“Something’s strange about this,” she said. Mike only glanced up for a moment at the sound of her voice, lowered to library volume. Natalie was curled in the corner with her computer heating her thighs and a niggling sense of discontent worrying at her mind. “Really,” she insisted. “There’s something odd going on every time I try to write.”
Lenovo ThinkPad X200s (Photo credit: Ronald HN Tan)
Mike sighed and shut his laptop. “Have you written anything?” Natalie turned her screen so he could see the glowing white page, blank and pure and hopelessly frustrating. He leaned back and opened his computer again, and said, “Well what do you want me to do about? Just write something already.”
“No,” she said. “That’s the thing. I’ve been trying to and I can’t. I wrote an idea down during class, but I open up Letters and it’s just gone. Vanished. I can talk okay and I can scribble something in my notebook, but as soon as the damn program’s up on my computer my thoughts just scramble and, I don’t know, I feel like I’m losing all the inspiration or ideas or whatever that I might ever have had to begin with.”
Mike frowned. “Okay,” he said. “Let me see. You know what, close it and I’m going to do some research. I’ll meet you here tonight, okay? You go take a nap or something, you look totally drained.”
Natalie nodded and gathered her things. When she said goodbye to Mike he was already absorbed in the computer on his lap, tapping and clicking furiously. He was a rather gifted hacker, she knew, and eventually he would worm his way into something interesting, if not helpful.
She did take a nap, and woke up feeling refreshed. When she left her dorm the sun had dropped beneath the horizon, leaving the sky a pallid grey and the campus doused in blue shadow. She stopped for a sandwich and then found Mike in the library, still in the same chair. He didn’t look up when she walked toward him, only tearing his gaze from the screen when she gently shook his shoulder. He said, “Hey, Natalie. I found something.”
She raised her eyebrows at him, suddenly dubious. “Yeah? Anything useful?”
Mike grinned. “Yep. Very. Look – ” He pulled her over beside him so that she could peer over his shoulder at a bewildering array of windows and tabs piled atop one another. “I got into the email of one of the project designers of the word processing programs. Namely Letters, of course. Look at this.” He double-clicked a file entitled ‘The WriterBlock® Project,’ which sprang open at the second page.
Mike began to read. “This project shall be kept in confidence between the committee assigned to dealing with the COMPANY’s Inspiration® program. The specifics of the effect of the word processor LETTERS shall be discussed here and kept strictly confidential.” There was a space at the bottom of the page here for a signature, and Mike scrolled past it to the middle of the next page and kept reading, his voice tight and controlled. “LETTERS is designed to implement the WriterBlock® method, in which the blank page induces a sudden and severe lack of enthusiasm, inspiration, and original thought in the mind of the participant or USER. The USER will therefore lose any and all motivation and ideas, necessitating his/her concentration and the prolonged use of the LETTERS program. The LETTERS program will then, by implementing the WriterBlock® technique, begin to siphon the USER’s creative energies through the computer, using wireless internet to carry those energies back to the COMPANY HQ, where it will be used in further projects. These energies become the property of the COMPANY. This technique and its use are highly classified, as is the entirety of the WriterBlock® project.” Mike stopped reading and looked up at Natalie, his eyes glowing with excitement. She stared back at him, struggling with a vague sense of horror and disgust.
“They do this on purpose?” Her voices sounded high and too loud to her own ears. A guy sitting across the aisle of shelves glanced up and scowled at the two of them, so she continued more quietly. “I can’t believe it. I mean, it doesn’t even make sense.”
“There’s more,” said Mike. “I could read you about loads of other stuff. This is a really developed project that seems to have started with the first computers. There’s tons of documents about it once you find the right people. I mean, for a company that’s so sure it wants all this crap to be secret, its executives and people never seem to clear out their inboxes.”
Natalie nodded, numb. She sank into the other chair and pulled out her computer, ignoring Mike starting to talk again across from her. He seemed very excited about all this. Letters was still up on her screen, and she raised her eyes to the white page. As Mike chattered, she let her fingers rest on the keyboard. She stared blankly forward, the unease and anger that clamored in her mind slowly fading away to nothing.
all the in between 