And of most interest is Techdirt’s article, Libraries Are The Best Counter To Piracy… So Of Course Publishers Are Trying To Limit Them. In it, Masnick recounts out that as O’Reilly has long pointed out, giving consumers a convenient place to locate good content is a sure-fire way to combat piracy (instead of some other kind of knee-jerk response like the US government’s SOPA), and under the best of controlled circumstances.

“Controlled circumstances” is a hugely significant term, because as Amazon has long understood, it doesn’t matter how much you “sell” an individual e/book for, if you get access to the user-data to better drive targeted e/book sales in the future. See how their Kindle “with special offers” is so cheap (and may actually be a positive to user’s experiences, if Amazon can mine their long tail of products tailored to a user’s metadata.)

The New York Times talks about the strange attitude publishers have to libraries lending out ebooks:

In their eyes, borrowing an e-book from a library has been too easy. Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.

But of course, where these attempted borrowers actually likely to buy the e/book at all? Or would they instead merely find another, different object to borrow—or perhaps, the same ebook to steal elsewhere?

To which article Masnick, again, says that “this suggests that if libraries didn’t exist, and somebody tried to set one up, publishers would use the same logic to refuse to sell traditional books for that purpose.”

And this is all wonderfully current to my novel Bibliotek (whose premise came about some two years ago now…)! That publishers fear the setup of libraries, because the lending of “traditional books for that purpose” would threaten (Amazon’s) scheme for collecting and targeting ebook user data.

That was the birth of the novel’s “Metatext.”

This isn’t really that big a deal, it’s only the next furthest edit, but I have been promising that for the past three months!

~~~~~

Ned watched as Agent Choinski awkwardly followed his own calm lead, taking a gulp of air before pulling the hood of her hazmat closed. He nodded to her, “you’re safe now,” he said roughly over the mic. He’d already felt the pinch in his own throat of cartilage fracturing in the gas. He tried to take a long, deep breath of recyced air and then looked around through his goggles. The air so grainy, dusted… the way an old film shows a nerve attack. He crossed to her, checking the hood which fit loosely around her bouffant hair, but it was secure. It’d be worth the discomfort.

Ned was proud of his innovation; thinking of the competition in the security rackets, the consultancies and their fire. Burning evidence and infrastructure alike. No, this was better. An aerosolised, termite-derived, cellulite dissolving enzyme. With the right precautions, it was safer than fire.

Theoretically. Though the Agent had asked him of the tests she’d seen, made on clean slabs of vat-grown flesh… Yes, it should only have attacked the contravening bond. He hadn’t wanted to admit that. So she had evacuated the whole site herself. ‘Just in case,’ and he had felt professionally stung—though personally appreciative of her sense of duty.

Covered, the two of them walked back into the kink club, where Ned had to grimace in soft, ironic humour: the cloakroom had peg after peg of gasmasks of their own. Well, he shrugged, if that’s what the punters wanted. Closing the curtain behind him, he left only a small, puckered gap around the nozzle of the gas mister and followed her inside the main room. Ned immediately saw the ludicrous print-jobs, literally ticker-taped around the two podiums, and shook his head—why would anyone be so gauche? Though he actually had a pretty good idea of why.

Choinski walked over to the stage, where she bowed and picked at some of the threads of now sticky bond.

As if in sympathy for their Authors. How novel. In contrast, at the time he’d developed the gas, corporations and Houses had all been overly concerned with analogue security—hence his ridiculous business name: Paperless Securities. The corps always wanted to know ‘why would anyone print?’ But Ned knew why—that’s how he came to be out in enterprise after academia; they thought it was foolishness or blackmail? Ned knew: print was philosophical. Owned. Egotism made crystal.

No room for sympathy then.

While the corps had loved him: he’d only used them to prove his own theories. Reader profiling. And they had so much to thank him for. That’s how they had found this target, after all.

He watched, as, in her hand, the contra-bond bled its fat from the cellulite fibre. Dribbling ichor to the floor.

His radio crackled: “Needing us? Guys are getting anxious out here.” His men were waiting outside the tent on stand by. Normally, this kind of job would only be his and his men, an Agent of her rank would never normally work directly with them, but this was a special case.

“I don’t think so, mate, you can douse ‘em now.” No one liked carrying the torches, holding on, prepared to burn the building. “Looks like it should be wrapped up in here. Get going on to staging area two.” There were new leads to take from there.

The two of them: Agent and consultant, looked across at the dance party photo prints, weeping in their frames around the stage. Then directly at the typewriters, their modified mechanisms still hot from printing. The House had only brought her in on this one at the end of the mission. To finish it off. Damn right, too, he thought. The club had been hosting illegal Auteur bouts, patrons betting on two pitted Hemingways; who, as they wrote, struggled versus one another, the words they wrote, catching, clipping and chewing the tape of the other man’s prints. Disgusting to use the poor wretches like that. Only one of them would come away with a text, the other likely shipped off, with his promised visa eaten up like the ruins of his shredded tape.

And he knew it wasn’t only that. Auteurs and diagnosed writers alike were being spirited illegally into the country every day. Into places like this, encouraged further into print… so they’ll never get free of it. Maybe, with the right help, the wretches could have had a real life. Ned looked at the crude fonting on the tape. It was a little gray as to whether it was publishable text at all. But that was why the Agent had been brought in along side his consultancy, to track those Authors down. To try and ‘bring them in to the fold.’ Huh. Listening to her, you’d have thought she believed it was her ethical duty. But Ned knew, if the Houses couldn’t have the Authors, no one would…

