[Short Story] CLIFFHANGER

Read Part One Now

The Harvest Corporation occupied the top three floors of a glass and steel office building that overlooked Columbus Circle. I needed to think over what I was going to say to Brian Morrissey, so I started walking north.

Buses moved slowly down Fifth Avenue and, when I looked through the side windows, I saw that a few passengers were looking downward as if at prayer. Most of them were checking their cell phones, but I knew from past experiences that a few people were looking at books.

A teenager in my apartment building told me about Muse Sessions at certain bars in Brooklyn. A half-dozen young writers without computers or phones would get up on stage and then a one-line dramatic situation written on a card was pulled from a jar. The contestants had an hour to write long hand and then they would stand up and declaim their creations.

That was a small reality overwhelmed by the display windows of a three-story chain bookstore on 48th Street. The store was advertising book signings by novelists who hadn’t written their books.

A decade ago, when the so-called Big Five New York publishers had consolidated to the Big Three, the corporate owners decided to dispense with peevish, greedy and difficult writers. It was much easier to have LLM bots write a complete book in 15 minutes, and then this product was marketed by a Face: social media influencers who resembled their genre.

Standing in front of the bookstore window, I saw a photograph of a muscular young man wearing a gun in a shoulder holster. Apparently, he wrote novels that resembled action movies. The next photo was a blond woman wearing a tight cocktail dress that was the Face of a series of passionate romances. But what about the middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun, wearing a black sweater and white blouse? I checked her titles and decided that she was the Face for a line of cozy mysteries set in a Maine village.

All these writers said that they came up with the plots and characters for the bot-written books and the software “executed” their ideas. The readers didn’t seem to care if that was true or not, and the media realized that the Faces gave better interviews than the previous group of truculent authors who had spent too much time alone.

The Twelve Apostles who once occupied the Allen Room had discussed this major change in publishing. It was clear that the LLM systems could write a competent novel in less than 15 minutes. We human writers agonized over each word while the bots delivered exactly what was ordered without complaint.

Whenever an outsider started to lecture our group about the power and nobility of literature, someone would laugh and mutter “Fahrenheit Fraud.” Ray Bradbury was a wonderful author, but the future world he dramatized in his novel, Fahrenheit 451, never came true. Books were still around – usually sold in cardboard boxes at garage sales – but fiction writers who wrote their stories without assistance were becoming an endangered species.

When I reached 59th Street I headed west on the edge of Central Park and reached THE Harvest office building on Columbus Circle. I expected a hassle with the ground floor security guard, but when I said I was delivering a package, he typed a command that allowed the elevator to take me up to the ninth floor.

Although The Harvest Corporation had made enormous profits off words generated by machines, an attractive young woman – not a bot – occupied the reception desk.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Tell Brian Morrissey that John is here from the Research Library. I want to return two Harvest writing pads.”

“You can just leave them with me.”

“I need a face-to-face meeting. Tell him I have some important news.”

“Let me see if I can make an appointment.”

“That’s not necessary.” I sat down on a pastel green couch. “I’ll wait until he’s free.”

Looking uncertain about my request, the receptionist typed a message to my boss. As I took off my backpack, the stolen light bulbs in my coat pockets clicked together.

Five minutes later, Brian Morrissey bustled into reception with his sleeves rolled up and a key-card lanyard hanging from his neck He was thirty years younger than me – the kind of person that had picked genial optimism as the best response for any sort of problem.

“John! Good to see you! Why are you here today?”

I held up my knapsack. “I brought the Harvest pads you gave to Sara and me. They’re company property. You told us that…several times.”

“Yes. Great. You’ll both get a month’s salary that will be credited to your checking accounts.” Brian got ready to shake my hand. “Thank you for your hard work, John. Several diamond-level users have noticed the system’s improved ability to generate irony. And that’s just the beginning. I’m sure that fiction customers will see an improved respond when a story requires a cliffhanger ending.”

“We need to have a short conversation. Right now.”

“About what?”

“It’s important, and private.”

Brian sighed and rolled his eyes at the receptionist. “Sure. No problem. But let’s make it quick. I have a conference call in ten minutes.”

He turned away from me and waved his pass card at a locked door. When it clicked open, I followed him through a doorway to a large room with two-dozen humans working in cubicles. When we reached a glass-walled private office on the outer edge of the room, he waved his pass card again, then tossed the lanyard on his desk.

Looking annoyed, Brian motioned to an armless leather chair, then sat facing me. “What’s this about, John? Our contract writers talk endlessly about this and that, but it’s almost always about money.”

“Not this time.”

“Go on. Out with it.”

I looked around me and evaluated his office. The plan I had come up with in the library was impossible in this room. We were nine floors up. The windows were one-inch-thick tempered glass without any latch or handle. They could never be opened – even if the office began burning.

“You fired Sara last night at 9PM.”

“That’s not true, John. I’ve never fired anyone. Your contract was up and it wasn’t renewed. You and the other contract employees were the victims of your own success.”

“What kind of success are you talking about?”

“You successfully showed the machine how to conceptualize, write and edit types of human speech that our system found difficult.”

“We taught a machine how to fake sounding human.”

