What should I find in my email inbox this morning but a rejection of this story from Everyday Fiction. It was a nice rejection though. It came with 4 one line critiques from 4 of their readers. Yay to Everyday Fiction for the tips on the story.
So here it is for you! Here’s your chance to write a critique. What advice will you give me to improve this story.
Get To It!
Nineteen-year-old, Mason, sat in the chair, tin foil wrapped around his head, covering his short brown hair, mumbling to himself. “Maddart, Maddart.”
Beside him, his mother sighed. “Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate that you could get him in so quickly.”
“We at Bayview Psychiatric Care understand how important it is to get your loved ones immediate care, Mrs. Low. We will be able to stabilize young Mason.”
She gazed with love and worry at her son, his thin fingers twitching together. “The foil hat is because he says he hears voices.” She started to reach out to him, then pulled her hand back. “He’s so bright. I just don’t know what happened.”
“Happens all the time,” the doctor replied quietly. “That’s the way it is with schizophrenia. Sometime in the teen, early adult years, something in their minds goes wrong. The medications should help.”
She nodded, wiping tears from her eyes with a crushed tissue.
#
“The experiment failed? The Superintendent’s voice rose. In charge of this project for the last 10 million years, he still hated leaving his home planet’s seas. To travel several light years for bad news was too much to bear.
“Yes, superintendent,” Quadrangle Four looked around the ship’s meeting room at the others for support. “They’re so fragile. If we push too hard they break and become useless.”
Trig One nodded, his brain sac swaying gently in the ocean environment his species liked best. “The more recent European experiment worked on one male, but doesn’t seem to work on any other test subject. You see the results of the most current test – the creature had to be placed in the human care facility.”
The Superintendent tapped a tentacle, the ten fine digits at the end, drumming on the table. “What about that group in their South America?”
Trig One responded. “It was going well. The entire culture – they called themselves Maya and Inca, understood multiple number systems. We had high hopes. Then the humans began serious travel around their planet. Our prize group was wiped out, 99 out of every 100, by diseases from the other groups. The whole hemisphere was wiped out, all the work lost. Dr. Doowd was so distressed that he stopped working with the humans and began to study plant life. He’s still recovering.”
Sighing, the Superintendent asked, “Can’t his methodology be used by someone else?”
“We tried that,” Trig One responded again. “It didn’t seem to work on any other sub-group, though progress was made on the Indian sub-continent. It took about 300 cycles after the South American failure for one of them to understand the concept of zero.”
“Three hundred cycles?”
“Yes sir. They only lived about 40 cycles,” he shrugged. “Short-lived and mentally fragile, they’re very hard to work with.” Trig One brightened, “But we’ve managed to get them to an eighty cycle lifespan, on average, now.”
The Superintendent began turning a darker green. “Nothing since?”
Female and the youngest researcher, Algebra dared to speak up, “Sir, it took 1100 cycles to get the concept of zero spread around the planet. We’ve had some successes but even the humans notice that the advanced ones are not stable. It’s a maxim with them that geniuses are crazy.”
Quadrangle Four looked hopeful. “The European strain was modified and given to a human about forty cycles ago. He advanced quickly and has produced prodigiously; however, the new strain has destroyed the subject’s body to the point it must be supported by their primitive mechanical and computer devices.”
The Superintendent turned almost black and slapped all four upper body tentacles on the table. “We need these humans! How long before the Maddart get here?
Algebra looked down at her tentacles and whispered, “About a million cycles, Great One.”
He turned black as space. “So basically all you have accomplished is to double their life span? Haul Doowd out of the plant project and get him back to work! Remember the disaster on Laser IV? I need these humans to be at least twice as brilliant as that European subject, without the physical degradation. Unless you want the Maddart to have you and the humans for brunch, the way they did to the creatures on Laser, the humans have to be able to defend themselves and help us. Get to it!”
The End
719 Words
Find more of the Forward Motion Flash Friday Group here: http://www.fmwriters.com/flash.html