A Moment of Doubt Read online

  And so it came to pass, more or less, that Marvin was engaged by Crow Mignon Books, Inc., to devise a means whereby all authors under serious consideration, given that they weren’t of genius status (they weren’t), and therefore had to knuckle under to the extent of owning a computer in the first place, if they wished to consider being published by CM Inc., might avail themselves of the marvelous labor-saving capacities of modern word-processing.

  So far, so good. Like most hackers, Marvin was no dummy. Naïve, maybe. Inexperienced? Hard to believe, with Ms. Michelov perched just down the hall, but yes: Marvin was inexperienced. Not only that, he loved Zork.

  The printing firm was a modem away. Another machine, set up to take particular control characters available in a .DOC file in user area 0 , readily downloadable to a disc file on my machine, dictated to the printer’s computer the format, the files, the quantities . . . Everything, in short, that anyone would need to know in order to print a complete book.

  Cover art?

  Hah.

  The Thesaurus fires o? its string.

  User 12

  Password?

  Money

  Password?

  Cash

  Password?

  Clams

  Password?

  Sequins

  Password?

  Lucre

  A12>

  In.

  As you might surmise, this can take hours, days, and did. But eventually, after weeks of wandering around Crow Mignon’s in-house machine, with quite a few hints from Marvin, and not incidentally incurring a huge phone bill, until I discovered how to call the machine collect, after many nights, I say, of snooping this larger machine, I had discovered many things.

  Pornography, for example. The Crow Mignon house computer had a huge selection of so-called ‘boilerplate’ passages of pornographic set-pieces, such as one might find in any ‘Victorian’ novel, by ‘Anonymous.’ Turns out Crow Mignon had published sixty such books, there was a list of them in an innocent-looking and obscure file labeled FLOWER.CAT., which in turn was a sub-category of a huge file called METNSPDS.DOC. Meat and spuds, doc. Get it? Out of curiosity, using a public domain utility running on my own machine, 3000 miles away, I queried the sixty FLR files concerning the frequency of occurrence of the PORNPA.TCH file labeled 3ON1PA. TCH, a pedestrian description of three men fucking a single woman. (The reciprocal, three women on a single man, was labeled 1ON3PA.TCH. Detect any sexism in the syntax? The masturbation routines were all in SCRATCHI. TCH.) The same passage, consisting of fourteen paragraphs, occurred in sixty books no less than 47 times. On a hunch, querying further, I discovered that 3ON1PA. TCH occurred more than once in fourteen of the files, or ‘books,’ by ‘Anonymous’; and no less than three times in one of them, undoubtedly a mistake.

  Naturally, I downloaded a couple of the ones I liked, erased two egregiously aprurient ones, replacing the latter with passages much improved in style, tone and lubricity. But I miss the point, which is that a certain printing house, Pre-Eminent Press Co., in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, printed these books for Crow Mignon, under the aegis of Amber Twilight Books, very cheaply, in large editions. Certain formatting codes presented themselves, which I downloaded into what later became a subroutine of BOOK. SUB. And not incidentally, Amber Twilight Books were at that time virtually supporting Crow Mignon Publishing; Crow Mignon had entered the fi eld on the strength of a strong seller entitled A Maid’s Honour , by Anonymous. I discovered Pre-Eminent’s telephone number and had the Crow machine call it. A computer answered. And it was menu driven!

  Hello. Your Account No. Please?

  This would take awhile. I hung up and subsequently found the Amber Twilight I.D. number over in accounting. Returning and entering it, I found my screen fi lled with courtesy.

