for Maureen

© by Evan Hause

INTRODUCTION

In the year 2233, planet Earth lost its power. All communication with its space colonies was cut.

Most of the world's great written works had been duplicated by this time and were held securely in this or that space station in electronic storage. They were backed up, in many cases, ten fold. The impressed word had effectively left the consciousness of humankind around the year 2167. The desire to read – to hold the printed page in hand or to write the word in free hand – had not disappeared, but rather had gone the way of Classical music (that music from the period of approximately 1600-1900), propounded by a small population of scholars. Nevertheless, one was in the majority who discovered the great imagination of humankind through the ages via talking books, dramatizations, and electronic print.

The obsession to back up the world's literature and print thankfully began around the year 2000, in the wake of the so-called "Y2K scare." The Y2K scare was the first, albeit quite minor, frightful speculation about an intellectual and scientific blackout such that an advanced civilization just might accidentally create for oneself (in the way that the overzealous cloudplane inventor forgets to install a braking device!). Since that time, and with ever-increasing speed and thoroughness, committees of thinkers and government officials have worked to commit without error the written works of humans to electronic memory. The chips which held these documents did not require much physical space, but their storage sites were the object of much lively discussion. The end result was that they were distributed carefully across the solar system so that no one catastrophe might destroy any given body of work.

While this project, which bore the name Synopsis, began in the spirit of preserving our greatest contributions of the imagination – literature, science, myth, and so on – it accelerated to include every letter that every human ever ascribed to print for any reason whatsoever. The reasoning for this exhaustiveness was a combination of sheer excitement for the electronic ability to do so (rather like the same excitement a child writer feels when left to a sharpened pencil and blank tablet of paper), and the belief that somewhere within the tangled history of print – the things that were believed important enough to print and the visual style of how they were printed – lay vital clues to the development (or demise) of literate civilization. Surgeon General warnings, roadside billboards, and graffiti have their place in a hierarchy for historical study below the classics of philosophy and religion, but have their place nonetheless.

Amazingly, the project was not insurmountable. Once the process of cataloging smoothed itself out, the amount of creative writing, scientific journalism, pulp fiction, personal diaries, and newsprint was curiously manageable and finite. One of the most common, and often perplexing, questions was whether to preserve only the words (which was suitable for literature and science, for example, excepting their original manuscripts) or to preserve their look as well (corporate logos, comic strips, and advertisements being obvious keepers); or whether to give one example of the look and follow with many examples of text (laundry machine coin slots, automobile license tags, and travel brochures). Even newsprint, with its attention to details of font size and placement, became a life's work for some during Synopsis. Needless to say, a great amount of new literature was spawned over the course of this enterprise.

One could say that the world underwent a period of reflection on a massive scale never before experienced. The Great Reflection (ca. 2000-2200) was a time of cropping, shaping, and filing the world's first unbridled, passionate blaze of creativity while at the same time contributing new work born under the influence of provocative statistical and cultural discoveries and projections. Ordinary people were encouraged and taught to record their most personal writings electronically. Everyone was invited to bring books, periodicals, pamphlets, pharmaceutical containers, grocery wrappers, junk mail, letters, and posters to neighborhood collection points, where they were duplicated or scanned at the government's expense. A paranoia briefly developed that the world government was invading everyone's privacy, but the fears were allayed when the leaders made provisions for totally anonymous submission. In rolled obscure gardening magazines, oil can labels, diplomas, Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, makeup ads, out-of-print novels by minor writers, wedding announcements, spelling bee scorecards, children's poetry, sports statistics, bus schedules, boating manuals, and posters for musical and theatrical events which may or may not have actually taken place.

There were holdouts. We will never know for sure if we filed everything, but now we can know that when someone dies and leaves behind a shoebox full of coupons, whether or not they were once filed with Synopsis, and whether the deceased had possessed the entire coupon or if he may have inadvertently snipped a word or two from his experience of that coupon.

A curious byproduct of Synopsis was the opportunity to cross-reference peculiar traits of the world's things that only an insane person would purposefully set out to do. For instance, how else would we know that by the year 2082 there existed 2,516,749 known coffeemugs with the words "Las Vegas" printed on them? An entire boom in the antique and collectibles industry occurred during the Great Reflection as we discovered once and for all what was rare and what was not. Before 2023 there was no such thing as a Receipt Tradeshow, where people gathered to swap old merchandise receipts from long-defunct (usually small) businesses. Small cults, like the one dedicated to partially solved crossword puzzles, sprang up because of Synopsis.

