The Mechjudge

“The Mechjudge” is one of a couple novels I have sitting uselessly on my hard drives. It is a sci-fi story about a young girl who awakens in a bunker on a post-apocalyptic earth. She commandeers a “mechjudge”, a modest body of armor meant to police the planet as most of its population departed in a mad rush to get offworld as disaster loomed. Aliens are afoot, there’s some nice mech-on-mech action, and a whole lot of moping about. Clocking in at 120,000+ words, it is my longest novel to date. It is also without a doubt the worst of the bunch. Miraculously, it has survived a couple of laptop changes, some computer swaps, numerous HD reformats, a long running USB juggling act, and a horrifying decade of time.

Now, a difficulty I’ve had with transitioning to novel writing is the concept of pacing. This book was a great example of it. For example, the opening section of the book was 9,000 words long. What occurs in that 9,000 words? The protagonist enters a small grocery, examines some things, and then gets into a very brief gunbattle with aliens. That’s it. Not exactly a barnburner. As one can imagine, the book was a complete and total trainwreck. I think it has its moments, the action scenes are alright I guess, and some characters aren’t bad. It’s just everything in between does not work. One thing I had a hard time doing was grappling with the Young Adult-side of things. I kept finding myself trying to mimic YA-style dialogue and the like and just failing completely. Eventually I ditched the style about halfway through which only added to the slapdash nature of the book. Come the first editing pass I about wanted to launch the thing into the nearest USB flashdrive, take it out on a boat, and sink it with a barrel of concrete.

A crazy thing about returning to old novels is you often completely forget what they were about. If it’s a good story, then it can be refreshing. If it’s more like this one you end up with an, “Oh yeah, that’s why I dumpstered this shit” reaction. But, on the other hand, the novel is one of the oldest I have written. So in that sort of twilight I can’t help but have a little sense of fondness for it.

Here are some scenes. The first one is a, gasp, flashback. Following that are some action sequences.

Young Adult - Flashback

Claire and Hugh lingered in the café’s entrance.

It was old-school. Sheet metal canopy, bell above the door, large windows rounding about the almost trailer-esque shape of the building. Inside, a jukebox, broken cause it played too many songs, and unfixed because everyone’d heard enough. A long white menu along the wall, mostly just white space, half the menu already on the counter for the eye to see: pies, cakes, coffee. Waitresses curled beneath the menu’s overhang, their elbows cocked, their heads lowered atop their crossed hands. Their red aprons had the sense of having seen better, brighter days.

One waitress mumbled a greeting, but it was swallowed up in the loud ching of a cash register. A man smoking a cigarette and fisting a cloth down a mug tipped his head up, and then returned to his work. The cook was in the back, peering sternly from his grimy kitchen dugout, arms folded over the counter in wait of orders that so rarely called for his services. His face looked like a grease pan. He looked like the man who would destroy a jukebox while everyone looked on.

Hugh ushered Claire in.

The patrons of the place regarded the newcomers with glancing stares.

Claire sat down first, hopping on a stool, but Hugh took her arm and when she stared at her father the man shook his head. They took a booth.

A waitress came by.

“Coffee,” Hugh said.

“And for you?”

Claire thought. “Hot chocolate?” she asked, accentuating the question as if to brace for the inevitable we don’t have that.

But the waitress simply turned on her heels and walked away.

“Fine place,” Hugh said, cozying his elbows up on the table. He pushed a salt shaker back against the wall, looked at it, and then touched it again for no particular reason.

Claire nodded. “Yeah.”

A window gave them a good look of the city streets with all its steam and people and cars and leashed dogs and closed umbrellas and green bins and seemingly permanent scaffoldings and the nonstop mishmash of languages, a world where everyone was at once local and foreign.

The waitress dropped their drinks off. The girl stared at hers in anticipation.

“It’s not too hot,” the waitress said.

“Oh.” Claire pursed her lips in disappointment. “That’s okay.”

