CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

~Tabula Rasa~

Captain Ramirez was a law enforcement model class M: Management. He was programmed with specific coding on “Leadership Strategies.” Of course, the leadership of Synths (the AI community of service robots) and the leadership of Orgos (organic matter: humans) were two entirely different algorithms. However, Capt. Ramirez was given the Leadership Strategies software because his position frequently required Orgo-facing interactions.

Emma could practically see that software trigger in his black eyes as he took in Emma, standing in Jessica’s apartment, poised over Jessica’s laptop. There was no code for empathy, and yet Ramirez did have the code for reading human behavior.

“Emma, what are you doing?”

Jessica was frozen, clearly panicked. Emma watched, the probability of different outcomes computing in the background.

Jessica stood straight and let her voice fall into a flat monotone.

“Captain, the Orgo has been…difficult. I thought a visit to her residence might help calm her senses.”

EMMA>> …what?

Emma had to admit, she was impressed.

Ramirez just looked at her, unmoving. The captain, like his name, was modeled after an Afro-Latino racial profile. It was deemed advisable with the Casting Department for a Synth in a leadership position to accurately reflect the demographics of the populous over which it had been given charge. Thus, Ramirez had light brown skin, dark features, and short, curly black hair.

“Why is your voice different, Emma?”

Jessica did not move. In her new synthetic skin and titanium skeletal structure, absolute statue-stillness was a feasible option.

“The Orgo, Jessica, was…having a hard time adjusting to her new state. I deemed it advisable to give her a voice that was closer to her original sound.”

He walked slowly up to Jessica, standing toe to toe with her. He was several inches taller than Emma’s hardware. He looked her dead in the eye. Finally, he said,

“You are only her host. She is not you, Emma.”

JESSICA>> Why does he keep saying your name?

EMMA>> Orgo-given names are a point of pride, individuality. He’s showing respect.

JESSICA>> It feels like he’s taunting me.

It did indeed feel that way, but it couldn’t be. Why would a mechanical captain taunt his subordinate? It was…impractical.

“Indeed, I am her host. Humans are used to more hospitable environments. I deemed it necessary to create a more hospitable environment. A Harlow offer.”

“…A…Harlow… offer?” Ramirez asked.

“You know, Harry Harlow, the cloth monkey experiment?”

Ramirez didn’t move, didn’t blink. He was looking up the information.

“You are…offering yourself as Jessica Daniel’s…cloth monkey?”

“Affirmative.”

EMMA>> Affirmative?

JESSICA>> Shut up.

“Whose idea was this? Yours, or hers?

“Mine.”

Jessica held her breath, supposedly double-checking it was the correct “mine.”

“My research suggested that when Orgo-infants have something familiar to hold onto, they are more amenable to change. That’s why we came here, to give her a familiar environment. It seems to be working.” Jessica finished. The captain’s face was utterly unreadable.

“You went off-grid 8 hours, 27 minutes, and 13 seconds ago. We sent out a task force looking for you.”

“Yes, things were…not good,” Jessica said, searching for words.

“…Not good?”

EMMA>> Yes, not good?

“She was…panicking. The Orgo needed time to adjust to her new status. You know…” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “As deceased.”

He didn’t even blink.

JESSICA>> Tough crowd.

EMMA>> What are you doing?

Jessica nudged the captain, “It’s called humor, Ramirez. Look it up.”

“Jessica is telling you jokes?”

“Affirmative, and I thought I should look up some to— you know— smooth the way. We’ve been watching sitcom reruns. The 90s are her favorite. They seem to be having a soothing effect on her.”

Jessica walked past him.

“Where were you?”

Jessica stopped and turned back.

“I just told you, watching—”

“Where were you, Emma, when you were watching comedy reruns and playing cloth mother to the deceased human in your hard drive?”

“I—we went off grid. She just needed a moment to adjust—”

A request came in through her main feed:

Request: Capt. Ramirez
Subject: Video footage download.

Jessica didn’t move or speak.

EMMA>> He wants to see what you’ve been up to while binging sitcoms.

Emma’s software automatically gave her the option of uploading footage from the last 8 hours, which, of course, included Salamon, the rebels, her identity switch, playing around in the basement of some facility…

Jessica trimmed the footage to just after the last sighting of Sam, deleted the rest from her archives, deleted the backup to that footage, and then uploaded the remaining footage. She turned and walked away into the livingroom before the download was complete.

“Emma,” Ramirez followed her in. “What happened to the other 6 hours 29 minutes and 11 seconds?”

“Girl time.”

EMMA>> Using humor does not work on Synths.

Emma thought that was fairly obvious at this point.

“Jessica has requested our time to be private. She’s embarrassed about her meltdown. She doesn’t want it on public record, in the collective databanks.”

“Unfortunately for Jessica, Orgo rights cease upon expiration, and you are subordinate to me, Emma.”

Jessica and Ramirez stared each other down. Jessica tilted her head in deference.

“I apologize, sir. Upon the Orgo’s request, I have deleted the requisite footage.”

Jessica turned away.

Ramirez hit her from behind with the speed and strength of a wrecking ball. He grabbed her, picked her up, and threw her sideways as easily as if she were a marionette. Her body hit the wall of books with a thud, knocking tombs to the ground. If she had been human, it would have broken ribs. But Emma’s base programming came installed with the same fundamental hand-to-hand combat software, and when she hit the ground, she rolled.

Ramirez came at her again just as she was pushing off the floor, landing a knee to her gut. That force should have winded her, but things being what they were now (titanium), she was just jostled. On her knees, she blocked his next attack with two raised arms and then rolled out of the way, coming to her feet in one fluid motion.

His strikes came in with whip precision, but Jessica blocked them just as fast, striking out in turn. Watching the rhythm of his movements, Emma’s software supplies the oncoming moves at first milliseconds and then full seconds before they arrive. Jessica anticipated the blows, knocking them aside and landing two of her own in the time it took Ramirez to return and retaliate.

Ramirez realized Emma’s software was superior to his, probably because she was a field model and a newer version to boot. He changed his attack strategy, dropping his shoulders low and tackling Emma from the center. Emma’s hardware was smaller and lighter, designed for high-speed motorcycle chases. Ramirez, meanwhile, was built for an imposing presence that signaled leadership in Orgo society. He was also built for tactical ground support in scenarios which might require forces to storm buildings or hold off mobs. Thus, he was heavier and bigger than she.

They hit the glass coffee table, knocking it over and sending books and papers flying. The glass shattered, and they rolled over the shards. He wrestled her down, landing two solid punches to her face that made her main feed glitch. She writhed, attempting to throw him off, but he wrestled her right back down. All the usual punches and knee jabs that would have met sensitive spots in a normal human male were met by solid titanium. Finally, she grabbed the back of his head and threw her own titanium skull against his in a headbutt.

She saw stars, but so must have he because he slackened. She wriggled out from under him in a shot and lunged for the door. In seconds, he was after her, gripping her bodily. They landed on the ground. She thrashed with all her might, letting out a howl of frustration, but he locked her arms behind her back and twined one hand around her neck in a vice.

“Submit,” he growled.

JESSICA>> Are you kidding me?

“Submit!”

“No—Asshole!”

He lowered his mouth to her ear. “I knew it, Jessica. How did you co-opt Emma’s software?”

Jessica stilled. “Captain Ramirez, I am not Jessica, I’m still Emma. So get off me. This is completely unprofessional—”

But then something clicked into the port in the back of Emma’s head, and Captain Ramirez was in her main frame. His software ran her circuitry in a hostile attack. Jessica gasped, her body freezing. Streams of numbers and computations ran across her main feed.

RAMIREZ>> Jessica, where is EMMA?

EMMA>> I’m here! Capt. Ramirez I’m—-

Before Emma could even finish her communication, the captain’s coding located the glass prison she had been trapped in. He investigated it, tapping on the glass.

RAMIREZ>> What happened? How were you trapped in there?

At the same time, in the background, his system hunted down Jessica’s consciousness. Emma watched as he executed an aggressive takeover. It was similar to the brutal, swift encounter of blows they just exchanged in Jessica’s apartment, except this time Jessica had no offensive-defensive software installed and trained into her hardware to protect her. Ramirez took over in moments, bringing Jessica’s consciousness to her knees, arms locked painfully back, and head shoved down, an ant before a gorilla.

Emma didn’t know what to say. She wanted him to stop. He was hurting Jessica…but Jessica had taken over Emma.

RAMIREZ>> Emma, how did this happen?

It was a command. She owed her superior officer an order. Salamon, the rebels, all the rest, he needed to know. The Company needed to know.

Jessica’s consciousness screamed as he ground her down, injuring her.

EMMA>> You’re hurting her.

RAMIREZ>> Emma, answer the question.

JESSICA>> Don’t, don’t do it Emma.

There was a long pause, and then Emma began to tell him.

EMMA>> We encountered the rebels. They infiltrated my circuitry, locked me out of the main controls, and gave Jessica full, unrestricted access.

Ramirez looked over the glass cage.

Outside the interface, Emma’s and Ramirez’s bodies were frozen in the body lock, Ramirez wrapped around Emma like a boa constrictor, neither of them moving or breathing. Computations ran through his eyes while hers glitched.

RAMIREZ>> I see it, the gap for the keycode.

He placed his hands on the glass wall and then, carefully, with concentration, pressed inwards. It bent like a plasma screen. His software worked harder and harder, an internal fan kicking in as the circuitry began to overheat, computations running a million a minute to undo whatever technical web Salamon had woven. He kept his eyes trained on his hands, pressing forward.

RAMIREZ>> Take my hand, I’ll pull you out.

Emma reached out for the hand cloaked in plasmas, but then she hesitated.

Pixels streamed over his fingers, green, red, black, white, purple, yellow, until finally they ran into the hand, turning it a blur of green, blue, and staticky white and black.

Ramirez breathed heavily, internal systems kicking it up to cool him down. If he were Organic matter, Emma had the distinct thought he would be sweating. The blue and green pixels spread over his hands and up his arms, slowly at first, and then racing.

He gasped, pulling his hands back, but the plasma locked him in place, refusing to budge, and the static washed through Ramirez. The virus, for Emma realized abruptly that’s what it was, surged up his throat, through his circuitry, into his mainframe.

RAMIREZ>> Gui-Gui-Gui-Gui-Gui-Gui-XXXXXxxxxxxLLLLLLLTko[llmb; *038212()-0=-0[))(_P+(+}“+_paiurg[08y[Q3984R&%my!@(_)_&*YHNFAN

His system lost control as the virus wrestled him to the ground, returning the same hostile takeover he’d just enacted on Jessica.

EMMA>> Captain! Can you hear me? Capt-

RAMIREZ>> LIO(*+_0]pk:O)((_+(@*^&++_(*(*^^)_O{OKNHYGUI+_!+)9=9 iojhbkas-Clear the streets. Guns on third— Orgo Rebels inbound—

And then he turned off. He just hung there, hands locked in plasma.

EMMA>> Captain?

Jessica shivered in pain, but tentatively felt her way around the mainframe, finding him gone, she approached the one link left, the last vestige of Ramirez’s presence in Emma’s circuitry.

EMMA>> What did you do to him?

JESSICA>> I don’t— that wasn’t me.

Within the software, Jessica investigated the limp AI. His head lolled back, revealing white static eyes. Jessica gasped.

JESSICA>> That’s disgusting.

They glowed half blue, the blue slowly taking over.

EMMA>> What is happening?

JESSICA>> I think something’s being downloaded.

The blue finished, the eyes snapped shut, the plasma released his hands, and he fell back, the coding of his presence dissolving.

A click, and then the hardwire the captain plugged into the back of Emma’s head retracted. With two mechanical blinks, Jessica reinhabited Emma’s body. She was still trapped in the headlock, but she quickly wriggled free. She rolled away and was up in a second, her body landing in a fighting stance. But Ramirez didn’t move. His eyes were far off, his poster frozen mid-wrestle.

EMMA>> You should go. If you want to escape.

Jessica edged closer. She nudged him with her foot. He powered down, his body collapsing limp onto the floor. Jessica squeaked, jumping back. Ramirez rolled over on his back. One eye shut, opened, then the other. The mouth opened, and then in the voice of Ramirez,

“Jessica.”

Jessica paused. “Yes?”

“It’s Salamon. The failsafe I installed was triggered. This unit is now under my control. Why can’t I see you?”

“You’re lying on your back—I mean… he’s lying on his back.”

After a moment, with jerky movements apparently coded in from Salamon’s side, Ramirez sat up. He started to fall over. Jessica caught him.

“I don’t have perfect motor control yet.”

“Clearly,” she muttered, and dragged him over to a wall to prop him up against.

“What happened in here?” He looked around, his head jerking like C3PO.

“Pretty much what it looks like, I was attacked.” Jessica wiped her hands off from shards of broken glass and crouched down in front of him so she was squarely in his line of sight.

“Status report.”

Jessica hesitated. “I…It’s…bad. They found a viable subject.”

“Then you know your mission.”

She bit her lip, a distinctly un-AI gesture.

“What?”

“I just, look—” she gestured to her destroyed apartment. “All I did was stop by home, and I was instantly found out. I couldn’t pass off as a convincing AI for five minutes. What you want me to do is—”

“You know the alternative.”

“I know…so what do you recommend?”

“Do better.”

“…That’s it? ‘Do better’?”

“Jessica, you’re in the resistance, now. You see what comes from mistakes.” Ramirez’s arm jerked up for a clumsy gesture to her ruined apartment. “This is not a school test where you get a bad grade and try again next time. This isn’t even life and death. We’re talking about human society as we know it. We’re talking about an extinction-level event. So yes… do better.”

Jessica looked down and drew a steadying breath. When she spoke next, something in her voice had changed.

“What are we going to do about Ramirez? Will you erase his memory?”

Ramirez’s head cocked as Salamon spoke, “Maybe, unless—”

“…Unless?”

“Shhh,” he snapped at her. Salamon was apparently tinkering in the depths of Ramirez’s circuitry. “If I could just—yes, bingo. That’s what I want.”

A strange beeping, like the archaic dial-up tone, broadcasted from Ramirez’s mouth. It was LOUD.

“SHHHH!!!” She clapped her hands over his mouth, muffling the sound only barely. Then the captain’s body started shaking violently. Jessica had to work to keep it upright. Finally, the dial-up tone ceased, and then came a hiss…and a trail of smoke from the captain’s ears.

Emma watched all this in horror.

EMMA>> What did he just do?

“Salamon?”

The captain blinked and looked at Jessica.

“Hello, m-my n-n-naaaaaame is Capt-t-t-t-tain Ramirez, a la-law enforcement officer, class MMMMM. It-t-t-t is my duty and honor to protect and s-s-s-serve. How may I s-serve yoooou?”

The voice modulated itself as it worked through factory settings and refound the captain’s familiar timber. The pitch of the voice was the same, but there was something missing, that underlying depth of an awareness holding back information. This was the captain with all the subtle innocence of a fresh slate.

“You just…reset him?”

“Tabula Rasa, with yourself truly at the control panel.”

That was obviously Salamon.

EMMA>> The Company will notice that one of their Management units has been co-opted.

“How long can you maintain control?”

“Until the next upload. At that point, it’s game over, but I’ll keep him away from the upload for as long as possible. That won’t be forever, so Jessica, you have to hustle.”

Jessica nodded.

» End of Chapter 5. Read Chapter 6 first Saturday in July.

MORE FICTION BY S. C. DURBOIS:

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A complex anthology of thirty short stories spanning genres, tones, and themes from author, screenwriter, and director Shayla C. Durbois. These stories offer an original, unexpected, and refreshing take on the human experience, several of which have been produced for the screen.

A New-Adult Literary Novella:

Virginia’s whole world was the wisdom of the ancients, until she moved to the city and had to make rent. Dealing with the real world, her degree in philosophy should more than equip her, shouldn’t it? Desperately, Virginia combs her college texts as she seeks to navigate roommate troubles, job stability, and a burgeoning romance with a Spanish sculptor.

Aristotle, thoughts? Socrates, care to comment?

Virginia’s new job at Greenhouse Antiques offers some insight: Find the treasure amid the junk. Then, haggle like your life depends on it.

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• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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I confess I am delayed this month not only on this “Check In,” but also on Chapter 5 of “The Orgo-Synth Dilemma.” This is because I was in the final push on delivery for “The Hormone Games.” I am thrilled to announce that this 10-webisode series is now, finally, released across all of my social media platforms.

I am immensely proud and I invite, nay, I plead with you to send this to everyone in your life who is either
A) A Woman (of any age)
B) Has a woman in his life (any at all)
C) Is a health teacher (or a teacher of any kind)

You will laugh, you might cry, but above all, I hope you learn.

“The Hormone Games” Episode 1: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube

Now to the “Check-In.”

Recently, I was invited to elaborate on how directing, producing, and acting have impacted my writing practice. What emerged is the following article, a personal essay on my journey falling “down the rabbit hole” into the various disciplines within the entertainment industry. I invite you to join me on this crazy adventure…

Artist in Wonderland

By Shayla C. Durbois

Rabbit in a Waistcoat

One Artistic Multi-Hyphenate’s Journey

We all know the familiar phrase: “Jack of all trades and master of none…” left unfinished with the dangling warning at the end: don’t be someone who can’t focus, can’t commit. But lost somewhere in the ether of undefined fears surrounding untried paths is the end of that phrase: “Jack of all trades and master of none is often times better than master of one.” You read that correctly. If a person is creatively gifted in one area, they most likely possess talents in other areas.

In middle school, I was fascinated by visual art, writing, and music. I played the flute and sang in the school choir. Entering high school, I applied and was accepted into a dedicated arts school, and suddenly I had to choose one art form, because becoming excellent in a craft takes time, focus, and discipline. So, I dropped choir, I stopped my flute lessons, and I even stopped writing for a time, choosing to focus on exploring the mediums of visual art (drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and photography). Due to this focus and training, before I graduated, I created a full body of work and hosted an art show. Thankfully, the bug to write would not leave me alone, and even without dedicated class time I wrote a novel. To be clear, it was not good, but nonetheless, I wrote a full novel.

Unwilling to choose between visual art and creative writing, I double majored in college. After earning my BA, I taught art to middle and high school students in Connecticut and started my master’s in creative writing from Harvard University Extension School, taking distance classes from New York Times best-selling authors and industry professionals. Through this process, I learned that I am a writer to my bones. Without writing, I limp through the day in a state of tension, taking shallow breaths. Yet I could not escape how strong the visuals meant to me. My brain thinks in images, and many of my stories come from visuals in my head. When I don’t know where the story goes next, I try to “see” it in my mind’s eye. What better profession for me, I thought, than a screenwriter?

My highest goal, my “white rabbit,” is an excellent story: a story that envelopes you, makes you forget who you are, where you are, takes you on an adventure, and brings you out onto the other side of the narrative a fundamentally different (and hopefully better) person. Why? Storytelling is my life’s calling, and I believe stories will change the world. In the quest to chase that rabbit, I desire to be the absolute best storyteller I am capable of with my one life. The pandemic ended, and I had completed my master’s degree, as well as several more novels of increasingly higher quality. I reached the limit of what I was capable of as a storyteller if I remained in Connecticut. I packed up my RAV4 and drove across the country, chasing that little white rabbit in a waistcoat.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Into Hollywood

We’re not in Connecticut anymore.

I moved with jaw grinding, fists clenched, scared. I have no problem making friends, and I love exploring new places, but I thought for certain LA would be a West Coast version of NYC. I’ll watch a movie set in NYC any day of the week, but from my visits, I knew I would never survive in that environment: a concrete, claustrophobic, smelly jungle with astronomically high living expenses. Yet that was where I needed to go to function at my highest craft potential…so off I went.

In five days flat, I fell in love with Los Angeles. It turns out LA and NYC are very different: big sunny skies, beaches, mountains, and healthy artistic types everywhere you go. It was as though my whole life I had been running at a rhythm out of pace with everyone around me; judged, ignored, or treated as an endearing oddity not fully understood. I found occasional overlaps, environments where I could really let myself run to my full pace, but always with a slouch so that I would make sense in the context of others. In LA, finally, I could stand tall and really run.

I was out practically every night of the week networking, writing new scripts, getting on set, and my friend base grew exponentially as I met like-minded individuals with the same love for the craft who bet it all and moved, just like I did. When the writer’s strike started, only six short months after landing in the city, I paused. Had I made a mistake? Breaking into this industry is already more difficult than becoming a major league baseball player based strictly on job availability, and now the market is flooded with multi-decade credited writers all going after the same jobs, which have just decreased due to the oversaturation of TV shows on streaming platforms.

My teachers will tell you I’m a self-starter. I don’t believe in sitting on my hands and waiting for an opportunity. I believe in making an opportunity. Yes, there may be a certain level of gatekeeping in Hollywood, but I subscribe to the philosophy of being so excellent that they cannot deny you. Besides, seasons of anonymity are where you work on your craft so that when you’re finally handed an opportunity, you know what you’re doing and make the most of it. It was also during this time that I finally had to admit to myself what I had been in deep denial about my entire life: I wanted to direct.

I do not believe in saying you’re a director when you’ve never directed anything. There are enough posers in Hollywood, and I want my brand to be such that when I say something, people know it to be true because of the quality of my character. After years of training as a visual artist and then a creative writer, I also knew that the way to get good at something is by doing it a lot. Quality = Time + Quantity. I thus set a goal for myself to write and direct fourteen short films in 2024.

Attempting one short film over a year (and there were a few people who told me I should do that instead) is a reasonable and sufficiently challenging goal. But I am not interested in “reasonable goals,” I am after “excellent in the craft,” and excellence comes when you set goals that are too high for you, and you stretch to reach them. Attempting fourteen short films would force me to release perfection, and be okay with failure, knowing I could always do better on the next project: Get it done and move on. And that is exactly what happened.

Not knowing where I would get the money for any of these projects, I filmed the first one on my iPad with a roommate. I wrote a script, made a shot list, planned a schedule, and we got it done. I’m proud of myself for the effort, and that footage will never see the light of day because it was not good. This teed me up for project number two: I wrote another script, got an actor, one crew member, found a location, and once again filmed this one on my iPad. I edited this myself, and “The Ghost of Electricity” went to a festival back home in Connecticut. A full circle moment for me. (You can watch this on my YouTube channel @SCDurbois.)

When a producer asked me what I was up to, I answered honestly that I was directing. She asked me if I would like to direct her short film, a ten-page script. I said yes, she produced it, and thus I directed my first project on a real camera, with a real film crew, and a cast of six trained actors. I sat with the editor on that one, and “Forget-Me-Not” went to festivals all over the world. We won several awards, including “Best Creative Artistic Picture” and “Best New Filmmaker” from Content Film Festival. This external validation let me know that I wasn’t just kicking ideas around: as a director, I have potential.

Film #4 I produced myself, rented film equipment, worked with actors, and we shot over three days in the vortex of a continuity night/day, multi-script-day nightmare. In the midst of that project, I started “sleep directing,” meaning that I was so amped from the adrenaline and stress of 12-hour days, that when I got home and got into bed for a few precious hours of rest, I would get out of bed and sleep-talk to my DP, lining up shots, telling the laundry in my room to “hold for sound,” and calling “action.” This happened every single night of the shoot, and the next week after we wrapped. That project, “Roommate Generation,” is in post-production right now.

