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The
First Twenty Steps |
Synopsis | Background | MS. Info
Writing InventoryThe novella, The First Twenty Steps, and all writing on this page copyright 2003 by Michael D. Smith
Harry, released from six years in prison, proves that his old reflexes are sound as he fights off thugs who try to rob him on his first day of freedom. He meets Roberta, but discovers she's in thrall to a motorcycle gang called the Cerebean Knights headed by a passive-aggressive tyrant, Alexander.
In plotting to stay together and eventually free her from this gang, Harry and Roberta plan to infiltrate Harry into the Cerebean Knights, but when Alexander announces that the Knights will commit a major crime this evening in order to pay back favors from the corrupt city council of One-West, Harry realizes that their plan was doomed all along, that he and Roberta compromised their love by their contact with Alexander's evil.
The motorcycle attack on the Dataflux computer building turns terrifying and surreal; Harry and Roberta find themselves outnumbered and outgunned by another biker gang belonging to the mysterious One-West billionaire Richard Mullein, who intervenes to protect the top secret navigational equipment for his Cathedral Spaceship.
An old biker friend of Harry's once posited that bikers and other outsiders from society were graced to climb a transcendent catwalk a short twenty steps above a common suffering humanity, which they could then view from a smug distance. Talented in both the world of computers and the world of motorcycle gangs, yet clueless as to how to survive in the new society he's returned to, Harry must come to grips with the arrogance of his "first twenty steps."
The First Twenty Steps came from two dreams and some events from, of all places, library school. The first dream was from sometime in the mid-70's, about being a member of a ruthless "commune" swooping down from helicopters to attack and occupy a fifty-nine story office building deep in the city, deep in the night. The dream stuck with me for seven or eight years; yet I always thought of "59" as unwritable. It was what I defined as a "buried dream," plotless, wordless, full of power, recalled only months or years after it actually took place.
The other dream was from December 1983, and came from images of a library school field trip (a records management class) to a delightfully chaotic Fort Worth engineering firm. The ex-prisoner let loose onto the streets of the western city, confronting the Cathedral Spaceship that, locked away, he'd never seen before. The "released prisoner" is the central myth of this novella. The released prisoner comes up against the twenty-first step.
In the quest for an elusive, indefinable "computer literacy," NTSU library students in the early 1980's were required to take BASIC programming. In the spring of 1984, at the same time I was writing The First Twenty Steps, I was also struggling through simple BASIC algorithms on a TI Professional PC. So that mixed into the story as well. The second draft of the novella a year later came during the final insanely stressed semester of library school and my Pascal programming class, which nearly took my head off its foundations. That seems to have mixed in too.
There are two 1996 paintings, The First Twenty Steps and The Second Twenty Steps.
Written
1984-1985, revised 1996
MS.
90 pages (Courier 10, double-spaced)
Sections numbered 1-8Words
25,800
Currently input in
Word 2000
Previously published
No parts yet published
Writing Inventory
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03/28/08