This may be a post to nowhere. Below is the opening to a novel called End Man, maybe science fiction. I've had plenty of agent interest but no takers yet. If someone is there, thoughts?
End Man Chapter 1 It was like a riddle, thought Raphael. What is always arriving but never arrives? What do we constantly approach but never reach? What door do we step through to find ourselves opening it again? A riddle and a disappointment. Ten years ago, he had imagined a future with electric cars, clean industries and invisible air, but gas guzzlers still filled the roads (cheaper purchase price), smokestacks belched their byproducts (downgraded environmental laws) and brown skies had returned to Los Angeles, though now, admittedly, filled with drones. That came true. And digital technology pretty much ran the show, though the armies of the night, the so-called Digital Luddites or blanks, were gathering. Robocalls, junk mail and spam still ruled. Hissssss. Raphael looked up at one of the organic light screens protruding from the department’s east wall. It showed a woman ironing a sheet. The hiss was steam. The screen’s loud volume was pointless. One of the End Men must have accidently turned up the control. Someone made the correction and the sound faded, leaving only an image, as was the case on the other screens showing hands kneading dough, a man whittling a pipe and a cat playing with a golf ball. The screens were there for bulletins, but during downtime showed only so-called mindfulness videos, which—though other End Men claimed the videos calmed and focused them— he found monotonous and tried to avoid. Beneath the screens, a panel of LED lights showed a four-digit number, the ones place digit changing so quickly, it could barely be discerned. The tens digit changed at a slower pace, the hundreds slower yet and the thousands seemed stuck on four. Above the screens, large silver letters on a black background spelled out the name of the division: Norval Department of Marketing Necrology. In slightly smaller script, its corporate charge followed: To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead. Derived from the division’s name, NDMN was the staff’s acronym for the unit. They happily pronounced it End Men, and the department’s various genders referred to themselves that way too. Turning back to his console, Raphael listened to the unremarkable hum of the department in which a hundred End Men verified death, the first step in acquiring the rights to online remains. In another month he’d have spent five years harvesting the data of the dead, which initially even he thought sounded morbid. He had come to see it wasn’t much different from any other data collection industry. Not that he had hands-on experience elsewhere. Norval Necrology was his first job, and considering his geographic limitations, it might well be his last. But at least he hadn’t remained on the bottom rung. He now was not only an End Man but a—possum hunter. Raphael drained his energy drink, stretched his legs out under the desk and set his heels on his skateboard. He turned a foot sideways on the board to see its sole, which was pretty much trashed. In the days when he practiced stunts, his pants would have been equally beat. But the black chinos, which fit like a second skin on his long slim legs, showed neither tear nor fray. He hadn’t tried a new skateboard trick since he was fourteen, twelve years ago . . . Now the board was strictly transport, carrying his 159-pound body from home to work and back and—well, there wasn’t much to add to that. Karaoke Thursday, dude. You’ve got a life. Yeah, sure he did. He sat up, put the can to his mouth, tapped it against his teeth in disappointment and dropped it in the trash. He picked up the printout of the Klaes obituary and read it for the third time. Former Caltech Professor of Physics Jason L. Klaes passed unexpectedly on January 10, in Los Angeles, California. He was sixty-four. A celebration of Jason’s life will be held on January 31 at 2 p.m. in the King George Room of the Harvey Hotel in Los Angeles. Reception to follow. The obituary, published in the Pasadena Tattler, provided no indication of the cause of death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Hoping to find out who had submitted the Klaes info, Raphael had left several messages for the obits editor at the Tattler, but none had been returned. Standing up, he tacked the notice to the bulletin board above his desk. It fit nicely between his Picasso and Seurat prints, which were bordered by skateboard decals. He appreciated