“Show him,” one of the yellow said to its brethren. “He deserves that much.”
Deserves what? Maddie wondered in excitement. Have they chosen me worthy to see that face, the grand face that has eluded many others for centuries, millennia-
Maddie’s thoughts froze as the room dissipated around him. Yellow was everywhere, and the basement, even Maddie’s mansion, seemed nonexistent around him. No signs of those New England woods surrounded him, no leaf of grass, no blue skies overhead. He seemed to not recognize his Earth, nor was he in Carcosa, where even the realities of death were apparent. Here, no reality but The King was apparent, and various shapes, forms and faces morphed in and out around him, teasing him, drawing his attention closer. All illusions, however, were as ephemeral as the world Maddie had once known.
Destruction was kind after Maddie gazed upon the truth. With that great truth revealed, he saw, feared, and respected the eternity of The King in Yellow.
Brian Barr is an American author of novels, short stories, and comic books. Brian has been published in various short story anthologies and magazines, including New Realm, Nebula Rift, Under the Bed, Queer Sci Fi’s Discovery, NonBinary Review, Dark Chapter Press’s Kill for a Copy, Mantid Magazine, and various short story collections. Brian collaborates with another writer, Chuck Amadori, on the supernatural dark fantasy noir comic book series Empress, along with Pencil Blue Studios’ Marcelo Salaza for the art. His first novel, Carolina Daemonic, was published by J. Ellington Ashton Press in 2015.
ALWAYS READ THE SMALL PRINT
MARK WOODS
They called it The Ultimate Writing Tool, just like that, in capital letters, and claimed it was the last word processor programme you were ever going to need.
The actual name of the software application was ‘Write or Die’, and the blurb that accompanied it quite literally screamed out its intentions loud and clear: ‘Be inspired to write that novel you were always going to write, but never felt you had the time—or pay the ultimate price and die trying!’ That was the tagline and straight away, right from the start, that was enough to hook most people in.
Even the fact that no-one had ever heard of R’yleh Industries before, or that the company had no traceability whatsoever, was not enough to put people off.
Within mere hours of its release, ‘Write or Die’ was flying off the virtual shelves as it broke all records for previously downloaded writing applications. Hell, for all other applications world-wide.
There had never been a phenomenon quite like it.
With unemployment at an all-time high, there were a hell of a lot of frustrated writers out there who were all convinced that their idea was the next big bestseller, but who lacked the motivation to actually sit down and write. This software was intended to help provide some of that motivation that they so obviously lacked by giving them an incentive, pitting them against the clock.
The idea was a simple one.
The first time you used the programme, your computer, lap-top or tablet took a photo of your face via webcam. You were then encouraged to set the total word count you were aiming to reach for your proposed novel, short story, or whatever it was you were trying to write, and then a clock would appear, in the top right-hand corner of your screen.
Somewhere below that would appear a computer generated image of your face, and as long as you wrote and met your projected daily target for each day, that face would keep on smiling.
The minute you began typing your first words, the clock in the corner of your screen would begin ticking and slowly counting down. How long the programme gave you all depended on how big your word count was, and was worked out by a number of factors that included assessing your average typing speed and working out how much time you spent online that might be better served writing.
If you failed to meet the projected daily targets the computer programme generated for you, the image of your face in the bottom of the corner slowly started to deteriorate. The closer the clock got to zero without you meeting your targets, the worse your face onscreen would gradually start to get until it resembled that of a rotting corpse or zombie. The only way to stop and reverse this chain of events was to increase your writing speed and word production.
To provide further motivation, and to show their customers that the threats they made about meeting your word count were serious, the programme also made you pay for each daily target you failed to meet.
At first these would be small—the first penalty, for example, was that the programme would automatically delete the first one hundred words you’d written if you failed to meet the first projected word count—but the further along you got, and the more targets you reached, the more severe the penalties became.
What was more, the programme refused to let you save your progress to anywhere other than to its own server either, and if you tried, the software would detect where you’d attempted to save the file and would then take pains to delete it. Likewise, the programme refused to let you print off copies of your work until the final word count had been reached.
The whole point was to stop you from trying to cheat or beat the system.
Some thought this cruel, but the whole concept of the application was to inspire you to write and without the actual threat that your work might be lost forever, the creators believed their software might as well be waving around an empty gun in a very crowded room. It was amazing just how much authors managed to achieve when they thought there was a chance their manuscript might be permanently and irreplaceably deleted at any moment should they fail to meet their deadline. In that regard then, the software was a success.
The makers of the application had quite literally thought of everything.
You couldn’t even try to bluff it.
