A Future We'd Like To See 1.42 - On the Writer's Block
By Twoflower (Copyright 1994)
 
     Four years had passed.
 
     Four long years, packed with events and people and things,
and he couldn't put them together right, no matter how hard he
tried.
 
     S'ykk looked down at his paper.  It clearly wasn't much
better than the sixteen previous drafts.  If he had KNOWN he
would have been picked as valedictorian, he would have joined a
biker gang and let his grades slide down the toilet.
 
     S'ykk was very, very good at forming words into sentences,
and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into works of art. 
'Essays' was too mild a term; a typically S'ykk paper would have
the reader undergoing three major changes of character before the
second page.
 
     What he was NOT good at was reading them aloud.  His last
experience at public speaking had been in junior high, where he
was forced into Forensics Club by an annoying guidance counselor
("You need some sort of club, or no college will accept you!" the
twit had said).  Sure, his informative speech was a moving
tribute to the survivors of the ancient Massacre of G'hjjiyk, but
it had taken forty-seven rewrites to make the paper 'less
embarrassing to be read aloud'.  By that point it was cheeseball
drivel which was thrice as embarrassing as his first rough draft. 
He made wee wee in his pants and passed out before he could read
it at the podium.
 
     He browsed over his recent draft.  It lacked his usual
style; it was barren of comparisons, devoid of metaphor.  Too
much historical wrap up, not enough sappy 'I love you all and
this has been the best four years of my life'.  Well, only way to
revise is to go over and scratch out the bad bits, he thought. 
Whatever's left can be refined, and that'll be that.  He got his
white-out pen out of the drawer and began to correct.
 
     "As I look upon the graduating class, I am reminded of how
far we've come in the last four years," the paper read.  Cheesy. 
White, white white.  "We've seen history being made and broken
simultaneously..."  What did THAT mean?!  White!  White!  He
continued to read, whiting out the bits that didn't appeal to
him.
 
     "On the political front, we've seen the disbanding of the
Heavily Armed Ambassadors of Friendship and Fun.  The government,
in efforts to cut costs as all the transport business slowly
trickled over to the newly-formed Disgruntled Postal Workers,
growing stronger even today, on their 10th anniversary..." No,
no.  Too informative; no fire!  White, white.
 
     "...which brings me to what the media has billed as the
Third Invasion of Cyberspace.  The first, the wave of programmers
and educators seeking to use the new VOSNet to encourage
humanity's growth in culture and knowledge.  The Second Invasion,
of criminals and traders seeking to make a profit off of the
virtual reality network.  Then, the Third Invasion, where the
businesses and media arrived seeking to make a profit off of the
virtual reality network, setting up sanitized systems which
allowed pre-cleaned access for a price..."
 
     Too preachy.  Just because I don't like the
commercialization doesn't mean everybody else hates it too. 
White white.  Need to keep this non-biased.
 
     "...also the sudden appearance and disappearance of the
Thinkers, now only a myth in cyberspace... a race of
hyperintelligent data creatures which could manipulate the net to
their will, bringing themselves into public eye and then
vanishing just as suddenly..."
 
     Speculation.  Few people believed they ever existed.  White
white white, white.
 
     "...not the only new race to come to light, as the AI
Cyborgs announced that they were indeed walking among us,
numbering in the millions and demanding rights and justice..."
 
     Alright, that's passable.  But it's not WORDED right.  There
was a lot of fighting and conflict over AI rights, a lot of which
is still going on... this simply didn't grasp it right.  White,
white white white, white.  White.
 
     "...throughout history, there have been three geniuses in
the field of science.  Of course, the great Einstein, a swell guy
despite the fact that he was rather wrong about faster than light
travel..."
 
     Ugh!  WHITE!
 
     "...the second genius, the unknown hero who first developed
the VOS software and the AI code, most of which remains
undecipherable today.  Many say it was not a single man, but a
group of men..."
 
     Speculation, speculation.  Also a myth.  White.
 
     "...and lastly, the third genius, Gallen Upberg, who finally
deciphered the last locks to manipulation of the body itself,
leading to neural modifications, custom limbs with mechanical and
organic tissue replacements.  Although his genius was short
lived, due to the freak accident where his splattered and mutated
remains were found all over his last published findings..."
 
     Yuck.  We don't want the graduates vomiting in the aisles! 
White white white.
 
     "...so where does this leave us, four years later and four
years wiser?  The government in debt, the racial conflict between
cyborg and human, the Net.Cops patrolling cyberspace in search of
anything against the Virtual Law... the universe is DOOMED,
DOOMED DOOMED!  NONE WILL ESCAPE!  SOCIETY HAS CRUMBLED, ANARCHY
IN ITS PLACE!  MY LIFE IS A HOLLOW LIE, A SHAM!  THERE IS NO
POINT TO EXISTENCE!  LIVE WHILE YOU CAN, GRADUATES, FOR THE
SYSTEM WILL CRUSH YOU IN THE END..."
 
     And the rest, meaningless scribble and scrawl.  Disturbing
scrawl, with half-formed shapes of terror and pain, trying to
form words but failing horribly.  S'ykk whited these out madly,
trying to cover up his own scratchings.
 
     That wasn't the bad part.
 
     The bad part was that, revision done with, he was facing a
nice, clean sheet of whited-out paper, not a mark on it.
 
     There wasn't a single good thing left.
 
     Well... maybe the situation wasn't as bad as he had written. 
Where he got those words he didn't know; they simply weren't
TRUE.  The economy was improving; President Doofman said it
himself.  The Net.Cops were there for your own good, keeping the
net safe for the free flow of information.  And for crying out
loud, society isn't CRUMBLING!  Sure, it's looking a little ratty
around the edges, but it always has and probably always will be. 
It's not a dark tomorrow, it's a bold new day!  The sun WILL come
out tomorrow!
 
     S'ykk grinned, proud of humanity, and took a running dive
through a closed third story window.
 
     He knew, he knew as he was pitching face first into the
pavement, that the universe certainly wasn't coming to a grueling
demise, that humanity would go on happily and survive, prospering
and generally enjoying life.  In the darkest light there was the
lightest dark.  He wasn't committing suicide because he feared
humanity mutating into a horrible, slathering monster, like his
parents would assume later after scraping through the layers of
his cheap ten-credit white out fluid.
 
     Sure, there would be a memorial service.  The principal
would speak about these dark times which drove him to his death,
how he was the student who 'tried too hard'.  Other students
would end themselves in honor of his last words, leaving confused
messages about a dark empty world that hates them.  Completely
wrong, of course.  That wasn't why he was jumping.
 
     He was doing it because, when he got right down to it, he
simply HATED public speaking.
 
     So he smiled on the way down, even after losing most of his
brain to the synthetic concrete.  Life's just funny that way, he
figured in his last synaptic firings.
 
     He was scooped up by the ambulance and converted to spare
parts shortly afterward, for use as life saving implants and
hyperaddictive drugs.