Not A Blog™

Marty Gantz made his way down the deteriorated wooden stairs into his neighbor’s cellar, a single hesitant step at a time. The space was illuminated by one bare light bulb, and one bare light bulb imprisoned in a metal cage. The combination of sharp light, mildew odor, and damp concrete walls created an illusion that the room was claustrophobic when, in fact, it spanned the entire foundation of the house.

Swinging around the bottom of the steps and entering the room proper, he said “So, what’s the great Professor Doctor Albert Manfred have that would be of any interest to me?” Marty pronounced Doctor with a faux-German accent.

Dr. Manfred was standing over what appeared to be a hair stylist’s hair washing chair. The dome attached to the head-end of the recliner was bristling with antenna and wires, and at least one flashing light. Without looking up from his work, the doctor replied, “as I said earlier: something which you, the great Author Martin T. Gantz, will undoubtedly find useful.”

“Undoubtedly,” said Marty staring at the contraption with bemusement.

Dr. Manfred snapped a breaker and the machine began to hum. “Tell me something: what’s the plot for your next novel?”

The author wrinkled his nose. “I really have no idea. Nothing in the pipeline,” he paused, then added, “which is really bad because after the success of Crimson Night my editor’s been all over me. I was asked to do a monthly column for the Reader’s Digest, so I took it just to get him off my back. You know how it is. It’s due next week.”

“And you haven’t started.” It was not a question.

“Not—as such. So what? What’s with the chair?”

Dr. Manfred adjusted his glasses with a thumb and forefinger and said, “what you’re describing is writer’s block, yes?”

Marty shrugged. “Sure.”

“This is my anti-writer’s block chair.”

The author snorted and answered with the same word, plus sarcasm, “Sure. And next I suppose you’re going to tell me to sit in it.”

“Oh heavens, no. Not yet. The voltage hasn’t been properly calibrated, for one thing.”

“Yeah, good. When you need test victims, or crash test dummies, or whatever you call them, don’t come knocking,” Marty crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “I don’t suppose you could tell me what it actually does?”

“Of course I could, but I doubt you would understand it.”

The author threw up his hands and rolled his eyes—his entire head, really—at the futility of being invited into the basement to begin with. “So what’s the point of bringing me down here?”

Dr. Manfred sat down at an old computer terminal and crack a knuckle. “Simple. I need to know about writer’s block.”

“What?”

“The machine works with a multi-layered neural net. In order to overcome writers block, I first need to tell it what writer’s block is.”

“You can’t tell me you’ve never experienced it.” Marty’s mouth stayed open when he finished.

“I have not. The only thing I’ve written have been papers. They’re based on research so they basically write themselves.” The doctor tapped a few keys until the computer beeped. “Okay, go ahead. What’s writer’s block?”

Marty bit his lip. “Well, um, it’s kind of like—” his mind went blank. Slowly, he grabbed a nearby chair and sat himself in it. “I have no idea. Actually, that’s kind of it.”

The doctor just stared at him, eyes magnified through the glasses to googley proportions.

“I mean, it’s like having ideas when you’re doing other stuff, then when you’re sitting in front of the computer ready to type, you don’t have any ideas.”

Dr. Manfred began typing furiously at the conclusion of this thought, and didn’t stop for a full thirty seconds. He made a note on a legal pad, then asked, “so it’s not for a lack of ideas, it’s for not being able to recall the idea at the correct time.”

“Right—well no. I mean—sometimes I don’t have ideas, either. But sometimes I just can’t put the ideas into words.”

The doctor typed this into the computer.

After an awkward pause, Marty finally asked, “does that answer your question?”

“Yes, I believe it does. Thank you.” The doctor began to work, oblivious to the fact that his neighbor was still sitting in the house.

Marty stood up, “So—is that all, then?”

“Oh, yes. Feel free to go.”

Marty did. Quickly.

Over the next few days Marty absolutely could not get the concept of the anti-writer’s block chair out of his head. It was all he could think about, even at the expense of thinking about actual plot ideas for his editor. In a sense, it had cured his writer’s block, if only by replacing the very thing he was experiencing with ruminations on that thing.

Despite his initial trepidation at being used as a test subject, he was very much wondering how—or if—the thing worked. The doctor came and went, but had not bothered to say anything else to Marty who was now trying to decide if it would be apropos to breach the subject at all. Finally he decided to hell with it. Since Dr. Manfred had brought it up in the first place, it would be absurd for him to assume that Marty would not inquire about it later.

“Yes, I’ve made some progress,” said Dr. Manfred, standing in his doorway. He made no indication that he was about to let Marty in—and, in fact, it appeared that he was prepared to carry on the entire conversation there at the front door. He went on, “but there’s a snag. It seems the neural net can only amplify and organize ideas that already exist. It is not able to create new ones, nor can it revive ideas which have been forgotten.” Marty tuned out the rest of the technical details until the doctor ended with, “unfortunately, I won’t have time to work on it at all next week, as I’ll be out of town for a conference on quantum electrodynamics.” He blinked once, then said, “Am I to presume you’re satisfied with my answer?”

That was Marty’s cue to leave. “Sure thing, Doc. It’s an intreguing idea. Just wondering how it was coming along. Take care.”

