This is a story I'm working on with a friend. It started as a kind of fun project-between-projects, but it's been fun to write and I want to see if it's good enough to keep on writing. Here's the first chapter, let me know what you guys think. It's my first science fiction piece ever.

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They grabbed me just as I was stepping onto the street. I was so relieved. It'd been weeks, and I was ragged from all the waiting.

The afternoon was bugle-clear and cold. My oculars registered the temp as 24 degrees; my breaths lingered then vanished into the February wind. Save for passersby like myself the street was deserted, the general citizenry either at school or work.

A white van screeched to a stop in front of me.

Two men got out. They wore plain, brown jackets, matching brown trousers, black, leather boots that gleamed like coins fresh off the mint, and black leather gloves—they looked like deliverymen, which seemed appropriate. Ski masks covered their faces, so I could only see one had blue eyes and an orange mustache, and one had black eyes and brown lips and clean-shaven, dark skin. Before I could say anything Mustache darted forward and jammed a needle into my neck, a mosquito bite of pain followed by a lunge of euphoria as the syringe’s contents flooded my veins.

A good citizen, I didn't resist.

They grabbed my arms and hoisted me into the air—it was sunny, I thought, that crisp, promise-filled kind of sunshine, the kind of sunshine with a tang of spring in it—and as they stuffed me into the van I noticed across the street a small, blonde girl watching us, her cheeks radished by the cold, her hand gripping a leash collared to a small mop of a dog.

I smiled at her, and she frowned at me and waved shyly, and if only my abductors weren't strapping my arms to my sides I would've waved back.

The van doors boomed shut. Someone slammed a bag over my head.

The government’s abduction protocols were going smoothly, I thought.

~~~

It started the last week of winter finals. I was at university, drunk, perched on my windowsill and leaning dangerously out the dormitory’s fifth-story window to smoke the last of my roommate’s tobacco ration. Blips of news floated across my vision: holiday parade routes, an announcement that next week canned ham prices were being cut, that there would be a curfew extension for winter shopping hours. A prediction of clear skies scrolled by, even though looking up showed a dense white like the head of a freshly poured beer. Holo-adverts flickered over the black skyline, dancing, I thought, and shimmering like the flames of giant cigarette lighters.

Every door in the dormitory had been flung open, every light blazed brightly. Students threaded in and out of dorm rooms reveling; many, like myself, had finished their finals that afternoon. Those that hadn't, like my recently-tobaccoless roommate, retreated to the library. Gifts were being given, end-of-year hook-ups administered, plans to celebrate the New Year solidified or shattered; and everywhere, everyone was equipped with a drink and, after weeks of studying, ready to romp and roil.

“It’s snowing!” someone shouted. “It’s snowing!”

I reached behind me and touched the ocular panel embedded on the back of my neck, dimming the feed’s readout to its faintest setting so the numbers and letters were barely discernable on my retinas. It was true—fat flakes of snow wobbled in the air like down feathers, then smacked wetly onto the sidewalk. In a few minutes a thin sheet of white covered the grounds; fresh powder slithered in the wake of cars accelerating on the street.

“Petr!” Anatoly, my neighbor across the hall, popped into my room. He was tall and thin, with long black hair, a narrow face that seemed perpetually sunburned, and silvery eyes that, like well-circulated coins, had lost their sheen. He was dressed in wrinkled slacks and an even wrinklier matching sweater, so he looked like a walking, wrung-out rag.

“Petr!” he repeated, lurching into my room and landing in a sprawl on my bed. “It’s snowing! Some of us are going to play Ghost-Hunting. You in? The weather’s just right for footprints.”

I flicked the butt of my cigarette out the window, stood up and grinned, plucking my jacket off the back of my desk chair and shaking into it. “Let’s get the bastards!” I shouted. Anatoly roared and leaped off my bed, and together we joined the queue dorm residents shuffling down the hallway and stairs to spill onto the grounds in front of the building.

Ghost-Hunting was an old childhood game where you tried to find a citizen that had been “ghosted”—turned invisible by the government—for crimes against the people. “Crimes” were loosely defined. They could be things like “sowing dissidence,” hoarding rations, owning foreign records. Or they could be multiple smaller infractions, such as staying out past curfew, jay-walking, missing many hours of civilian service practice or multiple State Worship services. Ghosts were universally despised—anything that went against the government and the people was considered a personal and grave insult. They were universally considered responsible for any number of daily inconveniences, like traffic accidents (“Someone must've hit a ghost”) or shortages of goods (“I heard ghosts broke into the warehouse”) or even, sometimes, terrorist acts (“I heard it was ghosts”). It didn't matter if the person being ghosted was a friend or family member—for as long as they were a ghost, they were also an enemy. You weren't even supposed to talk about them—to do so would be an infraction, risk being ghosted yourself. And when someone who’d been ghosted served their sentence, when they reappeared, often thinner and filthy and cowering in some far-off corner of the city, their absence was treated like nothing had happened, like they’d never gone away.

Unless, of course, if during their “ghosting” the ghosted civilians were caught. That was the true genius of the punishment: not that you were forced to watch, in solitude, as your friends and family walked by you as if you didn't exist—but that those very friends would turn you in if they could, and collect a ghost bounty from the government—an extra month’s worth of rations, or a travel voucher to another city, or simply a modest sum of money.

I had no idea that, within the hour, I’d be guilty of enough infraction to become ghosted myself.

