Below is the premise of a novel called End Man, followed by the most recent revise of the first chapter opening. The premise has been universally acclaimed (by literary agents), but so far the first chapter has only drawn in a few. I'm trying to broaden the opening's appeal. I have to pack in a lot of exposition early in the game, but I think I do it by the rules of free indirect style (if you toss around "info dump" or "show don't tell" don't bother reading this. Same thing if you only read in a particular genre).
Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life in the one square mile that surrounds his Los Angeles home. Fortunately the area provides everything an artistically sensitive person needs, including a job at an oddball company that tracks the online remains of the deceased. One of Raphael's assignments will require him to move beyond his geographic boundaries into the realm of extreme data harvesting, psychometrics and resurrection with a high tech twist.
Chapter 1 Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum.
On the second floor of the Norval Building, located in the heart of Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile, the obituary fluttered annoyingly in Raphy Lennon’s hands. He tilted back his head and said, “Air duct close.” The open silver plate above his cubicle ignored him.
Like much of the equipment in the old building,the voice sensors were broken. Sighing, he dropped his head, leaned forward and set the print-out back on his desk.
For the second time, he reviewed the details.
Former Caltech Professor of Physics Jason L. Klaes passed unexpectedly on January 10, in Los Angeles, California. He was sixty-four. Jason was a graduate of MIT. . . Among his awards the Boltzmann Medal . . . Lieben Prize . . . 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 Hollywood. Reception to follow.
The obituary, published in the Pasadena Gazette, provided no indication of the cause of death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Hoping to find out who had submitted the info, Raphy had left several messages for the obits editor at the Gazette, but none had been returned, which matched the response to his other inquiries on the Jason Klaes case.
Hissssss.
Was that damn duct closing?
No.
On one of the light screens protruding from the Necrology Department’s east wall, a woman ironed a sheet, vapor rising from the sleek device. The screens were for bulletins, but during downtime showed only mindfulness videos, which—though other End Men claimed the videos calmed and focused them—made him uneasy and caused him to avert his eyes.
Above the screens, large silver letters on a black background spelled out the name of the division: Norval Department of Marketing Necrology. 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.
Outside his cubicle, fingers raced over keyboards. Someone sucked vigorously—a straw probing a drained Frappuccino? A Cri de Coeur of, “Is it lunch time yet?” A throttled yawn. On the department floor, within the prehistoric, high-walled cubicles, amid crunching, gurgling and common complaint, a hundred End Men verified death, the first step in acquiring the rights to online remains. Come next month, he’d have spent five years as an End Man, the last three as a Possum Specialist.
Raphy snatched up his energy drink. He stretched his legs out under the desk, where he kept his skateboard during work hours, set a heel on a wheel and turned a foot sideways. The sneaker’s sole was 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.
Karaoke Thursday, dude. You’ve got a life. Yeah, sure he did.
A one square mile life.
He sat up, put the can to his mouth, tapped it against his teeth in disappointment and dropped it in the Omni-trash, where if things worked out it would immediately shift with a hum and a click to the recyclables sleeve.
In the silence, he again studied the obituary.
Slim pickings.
He stood up and 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 Seurat 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 Los Angeles Art Museum where his mother had curated. Her slender arms accentuated by her sleeveless print dress, she hugged Raphy, his head nestled against her neck. 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 him to assure her that his were still flesh.
Dance for me, Raphy.
Mom, I can’t dance. But glancing through the cubicle opening and seeing no one, he pivoted away from his desk, drew his hands to his chest, lunged in slow motion and threw his arms backwards, wrists swiveling smoothly. He broke off, feeling the heat well up in his cheeks.
Dropping back to the chair, he opened the Klaes computer file. 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 plays 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 the brainy types’ stains sometimes lay deep in the fabric, scrubbed clean from the surface.
From outside Raphy’s cubicle, supervisor Mike Dreemont’s voice boomed in bright infomercial style. “Seven thousand a day, and every day the number rises.”
“Amazing,” said a higher-pitched male voice.
Raphy glanced out his doorway to the floor’s main aisle. Dreemont, a thickset man with a heavy jaw and wide mouth, was standing with a new intern, a fresh-faced young grad in a blue skinny suit. Orientation. Dreemont droned on for a moment.