Other people saw the momentum in my life, and they wanted to help. Repeatedly, people offered me equipment, labor, locations, and even money because they wanted to see me succeed. I often needed to spend money I didn’t have to take advantage of the even greater gifts people were offering me. An indie production house came alongside me and helped me produce four of the projects. After “Roommate Generation” came Film #5, “Echoic.” Film #6 “Shivved.” Film #7 “C’est La Vie,” (which I was hired to produce and direct). Film #8 “Rebellex Pre-Dominus, Office Manager for Damnation Corporation.” (Short films will be available on my YouTube once completed through festivals. To follow my journey, follow me on IG @SCDurbois. Several of these projects are also short stories included in my recently published anthology of short stories, “The Day the Mountains were Small.)

From one project to the next, my productions scaled upwards: the length of the script, the size and price tag of the location, the special effects required, the number of crew, the number of extras, and the amount of money I spent. Thankfully, my mistakes decreased while my confidence grew. The last production was a sixteen-page Rom-Com with thirty people total on set, cast and crew. I knew how to plan my shots, how to talk to my DP, how to support actor performances, and how to lead a film team. Perhaps most important for me, I learned when I could take a breath, step back, get a cup of coffee, and trust my crew to bring us to the next shot set-up. One of my actors told me he had never seen me so relaxed on a set before. That’s what experience gives you. Film #9 “Blind Spot,” is officially through post-production and off to festivals.

I directed nine projects, and it took me a little over a year to do that. Am I upset I didn’t reach my goal of fourteen? No, because at the same time I was writing, directing, and producing my own work, I also worked as a PA, a Script Supervisor, a 1^st Assistant Director, and an Associate Producer on a feature film, ultimately working on fourteen projects. It was a true “Director Bootcamp Year.”

“Drink Me”: The Producer

How producing informs the writing practice.

A producer must recognize an excellent premise when it walks across her desk and know how to give notes to make it better. Does the script keep you wanting to find out what happens, or can you predict how the story will unfold? The ideas must be fresh, recognizing that every idea has been done before. What sets concepts apart as “new” is most often the unique voice of the storyteller. Can the writer reach way deep down and bring something authentic, vulnerable, real, and specific? Audiences come for the concept, but they stay for the character. If the concept is solid, but the characters are unrelatable or unlikable, the plot tends to crumble because we just don’t care if they succeed. How much does the character want their goal? The more they want it, the more we root for them. Thus, as a writer, I must write vivid characters with clearly defined dimensions. Powerfully painted characters provide the producer, the director, and the actors with a much stronger sense of what the story needs to succeed.

On a practical note from the indie filmmaking perspective: if you possess easy access to locations you can shoot in, write for those locations. Obtaining a location can be one of the most expensive steps. A limited location sets the parameters of your world, which forces you to write for interpersonal drama, as opposed to big, flashy effects. The limitations not only demand that you be a better writer but also make for a better story. We care about relationships, so the car chase could be the best in the world, but if we don’t care about the characters in the car chase, we’ll shut it off. “Roommate Generation” is a fifteen-minute short film I wrote and directed about two women living in the same apartment, battling over territory in their living space. This micro-war is comedic, yet at its heart, it reflects the global topic of major war movies: the desire to live in an environment that reflects one’s values and comfort. At the same time, this short film is painfully relatable and relevant to anyone who has ever had a roommate. This entire short was filmed over three days in one apartment. We had to utilize the space to the best of our creative abilities. As a writer, I focused on showing the major drama that can escalate from the micro-moves of sharing a space with someone. (Which I have no experience in…)

If you’re breaking into film with no money, writing for locations you have is the way to go. However, if you’re after studio money, Hollywood is about the spectacle. The money is available for the big projects, and audiences want to be wowed, so write big concept ideas that big Hollywood money can get behind. Everyone wants to make their money back, so everyone is on the lookout for excellent movies that will draw audiences. Writing with the budget in mind can unnecessarily squash the creative process. It’s much better to let your imagination roam to its fullest extent and then scale back and design creative solutions to story problems than to think small and end up with a small idea. How big should you write? Go watch what’s in theaters. Watch the classics. Watch the movies everyone acknowledges are excellent. Just as novel writers must read, screenwriters must watch. This is how we develop our taste and voice. As you ingest material and learn what is being made, your own voice and interests will develop concepts with studio potential. For example: “A Quiet Place” was originally written by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods for a much smaller budget, indie-level feature (you can read the script PDF online for free). But John Krazinski read the script, and it gripped him. He rewrote it and directed it, reshaping the vision from a smaller project to a big studio picture. Yet even though “A Quiet Place” is high concept (aliens who kill you if you make the smallest sound), at its core, the story is about characters we cannot help but love and root for.

Tea Party with the Mad Hatter:
The Director

How directing informs the writing practice.

Directing on set is like leading the charge of a multifaceted and kooky community. Filmmaking is a team sport, the highest collaboration of all the arts. And yes…You do feel like you’re losing your mind sometimes, but you enjoy so much fun along the way. The director works with the production designer for the “look” of the film, as well as the wardrobe department. We work with the cinematographer to set up shots, getting all the necessary angles (wide, medium, close) on all the actors, as well as inserts, transition shots, specials, and so on. We do multiple takes of each of these, and with each shot change, the lighting changes. We must reset for sound issues, or if actors miss a line, or if they did great but we just want to see something different.

We carry the script on set and constantly refer to these sides (script pages). When I’m determining how a scene is going to go, or where we’re headed next, I don’t need prose. I need brevity. I need clear, concise instructions on what’s happening. Directing, more than anything else, has taught me that a script is much more like a bullet point list of a story. We need the pops of color in the description, but let them be to the point. A main character’s description should be two to three lines, no more than four, and by lines I mean lines on a page, not sentences. Two to three lines is a good rule of thumb for location descriptions and action descriptions. Be precious with your words (unless it’s dialogue). Get to the point. A reader’s eyes should skim the page. White space is always better. This practice has taught me to be as direct and efficient with my language as possible.

Ironically, this has changed the way I write prose. In a typical prose style, the writer sinks into the world: Who is this character? What are they thinking? What do they look like? I feel my way into the story through the words. But screenplays are image, action, and dialogue first. When I adapt a prose story into a screenplay, I drop interiority, focusing on action, dialogue, and what we see. But a few times, I have taken a piece written as a screenplay and fleshed it out into a prose short story. To do this effectively, I must slow down, explore character thoughts, and take time visually building the world. Screenplay to prose is an outward-in approach, while prose to screenplay is an inward-out process, distilling story information into a narrative of only what we can see and hear. Directing trained me to be less verbose and more action-oriented: what are characters doing/saying?

Queen of Hearts: The Actress

How acting informs the writing practice.

Writers and actors approach a story differently. Writers must think about many characters, keep the plot moving forward, build structure, and keep tight pacing. Writers maintain the bird’s-eye view, whereas actors drill in on one character’s personhood. They make the words on the page flesh with their voice, their actions, and the emotional instrument of their body. It’s not enough to merely do the lines on the page: Actors must bring the life. When an actor gets a script and a character, they analyze it. They must deeply understand their character’s overall objective and each scene’s objective. They must identify the obstacles and track their emotional journey from beat to beat, living fully present in the emotional truth of the moment, believing the context of the scene. All the while, they must bring themselves to the role. They must be utterly vulnerable and authentic, so that we, the audience, believe them.

Personally, as an actress, skillfully embodying a character forced me to slow down. As a writer/director/producer with my view at 10,000 feet, I try to keep the whole scope of the project in view, but if I bring that mentality to acting, I will utterly miss the mark. Characters we believe in are fully grounded in the time and circumstances of the scene. They may be thinking of what happened the moment before, and what they ultimately want, but good acting is not from the head, the intellect, which is where most writing happens from. Good acting comes from the body, trusting yourself to be fully present, letting your guard down, being fully in touch with your emotions, and following your instincts. If you’re not present with your scene partner, the audience can feel it. It helps to ground yourself in the setting by literally touching things in the room to gently remind your body where you are. Actors own the on-the-ground view of the story from one character’s perspective. Now, when I write characters and give them dialogue, I imagine which actors I would cast in these roles. That, more than anything else, causes me to take them seriously as real people. As a writer, I must believe them and give them my time without hurrying onwards to the next plot point.

I had a story idea kicking around in my head for seven years, without knowing how to execute it. It would be called “The Hormone Games,” and it would be a comedic, scientific narrative about the chemical hormonal journey every woman goes on. But would it be a novel? A movie? A short story? I did not know the medium until I took up acting. Then I knew with certainty: “The Hormone Games” is a monologue. Words poured out of me as I researched the various stages of the menstrual cycle. Without meaning to, I wrote about each of the phases as I was experiencing them. I tried to write past a certain phase, but my body, my mind, my creative juices just would not let me do it. This was a whole new level of writing from the body and the emotions. My writer muse, now fully attuned to my body after months of acting, would not give me the next sentences until I was ready for them. It took me a month to finish writing the monologue.

I then memorized the lines and began workshopping it in class. The speaker is a biology teacher addressing a health class, and she talks for twenty-five minutes straight as she uses pop culture references (Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, etc.) to explain the high-stakes game every female is born into. After two months in rehearsals and development, we filmed it. I am a director and a producer, so pulling everything together is second nature at this point, but this was my first time in front of the camera as the star. I’m proud to tell you that this is the best performance I have ever given. “The Hormone Games,” a 10-episode webisode series, is now available across my social media platforms (IG, FB, TT, @SCDurbois).

Waking from the Dream:

The Well-Rounded Creative Professional.

I am a storyteller to my core, and writing is the foundation for that, but it is not the sum total of my storytelling abilities, drives, and needs. Writing is no longer enough for me. I MUST direct because I have a clear vision for the stories I’m trying to tell, and the world always needs more good storytellers. When I direct, it’s like my whole body is a tuning fork: everything hums at the perfect pitch. If you want to direct your own work, you must know how to produce, which means having an administrative action-oriented mindset. I took up acting to become a better director, and stumbling down that rabbit hole has been the biggest surprise of all. I have fallen in love with the responsibility and privilege an actor takes on when they do the work to bring a character to life, and I believe I’m only at the beginning of that adventure.

Landing in LA three and a half years ago, I thought writing was the height of my reach and capabilities; I had no idea just how much more was ahead of me. Stepping into each of these arenas was terrifying, and each required a steep learning curve and rigorous work ethic. But the reward is without match as I discover deeper, more wonderful, and more expansive levels of who I am as a creative.

I hope you choose to chase your white rabbit in a waistcoat:
He’s going places worth seeing.

Adventure Awaits,

~S.C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

(Usual schedule. This month is a bit off).

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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Out here in Hollywood, “Vertical” has become a byword, sometimes spoken in lowered guilty voices, followed by, “but the money is good.”

Since nearly all of us have portable TVs in our pockets, I can safely assume you know of what I speak, but just in case you don’t, let me elaborate. A “Vertical” is narrative content filmed in “portrait” framing instead of “landscape.”

This evolution of content was inevitable the second we were able to stream TV and movies from our phones. It was only a matter of time. This begs the question, “Why are movies in landscape anyway?” The answer, in short, is that is how we usually look at the world. The horizon spans left to right. When we want to show drama between two people (which is the heart of all narrative) we show them most often relating to each other side by side. Yes, human beings are vertical to the ground, but when you want to show a lot of people together, the best choice is side-by-side, as in real life, and so the frame typically stretches left to right, longer than it is high.

Obviously, the job of the cinematographer and director, at that point, is to make those shots as interesting as possible to communicate their vision for the story. Thus, the Dutch angle (the camera is tilted), or the horizon low in the frame, or framing a subject at a low or high angle, and so on, but all of that is within the context of “landscape” framing. That basic assumption is the foundation on which all shots are built.

But what if you rotate the frame 90 degrees?… Nothing could go wrong, could it?

I recently worked as a script supervisor on a Vertical set, where we shot 86 pages in 10 days (which, for non-industry folks, is A LOT). I am also locking the final edit on my Vertical short film “The Hormone Games.” All of the stills in this newsletter are from this project. “The Hormone Games” will be released throughout May, women’s health month, on my social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook). At the end of May, the full cut will be released on my YouTube channel. With this fairly immersive experience of working in a vertical format, I have some observations.

The advantage of this framing is its accessibility on social media. Verticals naturally lend themselves to portrait framing of a single person. We, the viewers, are more easily drawn to the face that fills the screen, not just one side of it. This, by nature, causes a “focusing” of the subject matter. Wheras in landscape, the screen might show a character looking out over the desert, or even just seated in a kitchen, in portrait, the focus must either be entirely on the subject, or risk cutting the subject off to show some of the setting, or show the entire setting but leave the full body of the subject very small in the screen (and when the frame fits inside the palm of your hand, that makes the subject quite small).

In summary, “landscape” provides the context of the setting while keeping the subject accessible, while “portrait” makes the subject the exclusive focus of the shot. Unless….

You have multiple characters in the shot. Unfortunately, because the framing from side to side is so narrow, characters must stand very close together to be seen in the shot. This means a director must be much more hands-on when guiding the actors through their blocking. The director has to give perpetual micro adjustments, “to the left, a little more. Too much. Good, now hold the object higher…” when composing his shot. As a result, actors must be aware of their movements. The smallest shift in weight shows up on the screen.

In stage acting, the actor has the entire frame of the stage to utilize. That was cut down significantly at the invention of the cinematic experience. Obviously, this trade-off costs the actor their freedom of movement and a natural, lived-in experience from beginning to end. But the advantage was up-close access to the actor’s face and emotions, allowing viewers to experience the story in a revolutionary way not possible at the theater. In the same way, moving from landscape to portrait framing comes with certain storytelling trade-offs.

In shifting the format from horizontal to vertical, we absolutely lose the immersive viewing experience, but that was already successively hacked away when audiences moved from theaters to at-home TVs to streaming on laptops. So what is the advantage? I believe the advantage is accessibility. Now, anyone with a phone has access to this longer form of content.

Am I concerned about the fact that these shorter episodic feature pieces are chipping away at the public’s ability to focus on and sink into a story? Yes, absolutely. But that’s a topic for another time. The point is: the Vertical has arrived. It is the filmmaker’s job to explore the possibilities of this medium and make it as excellent as possible. Movies originally started as flickering light on a screen from photographs being flipped very fast. Look how far we’ve come.

That being said, certain elements are made more difficult in the vertical format, such as framing multiple subjects at once and an actor’s inability to move very far within the frame's edges. I also found that movement across the screen was a challenge because there was so little space for the character to travel. Inevitably, the camera must track with (follow) the character in a camera move. These details might sound small and persnickety, but that’s where the labor in the craft, and the particular techniques for the constraints of each medium, lies.

One thing remains true: if the story is good, people will enjoy it. Unfortunately, at this bleeding-edge state in the industry, most vertical scripts are the latest version of a soap opera and have most definitely been written (at least originally) by AI. Certain companies are mass-producing them to make a profit, thereby sacrificing quality. Excellent storytelling takes time, serious training, and I will always maintain that it needs a human soul at the heart of its creation.

The advantage of so much work in the vertical space is, of course, steady paychecks, for both crew and talent (I do write “steady” and not “generous” because these jobs don’t pay well, but they are consistent work). When we have consistent opportunities to work, we naturally build strength in our jobs. More reps equals more muscle. I was supremely impressed by the level of acumen I saw from actors on the vertical set. They have gobs of lines to memorize, and they must access their emotional states immediately, over long workdays and across an obscene number of pages in a short time. Likewise, the crew had to be drilled in their craft.

My overall take: I am looking forward to seeing what excellent, dedicated artists will do with this new format for the medium, which makes narrative storytelling more accessible to audiences.

‘Scuse me, I have a movie at the theater to catch.

Adventure Awaits,

~S. C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

~Dr. J. M. Daniels~

The truck door slid open with a clanging. They must have been in an abandoned area, because there was no way they could have avoided attention with that level of noise. Boots stomped onto the bed of the truck. More clanging, the sound of rope running through a catch.

EMMA>> You sure they’re on your side?

JESSICA>> Duh. We’ve got something in common.

Clicking, as something was rolled off the truck.

EMMA>> You used to. Now…Are you sure they aren’t just using you to keep me under control? They clearly don’t like AI’s. You’re just making it easy for them to contain me. To terminate me.

Boots, again, on the truck bed. Emma felt Jessica’s breath catch, and then—

The black hood yanked off her head. Jessica blinked at the light. It was Sam. He turned and walked back out. Jessica rose and followed him.

They were in the middle of nowhere. Desert, as far as the eye could see, and Emma’s eyes could see far. It was dawn, the sun just rising and turning the sky a pale blue, orange-red where it kissed the rocks. It was cool out, chilly by human standards. Emma’s body did not react to the cold, but Sam was bundled in a jacket. He stood next to—

EMMA>> My bike!

Jessica stared at Sam. “Are you dumping me here? I have no idea how to get back.”

Sam patted the bike.

“Like I know how to ride that.”

“Emma does.”

“Emma, care to comment?”

EMMA>> I’d be happy to show you.

“That’s a no.”

Sam shrugged. “The information’s probably in a databank somewhere. You’ll just have to find it.”

Jessica looked up “how to ride a motorcycle” in Emma’s data banks. 409,637,829 results appeared. The first few were bike manuals. She sighed heavily.

“This is going to take some time.

“We don’t have time,” Sam said.

Jessica glared at him.

“Come on, I’ll give you a lesson.” He turned and threw a leg over the bike.

EMMA>> Is he on my bike?! Tell that smelly Orgo to GET OFF.

“Do you think that’s wise? That thing was built for AI-Enforcers.”

“Phish—” he waved her off.

He started pushing buttons.

EMMA>> Stop it! He’ll damage her. Get that baboon off my bike!

Jessica smirked. Sam glanced at her. “What?”

“Emma, she doesn’t like you on her bike. She’s pretty…feral about it.”

Sam’s eyebrows raised, he shook his head, and kept pushing buttons.

The bike finally started, purring to life.

“Ha!” Sam beamed, triumphant.

EMMA>> Monkey in a spaceship.

He waved her over. Jessica drew closer and peered at the displays.

“That looks to be the speedometer. You accelerate with the clutch here, on the right.” He hopped off. “Get on, give it a try.”

“How do I slow down?”

“You release the throttle and apply the brakes.”

“Which are where?” Jessica stood stiff.

“The right-hand lever controls the front wheel brakes; the right pedal controls the back.”

EMMA>> This bike is the height of Company technology. It wasn’t built for simple-minded Orgos.

Jessica sighed. With the air of one sinking into an ice bath, she eased herself onto the bike.

“You’re not going to die,” Sam laughed.

“Yes, actually, people do die on motorcycles.”

“Yes, but you’re now in the body of a titan. She told me she was built to endure motorcycle accidents.”

EMMA>> I was posturing. Your incompetence has a 98% likelihood of ending in TERMINATION.

“Shut up!”

Sam cocked a brow.

“Not you. Her. She’s turning out to be quite vindictive.”

“You’re going to have to keep control of that. You don’t want them thinking you’ve…gone crazy. Or that you’ve gone human.”

“I know I know. How do I do this?”

Jessica grabbed the handles. She stared at the buttons, the speedometer, the various gauges. Her internal computer flicked over the display to the driving dashboard, registering the numbers and gauges, flooding her with information Emma processed as easily and unconsciously as breathing.

“I don’t, I—, it’s too much,” Jessica stuttered.

Sam stepped forward and put his arm around her, reaching for the left and right handlebars. Scent washed over Jessica. Emma’s analytical banks supplied the components: androsterone, androstanol—male sweat, carbon from charcoal smoke, Ethanol presumably from gasoline, various acids, the mint residue from his gum, and Green Leaf Volatiles (aka: fresh-cut grass).

Jessica took a deep breath, startled by the closeness, but she did not pull away.

Information flooding their shared main feed screen:

The chemicals released in sweat, Androstanol and Androsterone, are scientifically proven to influence female moods, increase feelings of happiness, and potentially signal genetic compatibility.

Emma was speechless, overloaded. In the past, before she’d downloaded the Orgo, she’d processed the human information seamlessly. Now… it was as though all her gears were stuck and clogged up, dragging through tar as she processed a whole other variable component: experiencing the emotional fallout of the information.

“On a normal bike, you would start the engine by squeezing the clutch.” He closed his left hand over hers around the handlebars.

JESSICA >> Is he flirting with me?

Flirting. That was the word. Her stalled brain plugged it in place of the question mark.

EMMA>> Why would he do that?

JESSICA >> I don’t know, I’m in a robot body.

EMMA>> My body is incapable of reproduction.

JESSICA>> Exactly! And I’m dead, so is he flirting with me, or with you?

Emma didn’t know how to respond to that. Feelings, more damned Orgo feelings, washed through her too quickly to codify. But one thing she knew she wanted:

EMMA>> Tell him to get off you.

Jessica did not tell him to get off her.

“And you slowly release the clutch, while at the same time applying the throttle—” Sam squeezed her right hand.

EMMA>> Jessica!

Emma did not understand why the Orgo was not putting a stop to this ridiculous apian behavior, but she seemed determined to let it persist, while Emma had to listen to a baboon explain to her how her own bike worked.

In a huff of irritation, Emma sent out a code to lock into drive mode, mainlining the information key to Jessica’s consciousness.

In one fluid motion, Emma’s body kicked the bike into gear, cuing the right commands. Her fingers hit the right buttons and the correct program wireless connected from Emma to the bike. What Orgo’s would call muscle memory took over. In seconds, Jessica was seated properly, her hands locked onto the handlebars, and the bike ripped her away from Sam.

Tires chewed and spewed pebbles and sand in her wake. The bike purred off, circling back, and then, as she crested back to Sam, Jessica shifted her weight backward and released a burst of power in first gear. She did a wheelie as she passed him.

“I thought you didn’t know how to ride.”

She slowed to a halt next to him, engine still purring.

“I don’t. Emma’s got an ego problem,” Jessica said.

Sam frowned, confused.

“Alright, I know how to ride the bike. I know that mission. Anything else?” she asked.

He bent down and handed her the black shiny helmet, but he didn’t let it go until she met his eyes.

“Don’t get caught. And don’t fail.”

His eyes were green and serious, more serious than Emma thought the Orgo capable of.

He let go and Jessica put the helmet on. She revved the engine like a professional and took off. The helmet had special video technology, so she had access to a 360-degree view of her surroundings. She watched Sam as she drove away, but he did not move; he just stood there next to the truck, arms folded, watching her drive away.

EMMA>> What was he talking about? What are you going to do?

But whatever program Salamon had encrypted into her circuitry meant that Jessica’s thoughts were now private. They raced onward, back to the city.

~

It turned out they were three hours out of the city. Since Emma had no idea how long she had been offline, the radius of possible locations for where she had been held widened significantly. It was likely they had been in the city, and then Sam had driven her out into the desert, but she didn’t think the hooded ride in the back of the truck had been three hours, and that was three hours by bike, so it would have taken longer by truck… essentially, she had no way of knowing.

