Lexicoplasty - Flash Fiction

When the executive order came down the line, the words listed for expurgation were redacted in the textbooks beneath tape, until new editions could be run off the presses. However, the prodrome initially developed online, where the revised lections 404’d and only cached unbowdlerised versions remained accessible. Coding experts were called in to try and resolve the issue.

A librarian at Philadelphia’s Perelman School of Medicine was the first to notice the phenomenon in print. One of the sanitised words ‘vulnerable’ fluoresced from beneath its concealing black strip and radiated its defiant presence like any of the emergency exit signs throughout the hospital. Curious, the librarian ran a battery of tests to detect whether there was some sort of contamination in the printers’ inks, or even the presence of radioactive material. In other medical volumes, the word ‘diversity’ similarly glowed in an array of differing colours under their shrouds.

It was only when the books were checked out by students and researchers alike, that the pathology revealed itself in full. Words deliquesced from the page and vanished. The odd letter here and there remained in forlorn isolation, but all medical knowledge had been trepanned. The university’s mathematicians swiftly dissected the pattern of the remaining characters; they were the lone nine letters not contained within the original proscribed words. 

The academic linguists grasped the diagnosis immediately. Word necrosis. 

“Language is organic. You can’t simply excise and disassemble parts of it without secondary effects, or in this case, viral metastasis. You have to think of the alphabet like DNA, forming the amino acids of words, aggregating into the protein chains of sentences, the cells of paragraphs, discrete anatomical structures as chapters, finally building the corpus as a whole. This was venesection without coagulant. The executive just lobotomised the body politic’s healthcare”.  


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Based on the prompt from "New Flash Fiction" journal which was as follows: 

Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the Center for Disease Control from using seven words in their official documents: The words are as follows: “evidence-based”, “science-based” “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” and “fetus.”

Write a 300 word flash fiction using some or all of these words

Method Man - Friday Flash

He was Method Acting to within an inch of his life. Every second of every livelong day. Stanislavsky would be so proud. The Actors’ Studio would be so proud. If there were anyone left alive to witness his performance. Instead of wig and greasepaint, he adorned himself in blood and viscera. A fresh coat each day of his rank costume. Primitive man had studied the animals with such attention, that eventually they were able to mimic every one of their motions so as to hunt them. Here he was having to ape his predators to avoid becoming food for them.

The human offal masked the odour of his own untainted meat. He moved and sounded enough like them so as not to draw down notice upon him. In truth they were hardly the observant type. He shambled with the best of them, only deviating when he reached a supermarket and surreptitiously caching any cans of food he could find inside his clothes. 

For that was what they did all day, window shopped. What else was there for him to do? No theatre, cinema, sports events, no restaurants or boulevard cafés. The world had stopped passing by. Just this aimless mooching. The sun was still in the sky, trees still lined the verge, mountains still framed the horizon, but the natural world no longer seemed sublime. Man used to bask and wonder in the awe of Nature, lighting and providing and uplifting their lives, but their lives, his sole life, meant that she was now so terribly far from elevating anything. Illuminating nothing but this abominable scene. Providing for nothing now that there was no one left to harvest any nutrients, apart from second hand human flesh. Enthralling nothing in degraded brains that were of no greater sentience to every flower and plant and dung beetle. Even Wordsworth would be hard pressed to rhapsodise about this relinquished Nature. Shorn of her adoring audience she hadn’t curled up and died, but waxed on impassively.

He wondered why he bothered striving to survive. What was the purpose? There was no truth to be found in what he was doing. He had to so inhabit the world of the zombie, he effectively was one for all the inundations of his tormenting thoughts. It was all moot anyway, his food would eventually run out and he would starve to death. It was just a question of whether he might outlive the zombies or not, as some foolish asseveration of human pride. For the zombies too would run out of food and their corrupted bodies would close up and shut down on them for want of rancid sustenance. They were the ultimate deadly virus, having wholly colonised the human host and now unable to replicate any further. Just like him. That blind and ne’er understood human drive to reproduce offspring into future generations, now standing forlorn and superannuated in the sacs of his scrotum. What did Stanislavsky and Wordsworth have to say on that matter? Whither art? Whither seminal truth? Seemed man in his pomp and prime had little more understanding than these hollowed men. But there was no one he could relay that insight to. 

New Editors - Friday Flash

I opened my email and there it was. Exactly a month to the day that I'd hit send. I may have sweated blood to meet my deadline for delivery, but the response seemed goadingly effortless in its precision arrival.

I always hated this moment. Even though it always redounded to my benefit and I usually could find nothing to argue against, not even for the sake of form. I downloaded the attachment. My original manuscript, though after this metamorphosis at the steadfast hand of my editor, could it still even be said to be mine anymore? The truth about my fiction lay at hand, highlighted on my desktop.