Though hard copy was a fast dwindling species in the elaborate, ingenious, abstract electronic jungle, a few of the traditions of the past were preserved here and there in underground circles. There was a smattering of small newspapers, advertisements of illegal commodities that could not run on the ubiquitous state-organized commerce channels, and a plethora of diverse and unrelated print-adorned crafts that would sprout in the marketplace from time to time. Once the past was suitably entered into storage, it was a very simple and instantaneous matter to log any current print, sparse as it was.

Because the most important of the world's literary achievements were the first to be filed, and the very least important were the last, and due to the fact that small amounts of new print were still being created, there came a poignant moment in the year 2208 when the last, banal printed impression of the past and the first, arbitrary type of the present were simultaneously recorded in the electronic annals of Synopsis. It was duly noted and highly celebrated on the world news network that, in the Spring of 2208, there was recorded both an old "How-to-Wash" tag from the hem of lady's skirt in Saskatoon, Canada, and a current underground religious – more like an occult – semiannual newspaper from Bombay, India. In a world that had come to appreciate and delight in unimagined chance occurrences during over two hundred years of Synopsis, this remote piece of trivia became the crowning grist for the Great Reflection's mill, joked and editorialized about for years afterward. It seemed to typify the juxtaposition of the grave seriousness and lighthearted whimsy which had come to be associated with humankind's printed oeuvre.

At least one full electronic complement of every piece of print unearthed during Synopsis was left on Earth, while, as mentioned, numerous copies were scattered about the colonies and space stations of the solar system. Original manuscripts were a different matter altogether. Political and social unrest coupled with environmental concerns caused the world committees to have questions about where to store these priceless artifacts. Brain trusts were assembled to oversee the systematic placement of the world's manuscripts. In 2233 a Big Move was occurring, as printed matter was being shuttled all over the solar system to newer, sturdier depositories, cross-referenced by time period, genre, language, and historical significance. At one station could you find all Buddhist writing. This depository was a short ride from other religious stations, which were not far from archaeological and anthropological sites, and so on. The inconvenience of having to transport oneself a relatively great distance through space in order to carry on broad research applied only to the few scholars who required the study of these original manuscripts. Facsimiles were available to every person at the touch of button. Indeed, these manuscript stations became centers of education where whole universities devoted to single topics flourished.

Every person had electronic access to the complete world library. "It came with the home!" (to cite real estate jargon). Even homeless people could walk up to public kiosks and access history. While the elimination of homelessness was still only a utopian ideal in 2233, it had happened that certain destitute had been able to educate themselves and rise to a better life as a result of this brilliant social service. Unemployment and crime were quite low per capita in 2233, which is impressive when one considers the 43 billion Earth population. After the Great Reflection, people knew more about the past and present of the species than could ever have been imagined. By themselves, spiritual leaders, politicians, scholars and doctors could scarcely advise the average person how to live more efficiently than could the news and information people, who delivered neatly summarized contemporaneous and historical information on all maladies of the mind, body, and spirit at light speed. Electronic news and periodicals were so happily occupied with bringing statistics and facts gleaned during the Great Reflection to the people, that tabloid and muckraking journalism took a considerably low profile and was sneered at by the general populous.

Scholars were the only contingent who dabbled in handwriting, print, paper and, sadly, "eye-reading." Most folks were read to by a programmable electronic voice. This state of affairs came about partly due to the technological ability to do so, and partly due to research early in the 21st century which laid out the damaging effects that reading has on the human eye and psychology. Apparently the confining nature of submerging one's eye and mind in print was deemed (among with many other things) precursory to antisocial behavior, which would never do in an overpopulated, global society. The positive effect, which did in fact begin to take hold, was an increased emphasis on speech and personal interaction. Dramatization (movies, TV shows, radio plays, theater) became the favored means of storytelling, and improvisation became central to all of the arts, especially poetry and music.

There were astounding technologies. During the course of being read to by a computer, one might ask the computer to define a word or repeat a sentence, to read in any language, or, on the fancier ones, to summarize and make critical points when asked. One could request to view all of the known, recorded dramatizations of a given work (say, Romeo and Juliet) on their home screen. [An employment aside: the sheer time and man-hours spent compiling one of these "E-Masterworks" could employ a city block for half a year.] As for writing, one needed only to speak into a microphone. Even the so-called online chat rooms became a place where one spoke to another, albeit anonymously. A favored technique in this environment was to ponder what one wished to say, record a version, monitor it, correct it for expression, and then send the texted and recorded version in any voice one chose to the other party. Thus developed an amalgamation of the primitive forms of the texted e-mail and telephone voice messages from the late 20th century. One could now always expect to get it right. Through practice in the chat rooms, the average person could become a great real-time orator. As folks moved out into the street, they carried this skill with them. There came an ironic return to the supremacy of word-of-mouth communication, now on an interstellar level, as humans spoke with greater passion and clarity. As for composing new work, smart programs could edit grammar if asked and make suggestions about characters and events (in fiction), or factual agreement (in nonfiction).