~~~~~

By Paul McLaughlan

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Decorative initial letter “N” from 16th Century. Source: Delamotte, F.: “Ornamental Alphabets, Ancient and Mediæval” (1879)

He checked to see that Emlen and Robert were talking over a far set of shelves. Smudging the edges of the bound’s covers, he tried to remove any evidence he’d ever been there. He knew then, that this place was just as bad as he’d thought. There shouldn’t be anything so new in here. Of course, every bound printed before the Act had been ruled to have an implied, ‘permissive’ license, so the secondhand stores lay in that gray area; anything made since had to go through a publisher: books, blogs, everything. And they had to go online. If the text was then printed, it would inevitably conform to an expensive art&craft template—to beat the enormous green tax—or to a cheap and dirty, thirty day disposable.

But the Jewish bound there made sense, that had been going through the courts for years. Hardliners saying they couldn’t use a feeder on the Sabbath, and that the print restrictions were a violation of their ‘inviolate’ religious freedoms. Oh, but let the courts decide on that! The gun, sitting on the counter, made him feel less nervous than this. Graham understood then how Emlen was so sure that the place was clean of Inspiration. It was a professional chopshop. It broke the compact. And this was deadly against the law.

He reached round his hip—spasmed—to check his mobile. Then he remembered: the night before, they’d passed it off on an operative of Emlen’s, and now he had no idea what had been done with it. Last night was more manic than he’d felt it at the time. Emlen seemed so still now; but there, with his calm, it was more than enough to disturb Graham—this was far from a safe place. Then again, Emlen had said he was taking the two of them to a ‘safehouse’—compound word, as he now knew, and not actually a place of safety. He’d also said he was sincere in helping Graham track down a copy of his bound. Sure, so he could follow the changes that’d been made to it, pinpoint the precise school of hacking used from amongst all those he’d seeded into the wild, but sincere in that. What choice did Graham actually have in believing that?

Neither of them had known what the Collective had been up to, though Emlen admitted that he should have tried getting Graham out earlier. Brilliant. He’d been stalking Graham, waiting for disaster… Not that he would’ve gone on this mad run with Emlen if he hadn’t been being hunted… Maybe I’m actually the exact opposite of Emlen, he thought, last night after the heist might’ve been the most normal my life has been—and is gonna be—in a long time. But Emlen was at home there. Actions, and consequences. We fucked it, and the world worked the way it was supposed to. Now I’ve got no idea what the hell this is.

He waited while the two men finished their negotiations, Robert finally agreeing to source whatever it was that Emlen—or the both of them, Graham thought himself into the scheme ruefully—required. Graham thought then they’d go and hide out in the back room, but after Robert closed them in the lab, Emlen collected his few things and looked about ready to leave.

