Bewildering Stories

Change the color of the text to:

Change the color of the background to:


The End Of The World As We Know It

by Jerry Wright

Once upon a time there was a troll named Groteus Prime, called “GP,” for short. Well he wasn’t exactly a troll, although contact with his personality would probably make you agree with the “troll” assessment. What he was, was an extrusion of some sort of pan-dimensional, or n-dimensional, or something-like-that, machine intelligence left over from an earlier stage of space-time continuum empire-building. He wasn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill type berserker machine, either, as he wasn’t exactly “anti-life,” just sort of “intelligent life stinks,” which not an attitude you want for your closer friends.

His self-designated assignment at present was to bring the wheels of progress to a halt on a planet swarming with one of the most repulsive forms of semi-intelligent life that he’d come across in many millennia.

How did they phrase it? Oh yeah, “A shining planet known only as Earth!” Pathetic. After monitoring various forms of what you or I might laughingly call “junk,” he realized that much of his work had already been done. He listened to Amplitude Modulated jabbering, and was almost taken aback by the mindlessness therein espoused. He listened to Frequency Modulated gibbering, and knew that the tribal wailing and grunting was far more destructive than anything he could do with the limited energy he had to spare. He extruded an “eyeball” and spent much time monitoring the EM bands where video danced among the clouds. He could almost feel the intelligence levels of the viewers drop 20 points across the board as they consumed whatever was passing as “entertainment”.

So, what to do? After spending some time monitoring various data packets traversing some sort of world-wide conglomeration known as “The Internet,” he realized that there was still one sort of thing happening which caused these backward excuses for sentience to actually uplift. They read. Actually absorbing meaning through marks on paper, or sometimes, though not as frequently, pixels on viewscreens, caused IQ’s to climb. Not a good sign.

Then he noticed that it depended on the type of instrument the marks on paper were printed in. Certain instruments, known as “books” and “magazines,” caused a wide variety of responses. “Women’s Magazines” for example, caused a IQ drop that was quite measurable, and odd publications such as “The Weekly World News” and “Romance Novels” caused IQ’s to drop off the charts. But the IQ anomaly seemed to come from the oddly named “Science Fiction” magazines. A steady diet of this, as well as the marks on paper know as “SF Books” cause a measurable rise.

This qualified as “not a good thing” to his programming. So he schemed. A careful study of the natives of this mudball, and especially the ones who seemed to be in charge of putting these IQ “enhancers” into readable form caused GP much pain and aggravation, but one afternoon, casually flipping bits in a major network center, he chanced upon the concept that would allow these “fictions” to self-destruct. They accepted submissions from unknowns. Although the concept of “over the transom” didn’t make a whole lot of sense, GP realized that he now had a handle on how to make this crawling pit deliquesce into primordial slime!

He carefully wrote an article/story/fiction/thing that had an incredibly grabbing hook to catch the attention of whomever read it, followed by a horribly mind-warping subliminal, sublimated, sublime subtext which, when read, would cause the reader to spend the rest of his “life” desperately searching out and fixating on an incredible conglomeration of “television programming” known only as “Gilligan’s Island.” After that, there would be no thrust into space, no development of Artificial Intelligences, no seeking of “life, the universe, and well, just everything!” Success! When the “editors” of the SF magazines and books read the text, they would become mindless Gillagozombies, and no longer a threat. And if by chance it were to be published in a magazine because someone had not really read it, why that would be acceptable too, as the readers of that ’zine would quickly fall apart.

He quickly time-stuttered the pages so that he would have plenty of copies, placed them in also-stuttered envelopes, along with, just for verisimilitude, a self-addressed stamped envelope which he noted was called a SASE. And just in case of postal mishaps, he remotely rented a post office mailbox.

After mailing his missives off to all the magazines and book editors he could find, he took a happy three-month sabbatical to the lesser moons of Asjurbanipal 7 in the Cletus cluster.

As GP blithely returned to Earth, a quick check of the massed intellectual effluvium shocked the gravitons out of him. Not only had Earth’s vacuity level NOT risen, the various offenders against all that he stood for — Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, SciFi.com, and more — seemed to be chugging along, as though his mindkiller had been totally ineffective.

No! NO! How could this be, he thought to himself. By means of a quick intralocal inversion, he checked the contents of his postal box, and found it to be full — to overflowing. Cursing to himself, he translocated the mass of mail to his orbital location, where he found them to be all of his SASE’s.

In disbelief he ripped open the envelope on the top of the pile. Stapled to his manuscript he found a note. Obviously a form, it read:

Dear Contributor:

Thank you very much for letting us see the enclosed submission. Unfortunately it does not suit the needs of the magazine at this time.

Your submission has been read by an editor, but the press of time and manuscripts (approximately 850 per month) does not permit personal replies or criticism. For your general information, though, most stories are rejected because they lack a new idea or theme. A great many of the ideas that may seem innovative to an SF newcomer are in fact overfamiliar to readers more experienced in the field. The odds greatly favor this being the case of this rejection.

Another common cause (all too common, we’re afraid) of rejection is the obvious lack of basic English compositional skills on the part of the author. By this we mean that the writer has misspelled or misused everyday words, and/or mispunctuated same. Stories are rejected on this basis because a writer must be familiar with the tools of his or her trade, just as an electrician or carpenter must.

Finally, your story may have been rejected, not because it lacked a new idea, or was misspelled or mispunctuated, or because the writing was not “professional” enough, but simply because it failed to rise far enough above the other 849 seen that month.

Sincerely,
Gardener Dohzshwah
Editor

GP frothed for a moment, and then ripped open the next one. Again, a form. It read:

Dear Contributor:

Thank you very much for letting us see the enclosed submission. Unfortunately it does not suit the needs of the magazine at this time.

And on... an exact duplicate of the first. He flipped over the pile and pulled out the bottom return. He opened the envelope and a hand-written note fluttered out. He picked it up and read:

Dear Mr. P

In re: your submission to our magazine. At our latest editorial kaffeeklatsch with the editors of the majority of the publications in our field, we determined that you simultaneously submitted your story, “The End Of The World As We Know It” to every editor in the field. “Sim-subbing,” as this practice is termed, is absolutely forbidden, and so not only are we rejecting this story, but we all shall keep a determined lookout for any other submissions of yours, and you may rest assured that you will never be published on THIS planet ever.

Sincerely, The Editors

Meanwhile, at the offices of Bewildering Stories, the editors fought over a tattered copy of TV Guide, desperately searching for the next rerun of Gilligan’s Island.


Copyright © 2003 by Jerry Wright