One thing The Missus has always said about my writing: if it amuses no one else, it amuses me. Personally, I think she exaggerates. It doesn’t all “amuse” me. [wounded sniff] But one story, well, I really enjoyed writing it. And it still makes me grin to re-read.

Like many stories I wrote in the ’90s, “Modem Operandi” was born of a writing exercise. This one had a single simple premise: write a story about an online community whose members are dying. That was it. No length restrictions. No gimmicky bits about the opening and closing sentences. No genre specified.

At the time this exercise was presented to me, I’d just finished the first draft of my first book — a mystery which, as it happened, centered around email and electronic bulletin-board systems (BBSes). And I was feeling a little bit burnt out by the requirement to ensure that readers understand the technology. (Remember, this was the early 1990s: no Web, for one thing; online communication itself was via low-speed analog modems whose throughput was in the range of mere hundreds of bits per second. Email had begun making inroads at some companies, true. But by and large this was still very much terra incognita for my presumptive audience.)

So I decided to have fun with the exercise — just write and enjoy it, on the assumption that I wouldn’t have to explain every freaking thing to readers who at least understood the basics.

“Modem Operandi” was the result: a sort of comic-noir first-person story which (although 10K-ish words in length) took me only a couple days to write.

(By the way, the narrator of this story, one Jack Frame, has left a legacy in Merry-Go-Round: his son Kevin plays a minor but significant role.)

It was always too long to appear in print publications of the time, although I did submit it to a couple. Now, some e-zines might accept it… but the technology is woefully out of date, and honestly, I don’t feel a compelling need to re-write it around the Web, Google, even IRC over BBSes.

As always with these longish “short fiction” pieces, I’ll link from here to an opening excerpt. And there’ll be a link at the foot of that page which allows you to download the whole thing as a PDF.

Anyway: here’s “Modem Operandi.” Enjoy!