the prints for a moment and then lowered his eyes to a photograph that showed him and his mother posing in front of Three Quintains, the famous Calder sculpture, a permanent exhibit in the nearby art museum where his mother had curated. Their gray eyes and delicate lips were identical. She was smiling, as she would even when her disease had turned her limbs to stone and she looked to Raphael to assure her that his were still flesh. Dance for me, Raphy. Mom, I can’t dance. But glancing through his cubicle opening and seeing no one, he drew his hands to his shoulders and let his arms unfurl rhythmically. “I’m a boy, I’m a man . . .” He broke off, feeling the heat well up in his cheeks. Dropping back to his chair, he opened the Jason Klaes computer file, which had grown to 500 MB. He’d spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the case, mapping Klaes’s online activity in the months before the day of his reported death. Nothing sounded alarms: no darknet sites, no guides to disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency transactions or big insurance policies. The only unusual transaction on his debit card was a truck rental on January 8, two days before his death, but even physicists liked to haul out junk once in a while. Klaes, a reputable scientist, had no obvious motives for faking his death, but he couldn’t rule it out yet. From outside Raphael’s cubicle, supervisor Mike Dreemont’s voice boomed. “Seven thousand a day, and every day the number rises. We expect within three years every single newly dead over five years old will have had a substantial online presence.” “Amazing,” said a higher-pitched male voice. Raphael glanced out his doorway to the floor’s main aisle. Dreemont, a thickset man with a long neck that Raphael’s friend Matt likened to a periscope, was standing with a new intern, a fresh-faced young man in a blue skinny suit. Orientation. “So, how much can you access?” the intern asked. Dreemont enthusiastically replied, “Every click, finger swipe, pressed key, sent message, posted photo, vote up or down, blog entry, tweet and Instagram.” “Instagram, really? I thought you could erase those posts.” Once on the net, always on the net, thought Raphael. “Ha,” said Dreemont dismissively. “Despite wishful claims to the contrary, nothing really gets erased. Once on the net, always on the net.” Could he not vary that old saw? A hard drive never forgets. Nothing gets lost in cyberspace. Dreemont, clapped the intern’s shoulder. “And for that we should all be grateful. Imagine one day when your mother has passed . . .” Raphael’s chest tightened as he remembered that day. His mom’s frozen face. Dreemont continued in a bright voice, “On her birthday what would you do? Well, now you can enter her portal, go right to her favorite social media page and wish her happy birthday. Peruse her blog posts and count the accumulated likes. Read her saved email and the never-ending stream of new ones. It will all be there for you to visit year after year, as one day you too will be available to those left behind. Now let’s meet some of the people you’ll be working with.” Dreemont and the intern moved on. Raphael looked at his water board, where the letters, numbers and symbols swirled together like debris in a whirlpool until he lowered his fingers and the characters arranged themselves in in regular qwuerty fashion, unless he wanted Greek, Norwegian or another of a hundred languages. Pricey stuff, but Norval didn’t scrimp, though personally he preferred the resistance of an old-fashioned keyboard. On a water board proximity triggered choice. He picked out the letters that spelled his mother’s name. Birthday. That was a new angle. He placed his fingers above the J and A, but his fingers rose as if keys and tips were similar magnetic poles “Knock, knock.” He turned his head to see Matt standing at the entrance to his cubicle. Matt held his fist in the air as if he had actually tapped wood. “Hey, Raphael,” said Matt, putting his fist to his mouth, uncurling his fingers and then looking at them curiously. “Hey, Matt. Got big plans for the weekend?” Matt’s nose wrinkled. “Belinda, that girl I was going to take to the Arroyo Festival.” “Yeah?” “Her dog’s sick. Impetigo, I think. Anyway, she can’t go.” “Bummer.” “Yeah. Bummer. Anyway I’ve got an extra ticket.” For an instant Raphael allowed himself to imagine the fields of people and the scores of bands. If, but no. No. “Hey, that’s cool, Matt, but I’ve got . . . plans.” “Oh, yeah, sure. Well, I thought I’d ask anyway.” Matt pulled on his