To be Continued… with Authorial boybands and wordplay…

~~~~~

By Paul McLaughlan

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Delamotte, F.: “Ornamental Alphabets, Ancient and Mediæval” (1879)

Emlen narrowed his eyes. “They’d send me to the Library, Robert, and you know what that means. For both of us.” Robert looked back at him desperately. As if with no way out. Emlen continued. “You wanted into this, and I got you what you needed, don’t think you can play both sides of it now.”

Robert’s face literally crumpled then, as if his tension had been giving him a temporary facelift. He moved slowly, bringing the pistol up onto the counter, and weighed it flat on his palm.

Emlen shook his head sadly, “Oh Robert, you wouldn’t have wanted to fire a chemical round in here anyway, how would you have explained that to your clients?” He seated himself again. “I’m going to need passes out of the country and in to a Retreat. And equipment.”

While the two of them negotiated—Robert now only weakly—Graham realised that he could do whatever it was he liked, knowing now, that they were both under Emlen’s power. To do anything he liked, while trapped inside the shuttered three-by-four, barely able to get around the four head-height shelf dividers. The store itself was dry, almost arctic, in that way cheap bounds sucked moisture from the air—from his throat. Graham struggled with the thought of how rude it would be to wrap his shirt around his head?

Oh right, fuck it! He thought, in for a penny-dreadful… So instead, he wandered, sniffing along a shelf, the sharp volumes of scent variegated like piano keys. The bounds were just enormous odour-eaters. He wondered why anyone would buy these decrepit things, when the publisher’s texts were so easy to find online—albeit encoded with advertising. Heh, maybe that was just it, an old ideology of being ad ‘free’. There was nothing new; cheap paperbacks like those of new texts would’ve had to have been pulped after their thirty days. Looking at a shelf, he scrunched up courage, and squeezed out a particularly nasty piece. Its spine glue was yellowed with a previous reader’s grime—their greasy spoor. Sniffing it like a cigar, he actually smelt something like chewing tobacco—now dried and brittle of spit.

“This is old hardware.” Its warped pages crackled like cartoon fire; a sound effect which in cinema would be made of screwed cellophane. He hadn’t mean to interrupt them, but Robert took the excuse.

“They’re still good!” Graham looked over at them, where they stood by what looked like a sheet of slate and chalk. “The ‘hardware,’ as you say, might be old, but the print is still clear.” It was clear that he had the statement made, ready to fire.

Emlen laughed at his fervour. But then admitted. “He’s right, you know.” He went over to look at the bound, taking it from Graham and riffling through the bond. “It’s old, it’s grotty,” he looked over at the owner accusingly, “but even given that, the bound has an incredible resilience. It’s a very clever technology. Print has always only been a representation of the virtual text after all, but the way it’s pre-loaded and tied to this hardware… with the bound… readers are tricked into equating the text with the ‘ware. The beauty of that is, while print and bond is old, the bound is still the best form of DRM ever invented.”

Graham found himself laughing along with him. He knew that after they’d opened the Metatext, that had actually been the Houses’ finest selling point; that books were the better buy, because they’d never suffer access problems—drop your feeder in the bath? Sign on to a friend’s feeder: there’s your collection. Try doing that with a bound.

“Where does that put you and your ‘cultural capital’ Emlen? If that’s all the bounds are to you. If that’s the best you can say. That they’re just another form of licensed technology, locked-down in their own ‘hardware.’” Robert reached out for the bound in Emlen’s hands—and surely he would have snatched it, if he could’ve known it wouldn’t have damaged the old binding even further. Robert turned it in his hands.

“That’s precisely why I’m so interested in the bounds—in the same way you think of them as a memory institution Robert, as a catalogue of their own living readership—giving it away is a one-off transaction. You can never be certain you’ll get that same experience again. Even if the text is replicable, the historical confluence of text and hardware isn’t. It’s once off.”

Graham couldn’t look to either of them, and said, “yeah… I don’t know about that, shouldn’t books be social? These bounds are so lonely by themselves, I mean I can appreciate the sense of control an Author… an ‘Auteur’ would have over them…” Of course he could! “But with books, you can comment on the atomic pieces of it… follow along with the trending annotations… all the skins over the living text itself. It’s like being a part of a club.” It was. He knew. He smiled ruefully.

Emlen nodded and said sagely, “writing ecology.”

But Robert only laughed bitterly at Emlen. “Ha! ‘Social.’ Just the way the Houses made it after they’d gone and alienated everything else they had. Before the Amazon Standard Catalogue, and selling metadata.” He shook his head, and said to Graham. “You would have been too young, but my parents owned an old store, they used to tell me about it. They were worried no one would want bounds anymore, and so they supported the publishers. Tried to poison the uptake of book technology, worked underground with the printers, planted books with viral loads onto the peer networks, and over-charged for digital copies while cutting themselves raw on print margins. They only ended up driving their own customers away. That’s why it’s all about the ‘social’ now. Houses figured they couldn’t convince the public texts were worth anything in themselves. No one believed them, no one trusted them.” No, who does? Thought Graham, you trusted other readers, and what they said of texts, not in how it was published, right? Graham sneered—gently—he knew about that!

