If we’d had any idea how Lookouts would resonate with people - and resonate it has - maybe we would have done it last? It was something we came up with when we were having lunch at Arby’s, for fuck’s sake. Maybe we should eat at Arby’s more often.
The second concept is Automata, nineteen-twenties crime fiction which unfolds in a time where “machine intellect” has been outlawed. It wasn’t always, certainly, and the problem of what to do with the existing “stock” of fully sentient, mechanical citizens endures. Detective Regal and his stenophone Carl Swangee traverse the margin where these worlds overlap.
Sometimes, when we are retained to perform “creative services,” we will deliver three proposals: the one we want to do, and two others which are horrible on purpose. This policy has bitten us before, where the client chooses the very last thing we want to do in the universe, but generally this dark machine outputs the correct result. This week isn’t like that: we actually, one hundred percent, fully and thoroughly want to do all of these. It would be our distinct pleasure to tell you this story.
We’ve got two more Paint the Line stories essentially ready to go, and two more Cadobodo Tubu Samudai tales to relate, but the opportunity to investigate (and to respect) the bizarre fungi that cluster on the undercarriage of our streamlined process was irresistible. We don’t really have time for it, truth be told; we’re up to our asses in work, all of it mysterious, tinkered on beneath the ruthless gaze of multiple non-disclosure agreements. The relationship we’ve developed is very funny to me, and by we, I mean you and I. For some reason, my work isn’t real unless I show it to you.
Everything we’re working on won’t be seen for months; it’s excruciating. I’m writing constantly, and I have nothing to show for it.
(CW)TB out.
