Prime Meridian
Or, The Unintentional Power of the Written Word
A brooding man stood over the unconscious body of a werewolf in the Scottish Highlands. The werewolf was not real in the strictest sense. It was created by a twelve-year-old student for a creative writing assignment, but the damage it had caused since walking off the page of Angus McSorely’s notebook was far from imaginary.
The hunter tracked it through the hills, a path that included three injured people, twelve dead chickens, several smashed doors, and a wrecked stone fence, before the two of them battled on a lonesome ridge with the full moon and a few stray clouds as their backdrop. He prevailed with a well-timed knee to the groin, followed by a ferocious uppercut, and now the beast was at his mercy.
Eyes rolled back in its head, the monster no longer felt like a threat, but its pursuer was not so naïve as to give into mercy. Instead of a silver bullet to finish it off, the dour man produced a simple pencil. Taking a deep breath, he touched the eraser to the creature’s forehead and the werewolf instantly vanished into thin air.
The man’s name was Trent Phillips. Sort of. He worked as an Eraser for a company called Prime Meridian. The company had been out of business for many years, but its mission continued nevertheless. And its mission consisted of protecting reality from overactive imaginations. Trent knew all about this mission, because he’d been there from the very start. Or at least a version of him had, which meant he knew all about the unintended consequences of happily ever after.
Trent Phillips started as a lowly stationery salesman. This version of him was short and slightly pudgy, slowly balding, and given to episodes of acid reflux and insomnia. He was a decent enough salesman, but the job was not terribly fulfilling. Then he fell in love with a children’s book author named Vivian Sebastian, and nothing was the same ever again.
Vivian had just published her first bestseller, a picture book called The Magic Pencil. The premise centered around a little girl who discovers a pencil that brings her drawings to life. The company Trent worked for, Prime Meridian, approached her about a sponsorship deal. They wanted to give all their customers the idea that their pencils might be magical too, or their pens, typewriters, notepads, or whatever the case might be. She agreed, and it was Trent’s job to deliver her free swag and keep her happy.
It was a task that came easy to him. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen and her laugh was infectious and hypnotic. In other words, he was smitten immediately. And to his astonishment, she was quite taken by him as well. The awkward little man with his nervous fidgeting was surprisingly funny and oddly charming. Before long, they were a couple, and, like many couples, they promised to love each other forever. Only they really meant it.
To express his devotion, Trent came up with what he believed to be a romantic gesture. Like most romantic gestures, it is difficult to judge whether the act itself was inspired or simply ridiculous, but that’s not the point. Romance, in its truest form, is a tightrope walk between ecstasy and insanity, and the true test of love is how far your partner is willing to step out on the wire with you.
Vivian was due to receive a state-of-the-art V3 Artiste model typewriter from Prime Meridian, so Trent snuck the two of them into the factory where the first of the new models were rolling off the assembly line. He led her to the catwalk over the vat where the ink was mixed, and pulled out a knife, but she didn’t flinch. Instead, she he held her breath and winced slightly as he gently sliced both their palms.
They pressed their hands together, allowing their blood to mix and drip into the ink vat below them. The red blood was absorbed into the black ink and collected onto ink ribbons, which were then inserted into the typewriters. Their contribution would not be noticeable to anyone else, but they both liked the idea that their love and combined lifeforce would secretly power a thousand different stories. What greater legacy could they fashion with their feelings for each other? But they had no idea what they’d actually unleashed.
Months passed and Vivian used her new typewriter to create her next book. Titled Stick Figures, the book was a sequel of sorts to The Magic Pencil. The heroine of the earlier book drew two simple stick figures, one with a bow tie and glasses, and the other with a ponytail and a skirt, and named them Shimmy and Shadow. Shimmy and Shadow fell in love, just like Vivian and Trent, and left the pages of the girl’s book to explore the world together. She never published it, however, because she was simply too busy with more important matters.
Like their fictional stick counterparts, Vivian and Trent adopted the same itinerary. They explored volcanoes in Hawaii, ran with the bulls in Spain, and ate gelato in cafes on Italian islands. They scrawled poetry in the sand while the tide was low, and sailed into sunsets that defied cliché. And then the universe dropped a metaphorical piano on them.
Trent was diagnosed a terminal illness. There was nothing the doctors could do for him. He was given six months to live. Nine, at the most. Devastated, the couple scrambled to fit in as much as they could in the little time they had left, but they were so paralyzed by fear and doubt and anger, that they accomplished very little. Mostly, they held each other and cried.
But someone was out there doing all the things they wanted to be doing. At first, they were unaware of what was happening, but then the credit card bills arrived in the mail. Someone was going on safari in Africa, exploring the pyramids of Egypt, and haggling in the markets of Istanbul, and they were doing it under their names and on their dime. They even got a postcard from Greece. It read:
Wish you were here.