“Bangagram, really? Can’t you erase those posts?” asked the intern. “Ha,” said Dreemont dismissively. “Despite wishful claims to the contrary, nothing really gets erased. Since dense-cloud quantum storage, once on the net, always on the net. And for that we should all be grateful. The American people want to be remembered. Imagine one day when your mother has passed . . .”
Glancing at her photo on his bulletin board, Raphy’s chest tightened as he remembered that day. His mom’s frozen face.
Dreemont continued, “Now via her Norval Portal, you can peruse her blog posts and count the accumulated likes. Read her saved email and the never-ending stream of new ones. In the past, on her birthday you might put flowers on her grave, say a prayer or two. Now you can go right to her favorite social media page and wish her . . .”
Dreemont and the intern moved on. Birthday. That was a new angle. On his mother’s last, she had asked him to push her wheelchair over to the apartment window that overlooked the Tar Tower Plaza. In a painful whisper, she had then requested him go to the plaza and skate. As he ollied and kick-flipped across the concrete, he looked up to see her face in the window. A thin smile carved in her face of stone.
His fingers hovered above his keyboard’s J and A. Leave it alone, Raphy. Get back to your possum. Raphy turned from the darkening glass of memory to his quarry.
After three days of research, he couldn’t establish if Klaes was firmly dead, or “offline” in company parlance. Although no motives had surfaced, there remained signs Klaes had faked his death. Norval took no moral position on these frauds—and Raphy couldn’t much blame anyone for trying to escape their restraints— but to sell a live person as a dead one was clearly illegal.
He still wondered why it was so damn important to get the undeclared into the database at all. Norval had enough dead, and it would seem just ignoring questionable candidates would be the best policy. But CEO Geo Maglio didn’t see it that way. “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves,” said Maglio.
“Okay, Mr. Klaes,” Raphy said under his breath, “let’s figure you out.” The lead initially went to his friend Matt, but Dreemont immediately transferred Klaes to Raphy for clean-up. “Just a hunch,” the supervisor had said at the time, which Raphy took to mean Klaes smelled of possum—Norval-speak for someone faking their death.
Matt was capable, but he lacked persistence. He wasn’t the kind of End Man who would lose sleep over a work problem. A dozen times during his two years at Norval, Matt had turned over a troublesome lead to Raphy, who had been promoted once and recognized numerous times for his success at tracking down possums.
Dreemont had announced the promotion over the PA. “Raphy’s got the instincts of a Kentucky deer hunter. Just give him tracks, scat and a bent twig. Pretty damn good for a city boy.” Raphy’s skills were such that, with the exception of Matt, Norval no longer assigned any other End Man to these special cases.
Unfortunately, the city boy’s reputation had taken a couple of hits lately. Six months ago, he had declared a possum officially offline and sent the verification to the contracts department on the first floor. Contracts had no sooner gotten online remains rights from the next of kin, than the offline showed up at a Las Vegas casino. That was a shitstorm. The possum screwed the company for six figures to drop a lawsuit, the feds were getting on Maglio’s tail, and the press was raking up old scandals. “No more fucking possums,” Maglio had declared to Raphy. “One live possum in the database is one dead End Man.”
Two aspects of Raphy’s preliminary research seemed suspicious. The first was the obituary’s phrase “passed unexpectedly.” Generally, when people “passed unexpectedly” the cause of death was suicide. Suicides are reported. Raphy had obtained the coroner’s record of Klaes’s death, but there had been no proof-of-death letter. A POD was always filed with a possible suicide and would verify the coroner was investigating the case. Although Norval had solid contacts with the coroner’s office, no additional information on Jason Klaes was available, as if someone was pulling strings.
That could be chalked up to bureaucratic error. The email discrepancies were more alarming. First, there were signs of outward activity on several of Klaes’s online accounts after January 10. Of course, someone could have Klaes’s password or the account could have been hacked. People hacked the dead’s online remains all the time. The hackers were like mailbox thieves, sticking their hands inside and pulling out whatever was left, hoping to get lucky. But in Klaes’s case, nothing was taken. Something was added; an outgoing email appeared to be threatening someone, which is where things started to get interesting. The email was sent January 14, at which time Klaes was four days dead. Four other postmortem emails, one sent on January 11, two on the fifteenth, and one on the sixteenth also pointed to an undeclared..
