An Apology

[Soushi]

I imagined it as a recording being played to an enhaced individual being awakened from cold sleep to a war torn wasteland, is tyhat what you were going for or am I just weird?

No, actaully that is pretty much the image i had in my head when i wrote this thing. Glados stlye voice talking to a bunch of gentically engineered people waking up to fight a war.
Still, that's just me.

 

[deleted_by_strongbad]

Automatic translation software makes changes to the language being used. It normally carries about the same message, but can be used to simulate someone who is unfamiliar with a language/culture but is using logical algorithms to determine the words and phrasings. So pretty much, one possible way of achieving the goal of having a computer or something spit out a political apology would be to write a fluid political apology and have a computer process it with translation software. Problems arise if done too heavily, or if the punctuation/wording/syntax of the original is out of standard. Sorry if that was not apparent before I posted a wall of text. I wasn't going to post it, but it was a funny result with some interesting changes.

One positive thing that came from this though is that I think I isolated one of the major trends that is disrupting the flow. The entire thing is written in passive voice, there is one line that was actually made more effective through the translation-garbling that demonstrates this. Think about these two lines, how they sound, and their implications:
Your line: "Once again, we wish to extend our sincere apologies." Passive voice
Comp line: "Again, we extend our sincere apologies." Active voice

Not only is the active voice more direct, but since you hinted at your attempt to have a computer or something similarly removed as the source of this, it would likely lack the linguistic clutter that is in the passive voice example. The people who most frequently slip into passive voice are people with a good grasp on the language but then over think it and thus clutter it with a complexity that fights against itself.

 

[Soushi]

I actually really liked it. The wording was a little poor but that'll come with more practice. I imagined that I was in a hospital bed/operating table and some sort of God or something was talking to me. At first I thought it was saying that the human race was a mistake and he was sorry for it. The voice i heard was a mans voice talking in a concerned voice. At the end my interpretation was that somebody had died as a human but had woken up for the first time in the real world where there was a fight going on between two things and humans were being used as a weapon or something like that.

Interesting, never thout of that one... I'll have to include it in my mind when i do the revisions Thank you very much

This is a single page short story. I implore you to read it, as i wrote it for you.

Proceed with ripping this thing apart. Okay.... GO!

I'll ignore grammar, issues of repetition and just focus on your idea conceptually.

It could potentially work well in a story, but not as an introduction, and certainly not as the entire story itself. It might be good just before the final climax of a very long story, coming in right near the end. However, in this case, because the story has only just begun, I have no emotional investment in regard to whom is sorry over what, so as I read about someone being very sorry, I don't really care. You need to create that emotional investment in the situation first, before you bring something like this in, otherwise it's not going to have any impact. I want to know the setting, the characters, what actually happened, who is sorry and why, how true their version of events is compared to what actually transpired in the eyes of the people it affected - right now I know none of this, and because of that, there's a huge barrier between me and the story itself. As a writer your task (if you choose to accept it) is to tear down that barrier so I feel connected to what's happening. Good luck!

I accept that challenge! (I bloody well better, writing is about the only thing i can do and form the sounds of it i'm not doing it very well! I'm in trouble from the looks of things.)
The problem i have with this one is that isn't suposed to be a long story. It is supposed to be the dialouge equivalent of showing someone a single distinctive picture and asking them to make a story based on it. The story itself is just supposed to be a skeleton and let the reader flesh it out themselves, if they are so inclined.

 

[moretimethansense]

I imagined it as a recording being played to an enhaced individual being awakened from cold sleep to a war torn wasteland, is tyhat what you were going for or am I just weird?

No, actaully that is pretty much the image i had in my head when i wrote this thing. Glados stlye voice talking to a bunch of gentically engineered people waking up to fight a war.
Still, that's just me.

Ah, I actually imagined the voice to be a somewhat sympathetic pre-recorded message left by one of those resposible for the listeners condition, but then I've been playing Iji lately.

 

[Soushi]

The people who most frequently slip into passive voice are people with a good grasp on the language but then over think it and thus clutter it with a complexity that fights against itself.

thank you for pointing this out. If i have a grammatical and structural nemesis in my writing, that is it. But, when you are activley trying to write something with a message buried within it, somehitng meant to be both impressive and enjoyable, keeping it simple is a lot harder than keeping things complex and intricate. Something i have to work on

Thanks for the interesting experiment though. I never even though of that... i wonder if i should apply it to other bits of my work...