  Miraculous. I now had cachet with Pre-Eminent Press, a huge printing concern, whose trifecta in life was to produce massive amounts of cheap paperback books, ship them to distributors all over the world, and bill somebody for their trouble. Aft er a few weeks of hacking all over the East Coast and Midwest, I had lined up accounts with distributors as well, and was in business with every writer’s dream: a publisher, printer, and distribution network that would disseminate my books at my will to bus stations, cigar stores, airports, and newsstands all over North America and 18 English speaking countries, within two months of completion and ‘acceptance’ of the manuscript. Soon I was up every night, hacking away in the Crow Mignon computer. I downloaded their old royalty schemes and uploaded new ones, slightly more favorable to not only myself but to all their other authors as well. I downloaded their standard blank contracts, rewrote and uploaded them, keeping a copy on disc to print out, sign, and mail to Crow Mignon’s Legal Department as additional agreements were called for. I uploaded Squeam with a Skew , a new Martin Windrow novel, formatted according to their specifications, into a slot only six books behind So Long, Pockface in the production schedule. Carefully, I monitored the latter’s progress through the system. So Long, Pockface had been in the works for over a year and was nearly ready for publication. Each night I logged on and snooped the files to see what had happened to Pockface that day, and kept notes. I even fabricated electronic editorial correspondence between myself and Ms. Michelov on the subject of Squeam , consistent with the few non-prurient words we’d exchanged over slight revisions designed to get the libel out of Pockface . Every writer’s dream.

  Of course, this entire operation took up days, nights, and weeks. Within six months I had So Long, Pockface and Squeam with a Skew out of production and into the bookstores, with Cable Car to Hell and This World Leaks Blood creeping up the assembly line. The Michigan printers suddenly found themselves producing reams of promotional material on an unprecedented scale, for an ad campaign hyping Martin Windrow books. Sales were up, returns were down. Shipping orders began to increase, too. ‘Dumps’, not the hexadecimal kind, but cardboard matrices gaudily displaying a 4 × 8 array of the latest Martin Windrow novel, suitable for an endcap or display near the cash register or anyplace else conspicuous, began to appear in your finer chain bookstores. But things were so chaotic at Crow Mignon that I had to run almost the entire business by myself. To save money, the staff had been halved. Marvin was down to a couple of days a week, and Ms. Michelov’s job, she told me, hung by a thread. I had to do everything. Ms. Michelov, although achieving some credibility behind the sales of the Windrow books, could not expect a few pulp detective thrillers to save the entire company. Consequently, she became increasingly involved with ghostwriting a cookbook authored by a famous football player, to the executive mind then holding sway a surefire cash cow. I was left with the entire operation and management of the Amber Twilight Windrow series. Increasingly, I could not cope with these business matters, and still be expected to write the damn things. Not to mention to deal with Marlene. Not to mention to do nothing, daydream, relax, invest, drink a beer . . . . Not to mention to keep ahead of Marvin in Zork. Not to mention I fell behind in my reading, in particular of the ongoing marvelous pornographic adventures of the beautiful and sluttish Italian vampire, Sukia, to which series I maintain a subscription. Creditors dunning Crow Mignon began to turn up in windows on my Zork screens, deflected there by a little routine Marvin had devised to keep them o?his own back.

  A pre-ulcerous condition loomed.

  Automation became imminent.

  FOUR

  Returning phone calls is a pain in the ass, you know that. But try returning a bunch of calls to a computer. Christ, you can’t even flirt with it. Well. That’s not strictly true, actually. Silicon is reasonably lubricious, I suppose, if you’re feeling ‘that way’—’bloody rutty’, as Anonymous would say. Brushing the palm of your hand over a field of transistor chips and dip switches, feeling the bits slip in, out, on, off . . . Digging the absolute silence of the machine’s response, wondering if you’re getting it off , doing the right thing, lasting long enough . . . Remembering how you did this thing befo
re, and it’d be a shame to break off and check the records now , just when the machine’s about to write and tell its mother how perfect everything is . . . And then there’re the perennial matters of taste and elegance, precisely the twin nemeses one generally locks oneself in the house to get away from . . . The hours of imperfection limping from ashcan to ashcan in the mental streets, scavenging sustenance . . . And suddenly, in a wire waste receptacle . . . Taste and Elegance, two obese, short geriatrics in matching pineapple shirts, orange and yellow, blue . . . find The Sunday New York Times ! Well read, already smelling of cigars and ink and cinders and urine, the want ads wrapped around a load of dog shit, discarded but semi-intact . . . harbinger of cultural awareness, the City, the Nation, the World, municipal trash . . . And there they stand, Taste and Elegance, an old man and an old woman in identical Hawaiian shirts and thong sandals, their heads shaved for lice, ripping fewer and fewer pages of the Times out of each other’s swollen fingers . . . I want Arts & Leisure, I want the City, I want Fashion, Travel, Real Estate . . . more and more pages fluttering torn to the ground, the two toothless mouths gumming obscenities, too arthritic to settle for Sports, toe to toe, four hands on the Times . . . Pigeons at their feet . . . People cross the street to avoid them . . . .

