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everynight - DarrenJames.com

1. Oh Okay Maybe You don t think I m getting fat though I didn t really notice any fat I m wearing a sweatshirt You weren t for a moment She blushed Oh yeah That Yeah Also you cover your mouth when you laugh or even begin to smile Your teeth are white enough but you don t want people seeing them I ve got an overbite It looks really dumb too I look like a rabbit You don t look like a rabbit I look a little like a rabbit 25 everynight darrenjames Show me No C mon show me Why do you oh all right see She grinned furiously at him teeth locked together You don t look like a rabbit Maybe a wood chuck but not a Hey She slapped his knee and pouted I was kidding You don t look like any sort of lagomorph She sniffled and looked at the wall Lisa What Smile No She covered her mouth with the back of her hand Smile Cut it out no Don t smile Tm Not No matter what You re trying to make me smile she said her mouth twisting into a confused grimace No smiling She laughed instantly clasping both hands over her mouth Dobbit Hmmm I bed dob Dob ryinoo bake be mile You ve stopped making sense She huffed and threw her hands up Stop trying t
2. This That plebeian misgraded my spelling test Here look He pointed out the ticked colour on the test and flipped open his dictionary to the same word therein Right And here He pointed to reflexion counted as incorrect on the test and flipped through to it in the dictionary Every one of these misspelled words is spelled correctly ac cording to the people who invented the damned lan guage Right Murray sat down and closing his eyes nodded It goes back to playing by their rules before you can When When can I supersede them How can I su persede them if they re being intentionally obtuse Anyone truly qualified to teach English is going to know that I m right about this I m being persecuted for my intelligence Is that the world you want me to join Do you want me to fit in by becoming as dumb as they are No Then what in hell am I supposed to do here I don t know You re joking No I m not Calvin you re superior to these people we know that They know that And they re go ing to take that personally And there s not a lot you can do about that So why am I trying to fit in with them Because helping them to excommunicate you is worse Is it Look I never said it was fair I d like it to 95 everynight darrenjames be fair but that s not up to me My job is to keep the sc
3. As always Calvin was right and he knew it There was no room left in his assurance for argument or doubt Still That s a nice lengthy explanation Calvin but if you d been paying attention I was paying attention he told her No you weren t you were staring out the win dow I was doing both You can t do both you can t pay attention to me and watch the kids at recess at the same time I wasn t watching the kids at recess I was reading The teacher inflated stiffly How can you be reading while you re looking out the window And that was a rhetorical question But Calvin answered it anyway There s graf fiti on the wall down there It reads fuck the cubs they suck except suck is misspelled as S U K The teacher s face went red Out Go to the principal s office Right now Why Why Because I told you to Go Now Calvin regarded her in the way in which every one always regarded him shrugged and left 00110110 The principal regarded him oddly too But only be cause he had no idea who the kid was He looked through a file cabinet until he found one for Hamlet Calvin He tossed the file on the desk and sat down again looking it through and glancing up at Calvin You ve never been in here before he said 88 everynight darrenjames Yes I know The principal blinked Calvin
4. The light went green She pulled out and moved on down the sidestreet Hey she prompted Yeah What do you suppose my mental age is I dunno Twentysomething I don t know I m asking what you think Twentysomething Twenty three to twenty five You manage to keep your mouth closed if you re not talking and things register with you pretty quick You re at least above average Is that good It s not bad Half of America have IQs below a hundred Yours might be in the one twenties Huh Why I don t want you to think I m dumb I don t think you re dumb Good He regarded her oddly for a moment before glancing out the window Ah shit stop She hit the brakes instinctively screeching to a halt She gaped at him nervous Sorry That s my house He pointed to a small one bedroom off to the right Oh God I thought you saw a deer or some thing In Chicago Or something Nope Just that s where I live Oh Lisa seemed oddly preoccupied to him sad maybe Well he began reaching into the back of her Celica to grab his backpack and pull it through between the seats Um She nodded still looking sad He set the back pack between his feet and waited for a moment You okay She nodded slowly pushing her hair back out of her face Then s
5. Everywhere It s an old thing from decades He did the graffiti with the guy poking his nose and fingers over the wall was said Oh Yeah That was Kilroy I always thought it like some fucked up Fraggle or something He smirked sympathetically at her Anyway she asked Where do you live Down this road I 11 let you know She shrugged Okay Big plans tonight he asked No she said instantly Why You look like you re waiting for something She thought about it No not really she more hesitantly Oh Okay Were you waiting for something Nope Okay Okay They drove Left at the next light he said She nodded and thumped the indicator riding the line as it snaked over into a middle lane and slowing at the red light Woulda been a long walk she said Yeah They ve got some problem with fourteen year olds driving themselves No one knows why Can you drive Sure It s easy Ironically I m better at it 18 everynight darrenjames than eighty five percent of the licensed drivers out there Eighty five percent Exactly Yup The speed limits are set up so that the lower eighty five percent can handle them without wrecking I can go a lot faster than thirty five or forty on these roads But which of us has a licence The laws of this country stagger me
6. Right And say nine hundred forty one by three hundred sixty eight Three forty six two eighty eight Calvin produced eyes lazily surveying something off to his right So you re capable of the work Who isn t Calvin asked dryly What was that number again Three hundred forty six thousand two hundred eighty eight Murray grabbed a small calculator from his desk and punched in 941 X 368 The screen told him what Calvin had 346288 He shook his head in wonder and set the calculator down You said you could handle charts up to a thousand What s that mean Like you can calculate No I memorised the chart That s amazing Thanks I think No really that s extraordinary You know how rare that is To be able to memorise a spreadsheet like that I ve got an idea how rare it is There might be a thousand of us who can do it Are you proud of that To be so like elite Calvin looked at him for the first time since he d come in No Not at all It makes me weird Like a freak maybe Listen Always You re not a freak okay Believe me I was a smart kid too Not as smart as you are and that s weird to admit but smart enough that I can empathise with your situation Plight Exactly plight I wasn t sure you knew the word I know most of them now There are a few chemi
7. Armed with the palmtop he d ventured out into the world It wasn t a massive step he never got very far The mall was nearby restaurants were within a mile or two of home standalone shops convenience stores booksellers and such were within easy reach And with the palmtop he was able to literally stop walking open the thing up stab the spacebar to turn it on and type in whatever idea had arrived to buzz about his head It was a hell of a lot more efficient than trying to remember enough of the idea to have it all return when he finally got to a solid surface on which to place his Spiral and UniBall the idea into immortality The palmtop wasn t quite a real computer Or it was but it lacked some of the modern macros com mon to the Dell It had no spellcheck it couldn t be forced to justify the text to the left and right mar gins it didn t have any sort of hyphenator or the saurus That latter wasn t a big concern Calvin wasn t much for thesauri he knew all the words he was likely to use and seeing a list of loosely re lated terms usually just erased the initial idea from his head In any case it didn t matter too much he 100 everynight darrenjames could EMail whatever he wrote from the palmtop to the Dell and clean it up with the larger word processor at his leisure 00111100 He sat at the mall absorbing the penultimate volume of The Green Mile The clerk down at WaldenBooks had been resis
8. Lisa Nineteen Other car Lisa Identified Identified Identified dead How much wood could a woodchuck burn Calvin Hamlet was fourteen years old when he became an adult 33 everynight darrenjames 34 everynight darrenjames 00011100 Diatribes on the wall down there HOW MUCH WOOD COULD A RABBIT BURN KILROY WAS THERE 00011101 Kilroy had been fourteen years old when he d become an adult Eighteen years Eighteen fleeting ye He d been right about that the seco Pr fourteen years of his life had flashed by It ate t been an easy life by any means but it had happened and it had happened quickly 2013 had arrived without brak ing and slammed into him like a Cutlass Supreme into a Celica That had been four years ago that had been yesterday Kilroy was thirty two years old Kilroy was timeless He lit a Dunhill and looked out the window again Jolly old 00011110 He d outgrown America before he d outgrown the Adi he d been wearing that night There was nothing for himthere Nothing but memories of fire Memories Recorded live das ef t 35 everynight darrenjames He turned away from the streets of London and returned to his laptop He pondered the blank screen Wordless He be gan to type just to get used to typing maybe It was a dark and stormy He deleted the line instantly It was neither dark nor stormy It was old and sad It was over It was over It was
9. Okay so when I was what nine and a half Yeah you re right That wasn t all that long ago I guess I suppose the next fourteen years will fly by Calvin lamented I 1ll be twenty eight all of a sudden and wonder how it happened that fast Ick I ll be thirty eight in twice my life That s old huh Chronologically maybe he said I don t really follow chronology It doesn t quite fit me I go by mental age What s the difference she asked The difference is that while I m literally fourteen I m mentally a lot older I took an IQ test in school My mental age is almost forty already Like your brain is forty Almost I know the amount of useless informa tion that the average forty year old knows 17 everynight darrenjames Wow So you re like a genius or something Yeah I m a genius or something But I dress better than most of them She laughed again So have you got a name or what that ago Calvin Calvin Like Calvin and Hobbes Yeah Exactly like Calvin and Hobbes Except s not the idea behind the name Oh My middle name is Klein You re joking No but I think maybe Mom was So you don t go by Calvin Klein Nope Calvin Cal Kilroy Kilroy As in Kilroy was here Kilroy was where
10. You should see the things he can draw If it ends in saurus he can tell you what it was when it lived and who found it when and even what all those names mean in English He doesn t really like people too much That last was a disclaimer A sort of apology It usually came just after someone had taken her up on her offer to test her or ganic little calculator out or ask him what he knew about velocirap tors Calvin wasn t oversheltered or fragile by any account it wasn t precisely xenophobia he just didn t like strangers much And they were a strangers Jenny didn t understand it Couldn t She liked people well enough and short of admonishing that candy shouldn t come from strangers had never suggested to Calvin that people were at all rancorous Still he avoided them And not insultingly He was just quiet she supposed he preferred to be alone he wasn t the life of the party She had no way of knowing no reason to suspect that there was a physiological basis for his proclivities She d seen RainMan a few years before but had never thought to compare Cal vin to Dustin Hoffman After all Raymond in the film had been an autistic n e idiot savant And Calvin was clearly a genius He d never once ranted and raved about things like KMart or toothpicks It would be later in the year when Asperger Syndrome would finally be accepted as a real disorder Meanwhile Calvin s ninth birthday loomed on the horizon and he was f
11. ll let you know You still doing okay Mostly Got a cigarette Um yeah How old are you Fourteen You Nineteen You smoke at fourteen How old were you when you started 10 everynight darrenjames Um thirteen So are we in sanctimonious waitress mode or charitable waitress mode today ah Lisa I didn t give this to you she said rolling a Marlboro Light from her palm down her fingers and across the table to rest against the side of the palmtop And I didn t thank you for it Calvin added a coy smirk on his unlined face You don t act fifteen y know Fourteen Chronologically anyway Mentally I m probably too old for you She laughed and seemed to really notice the palmtop for the first time Are you online she asked shocked Yeah Until one of the batteries dies any way Batteries There s the one in the palmtop which isn t too bad the one on the phone might last another twenty minutes He turned the phone so he could see its screen There were two bars left on the main bat tery the auxiliary battery had emptied thirty min utes earlier Wow Yeah Calvin told her casually lighting his new Cigarette Science marches on Are you rich or something He refreshed the screen again twenty four bucks thirty six minutes Not at this rate He killed the con
12. ting a manuscript for consideration by a regulatable corporation had crumbled beneath the awesome power of the vanity press Anyone could be a writer spending a few thousand dollars on a short run through sites like BookCrafters com or even outsourcing his con tent free of upfront investment to Print on Demand sites realworld booksellers were dying and online services like amazon com were rising from the ashes like the protohuman shrews had risen from the car casses of the deinosaurs An idea a computer a modem a novelist a producer a distributor Most of the micropublishers failed lacking the knowledge of marketing strategy these housewives and accountants could write the books but had no idea how to sell them others had the Ba Korou in Sales and were able to peddle their novels as they peddled their vacuums and used cars but had no tal ent for conveying their stories yet some excelled stooping to innovation and even deceit And they were all untouchable There were regulations of course defamation was met with lawsuits from the damaged But for the most part the new breed of writer was unopposed by the powers that be There was no such thing as bad publicity after all And nothing about writing printing and marketing a novel was technically ille gal Initially At the same time the internet was evolvin into a capacious mass of disinformation and copyrigh infringement Fact and fiction looked alike in hyper
13. By day he was Calvin Hamlet Britainised Nov elist Extraordinaire and author of nearly a score of books by night every night Kilroy was here Diatribes on the walls down there Everywhere 42 everynight darrenjames 00100111 He d been an accomplished hacker back in 1999 The net hadn t changed so much A clean laptop here a borrowed SatPhone there and Kilroy wrote for the world uploading his Subversive tales and postulates to established and regulated websites throughout the Land of the Fee and the Home of the Slave Their efforts to trace his re sidual IP Address led them in circles literally around the globe from satellite to satellite There were thousands of the things up there running every thing from Unix to WindowsNT to QNX confusing the Signal at every junction And triangulating his tem porary SatPhones was flatly impossible He was online for a matter of minutes his custom scripted software Spamming his ASCII to thousands of popular websites simultaneously a moment later offline again he would dismantle the phones and discard their remains throughout the megalopolis of London 00101000 He regarded the laptop for a moment Then Kilroy Was Here Calvin Hamlet 43 everynight darrenjames Kilroy Was Here Calvin Hamlet Indicia Written and Designed and Edited by Calvin Hamlet Kilroy Was Here Copyright 2017 Calvin Hamlet This is a work of fiction All char
14. She beamed I told you you re not dumb Her smile died I feel dumb Most of the 23 everynight darrenjames time Usually a sign of intelligence It s the dumb ones who think they re all smarter than each other She regarded the pack of cigarettes on the ta ble and took two of them out lighting them and hand ing one to Calvin Thanks Hey you re old enough to know better I guess I guess She stared at him thinking What What else are you old enough for she asked I dunno he said shrugging Try me 00010111 Here it is she announced reaching in and flicking the lightswitch illuminating the small flat as she hurried in ahead of him I m kinda between roommates right now so there s no one to whisper for You sure you don t have to be home yet Mom doesn t care he said pushing the door shut and analysing the locks before turning them I doubt her life changes much whether I m there or not That s really sad Lisa said pulling her coat off It s to be expected She s only Don t tell me I don t want to find out I m closer to her age than yours His eyes flashed up left up right up left You re not We re practically twins She s that old No But she s older than you are Older enough Lisa groaned and sat heavily on her sofa This i
15. Some thing to remind him that time could be wasted Time could be wasted For all the technological advances since the construction of the pyramids the number of hours available in a day had never exceeded twenty four Choppy Disassociated Less than graceful But a good start He could fix it later if he had to Still it served its purpose for the moment it gave him a po sition from which to begin He could work with that He sat back and considered where he was going with the idea Time was static Even as the technology curve escalated nothing took any less time per day than it always had And that was boring More interesting might be a story regarding the curve itself Or more likely a character who was trying to keep up with For all the technological advances since the construction of the pyramids the number of hours available in a day had never exceeded twenty four Highlighted and replaced blah And again CHR was a 53 everynight darrenjames Stop He needed a name not just character CHR Chris Chris was a A Chris couldn t keep up anymore Better Chris couldn t keep up any longer Better still But Chris couldn t keep up with the world around him Or Chris couldn t keep up with the world around her Which was also an option And an interesting angle Chris couldn t keep up with the world Chris could remain a nicely androgynous character a sort of g