 

[deleted_by_strongbad]

The people who most frequently slip into passive voice are people with a good grasp on the language but then over think it and thus clutter it with a complexity that fights against itself.

thank you for pointing this out. If i have a grammatical and structural nemesis in my writing, that is it. But, when you are activley trying to write something with a message buried within it, somehitng meant to be both impressive and enjoyable, keeping it simple is a lot harder than keeping things complex and intricate. Something i have to work on

Thanks for the interesting experiment though. I never even though of that... i wonder if i should apply it to other bits of my work...

No problem, thanks for the intriguing story. Yeah hidden/implied meanings are hard to pull off, if you can deal with the dryness of it you might want to look into some Korzybski and other researchers on his General Semantics. It is largely about the hidden meanings of phrasings that can be revealed by specific use of words and syntax, but is broader than that.

It sounds like you have a very specific, complex, and difficult thought here, I hope you figure out how to pull it off, and hope you post it on here as you do.

 

[[.redacted]]

Add an unrevealed character to whom the apology evidently means something, though refer to them in the third person, and have them or their surroundings/state hint at some form of atrocity that the apology then will implicitly refer to.

For example, just adding lines like: "A crimson tendril slid silently to the end of her battered, outstretched finger, and ghosted silently to the floor, where it gathered amongst its brethren.
Her gaze drifted slowly, following the path so recently traveled by the tiny sparkles of silver she had hidden from everyone. She did not recognize the face that leered back at her.
Those eyes.
Those wretched eyes.
They truly had seen too much..."

 

[solidstatemind]

I don't think you should change much if anything: if it gets across what you were trying to convey, it's going to be very difficult to self-edit without jumbling it up and eviscerating it.

I particularly liked how the tone gradually built from a nebulous apology to a conflict-specific apology.

I'd say play with the formatting a little, but other than that, submit it for publication somewhere. The worst you'll get is a refusal with some feedback on how you could polish it up from a professional editor.

Oh, and in regards to how it came through in my head, it was silent: scrolling text on a display screen in a room in a medical facility. That would be a killer intro for a game.

 

[Freechoice]

I went ahead and "fix'd" [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RCnfGYflPNPPmTyEBryLKKX-Z7-UeOp9MHvT8veRcQA/edit?authkey=CILQ77AM] some stuff.

I tried to read it as GLaDOS.

I think what you are trying to convey is a deception stated by an artificial program unfamiliar with lying. It apparently did research on how to lie, but is still not certain on how to execute the act. I think it understands that there's an increase in words and topic avoidance, but overcompensates significantly.

What you need to add for breaks is changes in the environment brought about by the machine. I'll show you tomorrow. It's late.

I'm very, very, very sorry.

 

[brumley53]

To me it sounded like a parent saying sorry to a baby, apologising for what people have screwed up. the tone of the voice was kind of like the girl at the start of eternal sonata except an adult.

 

[Orthon]

I read it in the voice of Graham Chapman.

Like some have said, some parts are poorly worded and some senteances should be redone entirely. Otherwise, it's neat that people seem to have a certain individual or character in mind when reading it, and I like the concept of apologizing

Senteances I personally found problematic:
data that will allow you to understand what we are doing and why we must continue doing what we are doing.?

Way too many "doing" there, use something else, like "continue with our mission/research/plan" Maybe you were going for something that sounds a bit funny, but it just sounds weird to me.

We ask, only for your forgiveness and for you to avenge this, your land and honour. We ask you to take up the fight now, and win."

Instead of saying "for you to avenge this" I'd probably use "implore you to avenge this". Additionally, "avenge this, your land and honour" doesn't make a lot of sense. The "avenge this, your land" part is ok, but we don't know what "this" is, so I'd use something else. Avenging your honour though? What does that mean? That you have been disgraced and should retaliate? I don't think that qualifies as "avenging your honour". It's not like it's murdered, is it?

we didn't want to have to

the "have to" is a bit redundant, isn't it? It's already implied with "didn't want to".

Alright, that's all the nitpicking I'm going to do today. Good show of courage putting it up here for display, though. Kudos.

 

[the clockmaker]

I felt that it was a little too vague with no reason given to care, if you really look at the concept of an apology, we have four real emotional 'ins', the regret of the instigator, the hurt and loss of the victim, the concept of the act itself and the difficulty in accepting that what was done was wrong.

-However, we don't know who is apologising, what their motives are, what their personality is, if the apology is sincere.
-We aren't shown the victim character at all, so have no reason to sympathise with him/her/it/they.
-We are given only the vaguest hints of what may have happened so we are unable to engage with the horror of the event. Some real description may help at this point, give reference to, say the effects of one of the deployed weapons.
-We have, as stated, no idea whether the apology is sincere, so we cannot appreciate either the struggle of acceptance in the instigator or the manipulation that it indulges in.