Freehand writing was not dead, rather it was transplanted to the electronic realm. Paper was extremely expensive and touted a vulgarity of the distant past. When people did not use a keypad, they wrote with a special stylus onto electronic pads and read it on their display. This could in turn convert to chosen fonts for others to read on their displays. Electronic handwriting itself was a marvel and new poetic and artistic genres sprang up around it, such as the interactive "color poem" or script-sensitive plays where subtle discourses between content and font were acted out by masterful thespians.

By 2233, printed matter had wholly been replaced electronically. Homes conserved space by using an impressive array of differently shaped and sized solar powered video displays. Space-occupying handmade art and bulky accoutrements were a thing of the past. Virtual rooms transported families on virtual vacations, and mind-bending soirées were experienced without leaving the home. Billboards were large video displays that could be adjusted to the light of varying atmospheric conditions, yielding greater clarity at all times and, therefore, commercial selling power. Mailbox numbers were electronic in order to facilitate the expected, frequent changing of street names and numbers which accompanied the frenetic population growth. Automobiles, rapidly dwindling, were identified by the authorities via honing device. Consumer products such as facial tissue or clothing no longer carried brand names, rather they bore a store logo from the online site from whence it was purchased. There were occasional traffic signs, name tags, temporary notices and the like printed in the old-fashioned way, but any newsprint or telephone listings, let alone aspiring literature, was digitized.

Much of the power that drove this civilization came from the sun, wind, and ocean through a complex and ingenious network of underwater generators, desert solar panels, and tentacled Arctic windnets. Most recent was an experimental means of harnessing the Earth's underground pressure for power. It was all certainly tenuous and people did not take it for granted. After all, long-term blackouts had occurred half a dozen times in extremely large cities, the longest of which lasted an entire year and a half. Perhaps it was the surviving of these minor catastrophes that lent the confidence to the populous, that they could survive such a thing and that the authorities had improved their ability to react to it. Yet no person could have been ready for what happened on that evening in August, 2233.

There has never been a satisfactory explanation. Even if one had been put forth, worldwide chaos prevented its dissemination. On August 28, 2233 the system simply maxed out. Someone flipped on a light in a new house somewhere and an electric gremlin said, "No."

A ripple effect, really the most confounding aspect of the whole event, found its way through the tightly connected energy systems of the seven continents and within days the entire planet was without the precious commodity called electricity. Was it a virus? Vandals? Extra-terrestrials? An atmospheric condition? A magnetic sag beneath the Earth's crust? An overlooked timer in a very important place? Was it temporary? Did God withdraw artificial power to send us back to a simple life? If electricity can disappear from a planet, can fire? Air? Life? Surely this global phenomenon was the result of something beyond human comprehension acting of its own accord, for how could even ships at sea lose battery power in the same instant that all the refrigerators of the world went dead? It was as if the very wires which conducted electricity suddenly turned to stone, as if it had gazed upon some geophysical Medusa.

The initial terror and panic gripped the world for about eight months: looting, hospital fatalities, starvation, disease, freak accidents, suicides, crimes against people and on and on and on. In five years, the population fell to an estimated 20 billion. In ten years it dropped to about 9 billion and held. Hope was restored once Earth reestablished contact with its outer space colonies. It took about 15 years for them to arrive, analyze the situation, and develop a means for landing and subsequent takeoff without the aid of ground technology. They could not suffer the loss of a spacecraft at this juncture.

Humankind's ingenuity and survival skills were put to an epochal test. On a planet with insufficient natural resources the mortality rate plummeted from 135 to about 60, monetary systems were wiped out, religion ascended in importance and people lived primitively, spending their days focused on the essentials for sustenance. Governance seemingly disappeared for a time, for officials themselves were too occupied with a strange new brand of urban foraging to devote much time to their old style of leading.

It would be only a slightly gross generalization to say that it was the more informed and versatile humans who tended to survive that initial, brutal period. They were the ones armed with a knowledge of history and skepticism of the modern age. They noted the importance of the very artifacts and records of human thought that they cataloged during Synopsis. In short, they had a basic plan to combat the perils of a Great Blackout and to emerge from the very special type of Darwinism that would be fought on the streets afterwards. They were not geniuses, but they were aware. That is not also to say that the estimated 23 billion who died were unworthy of survival – it was a heinous circumstance, but certainly the ones who tried to bully their way to the top of the heap tended to kill themselves off in an uncompromising urban jungle that relied on information more than materialism.

