New Fleece on Life Read online

  Contents

  Logo

  First Page Header

  Preface

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Epilogue - Holston

  Epilogue - Liao

  My "Real" Writing

  New Fleece on Life

  A Wool Fanfiction

  and

  Lacuna Crossover

  “To die would be an awfully big adventure.”

  - J.M. Barrie

  Preface

  Hugh Howey’s Wool is the story everyone in the self-publishing community knows. One of its great successes, a breakaway piece that resonated with its audience and, entirely organically, seized the minds of its readers and refused to let go.

  I found Wool by following the sound of a million bleating lambs who implored me to read it. Now I am one of those lambs.

  From the moment I reached the masterfully crafted ending of Wool I knew there had to be more. I felt Holston’s powerful story wasn’t an ending for him, it was a beginning.

  I write my own books and I take pride in my work, but part of being an author is acknowledging when someone does what you do better. This, rather than evoking feelings of jealousy or self-pity, is both intensely gratifying and inspiring in a way that I’m sure anyone who’s ever written fan-fiction understands.

  So one day, on Kindleboards, I started a Lacuna/Wool crossover as a joke. It was literally a few lines thrown together from the top of my head and a poorly photoshopped cover. It was one of many joke threads and I had no idea where it was going. The readers—including Hugh himself—wanted more, so I posted more.

  And they kept wanting more. So I posted more. And they asked for more.

  And here we are.

  It is my opinion that Wool represents one of the most influential science fiction stories of this coming decade. I’m not alone in thinking this as it has, as of the time of writing, found its way into the hands of Ridley Scott (yes, that Ridley Scott) who has begun the long process of bringing Wool to Hollywood. Or, as I call it now, HollyWool.

  Wool and the canonical tale of Holston is over, but this is what could have happened if everyone involved lost their minds. In the true tradition of terrible fanfiction shipping, New Fleece on Life is poorly written and poorly structured, everyone acts wildly out of character and, in the interests of the ‘ship’, all previous emotional and romantic entanglements are disregarded so that all involved can throw themselves into a flimsily constructed, hasty and poorly thought out fling with little thought to the consequences.

  I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed, in a sincere and genuine way, writing it.

  Chapter I

  Lazarus

  Collapsing to the ground, curling up in pain from the slow death overtaking him, he held what remained of his wife and thought, with his last thought, what this death of his must look like to those who could see, this curling and dying in the black crack of a lifeless brown hill, a rotting city standing silent and forlorn over him.

  “Give him the shot,” came a voice, soft and feminine but edged with authority.

  The pain was overwhelming now; Holston felt his skin flake and melt away, eaten by the inhospitable world, digested by the unbreathable air, his lungs scalded as the acidic atmosphere dissolved their delicate tissues. Hands—bare, human hands—gripped him and rolled his body, a body a whisper away from death, onto his back and he sensed, rather than felt, a syringe press into his neck.

  The pain ceased. Holding up his burned and melted hands, Holston watched in part wonder, part horror as the dissolved skin slowly dripped its way up, reattaching itself to his bones. The remains of the protective suit melted away, although it liquefied harmlessly and passed around his skin like water by a riverstone.

  It was so surreal that, for a moment, he was certain he was dead and that his experience was just the last of his dissolving neurons firing as they, maddened by pain, tried to make sense of his environment. But contrary to his expectations, his vision remained crisp and clear and he was completely without pain. As pre-death hallucinations went this was fairly pleasant, overall.

  “Atmospheric Intracellular Degradation Inhibitor #41,” said a female voice. “Pretty powerful stuff, huh.”

  A half dozen people watched him climb, completely stark naked, to his feet. People living in this blasted barren wasteland as though there were absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. Spots of life in an empty void.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’ll explain in a moment. Rowe, give him some of the nanoweave clothes,” instructed an Asian woman, wearing a military uniform, stars marking the centre of boxy epaulets. Her hair was done up in a bun and mostly hidden underneath her peaked naval issue cap. “And make sure the suit is completely dissolved. We don’t want the next escapee to trip over it.”

  “Aww... I was admiring the view,” complained a lanky redhead, biting on her low lip and staring directly at him. She was quite clearly eyeing his naked form with an entirely unhealthy amount of interest and her eyes wandered as she tossed a wrapped bundle in his face.

  With no idea what else to do, Holston pulled on the string and the wrapping fell apart. Inside was a simple shirt and long pants, woven of some texture that seemed impossibly fine, as though it were a solid material instead of any fabric he’d ever seen. Holston put them on as though a man sleepwalking.

  When he was dressed again the Chinese woman stepped forward and extended her hand good-naturedly. “I’m Captain Melissa Liao. We’ve been waiting for you.”

  Holston took the hand, finding her grip to be surprisingly firm. “Waiting for me?”

  She smiled a strange half-knowing, half-curious smile and released Holston’s arm. “Yes. You wanted to see the world outside the silo,” she remarked, “And you will. But that can wait.”

