As for the content move, stuff will still be findable where it used to be, so no problem there. Might have some temporary broken links, but ultimately the Writings page’s links will all point to their intended targets. Thanks for understanding :)

(To see my progress, hit the jump.)

Below is a screenshot of the current Writings page. Titles with a vertical red bar next to them are still in page format. Everything either has been changed to post format (most of the short stories) or was already in post format (Night Switch).

The room grew darker as Jason slowly stepped back from the desk.

“Do not fear, my master.”

Jason felt the bed against his calves and stopped moving backward. Desks couldn’t talk, he knew. And there was no drawer that could accommodate a human. But then, that girl had been sending e-mails to her boyfriend about a dog talking to her—maybe there was something in the room, some hallucinogen. Jason shook his head vigorously and then looked around. Everything was as it had been, in focus, realistic, crisp.

“M-master?” he muttered. After a few moments’ thought, he decided to try addressing the voice. “What are you?”

“Open the desk and you will find me.” The voice responded immediately. Jason knew: it could hear him and understand his words.

“What’s going on? How can a desk—”

“I’m not a desk. I’m inside the desk. Open the top right drawer.”

“What will happen if I open the drawer?”

“You will be given the power to protect something you love.”

Jason laughed at this. It was too much like some of those television shows he watched and wrote about on his site. The entire scene, he realized, was straight out of that one he’d compared to the Bible. In this situation, he should smile and accept the gift, opening the drawer and the door of fate with one action.

He laughed again.

“I have nothing like that.” Jason remained where he was. He felt calmer, more collected. Weird things were happening and his life was turning into a TV show and he could deal with it if he thought of it like that. First demons, then conspiracies, now talking desks.

“That is not true,” responded the voice. “Now, open the drawer.”

“What are you, anyway?” asked Jason. “I’m not opening anything until I know why I’m talking to a piece of furniture.”

“I am El.”

El? Jason recalled the words of a raging Anonymous of New York: El was a name for God. Jason frowned at the desk.

“Open the drawer yourself, then.”

“Yes, my master.”

The top drawer on the right side of the desk burst open in a flash of light. Jason covered his eyes in order to avoid blindness, and when he removed his arm a large tome had appeared on the floor before him. Its worn cover was a solid brown. Jason stooped and flipped through a couple pages. They were all blank.

“These pages are the pages of the future,” said the book, and Jason jumped in surprise. Jason could see that there were countless ripped pieces of pages in front of the blank ones. He estimated that about half the book had been removed. “It is your turn to devise their contents.”

Jason knelt down and picked up the book.

“You just need to do one thing for me…” it said, and then the room was pitch black.

Sorry for not having an update on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday. It just won’t happen. I missed it. Hope you can forgive me.

“Hi, Joe.”

“Hello,” said Joe, not looking away from his monitor. He deftly struck the right arrow key twice and the down arrow key once and was ready to arrange the next falling block.

“Could you please pause that, at least, when I’m talking to you?” asked Ms. Harris, sighing. She had long since given up on reprimanding Joe for playing games on the job, and could only hope for an ounce of attention when talking to him.

“Not… yet!” answered Joe as he slid a 4×1 block across the screen and let it drop into place, clearing the entire screen. He did a little victory dance with one arm as he paused the game. “Alright.” He turned his chair around and faced his boss. “What is it?”

Joe was in a good mood; he was on track to beat his previous high score in Tetris.

“How would you like to work a real job?”

“What do you mean?” asked Joe, frowning. He could sense his good mood drifting away, and with it, his potential new high score.

“Upper management is eliminating your position, is what I mean,” replied Ms. Harris. “We can’t drop you along with your job for obvious reasons, so we’ve made sure that there’s an opening for you in the day shift.”

Joe couldn’t help but smile at the thought. A normal day job! A normal life under the sun! The anger and frustration his boss caused him quickly overpowered the joy, however, and he asked:

“What if I don’t want to be switched?”

“You’re free to quit whenever you want.”

“What if I don’t want to quit or be switched?”

“Your union rep might be able to give you some advice.”

“Hah,” he chortled, “you want a strike, after all.”

“Why would I want a strike?” asked Ms. Harris, confused. “We want to keep these trains running smoothly.”

“Trains?” Oh, that’s right, remembered Joe. I work at a government corporation that runs trains. Guess it slipped my mind, what with not doing anything at work. Somewhere between training and Rapunzel’s Escape, I forgot. “Right.”

“You already have the necessary training to do real work here, Joe. Do you want the position?”

