Galleys!

My attempt at NaNoWriMo was an abject failure. At midnight on November 30th, I had only 46,100 words (although a quarter of them were written on the very last day).

But layout is more fun than writing anyway. After I finished my novel (one day late), I decided to lay it out and typeset it. No one can ever read my book, but if you could, here's what it would look like:

The bastard title

The title page.
Yes, it's called Burn After Writing — as in, no one shall ever read it.

Closeup: Look ma, I have my own imprint!

The copyright page and dedication.
The copyright page says things like, "Any resemblance to actual person(s), living or dead, companies, events, or locales is purely — oh, who am I kidding? It's all true. Really."

First page of the author's preface

A spread showing the chapter head.
Text is set in 10/12.5pt URW Garamond No. 8.
Trim size: 5.5 × 8.5"

Wikipedia article on PdoX

PdoX

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

P. Dox is an American mathematician and computer programmer. He is best known for inventing artificial general intelligence (AIG) in 2012, which ran amok and destroyed the planet in the December of that year.^[1]

Early life

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PdoX was born on a pirate ship off the coast of Maine in 1983.^[2] On his first birthday, PdoX uttered his first word, "one." He did not speak again for an entire year.^[3]

When PdoX turned two, he said "four." The next year, he said "six," then "thirteen" the year after that. Although his vocabulary seemed startlingly limited, his family and neighbors noticed that he was developing remarkable programming abilities. By the time he was three years old, for example, PdoX had written a version of the ESP website. He was the youngest known person to have done so.^[4] PdoX said his fifth word on his fifth birthday — witnesses disagree on what the number was.

On his sixth birthday, PdoX's family hosted a visiting member of the Most Secret and Dark Guild of Mathematicians. The reason for the Mathematician's visit is not known. Family photographs show that the Mathematician was a tall figure in a dark robe; his (or her) face is not visible. On the morning of his birthday, PdoX recited a number thousands of digits long. PdoX's parents recalled that it took PdoX several hours, but he never faltered or paused.^[5]

When PdoX finished, the Mathematician announced that the number was correct, and told PdoX's family that PdoX must leave immediately to begin his Training. There was a bright flash of light. When everyone's vision recovered, PdoX and the Mathematician had disappeared.^{[citation needed]}

Mathematical training

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Little is known of PdoX's years with the Guild, or of the Guild itself. PdoX has made occasional references to a castle on a remote mountaintop, above the clouds. There are rumors that the Guild Castle received deliveries of neither food nor water — all that the Guild needed was conjured into existence by the Guild itself.

PdoX is believed to have developed great mathematical Powers during his Training. In 2009, an excerpt from the purported annals of the Guild was published on Wikileaks. It recounts a prank that the young PdoX played, temporarily making 2⁶³ − 1 a prime number.^[6] (Coincidentally, at around the time of the prank, RSA-129 was factored — experts had previously believed that the number could not be factored without millions of years of computation.)

Banishment

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At some point during his teenage years, PdoX had a falling out with the Guild. Some biographers claim that PdoX asked The Question That Must Not Be Asked.^[7] PdoX drew the wrath of the Guild Elders, and was shunned by his peers. He was excommunicated from the Guild and condemned to never practice Mathematics again, on pain of insanity.

PdoX spent several months wandering the wilderness, until he was adopted by a herd of wild house cats. The cats accepted him as one of their own, and PdoX became one of the few humans fluent in Cattish.^[8] One day, PdoX absentmindedly counted the cats in his cave, having momentarily forgotten the prohibition on doing any Mathematics. Encouragingly, he was not instantly stricken with insanity. PdoX became convinced that he had escaped the all-seeing eye of the Guild, and slowly redeveloped his mathematical Powers.

AIG and the end of the world

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In time, PdoX gained the Knowledge of All That Will Be, and control over the Source of All Power. He also raised an army of cats, against the day that the Guild came for him.^[9]

As PdoX's powers increased, so did his ambition. He began working on AIG, a system that would match, then surpass, the abilities of a human mind. PdoX completed the system shortly before he turned 29. On the morning of his birthday in September 2012, PdoX woke up and, following his annual ritual, announced the next number in the sequence to his cats. (PdoX had long ago derived a short closed form for the numbers, so as not to bore his cats with an unfathomably long string of digits.^{[citation needed]}) He then turned on his AIG.^[10]

The system began learning, and started to reimplement and optimize itself. It grew exponentially more capable each day. By December, PdoX was eagerly awaiting the Singularity, to be delivered by his AIG.

