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Fantasy
Brainstorm, Inc.
by Michaele Jordan
ฉ2008

Morris stared at the office in some dismay. Then he consulted a
card crumpled in his pocket. The card assured him he had the right
address. But he hadn't really been in any doubt. He'd
just been hoping against hope that this grimy, dank little hole in
the wall was not really the Mecca he'd come all the way to
Schenectady to find.
Brainstorm, Inc. proclaimed the large, official printing on
the window. And underneath, in a gaudier script, was
scrawled,
Ideas, Ideas,
Ideas! We specialize in prose literature!
Tacked onto the door was a note reading,
Students! We also
provide term paper and thesis ideas!
Morris shuddered. Then, summoning his fast departing
courage, he opened the door and entered.
The inside of the shop was clean at any rate, and a little
larger than a good sized closet. It contained a desk attended by
two comfortable looking chairs, and a tall, freestanding machine.
The walls were hung with cheerful inoffensive landscapes.
The carpet was soft.
Morris walked over to the machine and examined it. He supposed
it was some kind of a computer, since it was covered with buttons
and small, scrolling displays. But it was certainly not a Pentium.
Or a Macintosh. In fact, it didn't seem to have a proper monitor
or a disk drive, and definitely not a keyboard
although there
were a great many buttons on the front. Still, it looked more like
a computer than anything else. It wasn't a rocket ship.
"Well, good morning, young man. And what can I do for you?" Morris whirled to find that a plump, matronly woman of about four
foot eleven had somehow snuck up behind him. To punish her for
startling him, he glared. But she only beamed up at him, and
smoothed her thick hair back into its bun. Her blue eyes twinkled
furiously through her bifocals. It dawned on Morris that she
looked exactly like his mother. Since Morris' mother was tall and
slim and chic, he couldn't help wondering at the resemblance.
He stopped glaring.
"Who
who are you?" he blurted out with a stammer, and
compounded his clumsiness by blushing. She bestowed on him a
huge smile that seemed to say only the cleverest boy in the class
would have thought to ask that.
"I'm Janie," she informed him. "I own Brainstorm, Inc.
Now why don't you have a seat, and tell me what kind of idea
you're looking for? Something interesting in a term paper,
perhaps?" She paused to settle ceremoniously into the chair
behind the desk, and to sigh with the relief of getting off her
feet.
"Well, no, actually, I was thinking more on the line of a short
story." Morris was not pleased at being spotted so quickly for a
student. "Something marketable."
Janie was clearly impressed. "You're a writer? So young? Well,
you must be a very remarkable person."
Morris warmed to the praise with the air of a boy who had never
heard any before, and indeed, he'd heard very little. Seating
himself across from Janie, he took her into his confidence.
"Actually, I'm just breaking into the field. Naturally, I have
quite a few stories making the rounds right now." He had two. "But
you couldn't really say I'm making a living at it yet." Morris had
never sold a word in his life.
Janie's eyes warmed sympathetically. "It must be very rough on
you, just starting out and all. I hear that all the editors are
terribly suspicious of new writers. And as for the old established
names
well, I've heard stories about how jealous they are that
would just curl your hair. It doesn't seem like there's anybody
who will give a new talent a break."
Morris agreed with her one hundred percent, but it occurred to
him that it might not sound very professional to say so. "Oh, it's
not so bad as all that. Naturally the editors want to check you
out, see if you've got what it takes. But they're on the lookout
for new writers. After all, we're their bread and butter." He
indulged a cynical chuckle. "Of course, you've got to watch out
for them. Once they've got their hooks in you, they'll bleed you
dry if you let them."
Janie shook her head at the wickedness of the world. "Well, I
just don't know where you young artists find the heart to keep at
it. I know I couldn't." She laughed deprecatingly. "Not that it
would do me any good if I could. I can't even string two sentences
together."
Morris smiled condescendingly. "It's a talent."
Janie nodded emphatically at his profound insight. "It
certainly is. I only wish I had it. But . . . ." She shrugged and
gestured to the computer. "You do what you can with what you've
got. No use crying over what you can't have."
Morris glanced at the computer as casually as possible. "Is
that where you get the ideas?"
Janie laughed like a tinkling of small bells. "You mean from
Ignatius? Good heavens, no! You can't get ideas from a machine."
Morris suppressed a sigh of relief. Play-stations were all very
well and good, but he wanted real, human-type ideas.
"Ignatius is
just a glorified filing cabinet. He isn't even very bright as
computers go
he's a very old model. The ideas come from
contributors all over the country. Mostly writers who get an idea
they don't have time to work on themselves." She chuckled softly.
"Some of my best customers sell me as many ideas as they buy.
Maybe you'll sell me a few yourself someday."
Morris could not, for obvious reasons, conceive of having an
idea to spare. "Why sure, maybe I will," he assured her with a
generous sense of noblesse oblige, hoping he wasn't committing
himself to anything. "Of course, I can't give you anything today.
I'm a little dry right now. But usually I have plenty of ideas. I
mean, all writers get a little block now and then."
