Once upon a time, we pitched a game to Sony, which tickled their fancy, and resulted in us becoming registered PlayStation 3 developers. They didn’t fund our expensive game though, because we had no experience.
Fair enough we thought!
A few years later, we pitched the game again, in a different form, for a different platform. Once again Sony were intrigued, inviting us to several meetings with various departments to explain the ideas – but ultimately didn’t sign it up. Most probably because it was too ambitious, and all we had in our portfolio at that time was a lil’ crab on a beach!
So now, I’ve decided to write the ideas down as a novel. Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it, get some interest in it, and then, in a massively convoluted pitch process, get some genuine interest in making the damn thing 🙂
Anyway, here’s a short excerpt, hope you like it!
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It hung in the air, edges shimmering with a billion colours as it caught the light of the room, but this thing was black as night.
Professor Paul Drayton now watched alone. His colleagues had tried to flee, screaming in horror at the carnage brought upon this operation. It had been another day of protocol, and should have been innocent.
Of course, they had not followed protocol. Repetition takes its toll on even the most practiced and disciplined minds, and they’d let their professionalism slip in a moment of excitement, a chance to see something new; something that would break from repetition so brilliantly that it was irresistible not to act. They should have waited, calculated – followed protocol.
Instead they were weakened by emotion, and forgot there was no undo button.
It now seemed to stare at him, a floor to ceiling slice of shimmering black, slightly bowed along its length as a feline pupil might look under blinding sunlight. This thing, after causing untold destruction during the last two minutes, had now appeared to stabilise.
Paul dared not move. At first he was frozen in wonder, watching it dart around like a waveform razor blade. But as the devastation unfolded, he’d noticed that movement invited the horrifying attention of the thing, and now he was frozen in fear.
His eyes were dry, nagging for moisture. He had to blink. Flashing his eyes closed for a moment brought stabs of pain he couldn’t show. It remained motionless, save for its glimmering colour.
He looked around, keeping his head perfectly still. The room had been altered beyond possibility. Load bearing structures revealed large fractures of displacement, shifted in all directions by blocks of space that should have rendered them useless, but somehow their integrity held. Electronic equipment was bent and twisted, but remained operational. Inorganic matter had somehow survived this onslaught with core purpose intact. But Paul’s colleagues, some of the most respected scientific minds on Earth, were not as fortunate. The grey matter that once held their genius now laid splattered and hanging from torn surfaces. A result of bodies being pulled in impossible ways.
Keeping terribly still, Paul blinked again, holding his eyes shut. As the gravity of their mistake fell upon him, he made an instinctive wish, hoping the thing would not be there when he looked; he hoped it would have vanished like a bad dream in the warm light of morning.
When Paul opened his eyes, it was gone. In a mind already saturated with fear, Paul felt more – his whole being now stricken. From somewhere in the depths of memory, a thought bubbled up:
Encountering a deadly spider may seem terrifying, but be wary of looking away for just a moment. If you look back and find it has disappeared, you will feel true terror – of the known and the unknown united in torment.