One of the most entertaining classes I have ever taken was “Science Fiction” last fall. Every week, we would read great short stories by authors like PKD, Ursula LeGuin, and John Crowley. Each week there was a journal writing assignment, where we were given three options: either to write about the stories we read, write as if we were continuing them, or to write our own short stories. Frequently, the professor would read latest his favorite journal entries to the class, sometimes reading entire short stories that students had written a week prior.

After two weeks or so of writing conventional critiques of the readings, I caught on that writing short stories was where it was at. Every week or so for the next 6 weeks, I’d pound out a 1-2 page science fiction story the night before it was due. Then the next week, I’d receive it edited and commented upon by both our teacher and his assistant. It was an absolutely wonderful experience, and their comments motivated me to write some of my favorite things I have ever written.

I’ve considered posting these stories online for a long time, but haven’t up until this point. There’s something a little scary to me about releasing some “real” writing of mine this way. I feel like it’s much more subject to critique; much more fallible than a simple blog post, since there’s an implicit claim that it uses English better than one. All I can say is that I thoroughly enjoyed writing these short stories, and hope you enjoy them too. I would love to read your comments on them.

The following is my favorite story that I wrote for the class. Here’s “A New World of the Aesthetic,” written on 11/13/07.

A New World of the Aesthetic

The first color that Paul’s team created, we named vix. It was a strident, powerful color, striking in its contrast and tone. When we first sequenced it, the test subjects all got very quiet, when we showed them pure vix. As we expected, they couldn’t describe it. But they all knew that it was vix. They would hold up the gertie balls that we’d radio-signatured and just gaze at them, mouths slightly open. Made us feel blind, watching them enjoy themselves like that. Like closing your eyes and trying to imagine the color green.

We knew that it couldn’t be a real color they were seeing, but we’d hoped to determine whether it was truly a new color we’d created… whether their brain implants would interpret the radio signals as a new sense. The early subjects broke. We gave them vix, and that’s all they saw. At least, they claimed that it was vix. They said it was a color they had never seen before. We had no way of discerning that, since at the time they just acted blind and weird. It was like they’d just closed their eyes, they said. We’d hooked into the wrong axons in their brains.

Restoration efforts were mostly successful, once we figured out a reliable delivery mechanism. An intern from the United States took one look at our viral machinery and showed us some prions that’d do the trick correctly and much faster. All we had to do was tweak their optic nerves again with the new system and vision was back, pro-vix.

When we originally funded this research, the Army wanted a new way to tell friendly and hostile soldiers apart, without the costly technology of heads-up-displays. We didn’t really expect their research to pan out, but that proved to be of little consequence. Paul got to play with our virii and inhalants without much interference. For a long time, we toyed with the idea of simply augmenting wavelength perception. A little bleed into the infra-red range, but that really wouldn’t have been the same. It would have just been a change in mapping. When we finally got serious, we moved to Paul’s cortex modification and created vix.

Paul was so excited about the preliminary results of his project that he wanted to try some of the stuff himself. We tried to dissuade him several times, but he wouldn’t contain his desire. He imagined us a world filled with new colors and designer senses, of completely new arts and sensitivities. A new world of the aesthetic. It’d scramble his visual cortex all up, we told him. He didn’t care. So we cooked him up a batch of prions and let him play in our lab for a while. We gave him the canister inside the isolation chamber and he sucked it all in with one breath. Said it tasted like pepper. Held his head and pressed on his eyes. When he opened them, he beamed like a little child. Mouth slightly ajar.

It didn’t last that way, of course it didn’t last. If he had waited, we could have informed him of what were only a few isolated occurrences at the time. A few ones that went crazy after several days. We had no way of knowing it was a consistent effect. The problem was that the prions would wear off. The brain would reconstruct itself and form new connections, overwriting our artificial synapses. The nodules we’d generated would decay back into fatty nerve tissue, and the brain would be left filled up with connections to a sense that simply didn’t exist any more. We had no idea that would instigate general neural panic.

A few weeks after Paul died, after we put him and the others to sleep, we put away vix as well. It simply wasn’t practical to have an army that would completely lose its mind within days of withdrawl. We had better drugs to induce faction cohesion, for that matter. So we erased vix and the vix prions from the record and returned to more promising things like germ sequencing and mind control. For these things were known and well understood. They wouldn’t start a revolution.