16. stant that she d landed on Earth Some sixteen years after Neil Armstrong had taken a small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind Jenny had taken a gar gantuan hurdle for herself She d named him Calvin Calvin Klein She knew who Daddy Klein had been there hadn t really been that many contestants on The Kid is Yours nine months before But Daddy Klein had been the good Mister Adult Klein nearly twenty by the time Calvin had made his grand entrance into the world And if she d narced Daddy Klein out he d likely have become Convict Klein So Daddy Klein had been one of the kids in school if anyone had needed to know Which one in particular had been nei ther important nor easily determined It hadn t been much of a defence Even in those days before genetic testing had become globally available there had been blood tests Then again blood tests were merely an alibi they couldn t prove guilt but only innocence And without a list of suspects from which to narrow it down they d still have been left with a number of possible culprits just by statistical breakdown She could have named Daddy Klein nailed him to the wall sued for child support wrecked his life and hers and Calvin s She hadn t Daddy Klein was blissfully unaware of his progeny Jenny was excruciatingly informed Paula Hamlet had been remarkably supportive about it all Her insurance covered most of the costs involving the pregnancy and the rest ha
17. who hadn t understood them at all So he d picked a com pany roughly at random and plotted out the most probable course over the following month he d posted that on the fridge A month later he d printed out the actual mapping of the corporation s activity and it had matched almost exactly That had gotten Jenny s attention and she d let him propose a couple of small investments That had been in July of 1995 Nearly a year later Jenny had supplanted her income by over seventy percent It was her money 99 everynight darrenjames which had been initially invested and Calvin s pat terns which had produced the surplus they spilt the proceeds Calvin s half was stored away in a separate account which he couldn t technically access though the money was essentially his to use If he wanted something he d bounce it off Jenny she d consider it and either buy it for him with his half or deny the request She rarely denied him anything the only denial in recent memory had been a paintball rifle simply because he wasn t old enough to play on a real range and she hadn t wanted him sniping people walk ing down the front sidewalk That hadn t been his in tention but he understood her logic and let it go concentrating instead on the acquisition of a palmtop computer which he could take with him wherever he went She allowed for that purchase and he had the HP320LX in less than a week 00111011
18. 9 everynight darrenjames the same time of day but on different days so the compact disc he d happened across had nearly twenty five hours left to meet its twenty dollar reserve and the ageing Epson printer he d been donated had nearly fifty hours left to reach its fifty dollar re serve the printer was already up to forty five so he was likely to finish up there with sixty or so He returned to the war for the card Twenty four bucks thirty nine minutes left hopper429 must have given up Pity 00001010 The waitress slowed at his booth grabbing his cof feepot and shaking it decisively Okay on coffee Kiddo she asked Yup he said eyes on the screen You know it s getting dark out there Calvin glanced up at her and out the window Oh Okay He glanced back at her for a moment be fore returning to the palmtop Your mother know you re here Calvin rolled his eyes surreptitiously Yeah So you ve got a ride Calvin looked up at her Is this a hint A hint You lost me Calvin shook his head at the palmtop Usually questions like that preface the old been here quite a while speech The waitress grinned Been here quite a while haven t you About two hours Yeah You want me to split Calvin asked looking at her again She grinned again and glanced at the half empty smoking section Not an emergency I
19. I think That is I knew the real answer which conflicted with her perception of the answer And that created a problem for her be cause she s supposed to be the expert not me So here I am What was the bit about the graffiti Someone wrote Fuck the Cubs they suck mis spelled on the wall outside my window The principal nodded And you read it aloud I told her what I d been reading while listen ing to her She seemed to want me to tell her to prove that I was doing both at once She d underesti mated my abilities and assumed that like most of the kids in this school I couldn t read one thing and listen to another simultaneously 89 everynight darrenjames So you know what you did wrong Yes What did you do wrong vI overestimated the intelligence of my teacher The principal nodded again and jammed Calvin s file into the main drawer of his desk Not quite the answer I was looking for Is there a more correct one The principal opened his mouth to say some thing but then closed it and shook his head Cal vin listen you may be right about overestimating and underestimating and ain t and all But there are things you ll encounter in life that you re go ing to have to learn to adapt to the you can t just go around correcting people like that you ve got to try tocfit in Why Because Y
20. Mom lt CENTER gt lt BODY gt lt HTML gt That s how you get it to happen he told her Looks difficult she said It s not Now watch this he suggested typing in a couple of new lines lt FONT FACE Arial SIZE 4 gt lt B gt lt I gt Hi Mom lt I gt lt B gt lt FONT gt And Hi Mom 79 everynight darrenjames See She thought maybe she did You added something to make the lettering change and made it italic and bold And a little bigger yeah And that s worth a hundred an hour Not on its own but there are a lot more codes And they re making more all the time So I ll have more to learn soon She stood up straight again and regarded him from above It was another scary moment for her He d just turned nine When shed been nine she couldn t remember anymore but it sure as hell hadn t been writing in some weird alien language with two hundred fifty six different letters and making a Franklin per hour to do it That was like eight hundred bucks a day Four grand a week Sixteen a month As much in a month as she made in a year Then again she didn t speak Computerese Sixteen a month was one eighty a year Six figures Six fucking figures Nine years old Scary fucking kid It occurred to her for a fleeting instant to wonder what Benefit Four might have turned out to be In the next instant she decided she might be happier nev
21. been an established household name Not quite the most famous writer on the planet he hadn t quite surpassed Stephen King and Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy but he was doing well for himself by any estimation A dozen best sellers an estimated annual salary in excess of eight million dollars American He d had the gett assets and the malpractise insurance He d one nearly everything correctly Nearly Until he d slipped an innocuous passage into a novel Every night before sleep write a book I cannot keep 00100101 It hadn t been any sort of a code or even a direct reproach of the newly implemented laws It had in fact been largely autobiographical Calvin had been Speaking through an insomniac character who would lay awake for hours before sleep finally came In those hours his thoughts would wander The thoughts would arrange into plotlines stories and even entire nov els Then sleep would take him and the idea would be lost to the implacable weirdness of his dreams The point the character had wanted to be a writer but couldn t write when he d had the time to His ideas had been like flies buzzing about and mad 41 everynight darrenjames dening him until he d actually get to the necessary materials to process theminto something more stable by which time they d have flown off into nothingness again The point simple though it had been had been missed entirely by the idiots who had accused him o
22. could imagine the cracker forming a sardonic grin though he couldn t see it he could almost hear the grin Cain was enjoying this A lot Finally Cain responded Mac What a ah surprise Yeah Chris agreed not heartily Listen gave your offer a bit more thought Thought you might Oh Man you lowtechs are all the same you know that Every damned wonna ya Terrified of what the world is becoming and powerless to change it without becoming exactly what you fear It s not a matter of fear Oh but it is It scares you scare you But without me that s all you are is scared With me you might just get what you re after still don t get it Chris said I need you to get this to happen What s your incentive to help mean isn t it a bit like suicide To help defeat 66 everynight darrenjames Technophobe Calvin Hamlet Mac Open line Always an open line Always more than two listening to the conversation Cain sounded overly cautious even paranoid but Chris was beginning to believe that just because you re paranoid it doesn t mean they re not after you Okay Where can we talk Not here that s for sure Lincoln Park What Why Big open area with lots of people Even a sniper would be crazy to hit us there A what A sniper would be crazy to hit us at all We haven t broken
23. couldn t figure them out at all They wanted him to dial the number before he dropped in the money and they didn t require money he had the option of charging the call to his MasterCard For a phone call A matter of spare change Who in hell would ever charge a local call to a credit card Probably an effort to produce the cashless society he d heard so much about Worse internet terminals Slide you Master Card through their readers and you could surf the net while standing there as easily as you could use the new payphones unless you had a digital mobile phone in 64 everynight darrenjames Technophobe Calvin Hamlet which case you could just connect your laptop to your StarTac and surf from the backseat of your car He walked on wanting a cigarette and incapable of smoking one Gumball machines taunted him to buy their gum and watch it do tricks on its way to his hand He didn t want to watch a gumball do tricks he didn t even want any gum He wanted a damned cigarette that s what he wanted He wanted it to be yesterday Again Still Calvin stopped typing and looked it over He spell checked it His laptop hadn t wanted to believe in words like non smoking and cardscanning and StarTac and payphone and gumball but it had learned quickly enough Whether he wanted to believe in the text was another matter He wasn t sure that he liked it much It seemed rushed and choppy And bad It coul
24. flipped through his dictionary He found the word and read its definition Silently to himself Then he snapped the book shut and tossed it back onto the desk stretching You re 98 everynight darrenjames a very bright kid you know that Yeah I get that a lot Really Calvin smirked No Usually I m implored to talk English by the lemmings Lemmings Not very accurate is it in fairness to the lemmings they can find the fucking cliff Murray laughed loudly nodding frantically Officially I didn t just hear ah what the hell school s out Calvin nodded back School s out So long Kiddo So long Teacher Calvin stood and turned away walking casually out of the building as much as inside he really didn t want to leave 00111010 Summer began slowly for Calvin He wasn t really very limited The summer be fore there had been problems Jenny didn t really make enough to support recreational habits like films and sundaes Hadn t made enough That had changed Calvin had begun watching the stock market through wired com and noticed patterns in it Stocks went up and stocks went down on a larger scale they went up a bit down a bit up a bit more down a bit less and so on it was cyclic If no one had ever noticed the patterns then there was something very wrong with the world indeed He d shown the patterns to his mother
25. have the instant gratification The interactive element maybe I want to see it on their faces when the concept clicks in their heads In our heads you mean In mine Yeah In yours Did it Has it I think maybe Maybe so I hope so Yeah I m sure of it actually When I first came to this school back in kindergarten I already knew everything they could teach me out of a book I think I can honestly say that the only thing I ever learned here was what didn t come from books What did you learn here That the world is primarily composed of dumb people and that they re not going to automatically appreciate genius regardless how unfair that may seem so if I want to get anything accomplished at all ever I ve got to factor their expected re sponses into my doings And I know how cynical and sanctimonious that sounds but it s really not Well it s cynical maybe almost sardonic but I m not sure that cynicism is really an opprobrium And I m not really as pharisaic as I may sound I m just acutely aware of what might be perceived as shortcom ings in my thinking Murray grinned Shit he said reaching for his dictionary Was that with an F or a P H What Fari whatsit Far oh pharisaic PHARISAIC Technically of or having to do with the Pharisee The pharaoh Deceiving and unctuous Self righteous Murray was nodding as he
26. is all I m not a stranger Um no I guess not So what am I She shrugged You re Ca Kilroy You like Kil roy over Calvin Sometimes But it s sort of a stranger s name I use it on the net Oh So which do you like Either Both I guess it doesn t matter much 20 everynight darrenjames She looked at the polo in her lap and lifted it up showing him her nametag I m Lisa by the way I know Saw that huh I m just that observant Right She opened her door and got out reaching back in for her purse With the domelight on Calvin was able to find the door handle and he and his backpack followed her and her purse into the lobby of the res taurant 00010101 Hey Lisa the hostess greeted as they met at the podium Little brother A friend she returned Calvin Oh Hi Calvin the hostess said in the way adults talk to kids slowly and a little more loudly overenunciating and stooping a bit He regarded her dryly obviously used to being misidentified as an idiot Good evening he said We desire a hutch in the carcinogenic zone with the utmost impetuosity The hostess recoiled Um oh kay She looked back to Lisa Two for what smoking I guess Yeah Lisa said trying to remain stolid Please The hostess grabbed a pair of menus glanced at
27. it work Yeah It s about maxed but it works How could it work if the computers think it expired in nineteen hundred Um hey Yeah So the computers aren t the problem So what s the problem People Only four percent of the electronic money is represented by physical cash So people are already beginning to withdraw their physical cash from the ATMs It won t take long for the ATMs to run out of money so the American government will have to make more physical cash If you make more physical cash physical cash becomes worth less So now no one has enough cash to buy what they need Okay So then what raise minimum wage Okay let s do that You make about three bucks an hour without tips right Yeah Two something Just enough to cover taxes Okay Bad example Say minimum wage is raised so everyone has more money We ll raise it to say 22 everynight darrenjames ten bucks an hour Good idea Fine with me Okay Now you ve got X number of people work ing for you all expecting eighty bucks a day You have to raise your prices to make enough profit to pay them Now even though they re making ten bucks an hour like they thought they wanted that ten bucks will buy a twelvepack of Coke So now what raise minimum wage again Raise it to twenty an hour And pretty soon a case of Coke will be twenty bucks raise it again and
28. like that to read it was there really a point to it at all After all there were film rights he d read all about those but before a film was proposed the book had to do reasonably well with rare exceptions If the world in general were waiting on the damned film then who was going to read the novel to think that the story would translate well to celluloid to greenlight the project to make the film in the first place And what in hell was the advantage really of celluloid Never in the history of Hollywood had a film been better than the novel from which it had 102 everynight darrenjames been adapted The only times he d read a book which was worse than the film had been those unfortunate instances in which he d read the novelisation Nov elisations weren t books they were expounded film scripts And let s not forget the little tangents that the hacks tossed in to hit the fabled three hundred page mark Characterx left the scene you saw in the film and went off to do this that and the other distraction thinking about stuff which you couldn t see the actor having done had this piece of shit scene ever been filmed Novelisations were tired excuses for unknown writers to become published Cal vin would have rather worked at Quizno s reading a novel over the course of a month than ever nov elising someone else s plotline It wasn t writing it was transcribing badly He wasn t transcribing
29. nodded again Go I have to think about this Okay He grabbed his backpack and opened the door I 11 see you tomorrow okay Okay He began to get out then leaned in toward her again Don t she said People will see It s two in the morning I know but Okay I 11 just see you tomorrow then okay Okay she said smiling again So long Woodchuck So long Kilroy He nodded and backed out of the Toyota swing ing the door shut firmly but quietly She waved through the window he waved back 27 everynight darrenjames the Celica started off down the street Hoisting his backpack onto his shoulder he stood and watched her go When she reached the four way stop at the end of his street he began to walk up the path to his front door He heard the Toyota start off again at the stop sign then he heard its brakes chip and he looked back just in time to see an old Cutlass Supreme run the stop slamming into the Toyota at fifty miles per hour The sound of the impact came half a second af ter the sight adding a surrealism to it all The Toyota gave easily to the Oldsmobile piv oting on its rear wheels before connecting with the curb the frame collapsing under the pressure the bonnet rising like mountains at the edges of collid ing tectonic plates the Cutlass scooped the front of the Toyota off the ground and slid beneath it flip ping t
30. over before it had even begun A dumb Ameri can kid in a dumb American town He deleted that too It had all become hopeless His licence to kill had been revoked His licence to kill Deleted His licence to create Deleted His licence to write Deleted Fuck His licence to write His licence to record His licence to communi cate His licence 00011111 It had come as no surprise he supposed It had begun even before he d been born They d been working on it for decades Centuries maybe Ever since they d written the amendment in the first place Hays had censored Betty Boop The Motion Pic ture Association of America had created the Rating System GA NR G PG R X PG13 NC17 Beavis had been prohibited from acknowledging the existence of fire South Park and Saturday Night Live had been de clawed Dalton Trumbo had been banned and Mark Twain had been criminalised The attack had come in laughable seemingly be 36 everynight darrenjames nign waves The churches had argued against the prod ucts of Marilyn Manson and Kevin Smith The FCC had regulated George Carlin and Howard Stern and Eric ManCow Muller The PTA had counterattacked KISS and Slipknot in the schools CNN had shown the American people and indeed the world exactly what they d wanted to see As the iron hand of censorship had begun to constrict technology had come to the rescue with desktop publishing The archaic practise of submit
