Page 77 Test

Okay, so Guilie at Quiet Laughter picked me to do this page 77 test, where you put down exactly what is on page 77 of your work in progress. For me this is The Immortality Game, a near-future sci-fi thriller. The character involved is Zoya, a young woman who this morning saw her brother murdered by the Russian mob and then go after her. The mysterious package her brother had given her to hold contained a data slot card (these go into the mind/data interface behind your ear) and she has recently inserted this card, though she has no idea what it does. Pig was one of her less savory neighbors in her apartment complex. Here you go:



...toward her entrance door. Her eyes never paused, flicking between the car, the door, Pig’s broken window, scanning the surrounding area.

Shouts from her right startled her, but it was just the three boys running back into the parking lot, one carrying a football. The card took a moment before deciding on a green aura for them. She didn’t know the boys well, but she’d seen them around enough to know they were harmless.

She picked up her pace as she drew near the door, and breathed a sigh of relief when she reached it safely, punched in her code, and pulled the door open. There was no sign of anyone in the entry hall, so she cautiously made her way to the stairs and started up.

As she climbed flight after flight, she kept imagining various traps that Tavik had set for her. Mobsters would trap her in the stairwell, or perhaps they would be waiting in the apartment. She ran into no one, though, and heard nothing until she approached the tenth floor landing. Here she heard voices, muffled by distance; one sounded menacing and the other scared...and speaking with a strange accent.

She considered fleeing back down the stairs, but decided to risk a peek through the doorway. She saw one of the mobsters who had been with Tavik, the larger one, limned in red and pulling a gun from his coat. He was stepping back from a short, pudgy dark-haired man with a yellow aura. Everything became strange. Zoya felt her heart pounding like she’d never felt it before, a roaring thud within her mind, and it seemed she could hear the blood rushing through her veins. The slot card began feeding her an incredible amount of information, and somehow she could process it all--there was name, configuration, and history of the Gsh-18 handgun the mobster was holding to the small man’s head; trajectory lines pointing like lasers from the barrel of the gun; a multitude of tactical suggestions, listed in order of estimated success, and changing moment to moment with each movement the mobster made.