~~~~~

By Paul McLaughlan

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Initial ‘I’ used in The folk-tales of the Magyars, Jones, W. Henry; Kropf, Lajos L., 1852-; (ed., transl.) Kriza, János, 1811-1875 London : Pub. for the Folk-lore society (13) by E. Stock.

~~~~~

Graham woke painfully, and felt the beginning of a diabetes-like ache in his chest. It wasn’t a hangover, but the withdrawal of the usual alcohol lubrication in his veins. He’d recently figured that the bulk of his calorie intake had come from the drink—and right then he was starved. He didn’t want to think of it. Instead, he looked around the room they’d stayed the night in. He hadn’t been able to see it too clearly the night before, the whole neighbourhood having been in a planned brownout. Emlen had had his own key through into the room, from an alleyway out the back. Once they were inside the Victorian terrace, he’d left Graham there, slipping free to talk with the owner—or that’s what Graham had assumed. Graham had been exhausted, and hadn’t minded being left alone at all. While he knew that it couldn’t have been a good place, he hadn’t been able to maintain any more stress than a brief, healthy anxiety, and so he’d slept. As morning had come, the light well installed down the original chimney showed him their true predicament. While the chimney itself was glazed green tile and wrought iron—beautiful—the rest of the small room was crude particle board stapled into place. Emlen had returned in the dark, and was wrapped in his ur-leathers—he appeared to be sleeping however he could manage. The room was crowded with plastic mixing tubs, guillotines, clamps and vices all smelling of glue and other chems—it was some kind of lab. A closer inspection of the spray-painted walls showed finger-width gaps, where curls and twists of off-white fibre were packed firmly inside.

“Don’t touch that.” Emlen spoke behind him. Graham looked around from poking, to see he was awake.

“It’s a fortune in paper. Good bond. Packed into the walls…”

“It is.” Emlen stood, tall and grey as driftwood. “Wonderful insulation—against many intrusions—Robert shreds them, any of the bounds that he can’t resell himself, ‘waste not, want not.’” He laughed. “Even unrepentant bibliophiles have to be realistic at times.” Emlen grimaced as he stretched.

“Where the hell are we?” Asked Graham.

“We’re safe. It’s his workshop, where he repairs his finds, cutting new bindings in for old.”

“Chalk dust for coke? Like in a drug lab?” Emlen smiled at that—or better to call it a grimace? But nodded. Graham looked around. “Cutting fill. Brilliant.”

Still, better here than dead.

Emlen crossed to the door and knocked on it in a complicated staccato. Then waited. But not too long, so that when the door opened outward, it showed the owner, Robert, must have been waiting for them outside. He actually did look like a drug dealer—one not so happy to have them. He nodded, and Graham followed after Emlen through the door. Behind them the room closed blind, the doorway that led through to it camouflaged in feathers of the scabbed, antique wallpaper. They seemed to be in the man’s kitchen, the smell of the room they’d left behind resolving into that of pickled cabbage.

“I’m still closed Emlen, so you better come down to the shop now, and explain yourself before I kick you out.” He hadn’t looked at Graham, and Graham had the feeling that he never would. Maybe it was safer that way. They followed the man down a narrow terrace stairway, and at the bottom of it Graham had to gasp at what he saw. They had stepped into a den of iniquity. Almost a library, but not like their collection had been. Like nothing he’d ever seen in real life; open-faced shelving of raw-grained wood and particle board, slotted like a circuit stack with bounds, their spines sticking outward. It was the worst possible way to store them. Christ… All that pressure on the binding—perhaps he secures them through the page-ends, Graham thought, not to have the volumes lifted by unscrupulous hands, slicing the chained spine away from the print. Sure, that must be it.

Emlen laughed. “You seem shocked by what you see Graham?” Yes, he was. Obviously, this was one of those ‘secondhand’ stores; though not actually illegal, they were the very worst of the gray bounds market. They’d never raided that kind of place for the collection; only from fully certified, Cache-standard collections. Thankfully. He could safely swear that he’d never been inside that kind of place before. It actually made him gag, the smell of cheap acid burning into cellulose; the kind of firetrap lounge you heard the police would have raided.

He stopped at the entry. Better than being dead? … That smell?… he choked. It was a potpourri. There was a reason the police often targeted and burnt those stores down—uncontrolled outbreaks of Inspiration.

But Emlen scoffed at him. “Robert knows what he’s doing with his material, Graham. We spoke of that. Come in, it isn’t as if you can judge him by your own righteousness.”

No, he couldn’t talk about being legit. Just that it was so different from the Collective’s own industrial look, or like the luxury bound showrooms of the publishing Houses; like art galleries, each on message like a laser: sell the bounds showing, or lock-in a digital sale.

Robert motioned them over to a couple of packing crates, and just shrugged when Graham shook his head at that suggestion violently. He preferred to stand, touching nothing. He noticed, as Robert hunched against the counter, that there was a cash till upon it; oh yes, and what better signifier would there be that there was something wrong with the place? Cash, the plague rats of finance.

“I can’t imagine you were foolish enough to be involved in the damage to Gordon’s Library last night,” Robert said to Emlen, he looked quickly Graham’s way instead, “but you’ve got to understand the position you’ve placed me in. There are groups noticing what you’re up to.” Robert moved around his counter, placing it between him and the other two men. “I’ve been good to you in the past, Emlen, but you can’t bring the heat on me like this. You understand? They’ll come and raid us over your mad stunts.” Graham felt his face pinch. He didn’t understand, if he was the liability, what was Emlen doing with him?

“Robert, don’t be foolish.” Emlen remained seated, “you’ve done well with the favours I’ve made you in the past.” ‘Past’ seemed to be an implied threat. “The Codex alone made you a player.”

The two of them watched one another, seemingly playing out a psychic battle. Graham really didn’t know who he wanted to win. In the end, it seemed that Robert broke himself, giving it away.

“I don’t know Emlen, there are rumours you’re bringing something to the market—“ Emlen stood bolt upright, suddenly threatening.

“No!” Called Robert, jerking back from the move—quickly fumbling behind the counter. Before Emlen could move closer, he was met with a click from where Robert’s hands were hidden. That stopped him short. He’s got a gun! Graham could only watch as the two men stood at potential violence—

