Prologue: The Crisis

A teenage technician's mission to harness mantra-powered technology ends in disaster, annihilating Blue Ash City and leaving a haunting legacy 20 years later.

Prologue

The Crisis

Beneath Blue Ash City’s neon-lit streets, deep under a dying shopping center, a hidden chamber pulsed with electric life. Machines stacked like skyscrapers thrummed with a dull, steady heartbeat. Cables snaked across the concrete, black veins glistening in the dim halogen glow. The air stank of ozone and nervous sweat. Chino Tokoma sat at the central console; sixteen years old, hands trembling slightly as she forced them steady over the keys.

Ghost-light from floating screens flickered over Chino’s face in sickly greens and blues. In the stale underground dark, every electronic beep was too loud, every shadow too sharp. She could taste bitter coolant on the back of her tongue. Her stomach churned, but she swallowed the fear. Focus, she told herself, picturing her grandmother’s sunlit rice fields to calm her racing heart. It didn’t help much.

No one fully understood how ancient mantras and quantum code had become entangled in this experiment. Lines of Uchellan prayer scrolled through the software, fused with cutting-edge algorithms. It was bleeding-edge science that felt like dark magic. The promise was limitless energy, a new era of power for humanity. The risk was unthinkable: tearing a hole in reality itself and letting the unknown bleed through.

Chino’s fingers flew across the controls, initiating sequences with practiced precision. A low hum reverberated through the chamber as dormant circuits came alive. Above her, Blue Ash City went about its midnight routine--drunks stumbling out of karaoke bars, neon signs buzzing through a light drizzle. They had no idea what was brewing far below. Down here, one wrong move could wipe out the millions sleeping above. Chino felt that weight with every keystroke.

Her headset crackled. “Engines are green, awaiting your go,” came Falcon One’s voice through layers of static. He was the field technician stationed at the experiment’s edge--out where reality began to fray. Chino pictured him in his pressurized suit, floating in darkness beside the massive Mantra Device, tethered by faith and fiber-optic cable. “Roger that, Falcon One,” she whispered, trying to keep her voice from shaking. Her reflection in the monitor looked back at her: wide-eyed, determined, and afraid.

Her heart thudded as she initiated the final sequence. Lines of code scrolled in glowing green across her primary screen. Each command she entered was answered by distant clanks of machinery and the rising thrum of the Mantra Drive spooling up. Within the core of the device, a recorded chant began to play; low, resonant syllables reverberating in time with the electronics. The sound was a human drone woven into the wiring, a ritual murmur riding on the circuits. The fusion of prayer and program sent a chill up Chino’s spine.

A sudden red flash splashed across her console. WARNING. Chino’s breath hitched. Not now. Power levels were spiking off the charts, the readings bleeding into dangerous red zones. She hissed a curse under her breath and flipped two emergency toggles, desperate to coax the system back into balance. For an agonizing moment, the lights dimmed and that droning chant warped into a garbled hiss; like a chorus of distorted whispers crawling out of the machine. For a moment, it almost sounded like laughter.

The overload relented. Readouts stabilized from red to amber, then back to green. Crisis averted, for now. “Core stable,” Chino reported shakily into the mic, pushing a strand of sweat-damp hair from her eyes. Across the comm, Falcon One exhaled audibly in relief. Chino forced a thin smile, but the unease twisting in her gut only tightened. The system was stable, yet she felt as if something unseen had slipped in during that glitch; a presence watching from the dark corners of the chamber.

Chino exhaled slowly. They were poised to open the gate, to reach into the void and finally see what lay beyond. Instead, an alarm shrieked to life. A klaxon sound tore through the control room, flashing urgent orange on every screen. A new blip spiked on the radar overlay; something moving in the void where nothing should be. “Commander, we have an anomaly,” Chino called out, voice tight, as she watched the object hurtling toward their portal. This wasn’t part of the plan. Nothing was supposed to be out there.