31. were something to be hoped for in a 51 everynight darrenjames case of superior intellect Maybe so Maybe he d have been happier if he d been as dumb as the others They seemed happy enough after all They didn t have to regard the world as an ata vistic disgrace They didn t have to watch each other wage those ostentatious little contentions day in and day out among idiots it hardly seemed important which of them was the least dumb Idiots condemning idiots for being idiots trip the light bombastic The hell with them Two percent was better than zero 00101010 He sat in the smoking section shiny new laptop pur chased with the proceeds from such items as illbegot ten Pok mon cards plugged into the electrical outlet he d found next to his booth The cursor blinked expectantly at him Waiting for input The screen was blank So was his mind The Deleted It Deleted He Deleted She Deleted Damn Considered Deleted Blink blink blink blink blink 52 everynight darrenjames His life began the night hers had ended Heh His life had begun the night hers had ended Maybe Maybe not Deleted It wasn t something he could write about Not yet anyway Besides who else would care besides him and he already knew the story well enough There was no need to write it all down anyway He d remem ber He d remember her Lisa Not an obsession A focus Just a focus
32. with more productive activities He began to write It wasn t easy at first The words refused to combine into sentences the sentences resisted becom ing paragraphs the paragraphs were reluctant to be come chapters the chapters in no way wanted to com pile into novels It was a dark and stormy night for months When he tried When he wasn t trying the stories flowed eas ily and quickly and without bounds Every night before he slept he wrote a book But he couldn t hang onto it at all It would metamorphose into a dream and float away into other dreams and be ir revocably erased from his mind by the time he awoke Eventually it began to come together The 50 everynight darrenjames short largely pointless stories sequelised and be came chapters in novel lengthed tales Still the first page was always the hardest to write The first line He would read real published books But those didn t tell him much except that most of them started with articles or pronouns And while there were books and articles written describing how to publish and market a book none of them seemed to mention much about writing novels in the first place Every other vocation seemed to have a prover bial user manual to it He could learn to fix a car or make a salad or sell a house Writing it seemed was not only unteachable but diametric to the sim plified second law of thermodynamics Order from chaos Like a volcanic
33. Calvin oddly and led them wordlessly back to a booth There you go she mentioned laying out the menus as they sat down Coffee she asked Lisa and without waiting for confirmation she asked Cal vin Coke Chocolate milk Coffee please Calvin told her explaining My proclivities toward carbonates and lactates ex ceed those regarding apriorism and obloquy The hostess opened her mouth in illiterate hor ror then forced a meagre smile I ll get your server for you she promised hurrying away Calvin turned to Lisa and smirked 21 everynight darrenjames Fuck me she exhaled He raised his eyebrows questioningly She grinned self consciously and averted her eyes 00010110 The coffee came interrupting them they thanked the waiter assured him that they didn t need anything else just yet and waited for him to go on his way Okay now what s up with the bug Lisa asked It s a hoax Calvin said Mostly There was a problem but that was fixed like twenty years ago No modern computer is going to care when the clocks roll over to two thousand So they re not going to crash Then why is everyone saying they are Have you got a MasterCard or something Um yeah What s the expiration date I dunno She pulled her purse into her lap and located her Visa Eight doublezero August two thousand Okay Does
34. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation Which had precluded the freedom of speech and of the press and of the people 00100011 Two years later in 2013 the Federal Licensing Pro gramme had come into effect Writers artists musicians filmmakers web masters et cetera had been for the sake of sim plicity regarding the new amendment encouraged to apply for a Federal Creative Licence The application was some thirty pages in length The basics liquid assets in excess of ten mil lion American dollars were required by all licensed creators as well as malpractise insurance to guaran tee payment of libel suits as well as logues submit ted regarding hours spent creating a minimum of two hours per week and a maximum of forty as well as di vul ged expendit ures relative to creating and so on Truly established household names had been able to remain in business the majority of novelists po ets actors and such had been forced to find new forms of employment Some had gone quietly viewing their inability 40 everynight darrenjames to gather the necessary liquid assets as personal failure in their industries Others went into hiding Kilroy had gone into hiding 00100100 It Deleted Blank And wordless And pointless Kilroy sat back and glared at the laptop igno miniously fromthe sides of his eyes He d never been a housewife or an accountant He had at the time
35. His life was beginning to end Or his life was going to change Either way life as he knew it had outlived its usefulness 00001000 Calvin Hamlet was fourteen years old when he became an adult everynight darrenjames 00001001 At first glance he was a kid sitting in a booth in the smoking section of the restaurant playing with one of those organiser thingys with a keyboard a mo bile phone sat nearby waiting for a call perhaps But the palmtop was an old HP660LX its flashcard mo dem was connected to the Motorola StarTac 7762 Cal vin Hamlet was online watching rather a humble bid ding war take place on eBay com Too humble In the final hour of the auction the three remaining bidders had been inching toward the reserve by merely a dollar at a time Calvin drummed his fingers impatiently against his temple and refreshed the screen Fifty two minutes remain ing reserve marginally met a dollar here a dollar there Slow day out there in AsciiLand He scrolled down on the small panoramic screen The palmtops were a dying breed now They d once been pretty big and might be big again in the future Now the sublaptops were grabbing the type as you surf hackers and the PalmPilots were cater ing to the touch and read users The SixSixty s bat tery outlived those of the sublaptops made by Sony and Toshiba though its rechargeable bank didn t last quite as long as the doubleAs had in the old Three Twenties then agai
36. Hulk just before mentioning something characteristically brainy in his husky voice Calvin had been only five the look he gave her and the huskiness in his voice had been far older It s a rerun he d told her The look and the certainty had left no room for doubt he was right and he knew it What Her voice had been less than steady and her throat less than humid This happened before he d told her in Viet Nam They televised it back then too She d blinked understanding but missing the point at the same time They showed them what they wanted them to see Who she d said Who showed who They Them The people who film the news They showed the audience what they wanted the audience to see She hadn t fully understood that either Well yeah that s their job No it s not Their job is to report the news That had made even less sense to her Right They re not reporting the news they re reporting what they want the audience to think is the news Either Jenny or Calvin misunderstood something very impor tant She hadn t been sure which of them she d hoped it was either 73 everynight darrenjames Calvin had regarded her with taxed patience They re making things up he d told her again right again certain They re saying that one thing s going on when they should be talking about the other thing What other thing she d heard hers
37. Lisa is his mother told him I want to take you over there to the ambulance and make sure you re not hurt Okay Mom Are you hurt Is anything numb I m okay I m just concerned about Lisa Okay Me too I m sure she s fine wherever she is But let s make sure you re okay before we go find her c mon All right 00011010 He floated toward the red and blue lights on feet he could no longer feel or even remember clearly The rest flew by buzzing like schizophrenic flies re fusing to land Someone asked how he felt cold wet glass and the smell of soap hands on his throat one side and the other told to breathe asked if he felt okay Juice He drank orange juice The night grew dark and cold The fire was gone 31 everynight darrenjames Still people ran past him A blanket was on his shoulders A cart rattled by Something misty and grey floated just above it And another And a third And his juice was gone And people were crying and talking and whispering and postulating and it was all over now and there was nothing more to see Something lashed out at him grabbing him and trying to pull him back down Calvin Let s go back inside now okay Okay Mom Voices out there in Fleeting Colour Land Did anyone whole thing the initial wreck but I saw miracle he s alive did you see know whose faul
38. a ride anywhere Me he asked blinking Yeah you Um I guess maybe I mean I haven t got one I walked here Getting cold out there now she added Tell me about it Sure If you re okay with it sure She grinned You re probably not going to like kill me and take my car right Not in that order anyway She laughed Le me grab my coat 16 everynight darrenjames 00010011 Even in the car they could see their breath It takes a few minutes for the heater to show up she apologised grinding the stick into first and sneering at it Short year she added Hmmm Calvin prompted Ninety nine One minute they re playing Prince ten times an hour and the next it s October Yeah Time doubles Doubles Sure It speeds up as you get older Think about it One day you re five then you re ten And you notice that the second half didn t take as long as the first half did I m fourteen now but seven doesn t feel much like half my life ago Maybe ten percent Never thought about it that way Lisa told him Me neither On the other hand I don t even remember anything before three It s like I didn t even become self aware until I was three Still the four years between three and seven seem a lot longer than the seven years between seven and fourteen Lisa pondered that for a moment
39. acters and institutions herein are products of the author s imagination or are used in an en tirely fictional manner any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical without written permission from the author Published by Calvin Hamlet Knightsbridge London UK ISBN TBD 44 everynight darrenjames Kilroy Was Here eee ee Calvin Hamlet for 45 everynight darrenjames Kilroy Was Here Calvin Hamlet blank 46 everynight darrenjames Kilroy Was Here Calvin Hamlet Preface 1 Every night before sleep write a book cannot keep Everynight Kilroy is here Kilroy was rather above the indignity of regulation 47 everynight darrenjames 48 everynight darrenjames 00101001 Calvin Hamlet was fifteen years old when he dropped out of school He d put up with it as long as he d felt able to The coursework was easy enough too easy It wasn t that at all It was simply an inability to em pathise even sympathise with them The others The world Lisa remained in his mind Not an obsession but a focus Life he d discovered was short Life was fragile Life could be far better spent than by sitting in a classroom with the alpha group who were able to find their ways to school that day The school and p
40. ame ones Mostly Ah They sat in silence Finally Murray nodded to himself Okay hit me with the long version Calvin exhaled It s not your fault I know that much Okay Glad to hear that much I also realise that the average ten year old isn t qualified to determine his future Ah Le me guess reluctance to conform again Something like that I m a writer I write I have a working knowledge of differential calculus and no need for it in life even still this inexora ble assloaf refuses to accept that my time could be spent more wisely than regurgitating multiplication tables day in and day out So here I am Again You know the multiplication tables then We ve met One through twelve two four six eight ten twelve fourteen sixteen eighteen twenty twenty two twenty four three six nine Murray sat back letting Calvin finish He was actually somewhat fascinated by it all one twenty eleven twenty two thirty three forty four fifty five sixty six seventy 91 everynight darrenjames seven eighty eight ninety nine one eleven one twenty two twelve twenty four thirty six forty eight sixty seventy two eighty four ninety six one hundred eight one twenty Their chart stops at twelve by twelve but I can handle charts up to a thousand squared What s a thousand squared A million
41. and Paula had got into a fight he hadn t understood and he d been carted off to a new city just as he was beginning to figure out the politics of kindergarten Since then he d been here in Chicago Jenny 6 everynight darrenjames had picked Chicago for its size and notoriety He d been born in Marietta Georgia just outside Atlanta He d since become a solid Yank watching his Cubs lose again and again to the Braves 00000111 At the age of fourteen his life was already begin ning to end He wasn t dumb he knew what was going on out there Half the kids he knew in school would drop out before senior year He might well be one of them It wasn t a matter of grades he understood the brainless information he was fed it was a matter of reason There was no reason at all Five years ahead of him dropouts and graduates worked side by side at McDonald s and Burger King and Pizza Hut Five years ahead of them the graduates of the University of Chicago were the supervisors in the same restaurants And five years further on those twice Calvin s age were finally moving into McManagement Unless he was missing something there was no incentive at all to do what he was told There were laws against certain things but nothing seemed to reward him for going along with the undocumented wishes of society If there was a point to any of it he hadn t got that memo He was alive and living in Shytown No less no more
42. any Conspiracy to conspire Cain said Not a real crime but they don t pay much attention to details like those Cain Yeah Man Who are they They Cain told him are Them Them is They We are Us and They are Them That didn t help much Lincoln Park An hour Chris wanted to respond even to confirm But the line went dead There was no instant dialtone like in the movies it just ceased to make any noise He set the odd grippy receiver into the weird counterbalanced cradle and walked quickly away from the phone Calvin saved it spellchecked and hyphenated it and saved it again he read it over and nodded to him self He d left the mall It was far too SmokeFree for really effective writing That he assumed had been the problem earlier Without nicotine the brain went wild smoke a cigarette and things calmed down in there Organisation Rationality Novelisation He read it again Now his story had a point and a few characters and a bit of potential after all He glanced at the lower right of the screen It astounded him Pg97 97 67 everynight darrenjames That of course included the title page and the in dicia and so on it also included the story he d be gun the night before He was onto something here Whether it would prove to be something useful in the end he didn t know yet but it was something either way He
43. as learning to presume Most adults he d found really didn t know much more than the kids they hoped to teach While you re probably expecting the correct answer to reflect the inexistence of the colloquialism ain t the word is in fact viable Huh the teacher asked The word ain t is a contraction for am I not which was later replaced by they equally incor rect aren t I That is the subject I is singu lar and can t be represented by the plural verb are Factoring that the term am I not is more correct But while the original contraction was Yamn t it was difficult to pronounce and easily confused so the term was recontracted to ain t by dropping the M as well ain t is literally am minus the M plus I plus the contracted N apostro phe T ain t am I not In that context the word is viable however the terms we ain t and even I 87 everynight darrenjames ain t are incorrect the first because the singular ain t conflicts with the plural we and the lat ter because the full uncontracted sentence would read as I am I not which fails to make any sense So the only real way the word could be used would be in a case like ain t here or am I not here which would be rare enough to allow the vernacular understanding of the word ain t to be that of a nonexistant word
44. badly he also wasn t writing He was watching the cursor blink and blink and blink and blink and blink He shut the palmtop off and set it atop his finished copy of The Green Mile 5 Slurping the very last nanolitres of soda from the cardboard glass he grabbed the computer and the book and walked away from the table He just wasn t a writer that day he supposed 00111110 Calvin struggled with it for years It wasn t that he couldn t write it was that he didn t write He thought that probably he was able to write but for whatever reason it just wasn t happening for him He wrote things it wasn t a lack of trying But the things he wrote sucked In his objective assessment sucked A lot Which was oddly encourag ing to him if he was able to spot a story sucking then he d also probably notice when one failed to suck Whether that ever happened was another matter but he at least thought he might know the difference if it were to show up on his palmtop someday He was able to determine whether other people s stuff sucked Novelisations of second rate films 103 everynight darrenjames sucked without question real novels by real au thors failed to suck He wanted to be a real author with real novels For whatever reason he just wasn t able yet to produce anything which failed to suck And he wasn t at all certain why he couldn t do it He knew what he wanted to have happen he want
45. book was nothing more than a pen and a notebook or a palmtop and a printer and a month or two of inordinate amounts of free time 00001111 He d heard about the history of publishing Authors writing entire novels in pencil on legal pads or em bedding ink into onionskin on old Underwoods leaving the typesetter to figure out how the thing should be printed Strikeouts to be dodged margins to be aligned spelling to be corrected the author s job had become a lot easier in recent years but his job description had become a lot longer Not that it concerned him much Writer or not he was a budding control freak He preferred the ability to typeset and spellcheck his stuff in a word processor over the simplicity of handing it over to some unseen editor and hoping for the best And it was all less than relevant anyway he wasn t a novel ist he was a fourteen year old kid in a restaurant at sunset with a palmtop to monitor the sale of his stolen Pok mon card and a disquieting lack of swatable ideas on hand 00010000 He groaned guietly at the palmtop and shut it off 14 everynight darrenjames pushing it away and pulling the hardcover out of his backpack Hearts in Atlantis by the good Mister King He d got through Part One the night before and peeked at Part Two in which the story seemed to change drastically He d put it off until later not too much later not like abandoning it But later enough that he coul