So he’s leaving for a week, thought Marty. A week of empty house; plenty of time to take a closer look… This was followed immediately by No. I’m not that kind of person and chased with, I don’t want to know that badly, anyway. This entire evolution of thought was called into question, however, with a simple, or do I?

On Monday, Marty’s editor called. Wednesday was the first deadline. The insinuation was that although everyone at Collins and Rowe likes you, Marty, there are approximately fourteen thousand other people who will write nearly as good, for much less. Don’t drop the ball on this one. But we know you’re a procrastinator, so we’re still expecting great things. Marty hung up the phone and bit a nail.

On Tuesday, Marty started eighteen manuscripts. His total sentence count for the day was also eighteen. Number of finished columns: zero. Number of ideas was at the persistently low number of one. And it was exactly the wrong idea. I could just write something about curing writer’s block. It’s got a great postmodern flair to it: I can’t write so I write about not being able to write. This was followed by a three martini lunch after which Marty decided that the subject was more appropriate for The New Yorker than for the Reader’s Digest, not that he was calling Reader’s Digest readers low-brow.

On Wednesday, Marty had no further recourse. Besides having nothing to show for his procrastination, he absolutely had to find out more about Dr. Manfred’s chair. It doesn’t work he told himself sixty seven times on Wednesday morning. I just have to prove to myself it doesn’t work so I can move on. Two minutes later and he was standing at the doctor’s back door.

Like all suburbanites, Dr. Manfred locked his front door, but left the back open. Marty discovered this after flipping over the door mat looking for a key. He found none, so he twisted the door knob just to see what would happen. It gave. The basement was creepier than usual due to the emptiness of the house. For a fleeting moment, Marty thought perhaps Dr. Manfred had an elaborate security system—indeed, that the whole setup was some sort of bizarre experiment on the psychological aspects of burglery, and that his every move was being recorded. The feeling passed, but never subsided completely.

Power was easy enough to find: a strip here, the button on the front of the computer, and the larger breaker Dr. Manfred had used to energize the chair itself. The computer booted to an old DOS application which configured itself to accept output from the neural net. The net was laying on the table. It was, Marty decided, somewhat anticlimactic in appearance, being a simple gray box with wires from the head-dome going into it on one end, and more wires coming out the other end, attached to the computer. It had one amber LED, glowing steadily. The only indication that it was, in fact, the most important item on the table was a piece of masking tape stuck to the top where the words neural net had been scribbled on with a Sharpie.

The top half of the computer screen was filled with graphical depictions of connections and relationships, as well as esoteric abbrevations and equation gibberish. The bottom half of the screen was a simple word processor. The first line of type at the prompt read:

> System initialization successful. Select Return to begin transcription.

Marty decided to try this before subjecting himself to the unknown failure that was the anti-writer’s block chair. He pressed return. The head-dome on the chair lit up with tiny points of light all across its surface. Somewhere beneath the table a capacitor whined while charging and the hum of various fans increased in pitch as they were brought to speed. On the screen, the computer began to tick off lines as it waited for input.

> Transcription in progress…
.
.
.


After a few seconds of nothing, the computer beeped at presicely the correct pitch to indicate annoyance, and the whole system spun down. The capacitor discharged to the ground with a snap.

> Transcription failure. Check connections.
> SAVE or DELETE?

Marty selected “D” to delete the empty transcription. The computer beeped in the affirmative, the text field cleared and he was once again presented with a message telling him the initialization was succesful and he could begin by pressing return. The author, devoid of ideas with a deadline mere hours away, took a nervous half-step toward the chair. His heart was racing; each hand was curled into a fist so tight his fingernails dug into the meat of his thumb. He lost track of how long he stood there, staring at the device, undecided as to a course of action. He remained in this trance until the fan on the PC fired up and broke the silence.

Before Marty could talk himself out of it, he grabbed the keyboard off the desk and sat in the anti-writer’s block chair. The curly cord on the keyboard kept trying to pull it back to the desk, so he wedged it in the office chair and yanked the whole thing over next to him. This, in turn, pulled the computer across the desk. Sliding under the dome was awkward, not to mention more than a little frightening. With a deep breath, the author hit return again.

The system energized and Marty felt his hair stand on end. A tiny prick of electricity popped against his skin, but he resisted the urge to pull out from under the dome. Instead he put his hand on the keyboard, only to realize he didn’t know the command to cancel a transcription in progress. Esc should work. Before he could position a finger on the upper-left-most key, the capacitor discharged its energy into the dome. The resulting burst of current was like a lightning strike and Marty realized with horror that the chair was metal. The current cycled through the system.

Hand paralyzed, Marty smabhshewfid a3t thf2oe k20deybo9raxd, p2fjjufslling it out of the socket on the back of the computer and knocking it to the floor. He tried to slide out from under the dome, but his body was stuck to the chair with electricity and despite thrashing uncontrollably, he was unable to break free. He could feel thoughts being ripped from his mind, and beneath the chaos he wondered if he managed to live through this, would it even produce anything worth reading. And if so, would those morons at the Readers Digest even be able to makTranscription connection lost. Save or Delete?