“Did you want whip cream? We’re all out so I could maybe use some syrup or…”

Claire glanced at her father.

Hugh smiled and nodded. “We’re fine, thanks.”

The waitress curtsied and with her knees still bending, spun away and left.

“That was weird,” Claire said, curling her hands around the mug. It wasn’t hot at all. She sipped.

Her father nodded to the rest of the café. He kept his voice low and said, “Look around you. These are the people that are going to be left behind.”

Claire swallowed her drink. She stared at her father until he noticed.

“What?” he asked.

“You’re going to be left behind.”

He gave her a flippant wave of the hand followed by a smirk. “Nonsense.”

Claire talked like a girl who had cried enough over the issue. She spoke in seriousness, “You are going to be left behind, dad, and you’ll never see me or mom again.”

And Hugh responded like a man who’d spent his every evening mulling that very reality over, and over, and over: “That’s right, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I don’t deserve a spot more than anyone else.”

A car came squealing down the road and echoing honks chased it into the city’s heart. An old lady stood in the wake of its squall, hollering with gravel in her voice, blaming the entire teenage population for ruining her sense of serenity.

“Besides,” Hugh said, grinning. “I kinda like it here.”

“I’ve seen how people are when it’s good. It’s gonna be terrible,” Claire said, thumbing her mug back and forth. She looked up. “When everyone leaves. It’s gonna be terrible, dad.”

Hugh shrugged. “It will be what it is.” He looked around the diner, eyeing the patrons. A waitress was watching them from behind the counter. Hugh leaned forward and whispered, “Keep your voice down about you going off-planet.”

The girl sipped her drink. It was already cold and the cocoa ran down her throat like grit.

“Say,” Hugh said. “What’s this I hear about you getting into another fight at school?”

Mom, Claire thought rather accusatively. She looked up. “Yeah, it was nothing.”

“Nothing? I didn’t teach my girl to fight.”

“Well, strictly speaking, you didn’t teach her to get beat up, either.”

Hugh bobbed his head, raising an eyebrow and sipping at his coffee. “Fair point.” He set the mug down and crossed his arms over the table. “That’s gonna be it, though. You hear? No more fighting.”

“I can’t control what happens,” Claire said.

“But try, alright?”

“I’ll try.”

“Alright.” Hugh reached over the table and patted his daughter on the cheek. Curling his hand back around the coffee mug, he asked, “So, you think it’s gonna be really bad, huh?”

Claire looked about the diner. Some people glanced away as her eyes passed them. Others kept staring. She sipped her drink and lied, “It’ll be fine.”

Casey Note

Below are a series of random action-sequences; most of these are unedited as during the editing process I did the flashbacks and “civil” scenes first before ultimately throwing in the towel. “Malcom” in this case is a floating robot that acts as her eyes and ears. The “mechjudge” suit is a body of human-sized armor that can protect against my physical damage, but isn’t exactly intended for war. It is a force of nature against most creatures, though later in the novel the protagonist runs into roving gangs of surviving humans who have commandeered military tech, as well as aliens which have evolved into monstrosities. The aliens are referred to as “meaties.” You can get a sense of Claire’s lonely angst in some of the lines.

Action Sequence 1 - Mech Survivability

The engine’s roar echoed through the teeth of blown out buildings as Claire drove the truck through another one-road town. She was barely at the wheel – dead-eyed, not paying attention, her hands moving the wheel in memorized patterns. Rusted bicycle in three, two… there it is. Same as always. Overturned semi, looking good. Mummified dead guy in rocking chair. Yup, still there. Grass growing through the pavement like arboreal manholes and — a dead deer? Not necessarily new, but a new one in a new place. The body ballooned as a buzzard barreled its way in.

“How are we on gas?” Malcom asked, staring out the passenger window as the carcass passed.

“We’re fine,” Claire said.

