A railroad car clanking along the long tracks in the frozen wasteland of Antarctica opens the dystopian science fiction short story of “The Indebted.” It is perhaps one of the coldest and most disturbing pieces of fiction I have tried to tackle to date. The story is set over a hundred years from the current day. The treaty that has kept Antarctica from being exploited has expired and the world lives on “environmental friendly” energy. However, the hunger for power cannot be fed solely from the power stations around the world, but must rely on power derived from geothermal, wind towers, and solar panels set in the most remote continent.

The world economy has failed and the power companies need employees to work in the frozen conditions. In response, the World Court has redefined its mandate under the United Nations from prosecuting those who commit crimes against humanity to those who have large sums of debit “and thus have caused the collapse of the world economy.” The sentence for this crime is to work the debit off in the debtor camps—set in the harshest environments of the world.

The camps, as Soren Jeager discovers to his horror, are not worker camps but concentration camps where life is frozen, there is no escape, and abuse that would be seen with slavery is heaped upon those who try to survive as they are forced to feed the world the power it hungrily craves. Even upon death, the debtor serves a purpose—for his body is fed into the main incinerator, giving off a little more energy.

In the face of the frozen hearts of the prison guards and overseers, Soren is forced to choose to keep the flame of life burning or to allow himself to become as dead as the surrounding ice.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for the latest updates on blogs, novels, and short stories I am working on.

A few posts ago, I described a short story I was working on titled The Dance of Death. It is an experiment in mixing modern fantasy with the Chinese martial art fantasy. It is still being rough drafted. However, I am moving it to a lower priority to finish at this time. The reason for this is two fold.

The first reason is a feeling I have about the story. While rewrites are used to bring the story more to life, I feel like it is a slab of clay lying motionless and lifeless as an ancient golem. I know that I am not putting my best effort into it, so after nearly ten pages I am putting it on hold to try again soon.

The second reason is that I have felt my muse become impassioned with writing a short story called “The Indebited.” I will blog on this story soon. However, let me say at this moment that while it is a Science Fiction story set in the not too distant future, it is a story fitting the times we live in today.

Meanwhile, next week I will be working on later drafts of “The Tower.” I have fought the temptation to attack it again with my editing pen so far. I want it to sit so I can look at it with fresh eyes and apply feedback from some people I ask to secretly read for me. Once I finish my rewrites next week, I will be sending it to an editor for one final review before submission. This may slow the submission process down, but I feel professionally that an author should use an editor prior to submitting. I just have not with my last two stories due to deadlines.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for updates on the short stories, novels, and blogs that I am writing.

In the world of journalism, there is a place known as the morgue. This is the place where old stories are kept on file. I borrowed from this idea and called it the tomb. The tomb is where I put my stories to rest while I work on another one before I return to it. Last night I was able to finally put “The Tower” into the tomb. This also explains why this blog entry is late. I apologize to my blog readers, but I was pushing this short story into its 6th (or tomb) draft.

I have described this story in the past and on my website at www.davidalanlucas.com. As I wrote the story, I left the moral dilemma unresolved. At first that bothered me, but as I revised it I found that the moral dilemma was meant to be unresolved. Life is not like the one hour (or really 40 minutes after you remove the commercials) television shows where all the moral dilemmas are resolved quickly. Most dilemmas in real life take years, generations, or are never solved. I wanted “The Tower” to show the beginning of the dilemma that is faced by a handful of surviving humans who are exiled to a hostile planet because the Earth is no longer able to support life.

In the story, mankind has settled on a new world. They are having to use the last of their resources to colonize and terraform this “lifeless” world. However, they learn that the world is not lifeless. In fact, the environment that mankind finds deadly is the natural environment to this other life form. I want the reader to walk away from the story and ask themselves, “What would I do? “ and “Is there a middle ground?” What would the last of mankind do if faced with the idea that for man to live they must commit genocide of an indigenous sentient life? “The Tower” does not answer this question. It poses it for debate.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for more information on my stories and blogs.