Scribble 21: Narrative Sandwich
Third level
Yo Wanderers!
Long time no see, eh? I have another draft planned for June but I can't finish it in time, so I wrote another draft instead. crazy, eh? And it's been five months (!) that I haven't written any scribble!
Well the title for current scribble is Narrative Sandwich, yet no sandwich is provided nor is harmed in the production.
What is a Narrative Sandwich?
It's just my silly way to refer to a form of fiction called meta-fiction, where the stories occurred not only where the protagonist walked, but also in your side, everywhere, but also nowhere at once.
Yes, the story is already started.
First level
I walked through the ruin, gigantic fingers larger than my person looming in the horizon.
It has been a hundred years since the world ended.
Fueled by their warlike tendency, humanity abandoned their survival instinct and built gigantic machines, indiscriminately exterminating their own kind. And then one day, after long years of systematic extermination in which remnants of the humanity were forced to hiding from their own creation, the machines fell.
I jumped through the ribs of the giant machine, unto the darkness of its heart.
Second level
I deleted the draft again. It’s not like I don’t like the setting or something, it’s just that writing dystopian future wasn’t my forte.
Not that I have any forte, though. I’m just a newbie writing whatever in the time that I have too much of, wandering between the tropes of both sci-fi and fantasy, everything between dragons and the arc reactors and warp generators.
I stretched my back, squinting at the bright screen against the dark room. I really need to buy a new lamp.
I closed the word processor, let out a sigh, and headed to the drawing board. The word “hope” was written on it with thick board marker, circled in red. Why did I write that anyway?
“Hope”. The Ancient Greek goddess for hope was Elpis. Hope was trapped inside the Pandora’s Box. Pandora’s Box was lost after it’s opened. Thus humanity no longer has hope. And it’s all Pandora’s fault.
Sighing, I wiped the board. Taking my jacket, I set out on my quest to get a new lamp for my room.
First level
The machine’s figurative heart was an iridium plasma MHD reactor the size of a house—which I actually never seen, as I was born in the pocket of human remnants long after the last house burnt down by the Machines. Still, it supplied the power to the kilometer-tall robot culmination of human bloodlust, generating more power than the world would have needed for a hundred years.
Those ridiculous amount of power was used to vaporize chunks of rock and buildings and flesh, the huge fingers of the apocalyptic beast flattened cities with a single tap. The gigantic machine, or simply the Machine, created new lakes with its each step, its exoskeleton made of material impervious to normal weaponry.
It requires a Machine to fight another. Thus the weapon development to doom mankind was started.
I shook my head, and began to check the structure of the generator. If I’m lucky, I would be able to walk straight out from the labyrinthine chambers inside the Machine.
Third level
Writing meta-fiction stories are hard, okay? And you can’t have stories where the only selling point is that it was meta. People won’t read meta stories solely because it was meta. It has to have something behind the meta-fiction writing style. Writing a meta story meant you have to prepare at least as many worlds as you going to mention in the story, if not more, and hinting the reader as of how the worlds are interconnected, as well as fleshing out the details of each worlds.
Let’s see, yes, for example, if you want to write a world where a writer write a story, then at least there should be a world where the writer existed, a world that the writer was writing, and the world where I, the reader, existed. And the separation can’t be too clear and yet it can’t be nonexistent, the reader must be able to discern where their world, the writer’s world, and the writer’s story begin and end.
More or less, like...
First level
I closed my journal, the scribbles that I wrote ever since I started exploring the ruins of the Machines years ago. I returned to the generator chamber of the particular Machine that I had checked out for the past days, the generators and the cables were intact, it doesn’t even have any rust in the composite shielding. I can’t determine why it even malfunctioned a hundred years ago.
Hmm, all’s well that ends well, I guess?
I shook my head, before salvaging the parts of the Machine. The MHD generator was too big to bring back, not to mention we can’t activate it yet, but it never hurts to have more cables and sensors, as well as a couple quantum processors. A single Machine ruin could supply a settlement for months in parts and electricity from its quaternary generators.
Second level
I entered my room to find someone reading my recently-deleted draft. I groaned.
“Two questions.” I said while face-palming.
“I won’t answer, so don’t bother asking them.” The woman on my seat laughed before I could finish my sentence. “What is this ridiculous settings? Dystopian future where giant robots killed off humanity? What are you, a middle school student?”
“Laugh all you want.” I grumbled. “I never asked for your opinion nor existence.”
“Ah, come on, I know you have a crush on me since third grade.”
Thank god the room was dark, else she would see my face burning furiously at her off-hand remarks. I kicked the chair where she was sitting, right in front of my laptop and below my broken light bulb.
“I didn’t! Now move! I need to change the light bulb!”
“Yeah, yeah. Want me to kiss you?”
“?! I said move!”