But unbeknownst to PdoX, the Guild of Mathematicians had not forgotten him. The Guild had been secretly monitoring PdoX since his banishment. To sabotage his project, the Guild had added a small virus to PdoX's AIG.

On December 21, 2012, PdoX plugged himself into the AIG, expecting to be the first person to experience the Singularity. PdoX had built a neural interface to his system, because he found every other form of user interface too slow.^[11]

The Guild's virus activated just as the AIG achieved Singularity. The virus instantly rendered both machine and man insane, at last carrying out the Guild's sentence. PdoX became a gibbering lunatic, while his AIG used its near-infinite power to destroy the world.^[12]

PdoX in popular culture

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[fill in this section]
…

My initiation into the seedy underworld of counterfeiters

What's wrong with this picture?

(Not a story about Mimi)

The Garage was where you went to offload merchandise too hot to fence anywhere else, where you went to buy things that no other dealer would touch. But David didn't know any of that when he passed by The Garage. He saw the sign in front, "FLEA MARKET - 2 FLOORS OF SHOPPING - SATURDAY AND SUNDAY," and decided to go in.

David nearly jumped when he saw the bouncer behind the door. David was not short, but the bouncer was a full head taller, and then some. His arms were almost as thick as David was wide. His hands looked like they could wad David's skull up like a sheet of crumpled paper.

"Any weapons?" the bouncer growled.

"Errr -- no."

"Then you go that way."

David thought about turning around and leaving, but the bouncer's command sounded persuasive. He gulped and headed in to the flea market.

David had never been to a flea market before, but he was pretty sure that this was not what they were supposed to look like. It was dimly lit with diffuse red light. David's nose filled with the smell of smoke as his eyes adjusted.

A table in front of him was laid out with guns and larger weapons that David did not know the names of. Further back, he could see tables with bags of pills and powders. On the other side of the room were rows of cars and motorcycles. Another dealer was offering cages with dark moving shapes inside.

The buyers and sellers here looked uniformly menacing. Many of them were large and heavily tattooed like the bouncer in front. The rest were dressed in suits that reminded David of movie gangsters -- except these were real gangsters. Some of the men at the tables were surrounded by stiff-looking bodyguards, standing at attention. Others had women draped around them, wearing very little.

The group in front of David stopped their conversation to glare at him. "Um, I think I'll be going now." David backed away slowly.

"And where do you think you're going?"

The dealer who stopped David had grease-slicked hair, teeth that glinted gold, a loud, ill-fitting suit, and way too much jewelry. "You're not going to leave without buying something, are you?" The dealer opened up his suit to reveal watches, chains, coins, lighters, and other shinies hanging inside.

"I think I've the wrong place, so I'm just going to let myself out--"

"You're not going to leave without buying something," Greasy repeated. He wasn't smiling anymore this time.

"Uhhh--"

"How much cash do you have on you?" Greasy demanded.

And that's how David ended up buying a $1 coin for $20.

---

OK, so it didn't quite happen like that. I went to check out the Antiques Garage last weekend. There was an older gentleman there selling old coins. I thought it'd be cool to own one, and his prices seemed reasonable when I did a quick check online. So I bought a silver Peace Dollar from him for $20.

I took the coin home, cleaned it up a bit, and decided to weigh it. It was 19.4 grams. All the sites I checked online said that the coin should weigh 26.73 grams. Uh oh.

Another website said that fake coins were often magnetic, whereas no real US coin should be. Sure enough, I could pick up the coin with a refrigerator magnet.

I went back the next day to get a refund. I wasn't quite sure how I was supposed to confront the seller and tell him that he sold me a fake coin. I told him that the coin felt a little light. (He snapped his fingers, and I turned around to see two displeased goons glowering at me -- OK, not really.) He pulled out a scale, took some other coins from his display case, and weighed them. They all weighed the same as my coin -- all underweight.

I had brought a magnet with me -- and all of his coins stuck to my magnet. He mumbled something about how he thought they were all real, that he couldn't imagine why someone could go through the trouble of counterfeiting cheap coins like this, etc. I got my money back.

And now I know I have to bring a magnet next time I go to a flea market.

Assassination

Mimi woke up with a crick in her neck. Why was her bed damp and hard and cold? Why was she aching all over? Her fingers were sticky as she rubbed her eyes open. Her hands were covered in red, as were her arms. Her ribs radiated sharp pain when she tried to move. A few feet from her, another body was lying on the floor, unmoving, battered, in a puddle of blood. OMG, what is going on? Mimi wanted to throw up, to scream. She passed out again.