The people got by. Communities pulled together into patches of survival systems. As newborns grew into this society, morale increased, for it is always the mind which knows only the life it is born into that adapts to that life and finds the spirit within it. They intuit changes which need to be made that escape the eyes of those carrying the baggage of an earlier and different society. After all, though the older generation may feel that their society was better or worse than the current one (and in this case most felt that it was obviously better), the issue is moot. A past time is merely different, and one is cursed, or at least infected, with the knowledge of it. The older that one becomes, the more painful the recognition that habits and preferences created by an earlier state of things are really the aches and pains that are the harbingers of old age. It is the impossibility of seeing each new day as the only day – square one on the playing board – that is the truly blissful state of being to which our spiritual journey attempts to cart us, like a number dividing itself eternally towards infinity. Another way of putting it is that our discontent with the world is directly proportionate to the number of days we have been in it. Every day we are alive we learn something, but our mortality unfortunately deceives us into thinking that our cumulative knowledge moves towards something worthwhile that only Time can teach us. In fact, it moves us away from the most all-knowing, all-seeing state of Nascence. The content that the elderly feel was worked at; indeed it is their life's work since they came to a realization similar to this. To have such bliss without putting in the requisite personal labor – that is what it means to be young, and the more nascent, the more complete the bliss.

To the young of 2257, where my story originates, this non-mechanical existence was the only world, and only they had the true optimism and energy to improve it. In this sense, Time was the healer; just not Time as belonging to individuals. Time brought new youths, new ideas, new optimism, and new love. Yet, Time sees itself differently than we see it. The story I am about to tell is not the story of a restoration of the old way. It is not about a new way, nor a suggestion of what would be a good way. I will not live to see how things play out, therefore I have become interested in things that just happen. That is what Time has told me, and that is one way that I labor to achieve my own bliss.

The life of 2257 was a life which knew only the spoken word – the oral tradition. It emphatically knew not of the printed word, from which it had been arduously and assiduously cleansed. Though this rise and fall, or development, of a literate civilization yields many unbelievable and astounding stories, the one about the magic newspaper is just about my very favorite.

***********************************************************************************

THE MAGIC NEWSPAPER

Sandeep was walking home through a forest of crumbling tenements, office buildings and warehouses in one of Bombay's central districts at the end of an easy workday in the office of a huge bottling corporation. The dimness of sundown was only just beginning to creep around, between, and through the panoply of brick façades and rusted fire escapes which seemed to have leapt from the architectural imagination of a young boy hastily fastening together painted wooden blocks and toothpicks. Though the weather was entirely pleasant, Sandeep thought of how this walk gave him the most pleasure during the Winter, when the sun was closer to the ground at quitting time and the shadowy designs of this route were alive with change, like the sand traces of a serpent.

The Shiktar, the street that he spent most of this commute absorbing into his feet and eyes, was a busy avenue. As a father, Sandeep pondered the subtle and vast differences between lives on a busy and a quiet street like the one on which his house stood. Though parallel to the Shiktar and a mere block to the east, his own street felt nothing like it. The type of people that kissed on his street, the type of wheeled vehicles that moved down it and the speed at which they passed, the articles of debris that would lift into the air under the pressure of a strong gust, and the play and pitch of excited children's voices which entered the open windows of the homes must all have a particular long-term effect on the psyche that differs in profound ways from those analagous fixtures on the Shiktar. A busy street is a gathering place for people with a definite purpose, people with no purpose, people from wider and farther, people less apt to ever be seen again in that place, and people, like Sandeep, on their way home (which is very different from being home).

This arid, breezy day had a wondrously lazy quality about it. Sandeep's step lingered here and there like the smoke and dust which drifted about his head. Many unemployed people had spent the day outdoors, exercising their freedom and making the best of it. That coupled with its being the day before trash collection made for a particularly cluttered sidewalk, and none too fresh-smelling. Sandeep sided with the smell of a variety of tobaccos and incenses in their battle against the more fetid rubbish. He turned the corner to join up with his home street, allowing himself three more blocks in the direction of home to appreciate the "quiet" side.

A few steps down the darkening cross street, Sandeep felt a great surge of wind. Dust stung his eyes before he could shield his face. He stopped momentarily, turning his head to rub his eyes, when a thin piece of white paper, larger and more flimsy than any food wrapper, danced around his calves and knees. Its effervescence attracted his attention. The gust died away as soon as it had come leaving the paper to float slowly to the sidewalk like a kitten nestling into a soft cushion. Sandeep looked more closely at it, impressed by its frailty. Like any food wrapper, it was blank and white. What could it possibly be used for? After looking around to seeing if anyone was watching, he picked it up. It was about two feet by two feet and had been folded down the center. He tore a tiny corner off of it and tossed it into the air, watching it float slowly downward with no more velocity than a feather. Satisfied that he had performed some tactile bonding ritual with this exotic object he started toward the nearest garbage can to dispose of it. At that moment he gasped. The corner of paper was suddenly fully restored to the sheet as if nothing had happened!