Driving the truck while sitting in a full-body power-suit was a feat in and of itself. The weight of the vehicle was biased to her side, giving an awkward angle to the view through the windshield. It reminded her of going through a funhouse as a kid, one of the few memories she had that went that far back. Maybe it was the constant driving that brought the imagery to her. If you knew all that lay ahead, why wouldn’t time be spent looking back?

But the memory was faded, tickling her with the faintness of a whisper pulled from oblivion. She could see the mirrors and the tilted walkways. The noise, there was some kind of noise in the funhouse, always, just… constant noise. She couldn’t remember if it was a good noise. She couldn’t remember if she went alone or with someone else. A place of mirrors always kept company. Was it her father? Her mother? Or was it –

Two people.

Two people.

Between buildings. Near a dumpster to the side of the road.

They crouched as the truck drew close.

Claire passed, letting off the gas as she looked out her window.

A woman? A child?

The woman put a finger to her lips.

“Look out!” Malcom screamed.

Claire jerked her head just in time to see the metal wire pull taut across the roadway.

Malcom’s magnetic pulse vibrated strongly as the droid braced for impact.

The cable struck halfway up the windshield with a violent crack and the sides of the vehicle resisted for only a moment before unpeeling like a tin of tuna. Glass sprayed into Claire’s visor and before she knew it the wire had caught her across the chest, violently folding the Mechjudge around it. Claire’s vision blurred as the truck continued on, her power-suit blowing a hole out the back as the vehicle shot forward, unfurling the metal of the vehicle around her like a baseball shedding its leather from the cork. She spun around the cable before falling to the pavement, the driver’s seat still imprinted to her back, and the truck’s scraps collapsed atop her like a crabshell. Ahead and with a glaring hole in its body, the rest of the chassis ambled onward, motoring and bouncing on its wheels before going offroad and slamming into a ditch. The hood popped up as a fire began to crackle in the engine block.

“Malcom...”

Claire got up, tearing the mutilated driver’s seat off her back, and started toward the truck.

A bullet dinged her helm, and another sparked a bright white as it ricocheted off her visor. The pilot winced as more shots came in.

“Leave me alone!” Claire screamed, throwing her hands out to the buildings on either side of the road. Shapes moved away from inside, illuminated in yellow flashes as the meaties fired.

Claire looked at the cable and followed its line to both ends. They had tied it around the pillared foundations of adjacent buildings. She grabbed the wiring with an arm extended out to each side and gave both ends a mighty pull at once. The buildings’ corners burst plaster out onto the street and the meaties, for a moment, realized they had made a terrible mistake. Screaming, Claire gave the cable as strong of a fight as the Mechjudge would allow, and the cable burst forth, cutting through the pillars of the buildings and bringing them both caving in. The meaties scattered, but they were caught in the falling blocks and crushed, many of them halfway out of the rubble. With a sharp twang, the cable lines looped past one another as the tension gave out. They rapped about the street with coiling, snakelike sapience, and then they were done.

She let the cable go, stepped over it, and hurried to the truck.

Malcom was notched into the passenger-side footwell.

“Lieutenant,” it said, the droid’s eye awkwardly looking around. “Mind giving a hand?”

Claire unwedged the droid and let it get its sea-pulses beneath itself.

“The truck is on fire,” it said, shaking about to ‘brush itself off’ as well as an armless creature could.

“Yes,” Claire said. She looked at the horizon toward the base’s next entrance. “We’ll have to walk.”

“Did you see something back there?” Malcom asked.

Claire thought.

She saw the woman and the child.

She thought she saw the woman and the child.

The truck popped as the fire grew.

“Claire?”

Staring at the flames, the pilot finally shook her head. “No. I didn’t see anything.”

Action Sequence 2 - Mech on Man Violence

A man with a pistol was sliding into the kitchen behind the android. He was close enough to the fridge to open it with one outstretched hand, the other hand eagerly tapping the pistol grip with homicidal anticipation. She watched him open the fridge. She watched him grin. He was a terrible thing, this man, and he was ever worse as he pointed the gun down, aiming at what was hiding there.

