This installment, Chapter 4, is where the themes in the novel are meant to begin to come together, although the introduction of new characters and settings will continue for several more chapters before the initial storyline is picked back up. The various scenarios and protagonists are all connected, though seemingly separated by years and distances. Everything will make sense eventually. Or maybe even sooner.

I hope...

---

Read and comment on my #freewritemadness posts for a chance to WIN SteemBasicIncome shares! For more information, click on the first banner at the end of this post

---

In case anybody's wondering, this is my 81st 5 minute freewrite. (Disclaimer: even under normal circumstances, these usually take me significantly longer than 5 minutes to write and edit. And given that November is novel writing month, "significantly longer" has taken on a whole new meaning 😉).

Today's prompt is "sponge"

Word count for this installment is 1718.

Come join in the fun at @freewritehouse! Lots of contests and other fun stuff for both writers and fans 😃🎉

Many thanks to the incomparable @mariannewest for hosting these wonderful daily freewrites :) https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-380-5-minute-freewrite-sunday-prompt-sponge

---

https://unsplash.com/photos/ACt2UZwHsIk

The Perfectionists

Chapter 4

Eve

---

Eve is the future. She knows this. How could she not? They’ve told it to her over and over again, almost from the first moment she could hear them speak. Her name, she’s been told, is a symbol, a touchstone. 'Eve' was the first human being, the first woman, in ancient myth. So she understands that she has been named for her first ancestor, in one way; and for somebody else’s first ancestor, in another. ‘Forerunner’ might be a better word for the relationship her namesake bears her. In any case, she finds a strange kind of comfort in this identification with the woman who first carried the name. Whether she was, in fact, an actual woman, or merely as symbol.

They say history repeats itself, and although Eve doesn’t see her own trajectory as a repetition, so much as the birth of something new (albeit out of the ashes of the old), the parallels are obvious. She, too, is a pioneer, beating a path for her descendants to follow, into this strange universe which is both frightening and beautiful. Yes, she is akin to the original Eve. The name suits her.

Although she doesn't get the part about the apple.

In spite of which, she’s never felt the need to look more deeply into it. The first time somebody said anything to her about it, she listened, and the next time, and she listened when they talked about it in school, and completed the required reading and writing assignments on the subject, and she thought it interesting enough, but not interesting enough to look into any further. And to be honest, the last hundred or so times somebody said something about it to her she barely even noticed. But now, all of a sudden, it seems crucial. It's become something she has to know more about.

This sudden interest has sparked a flurry of research, and the eventual discovery of a novella, self-published in 2036, entitled "The Fall", by a man named Alphonse Provost, who earned his living primarily as an actor in pornographic films. A novella in which God (the protagonist) speaks, in a kind of soliloquy or monologue, about what has happened between him, and Adam, and Eve. A strange little book that is throwing everything she thought she knew about herself and the people around her into question.

It started with something Hal said, a few nights ago, in her bed, his fingers still laced into her hair, her lips still bruised with his kisses. “Did God feel like this…?” he’d asked, and then stopped. Tears had appeared in his eyes, and Eve, alarmed, had asked him what was wrong, but instead of answering he’d buried his face in her neck and held her tightly for a few moments, and then let her go. Afterwards he’d gently refused to talk about it. He’d smiled at her and reassured her, told her that everything was ok, but there was a tightness around his mouth that sent a different message. She’d known he wasn’t talking about G.O.D.

So for the past few days she’s spent all of her free time reading, and watching, and listening to everything she can find on the subject, starting with what are considered to be the original versions of the myth, and from there to the so-called ‘apocryphal’ versions, to folklore and legends, theories as to the story’s origin and meaning, theology, criticism, Jungian analysis, round table forums, Feminist deconstructions, references in literature, fictional retellings… The Bubble’s information decks contain enough words on the subject to occupy her for who knows how long. She’s tired, but her curiosity drives her. She's found tantalizing clues as to the meaning behind his words, but nothing really promising until "The Fall". Nothing that blows the lid off of whatever it is that Hal is hiding from her. That all of them are hiding from her.

Because she knows that they aren’t telling her the whole truth. She can see it in their eyes when they speak to her. Some of them are better at hiding it than others, but if she looks hard enough, she always finds it: a flicker of something like guilt; or pity. Most of them can tell that she sees it, that she knows, but they don’t let on, and she doesn’t press them, believing it to be wasted effort. She loves each of them, in her way. They’re her parents, all twenty-six of them. Their children are her brothers and sisters. Three children, out of twenty six adults. More if you count those of their partners who are not part of G.O.D. Three children, out of thirty or so potential parents, are not enough. Each conception is considered to be a miracle. Pregnancies carried to term? Births? These are painfully rare and precious. Their species is dying.