stretched earlobe, which hung like a carabiner. “Impetigo. Poor pooch.” “Skin infection, right?” “Is that it? Hmm.” “I think so. Anyway, thanks for asking, Matt. Maybe try Anastasia.” Matt took a step back and glanced toward the department door behind which Anastasia manned the reception desk. He turned back to Raphael and rolled his eyes. “I wish. Well, have the best weekend you can.” “Later, Matt.” He watched Matt drift away. How unfettered his friend’s life was. With his toe Raphael turned the skateboard on its back and nudged a wheel to send it spinning. After three days of research, he couldn’t establish Klaes was firmly dead, or “offline” in company parlance. There were contradictions that pointed to someone faking their death. Norval took no moral position on these frauds—and Raphael couldn’t much blame anyone for trying to escape their restraints— but to sell a live person as a dead one was clearly illegal. As Geo Maglio, company founder and CEO, often intoned, “Let other companies sell the data of the living. Norval sells only the data of the dead.” Raphael first heard that arch precept at his onboarding meeting with Maglio. Fresh out of the private tanning machine in his office, Maglio had summed up the corporate mission. “In a nutshell, the American people don’t want to forget, and Norval is fulfilling the will of the American people. We want to be remembered. We want our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, ad infinitum, to remember us. The Norval NDMN division’s goal is to preserve the online remains of every dead citizen of the red, white, and blue, and provide the slickest transport to their info since Walt built his monorail.” Maglio had then grabbed a peppermint from a bowl on his desk and tossed it to Raphael, who caught it as neatly as he’d catch his skateboard backhand off an ollie. “Good reflexes, young man,” said Maglio. “You’re quick, and at Norval we must be quick with the dead.” “Uh, yes.” Raphael unwrapped his peppermint. As he chewed on the candy and listened to Maglio tout the firm’s benefits, a question occurred to him. It all made sense, except— “Money?” Maglio laughed. He sat down behind his desk, leaned back, and gazed at the ceiling. “Among other revenue streams, tens of millions of people visiting their loved one’s remains will provide solid demographics for advertisers. And the beauty is this: as the deceased pile up, our visiting audience can only grow larger.”
End Man
Chapter 1
It was like a riddle, thought Raphael. What is always arriving but never arrives? What do we constantly approach but never reach? What door do we step through to find ourselves opening it again? A riddle and a disappointment. Ten years ago, he had imagined a future with electric cars, clean industries and invisible air, but gas guzzlers still filled the roads (cheaper purchase price), smokestacks belched their byproducts (downgraded environmental laws) and brown skies had returned to Los Angeles, though now, admittedly, filled with drones. That came true. And digital technology pretty much ran the show, though the armies of the night, the so-called Digital Luddites or blanks, were gathering. Robocalls, junk mail and spam still ruled.
Hissssss.
Raphael looked up at one of the organic light screens protruding from the department’s east wall. It showed a woman ironing a sheet. The hiss was steam. The screen’s loud volume was pointless. One of the End Men must have accidently turned up the control. Someone made the correction and the sound faded, leaving only an image, as was the case on the other screens showing hands kneading dough, a man whittling a pipe and a cat playing with a golf ball. The screens were there for bulletins, but during downtime showed only so-called mindfulness videos, which—though other End Men claimed the videos calmed and focused them— he found monotonous and tried to avoid. Beneath the screens, a panel of LED lights showed a four-digit number, the ones place digit changing so quickly, it could barely be discerned. The tens digit changed at a slower pace, the hundreds slower yet and the thousands seemed stuck on four.
Above the screens, large silver letters on a black background spelled out the name of the division: Norval Department of Marketing Necrology. In slightly smaller script, its corporate charge followed: To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead. Derived from the division’s name, NDMN was the staff’s acronym for the unit. They happily pronounced it End Men, and the department’s various genders referred to themselves that way too.
