I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: December 3, 2024] “Eat, Pray, Click”

This year my wife ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my seventh time reading the Calendar–it’s a holiday tradition!  Here’s what H&O says about the calendar this year.

Ten years of stories! Yikes, where does the time go?
When the first Short Story Advent Calendar launched, in 2015, we frankly had no clue we’d still be sitting here today, continuing to offer up batches of tasty stories fresh from the oven. To celebrate this milestone, we’ve packed the 10th SSAC with a mix of new and familiar names—ideal company for those chilly winter nights ahead.

The author of this story was Ed Park.  Each day has an online component with the author with a brief interview. And this one opens:

It’s December 3. Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams, chooses his own adventure.

This is a very brief story set in ten brief sections.

In the first we learn that the Kindle has been hacked many times over.  Animated scorpions run amok across The Corrections.  The Glass Castle turns Swedish in the middle of chapter three.  But his friend Rolph was the first to hack the system.

They met at a fiction workshop and Rolph was big into Sensibilism and Mood Writing.  The narrator gave up writing and became a detective, but Rolph continued. he was working on a magnum opus–either one huge novel or ten interconnected ones, it was never clear.  Excerpts appeared in journals, but Rolph was never satisfied.

He hated that narrative had to go from point A to B and believed that stories should be ever evolving.

In addition to writing Rolph was an ethical hacker–he would hack into companies systems to show them their flaws.  That was his job application and he was almost always hired immediately.  That’s how he possessed a Kindle prototype.  He was thrilled by the potential of the Kindle.  He imagined it updating stories based on a reader’s preferences.  He imagined stories changing every time you read them.  And then he imagined putting his own story into other stories.

This is a fun little piece of technology gone amok and the limits of fiction.