Media inquiries: Margaret Brown, Publisher, Shelf Media Group, www.shelfmediagroup.com, 972.375.4956, margaret@shelfmediagroup.com

Shelf Media Group announces The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door video contest. Read a chapter from this forthcoming book by acclaimed author Stephen Stark, then create a one- to two-minute video based on or inspired by the chapter. Post it on YouTube with the tag TFAOAFGND by April 1, 2011. All video content, including music, must be your original work. Three winners will be chosen by Shelf Media Group based on creativity, successful evocation of the chapter, and number of views on YouTube. The winning entrants will have the opportunity to have their video included in the official app for the book and will also receive a signed limited-edition copy of the book. The chapter appears below.

About the novel and the chapter:

The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door

After years on what the brilliant comic Bill Hicks called “the flying saucer tour,” comedian Ellen Gregory has hit the big time with a sitcom called Girlfriends. And when she leaves it in the middle of a shooting season, after being kidnapped by and later shooting to death a stalker, it is not just the biggest blunder of her so-far brilliant career. It is the only thing she can do to survive the spiritual crisis of having reached for and got it all.

All except for love, which is the last thing she expects to find when she flees to the childhood home in Iowa she left half her life ago and hasn’t returned to since.

But Michael Webster, the Ph.D. student she meets in a grocery store, may be everything she’s ever longed for but could not have. But can she really have him? After a whirlwind romance – the only real romance she’s had with anything other than her ambition – Michael is killed and Ellen is maimed in a savage shark attack off the coast of North Carolina.

When Ellen recovers, she finds that, thanks to the black box, the “failed” device he created in the research for his dissertation, he may not be dead all. The black box, a computer with a mind of its own, seems to enable the user to enter parallel universes, where the slightest change in plans can have profound consequences for the future. In the other world she discovers that she and Michael never went into the water the day of the attack. He is still alive and she still has her left foot.

But is this real, or real even in the unconventional sense of the black box, or is it the wishful thinking of a grieving woman? Like a powerful drug, entering into the world of the black box is both addictive and dangerous. But how do you say goodbye to the one to-die-for man who does?

And the chapter:

The novel does not operate in strictly chronological time. Although it takes place over a period of several months in the spring and summer of 2001, as the story plays out, there is considerable plasticity to time.

Michael Webster is a thirtysomething scientist trying to finish the research for his dissertation – a prototype human-machine computer interface that enables the user to operate a computer by thought alone. Wiry and pale, with dark, curly hair, he has spent much of the last decade of his life in a computer lab, or in a medical lab with his business partner, Soraya Ouellette, MD, who has been helping him with brain research to finish the prototype for the Black Box. But something goes awry with the prototype, which starts doing something it should not (as Michael sees it) be able to do.

Ellen Gregory – the title character of the novel – is about the same age as Michael (32), a comedian-turned-white-hot-TV-star who abruptly leaves her TV show and LA to hide out at the childhood home she left slightly before her 18th birthday and to which she hasn’t returned until this crisis of the self. Her departure from LA is not very long since she shot to death the stalker who tried to kill her in her own home. She makes an appearance toward the end of this chapter, but without her “wholesome” girl-next-door blond hair. Instead, she sports the haircut and dye job she did on herself in a bathroom in LAX as she was leaving.

When Ellen and Michael meet – chronologically later than the moment in this chapter – they become quickly attached. He’s one of the few people she’s met who has no idea who she is – the same is the case with his circle of friends. But it is to be a tragic love affair. On the last day of a beach vacation – the next day he will return to the lab and she will return to LA – they are savagely attacked by a tiger shark. She loses a foot. He loses his life.

But such is the strange magic (so to speak) of the Black Box that in it – in the alternate worlds to which it provides access – he is still alive, and she can still be with him. Except that being in another world is extremely dangerous to the body in this world.