Turning back to his console, Raphael listened to the unremarkable hum of the department in which a hundred End Men verified death, the first step in acquiring the rights to online remains. In another month he’d have spent five years harvesting the data of the dead, which initially even he thought sounded morbid. He had come to see it wasn’t much different from any other data collection industry. Not that he had hands-on experience elsewhere. Norval Necrology was his first job, and considering his geographic limitations, it might well be his last. But at least he hadn’t remained on the bottom rung. He now was not only an End Man but a—possum hunter.
Raphael drained his energy drink, stretched his legs out under the desk and set his heels on his skateboard. He turned a foot sideways on the board to see its sole, which was pretty much trashed. In the days when he practiced stunts, his pants would have been equally beat. But the black chinos, which fit like a second skin on his long slim legs, showed neither tear nor fray. He hadn’t tried a new skateboard trick since he was fourteen, twelve years ago . . . Now the board was strictly transport, carrying his 159-pound body from home to work and back and—well, there wasn’t much to add to that.
Karaoke Thursday, dude. You’ve got a life. Yeah, sure he did.
He sat up, put the can to his mouth, tapped it against his teeth in disappointment and dropped it in the trash. He picked up the printout of the Klaes obituary and read it for the third time.
Former Caltech Professor of Physics Jason L. Klaes passed unexpectedly on January 10, in Los Angeles, California. He was sixty-four. A celebration of Jason’s life will be held on January 31 at 2 p.m. in the King George Room of the Harvey Hotel in Los Angeles. Reception to follow.
The obituary, published in the Pasadena Tattler, provided no indication of the cause of death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Hoping to find out who had submitted the Klaes info, Raphael had left several messages for the obits editor at the Tattler, but none had been returned.
Standing up, he tacked the notice to the bulletin board above his desk. It fit nicely between his Picasso and Seurat prints, which were bordered by skateboard decals. He appreciated the prints for a moment and then lowered his eyes to a photograph that showed him and his mother posing in front of Three Quintains, the famous Calder sculpture, a permanent exhibit in the nearby art museum where his mother had curated. Their gray eyes and delicate lips were identical. She was smiling, as she would even when her disease had turned her limbs to stone and she looked to Raphael to assure her that his were still flesh.
Dance for me, Raphy.
Mom, I can’t dance. But glancing through his cubicle opening and seeing no one, he drew his hands to his shoulders and let his arms unfurl rhythmically. “I’m a boy, I’m a man . . .” He broke off, feeling the heat well up in his cheeks.
Dropping back to his chair, he opened the Jason Klaes computer file, which had grown to 500 MB. He’d spent much of Wednesday and Thursday on the case, mapping Klaes’s online activity in the months before the day of his reported death. Nothing sounded alarms: no darknet sites, no guides to disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency transactions or big insurance policies. The only unusual transaction on his debit card was a truck rental on January 8, two days before his death, but even physicists liked to haul out junk once in a while. Klaes, a reputable scientist, had no obvious motives for faking his death, but he couldn’t rule it out yet.
From outside Raphael’s cubicle, supervisor Mike Dreemont’s voice boomed. “Seven thousand a day, and every day the number rises. We expect within three years every single newly dead over five years old will have had a substantial online presence.”
“Amazing,” said a higher-pitched male voice.
Raphael glanced out his doorway to the floor’s main aisle. Dreemont, a thickset man with a long neck that Raphael’s friend Matt likened to a periscope, was standing with a new intern, a fresh-faced young man in a blue skinny suit. Orientation.
“So, how much can you access?” the intern asked.
Dreemont enthusiastically replied, “Every click, finger swipe, pressed key, sent message, posted photo, vote up or down, blog entry, tweet and Instagram.”
“Instagram, really? I thought you could erase those posts.”
Once on the net, always on the net, thought Raphael.
“Ha,” said Dreemont dismissively. “Despite wishful claims to the contrary, nothing really gets erased. Once on the net, always on the net.”
Could he not vary that old saw? A hard drive never forgets. Nothing gets lost in cyberspace.
Dreemont, clapped the intern’s shoulder. “And for that we should all be grateful. Imagine one day when your mother has passed . . .”
Raphael’s chest tightened as he remembered that day. His mom’s frozen face.