A day job would mean colleagues. It would mean real work. It would mean no more games or e-mails or fun websites. No more Meow Meow Anim or Blue Sky. Well, whatever, figured Joe. It’s not like those games were becoming more exciting the more he played them alone at night. And his favorite website was unavailable.

Real work sounded like a pain, but Joe needed to keep a job.

In case dorito ever found his girlfriend.

He needed a career, so that he could live an honest life, marry, and raise a family to love God.

“I’ll do it.”

Jason was curious. He caught a train across the bay and got off in downtown Berkeley. Ten minutes’ walk later he was standing in front of an impressive-looking apartment building, each unit with its own beflowered balcony.

He stood patiently on the sidewalk, examining traffic with a measured look of concentration, until the garage gate opened to let a resident out. Jason turned, smiled at the cautious driver as the hybrid car rolled up the driveway and onto the street, and then ducked under the gate as it began closing. He grinned to himself as he readjusted the laptop case under his arm. Infiltration successful.

Jason entered the first floor of the apartment complex and was pleased by the sight of a television relaying the latest NBA happenings to an empty common area. He stopped to buy a Coke from the vending machine next to the television set and then made for the stairs.

After climbing five flights, he found himself on the top floor. There was only one door leading off of the beige carpeted hall, and he strode right up to it.

Jason produced his Macbook Air from the laptop case and opened it up. He launched his web browser, checked the cached web page he’d spent most of the train ride reviewing. He scanned the contents of “How to pick locks with a Macbook Air” one last time and then powered off the computer. He closed it and got to work.

Within a minute he was inside the apartment.

“Just like on camera,” he chuckled to himself as he closed the door behind him. He examined the room carefully and then moved on to the next. He passed from kitchen to living room to bedroom to second bedroom… he had known that the Cal girl had an extravagantly luxurious apartment, but actually being in it made his own one-room abode seem all the more inadequate.

Jason had come for information but the luxuries at hand were enticing. He jumped onto the bed, awed by its size and softness. The mudkip bed sheets were hilarious and didn’t detract from the experience. Jason reveled in the comfort for a few minutes, and then he remembered his mission—to look for clues. He would discover for himself why she had summoned that demon.

He got up and walked across the room to the desk. The girl’s hideous Apple desktop machine reared its ugly head and Jason cringed a little.

“What are you afraid of?” came a booming voice.

Jason’s heart beat quickly and his legs trembled as he looked around the room, searching for the speaker. Had he been caught? He fumbled in his pocket for his LAW1 badge and tightened his grip on the Macbook Air.

“I’m over here.”

Jason looked at the desk with wide eyes. He was sure of it—the voice had come from one of its drawers.

At eight o’clock in the morning, Jason stepped up into the LAW1 van and removed his sunglasses.

“Hey, Jason,” said Frog, his eyes, as usual, fixed to his screen.

Jason stood just inside the door.

“Where is she?”

“Who are you talking about?” asked Frog. The rest of the crew, all present in the van, remained silent.

“The girl,” replied Jason. “The target. Where is she?”

“In the hands of LAW3,” Frog said mildly. “Why?”

“What’s going to happen to her next?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you want to know so badly?” Frog frowned at his screen. Jason fell silent. “I told you, right, Jason? Some things are secret. Some things some people can’t discuss. Some things you simply can’t know.”

“I just want information.”

“Information is a dangerous thing, Jason.”

Jason bit his lip in frustration. He was curious. He wanted to know. He had received an e-mail the evening before from the administrator of Blue Sky. The amateur photographer had somehow linked the girl’s disappearance to Jason’s posts around the time of the demon sightings, and he wanted to know where Jason had spirited her away to. Jason hadn’t responded and had no intention to, but the question bugged him—where was Marin?

To further confuse matters, Jason’s IRC channel operator Meg-Sho had reported that Meow Meow Anim enemy number one—a terrible spammer who called himself “king_j”—had come back, demanding that “dhsfags,” Jason included, return his girlfriend to him.

Jason stood there for a few minutes, mulling it all over. A couple of the Oakland team threw him quizzical glances.

“Are you going to get back to spying or are you going home?” asked Frog.

That was when it struck him.

“Frog, what was the e-mail address of the guy to whom she sent that cryptic e-mail, right before she summoned the demon?”

“Drop it, Jason.”

“Where can I access the logs?”

“Drop it, Meowmeow,” joked Pablo.

“So I need to pierce the obfuscation with my Macbook Air, eh, Frog?” muttered Jason, turning his back to his colleagues and examining the spring foliage outside the van.

“You know what you doing,” replied the man.

