First Day of NaNoWriMo

The first day of NaNo is always the most fun. As you're writing that first section you realize the things that you are going to love about writing your novel, who is going to become your favorite character and you realize how short 1,667 words per day is. You don't realize what you're going to hate about writing your novel, or who your least favorite character to write is going to be, or how long 1,667 words per day can be when you're busy until about the second week.
But I'll try not to get ahead of myself. Just to show you how much 1,667 words is, and to give a little understanding of what my blog is going to be dedicated to for the next month, I'm going to post the first 1,667 (or so) words. Try to remember that this is an extremely rough draft.

***

            The first thing I saw when I woke up was my alarm clock lying in a decidedly dead position in the corner of my room. Before I could even shiver at the cold, I was up and out of bed.

“Julius,” I groaned, pulling off my warm pajama pants and wincing as the cold air pulled goose bumps from my skin before I could pull on my jeans.

“Julius, you good for nothing robot, get up,” I said, flinging one of my shoes across the apartment at him. It bounced down on his bed, and I swore in the slurred speech of the recently awoken when I realized I needed it.

            When I walked over, Julius was sitting stock straight in his bed. I leaned forward and saw his eyes flicking around rapidly, so I left him to scan his memory. If I didn’t we wouldn’t know where to go, since of course I didn’t keep track of any addresses.

            I grabbed my shoes from his bed and rifled through his dresser until I found clothing to toss at him. He didn’t react as they fell into his lap. Finally, with three short twitches of his right hand, he looked up at me with clear blue eyes and a bit of annoyance.

            “Why do you have to wrinkle every single piece of clothing that you touch,” Julius complained, trying to flatten out the shirt I’d thrown to him as he buttoned it up.

            “Because unlike you, I understand that we’re in a bit of a rush,” I said, pulling out the ingredients to make a quick breakfast. Julius did up his last button as he approached me, and he pushed me aside. He quickly began to make some French toast, faster than I could’ve made regular toast.

            “How late are we this time?”

            “Only about half an hour,” I said, not looking up at him as I tied my shoes.

            “Wonderful. And whose fault is that?” he asked. I made my way back up to my room, and kicked my alarm clock aside to root through the pile of papers beneath it.

            "Not mine," I complained, "I set an alarm! And you're a companion robot, aren't you supposed to have an alarm?"

I plucked out an almost empty notebook. I ripped the used pages out and pinned them over a few others on my bedroom wall.

"You know my alarm doesn't work anymore. Would you rather I get a memory wipe so that you can wake up on time?" he asked, turning to give me an admonishing look, though it was somewhat tempered when he gestured angrily with his spatula.

"Oh really, Sarah? Don't fill up another wall," he said, when he saw I'd pinned the papers to a new wall. He looked woefully at the crowded, messy wall of papers I'd made on one full end of the apartment.

"Maybe they'll cover up the wall you hate so much," I said, gesturing to our white and black striped wall. The stripes were wavering and imperfect and the white paint was beginning to show from under the black paint.

"Won't you just let me organize your papers. Or at least repaint that atrocious wall," he begged, placing out a piece of French toast for me. I bit into the thick bread and he popped in a gray supplement pill before we left. Julius wouldn't stop fidgeting with his collared shirt, complaining that I'd wrinkled it. By the time we were on the elevator, I'd convinced him it was fine. But then he'd started to worry about the single curl that always managed to pop up in the front of his blond hair. It curled down onto his forehead every day, without fail, despite his arguments that he "wasn't designed with it."

By the time we were out the front door, our neighbor was bringing in her laundry and barking in Spanish at her husband, who was leaning out of one of the windows above us. He waved to us as Julius and I crossed the empty street.

"Do we have to cross the mall?" I asked.

"We can if you want. It'd take us in the right direction."

"Of course I want to," I said, tugging his jacket towards the row of bare trees surrounding the mall.

"You know you're like a small child right? You're twenty two and you act like a small child half of the time," he said, rolling his eyes.

"And you act like an old man, so together we even out," I said, as we passed the towering Washington Monument and frozen dew crunched under my sneakers. I shivered just barely.

"I told you to bring a heavier jacket," Julius said, looking idly at his watch.

"I'm fine," I replied, rubbing feeling back into my arms, "How late are we going to be?"