But what undeclared would use his own email for trolling?
Afflicted with dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, 26-year-old Raphael Lennon must live out his life in the one square mile that surrounds his Los Angeles home. Fortunately the area provides everything an artistically sensitive person needs, including a job at an oddball company that tracks the online remains of the deceased. One of Raphael's assignments will require him to move beyond his geographic boundaries into the realm of extreme data harvesting, psychometrics and resurrection with a high tech twist.
Chapter 1
Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum.
On the second floor of the Norval Building, located in the heart of Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile, the obituary fluttered annoyingly in Raphy Lennon’s hands. He tilted back his head and said, “Air duct close.” The open silver plate above his cubicle ignored him.
Like much of the equipment in the old building,the voice sensors were broken. Sighing, he dropped his head, leaned forward and set the print-out back on his desk.
For the second time, he reviewed the details.
Former Caltech Professor of Physics Jason L. Klaes passed unexpectedly on January 10, in Los Angeles, California. He was sixty-four. Jason was a graduate of MIT. . . Among his awards the Boltzmann Medal . . . Lieben Prize . . . 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 Hollywood. Reception to follow.
The obituary, published in the Pasadena Gazette, provided no indication of the cause of death, relatives to contact or burial arrangements. Hoping to find out who had submitted the info, Raphy had left several messages for the obits editor at the Gazette, but none had been returned, which matched the response to his other inquiries on the Jason Klaes case.
Hissssss.
Was that damn duct closing?
No.
On one of the light screens protruding from the Necrology Department’s east wall, a woman ironed a sheet, vapor rising from the sleek device. The screens were for bulletins, but during downtime showed only mindfulness videos, which—though other End Men claimed the videos calmed and focused them—made him uneasy and caused him to avert his eyes.
Above the screens, large silver letters on a black background spelled out the name of the division: Norval Department of Marketing Necrology. 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.
Outside his cubicle, fingers raced over keyboards. Someone sucked vigorously—a straw probing a drained Frappuccino? A Cri de Coeur of, “Is it lunch time yet?” A throttled yawn. On the department floor, within the prehistoric, high-walled cubicles, amid crunching, gurgling and common complaint, a hundred End Men verified death, the first step in acquiring the rights to online remains. Come next month, he’d have spent five years as an End Man, the last three as a Possum Specialist.
Raphy snatched up his energy drink. He stretched his legs out under the desk, where he kept his skateboard during work hours, set a heel on a wheel and turned a foot sideways. The sneaker’s sole was 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.
Karaoke Thursday, dude. You’ve got a life. Yeah, sure he did.
A one square mile life.
He sat up, put the can to his mouth, tapped it against his teeth in disappointment and dropped it in the Omni-trash, where if things worked out it would immediately shift with a hum and a click to the recyclables sleeve.
In the silence, he again studied the obituary.
Slim pickings.
He stood up and 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 Seurat 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 Los Angeles Art Museum where his mother had curated. Her slender arms accentuated by her sleeveless print dress, she hugged Raphy, his head nestled against her neck. 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 him to assure her that his were still flesh.
Dance for me, Raphy.
Mom, I can’t dance. But glancing through the cubicle opening and seeing no one, he pivoted away from his desk, drew his hands to his chest, lunged in slow motion and threw his arms backwards, wrists swiveling smoothly. He broke off, feeling the heat well up in his cheeks.
Dropping back to the chair, he opened the Klaes computer file. 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 plays 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 the brainy types’ stains sometimes lay deep in the fabric, scrubbed clean from the surface.
From outside Raphy’s cubicle, supervisor Mike Dreemont’s voice boomed in bright infomercial style. “Seven thousand a day, and every day the number rises.”
“Amazing,” said a higher-pitched male voice.
Raphy glanced out his doorway to the floor’s main aisle. Dreemont, a thickset man with a heavy jaw and wide mouth, was standing with a new intern, a fresh-faced young grad in a blue skinny suit. Orientation. Dreemont droned on for a moment.
“Bangagram, really? Can’t you erase those posts?” asked the intern.
