This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.
The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real
Previously: A spaceship crashed through the portal station, destroying much of the foundations of the Joint Council tower above. Former detective Nisha Chakraborty is near the very top of the building, with DI Robert Ford and the conspiring Lord Hutchinson…
London. Mid-Earth.
1980. July.
Rolling like waves along the coast, the floor of the open plan office buckled and cracked, snapping apart in bursts of tiling and insulation, desks being upturned, computer monitors falling and swivel chairs sliding at speed from one end to the other. The Joint Council tower was coming apart and Nisha Chakraborty was still some 250 metres above ground.
“It’s supposed to do this in an earthquake, right?” she said, stumbling as the room tilted.
“You’re thinking of Japan,” Ford said, dragging Hutchinson along by his arm. “We don’t have earthquakes.”
They could feel another shockwave rippling up the building, distant and far below then travelling through their feet and into the ceiling. Light bulbs exploded, panels shook loose, windows partitioning interior rooms smashed.
“A terrorist attack,” Hutchinson mumbled, “it has to be. Some of your own people, no doubt. Was this part of your plan?”
“No,” Ford said, giving Hutchinson a shove, “blowing ourselves up was not part of the plan.”
“Surprising,” the politician sneered. “You lefties are always turning upon one another, after all. It’s why you always lose.”
“You’re the one going to jail, fucker,” Nisha said, heading for the floor’s exit. Whatever was happening, the only response was to evacuate the building as quickly as possible. Zoltan and the others would already be on their way to the lobby, and had far less distance to travel. She clutched the binder of critical files to her chest, hoping that it would be enough to put Hutchinson, Maxwell and their entire conspiracy behind bars for a long, long time.
It was the noise that was the most disturbing, even more than the movement underfoot or the sight of the office tearing itself to pieces. The building was screaming, and had not stopped since it had started. Steel beams that should not move were contorting into new shapes.
Her finger hovered over the elevator button, then she glanced back at Ford. “No lifts, right?”
“No lifts,” he confirmed, pointing to the door to the stairwell.
“We’re on the sixtieth floor,” Hutchinson said, looking aghast.
Ford shot him a look. “Then we’d better crack on.”
The door didn’t budge when Nisha tried it, the frame already warped beyond its original design. Swearing, she braced herself then ran her shoulder into it as hard as she could. Coming away at the hinges, the door tipped and thudded to the floor.
On the other side, she found a deep stairwell already cobwebbed with long cracks, as far down as she could see. Whatever had happened to the building, was still happening, it had ripped through it from basement to rooftop. A growing urgency gripped her, an instinct that every second spent inside the tower was taking them closer to disaster.
“Fast as you can,” she said to the other two. “We need to get out of the tower.”
There was movement on the stairs far below, tiny toy people running around and around the edge of the square pit, Few people had been on Hutchinson’s floor, it seemed. Somewhere in the distance a klaxon rang on repeat. She hopped down the steps two at a time, glancing over her shoulder at every ninety-degree turn to check that Ford was still there with Hutchinson.
“I’d have been home hours ago if it wasn’t for your little riot,” he said. “Staying in my office seemed like the safe decision.”
They should have handcuffed him to his desk and left him to go down with his ship. Hutchinson deserved no less, after all the shit he’d pulled over the years. So much blood on his hands, including John Callihan’s. And for what? That was the part that tore Nisha up inside about the whole thing: that Hutchinson, Baltine and Matheson had done it for such flimsy reasons. A vague notion that they’d been wronged, that somehow they were the victims. Nigel Maxwell was at least a classic sort of power-grubbing political vermin.
Down they went, storey after storey, Nisha’s feet finding a kind of rhythm as she moved, placing her feet precisely and swiftly. Speed was vital, but it’d do her no good if she twisted an ankle.
The lights flickered and went out, leaving them suspended in darkness. The tower groaned and cried out, and she could hear plaster crumbling from the walls and metal shearing off from the stairs somewhere nearby. The steps swayed underfoot and she gripped the railing, acutely aware that they were still probably fifty floors up, with the centre of the stairwell a straight drop to the bottom. A cacophony echoed up and down over and over, the sound of something heavy falling, and falling, and falling. Her ears felt that they would bleed.
