Fictioneering

In the second half of the twenty-first century, the world ran out of stories to tell. The burgeoning Western entertainment industry of the modern age, combined with the emergence of robust new literary economies in the former Third World, stressed the planet Earth’s reserves of fiction to a degree unimaginable just decades before. The cornucopists could argue long and breathlessly that the world would never run out of imagination or creativity, but the numbers spoke for themselves; ratings were down, book sales lagged, and across the globe the same dreary tepid movie plots were repeated ad nauseum.

Economic and political conflicts erupted the world over as governments and companies scrambled to control the remaining reserves of literary talent and originality. Wars were fought, empires fell, and fortunes were made. As the conflicts of the age began to abate, humanity found itself gradually adapting to the new scarcity. Like oil, coal, and water, the planet still possessed an abundance of fiction, but extracting it had become costly and difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. And very lucrative.

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“No good,” said Director John Hitherby. “It’s caught in a self reflexive loop.”

He crumpled the sheet of synth-paper in his hands, letting the soy ink of the rejected text add to the already impressive mosaic spread across his leathery palms. He tossed it into a waste receptacle and turned back to the tech that had handed the parchment to him.

“Cut the feed and reset the filters to New Weird. Maybe we’ll get a lucky break from that vein. And no Gibson! We’ve been getting complaints.”

The tech nodded and jogged away, wasting no time with small talk. Director Hitherby ran a tight operation at Time-Sony Content Generation Facility 36, one that could not afford to fall behind on quotas. When he gave an order, one did it without question or commentary.

Director Hitherby marched up the rattling steps to his office above the central control room. A dozen techs and stenographers sat at monitoring stations, typing furiously away as new data streamed into the control room from the processing floor far below. The great bay windows let the warm glow of the extraction chamber fill the room, but for reading, the Director preferred the colder, clearer and more efficient halogen lamps in his office.

There was someone waiting for him there – a thin man dressed smartly in a company suit and tie.

“Director,” he said cheerily, extending a hand. “Tom Johnson, Facilities Review Team. Wonderful operation you have here.”

The Director stared at the suit for a moment, then held up his ink-stained hands in what one could interpret as an apologetic gesture. He walked around the man and sat behind his desk, upon which rested an improbable amount of paperwork. Tom Johnson eased into one of the two chairs in front of the desk.

“I’m sorry if I’ve caught you at a bad time, but scheduling during work hours is always problematic,” said the suit. “However, the company has some urgent matters to discuss with you.”

Director Hitherby moved some reams of paper about. He looked coolly at Tom Johnson.

“First of all, we are very happy with the quality of the product to hit the distribution centers in the last month. Excellent work, some of the best we’ve seen. However…”

John listened to the corporate speech training and personnel management techniques slither through Tom Johnson’s voice like copulating snakes.

“Given that this is the last and largest facility of its type to be built, management is somewhat disappointed in the unexpectedly low quantity of output. The networks need material, Director. Our clients need content. The company would like to increase your set quotas by 20%.”

The Director perused the hourly samples. He could have had them remotely transmitted to the monitor on his desk, but he still preferred old fashioned paper in hand when reading. Company policy be damned – he had a job to do, and he did it well. He began to speak aloud. Tom Johnson could have assumed the Director was addressing him, but he could have just as easily been talking to the walls.

“Rewrite of Shakespeare’s MacBeth, set in a zoo, wherein Lady MacBeth is portrayed by a four hundred pound gorilla speaking in sign language.”

“Three hundred and twenty-two unrelated images of giant robots fighting, with Japanese and English dialogue.”

“One’s a film critic, one’s a biochemically enhanced clone of Adolf Hitler. They fight crime.”

“Medieval period piece about the betrayal of a 16th century Scottish general, fifty two thousand four hundred and seventy-eight words, including such culturally appropriate terms as ‘dingbat’ and funkalicious.’”

“Detailed narrative of an interactive 3D video game session in which one of the author’s friends is a notorious ‘teamkiller.’”

