With typical writer self-obsessed ego I apologize for not being able to read your work at this moment because I am, in fact and as stated,self-obsessed – But in truth it’s more of “I cannot let myself get distracted by work as wild as my own. I must write till brain fry. Therefore in my place I send you the first few pages of the novel as recog ition of your efforts. Best I can do till evening.
Nature Bats Last
Richard Marcus
CHAPTER ONE
Thayer closed the door to her bedroom, padded over to the enormous dark oak, roll top desk and sat down in front of the coral green,1959 Smith-Corona Sterling Super-5 (serial # 5A862417), which she had named “Smitty.”
She leaned over Smitty and flicked the “on” toggles connected to the noise cancellation units in the foam rubber baffling attached to the back of her bedroom door and the one that swept the floor and walls. She nodded to herself, satisfied she wouldn’t disturb the rest of the house
Thayer placed her fingers lightly on the white, marshmallow plump keys almost like a greeting; telling the squat, happy machine she was there. It was wired to know.
The ancient desk’s gaping workspace was so huge and dark and Thayer so slim and, to be honest, close to boney, that it looked like a tiny child trustingly putting her hands into the enormous mouth and touching the flat wide teeth of a very patient hippo.
She lifted her hands off the keys and from a neat stack plucked up a sheet of thick, creamy paper and positioned it precisely parallel with the back of Smitty’s platen, the black barrel which did all the work.
She then grasped the chunky, white knob on the right side of the typewriter, turned it and smiled at hearing the ratcheting “click-click-click” of the cogwheels and sprockets as they rotated the barrel, making the paper disappear down into the back of the machine. Every time this happened it caused the tiniest catch in her chest that the sheet was really gone into Smitty, never to appear. Of course it always did, rising up like a perfect, white, recvtangular sunrise behind the chrome silver bar of the paper bail.
To Thayer, the “clickety-clickety-clack” of the keys, the type bars, those long metal, alien fingers with their alphabet fingerprints, hitting the black/red ribbon, then paper and platen with their “fwap-fwap-fwap-fwap...” the platen barrel’s cheerfully efficient “tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety-tickety,” as she pushed it back to it’s starting point and the deep “bong!” of the bigger bell her dad had installed, was more than just a Rube Goldberg piece of performance art. The levers, gears, springs and cables, pulling, shifting, was a metal shop symphony of virtually extinct sounds, vanished history and the fading wisdom of a far more tangible, concrete and dependable world. Long gone, that world. Long gone.
She stopped, gazed at the thunky contraption. Even silent and still she was comforted by its clock work operating system. A tight, well oiled Newtonian universe of interlocking components, dependable cogs, durable cause and effect. Safe from all outside influences, slings, arrows, tragedies and morally depraved hack bastard, cyber thieves.
She saw the machine not as one solid unit but as an army of thousands; unified, bound together in their fearlessness. It connected Thayer to the energy of bulling steam engines, prehistoric iron bridges and the bulging sweat muscle work of hammers and nails She was their general and they were combat scarred warriors who fought with her for the truth. They were now poised, waiting for her to lead them into a battle for the hearts and minds of the world.
She accepted the fact that the cacophony from her iron word factory assaulted the senses of countless, prissy, mid 21stCentury café customers, library patrons and cafeteria classmates. Nonetheless she was willing to incur their daggered disapproval and even expulsion from those rooms. And she had. Many times.
It didn’t matter what they thought. What she stamped intothe white paper, not sprayed or lasered by some flaccid bladder or pump, was a commitment to passion, observations. Life. Her life. Her existence.
She liked the fact that, if and when she chose, she could maintain an unhackable, untouchable and utterly private, steel firewall. Her thoughts, words impervious, safe from the data storms, the hyper-morphing either clouds of the ever monitored links and eternally surveilled nano-data circling and re-circling the globe like poison gas.
Her brawling machinery stopped the sucking vermin hackers dead. Made the cyber felons move on to mug and rob the sheen of sleek, silent, insubstantial light glimmers flitted on to the waif thin, gossamer screens of the utterly helpless, the terminally dependant and self involved.
Thayer also needed the noise and impact of Smitty’s powerful kinetic energy physically, to preoccupy her anterior and prefrontal lobes. Keep the monkey mind busy while hercerebral cortex, calmed and clever, captured the truths of what she hunted.
Smitty also buoyantly raised chemical levels which modulated the phasic reactivity in her brain’s volatileneurotransmissions, and what writer has ever wanted more to then to have their passions, images, characters and tales stream through their minds and souls on to paper while the joy of a Boccherini cello concerto of dopamine, washing over, sweetly channeling the raging images and epiphanies, so they could focus, could report. Could spin magic on to paper.
She paused. Brow furrowing. Truths. Unwieldy things. A serious, decision making crossroads; whether or not to commit that evening’s private family events to more than just the paper. The threat of all the forces aligned against decent human privacy swept through her brain.
She nodded, agreeing with herself that it all must be observed and chronicled clearly and honestly but she was not going to risk putting it out there to be analyzed and “on the record,” not yet and not realizing that she whispered out loud “On the record.”
She knew that the moment Smitty’s “ *” struck the upper left hand corner of the page, a single nanobot embedded in the typing paper would instantaneously be turned on and with almost the speed of light send an electro-chemical shout of “Wake up, guys, it’s show time!” to the next nanobot, then the next and so on, cascading down the page like robotic dominos, the whole sheet coming alive, nerve endings touching nerve endings, the whole phenomena of a subatomic grid crackling like telegraph wires, top to bottom, coast to coast, across the vellum through embedded conduits.
Of course, Thayer knew that was not the way it actually worked and that the tiny asterisk was as wide across as at least ten million nanobots and that the paper she was using was probably infused with a hundred trillion of them. She removed the now charged sheet, crumpled it up and threw it away. Putting another sheet in she began to type the date: “December...” Then she stopped and glanced over at her at her iEdge to make sure it was not receiving the signals from the sheet of 8.5 x 11, 20lb (94 brightness) NanoType white bond.
The blue light stayed steady. It was not receiving. Good. She finished the date...
“...12, 2030, then assaulted the keyboard, angrily focusing her flash flood of words on the hapless keys. Hair flying, fingers a blur, she looked like nothing less than a wildBeethoven assaulting a piano in a ratta-ratta-ratta-tat-tat fusillade of machine gunned letters, punching the paper with a continuous and deafening stream of crackling shots and brutal machinery.
