Young Writers Society

A beam of energy hit her back and the tangible world faded from sight.

Submerged in darkness, Caia roamed her mind. She wouldn't regain control of her body until it awoke. For now she would have to bide her time and avoid rogue memories.

A light in the gloom darted towards her.

Crap!

She fled, but it pursued her. Ordinary people speak of memories haunting them. They had nothing on her. Sleep, unconsciousness, coma; wherever she was her subconscious pummeled her with terrors of the past. In normal daily activities it didn’t matter, but when consciousness left her, the subconscious took over.
Closer and closer it came, and slowly it managed to envelop her. It was over. All she could do now was let the memory take its course.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The light of the sun nearly blinded her. It was mid-day of a beautiful spring. The last spring this planet would ever see. Of course she didn’t know that then. It'd be a long time still before she'd discover that.

It was as beautiful as the untouched places of earth, but at the same time it looked nothing like earth. The ground was covered by small circular moss-like plants, and the sky had more of an orangish-pink tint.

Like earth's sunsets.

Unlike on earth where, for the most part, white leaves generally are a bad thing; every plant was white. It resembled a winter landscape at sunset.

Her back against her an invisible tree trunk, the leaves above shaded her from the sun.

Invisibility was a neat trick to avoid extinction, but invisible leaves can't collect sunlight. Many of the taller plants were a strange combination of scrambled mutations. You could always tell where one of these particular trees was by looking for foliage which seemed to be flying in the air with ‘no support’. Then again you could just run into one…literally. It wasn't as if that hadn't ever happened before.

In her hand sat what could only be described as a computer-like device. It looked nothing like a computer, but its functions were similar. It was a metal sphere twice the size of a golf ball.

Her touch activated it, and as her eyelids shut, it's world unfolded around her. Movies, books, information; everything was available here. A simple thought could do anything; anything that is except change the circumstances unfolding around her.

Screams from outside the digital realm caused her to deactivate the sphere and open her eyes.

The Caia of the present struggled and fought against her subconscious, but to no avail. Back then she was oblivious, but the same couldn't be said for her now. She now knew what would happen if she went looking for the sound, but the past could not be changed. Her memories wouldn't allow themselves to be altered or forgotten, and they manifested themselves in these instances of weakness. For the moment they were in charge.

Eyes of the present through eyes of the past witnessed the gruesome scene once more. Her father, first scientist of Aroxia, lay face first on the ground. Blood oozed from a gash in his neck. The thick liquid poured out and stained the white turf a ghastly dark red.

As her stomach emptied itself of its contents, her gaze by chance wandered to the entrance of the garden. There her mother sat, dazed. Blood streamed out a gash in her head. Terrified, her past self did something extremely stupid.
She reached into her father’s mind…just in time to feel him die.

Intent and purpose seized up on themselves. They were never really part of a plan, and apparently realized so. They reeled off into oblivion, leaving a terror stricken child to do any amount of irrational actions.

Her full consciousness jumped from her body to his. It wasn't a purposeful decision. Everything just overwhelmed her senses, and cut her off from the safe haven of her body. Shock prevented any response to save herself, and without interference she would have been gone. With her mind disconnected from her body, she would follow her father into death's realm. No pain of the many horrible events to come would have the opportunity to torture her.

Then he realized she was there.

No, not the attacker. He was long gone.

Her father was still there, suffering through the pain. His mind still trudged along in a body that was quickly failing him. He had little strength, but somehow he used it to push her back to the surface and bridge the gap from his body to hers.
Behind her, his thoughts whispered quieter than a blade of grass bending in the wind. They flickered in and out of existence; reaching her but not really registering. A jumbled message from her father reached deaf ears. Comprehension had numbed itself into non-existence. Neither Caia of the present nor that of the past perceived a thing other than an emotional tornado of anger and sorrow.