Convinced that he had inhaled too much smoke on the Shiktar, Sandeep looked across the street to see whether he could discern the familiar numbers of addresses on the doors. He could. He tore another corner from the veil of papyrus and held it tightly in his hand for a full minute while staring at the ripped edge. He then opened his palm to find nothing. His eyes darted to the paper only to find that the corner had been restored once again. He uttered an exclamation of fear and surprise in his native dialect, followed by a single religious gasp--an "amen" of sorts. He tucked the sheet under his arm and proceeded homeward.

When he arrived at his tiny apartment, he entered and greeted his wife and eight year old son excitedly. He briefly described where he had picked up the paper, his tearing experiments, and his concomitant emotions amid admonishments from his wife regarding the unsanitariness of the whole affair. He produced the paper, unfolded it, and spread it on the sitting room table. Now, to his great surprise, there appeared writing where before there had been none! His wife and son, oblivious to this new development, started at his new animations of amazement. He blurted, "This sheet was blank not ten minutes ago!"

He looked closely at the print. It was in Hindi and lined the top of the paper beginning, peculiarly, exactly half way across the page and returning to the same margin creating a neat-looking paragraph. It lasted for about twenty lines and began:

"This sheet was blank not ten minutes ago! I don't know what this could be. Is it alive? Is it a sign? Do I make wishes? I was shocked and scared....."

and continued, listing everything he and his family had said in reverse order. He was reading his own words! At the end of the print was the "amen" followed by the sole exclamation he had uttered on the sidewalk, which he spoke again in disbelief. He looked at his wife and son, and he looked again at the paper. This new exclamation now appeared first, and all of the other words ahd shifted one place to the right.

The wife and son asked him questions. Soon they were talking fast in an attempt to reach explanations. They referred periodically to the magic document to see that their full conversation was being recorded in print, filling the entire right half of the sheet before spilling onto the top left of the reverse side. This print halted at the halfway point on the page, returned to its extreme right margin, and flowed down the length of the page before commencing again on the top of the other half of the page. After this print flowed onto the reverse left half of the sheet, they deciphered that the page was meant to be folded like a newspaper of yesteryear, a rare object that Sandeep had seen only in the museum. As they continued to talk, they watched the man's initial outcry get bumped farther and farther to the end of the copy. As it neared the bottom right corner, near the fold, they paused. What would happen when it reached the end? Would the paper stop transcribing their conversation?

As they scolded themselves for not making better use of the treasure, their question was soon to be answered. They thought of the things they could have said. They might have recited a favorite religious bromide and seen it in print! They could have listed the names of loved ones and honored the spelling of their names. They could have left a testament for future generations to remember them by. Instead they had managed only confused, excited comments and inquiries into the miracle of the paper itself. As they discussed these things, the paper had continued its disembodied stenography. Sandeep's first, fearful exclamation marched right off the last page as their new musings began at the top of the first with no disruption of the careful measurements of the margins and–what was now taking shape–artful column and section breaks.

"...ago minutes ten not blank was sheet this...." trickled off of the back page into oblivion, gone forever, as new print appeared at the entry point on page one. The family eventually exhausted themselves with high emotion and deep pondering, and went to bed. When they awoke, the magic newspaper was gone.

The magic newspaper managed to transport itself as if it were alive. It would be carried by the wind, ride the back of a garbage truck, get stuck to the hides of animals, or get picked up and "owned" for brief periods by humans. It remained for some time within the bowels of the mammoth, overcrowded Indian city and encountered many times the same fate with humans as with Sandeep. A household would tentatively make the same discoveries of its supernatural properties and meet with the same disappointment at its untimely disappearance. Ultimately it wound through the city, beyond the suburbs and right out into the countryside, blowing about randomly. Its sheer material composition was enough to pique the passing interest of most people, but only the literate, of which there were few in the country, ended up taking it into their possession for a time.

Often a newcomer would read the paper spottily, skipping around the remarks of its last owner. He would rarely notice that the paper began with his own words and bumped the latter words off the back page unless he kept it for a while. He was visually bored (at worst) or intrigued (at best) by the banal dialogue and speech that graced the paper until that "Aha!" moment came when he discovered its enchanted properties. Of course, no person ever expected to part with the magic newspaper once they were aware of these properties, so it rarely carried any writing other than the usual surprise and guesses about its origins. However, it had far to go and it did always, most assuredly, move on.