Static swallowed the response before it reached her. Then Falcon One’s panicked voice cut through, crackling in her ear: “I see it... it’s coming right at me!” Chino’s blood ran cold. On the central holo-display, she caught a glimpse of it; a searing point of green-white light blazing in the blackness, closing in fast. It moved like a shooting star on a collision course, but there was something wrong about it, something hungry in that glare. For a split second, Chino thought she heard that digital whisper again, lurking beneath the static, and her hands turned to ice.

“Falcon One, evasive maneuvers!” Commander Honda’s order ripped through the chaos. Chino could only watch in helpless silence, heart lodged in her throat. The brightness on the screen swelled into a blinding halo, flooding the chamber with an otherworldly luminescence. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. In that artificial daylight, Chino felt an overwhelming wave of dread wash over her; a sense of ancient, malevolent presence rushing in with the light. Every instinct in her screamed that they had opened a door that should have stayed shut.

The impact came an instant later. A white-hot blast of light and force tore through the lab, eclipsing thought and sound. BOOM. The floor jolted violently; Chino was flung backward from her chair as the console erupted in a fountain of sparks. Banks of monitors exploded, shards of glass and twisted metal scything through the air. Concrete walls cracked like old bone, and the ground itself buckled. She heard screaming; her own, the others’, she couldn’t tell; merged with the howling static and the shriek of rending steel. In one terrifying heartbeat, the world disintegrated into chaos. And then, just as suddenly, nothing but darkness.

Twenty years after that night, a new metropolis stands where Blue Ash City once did. New Ash City’s skyline glitters with glass towers and neon holograms; a monument to progress built atop a mass grave. Technology has buried the horror, or at least tried to: self-driving taxis whisper down roadways, digital billboards bathe the streets in artificial daylight, all of it covering the ashes underfoot. To the new generation, the Blue Ash explosion is a distant legend, a ghost story reduced to history logs. And yet on this night, the past refuses to stay silent.

Apricot Signa watches the anniversary broadcast flicker across her bedroom wall. The news anchor recounts the grim litany in somber tones: two million lives lost in an instant; three days of smoke that blotted out the sun; the rise of New Ash City from the radioactive rubble. Apricot has heard it all before; every year the same hollow memorial. History packaged as a neat newsfeed, tragedy rendered into a tidy montage of archive footage. She mutes the sound, but in the ensuing quiet she swears she can still hear something under the rain and distant hovercraft engines… a faint crackle of static, like an echo of a scream.

Rain drizzles against the window, tracing neon rivulets down the glass as Apricot gazes at the city beyond. New Ash City is bright tonight, alive and electric; every gleaming streetlight and humming server seems to proclaim victory over the darkness of twenty years ago. And yet, beneath the hum of cars and the buzz of augmented reality displays, she feels a familiar chill crawling up her spine. It’s as if something unseen still lurks in the city’s bones, humming in the wires, waiting for its moment. Twenty years of peace have passed, but the dead of Blue Ash are not at rest. The horror that was buried is still breathing, quiet… and patient.

Reviews

[JayG]

First, when posting on almost any site, if you use leading spaces or a tab to indent it will be stripped out. For this site, and when submitting a manuscript to a publisher, indent via the word processor's top ruler (though for a publisher there's a lot more to do).

• Now I feel my writer's spirit is well enough to endeavor into the possibility of bleeding it for a living.

Because you said that, and because there are problems that are invisible to you, I thought you would want to know what they are and how to fix them. So take a deep breath...and perhaps a few sips of wine to ease the shock. 🤣

Here’s the killer: Start-to-finish this is a transcription of you being a storyteller. And that is the single most common trap that catches the hopeful writer. I see it in about 90% of what’s posted in the online writing sites.

The reason it’s invisible to you is that you cheat. When you begin reading you ALREADY have a mental image of the setting. You know what’s going to happen, and, you know the protagonist’s mindset and backstory. So you have the thing you don't give the reader: context.