46. cal and botanical terms I don t use often enough to remember them exactly but the more common if not truly vernacular words are pretty easy to remember 92 everynight darrenjames Anyway I ve been in a similar position to yours I know what you re going through I think You see what I m saying Yeah You re saying that you re fully aware how dumb the average idiot really is but without saying so directly since that would be bad for your career Murray grinned I didn t say that I know I wasn t necessarily thinking that either Not necessarily no But it s possible I was thinking along those general lines Yup Still there will come a point where you ll have to adapt to the lesser mortals out there Cal vin Otherwise you re looking at a very lonely life I d rather be lonely Oh Who needs friends when they re all retarded They re not all retarded Not clinically but they re close enough that it s immaterial Hell they aspire to suck they want to be dumb stupidity is in style Stupid and conta gious Murray laughed and began to croon Nir vana sort of A tomayto a tomahto a potayto a patahto Calvin laughed Something like that yeah We re not all that dumb Man And those who are well I 11 tell you how I always looked at the world but for the dumb hal
47. ckaging and shipping which the high bidder would overpay for once the cheque or money order cleared It could be as much as two weeks before he was past all of this He should have set the reserve for at least thirty Too late now of course If he refused to sell it at any price above twenty he could expect his rating to drop making it more difficult to list any thing again in the future Bad business after all He refreshed again Twenty four bucks forty three minutes remaining Damn Still there was hope the three remaining bid ders were taking sequential turns hopper429 had kicked it to US 22 magition had one upped hopper429 to US 23 and now royalflush had taken the lead set ting the card s value at its current figure hop per429 would probably be next again sweetening the deal up to twenty five Then if magition really wanted the thing he d offer twenty six royalflush would offer twenty seven hopper429 would offer twenty eight it might get up above thirty after all if these three really wanted a war He refreshed again They were still holding at twenty four Forty two minutes remained Calvin shrugged at the screen Whatever Twenty four bucks was about the same as thirty four when there was no invested capital in the deal Pure profit The American Way He abandoned the Pok mon card for a moment shifting over to his other auctions just to have a look at the progress He d listed them all at about
48. computer knows two hundred fifty six different characters and each has a different number from zero through two hundred fifty five If the eight digit code the binary code is for the sake of example zero zero zero one zero zero one one then the result is thirty five Because one twenty eight is off sixty four is off thirty two is on sixteen is off eight is off four is off two and one are on Thirty two plus two plus one is thirty five So now the computer knows that the character represented by 00010011 is equal to thirty five The eight numbers are each one bit all eight bits together are a byte Bytes are used to measure storage on the system itself One byte is one byte ten bytes are a dekabyte a hundred are a hec tobyte a thousand are a kilobyte a million are a megabyte a billion are a gigabyte a trillion are a terabyte And that s moving into im possible figures In 1994 harddrives over a single gigabyte were very rare indeed Bits the solitary zeros and ones within the byte were used to transmit data One number literally followed another along the phonelines Like a number of platoons marching along eight sol diers to a platoon One goes another goes a third goes until eight have moved out then the next platoon follows first the one then the second the third the fourth until all eight of those are away The computers sent over fourteen thousand of the little buggers out per second And that wa
49. d temporarily in RAM or if he d gone ahead and saved it to the drive She could even envision the operation which would have taken place inside his head behind his eyes Save As ORWELL84 NOV She re pressed the shudder before it could surface Not to keep him at all calm she knew but to keep his eyes from hopping creepily back from the dropping marbles and drilling the hell into her soul again She nodded decidedly and locking her eyes on something other than her son walked purposefully out of the room toward a destination to be determined later 85 everynight darrenjames 86 everynight darrenjames 00110101 Diatribes on the wall down there FUCK THE CUBS THEY SUK Calvin read the graffiti from his desk listening to the teacher without looking at her if Calvin were paying attention maybe he could tell us Calvin looked over at her Maybe he agreed You re back the teacher asked I never left Did you want me to answer the question Which question is that Calvin The rhetorical one you just asked Generally rhetorical questions require no answer and are used merely to stimulate thought but in this context it could be directly addressed The teacher regarded him oddly Everyone re garded him oddly Okay so what s the answer That probably depends on how much information you already have Calvin told her It wasn t an in sult it was something he w
50. d be better He wasn t sure how it could be better and he knew it could be worse but it didn t seem quite like what he d been hoping he d wind up writing He read it over again Maybe it wasn t that bad Maybe that wasn t the problem Maybe the problem was the everpresent Now What He had a technophobic protagonist Great And so what He could introduce the character had in fact introduced him Hi there I m Chris McPherson howyadoin And then Now What He had to do some thing or it wouldn t be a story And Calvin couldn t think of a damned thing to have him do The Now What It got him every damned time 65 everynight darrenjames 00101110 Now What ally important how it had gotten that far or even why What mattered to Chris was finding a way to stop it And that meant that he needed Cain after all He returned to the payphone glancing skyward before picking up the handset as if to ask forgiveness from whatever deity might rule in lowtech heaven Then he dialled Cain s number and waited as a computer told him how much change he needed to insert to connect the call He gave the ugly yellow monster a pair of quarters He didn t happen to have exact change with him but he preferred spending an extra fifteen cents over actually feeding the thing his MasterCard Cain he said dryly answering his phone Chris hesitated for a moment Then Hello Cain Cain paused briefly Chris
51. d been covered by Social Services It was all going to be okay everyone had told Jenny with every breath Jenny was one of the founding members of GenerationX She didn t know that in 1985 of course the term was still half a 69 everynight darrenjames decade from being coined But she was the product of a pair of BabyBoomers designating her by birthright to be an inherent slacker and antichristian The syndrome was no more her fault than that of any XMan Paula Hamlet had left and subsequently divorced Chuck Hamlet Paula had joined the workforce losing most of what would eventually be categorised as Quality Time by the marketing divi sions Jenny s life had been little more than school and television The Boomer activities of churchgoing and baseball games and annual trips to Yellowstone were foregone but not missed Paula had always asserted that there was a god up there somewhere but had never done much to point the deity out to Jenny at all Jenny like the majority of XMen had used the term god exclusively in vain there was no other way to pronounce it the clos est thing to divine intervention had been catching George Burns shuffling out of the courtroom and out of John Denver s Earthly Life on HBO in the afternoons of her childhood In Jenny s mind there was no god Or if there was it was not a friendly animal Particularly during labour She d mentioned that with vehemence during delivery She d never held Dadd
52. d remember what he d read the night before more distantly now that the story was shifting ahead by a number of years He didn t know if he was expected to read the book that way but it seemed like the right way to do it And hey it wasn t like Steve was going to catch him at it and go You what That s not what I meant at all you stupid kid which was something that he Calvin Hamlet wasn t entirely certain he d have been able to keep to himself were he to happen across a reader of one of his stories who was reading it the wrong way 00010001 He was sitting there His palmtop was closed His copy of Hearts in Atlantis was out but lay closed atop the table His cigarette was gone His coffee was cooling He was staring off into space and his mind was wandering along lost without a tour guide It was a dangerous place for his mind to go he supposed Never know if it might get really lost so lost that he wouldn t get it back Wouldn t find his way back He never knew how to look at it When your mind wandered did it take you with it Did it show you the things that it saw on its journey And did anyone else anywhere in the history of the planet ever ramble on with this sort of internal dialogue more specifically were those who had thought these things ever allowed to walk the streets again or were they stashed away in the Quiet Rooms of psychi atric clinics the world over And did most fourteen year ol
53. ds ever think that far ahead or just him Mysteries abound He grabbed the book and opened it to the Business Reply Card which could get him a sub scription to Wizard were he to fill it out and drop it off in a mailbox 15 everynight darrenjames The story picked up again in 1966 Calvin punched out and took a break from reality for the next hour Or two 00010010 One hundred fifty pages later Calvin reached the end of Part Two of Hearts in Atlantis He grabbed the Business Reply Card which had soaked up a bit of the water condescending from the glass he hadn t touched Since he d sat down and flung it into the book right where it was likely to start up next time in 1983 He sat back and looked for a cigarette in the pocket of his Tommy Hilfiger oxford he found nothing carcinogenic there Grimacing he glanced up at the restaurant and found Lisa standing before him She grinned tossing him another Marlboro Light He caught it manoeuvring its filtre deftly into his lips and quick drawing his Zippo to light it Thanks he said I didn t give you that one either she told him Right You need anything else before I go she asked I m clocking out here in a sec He thought about it briefly and shook his head Nope Don t think so She grabbed his coffeepot and shook it You re a little low I 11 fill it up real quick Oh Okay Thanks She stopped You need
54. e a can of soda had doubled from about fifty cents to a full dollar For that matter Coca Cola had disappeared just about fifteen years ago now replaced by New Coke and later renamed CokeII Coca Cola Classic had risen like a remodelled phoenix from the ashes of the mis take and had since become commonplace Still to someone who had spent half his life drinking Classic Coke before it had returned as an apology for Coke s pepsification endeavour it might be a little awk ward That probably wasn t Future Shock in its purest form but it might be worth considering for a para graph or two Then there was coffee to consider What had once been a simple invariable beverage had suddenly become an industry Cappuccino Frappuccino Mocha HalfCaffs if it was reasonably warm and contained methylated xanthenes someone probably thought it up and labelled it as coffee Strike that coffee no longer had to be particularly warm That could drive Chris McPherson utterly bugshit And MicroBrews And airbags and side impact measures and ABS And body piercing And And there were lots of things for a technophobe to shrink away from in society Lots of things to hide from in the corner and wish it could all be like it used to be The good old days And these were ideas And they were buzzing about his head like rabid mutated flies He darted for a table near an electrical out let started up his laptop and prepared to speak out agains
55. eaving a bloody smear which re 28 everynight darrenjames minded him oddly of the poster for the film Psycho He moved back to the driver s door and tried to see into the car Lisa moved again climbing up to look down out the window at him She was gyrating in there panick ing After a second he realised that she was trying to get her door open he could see from the shape of it that the door would never open again The windows he knew were electric Assuming that there was no power to them something else would have to be done He pulled his phone out instinctively its bat tery was dead from spending too long online he jammed it back into his pocket and looked at Lisa again Car wreck or not it seemed weird to scream into the night He pantomimed to her that he was go ing to go back and call for help She nodded that she understood desperation in her eyes He backed away still watching her but glancing toward his house to keep on course Something in the wreck squeaked again and the Celica shifted Lisa shrieked in surprise and antici pation before hyperventilating back into silence Calvin held his hands out letting her know that it was okay he d be right back with some help Along the street more doors were opening Chi cagoans in terrycloth robes and old jogging suits were beginning to emerge Somewhere something popped It was a small benign noise But its result was amazing At first Calvi
56. ed a good story written well not too formally but not so casually that it was hard to follow and the right length was a concern The stuff he wrote seemed to either drag on and on and on without any discernible purpose even to him and he d been there when it had been typed into the HewlettPackard or rush along in an infantile introduction of charac ters introduction of adversaries signs of trouble plottwist resolution the end format which was lucky to cover ten thousand words He knew what he wanted he wanted a nice four hundred page novel about a hundred thousand words or so with a beginning a middle and an end what he got was either Tolstoy overdosing on smack or Cliff s Notes by the Micro Machines guy It had been one thing when he d been ten years old There weren t a lot of ten year old bestselling authors out there in TelevisionLand But as he edged in on fourteen the stakes began to raise a bit Ei ther he had it or he hadn t and if not he was probably doomed to food service Sure he could analyse the stock market but that was more of a hobby To really do that sort of thing you had to go to school for years That was something he didn t have time for and it was some thing he needed in order to convince the masses that he wasn t somehow dumber than they were Ironic and sad but it was the way the world worked Murray had been right about that he d found And it wasn t what he wanted
57. elf ask and instantly become frightened of the forthcoming answer It never came Calvin had rolled his eyes Why do I put up with you the look had been He d snapped the book loudly shut and slammed it onto the tabletop The subject it would appear was closed It had occurred to her that she could have scolded him for looking at her in that tone of voice a decidedly Paulaesque term or for slamming the book down but she d abandoned both Some issues were better left dead Sometimes Calvin simply scared the living hell out of her There was no question that he was intelligent The question which Calvin would later ask himself time and time again was whether that intelligence was a preeminence a detriment an opprobrium or all three at once 00110010 By 1994 Calvin s memories of his childhood had become irrevocably intertwined with Jenny s embellished third party stories She d retaliated against her fear of Calvin s intelligence by embracing it and even bragging about it Her remarks regarding Calvin had become a sort of nonlinear mantra Calvin was a genius she thought He d learned taught himself to read before he was two years old He had read the encyclopaedia when he was four You could ask him to multiply numbers and hed have the answer before you could punch it out on a calculator Give him a list of ten things and hell have it memorised backward forward and every which way 74 everynight darrenjames
58. else I m really qualified for I m not really geared for customer service Murray laughed No probably not I ll get it How hard can it be Oh harder than you might think But not im possible That which isn t impossible is merely improb able Calvin said I can work with that I think you probably can Murray agreed He meant it too So what s the story The plotline I m not sure yet I ve got a few ideas but they re all mutually exclusive I m trying not to meld them into one long idea Right Keep the story simple Expound on the obvious But don t write down to their level make them come to you They might not get it if I make them come to me Maybe not But some will Or if they don t get it they can find a dictionary And for those who 97 everynight darrenjames refuse to cross reference against Webster s well you got their money what more can you ask for Suc cess they say is the best revenge Success at the expense of the enemy would probably be even sweeter Have you ever written anything Maybe a little Nothing serious Nothing I ever published anyway But I wasn t that good at it Probably because it wasn t the way I wanted to do things Hmmm I m a teacher And you can teach through nov els of course but you never really see it working on people For me I ve got to
59. en years old in 1999 Millennial Generation The 00000010 He d seen the Star Wars Trilogy on VHS in Pan amp Scan years before it had been rereleased into the cinema He d heard of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley he had vague memories of Ronald Reagan and Jon Bon Jovi He was too young for Legos and too old for Pokemon 00000011 His grandparents were divorced and largely Missing in Action His mother s tassel from the Class of 1987 still hung from the rearview mirror of her dying 1986 Mustang Dad was as accessible as Nixon and Elvis everynight darrenjames 00000100 He d been born too late 00000101 In earlier times he d have had a chance he sup posed There had been times in history when you could still do pretty well for yourself even if you were an American of English descent without any discernible handicaps But in 1999 the world was a different place than it was depicted as having been in the EBooks he pirated from the net 00000110 His mother was Jenny Hamlet His grandmother was Paula Hamlet He had no idea who his great grand mother had been or if she still existed He knew his grandmother of course Jenny had been sixteen when he d been born so the two of them had lived at home with Paula for years Paula s ex husband had moved across the country back in the sev enties Calvin had never actually met him though he could remember a few conversations over the speaker phone Then Jenny