Dreemont continued in a bright voice, “On her birthday what would you do? Well, now you can enter her portal, go right to her favorite social media page and wish her happy birthday. Peruse her blog posts and count the accumulated likes. Read her saved email and the never-ending stream of new ones. It will all be there for you to visit year after year, as one day you too will be available to those left behind. Now let’s meet some of the people you’ll be working with.”
Dreemont and the intern moved on.
Raphael looked at his water board, where the letters, numbers and symbols swirled together like debris in a whirlpool until he lowered his fingers and the characters arranged themselves in in regular qwuerty fashion, unless he wanted Greek, Norwegian or another of a hundred languages. Pricey stuff, but Norval didn’t scrimp, though personally he preferred the resistance of an old-fashioned keyboard. On a water board proximity triggered choice. He picked out the letters that spelled his mother’s name. Birthday. That was a new angle. He placed his fingers above the J and A, but his fingers rose as if keys and tips were similar magnetic poles
“Knock, knock.”
He turned his head to see Matt standing at the entrance to his cubicle. Matt held his fist in the air as if he had actually tapped wood.
“Hey, Raphael,” said Matt, putting his fist to his mouth, uncurling his fingers and then looking at them curiously.
“Hey, Matt. Got big plans for the weekend?”
Matt’s nose wrinkled. “Belinda, that girl I was going to take to the Arroyo Festival.”
“Yeah?”
“Her dog’s sick. Impetigo, I think. Anyway, she can’t go.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah. Bummer. Anyway I’ve got an extra ticket.”
For an instant Raphael allowed himself to imagine the fields of people and the scores of bands. If, but no. No. “Hey, that’s cool, Matt, but I’ve got . . . plans.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. Well, I thought I’d ask anyway.” Matt pulled on his stretched earlobe, which hung like a carabiner. “Impetigo. Poor pooch.”
“Skin infection, right?”
“Is that it? Hmm.”
“I think so. Anyway, thanks for asking, Matt. Maybe try Anastasia.”
Matt took a step back and glanced toward the department door behind which Anastasia manned the reception desk. He turned back to Raphael and rolled his eyes. “I wish. Well, have the best weekend you can.”
“Later, Matt.”
He watched Matt drift away. How unfettered his friend’s life was. With his toe Raphael turned the skateboard on its back and nudged a wheel to send it spinning.
After three days of research, he couldn’t establish Klaes was firmly dead, or “offline” in company parlance. There were contradictions that pointed to someone faking their death. Norval took no moral position on these frauds—and Raphael couldn’t much blame anyone for trying to escape their restraints— but to sell a live person as a dead one was clearly illegal.
As Geo Maglio, company founder and CEO, often intoned, “Let other companies sell the data of the living. Norval sells only the data of the dead.” Raphael first heard that arch precept at his onboarding meeting with Maglio. Fresh out of the private tanning machine in his office, Maglio had summed up the corporate mission.
“In a nutshell, the American people don’t want to forget, and Norval is fulfilling the will of the American people. We want to be remembered. We want our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, ad infinitum, to remember us. The Norval NDMN division’s goal is to preserve the online remains of every dead citizen of the red, white, and blue, and provide the slickest transport to their info since Walt built his monorail.”
Maglio had then grabbed a peppermint from a bowl on his desk and tossed it to Raphael, who caught it as neatly as he’d catch his skateboard backhand off an ollie.
“Good reflexes, young man,” said Maglio. “You’re quick, and at Norval we must be quick with the dead.”
“Uh, yes.” Raphael unwrapped his peppermint. As he chewed on the candy and listened to Maglio tout the firm’s benefits, a question occurred to him. It all made sense, except—
“Money?” Maglio laughed. He sat down behind his desk, leaned back, and gazed at the ceiling. “Among other revenue streams, tens of millions of people visiting their loved one’s remains will provide solid demographics for advertisers. And the beauty is this: as the deceased pile up, our visiting audience can only grow larger.”