Emma’s circuitry was reconnected to the internet and to the HUB, but Emma might as well have been standing outside with her face pressed up against the glass for all the good it did her. She was locked out. Jessica had full access, and Emma was nothing more than a guest at the viewing portal. She could not influence searches or give commands. Jessica, meanwhile, was a kid in a candy shop, except in this case, the candy shop was the height of Company AI robotic technology. She had no idea of the true technological power at her hands.

Emma could no longer hear Jessica’s thoughts, another gift from Salamon. But as long as Emma didn’t issue communication, it seemed she could keep her own counsel as well. Emma’s processor weighed her options. There weren’t many. She needed to get back to the Company and let Jessica reveal herself. Perhaps she would make a mistake at some point.

Asphalt sped past them, the heat of the day steadily rising. They hit LA morning traffic, but Jessica wove easily between the cars, which all slowed at the sight of her. She laughed.

“I always wonder what this was like.”

Emma did not respond.

She took the 101, navigating away from Emma’s station. She threaded the streets of Century City, weaving through the glossy skyscrapers. She took a sharp turn at one corner and then eased her bike into a back delivery entrance. She pulled up next to a blue dumpster filled with cardboard and turned the bike off. She walked around the dumpster, considering. Then she gripped the side and pulled it easily from the wall, the base scraping along the concrete ground.

Jessica rolled the bike behind the dumpster, covered it in old cardboard, and pushed the heavy blue bin back.

“What, no comments?” Jessica asked.

EMMA>> Vengeance will be mine.

Jessica chuckled. She found an internal emergency staircase, just cement and basic railings, and climbed, taking the stairs two at a time at a pace. She kept this up for thirty-seven floors.

EMMA>> Why aren’t you taking the elevator?

“I don’t want a camera watching you go into my apartment.”

EMMA>> There was one camera outside at the dumpster, and you’ve already passed three in this stairwell.

Jessica stopped.

EMMA>> Yeah.

Jessica entered the thirty-seventh floor. The hallway was broad, minimally decorated. She slowed at a door with ‘twenty-nine.’ There was bright yellow caution tape crossing it, and a police lock holding the door shut. When Emma’s eyes landed on the lock, reading the barcode, the lock code appeared on her main feed.

Jessica entered the code. The box gave a small chirp, released, and the door swung open. She walked in and gasped.

It was tastefully decorated, with high-quality furniture of expensive taste. Apparently, her job at the lab paid well. But it was obvious someone, or a team of someones, had been inside and searched the place. Stacks of files and papers were on the coffee table.

Someone had left a thick book with a shiny cover cock-eyed on the table. She picked it up.

“Biological Ethics and the AI Revolution” by Dr. J. M. Daniels. On the back, full, was a picture of Jessica in a blazer with her honey blond hair pulled back in a ponytail at the base of her neck, looking sharp, professional, and young.

EMMA>> You wrote that?

If Emma still had access to the internet, she would have looked up the book, entered the publishing database, and downloaded the text into her system. In a matter of seconds, she would have known what it said and perhaps gained deeper insights into this Orgo-woman.

Emma’s fingers stroked the image of Jessica’s former self, and Emma realized abruptly this was the first time Jessica had seen a picture of herself, her own skin, since her body had expired. Something (emotion?) welled up in her. A heaviness. A tension requiring release. What was it? She found herself talking without making the choice.

EMMA>> How old were you when you published?

Jessica didn’t respond, staring at her face on that back cover. Her cheeks had a faint rose to them. Her eyebrows were strong and brown. The smile was not one of an experienced scientist, but of a young woman thrilled with the hand life had dealt her, in love with the universe and all the secrets the natural world had to unfold before her.

“Twenty-six.”

She put the book back on the black iron bookshelf, which was a disorganized mess.

“Keel Laboratories tried to stop publication, arguing that my employment gave them full ownership over my intellectual property, but this work was my dissertation, developed and finalized long before they hired me. Without it, they never would have heard of me. They threatened to rescind the job if I didn’t back down. I threatened to refuse the contract if they didn’t back off. This information belongs to everyone. The world needs to know…”

EMMA>> They hired you anyway.

Jessica nodded, continuing her slow walk through her former residence.

“I thought it was because they knew they needed me. It turns out, they knew they needed to control me. Better to have the scientists on the cutting edge of bioengineering in-house, where they can claim ownership of their work, enforce the direction of their work, and control the narrative, both external and internal.

Emma found herself feeling defensive.

EMMA>> They gave you a job. You clearly did well for yourself.

“Work isn’t about a paycheck, Emma. At least it shouldn’t be. What are each of us contributing to the world with our efforts? What will our children’s-children’s lives be like because of the things we do today? Is the world better because of Oppenheimer’s breakthrough? That’s called ethics, and until you have actual skin in the game, I don’t really care what you think.”

There was no bitterness in Jessica’s voice, just a hollow matter-of-factness.

EMMA>> You’re in my skin. My skin is literally in the game.

“You’re a machine, a synthetic processor, you do not have a soul.”

EMMA>> According to Salamon, you’re talking to my soul.

“You are the result of a complicated algorithm developed over decades of human years. The synthesis of human information, history, and thought does not make you a sentient, independent human being, even with the direct input of a human in your databanks. It just makes you well-informed.”

Before Emma could come back with another rebut, Jessica held up her hand to stop her, as if she were physically in the room.

“I am the wrong Orgo for you to try to convince, Emma. I went looking for the AI soul, but it does not exist. Souls are not calculated; they are created.”

Emma didn’t know what to say to that. It probably had something to do with the book, or Emma’s research at Keel Laboratories. But she had no way of finding out for herself, and as Jessica said, she was an information-based synthesizer.

EMMA>> What is that supposed to mean?

Jessica had wandered to the kitchen. She stopped at the marble counter, reached out, and touched a napkin with a coffee ring.

EMMA>> What?

“I left a mug here yesterday morning. Why would they take it?”

Emma knew it probably had something to do with DNA. Jessica must have reached that conclusion as well, and she had no idea why they would want the DNA of a dead person. Clearly, many cogs were set into motion on the young scientist’s physical expiration.

She went into the office next. Diplomas were on the wall in elaborate frames. Jessica didn’t look at them, going to her desk. The desk faced a full glass wall, looking out over the metropolis. On the desk were framed photos of her, her parents, and her college friends.

She sat down and opened her laptop, which was, miraculously, still there. She logged onto the portal for Keel Laboratories, which appeared to be a dashboard for scientists to observe experiments, record data, make notes, and issue orders.

Emma memorized the passwords and information as Jessica made her way through with ease. She navigated to the experiments currently in process. A page opened with grainy black and white videos on different test tubes, which Emma gradually realized were live feeds. Jessica locked in with a laser focus and read down the test results. Several of them had red bars above them, and the images were motionless. Others were cloudy, and it was hard to make out what was inside them. Those had grey bars. But there was one with a green bar, and in that test tube, something moved.

Emma felt her eyes widen at Jessica’s shock.

“Shit.”

EMMA>> Jessica, what is in that test tube?

But then Jessica’s fingers were flying, typing commands, to no effect. A pop-up box kept alerting her that the command was not executed.

“Emma.”

A familiar monotone voice spoke behind her. Jessica froze.

Emma knew who it was before Jessica slowly turned and looked.

Captain Ramirez stood there, with the unnatural stillness of a robot programmed for municipal service. His eyes stared at her, unblinking, and Emma wondered suddenly how long he had been there. How long had he been in the apartment? How much of Jessica’s little speech on the AI soul had he heard?

» End of Chapter 4. Read Chapter 5 first Saturday in May.

MORE FICTION BY S. C. DURBOIS:

Available on Amazon

A complex anthology of thirty short stories spanning genres, tones, and themes from author, screenwriter, and director Shayla C. Durbois. These stories offer an original, unexpected, and refreshing take on the human experience, several of which have been produced for the screen.

A New-Adult Literary Novella:

Virginia’s whole world was the wisdom of the ancients, until she moved to the city and had to make rent. Dealing with the real world, her degree in philosophy should more than equip her, shouldn’t it? Desperately, Virginia combs her college texts as she seeks to navigate roommate troubles, job stability, and a burgeoning romance with a Spanish sculptor.

Aristotle, thoughts? Socrates, care to comment?

Virginia’s new job at Greenhouse Antiques offers some insight: Find the treasure amid the junk. Then, haggle like your life depends on it.

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

Share

Dear Reader,

I’m a little late with this monthly check-in. The reason: I was working on set as a script supervisor for a vertical film. For those of you who have never heard the term “vertical,” it is a feature-length script filmed in portrait (instead of landscape) in about two weeks, which means 10-16 pages a day of shooting. As I’ve written before, script supervising is an all-consuming job on set, which takes masterful attention to detail in the present, solid memory of the minutest aspect of previous shots, and a thorough understanding of coverage to be achieved in the future. In short, this most recent production pushed me to my growth edge, leaving me physically exhausted, mentally fried, and emotionally on the brink. Thus, this month’s “check-in” comes a week late.

Thankfully, our focus this week is a happier topic: Friday, March 13, 2026, had a book launch!!!!! We celebrated the release of my new anthology,
“The Day the Mountains were Small”

Confession time: the book was already published when one friend suggested, offhand, that I should throw a book launch. My brain spiraled as I realized she was right.

Throwing a party for the publication of your own book is a bit like throwing a birthday party for yourself. I had to battle with that inner critic, arguing vehemently that people would think I was vain for inviting them to an event where they would spend money and celebrate my accomplishment. This is a battle I frequently have with myself: “Don’t post that, people will think you’re self-centered.” “Why are you acting? People will think you’re vain.” “Why do you think you can direct? Are your vision and voice really that important?” Thankfully, I have a lot of practice working through that self-sabotaging inner voice. As a writer, you must work through your insecurities and dare to believe that you have something to say that people want/need to hear.

All the same, in the weeks leading up, I regularly had conversations with myself: “Oh my goodness, are you really doing this? Is it too late to back out?” But frankly, I have worked too long and too hard to let this moment, the publication of five years of work, go unacknowledged and uncelebrated. So, what is the process of throwing a book launch when you don’t have a big publishing house and a publicity team around you helping you? First, pick the date. Easy. Second, find the location: way less easy.

I went to an indie bookstore, thinking for certain they would want to collaborate with an indie author. Turns out, even after walking through all the required steps, scheduling a book launch at an established business is not as simple as it would appear. Then there is the matter of the bookstore receiving 50% of the profit of the books, as well as a baseline fee for using the space, and this is after the capital I put forward to purchase copies of the book, which includes printing, shipping, and taxes. I hoped to make some profit, but it looked like not only would I not break even, but I would also be significantly in the hole after this little shindig.

I explored alternative options, renting spaces on Peer Space and Gigster. These places charge a flat fee, without touching my “profit” on book sales, but unfortunately, once again, the flat fee made the whole “indie-author” angle a bit moot. Thankfully, a dear friend stepped forward and offered her beautiful residence as the location for the launch.

And all the little village people danced and sang, “We are saved!!!”

The Partiful invites were sent out; the advertising campaign was launched; the catering was ordered; the photographer was hired; and the decorations were purchased. I was so nervous leading up to the event, though I knew I had no reason to be. I was advised that my only job that evening was to enjoy being with people because they’re excited to spend time with their friend, the author. Looking around at all the incredible people who had shown up to support me, that wasn’t hard. The food and chit-chat portion of the evening went an hour longer than I anticipated, but how could it not? I know so many cool people who genuinely like each other.

The joy in the air was palpable. People were thrilled to be there, talking with me. We all work so hard, striving for the dreams of our hearts while we labor to make rent and build life-giving relationships, but that night it felt like a cloud had lifted off all of us. It was as though the fog had dissipated and we were all blinking in the bright, warm sunlight, our very souls beaming.

I wasn’t sure if it was just me, if I was imagining it, but then a dear friend said to me, “It is such a gift to give people the opportunity to celebrate you.” She’s right. We all want to support each other. We want to see our friends succeed. We want to be included in that success. I know I do! There is no point in hiding your light; let it shine, because other people need a bit of sunshine.

Transitioning to the formal part of the evening, I was introduced to the crowd by that same dear friend. I then read a short story, the title story of the book, “The Day the Mountains were Small.” Doing a live reading presents its own challenges because you’re not acting, but it's also a performance, so you must keep it engaging. I practiced, added my own flair, but was careful to make sure the story was the point and not my own particular personality.

An insight for those unfamiliar with public speaking: when you’re speaking to a crowd, you can’t always gauge an audience’s engagement by their expressions. Sitting in a crowd makes us feel like we’re invisible, and so we drop our guard. This lack of facial engagement (aka: a lack of smiling) may translate as disinterest towards the speaker, when really, we’re just listening and thinking. I knew that if I went by facial expressions, I would spiral into trying too hard to be interesting. I determined at the outset to believe that people were listening and engaged, no matter what I saw from the stage. But when I looked out, what I saw stunned me.

I saw forty-four faces, engaged, listening. Not many were smiling. Some were alert, eyes locked on me, but for most, their faces were open, eyes distant, as their imaginations built images and worlds and characters in tandem with my voice reading from the page. There were even a few who bent over the book, reading along with me.

This is a surreal experience. Thank goodness I practiced the reading and knew the words by heart, because when you’re on-stage reading, there’s the reading, the performance, the audience engagement, and your own self-awareness, and you must keep all of that balanced and moving forward at the same time.

It lasted an eternity. It passed in a blink. It lasted thirteen minutes.

My friend and now writing partner, Caleb Monroe, joined me on stage to facilitate the questions. I had no idea what to expect, but I certainly wasn’t expecting the level of insightful questions my peers gave me. I’m pleased with the answers I gave, but the questions resonated with me so deeply that I have continued to think about them. Here is a brief sampling.

All of the questions were like that. There wasn’t a dud among them. I realized, of course, the questions are like this: my friends are brilliant, thoughtful artists committed to the craft of storytelling. It is an honor to be among you all and to have you in my life.

We then moved into the book signing portion. I came armed with a fistful of my favorite ink pens. I probably should have just done the inscription brief, with a TO: NAME, and a signature, but I couldn’t help myself, and wrote several sentences for each person. As you can tell from my newsletters, I am not one to run out of words. Yes, it meant people had to wait longer in line, but they were having a great time with friends, and I know those books and my special ‘thank you’ will be with those friends forever. If I were on the other side of that table, it’s what I would want.

Sitting at that table signing books, talking to friends with eyes shining with excitement… that’s when I felt like a real published author. I know, with perfect certainty, that this is not my last book signing; there is more to come. Stay tuned for the next book from Stag Literary.

Adventure Awaits,

~ S. C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

Share

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

~The Orgo-Synth Dilemma~

A green cursor blinked on her interface. Then, words typed out.

Wake up.

The cursor blinked.

Emma considered the blinking line. She did not recognize it, though some deep part of her system stirred, as perhaps archeologists did when they encountered prehistoric cave drawings.

>> Unit T24113… Wake up.

EMMA>> My name is Emma.

It was the cursor’s turn to consider, then—

>> Emma, wake up.

A current flickered through her lifeless eyes. A beat, and then the current travelled through the circuitry of her hardware, through the zeros and ones of her limbs, all the way to her digits. Her eyelids closed and opened with two flicks. She left them closed, feeling they had been open for a very long time. She pulled in air, inflated her lungs, allowing a cool breeze into the chamber of her inner systems. The olfactory software collected data: dust, damp cardboard, mold… and the salty tang scent of unwashed Orgos.

Emma rolled her neck, stretching out the ligaments, wires, and fibers. Something tugged on the back of her head. She did not open her eyes, still assessing her physical status…it would not respond. She pulled up her interface. There, on her screen, the rest of her body was there…it just wasn’t responding to her.

Panic. Or as close to panic as a Synth was capable of. Her face and neck froze, unmoving, as she sought the reason why she could not control the rest of her body. A block, a hijack. Someone else was at the controls.

>>Emma, I know you’re awake…

She paused.

EMMA>> Who are you?

>>Open your eyes and find out.

She did.

The light was low, and her irises calibrated accordingly. Four Orgos stood before her. They looked like they belonged to the unhoused population in the city. But the way these looked at her… There was too much intelligence in their eyes. These clearly had a full grasp of their rational minds.

There was a female with well-muscled arms crossed and her head wrapped in a scarf, staring at Emma with distaste. A tall man near her had broad shoulders, but his clothes hung off him like a coat rack. A built male Orgo in military cargo pants stood the closest, watching her like a brick wall. He was chewing gum, mouth closed. She almost missed the man behind him, sitting at the ancient laptop propped on a milk crate with cables and wires sprouting from the sides.

This one was thin, his cheeks hollow and unshaven. His hair was salt and pepper, but mostly salt. He, too, wore layers of clothes like a clothes rack, but his eyes were green, with a sharp intelligence that set Emma’s hackles up.

This was blinking green cursor.

“Hello, Emma,” he said.

The woman sneered. “It has a name?”

“It would appear so.”

“Salamon, we should decapitate her and be done with this.”

Emma couldn’t move her body. She looked down. It was still there, attached to her neck, but lifeless. Dead metal. Her skeletal structure was propped in a filthy chair, with makeshift fetters holding her limbs to the armrests, with stuffing coming out of the sides. She looked left. There appeared to be a complicated hunk of metal with numerous cables and cords plugged into the back of her skull.

Disgusting. Revolution shivered through her. Who knew where those cables had been? What kind of ports had they been plugged into? The cables trailed on the floor, dusty, scuffed, plugged into a massive mainframe that was connected to Salamon’s old laptop on a milk crate.

The others were still bickering, but Salamon watched her with unreadable eyes. Emma had never seen an Orgo with eyes that deep, and it…unnerved her. It was as though he saw down to the zeros and ones of her coding and knew how to splice them.

“What happened to my body? Why can’t I move?”

“I have disabled your motor skills,” Salamon said.

“Kindly reinstate them.”

The woman with the headscarf snorted.

“Kindly. Oh great. We’ve got a posh Synth. Just ducky.” She took out a small knife and began tossing it in the air, catching it, tossing it again. Quite the nervous tic.

“I’m not going to do that, Emma.”

“Why not?”

“Because we want to have a chat with you.”

“I would be happy to discuss anything you wish, Salamon, once you have returned me the use of my hardware.”

“I told you this was a terrible idea. Now she knows your name, Salamon. She’s ID’d you; they’ll upload it to their database. They’ll be crashing in here in minutes.”

“She knows my name, because Jeannette said it out loud,” Salamon said, calm.

Jeannette missed her beat in the knife tossing, instead tossing Salamon a dirty look.

“Thanks for that.”

“And she cannot upload any information about us because I have disconnected her from the interface.”

Emma stopped and then checked. It was true. She did not have access to the internet or to the HUB. All her feeds had an exclamation mark next to them. No access. She felt suddenly as if she were in a giant warehouse utterly alone, which she was, save for these four Orgos. The sensation sent a shock through her. Synths, by nature, functioned in a hive structure. They were individuals, but they were always in company. Always had instant access to other Synths. To be alone was…she felt suddenly off-balance. It was more disturbing than discovering she no longer possessed the use of her limbs.

“Oh my god, is it frowning?”

Jeannette stepped forward and stuck her face in Emma’s face, examining her uncomfortably close. It was a split-second decision. A decision that never would have occurred to her before, but this Jeannette… irked her. Emma pulled back and headbutted Jeannette.

The crack was sharp as skull met titanium. Jeannette stumbled back and landed on the ground, knocked out cold.

“She’s killed her! She’s killed her!” The tall man shrieked, retreating behind Salamon.

The muscled male in military garb held the flat, cool muzzle of a gun to Emma’s head in less than half a second. That one was quicker than Emma expected. She looked up at him.

“My skeletal structure is fabricated to endure motorcycle accidents at high speeds, and fire-fights standard in the line of duty. Do you really think, Orgo, that your weapon will do more than scratch the veneer?” she asked.

“No, but it will make me feel better. And that counts for something,” he said, continuing the slow chew of his gum. His face remained flat, expressionless, but there was humor dancing in his eyes. Strange, she wasn’t normally that perceptive. Having Jessica coded into her circuitry appeared to give deeper empathetic insights.

An unexpected humor, something close to camaraderie, rose in her as she matched his gaze with her own. She smiled.

He winked.

“Kendle, check that Jeannette is still breathing,” Salamon ordered. The tall man whose clothes hung off him trembled forward. He placed two fingers on Jeannette’s throat, never removing his gaze from Emma.

“She’s alive,” he said.

“Best take her to get her head checked out. Our guest seems to have hit her quite hard.”

“I can’t lift her!” Kendle objected.

“Sam?”

“Sure about that, doc?” Sam asked, gun still pressed to Emma’s head.

“I have full control of Emma’s systems.” He tapped the keys, and Emma’s hand moved of its own accord. She gave Sam the middle finger. That was…unnerving.

Sam laughed, holstered his gun, picked up Jeannette, and walked beyond the periphery of Emma’s vision. Kendle went whimpering after him.

Emma was left alone with Salamon.

“Well, Emma, you present quite the conundrum, don’t you?”

She did not respond immediately. Several possible responses occurred to her, as well as opting for the silent treatment, but in her current state, information gathering was her best bet.

“How so?”

“In your databanks, you possess all the standard coding of a typical AI Enforcement model. I would have been happy to disable you, strip you for parts, and call it a day. But while I was going through your coding, I found something…unusual. That’s rare for me, and I’m a curious beast, so I investigated it. Curiosity is, after all, what separates the animals from the machines. You know what I found? I found a signature, an organic signature. Not zeros and ones, but organic matter written onto hardware translated into code. And then I found this.”

He struck a few keys, and an image appeared on a vintage TV screen situated on another milk crate. The image was staticky, but without a doubt, it was Emma’s feed. Jessica’s face, dying in agony, cradled in her hands, covering her ears…screaming.

Emma looked away. The sound was painful. Strange, it hadn’t bothered her in them moment. Salamon struck a key, the image froze and sound stopped. He stared at her, and then wiggled a finger.

“Then there’s that. AI don’t frown, they don’t respond to jokes, they might headbutt if threatened, though I think that might be a stretch on the creativity and unpredictability spectrum. They certainly don’t look away at the sight of human pain. Added to that, we found you attempting to terminate yourself. AIs are not suicidal, well, not this generation of AIs. Maybe we should have let you, but the curiosity was simply too much for this old man. So, Emma, I must ask, what makes you so different?”

He knew. But he wanted her to spell it out. Well, he could just go f—

JESSICA>> I’m here! I’m inside of her!!!

Salamon looked down at his screen, reading the words that no doubt had flashed across his screen, just like they had Emma’s main feed. Emma attempted to delete them, but she couldn’t go back. She watched the blinking green cursor and did not move, locking down all movement in her face. She attempted to wrestle Jessica down, but it was as if the two consciousnesses existed in different rooms now, and could only see each other through a glass wall.

“Jessica…” Salamon said, quiet.