If you were falling short one day, and tried to meet your target word count by simply typing gibberish and gobbledy gook, the computer programme was designed to recognise that and issue out a penalty. Likewise, if you decided to be clever and get somebody else to meet your word count for you one day, either because you didn’t have the time or simply could not be bothered, the software was also designed to recognise this—from the change in speed, style, and tempo of the keystrokes being made—and would again eke out another penalty.
You got three chances, three lives as it were, three warnings.
After that, that was it, and the makers of the programme issued what they called their ‘Ultimate Penance’.
Even those who thought they were being clever by copying their work down in longhand as they wrote it, so it could not be erased and deleted permanently from existence, failed in their attempts to foil the software. The few people who tried this all experienced small house fires shortly after they had switched their computers off. Curiously enough, in every case, the only damage ever done was to their manuscripts and once again, everyone who attempted this was made to pay a consequence for their actions.
The programme didn’t care if what you wrote was good—all it cared about was that the writing that you produced was consistent, coherent, made sense, and reached the minimum word count every day that the programme set you.
A lot like a lot of the other writing challenges that were available online, the idea was more that you actually complete something rather than it was perfect. If you then wanted to use another word processor application to edit or play around with your work once you had completed all your targets and met all of your deadlines, then that was up to you.
The main goal of their application was just to get you to write, and write each and every day.
If you failed in this, there were consequences.
There were always consequences.
***
Danny Patterson was in trouble, and he knew it. He had downloaded the ‘Write or Die’ application onto his laptop and had been reaching all his writing targets and meeting all his deadlines—up until now. Now Danny had writer’s block. He quite simply could not write any more. The well was dry, so to speak. Empty.
His muse had left the building.
The clock was against him—as it was against all those writers who had signed up to the programme, agreed to the terms and conditions and ticked the ‘yes’ box without really looking too closely as to what it was they were signing up to. He was on his last warning, his final strike; any more failures on his part and he would be forced to pay ‘The Ultimate Price’ as the website put it.
Danny was not afraid of consequences, he would take whatever came. No, he was more concerned that all the days and weeks and months that he had put into his body of work were all now about to just be wasted.
If the software programme started deleting all his progress, he would have nothing—nothing to show for all that hard time he had spent working on his novel. A novel he strongly believed had the potential to be his masterpiece, his greatest work to date. He would have to start again, start from the beginning, and Danny wasn’t sure if he could do that because, right now, he had nothing, absolutely nothing. He had hit the proverbial writer’s wall and could see no way around it.
This was it—make or break for his writing career, maybe his whole life—if he couldn’t see his way out of this hole, and soon, his whole future as a semi-successful author might as well be over.
There was no way on from here.
He had no idea how right he was.
Danny sat there and looked again at the blank page sitting there before him, taunting him. He really did have nothing, he decided, his choice of plot direction had painted him into a corner from which he simply could not get out.
He could go back and change things, edit them to make things easier, but he wasn’t even sure if he could do that in the time he had left to meet his latest deadline and besides, going back wouldn’t count towards the daily word count the software programme had set him.
The application did allow him to open up another existing manuscript and work on that instead, and that would count towards meeting his daily goal, but he didn’t have any other manuscripts at present, and no ideas to even begin starting something new.
This was it.
It was all he had.
And he had nothing.
No matter how many times he said this, it didn’t change anything.
What Danny really needed to do was take a break, walk away from the screen for a while, and clear his head but the constraints of the software application didn’t allow him to do that either. You couldn’t just pause the timer, just hit stop for a while. No, if you had a deadline approaching, you had to meet it—no matter what.
If you didn’t, there were consequences. The creators were quite clear on that when you downloaded the programme, even if they did not quite come out and spell out exactly what those consequences were.
Danny thought he knew.
There had been rumours—stories on the internet about authors who had disappeared, whole files on their computer wiped, so no trace back could be made to whoever might be responsible.
Like, say, the company responsible for a writing programme perhaps, whose sole purpose, its raison d’etre as it were, was to get you to write no matter what.
But that was just paranoia, right?
Although the writing programme was called ‘Write or die’, surely it couldn’t really mean exactly what it said. That was just a marketing gimmick, right?
No-one was going to break down his door and actually kill him if he didn’t finish this manuscript, that was just a ridiculous notion wasn’t it?
Danny didn’t want to take his chances.
He thought it probably best if he didn’t try and find out.
At the top of his computer screen, the timer continued to count down.
Tick tock, tick tock, there goes the clock.
The pressure was on.
It was no longer just about his writing anymore, now it was about him just meeting the deadline.
If he could just get another couple of thousand words down or so, he could stall the clock, buy himself more time.
