To Make a Long Story Short

50,000 WPM

IT WAS GETTING TOWARD MIDNIGHT and Vic Williams was still at his desk working on a report that the boss wanted out the next day. He sat in front of the green-lit screen of the word processor, contemplating how to adjust the columns into the ‘new’ format his superior had given him at exactly 5:30. Nothing ever came to you in the morning at Universal Living Systems. You always got it just when you were ready to escape and go home.

It had taken Vic over four hours just to enter the content revisions.

“It’s not like you have to retype everything,” his boss said. “You’ve got it on that screen thingy and you can just change them.”

Right. Anticipating at least two more hours trying to get the format ready for printing, he considered that it might have been easier to start over fresh. No matter how many new functions he learned on the equipment that had been placed in his office to ‘simplify his work’ only six months earlier, he never seemed to have the right function to do what he wanted to.

Learning the equipment itself was novel. It was a kind of electronic fantasy machine that greeted him when he came to the office each day. Being in a division of the first manufacturer to gear up for the needs of space colonists had lifted his self-image from lowly clerk typist to a real contributor in the Systems Analysis Division, and had fulfilled many of his fantasies concerning space age equipment. He could even dream of the possibility of being invited along on the colonization, because, of course, they would need a word processing operator. Right?

*Sigh.*

He would never understand the design and mechanics of the code, but he explored the functions both randomly and systematically. At times, he was certain that he was communicating directly with the equipment during his experiments.

“If you had breasts, I’d date you,” Vic commented to the silent machine.

The original programmer of the electronic typewriter certainly had a sense of humor when inputting the prompts that flashed on the screen whenever Vic began to randomly key in commands and request glossaries. He had already created Trojan horses that gave him access to password protected documents in two other departments. He didn’t know how to use the information he found, but having it available gave him a sense of achievement and success.

The salesman and instructors had quipped about the word processing equipment being a poor man’s computer. It did not have the capability of rapid data processing that was reserved for a department of specialists working in a cool and pristine environment three floors above Vic’s office. His equipment was remotely tied to the same network, but the workstation did not require special cooling and Vic’s office had not warranted an environmental controls system during construction. It got hot.

He was just sitting down with one more cup of coffee when the phone rang. Assuming the only one who would call at this hour would be his boss, Vic debated a few moments before deciding he had better answer it. He reached across the desk for the phone and his partly rolled up sleeve caught on the handle of his coffee cup. He dropped the receiver as he scrambled to prevent the hot liquid from hitting his precious equipment, but he was too late. The trajectory of the spill had been sufficient to spread a line of coffee from the lead wire of the terminal to the network connection to the telephone.

A hot arc of blue flame shot across the liquid connection, linking the screen, telephone, and network. Instinctively, he grabbed the phone to break the connection and felt the clear blue flame leap up his arm so quickly he could not even scream before the fire had paralyzed and engulfed him. All he remembered thereafter was the faint buzzing dial tone coming through the receiver he clutched in his hand as he fell to the floor.

When he awoke, the first rays of the summer sun had already begun to beat in through the narrow slit of a window that linked him to life outside the office. He thought he heard sirens and hoped they would hurry to find him. They sounded close, but something was wrong with his hearing. The sirens weren’t constant, but faded in and out in a rapid syncopated rhythm. The phone receiver was still clutched in his right hand and a tingling ache played all across the right side of his body.

It was several minutes before he coordinated the syncopated sirens with the telephone receiver and realized it was the message of the telephone company indicating the phone was off the hook. He looked up, wondering if he was able to stand. The telephone itself perched precariously over the edge of his desk, directly above his head.

He reached up with his left hand to push it back, not daring to try his right with the handset in it. He wasn’t sure he could release his hold on it. As he nudged the phone back from the edge of the desk, the receiver snapped out of his hand and thumped against his chest. He hadn’t felt himself release it.

He breathed deeply and rolled away, using his hand on the desk to pull himself up. The entire right side of his body throbbed with the tingling pulse of the pain. After struggling to feel his arm and leg, he managed to get himself into his chair and return the receiver to the switch hook.

He turned toward the blank screen of the terminal. It had shorted out and gone off during the accident, he surmised. Then he remembered the hours of work that had been on the screen when the accident occurred. He forgot the injuries, though his movements were hampered by the constant buzzing in his ears, echoing the phone noise he had been unconsciously listening to for over five hours. He was further hampered by the flashing numbness that pulsed through the right side of his body. Numbness on the right side of his body was supposed to signify something, but he couldn’t remember what. He used his left hand to sop up what remained of the spilled coffee with his handkerchief, and moved to the archive unit nearby. Here he punched in the appropriate code to re-activate the system.