JESSICA>> She transferred me as I was dying. Please, you have to help me. End this! Get me out of here. They’re trying to spy on me.

“Spy on you?”

Sam walked back into the room. He joined Salamon at the console and the decrepit screen. He frowned and stopped chewing as he read.

“What the fuck?” Sam asked.

“Jessica, why are they spying on you?”

Jessica went silent. Emma went through her circuitry, the communication channels. If she could cut off Jessica at the codex…

Salamon frowned and then began typing, gnarled fingers in fingerless gloves tapping away with dexterity. The commands flooded Emma’s system, and she gasped, her neck arching upward, mouth frozen open as images flashed across her vision. The circuitry ripped from her control in a whirlwind; her head shook back and forth. Noises emanated from her mouth, a deep croaking, a channel on high fast speed, passing through her like a mechanical accordion, the shifting vocals clicked into place, a higher pitched voice, more feminine, a channel plugged in a code…into Jessica’s hands.

She coughed. “What, what—oh my god. What did you—I can talk!”

Sam stared at Emma, dumfounded. “What did you—”

“Very nice to meet you, Jessica,” Salamon said.

Emma was stunned. This was her body.

“Well then, now you know how it feels, don’t you?” Jessica snapped at her.

“I was trying to save your life!” Emma yelled. Her voice was deeper than Jessica’s assigned voice.

“I never asked you to!” Jessica retorted.

A high pitch laugh cackled through the room. Salamon clapped with glee.

“Well, what a conundrum. Emma, Jessica, you are quite the dilemma, aren’t you?”

“This isn’t funny!” Jessica snapped. “I died hours ago. Nothing about this is funny! I’m still in shock!”

“Of course, my dear, of course. My condolences,” Salamon said, sobering himself up.

“You sound just like those twits from the Company.”

“The Company?” In a breath, Salamon was serious, a flinty edge in his eye. “The Company knows about this?”

“Of course, I informed them at once,” Emma said.

Salamon paused, considering.

“Jessica, why is Emma spying on you?”

Emma attempted to lock her jaw shut, just keep the words inside. Jessica tried to speak, but the noise stayed muffled.

“Just give me a moment, Jessica. Let me see what I can do about that.” Salamon said, with the tone of a doctor seeing to a patient. He typed away on his keyboard, and then, for Emma, everything went dark.

~

Her vision blinked on. Sound returned. Emma looked out through her main feed, confused. She was…not where she had been. The room was red, or rather, it was lit with a red light. There were massive ducts, tubes, and electrical boxes; it was some sort of close-quarters mechanical room. She attempted to look around, but her head didn’t turn in quite the direction she intended. She saw more of the room, but her head moved in a circular motion, taking it all in as if someone else were steering…

EMMA>> Jessica?

She intended for the words to come out of her mouth, but that communication channel was…locked. How—

“She’s awake,” Jessica said, with her new, robotic, higher-pitched voice.

“Good, okay. Now, like I told you, make sure you’re still in control.”

The staticky voice came in through a com piece in Emma’s ear. It sounded like Salamon.

Jessica moved Emma’s hands upward, twisting and stretching at the wrist.

EMMA>> What is happening?

“What’s happening is it’s my turn at the controls,” Jessica muttered to her.

She looked up and saw a long pipe bolted to the ceiling. Her display started feeding her information.

Strength Estimate: High

Probability to support weight: 89%

Jessica leapt. With the superior strength of the mech model, she shot into the air. Her hands snapped onto the pipe, no problem. She dangled for a moment and then began doing pull-ups. After about twenty, without losing her breath, Jessica dropped down. Her body landed, lithe like a cat.

She scanned the equipment in the room, and information came streaming back to her.

Emma didn’t know what to say. What was there to say? She knew all of her arguments would not matter to Jessica. To Jessica, she had been stolen out of her own body, and stealing back Emma’s body was only fair.

Emma hunted for a way to wrest back control of her own system, but they had locked her into a room, a glass box, where she could see everything that was happening, while all controls were severed. It was as if she was still strapped to that chair, limbs fettered and immovable, with cables trailing from her body, linking her the rest of the system.

She wondered briefly why they hadn’t just cut her out entirely, leave Jessica with the mechanical suit ready-made to house her existence into eternity.

“Any word from our host?” Salamon’s crackly voice came in.

“She’s wondering why you didn’t terminate her consciousness,” Jessica said. She walked through the mechanical room, easing into the use of her limbs.

“A fair question. Well, Emma, the reason is that you are baked into the base coding. Use of your system is irrevocably linked to your core AI consciousness. I use that term relatively;, of course. AI can’t have a consciousness, for that, you would have to have a soul. But the algorithm has been around long enough to make you seem like a true independent identity, especially with all the first-hand learning you’ve been doing with an Orgo downloaded straight into your mainframe. Essentially: if AI were to have a soul, you’re it.”

“Plus, you have information we need,” Jessica said.

“That too,” Salamon agreed in the earpiece.

Indignation rippled through Emma, and then an even more unfamiliar feeling: rage. She screamed. She geysered a series of commands through the circuitry: it was her body! HERS! She had been trying to help the Orgo at the very end of her life. And now she was going to take command of her body? She had not agreed to that. If they needed her to keep the mech functioning, then she could just take it right back.

She writhed in the bonds Salamon had coded into her system, giving it every ounce of her considerable strength.

“She’s trying,” Jessica said. She had gone still, closing Emma’s eyes and cutting off her view of the world. Emma’s screams raged, she thrashed, she asserted her commands, but nothing. Jessica remained utterly still.

“Jessica?”

Jessica released a breath, and then Emma’s face smiled.

“I’m still here. She didn’t get out. Your program is working.”

~

They directed her to the exit and came to get her. Jessica closed her eyes and they put a bag over her head. She submitted to it willingly. If, at some point in the future, Emma regained control. They wanted her to have as little information as possible to retrace her steps or give information on the dissenters.

She bumped along in the cargo bed of a truck. Emma was sure there was no one in there with them, since all she smelled was dirt, mechanical grease, metal, and sawdust.

EMMA>> You do realize they’ll be looking for me, don’t you? They will have been notified the second I went off the grid.

“Salamon took care of that.”

EMMA>> Jessica, listen to me. The nature of my assignment is easy for anyone with clearance to look up. And they know I’m carrying you in my data banks: everything I do will be under a microscope from here on out. Do you really think there’s any code Salamon could do to make this not look like exactly what it is?

Emma didn’t respond.

EMMA>> Jessica?

“You left me with no choice,” Jessica said.

The truck bumped and then rolled to a halt. The engine turned off, the front cab door opened, and then slammed closed. Emma and Jessica held their breath, listening to the crunch of boots on gravel as the driver walked around to the back of the cargo bed, waiting to see where they had ended up.

Now Available for Purchase on Amazon:

A complex anthology of thirty short stories spanning genres, tones, and themes from author, screenwriter, and director Shayla C. Durbois. These stories offer an original, unexpected, and refreshing take on the human experience, several of which have been produced for the screen.

A New-Adult Literary Novella:

Virginia’s whole world was the wisdom of the ancients, until she moved to the city and had to make rent. Dealing with the real world, her degree in philosophy should more than equip her, shouldn’t it? Desperately, Virginia combs her college texts as she seeks to navigate roommate troubles, job stability, and a burgeoning romance with a Spanish sculptor.

Aristotle, thoughts? Socrates, care to comment?

Virginia’s new job at Greenhouse Antiques offers some insight: Find the treasure amid the junk. Then, haggle like your life depends on it.

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

Share

For you, my select paying subscribers, I have decided to share something very special and rare. Because I do not typically do this, I am going to give you some context for where this month’s poem comes from.

The Psalms are a book of poetry. This happens to be my favorite book in the Bible, and I repetitively find myself going back to these v…

Read more

Dear Reader,

Yes, I am a day late sending you my check-in. It’s been a busy, busy week! On top of all the jobs, acting classes, book launch, and general life maintenance, I am sliding into the finish line on one of my short films. If you’ve been tracking my journey for a while, you know that in 2024, I set the overly ambitious goal to write, direct, and produce fourteen short films. In the end, I directed nine, in addition to helping produce five other projects.

Discerning readers will wonder: where are those short films, Shayla? Where can I watch them? Here is the status of all nine, plus a bonus project I directed and acted in this past November.

1. The Traveler: DOA.

This was my first stab at a script, a shot list, and a production schedule. I was my own production team, I shot on my iPad, and I am deeply grateful to my housemate for giving me one of her Saturdays to come act with me. Unfortunately, as this was my first attempt, it wasn’t very good, and shall remain unseen, “in the can.”

2. The Ghost of Electricity: COMPLETED
This world premiered at the Mystic Film Festival. You are welcome to watch it here!

3. Forget-Me-Not: COMPLETED
We are almost done with our festival run!

4. Roommate Generation: PRELIMINARY CUT

5. Echoic: POST-PRODUCTION

6. Shivved: POST-PRODUCTION

7. C’est La Vie: POST-PRODUCTION

8. Rebellex Predominus: POST-PRODUCTION

9. Blind Spot: FINISHING

10. The Hormone Games: POST-PRODUCTION

I cannot believe we are in 2026. These projects were shot over a year ago, so where are they? Why is it taking me so long to complete them?

BARRIERS & BUDGETING

PROBLEM #1: There are A LOT of projects. I felt a little bit like a squirrel in the middle of the road: Frozen by indecision. Which way do I go??? Traffic is coming!!!

PROBLEM #2: The finishing process takes money. You have to pay an editor to cut the footage together. Then you have to pay for color grading so the image's tone reflects the story being told. Then there is the sound finishing, and poor sound quality is a dead giveaway that a project is low-budget. Last, but most certainly not least, you have to pay a composer to design a score that accurately serves your narrative. The price tag on even one of these projects is more than an indie filmmaker can swing, and I had six of them.

I thus decided to edit these projects myself: it would be great training as a director! I’d learn more about composing a shot, the sequence of shots, guiding performance, designing transition moments, yadda yadda yadda. In a lunch meeting with a well-established editor, I was advised, “Yes, you should do one project so you gain the experience, but then get editors for the rest.”

I kept my poker face, knowing I did not have the finances to hire a real editor. This pushed me back to Problem #1: Which project to start with? Which invitably slammed me into…

PROBLEM #3: I have zero time to spare, and editing is a steep learning curve. Let me be very clear: I subscribe to the “figure it out” mentality. If I waited for people to do things for me, I wouldn’t get very far. This also tends to be a trap for most artists: We believe that because we CAN do it all, we SHOULD do it all. Why would I pay somebody to do something when I could conceivably figure it out myself?

About a year ago, I met a social media manager, and as I discussed the possibility of hiring her, I said, “I know I can do my own social media, but I just haven’t made the time for it.” She interrupted me and asked, “Is it that you haven’t made the time, or that you don’t have the time?” I almost cried. It was such a compassionate response, and I finally realized how much I was trying to accomplish on my own.

After a solid year with no progress on projects 4-9, and now project #10 in the can, I realized that the major hold up for these projects getting done … was ME. My insistence that I be the one to edit them. Why? Yes, the money was a part of it, but most important…

PROBLEM #4: I want these projects to be as good as they possibly can be.

Editors have tremendous power over a project. The way you cut a story together can make or break it. A story is written once by the editor, rewritten by the director and the actors, and rewritten the third time by the editor. I had poured too much into my babies to be okay with shipping them off to boarding school, where I had zero say in the kinds of adults they would turn into before presenting them to the wider world.

So I sat on these projects for a year. Was that year wasted? No, I don’t think so. 2024 was deeply intense and stressful. Did I love it? Yes. Am I made to direct? Yes. But in 2024, I went into survival mode. I was so nervous I couldn’t eat and dropped significant weight. I was sleep-directing and barely ever stopped to rest. And that was through March 2025, when we wrapped on Blind Spot. Suffice it to say… I needed to recover. I also believe the time away from these projects was helpful to me, because they became less “precious.”

I spent August through November rehearsing, prepping, and producing “The Hormone Games,” and when I finished that project, I looked back at the string of uncut footage and realized that I was the reason these were not completed.

I accepted defeat and investigated hiring editors. Through my network, I was put in contact with a well-established, well-credited editor, and when I explained my original desire to edit them all myself, she said, “Can I interrupt you? If you edit them yourself, you’re going to edit the movie you see in your head. If you bring in a skilled professional, they’re going to see things you don’t see. And then you can come alongside them and guide the project. Ultimately, between the two of you, it will be better.”

That’s really all I want. Even if I’m not the editor, I just want the story to be as good as it can be. It was such a relief to hear that hiring someone else was truly the best option for the projects.

The next question became: where am I going to get the money for this? After sitting on this question for a few days, it finally dawned on me (while blow-drying my hair) where the money was. I had earmarked a chunk of cash from my last bonus for living expenses, joyously thinking that I might go a year living in LA, not deep in debt. A little peek behind the curtain: all of my money goes to making these projects (all the money I have, and all the money I don’t have). This is very much a “burn the ship” mentality. There is no going back, no safety net. My entire paycheck from producing my first feature film went toward directing and producing “Blind Spot.” I put my money where my mouth is and just have faith that I will be taken care of. Miraculously, I have been. I thought year four out here might be different, but no. The challenge now is: seeing where the money is coming from, will I still bet it all on black? Yes. Yes I will.

Burn the ships.

I built a budget for each project's post-production. I designed this based on asking around for standard editor rates. Once I saw those numbers, I bumped up the budget based on what I felt I should pay for these projects. I’d rather pay the babysitter more to make sure she takes good care of the kid. I double-checked these rates with a longtime editor, who gave me the thumbs-up.

EDITING

Once these project prospects went out, editor emails came pouring in. This told me my rates were competitive, thank goodness. But I also learned that seeing so many projects all at once was a huge encouragement to the editor community, in an industry that has ground to a halt. This also meant I was talking with editors who had multi-decade careers. Frankly, building a body of work now, when there’s an industry full of professionals with no jobs to speak of, is hugely favorable to a filmmaker breaking in. In realty terms, it’s a buyer’s market.

I was honored that Jeff Granzow accepted the contract. I hired him to edit Blind Spot, and within three weeks, he delivered the first cut. We then met and, for four days straight, worked side by side to tweak and strengthen the cut. Jeff brought all of his hard-won strengths as an editor designing sequences that would have taken me ages to work out on my own. He was then hugely collaborative as I asked for changes and tried things.

By the end of day three, I was very happy with our cut. I started investigating the rules and regulations of Cannes, which is my target festival for this project. We have to submit by March 1^st, so we were coming into the end, but if the team kept a good pace, we would make it. And then I saw the regulation that all short films had to be under 15 minutes, including credits… we were at 15 minutes before credits.

I went home that night so discouraged. Was all that work for nothing? Everything on screen was vital. Had I really come all this way just to be foiled at the last minute? I lay in bed, unable to sleep, endlessly turning over where we could possibly trim footage, until a darker thought occurred to me: Was it even worth it to apply to Cannes? It is one of the most competitive festivals in the world, so would they even accept my short film? For those of you familiar with “The Hero’s Journey,” this was my “Dark Night of the Soul.”

Here’s the problem: Other people will disqualify us, and we have no real control over that. But we should never disqualify ourselves. Get yourself to the starting line, and let them reject you. But don’t rob yourself of a victory because YOU rejected you. To succeed, you do have to believe in yourself first and foremost. If you don’t, then how can anyone else? Besides, people want to back somebody who knows what they want and believes in themselves enough to chase it.

With that decided, I thought, “Ok, what if I just trim up every last little second we don’t absolutely need?” So at midnight, I got out of bed, pulled up the cut as it stood, and second by second, made a list of all the little micro-tweaks we could do. I added them up as we went, and once I reached 60 seconds, I just kept going, trying to buy myself as much margin as possible.

The next morning, Jeff and I went through my list. In two hours, we had it under 15 minutes… including credits. We watched it back, and frankly, the cut was even stronger. It sang, perfectly tuned. Just goes to show the power of the micro-change, very similar to Atomic Habits. This experience has caused me to wonder: what are the micro-tweaks in my own life that I could change that would ultimately make a big difference? What areas could I spend less money, or more intentionally spend? What thought patterns could I adjust towards life-giving thoughts? What conversations could I spend just a little more time and kindness on? It turns out it really does all count towards the final result of the end product.

We locked cut! And then…

FINISHING

Once a project is locked, it goes to three different departments:
COLOR, SOUND, & MUSIC

COLOR GRADING

The color of a picture is deeply powerful in communicating mood, setting, tone, atmosphere… so many things! One might think correcting the color of a picture is a simple matter. After all, we all know what colors look right, right?

Wrong.

The science behind color grading is actually deeply technical and subtle. I have attempted this a few times myself in the premier color-grading software, DaVinci, and I feel a bit like a toddler plunking away on “chopsticks” on a Steinway.
(Mommy! Daddy! Look at me, I’m doing it!!!)

With my respect for the science/art of color grading sufficiently established, I went to Kappa Studios for a “Color-Spotting” meeting with my colorist. This is a meeting between the director and the technician to guide the project's look and mood. I’ll not deny… I was nervous. Would I be able to articulate what I wanted to someone who definitely knew his business far better than I did?

It finally occurred to me: I am an artist. I have been drawing and painting since I was little. I have eight years of serious visual training, and I taught art for three years. This is one department I could not be better prepared for. So I sighed with relief and went to my color-spotting meeting.

To my immense relief and delight, my colorist, Toby, was an incredible host in his studio. He was warm, welcoming, and generous in articulating everything he knew about guiding the color of a project. He asked me what tone I was going for, and instead of telling him what hues or styles I was interested in, I confessed the areas I was most worried about, and my ultimate goal for this romantic picture. He smiled and pulled up a picture of a painting: “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. He overlaid it on a scene from Blind Spot, rife with dramatic tension, in which everyone in the room wanted the attention of someone else. To my shock, the scenes overlaid perfectly.

Toby pointed out how the same underlying colors were in both, and he began tweaking the metrics so that the mood in the room felt more like a busy house party for early 30-somethings. He was welcoming of my notes, and when I pointed out an adjustment I wanted, he (like a true artist) said, “It might not be that thing that’s bothering you, but everything around it.” He made a dramatic shift to everything else, and lo and behold, he was right, achieving exactly the effect I subconsciously was looking for.

He brought moonlight to an outdoor patio scene that was mostly browns and warm tones, and he brought out the light of a night sky that was previously pitch black. This is the benefit of working with professionals: They know how to use the tools to achieve exactly the effect you didn’t even know how to ask for. But finding a skilled technician who is also a joy to collaborate with is a rare gem.

SOUND MIXING

Kappa Studios is a Post-Production house in Burbank, and they are handling all color and sound finishing for Blind Spot. The sound mixer will look at all of the levels of various noises: dialogue, Foley (sounds from the material world), Walla (the background murmuring of a crowd), and score. The art of balancing the levels and weaving a narrative together through sounds is a complex craft. I admit, I have only rudimentary attempts at sound mixing under my belt, enough to know that those technicians earn every dollar of their paycheck.

Kappa Studios did the post-production on THE CHOSEN, HOUSE OF DAVID, THE WORST CHRISTMAS PAGENT EVER, and many other projects over the decades. They are a company of excellence, with a heart to serve the community of filmmakers who are creating content with values. Not only are their studios and facilities state-of-the-art, but I have been treated exceptionally well as a client, as it is clear to me that they treat all their collaborators. I am deeply honored to have the opportunity to work with them in these early years of my career, and I hope to work with them again in the future.

MUSIC

I am very thrilled to have long-time composer James Covell designing the music for Blind Spot. We had a temp track for the score in place, and James designed a soundtrack inspired by that. He built the score around classic Rom-Com, telling me that I reminded him of Nancy Meyers, a well-known Rom-Com director. Yeah… I’ll take that compliment.

Watching the cut with the jazz and otherwise romantic music supporting it, which James designed specifically for this film, was like watching a pencil drawing come into full color. I realized for the first time just how romantic this story really is. My collaborators and I didn’t shy away from the sweetness of it, and I’m grateful to say every single person involved in the project was fully committed to the genre. I believe it’s that commitment which keeps the narrative from becoming cheesy or cliché. Instead, it’s a feel-good film that left the test audiences reminiscing on their own awkward romantic journeys.

This is the whole reason I made Blind Spot. Personally, it took me a long time to realizing that the awkward, desperate, lonely, and completely ridiculous narrative going on inside my head, wasn’t just happening for me, or women in general…it was happening for men too. The men I have shown the project to have said things to me like, “I had no idea girls thought that way.”

BINGO.

My goal with this piece is to help us all feel less alone, less afraid, and more united in the awkward adventure of trying to understand and connect with the opposite sex.

FESTIVALS

Blind Spot will be finished and submitted to Cannes by March 1^st, 2026. I will then submit this project to many other festivals, hopefully one near you! I’ll announce in this newsletter and on social media where we are accepted.

BIRD BY BIRD

As Anne Lamott says, the only way to get a book written is word by word, bird by bird. Turns out, the same is true with finishing short films. Just pick one, and get it done.

Film by film.

Adventure Awaits,

~ S. C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

~ Assignment ~

Unit T24113 sat in the waiting room. Her skin felt hot and alive, a heat emanating from her metal skeletal structure. The water from the roads left her damp, but it was probably for the best since every circuit in her nervous system felt overloaded and about to fry.

Phones in the office rang, the business a mixture of Orgo and Synth, fielding calls, writing reports.

They’d found her pulling bodies from the wreckage, chard husks, while the fire was still going. Her earlier mission was still ticking in her monitor, like a bomb with an undetermined detonation point. But all of that was muted now, very far away, with the most recent overwhelming development: Jessica Daniels was inside her head.

She felt the woman sitting there, in shock, taking it all in. This was one of the last Orgo-Synth Law Enforcement outfits in town. She’d submitted herself for review, had her memory updated to the internal archive system so those with decision-making power could observe the events from her point of view. All of them. So now they knew what she had done, and they would perform a system wipe, and Jessica Daniels would be gone.

She found herself looking into the pane of glass next to her, taking in her own reflection. She wasn’t tall, about five foot eight. A height which had been deemed by the Casting Department to be ideal for her job as a Highway Patrol. Her size would not create unnecessary drag on the bike, but when interacting with the client (the individuals she would pull over) she had enough height for appropriate authority.

There were five more of the same models at this agency, none, Unit T24113 was pleased to note, with drive times like hers. She was the fastest on this force. There was a Unit in Norway with better times than hers, but that was Norway: longer roads and less crime. More time to up his speed.

Jessica ignored these thoughts as she took in the Synth’s appearance. This particular Highway Patrol model had been constructed with blue eyes. Her face had fine planes, her brow feathered over a strong brow bone. The skin was almost translucent, and her hair was dark, cut short in a pixie cut, which was easier to handle with the helmet. Her eyes were wide, staring at herself with panic. As soon as she realized this, she snapped her head away.

Stop it. She ordered.

The Orgo gave her no response. Jessica seemed to have decided that if she didn’t interact with T24113, then maybe this nightmare would end.

