Started work on this one today. It’s odd - with two stories done, I’m officially a third of the way through, which feels like an achievement given that it took a year to get about a hundredth of the way in.
This one has a framing narrative, which is done to death, but I’m hoping that the contrast between the two (woman discovered by raiders in the desert and forced to come to terms with the reality of her potential death vs. charged political thriller with a lot of backstabbing and scapegoating) bears out some originality.
It’s funny - this is maybe the one story that doesn’t have some pointed comment on the society that’s risen out of the ashes - one with soft prescriptivism, where following the rules is supposedly a guarantee of a meaningful life, but only as long as the government is a well-oiled machine (spoiler: it squeaks and clatters like a motherfucker). There’s maybe something to be found in that the people she encounters at the start of the story are rejects, fellow victims of exile who caused more problems than could be fixed, but that’s not really the focus. It’s a thriller first and foremost.
Honestly, I’m not sure where the rationale for having government-assigned assassins comes from. The protagonist only executes high-profile individuals in (often) high-profile situations - there’s a narrative reason for the assassin’s existence, so she isn’t just providing a service. It came, roughly, from Martin Luther King, Jr. - specifically, these lines (my emphasis):
Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.
I won’t condescend by saying what happened next, but things like this seem oddly prescient. King’s life was one lived with meaning, and while his assassination was tragic (longevity, after all, has its place) this speech would lose some of its poetry had he lived well into old age. He was an individual who knew that he had lived a meaningful life, and his life - cut short as it was - occupies a unique place in history.
The society I’m writing is a little different. Meaning is created through a billion algorithms housed in a seventy-storey-high supercomputer, four hundred years after the fall of civilisation. Statements like the one above threaten to slide into offensiveness if read the wrong way, because they come down to subjectivity - the unknown elderly King might have had multiple arcs that came to define the lives of subsequent generations. Maybe he had a renewed will to see the so-called Promised Land on the day of his death. Making express judgements (rather than just thinking aloud) on the meaning of the length and breadth of someone’s life is something that no individual should ever do.
But.
The machine that makes these judgements isn’t an individual. Its capacity for knowledge of humanity far exceeds the best and brightest minds of its day, and while anyone could probe the rationale behind what appears to be a life blinked out of existence, there has never been an occasion when things have gone wrong while it’s operational. Supposedly. There’s a bit of depth to that, but that’s (literally) another story.
The one I’m writing is an example of the impossible - where a miscalculation means that the wrong man is killed by the protagonist, with a chain reaction of consequences that’s nearly impossible to contain. Damage control, in this society, is exile. It’s problem-solving at its most brutal.
That’s roughly where I am so far. This went on far longer than it needed to. I’m excited about this one, needless to say.