Jack sat silently, mesmerized by the pale screen of the thin laptop.  The cursor blinked…on…off…on…off.  Still, no words came.  No inspiration.  No ideas.  He felt as if his mind was as empty as the crumpled cigarette packs scattered around his desk.  He chuckled at the term ‘writer’s block’.  A block gave one the impression of something solid, something you could hold, something you could smash.  This wasn’t a block, he thought, this was a nothing.  A big, black, empty, nothing.

The brand, new ’state-of-the-art’ laptop his agent had given him hadn’t helped, although Stan had said it was just what he needed.

Jack ran his fingers through his greasy, blonde hair and then rested his head in his hands.  He felt that familiar tug of panic on his bowels.  He had a deadline to meet in just six days and he’d already spent the advance.  In frustration he pounded his fist on the desk hard enough to shake everything on it and swore, “Goddammitt!!  Help me…do you hear me?!  Help me, Goddammitt!!!”

Silence.  Well, what did he expect?  A rainbow and a leprechaun?  He was a fiction writer but he wasn’t an idiot.  He got up went into the kitchen and poured yet another cup of coffee with yet another shot of Jack Daniels, then returned to his desk.  But when he sat down and looked at the monitor, he nearly dropped the mug.  Staring back at him from the screen were five simple words; one line, one question.  “HOW CAN I HELP YOU?”

What the hell, he thought.  Was somebody messing around with him?  He checked the modem; maybe somebody had sent him an instant message.  No, the modem wasn’t even hooked up.  He looked back at the screen.  The words were still there.  Okay, I’ll bite.  He typed in an answer, “I need a story.”

Immediately the cursor began to move again.  “DEFINE STORY”

Jack looked around the room half-expecting to see someone with a camera or one of his jackass friends.  But he was alone.  This is crazy, he thought, or I am.

Again the cursor moved.  “DEFINE STORY”

Quickly he typed in a reply, “a story is a narrative telling of a series of incidents in a dramatic way.”

“LENGTH DESIRED?”

Jack blinked.  Length desired?  This was nuts.  This was, was this really happening?  Carefully he typed “5,000 words”.

The screen went blank.  Jack shook his head, hard.  He must be dreaming, or losing his mind, or both.  Did he really think a computer was going to write his story?  Jeez, he should switch to science-fiction.  Suddenly the cursor began moving faster than Jack’s eyes could track it.  Line upon line filling up, scrolling down.  It was moving too quickly for him to make any sense of it.  Finally, with an insignificant beep it stopped.  Jack had no idea how long it had taken.

He hit the page-up button to scroll it back to the beginning and nearly fell out of his chair.  There it was, twenty pages of text, five-thousand words of something, whatever it was.  It took him about twenty-five minutes to read it and only three seconds to make the decision to save and print out the entire thing.  Not only was it a story, but it was a good story; certainly better than anything he had ever written.  The only thing he added to it were four words: ‘written by Jack MacNeihl’.

Within minutes it was converted to a PDF file, and it took only seconds for him to make the decision to upload it to his agent.

Jack stayed away from his desk for the next few days.  He busied himself with the clean-up that always came after a long stretch of writing activity.  Stale pizza boxes, empty soft drink cans, Starbucks cups, Jack Daniels bottles, and mountains of cigarette butts.  He even managed to pick up his dirty laundry and made a weak attempt at vacuuming.  With every passing hour the bizarre experience with the laptop became more and more unreal, until he convinced himself that it never happened.  He had been so overtired trying to meet the deadline that he must have imagined the whole thing.  But he still didn’t have a clear memory of writing the story.

In the middle of his mindless clean-up campaign the phone rang.  Jack picked it up on the second ring and before he could say hello, the voice on the other end boomed into his ear.  “Jack!  This is Fred Waring, I got your story this morning.  My God, Jack, it’s wonderful.  It’s absolutely the best thing you’ve ever done.  In fact, it’s so good, we’re featuring it on the cover of next month’s issue.  I’ve already spoken to your agent.  I want to send a photographer over to your place this afternoon.  Get a couple publicity shots, y’know, author at work, that sort of thing.  Will you be home?”

“Uh, sure.  That would be fine, Fred.  No problem.  A photographer, huh?  That’s great, Fred.”  Jack felt a strange dullness in his head.  It was hard to collect his thoughts.”

“Damn right it’s great, believe it!  You stay home this afternoon; we’ll be sending someone by about three o’clock.  Talk to you later, Jack.”  The phone went dead.

The photographer was only the beginning.  Once the story hit the stands, it was as if he were the greatest thing since fat-free ice cream.  And he had just about the same substance.  He was interviewed on TV, radio and in print.  And he had no idea how he got through any of it.  He felt as if he couldn’t put two intelligent words together.  Mostly he smiled, agreed with everything and spouted platitudes.  But it didn’t seem to matter.  Everyone was so impressed with his writing that nothing else was relevant.  He sometimes wondered if they thought he was some sort of idiot savant.

He also wasn’t writing.  He hadn’t turned on the computer since that weird night.  But his agent was getting impatient with him.  He’d been approached by The New Yorker.  They loved his story and they were hungry for more.  No one seemed to remember any of the other things he’d written in the last sixteen years.  So, it was after three very agitated phone messages from Jack’s agent, Stan Liedyk, that Jack decided to tackle another story.   The pressure was becoming unbearable, so finally he caved.

This time it was faster.  He simply turned on the laptop and the eerily familiar “HOW CAN I HELP YOU?” appeared on the screen.  After that there was very little for him to do.  That night the computer wrote two dramatic short stories, a humorous essay, and a one-act play.  By the time everything was printed it was almost four-thirty in the morning.  Jack didn’t even bother to read the last two pieces.  He simply uploaded everything with a note that he had wanted to do a bit of re-writing before he sent everything off.  Then he dropped fully dressed into bed.

He was exhausted yet had no reason to be.  He wasn’t really working, yet the dullness in his head intensified.  All he wanted to do was sleep.  If you rated the popularity of the first story on a scale of one to ten, it would score ten.  The new works just out by Jack MacNiehl could easily have blown up the scale.  He was a literary phenomenon, spoken of in the same breath as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Mailer.

The laptop was spewing out one to two short stories or essays a month and was working on a novel.  Sight unseen, the novel had already been picked up by a large house in New York, with an advance figure that by any standard was considered obscene.

But what no one knew or even suspected was that Jack MacNiehl was in serious trouble.  He slept between sixteen to twenty hours a day and the dullness in his head was slowly being replaced by a spreading blackness.  He rarely ate and he spoke to no one.  Most everyone assumed that this was because with his success he had taken on eccentric traits.

In fact, the only thing Jack really accomplished was converting the stories, essays, plays, etc to PDF files and uploading them to his agent.  The computer ran constantly, writing, saving, uploading, writing, saving, uploading.

Jack sat quietly in front of the screen, just watching.  His mind was almost a total blank now.  His eyes focused only on the traveling cursor, blinking…on…off…on…off.  Slowly he noticed a change in the screen.  The words disappeared, the cursor grew larger and larger until it almost filled the screen.  It was beautiful, blinking…on…off…on…off.  Instinctively he reached out his hand and touched the screen.  There was a quick, blinding flash of light and he vanished, into the screen, into the cursor where he blinked…on…off…on…off.

The phone rang.  “Hello.”

“Hello, Michael.  Stan Liedyk here.  Listen I like your work, but I think a little fine-tuning is in order.  Tell you what, I’ve got a slightly used laptop with a great creative writing software program on it.  I sure don’t need it.  How ’bout if you come by this afternoon and pick it up?  I think it could be just what you’re looking for, y’know?”