60. enderless everyman An everyperson It would complicate things since the pronouns would have to agree with either possibility But it wasn t impossi ble And it might be interesting Maybe Or thinking about it it might not It might sacrifice the story itself to do it that way And the point of the story wasn t precisely Chris as a char acter the point was the rush of technological ad vances as seen by the public That s where the story was Chris couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him Him So there it was Chris Surname couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him Details details 54 everynight darrenjames Chris Fuckit couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him Bet the Reading Is Fundamental people love to see Ehat pots Chris McFuckit couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him Much better Chris McPherson couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him Good enough He sat back and lit a cigarette staring out into the rest of the smoking section for the first time in an hour No technological advances out there People trying to catch on to the latest annoyances in child proofed lighters That was about it The year 2000 not flying cars and robotic maids but Bic and Scripto lighters containing IO tests Science marches on Chris McPherson couldn t keep up with the world It perp
61. er knowing Daddy Klein never knew about Calvin s existence after all There was such a thing as too much information 00110100 The exact date was never especially important but for the record it was on Saturday 28 January 1995 that Jenny first realised the obvious Calvin was in third grade He d been going to the same school since they d moved to Chicago four years earlier Still he d never once mentioned anything at all regarding any of the other kids If Billy had said anything really funny in class one day Calvin had never ever told her about it If Bobby had tripped him in the hallway and laughed at him he had never ever told her about it If 80 everynight darrenjames Tina had giggled as seductively as a third grader could and made him blush he had never ever told her about it He d never ever mentioned anything about the other kids at all She didn t even know whether any of the other kids were named Billy or Bobby or Tina For all she knew the kids at school were the Skipper the Professor and Mrs Howell That made her smile slightly to consider the Skipper launching some hysterical oneliner as the Professor tripped Calvin in the hallway as Mrs Howell giggled in his direction Too much televi sion when shed been Calvin s age she supposed Just then Calvin was closing the rear cover of yet another novel and setting the book aside The title on the spine was upside down but she was able to read it easi
62. erhaps the world were too dumb to survive And that was something for which he was unwilling to accept any responsibility Darwin had come up with a pretty good theory Calvin had no interest in disproving it by tainting the samples with his participation The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that which one observes one also changes Granted that was largely true only at the subatomic level but Calvin wasn t taking any chances After Lisa s death and before his resignation from high school his grades had begun to drop He tested well but he didn t bother with his homework Word had spread to the guidance counsellor Acting on a hunch she d referred him to a neurologist who worked on a sliding scale The simple fact of the matter there was something unusual about his brain The syndrome was known as Asperger Disorder Generally regarded as an offshoot of autism it led to superior often immeasurable intelligence in the capacity of memorisation and comprehension mean while it disallowed the individual from understand ing various social graces and routines According to the experts Calvin was likely one of the ten most intelligent people alive Calvin regarded things literally Mental pic tures developed over metaphors and similes his lin ear logic relied on sentence structure Simple collo 49 everynight darrenjames guialisms arrested his mind His mother had told him hurry up or you ll be late which had g
63. eruption creating an island it could happen but there was no way to explain the procedure to a student Fly or die sink or swim write or suck He wrote He still wasn t sure whether he was any good at it People read his stuff and told him it was good but that didn t mean much to him It seemed more like sympathy than praise he d show a story to someone who would read the first three or five pages before stating That s really good I 11 have to read it when I have some free time Which told him nothing more than he already knew ninety eight percent of America were functionally illiterate incapable of reading at a twelfth grade level and often trapped beneath the sixth He could have drawn a picture or sung a song or made a film and people would have assimilated the whole thing in less than two hours assuming their attentionspans held out for that long But a novel he seemed to take less time writing them than his au dience took to read them Cynical perhaps Sanctimonious If they only knew how accommodating he d been thus far It showed in his writings too He d once re placed the blank screen with an opening line You won t understand a word of this but keep moving your eyes back and forth as if you did so you ll appear a little less dumb than we both know you are Which he d ended up deleting within seconds No need to alienate the two percent who could handle big words like understand If a cure
64. ery well be a real writer A novelist An au thor He could actually be one of those guys who takes a blank page and a blinking cursor or even a blank notebook and a new pen and transmogrifies them into a complete book Printed bound shipped and lining the shelves and the cardboard display cases in case they were still making them out of card board two decades or so into the twenty first cen tury alongside icons like Stephen King and Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy and But probably not 1947 1942 it was possible that the major authors of the late twentieth century would have retired by the time he was in his thir ties Instead there would be a new generation of novelists out there A few of them would already have been publishing as the new millennium began others would appear later out of the blue 62 everynight darrenjames He Calvin hoped might be one of them That in mind he began to move quickly along again watching for things which might scare the liv ing hell out of Chris McPherson The mall itself might be a good example A SmokeFree Environment disquieting to Calvin to wake up one day and discover that such a place had gone nonsmoking overnight might well send someone like McPherson over the brink And the price of ciga rettes rising desperately more quickly than the gen eral six percent annual increase common to inflation In Calvin s lifetime the things had gone from a buck a pack to nearly fiv
65. es Because because that s what s expected of you By whom By everyone Everyone Yeah You ve got to try and get along with people even if you know you re right and they re wrong Why Because that s how the world works Works A world which defies logic can be ac cused of working It s always been that way I see Do you I think so What you seem to be telling me is that the world is composed of largely brainless twits who can t understand the first thing about logic and prefer it that way so people like me are considered the outcasts because we know more than they do The principal didn t agree right away Then It certainly seems that way doesn t it Unless I m overlooking something The principal shook his head Hey Calvin Yes He grinned Come again Calvin nodded got up and returned to class 90 everynight darrenjames 00110111 By the spring of 1996 the relationship between Cal vin and the principal had evolved to a first name ba sis Calvin the principal sang as the kid wan dered unsurprised into his office again Hello Murray Calvin returned Dare I ask Don t bother You want the long version or the short one Let s try the short one first Okay I m surrounded by idiots Again Stadt S
66. everynight Legal Stuff Written and Designed by Darren James Edited by Corey Taylor and Darren James Catering by various servers at Perkins Family Restaurants Gar field s and The Drake Diner The producers wish to thank George Orwell Ray Bradbury Steve Coupland Kurt Vonnegut jr James Morrow Orson Scott Card Al vin Toffler William Gibson and of course George Carlin for paving the way everynight Copyright Darren James 1999 This is a work of fiction All characters and institutions herein are either fictional or used in a fictional manner and without malicious intent Any simi larities to anyone living dead or in hiding is coincidental unintentional and unfortunate All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including but not limited to photocopy recording EMail memorisation and regurgitation or any information storage system except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review or article without written permission from the author or publisher This product is not intended for use by persons with mental ages under eighteen By proceeding beyond this page you agree to hold the author and his affiliates known and unknown harmless of liability no war rantees regarding this product are expressed or implied WARNING this product is not intended for use by an idiot we at Wasted Inc are in no way expert in the cogniti
67. f resistance to the laws of the land When he d ultimately managed to get the FCC to understand the autobiographical and personal nature of the concept they d been very accommodating in deed accusing him of falsifying his worklogues and reporting to have spent less time writing than he really had That the work performed was wasted and lost in the night was irrelevant to them it didn t matter whether he profited fromthe extra hours only that he used them without admitting it ine e d 1 He d been heavily f d and his licence had been revoked Otherwise h been free to go and to write no more Calvin Hamlet had left the United Republic of America the following Monday 00100110 That he d fled to England to secure amnesty against the FCC had been the ultimate irony less than 250 peer after the United States America had been estab ished to prohibit the censorship of speech and re ligion and by some accounts thought Greater London had emerged as a sanctuary for writers and other art ists In London he d been able to write again No one had given a damn Except for him His books were banned in America He could sel them in the UK and have them translated over to a dozen other languages for purchase and assimilation by other Eurasian countries but he couldn t so much as place a classified advert in an American newspa per He took that oddly personally That was why Kilroy had returned after al these years
68. f the smart half would be average Which doesn t mean I have to like them No It doesn t mean you have to like them What it does mean is that you have to prove yourself to them Why Otherwise they re going to think that you re the one with the problem And for all you might think that their opinions are irrelevant they re not They run the world Calvin not us We may keep the components in good repair but it s the lesser intellects who actually decide how the components are to be used Get me I think so yeah Meet the new boss same as the old boss We re the Morlocks in the equation Something like that And if you want to get 93 everynight darrenjames ahead of them you re going to have to start at their level before you can supersede them Okay Okay I 11 bear that in mind Do Really do Unless I m overlooking some thing it s really your only option Calvin nodded and arbitrarily dismissed him self back to class 94 everynight darrenjames 00111000 Calvin stormed into Murray s office unannounced slamming a sheet of paper marked by a massive cir cled B with his right hand and a paperback copy of the Oxford English Dictionary with his left onto the desk in front of the principal He said nothing Hey Calvin hey Murray stuttered standing You can t just come running in here like what s wrong anyway
69. g She also didn t want to ask him In a very big way she didn t want to be in the same room as him Possibly not in the same country Something about him was truly scary Almost though she hesitated using the word to de scribe him evil She waited him out again If there was more to it he d get to it more quickly if she didn t bug him about it I probably shou d know people he said telling himself she thought more than he was telling her I should probably have friends of some sort Do they call you names she asked without really meaning to The kids at school He began to shake his head then his eyes rolled in that odd processing way she d become almost used to and he told her Not to my knowledge no What names do they use these days she asked Is it still geek and Not really The moniker geek has evolved into a sort of vocation now It s reserved for the more prolific programmers Per sonally I still prefer hacker though that s not entirely accurate either A hacker is anyone more skilled than a user one who can actually get the computer to perform a specific function internally like writing a website A user then views the website and can handle the brainless tasks of clicking on hyperlinks and typing in URLs Someone who actually breaks into other computers to steal in formation or writes viruses is more correctly termed as a cracker Like a safecracker I s
70. had never been in any sort of trouble and had never even attracted his attention before Now he was sitting here and seemed far too calm The principal wondered briefly if third graders were too young for heroin no one was ever this calm in his presence So what brings you here today ah Calvin Instantly My language teacher has an inferi ority complex She was incorrect about the validity of the word ain t and I corrected her She s lashed out against the correction by sending me here The principal closed the file and sat bolt up right Come again Calvin blinked Does that mean I m dismissed Huh Ordinarily the term come again is an invi tation to return at a later time but I haven t left yet so I m not sure if that s what you meant Is there another definition of which I m not yet aware The principal squinted at him Are you for real To my knowledge All I meant was um you know come again Um explain what you mean Which part All of it Inferiority complex and all that That might be my doing to a degree I was reading some graffiti as she asked a rhetorical ques tion regarding the word ain t and then mentioned that had I been listening I d have been able to an swer it Assuming that she d actually wanted me to answer it I did But I answered it more correctly than she d wanted me to
71. hand fran tically in front of his face He caught her arm by the wrist and pulled himself painfully up with it He looked at his mother s arm for a moment Studied it Let it go And he looked at the flaming mass ahead At first he could only watch it happen Fire Sizzling popping fire Meaningless fire Flames bil lowing up from from From Lisa He got to his feet swayed a bit stepped to ward Lisa Calvin No He pulled away from his mother and walked on Now his neighbours were there flashing in and out at the edges of his vision talking chattering yelling 30 everynight darrenjames screaming buzzing chirping flashing in a sea of back ground hues Lisa was in the fire He had to to But there was no answer to that Lisa couldn t have survived this She must have made it out of the car she must be here somewhere she must Calvin stop He stopped Where Over here C mon I want to get you looked at Okay he said distantly then No No have them look at Lisa first Who s Lisa She s my I dunno He thought about it care fully still looking for her We re friends I think We re not strangers Look at me He didn t He looked for Lisa His mother spun him round and he was eye to eye with her seeing but not seeing looking for Lisa in his mind Lisa wasn t in there that he could tell I don t know who
72. he smaller car to starboard aft Finally the Celica lurched into the telephone pole beyond the curb stopping again it collapsed back onto the Cutlass teetering across the Oldsmo bile s disintegrating dashboard and creaking clock wise nose dropping and tail lifting With a final scream of wrenching metal both cars came to a lazy stop Calvin blinked beginning to walk dreamily to ward the cars at the end of the block He was vaguely aware of lights coming on in the houses along the street He heard a screendoor squeak open nearby He walked The Celica s fuel tank was ruptured petrol streaming out onto the Oldsmobile s engine block Both cars were stalled dead by the crash He circled the wreck glancing into the Cutlass at the driver the driver s face was invisible to him forehead against the steering wheel and right arm twisted over Phis neck in a way Calvin could only identify as wrong He didn t see the passenger at first neither had been wearing seatbelts and the car was too old to have had airbags the passenger was compacted into the footwell of the Olds Neither of them moved at all He walked on reaching the driver s side of the Celica It was difficult to see into the Toyota since the driver s side was higher up than the pas senger s balanced atop the Oldsmobile s frame He began to move on around to the front of the car to look in through the windscreen then Lisa s hand slapped the glass l
73. he table Otherwise he was usually more likely to overexplain a lack of knowledge with I dont know or I have no idea When he failed to stick to the absolute Queen s English Jenny always got the impression that he was hiding something Also she d learned the best way to get him to show his cards was to wait him out She waited Finally after thinking it through from a number of angles something else she d noticed that he did a lot he shrugged again T ve never really thought about that Top three or so then she instantly suggested And that caused the nothingness that he was keeping so close an eye on shoot over to his lower right She waited again Finally he just shook his head His eyes remained fixed on the nothingness Top two maybe 82 everynight darrenjames He shook his head again He seemed to be realising that he didn t actually Anow anyone out there She leaned in on her elbows with a sort of curious horror I guess I forgot that part he told her or really he told whatever wasn t there to his lower right he still wasn t looking at her at all Nevertheless she was certain that he was seeing her Peripheral vision allowed for that And it felt wrong in the right way He was watching her without watching her He didn t entirely trust her she thought She didn t know what she d done to him to cause him to be wary of her wary enough that he tried to hide his concern by watching without watchin
74. he turned quickly toward him Hey Yeah 19 everynight darrenjames She dropped her eyes to his backpack her lower lip quivering once Nothing Sorry Okay he said reaching for his backpack again He fumbled for the door handle wherever the hell Toyota had hidden it You all coffeed out she spat What Are are you in a hurry What are you talking about She grinned worriedly Do you want to go some where else and get some more coffee And maybe talk to me for a while He abandoned the search for the door handle and let go of his backpack again Nodding Okay 00010100 Lisa s Celica pulled into the carpark of a competing restaurant and found a parking spot She flicked the lights off and jammed the stick into reverse letting the engine die She pondered again Is anyone watching she asked I dunno Calvin said glancing out the win dows No one I can see She nodded and pulled a sweatshirt out of a bag in the backseat I can t go in there wearing this she said lifting the polo shirt over her head quickly and replacing it with the grey Chicago Uni versity crewneck Calvin noticed that she d sucked in her stomach intentionally as she d changed I was probably supposed to look away just then wasn t I he said Sorry forgot Huh No I don t care I just don t want a bunch of strangers watching me
