A Moment of Doubt (5 page)

As a result, nobody, least of all the board of directors of Crow Mignon Books, all of whom were majority stockholders and officers of Carry On, Inc., having bled the publishing company dry, paid the least attention to the daily goings on of Crow Mignon. What with Marvin stoned on Zork in his exclusive User Area, 11235 (note the Fibonaccian spurt), I had the run of the system.

Not that I could run it. But with Marvin's absentminded advice, I hacked it, and how. I modemed in there every night, late, about eleven o'clock, California time, which is two a.m. in New York. Marvin, having studied and sorted his rather intense stock portfolio and sleek routines for manipulating it five or six hours earlier, and having been disassembling or playing Zork ever since, was usually ready to exchange a few desultory words and call it a night, so far as my window into his world was concerned. He built me a little windowing routine by which, when I was in trouble or confused, I could open into his Zork screen and ask him a question. He would simply key out the answer and boot me off the screen if I were slow in leaving. The exchanges generally went like this.

Author 126, Hello
Hello. Password?
Felch
That's a good one. Enter.
Sir, the Klingons are aboard, Sir.
Good evening, Mr. Jameson. Are you writing tonight?
No. Touring. And yourself?
I'm stuck in level 22. The Princess won't yield me her key.
Try plucking the lute.
I lost the plectrum somewhere between 19 and 21.
You can grow a plectrum-like thumbnail by remaining alive in level 14 for three iterations. Don't forget to specify which thumb.
Thank you. But, Mr. Jameson, will the Princess wait?
Take the lute with you.
No more hints, please. By the way. What does Felch mean?
Forget it.
Thank you. I'm leaving to grow a thumbnail.
Marvin, wait.
Yes?
Who controls User 6?
Mr. Compton, the comptroller.
Oh. He wouldn't be using just any old password, would he.
Oh, no way. Have you a thesaurus?
No, but you do.
I We do?
In Formatting and Editing, User 12.
Oh, yes. Ahem, I quite forgot. They do fool around, in there, I remember their clearing the compatibility of the purchase with SYSOP. A thesaurus and dictionaries take a heck of a lot of memory, Mr. Jameson, very inefficient. Things are much more interesting over in database.
SYSOP? Why didn't they just walk down the hall and ask you?
People carry germs, Mr. Jameson.
You're right, Marvin, I quite agree. BBS are a lot cleaner. Although, carrying germs is a lot of work. Someone has to do it, and it might as well be sapient creatures.
I'm sorry, Mr. Jameson, but changing levels garbaged your transmission. Ah. The jar of hormones?
I'll never tell.
I skipped it before.
Now all you have to do is fend off the spiders for three cycles.
With pleasure.
Have you seen the big one?
What big one?
Synonym for . . . ?
WHAT BIG ONE
He only turns up on the third iteration, just when you think you've got that thumbnail grown. Comptroller . . . Synonym for money?
Right the first time. What big o
Hey, thanks, Marv. User 12, fire thesaurus torpedo . . .
Great Spock!
Big one, isn't he . . . ?
It's a she!
If you found that out, you've already lasted longer than I did.
Monstrous, hairy . . . Where's the heart—I left my sword on 23! All I've got it this fucking lute!!!
Bye
AAAHHHRGG!
*
\

Now, Marvin had this hack going, to which I was the willing guinea pig. Today, PRODOS, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, CP/M, MP/M, UNIX, PROLIX—they're all compatible on any big system, just like any user can program in Pascal, C, Forth— in short, speaking the language he or she speaks, and program away, the Translators look after the small stuff, the details. This of course enters into all sorts of philosophical domains, like if you are GOTOing in Basic, are you IF-THENing in Pascal, or whatever. Like, Total Syntax, if you care. I'm bullshitting here, apologies to the nine of you who know what I'm attempting to discuss, but all this aside, in the times I'm talking about, nobody had this translation thing together. Philosophy really does enter into the picture, as if two composers were trying to express the same idea in music, it really can and does get that deep, but Marvin, he had a compatibility thing going in this network of his.

Crow Mignon, when they thought about it—and they had, back when they had management who cared about books per se, and by extension the people who write them—had realized that by no means were they in a position to dictate the brand of computer their writers were to write on. That is a very personal decision, akin to telling you who you're going to sleep with tonight, or capitulating to predestination. One can handle only so much Calvinism. Ever tried to borrow a computer from a writer? He'll loan you his tractor, his wife, his fifth, his mule—never his computer. Right, let's don't forget the recidivist, who won't loan you his wax stylus, let alone his syntax,
because
it's different from what he thinks you
should
be handling. We're in a different class, here. Here, we're talking abject. After all, if we find a writer who can write (
the stuff
), why not cater to him to the extent that his computer can talk to our computer? Moreover, if it can, we save $thousands in typesetting costs, no?

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.