“Call me if you see anymore demons.”

With that, Jason stepped down out of the van and began the two-block-long trek back to his apartment, laptop in hand. There was no way of knowing for sure, but he had the feeling that before long he’d awaken to an e-mail from Frog, sent once more via the contact form on Meow Meow Anim, demanding that he get outside and rock.

Joe remembered how he had found Blue Sky in the first place. He fished his mouse of the wastebasket and directed his browser to Meow Meow Anim. As he had feared, Meow’s blog was unreachable.

“Piss,” he muttered.

Joe loaded up a chat program and entered MMA’s IRC channel. Bad memories of his first ever ban returned to him as the user list appeared, the abysmal moderator Meg-Sho at its head. As soon as Joe was in, he fired off his question.

guest187442: where’s meow?
@meg-sho: was just here
@meg-sho: left minutes ago
guest187442: you’re a moderator
guest187442: what happened to the damn site
+scottf9000: no one here knows :\

Joe furrowed his brow. Scott was one of the whinier members of Meow Meow Anim. Joe could count the number of times Scott had contributed intelligence to a discussion on zero fingers because Scott never contributed anything.

guest187442: shut up scott. meg-sho what happened to the damn site
+scottf9000: you must be that king guy again :o
+scottf9000: that vulgarity and presence, yep

Joe typed harder. What did it matter who he was? He wanted information.

guest187442: SHUT IT
guest187442: I DONT HAVE TIME FOR YOUR WHINING
+physics556: what’s going on, king?
+physics556: you seem more
+physics556: agitated than usual

Ah, Mike. Joe hated Mike, too. The guy was quick to equivocate and disliked arguments. When he was around, it was simply less fun to spam insults.

guest187442: dhs stole my girlfriend
+scottf9000: hahahahaha
+scottf9000: i call bullshit
@meg-sho: same
+scottf9000: it just wouldn’t be fair for you to have gotten one before me
@meg-sho: lol
+conedrill: dhs = football team and girlfriend = mom more like
+conedrill: eh? ;)
+conedrill: ehhh? ;)
@meg-sho: :\
guest187442: …

Joe was red in the face. Cone had never had a sense of delicacy. Dumb liberal, too. Joe calmed himself on his side of the screen by walking to the vending machine at the end of the hall and procuring an orange soda before proceeding.

guest187442: so i don’t know where she is
guest187442: and i want to know where she is
guest187442: think it’s connected to blue sky going down
guest187442: something about dhs media suppression
guest187442: i think meow might know something
+scottf9000: listen to this guy
+physics556: he _was_ saying something about that, earlier. dhs something
@meg-sho: meow works there after all
guest187442: no way *rolleyes*
guest187442: anyway i was thinking i might come here
guest187442: and get some answers
+conedrill: why don’t you try asking your god or something
+conedrill: or, you know, king

Joe sighed. Of course he had tried that.

+conedrill: you could rely on another human being once in a while
@meg-sho: you say some good things sometimes, cone
meg-sho poses
conedrill poses

Joe closed his IRC client abruptly. Cone, despite being a total asshole, was usually right when he was serious. Joe understood that Cone was the distant second brightest MMA regular, and that when the guy was trying to be helpful, he succeeded more often than he failed. There was no doubt in Joe’s mind that Cone was trying to be helpful. Anyone with half a brain and half a belief in God would help a guy find his girl.

Joe brought up his e-mail client, loaded dorito’s message, and clicked reply. He typed furiously,

“You’re a snoop, right? Find Rin. Please.”

“What the hell is this?” demanded Jason as he hammered F5 on his laptop keyboard.

He was sitting on his bed in the dark of his room, window shades keeping the unpleasant truth of daytime at bay. No matter how many times he refreshed, his blog didn’t show up. No error message, no connection problem, nothing. He seethed. How would he update his site? How would he tell his readers about his exploits?

Jason gazed off into the blue glow of his LED monitor.

Is this the doing of that “LAW3 Media Branch” Frog mentioned last night? After returning to the LAW1 van, Jason had been shipped straight home without a word. He hadn’t had contact with any of his colleagues since. When he brought up the news on his television, there was nothing about the protest. Cheery-faced weather reporters had replaced the usual newscasters, describing how fog would once more envelope San Francisco this evening.

It was always the fog, thought Jason. The fog covered everything, hiding it from view.

Jason remembered something gleaming on the reporter’s shoulder.

A golden badge.