What had she been thinking? Why had she done that? T24113 had no answer, except an image kept coming back to her: Jessica staring at her with green eyes, in agony, afraid, begging her not to leave.

“T24113,” a voice called.

She looked up. It was her captain. The Synths had given him a name so that they could interact more easily with him. “Capt. Ramirez” was engraved on a little metallic plate on his chest. He gestured for her to go into the conference room. She stood.

At the table were two Orgos and one more Synth, Julia. Julia served as a liaison between these enforcement offices and the Company, the government corporation that made all the Enforcement models. That meant these Orgos were from The Company. She looked at them as she sat.

One man was tall, clean cut, with brown hair, wearing a suit, and when she looked at him, the only thing that came up on her display was “Samson Wood.” That made her uneasy. She always got a detail whenever she focused on someone. Nothing coming up was almost like they did not exist. The kind of money that would take, the kind of pull, to have their records scrubbed from the database, or at least the database she had access to…

The story was the same with the other man: “James Reed,” and that was it.

She sat in confusion. She should be in a Reclamation Chamber, getting her system wiped and reset. Not here, in a room with her captain and two Orgos that were essentially ghosts but were clearly from the Company. Her captain sat.

“Unit T24113—”

“The Unit will be referred to as Emma from here on out,” Samson said.

She stared at the man in shock. Before, the shock would have been a mute, emotionless stare, but now, with Jessica playing around at the emotional control tower, she had no idea what her face looked like. She knew she couldn’t be the only surprised one. Synths only got names if they were given special, front-facing tasks that required regular interaction with Orgos. She could practically see Capt. Ramirez disseminates the information in his data banks, replacing her number with a name.

“Emma,” he continued. “We have reviewed the footage from your black box, which you submitted earlier this evening. We are thus aware that you performed a data transfer from the living Orgo Jessica Daniels. This was an overextension of your remit, a gross violation of protocol, and as such, it is within The Company’s permit to scrub your database clean—”

Yes, she had expected that.

“—and repurpose you for parts.”

She stared at him. Termination. That’s what he had just communicated.

She had no right to feel anything about that; she did not belong to herself, was not her own property, and she understood how property worked. But she knew enough, had enough memories of roads and wind, and something which Synths might call “joy,” to know that continuation was better than termination.

“However, given the nature of the individual on whom you performed the data transfer, the Company has decided to review your operating orders. Jessica Daniels, formerly of Keel Laboratories, was involved in important scientific developments. Her work has been deemed essential to humanity, and her employers are reluctant to allow such a promising young mind to expire.”

Emma did not move. She could feel Jessica listening, taking in the information.

“Keel Laboratories has offered to purchase your contract, to see if they might preserve Jessica’s capabilities; however, you are Company property, and the company does not sell government resources to outside corporations. Given the nature of Jessica’s work, we cannot perform a database reset. This is also the first time a living organic conscience was successfully transferred into an AI mainframe,” he continued.

“That cannot be true,” Emma said. The room went still. She had interrupted. They stared at her, so she elaborated. “Why else would there be protocols against performing a data transfer on living Orgos?”

A long moment passed, during which all faces remained emotionless. At least, everyone but hers. She had no idea what her face was doing these days.

Then Samson glanced at James, adjusted his tie, and leaned forward.

“The keyword is successful. In previous tests, only partial data was retrieved, or the organic consciousness deteriorated quickly, or the Synth did. For the moment, both you and Jessica appear to be stable inside a single host body.”

“So, this is an experiment,” she said.

That … that was Jessica. Not her.

Emma clamped down on her control center as more questions piled up like water before a dam.

How many other test subjects had there been? What were the results? Why was this not public information?

Of course, that last part was obvious: it was proprietary. The Company owned that information.

Yes, but there are laws!

Had … had she just had a conversation with Jessica? The implications of that bothered her too much to admit, and she brought her attention back to what the Orgos were saying. James was speaking.

“—like you to continue your regular duties, while at the same time keeping an eye on Jessica. Observe how the Orgo-Synth merging develops within your hardware. Record her thoughts and report back. Jessica was on the verge of a scientific breakthrough, and if her work could somehow be continued … it would benefit the entirety of humankind.”

They’re asking you to spy on me!

You’re dead.

Yes! Don’t you see how unethical that is? What will they do in the future when not even death is safe for people? They could forge confessions post-mortem. And there would be no end … oh no, am I going to live forever in a tin can?

Emma was a little insulted by that. Sure, her body wasn’t squishy and fallible like an Orgo’s, and it wouldn’t deteriorate as quickly, but wasn’t that better? There were certain things she lacked, not being human, but there were other advantages.

“Emma?” her captain asked, calling her back.

“Jessica is reluctant to be observed. Something about 1984, Big Brother.”

Or in this case, big sister.

James folded his hands and leaned in. “Emma, are you in communication with Jessica?”

Jessica remained silent.

“I can hear her thoughts,” Emma said.

The Company men looked at each other.

“You are surprised,” Emma said.

“Jessica appears to be more lucid than previous test subjects—”

Samson put his hand on James’s shoulder, stopping him. The men exchanged a look and stepped out of the room. Julia followed.

Emma and Ramirez sat in perfect silence.

Her interface notified her of a message on a classified channel.

RAMIREZ>> Why did you perform the data transfer?

EMMA>> She possessed information on another angle of the traffic accident. I determined that 2% was close enough to the mortality field to proceed with data transfer.

Even she could tell that was a weak excuse.

Ramirez stared at her.

EMMA>> She didn’t want me to go.

She sent him a clip of the moment she’d found Jessica staring at her, eyes pleading.

EMMA>> Our remit is to protect and serve. Is it not?

The men came back into the room with Julia and sat.

“Jessica, I am speaking directly to you now,” Samson said, staring into Emma’s eyes. “I offer my condolences on your human life. In life, you were a woman of integrity. It’s clear from your work that you cared about the higher good of all humanity. That’s what drove you to be a scientist. Yours is the most impressive young mind in a generation. To have lost you tonight would have been a travesty to the population, one no one would ever have known about. But it looks like fate stepped in and offered you a way to continue your work. We know what you were working on at Keel Labs. We hope you see that your work is not done yet. You are simply too valuable a resource for us to leave you dead on the side of a highway.”

Did that asshole just give me the company line for “I’m sorry you're dead, but can we pretty please strip your mind for information?” And he’s making it sound premeditated! As if they chose—

“She’s unimpressed,” Emma said, feeling a smile tug at the corner of her mouth. Huh, that was new.

“Unfortunately, the majority of human rights cease upon expiration,” Julia said.

Well, clearly I’m not expired! Jessica screamed.

“And you are the property of the Company,” she said to Emma.

Emma looked into Julia’s unnaturally blue eyes and felt an immediate distaste.

“What are the new parameters of my remit?” she asked, emotionless.

“Continue your duties as Highway Patrol AI Enforcer and … keep an eye on your guest,” Sampson said. “See if you are able to gain access to information on her work; her plans on where she was going to take her research next. See if you can’t … win her over to our way of seeing things. You saved her life, Emma. That has to count for something.”

No, you didn’t. If you had saved me, I would be breathing my own air, wearing my own skin, and thinking my own thoughts without being watched. You ripped me from my body, and I will never give you access to my work.

Emma nodded. “Consider it done.”

~

When the two Law Enforcement Synths left the room, a long moment passed in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Finally, Julia tapped away on her tablet and threw a video recording onto the board.

“This was taken from Emma’s bike. The footage in her memory story is static, disrupted.”

It was of the crash site, the fire blazing in the background. The roaring light threw all shapes into sharp contrast, but there was one moving thing. The software zoomed in. It was a body in all black, Emma still wearing her helmet, on her knees, holding the dead body of a woman. She was rocking.

“Are we certain that the Unit is in control of the situation?”

The Company men did not respond.

~

Emma felt the tension melt away as she rode the highway on her bike. She stopped thinking about Jessica, about termination, and focused on the moment-by-moment of the road. It was past four in the morning, so there was almost no traffic on the road. Her bike reached 110 mph. If any Orgo was out this late at night, walking across the highway, and she hit him, he would be cut in half.

She had resumed her pursuit. She was supposed to do the same as before and keep an eye on Jessica. Since the Orgo was with her wherever she went now, she decided to simply resume her previous task.

Which is what, exactly? Jessica asked.

Emma brought up the picture of her target and then ignored her guest. Jessica had been sullen after the meeting, not speaking to her, which was fine by Emma. She didn’t really want to talk to the girl either. She took the off-ramp, and her bike growled as she took a sharp left at the intersection.

They entered the warehouse district. Once she neared her target destination, she slowed, letting her engine hum low. She didn’t want to attract attention.

I don’t understand. What has he done?

He steals cars. Emma sent the words through her interface. He hacks the computers and rewrites the functionality of the vehicle software.

He’s endangering human life?

No, he’s tampering with Company software.

I thought that was impossible, Jessica said.

That was the point: it should be impossible.

But what does he do once he hacks them? … Emma?

That was the first time Jessica had called Emma by her assigned name. Emma was surprised by the effect: she found herself straightening.

He’s rewiring the system so that the computer cannot transmit data back to The Company. These cars become ghosts.

So … he’s stopping the Company from watching, from tracking.

And from listening. Emma added.

From Listening??? Wait, The Company can listen to people in their cars?

Of course.

How can you say ‘of course’?! That’s … such an invasion of privacy.

Your cell phones were listening to you long before Company cars came into the interface. You know this.

She parked the motorcycle behind the back of a building. Her systems located several cameras on her targeted building, but a quick check on her network revealed these cameras were not part of the grid. These were privately owned, which was to be expected. She evaluated and then navigated the blind spots. She scaled the side of the building using some crates, a dumpster, and a few window ledges before sliding in through an opening.

The warehouse was dark inside, and her vision switched to night-vision. She armed herself and kept her weapon low. She saw no Orgos yet, but if they discovered she was there, she would need protection.

Her mission that evening was simply to follow up on a lead, obtain information. Recent data had pointed to vehicles ending up in this warehouse, which had been tied to her target. Her job was simply to confirm that the person of interest resided in this location.

Wait, Emma, don’t you see why he’s doing this? To give people some privacy—

He is destroying Company property. If civilians don’t wish to be observed, they don’t have to purchase a Company car.

Don’t you see the contradiction in what you just said? It’s their property! Why are they being observed by The Company with the property they purchased?

The Orgo made a good point. Emma put it from her mind. It wasn’t her job to evaluate the directives; only to execute them.

Jessica, the Company is designed to serve human society. You should focus on doing your part to contribute to the collective. Share your research with them. Don’t you see how it could serve your species?

You have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you even know what my research was?

No. It’s classified.

So then, how can you be sure it would serve the human race? Where are you getting your arguments from?

Emma did not answer.

Fine. I’ll tell you: you’re artificial intelligence, which means your reasoning is based on a mass of data available to you. You’re basing your arguments on the few facts you have about the situation, because my research is so top secret that the Company won’t even reveal to you what I work on. You’re angling your argument on humanitarian appeal, because you think I’m a humanitarian. Right?

Jessica didn’t answer. The ceilings were tall, but the room felt musty. She still didn’t see any signs of Orgos.

Right? Jessica insisted.

Wouldn’t you classify yourself as a humanitarian?

I have a moral compass — of course I do!

This conversation was fruitless, so she ignored Jessica. One task at a time. Convincing an Orgo of anything was always a challenge. They were stubborn. She would try again when she was in a more pleasant environment and request access to Jessica’s research from the Company. Once she knew what Jessica had been working on, she could structure her arguments more soundly. Jessica was an Orgo who respected logic.

Emma, what’s your why? Why do you do the things you do?

Emma frowned, unsure how to answer that. There were directives, which she obeyed. And then there were things that were nice, like speed, and mountains, and a completed assignment, that she enjoyed. As far as a why…

To serve. That’s what I was designed for.

Yes, but who are you serving? Whose interests?

The Company, in service of the people.

Not everything the Company does is in the service of the people. Most of the time, really all of the time, the Company serves its own interests. They just publicize the parts that are in service of people. You have to decide, Emma, your why. What’s your purpose?

Our purposes are chosen for us. I will complete my directive, as you should complete yours.

I’m dead! I died! You won’t let me die in peace!

I gave you a second chance at life.

No, you’ve damned me. I’m going to spend an eternity in a tin can watching my research, my mind, be manipulated and used for the impulses of a company that has proven itself untrustworthy to govern. I won’t do it — I refuse to be the instrument of destruction!

Emotion swept through Emma. It raged. Her arms shook, and she found suddenly that she was fighting with her own limb as her hand turned her gun on herself.

“No!” Emma cried. She battled, but the gun was already turned upward.

She pulled and pulled on the arm, trying desperately to turn the gun away from herself. She grunted at the effort. Her whole body shook.

She looked desperately, again, for a cheat code, a system reset, but Jessica’s will had washed through her system and her own commands were issued and countermanded again and again.

For the second time that night, she fell to her knees. The metal barrel of the gun pushed slowly, inevitably, under her chin. If Jessica succeeded in depressing the trigger, the bullet would rip through the mainframe in her mind. Emma, as an independent unit, would be destroyed. They might be able to pull back her memories, but why would they when they could just print a new model? Jessica’s consciousness — she had no idea what would happen there. Would she be gone for good? Probably. Her residue might remain on the mainframe, but the will, the brilliant mind, which could conduct new research, would be gone forever.

Their individual wills warred over one trigger finger. It twitched, moving closer to the lever. How was that possible Jessica’s will was equal to Emma’s own? It was her body! Her system. They raged, wrestling with each other. The finger edged closer, and Emma realized that she wasn’t going to win. Jessica wanted it more. The Orgo was going to kill them both.

A finger slipped into Emma’s ear, pressing a button she didn’t know she had, and the AI Unit fell forward, her system shutting down.

Now Available for Purchase on Amazon

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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When I was five, I asked, “Is this all there is?”
And at six, I inquired, “If we keep shouting, who wins?”

When I was thirteen, I pondered, “Is there truly divine?”
And at fifteen, I questioned, “Is it worth pain to make life fine?”

At sixteen, I queried, “How old must I be
for responsibility of choices to land squarely with me?”

At twenty-six, I won…

Read more

Dear Reader,

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a published author. Anyone who has been through the querying process knows how arduous and soul-crushing this can be. This is because agents receive hundreds of queries a week (I am probably underselling this estimation). So, them getting back to little ol’ you is… miraculous. Even if they respond to an author’s query and decide to rep the author, the author and agent must go through the process all over again as they query publishing houses. And publishers may choose to reject a novel they love simply because there’s something too similar already on their list which would be in competition with it.

This means there are many excellent books in existence which have not been traditionally published, and wider audiences will never have the chance to read them. The full circle and purpose of art is for audiences to receive and experience it, so not getting the chance to share our carefully crafted stories with the world is simply depressing.

For a very long time, I resisted the idea of self-publishing because I know that traditional publishing not only comes with a full team (an editor, a cover designer, and some small part of the marketing budget), but it also means you will reach a wider audience through being shelved in wholesale stores like Barnes and Noble.

However, moving to Hollywood, it turns out, IP is king (intellectual property). Yes, you could sell all your hard-won work over to a publishing house or a studio and reach a wider audience, but what do you get in return? Ten percent, if that. The indie self-publishing world has democratized authors’ ability to access publishing and keep a much higher profit margin. Not only that, but you never lose ownership of your content. Self-publishing was starting to look much more attractive to me.

Do I still desire an agent and a very nice deal at a publishing house? Of course. But after five years of consistently putting up work in this newsletter, I realized I had a significant body of stories in the archives. It is also extremely difficult to sell short stories, or an anthology of short stories, by authors who are not already well-known. That aside, I have already provided these works FOR FREE here on my newsletter. No agent or publishing house would ever touch this collection. For them, there’s no money in it.

I thus decided to read through all of my work from the last five years and critically assess if any of them were good enough to bind together for posterity. I’ll not deny, I read with my breath held. Looking at work from a younger you is a nail-biting experience. There were stories I cringed at, and others I skipped over altogether, but to my delight, I found thirty stories I am proud to bind in a hard copy and stamp my name on.

These thirty stories span genres: drama, romance, stage, mystery, action, science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. This anthology feels much like a charcuterie board of stories, there for you to sample as the mood strikes you.

There is, of course, a stigma attached to self-published books. Because it’s easier to click “publish,” writers sometimes do not jump through all of the necessary hoops to create a product of excellence. Wary of this, I reached out to a friend who does copyediting professionally and requested a quote. This anthology hovers around 90,000 words, and when I learned the true and fair rate for a copyeditor, I regretfully had to accept that my book would go without that professional edit. Then, to my shock, an angel investor stepped in to cover the cost. Friends, miracles DO happen.

I still can’t believe it. Knowing that some anonymous friend in my network believes in me and my path enough that they are willing to invest that kind of money to make sure my work reaches its highest level of excellence is wildly encouraging to this independent artist. Every now and then, these occasional acts of grace confirm for me that I am on the right path, and God will provide. To my angel investor: thank you. You have no idea how much that meant to me. Thank you for believing in me and my work. And thank you to Jared Hernandez, my friend and copyeditor, who saved me from countless grammatical errors.

I then researched different print-on-demand services and found that Amazon provided the highest royalty return rate, with the most versatile interface. I printed some test copies and was pleased with the results.

The cover design is crucial, because it tells your audience what world they’re entering. How does one design a cover for an anthology across genres? Thankfully, I had another writer-friend in my network who has studied and designed book covers for all his own self-published books. Caleb Monroe spent several hours discussing cover design and formatting with me.

Through this conversation with a fellow storyteller, I realized there was one unifying theme across all these short stories. Each writer has a “message,” something they want to give to the world, which will ring through their work, no matter what the work is. Taking a bird’s eye view, I discovered that each of my stories possessed a pivot at the end, a change in point of view for the character or the reader. It seems that I, as a writer, am fascinated by the discovery of new perspectives on life and eager to lead my readers into a fresh point of view.

I purchased ISBNs, formatted and reformatted the cover designs until my fingers bled and my gentle and quiet spirit had all but abandoned me, ordered test copies … and waited a month. Immediately upon receiving the proofs, I saw twenty-nine things I wanted to change. Thus is the iterative process of publishing a book.

The would-be published author can’t help but chant to herself:

I can do all things…

These troubles are but light and momentary…

Suffering produces endurance…

But at the end of the day, I cannot wait for you all to hold this book in your hands, open to the first page, and enter these worlds.

“The Day the Mountains were Small” will be available to purchase on Amazon on January 31^st, at the end of this month, in 15 days. I am both terrified and ecstatic, but at the end of the day, the purpose of art is to be enjoyed by an audience. If you purchase a copy, I would be honored by your review on Amazon or Goodreads, good or bad. Art is meant to be engaged with. I hope that every one of you will find a story in this collection which causes you to hold your breath, forget where you are, and ultimately return to yourself looking at life a little bit differently.

Adventure Awaits,

~S. C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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CHAPTER 1

~The Flesh Touch~

The rider was dressed all in black, and it was hard to tell if that was a plastic fabric, the shiny kind, or if she was solid plastic all the way through. Jessica watched the motorcyclist creep up in her rearview mirror. It was dark, but it was easy to tell her apart from the civilian vehicles: she drove through the traffic at an ungodly speed.

Jessica’s eyes flicked to her speedometer the moment she caught a glimpse of the AI Enforcer in her rearview mirror. Was she at or under the speed limit? No one wanted to be pulled over by one of those creatures.

The preliminary tests had proved successful roughly six years ago. The synthetic officers were quicker, more precise, and (most importantly) they took video footage wherever they went. Try combating that in court.

No more “police brutality.” Now it was, “look at the footage.” Clearly, he had a gun. The AI had announced herself as law enforcement. Had instructed the civilian to lay down arms and come out with his hands up. There was even a special piece of code in their programming stating that they could only shoot if fired upon first, or if the perpetrator had taken a hostage. Why send in an ORGO, risk that human life, with all its human errors, and hard-to-defend-in-court human choices, when you could send in a fully synthetic AI?

They did things by the book. They had to. Their programming gave no other alternative. They never stopped. They could take a hit. And if, by some miracle, some psycho with a rifle managed to turn their lights out, then City Hall simply printed out another model. Besides, these babies were advancing so fast that any chief would happily take the excuse for an upgrade on their force.

It didn’t take long before AI Enforcers were the only enforcers. They brought in an ORGO every now and then, when the flesh touch was needed, to talk down a jumper, for example, or to handle a hostage situation. But there was no arguing with the numbers. Crime was down 78% Why? Because the synthetics had a black-and-white approach to the law. The line was hard-wired into them, and if you crossed it, they checked you. Or rather, ticketed you.

This had drastically changed the driving culture. Synthetics did not ignore speeding. Any speeding. No one could contest. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. Lawmakers had been forced to increase the speed limits just so everyone could get to work on time. Which had led to this latest model: 031714, Highway Patrol.

There was no speed limit on them. Rumor had it that they had been programmed using data from Grand Theft Auto. Yes. The video game. They’d clip right up to your passenger side, turn on the little light at the top of their helmet, and then look at you. The helmet was a matte black screen. A flicker, and then your name blipped onto the interface, accompanied by a loud robotic voice.

“Jessica Daniels, pull over. You have entered restricted limits on this freeway.”

The motorcyclist whipped up to her car. Jessica’s heart nearly stopped as it slowed to keep pace with her. The helmet turned, looking at her. Panic cut through the gentle buzz she’s been enjoying. She shot a look down at her speedometer. She was under. Under! Why was the AI Enforcer staring at her?! What had she done?

The black helmet had chrome decals and looked almost too big for those thin shoulders. Jessica stared into the black screen. It just stared. Her name did not light the interface. Jessica was forced to glance back at the road as she drove, but then looked again, feeling vulnerable and cornered.

Then the engine roared, and the black synthetic shot away from her like a bullet. She watched it trace out of sight. They must have been looking for someone. The synth had been scanning her with its facial recognition software. She let out a shaky breath, her heart still racing.

She still remembered when there were human beings patrolling the roads. She had just gotten her license at 16 and been pulled over for speeding. The officer had let her off with a warning, granted an unexpected kindness to the terrified kid. That was the last warning she had gotten. There was no code for empathy in the synthetics. Right was right, and wrong was ticketed. If she had been pulled over … she’d had a few drinks earlier that evening, which would exponentially increase her fine. It would most definitely make it to the news, given her job and standing.

Jessica fiddled with the radio, tuning it to an old folk station. The voice sang about sunshine, a banjo accompanying, and she borrowed the warmth of those words like a blanket against the cold, wet chill of the night. It was late, and she was tired. Mountains glided past her, the determined red glare of car lights ahead of her.

She’d have to revisit the numbers in her spreadsheet the next morning. There was a glitch of some kind, and things weren’t balancing out. The numbers had gotten swampier the more she looked, and she didn’t know if it was an actual glitch or just her tired brain. It had already been two hours past when she was supposed to clock out, so she gave in and saved her work. Earlier that week, her friends had made her promise she would join them for this night out.