The program call-up took an eternity and he could feel in his bones each switch of the system as it engaged the next step. He had never felt the sensation before, and hoped there was nothing permanently damaged in the network. When his terminal screen lit up with the words “Hello New User. Please identify yourself by entering your User ID and password,” he felt a sharp stab in the back left part of his head, just above his neck.

He keyed in the password and hit Enter. He could see the words in the back of his mind before they made it to the screen. “Good morning, Vic. Welcome to work. What time is it, anyway?” He keyed in the date and hour slowly, using only his left hand. When it had been entered, the main menu flashed on the screen. He carefully selected the ID for the document that he had been working on the night before, knowing before the words flashed across the prompt screen that it was an “Unknown Document.”

He folded his arm across the top of the screen and lay his head down on it. The hours of work. The data that would need to be recreated. All were lost—erased from the memory of the system. He could see in his mind the steps that it would take to recreate the document that was supposed to be ready for an 8:30 meeting his morning. It might take weeks to gather all the information from original sources again. If he was still employed.

He couldn’t take it. Still lying with an arm over the machine, he went to sleep.

It was gentle hands that woke him next, just minutes after he had drifted off. Two men in the unmistakable uniforms of emergency medical teams were lifting him from the chair. Behind him, he could hear the printer clattering away and wondered if he had accidentally hit another switch on the system to have a document printed. He couldn’t worry about it now. His head was filled with the images of the lost report and how he had thought it would look when it was finished correctly.

The men in uniform had him out of the building and his stretcher was slid into the back of the ambulance. But in his ears, he could still hear the printer clattering away in his office.

By mid-afternoon Vic had undergone a battery of tests and his boss was sitting beside him in the hospital room waiting for the results. That was one thing that Vic could count on. Ellis Larson was a hard worker and expected the same from his people, but he was genuinely concerned with their well-being and had been with Vic most of the afternoon—as soon as the management meeting in the morning had ended. Vic had never been married, nor did he have family in the same city. It was a special comfort to know the man he worked for was at least concerned.

“Vic, I can’t imagine how you managed to finish that report this morning after the accident. You’ve got to learn there is such a thing as over-dedication,” Ellis had said when he walked into the room.

His concern for work-related injury was understandable. He had come up the hard way, through floor management on an assembly line. Keeping his workers safe, and in some cases alive, had been ingrained into him from his first day on the job. The lecture was going to take up the first fifteen minutes of the visit, but Vic was already lost. He had to go back to pick up the tidbit on the completed report.

“I didn’t complete the report. It was gone. I lost it. It will take weeks to recreate that work,” he moaned. How could Ellis be so crass as to toss bad jokes about the missing document around as soon as he walked in the door?

“I’m not saying you knew what you were doing, Vic,” Ellis said, “but the last page of that report was printing out when I walked into the office at 8:00. And it is a beauty. Senior management doesn’t toss around compliments in this outfit as you well know, but their opinion was that our installation of the word processing system was paid for by the presentation of that report. And your addition of that appendix of statistical comparisons between departments took us all by surprise. I didn’t even know we had that data available. Jackson has been such a prick about getting us information from his division that we had all written it off as hopeless. And you should have seen his face when he opened to that page and saw how low his productivity was in comparison to the other departments. You earned your annual wage in that split second.”

Vic was confused. He remembered thinking that the report needed a statistical comparison, but there was no way he had time to create one. Or to recreate the report at all.

“All told, management figures the report will enable them to correct up to three-quarters of a million in waste corporate-wide. My only worry now is how I’m going to keep you with me once word is out that you were responsible for most of the results. I know it’s a small reward for the pain you must have suffered in that accident, but this whole company is talking about the word processing genius in Systems Analysis.”

Ellis kept talking about the areas, assuming Vic’s silence was due to physical discomfort, and not reading the mental problem-solving going on in his head. Vic simply could not believe the report had been printed. He knew the document was lost. It wasn’t possible.

“You didn’t happen to bring a copy with you, did you?” he asked casually. “I never did get a chance to see the finished product.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Ellis responded reaching for his briefcase. Vic chuckled, knowing full well Ellis might sit with him all afternoon, but he would still get the day’s work done while he was there. “But this is just for your pleasure in seeing a fine product,” Ellis continued. “No work until you get out of here and are fully recovered.”

“Not that I could do much here anyway,” Vic laughed. “My monitor and keyboard don’t fit into a briefcase like your work.”