Third level
Thusly, the reader must be able to see the connection between the written world and the world of the writer, and vaguely hinting that the world that the fictional writer wrote have a connection to another level of narrative written by the main character in the world that the fictional writer wrote.
Have I broke the word ‘write’ to you yet? No? Good, because this is going to get a lot worse.
So the main concept of the meta-based story is that there are several level of world, maintained by stories written in another levels, but not looping through itself.
First level
“In other word, you can’t perceive higher-order world, so when you are on the lowest level you would mistakenly think that the world where you exist is the only one…”I muted my communicator, before sighing. Alf was by no way a bad girl, but her obsession with Old World technology could be unbearable sometime.
A long time ago, before the war that ended the world, it was proven that there are extra-spatial dimension between the ‘quanta’ or the ‘particle’ of space-time itself. While it conformed to the proposed theories, it was said that the extra-spatial dimension recorded was large enough to fit several more worlds than the one that we perceive with our eyes. The war destroyed all records for the experiment, and we currently have no technology to build the accelerator complex needed to investigate it, but the fact does nothing to Alf’s enthusiasm.
“Alf, listen to me for a moment.” I cut through her babble.
“…and the mapped narrative—what is it?”
“You know that I love you, right?”
“W-w-what are you saying all of sudden?!” I smiled, I could almost see her blushing face.
“No, but seriously, don’t you think you could spare me the mad science talk? I could barely wrap my head around basic calculus, so give me a break.”
“I’m sorry, I got too excited again.”
“Well, as long as you understand.” I scanned the horizon filled with the corpses of Machines, wondering what the heck killed them a hundred years ago. “The multiverse theories aside, do you have anything about why these Machines dropped dead a century ago?”
“Nah, I still don’t get it. The storage and processing systems are intact, not that anything could break it. The Machines were built to withstand even the planet splitting in two, so it just doesn’t make any sense for them to simply turn themselves off.”
“Hmm, well, we could think about that later, we have all the time in the world to think about that. Now the greenhouse, on other hand…” I dragged the salvaged parts behind me through the sand, walking to the place closest to home that we have.
Second level
“That girl is basically me, right, ha, why don’t you be honest and confess to me already? Even I would be bored being single this long, dammit!” As usual, the mood swing of this stepsister of mine was astonishingly quick and extreme. I sighed once again, rescuing the cup of tea from her swinging fist.
I don’t remember how many times I sighed in past ten minutes. This is alarming.
“It’s not my fault that your personality is unlikable. Please don’t dump your frustration over my head, I have a standard too, you know?”
“…what was that?! What was that supposed to mean?! Even though you’re just Len! What are you doing acting all high and mighty?!”
Damn, I almost sighed again.
“Just calm down, okay?!” I held her forehead in my hand as she tried to choke me. “Besides, I’m your step-brother, wouldn’t dating me be kind of gross?”
“Well, I don’t care anymore! Even if it’s just Len!”
“What was that even supposed to mean?!” I sighed again, finally peeled her away from my collar, sitting before the story I’ve written.
Hmm? I don’t recall writing it until this far?
Third level
Can you see it now? The interconnections and overlaps between narratives span all worlds, including the one that you are…
First level
And up to that line, my pen ran out of ink.
Well, no one uses pen nowadays so it’s pretty rare yet worthless resources. But there’s no way in hell I’d keep this thing on the shared cloud.
“Well, even if you won’t store it in cloud I could always just snatch it out from you.” Suddenly, Alf appeared behind me, grabbing my plain notebook filled with chicken claw scribbles. “Damn. It’s written in ancient language I never got the chance to learn.” I simply laughed.
“Well, it’s basically a sci-fi dystopian story--”
“Our life, then.” She smiled. I laughed again.
“No, I mean, it’s a sci-fi story based on that thing you spouted all the time, the overlapping worlds between the space-time that we inhabit.”
“Want me to lecture you on the theoretical basis?”
“I’ll pass. What’s for dinner?”
“Me.” Alf answered deadpan as she made questionable pose with her hips and fingers.
“…what?”
“Strange, the data said that that pose should incite strong emotional response…”
…just what kind of things that our ancestor dumped into those giant Machines…
I held my head in my hands as Alf tilted her head in confusion.
Second level
“Hey Len.”
“What is it? I’m busy.”
“Well I’m bored! A beautiful onee-san is right in front of you, so why are you concentrating at your computer! That story is an overused trope anyway!”
“First, calling yourself beautiful wasn’t cute at all. Second, I don’t care about what you think about my story.”
“…don’t you think you got too cocky, Len? Maybe I should tell dad that we’re in that kind of relationship…”
“Please don’t! He would kill me without even confirming the truth!” For the umpteenth time, she simply laughed while I sighed once again.
It’s always like this huh? She teased me, I rebutted, she laughed and I sighed.
