pbray

Thanks to

matociquala for International embarass yourself as an artist day. Many people on my friends list have chimed in, so with the example of their bravery before me, I'll add to the pollution of the blogsphere.

My early juvenilia is written in notebooks, and the somewhat later offerings (in .TXT files) are on a floppy disk but I no longer have a working computer than can read a floppy disk. Ooops.

So I dug up this treasure, which isn't quite juvenilia, but is definitely bad, and dates to my pre-published days. I can't tell the exact date, but it's from the days when Lotus AmiPro was considered a pretty spiffy wordprocessor.

Untitled Space Opera Fragment by Patricia Bray

"My people will come for me," he said.

Her heart sank. They all said that. She had thought that this one was different. Maybe, just maybe he was strong enough to survive. But she had been mistaken.

"They will come for me," he insisted. "Space Patrol never leaves one of their own behind." He gripped her arm fiercely, as if he could somehow force her to share his belief.

She waited, but he would not let go. "Of course they will," she finally said.

He loosened his grip, and slumped back against the wall, burying his head in his hands. "You don't believe me," he said. "But I know they will come for me. They won't let them keep me.."

She rose and looked down at the new prisoner. He was a man marked for death. Already defeated, by his belief that someone would come to save him. She knew better. She had seen hundreds like him, over the years of her captivity. Each had started out the same, confident of rescue. Surely their family, clan, company or military would come to rescue them. And then as the days slipped into weeks and months, with no rescue in sight, they lost their will to survive. Their hope and naiveté made them easy prey for the masters.

Within her, the small part of her that remembered freedom felt pity for him. So she tried once more, telling him the truth he needed to hear. "No one will come for you. If you want to live, you must learn to take care of yourself. First, last, and always. Trust no one, care for no one. Only then will you be able to survive."

Even as she said the words, she knew they were wasted. She turned abruptly and left the compartment, knowing that to stay would give the prisoner the false idea of friendship.

She was young enough to still be a child according to his laws, but her experience had aged her far beyond her years. There was a hardness and a purpose in her that made him feel young and foolish. No one that young should be that hard, or should have witnessed so much in her brief life.

He knew that she did not believe that the Space Patrol would come for him. At times he found it hard to believe himself. But he clung to that belief fiercely. He would live for the day of his rescue, and for seeing the expression on her face when she realized that she had been set free.

*Face-palm* Yes, I wrote a scene that included the "Space Patrol"! I hope I was trying for irony, but sadly suspect I was being serious.