Claire didn’t think – everything simply happened.

The Mechjudge engaged the driving actuators in its legs and darted forward, one foot raised, the other sliding across and digging up kitchen tiles. She caught the man in the side – right where the liver should be – and with her momentum smashed him into the countertops. The bones in his spine drummed upward as the vertebrae exploded. She felt his organs compress around her boot. She felt his body displace at the hip, the man now just two halves in one fleshy sleeve, and then his body stretched, rubberbanding into the kitchen sink, the skin tearing and exploding. Blood sprayed so violently the cupboards rattled and a piece of bone broke a kitchen window and the fridge door popped open and closed again all on its own. The dead man slunk into the kitchen sink, dropped off some organs, and then fell back and slid face-first down the cabinets and to the ground.

Action Sequence 3 - Mech on Mech

Casey note: At this point, Claire has discovered her first living human inside an old house, but she is quickly set upon by a gang of soldiers who are looking for him. The man had ostensibly escaped their camp and, in doing so, left it open to the aliens who promptly slaughtered everyone inside. Yes I named a character Bickleboo. Am I proud of it? No. Not in the slightest. Conway is another character and actually one of my all-time favorites — he was basically an android whose sole purpose was to learn languages. He ended up being capable of talking to the aliens. You can get a sense of the unedited process, but I’ll post it here in its original first draft scratchup. The writing is rough and the dialogue is awful shit so brace yourself:

“Bickleboo is here,” Claire said, repeating her tone. “But you’re not getting him.”

“Many good men died there because of that ratbird of a man. The meaties tore everyone to fucking pieces. They came in with their fat fuckin’ monstrosity and that thing killed every man, woman, and child it could get its hands on. Consumed them, like a dog outta Hell’s cellar. We escaped because we’re cowards. We don’t deserve to live, but we live anyhow, because Hell couldn’t wait – it had to be brought to us. Now turn that man over. You can walk, I don’t give a shit. But that man, he’s responsible, and his crime deserves punishment.”

“That judgment will have to await another day,” Claire said. A soldier started toward the kitchen, but she planted her arm at the doorway’s sill. She looked down at the grunt, and then at the captain.

Retrieving the cigar from his mouth, the captain lifted the lip of a pocket on his military garb and stuck it in. His eyes slimmed, the wrinkles in his face deepening.

“You know,” he said. “I’ve had that cigar for years now. And,” he laughed, shaking his head, “it’s funny because I don’t smoke.”

Claire’s HUD lit up – layered squares umbrating each other like a deck of cards splayed out.

The captain nodded. “Good luck.”

She didn’t have time to match her system’s warnings with reality – it simply crashed through the front door with its shoulders leading the way and tore Claire off her feet. The clash of the two mechs rang like a car crash and they soared into the stairway in a ball of metal limbs. A soldier too slow to get out of the way was pulverized into a glop of sawdust and bone and blood.

Claire looked up to find a mech straddling her. She threw a punch that knocked its helm sideways, but it slowly fixed its gaze and with but one fist smashed her deeper into the stairwell. It placed a hand on her helm to block her vision and with its freehand jabbed a double-barreled machinegun against her neck. She heard the whine of the gun readying up, echo-located it from the blindspot, grabbed it, and crushed its barrels. The mech fired anyway, the heavy chug of gunblasts barely suppressed by the Mechjudge’s audio tuning capabilities. Shells spewed and bounced about the wooden debris and in the confusion of light and sawdust and everything else Claire drew her knees close and reversed the mech, throwing it to a side.

The enemy pilot did not have the foresight or training to stop firing. Its aim traced along the walls, punching chunks of plaster out, and the spraying gunfire carried on into the living room where the squad of soldiers exploded into red mist. Claire continued to roll the mech until she got top position. She held the gun-arm down and punched the rise of metal that clearly indicated its magazine assortment. The shooting stopped and the firearm clacked as it jammed.

“Augh, goddammit.”

