#938sps

(938 Seconds Per Second)

Funny enough! I ended up never needing to refer to Mendoza by first name in the story, so I didn't figure it out while drafting, and then I got attached to him as a last-name-only type of guy.

(938 Seconds Per Second) / (Sewn) / (God’s Favorite)

AAAAAAAAAAAAA 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹. Not like a bot comment at all!! (No bot would go the distance to actually learn story titles.)

As a hopeful-archivist and future-librarian with memory problems myself, I wonder if Sampson was intentionally written with a hint of ADHD, or if that's simply interpretation of the presented information on my part? The nervousness certainly has its explanation in his (gestures at everything) circumstances, but still.

Anyway I just really like it.

(938 Seconds Per Second)

Ahhhhhh thank you!!! 🥺🥺🥺 Absolutely enormous compliment. I love reading Ray Bradbury short stories in school, and honestly you're making me want to revisit his work since it's been so long.

ADHD is absolutely a sensible read for Sampson! My intention for him was broader, in that you can answer it several ways and be correct, and ADHD is absolutely one of those answers. The core of it, to me, is the total tragedy of Sampson's character - the last living relic of his people whose only reason for being alive is as a living encyclopedia and he's not good at it... He cares!! He WANTS to be good at it. But he can't do it well on his own. And he has no help. No one else cares. He's the bullied kid in the lunchroom but there is no going home. He's 1,000 years ahead of the death of every single person he ever knew and now his entire reason for being alive is to sit in this lunchroom, bullied by everyone friend to no one, existing, remembering, and everything he forgets and everything he fails to remember is another strike against "why are you even alive"?

(938 Seconds Per Second)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaa thank you!!!! 🥺🥺🥺.

As for cut stuff, there isn't really any cut written material. (It was more like I got stalled-out while first trying to write 938sps before I discovered how pivotal Sampson was to everything.)

But I absolutely did toy with an entirely different premise to execute the time dilation plotline with. I believe my original idea was about a young girl who crash lands on a planet, and strangers find her, and she's distraught because she's been separated from her father. Her father was getting them away from danger and could only send her, and he sent her alone.

The strangers come to task and try to help her locate her father--what's his name, what did he look like, what planet did they come from. And when the pieces come together, the strangers realize her pod she arrived in is a "super lightspeed" pod, and her father, her war-torn civilization, her planet, have been dead for hundreds of years now.

These tags are taking me out

(938 Seconds Per Second)

(938 Seconds Per Second)

Probably that I'd very nearly abandoned it!

The idea started from an article I was reading about time dilation - the gist of it being "okay but what's to stop you from accelerating infinitely? Up to and past the speed of light?" and the conclusion was kind of "you sort of can... from YOUR frame, from YOUR perception of time, potentially. but from a resting frame, you will appear to only ever approach the speed of light." So even if you could perceive yourself traveling 100 light years in a month... to every resting body, 100 years have passed.

So I was like cool! Fucked up potential! I really liked the concept of "you can notice your mistake after 5 minutes and already be 100 years too late to fix it."

I toyed with a few ideas and ended up gravitating towards "what if one shipmate intentionally leaves another shipmate behind... and by the time this is discovered days later, the left-behind shipmate is long dead." I also settled on "what if your shipmate sucked so bad that he causes you to snap and leave him behind"

So I started writing with that as the core idea. Main character Mendoza has the Worst Coworker in the World Universe, and he snaps and leaves Carson behind on a planet.

...But then I was a little lost. I was struggling with the substance. The "what makes this interesting" and the "what ties this all together." Sure I could just write Carson being an ass for 3,000 words and then... Mendoza leaves him behind the end?

I was even struggling with the first draft because part of me was like "what's even enjoyable about reading about a completely insufferable person...?" Even Mendoza himself is no peach. Maybe the whole concept was just unpalatable. I kinda just... ditched it where it was.

Then I came back to it this weekend and decided to kind of rethink it, fresh. And the absolute biggest difference between the early stumbling draft and what I ended up with was Sampson. He actually solved so much. (He existed in the early draft, but not importantly.) He introduced the character stakes and the tying thread to the story I was missing.

Now it wasn't just Carson annoying Mendoza. Once Sampson's tome enters the story, the stakes change. Mendoza is now in the middle of Carson actively destroying the thing Sampson is even alive for. Mendoza is now in a position of actively needing to make choices--he could intervene and try to save Sampson's tome. He could tattle. He could do anything--but he doesn't. Because "not letting Carson win" is the single most important thing. Mendoza doesn't need to be any kind of hero. He chooses not to be.

And now the reader is captive to this conflict, privy to everything Mendoza knows, and does not act on, as Sampson unravels in the background.

And now we have a thread that leads to Carson and Mendoza ending up on-planet together. Carson isn't out there for shits and giggles, he's out there because the plot point about Sampson's tome led to this. Now Carson knows about the cargo, and now he's offering Mendoza the chance to not just be passive witness, but be accomplice to Sampson's destruction.

And it's enticing. It's unimaginable wealth, and it's getting off the shitty ship, and it's never seeing Carson again. Mendoza has the chance to stick to his every-man-for-himself ideals and go along with Carson. And it's interesting to explore Carson's reasoning for why they deserve this! They're the ones who sacrificed 300 years for this journey! Don't they deserve this over some fucker who wasn't even born when this mission started?

And then it reaches one pivotal moment--Carson's gleeful declaration that Sampson will totally kill himself once he discovers what they've stolen. Because now there are consequences to this action. If Mendoza follows through with this, it's with the knowledge that he's gotten Sampson killed. (And maybe he shouldn't care. Maybe it doesn't matter. As he's asserted this whole time.)

Mendoza doesn't do it. He pulls up the ladder after Carson.

He doesn't let Carson win.

And then the ending... the ending where Sampson very much was witness to Mendoza following Carson out of the ship. If Sampson were every-man-for-himself, he could just comply and tell Major Kensington what he saw. Mendoza knew Carson was outside the ship. Mendoza came back. Carson didn't. The ship took off. Sampson knows this all.

But, Sampson has an idea of what, may, have happened. He knows he accidentally revealed too much to Carson. He knows Carson stole the tome which contains information about the cargo. Sampson, maybe, knows what decision Mendoza made.

So Sampson lies to Kensington. Sampson will swear on his life he never saw Mendoza that evening. No one will ever know.