A deathly red glow flooded the shaft, throwing everything into sharp relief. Deep black shadows played on every surface, making it difficult to judge distance or where each step ended. Emergency lighting of some sort. She started moving again—
Ford’s hand gripped her shoulder tightly, almost to the point of hurting. He had remarkably big hands, she realised, having never previously noticed.
“Watch where you’re going.” He nodded past her, and Nisha’s eyes adjusted to the strange lighting, only to realise that the stairs below were entirely gone, shorn clean off to leave only protruding metal spikes. The stairs resumed three floors down from where they were, albeit now covered in mangled debris.
“Back up,” he continued, and led the way to the previous floor. Banging open the fire escape, Ford took them through into another large office space, already evacuated and eerily empty.
“There’s another fire escape on the far side,” Hutchinson squawked. “We can try that one.”
Nisha could feel the building sliding beneath her, tilting. She hurried along, binder of files tucked under her arm, moving past abandoned desks covered with spilled coffee and upturned stationery. The red door to the stairwell was up ahead.
Lurching violently, the entire open-plan office dropped down in one corner, glass shattering and ceiling panels blowing out. The floor turned into a slide and they each fell, feet pulled out from under them, tumbling and rolling. Desks and chairs and filing cabinets went with them, smashing into each other, and Nisha raised her hands to protect her head. The folder of evidence slipped away. The far wall shattered and disintegrated, glass and frames, leaving a gaping hole to the outside. Beyond she could see London splayed out below, the Thames snaking its way through the city. She grabbed for any kind of hold that would halt her uncontrolled slide towards the gap and found it in a support pillar that was somehow still in place. Piles of paper, staplers, pencils, whiteboards all fell past her, and she felt something slice into her forehead.
Taking a breath, she tried to make sense of where she was. That side of the office had largely collapsed, and she would need to clamber back up a steep slope in the direction of the stairs. Assuming they were still there. Ford hadn’t fallen as far, having managed to brace himself against a bolted-down desk. Wind buffeted her, swirling her hair around her face. The sun was going down.
A cry for help came from further down the collapsed floor. Hutchinson had slipped almost to the broken edge; another couple of metres and he’d have been in free-fall. Instead, he’d become lodged on an unstable pile of swivel chairs, which looked like it could give way at any moment.
She spied the binder, which had come to rest beneath the remains of a desk, also very close to the edge but away from Hutchinson’s position. The cover of the binder flapped, threatening to eject its contents out of the smashed wall and over the city.
Hutchinson could get screwed: she needed that evidence. If Lord Hutchinson became a smeary mess on the pavement far below she wouldn’t feel too bad about it. John Callihan had been decapitated, his head thrown at Clarke. Hutchinson had arranged the killing. Nisha hadn’t even gone to the funeral, too unbearably guilty to face John’s fiancée when she’d been fucking him for months. It had just happened, and she’d meant to end it, but then John had died and everything was too late.
If she climbed down the incline, using the piled-up desks, she should be able to reach the folder. Getting back up to Ford while holding it would be a different trick, but she’d figure that out when it came to it. Still holding on to the pillar, she shifted her weight and placed a foot on a nearby desk: it instantly shifted, sliding away from her, picking up speed and bashing into other objects as it fell, before spiralling dramatically out into space.
There was still another potential route to the evidence, which would take longer, but was doable. She could do it.
There was a whimper from Hutchinson, who was adjusting his position, trying to get some kind of handhold. He was closer to the edge than she’d realised, precariously at risk from simply dropping out of the building.
Ford was shouting something, was waving at her to climb up towards him. She saw the folder slip closer to the edge. Heard Hutchinson pleading.
A roller blind had been torn from its mount somewhere in the office and was now tangled near her feet. She picked it up, bracing herself against the pillar, and started unravelling it. Swallowing, making herself concentrate, she held one end tightly and threw the other, watching as it tumbled open like a plastic ladder. Her throw was good, the far end coming to rest an arm’s reach from where Hutchinson was crouched. He grabbed at it, eyes frantic, and began pulling himself up: the incline wasn’t vertical, and with the assistance of the makeshift ladder he was able to make progress. Nisha remained braced against the pillar, hoping it would hold, the blind looped around her arm several times. The plastic slats cut into her skin but still she maintained her grip, until Hutchinson was level with her.