75. heavily Then Did you want me to go back to class Murray looked at the clock on the wall Nah It s out in seven minutes anyway minus three min utes since you wouldn t be running in the hallways Calvin grinned Caught So there s not much point in catching the last four minutes Catch me before you split today I ll talk to F Conway sort this out and find out if you ve got any homework for the weekend okay Deal And thanks Yeah yeah beat it kid Calvin grinned and left 96 everynight darrenjames 00111001 Murray had been the first and last scholastic liai son of Calvin s educational career In June of 1996 he finished elementary school and left it behind That fall he would move on to middle school where according to Murray life would really begin Murray looked up slightly surprised but not very as Calvin walked into his office thirty minutes after fifth grade had ended for him He grinned as the kid sat down in front of his desk All packed up he asked Yeah All packed up Ready for summer Sure Actually yeah I am I ve got a few things I ve been wanting to work on but I haven t had enough time with all this normal person stuff to do Murray nodded Still gonna be a novelist Hope so No promises but I hope so I hope so too I think that s probably the perfect career for you Writing Not much
76. hit the Word Count in the Tools pulldown menu Microsoft Works Pa There are 34901 words in your document Works has counted the words in your document including footnotes and header footer paragraphs Nearly a hundred pages nearly thirty five thousand words He didn t know if that was good writing thirty five thousand words into a hundred pages in twenty four hours And it didn t really matter to him Other writers might be faster others still might be slower in any case he could have the book finished within a week at this rate Whether the book turned out to be any good was another matter He d rather write a good book over the course of a month or a year or a decade than a bad one in under a week Of course writing a good one in only a week was fine too The real question of course good or bad a week or a decade would anyone ever actually see it Could he get the thing published Could he get any books published Ever More than anything else he could think of even and he felt oddly guilty about this one having Lisa remain among the living more than anything else he wanted the answers to be Yes 68 everynight darrenjames 00101111 Jenny Hamlet was sixteen years old in 1985 too old for My Little Pony and too young for Rambo First Blood Part Two If you remem bered the sixties you weren t there she d been there for about a year the ApolloXI had landed on the moon at nearly the same in
77. hool running as well as it can that s a far cry from getting the world to accept that some of its members are smarter than others Believe me if I could get the world to cater to the geniuses I would But I can t The world and please don t quote me on this the world is designed to accommodate the idiots Because the geniuses can take care of them selves Something else I d rather you didn t quote me on but I 1ll tell you just in case you haven t fig ured it out already because the world caters to the uninformed it honestly doesn t matter whether you ace or flunk a spelling test in fifth grade No one is ever going to care what your exact grades were back in elementary That s not an excuse to quit be cause they will notice that but really it s never going to matter whether you aced this test or not It matters to me It matters to me too but to the masses it s nothing So I m stuck with a B minus Murray took a deep breath No You re not I m going to talk to who was this Oh of course now it all makes sense I m going to talk to Fr ah Mister Conway and I 11 let him know that the British spelling is at least as correct as the Ameri can okay I know that as well as you do But really in ten years this test he rattled the pa per demonstratively won t be the deciding factor in anything you re up to by then Okay Okay Calvin sat down
78. ich volume he would find the entry upon He d sat down again eyes darting from the television to the book and back resembling a clock built into a big plastic cat except his eyes had moved back and forth far more quickly than once per second if time were as fast as Calvin s eyes had been as he d switched from television to book to television to book summer vacation might have been a matter of hours away 72 everynight darrenjames She d observed him almost scientifically His breathing had been normal his pulse and heart rate had probably been normal he d seemed completely relaxed save for a tiny crease marking the sym metry of his eyebrows and the impossible stutter of his eyeballs Whatever it had been it hadn t been epileptic as far as she d been able to tell After a minute or according to CalvinTime about a month and a half she d begun to become frightened the same fear of reality she d first discovered looking at the alphanumeric mindless ness of the computer manual and taken a deep breath before ask ing what he was reading about She d missed that opportunity too She d never determine or even ask whether it had been coincidence or if Calvin had divined her curiosity when he d sud denly stopped zipping his eyes back and forth and set them exactly into hers with the intelligent gaze of an adult She d seen that look before though never in any five year old Bill Bixby had always worn it on The Incredible
79. ich was one way to do it he supposed He read it through again And again it oc curred to him how pointless it suddenly seemed It might have been a good story and worth writing but it didn t seem quite important enough to him Not 58 everynight darrenjames right at that moment anyway Later Maybe Now Pointless He didn t delete it He just stared at it in something like disappointment Drank some coffee Smoked a cigarette Stared at the screen Waited for something to happen An idea to come a meteor to fall on him someone to ask whether his new laptop was a computer He waited impatiently for nothing in particular Pointless The whole Lisa thing was pointless It shouldn t have mattered But it did It did matter To him It was only one night It might have only been one night even if it hadn t been her last night It might have ended anyway It might have de veloped into something more He d have liked to have found out either way He d have liked for her to have lived If wishes were horses though If wishes were horses beggars would He had ridden That s why she d been there in the first place But for dropping him back off at home she d have lived Not for ever maybe but for longer than she had It wasn t really his fault But in a very un deniable way it had been In a way it still was The cursor blinked at him Almost accusingly He saved Technophobe again a
80. ine them from the perspective of a thirty five year old Digital phones for a penny at Radio Shack and in the kiosks set up for AirTouch and SprintPCS Furby knockoffs at KayBee Toys and Spencer Gifts Gumball machines with Central Processing Units running the little spheres through obstacle courses before dropping them off to the consumer He tried to imagine what a DreamCast or a PlayStationII would seem like to someone twice his age To Calvin none of it was very impressive at all It simply existed But to those who had actually been there when Space Invaders and Asteroids had been a Big Deal Sega and Sony might be perplexing crea tures indeed He still couldn t empathise Realistically the technology curve was steep enough in the year 2000 that more had happened during his lifetime than had ever happened prior to 1985 His first real computer had been a Dell desktop model screaming along with its 80486 CPU and 14 400bps modem his laptop was a Pentium Three running DSL at half a megabit per sec ond Still he wasn t shocked by the advances on the contrary he was a little disappointed It wasn t happening quickly enough There was so much more that could be done He d read about the closing of the patent office It had been shut down because according to them there was nothing left to invent everything that could ever 61 everynight darrenjames exist had in some form or other already been cre ated Years later
81. it or write it badly Better to make it too good for a personal pro ject than limit his writing in the expectation of pinkslips He skipped back up to the top of the page and tossed together a working title 56 everynight darrenjames Technophobe Calvin Hamlet And a page break And 57 everynight darrenjames Indicia Written by Calvin Hamlet The following is a work of fiction Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental All Rights Reserved No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the author Technophobe Copyright 2000 Calvin Hamlet ISBN To Be Determined Which as far as he knew was good enough for the mo ment Page three For For That was a very good question Lisa popped into his mind But no It wasn t for her He didn t know who it was for but it wasn t for her It wasn t important enough to be for her Maybe one day something would be Until then he didn t want to waste it on something this pointless It was pointless He looked it over again beginning at the title through the indi cia the unfinished dedication the first page which should have been the fifth page but was sitting on the fourth He added a page break just beneath the unfin ished dedication creating a blank portside page be tween the actual Page Three and the opening of the story on Page Five Then blank Wh
82. its to her specifically Benefit One information The net was a sort of virtual en cyclopaedia Not entirely unlike the ageing edition of the Britannica in the study but updated daily and searchable which meant that he could tell the computer precisely what he wanted to know about and the computer would show him all the places in which it could be found When that went a bit over her head he coined an analogy it was like subscribing to a newspaper except it was made of light and not pulp and it would give them exactly the news they needed also it wasn t just the daily news but news from past decades When he d decided that her nodding had gone from her confused whatever impatience to her comprehensive okay I get it grokking he moved on Benefit Two communication Transfer of information He could learn from them and they could learn from Aim It was like a telephone call in written form He could trade information with any number of people from all over the world and without ever dialling one plus the area code there were no long distance charges in volved Building from the first point she caught onto Benefit Two almost instantly Benefit Three profit Hypertext was easy for Calvin but was probably pretty intimidating to most people If he knew how to get all the boring and lifeless ASCII simply typed words he d had to explain to look particularly sensational companies had better things to do than spend h
83. iven him the impression that he d be hurrying upward ascending quickly hurtling skyward lest he might arrive past schedule Or in secondary analysis late might have been a euphemism for dead Hurry up or you ll be late Ameliorate or end up deceased He never thought about it much of course To him it was just word games and possibilities mean while the very admonition had secondarily caused him to end up not dead but behind schedule Irony abounds Possible responses to stimuli read like shop ping lists Nevertheless his thought process worked quickly enough that he could pick one from a field of dozens in less time than anyone else took thinking up his first reply The disorder went unnoticed for years due simply to that inadvertent camouflage The diagnosis hadn t helped him at all In fact it had encouraged him to bail out of ninth grade He had a mental disorder which didn t sound right to him he d never equated genius to disabil ity which couldn t be cured if a cure were some thing to be hoped for in a case of superior in tellect and which merely explained why everyone he talked to seemed so damned fucking dumb all the time It wasn t a matter of narcissism either it was lit erally hard even dangerous to be humble when as good as he The most painless course of action evacuate So he had Initially the free time was painful to him Heavy and slow Progressively he began to fill it
84. lexed him It outran him It overlooked him Ooh The plot thickens The question so the hell what So the world was moving too quickly for this one poor guy How ex cruciatingly interesting There had to be more of a point to this Calvin sat back and thought about that for a moment He wasn t sure about the rest of the world but he tended to watch the very first page of a given book for something worth reading about Either there was an obvious point in those few opening paragraphs or there wasn t He didn t rely on the meretricious little blurbs Chris McPherson is a technophobe liv ing in a technophiliac world who must learn to adapt or fall behind into blah and blah and blah and so on or the rave reviews Calvin Hamlet at his very best an invigorating read from the sorts of critics who wanted everything to be better than Cats If something interesting didn t appear on the 55 everynight darrenjames first page the first four hundred words or so there probably wasn t going to be much point to it at all And if he didn t see a point he doubted if anyone else would find one for him He read his first two paragraphs yet again And began to create something of interest he hoped Chris McPherson couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him It overlooked him At thirty five years of age he was a solid victim of Future Shock that modern miracle of psychological unrest i
85. luent through self instruction in English Latin and Greek as well as BASIC C and hypertext The latter was of extreme interest to Calvin He d belea guered Jenny about computers showing her the advantages to hav ing one In the end she d accidentally relented telling him that if he could figure out a way for her to pay for a modern computer and still cover the escalating bills she d get him one for his birthday He d solved the riddle in under an hour Her credit was still a bit risky but not tarnished She could get a useable model on terms it worked out to an extra hundred a month in addition to her existing bills which wasn t what she wanted to hear Then since the computer could be used to work out exactly such things as finances it would be deductible in part from her taxes even as the head of a single parent family the IRS still 75 everynight darrenjames wanted a piece of her The thing wouldn t really end up costing her that much up front A few bucks a month maybe Then the real work began The internet which had come into being in the sixties when NORAD had begun transmitting binary code across the phonelines instead of snailmailing the hardcopies to and fro was becoming a graphical and public medium Already busi nesses were placing information online on the web and beginning to accept ECash as well as plastic He lost her with the buzzwords at first until he was able to define the benef
86. ly enough Nineteen Eighty four by George Orwell She blinked uneasily at that She didn t even know where the book had come from she d never read it or even seen the film She had however encountered it somewhere in her lengthening history and subconsciously flagged it as a Bad Thing Following the text on the spine was the silhouetted figure of a man running Not running for exercise she thought but for his life Calvin glanced at her guiltless and undisturbed He always looked eerily guiltless and undisturbed As if nothing in the world could ever surprise him or shock him or stump him As if As if he were more of an observer than a member And he never spoke at all of the other kids He was sitting at the kitchen table exactly in the spot where he d been four years before Bush had been fired Clinton had taken his place Kurt Cobain had come into the scene and left it just as quickly and somehow four years had gone by Gone away Become lost That had been four years ago that had been yesterday Calvin was looking at her His unblinking unsurprised un shocked unstumped undisturbed eyes watching monitoring her above his slowly convexing nose and emotionless mouth Unblinking Like a damned alligator She noticed in that moment that his eyebrows were darken ing His hair a just under bright red was beginning to fade to black If the chemistry of it worked out just the right way he d 81 everynight dar
87. mpt And ideas were shy animals Like flies maybe If he wanted one to land so he could do something about it it never would if he wasn t particularly prepared for one it would buzz about and terrorise him until he could get to whatever tool might subdue it at which point it would fail to return until he was no longer ready for it again Flies and ideas were annoying when they were flying about flattened black and white on paper they became art Whether anyone would ever want that art was yet another question Still having the thing stuck to paper was better than having it buzz about his head driving him mad 00001110 There was something almost insulting in the observa tion that a stolen Pok mon card could sell for twenty four bucks on eBay com while a captured and rendered idea on paper might get seven ninety five in paperback at amazon com And that was before ama zon com took fifty five percent leaving the rest to 13 everynight darrenjames pay off printers and marketers The author would get a dollar maybe Fifty cents It was fine if the thing sold a million copies or ten million but mak ing one sixteenth maybe of the cover price for catching the idea smashing it onto the paper and convincing someone anyone that it was worth looking at it didn t seem quite fair to him On the other hand it was largely free A film required millions in order to be made And millions might see it But a
88. n the SixSixty was running a lot faster than the ThreeTwenty had geometric RAM en hancements and was in colour He d never used a PalmPilot there was something wrong with a computer whose screen was taller than it was wide Beneath the bidding information which was po sitioned up above the fold as the newspapers called the topmost area of a document was the de scription of his offering Rare Pok mon Card This is a very rare First Edition Charizard card for use with Pok mon It is in near mint condition without scratches or creases High bidder to pay US 2 00 S amp H 8 everynight darrenjames He scrolled back up and refreshed the screen He could currently count on twenty three bucks for the card He d acquired the card at the mall casually walking up and talking to its previous owner hands in pockets for several minutes before leaning in to intimate that a girl who the little geek wound up just missing was looking in the latter s direction and smiling at him somewhere in there the hand he d laid onto the card which was indeed rare created a sticky and explainable bond which held the thing long enough to transport it back into the pocket of his jacket It had been innocent enough a manoeuvre in the event that he d been caught stealing the thing but he hadn t been Free card Free or not the card should have got him more than twenty three bucks It wasn t over yet there was the pa