Like hitting a brick wall while running, Caia's past self snapped back to her own body. She lied on the ground unconscious, unable to move or do or think. For the first time, the darkest part of her mind took control from her hands. It played the newly formed memory over and over and over. Each time it sickened her a little more. Each time she retreated from humanity a just a little bit farther.

What was all so great about sentient beings? Her father was dead. They or him or her it didn't matter.
Someone did this. Someone who lived and thought and breathed went out of his way to end her dad's life. What was so great about everything her people created? What was so great about her people?

Her father had spent his entire life devoted to saving their civilization from the hole their government had sunken into. He was a mind searcher just as she was. Or it could be said, she was as he was. They both could read the desires and intentions of those around them. When it came down to it, most people were as corrupt as the government that led them. How could she trust anyone?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

As the world disappeared in black around her past self, the memory faded. She was left alone in the dark. In the distance she could see other memories, but she dared not approach their light. She feared finding more of what she didn’t want to see.

Her past was her enemy, and wished someone could erase her memory just like she had done for her brother. At the time she hadn’t approved of burying his memories, but he begged her. He wanted the pain to go away.
He had been the stable pillar she leaned against when everything continued to go wrong. When he broke, she broke to his desires. He was in the same pain that she was, but she had the ability to end his suffering. He didn't have to hurt. He was older, but at the same time more fragile. She could handle being on her own. She could handle anything...hadn't she proven that so far?

As the light of a memory neared, Caia would back away. It was a game of cat and mouse. Except she was the only mouse and there were thousands of cats chasing her. It went on for hours and hours. Wake up already, wake up...

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Closer, closer, closer; She slowly lost ground. A sickening feeling took her gut hostage as the memory reached her, and slowly began to envelop her. It caught her up and it slowly seeped into her consciousness.

Opening her eyes and blinking, her stomach lurched. The memory had her...no, it didn't. The room was unfamiliar, and the landscape outside the window made it fairly obviously earth. Not per say that it was impossible to conjure up a memory of earth; she had been here nearly half her life now. Her head just couldn't find many earth memories horrifying enough to justify wasting its precious time reserve.Those few that existed didn't match her surroundings.

Proving to herself that it wasn't just in her head, she used the control she always lacked in the nightmare memories to propel herself up. Agonizing pain streaked up her nerves into her brain, carrying a sensation of insatiable pain. She dropped back onto the bed, but it wouldn't cease. Originating near the bottom of her vertebrae and expanding in a crude half circle upwards, it stole both breath and movement from her body. Even writhing in pain was impossible.

Her eyes rolled, but at the same time caught movement. Some liquid glided its way down inside a tube attached in her arm. Upon impact she didn't notice anything, but twenty seconds into it she dropped off into a deep sleep.

Before she went under, she was almost afraid of returning where she just escaped from. For some odd reason, she didn't have the capacity to translate the unformed fear into thoughts. Everything went dark, but no lights appeared on the horizon. Her mind didn't even wander in circles. All thought process just stopped, and she enjoyed her first real sleep since that day, six years ago, when an eight year old witnessed her father’s murder.
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Original Draft

Here to review.
Sorry if this seems a little harsh. (And long) The truth is, you have a captivating, and quite simply, great premise, but the story itself fails to do it justice. It is because you have such a great premise that I am going to be tough on the story, I want you to make this ten times better. I don’t want you to have just a great premise; I want you to have a great story.
That being said, I hope I can help.

So, I’m presuming that this is the first chapter of the book?
Starting off with your heroine loosing consciousness is interesting, and I think you were trying to jumpstart the story, but the fact is I was never interested enough to ask, "What happened?" I had no desire to find out about this character, who she was or why this was happening. There are many, many ways to make your first sentence that much better, that much more engrossing. You should have the reader hooked on the first word, pull us in right away.
(That being said, I realize that this is what you were trying to do. I want to say that it is very difficult to achieve this, even for published novelists. You probably know all this already, but I’m just trying to say that the first paragraph needs more work.)