More than that, as you read, you hear the emotion in the narrator’s voice—your voice. And you literally perform as you read, using gesture, facial expression, and even body language. That matters, because verbal storytelling is a performance art, where HOW you tell the story matters as much as what you say. That’s a problem, because to work, the reader needs to hear/see YOUR performance as they read. But how can they know the emotion you’d place into the words? How can they duplicate your performance.

Your wordsmith skills are excellent. But the trap has several facets. To try to make the setting seem real you’re way over-describing things, and getting into trouble because of it.

In the first and third paragraph she’s tasting things. In paragraph two you have the light from a data screen flickering on her face. But at the same time, it “it up” her features. How can it do both? More than that—and ignoring the fact that data screens aren’t showing constantly changing information—have you ever, in all your life, seen light from a data screen “flickering” on someone’s face? We have to assume that if it’s a workplace there are lights.

But more than that, who cares? You’re describing what COULD be seen, were it a film. When you say, “Ghostly light from data screens flickered across her face,” who’s watching and describing? You’re neither in the story or on the scene. And she can’t see her own face. And of more importance, were she to not taste those things, and not be flickered on, with the action change in the smallest way? No. So all that embellished description does is to sloooow the pace of the story.

In general, if it takes longer to read than to do in life, the story drags. And, when you say, “The screen's red flash sent a wave of panic through Chino, leaving a copper tang in her mouth,” you know what the "flash" means. But for the reader it's meaningless as it’s read.

Bottom line: You write well, but like most hopeful writers, you’re using the nonfiction skills we’re given in school to ready us for employment, in an attempt to write fiction. And while that works perfectly for you, were this a submission to a publisher, It would be immediately rejected. And your story deserves better.

The solution? Simple. Acquire the skills the pros take for granted—the skills that were used to create all the fiction you’ve chosen since you learned to read. That matters, because nonfiction can only inform. But the emotion-based skills of the Commercial Fiction writer that you want to be, will place the reader into the story.

Look at it this way: If we make the reader know the situation exactly as the protagonist does, in all respects—including the effect of their personality, background, resources, needs, and imperatives, then when something is said or done, the reader, learning it first, will react as the protagonist is ABOUT TO.

Then, when the protagonist’s reasoning matches that of the reader, it will seem that the protagonist is their avatar, and doing what they choose to have them do. And THAT’S where the joy of reading lies.

When reading fiction we don’t learn that the protagonist has fallen in love, WE are made to fall in love. WE live the adventure...if the author' taken the time to learn how to make us do that. E. L. Doctorow put it perfectly with, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

Will fixing the problem involve lots of study and practice? Of course. You’ll be learning a profession. But so what? The learning is filled with, “So THAT’S how they do it!" And the practice is writing stories that are more fun to write and more to read.

Personally? I’d suggest starting with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader.

https://dokumen.pub/techniques-of-the-selling-writer-0806111917.html

It’s an older book (circa 1962), but the man was brilliant, and used to fill auditoriums when he took his workshops on the road. And his student list read like a who’s who of American fiction at the time.

So try a few chapters for fit.

And for what it might be worth as an overview of the traps and gotchas awaiting the hopeful writer, you might try a few of my articles and YouTube videos.

But whatever you do, hang in there and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

“In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”
~ Sol Stein

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
~ Groucho Marx

[Jayce Ran]

I think I understand what you meant. Does this version seem more fitting?

[JayG]

There's an old saying that if all you own is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And if all you own are nonfiction writing skills, anything you write will read like nonfiction. So, start to finish, this version is you, telling the reader a story in a voice that contains none of the emotion you hear as you read this. It's presented in overview, to a reader who expects you to make them live the adventure in real-time, as-the-protagonist.

Take a read of this article:
http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

It's a condensation of two of the techniques outlined in that book I suggested, One, the MRU technique is critical to a feel of realism, but you're not yet using it.