“Ha,” said Dreemont dismissively. “Despite wishful claims to the contrary, nothing really gets erased. Since dense-cloud quantum storage, once on the net, always on the net. And for that we should all be grateful. The American people want to be remembered. Imagine one day when your mother has passed . . .”
Glancing at her photo on his bulletin board, Raphy’s chest tightened as he remembered that day. His mom’s frozen face.
Dreemont continued, “Now via her Norval Portal, you can peruse her blog posts and count the accumulated likes. Read her saved email and the never-ending stream of new ones. In the past, on her birthday you might put flowers on her grave, say a prayer or two. Now you can go right to her favorite social media page and wish her . . .”
Dreemont and the intern moved on.
Birthday. That was a new angle. On his mother’s last, she had asked him to push her wheelchair over to the apartment window that overlooked the Tar Tower Plaza. In a painful whisper, she had then requested him go to the plaza and skate. As he ollied and kick-flipped across the concrete, he looked up to see her face in the window. A thin smile carved in her face of stone.
His fingers hovered above his keyboard’s J and A. Leave it alone, Raphy. Get back to your possum. Raphy turned from the darkening glass of memory to his quarry.
After three days of research, he couldn’t establish if Klaes was firmly dead, or “offline” in company parlance. Although no motives had surfaced, there remained signs Klaes had faked his death. Norval took no moral position on these frauds—and Raphy couldn’t much blame anyone for trying to escape their restraints— but to sell a live person as a dead one was clearly illegal.
He still wondered why it was so damn important to get the undeclared into the database at all. Norval had enough dead, and it would seem just ignoring questionable candidates would be the best policy. But CEO Geo Maglio didn’t see it that way. “Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves,” said Maglio.
“Okay, Mr. Klaes,” Raphy said under his breath, “let’s figure you out.”
The lead initially went to his friend Matt, but Dreemont immediately transferred Klaes to Raphy for clean-up. “Just a hunch,” the supervisor had said at the time, which Raphy took to mean Klaes smelled of possum—Norval-speak for someone faking their death.
Matt was capable, but he lacked persistence. He wasn’t the kind of End Man who would lose sleep over a work problem. A dozen times during his two years at Norval, Matt had turned over a troublesome lead to Raphy, who had been promoted once and recognized numerous times for his success at tracking down possums.
Dreemont had announced the promotion over the PA. “Raphy’s got the instincts of a Kentucky deer hunter. Just give him tracks, scat and a bent twig. Pretty damn good for a city boy.” Raphy’s skills were such that, with the exception of Matt, Norval no longer assigned any other End Man to these special cases.
Unfortunately, the city boy’s reputation had taken a couple of hits lately. Six months ago, he had declared a possum officially offline and sent the verification to the contracts department on the first floor. Contracts had no sooner gotten online remains rights from the next of kin, than the offline showed up at a Las Vegas casino. That was a shitstorm. The possum screwed the company for six figures to drop a lawsuit, the feds were getting on Maglio’s tail, and the press was raking up old scandals. “No more fucking possums,” Maglio had declared to Raphy. “One live possum in the database is one dead End Man.”
Two aspects of Raphy’s preliminary research seemed suspicious. The first was the obituary’s phrase “passed unexpectedly.” Generally, when people “passed unexpectedly” the cause of death was suicide. Suicides are reported. Raphy had obtained the coroner’s record of Klaes’s death, but there had been no proof-of-death letter. A POD was always filed with a possible suicide and would verify the coroner was investigating the case. Although Norval had solid contacts with the coroner’s office, no additional information on Jason Klaes was available, as if someone was pulling strings.
That could be chalked up to bureaucratic error. The email discrepancies were more alarming. First, there were signs of outward activity on several of Klaes’s online accounts after January 10. Of course, someone could have Klaes’s password or the account could have been hacked. People hacked the dead’s online remains all the time. The hackers were like mailbox thieves, sticking their hands inside and pulling out whatever was left, hoping to get lucky. But in Klaes’s case, nothing was taken. Something was added; an outgoing email appeared to be threatening someone, which is where things started to get interesting. The email was sent January 14, at which time Klaes was four days dead. Four other postmortem emails, one sent on January 11, two on the fifteenth, and one on the sixteenth also pointed to an undeclared..
But what undeclared would use his own email for trolling?