I inadvertently smiled.
“As I thought, I really did fall in love with you.”
“Wha—I know that I’m the one that told you to confess to me already, but it’s too sudden!”
That damn woman, what is she doing pulling herself to the edge of the room like that?
I could only sigh, my hands dancing once more over my laptop keyboards.
Third level.
So through the dialogue within each worlds it could be hinted where the worlds overlap with each other, the intersection of narratives and the collective truth that was shared within the meta-fiction universe. Just as this story was supposed to be set at the same world as the reader, you could also play with the setting as to confuse the reader where in the meta-fiction level are they supposed to be.
By using these kind of sentences and paragraphs that address the readers directly, you could build the illusion that the readers are part of the story, as well as using the real world as a narrative level. Using the real world in meta-fiction is very beneficial as you practically don’t have to do any world building to immerse the readers into the story, thus you could focus on what you want to tell the readers.
First level
“Instead of building the entire thing from scratch, it’s always easier to use preexisting one, huh?” Alf mumbled idly while she combed through the myriad of cables and silicon wafers I got from the Machine.
“The disadvantage is that you might lose the method to manufacture it, though. But well, there’s no such kind of facility in this world anyway.” I selected a couple circuit board, trying to figure out what they could do.
Silence.
“Hey, Alf.”
“Yeah?” She gave me a glance as she pushed a particularly heavy cooling system.
“If alternate realities really exist, would you…”
“Would I try to go to another universe, you mean? Well, as long as it’s with you, maybe…”
“…you, when did you learn to be such a smooth talker?” She simply chuckled.
“You’re not the only one who are allowed to make people blush, you know.”
“It’s decided then. If alternate realities really exist, I will take you to one of them, to the place where ice cream resides.”
Silence.
“…hey, say something, will you?”
More silence, intermittent clanking of metals are the only one breaking it.
“…why does it end like this…?”
Second level
“…why does it end like this…?”
I stared at the face in front of mine, the sleeping face of my beautiful stepsister.
Before anyone accuse me of immoral acts, we still retain our clothes, thank you very much, and we behave under the limits that was morally acceptable for siblings. I did confessed my love to her, but it was familial love, not—
Okay, that part was a lie. I won’t use “falling in love” to refer at familial love.
I sighed.
I looked at my laptop screen, still showing the same page of the unfinished story.
No, wait.
It’s not at the same page as where I left it yesterday. There are several possibility as of how this could happen, the first that I considered was this stepsister of mine woke up at the middle of the night and continued my story without my permission. I discounted it from the equation as the writing style is clearly mine, and in line with the story that I built in my head.
Then it’s either I forgot that I wrote it or the story somehow wrote itself—hah, as if. Better get carbon monoxide detector and get my head checked then.
Third level
The development of a story doesn’t always come from the story itself, instead, a meta-analysis of the story could also contribute to the plot and move the story forward—in fact, this is the basic of meta-fictional narrative.
First level
I bit into the spherical gray fruit that tasted like a sawdust, courtesy of the greenhouse of your fair maiden Alf herself. I half-chuckled and half-choked at my own exaggerated comment. Alf can’t be further than the image of fairy tale maiden depicted in the remnants of Old World, rather, she was the strong and brave heroine who challenged the world and earned her worth.
Irrelevant thought. I scolded myself. There simply nothing of value in comparing her to fictional characters.
But then again the history of the Old World was so scattered that we cannot separate truth from fiction, and at some point, maybe all that was considered fictional by even the Old World would be taken as truth by another civilization that they themselves had forgotten.
“Ah, I figured it out! The cooling system is active, we could use the extra processors now.”
Who needs fiction when your life is stranger than one?
I trudged towards the smiling Alf with a smile of my own.
Second level
Which got me to ask the same question, is the reality that I’m living on really the baseline?
I mean, considering the fact that I could write this story here with the protagonist writing another story of his own, how could I be so sure that I’m not another protagonist writing a story inside someone else’s story? And who am I to say that I am the one writing the story, instead of the story using me to write them?
But then again, right now I have much more important problem occupying my literal arm rather than my figurative one.
Namely, the sleeping beauty of a stepsister that had turned my right arm as a pillow.
Third level
Could we really argue about the existence of baseline reality?
What is baseline reality?
There’s also the term ‘Consensus Reality’, but whose consensus was that? Who are we to determine that we all lived at the same kind of reality as everyone else?
Playing with these topic, we could converge the realities of the meta-fiction story into a single unified reality that is both the sum of all realities and yet part of none.
And thus I laid down my pen, wishing another time for us to meet.
First level
And thus I closed my journal, holding to the hand of my beloved.
Second level
And thus I turned off my laptop, stretching my left arm to its limit, facing the bright sun to once again march against the unforgiving reality.