89. n thought it was a kamikaze firefly blitzkreiging his foot but the spark danced on the pavement before dying then two more followed it in Glancing up to the source he watched silently as the wire fell slowly away from the pole in a cas cade of lightning Embers fell here and there at his feet behind his back onto the Toyota s windscreen He caught the firestorm in the greasy reflexion of the pooling fuel beneath the Oldsmobile and looked up at Lisa s pal ing face just as 29 everynight darrenjames 00011001 Jesus Calvin It was his mother Somewhere up there Up ahead behind the blue Green Blue Turquoise Cyan Drifting and folding And fading The bluish greenish wisp faded out as the light faded in And Jenny Ham let was standing over him He was laying on the ground he thought Sunburned What he said Are you okay Jesus Christ are you okay Cal vin Can you hear me Are you okay Mom Zip it What happened Can you move No don t move don t try to move oh Christ I can move ow What Then it all came back Oldsmobile firestorm reflected in the pooling fuel Celica Lisa Lisa Lisa What his mother asked Is Lisa here I dunno I don t know Lisa Are you okay Really okay Where is she Where did she go Calvin I don t know who you re talking about Can you see me Over here She waved her
90. n which the subject found even day to day surprises to be more than his mind could bear He was not alone the syndrome displayed in a massive percentage of society Still he felt abandoned by the rest of his species the world was speeding away from him like the last crosstown bus on a cold winter night Colloquially he couldn t deal That Calvin thought might be of interest to anyone picking up the novel at random and flipping through it down at Barnes amp Noble some afternoon At least he hoped so He saved what he d done spellchecked it FindReplaced the doubles between the ends of previous sentences and the beginnings of the next he d read somewhere that the habit of hitting the spacebar twice after a period was unnecessary in printed books and that typesetters didn t bother with them this after he d taught himself to doublespace after reading the opposite somewhere else and ran the hy phenator ALT T and H in Microsoft Works to clean up the gaps in the justified text Then he saved it again and read it over He liked it well enough It could have been better and it could have been worse and it could have been written by someone else in someone else s style His book his rules And it wasn t like anyone else would ever actually see it No one knew who he was And the publishing industry was hardly known for printing and shipping novels written by fifteen year olds after all Still no need to abandon
91. nd shut down Micro Soft Works for a while More coffee more cigarettes maybe later he d be in more of a writing mood For now time passed Come ideas or meteors time passed 00101011 The moving rider rides and having rid Calvin awoke abruptly He d been dreaming of Lisa again Little Lisa all burned up All gone All she wrote Or rode Or drove Or something 59 everynight darrenjames The dream began to dissipate away from him Clouds of smoke clearing magically before an opening door Or maybe a closing one Or maybe he wasn t awake enough for meta phors At least not good ones Not ones worth writ ing down They were pointless like everything else about writing was He wondered whether it was too late to go back to school And of course it was Diploma or not he d be working a McJob for McNothing McSoon And for all his deplorable little McLife And all that happy McShit McFuckit He crawled out of bed feeling a hell of a lot older than fifteen He lumbered over to the mirror and looked into it with fatigue He d taken a bath the night before washed his hair and gone to sleep Now his hair was anarchic but generally clean He combed through it without much thought He wasn t late for much but he wasn t really very interested in taking another bath He wasn t very interested in much at all He looked at his eyes in the mirror Aestheti cally he was fifteen he thought Hi
92. nexion and closed his phone He could track down the high bidder later In fact eBay com would EMail him with the final results Watching the card sell for less than thirty was just morbid curi osity And he had enough stress IRL Detaching the cord from the PCMCIA modem he sat back and looked at Lisa again So So He shrugged You looked talkative At that she glanced about watching for signs that her other customers might want something which if they didn t have it soon would hurt her tips It was smooth sailing out there though she wasn t late for anything yet She shook her head distantly Not really she muttered then realising she d said so out loud snapped her attention back to Calvin and amended Not really busy I ve got a minute Okay Calvin said 11 everynight darrenjames She stared at him and then laughed I guess we ran out of stuff to talk about though huh There s always stuff to talk about Calvin promised Rarely anything important but there s al ways stuff Why talk about it if it s not important I don t Calvin said smoking his cigarette But they do He tilted the cigarette out toward the rest of the smoking section I sit here doing what I do and listen to them It s amazing the unimportant bullshit they can produce For hours and hours The faces change the names change the bullshit never runs
93. o make me She was smiling she slammed her hands back over her mouth Lisa Wuh Move your hands for a minute Oh It s worth it Wuh You 11 see She dropped her hands into her lap What He took her hands and pulled She leaned toward him then fell back and slid toward him on the sofa What she said again more impatiently He kissed her She kissed him back That he said She regarded him in fear for a moment Then she kissed him again Things progressed from there 26 everynight darrenjames 00011000 They sat in the Celica in front of Calvin s house for a moment Listen she said writing her number in a matchbook and handing it to him I can t really call here for you in case your mother answers the phone but call me okay Sure And I 11 see you again anyway I mean I m a regular A regular she asked momentarily indignant Oh at work Yeah Okay But I 11 call Maybe we can do something to morrow Maybe she said sadly What s wrong now The same thing as before she said I m five years older than you We can t let people know about this I know But we can look like friends can t we She sniffled and nodded I guess so If that s all it looks like We can make it look good he promised No one has to know anything She
94. om piled the code into a computer generated illustration She d ac cepted his explanation with the whatever attitude of an overloaded twenty year old Dissatisfied with her response Calvin had burned it into his mental itinerary to prove to her how CG worked once and for all when they got back home to the ageing computer That had gotten her interested in his learning curve She d asked how he d known about the programming language at all and he d handed her the book laying approximately where later models would require a mousepad to be and he d given her a look represent ing a phrase which would later dominate the internet RtFM Read the Fucking Manual She d leafed through it and it had scared her Literally scared her Not in the way a horror film would scare her either Five years later Alice Cooper would vocalise the concept behind The Last Temptation of Alice with the idea that It s become more frightening in modern times to walk back to the car in the real world than to sit there watching the manufactured horror onscreen at the cinema Jenny had run her eyes over the example codes of BASIC not understanding a bit of it and realised for the first time that Calvin was already smarter at four than was she at twenty She would realise that again and again as the years flew by 71 everynight darrenjames 00110001 1991 had begun with Desert Shield metamorphosing into Desert Storm Calvin had been five On the news Arth
95. ore so perhaps Good book He nodded to he was facing her but his eyes were on the book He nodded anyway Affirmative yup absolutely But not an enthusiastic yup Not a desperately important Two Thumbs Up yup Merely the opposite of nope and just to the north of maybe Yup good book No further information is available please try back later Calvin Hamlet now leaves the air She didn t scream in fear and frustration instead she nod ded yup back to him And then he did look at her Possibly just to confirm that she was nodding Then he went back to the mesmerising nothingness to his lower right But that wasn t quite right either He wasn t mesmerised he wasn t concentrating on anything His eyes had simply rolled to that position and clocked out It was like it was like the screensaver on the Dell give the thing enough time without typing or moving the mouse and everything would go away and little marbles would begin to drop from above to pile up senselessly until you started typing or moving the mouse again A computer That s exactly what he reminded her of A com 84 everynight darrenjames puter A walking talking calculator complete with a damned screen saver She entertained the idea for a moment that if Calvin were knocked out he would run a systems check before he woke up again just to make sure that the drive hadn t been corrupted somehow She wondered whether the contents of Orwell s novel remaine
96. ours and hours learning how to upgrade text into hypertext and were willing to pay those who already un derstood it astronomical amounts of money for the service How astronomical Six figures Benefit Three had closed the sale though his mental pro spectus was less than halfway leafed through There were more benefits but he could show her those by example once the system was set up and running and online 76 everynight darrenjames 00110011 For 1994 the Dell was top of the line Its 80486 processor screamed along at dozens of megahertz and its modem downloaded at up to fourteen thousand four hundred bits per second He d had to explain that one as well The way computers thought was a little different than how people thought People didn t really consider how things went to gether in words The word cat was a very simple idea three letters in length People could spell it and identify what it meant Com puters didn t work that way Computers were more like words in Japanese he d explained in that a word was the product of a number of little variables components parts To a computer the word cat wasn t three let ters in length but twenty four The language used by computers was made up of two letters There was Zero and there was One Depending how the zeros and ones were spelled out to the computer determined what they meant Each letter in English was determined in Computerese by its value In other word
97. out She shrugged at the rest of the smoking sec tion People are people And clich s are clich s he added not in sultingly Yeah Anyway le me know if you need anything else Okay he said nodding as he slid the palm top round so he could see it from his new laid back angle Still he watched her until she nodded back and went off toward the kitchen again Cute kid he muttered to the Palmtop closing its WindowsCE version of Explorer and opening its word processor 00001011 He stared at the blank screen beneath the functions and above the tray The cursor blinked in casual ex pectancy of input He didn t really have any for it 00001100 Writing was funny that way He d start off with noth ing at all On one hand he d have done nothing to 12 everynight darrenjames regret in the beginning on the other he d not ve begun yet Writing was also resistant to commands The flow chart was excruciatingly linear First came the idea second came the words Words without the idea were words ideas without words were stories waiting to happen And screens without words were blank And his screen was without words 00001101 His screen wasn t always this wordless he could write stories In his mind he could exist to write stories He didn t know if he was any good at writ ing but he knew he was good at trying But only if he had an idea with which to make the atte
98. peech had become known colloquially as Schindlers The free web based EMail banks had been dissolved The net had become as regulated as PBS Some aspiring writers had gone back to being housewives and accountants Others had turned once Aga to the preprinted vanity press market A few thousand dollars a few thousand novels a few thou Sand readers Communication had survived For a lit tle while Printers had become less and less common as the presses had been seized under the provisions of emi nent domain Established publishers had been con trolled for content or dissolved in tax evasion charges and drug trafficking scandals Hardcopy pub lishing had quickly joined the internet in forced compliance to the FCC The opposition had weakened but remained America was the land of the free its first constitu tional amendment prohibited the congress from passing any law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press A totalitarian state was legally impossible in the United States of America Legally 39 everynight darrenjames 00100010 In the year 2011 Amendment XXVIII had been ratified into the Constitution of America Section 1 The Federal Communications Commission may with regard to due process restrain the freedom of speech in respect to any individual or establishment of America pro vided that such individual or establishment is found guilty in a court of law of Conspiracy to Disinform Section 2 The
99. percep tion of time The longer he lived the shorter it got Days had once lasted for ever now they lasted for hours The sun rose the sun set the days disap peared It was the first day of October in 1999 It would never ever be that day again Soon he pre dicted dejectedly it would be the second then that too would pass and never rear its historical head again Time was speeding up for him Time was running out He d be fourteen in three weeks Three weeks Five hundred hours Five hundred and four to be precise He didn t really want to be precise anymore he just wanted to write He dug his hands further into the pockets of his jacket and curled slightly forward into more of a sphere as a cold and cruel wind began to blow 105 everynight darrenjames 106 Part Tuo Before I Sleep
100. prices go up to cover the new salaries and again Until one day a case of Coke is a hundred bucks Oh Meanwhile if everyone s making at least a hundred an hour you re burning through all the new money you printed so you have to print even more which is worth even less Now a case of Coke is two hundred bucks Raise minimum wage again four hundred bucks raise it again pretty soon the American dollar is about the same as pesos are now Except that the rest of the world take the American dollar seriously So the rest of the world begins to follow the trend and pretty soon everyone has lots of money everywhere but no one can afford anything So then what happens Then people get mean Then they start burning banks thinking it s all the banks fault Then you re probably looking at anarchy at martial law That s what s gonna happen Maybe Maybe not It s a possibility It s scary Yeah I don t think I d wanna live in a world like that I don t think anyone would But it might be the only world we have pretty soon So why not just tell everyone not to take out all their money I do But there are six billion of you out there That s a lot of coffee She laughed heartlessly I probably won t live to be twenty one Carpe diem I know that one Seize the day Yup See I knew something
101. renjames wind up with that burgundy mane which had helped Daddy Klein talk her into what had led to Calvin in the first place In the right light it would look black or purple or silver That combined with the odd greyish green eyes the unb inking eyes if he could somehow dodge Daddy Klein s nose it was entirely too easy to imagine a future filled with many many illegitimate Daddy Klein Mark Threes Calvin blinked startling her out of her musings She sat down at the table and studied him for a moment He studied her right back probably pondering what might make her look so damned severe She shook her head both to clear it and to let him know that he wasn t in any sort of trouble That only led to an intensified scrutiny in his gaze Hey she said Hey he agreed his eyes remained dead only his mouth moved and only slightly She didn t know exactly what she wanted from him or how to go about getting it So Who s your best friend Calvin blinked Twice With the second blink his eyebrows knitted downward His head tilted questioningly to the side Out of all of them at school she qualified which of them is like the coolest one His eyes darted instantly toward nothing which seemed to lay down and to his left After a short pause he shrugged No idea Generally he spoke in complete sentences Roughly He tended to abandon the unnecessary you prefacing predicates like ask me later and look on t
102. s the number which the computer got from adding up the ones and zeroes equalled a certain character But the numbers weren t zero through eight or zero through eleven million one hundred eleven thousand one hundred eleven though it might have looked that way on paper The codes were geometric The first number in the series of eight was good for one hundred twenty eight and was either true or false either one or zero If the first number out of the eight was zero then the number was under one hundred twenty eight Because the second number was either zero or sixty four zero if zero sixty four if one If that number was also zero then the number was less than sixty four Because also the highest number in which all eight letters were ones was two hundred fifty five There was a total of two hundred fifty six be cause the lowest number was zero Zero was the total of eight ze 77 everynight darrenjames roes Meanwhile the third number was either zero or thirty two the fourth was either zero or sixteen the fifth was either zero or eight the sixth was zero or four the seventh was zero or two and the eighth the final number was zero or one That got the con fused look to return to Jenny s face of course Twenty six letters in the English alphabet But that s not counting commas periods semicolons numbers and other charac ters Also to a computer a capital A is a different character than a lowercase a The
103. s crazy Probably Maybe I should just take you home Your place home IE you want to 24 everynight darrenjames What do you want to do Either Okay she said getting up again and reaching for her coat I don t know what the hell I was thinking I could get arrested just for having you up here Only if I told And I m not going to She stopped and put her coat back down What do you want to do We can just sit here and talk for a while Nothing s really that important yet Okay She moved back over to the davenport and sat down After a moment he joined her So talk she said About what I dunno Stuff like before Computer bugs Latin Your self image My what Nothing Bad joke What about my self image He took a deep breath You don t like yourself much How do you know Little things Not telling me that you usually feel dumb that s what you want me to know Other stuff Little signs that you aren t very happy most of the time Which doesn t make a lot of sense There s nothing wrong with you What sort of self image do you think I have Okay you think you re getting fat you re not I know that I mean I know I m not fat What makes you think I think so Stuff you do Or maybe not Stuff I would do if I thought I were fat
