I have a real love for Christmas specials. Or, to be more accurate, Christmas episodes. If you gave me the choice between an unknown Christmas movie and a Christmas episode of The West Wing, I’d choose the latter every single time. I watch “A Very Supernatural Christmas” every year around this time. I like what a specific seasonal, cultural, emotional context can do for characters. Putting them through a regular event that your audience has a visceral understanding of is a good way to cast them in a different light. So, in this spirit, I wrote “A Very vN xMas”.
For those of you playing along, this could very well be the first (non-prologue) chapter to Rev: The Third Machine Dynasty. It immediately follows the end of iD, which costs only £1 in ebook form today, along with vN. So consider it a sort of sneak preview of coming attractions. Those attractions include spider tanks and fried chicken and a whole novel about the robot apocalypse told from the perspective of ubiquitous surveillance. Watch for jokes or references to:
- “Merry Christmas! War is Over!”
- Star Wars
- A Christmas Carol
- Lupin III
- Tokyo Godfathers
- Many, many Christmas songs
Here’s a taste:
Javier was uneasy in this place. That much was obvious. Portia saw them when they were sleeping. She knew when they were awake. She knew if they’d been bad or good. At night Javier lay awake, staring at Amy before getting up to check on the children. Amy had designed living walls and water features into their bedroom, so the whole place was thick and warm and green with organic life, but it still wasn’t the teeming silence of the forests Javier’s clade was built for. Portia understood. Portia sometimes missed the desert. It was so conveniently anathema to human life. Like Mars.
At night, Javier stared down on the city with something like quiet horror. At first Portia suspected it had to do with the bomb dropping there. He still had some sympathy for humanity, she thought. Some remnant of sentiment running through him like old viral RNA. Something that made him feel pity and not scorn. But no. It was the city. It was the height of the towers and the lack of trees. The lack of green. The farm towers couldn’t make up for that lack, no matter how hard they tried. This was the price of his freedom. The problem with becoming a real live boy. The thing the Tin Man had exchanged for a heart.
It wasn’t until he was in the living room, staring down at the lights around the harbour, that Esperanza would silently creep into her brothers and slip herself onto the futon beside him. Each morning she left at dawn. Sometimes her brother noticed her. Sometimes he didn’t. When he did, he curled an arm around her, and she smiled. She still smiled, even when he didn’t. Even now, this minute, she was staring at her brother from under the long lashes her father had given her. And Xavier, like everyone else in the whole goddamn family, was completely oblivious.
Portia would have to do something about that. Wake them up. Get them into fighting form. It would be her gift to them, in the spirit of Christmas.