“Four hundred thousand pages of unsorted slash fiction. Buffy/Willow, Buffy/Spike, Zander/Spike, Yoda/Angel, Luke/Han, Han/Chewie, Han/Jabba, Kirk/McCoy, Kirk/Sulu, Kirk/Uhura, Kirk/Spock, Spock/Mirror Spock, Spock/Angel, Spock/Optimus Prime – that’s a new one.”

As if on cue, a tech entered the office. The Director tossed the voluminous stack of slash fiction to him. “Clean this up and send two copies up to Distribution, one tagged ‘cool’ and one ‘ironic.’” The tech left in a hurry.

“Tell, me, Tom. Which one of these scintillating samples of human creativity do you think would make the biggest splash on the central networks?”

Tom Johnson paused as the snakes took a moment to get back in the mood. “As Director, that’s your concern, Mr. Hitherby. The company only wishes to properly motivate you and your staff. Given the complexity and expense of this operation we have the utmost confidence in your ability to meet a higher standard of output.”

The Director abruptly stood and walked to the door. Tom Johnson, a look of consternation on his face, followed. They stepped down into the control room, between the monitoring stations with their loud clacking, and looked out the wide windows into the extraction chamber far below them.

The massive dome enclosed a central shaft – the Zeitgeist tap – surrounded by three dozen psychic feed arrays. Each array pumped away rhythmically, moving bell jars full of cloned neural tissue up and down in the energy flow provided by the central tap. Technicians in protective gear and heavy shielded helmets monitored the machinery and piped the collected data up to the control room. From there the processed data went to Central Parsing for analysis before being printed and hand-delivered to Director Hitherby’s desk.

“Tom, unless you’ve work on a rig like this there’s something you can never understand. It doesn’t matter how many pipes you lay or how big you build them, you’re still pulling from the same vein.” He pointed to the tap. “90% of everything is crap, no matter how much you pull up. But the company doesn’t want crap, it wants gems. And if you want that 10% that are gems, you have to let us do our damn jobs down here.”

“Sir, I’m getting multiple infallible protagonists,” said one of the monitors. The Director leapt to the tech’s station and scanned the readout. Even unparsed, he could see the plots forming into predictable lines, watch canon characters fall by the wayside to make way for an artificially superior persona.

“Mary Sue! Mary Sue! Egocentric contamination on arrays five, eight, and thirty three!”

John grabbed the facility microphone and shouted. “Disengage Zeitgeist tap! Purge those arrays now! I don’t want that crap to spread to the unaffected feeds!”

As technicians scrambled to stem the potential damage, Tom Johnson walked over to the monitoring station and placed a friendly hand on the Director’s shoulder. “I can see you have your hands full down here, Director. We can discuss this at length tomorrow. I’ll need a full incident report sent to the Facilities Review Office, of course. Thank you for your time.”

Tom Johnson left. As the Director seethed quietly over the monitor, the tech who had sounded the alarm leaned over to him.

“We always get a contamination when management comes sniffing by, chief,” she said. “Maybe we should give them helmets.”

The Director released his murderous grip on the microphone and slumped forward, laughing bitterly to himself. “You’re probably right. We could also stuff them in the feed jars. Since they’re so eager for more content, maybe they’ll pick up material better than the vat brains.”

The whole control room laughed at that.

“Ok, people back to work. We have a quota to meet, and the day isn’t getting any younger.”

A breathless tech ran up to the Director and handed him a small sheet of paper. “Sir, this came in just before the shut down. I think you better have a look.”

John took the paper and began to read.

In the second half of the twenty-first century, the world ran out of stories to tell. The burgeoning Western entertainment industry of the modern age, combined with the emergence of robust new literary economies in the former Third World, stressed the planet Earth’s reserves of fiction to a degree unimaginable just decades before. The cornucopists could argue long and breathlessly that the world would never run out of imagination or creativity, but the numbers spoke for themselves…