He flipped his television set back on but the news program was over, succeeded by an hour-long ad slot. It wasn’t there to look at anymore, but he was sure he’d seen it earlier. A golden badge. Just like those of LAW3. No, Jason was sure of it—it was a LAW3 badge. The weather reporter was an agent, a puppet of the government deployed to deceive the people.

First the hearing (and how well that went, Jason thought to himself), then the encounter with the terrorist girl, and now this “media branch.”

Jason pieced it all together, and the walls echoed his conclusion:

“IT’S A CONSPIRACY!”

He fell back on his bed, laughing. There was no way it could actually be a conspiracy, he knew. If this were some amazing television show he’d watched once, and if he were its main character, then it might be a conspiracy. But he knew what he knew. The world was too disorganized for conspiracies. The fog that hid the bay from his apartment window hid people from each other. No one knew anyone’s true motives.

Jason clenched his fists and then relaxed them. He knew he had no business caring. He had embraced the Establishment when he had begun working under it. He’d never liked radicals, either. He didn’t want to be like the insane terrorist girl.

He turned his head and looked over at his work machine, its web browser dutifully attempting to connect to his blog.

“Pierce the obfuscation with my Macbook Air, eh, Frog?”

From now on, I will only post the next installment if I have a minimum of one comment on the latest installment. To illustrate: if there are no comments on Night Switch 31.29 by the time the next release day comes around, Night Switch 31.30’s release will be postponed to the next release day. So if you read Night Switch, please comment!

Next, a bonus for you readers: if I get a minimum of two comments from different people on a Night Switch installment, I’ll put up a bonus installment on the next week day. This bonus does not apply to bonus installments; so we’re talking a maximum of four installments a week. The minimum number of comments for a bonus installment will increase as I attain more readers.

Night Switch comment-posting rules:
- no “more please”
- no incoherence/gibberish
- spam/off-topic is alright so long as it’s funny
- if I reply to your comment, my response comments don’t count toward bonus installments
- the first person to comment on an installment gets a bonus point (these can be redeemed for rewards later)

It was another night of discomfort on the job for Joe as he sat dejectedly at his desk, browsing archives of poorly-made Flash games. A day had passed since he had seen the photos of the protest on dorito’s blog, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that he had done wrong. Should he have called that insane girl and tried to dissuade her from doing her thing, whatever it might have been? Joe ground his teeth and squinted agitatedly at the screen. It might have been better to risk his job and the reputations of those around him in order to save a girl.

But what had she ever risked for him, he wondered, and then he prayed for forgiveness from God for being such an ungrateful wretch.

She had done everything for him. Joe knew he didn’t deserve such a beauty, that he didn’t deserve anything much less feelings of love. Yes, she was quirky, but she was funny, and into the same things as he, and she was hot! Joe made a sweeping blow at his desk in frustration, knocking the mouse into the wastebasket.

He should have made that call.

“Is something wrong, Joe?” asked Ms. Harris, cautiously poking her head into the cubicle.

“Why would anything be wrong?” responded Joe.

“I heard a loud noise—”

“I’m hearing one right now, too,” Joe interrupted, raising one eyebrow at his boss. She had always had an unpleasantly loud voice, Joe felt. Maybe that had developed from her lording over too many subordinates throughout her career. What she needed, Joe decided, was God to put her in her place. Humans simply weren’t meant to boss each other around like that.

“Alright, Joe,” sighed Ms. Harris. “Alright.” She stole back to her own office, leaving Joe to loosen his facial expression and turn back to his monitor.

When he did, he saw that he had a new e-mail in his inbox.

From: dorito <soraphilia@dorito.us>
To: Me <king_j@hotmail.com>
Subject: urgent news

• hello “Anonymous of New York,”

  dorito of blue sky here. i figured to let you know this via e-mail because dhs media suppression is currently in control of my blog. if telecoms catch this message, it might be bad for me, so you owe me one k?

  rin’s caught up in something bad it seems, she disappeared during the protest. got some shots of law3 personnel rushing the hall but they confiscated my baby before i could upload. i don’t know what our friend is doing, but hopefully they won’t do bad things to rin… anyway, i don’t really know what to say here, man, i’m sort of at a loss. just passing the news.

  -dorito george

Joe froze at his desk.

It really was, as he had feared, all over for his too-many-screws-loose girlfriend.

Brief descriptions, from top left to bottom right:

First is a sketch, from memory, of the art for the “Cold-Eyed Selkie” creature card from the latest Magic the Gathering set (MTG). Second is my artistic rendition of spambot (that dude who sometimes writes The Amazing Adventures of Flak) (TAAOF). Third is another sketch of the same fellow (TAAOF).

Later!