104. s eyes looked old and tired It hadn t always been this way He d had a chance once But time was slipping away from him now He was getting old He couldn t legally drive a car yet but he was getting old He casually tossed the brush back onto the desk and shuffled away from the mirror 00101100 Breakfast uncooked PopTarts a can of Doctor Pepper and thou Thou being whatever passed for Mtv at the end of the twentieth century Commercials with com mercial breaks Infomercials were less annoying Time passed The sun rose The channels changed The day progressed toward nothing at all He felt unemployed Dangerously static Over Done Pointless in a word His mind wandered back to Technophobe Was the title taken already Was there a technophobe com Did 60 everynight darrenjames it really matter or could he still publish a book if the title had already been used elsewhere Could he publish a book at all Could a book be pointless Was Technophobe truly that pointless or did it have a modicum of potential to it Questions abound If his life were a novel that novel would be pointless He wasn t giving the reader anything to see He shut off the television and went off to find his shoes 00101101 Calvin wandered mindlessly through the mall He felt a bit like a secret shopper or a cor porate spy or something He glanced about at the modern conveniences he already took for granted and tried to imag
105. s pretty fast In more applicable terms eighteen hundred bytes were mov ing through per second which meant that eighteen hundred charac ters were moving Though they weren t necessarily characters in the strictest sense they could also represent colour codes Colour codes were hexadecimal which meant that out of six characters each made up of sixteen bits totalling sixteen million seven hun dred seventy seven thousand two hundred sixteen colours the 78 everynight darrenjames shorthand if the first two of the six are sixteen and the latter four are zero the colour is red And that s the sort of thing that the corporations didn t have the time or the inclination to go learn about which was why they outserviced website design to the people who understood hypertext That was why also website designers made a hundred bucks an hour And that was the first thing out of Calvin s mouth that Jenny really understood A hundred per hour was a lot easier to pic ture than eight bits per byte and eighteen hundred bytes per sec ond Calvin understood her understanding and switched over to a visual explanation Hi Mom See he asked That s hypertext Okay she said leaning over his shoulder and wondering what was special enough about that to earn a hundred bucks an hour He detected that and showed her the coding behind it lt HTML gt lt BODY BGCOLOR FFFFFF TEXT 000000 lt CENTER gt Hi
106. such things as televisions and computers had been invented and patented after all To believe for an instant that there was noth ing more to exist under the sun was the act of a fool Calvin alone even at fifteen could imagine hundreds of nonexistent wonders Genetically engi neered housepets were an option and repulsorlifts and terraforming and But he wasn t shopping for future advancements he was looking for commonplace items which would blow the mind of a BabyBoomer Or even an older example of GenerationX Thirty five presuming the book was set in the year 2000 and he hadn t ruled that out then a thirty five year old could be either depending which generation his parents had belonged to Or still did Thirty five year olds weren t often or phaned even if they seemed incalculably old to a fifteen year old Something to bear in mind for the book if he was indeed planning to write it He slowed his stride and thought about that a bit One day in about twenty years his mother was going to be fifty Fifty And he d be thirty five What would the fifteen year olds of the future make of him he wondered Terraforming was one thing to imagine being thirty five was something entirely else But maybe it wasn t such a bad thing to con Sider There could be advantages to it after all If that was he wasn t moving into McManagement right about then He pondered that By the age of thirty five he could v
107. t real tragedy know how old she was probably drunk if you ask damn kids just never learn And the door shut behind him and he was back home Back to normal 00011011 soup sound What I said how does a nice hot bowl of tomato soup sound his mother said Can you eat something do you think Oh Okay Why not Okay Jesus you scared the hell outta me Are you okay now Sure Yes or no Stop playing games here Okay Yes No Calvin Yes I m fucking okay goddamnit Jenny Hamlet jumped back from him her face twisted into a relieved surprised terrified amused hurt angered mess for an instant Then she exhaled pointedly and stepped forward to him again taking his arm and leading him to the dated sofa and 32 everynight darrenjames coaxing him to lie down Here she said grabbing the remote and hitting the Power Button She handed it off to him as she turned to go Find something I ll have your soup ready in a few minutes More fleeting colours Channel up Hawkeye whining about something on M A S H Channel up Some revolutionary new formula on an infomer cial Channel up Pat Robertson postulating that everyone was the spawn of Satan Channel up other car has been identified as Lisa Ken nedy nineteen also of Chicago More up to the min ute coverage as it comes in
108. t technology on Chris McPherson s behalf 63 everynight darrenjames Technophobe Calvin Hamlet One Chris McPherson couldn t keep up with the world It perplexed him It outran him It overlooked him At thirty five years of age he was a solid victim of Future Shock that modern miracle of psychological unrest in which the subject found even day to day sur prises to be more than his mind could bear He was not alone the syndrome occurred to a massive percentage of society still he felt abandoned by the rest The world was speeding away from him like the last crosstown bus on a cold winter night Colloquially he couldn t deal Today was a perfect example He walked along through the mall desperately aware of the newly implemented nonsmoking policy throughout the structure grimacing at the latest in technological achievements Unnecessary brainless advances for a world without ends Why fix it he wondered to himself if it ain t broken Broken or not society was ringing up a hell of a repair bill It was all around him Cellular phones no digital phones you could get them for a penny if you signed up for the service He couldn t imagine anyone being important enough to need such a thing Payphones still existed for emergencies even if they had suddenly mutated from the standard metal black and chrome monoliths into whatever the hell the cardscanning yellow digital readout gizmos were He
109. tant to letting him buy it at first it was hardly a children s book after all Calvin had first given her his trademark Oh I See You re an Idiot look secondly mentioned with authority that he was currently approaching eleven at top speed and wasn t really a child anymore per se and thirdly As a writer myself I m excruciatingly aware of the Carlin List if that s your concern and could easily quote you all seven words moreover having read the first four serials of this work I can estimate the sort of thing I m likely to encounter moreover still your nametag is crooked and your section labelled as re ligious fiction is a redundancy He d got the book after all He was reading it in the food court feet up on the table book resting on his knee His number was called and he doubled his speed to finish the para graph before getting to his feet to go over and pick up the sub from Quizno s he d ordered five minutes earlier Good book the clerk asked as he got there Yeah actually he said yanking on the knap kin dispenser s front plate to access them through the top instead of having to pull them out individu ally through the front slot I always wait for the movie the clerk said almost proudly Calvin glanced up at him He looked about sev enteen and less than thrilled to be working in food service he also looked a little underqualified for the responsibility of put
110. text Spawning a new order of intelligence in the American people experts in the untrue Third layer mpegs compressed over half a P of music to a mere fifty megs allowing igital recordings to download in a matter of minutes and then seconds EBooks sellable hypertext and extensible versions of printed novels cut the expense of publishing to zilch The information society had grown and flour ished at the turn of the millennium g t 37 everynight darrenjames 00100000 Fears of internet regulation had begun to surface Paranoid theories regarding FCC regulation of website content and spammed hoaxes regarding EMail postage rates had choked the ISDN lines Icons claiming This Site a KERIS Free Speech on the Internet had surfaced and spread Never in the history of civilisation had cen sorship seemed so terrifying yet so impossible ter all the net was worldwide And it was largely anonymous People used pseudonyms to remain enigmatic in regard to age and even gender Netisens were regarded as he she its Anyone could upload any thing anywhere anytime What wasn t understood by the majority was ex actly how traceable they really were They left routing signatures whe went Internet Protocol Addresses 207 168 was merely a matter of recording the IP Ad given user tracing him her it back to his her its Internet Service Provider and posre determining which of that ISP s dynamic customers had visited a particular
111. ting meat and cheese to gether with lettuce and bread Calvin smirked and nodded Ah I mean a movie s like two hours tops A book takes for ever to read 101 everynight darrenjames Nah Well this one maybe it s only being released one section at a time monthly roughly But at an average of a hundred pages or so maybe an hour to read each part six hours altogether No way Dude tha d be like six hundred pages tha d take weeks to read Why Calvin jammed the straw into his Doctor Pepper and sipped at it Well you know six hundred pages I mean fuck That s a big book Man Six hundred pages Calvin thought about the various books he d read recently Yeah maybe The average book s only three to five hundred huh But then that s about four hours in reading time Five hundred pages in four hours Bullshit Try four weeks I read fast I guess Damn Okay whatever Dude Calvin nodded and returned to his seat hold ing the book in his left hand and switching from his soda to his sub with his right He finished the book at about the same time he finished his lunch 00111101 Blink blink blink blink blink It wasn t precisely a lack of ideas it was a lack of an audience The kid who took four weeks to read four hundred pages had disturbed him If it took less time to write the book than it took someone
112. to do He wanted to write How hard could it be Hard enough he d learned All because he was too impatient and too dedicated and too Of course if he knew the real answer the question would dissolve He could write he was sure of it at the same time he somehow couldn t And he had no idea why He was thirteen years old Soon he d be four teen Then fifteen sixteen seventeen then he d be an adult and time would really begin to move And if he hadn t figured it out by then he d probably never get it And that he figured was probably a little more stress than most kids his age dealt with on a 104 everynight darrenjames daily basis 00111111 To be or not to be that was the question He didn t want to fail at it He really didn t He also wasn t sure what choice he had He began to notice the more dangerous things in life And not with any fear something more like ava rice He began to long for something accidental to happen He d walk down the street noticing how few grand pianos were being hoisted up through the win dows these days That was his real problem the world had become far too safe and user friendly as of late No piano was ever going to break loose fall thirty storeys and flatten him in D Minor That wasn t a relief to him The summer went away more quickly than it had come and more quickly than it had left the year be fore It wasn t a climatic change it was his
113. uppose His eyes remained locked on the nothingness to his lower right While I m capable of scripting a virus or breaking into NORAD s files I generally don t bother I m 83 everynight darrenjames really more of a hacker in the correct definition of the word The monologue stunned her She abandoned the subject So what s the book about Still staring to the lower right It s about a His eyes shot up to hers for an instant and then to the book on the table At the time it was written it was about a future at this point it s eleven years in the past In any case it details a circumstance in which the government has totalitarian control over the people Free speech and even radical thought have been outlawed The story follows a central character who dares to fight back against the system It begins with a journal which he s legally forbidden to keep and pro gresses to unauthorised there are transceiving televisions of sorts not only do you watch them which is largely mandatory but they or more accurately the people onscreen are watching you Sort of like the net I guess Interactive television They the peo ple onscreen are They Them The government If you do anything disallowed They come in and get you A sort of embellished version of the NSA maybe It s a little hard to explain short of reading the book to you out loud She felt no less stunned than she had a moment before M
114. ur Kent had babbled away about the op eration making sure that all the Americans watching CNN knew what was going on over there Calvin had watched with sceptical in terest from the kitchen table eyes wavering from one side of the thirteen inch screen to the other to the trapdoor of the built in VCR to the Magnavox logo back to the screen left right up down over to the side almost as if he were trying to duck to a better vantage to see what lay behind the newscaster in the background Jenny had caught that but hadn t understood it She also hadn t known whether it was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing that her son was bobbing like an overcaffeinated raven at the television She d almost asked if it had come out at all it might have been more of a de mand what the hell he was up to and why he couldn t just sit still and watch like normal people might But she d never got the chance Calvin had hopped up so quickly that she d barely seen him move and he d disappeared down the hall toward what might have been a study in another house Jenny had absconded without resis tance from Paula with a number of books for Calvin to read over the course of his childhood Among those books had been an entire set of a nearly recent edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Soon too soon Calvin had returned with one of its volumes opened to a specific page Jenny had got the impression that he d read it before and remembered which page number in wh
115. ve abilities of any given imbecile and cannot predict what said moron might do to itself or others given this or any other product without the close supervision of the American Government Published by Wasted Discourse Publications Wasted Inc wastedinc com ISBN 0 9669059 6 2 For Sean Meier Which two were the victims in the end By the Entity Postwar The Lost Kingdom LK1 History Lab The Trouble with Mars LK2 Revenant The Intrinsic Power of the Colour Blue LK3 All God s Creatures Phobivore SB95 97C The Discovery of the Lost Pen LK4 97B Martian People Suck LKS 97A The Nicest Parts of Hell LK6 One of Those Nights The Hotel Foxtrot LT Aspiria LKS Beyond the Mesphos LKLast everynight FC2K News of the Stoopid NotS 97D LKO Damnitology Dubhmerica Paroxysm And Another Thing Slackerhood Acts of God Accrocorinthus Superchav Every night Before J sleep I write a book I cannot keep BLANK everynight darrenjames 00000000 Diatribes on the wall down there THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD And beneath HYPERTEXT IS MIGHTIER THAN THE PEN And the tag KILROY 2017 And the sidewalk beneath cracked but pristine of Krylon Kilroy watched the shadows lengthen before the setting sun It hadn t always been this way everynight darrenjames Part One Every Night everynight darrenjames everynight darrenjames 00000001 Calvin Hamlet was fourte
116. website at a specific time It was a fail safe designed to allow the proper authorities to trump anonymous threats and conspirators The net was under observation passive regula tion Censorship was a possibility after all Later it was a reality 1 of a 00100001 That s where it had begun Disinformers had been de nied renewal or even panned by their ISPs leaving those otherwise benign es to start up accounts elsewhere but by that tim they d been flagged their names logued and Ha creditcard and social security numbers prohibited Some of them had moved to the mall based terminals only to find that their 38 everynight darrenjames cards had no longer worked in those machines either The coin operated browsers had begun to follow ciga rette vending machines into historical lore Registered webmasters had been even easier to control NetworkSolutions were regulated by design giving the FCC free reign over the renewal of domains within the United States The universally advertised blowme com had me aL other infamous free thinker sites had followed it into oblivion Hypertext had been scanned for disinformation by spiders the URLs catalogued for action MPEGs of both audio and video had been hunted analysed and often deleted by sysops The regulation of the net had quickly been compared to the Third Reich of Nazi Germany websites sympathising with those radical few still supporting free internet s
117. y Klein or Calvin responsible for any of it Calvin was at least fifty percent her own fault and she d gained controlling interest over Daddy Klein without issue She could have deleted Cal vin months before it was too late she could have handed him off to an established parenthood even afterward she d kept him and done every damned bit as well to raise him as she could If her shortcom ings as a mother were her fault they weren t intentional 00110000 Jenny was somewhere between brainless and brilliant like most people of her generation Calvin was exceptional A part of his bril liance Jenny had always assumed was environmental He d had the combined input of Jenny s and Paula s efforts in the formative 70 everynight darrenjames years He d absorbed everything they d offered him It was unnerving in a way Calvin spotted patterns in impos sible places When he d been four she d taken him to a greasy spoon of a place for a snack On the wall had been a dated aluminium ad vert for Hires Root Beer Calvin had identified the brand he d been reading for two years the previous six months at an adult level as HiRes She d corrected him on the pronunciation and he d corrected her back explaining that HiRes was short for High Resolution and diametric to LoRes It was a command in BASIC which let the Ap pleIIPlus know whether it would be outputting the HLINs and VLINs Horizontal and Vertical LINes respectively when it c

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