~~~

The van sloshed and skidded through the slushed city streets, and I was jostled inside of it like the littlest nesting doll alone in the belly of the largest. In the corner of my consciousness half a dozen questions were spinning round and round like roulette pills:

Would being ghosted hurt?
Would my abductors beat me first?
How long was my sentence going to be?
Where would I sleep?
What would I eat?
What would my parents think when I didn't come home?

Then, after what felt like an hour of being jostled, the van screeched to a halt and I rolled forward and slammed my head into the front seats. Dazed, I barely registered the rocking of the van as my abductors exited the vehicle, barely heard the slam of the front doors shutting followed by the clunk of the back door latch being released. Like a dense canopy, daylight winked through the fibers of the bag over my head. My abductors grabbed my arms and extracted me from the van, and held me over the ground until I could find my footing. A large hand slithered into my trousers and extracted two crumpled bills from my pocket, all of the change I had left over from that morning. One of them made a throaty noise that was half a chuckle and half disgust.

Then their hands, rough on my arms, guiding me forward—there was a crunch of gravel beneath my feet, and a feeling of openness: the cold, winter air mobbing me, traffic noises dimmed to non-existent. We walked for a minute or two, until the abductor on my left told me to watch my step and duck my head, which I did, though I nearly panicked because I didn't know how to watch my feet with a bag over my head, nor did I have an idea of how much I should duck my head. The drugs’ hold on me was strengthening: my tongue was becoming bloated and dried, and I felt like I was walking on a strip of tilted trampolines.

The expansive atmospheric feel vanished minutes later, and was replaced with a kind of hollowness, like being alone in a large lecture hall, or a subway terminal right before curfew. It was cold, nearly as cold as the outside. I figured I’d been taken to some sort of warehouse. Our footsteps echoed and the rubber soles of my boots squeaked. One of my abductors, speaking in a soft, high-pitched voice, told me to stop, spun me around, and shoved me into a chair.

“Don’t move,” the voice said. “We’re strapping you down.”

The chair was large, with a pew-rigid back. My abductors went to work, strapping belts around my ankles and calves, lashing me to the chair legs. They undid the bonds binding my arms to my sides, and placed my arms on wide, wooden armrests, strapping my wrists and my forearms to the armrests again with belts. My senses were keyed up: there was the smell of leather, the clinking of buckles, the creak of straps tightening. A final belt was cinched around my chest, binding my torso to the chair’s back. For a moment it was nearly suffocating, though I couldn't tell if this was some suppressed phobia of being tied down; the adrenaline-burst of realization that I was being abducted and about to be turned into a ghost; or if, in fact, the straps were too tight. I inhaled and exhaled rapidly, the bag over my head ballooning comically then withering as I sucked another breath in. My abductors laughed. My eyes welled up, and some unnamed, albatross-sized emotion threatened to rise up in my throat.

I heard footsteps, followed by the tinkling of a chain, and the roaring of a warehouse gate slamming shut. There was the muffled sound of gravel crunching underfoot, followed by the muted, low tones of my abductors talking and the van doors slamming shut. The van engine wheezed and chuffed, accompanied by the sound of crunching gravel as the van presumably backed up and drove away.

“Hello?” I said.

But there was no reply. The warehouse was so empty I could hear my “hello” age, fray, and die. Sometime during the drive my oculars had gone blank, save for the top-right part of my vision, which usually showed the time in numbers the color of a soft orange, like embers in a dying fire. But now they read:

--:--:--

I was, I realized, utterly alone.

I can't offer any critical literary advice because that's not my thing, but I can read the piece and suggest some grammar edits and things of that nature if you'd like. Give me the okay and I'll shoot you a PM.

Nah this isn't ready for a line edit but if that's something you like to do I will be thrilled to send stuff. I just want to see if people like this and would read more.

Okay cool, but yeah I love to read things and edit them as weird as that sounds. I don't have the ability to write myself (at least not literary work, anyway), but I like to think I'm half-decent at the other side of things like fixing up grammar, punctuation, and culling out redundancy.

You know, the boring stuff.