The paper moved eastward across the continent. It always appeared in the language of its reader, and the print always read in the proper direction of the local language. Up-and-down, left-to-right, right-to-left. At times it would go weeks without encountering any people as it swept through mountain passes and deep valleys. It may have even recorded the languages of animals, but who knows? Had it fallen first into the hands of the brilliant scholar, Gao, immediately after its pastorale journeys we might today know the language of the birds, but instead it worked its way through scores of shepherds and farmers before alighting on a bus stop in the university town of Shangtiu, just past lunch on a sunny Spring day at the side of this learned and unerringly observant gentleman.

Upon first sight, GAO recognized that the magic newspaper was an object to be studied. Although he knew not of the paper's magical qualities or penchant for escaping from its owners, he did know that it was an object to be protected. It was fine paper. It contained that rarefied pictography known as print. It may be a valuable artifact that should be protected from defacement and theft if nothing else. Perhaps he himself could donate it to a historical museum. Perhaps he could parade it out among his students during particular lectures on history, literature or iconography. He thought these things and more as he read its contents.

What kind of document is this that speaks of grocery lists, household chores, desires of the flesh, weather patterns, crude jokes, shouts from the windows of taxi cabs, or the impassioned arguing between merchants and buyers at a fruit stand? Who would have taken the time to print this in a world where only the highly educated hand would have the ability to manufacture such a paper? It seemed to be gibberish with its run-on sentences and non sequiturs. Take the first line, for example:

"Okay. May I sit here? I want to believe look out the building of many years....."

GAO scratched his head. He was almost certain that the first line had previously read, as cryptic as it was, "I want to believe look out the building of many years..." The woman next to him had just asked if she could sit on the bench with him, and he had said......

The bus arrived. GAO folded the paper and carefully tucked it in his satchel. He was in the grip of a strange emotion. It was as if he had just been tapped on the shoulder by an invisible spirit, ready to impart great knowledge upon him. He felt stimulated, receptive, cautious, frightened. He stepped on board, paid his fare and braced his body to keep from falling as the bus driver careened away carelessly.

Once in the seat he strangely checked the latch on his satchel to be sure it was fastened. He suddenly felt the uninvited presence of greed. He rationalized that it was merely a piece of vagrant paper, not a living thing, and that no one could possibly fault him for keeping it tightly among is belongings. He rationalized further that, being a scholar, it was his duty to study this object further. But what had just happened? He desired to look again at the paper, but did not dare open his satchel until he got home. His mind may be playing tricks on him, however unlikely that may be. He would get to the bottom of this.

GAO spread the newspaper out on his desk as soon as he was home. Indeed the print began, in Chinese characters, "Okay. May I sit here?" GAO reread the paper. He chuckled. Certainly this all passed as news in the larger sense. The admonishments, the haggling, the seductions. Very contemporary. It reminded him of a movement in literature which was still active in some corners of the world: HyperPostRealism. The father of this movement had been a New Yorker in the 20th century who copied every word that ever reached his ears over a yearlong span of time, and documented it in a book. What was that book called? The Book of Utterances, or something.

"Utter," he said, eyeing the front of the paper. "Utter" was printed. The black lines covering the entire paper shuddered and repositioned to make room for the new word. Gao's heart pounded. He looked around his apartment. Why? To see if anything else had changed? "I am forty years old," he said, quickly. At its own regular pace, the newspaper responded. He touched it. Was it really only paper? Yes. Everything about it seemed mundane and perfectly in accordance with what a newspaper should be. He spoke a few words in Russian. They appeared in Russian lettering. English. Hebrew. Arabic. The paper knew every language that he did. He mumbled some nonsense in a made-up language. A phonetic rendition appeared in Chinese characters. This gave him pause.

How did the paper know my native language? Why did it dictate my gibberish in Chinese characters? He feigned gibberish in the manner of a Frenchman. French print appeared, mirroring the nonsense. He improvised a string of sounds: percussive African-esque syllables, guttural Inuit cum Turkish notes, tones that disobeyed all rules of his native language, all punctuated with coughs and snorts in a flurry. The paper responded by transcribing the sounds in the most convenient language, sometimes incorrectly, without regard for grammatical sense. When confused, the paper produced nothing. For the coughs and snorts, it only wrote if a syllable was produced that resembled some language, however remote. GAO's little experiment yielded the following rule: this paper only dealt in language. It did not deal in music or sound.

