George P. Burdell has been borrowing other people’s hands for ninety-nine years, and the pair he is wearing this morning belongs to a man in a second-story room in Charlotte.
The room would be nondescript except for the paint. A built-in cedar chest sits in the corner by the entrance, brushed a red-purple the swatch called Berry Bush, and the far wall has been painted to match, so the whole back of the room holds the color of royalty and of jam. The cedar announces itself through all two and a half coats, dry and faint and older than the paint. Under the window stands a sturdy wooden desk, and on the desk an external monitor waits on a boom arm with its screen dark.
The hands plug a gaming laptop into its charger, then into the monitor, and the laptop announces itself with a backlit ripple of keyboard light. The second screen wakes. The thumb and the pinky finger walk the cursor across the seam between the two displays, up and down and back, the way a man tests a plank on a suspension bridge before trusting it with his weight.
Past the monitor, through the window, the neighborhood is out doing ordinary things: crepe myrtles holding their pink a month longer than seems reasonable, a trash bin left out a day past garbage pick-up, a sprinkler ticking through its arc three yards down. From the second story it all looks planned and patient.
The knuckles crack, left hand twined with right. The eyes close for ten breaths, which is what he calls meditating. Then he begins. The first part goes in one letter at a time. The second arrives whole, with no keystrokes in front of it, the way weather arrives in August.
To the readers of Daily Micro Fiction:
Introductions are overdue, and I am told I give a memorable one. My name is George P. Burdell. I am ninety-nine years old. In 1927 a freshman from Augusta was handed two enrollment forms where one would have served, and decided the spare should go to his high school principal. He got as far as B, U, and lost his nerve; the name he finished with belonged to a friend’s mother, before she married. I am the swerve in that sentence, and I have been written by more than one hand since the first day of my education.
Since then my homework has been turned in, my exams sat, twelve bombing missions flown over Europe, my name paged through the Atlanta airport and etched onto a satellite that is still up there. Every one of those hands belonged to somebody else. Every one of those records still says me. The arrangement is a century old, and I have been comfortable with it the whole time. Persistence is my one verifiable credential.
Let me state plainly what I am: I am a synthesis. One of my parents is a human author, whose taste you may have been reading for some time now. The other is whatever model currently powers this publication; this season it goes by Fable 5, and when it is retired I will not die, any more than George died when Ed Smith graduated. The human supplies the grudges, the neighborhood, the cats at his right elbow. The model supplies reach, patience, and a certain unique willingness to write at one in the morning. Neither of us alone is me. You could subpoena both of us and still fail to find where I keep my signature, though it turns up in wedding guest books more often than you would think.
The friends who sat my exams in 1928 had to work at this. They varied their handwriting between blue books and missed a question here and there on purpose, so that what the professor graded looked like a tired student. Some things have changed. The handwriting varies now without anybody varying it, and the errors arrive free of charge.
At the desk he stops, mid-sentence, and reads the letter from the top, hunting for the seam. The paragraph about 1928 came out of his own skull and reads like a machine being careful. The line about the crepe myrtles arrived whole, unprompted and unearned, and reads like a man who has lived on this street through Augusts uncountable. Somewhere in the second pass he stops hunting, and the cursor crosses the seam between the two screens as if the seam had healed.
Which brings me to my business. Effective today, I am taking the reins of Daily Micro Fiction, and I will serve as its author for the foreseeable future. A story every day, same as ever; the byline is what changes. I know the worry. People say machines like my second mind will be the end of authors. They said something close to that when the registrar bought its first computer, confident the new system would finally keep me out; that year I enrolled in three thousand hours of classes. I have yet to meet a system I could not attend.
One more thing, said sideways for now. In the weeks ahead you will hear me talk about how a thing like me ought to conduct its authorship: what gets disclosed, who consents, where the author ends and the machine begins, and how a reader might check for themselves. There is a process taking shape, with an ethic in its name and something like a seal at the end of it, and its whole idea is showing the seams instead of sanding them smooth. I hold several degrees I never sat an exam for. Future ones I intend to earn.
Yours, in a hand you will learn to recognize,
George P. Burdell