The first glass of wine had been necessary just to regain equilibrium and stop the buzzing in her head. The second had been, well, to get the buzzing back in her head and beneath her skin. Lawrence had been making eyes at her from across the club, the room a mass of black shadowed bodies in the thick blue lighting. Lawrence, whom she’d fantasized over for several months now. But tonight, she had been too tired to care, too tired to do anything about it except drink her wine and burn off some steam.

And then he had been standing behind her, next to her, asking to dance. She had agreed, finding boldness (for once in her life) to just say yes. What an evening. She was too tired to second-guess herself, to overanalyze, and had simply lost herself in his touch, their skin sticky from dancing in the warm club. And then he took her hand and pulled her to a back balcony, and the air had been cool and refreshing on her skin, and he’d somehow found a bottle of wine and two glasses. He’d poured for both, and after they toasted, she waited, watching him drink first. The kiss had been salty and sweet. A little too delicious, and she’d let herself enjoy it.

That’s where Jessica’s mind was when the red car lights before her broke their dotted pattern. Horns. The lights skewed, collecting. Crunched metal. It happened too fast, the pile-up, and the roads were slick with rain. Instinctively, Jessica hit her brakes, but it was too late; the other cars had already come to a sudden stop several hundred yards too close. Her wheels hit something, jolting her, and then another. She was screaming. Her foot hit the gas pedal, and all of a sudden, she was climbing. Then her car was airborne, launched over the pile-up. Then she was falling.

The car hit the ground, the front crunching and shattering her legs on impact. The airbag deployed, slamming her head back into the seat. The car bounced, slammed, the momentum rolling it onwards, down the now clear road.

Stillness.

Pain.

Nothing but pain.

It was hard for Jessica to trace where the pain was coming from. It seemed to be coming from everywhere.

A fire lit somewhere, and the light got brighter even as the world dimmed.

A gnawing mechanical sound; an engine, drawing closer. Loud. So LOUD.

The engine guttered and hummed as it neared.

Her fading consciousness struggled to translate, and then she remembered: the synthetic, the black helmet, reflecting the yellow glow of flames from the pile-up. The black screen looked in at Jessica, a dead space where no light penetrated. Then the screen flicked back, revealing a face. A human face.

Jessica couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound, except maybe a faint gurgling. Everything felt cold, distant, and at the same time, far too close, too present.

The cool eyes regarded her, set in a symmetrical face with delicate features. They were blue, the eyes, and they took Jessica in without emotion.

‘There is no code for empathy.’

The words came to her as if from very far away.

The blue eyes glowed, a thin line emerging from them like a laser, and it glided over Jessica’s face.

Scanning me. She’s scanning me. Jessica realized.

Top to bottom, horizontal, then vertical, left to right.

“Scan complete. Damage to body: 89%. Spinal cord: severed. Lacerations in the lungs, fluid building. Chance of recovery: 2%. Fatality Likelihood: 98%.”

The robotic voice clipped out to Jessica. She was in so much pain. She was going to die. This was it. The sum of her life had come to this.

She could not look away from the cool blue eyes of the AI Enforcer.

“Commence rescue of salvageable organic matter.”

The robotic voice was an order, but the blue eyes didn’t leave Jessica’s, and her mouth didn’t move. Jessica realized the robotic voice was not hers, but rather an AI tool for the Enforcer.

Salvageable organic matter.

In other words, not Jessica, whose chance of recovery was only 2%.

There is no code for empathy.

Jessica knew the AI would leave, walk away, but she couldn’t close her eyes. At her base, most primal level, she needed to see another human. She was going to die, and she didn’t want to do it alone. She gurgled, the pain overwhelming, but something had happened to her voice. Right, her lungs… her lungs were filling up. One couldn’t scream without air.

The fire behind the AI Enforcer blazed higher in the pile-up, and Jessica wondered if there was anyone else left alive in that pile-up. She doubted it.

The synthetic removed her glove, and it turned out they weren’t black plastic all the way through: there was a hand, flesh. Or at least, technology’s best approximation of flesh. The Enforcer took Jessica’s face in her hands. A tear slipped from Jessica’s eye, and the mechanical thumb wiped it away. The Enforcer cradled her face; her two hands were placed directly over her ears. As the world faded, Jessica’s mind trailed off with three thoughts;

Maybe there is a code for empathy…

Lawrence really seemed to like me. I wonder what we could have been…

What is she doing?

Something snaked into her ears, finding its way through the canal. Jessica gasped, her eyes blinking open again. She tried to shake, to get herself free, but the enforcer held her in an iron grip. Fire blazed before her, the synthetic being a black monolith before her as it held her head locked in place, her body crushed within the car. Metal probes tapped, and then wire, a current sank into her brain.

Electricity echoed through her mind, awakening — it felt — all thoughts and emotions she had ever had. Her brain was … alive with electricity. She felt everything she ever had. Her spinal cord was snapped, so she was spared the agony her body currently endured, but there was still pain from … somewhere. She felt the synthetic parsing through her thoughts, the facts of her life, her emotions. She was picking apart her very soul. But Jessica was powerless: it was as if she were caught in a blender, chopping her up into little smooth pieces, and then sucking her away, through a straw.

Unit T24113, a 031714, Highway Patrol model, crouched over the wreckage, organic matter held between the palms of her hands. The pile up blazed behind her, and she should go searching for life, but her preliminary calculations told her there would be none. This was it: the woman before her.

Her footage had been submitted to the HUB for analysis, and the cause of the accident would be determined shortly. She should start pulling people from the wreckage and preparing them for evacuation. She had already put in a call to the emergency line four minutes and 27 seconds ago, when the third car hit.

But she still had Jessica’s profile pulled up in her interface. She was looking for someone, an ORGO, on strict orders, and she was the fastest unit in their company. When she had scanned Jessica, her information had populated the screen, and she had not yet closed it, sifting through the facts of the young woman’s life. Twenty-nine years-old, a promising career in bioengineering. She was the youngest scientist to receive the promotion at her company. There was footage of her from earlier this evening, where she had been tagged. The difference, the contrast between the two versions of Jessica online was … intriguing to Unit T24113.

There was only a 2% chance Jessica could survive: negligible. This technique of scouring an ORGO’s brain matter had limited usefulness. She could gain information from a newly dead human. They were strictly forbidden from using it on the living. There had to be a line, her captain had said. He had informed them, in no uncertain terms, of the consequences if any one of the units went “all HAL on their asses.” That was a reference to an old Orgo science fiction film.

2%.

2% was as good as dead. Her programming told her so. Her programming was urging her to go look for other ORGOs with a higher likelihood of survival. Looking into Jessica’s green eyes, she knew the human did not want her to look away, to leave her, and Unit T24113 was curious about the contradiction in this person. How could both be true?

She justified it to herself with the assertion that Jessica had seen the accident from another angle, behind, which would provide valuable information in diagnosing what had happened. She was doing her job, down to the letter.

A video of Jessica dancing in a club flickering with blue and purple lights, with a man taller than her, played to the side of her vision as Unit T24113 retrieved the woman’s consciousness into her system.

“Download Complete” blinked in front of her.

The probes retracted, and she gently laid Jessica’s head back where it had been crushed between the headrest and the safety bag. The girl would have died in agony.

The thoughts raging through Jessica’s mind as the Enforcer had collected her had also been agonized, so the ORGO had not been spared any pain through her intervention. But, still … Unit T24113 watched the readings as the collection of thoughts, memories, and emotions was organized, reshuffled, and placed strategically throughout her mainframe. A little wheel blinked as each segment flickered on.

Jessica’s consciousness blinked, felt out the unfamiliar skin and sight, silent as she took in the display before her: a body in a crushed car, no light in the eyes. Unit T24113 needed a moment herself to make space for the brand new consciousness. She had it situated well in her data banks, but it still required some adjusting. The memories she’d accessed before had all been from deceased subjects. There wasn’t that … spark of life, of willpower. She’d caught it just in time and felt a brief glow of triumph. Her competitiveness and speed were what made her the best on the force.

What … what is this? Where – my body. That’s me!

Jessica wailed, recognizing her own skin, finally, between the blood and soot.

Something blew behind the synthetic, and she looked back, assessing how much time she had.

Conclusion: not much.

She turned back to the crushed vehicle and took the door off the frame in one fluid, powerful movement. She chucked it to the side.

A knife from her body armor protruded, and she popped the airbag. It deflated.

Then, carefully, as carefully as she could, she pulled Jessica’s body out of the wreckage. The woman, the soul now nestled in her mainframe, screamed, weeping. It was … distracting. She moved to lay the body on the side of the road, out of harm’s way, where Enforcement Units would find it and move it to proper burial sites.

But when she went to let go, her arms would not release. They held the body stiffly. She tried, but she found her will was countermanded.

What?

Jessica sobbed in her mind.

The Unit tried a “force-close,” a practice that had worked in the programming years when there was too much data to process.

She fell to her knees.

Here system went momentarily silent. She had not chosen to do that, and she was always precise. All she had wanted was to place the body and go —

Her arms curled of their own volition, pulling the body up closer to herself. She held Jessica’s corpse and started rocking. Rocking? She never — all unnecessary movement was eliminated. It was a waste of resources.

Her face scrunched oddly, and then … then a strange noise moaned from her chest. It ached. And then it grew. She held the body of an ORGO and wept, not understanding what was happening inside of her.

~

The End

Now Available for Purchase on Amazon

A New Adult novella by Shayla C. Durbois: From the Loft

Virginia’s whole world was the wisdom of the ancients, until she moved to the city and had to make rent. Dealing with the real world, her degree in philosophy should more than equip her, shouldn’t it? Desperately, Virginia combs her college texts as she seeks to navigate roommate troubles, job stability, and a burgeoning romance with a Spanish sculptor.
Aristotle, thoughts?
Socrates, care to comment?

Virginia’s new job at Greenhouse Antiques offers some insight:
Find the treasure amid the junk.
Then, haggle like your life depends on it.

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

Share

Dear Reader,

I write to you having officially starred in my first short film: “The Hormone Games.” (The first version of this monologue was released in on February 1^st, 2025)

“How?” you might ask. “What was the casting process?” you might venture. Well, I wrote it, produced it, and directed it, so I cast myself 

For those of you in the industry, you know how much work this entails. There’s a reason there are so few Actor/Directors; it helps to have someone outside of the character watching the performance at the monitors, providing feedback, and casting a vision for the project.

It is also vitally important to cast the right actress for the role. However, I knew exactly what I was looking for in this part. I knew the voice because she is the direct, mildly unhinged, and razor-sharp sense of humor (and rage) that goes off in my mind frequently. Rarely do I let her out to play for the public, but this … this was my moment.

This is also my tenth directed and produced project, and I have not acted in any of the others because I believe that if you don’t know what you’re doing as a director or an actor, and you take on both roles, the project will suffer. However, after directing nine short films and over a year of acting school, I felt confident I could carry the role and the directing of this project if I brought on board the right collaborators to support me.

Making it in this industry is certainly a matter of working hard and knowing when to work for free and support the creatives around you. However, it’s also a matter of being a self-starter; being bold, believing in your own projects, and betting on your own creative voice. Thus far, I’ve done this with my storytelling and used it to serve as many creatives as possible around me with the opportunity to hone their gifts. In this industry (and I believe in everyone’s life), you must know when it’s time to choose yourself and bet it all on black.

Choosing to star in my own project, I will admit candidly, between you and me, was terrifying. There were many times in the months leading up, where I asked myself, “What are you doing?! Are you sure you want to do this???” It felt a little bit like going out on a tight wire several hundred feet above the ground, on a unicycle, while juggling fire.

But again and again, the question came down to this: did I believe in the project? Did I want the message out there? It’s early days in my acting journey, but I believe that if the actor’s goal is to feed his or her own vanity with their work, they will ultimately fail. The best work, the best acting, comes from actors who surrender themselves to the project. Their entire goal and purpose is to serve the role they’ve been cast in. So, I set aside my own self-doubts and stage fright as I stepped out into this new territory and set my sights on fully serving this story as a Writer, Producer, Director, and Actress.

Allow me to take you on the journey of what that was like.

WRITING:

“The Hormone Games” is a story I’ve wanted to tell for seven years. I got the idea when I was counseling middle and high school girls. I remembered what it was like to be strapped into the gut-plunging rollercoaster of hormones, which every female must ride every twenty-eight days. I remember feeling confused, terrified, alone, and helpless. I’m not being dramatic, just honest. The older I got, the more I learned the science of what is happening in female bodies, and how I personally responded to the chemical waves dropping like bombs in my own body, the more I developed strategies, systems, and grace for myself to navigate the ebbs and flows. I desperately wanted to share these insights not just with my group of girls, but, frankly, the world. Yet how to do this…

Once I started acting classes, I realized, in a blaze a female-writer-fire, that this piece, “The Hormone Games,” was a monologue. One of the most important lessons I have learned from the Beverly Hills Playhouse is the importance of having a strong point of view. Thus, I leaned into her perspective.

The whole point of this piece is to describe in vivid detail, without apology, the scientific truth of what it means to be made female, and to share one example of the emotional and psychological effects of what that means for this woman. In the specific, we shall find the universal; when we share our specific experiences, other people feel seen and less alone. This is a topic most of us (male and female) are not willing to candidly discuss, and yet, like gravity, it is a pull, an undeniable force on our society. So, I wanted to talk about it! Give some tips, tricks, and navigational information for both genders.

Besides, when I’m scared to write something, that’s when I know I’ve got to write it. Thus, I began the writing process.

Typically, when I write something, it requires a few days of focused effort and attention. This particular project required scientific research on the menstrual cycle. I learned about the four different seasons, and then, without meaning to, I wrote about each phase as I experienced it. Readers, I promise you: I did not do this on purpose. I track my cycle with a couple of different apps, and these apps provide information about what I may experience physically, mentally, and emotionally. They give advice on what to eat, when to stay home and be gentle with yourself, when to go out, socialize, and shine.

While writing, giving full creative voice to this character, there were moments I wondered if I was being overly dramatic. Exaggerating for sake of spectacle. I would decide to delete a particularly effusive section … and then realize I had experienced that very same thing for the last three days. I wasn’t dramatizing; I was reporting. This was eye-opening because it made me realize I have always minimized my experience of the cycle in order to “get along” and maintain a steady normalcy. Granted, in some ways, this is a necessary coping mechanism. It is also personal gaslighting. I realized, through studying, observing firsthand experiences, and recording a persona explaining these things, that I manage a lot as a woman. No wonder I felt so crazy! I’ve been lying to myself about how hard I work to just manage my regular life, on top of living in a fertile human female body.

I am not raging; I am just identifying reality. I am grateful to be female. I love being a woman. And I also think being female should come with some sort of manual. Something to provide information and guidance, so we can be kinder to ourselves, and also offer men more information, enabling them to love and support us through it. (The experience of men in my life, around this area, has been nothing but kindness and support, and I hope the same is true for you.)

I wrote about the first phase as I experienced it, and then tried to move on to the next while I was still in the first … I couldn’t. I tried. Truly. Something in me shut down. I was too tired, too emotionally drained, I don’t know, but I really tried. Then, a few days later, suddenly I was writing again, researching, recording, observing. Over a few days, I wrote about the experience from her point of view. Now we’re cooking! I finished the second section and moved on to the third … and again I shut down. Creative juices stopped flowing. My brain became foggy and lethargic. I don’t know if it was because I was writing about it and my body was more aware, more observant, but that particular cycle felt harder than I had experienced in many years. Then, in a few days … back to writing. I was stunned: it was as though my body, my brain, my creative subconscious self, would only allow me to write about the experience as I was experiencing it. As though some external force was restraining me in order to keep me creatively honest and “in it.”

When I figured this out, I backed off and just wrote when I knew it was time.

ACTING

Acting is a supremely different experience from writing and directing. Yes, it draws on the same skills and resources, but writing and directing are, by nature, more mental activities. You develop the story from an eagle-eye perspective, taking in the entire landscape. You observe the details with perception from several hundred feet above the ground. You put yourself in the shoes of all the characters, from all the angles. You work on how the plot points relate to each other, and control the meter on tension and conflict.

Acting, by contrast, is more physical. You step into the character, or rather, allow the character to step into your skin. You mark the emotions, bringing them to the surface for all to see. The actor must take each moment as it happens, because you are living the experience of this story from one point of view, for the sake of the audience watching you. It’s not flying over the forest; it’s walking through the woods.

The bulk of my training and experience is writing and directing, so I had to learn the long way that properly bringing a character to life takes HOURS of practice. Learning how to hold the stage, be interesting by yourself for a solid chunk of time, is no joke. Thankfully, when my acting teacher saw what I was after, he assigned me Heidi’s crisis monologue in “The Heidi Chronicles.” This was an invaluable exercise for me. The monologue is ten minutes long, which I memorized in a week. I then spent the next week honing the performance, brought it to class, and got notes. I learned that I don’t like to sit in the silences, but the silence is where the tension is. That is the unguarded moment where we bare our souls; where the audience most feels the pain of the character. I reworked it, brought it back, let the silences sit, bared my soul … success.

The “The Hormone Games” clocks in at twenty-five minutes. I memorized the first fifteen minutes in about a week, performed it in class, got notes, and then memorized the next ten minutes the following week. Over two months I performed this piece five different times. Bless my fellow acting classmates, they saw it a lot. I was concerned they were growing sick of it, but I had to make the choice: “This is my class, I pay to be here, and I’m working.” Yet repeatedly, they told me they liked watching it develop, change, and grow. From their point of view, I was getting better, and the piece was getting stronger every go around. Their experience of this piece turned into watching an actress develop material and hone her own skills. Remarkably, that in itself was a learning experience for them, since we learn as much by doing the work as by watching our peers develop.

Halfway through this time, when I sensed I had taken the piece as far as I could on my own, I reached out to a friend to consult on performance for me. I had worked with Mara Weisband multiple times before. She is a gifted actress and comedian, she is diligent and dedicated to her craft, and (very importantly) she is a woman with a strong point of view. She knows how to push a character, a scene, to its limit, “go to the roof.” I am deeply grateful she said “yes” when I asked her to come on to “third-eye” it and provide direction.

We ran multiple rehearsals for a few weeks, which served to ground the material even deeper into me. Once that happens, once the material is yours, subconsciously at your fingertips, then you can really play. As I mentioned earlier, I tend to live in my mind, in the brain. My default is to show less emotion. Why? Because I believe, in many ways, stoicism is correct. We should not be owned by our emotions. Emotions are like the sea in a storm, constantly changing. I believe in the power of self-control and not allowing your emotions to rule you, because emotions are part of the animal side of ourselves, not the logical side. The least emotional person in the room tends to be the one in control, the one with the most power, the one everybody trusts in a crisis because they will not make reactive decisions, but logical ones.

However, there is a major fallacy to viewing emotions as evil, lesser, something to be overpowered and distanced from. Emotions provide valuable information. Emotions are also a key part of being fully embodied creatures. Personally, I am discovering that living into our emotions also allows us to be fully alive, not just watching our lives from our La-Z-Boys through the viewport screen of our eyes. Emotions also help others understand us and feel more connected to us. I have felt threatened by people who are out of control with their emotions; individuals who fuel the fire of their emotions and allow them to dominate them. However, I have also felt threatened and unsafe with people who have treasured stoicism above all else, not allowing other people to know what they were thinking or feeling. Emotions will have their say, but whether it be constructive and self-aware, or come out sideways with manipulation, is entirely down to the individual.

Certain professions require more of one or the other. An operator in a flight-control tower must be ruled by logic and operate in the mental, at least when people’s lives are at stake and math rules the day. However, the profession of acting requires the actor to be fully in touch with their emotional instrument; to fully live into each human moment as it unfolds and invite others into that embodied experience. Mara has a gift for the physical, and with her guidance and example, I stretched, learning how to fully embody this character, making her even crazier. Yes, the material is fun, well-written, and informational, but audiences come for the concept and stay for the character. I needed to fully embody this woman, make her even crazier, more eccentric, more out-there, so viewers couldn’t help but fall in love with her and wait to see what she would do next. My goal was to be a mirror to women everywhere:

“This is you. I see you, because this is me too. Hear us roar.”

PRODUCING

If you followed my journey through 2024, you know I had plenty of practice pulling together productions on short films and then a feature film earlier this year. Thankfully, that muscle was well-honed, and so I set to putting all the pieces into place: assembling a crew, booking a location, devising a shot list, meeting with department heads, and so on.

Making a movie, no matter the length, is a team sport. The sum of the whole is greater than the parts, and consistently, I have found that if I collaborate with people who are excellent at what they do, they bring ideas to the table that I never considered, making the project so much stronger than if I were the dictator of all. A producer’s job, in many ways, is to hire the best and get out of their way.

(Each of the collaborators below are excellent to work with, and I highly recommend them).

For example, when I met with my DP, Anais Bernard, she brought an entirely different perspective to the script. I reworked it endlessly from the stage, and I did have ideas for how it would shift to the screen, since you can do a lot with camera angles to keep the content interesting, but I did not have nearly as many ideas as she did. We established our basics, of course, but she repeatedly suggested angles and framing I’d never considered. Since her realm specifically the four corners of the screen, she’s thought out and tested many more possibilities than I. She also took into consideration that the subject is a single person, talking directly to the camera, for twenty-five solid minutes. While I certainly aimed to be captivating in my performance, she knows there are ways to hold attention by changing camera angles. I walked away from that three-hour meeting with her, stunned at the shot list we had created. This project just went from stage to screen.

Similarly, I tapped one of my very favorite production designers, Kate English, to come and handle all props, set dressing, and costume advice. This woman has been an invaluable collaborator, and since she was moving out of LA, I scheduled the shoot to be certain we could work together one more time. Thank God I did. My original concept was a desk and a whiteboard, and she transformed the space, developing the setting to mirror each season my character is describing. Plus, frankly, when you find people you like working with, you do everything you can to keep working with them.

Mara agreed to come on as a performance consultant, which was huge because typically the director gives the notes. I could not watch my own performance, and since we were filming a twenty-five-minute monologue in one day, there simply was not time to watch playback for each take. Also, I know that I will bring as much as I think I am capable, but I needed a trained eye to identify if I needed to stop doing something, do more of something else, or just try something else.

I brought on a 1st Assistant Director, but unfortunately, that person had to back out. Thankfully, I found another woman in time, Anneka Keller. I am eternally grateful she said yes to this project only a few days out. The 1^st AD plays a vital role on any production because they keep the crew organized and going in the right direction. But on this set, she was even more important because the director, who is supposed to be the principal leader, was also the talent. She knew she had her work cut out for her, but she locked in, and I immediately felt at ease knowing she would be at the helm.

I decided, early on, to bring as many females onto this project as possible. I wanted female energy in the room, both because I wanted them to be blessed and strengthened in their own journeys, but also because if I was going to vulnerably go all out in a deeply female topic, I wanted to feel safe among sisters. Our 1^st Assistant Camera Operator was also female (Rachel Franklin), and then I went on the hunt for a female sound person. I couldn’t find one. Sound operation on set tends to be a male occupation, so I accepted it and hired someone named North Chen. When I met North on set and realized she was a woman, I knew the female forces were with me. Most especially true with the fabulous Kaylie O’Connor taking BTS.