“There’s nothing fake about it. Shakespeare, Melville, Proust and every other writer created certain patterns of language that can be learned and duplicated.”

“So, you fired us.”

“You’re a writer. Be accurate with your words. No one was fired.”

“Sara went to the Allen Room this morning.”

“She didn’t have to show up. Neither did you.”

“And she killed herself.”

“What?”

“Sara killed herself with a drug overdose and left a note.” I held up my phone and waved it slightly. “I took pictures of everything.”

“Did you report this to the police?”

“The police came and Sara’s body was taken to the morgue. But I removed the empty drug containers and didn’t tell anyone.”

“Good. That’s helpful.” Brian exhaled loudly. “There will be an autopsy, but the company isn’t involved.” He leaned forward and pointed his finger at me. “So, what’s the number? How much money do you want for keeping your mouth shut?”

“Let’s postpone that negotiation. I want to talk to your boss.”

“I can handle this, John. Negotiate an acceptable number and I’ll get approval.”

“Go find your boss or I’m walking out of here.”

Brian stood up and jabbed his finger at me. “You were always a sneaky little bastard. You writers deserve to be obsolete.”

I thought Brian was going to punch me, but instead he jerked open the door and marched out of the room. Standing up, I grabbed the keycard lanyard, then peered out into the cubicle area. When Brian entered another private office, I walked quickly back to the reception area.

“Have a great day,” the receptionist said.

“Oh, I will. This is going to be the best day of my entire life.”

I punched the up button for an elevator and, when it arrived, I touched the command panel with the keycard. A list of floors appeared and I picked the highest number.

The top floor was a maintenance area, and I heard ventilation blowers making a muffled roar. An unnumbered door led to a concrete emergency staircase and that led to the roof. There was a safety wall at the edge of the roof, and I carefully sat down on the concrete wall cap. My back faced the exit door and my feet dangled in the air.

I’ve always hated heights – they scared me – but I began to smile. Pulling out my phone, I called Harvest and the young receptionist answered the phone.

“Hi there. It’s John. We met a few minutes ago.”

“Where did you go? Everyone’s looking for you!”

“Tell Brian and his boss that I’m up on the roof.”

I hung up, called 911, and told the police that there was a jumper on the roof of the Harvest Building at Columbus Circle.

“Can you see him, sir?”

“Oh. Definitely.”

“Are you sure that it’s not an employee doing maintenance work.”

“Nothing like that. He’s sitting on the edge of a wall. I think he might jump.”

I switched off the phone. Everything was quiet except for my breathing and the wind. Well, there was a way to change that. I took out one of the lightbulbs and made sure that no one was on the sidewalk below. When I let go, it drifted slightly, then smashed onto the concrete. Two pedestrians saw the bulb shatter and looked up. I waved at them and they waved back. A crowd began to assemble, and they watched as I dropped a second lightbulb. The bulb smashed perfectly and everyone appeared to realize that I was a genuine crazy man.

A door slammed open behind me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Brian Morrissey, two uniformed security guards and a red-faced man with thinning hair.

“Don’t get any closer or I will jump,” I told them. “You don’t want that. Blood and brains on the sidewalk. Half the people down there will record it on their phones. When the Medical Examiner searches my body, they’ll find Sara’s suicide note in my pocket.”

“This is pointless!” Brian shouted. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Right now, I’m enjoying life while considering death.”

Turning to Brian and the guards, the red-faced man held up his right hand and slowly moved it downward as if he was ordering a dog to sit. When everyone else was quiet, he took one step forward.

“Good afternoon, John. I’m Paul Hackett, a Senior Vice President here in the New York office. “Let’s relax and see if we can work together to solve this problem.”

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Hackett. Do you see me now?”

“Of course I do.”

“I don’t think you saw me at all. I was just a part-time employee hired to make your system even more capable. Sara Bowman and I wrote using memories from our lives. You didn’t give a damn about that. We were just…widgets.”

“You can still write,” Hackett announced. “There’s no law against writing.”

“Your system works, but it’s not connected to passion and pain.” I looked downward. “The police have arrived. Three squad cars. Give me a second, okay?”

I pulled another lightbulb out of my coat pocket and dropped it carefully. When it shattered on the sidewalk about ten feet away from a policeman, little points of blue uniform scattered like ants.

“Looks good. Now they’ll handle the traffic and set up a barrier for the crowd.”

“Tell me what you want,” Hackett said. “Hell, I’ll give you stock options. You can’t be angry at our company if you partially own the company.”

“Let me calculate this.” I took out my phone and sent a photo of Sara’s letter to three of the Apostles that had once been in the Allen Room. Was that enough? Probably not. I sent a second message and attached photos of Sara’s face and the drug containers.

The two security guards were edging closer. “This isn’t movie so don’t try to be a hero,” I told them. “But it does have one element of a story.” I tossed my knapsack onto the roof and stood up onto the wall cap.

“Most people don’t understand cliffhangers. It’s not about the characters or the situation. It’s about the unknown. The punchline hasn’t been spoken. The ending hasn’t been expressed.”

I dangled one foot in the air. It was a long way down. “Until you take that one step forward, all things are possible.”