~~~~~

By Paul McLaughlan

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Initial G from page 14 of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) by Ezra Pound.

Funnily enough, it wasn’t thinking about posting, it was getting me thinking about my workload atm.

As of… now(ish), I’m sending out Bibliotek to my editor, and as such I’m going to be spending a lot more time going back over the nitty-gritty of it. While I’ll still be posting for Bibliotek Fridays, it’s going to slow down for a while and be missing the regular Mondays.

Instead, I’m thinking of writing some different blurb-style / query posts for other projects I have running. Hopefully they will be fun too? Hopefully you’ll have some feedback for me!

… be seeing you.

~~~~~

They were moving again. They’d returned to the Tube. “Cute.” Graham muttered. “They own an illegal print-job for the intrinsic flaw that it’s been Auteured. That it isn’t an auto-correcting text. That bound’s only ever been valuable to them for once having been ‘right.’ That it’s become a part of their own history, reading it’s made the bound a love letter between the two of them.” Graham mused on that: he’d thought their scrawlings just masturbation—grotty, low, obscene—I never thought of the two of them… together; just as faintly scandalous boys. But how poetic…

Emlen said. “People connect over their bounds, and by owning a print version of the text. That’s its value: the call and response between two young men.” Graham thought then—as Emlen’s fingers twitched in excitement, uselessly haptic—thought about static narratives, print bounds versus evolving texts. Dynamic, reader-defined works, Authored and re-authored on the House boards, which pushed updates and new annotations, unasked, into the text works. Negotiated narratives always in process, and never slowing enough to be interrogated. Texts never slowing enough to be loved.

They’d already switched three train lines, and it felt like Emlen would never stop. Then he grinned over at Graham from a train bench, swaying over absurd Nineteenth Century lines, holding up two cheap trade-bounds.

“The Underground Library.” He passed Graham a romance, open to the inside cover. “Have a look.”

Graham recoiled from the bound. “Is that clean?” He thought of its Inspiration hazard.

Emlen shrugged. “While it is very unlikely there would be any infestation… you don’t even Author in its genre.” That was true. It was yaoi—Japanese boy porn. And no, he didn’t write that, so Graham knew he was being silly. You had to be an Author, had to have an inclination to the genre, in order for the Inspiration to give you any more than just the thrill of a ‘good idea.’ But obviously, Emlen wasn’t an Author, or he would understand the—somewhat irrational—fear of becoming addicted to forever having to top that drugged sense of Inspiration.

Graham reached out, and lifted the bound hesitantly, opening it. There was a sticker inside: ‘Bookcrossing: London Underground Branch,’ a blurb and reference number.

“You track it by searching for its number, finding its release notes and the reviews of it scattered wherever they are amongst any non-House boards. It’s been around for years, but now it’s had to go, quite literally underground. Most of the refs are merely for admin, and there’s been no real organisation to it at all. I try and take the sorting in hand whenever I’m on the Tube—I developed a line-based system: Victoria for the romances, of course.”

Graham heft the acid-browned bound—old hardware—and frowned. “Emlen, do you actually know of any print copies of my book?”

“Legally art-published? Yes, I have heard of a couple. I wouldn’t know who would have bought them—that’s why I wanted you.” He passed him a literary detective story, swapping their bounds. “You’ve been on my radar for awhile—bleeping loudly I have to add. I heard about the job you had tonight, and I knew I’d have to step it up to bring you in. But lets be sure about this, Graham: what I really need is an assistant to find my lost bound. Now it is perfect that you need my help.” Graham had known it. “I told you not to worry about the hunters,” he chuckled, “but really, Graham! You might not have counted much before, stealing a few bounds here and there—it’s the dissemination large-scale that bothers them, and cutting into the House’s profits and web ranking—but you blew up a building.” Stopped. Thought, “or near enough. A few floors. They might not be modified, killer cyborgs … but they’re after you now. I thought we would have more time to work tracking your bound, but now we really just have to keep moving you.”

The train came to a jerking halt. They stood and considered.

“I will look after you. I have a safehouse to go to now it’s late—took me all night with us running round to arrange it, this has been great cover. We can work out what we—or you and I separately—” he held out his hands, “do from there. It’s up to you.”

He stepped off the train, Graham thought then about staying seated and just accelerating away from him.

“Yeah, ok.” And alighted with him. What else did he do—zoom around the tracks all night? Wait and be picked up, with his head stuffed in a black bag? He looked properly at Emlen, saw he was clothed in binding leathers, that he had mirrored nightsight goggles lodged by the end of his nose. And a holster, with snub-nosed gun on his hip. Standing on the edge of the platform, Emlen was busy performing corrective surgery on the trade-bound, from a field kit of scalpels and tape. Fuck. Was that a real Librarian?

“You’re a nerd!” He said gently.

Emlen snapped up his head, flashing a slant-eyed glint of scalpel. “Of course. The most dangerous nerd you’ll ever meet.” Was this what he was in for?

Holding the bound, still stinking of long-pins of setting glue, Emlen spent credits to request the next Victoria train coming by. As it arrived and slowed he trotted over to it. Still holding the porn-romance, he flicked through it and shuffled his card inside; that extravagant scrap of bond. He briefed it to Graham, and he could see it was only a search term ‘cowboy librarian.’ Once the train stopped, he held Graham off while jumping aboard, to secret the bound behind a seat, easily walking the carriage and coming off down the platform.

“Isn’t that environmentally irresponsible?” Asked Graham, pointing at the window by the hidden bound as the train left.

Emlen laughed sharply. “Do you know the research regarding greenhouse gasses off a human? Or any on population density, indexed versus an educated, literately interrogative stance?” He didn’t. “Then I’ll just tell you this, libraries of bounds are one hell of a contraceptive.”

Emlen slapped the powdery dust of the bound from his hands, striding away up the escalator. ‘Tally-ho!’ The station wasn’t a narrative, its ads and notices actually an ongoing soap opera. They climbed from the station, past a strangely litterless street-entry: no flyers, no stomped-upon papers. No midnight rustling of rubbish.

End Chapter Three

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By Paul McLaughlan

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Illuminated initial “T” from Crainquebille (1915 translation by Winifred Stephens)

