diss extracts: interlude 3 (part 1 of 2)

here's the first version of my third "interlude" section of the diss. as usual for the interludes, it's a nonfiction-y narrative thing that sets up the upcoming chapter. this particular one is from the perspective of the player's avatar in minecraft. this is the first half, second half is coming tomorrow. enjoy (i hope)! a few of my avid readers might catch a sly reference to an earlier nonfiction piece of mine, which was published posthumously in the element.

okay, not really posthumously. moving on...

The first rays of of the day's sunlight suffuse my bedroom, drawing me out of a deep sleep. I open my eyes slowly and for a moment I simply take in my surroundings. I am lying in my bed – rickety wooden bedframe, rough wool sheets – in a small, but solidly built room comprised of grey stone walls and a roof made of overlapping slate tiles. The bed takes up almost the entirety of one wall, while the opposite wall is lined with a series of shelves supporting nine chests made from polished wood. A few of the chests have been left open and old tools and worn-out clothes are barely visible beneath their lids. Near the bedroom door – a hinged, wooden affair that is currently closed and locked – a single, failing torch gutters, its wan light overwhelmed now by the warm glow of the rising sun. Outside the room's one window, a cow lumbers by, mooing. It's time to start the day.

I slide out of bed to a standing position. The floor beneath my feet is more hard stone, but it is cushioned and warmed somewhat by a layer of soft-colored rugs, weakly dyed a cloudy white. I pad over to the door, which yields with a creak, and then I proceed into the house's main hallway. Straight ahead of me is the door to a bathroom of sorts, where a porcelain washtub dominates an otherwise sparsely-filled space of roughly the same dimensions as the bedroom. To my left, the hall opens up into the house's main living area. Here, the rugs are a bit more vibrantly colored – a muted blue – and the walls are lined with earth-toned hangings that catch and soften the sunlight angling in through the windows. Against the far wall of the room, a furnace smolders dully, and beside it a few bars of shaped iron – last night's work – are cooling. On a wooden table near the furnace lay a crust of stale bread and an apple. I grab them and put them in the pocket of my trousers. They won't make for a spectacular breakfast, but I'm in a hurry to be on my way this morning and I don't want to take the time to make something else. I reach into another wooden chest that sits on the floor beside the table and pull out an old leather rucksack. Into it goes food for later: some smoked meat from the pantry and a skin of river water, along with a half-loaf of fresher bread. Back at the front door, I round up the usual equipment: pickaxe, handaxe, bow and arrow, and my notched, rusting sword. Then it's out into the world.

As I step outside, I check the two torches that hang below the house's eaves, framing the door. I fully intend to be back before dark, but it never hurts to be safe, and at night these torches will be visible from a long distance. With my back to the front door, I am facing south, and directly ahead the gentle plain on which my house rests continues for a hundred or so feet before terminating in a cliff; it's a fifty-foot drop into the lake that spreads to the horizon. To the east, the land thrusts up almost immediately into a hill that stands, at its highest point, nearly two hundred feet above my roof. As I do most mornings, I turn this way and begin to climb. On my way around the corner of the house, I pass the cow I saw earlier, and as I do he looks up from grazing, mooing again in what I suspect is a cow-greeting.

Climbing the hill is tough going, and, as usual, I don't bother walking all the way to the summit. Instead, I climb just high enough so that I can see out across the flatland to the west and north of my house until it butts up against the smaller, less spectacular hills in the distance. From this vantage, I can see the first sliver of the sun as it inches its way into the sky to the north, and as it does, its light spills out across the entirety of my work at surviving in this place. Waves of golden wheat sway in the wind to the west; they are arranged in precise rows, fed by narrow irrigation channels and protected from roving wildlife by a sturdy wooden fence. To the north is a similarly arranged but less impressive patch of wheat – I culled this one only a few days ago, and what few stalks remain are short and green yet. Along the edges of the lake to the south, papyrus shoots grow taller than a man, and cows and pigs dot the landscape in all directions, numerous enough that I've deemed fencing them in unnecessary. As I scan my environs contentedly, one particularly enterprising pig snorts at me from the hill's summit, startling me and then prompting me to wonder what in the world inspired him to make the journey all the way up there.