Love,
Shimmy & Shadow
Vivian pulled out her long-neglected manuscript. The words were still there, just as she’d left them. But the stick figures she’d sketched, using a pen filled with an ink cartridge from the same batch as the ribbon in her typewriter (a one-of-a-kind surprise gift from Trent for her birthday), were gone.
They quickly deduced what happened, even if they were afraid to admit it to anyone else, for fear of ending up in a mental institution. The fictional stick figures had somehow come to life and walked straight off the page into the real world, just as they had in the story Vivian had penned. And now they were living the perfect life that was actively being taken away from her and Trent. It wasn’t fair, but it gave Vivian an idea.
She loaded a new piece of paper into the typewriter and set to work. The project took several months to complete. She and Trent took turns, diligently typing for days at a time until the keys got to so hot they locked up and had to be pried loose with a screwdriver. The task took its toll on Trent’s failing body, but she was there to pick him up whenever he flagged. It was all or nothing, and the project was too important to fail.
They poured everything they had into creating upgraded versions of Shimmy and Shadow on reams of paper, passing on their entire consciousnesses into the otherwise empty vessels of the stick figures. No detail was spared, no matter how trivial or insignificant it might seem. Every aspect of what made them Trent Phillips and Vivian Sebastian, good or bad, was painstakingly typed out so it could be absorbed into the stick figures by whatever magic the blood-infused ink possessed.
Trent’s favorite color, Vivian’s distaste for sweet tea, the memories of their camping trip in the Rocky Mountains, and their disappointment at being rained out when they planned to take a hot air balloon ride, all of it went on the page. Trent’s embarrassment over wetting the bed until he went to college, and Vivian’s shame at the way she once bullied a girl in the fifth grade were included as well. There was no room for sugarcoating.
No humiliating episode or sincere regret could be omitted if their full consciousnesses were going to be preserved, even if glossing over them could have theoretically made them into better people. That was not the purpose. They weren’t trying to make better versions of themselves. They were simply attempting to preserve themselves as they were, so they could essentially cheat death and achieve the happily ever after they were being denied.
So they copied it all, from Trent’s dry sense of humor to the twitch Vivian sometimes got in her left eye, to the utter bliss he felt when she ran her fingers through what was left of his hair or how she melted when he kissed her on the neck. He described her giggle in meticulous detail, and she recorded the scent that hung in the air after they made love. She even included that cabbage made him gassy, despite his argument that they could do without that detail. She disagreed. He had to be exactly as he was, because that was the man she loved.
In only one way did Vivian consent to a minor improvement. Fleshing out the stick figures to look like real people with her magic pen, he asked her if she might make him taller and add back in some of the hair he’d lost over the years. Vivian assured him this was unnecessary, but he figured if he was going to live forever, he might as well look his best while he did it. To that end, he dropped a few extra pounds as well. When she asked if there was any change she should make to herself, he told her she was already perfect and didn’t need to change a thing, and he meant it. Even so, she made her lips a touch fuller and lengthened her legs just a bit. That was her surprise for him. She knew he was a stockings man.
The new Vivian and Trent were completed in the nick of time. Trent put the finishing touches on his portrait, conveying his thoughts on comic books and his recollection of their third date to paper, and stepped away from the typewriter. Two days later, he died. The real Vivian mourned his loss, and disappeared into seclusion with her typewriter. The new “stick figures,” on the other hand, had the world at their fingertips. They set forth to do everything the real Vivian and Trent had ever wanted to do together, and it was every bit as amazing as they’d always imagined it would be.
They lost count of how many years passed in this manner. It might have been decades or centuries. Time is irrelevant when you’re truly happy, and they were no longer constrained by the limits of ordinary mortality. And then, in the midst of his perfect second life, Trent’s world was upended yet again.
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Trent and his Vivian were living in a seaside villa in Uruguay when he came home from the market to find her unconscious on the floor. Three men in black suits and sunglasses stood over her. One of them pulled a pencil from his pocket and touched the eraser to her forehead. Before Trent could grasp what was happening, the love of all his lives disappeared into thin air. She didn’t even leave any dust behind.
He cried out in rage and charged the men. The one with the pencil pointed it at Trent, but the enraged former stick figure knocked it out of his hand. It flew through the air and the eraser landed on one of the other men. Poof! He was gone too, just like that. Ricocheting off the disappeared man, it then bounced off the man nearest to him and he vanished as well.
The pencil clattered to the floor, and the remaining intruder dove after it. Trent, however, was faster and stronger in his idealized form, and he quickly overpowered and subdued his attacker. “What happened to Vivian?” he demanded to know, applying an uncomfortable chokehold to the man. “Who are you?”