~~~~~

“How do you know, Man’?” Graham figured looking at the little guy was the thing to do: the other two men had turned to him.

“Because they’ve logged in to the damn club under one of my own pseudonyms!” He turned his mobile around for them all to see. There was no text on the screen, only smarticons surrounding a slightly pixel-shifted version of Manoj’s face. If he hadn’t been sitting there, holding the screen beside his head, Graham never would have known they weren’t ‘just’ twins from over the other side of the world.

“Damnit!” Emlen laughed. “What’re the chances of that?” Shaking his head, he then perked forwards. “Do you have another way out of here?”

“Of course we do, but what’s it to us? Why would they be here for us?” Asked Adam.

“Adam. If I’m caught out with this pseudonym…” Adam bit his lip at Manoj’s failed statement.

Then Adam stood, “alright then, follow us.” But did not break gaze with Graham.

Like it’s my fault, you twerp! But Graham looked away first, as Emlen swiftly collected his materials. Adam stepped off the platform for the back of the club. That’s when Graham literally saw the darkness coming for them, plowing through the crowd of dancers. Headed by that damned skull.

“Move it!” He shouted, and the other two actually started after him, pushing for the far wall.

Graham was impressed with the speed they made, what with Adam and Manoj having pulled their jackets over their heads. What the fuck? But at least there was a trick they had, moving through the crowd—Graham was sure he must have once known it himself, but it was lost in the rush of blood to his head.

Graham was just lucky to follow them to a hidden door—painted black eggshell.

Pausing to get it open, Graham just watched dumbly as Emlen turned to grab his arm. Saw his eyes flare, as he twisted to the side and took Graham with him. “Down—“ There was one low beat—felt, and not heard—out of time with the music. “Up!” Emlen dragged him. For an instant he was off his feet, then running. As they passed the now opened door leading outside, Graham pulled along behind Emlen, his eyes came brushing close by the wood. The black paintwork was blistered and smoking.

“Jesus Fuck!” He said, but Emlen pushed him down the fire escape before he could look at it again. Whatever else happened, Graham just concentrated on hitting at least one out of every three steps both storeys down.

At the bottom of the building, Adam spat, “what the Hell have you got us involved in now Graham?” Before wiping away blood-stained drool from his lip. Damn, he must have hit his face in the rush down. Then Adam shrugged and hunched over with Manoj to shift a pile of refuse. Graham saw how they quickly revealed a hidden grate.