  Taste and Elegance. These SUBMIT routines are funny. So are detective novels. But insofar as they have to survive, there’re a lot like the phone, they don’t need one another; they just need us.

  Q

  ; we need them.

  SAVE

  (xsub active) . . .

  . . . overweight polysexual criminal out there in the hall just waiting to pounce on your child/mother/daughter/husband/loved one/self and give them a taste of the old badinage, scratch that, syphilitic appendage, it was Oscar Wilde, wasn’t it, who’d rather give a taste of the old syphilitic badinage . . . wasn’t it? But appendage will do, go to thesaurus, let’s make badinage the code word for this file, remind me not to forget it I’d hate to lose this chapter after all I’ve been through to get to it, I told you to screen all my calls except for Ms. Michelov, let her through, use the loop routine BIZWIZ, handle that stufffor god’s sakes, can’t you see I’m trying to write? How do I expect myself to continue to be a productive arm of this concern if I’m constantly attending to these ridiculous business details? What’s a publishing routine for, anyway? Take the book, publish it, send me the checks. That’s it. Wait.

  A clipping service. Invent the routine CLIP.SUB. Another week of sleepless nights.

  And don’t forget to copy me every review, goddammit.

  Wait a minute here, dear reader. Let’s get something straight. I’m talking to myself, not to the machine. You weren’t seriously thinking that I was going to sit here and try to tell you this goddamn machine took over my life, were you? That it ‘took on this mysterious life of its own?’ ‘The machine anticipated my every thought—nay, my every afterthought . . .’ ‘Even after its sluttish advances I continued to resist it, until, late one night . . . I’d been slaving over the CON:, writing at white heat. Never before had the lubricities spewed with such facility, the gore gushed, the rancor so articulate, the word count so tumes-cent . . . Surely, my subconscious was thinking, as I typed furiously, here smoked a career carried over the Alps by Hannibal . . . When, suddenly, I noticed the most marvelous, the most mysterious, the most frightening thing . . . The screen was actually anticipating my thoughts, even as I struggled to express them! Be it ever so humbly . . . Were I to type so fast, I’d be a marvelous secretary! But we continued unrelenting. Yes, we: the machine and I! Pages, chapters, Parts One and Two and Three virtually spewed forth! It’s a Trilogy! The magic was exhilarating, intoxicating! Marvelous vistas of prose opened up and unrolled before my eyes at such consummate velocity I could hardly read them ! The coprophilia of the ages regurgitated onto the CRT:, entered the disc, burst the bounds of the limited memory of the print spooler, sloughed pages (paginated, oh! so fortunately) to and fro on the floors, the furniture, the shelves of my study. Ankle, knee, balls deep! A whole book in a single night!

  'And as dawn’s polluted fingers caressed the diseased cock of the Transamerica Pyramid, I lay exhausted: limp and hysterical, draped across my machine, with what horror, yet with what unspeakable fascination, did I watch the following message scroll up the big green screen . . .

  Poor Mr. Jameson.

  You’ve worked very hard.

  You must be very tired.

  Would you like a back-rub, before we resume our labors . . . ?'