He didn’t bother telling Ellis it wouldn’t make any difference if they did. One problem with word processing was that it still took two hands to operate and Vic’s right arm wasn’t functioning. He took the report in his left hand and spread it on the bed in front of him. It was beautiful. Just the kind of thing he had imagined when he was trying to figure out the proper format last night. But he was certain he had never seen the information compiled in the appendix Ellis had been so proud of. Or was that the result of one of his Trojan horses? He shuffled through the papers and handed them back to Ellis.

“You don’t happen to have the document summary with you, do you? I mean, if you took it off the printer, the summary should have been on top,” Vic said. He was curious about this document. The summary should indicate what workstation it was sent from and who the author was.

“Oh, that. I wondered what that was. Almost handed it to the copy clerk when I had the reports run. I tossed it in here somewhere.”

Ellis turned back to the briefcase and pulled out the summary sheet. It printed automatically at the beginning of every run. Vic scanned it quickly, taking in information that wouldn’t have meant a thing to Ellis. In the first place, it was not the same document ID number that Vic had searched for. He had been right about that. The document he had on screen when the accident occurred was lost. But had it transferred automatically to a backup document? He checked the creation time. 0637. He had given the time of 0629 to the computer when he logged on. It had been created after he had woken up, after he had called the ambulance, and after he found out the original document was missing. There was no way he could have created that document in the morning while he passed out on the monitor. But the final thing that struck him was the print time. 0644. Just seven minutes after the document had been created, it had been printed. And it included information he had not even put into the original document. It simply was not possible.

Dr. Sorenson entered the room and Vic happily turned his attention to her. He was fortunate that the corporate medical consultant had also been on call at the hospital when he was brought in early in the morning. She was well into her forties and had an air of professionalism about her that was unequalled.

For not actually being an employee of the corporation, she had the greatest amount of individual authority. Any executive would obey her, even if it meant taking time off or lessening workload. And all of her changes and demands had resulted in vastly improved health and productivity throughout the company.

“Well, Vic,” she began, “I see you are disobeying orders already and are back to work. I would think your manager would have some respect for a doctor’s order. If I had wanted you back at work, I would have released you from the hospital.”

“We weren’t working, Dr. Sorenson,” put in Ellis immediately. “I was congratulating Vic on the superb job he had done and he just asked to see a copy because he hadn’t seen the finished product. We weren’t working on it, just admiring it.”

Dr. Sorenson turned to Vic and sized up the look on his face before smiling and responding.

“Well, that may be what you thought, Ellis, but I’ve a feeling our friend here is having difficulty turning off his equipment. I think you’d better leave me alone with my patient for a few minutes and let me check things out. Go on now.”

She abruptly pulled the curtains around the bed, closing Ellis out and they heard him shut the door to the room behind him as he left. Vic breathed a sigh of relief at not having to face both Dr. Sorenson and his boss at the same time for this examination.

“Got something on your mind?” she asked casually as she checked the improved reflexes in his right arm and leg. He only nodded. She took his right hand and told him to squeeze. “Better,” she said. “You’re going to be a case for the books in the future. It is unusual to find a case of temporary partial right side paralysis other than in stroke victims. And we have ruled out the idea of a stroke based on other evidence. We’re going to keep watching that, though. How are your speech patterns?”

“Better,” responded Vic. “As long as I think first and separate the words in my head. At first, they were coming out all at once.”

“I know. I was here when they brought you in. I want you to tell me about when you woke up the first time after the accident. We put together that you had woken up and then passed out again. During that interval, was it you who called the ambulance?”

“Yes,” Vic said slowly, drawing out the word more than his slowed speech required. “At least I know I thought about calling.”

“The dispatcher received a call at 0623 this morning. She says no one was on the line. But, she’s one of our more daring operators. She said she had a clear impression in her mind of a man suffering from electrical shock and was able to describe the location accurately enough that one of our emergency teams recognized the building and wing. They arrived within twelve minutes and found you exactly twenty minutes after the call was received. Vic, how did you make that call?”

“I don’t know,” he responded truthfully enough.

“Vic,” the doctor began as if lecturing a classroom, “we happen to live in one of the most exciting eras of history humanity has ever known. We are looking to a time when it is feasible to plant a colony on an alien planet. It is also an age in which we are seeing a new respect for parapsychology. You’re familiar with the term? Good. For that reason and that reason alone, there was a receptivity to the message our operator received and that we assume you sent. There is already a great deal of curiosity about it. Especially when coupled with some of our other discoveries today.”

“What other discoveries?”