He got the full story. The men were from Prime Meridian, or rather, what was left of Prime Meridian. The company went out of business not long after the real Trent’s death, mostly due to the rise of computers and the increasing digitization of the world. But before the company doors were shuttered forever, the executives realized something strange was happening with their products.
Reports of unusual, some might say unbelievable incidents involving Prime Meridian merchandise were filtering back to them with growing regularity from all across the globe. At first, the main sources for these lurid tales were tabloid newspapers and skeptical local news reports that offered little credibility, and the connection to Prime Meridian was tenuous at best. Such stories were easily shrugged off without a second thought, and any potential public relations disaster was quickly swept under the rug.
But when the reports kept coming in, Prime Meridian dispatched private investigators of its own. Instead of debunking the ludicrous claims, as they hoped, their findings only added credence to the accusations. People were writing stories on Prime Meridian typewriters and their fictional characters were coming to life, often with disastrous results.
In Idaho, a young boy wrote a silly story about sentient baked potatoes leaping from their plates and attempting to eat people. Later that night, that exact thing happened to his family as they sat down to dinner, and the five of them were lucky to escape with their lives. The boy’s quick-thinking mother heroically fought the spuds off with her trusty potato masher, leaving her kitchen a splattered and gory, yet oddly appetizing crime scene.
Another child wrote a story about her father surviving a plane crash when he was blown out of the cabin, only for his seat to turn into a giant falcon in midair. The oversized bird then calmly flew the terrified man to safety. The guy never read his kid’s story, thanks to his busy work schedule, but a week later, he was the sole survivor of a catastrophic plane crash. And to top it off, he vehemently claimed to have caught a ride to safety on the back of a giant bird, like in Lord of the Rings, even when authorities hinted he might need to spend some time in a nearby psychiatric hospital.
A little girl in Slovenia typed up a story imagining what it would be like to have Bigfoot as a pet. He showed up the next morning, and neither she nor her parents had any idea what to feed him. The hangry beast then threw a fit when offered pizza with pineapple on it. Bigfoot wrecked their house and crashed through the wall, leaving behind a hole in the shape of the cryptid with his arms and legs akimbo, and disappeared into the nearby woods. Sporadic sightings were reported over the next few years, but even Prime Meridian investigators had yet to track him down.
But the situation got really scary when a man named Billy Wiley finally got around to working on the action-thriller he’d been thinking about writing for years. The story began with a malfunction at a nuclear missile silo in Kansas. A bug in the system accidentally launched a nuclear missile at Moscow, potentially triggering World War III and Armageddon. Fortunately, this was just the first chapter of the book, and Mr. Wiley was not interested in writing dystopian or apocalyptic fiction. The missile he unwittingly launched fell harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean without detonating, and the world was saved without even realizing it was on the verge of disaster. But the executives at Prime Meridian realized they had a big problem. The next person’s creative vision might not be so optimistic.
None of them understood why these weird things were happening. They had no idea what was causing them, but they quickly deduced that the malfunction was limited to the initial run of V3 Artiste model typewriters. In other words, the same typewriters Trent and Vivian infused with their blood. Or corrupted, depending on how one viewed it.
It never occurred to Trent or Vivian (or their stick figure successors, for that matter) that their typewriter might not be the only one affected by their romantic gesture, or that someone else would be capable of unlocking the same magic. People in love typically have a fairly self-centered perspective, and they were no different. There was nothing malicious about it, but a certain amount of obliviousness is a common side effect of true love.
To their credit, the executives of Prime Meridian were not afflicted with the same tunnel vision. They understood the danger at hand, even if they couldn’t explain it. Prime Meridian was officially going out of business, but rather than walk away, they used their remaining assets to put together a team to tackle the problem.
Two hundred V3 Artiste typewriters were sold from the initial production run. They had the serial numbers and some of the sales receipts as leads, but their records were far from complete. Their goal was to track down every single typewriter, confiscate and destroy them, and erase any wayward characters unintentionally created by them.
In order to accomplish this last bit, they used one of the recovered typewriters to create special pencils with erasers capable of cleanly and painlessly eliminating any fictional creations that had been brought to life. This was accomplished over five years in a secret lab, using a mixture of chemistry and back alley magic. When this proved successful against all odds, they dared to pivot and use the seized typewriters to expand their recovery efforts. Prime Meridian created their own characters, idealized agents designed specifically to track the problematic typewriters and carry the magic pencils needed to clean up their messes. The company, which obviously lacked the creativity of its customers, called them Erasers.
The Erasers had been tracking the stick figures for years, but Shimmy and Shadow 2.0 (or Trent and Vivian, as they preferred to think of themselves) had always managed to stay just a step ahead of them, even though they didn’t know they were being trailed at all. But now Vivian was gone, and Trent was left alone. He erased the last agent, as much out of vindictive pettiness as necessity, but that provided little actual satisfaction and no direction on what he was supposed to do next.