  He struggled to process this. “How... how did you know I was coming?”

  Liao’s smile broadened and the corner of her mouth turned up. “Allison told us you’d be dropping by, sooner or later.” She gave a playful laugh, putting her hands on her hips. “Although you’re a little taller than she lead us to believe.”

  *****

  The hours passed as they walked. Liao took the lead, Holston followed and the rest of the military crew fell into step behind them. Holston would glance over his shoulder occasionally, sensing eyes upon him. The “nanoweave” clothes he was given were extremely form-fitting and Rowe, the redheaded woman who apparently had no reservations about eyeing him off, would steal glances at his behind. It was discomforting.

  Holston moved up beside the leader of the strange posse. “So... Li-ao, right?”

  “That’s right. Your pronunciation’s pretty good.”

  “Thanks.” Holston took a disturbingly unnatural, slow breath in the poisoned atmosphere. Years of seeing the outside of the silo as nothing more than a poisoned wasteland, confirmed by his near death and the barren, lifeless corpse of a world all around him, made breathing it feel unnatural. “You mentioned you’d show me what’s outside the silo. I’m guessing there’s more to it than ruined fields and dead cities.”

  Liao nodded, although there was the hint of reluctance when she spoke. “There’s… not much left on the surface. Not much that anyone outside of an archaeologist would be interested in. We haven’t had much contact with those other silos; the ones we’ve found were opened, empty and dead. We’ve been mostly occupied with trying to get our ship sailing again, if that’s even possible.”

  Holston regarded her, inclining his head. “A ship? We’re near the ocean?” Images of the picture
s he’d seen ran through his mind, of how the world used to be. Pictures in libraries. A world with oceans blue and vibrant, deep and rich. Seas teaming with life.

  Liao laughed. “Oh, no. It’s a spaceship.”

  “Oh.” He paused. Was this an escape vehicle? A way to leave this ruined planet? “Are you survivors from another silo?”

  “No, we’re from Earth.”

  “But this is Earth. There’s nobody alive outside the silos.”

  Liao reached out, stopping once, but touched Holston’s arm as their boots crunched over the dry brown grass. For some reason the gesture seemed welcome... safe. Comforting. “It’s difficult to explain,” Liao said, “our ship has a very unique technology that allows us to teleport between locations of extremely low gravity. Lagrange points, we call them, although for the scientifically disinclined the term ‘jump point’ is also acceptable. But misuse, including overuse, of this technology can lead to the creation of vast singularities that swallow everything they come into contact with. These singularities constantly grow until, well, we don’t know what happens then.”

  Holston stared a moment. It was a lot to take in, but one thing in particular stood out to him. “You can go to other worlds?”

  Liao nodded. “Yes.”

  “Have you?”

  The question was abrupt and odd, he knew that, but Liao’s reaction was surprising. She instead looked away, but he caught a flash of sudden sadness across her face. “Yes.”

  He could see the pain his question caused. “Um, I’m sorry.”

  She looked back to him. “It’s quite okay,” she said, “it’s a legitimate question. But… yes. I’ve been to two different planets. Karathi and Velsharn. One was a planet of mostly sand and desert, while another was almost completely water, kilometres deep.”

  “What happened there?”

  Liao smiled sadly. “There’ll be enough time for questions later, but sufficient enough to say it didn’t end well.”

  “Okay.” He thought back to what Liao had said. Of holes in space. “You said that this technology of yours can cause singularities. How big do they get?”

  Liao took a breath. “As far as we’re able to tell, the singularities continue to grow forever. Gradually getting bigger and bigger... we don’t think they ever stop, so we can only assume that they will eventually consume everything in the universe. There are three of them we know of.”

  “Not good. Still,” he said, “it must be good to get out. To live amongst the stars. Be free. Go where you want.”

  “No question,” said Liao. “It has its advantages.” She smiled a lopsided, amused smile. “But if you think being in the military gives you permission to go wherever you want, well, I think you’re sorely mistaken.”

  He couldn’t help chuckling. “I know, but relative to life in the silo it’s free. Sometimes you just have to know what’s out there, and there’s only one way to really find out. Besides. I’m a sheriff, I know what it’s like to serve.” They walked for a time, then Holston spoke again. “So, how did you get here?”

  “Well, we accidentally created one of those singularities and were sucked in. We thought we were done for, but it turns out—through some mechanism we don’t quite understand—sometimes you get thrown into a different universe. Our ship was badly damaged. It drifted for some time, then fell into the atmosphere and crashed here. This planet, this version of Earth which is so unlike our own, has been our home for years now.”

  They crested a rise and, splayed out before them was an incredible sight. Some kind of spaceship—long and thin like a blade—lay speared into the ground at a shallow angle, carving a great trench in the ground, surrounded by tents and prefabricated buildings. It looked like a city had grown, organically, up around the ruins of the vessel.

  To the others it was a fairly routine sight, but to Holston, whose glimpses of the outside world had come through static, unchanging images displayed on computer monitors, it was almost overwhelming.