“You may be unable to see it yourself, but there is a blue aura about the right side of your body. We have discovered an inability to use electronic monitoring devices on you. You may have noticed there is no electronic equipment in this room. We tried a heart monitor and it went haywire. We sent you through an MRI and the equipment had to be reset. I can use a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. I can have you grip my hand and test your reflexes, but nothing electronically based will work.”

“I’m radioactive?”

“No. There is no sign of emitted radioactivity from your body. It seems to be entirely electrical. People are going to start demanding answers to some of these anomalies and to how you contacted the help line. Parapsychologists will want to cut you apart and see what makes you tick. I need to know how you made that call.”

Vic flinched as he repeated his first renunciation of knowledge.

“But that isn’t the only strange thing that has happened today,” he volunteered. “I’m a little worried about what is happening.”

“Tell me about it.”

Vic described the accident to the best of his ability. He had told the story to her earlier, but now he had the document summary in front of him for the report his boss had taken to a management meeting a couple of hours after he woke up. He explained what the times on the readout meant. Then he pointed at one more piece of evidence: The report of 130 pages had been created with no keystrokes.

“Let me explain,” Vic said. “It’s one of the weird features of the word processing system that it records the number of keystrokes used in a document. Even if you create a document and do nothing but copy the contents of another document into it, you use up at least a dozen keystrokes. This records every single time a key is depressed when that document is open. If you just create a document and cancel out of it, you have a document with three keystrokes. And look at the times. A 130-page document was created with no keystrokes at 0637 and was printed at 0644. When I restarted the system and read the time in at 0629, that document and all the information it contained was missing. It no longer existed.”

Vic’s agitation was getting the best of him and the words were slurring together as he failed to stop and think of each word he spoke. Dr. Sorenson stopped him and asked him to rest a minute. He had plenty of time to tell the story and they would get to the root of the matter without rushing.

She looked over a stack of papers she had carried in with her and compared one sheet with the document summary Vic had been waving in his left hand. Then she turned to the uncomfortable man and smiled.

“I have compared your document summary with a sample I ordered earlier. We had to go over all the specifications of the equipment you were using this morning in order to determine the approximate voltage and impact of the electrical shock you received. By all our calculations—which everyone in your office said would be easier to understand if Vic was here to operate it—it was not possible for you to short out your equipment by spilling coffee on it. That kind of accident is too common to leave the equipment unprotected from it.”

Vic nodded. Even his keyboard had a molded plastic cover over it that made it awkward to hit the keys sometimes.

“The wires were shielded and there was not so much as a frayed insulation on any of them. The equipment shows no further damage. The telephone has also been examined and there is no appearance of damage to it. Even if the electrical arc you described originated from the phone, it couldn’t have done to you what seems to have been done. You are the only variable in the system. Somehow or other, your own body chemistry must have triggered the eruption. Probably what ever we are seeing in your aura that is affecting any electronic equipment we try to use to test you.”

She looked at Vic and smiled as she shook her head. It was meant, he supposed to reassure him, but he didn’t feel reassured.

“You know, Vic, baffling the medical profession is no longer supposed to be in vogue. We are supposed to be far enough advanced to be able to answer all the questions.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Sorenson. I didn’t mean to be difficult.”

Vic smiled at his own ability to appreciate the joke. He couldn’t be in too bad of condition then, he assumed.

“I’m afraid the difficulty is going to be mostly yours,” Sorenson admitted. “Face it, Vic. Somehow or another, you have linked yourself with that computer.”

“It’s just a word processor,” he objected.

“You’ll find the difference is minor. I see two possibilities. One, it was an oddity and may never happen again. Two, it is a recurring phenomenon and could be considered dangerous. Human mind links are still being theorized, but it has always been assumed that the second party would also be human. Having a human mind that can tap the resources of a computer and put together the unexpected is something that some people would pay a great deal for.”

“What should I do?”

“For the time being, I think we should keep this between us. When you return to work, which I will make sure is soon, we will run some tests with your equipment, under the guise of making sure the equipment itself is safe. Then I’ll be monitoring you and your work output. Do you understand what I’m saying, Vic?”

“Like they say in the movies, Doc, give it to me straight. Will I ever type again?”

“Probably,” she said. “The improvement in your reflexes is rapid and I don’t think you’ll have any residual effects. You are going to suffer a great deal of inconvenience for a while, though. You may not immediately have quite the dexterity you once had. But for a person with your talents, 50 words a minute manually instead of 80 won’t affect your career. And if this document summary is any indication of what is possible, you may have just increased your typing speed to somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 words per minute. Conservatively speaking.”

They both laughed, but somehow, Vic was not quite as comfortable with that joke.

❮ Twenty-Five Percent Soy Crazy? ❯

Donate!

Comments

Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.