GAO instantly began to think of ways of presenting this phenomenon to others and of using it in his classroom. He was a teacher, a curator of the past, a spokesperson. He could not conceive of evil or selfish uses the way another might. He grasped that this enchanted artifact could actually teach himself and others how to read and write in other languages. He was reminded of voice recognition and translation computer software, which had achieved the same goal in its day, but which was now vanquished from the Earth. How ironic that this newspaper embody both that distant era of print and the more recent era of digital supremacy. Perhaps both eras gave way for this moment, this delicate work of...what...machinery? No. This paper had no powered or moving parts save language itself. Or did it? Could a computer be made that had all the texture of paper, an advanced auditory receptor, and the intelligence to perform such amazing feats of voice recognition? No, GAO decided. This is pure necromancy.

Magic. A force of the supernatural. Humankind had ignored the possibility of it for some time, it seemed. The ascent of Logic and Reason begun in the Renaissance had progressed and steamrolled any and all resistance to rational thought. God had been the first to go. Then art, then dreams. Perhaps, GAO thought, Reason's march into the digital era, the era of Synopsis, was ultimately a journey to this precious bauble he held before him. Perhaps all of the power generated for the digital world had been condensed into such a tiny summary as this magic newspaper. It lacked feeling. It lacked thought. It was a mimic, an analyst. Yet it performed superhuman feats of perception. This is what computers had previously become. Now, lacking power, the new inanimate reflection of humankind's logical mind was a serene slice of papyrus. Was it benign? Was it singular? For GAO's modest purposes, yes.

The scholar began his own school with the magic newspaper being his only teaching tool. Students of all ages could speak and see their words transformed into print. Then, in silence, they would copy their printed words on fresh paper. A small paper mill sprang up on the bank of the river near the woods. A pencil and eraser manufacturing company took root in town. A decent level of literacy was attained by everyone attending GAO's little school. He himself learned three more languages in addition to the four he already knew.

At night he would use the paper to prepare his lectures via dictation. He would talk to the newspaper, then copy the print into his notebooks. Once while dictating a knock came on his door and he opened it to find an unexpected guest. He entertained, as was the polite thing to do. Upon returning to the newspaper he discovered his notes had been replaced by the conversation! This was an accident to which he fell victim only a couple of times.

Word spread across the province. People traveled by foot, bicycle, boat and mule to witness the non-electronic miracle. Many praised a God they had not thought about for many, many years. GAO mailed inquiries to the great universities of the world: had anyone else seen anything like this? Most thought him mad and never replied. Nonetheless, awestruck people continued to visit GAO and his school. More and more folks entered GAO's, and the newspaper's, daily orbit. The school expanded and the great scholar took on assistants. A new level of literacy spread across the province. Writing came first. Then, as the writers began to express themselves in multifarious ways, readers were reborn. Two periodicals were founded in GAO's city: a literary magazine and a daily newspaper!

And then, without warning, just as poetry and art began to arise anew, the magic newspaper disappeared without a trace. No one ever knew whether it was stolen or lost. The future of GAO's city was assured, however. Literacy, art, and faith had been restored.

New people encountered the paper. Villagers and farmers who had never heard of it watched, fascinated by the strange artifact. People would read it with great interest. Over months people in new provinces began to hear of it and even to expect it. Just as one lucky shopkeeper had been able to read a selection from GAO's last, brilliant dictation (which had happened to be about the Soul), so a trash collector might read the results of an auction over the mountain ridge, or the description of yesterday's weather from one maid to another. In this glorious, unselfish period, folks would read the paper for entertainment, make their additions to the print, and send it on its way.

The games became quite elaborate. Three delivery boys improvised a dramatization of a well-known fable about an ancient emperor and his cat. A woman asked her grandfather to describe life in the 2160's, which he did with very opinionated asides that bordered on the profane. A public official spoke as a group of spectators watched his words cross their vision on the paper. In one incident a young man recited a poem to the paper, let it fly away in the wind and rediscovered it on a family trip only to find that his poem had been elaborated upon. He was so struck by this that he finally copied it down. (In later years he became a very famous poet and cited this experience as his divine motivation.) More and more people began to take the time to write down the words created by the paper before sending it on a cart, a backpack, in a boat or in the beak of a bird. Even when the words were of the most banal variety, some moved individual might copiously transcribe the precious text. Words were wondrous, it seemed; beautiful to behold in black print, a kind of art. The human emotions captured at a funeral, or even an assembly line, were genuine. A new movement of Realism began to infiltrate the artistic interests of the continent.

Soon the magic newspaper fairly disappeared. The people had developed their improvisatory craft to such a level that they could contain themselves no longer. They could not wait for the newspaper or one of its experts for inspiration, rather they improvised their plays and stories for one another. Often a scholar was enlisted to turn their ideas into print. This led to their learning to write themselves. City newspapers began to flourish again. People began to write letters and send them along with travelers to their destination.