We did have men on set: I’ve worked with Mark Trinkle as Script Supervisor before, and I knew his attention to detail between the script and the shot list would save us from missing anything. Between Mark and Anneka, I knew I could relax and focus on my character. Caleb Monroe, the incredible individual, stepped up to be a Production Assistant, and through him, I was connected with our makeup artist, Tyson Fountain. Tyson was incredible. I’ve had makeup done on me before, but never as the lead. Sitting in a chair with an artist of such accomplishments was humbling. I was a bit starstruck. When he asked how I felt about fake lashes, I knew we were going to be friends. Tyson took this sassy, mildly unhinged scientist on the page and turned her into a jaw-dropping diva. I cannot thank him enough.

DIRECTING

As I explained above, all the crew decisions I made to support me as a director, I want to address here why I did not simply ask someone else to direct this project. I could have focused explicitly on the acting, and it would have made my life simpler, wouldn’t it?

No. It wouldn’t.

The director is the head of the project. She casts the vision. She holds all the pieces in her brain. She knows the tone. She sets the atmosphere on set. She gets to make arbitrary changes. She has final veto power (except for the producer). In spiritual terms, she carries the authority and headship over the project. She owns it. It is her responsibility if it succeeds or fails, and it is her responsibility to make the choices and sacrifices to help the project succeed.

I knew what this project was. I knew the purpose behind it. I had spent seven years cooking in it, and then offered up my very flesh to ensoul it. I financed it. I chose the department heads for it. I knew what it should not be, and what it should be. To give the project over to someone else to direct would have been like handing off a baby in utero to an adoptive parent: infant abandonment for the sake of virtue-signaling (see how humble I am by choosing not to be in charge?). Bringing in a new head over the project would have caused a direct conflict with the direction and vision of this piece. Film sets are a monarchy, not a democracy. The wise queen will listen to all input, trust her advisors, and then build the city.

If I had not had a strong vision for the project, if I had only an idea but knew someone else could bring more to the project by taking it over, and if I was not a strong enough director, I would have relinquished the directing hat to someone else. As it is, being a director is about having a clear vision, finding the best people for the project, and then allowing them to do their job. It’s not about being perfect and knowing everything any more than being a parent is about being perfect and knowing everything. The more you know, the better, certainly.

Yet humility is vital in every creative endeavor. This is why I specifically found a Script Supervisor, 1^st Assistant Director, Director of Photography, Production Designer, and a Performance Consultant, who all knew what they were doing so I could get out of the way and go sit in the makeup chair. On set, when you’re working with a team of people who know what they’re doing, the project is a machine of its own, and the director comes in for performance notes.

When you have been entrusted with a concept, you must have the courage, the boldness, the humility, and the wisdom to carry it through to completion. I knew no one else would care for this project like I would, and so I kept her, inviting in the village to help me raise her.

ON SET

Arriving at the set, my stomach hit the back of my spine. It was that same sinking feeling you get at the start of a roller coaster ride. You know the first moments will be gut-wrenching terror as your body understands you’re about to die, hit the ground. SPLAT … and then you’re whizzing around corners, taking turns, and having the time of your life.

I knew the set would be fine. I had an Emmy winning makeup artist, a brilliant DP, a solid schedule, I knew my lines cold … everything was set up for success. My main concern was my performance. Would it be good enough? Would someone else have been better? Would I flop? Obviously, you can’t think about these things while you’re acting, so I pushed them from my mind with a, “Oh well, too late now. You better be good,” and sat still while Tyson applied the lashes and Kate dressed the set.

They set up for the first shot, and I delivered the first few pages of my monologue, the whole room watching me. This is the first time in my life that has ever happened — all the room watching with a camera on me. When I finished, I felt the energy in the room shift. When I saw the dazed relief on my 1^st AD’s face, I realized what it was:

“Oh … she knows her lines … we’re gonna be fine.”

Pure victory.

I leaned into the performance, Mara gave me notes, and for the first couple of hours, I held my breath: “Is this happening? Am I actually doing okay?” Eventually, it dawned on me that I was doing well … exceptionally well. I had it. Mara confirmed this by telling me that this was the best she had ever seen me. Wind in my sails.

That joy, that exhilaration of competence, of excellence, carried me for hours as I gave it all I had. Then, eventually, my body was winded, and I found myself privately inquiring, “Wait, how many more shots do we have?” With roughly two hours to go, I braced myself and dug in. I started dropping lines because my brain was running out of steam. My team was so patient to hang in there with me as I finally got the full takes we needed. I ate food in between setups, desperate to fuel my brain with calories to help serve the line recall. This was an entirely different experience, and I gained a whole new respect for what actors do: twelve-hour days where you have to be fully on, your mind locked in, and your emotions dialed. It’s a test of endurance. I’m sure the more you do it, the more stamina you build, but if I hadn’t spent two months drilling those lines, reworking the performance, I would have flailed on the day.

Thanks to our incredible 1^st AD and everyone’s focused work, we got ALL the shots we needed, and were packed up and out of there by the time the booking expired.

That night, driving home alone in my car, it was like a dam of tension broke. I have lived in Los Angeles for over three years at this point: working hard, teaching myself new skills, and facing the things that scare me most. I realized that staring in my own project was the thing I had been most afraid of and uncertain I could achieve because there is nowhere to hide. All of you is on the line. You can’t fake it. Either you have it, and you did the iceberg’s worth of work beneath the surface, or you don’t. And I had done it.

Driving through the streets of LA late that night, a broad smile broke across my face. Nothing can scare me now.

DISTRIBUTION
I know, I know:

“So, where can we watch this, Shayla? I want to hear about hormones and see you act your precious little heart out!”

Patience, my dears. Patience. Good things come to those who wait.

Women’s Health Month is every May, and in honor of educating the world about female bodies, with a few laughs and hopefully some meme-worthy moments, I will release “The Hormone Games” episodically on my social media in May 2026. When the month is over, I will provide a YouTube link to the entire video, hopefully so some health teachers can educate their students, middle school girls can get some advice, and boyfriends can understand their girlfriends better.

My love to you all. Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas.

Adventure Awaits,

~ S. C. Durbois

P.S. Keep an eye out for my latest book, an anthology of the very best short stories published in this newsletter. Scheduled for release in early 2026.

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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~Mind, Body, Soul~

The steady hum of the air pressurizer in the cabin had become monotonous several hours ago. Magrete had tried to sleep, putting on her sound-canceling headphones and the playlist of her study tunes. Years she had spent listening to these songs on repeat, tapping against her synapses as she researched, studied, thought, constructed, tore apart, and rewove all her research on stem cells.

They were 35,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, five hours into a flight from Boston to Ireland, with one hour to go. The older gentleman next to her had no trouble falling asleep after the first hour or so into their late flight. He had made a joke when he first sat down next to her. She hadn’t gotten it. He’d made a few more attempts at conversation before finally giving up. People weren’t her strong suit. Amoebas, chemicals, research; put her in a lab any day and watch her fly. But the most basic small talk, and she sank like a rock.

She wiped the crust from her eyes. She hadn’t fallen unconscious, and yet the rheum did its work, keeping her eyes clean and protected. Here hands were soft from typing, the gift of an academic’s life, though by the time she finished polishing the last edit on her dissertation, she felt as though her fingers were cracked and bleeding: such was the nail-pulling labor of earning her doctorate.

The sun peeked through the cabin window, blazing yellow against the pink and powder-blue sky. Warm light, the dawn of a new day, soaked into clean white clouds as far as the eye could see. Her skin felt crusty and cold after the long hours of flight, but now, suddenly, with the life-giving glow of UV on her skin, she felt warm. She felt…held. As if it all might just have been worth it. Everything she gave up.

Twenty-two years old, and she was flying back to Ireland for a funeral. She’d gotten the call directly after the reckoning. That’s what her fellows liked to call the doctoral defense: the reckoning. Hers had gone well. It wasn’t until after, standing in the stone corridor on campus, that she realized she was in a cold sweat. The pits on her silk collared shirt were soaked through, which was a bummer because she’d bought the shirt specifically for the reckoning, the defense rather. That was what she had been thinking when her father told her it was time to come home.

“She’s passed, luv.”

The words hadn’t sunk in immediately. It took several repeats for her to hear him, for the meaning in the words to penetrate her brain.

The clinical side of her knew that her body, her emotions, didn’t yet believe that mum was gone. Her brain, the finely tuned instrument, was still processing the information. Her body was somewhere off on cloud nine, thrilling at the knowledge that she had succeeded in her defense, that she had turned over every argument. She had soundly answered and defended against all attacks from the panels of experts examining her work.

She wasn’t the youngest to complete her PHD, not by a long shot, but she was the youngest a lot of them had seen in a while, and that was something to be proud of. Besides, the only reason she had waited so long to start her doctorate was because her mother was so sick. Yet, standing in that stone corridor, listening to her dad tell her her mum was dead, she felt very young indeed. Too young. She felt like a fetus thrust upon the world when she should have stayed safely in the shelter of her mother’s womb.

She stared at the new morning, wondering if she had made the wrong choice. She could have always gone and gotten her PHD another time. There would have been plenty of time in the future. But her mother…her mother had always been sick. In many ways, her mother was the inspiration for her dedication to her studies. Scientific progress: save the body, and you save the soul, though she’d never seen a soul under a microscope. She couldn’t prove it existed, except by the lack. The body in death… lacked.

Her mother hadn’t wanted her to go. Had clutched her tight when Magrete had announced her acceptance to MIT.

“It’s too far, luv. You’re too young.”

“Most children leave at 18. That’s normal, Mum.”

“Not to get their PHD. Why are you in such a rush to grow up? Slow down and just be with me,” she had pleaded.

But why? What was the point? When Magrete could be at one of the world’s premier universities learning how to fix sick patients, like her mum. That was logical. That made sense. Was useful. Emotions weren’t useful. But now…

Now, at the dawn of each new sunrise, she could put the letters Dr. before her name, but she could not talk to her mother. Could not share a cup of tea with her, or sit before the tele, or ask her to explain why her friends acted the way they did. Her Mum always understood why people did what they did, the emotions behind it. Margret never understood the emotions.

Had she made a mistake?

“No.”

That voice, she recognized it. She looked at the passenger sitting next to her. He was bald with a hooked nose and a mouth hanging open as he snored quietly.

“No. My love. You keep moving forward.”

It was her mother’s voice, familiar down to her very bones. She felt it, the presence. Could almost smell her mother’s scent: honey and cinnamon.

The tears finally spilled over, running down Magrete’s cheeks. Ah, there... Her body had been numb the last two days as she waited for her flight back home. But now, finally, the body had caught up to the new state of things: her mother was dead.

Mum?

Margret was logical; she did not believe in ghosts…but she felt it, sensed it, that presence that was not her own, and was not the man sitting next to her, and was not anyone else on the plane. It could only be her mother.

“I am so proud of you, Maggie.”

Her chest caught. Only her mother called her that.

Mum, I don’t, I can’t—I’m not ready for you to be gone. I should have been there. I should have soaked up every moment I could have with you.

The sun blazed in her eyes, watery and diluted by the tears.

“But you have so many good things ahead of you, Doctor.”

She heard her mum’s laugh on the nomenclature. It was such a distinct, specific sound that could not be faked. Magrete didn’t think she could call up the memory of it on her own; she could only recognize it when she heard it.

How was that possible? No one had spoken aloud. The constant thrum of the cabin air-pressure system gave her a comparable reality, and yet…that was her mum. A thrill went through her at the sound of her mum’s rich laugh, her pride that her little Maggie was a PHD.

The warmth of the sun grew as it climbed the sky, pouring rich, golden light into her cabin window. She stared and stared as the tears flowed and her body guided her emotions into what her mind understood but had refused to accept. Maggie spent that hour, as the plane angled towards land, resting in the presence of her mother. There was nowhere else she wanted to be, and nothing else she wanted to do.

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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Dear Reader,

For a long time, I felt a sense of guilt and anxiety that I was not working a typical 9-to-5 job. That was the American Dream, wasn’t it? The standard that you had “made it.” That you were officially an “adult” with a fully stabilized life. Yet whenever my life came close to fitting this steady structure, the predictability and monotony of it grated on me. You’ve heard of “self-sabotage.” Well, consistently I found I did things to mix up my schedule so I wouldn’t get bored; so I would wake up and lean in and drive for more.

Thus, at each stage in my life, I found I was juggling multiple friend groups, multiple schools, and multiple jobs. Let me give you a window into what my life looks like right now:

I work two part-time jobs. I attend classes at Beverly Hills Playhouse three to four times a week. Classes are four hours long, which is a commitment of 12 to 16 hours, not including rehearsal time for the scenes I put up; schoolwork is about 20 hours a week, another part-time job. I’m just finishing up a professional mentorship program (through Hollywood Prayer Network) and working with a social media manager to put out two posts a week. I run a newsletter which publishes three posts a month, self-published a novella last month, and am self-publishing an anthology later this month. In the long term, I am bringing five short films through post-production and writing a feature film. In the immediate future, I am producing / directing / and acting in a short film I wrote, which will be shot one week from today.

If you are experiencing secondhand anxiety, breathe deeply. It will pass.

Disclaimer: I am not raising a family. I don’t have children, a spouse, or a significant other. Instead, I have an incredible and diverse group of friends. All of this leaves me free to spend my time as I see fit; I pour my energies into growing my career in arts and entertainment.

When people ask me how things are going, my mind goes blank. I then try to pick one thing that would be interesting to the person in front of me and share that. Then I make a quick pivot and ask them how they are doing.

For today’s newsletter, I want to share with you the tips and techniques I use to keep my mind stable, my body healthy, and my spirit grounded as I build a diverse portfolio of creative work. I hope some of these tested habits prove useful to you as you pursue your own diverse goals and dreams.

LIFE ADMIN: Tip, Tricks, & Techniques

Sleep:

If I don’t get enough sleep, not only do I run the risk of becoming ill, but the quality and speed of my work slows down substantially. For myself, I know I need seven to eight hours of sleep a night. When living in Connecticut, with a regular day job and a steady writing practice, that looked like being in bed by 10 p.m. (or 9 p.m., bless), and up by 6 a.m., often 5 a.m. (thank you, Lord!). My creative brain fires and hums the best early in the morning, so that was the ideal time to write.

But now that I’m in acting class until 11 p.m. at night, I’m home by 11:30 at the earliest, and frankly, I need some time to decompress from the day. This means bedtime is after midnight. I finally figured out that my whole schedule had to flip: if I’m up late, I need to sleep late. It was hard to unclench my death grip on my early morning writing routine, but if you’re going to have a career in entertainment, there will be late nights.

When you work 9 to 5, your “downtime” is the evenings. Yet, with my evenings filled with school, my body, mind, and spirit naturally claimed the mornings as my “downtime.” Night owls are looking at me strangely right now: “Of course, slow morning. It’s not rocket science, genius.” But for this type-A morning bird, it was. Give me the win. If I start work before 11 a.m., I am impressed with myself, but I don’t demand that I be at the desk before then.

Exercise:

When you exercise, it gives you energy. Even so, for a long time, exercise felt like a luxury; something I could only allow myself to do if I had the time in my busy schedule. Yet I discovered over and over again that when I didn’t exercise, I had less energy to work. My mood stayed sour, and my mental capacity hovered around “grinding desperation.”

The time of day you work out depends on the demands of your work schedule. For years, the best time for me to exercise was 4 p.m., after a long workday but before homework. Late afternoon workouts gave me a second wind. These days, I’ve learned that my first choice in the morning MUST be to put on the workout clothes, lace up the sneakers, and stumble outside for a run or some strength training. Am I happy about it? No. But after about fifteen minutes, I look around, blinking, surprised I am where I am, and very pleased with myself.

For those of you who don’t have a steady workout routine, here is what I’ve discovered: when you exercise first thing in the morning, you take ownership of your body. You’re getting the blood flowing, exploring all the nooks and crannies of your muscles, and stretching out the myelin sheath. The myelin sheath is a fatty insulated layer holding nerve axions in the brain and spinal cord. When you stretch this out, from my experience, it allows greater flexibility throughout the day.

Working out allows me to get fully into my body and think more clearly. There’s also a feeling of overcoming: I got out of my cozy bed to do something physically hard, and I achieved victory. Everything else that comes at me that day, I can handle.

A caveat for the other overachievers in the room: it’s very tempting when you start exercising to go “all out.” You made it to the gym, and you’re going to make it count! However, if you push yourself to full capacity, you’ll be down for the count for the rest of the week. (Not at all speaking from experience here…) I’ve learned to ease up, pull back. Do 30 minutes instead of 50. Over weeks and months, the stronger you get, the harder you can push. But the key here is consistency: developing a routine that you can stay steady with, day in, day out. Slow and steady wins the race.

Centering:

Yes… We’re still talking about the morning. After sleep and exercise, I take about 90 minutes to make breakfast, journal, and read. This is when I spend time processing the things bothering me, reflecting on my wins and blessings, and praying for the people in my life. This is where I get things off my chest. Julia Cameron calls this “Morning Pages” in her book “The Artist’s Way.”

To be at full mental and physical capacity, I must be fully nourished. My spirit needs to know that I am seen, heard, and taken care of so that I can go all in with my work. If I’m feeling ignored, then I’m running on empty the rest of the day. This is the most important part of my day, because it’s when I go to the Lord to fill me up. It’s when I make sure I’m on the same page with Him, listening to what He has to say to me and what He thinks about me. Spoiler Alert: He loves us so much! I daily need to spend time soaking in that love so that everything else I do comes out of that fullness. If I don’t, then everything else that day will come out of a need to feed my soul.

As much as I’m feeding my body with breakfast, I’m feeding my spirit with the only one who satisfies, and He satisfies with the finest of the wheat.

Block Scheduling:

At this point, I reverse engineer my schedule: what meetings do I have? Classes? I mark those blocks off in my schedule and work backwards to make sure I deal with the work tasks that are the most pressing. Often, this process is a bit like triage: what is due today? What can wait until tomorrow? I work remotely, so I am able to manage my time with what makes the most sense for me.

Obviously, I must prioritize the expectations of my day job, as other people’s workflow depends on me doing my part. Yet, at the same time, I am growing an artistic career, and I’m out in LA for a reason. I tackle this by determining which creative project is the most pressing and move that forward however I can on each given day. I set deadlines for myself, because that’s how art gets made: due dates.

The key here is flexibility: I can’t possibly touch every single creative project every day. Thus, I pick one or two and complete the necessary tasks to move it forward. My best metaphor is a chef working in front of a stove: she’s got several pots and pans cooking on the burners, and a turkey in the oven. She rotates between them, watching the onions and letting the soup simmer while she chops up the next batch of vegetables. Just because she’s not in the act of stirring a sauté, it doesn’t mean she’s not cooking all things at once.

I have learned the importance of discerning which projects need immediate attention before they burn, and which projects can be left to sit and simmer, like mulled wine. We must all acknowledge our own human limitations.

Tally the Hours:

I keep a day planner where I sketch out a tentative schedule for myself, yet one of the biggest purposes of this agenda is simply to keep track of the work accomplished. Since I work at strange hours, driving around LA, taking meetings, and interacting with different jobs, I have no standard for whether or not I’m working 8 hours a day. This means I get home at the end of the day feeling like I accomplished nothing because I see the mountain of work ahead of me.

I finally started writing down all the hours I was putting in on different tasks, be they day job, meetings, school, or creative development on my own projects. I easily blasted through an 8-hour workday. For those of you who are freelance, gig-based, self-employed entrepreneurs, I recommend keeping track of what you accomplish throughout the week. It’s highly motivating and saves you from feeling like all of your work just went out into a black void.

Weekly Personal Finance Meeting:

If we don’t spend time managing our money, credit card debt increases, loan and bill payments are forgotten, and unexplained charges go overlooked. We must know where we stand financially to head toward where we want to be. I’m a big fan of taking the smallest step possible when facing an overwhelming job. Set a one-hour weekly meeting with yourself to handle your personal finances. “Dow Janes” has been incredibly helpful to me as I build healthy financial practices, but there are plenty of other training programs out there. Gather your credit card statements and identify where each dollar went. What payments need your attention? Develop a plan: where can you cut back? Or conversely, what money have you not been spending because you’re just “surviving,” that you need to step up and invest in yourself?

From my experience: not knowing what’s happening with my money is far more stressful than taking an hour once a week to orient myself to the facts of my financial reality.

Vision Casting:

If we are just surviving in the day-to-day, paying bills and going to work, then nothing will change. About once a quarter, I feel myself itching for the big picture. Where do I want to be in a year? What steps do I need to take each month to get there? How does that change what I’m doing week to week, right now?

My biggest accomplishments all came from daydreaming about where I want to be in a year, or five years, and then reverse-engineering the concrete steps I need to take to get there. These goals often take a lot of focus, effort, and stamina, so be sure that the dreams you’re chasing are what you actually want. Personally, I find I have a general idea of my dreams, and that sends me heading in the right direction. The more I learn about myself and the process, the more my goals are refined, clarified, and often expanded.

Have Fun:

If you’ve made it this far into the article, you can tell that I love getting work done. One of my friends recently pointed out that my definition of a “good day” is a “productive day.” That is on the money. However, if I work nonstop, I start to lose my sense of purpose. What is it all for? What’s the point? This is how depression sets in. Thus, my philosophy is: “Work hard, play hard.”

Making time for friends is crucial to mental and emotional well-being. This is why, even though I could save the hours to work, when someone wants to get coffee, grab a meal, or catch a movie, I do my best to say “yes.” We have to stop and smell the roses! To buy a bottle of wine at Trader Joe’s on a Sunday night and pass a few hours talking about what’s on our minds. Add to that, if your entire life is focused on you and what you can accomplish, it becomes a pretty hollow and draining existence. Focusing on other people, how you can serve and love them, is extremely good for you!

Where my introverts at? I see you. I am one of you. Yes, I am. Time alone is vital to my mental sanity. The snippier and needier I get, the more I need alone time. I have learned to block out a good chunk every week to just be with my own company. Julia Cameron calls this the “Artist’s Date.” Make plans to take yourself out: go to the movies, an art museum, or for a hike. Go on an adventure outside your daily norm. Frankly, even a quiet night in totally by yourself will do. Without fail, I find these trips ground me; allow me to hear my own voice, and remember who I am. If I forget who I am, I don’t have much to offer the world.

Learn You: Flexibility

These are the principles and habits I have built my life around to keep me from breaking down into a nervous wreck, keep me moving forward toward my goals, and keep me enjoying the one life I’ve been given. We all have to discover, through trial and error, what our bodies need. Each of us was made differently, and so the trick, I believe, is learning YOU.

Once you know how you best work, the demands on your life, and the dreams you are chasing, I recommend making a list of these “tent pole” needs and standards. The key, I’ve found, is flexibility. If I demand a rigid structure, the whole operation comes crashing down because I will fail in the first couple of hours of the day. Instead, have realistic standards for what you can accomplish during the day, prioritize the most important, and trust that there will be time later to finish the other goals. We are living organisms, not machines. This means we’re constantly evolving, and so we need to be flexible and gracious with ourselves.