  There was a whole world out here, full of new things to see and feel and experience, beyond the simple steel of the silo and the monotony of day to day life. And, more pressingly, there was life here. Not like he had anticipated, certainly, but there was a certain thrill in that.

  Despite all of the splendor, despite the colossal visage of the ship looming over the makeshift camp casting its shadow onto one of the nearby hills, there was only one question on his mind. The most important question.

  “Where is Allison? Where is my wife?”

  Chapter II

  The Second Goodbye

  “Where is Allison? Where is my wife?”

  Liao’s eyes watched him, silent for a time. He waited for her to answer, the seconds ticking away. Finally she clasping her hands together in front of her. “Come with me; I’ll… I’ll show you.”

  Liao lead Holston to a small rise, a coffee-brown mound in an endless sea of coffee brown mounds. She stopped near the rise and turned back to him.

  “We came across her entirely by accident. A scouting party, looking for more silos. The ones we’d discovered until we found yours had been empty but we had wondered if there might be full ones, too. The scouts saw her just as she was leaving. They saw her remove her helmet, much as you did, and the corrosion in the air start to… well, you know. They gave her the shot, but you must understand…” The emotion of the retelling crept into her voice and it softened. “She was far further gone than you were. The medicine is a powerful thing, Holston, but it is not magic. It can only do so much.”

  Holston nodded, understanding but not accepting. “What happened?”

  “She lived for a few weeks. Enough for us to fall in love with her easy smile, her voice, her laugh. She spoke of her desire to have children, of how you lived in that terrible place. She spoke of many things, but most often of you. Eventually her injuries became infected, her fever became too great and she passed. We,” Liao paused, struggling with the retelling and obviously trying to rephrase what had happened to Allison into gentle words. “left whatever… residue… that could not be reconstituted—the suit, some skin and hair—where she fell, outside the silo. The rest we buried here.”

  They crested the rise. In the valley below were a dozen or so headstones, laid out in a row, and Liao gestured to the closest one.

  “Go and say your goodbyes properly, like a husband should,” she said, her voice breaking as the tide of emotions barely held in check began to seep through the thin cracks in her otherwise sombre composure, letting him see them. Fireflies of emotion winking up in the dark. “I’ll wait however long you feel you need.”

  Holston reached out and gave her arm a grateful squeeze, then stepped down the hill into the small valley, approaching the grave Liao had indicated.

  A small headstone lay planted at the head of the raised mound of earth, and he drew his breath inward in a low hiss. The crew of the Beijing had dispensed some of the mysterious medicine over the grave site, the strange properties of the chemical proving to be just as effective on plant-life as it was on humans.

  An explosion of green foliage grew all around the grave, a single island of life in a sea of annihilation. It spread like an emerald carpet, wild and unkempt and glorious, creeping out over the small mound, the edges consuming the coffee-brown plants in a wave of vibrant green grass that grew unhindered in the toxic atmosphere. All over the green patch, flourishing in spite of their environment, were the thin stalks of plants tipped with white flowers swaying gently in the breeze. Living, actual flowers in an oasis of growth, a dot in the empty wasteland of ruin.

  This was exactly what Allison would have wanted. To be buried in a real grave, with real earth and real flowers, out in the open. Outside. Free.

  The grey headstone was engraved with a message etched with the precision only a computer with a laser could offer. He recognised the stencil as one identical to one of the standard ones from the silo. It was the same technology.

  You always wanted to see the outside,
r />   So we buried you facing the sky,

  Yet to remain in hearts left behind,

  Is to never die.

  Here lies Allison.

  Loving wife, fearless explorer.

  Our time together was far too brief.

  We will wait for him every day.

  Allison slept under an island of life, buried by people who had loved her. The tears came; he cried alone, beside the grave of the wife he had tried so hard to reach, the intelligent, soulful woman that had consumed his thoughts for so long he barely remembered any other way of living.

  Holston didn’t know how long he stayed there. By the time his grief came to an end, hours had passed. As the sun slowly dipped below the ridge, kissed the horizon and melted into its embrace, Holston climbed back up the small hill soaked in an amber bath of the sun’s fading light. Liao sat, cross legged, watching the yellow disk of Earth’s sun slowly disappear and she turned as he approached.

  “Hey.”

  Simple words, spoken kindly, seeming strange to be coming from a woman in full military uniform, her breast decorated with numerous ribbons and medals. Holston, without knowing what else to do, simply sat down beside her.

  “I never gave up hope, you know. I always thought I’d meet her out here.”

  “I’m sorry. For what it’s worth, so did she. She held on as long as she could, through the pain, through the surgeries, she held on for the chance to see you again.”

  Together they watched the last vestigial rays of the sun’s light flicker and dance over the lurid, brown landscape. Then slowly, reluctantly, the sun dipped behind the horizon and the world was painted in twilight.

  “Come,” said Liao, smiling comfortingly to him as she stood, extending a hand to help him up. “Let’s get some dinner from the mess hall.”

  Chapter III