"But of course they do! Otherwise, I'd be out of business."
Janie had come in a little too promptly on cue, and Morris looked
at her suspiciously. But she was gazing at him with earnest
understanding, and he decided she had intended no sarcasm. "Why, I
can't tell you how many of my clients have come in here and said
to me, 'Janie, I just don't understand it. One day I've got so
many ideas I can't get them down on paper, and the next day I'm
dry as a bone.' That's their exact words. And I always tell them
the same thing.
I say, 'That's what I'm here for.'" She nodded
emphatically. "And it's true. That's what I'm here for. So." She
straightened up and smiled. "What can I do for you?"
Morris felt so safe in her perfect comprehension that for a
moment he forgot and stopped posing. With genuine boyish charm, he
shrugged, spread his hands, and grinned wistfully. "I need an
idea."
And Janie smiled back with a gentleness that was not at all
reminiscent of his mother, even if he persisted in thinking it
was. "Whatever you want, honey. Any particular genre?"
Morris basked in the endearment and the smile for an eternity
before remembering that he was a sophisticated man of the world.
"A mystery, I think," he intoned with his most judicious air.
"That's where the real money is these days."
"That's the truth," intoned Janie with immense and visible
respect for his business sense. She rose and crossed to Ignatius,
pushing a button on the front panel. "Would you prefer something
action oriented, or one of those chess problem plots?"
Morris considered. He personally preferred the action stories,
but he was afraid his own tastes might be called plebeian. On the
other hand, there was probably more money in thrillers. But he
didn't want people to think he was in it for the money. He wanted
to be a class writer.
"A chess problem," he told Janie. "I think
tight plotting is the most important part of writing."
Janie gave him the warm admiring smile again, and he was glad
he hadn't risked her good opinion on an action plot. She punched a
few more buttons, and a half dozen printed cards spat out of a
feed slot. She thumbed through them, making little faces of
discontent, until she found one she liked. "This one ought to run
about eight thousand words, if that's all right." She
offered the idea to Morris.
He grabbed at it. "That's fine, fine," he muttered, scanning
the card. And then he sighed. The idea was beautiful, a tight
little plot outline of a crime as complex and original as he had
seen in years. It was perfect. It was complete. It brought tears
to his eyes. He looked down at Janie. "How much?"
Junkies had inquired the price of their desire more calmly.
Janie smiled. "Ten percent of whatever you sell the story for."
She returned to her desk and pulled a form from a drawer. "If
you'll just fill out the standard contract."
Morris would have filled it out in blood if she'd asked. He
signed on the bottom line, shoved his idea into his pocket, and
took Janie's hand. "Thanks a million. I mean, well, I mean,
thanks."
He ran out the door in his eagerness to get to work on the
story.
He should have turned to wave goodbye to Janie. He might have
enjoyed watching her grow another foot taller. He would certainly
have enjoyed watching her figure slim down and fill out to
proportions undeniably voluptuous. Of course he might not
have liked it so much when she sprouted sleek green fur, but you
can't have everything.
***
Yania turned with a sigh to regard her mate. He was, as
usual, curled up in the corner, engrossed in a book.
"Inato," she remarked in a deliberately light tone. "I've been
thinking. Maybe we should charge fifteen or twenty percent for the
ideas; you know, bring in a little more money. These kids would
pay it without thinking twice. I've heard some humans will pay as
much as fifty percent to a
a collaborator, they call it."
Inato raised glazed eyes from his reading with difficulty.
"More money?" He looked bewildered.
"What do we need money for, Yania?" She reflected
briefly on a larger, more luxurious home, not to mention the
bookstore bills, and sighed again.
Inato shook
his head. "The less we charge, the more customers we get. And more
customers means more writers, and more books. And we need more
books."
"It would almost be easier to write them ourselves," she
whispered.
"That would take too long," he snapped. "And besides, writing
them is not the same as reading them." His eyes sank gratefully
back to the volume in his lap. He had nearly finished it, and
there were only two more left. He needed more books.
Yania thought of Morris, and the hundreds
soon to be
thousandslike him, all running home to spend their lives
banging on keyboards, regurgitating used ideas, and calling
themselves creative, and never any of them thinking to settle down
and get a decent job that they were genuinely capable of
performing. And then she thought of Inato, and his inhuman
addiction, and what would happen to him if he didn't get his
books. She shrugged.
"The things you have to do today, just to get something to
read."

~ Michaele
Jordan,
Ohio
ฉ2008
Michaele says her imaginary friends are so much more
interesting than her. Retired from a very dull career in office
administration, where she wrote other people's letters and news
letters, and helped them remember where they left their their keys
and their cell phones, Michael lives quietly in Cincinnati with
her husband and an ill-tempered cat. She fills her days with
swimming, gardening, crocheting, baking and
of
coursetalking
to the aforementioned imaginary friends. Her novel, Blade
Light, has just been accepted for serialization by Jim
Baens Universe. It will be published later this year.