At one point, a few hours ago, Danny had tried unsuccessfully uninstalling the software, taking it off his laptop in an act of desperation, but when he had restarted and rebooted the system, the programme had been right there again. Its timer winking him as it continued to count down.
The avatar supposed to represent his face, under the clock, had never looked so ill. Danny was so gaunt and stressed by all he was currently failing to achieve, that in actuality it wasn’t a bad likeness right now. Now that was worrying.
His bags under his eyes had bags of their own; he hadn’t eaten, he hadn’t slept, had barely drank anything—none of which was conducive to his condition—but all he needed was another 3k and he would hit his 10k target. Just.
Danny didn’t even think he could manage 1k the state his mind was in at the minute.
The timer got ever closer to zero. Danny stared at it, willing it to stop, mentally attempting to use the power of his mind to maybe push it back again, perhaps reset the clock.
Nothing.
That sort of thing only happened in the movies; that and in the sort of books he really had no interest writing.
3...2...1....stop.
Before he knew it, another hour had passed and the countdown clock finally came to a complete stop. Danny put his head into his hands. He had reached the deadline and failed to meet his target. The avatar supposed to represent him, underneath the clock, now resembled a figure of death; rotted and decayed beyond any recognition.
The sound of the funeral march began to sound out of his computer speakers, and then the page in front of him slowly faded to black.
There was almost a sense of relief that it was all over, coupled with a sense of despair at all that hard work he had put in these last few weeks and months now all going to waste.
All that time that he had spent working on this, he knew, he would never, ever get back.
Danny wanted to pick the laptop up and throw it out the window, but he knew that wouldn’t solve anything.
He had failed—and now he had to face whatever consequences the makers of the writing app had devised for people like him.
Failures.
There was a sudden, sharp knock on his front door.
For a moment, Danny was perplexed. He wasn’t expecting anybody.
Then he remembered again the warning plastered all over the website of the software he’d downloaded.
It was time to pay the piper.
Time to pay ‘The Ultimate Price.’
He moved into the hall, calling “Who is it?” as he did so.
Silence was the stern reply.
The knock came again.
Danny moved towards the peephole, located in the front door and looked out. Two official looking men standing tall, straight-laced and in a pair of expensive made-to-measure black business suits, stood outside his door; their faces shielded by the black fedoras each man wore upon their head.
Police, probably, he thought, breathing a sigh of relief. They certainly looked like police from the way they stood and there had been a lot of break-ins lately.
They were probably from Robbery Squad and doing house-to-house calls in the area to warn people to be vigilant.
They certainly didn’t look like any kind of threat.
Danny opened the door, too late wondering why they had not announced themselves as Police and suddenly thinking he should probably have asked them for I.D, but his mind was all over the place, and he wasn’t thinking straight.
“Danny Patterson?” The first man asked. “The author, Danny Patterson? Of ‘Kingdom Come’ fame?”
Kingdom Come had been his first book and a moderate success. It had got him a publishing deal with a medium-sized press who had then turned around and offered him a moderate advance for his next book on the back of his first books sales.
Unfortunately, nothing else that he had written since had generated anything like as much income and eventually he, and his publishers, had both started to consider him a
s a one trick pony.
That was when he had seen the writing programme advertised on the T.V and figured it was exactly what he needed to get himself going once again.
Which it had been...for a while.
“Well, yes, that’s me,” Danny replied. “But that’s not all I’ve written. I mean, I have a few other books ou...” He stopped, mid-sentence; not sure where this whole conversation was going, aware that he was rambling. Danny did not know who these two men were yet, and it never hurt to be polite, but he was fully conscious of the fact that he was just talking for the sake of it and that neither of these two men in front of him really seemed that interested in what he had to say.
They already knew who he was, Danny was sure of it. It had been a rhetorical question and if they hadn’t already known who he was, they would never have come here to his door in the first place,
These two men looked exactly like what they were—the kind of men that didn’t mess about, just got down to the job in hand and did not believe in any kind of unnecessary small talk.
Danny shut up.
The first of the two men, and the tallest, stepped forward, pulling out a cotton wool bud and a small, plastic tube as he did so.
“Open wide,” the man said, and Danny found himself complying before he even realised what he, or the other man, was doing. There was something about both men’s tones that suggested they meant business, and Danny was one of those people that had been brought up to always respect and obey figures of authority.
The tall guy swabbed all around Danny’s mouth, while the second man, his partner, pulled out a device that looked a lot like a blood glucose meter used to measure blood sugar levels in diabetics; small, square, with an LCD display and a slot at the bottom where you could insert whatever it was you wished to scan.
Within Stranger Aeons Page 18