So we have no emotional attachment to the story and, as there is no real sense of narrative, no compulsion to read on to find out the answers to any question beyond 'where is this going'. The only thing left is the pleasure of the language, the sort of thing that makes James Joyce enjoyable, or, lets be honest, readable and since the language itself if fairly stilted with unessential repetition there is no real sense of rhythm or joy in the words.

Therefore, in the end, the reader is given no reason to care or continue.

So, my advice would be ditch some of the vagueness, build upon the skeleton that you have created. Build up in your mind the exact details of the civilisation and/or mind that is creating the victim character, what did they look like, why did they create the victim, what happened to them etc etc. Once you have that in your mind, begin to write from that perspective, for example, while keeping in the theme,

" We apologise that you will never see what we have seen, that all we have to leave you are the burnt out skeletons of old towers and irradiated fields. We apologise that the vision of silver glass against a blue sky that has kept you through this long sleep has been replaced with charred steel obscured by smoke. This was not what promised you, and we apologise.'

no that is by no means perfect, it was kind of off the top of my head, but I tried to explore the world, to give the act of waking to it some meaning. Alternatively, you could try and give a tone to the speaker that seeks absolution.

In the end, this is a good start, but it simply needs more. For a good example of this type of writing, read chasm city, by Alistair reynolds, in the explanation of why the grand civilisation of the glitter band has fallen.

I hope this helped.

ps do we have a section for writing critique, cus that would be really helpful.

 

[XHolySmokesX]

I got a wierd matrixy theme from this, guess after i realised it was a story and the waking up thing i just thought of the pods and stuff.

anyways here's my 2 cents
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pretty good, the voice was a human voice spoken as if it was superimposed onto the background like a voice over.

Felt like it was set in a future where humans, who had evolved to an extent that they almost don't look human. The world was a destroyed wasteland created by a battle between humanity and a galactic foe. The humans were creating ancient humans (from our time) to help them win the war due to a distinct advantage lost through evolution.
______________________________________________________________

All this came to me in what was kinda like a jolt of electricity i just understood, thinking it wierd, especially how you can think all that detail in less than a fraction of a second.

 

[Kirkby]

After 36 comments i doubt i have much more to bring to the table, but just incase.... = P

The story gave me the impression that it was a collection of people saying sorry to me. I originally thought u were gonna make it so that god had come to earth and seen what had happened and was getting a very swift apology from his followers who had committed horrors in his name. Mainly because these people seem to be grovelling and desperate for the protagonists help. It sounds like theyv been just as bad as their enemy but refuse to recognise their own deeds and, as a result, exist in some sort of denial. It also sounds like this entity which they are apologising too doesnt have a clue what is going on, but the entity is a last ditch hope to win an exhausting war for a bunch of confused people who dont really remember why the war started in the first place. Im sure the Master Chief can relate.

Hope that helps in some way :S

 

[Soushi]

I had no idea i had to read it in a certain voice, so i didn't. I guess it kinda felt like some sort of recording from an annonymous face, like in Mass Effect with Vigil (if you know what i'm talking about).

And since you said "i wrote it for you", i was under the impression that it was adressed to me directly, or people like me.

It was written with this demographic in mind. i figured that individuals with knowledge of video games would have access to a diverse set of narrative upon which to draw conclusions and ideas about the story.

 

[Zyst]

It felt like a robot entity with no clue of how human emotions work outside of a lab setting trying to manipulate me into thinking it was actually sorry, when it couldn't really give less of a shit.

When i was writing it, i got Glados's voice in my head.

Yeah, I kind of felt a strong GladOS vive when I was reading it as well, but GladOS is a bit more clever, and uses serious but dark humor. But I suppose this is good as well.

 

[GeneWard]

Cannot... stop reading... in Gman's voice... taking forever.

Ahh now you've got me doing it!

 

[Freechoice]

snip

Kept my promise. [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RCnfGYflPNPPmTyEBryLKKX-Z7-UeOp9MHvT8veRcQA/edit?authkey=CILQ77AM] Forgot to post it.

Look for the Times New Roman text. It's mostly meant to give you an idea of what needs to be done.

You need action breaks to increase the impact of what is being said. Having the actions act in tandem with the speaker serves to strengthen what is being said. A theme is the most obvious way to go about it. I chose lights (I believe there are four of them) to punctuate the illuminating of these individuals by a GLaDOS expy. I don't know what you want to do with them.