“Brilliant setup, gentlemen. I’d give us at least a minute before they get past your deadway.” Emlen had swooped down the escape.

“They’re after me, aren’t they?”

Adam rounded on Graham, “why so sure?”

“Christ, if you’d had the night I have, you’d think it too.”

“Forget it now, Adam, keep up the escape and I’ll do what I can for you both.” Emlen—for the first time—exuded an incredible surety.

If only, thought Graham. But he just shut up, and helped throw rubbish to the side, to slip through the narrow passage.

Emlen spent the getaway talking the two boys through staying ahead of the pursuers. By the time the group of them came to the boy’s hideaway pad, the two were calmer than Graham could manage.

“Yeah, we’ve been pretty good about text,” Adam slipped a key into their door, eschewing the scratched datapad, “turns out that ‘restrictions’ just make the art. I was never especially creative before, but having to change like that… never writing again… it flips you—being broke hasn’t helped much either; it was either get involved in some hardcore movement, or sleep-in the whole day and die—but then again, we don’t do that ‘sleeping’ very well, do we Man’?” And Manoj grinned defensively at the wink that followed.

“Is this Printcore you’re into?” Emlen in his professional, utilitarian suit, a one-piece slung with holsters, suddenly synched with their drab-punk.

“No, man. Printcore, textcore, pixel- or ink-core all went away ages ago with the stuff like queercore music—all those ‘cores—by definition having to be harder than each other and themselves. It’s all just simple hardcore again, and better that way.” They showed the two older men into their one room and bed, floor covered in discarded clothing. “I like it better as this non-declarative movement. All that screaming ‘bout ‘the ink and the bond and the leather’—Christ. Fuck that. Just spoilt kids reminiscing about that one bound from their childhood, the one their parents had to hock…”

Manoj sat back on their bed with a box from out the wardrobe, and just looked at it, embarrassed.

Graham sat with him, and joked, “this where you hide your porn?”

Manoj looked away from him, back down at the box. “We don’t hide our porn,” he said, confused, “this is where we put our ‘naughty’ stuff.” He blushed black. “Go on.” And handed it over.

Inside there were postcards, ‘saved from that damned cull’ said Adam, sent from close friends away on a holiday. And from only a few years ago, a diary and torn band posters taken directly from a derelict wall, and also two print bounds.

“No pens.” Said Emlen.

“We don’t take notes anymore,” from Manoj, “we teach each other. Then we remind ourselves of it, taking turns to talk it through the night. It works pretty well.”

They were both academic works: one of international poetry, each page of the original and then the English translation. And one was Graham’s, on the inter-relationship of titling to identity in textual communities.

It wasn’t the title he was after, however. “You kept it? From when they charged you.”

“… Yeah.” Manoj took it from him, flickering through the bond. “It’s probably the one that got us in trouble to begin with. Not so much the print itself; we used to write notes in the margins, and leave them for each other.” He looked at Graham, the Author, guiltily, “they’re relevant… I don’t know, I liked how insecure it was—though not how insecure we were,” he apologised shyly to Adam. God, thought Graham, they wrote each other love notes in the margins of my bound, arguing with each other and explaining themselves. Manoj smiled. “But that too. It was different than leaving msgs on boards and hacking away at a pad. This felt more tender.”

“The notes were on the two of you?” Emlen. “About your—a couple’s—interpretation of the text.”

“Yeah.” They nodded. And Graham had wished he’d paid more attention to them at the time. “We argued over what you were saying, Mr Nutt, but we used it like a cypher—so that I knew how he’d felt coming to his interpretation. Shit, I never wanted you to correct us! Then I wouldn’t have known what was what.”

“That’s not really what we’re after. It’s not even the right bound.” Emlen had passed on it already.

Adam shrugged, “it’s what we’ve got. It’s gray they could even do us for still having it. We’ve been charged for it already.” He laughed. Graham held on to the look Adam and Manoj then gave one another, of lovelorn fish pouting round their own hooks. But Emlen had already stood, boots upon their make-up, over their make-believe clothing—pieces strewn across the floor.

“Remember what I told you, and you should survive.”