And they love her. They love her as if she were one of their own children, which, in a way, she is. But also, they love her for the hope that she brings, not only to their dreams, but to their waking lives. And she is grateful to them, and loves each of them in return.

But not the way she loves Hal.

With all of her altered heart, she loves Hal. His boyish, mischievous smile. His perpetually messy hair and casual bearing and intense eyes. G.O.D.’s Chief Technical Assistant in Charge of Bioengineering, the one who wrote the tweaks to the genetic code that have made her happily different from her brothers and sisters. Those poor little ones who never made it past the twelve month mark.

Hal was the only one who would touch her at first. The only one brave enough to cross the airlock and enter her cocoon and talk with her face to face, not via holoscreen, and without wearing a biohazard suit. The only one willing to breathe the air she breathed. To drink from the same cup, and eat from the same plate. And, eventually, the only one willing to hold her. To sleep with her. To kiss her.

She hadn’t been born like other children. She’d opened her eyes for the first time at the age of twelve, as best they could approximate. Before that, she’d been a cypher, number 5,972,084 in a long series of failed experiments. Something they were afraid to name, afraid to get attached to. Afraid to love. They’d watched her grow, inside of her amniotic sac, monitoring her progress, and when she’d reached nine months successfully, the first of her kind to do so, they’d begun to feed something through her placental tube to speed her growth, not wanting to remove her too early, but also not wanting to wait for a decade or more, only to have something go fatally wrong at the last minute. They also began to feed her something that kept her asleep, drifting in a pleasant haze of sensation, so that she was perpetually dreaming. And her dreams were strange, and beautiful. She learned to control them, to do as she liked within them: to fly, to change her shape, to visit the most bizarre and beautiful and fantastical landscapes her inner self could conjure up.

After a time, she became aware of the dreams of those around her, and she learned to visit them, the other denizens of The Bubble, and particularly those who belonged to G.O.D., because their sleeping quarters were closest to her own. The dreams of the others, the waking people, were different. Often disturbing, sometimes nightmarish, she’d been afraid, when she'd first come into contact with them, that she would somehow absorb all of that pain, that it would seep little by little into her beloved dreamworld, that she wouldn't be able to stop herself soaking it up like a sponge. But being by nature kind, and curious, she’d gradually learned to bring herself, little by little, closer to the dreams of others, observing at first from the outside, and, eventually crossing over into them. Which was when she discovered whole strange worlds within their dreamscapes that she was unfamiliar with, and that seemed as endlessly intriguing and fascinating to her as the ones she’d experienced in her own dreams.

In experiencing these new realms, and getting to know the dreamers themselves, by far the sweetest surprise was to find that she was able to offer them comfort, to bring some of the innocent, playful magic of her dream life into theirs, to remind them of their own beauty. And the love that they felt for her, this strange little pixie, this luminous, ethereal nighttime visitor who brought to them the sweetness that was missing from their own dreams, soothed and comforted her as well. Often they seemed to remember her, and the love that they bore her, from night to night, though she was, for the most part, unable to reach them during the day. Though she found this alarming, not understanding where they had gone, having had no experience of the waking world, they always came back eventually. Thus, in dream, she made her first friends.

But those same friends had been afraid of her, when she was finally born, so that for a time she found herself unable to bring them comfort anymore, or be comforted by them, even in sleep.

When analysis of the data collected by G.O.D.’s monitoring systems and statistical projections had begun to show a high enough probability that she would survive it, she’d been awakened and removed from The Womb, to be bathed and clothed and fed (and subsequently to begin to undergo the endless battery of tests which she would be subjected to over the following fourteen months and more). She’d screamed and screamed, uncomprehending, in the agony of it, the being ripped from her warm, liquid dreamworld, the dry air pressing in on her eyes, her skin. They’d made everything as comfortable as they could for her, keeping the lighting as close as possible to a level she was already familiar with, the air temperature identical, the food in liquid form, and also at body temperature. They treated her gently, kindly, like a precious creature, a treasured child. But the biohazard suits they wore frightened her, and the strangeness of it all, and more than any of that: the loss of the ability to fly. She couldn’t understand, at first, why she couldn’t do it. She didn’t know the difference between waking life and dream.

---

©2018 Bennett Italia, all rights reserved.

Horizontal rulers courtesy @cryptosharon

For a chance to WIN SteemBasicIncome, read and comment on my #freewritemadness posts For more information visit the @freewritehouse