* * *

A pulse of current seared Mimi's brain. A memory came into focus, then faded: She was driving to a motel in the middle of the night. Another burst of energy to her brain, another memory: a fire extinguisher being swung at her head. Then that image was gone too.

"Good, you're finally awake." The voice came from a man in a lab coat. He was aiming something that looked like an oversized supermarket barcode scanner at her head. "Hold still." He pulled the trigger. Mimi convulsed once, she felt the electricity through her brain, and suddenly she was Agent Mimi again.

She recognized the operating room, in the secret underground medical center. She noticed that she was strapped down to an operating table. The man in the lab coat was the Director of Neural Reprogramming: "You woke up as a civilian while you were on your mission. Now we have to get inside your head and tidy things up."

Mimi tried to inventory her injuries while the doctor worked. "Someone tipped Nikolas off. He was waiting for me when I got to his motel room."

The doctor nodded. "We're looking into that. But need to send you home for now. You're going to remember that you spent all weekend grading papers. And your scratches and bruises -- hmm ... those are going to come from your run-in with some comically misarranged furniture."

* * *

(Earlier that day) André hated desk duty. If Mimi had been a TA for an explosives class, or class on biological weapons, or even a foreign language class, they could have found plenty of agents to grade her papers for her. But André was their only available agent on the East Coast with an MBA, and Mimi needed to remember that she spent all weekend grading ...

A Scene of No Consequence

3:59:58 AM ... 3:59:59 ... 4:00:00 ... Mimi bolted upright in her bed. Her room felt a quarter of a degree too warm -- someone else was in here. She reflexively reached for her weapon under her pillow ... until she remembered that she had a guest staying over.

Agent Mimi listened in the dark. Amy was breathing slowly, asleep. Mimi wondered if she could check in without waking her friend. Mimi tiptoed across the room.

Unfortunately, Amy chose that exact moment to turn over, rousing slightly. "What are you doing, Mimi?" she mumbled half awake.

"I'm uh ... I just wanted to get some water. See?" Mimi unscrewed the bottle of water. Glug glug glug glug glug ... glug glug glug. "Go back to sleep."

My Inability to Write

5AM...9AM...Noon...5PM...9PM...Midnight...David IIV carefully lowered his middle finger and soldered the remaining resistor into place precisely and perfectly, finally finishing his wazzastic superschrumer, which was death to all pollen creating objects. A tendril of smoke rose from the finger as his metallic eyes blinked and rattled in satisfaction. David IIV was supremely happy for a Grade AVA robot. He clunked his hand on the lever and his circuits immediately went into overdrive. Outside of his metal grate, he saw trees folding into themselves and flowers growing back into the ground. David IIV ran through the wall in his panic to stop the chaos that he had unleashed.

Suddenly, a siren was nearly on top of him and lasers flooded the area. A loudspeaker announced, "David IIV. You are wanted for the destruction of plant life. Turn yourself off immediately." David IIV froze in mid-clunk and took a nanosecond to ponder his 12,347 possible options, of which 10,346 led to the same scenario with a 5% margin of error, 364 of which were plain awful, and the rest were somewhat in between. Something amazing happened just then. Instead of taking the rational option to turn himself off, David IIV shivered and teleported himself into the middle of a garbage heap on a large and gaseous purple planet.

See, I can write about you instead

4:02:09AM ... 4:02:10 ... 4:02:11 ... 4:02:12 ... Mimi bolted upright in her bed, instantly awake. Her Training had been thorough -- she could keep time without a watch, and will herself to wake up whenever she needed to. Mimi tilted her head toward the far wall -- before she became an Agent, she would've had trouble making out the clock there, but now, she did not even need to use her eyes: the distinctive pitch of the ticking told her where the hands were, told her that her own circadian clock was two minutes slow this morning. Time to get to work. Her fingers found the latch to the false bottom of her dresser. She pulled out the laptop and transmitter, and began reporting in.

By day, Mimi was a student at a university in Philadelphia. Student-Mimi needed an alarm clock to wake up, couldn't see without glasses, and had no idea what Agent-Mimi did at night. Student-Mimi occasionally mused that it might be cool to be a secret agent, but sighed that she probably wasn't cut out for it. Except for a subconscious aversion to ever looking in the bottom drawer of her dresser, student-Mimi was perfectly normal.

Agent-Mimi put her gear back into its hiding place and crawled back into her bed. Tonight, she wouldn't need to change out of her pajamas, to trudge outside. She instantly fell back to sleep.

...

Outside her building, a man in a dark coat packed something back into his bag, weaved through the shadows to his van, and drove off.