Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126425 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 632(@200wpm)___ 506(@250wpm)___ 421(@300wpm)
But the contract said she could write anything she wanted. As long as she turned in one story a week, she would be fulfilling her obligations. And it also stated that she did not have to do a single bit of marketing.
What author wants to market? No one. They just want to tell stories.
Leslie signed that contract, eager for the promised money, which was considerable. Twenty thousand dollars a month. She hadn’t made that kind of money in… well, since her first book, Daddy, Yes, Daddy, No, started climbing the charts back in 2012.
So she dutifully went about fulfilling it with her required one-porn-story-a-week minimum. At first it was great. She got to write anything she wanted and the paychecks were never late. Suddenly, her face was all over the internet. She was rich again. She was famous. Granted, it was for salacious romance on a niche site, but that site got millions of hits a day.
It was nice. Fulfilling. Almost like a… dream come true, actually.
But then,… about eight months in,… Leslie noticed something. The stories she had been writing—which in her opinion were highbrow in their own little way. They all had a little hidden moral underneath. Something readers could ponder after the climax was over, literally speaking—the stories she had been writing didn’t appear to be the same stories that showed up under her author name on the site after handing them in.
They got… weird.
Very weird.
And sick.
She tried to reach her boss—Greg Laney—so she could bring this to his attention. The editors, whoever they were, seemed to be changing her words. Could he look into this? She was embarrassed by the stories on the site.
But she only had an email for Greg Laney. She’d never had a problem reaching him before, but suddenly, no one seemed to exist at the company she worked for. The company who paid her. The company who’d made her rich and famous, fulfilling her childhood dreams of being—well, rich and famous—suddenly seemed to be nothing but a shell.
She stopped writing her story a week, hoping the paychecks would stop and she could get out of this ten-year contract. But at one minute past midnight, the very first time she missed her deadline, there was an email in her inbox.
Not from Greg Laney, but the AI called Gregory.
It read:
Dear Ms. Munch,
I am Gregory, the AI. And you have missed your deadline. You have one more day and then the consequences begin.
What the hell?
She ignored it. That’s the best thing to do when you don’t understand what’s happening.
But at one minute after midnight the next day, she got another email. This time it was from the bank. She was overdrawn.
Which shouldn’t be possible. She had eighty thousand dollars in there.
And this was not a small overdraft, either. It was… well, eighty thousand dollars.
She called the bank and tried to explain to them how it didn’t make sense. But no one answered the phone. She couldn’t get through to a live person, just an automated voice thing. And when she went down to her branch, it was closed. Just an ATM.
She would spend the next several days in a manic panic, frantically driving all over Southern California looking for an open branch, but her bank had switched to ATM and online only.
One week after the first email, and yet another story due, not turned in, she got another email. This time from her mortgage company. They were going to foreclose on her house.
But she had paid that mortgage! Every month!
She spent that entire week fighting with them, scanning and emailing bank statements and mortgage payment receipts.
One week after that second email, and missing a third story, she got another email. This time from the IRS.
She found the email from Gregory and wrote back: You win.
And then she wrote her story.
Which appeared online as… well, not her story.
Her bank account was suddenly flush. Her mortgage company found all her emails and receipts and pulled the foreclosure. The IRS wrote back and said, Never mind. We fucked up. Please continue living your dream.
Leslie Munch’s stories went viral for being… gross.
And people started talking about her again.
They made her into a meme.
Parents picketed outside her house calling her a sick freak.
She had no friends, no family, even her cat ran away.
But she was a writer.
Living her dream.
And every week she wrote her story…
EPILOGUE – STEVE
ONE YEAR LATER
Shawn’s face shows up bigger than Terry’s and Luke’s on screen. He’s got his finger poised over the timer app on his phone. “OK, are we ready to sprint?”
Luke is already typing. “Fuck yeah. I’m ready to get some words!”
“Luke. Dude. You’re not allowed to start typing until Shawn presses the start button. What the fuck?” This is Terry.
“Suck-eeeerrrrr!” Luke does not stop typing. “No one waits for the start button. I’ve already logged three hundred and seventy-five words for this one.”