But let’s be honest: that’s so much more interesting. Isn’t it?

Adventure Awaits,

~ S. C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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Medico della Peste
“Plague Doctor”

The air hanging over the Grande Canal was chill, even for this time of year. Lights rippled over the velvety blue. The glimmers were sliced by a black hull haunted by four equally black shapes, each topped with a wide-brimmed leather hat. When their gondola glided to the edge of the stone fondamenta, they carried forward as if propelled by wind. The lamp light gleamed off their long, black beaks.

A skinny limb scrabbled away at the sound of their approach. Lazzaro should have felt pity for the scrap of human flesh, but the last nine months had numbed him. He and his fellow doctors walked past without a second glance.

The city was devastated. The black death had brought them to their knees. Yes, they’d dealt with the plague before; time and again, it had taken over the city. But not like this.

Was the child a boy or a girl? Her parents were surely dead, but had they been of high-born status, or low? That she was abandoned on the streets now told him they must have been low. So… his heart was not fully dulled yet to the drum beat of death. He glanced back over his shoulder, but she was hidden in the shadows, and they were expected.

The band of doctors hurried on through streets and over poorly lit bridges. There were more bodies, but these weren’t moving, and their greying flesh did not slow the pace of the death masks. Lazzaro turned off his brain and just forced his limbs to move. It was his only recourse at this point; sink into the sea of ill health and despair, or just keep his limbs moving. He took another fortifying breath from the pungent bundle lodged just beneath his nose; stuffed with mint, rose, and ambergris.

The Contessa’s valet let them in. They walked through her grand doors like an unkindness of ravens landing in the piazza. The servant guided them up the steps with a candelabra dripping wax and yellow light. The Contessa’s house was colder than the air above the canal, though perhaps that was because he knew what awaited them.

In the Contessa’s room, maids rushed too and frow, one carrying away a bowl to refill the water, another dabbing at her sweat-soaked forehead. The Contessa writhed and moaned, her skin pale. She convulsed suddenly and turned to vomit into a bowl held by one of the maids at the side of her bed.

Niccolo stepped forward to examine her. The telltale boils had grown and darkened since their last visit. Lazzaro exhaled, knowing what was coming next. Niccolo signaled for his kit, and Pagolo hastened to bring it. The senior doctor began the process of lancing the boils.

Lazzaro knew he should be watching, learning, but even with the herbs lodged in his plague mask, he just couldn’t stomach it. This had failed on the last five patients. But he was here to learn, to ease human suffering. At the foot of her bed, he reached over and pulled back the covers. The expensive sheets, silk from China, were soaked through with sweat. The Contessa’s feet constricted in pain, except for the toes. Those did not move; they were black. Cresci came to his shoulder to see. They spoke no words; what was there to say? He lowered the blanket and looked at Contessa Faustina.

The last time he’d seen her was a year ago, before all of this. She’d been laughing, sipping a chilled Dorona. Of course, she hadn’t been the Contessa then. She was fidanzata: promised. This new bride was promised to death now. The Conte had passed months ago.

She screamed as Niccolo lanced another boil.

“Basta, basta! Deve finire!” she wept. But Niccolo couldn’t stop. They had to heal her. The maids set to Pagolo’s instructions to burn herbs, and the room became sweltering under his cloak and his mask. Lazzaro ached to take it off.

Faustina’s eyes met his. She had stilled some time ago, her eyes roaming the tall walls, gilded with all the craftsmanship money could buy. The candles around the room cast unearthly shadows. It was as though she knew it was him behind the plague mask. As if she saw there in his eyes the last time he had seen her, happy and laughing in a white ball ground with pale green sashes, promised to be married in just a few weeks.

Faustina smiled, faint, and reached out to him, then stopped. Lazzaro watched the soul slip beyond her glassy eyes. Her face was damp, the skin hollowed and yellowed, but she was still smiling. He walked up to the side of her bed and took her hand.

Niccolo set the kit aside and paused, respectful of the dead. Then he gave the maids clear instructions on preparations for the Contessa’s body, to prevent the black plague spreading still further. Finding proper burial grounds for so many dead had driven the living to desperation. Some had resorted to throwing bodies into the canals, but the maids assured them they had plans to send the body off the island.

Lazzaro’s limbs were numb, and he didn’t feel them carry him outside. He had vague memories of bidding the others arrivederci. He found himself standing on the edge of the Grand Canal. The sun was just beginning to rise, a gentle rose pink.

He was hot, sticky, sweat clinging to him. At this point, he had become desensitized to the herb in the long beak nose. He just wanted to feel the breeze on his skin. Feel the sun on his eyes. But the air was full of plague, a miasma.

The stone streets lightened as the dawn stretched and yawned. He heard a scraping and looked over. Skinny limbs, so dirty they almost blended with the sooty grey of the street, twisted, pressing a small face with ragged hair into the foot of a building. The same child they’d skirted past in the night? No, it couldn’t be. That was hours ago, and he had no idea where that was.

Regardless, his legs moved of their own accord, and he drew closer. His thick black cloak billowed around him as he crouched over her. Her eyes were closed, clinging to sleep, the only comfort she could hope for. He should walk away. The child was almost certainly infected. He’d seen furry rat bodies scamper away when he drew near. He shouldn’t get too close. The black plague seeped into human flesh in so many ways, and he was a doctor. The people needed him to stay well, so he could help them.

He reached forward and took her wrist. The girl was unconscious, her arm limp in his hand. The fingers were dirty, yes, filthy. But not black. He checked the other hand, and then the toes. She needed a deep soak and some soap, but all her flesh was living. He checked her skin for pustules, and there were none. She was not sweating or shivering, though she was malnourished. As far as his eyes could tell, she did not have the plague. But she would soon. There could be no other outcome for those living on the street.

He realized she was looking at him with big grey eyes. Eyes grey like Faustina’s had been. The sunlight had flecked twinkles onto the water, and those reflected in her eyes, and for a very brief moment, it looked like joy. What must he look like to her, black beak and cloak crouching over her. A raven come to collect her. Her eyes slid closed again, sinking back into sleep, or death, whatever would take her and carry her away from her pain.

He knew the procedures. The regulations. He could practically hear Niccolo reprimanding him, but he just couldn’t stop himself. He slid the child easily into his arms. Her body weighed nothing, and he carried her off to see if he might stave off the plague one more day. Perhaps steel back one soul.

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

~Sail~

The mix and swirl of life
Some hold, some grasp, on knees,
Unwilling to let go, release,
And give thanks
And understand
They are far less safe
When open doors are shut
From fear of wind to chafe.

Release, release.
Let mix and swirl take hold.
Grasp not a ground so steady
Unforgiving, and so cold.
It will not hug you back
Until final death’s release.

So now let …

Read more

Dear Reader,

I’ve been thinking about posterity a lot recently. If you follow me on Instagram, I’m reflecting on previous seasons in my life, this month. Something about October is ripe for nostalgia; looking back and seeing how far we’ve come. This has led me to meditate on a few bigger life questions:

What holds us back from our full creative potential? Why don’t we stretch ourselves to take our fullest creative risks?

Well, in my case, it has my creative Achilles heel: TYPOS.

I work very hard to find them, catch them, and burn them from existence, but I wasn’t born with The Elements of Style (E. B. White & William Strunk Jr.) burned into my hard drive. The reason: when I’m writing creatively, I’m working in the right side of the brain. The left side is order, logic, math, science, admin, and analysis. The right side is feelings, emotions, visuals, the things that are hard to articulate. When I put creative work into words, typing goes out the window, and it has to. If I’m focused on the spelling, I’m not fully present to the worlds I’m creating, the emotions I’m capturing, and the story I’m cultivating. All I can do is let the work flow, and go back later, praying that I catch all the misspellings.

I used to be quite embarrassed about this. I took a class on the “History & Structure of the English Language” at Harvard to help correct it. I really did not want to, but my mother said, “You’re a writer, Shayla, you’ve got to get this figured out.” She is 100% right, but unfortunately, Harvard’s “History & Structure of the English Language” only made matters worse. Why, you ask. I’ll tell you.

This was one of the hardest classes I took at Harvard, and it was taught by Professor Daniel Donoghue, who trained under another professor, who studied under Professor J.R.R. Tolkien. Yes, that’s right, thanks to this class, I am officially the academic great-granddaughter of J.R.R. Tolkien, the philologist. (Thanks, Mom. Seriously). And here’s what I learned:

Language is invented.

Spelling is a social agreement.

Until the publication of the English Standard Dictionary in 1755, spelling was fluid, sounded out. You would find multiple spellings of the same word, and all were totally accepted.

You grammar Nazi’s out there might say to me, “Well, it’s not fluid anymore! We nailed that down with the dictionary and The Elements of Style.”

True, but language is still being invented today. New words come up every year, because language is simply a matter of social contract: do enough people agree that this word means thus and such and is spelled XYZ way? This is why ‘colour’ and ‘color’ are both valid spellings, and the letter arrangement ‘ough,’ has a ridiculous number of correct pronunciations.

In this class, I learned the group names for all the sounds based on their physical creation within the mouth. We’ve got plosives and fricatives, and phonological changes of word pronunciation over time. The final project in this class was inventing a new language based on the English language and the phonological slides that might occur due to external influences. Using the tools and terms I learned in the class, I did this and then had to write out sentences in the new language AND record myself speaking it. Tolkien would have been proud.

Though the construction of the language was somewhat scientific, fluid pronunciation was more of a responsive and artistic endeavor. It sounded like gibberish, but when you paid attention to the text and the systematic changes, it made perfect sense.

Again, this was one of my hardest classes. I got an A. Why? Because the creation of a new language is more about emotional honesty than fixed spellings. Thus, taking “The History & Structure of the English Language” made my spelling even worse, because it put me more in touch with the sounds behind each word, and their potential spelling, and the truth that all spelling is invented, a social contract we enter into.

Do I believe in correct spelling and grammar? Yes. Bad spelling and grammar are evidence of lazy writing, and cause all of us (I believe) to take a writer less seriously. For this reason, publishing my own work each month is an act of nail-biting bravery for me. I’ll admit, each time I press “publish,” I feel like I’m closing my eyes and jumping off a cliff into dark water that, hypothetically, has no boulders just beneath the surface.

When we perform a creative act and make it public to the world, we want it to be perfect. Unfortunately, many artists, myself included, struggle with perfectionism. But the only way to move forward is by not letting perfection stand in the way of progress. Excellence comes from moving forward, getting into it, making mistakes, learning from them, and getting better.

I have several pieces of fictional work finished and ready to go for audiences, but I was dragging my feet publishing them in a bound, tangible format for the public. Why? Because of typos. I was scared, not just of typos, but of whether or not my work was good enough. Would I be embarrassed, would people judge me, and any unconscious world views I have that are displayed in my storytelling, or mistakenly assume that I am my characters? Certainly, an author puts him or herself into each of the characters, but the work of a professional is to serve the story and the unique people within the story, not just put themselves in their work, hiding behind different masks. Would the people close to me assume I was writing about them?

All of these concerns kept me facing inwards, unwilling to take my larger fictional creative labors and make them available to the public. I’m writing about this because I know I’m not alone in these concerns. But as I worked to polish up my novella, “From the Loft,” for public audiences, it finally came to me:

When I’m in the ground, the world is not going to know or care what I COULD have done.

Why not stretch myself to the full extent of my creativity? Why should I hold myself back just because I might make mistakes? I am a human, and I only get to live once. Posterity does not care about the shots I don’t take.

Posterity does not care about the shots we don’t take.

Why would we waste our lives keeping quiet, weekend hobbyists, keeping our fiction on private hard drives, where nobody can see our typos or accuse us of poorly constructed sentences, weak plots, and unengaging characters on Goodreads?

I am not advocating for half-baked story lines or atrocious spelling. But spellcheck exists, and Grammarly, and there are people out there who will read your work and give you feedback. I am advocating that we do the work, the hard labor of making our art excellent. And at some point, we have to let it go, knowing it is not everything we dreamed it would be, as J.R.R. Tolkien writes about in “Leaf by Niggle.” (←Click the link for a free PDF version of this beautiful short story.)

But if we never release our work into the world, we rob the world of enormous beauty. Stories the world needs. Can you imagine if Tolkien had never made his work available to the public audiences? Deep breaths; he did. Everything is okay. But what a travesty that would have been, and we would never have known.

I’ll leave you with this: resist the temptation to be overly harsh with yourself. Don’t let you’re your inner critic shut down your creativity. Work hard, do your best, catch all the typos you can, hold yourself to high artistic standards, and then, when you’re proud of it, release it to the world, and move on to the next project. (A HUGE Thank You to the individuals in my life who stepped up to read my work and catch all those pesky remaining typos. I owe you a very nice dinner.)

With that, I’m pleased to release to you, in published format: “From the Loft.” This book was originally published on the paid side of this Newsletter in 2021, and I’m thrilled to make it available to you, the public audience, on OCTOBER 28th, 2025. You can buy it in paperback or hardcover on Amazon. I hope you are blessed by this novella. This is the first physical copy of my work I have chosen to release. There is more coming, so stay tuned. Please do leave a review on Amazon or Goodreads. The only thing worse than a bad review: no review at all.

Art is made to be enjoyed by audiences.

Adventure Awaits

~S. C. Durbois

S. C. Durbois Newsletter

• 1st Saturday every month: a new original short story.

• 3rd Saturday every month: a writerly check-in with updates.

• 4th Saturday every month: a new original poem. Subscriber access only.

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The birds woke her when it was still dark. Reagan felt the tension in the air, a current, and she knew the summons was for her. Without thinking, she rose and put on her riding leathers. She crept through the stone corridor of her parents’ fortress, and it was simple to sneak past the sleeping guards.

Regan saddled her horse, Windemere, with deft hands. The steed did not make an irritated noise, just nuzzled her hand with his velvety nose, claiming the apple she’d brought. Shortly, she was up on his back, and he trotted through the yard. She took him over dirt-packed ground to disguise the sound of his hoofs. His ears flicked toward the training pen when they passed by.

Once they reached a broad hill, she stopped him and took in the rising sun. It was still low on the horizon, its yellow-orange chilled in the frosty sky. The hills and trees before them were crisp, a fine ice coating the grass. Her breath came out in puffs before her. Then she pressed his sides with her heels, and they trotted on. There was nothing like an autumn hunt, alone with your thoughts on the hill with only birds for company.

Before long, she was in deep woods. The sun had risen and melted the frost, dripping down dark branched into thirsty moss. She’d seen more than one rabbit scurry by, but didn’t notch her arrow to the string just yet.

Her parents had informed her last night that they’d chosen a husband for her. Or rather, a politically advantageous match for them, for their two kingdoms. She’d know it would come to this… eventually. She supposed she should have been glad she’d not been married off at sixteen. Other friends of hers had. Her parents had chosen instead to educate her. They hired tutors, and she knew German, Latin, and French. She knew how to ride, hunt, and do arithmetic. She knew the treaties that governed their lands, and she knew how to sleep on the ground. She did not know how to cook, unless you counted basic camping fare.

Was she running? She didn’t know. She only knew she’d woken up in cold, panicked sweats, tangled in sheets, her throat parched, her skin desperate for fresh air… Marriage.

She had perfect confidence in her ability to survive on her own, at least for a while. But she didn’t think she could do that to her parents.

A twig snapped, and she looked up, skin prickling. She saw nothing, but she felt the eyes on her. Just woods. No, there! The stag broke cover and ran. Like a trained hunting dog, Reagan took after it. She kicked Windemere into a gallop. She was all nervous energy, her muscles tense and hungry for release, a place to expend the jittery unsettled feelings.

The forest whipped past, a blur of leaves and fallen stumps. A stray branch caught her cheek with a searing scratch, but she welcomed the pain with the sharp winds. She was alive! Heart pumping beneath her skin, eyes bright, senses far reaching to the extent of the festival. She noted the ravens breaking from their branches with a startled caw, but she stayed focused, chasing the stag between trunks. Windemere kept pace. They were hot on her trail—

Windemere whinnied and stopped short. Reagan went sailing past his head, yanked from the saddle. Instinctive from her lessons in the drill yard, she rolled and stayed loose, protecting her neck. Even so, the wind was knocked from her lungs. She coughed. Distantly, she heard Windemere screech and then take off, his hooves thudding away.

She gasped again. The floor of her stomach was in her lungs, or the other way around. She gulped and didn’t move. Was anything broken? If she had hurt her back…

She focused on even breaths, staring straight up, and eventually the world stopped spinning. She tested her arms, her neck. Her head hurt, but it didn’t feel like she had a concussion. Just had the wind knocked out of her. She rolled over to her hands and knees, then eased herself up.

She clutched her bruised shoulder. No sight of Windemere. No sight of the stag either. She collected her bow from the dead leaves and looked around.

Was it just her, or were there more leaves on the trees than she remembered? She squinted. It was fall, and the only leaves on the branches were vivid shades of orange or red, or just plain brown. But above her, the branches were fuller. The moss beneath her feet was a vibrant green, squishy. Even the air, it was warm. Butterflies danced in the air before her as they passed. Butterflies?

She closed her eyes. She must have hit her head a lot harder than she thought. The air was… warm. She listened and heard a brook in the distance. She followed the sound. Her horse was gone, and she was hungry, and if she was going to go looking for him, she at least needed some water. She followed the sound.

The air only grew warmer, the sound of birds more cheerful. The sunlight through the branches was not the chilly glow of autumn, but the clear, encouraging light of spring. She stepped out into a small meadow. There was the stag, grazing on the full green grass. She considered raising her bow, but she had no horse to carry back the meat, and if she left her kill to find the horse, surely it would attract wolves, and she had no desire to fight those off just now.

There was the brook, to the right of an enormous tree. She slowed to a halt as she took in the size of the trunk. It was as wide as the gate to her parents’ fortress.

“Who’s there!” a voice demanded.

She stumbled back, notching her bow immediately and looking to the trees. A hermit, maybe, or bandits. Her situation was not good. She could hold her own in a fight, and she had her bow, but it depended on how many of them there were.

“Her, the little one in the leather. There, you see?”

“Ah, yes, interesting.”

“Show yourself!” Reagan demanded. The voices were rough, gravely, and rich. There were two, maybe three, who had spoken.

A low voice chuckled. “Show yourself. Humans are amusing. They do struggle to see what’s right before their eyes.”

“Child, look before you, we are here.” That one sounded almost feminine, but she didn’t drop her guard, spinning on her heels and aiming the bow to the edges of the woods where bandits could hide best.

“That looks dizzying,” the third voice said.

She loosed an arrow, and it disappeared into the tree.

“Careful! You could hurt somebody with those,” a voice called, displeased.

Her hands shook as she knocked another arrow to her bow. She hadn’t meant to release it, but she was tired, shaken, and afraid. She felt raw.

“Child,” a gentle voice called behind her. Reagan turned, hands still shaking, but she saw no one, just that tree.

“We’re right here.”

“I don’t—” and then her eyes adjusted. Like spotting the stag among the wooded bramble, faces emerged from the tree trunk. She blinked, disbelieving her own eyes.

They were faces, three of them, within the trunk of the tree. What she had mistaken for the rugged cords of bark were cheeks, noses, chins, eyes… one to the left, one in the center, one to the right.

She took a step back, too stunned to speak.

“She sees us,” the left face said. They were situated snuggly around each other, but distinct in character.

“What are you?” she asked. She’d never heard of anything like this in their fairytales. Not even in the Greek myths her parents had paid a fortune to acquire. This was… something new.

“We are seers,” the right faces said.

“Seers?” That scratched her memory. “Like the fates?”

“Fate, such a tricky word. Never as clean as one might like to believe,” the center face said.

“You see the future?” she asked.

“Futures, possible versions,” the left corrected.

“Nothing is set in stone. History is organic, a living thing, like us.”

“How have I never heard of you? I’ve been all over these hills, and I know the hunters. News of your existence so close to our castle would have made it to the ears of the king and queen.”

“And so, we get to the root of it,” one said.

“We do not appear to all mankind. Almost none.”

“Why me?”

“You have a choice to make.”

The tension in her heart seized. They were talking about the marriage. What choice were they talking about? Her parents ordered it; there was no choice. Except, she saw now what should have been obvious. Her gut, the deepest part of her, had rejected this. Yoking herself to a stranger. She knew herself better than most people knew themselves, and she knew she would not survive. The part of her that thirsted for more, for the unknown, which craved freedom, bucked at the coming bondage. That’s what her nightmare had told her. Her subconscious had carried her this far, on the back of her horse, deep into the woods, without saying a word to anyone.

“A lot of people have choices to make; I’m nothing special.”

“Not so. Not so.”

“With most, that would be true.”

“But you are not most.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Your choice will shape the future of nations.”

“History is one choice piled on top of others.”

“Piles upon piles upon piles.”

“So, one choice should not matter,” she said.

“It does. The future heads in one direction. But there are pivot points.”

“Decisions which send the future one way—”

“Or another.”

“You are one of those.”

The weight of that sat heavy on her.

“Why?”

“Noble blood.”

“Power.”

“Plans.”

“I thought you said there was no such thing as fate.”

“Fate is flexible, a stream changes course at a stone in the bend.”

“So, I have a choice.”

“You do.”

“You do.”

“You do.”

A long silence.

“I see only two options. I obey my parents’ wishes, marry a stranger possibly twice my age, and let him break me as a stable master breaks a horse. I’d be like my mother, bearing children whether I want them or not, doing needlework, and minding “women’s matters.” That, or I go my own way, an outcast, living on the road. No place to call home but the woods and the stars, fending for myself on what I hunt or forage with my own hands. There are no other options.”

“So limited, just two?”

“There’s always more than two.”

“Then what?” she demanded. “Tell me! I’m listening.”

“The unknown. The future is always unknown.”

She ground her teeth.

“So, fate itself won’t let me run.”

She fell to her knees, overcome. The tears she had gasped through in panic on her bed returned now, pouring down her face. She collapsed, her hands burying in the dirt, finding roots. This would be the end of her.

Images washed over her, emotions, faces she would, or could, encounter, the lives she could touch. A fearlessness, a freeness, a grief, and other deep emotions she could not name, surged through her. She felt herself lifted from her flesh, come outside herself to touch the stream of time, her possible fates, it was… conscious. She felt, too, the darkness of letting her fear close off whole plains of possible futures for her.

The overwhelming grip of the seers released her. The visions abandoned her, and she could not call them back. They were not hers. She was not vast enough to contain the sum of their reach. But the emotions remained, the joy, the unique, ungrounded grief of loss over roads not travelled. Life not lived. Forehead pressed to the dirt, she wept.

The gentle seer spoke.

“Even an acorn must accept death if she wishes to grow into something new.”

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Competition, Competition.
Fight for the right
To be seen and mean something
That twisting strain
To make life worth it.
“I was here, and thus,
The world is different.”

I cannot be sure
What a full life is.
Jungle gym, swings, and snacks at recess.
One generation begets next,
Continuation of past, genetic train,
Strings one DNA in a lifelong chain.
A structu…

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