Friday, February 24, 2012

The wrong motive

For a change, I am posting something on here that was cut from something I am CURRENTLY working on and something not yet published.

This is from my first ever sci-fi short story. I started it up years ago but never finished it. I could not decide on an ending then and I can't figure out an ending now. I have discovered that one reason why I can't decide on an ending (I have several ideas) is because I can't figure out my antagonist's motive for doing what he did in the story. (His name is John Jake Pitt.) Right now, I am at the part where he is holding my main character, Robert Altman, captive and he owes up to what he did. I realized that this particular motive wasn't going to work because it was just not realistic enough for it to make the plot work. So I have cut it from my story. (I will press on and hopefully complete this thing!)


Memories of what Pitt had done flashed through his mind. He growled, suddenly grateful for the restraints holding him back because he was ready to beat the shit out of the guy. “You son of a bitch! Don’t you realize what you’ve done! You’ve corrupted an entire alien race! We’re supposed to be studying them and learning about them, not interbreeding with them!”
Pitt shook his head again. “You’re wasting your breath yelling at me, Bob. It’s not going to do any good. There’s already a good population of the alien/human hybrids on Earth. You’re too late to do anything about it.”
Altman leveled his gaze. “How many?” When Pitt didn’t answer, he gritted his teeth again. “How many!”
Pitt shook his head. “It’s hard to say. Two, maybe three.”
“Hundred?”
He shook his head. “Thousand.”
Altman felt a whoosh of dizziness swim over him. It was a good thing he was sitting down. “My God.”
“Oh, God would never have thought of doing something like this. This, Bob, is the future of intelligent life. This is what’s going to save future generations of the human race. We know how the alien/human hybrids fare on Earth, but we haven’t studied them enough to know how they’ll fare on other worlds, other planets. Sadly, some have died when we tried to see if they could survive on planets in the Habitable Zone. Cronus, Spartan. But there are other planets out there, and if we find the right match, then the human race can be gone before Earth is.”
“Do you even hear yourself? You’re talking about replacing humankind with a hybrid. What makes you think this would work? That people would even go along with it?”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s a start.”


REASON FOR CUTTING: Not realistic enough to work.