I think I was probably squinting through half-closed eyes such was my trepidation. Track changes was harder on the eye than the editor's former method of red pen. For such a stickler to the pre-determined standards of grammar, she wasn't averse to adopting the new technologies. My eyes could barely take in the text. It seemed to be dancing on my plasma screen before me. I blinked my eyes to clear the fug. The letters were still spinning, melting and mutating. What's going on here? No word seemed to stay still long enough in its arrangement of letters for me to be able to read it.

Damn, seems somewhere between her computer and mine, we'd contracted one of those viruses beloved of Microsoft Word that ensconces itself in the macros exchanged like lovers’ fluids. I immediately hit my anti-virus clean up app and trashed the document and purged it forever from my computer. I picked up the phone and dialled.

"Hi Clara? It's me Gil"

"Hi Gil". Now my editor was never one of those profuse in warmth or who called all her authors "Darling", but she sounded remote even for her. The voice resonated metallically.

"Look, I think you accidentally passed me a virus when you sent my manuscript"

"You got it alright then"

"No, I don't think you-" she sounded like she was calling from a railway concourse or something. One of those big open spaces that compresses the voice and scoops up all the background noise as screams and shrieks. Only I was sure I had called her on her office landline...

"It's settled down then?" she intoned.

"What do you mean 'settled down'? Is it just some new formatting thing?"

"No, it's only about the words and letters"

"What are you talking about Clara?"

"The Guild of Editors grew weary of receiving an endless stream of poorly written and composed manuscripts, fixing them up, or rather saving them, turning them into publishable books all with receiving nothing more than a thank you in the acknowledgements-"

"But that's your job. And thanks for saying we authors can't write". Again those high pitched, distorted squeals in the background. With plenty of banging. Was she at a child's birthday tea party? Who'd ever let her near children?

"So we did something about it. We developed an app that would mend your manuscripts with the minimum of effort on our parts. It takes your texts and runs its own analytics on the words and edits them. We call it the ‘Hundred Monkeys and their Typewriters’ app"

"Is that what I can hear in the background? A monkeys’ tea party?"

"Of course not. It's a silent computer app"

"Well what is that noise around you? And why do you sound so... odd?"

"Goodbye Gil. It was nice working with you". She hung up. What did she mean by that? Whatever lay behind it might explain why she was sounding so distant. I decided to take her at her word that it wasn't a virus and once again downloaded the manuscript from her e-mail and opened it.

I stared bemusedly at the jumble on my monitor. My text so irradiated, that it was mutating. The letters possessing a half-life as they decayed into different words before my very eyes. It was impossible to catch any word before it changed. I started a series of screen grabs to try and capture the process.

prison prism like ambergris... prison prism dike ambidextrous jism

Nip tuck plastic surgery chicken neck...  Nipple clamp tuxedo spandex sugary cock nectar

Oh this was hopeless. It's just gibberish. Would it never end? I tried ringing Clara again but I couldn't get hold of her. Time to nab me a new editor it seemed. I made some calls, but none of the editors would even pick up. Maybe she wasn't kidding when she said all the editors were in it together. I spoke to a couple of my fellow writer friends, but they couldn't confirm or rebut anything since they didn't currently have manuscripts with editors.

I contacted the Writers' Guild and while they said they'd heard rumours of the Hundred Monkeys app, they sniffily remarked that if anything it had put the editors out of work and that maybe that accounted for the automated sound of my former editor's voice. That she had already been replaced by a machine. My triumphantly human correspondent from the Writers Guild assured me that there would always be a need for authors no matter the black magic practised on out texts by other interlopers in the publishing process, since we were the ones with the creative ideas and drive.

While vaguely comforted, I still needed to decide what to do with my manuscript. While the literary Turing Machine on my computer had finally finished its churning, I just shut it off without daring to peruse its final version. I resolved to self-publish my original manuscript myself, but allowed that it could probably do with one last edit on my part.

Twelve weeks later and with gratifyingly few alterations to the book, I formatted it for e-publishing. But when I tried to upload it, I was informed that a book with the same title by the same author, to wit me, was already published. Publication date some twelve weeks ago. I bought a copy and started reading it. It was pure filth to be honest. Made me blush. I was struck by an idea and searched out the finished product of my manuscript after the 100 Monkeys' treatment. And word for word it was the same. They had published my book right after this edit. Without any input from me, the writer. The gall of it. My hard boiled thriller turned into this pornography. The only thing was, I caught sight of the book's position in the sales chart. Maybe the Hundred Monkey editors knew what they were doing after all...