Not my first first fic, but the other ones have been lost to time and hard drive crashes, and I never shared them. So here’s my first published one.

2021

Sébastien Le Livre was a man without a plan.

This, in itself, was not actually an unusual state of affairs for him. One could draw a straight line from the time he was an eight year-old taking a purloined cooper’s barrel for a joyride down Marsellie’s steep streets and right into the harbor, to getting caught forging port permits and cargo inventories and manumission papers and being drafted into the Grande Armeé for it all, to all the shit that went down in Russia that lead to dangling at the end of a noose for three days. All the way down to the whole sordid mess with Merrick.

He’d never been some towering intellect at thinking ahead about the consequences of his actions. Jeannette had loved him anyway.

2022

Merrick was now incoherently ranting about his sensory-deprived existence and how his only entertainment came from toying around with the lives of “meat sacks.” It made Nile suddenly and dimly recall a computer game from her childhood. That one where a player could delete a pool ladder and the little virtual human would drown, because they were too stupid to figure out how to get out of a pool without a ladder. She had been a Capricious Neighborhood God to her little virtual people quite often. Merrick took it to a whole new level and on real people.

“They can still feel! Taste! Touch! And they’re so fragile! I used them sometimes to see if I could put an artificial brain in an organic body, you know, but they’re so fragile. And they die.”