Day 4

He was waiting for me when I got home, standing in the doorway with the biggest grin I’d ever seen him wear. I couldn’t help it; I had to laugh. The two six packs of beer (MGD for me, PBR for him) clinked together in the bag I cradled, giving away my surprise.

”Here,” I said, putting the bag down and pulling the Blue Ribbon out, “To celebrate.”

The grin quickly soured.

”Steven, you shouldn’t talk about celebrating. It’s bad luck to do it beforehand.” He didn’t, however, take his eyes off the beer.

”Suit yourself,” I said, “Not like you really have to thank me, that stuff is cheaper than water.” Owen looked around, as if suddenly unaware of what he was doing. He recovered, and the grin showed up again.

”Steven. She’s ready.”

”Yeah? Let’s go fire her up.” I’d already popped the cap off of one of my beers and taken a pull. Steven didn’t notice - he was bounding down the stairs like a little kid.

”Come on! Look, she’s all set. All we have to do is hit this button.”

“Mmm...” I grabbed another beer and started down the stairs. “Congratulations, Sally. Tonight is the night.”

It wasn’t. Three hours later, my beer was gone and Sally was still humming her low, scratchy tune. Owen was sitting next to me, head in his hands.

”So...how do we know it’s working?”

He sighed, as if I hadn’t already asked the same question multiple times.

“We know, Steven, because she’s awake. She’s not idling, and she’s not errored. If that had happened, she would have printed an error message.”

“What if the error message was really the title? How would you know?” I tried not to laugh, but it was hard. I was far from sober, and felt like funning with the guy a little. He always assumed I was serious, even if my questions were, in actuality, ridiculous. That’s one of the things I enjoyed about Owen, and I took advantage of it often.

”Really, Steven! Would the greatest title in the world really be “Error Message”? Besides, I’ve already thought of that. If there’s an error, the error message will print the three safe words I’ve chosen beforehand. So I’ll always know what the output means.”

“What are the safe words?”

”What? Oh....Sandwich and jelly and something else. I don’t remember. I’ll know if I see it.”

”Peanut butter?”

“No, Steven, that’s not it! How is that even one word?!” Frustrated, Owen stood up and puffed his chest out, taking a deep breath. “She’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. I’m going to bed.”

With that, he pounded back up the stairs.

”Night, O.”

Day 3

Her body was a string of processors snaked together within a giant heat sink, each whirring and clicking in unison to create what Owen described to me as a sort of semi-consciousness. She wasn’t aware of anything but herself, and the series of specific and limited tasks he’d programmed into her. Owen told me she was a marvel of modern computing. Maybe I believed it. Maybe I still thought it was just a bunch of metal and plastic sitting in a bin in the basement.

Sally was built for the idea - which was, ultimately, to write the greatest novel anyone had ever read. To do it in a way that wouldn’t leave anything up to chance. Wouldn’t leave me, for example, writing something that may or may not have been anything good (or anything at all). She had two tasks in this regard, two main functions. First, as Owen had explained to me several times, she’d compile, from a database, the titles of every book ever written - so long as those titles could be translated into English. And from those, she’d spit out a single title. That, my friends, was to be the title of the greatest book ever written. I could cope with that. That seemed feasible, forgetting for a moment all the millions of books that had been written with titles, and their varying qualities (we kept them all in the mix so as not to disqualify bad titles for great books and the opposite...Owen said this would give us a much more empirical answer than if we’d culled any). We had just, he told me, to hook Sally to the internet and wait maybe a day for her answer.

The second task was the one I wasn’t sure could be done. What Owen proposed was that he could, based on various rating systems and user reviews around the world, program Sally to collect full texts for a hundred thousand of the best books in the world - more, even, or less. We controlled the limit. Of course, she’d then be asked to compile, from all those, a novel that would have all the best attributes of each and none of the filler. It would, essentially, be the best book ever written. By anyone. By me.

Yes, I’ll admit it. The only reason I even listened to Owen for a second after he started telling me his idea was because I was the sole beneficiary if his plan worked.

"This book, Steven,” he said, “can only be written once. And it has to look like it was written by a regular guy. The world wouldn’t tolerate the news that a machine wrote it. You’d get it all - the advance, the royalties, the fame that follows. All you have to do is let me live with you, so we can work on it together. So you know just what’s at stake.”

I was sucked in. I couldn’t think of a reason to say no - if it didn’t work out, I’d still be in the same place I’d always been. Working at the bookstore, planning to be a novelist. So that’s what brings us here - a year later. To the day of the title test.

Day 2

I was going to be a novelist. That’s what I told myself then. That’s how I justified working at a university bookstore a full two years after I’d graduated from the same university. I told myself that when the time was right, when it was meant to be, I’d write my novel. And then, I’d sell it. I’d live off the royalties for the rest of my life, doing whatever I felt like. Heck, maybe I’d even write another one if I got bored of that.

I was a stupid kid. I spent all this money on writing books, magazines, and every piece of software that came out promising to help me write the thing, or to effectively write it without my having to do any real work. I told myself I was going to be a novelist. And I believed it. That’s why, the summer before Owen Sinclair and I got an apartment together, I told him my plan.