A voice. The captain’s.

Claire looked over to the front door – or where the front door used to be – and saw the captain leaning against the wall, ropes of blood squirting between the fingers that clenched his thigh.

But then her view shifted – carried upward beneath two poled arms.

The enemy mech lifted her as it got to its feet, and when it stood it smashed her into the ceiling and held her into the wooden cavity seemingly for its own amusement. From this angle she could see the machine in full. It was a Sentinel – a mech with a burly chest squatting atop tree-trunk legs. It was meant to protect convoys in the Middle-East. A big bowling ball of doom, the mech could sprint short distances with incredible speed and leap through walls if need be, unfurling itself on the otherside. An amazing tool of shock and awe, domestic SWAT teams bought them in bulk as the wars came to a close.

Claire gripped the mech’s hands and tried to twist them. She didn’t know why she remembered the maneuver. Malcom always said her training was still in her, buried deep, and it would take moments like these to bring it out. But the Sentinel’s hands didn’t so much as budge. Unlike a human, a mech wasn’t weak in the wrists. The Sentinel lowered her. She heard the actuators in its legs engage, the powerful hiss of energy being expended, and then it leveled her horizontally and drove her through the wall and into the kitchen. They landed on squares of plaster and tiles which broke into shards and ground into powder and they skidded to a stop with the Sentinel sitting on her chest.

“Die,” the Sentinel said, its voice but muted melancholy. A fist raised up before hammering into Claire’s helm, and then another and another. Her visor shook and trembled, and the digital HUD shimmered as it tried to keep up. And it warned, of course, that none of this was a good thing and needed to stop.

She blocked one of the arms as it came down and tried to pull it past her shoulder and then wheel her legs around for an armbar. This, also, was a forgotten element in her training. With enough pressure, and a pinch of hope, she could rip the Sentinel’s arm right off.

But the mech countered, ripping its hand free of her grip and throwing down another hammerfist. The last one cracked the top of her helmet and she heard metal slip out of place that probably could never be put back. When she gained her bearings, it was only in time for another fist. And another. She held her arms up, but they were just punched into herself as the Sentinel easily busted her guard.

When the fists fell, she did, too. She fell away from the fight. Her memories came to her again, perhaps just to say goodbye. It was her father and mother. They asked her how could she sign up for the military. They told her she could have been on one of the ships. They asked her why. That they knew things she didn’t. And her father eased her mother’s anger and promised he would make it work anyway. Claire didn’t know what he meant by that.

Dad, it’s okay. Seriously. It’s oka—

The hammerfist brought her back.

She looked up.

A crack. The visor was nearly split in two, a sliver of a line running top-to-bottom right down the middle. The HUD’s digital agility had it awkwardly mending some sense of analysis, trying to broker data and information across shards of presentation.

“When I kill you,” the Sentinel said, closing its brutish yet faceless helm close to hers, its own visor a pallid sheen of nothingness, “I’m going to find that old man and rip him limb from limb. Maybe I’ll just kill him first and make you watch. Yeah, that’s how I’m gonna do ieaughgh.”

The Sentinel jolted upright, a fork of crackling blue light giving its neck a simmering lick.

Conway stood over the teetering mech, his little gadget in hand, holding it deep into the Sentinel’s neck. When he let the button go, the Sentinel rolled over, frozen save for the spasms as its actuators and gears tried to dispense the sudden surge in energy.

“F-f-fucking… F-f-fuck-eaughgh.”

The Sentinel was given another dose.

“That’s enough talk for now,” Conway said.

This time, when the taser went off, the Sentinel simply leaned back, slowly and quietly like a man injected with horse tranquilizer. Tiny ropes of electricity hopscotched from one joint to another. The mech resisted just a moment more, lingering an inch off the floor, and then it gave out, thudding against the ground, its own weight anchoring the pilot down. They could hear the murmur of a voice inside the mech, but without a modulator, it might as well have been a man screaming from a buried coffin.