No Hope Press Limited

Michael Johnson

Description

No Hope Press Limited takes place in a not-too-distant future when "totally ecological " magnet wave power. replacing pollution generating types of energy production, has nearly destroyed the planet. Magworld inhabitants, not needed for work since magnet energy provides for all needs, spend their time viewing idiotic Magscreen programming and consuming artificial burritos. Markus, helped by his non-ambitious gourmand roommate, Hobart, is determined to achieve success even in their magnetically destroyed world. His novel The Life of Markus Aurelius Harrison lll, has been accepted by Elphina, the lovely reader at Freeboot Press Limited. Freeboot has accepted Markus's Life. but there will have to be lots of changes!

Sujets

• Limited
• Press
• Hope
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 28 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669856382
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

No Hope Press Limited
Michael Johnson

Copyright © 2022 by Michael Johnson.
 
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022921729
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-5640-5

Softcover
978-1-6698-5639-9

eBook
978-1-6698-5638-2
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 12/15/2022
 
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
848524

“Hello, No Hope Press Limited, how can I …?” Markus did not finish the receptionist’s parrot ph rase. The antique digital telephone was not connected. Service had ended years ago because of non-payment of the monthly bill. Since then, the traditional communications technology and everything else had been entirely replaced by magpower computators, a form of extremely powerful computer that ran on the energy generated by magnetic waves. Still, Markus felt it was his duty at least to attempt to go through the office routine once a day. Or night. Since the windows of the offices of NHP Ltd were curtained, boarded up and painted over in black, it was impossible to know whether it was day or night. The clocks were busted, unplugged, unreliable, lost or hidden. Neither Markus nor his co-editor, Hobart, had a wristwatch. Just out of curiosity Markus peeked under the corner of a draped window, where he knew there was a one inch space unpainted and not boarded over. It was probably day. Down in the street magwagons moved people and containers around on the street in front of the former warehouse building. It was either early morning or late afternoon or early evening, judging from the amount of sunlight. There wasn’t that much difference since the advent of magpower, a type of energy that, so full of promise in its glorious beginnings, had eventually caused vastly destructive and irreversible damage to the time-space continuum, including a blurring of the photon differential between “night” and “day”.
As President, General Manager and Chief Editor of No Hope Press Ltd, Markus had a duty to collect the mail. He hoped there would be an important letter or package. In fact, Postal Service had stopped just after the previous occupant of the loft, Fast Sewing Service, had decamped, twelve years ago. Several abandoned sewing machines still lay scattered on the floor. Hobart, Markus’ co-editor, who inhabited the same space, had tried to repair one several years ago, but without success. There was no mail service but, inexplicably, manuscripts and letters were often left in front of the street door. Markus shifted his seating position on the warehouse floor where he had been uncomfortably trying to carry out his editorial duties. Looking down to discover the cause of his rough perch, he discovered that he had unknowingly been lodged on top of a manuscript bound in book covers that had been left years ago at the loft door by a long vanished anonymous writer. He took it up and re-examined the book. It was thick, about four hundred pages, but all the pages were blank except the top part of the first page. This page was stained with blood. A pen mark showed that the author had left a long, irregular scratch as his last official act. A cover letter was attached to the manuscript. The letter explained why the opus was incomplete, although it was important to remember that these cover letters were often inaccurate, if not totally falsified. He would collect the mail later.
The blood stained first page of the manuscript itself began:
“Since the beginning of the epoch of magpower, a civilization founded on the exploitation of magnetic energy, the horrific events of its origins have been hidden or told in a false and altered form. Research on the feasibility and practicality of extracting energy from the natural magnetic waves that surround us began in late 1944. At that time Afanasy Plebeshenko was a top scientist in Soviet efforts to forestall the early attempts of the western democracies to explore and develop a program of magnetic wave power. Both sides realized that the winner in this race to put into effect a totally new, inexhaustible and immensely powerful form of energy would dominate the world forever. British and American agents planned a coup that would decide the question. With the aid of Hungarian and Czechoslovak double agents within the Comintern, they were able to kidnap Plebeshenko and to convince him to defect and to join the efforts of the democratic governments to monopolize magnetic power technology, a force potentially for both good and evil that dwarfed the power even of the nuclear bomb. Plebeshenko was appointed head researcher of the American magnetic power research program centered in East Hoboken. This is his story …” There the manuscript had ended.
The cover letter explained that the manuscript writer’s headless body was found in 1948, approximately two years after its demise. The subject of the manuscript, Plebeshenko himself, had been killed around the same time by foreign agents and his body also mutilated. During his few work years in East Hoboken, however, the scientist Plebeshenko had greatly contributed to the discoveries that would transform the nature of the world forever.
Markus, now looking at the ms once again, had no doubt of the literary value of the work, whatever its veracity. But No Hope Press Ltd could not publish it. The market for half-page long history, biography or political science studies was small. Even smaller than No Hope’s annual budget for printing charges.
Now that the receptionist’s work had been done, and the blood-stained page given yet another glance, Markus turned to a larger and more important task. He had, finally, after years of viewing and reviewing, to make a definite evaluation among the hundreds of manuscripts that had been delivered to NHP, often anonymously, over the past twelve years, and to decide which one(s) should be printed by No Hope, in the event, that is, that they were ever able to collect enough money to pay even for the most primitive form of printing. They were three and a half months behind in rent payments for the loft. Fortunately, Mr. Hong was not the world’s most exacting landlord, possibly because the building had long been declared unfit for human habitation, as well as a general hazard, an environmental danger and an aesthetic blight, even compared to the current state of general dilapidation. They might be able to pay down the back rent by an additional thirty-one neuros within two weeks, depending on the market price for Mag Supplement Vouchers. (MSVs were government supplied coupons intended to allow the recipient to purchase a minimum monthly food supply, but they were often sold for cash by recipients). Literature, Markus believed with all his intellect, ought not to be stifled by the petty claims of mammon. Poe had been squeezed of his life’s blood by such concerns. They had driven Melville to a clerk’s job. Hawthorne had reached subsistence by putting forward the least valuable of his work. No Hope Press Ltd was not going to be dragged down by the world of philistine demands!
Which one? Scattered on the loft floor, partly in front, partly in back, and partly on top of a long-broken sewing machine, were piles of manuscripts. Most were computator processed or at least typed. A few were handwritten, including the longest, which comprised over a thousand pages of dense, smudged pen and pencil marks. This was the most fascinating of the lot. The text itself was almost undecipherable. The title, as well as Markus could make out, was If I Can Die . The action of the novel, if it was a novel, took place, judging from frequent repetitions of the name, in a city called Burbank. Markus had never been able to locate it on a map.
Not all the mss were written in English or in any of its fragmented dialects. At least one was apparently written out in hieroglyphics, but in a mixture of Mayan and ancient Egyptian signs. Mark gloated over the piles of mss, a literary treasure of incalculable worth. He had read many sections of the novels—it was best to think of them as novels, since even the clearly non-fiction efforts were of such doubtful accuracy—and was enthralled by their oddity and inaccessible meaning. Parts were straightforward, yes, such as the beginning section of one of the novels, which describes a visit to a shoe store. After forty pages, the protagonist, who has a fatal infatuation for candy bars, finally decides on a pair of blue sneakers. But the straightforwardness of some parts hung in a generally wayward framework. The shoe store episode was imbedded in an historical novel about medieval Surinam. A second ms, a science fiction novel, told of a strange world in which an enslaved population was forced continuously to view 4-D computator entertainment videos almost identical to those obsessively watched by a volunteer public even now on earth. These were among the most coherent of