In Darkness

I saw it on the shelf at Blockbuster and I rented it for exactly two reasons:
1) The demon on the cover looked cool.
2) The parental notice on the back said there was nudity.

(Note To Hollywood: Demons + Nudity = Dark Icon Will Rent Your Movie)

The plot synopsis was something I’d seen a hundred times: College kids in an abandoned house unleash and ancient evil that proceeds to chew on them one by one until the credits roll. Literally, I’ve seen that movie like sixteen times this year. I was expecting some low-budget crap with maybe enough boobs and special effects to make it worth the rental fee.

Turns out I was half right. Sort of. Maybe.
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Our time was close. We didn’t have the element of total surprise, but we knew their weaknesses, while the latest mutations had rendered their knowledge of US obsolete. Now it was a waiting game. The cockroaches may have had the upper hand since the great fall… but winter was coming, and they didn’t have fur.

Actually, I don’t know WHAT the title of this story was supposed to be, but “Shadows of Sentience” sounds about right.
This was from 1995, when, apparently, I thought that the way to write a novel was to just sit down and start writing… no plan, no outline, no notes… nothing. I remember that this was supposed to be a novel about terrorists and machines and some Bruce Willis-style badass caught in the middle.

I got about one chapter in before I quit. This is it:

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Through the miracle of technology, I have established communication with our future. Rather than listen to media and government hype about how ‘wonderful’ the future America must be, I requested a letter from a high-school student somewhere in the US. Children can be so brutally honest, ya know. Anyway, below is the first letter received from 2034:

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This isn’t a story fragment, just an interesting quote I found in a text file:

“Magic is in the enigmas and mysteries, puzzles and paradoxes. At times there may be words that must be said, or rituals that must be performed… but the power lies not within these things. It lies in the willingness to do things that other men will not. To think the unthinkable, fathom the unfathomable. Conceive the inconceivable. The difference between the possible and the impossible is merely the degree to which you will go to change the latter into the former. That is the Art. Most men will never learn it, simply because they are too lazy… or because they have been deluded into thinking that it is not real… that the line between possible and impossible is inviolate by definition.”

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