Graham didn’t know what to say after that. So he left them instead.

~~~~~

By Paul McLaughlan

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Inside the club it was DnB. Drums at a hundred and eighty-five BPM / and the sub-bass at a slower, iambic ninety. Some of the dancers raved inhumanly at the slower pentameter, holding their water bottles high into the laser light. The agitated bubbles foaming their drinks like molten silver. Graham would not have thought that the declamations were human, so sped were the samples of verse; but looking over the twisting bodies, he saw it was actually being mixed live. His headache sped-up in time.

Emlen went off by himself, holding his feeder with the kid’s composite pictures, and Graham was left alone to look for them himself. He might normally have feel like the authority in a place like that, better than anyone else present, but after the mess of his night, he only felt himself in a technoir nightmare—disembodied in the vid. Buffeted by clammy bodies, drenched in dancing. He could barely even see faces in the light; though the epileptic flashes of strobe seemed to reveal a substrate of the crowd of heads. Flashing. Did he recognise one of those skulls? Was he being followed by a disembodied head in the dark?

So lost, of course, he met Adam first: with long, fine hair and wearing a peaked-cap. Reintroductions were as simple as them each having set their mobiles to vibrate when friends list were near. He turned straight toward Adam at the mobile nudge. Then he saw him, sitting by himself in a raised booth.

“Mr Nutt! Graham.” He looked confused momentarily, having addressed another man as a ‘Mr Something.’ “I wouldn’t have thought to see you here.”

“Hey, Adam. Been a couple of years. How are things?”

Adam looked around him. The club was oddly text-less—having thought that now, Graham realised that even the virtual signs were in java and flash, nothing published over the gray day that was allowed to a transient work. Even the bottles that guests carried were stripped free of labels.

“Weird.” That’s what Adam said. That’s what anyone would have thought. “Things have been weird. What’re you doing here, man? You here on a date?” He looked around. “I mean, I didn’t think this was your kind of scene?” Graham smiled that judgement away. He could be, and go anywhere, right?

“I was here to see you and Manoj, actually. I’m doing a bit of research you could help me with.” They both paused while someone started speaking over the PA, sounding as if halfway through the ‘third chapter’ of something.

“Yeah? Bit early in the morning for that, isn’t it?” Graham could understand why Adam might not be entirely warm to him, he’d never come to their defence after all—not that an Author could ever have denied the legalities against them. Behind them, the voice on the PA had no reverberate-edge to be stripped—it was a voice perfect for MP3.

“You know how neither night nor day gets in the way of it.”

Adam nodded stage ward, “well sure, and now we’re both here anyways.” Graham looked over, and recognised him then: short and dark, in a tight, offensive t-shirt. “And it’s most probably legal for us to be here, right, so it’s all good.” He shouted that, over Manoj on the stage, proclaiming it a ‘calm, clear day.’

Graham notified Emlen to join them, but while they waited, Adam asked the one question he really didn’t know the answer to yet.

“What are you up to, Graham?”

“I’m looking for a bound of my last book. And… err…. given your past history, I thought you might actually have one.”

“Legit or not, huh?” Adam smiled. “Why would we be up for helping you though?”

He wasn’t sure what to say, but then Emlen had arrived and leant between the two of them: Graham, and doubting Adam.

“You wouldn’t be helping him. You’d be helping me: Charles Emlen.” He passed over a kind of encrypted recommendation, and Adam looked over him with bespoke public keys. Graham had seen academics blurb themselves like that before—though not often in a loud recital-club. Whatever it said— ‘trust him’ for all he knew—whoever it was from, Adam suddenly realised that he’d been speaking to the wrong guy.

“You’re for real?” Asked Adam.

Emlen merely nodded, and told Graham to go get them all drinks. “We’ll meet without you.” He was told. “Manoj, too.” From Adam. So Graham went.

The money he paid at the bar—in crinkled plastic notes—was probably the only thing with print in the place. The barman wasn’t happy taking them either, having much preferred a more secure micro payment. As he collected the narrow bottles, he sniffed at selection at the bar—a bar which itself smelt of nothing but honey and fresh sweat. There were only saccharine alcopops and electrolysed smart-waters on sale. Though Graham guessed that Adam and Manoj would be ok with that.

Back at the alcove, Manoj had joined them from the stage, and the two boys were sitting in silence with Emlen. As Graham put the drinks down, Adam asked him. “What do you think of our club, Graham?” He just nodded stupidly in response. Adam spoke on. “Yeah. ‘Post-publishing,’ you know? We weren’t allowed near text or print again; but being fucked up gave us an urge to tell different stories. Difficult to do with our sentence. So this is the idea, let the other guys get it down, and make money off the fact we’re not allowed to write at all—making a spectacle of ourselves.”

Manoj spoke for the first time. “It’s not actually all ours. In fact, us not being able to sign-off on a contract makes owning anything pretty damn hard.”

Adam cut him off, “but we could have gone with a label, been performers instead of orphaned Authors… but we like it this way, the club is with us, attempting to subvert the injustice done us.” Manoj just nodded with him in an anime complicity. And then gently looked back out away from both Graham and Emlen.

“They’ve agreed to show us what they have, Graham, Adam here was just going to run the works they—“ But Emlen didn’t get to continue.

“Adam.” Beside the boy, Manoj jerked. “We’ve got visitors.”

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By Paul McLaughlan

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