“Get up here!” Ford shouted again.
She looked back to the folder of evidence, but it was already gone, fluttering out somewhere on the breeze.
Another hand on her shoulder, Hutchinson this time. “Come on, my dear,” he said, and began clambering back to Ford.
She followed behind him, watching the man claw his way back to survival. Hutchinson was someone who always found a way, who somehow evaded responsibility and consequences. Still, she’d kept him alive. That meant something.
It’s what John would have wanted.
They made it to the stairwell without further incident. Ford barrelled through the door and sighed in relief. “Stairs look intact,” he called out.
Hurrying down as fast as they could, the building heaving and creaking around them, Nisha wondered at the point of it all. The wrong people died, the wrong people survived. One failure after another, year over year. She struggled to remember when times had been good.
“Don’t worry,” Hutchinson said, breathing hard, the words staggering out of his mouth as he kept moving. “It would have been foolish of me to not keep backups.”
There was noise of footsteps from below, and then Zoltan Kaminski came into view, red in the face and looking exhausted as he hauled himself up the steps, pulling at the rail. Nisha grabbed for him and hugged him tightly. “What are you doing here?” She stared angrily at him. “You should be out of the building already!”
He grinned. “I came looking for you, stupid.”
Meanwhile.
Check out this amazing web design museum. Such a fascinating intersection of design, technology and (bad) fashion.
Anyone remember this?
Bonus points if you can name the movie this website was promoting:
I spent so much time tinkering with that thing.
Substack’s
put down some interesting thoughts that try to make some sense of the last 25 years of the internet:
The teenage daughter of a friend of mine has been deeply worried by the emergence of generative AI, which seems poised to undermine her entire graphic design education. I don’t think AI will be as much of a threat long-term as it is short-term. The current threat to employment is from idiotic executives making daft decisions, rather than the tech itself (which remains woefully inadequate for most professional tasks). Anyway,
has some good tips:
OK, let’s do some author notes, shall we?
Author notes
Well, all that big fantasy stuff with gods and spaceships having a scrap was a bit much, wasn’t it? I’d known ‘Gods and Robots’ was coming up for at least a year, probably longer, and put in a fair bit of preparatory work to make sure readers weren’t entirely blindsided by all of that.
But, still. It’s nice to get back to 1980s London, right? Albeit with a collapsing building, so we’re still essentially in Disaster Movie Genre territory. Ah well.
This chapter is one of those that required a bit of a rewrite. I got perhaps three quarters through, and the action was all largely the same as in the published version, but it felt a bit plodding, a bit event-led. It only started working when I went back and in revisions added in a lot more of Nisha’s inner thoughts, specifically about his disdain for Hutchinson, and linking everything back to Callihan and the very opening story of this entire thing.
The chapter then shifted from being a fairly tropey Disaster Movie scene to actually being about Nisha getting past the trauma she’d suffered years earlier when Callihan was murdered. That led to her descent into alcoholism, her general depression (both things I don’t think I’ve explored as well as I could have — Nisha is someone I’ll work on in any future editions of Triverse), and the general sense of her being stuck in a bit of a rut.
Today’s chapter is when she sort of gets past all that, even while being right in the middle of another traumatic and highly stressful event. She chooses to save Hutchinson, despite everything he’s done, and she gives up the evidence that she’s worked so hard to uncover.
The universe rewards her by Hutchinson offering backups, and then Zoltan coming to make sure she’s OK — thus reminding her that, in fact, in amongst all the darkness .in her life, there was a very bright light as well. None of this is a magical fix, but you can bet it goes a long way to helping her move on.
I mean, unless I kill them both next chapter, right?
So, yes, a good example of how a chapter can go from being plot-driven and a bit dull, to hopefully far more compelling through the injection of character motivation. This is hardly Advanced Writing, sure, but I often find that when a story isn’t quite coming together it tends to be due to the character work being too light, or too subtle.
Right, this chapter’s coming in late as it is, so I’d better shut up and post the thing.
Thanks, as always, for your support!
Nah, after all the character work you just did to restore some hope in Nisha, you aren't about to kill her or Zoltan off. You're just tweaking my nose*.
Ford, maybe.
*I do not actually believe that note was just to tweak my nose.