  Nope. None of that obtained nor obtains. Phooey. No sentient mess of tentacled bread boards and feelie-feelie chips with sixteen ruby light-emitting diode eyes was taking over my life, like some kind of hideous sapient mold in your refrigerator, that one night gets out and digests the cat. We’re not transubstantiating any such shit to New York for Immediate Release. Maybe such things happen, maybe not. There are rumours of prescience, clairvoyance, dark forces . . . I’m not denying that I personally, for one, know someone, who knows someone, who has a sister who saw the 22 Fillmore crash into the power station, killing everyone aboard, just after it passed her as she was going through the trash looking for a transfer, and, had she immediately discovered one, would have jumped on the bus without giving it a thought. But, instead, something , no one could say what , exactly, made her space out on some kind of guru circular she found in there, the former science-fiction author movie stars endorse, and, reading it top to bottom, front to back, never found a transfer in time, and missed the bus . Lived to tell the story. Made the Inquirer . Clairvoyance? Or Divine Providence? Aeyup . . . . Nope, that’s not what I’m trying to lay on you, here, gentle consumer. I’m not trying to tell you that somehow, somewhere, there was a computer up there (points) looking out for the welfare of the sister of the friend of my friend (smiles). In point of fact, I believe her welfare was canceled very soon after the time of this accident. (Smile off .) But, as you might imagine, at that point in time they were grateful enough just to be alive.

  Nope. As you might expect, nothing’s ever that simple around Marlene’s house, nothing. Ever. And it’s not just that she gets horny reading Humour in Uniform.

  I wrote the SUBMIT routine, and called it BOOK.SUB. No big deal. Just sixteen weeks, hacking mainly at night. During the day I wrote Through a Mandible, Delicately , at that time the sixth or seventh Martin Windrow novel, already I was losing track. This powerful medicine always leaves trenchant fumes drifting through the head . . . Subroutine to keep track of them all . . . Of course you must realize that I’ve written several subroutines to keep track of them all, having either forgotten the names of the previous ones or where I stored them, or lost the subroutine that keeps track of the subroutines that keep track of the Martin Windrow novels, alphabetically, chronologically, financially, I had to go to a hard disk, etc. etc. Do you know the Shelley?

  Lift not the painted veil which those who live

  Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,

  And it but mimic all we would believe

  With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear

  And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave

  Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear . . .

  Through a Mandible, Delicately was my Hope, and assembly language my Fear. These danced—lascivious, pansexual, grotesque—insane harpsichordy quadrilles with Taste and Eloquence. Want to know a little routine that asks you your name?

  Notice the mnemonic DAD D. A few weeks of this stuff, and you’re ready to holler for your UNCLE D, if only to quote you the Shelley.

  But the SUBMIT routine is different. This is an operating system transient command. You can get SUBMIT to run routines like HELLO (after they’ve been assembled and loaded), and you can get XSUB to plug in appropriate console input. And brother, it’s simple. All you really gotta do is blow off a lot of sleep and read a bunch of books. Then you take a stiffdrink and a deep breath. Now hold it. Then you expel the trapped air suddenl
y onto the CRT screen, fogging it over. In a burst of nervous tension you kick back your chair, get up and pace around your oak and formica, ergonomically hip work station (optional extra), or your old pool table, your kitchen table, whatever. Then, finally, when you’ve worked up enough nerve, you create the file HELLO.SUB.

  XSUB

  HELLO

  Fame and Fortune

  This is after you’ve assembled, debugged, and loaded HELLO.ASM, above, of course, which process, while taking a little longer maybe than HELLO.SUB, has yielded the new transient program HELLO.COM. If you were to merely call HELLO at your prompt, you get a screen that looks like this.

  AØ>HELLO

  What is your name?

  You, flattered that the machine would ask, reply, from the console,

  Fame and Fortune

  And the machine immediately responds.

  Hi, Fame and Fortune!

  Much to your astonishment, or astoneagement, as Jas Joyce would say. Now, this is all well and good, a nice lesson in 8080/Z80 assembly language, out of date these 10 years. But, say you were sick of typing cute replies to dumb questions from your computer today, but, for some reason, you would really like to see a cute if predictable reply to a dumb question from your computer with minimum effort. If you merely embed HELLO.COM in a SUBMIT file, then called it thusly,

  AØ>SUBMIT HELLO