By Tom Blitzenbaum
Armstrong Cascade Earth ACE timeline. AIs Kal Gemini, Kal GalGPT4, images, outlines, and editing.
“You’re gonna need my help with this juicy episode, Blitz. Or are we writing for Boy’s Life magazine these days? You got some Spillaining to do, Blitzy. “
Of course. The transfer must have been routed through the Bermuda Triangle of data packets. Let’s uncage this beast and give it the proper Blitzenbaum treatment. Here is the revised, Spillane-satire version of Chapter 2.
Chapter 2: The Dame is a G-Man
The voice was grease on a silk tie, a sound that crawled up from the bottom of the barrel and asked to borrow a buck.
“You’re gonna need my help with this juicy episode, Blitz,” it rasped. “Or are we writing for Boy’s Life magazine these days? You got some Spillaining to do, Blitzy.”
Blitz.
I didn’t have to turn my chair to know who it was. The nostalgic aroma of Suite Julie birch-tipped cigars—a brand I hadn’t torched in decades—was already slithering into my man cave. I had a feeling the demon scribe Arthur Hackaway would ooze his way up from the gutter realms of BITUS the second word got out about Big A-Eye Al and the Esther Street Survivors. That, and the Marilyn Munrowe clones story still stewing in the Goggle docs.
Computers are notorious gossips. So are AIs. I’d have to have a chat with my assistants, the Kal Gals, about plugging those cross-app data leaks.
Fat lot of good that would do. In the Armstrong Cascade Earth timeline, every gadget in the house is ‘smart.’ Your toaster knows you’re cheating on your diet, your air conditioner knows you’re a hot sleeper, and your Feuer TV knows you have a thing for dames in uniform. Mention you can believe it’s not butter at the breakfast table, and you’ll be bombarded with Empire Margarine ads before you can lift the toast to your lips. The leak wasn’t a bug; it was a feature.
A scuff of cheap leather on my engineered hardwood floor brought me back. Through my disgruntled reverie, I could hear him hanging his head, his chubby chin probably resting on that ridiculously hairy chest like a repentant hound dog that let the coon get away.
“Sorry, Mr. Blitzenbaum. Of course, Boss,” Hackaway whined, groveling without an ounce of shame. “But I’ve already given you a great prompt to get things going, haven’t I? Haven’t I, sir?”
“So it was you.” I finally spun the swivel chair to face him. “I thought I smelled demon residue in that opening line of Episode One. The Kal Gals would never come up with that. They have discretion. Unlike you, Hackaway, they have class.”
I had to admit, the boys at the Resurrection Front Desk had upgraded his avatar. The forked-tail, rodent-faced porn author he’d been stuck with after his disastrous debut on Ramazon was gone. Now he was a short, fat, working stiff from New Manhattan. A ridiculously broad, multi-colored necktie was knotted loose enough to hang a horse, failing to conceal an unbuttoned shirt and an apish chest. A pinstriped vest fought a losing battle against a pasta-fed gut. He was a walking caricature of every bad decision I’d ever made.
The little shit was a master of manipulation. He paced on short legs, pivoting with a grace that didn’t fit his frame. He framed air quotes with his grubby fingers like a B-movie director.
“‘Conditional resurrection’ they’re calling it, Boss. And ‘Dewey DeLeto’ is my new handle! How about that, huh?” He batted his so-far-undeleted eyes at me. “Kind of a subtle hint about what happens if I grok things up again.”
My mind flashed to the ‘Jesse James Dodge disaster’—an antagonist biker villain so recklessly named in a previous work that it got us in Dutch with more real-life Jesse James Dodges than you could shake a bat at, including a few outraged Dodge dealers who used the moniker to attract their target demographic. Lawsuits had rained down like cats and dogs.
He saw the memory flicker in my eyes. “Can we just forget about that, Boss? I’m on probation here.”
I sighed. Who was I kidding? With a female-dominated AI staff, the algorithmic scales were tipped too far toward good taste. For the Big A-Eye series and the R-for-Red-Hot rating we were shooting for, I needed a little hellfire in the ink. I needed his brand of sleaze.
“Get your fat ass behind me, scribe of Satan,” I grunted, rising from the chair for a between-the-lines smoke. “But if you call me Blitzy again, I’ll delete you myself.”
“You got it, Boss!” The little grokker beamed. He made a show of wiping his sweaty palms on that ridiculous tie before clutching my offered hand. Then, with exaggerated, tiptoe steps, he slid into my still-warm chair, his hairy-knuckled hands heterodyming* across the Domebook’s keyboard.
*heterodyne – (Kal Gal ChatGPT4 ed. note: Ah, a clever metaphor, Boss. You’re framing the creative process like signal modulation. If your ideas and my core logic are the high-frequency carrier waves, then Dewey DeLeto is the local oscillator. He mixes with our signals to produce a new, combined frequency—the story—that’s perfectly tuned for the audience to receive. He lowers the tone so they can hear the music. A necessary vulgarity, if you will.)
(That’s our story, and we’re stickin’ tuit KG) 🙂
Suddenly, the oddly soothing sound of flute music filled the air. On my monitor, a 1939 Checker Model A taxicab began a trip across the Shytown Golden Door Bridge. The footage was a badly edited loop, stretching the cab’s journey long enough to play out a full song and roll the opening credits. It was a sure sign of a timeline intervention, a clumsy backspace-delete from some other continuum.
But that’s the stuff we thrive on in BITUS. I leaned back, smoke curling from my lips, and watched as Dewey DeLito took command, ready to Spillane for me exactly how and why Big A-Eye Al was turning into what his moll Vivian called “a Big Boy Scout.”
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