As the magic paper continued its windblown course toward the sea, it took on the role of eavesdropper. News and conversations of great import would roll on and off of its faces without ever being read. It was a window on the world from an empty house, its observations the property of no one. Its surreal properties were no more honored than the miracle of a bird's flight. It existed mostly in desolate countryside, away from human chatter, etching glyphs representative of the sound of a breeze in the ferns or a laughing critter in the brush.

Two young lovers sat under a fir tree on a cliff overlooking the beautiful rocky coastline of the vast milky-blue Eastern sea. Puffs of creamy fog swam among the ornate outcroppings of stone and earth, blending with the grinning whitewater at the cliff bases. The horizon was stratified into tints of light blue and lavender, and ran a rosy spectrum from south to north. The sun sparkled gaily off of the crests of waves for as far as the eye could see. The pair were alone, having hiked here for a solid day. A solitary bird chirped carelessly in the branches of a white pine. Two butterflies chased one another among the fronds, ducking and reversing aimlessly. The boy, who had carried the big pack of supplies, lay on his back staring into the ether, his head in the lap of his pretty young lover. He listened as she talked about this and that. Spiraling up the hill from the mainland, nicking treetops came the magic newspaper.

A white buttercup tucked behind her left ear, the girl chatted with very few pauses. "....I used to have to sweep the entire patio with a tattered broom. They never bought a new one. I think they did this on purpose, knowing that I would have to stay home all day on Saturdays when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. My little brother was born early and my aunt said that this was because of our puppies, which agitated my mom during her third trimester. Funny, those puppies became Ji-ni's favorite playthings when he got older. They are still around the house, fully grown, and they still like Ji-ni best. They made it so hard to sweep the patio. It made me wonder if maybe they were in on the conspiracy." She giggled. "Even when we went to the lake they knew how to make a mess of things. They took turns getting every one of us wet. They invented new ways to bring water out of the lake and onto our clothing or carpet or dinner table. The lake was so beautiful. It was always my favorite place. The water could be very cold, but never too cold for a daring dip. There was a floating dock that seemed very far out in the middle of the lake. My grandfather used to love to swim out to it and taunt us. He would say, 'Maybe when you're as old as me you can swim all the way out here!' Well, I first made it out when I was fourteen, thank-you-very-much." She gave her boyfriend's hair a little brush with her hand. "Sometimes we would row our boat all the way across the lake to my uncle's. He had a marvelous pear orchard that went halfway up the mountain. My cousins and I would play hide and seek. The ones hiding would climb up into the trees, and if the person that was It walked by, they would drop a pear down on their head. If they hit the It person, they were safe. If they missed, the It person could climb up and tag them. That is, if the hiding person didn't squirrel away in time. That was very difficult to do, but my little brother was good at that. I once saw him jump all the way to another tree. How dangerous! If he'd have fallen, he'd have broken both of his legs!"

The boy changed his position by rolling on his side, keeping his head in the girl's lap. She stroked him behind his ear lightly, running her index finger along the lobe. He was fading in and out of sleep. "Back at my uncle's house we would eat fresh fish. I didn't really like fish too much. At least not until...." She blushed. "Well, I had my first kiss near the boathouse. Oh, don't worry, it wasn't that great, anyway. It was a boy from down the street whose family was eating with us that night. We were there and it stank of the fish that my uncle had just gutted. I wanted to run away but Won held me in place. I tried to hold my nose but the rascal kept my arms pinned! Then he kissed me! I kissed him back. You know, it was the first time and you don't ask questions. I remember noticing that the fish smell had disappeared. When we walked away I could the see the fish guts down on the cleaning board near the boathouse, but I couldn't smell them. I thought, 'how strange,' and that night we ate fish. It was cooked so good. As I ate it I thought of Won's lips. He was kind of ugly and all, but his lips were pretty good. If he hadn't been so ugly I might have kissed him again, but once is enough for a first time, don't you think? Anyway, he gave me a nice sweater as a gift when we left later that Fall. I still have it but I don't wear it very much. I like the one you gave me better." She swiped the tip of his nose, cutely.

Snagged on a bush, the magic newspaper printed each of the lovers' words. A land dispute dribbled off the back page, then a weather report, a snippet of drunken revelry, a food order from a cafe, a bit of gossip from the laundry, a farmer's chastisement of his stable-hand, a merchant's accusation to a thief, a postal worker's greeting, the calling of a pet, a medical analysis, a quarrel between a mother and her son, a prayer for rain, a boat's boarding call. Soon the paper was completely covered with the girl's stories and thoughts, intertwined like DNA with the boys sighs of affection and affirmations. The words eventually began to spill off the back page. The bird swooped down from the lowest branch of the white pine tree, brushing the magic newspaper with its wing. The paper lifted into a sudden gust and soared away over the ocean.

************************