It was a party he didn’t belong at. Heck, I don’t know if I belonged there, but I was closer to the type who did. It was a forty-hands night, the type of thing that had everyone in attendance floundering up and down stairs and through hallways, giant brown bottles duct-taped to each hand. The rule was you couldn’t pee or free your hands until you finished both, and you couldn’t do that too fast unless you wanted to puke. The purpose of the party, apropo of nothing, was to drink.

I was halfway through my second forty, sitting in the basement near a girl I was trying to impress - she wasn’t interested, but I didn’t care. “I write books. I’m going to be famous.” The truth was apparent - I was drunk and would do no writing, and would do no being famous either. She knew it, and I think when she got up to leave I knew it too. Plans don’t matter to anyone until they’re no longer plans.

I stared at the ends of my arms for a few minutes, at the two glass apertures that had replaced my hands. I took a long drink of the second bottle, and belched. When I looked up again there was a boy sitting where the girl had been.

“I’m Owen Sinclair.” I stared. His bottles were, from where I sat, full.

”I was sitting over there listening to you talk to that girl. Are you really writing a novel?”

My mouth was dry, my tongue was numb. I squeezed my bottles with every bit of strength in my fingers.

”I’m writing the best novel anyone will have ever read.”

He clicked his bottle tops together and leaned forward, interested.

”Really?”

“Sure, why not? Why the hell do you care?”

“Let’s say I help you do it.”

”You? What can you do? Babysit me? Tell me everything I’m writing needs to be rewritten? Jesus, man. No one can write it but me.”

The alcohol was beginning to take hold. His shoes were extremely large. Velcro shoes - I hadn’t seen those since middle school.

“Listen, man. It’s all real simple. You see, a hundred million books have been written so far by humanity, maybe ten or twenty thousand of those were any good. Now, what if I could...”

That was the first night I heard it. Owen’s idea. And it might not have made much sense then, seeing how I was. But after hearing it again, and again (the idea was always the topic of our conversations after that, after I remembered I’d seen Owen Sinclair in the newspaper for doing some really groundbreaking work with computers) it began to make a majestic sort of sense. Whatever he’d done before, whatever computer thing he’d done had apparently been big; big enough for the university to award him a five-hundred-thousand dollar grant to work on his next project.

And his next project was Sally.

Sally lived in the basement.

Day 1

The important thing was that I knew him - a lanky boy with greasy hair and bad acne. I put his books (calculus, general computing, and advanced programming) into a bag and cleared my throat.

”One-sixty-four eighty-five.”

He sighed. “You know, Steven, I don’t even need these books.”

I nodded. “Of course not.”

He pulled a card from the satchel strapped to his waist - a tassled black leather fanny pack that hung all the way past the crotch of his jeans.

“I could have written these books, Steven. Heck, I could have written books that would have taught the writers of these books to write them better than they’re written.”

I nodded and scanned the card. It beeped, and began the authorization process.

”Debit or credit?”

”Sheesh, you know I have like zero funds - credit.”

The credit card slip printed. I pushed it across to him, along with a pen. I knew he wouldn’t have a pen.

”Thanks. You know, I think I’m almost there, Steven. I’m almost ready for the title.”

He pushed the slip back - there, on the signature line, was what looked like a drop of ink that had been smeared across with a fingertip. I watched him put my pen in his fanny pack. He licked his lips. I decided to humor him.

”The title, huh? What do you think it’s going to be?”

I threw his receipt in the bag and pushed the whole thing across the counter. He scooped it up and gave me a look before he began to walk away.

“I’ve explained this to you before, Stephen. There’s no point in wondering what it’s going to be - she’ll tell us when she knows. And I think she’s going to be ready for her title performance very soon...I can almost feel it.”

At that point he was around the counter and throwing open the door, sucking the flakes of snow that had been swirling just outside into the store and sending them into kamikaze dives toward the muddy carpet, melting as they went.

”I’ll see you at home, Stephen. When do you get off work?”
”Seven. Later Owen.”

And he was gone. I turned to the next girl in line. She gave me a peculiar smile.

”You live with Owen Sinclair? Wow. Is he really a genius like they say? My sister had a class with him and she said he basically ended up teaching it, and the TA just sat there with his mouth open the whole time. Why did he get those books if he didn’t need them?”

”He’s...really big on adhering to the required course material. And yeah, he’s smart. Did you want all of those?”

She ignored me, and stared out into the blustery cold beyond the plate glass windows.

”I wonder if he has a girlfriend.”

I pulled the books from her arms and started scanning. I tried not to clench my teeth.

”Of course he does. And besides, you wouldn’t be a good match for him.”

“No?”

“Not enough circuitry.”

NEWS

I gave my GF a new whatchamacallit. Template. It's nice, kinda. I'm still trying to figure out if I like it - what do you say?

The new tagline is going to be "All Warts - Every Day"

Basically I'm going to post my writing for the day - all rough. It's meant to be read, obviously. It's meant to be internalized and meditated on, and eventually it's meant to be criticized. The rewrites, the final stuff, won't go here.

This is just for the crap. Don't misunderstand it.

"Don't send out anything until it's sat in a drawer for a month. Then take it out and read it through again." - Michelle Gagnon in How I Got Published

Welcome to the drawer.