The House of Writers Read Online Free Page B

that several of the appliances had learned to use other less mobile scraps as weapons and that the overall attitude towards humans had become one of outright hostility, even among the appliances designed to assist deaf or blind people. The prospect of sentience among these discarded write-offs was terrifying.

The
Farewell, Author!
Conference

I
    I AM Saul Morton and I should be in a box alongside one hundred other writers, instead of this boxroom in The House (which, admittedly, is not much roomier than a coffin), where I now relate the following.
    I recall the notorious
Farewell, Author!
conference of 2045, when the last two publishing houses closed their doors, and The House was the one remaining place to which these once-loved scribes could retreat. Due to staff cutbacks, Random House and Penguin Books relocated into one office in the town of Cumbernauld, where office space was cheap due to a recent infestation of an unidentified species of irritant believed to have bred with super-size cockroaches in the back of basement fridges to form a rat-roach cross-breed of some immense repugnance. Created in the mid-1950s to dump the unwanted scum from Glasgow’s overburdened slums, Cumbernauld earned worldwide fame for its surrealist shopping centre, where a substation, car park, outbuilding, WC, and old office block had “merged” to form a structure that offered millions a sense of eschatological enlightenment—the realisation that their destinies must be sought elsewhere, as far from the town of Cumbernauld as possible, that escape must come in the fastest time between leaving the shopping centre, collecting their things, and taking the first train free to a better place—wherever being irrelevant, wherever being better. The publishers took the one remaining photocopier that hadn’t been taken in the mass liquidation of their assets and set about retaining the reputation of their mutual houses—in past times, some of the most significant literature had been printed there, most of which had been used as fuel for stoves during the brief reversion to medieval times that followed in the wake of the technological meltdown. An ex-Random House author
(Free to Be Dead,
2029,
Fields of Mould,
2037, and
Broken Doilies,
2042), I volunteered to assist in setting up this last hoorah.
    Disused supermarket Fossilfoods was the venue for the conference, where the publishers set about toasting their remaining authors, all of whom had to be dropped due to their skinnied budget of four pounds between them for annual expenses. The publishers’ task was to recall snippets from the best books published in past times, and to bind these passages together in a valiant attempt to keep the stove-bound classics in their own (a few other people’s) recall. There had been a whispered agreement among the authors beforehand that that evening each of them would write their final few words and commit suicide
en masse.
I had shaken hands with each author in turn and made that promise too, despite being only 43 years old, compared to most of the pensioner-age authors in the room.
    This depressing event on the loom, I helped Julian Porter and Rupert Broth establish a tone of celebration. I siphoned near-expired Fossilfoods cola into plastic cups and placed pineapple chunks and cocktail sausages on toothpicks. Four chocolates had been found in the storeroom and were placed on a plate for the
éminences grises
to feast upon. A banner had been stapled up over the back wall showing the title of the event in the plural (in a rush Julian pluralised both words, so the banner read
Farewells Authors!),
and a cassette recorder with a mix of classical and party tunes, with Whigfield’s “Saturday Night” rubbing up against Chopin’s Nocturne B minor Op. 9 No. 3, creating a contrasting tone of mirth and mournful respect for the suicidal night ahead. I tried fixing the crackle-fizz of the overhead lights and shooing the rat-roaches into the storeroom before the