"About half an hour. You were exaggerating a bit this morning," Julius said, shrugging off his jacket and handing it to me.

"Julius, you don't have to--"

"You know I don't need it. I can't get cold. And if you freeze we'll never get there on time," Julius said, pushing the jacket back into my hands.

            We passed through the mall and came to the end of the containment unit. A huge plastic wall rose before me, and I could see my own wavering reflecting in the thick plastic next to Julius'. A dull hum came from the air purifiers a hundred feet away as they pumped clean air into the unit. I opened the steel locker in front of me to reveal racks of oxygen masks. I pulled off my wool hat and jammed it onto Julius' head. He shook his head and the bright red pompom on top of the hat bounced. He pulled the hat off, and jammed it into his pocket. I didn't tell him that it'd ruffled up his hair.

I grabbed an oxygen mask. Smirking at his messy hair, I pulled on my mask, trying to find a way to place the strap so that it wouldn't leave angry red marks on my cheeks but knowing no matter what I did it would.

"Get the back?"

Julius stepped forward and tightened the strap. He always pulled it tighter than I wanted. Even though I knew if he didn't pull it tight enough, I'd suffocate as soon as I stepped across the border into the robot quarter.

"Why is it called the robot quarter, anyways," I asked, my voice muffled by the oxygen mask that Julius was carefully adjusting. He didn't respond.

"I mean it's not a quarter of D.C. It's more like three quarters. Or five sixths. When you think about it, most of the city, heck, most of the world is part of the robot 'quarter'," I mused.

"Do you really want me to check that, or is this just that weird habit humans have of speaking through their entire thought process," Julius asked. I wasn't sure whether he was being sarcastic or not.

"No, you don't have to," I responded. I assumed that he was being serious. He wasn't sarcastic often, and when he was, he wasn't exactly subtle.

"Come on, Sarah. We've got to get to the entry point," Julius said, tugging on the strap of my mask to lead me there. My laugh seemed hollow as it was stopped by the plastic around my face.

Julius came to the terminal in front of the entry point  before I did, and punched in the code that verified that any humans coming over were wearing the appropriate masks. He was programmed so that he couldn't enter the code unless the humans were masked. But I'd seen him put in the code enough that I could probably cross by myself if I wanted to, mask or no mask. But no one in their right mind would cross out of the containment unit into the oxygen depleted and pathogen ridden outside without a mask. Though, from what I'd heard, being among the last hundred humans in existence can put some people out of their right minds.

"Are you thinking about something depressing?" Julius asked, raising his voice over the hiss of the entry point opening.

"What?" I sputtered, "You know I hate it when you do that. It's like you're reading my mind."

"I'm a companion android. It's not my fault I have to analyze it every time a muscle in your face moves," he said. He slipped away from me into the entry point before continuing.

"Then again, it's not like I really need to. Every thought you have is clearly spelled out on your face before you even have it."

I glared at him as the entry point blasted him with air and opened the door into the other side. I stepped into the entry point once the door to the robot quarter slid shut.

Cold air that tasted vaguely like the doctor’s office rushed over me, whipping my hair and jacket. It died down and I hurried to fix my now wild hair. But judging by the look that Julius gave me once I stepped out into the robot quarter, I’d failed. I managed to get it back where I wanted it, but his look remained.

“Alright, what is it?”

“Do you need to part your hair to the side? It’s asymmetrical,” he said, his fingers twitching a bit, like they did when I told him he couldn’t clean up my room.

I laughed just a bit. This was the perfect revenge for when earlier in the week, he’d tossed my transcript of my interview with one of the teachers in the human reserve, just because I’d spilled a bit of pasta sauce on the corner.

I laughed quietly though, then waited for Julius to catch up with me after he’d entered another code into the terminal.

I didn’t like to spend time in the robot city alone. Or at all, really. Julius loved this city the way I love the human city. For him it was perfect. Pristine, symmetrical, geometrical, and perfectly organized robots are the only ones making their way silently down the street. We must’ve passed a hundred androids in the first few blocks. 

A few, the older robots, greeted me. But I’d noticed recently that most robots were no longer programmed to greet humans. The deference that they used to show was pointless when only about one hundred humans remained. 

***

So, while 1,667 isn't an impossible word count to reach, it's not exactly a cake-walk either. Well, I better get back to writing.