Charlie Walks: A Novel Chapter 5

Charlie writes a letter to Pauly. Tells a story about what he’s learned from his secret project.

Jumping out of a plane solo is about as on your own as you can get… or is it?

From my first novel, Charlie Walks.

Some background: Charlie’s a machine learning engineer working at the largest technology company in the world but wants to be a writer.

In his spare time at work he siphons the company compute power to fuel his secret world-generating project, XK-1.

However, whenever Charlie enters XK-1 and comes out, he never comes away with a full recollection. It’s more like waking up from a fuzzy dream.

So to put things together, Charlie writes stories about his past and what he finds in XK-1 to his nephew Pauly.

Chapter 5 (this post) contains the book’s first written letter to Pauly. You’ll notice any writing Charlie does in the book is italicized.

Chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3 and chapter 4 are also available.

I liked to start writing as if I was writing a letter. Partly because I lacked the ability to start from scratch and partly because my nephew Pauly had reached an age where he could read (and quite well too).

Start with the date, the time, a little ramble about what’s going on, a hello or good…