The thing is, having your MC get blasted with an energy beam at the very start is kind of, well, cheesy. And it fails to deliver. What I mean by that is you are setting up expectations which your story fails to fulfill. “Okay, she’s K-Oed, what now?” nothing, she goes on a dream ride.
I would suggest just starting in with the dream itself, otherwise you are breaking one of the “Rules” when it comes to story writing:
Don’t start off with back story. Or worse, don’t start off in the present, then have a flashback, dream, inner monologue, etc. explaining how the character got here, why they’re here, etc. (This pattern then continues for several pages, chapters, or worse, the entire book.)
You probably didn’t realize that this was killing your story. I think it would be better if you started out, as I’ve said earlier, in the middle of the dream, or in the middle of the present action. (When does she first start having the dreams? When do these people start chasing after her?) It’s better to start off with a “normal character becoming abnormal” than it is to start off with an “abnormal character explaining why they’re abnormal.”

There is also another problem here, and that is an “information dump.” You are presenting the reader with way too much info to start off the book. “So wait, this girl is from another world, but she’s here know, but she’s having dreams of that other world, in which her father died, her brother is dysfunctional, and she can read minds????’ This is all interesting, of course, but it shouldn’t be the start of the story. Science fiction books, in particular, often lose the reader in vast expanses of black text, filled with unpronounceable words and a bunch of “scientific” explanations that all sound like “mumbo-jumbo” to the reader. Right now, at the beginning, all we need to know is who she is, who “they” are, and why she’s being chased. You can save her back story for later on and slowly give us pieces of it as the story progresses, but a large block at the beginning is going to drive readers away, and is a sure way to kill suspense.
But, your story is different, isn’t it, where her main goal is to escape the dreams of the past?
In that case, your premise is essentially this:
There is a girl who must, at all costs, run from her dreams. Because to dream means…(what)
Now THAT’S universal! That’s what your story is, but the reader loses sight of this by being dumped into the middle of a muddle of dreams. This isn’t going to cut it. True the reader needs information, but you’re giving us the wrong kind here.

Anyway, I’m am under no circumstances trying to make this story my own, but I think that it would be much more powerful if you started it off differently.
One of your problems might be that you haven’t thought out an ending or plot to this yet. Take a very intelligent author’s advise, (I don’t know who his guy was but this is great) “Don’t write the beginning until you have written the end.” Now, this is by no way set in stone, I personally think this is impossible. But I think it is applicable to every one. You don’t really know for sure where your story should start until you know what your story is. But (most) of the time, stories spring form the start of it. It is natural for us to have a linear way of story writing. (this happens, which causes this, which causes this…)

But I’m getting a little long winded. You should start the story at the start.

Other than that, I think there are only three things that could use some more thought/work.

1) Your prose is excellent. Very easy to understand. It flows beautifully and naturally. However, there are a few typo’s, and some grammar mistakes, but those are minor and easily fixed. The problem is that you have switched tenses. I am not an expert on tense, so I have no idea when it happens or what it switches from/to, but I know that it happens. And if I could tell when it happens, others will too. (I think you have gone form “very close” third person POV to more of a distant, “omniscient” POV, or vice versa. But then again, I’m bad at this sort of thing, so you should ask for an experts help.)
Also, I’m a little concerned that you will be able to keep this “voice” up for an entire book, it might get really tough. However, it perfectly fits the story, so I don’t think you should change it. It just needs to carry the action a little bit more.
2) This story should be in the science fiction genre, not action adventure.
3) Your title is terrible. There’s not any other way to put it. It is misleading and had very little to do with the story. I think a rethink session would be better. A title needs to perfectly encapsulate the story in a few words. (“War and Peace” is a classic example, “Legally Blonde” fits the story perfectly, and my all time favorite is “Inception.”) The title needs help. “Homesick and Alone” doesn’t really have to do with the story. This is about a girl and her dreams, I think you can come up with something better that fits the story. (You’ll get more reviews that way too.)

Overall, I loved your premise. You should plot out the story. Write more, this deserves to be finished.