I don't have any formal training, btw, I'm just a guy with OCD-like tendencies and a knack for language. Gimme some stuff and see what you think!

Good pacing and worldbuilding. I like the way you write, but I wish the story had a definite end. Right now it's more a narration of events than a story, with no sense of closure. What's the point your story is trying to make? How is the conflict resolved?

Well, it's chapter 1 of an eventual 300 page novel, so I should probably wait a lil' to end it yah?

Loved this line.

Anyway, let's talk worldbuilding.
Why are these ocular panels embedded in the neck? That sounds unnecessarily unsanitary for something with no practical value, no actual gain, unless it's powered by the currents of your bloodstream or something wacky like that, which doesn't seem to be the case. I can't understand why someone would voluntarily accept such a thing.
What's this ghost thing and why does the end feel like a slap in the face? It builds up like some next level Another scenario where you exist invisibly in society, and somehow ends being tied down in some remote location. What was all that build-up for? Or am I misinterpreting the entire scenario?
Why are you discouraged from talking about ghost, but encouraged to catch them?

Love that line too

Ocular panels (as it will be revealed later?) are installed in everyone as a combination of social media and government monitoring... think like facebook selling your information to the nth degree. People get them as infants, and I'm not really interested in explaining the tech behind it because it's more about using the ocular device as a vehicle for plot and less about pseudo-sciencing random tech. (Which I would do terribly I'm sure.) They're not voluntary, but they're widely accepted by society because everyone has them and has to get them.

Not sure I understand your point about the slap in the face. Basically: Petr gets abducted by government kidnappers. He's been expecting it. There's a flashback to the "beginning," aka the night he committed the infraction that would get him ghosted, but I don't go into it immediately. (Literally it's the beginning of the next chapter.) The abductors take him to a warehouse.

That whole thing about talking about ghosts/encouraged to catch them has been cut because a) it doesn't move the plot forward and b) it's one of those things where more information has made things less clear, whereas all you need to know is that everyone has these ocular implants and people are punished by being turned invisible.

Cool? Thanks for the intense read!

"Petr" captures the Russian spelling of the name, but not the pronunciation. "Pyotr" is how it's pronounced, so I'm not sure if you care about that or not.

Kinda on the fence about the whole Russian thing anyway, but thanks!

Russians are badass. So is their language.

Might be that I am just overanalyzing it all, but I felt like the punchline of the excerpt is that "I am all alone tied down in a warehouse, this is how it is to be a ghost."
Mostly because I don't see what other reason there was to tie him down, but maybe they are going to wrap him in aluminum foil, what do I know.

I get easily triggered by things that I think exist just for the sake of storytelling. Oculars feel very unplausible.

This triggers me, ahhhhhhhhhhhh.....

*shrug*

They're common in cyberpunk scifi books, and canonized in more popular fiction via MT Anderson's "Feed".

Also, everything in a story exists for the story, so that doesn't literally make sense even if I know what you mean. That seems like an incredibly inhibiting tic for a reader though, like saying "Moby Dick" would be better without whales or The Avengers movie would be better without Ultron. I find that... implausible.

Well, I don't read much.
Anyway, let me explain before we extrapolate too much. Whales exist, right? The author didn't create their attributes. Whales makes sense, I don't have to ask myself how they came to be. Now, I get more invested in worldbuilding than actual plots, so if I think that an introduced aspect of a setting only exist so X and Y can happen to Z, instead of feeling like a natural evolution of a scenario or state, I think to myself 'well isn't that convenient?' and then lose all immersion. So if I don't get an explanation as to why everyone accepts having big brother embedded into their flesh, things start to become inconsequential to me.

So writers often need to balance out earning the reader's "suspension of disbelief" while not over-taxing the reader with reams of exposition. Obviously many readers have different degrees of suspension of disbelief--some more difficult to earn than others. And some readers will never reward an author with their suspension of disbelief... it's one of the many reasons why non-fiction is read way more than fiction.

Sometimes the "believability" is of no consequence too, it's why deus ex machina have been around since the Greek playwrights.

In the earliest draft chapter 2-3 goes into a long monologue where someone explains the importance of the oculars and why they were created. (You never ever info dump in chapter 1, it's better to leave the reader with more questions.) However it's loooooooooooooong, and I'm probably going to cut it entirely.

If it is a standard dystopian setting one would think that individuals do not have much choice in having an ocular installed. I would imagine that the control panel being on the neck is a combination of aesthetics and convenience. If you start with the assumption that the control panel needs to be near the user's head, then the back of the neck is out of the way but still easily accessible. There might be healthier or more practical ways to hypothetically control the ocular but there are such things as imperfect implementations of technology.

oh hey forgot about this thread. I should probably delete this since it's a first draft, but eh.