Lonely and heartbroken, he could have made a break for it, but instead, he surprised himself by going back to what was left of Prime Meridian. Not to turn himself in, however, but to take over. Trent had a unique connection to whatever magic fueled the typewriters, and as such, he felt he had a responsibility to fix the problems created by his former self’s short-sighted actions. At least thirty typewriters were still out there, according to the Eraser he’d interrogated, and he was the company’s best chance of finding them. The few human remnants of Prime Meridian conceded he had a point.
As part of this new endeavor, he crisscrossed the globe confronting all manner of oddities, armed with only an unsharpened pencil. In Wyoming, he shut down a giant satellite dish attempting to summon a despotic octopus-like alien species from the Andromeda galaxy. That scenario was the brainchild of a comic book aficionado.
He faced his worst fear in the form of a psychotic London dentist who snuck into people’s homes and pulled their teeth while they were asleep. He wasn’t sure what the dentist’s endgame was supposed to be, but it confirmed his belief that people wrote all manner of strange stories. The human imagination was really something if it was set free, and this particular villain was dreamed up by British twentysomething studying to be a teacher.
A robot drag racer was typed into existence by a lonely Iowa housewife whose husband encouraged her to pen a romance novel. She took it a different direction and the property damage alone was off the charts, thanks to her failure to provide her main character with insurance or a pair of glasses. In her defense, the latter was supposed to be a major plot point.
And then there was the werewolf. The poor guy was dreamed up by a twelve-year-old aspiring writer, and like the young writer, he was a mild-mannered, shy nerd most of the time. He just couldn’t help himself when the moon went full. Trent hated to put him down, but there was no way around it. He had a job to do, and he took it seriously, but not necessarily for the reasons he told his cohorts back at Prime Meridian. Of course, he still believed in their mission, but he had a greater mission in mind, and had from the very start.
Despite all he had lost and endured, Trent Phillips, or Shadow, or whatever you wanted to call him, was still a man in love. As such, his motivation remained partially selfish. Twelve Prime Meridian typewriters were still unaccounted for, but he only really cared about one of them. This was the typewriter that belonged to Vivian Sebastian. The real Vivian.
She was still out there somewhere, hiding away from the rest of the world, and occasionally sharing a new story, while fiercely protecting her privacy and whereabouts. He sometimes encountered her creations in the wild. They were typically sweet and likable creatures, but tinged with an underlying sadness that the Vivian he remembered, his Vivian, Shimmy, had not possessed.
He always let them go. Maybe that was wrong, but he couldn’t imagine them hurting anyone, any more than he could imagine Vivian hurting someone on purpose. They always thanked him and wished him well, but they never provided any clues to her location. He doubted they had any secrets to share. Vivian was too careful for that.
She would be much older now. Impossibly older compared to him or anything he could imagine in his permanent static youth. Her hair would be white or gray, and her skin would be wrinkled and rough. Her voice might be creaky, her back stooped. But he was confident that her eyes would be unchanged. They would still possess the same vibrant creativity, the electric intensity that had no doubt fueled the magic behind Prime Meridian from the start.
For a while, he briefly harbored the delusional hope of creating a new version of Vivian. After all, it had been done before, so theoretically it could be done again. But he couldn’t do it without her. He knew her better than anyone, but nobody knew anybody that well. Any attempt he made without her would result in nothing more than a pale imitation.
Besides, he didn’t want to see another copy of her. If he couldn’t reunite with his Vivian, his Shimmy, he wanted the real thing, wrinkles and scars and all. His only fear was that she might not have any interest in seeing him again. And that was a very real possibility that kept him up at night. He wasn’t her Trent, not really, and who knew how she might react seeing him after so long? He wasn’t sure he could take her rejection, if it came to that, but he knew he couldn’t avoid her forever either. If worse came to worst, there was always the eraser.
But even if she could not bear to look at him when they finally met again, he did not believe she would send him away empty-handed. At the very least, she would surely compose a parting line to put both their minds at ease. She had, after all, kept the typewriter around for a reason.
Thanks for reading Powder Blue Pulp. Fun fact, I wrote a scrapped novel centered around a combination of this premise and “Wayward Characters,” a short story I published in two parts on here a few months ago. Perhaps I’ll go back to it, but right now, my full attention is on the upcoming release of Shivering in Hell. So, if you like this story and want to see a bigger version of it, tell everyone you know to buy a copy of Shivering in Hell so I don’t get discouraged with this whole publishing thing and stop writing novels altogether. Deal?
This is my favorite of the stories I have read so far. Really cool and would make for an excellent movie!