Written (Excerpt)

1.
 In the House of Prospectives, the future is a game of dreams and chance. The administration takes a new attitude toward work: the basics of the educational process must be observed, of course, but it was a well documented fact that dreamers Write the best books. The rare ones, whose novels sell a million copies in the first two weeks, are always the laziest children, the ones who spent their time at school staring out the windows, drawing hieroglyphics in their food.

One spring the whisper filtered down from the Agency that horses novels were popular; the children were all given riding lessons. The next season it was shoot-em-up pulp, gun-toting battalions in metal and leather covered with purply, bruised blood. The House attendants took all the boys out shooting in the range during the day. At night the older boys would sneak the younger ones out into the alleys to shoot at cats and trash cans. The House looked the other way. It was good for their Writing.

It wasn’t the work ethic that was important, it was the richness of the unconscious, dreaming. And also practical things, like the shape and circumference of the inner ear canal, how close the veins of the arm were to the skin, to make the machine’s probing injections easier. It stuck one needle here, and another there, a pinprick and a thimbleful of green juice in your sleep, and a thin laser etched across the paper in neat, computerized shorthand. A great big novel tapped from each child’s unconscious and sprawled out across the screen.

When the child woke up they would get a diploma with a gold stamp, a check for their novel rights, and a plastic mortarboard, a pathetic parody of a graduation ceremony. People called the machine the Writer Thing.

The House was a wonderful place for children.

2.
 Bret was a second form, which meant he’d be Written in another two years, on his ninth birthday. Bret had it lucky, the others whispered behind their hands. The professors let him off lessons, and he would roam free across the manicured grass. He was a thin-skinned boy who jumped at noises and stared out windows.

The administration made audio notes in his file each semester, often using words like “potential” and “promising” and “grooming.” He slept soundly at night in a narrow bunk in the second form boy’s dormitory, and every other month his mother would come to the school and bring him a package of new clothes.

3.
 There were still bad rumors of the books the first authors Wrote. People said they were full of perversions and tangents and dead ends, dark fetid clusters of dead-leaf words that the researchers kept falling into. They said that two of the scientists went crazy reading the early work of the Writer Thing, that one of them ended up in a little green coin locker of a room somewhere and the other floated his car onto the thick sludge of the Thames and let the crabs come out and eat him.

But eventually it was all sanitized, cleaned and wrapped in neat white cloth, the traces of vomit scrubbed from the floors, and where the scrubbing wore the linoleum down the workmen put in stainless steel.

Soon the first Writer Thing novels were appearing in bookshops, and then one of them hit the bestseller’s list. The author became a multi-millionaire overnight and the line to apply to become a novelist grew around sixteen city blocks. Little kids made their summer fortune in those first few months, holding places for a few cents an hour in that never-ending snake-line of people looking to make it big.

The line started to become a problem. A riot broke out one Saturday night, a cop got a bit of his ear torn off, and the next day a group of six men in long black coats cut the line and climbed the agency steps.

The next day the Agency posted a sign on the door that said Criteria for Prospective Novelists, and the line disappeared overnight. Oh, a few hopefuls stuck around, one or two even got into the waiting room for an interview, but essentially the problem was solved. They wanted people with the right sort of brain wave, and who knew what kind of brain wave one was carrying around in one’s head. And they would only see children, ages four to nine.