All is well this morning, I think to myself; yet, even as I do, my eyes are drawn to the foot of the hill below me, where a few human-sized bones rest in a pile and the corner of the house nearest them looks somehow burnt, blasted, the grey stone charred black. But now is not the time to dwell on such things. Now is a sunny summer morning, and there will be plenty of time for such darker concerns later. With some difficulty, I avert my eyes and turn away to face the day's demands.

There are only two tasks on today's agenda, but those two tasks could easily take me the remaining balance of daylight to complete: I need to find iron ore and wood. The iron ore will be used eventually for the forging of a new sword to replace the brittle, misshapen thing that currently hangs at my hip, and the wood will be shaped into more fenceposts to encircle the third, larger wheat field I am currently in the process of planting. Because of the flatness of the land immediately surrounding the house, it has been hard to keep the fields properly irrigated and the wheat in the first two fields hasn't been growing as fast as I'd like. Getting more seeds in the ground is easy; making sure that the resulting stalks aren't destroyed by any number of wild creatures is much more difficult and requires some forethought.

Fortunately, finding wood should only require a short walk. I've long since cleared the flatland below of trees whose wood went toward my earlier projects, and though I've replanted some saplings in their place, they haven't had nearly enough time to grow to any sort of size yet. So I strike out to the east, skirting the large hill and following a gentler ridge up and up until my house is lost to sight behind me. I've never been logging in this direction before and so I know it's only a matter of time before I come upon some suitable trees. Eventually, the ridge leads me up into the first foothills of the eastern mountains. On a clear morning like this one, I can often see these snow-dressed hinterlands from the top of the hill near my house. They loom in the far distance, gauzy-looking, like something out of a dream, tugging at my curiosity. But for now I have more pressing concerns.

From my current elevation, I can see that along the flanks of the foothills, the trees grow thick and large, and I will have my choice of trunks to cut. I spend much of the rest of the morning chopping down a few of the closer, smaller trees, stripping the the trunks to fencepost-sized poles, and eventually plowing through my nearly-forgotten breakfast. By the time I judge that I've cut enough wood, the sun is directly overhead. Rather than spending the rest of the day hauling logs back home on already-tired shoulders, though, I decide to leave the logs where they are until tomorrow and take a circuitous route back to the house while keeping an eye open for potential iron veins.

I head back down out of the hills and circle around the house to the north, where the land is rough and uneven. Here, rocks jut out of the dirt, forming odd-looking plinths. Occasionally, the ground under a bluff has given way completely, revealing a tunnel or shallow chasm that twists down and down into the stony guts of the world. These tunnels could lead anywhere, and if they ran deep enough they would almost certainly lead me to iron ore. But just looking into their depths from a distance fills me with foreboding – I don't yet need the ore that badly.

After an hour or so of walking through this strange land and another few bites of smoked meat, I am surprised to see a tunnel entrance bracketed by two of my old torches. I know that I haven't ranged far north of home recently, so this place must be one of the first caves I ever dug, lost to my memory in the confusion and darkness of those first days. Regardless, I know that if I've been here already, this particular cavern is at least relatively safe. Checking the position of the sun one last time, I light a fresh torch and disappear down the tunnel's throat.

The cavern opening leads into to a labyrinth of stone. Some of the tunnel's arteries are very clearly my own work – they are neatly head-height, squared-off, and run straight into the earth – while others are more angular, twisting, and disorienting – likely formed naturally by running water. I follow a number of these paths in succession, leaving more torches behind me as I go so that I can retrace my steps if necessary. The deeper the tunnels go, the greater my chances of finding iron ore become, and yet the crushing darkness at those depths is intimidating, and so I ultimately choose to stay just barely belowground. It is only purely by chance, then, that I find an iron vein in short order.

The hard work of chipping through the surrounding stone with my iron pickaxe prompts me to eat through the rest of my lunch as I work, and so by the time I've finally collected what I judge to be enough of the ore, I'm quite ready to be out from under the ground and en route to home and dinner. I follow the trail of torches back to the tunnel exit easily enough, but as I reach the surface, I'm struck by a sudden all-consuming fear. While I was underground, I must have lost track of the time! The sun is long gone, and it has been replaced by the apologetic silver light of a waning moon. It is night, and I am still miles from home.

Screenshot taken from Tom Francis's (PC Gamer) Minecraft travelogue, which I am citing heavily in my chapter.