The Black Box
Michael Webster had not slept in something like two or three days, and while this would have been nothing ten years ago when he was 20, these days, he was nearing his limit.
Old man, he said out loud, but there was no one but his computer array to hear him.
He had also only had one real meal in the last couple of days, but he was used to working through meals, and had the vaguely gaunt, incredibly pasty appearance to show for it.
Right now, he wasn’t exactly sure what day it was, or time. This wasn’t an unusual state of affairs, either. His office at the university was in the basement of a 1950s-era building that had been repurposed with a lot of very expensive processing power for very serious number-crunching by physicists and mathematicians who took number-crunching very seriously. The office had no windows, but it was aggressively air conditioned pretty much year round (despite the cold Iowa winters) because of the heat that the servers generated. This had become his favorite place on earth, largely because he had, in the last few years, been nowhere else, except for the annual beach trip he took with friends at the beginning of each summer. That one-week trip represented about 80 percent of his social life. It had been more than a year since Soraya had broken up with him, and he had not had a lover since. This wasn’t because he and Soraya still worked together closely, it was just because he didn’t have the time.
He was almost there, almost to the virtual grail that he had been seeking as soon as he had realized that it was possible.
He rebooted the computer and picked up the headset and put it on again, then reset the Black Box.
The headset consisted of a custom-made and -built goggle display that fit tightly over your eyes and blacked out everything else, headphones that did essentially the same thing for your ears, and a sort of modular headband that fit tightly against the temples and other key brain areas so that its sensor-stimulators could interact with the head of the user. Right now he was almost literally goggle-eyed from weariness and wearing the headset (but also from frustration and anxiety).
A few hours ago, it had seemed that he was perilously close to a breakthrough, that it was at last going to work. He had actually dropped in—he had been inside the sweet blue sphere that he had designed—but then it had crashed. It had taken hours to find the bug in the boot code, and now he was giving it a final try before he would give up and go back home and go to sleep for a day or two.
When he plugged in again, he had the sense he got sometimes when he’d spent too long coding. His field of vision was no larger than the frame of his monitor.
He hit the safe switch, which shut the system down after a pre-determined time just in case you happened to induce some grisly neurological horror (another Soraya precaution).
He saw flashing lights, and there was a hum that was actually binaural tone code that
The Black Box

Michael Webster had not slept in something like two or three days, and while this would have been nothing ten years ago when he was 20, these days, he was nearing his limit.

Old man, he said out loud, but there was no one but his computer array to hear him.

He had also only had one real meal in the last couple of days, but he was used to working through meals, and had the vaguely gaunt, incredibly pasty appearance to show for it.

Right now, he wasn’t exactly sure what day it was, or time. This wasn’t an unusual state of affairs, either. His office at the university was in the basement of a 1950s-era building that had been repurposed with a lot of very expensive processing power for very serious number-crunching by physicists and mathematicians who took number-crunching very seriously. The office had no windows, but it was aggressively air conditioned pretty much year round (despite the cold Iowa winters) because of the heat that the servers generated.

This had become his favorite place on earth, largely because he had, in the last few years, been nowhere else, except for the annual beach trip he took with friends at the beginning of each summer. That one-week trip represented about 80 percent of his social life. It had been more than a year since Soraya had broken up with him, and he had not had a lover since. This wasn’t because he and Soraya still worked together closely, it was just because he didn’t have the time.

He was almost there, almost to the virtual grail that he had been seeking as soon as he had realized that it was possible.

He rebooted the computer and picked up the headset and put it on again, then reset the black box.

The headset consisted of a custom-made and -built goggle display that fit tightly over your eyes and blacked out everything else, headphones that did essentially the same thing for your ears, and a sort of modular headband that fit tightly against the temples and other key brain areas so that its sensor-stimulators could interact with the head of the user. Right now he was almost literally goggle-eyed from weariness and wearing the headset (but also from frustration and anxiety).

A few hours ago, it had seemed that he was perilously close to a breakthrough, that it was at last going to work. He had actually dropped in—he had been inside the sweet blue sphere that he had designed—but then it had crashed. It had taken hours to find the bug in the boot code, and now he was giving it a final try before he would give up and go back home and go to sleep for a day or two.

When he plugged in again, he had the sense he got sometimes when he’d spent too long coding. His field of vision was no larger than the frame of his monitor.

He hit the safe switch, which shut the system down after a pre-determined time just in case you happened to induce some grisly neurological horror (another Soraya precaution).

He saw flashing lights, and there was a hum that was actually binaural tone code that was in the same frequency range as beta brainwaves, and suddenly there were colors—what would have looked like a pixellated screen if this were a screen and not a retina-painting goggle display. And then he dropped in.

What he expected to see was what he had designed, and what he had seen a few hours ago: a three-dimensional correlative of a common computer desktop, a virtual space where a user could operate using nothing but thought. His operating system had leapfrogged the tools that others in the field used to manipulate icons and data. That was what his collaboration with Soraya had done for him.

It turned out that the whole brain-hand-keyboard interface was totally unnatural, no matter how completely second nature it seemed to someone like Michael who had spent so many hundreds of thousands of hours at it. But that was Soraya’s point, it shouldn’t be second nature, it should just be natural.

That old interface involved several different neurological processes in completely different areas of the brain (something that he did not know until he met Soraya). His interface tapped directly into the areas of the brain where things happened. No middleman. You didn’t have one neurological process handing off to another to another. It was intuitive in the purest sense.

Ultimately, it wasn’t about laptops or desktops, but computers that didn’t exist yet, computers that would be so small you would carry them in your pocket or wear them, and you would be connected to the cloud—servers that existed somewhere—through ubiquitous bandwidth at the same time you were connected to the real world, and you could be on a treadmill, or on the john, and you’d get an idea and you’d just open up that file, mentally, and make your notes, fire off a message. There would be the prosthetic reality of the computer right next to real reality, and the prosthetic reality would augment the real reality, and it would be like what people like Michael’s heroes Doug Englebart and Ted Nelson had been predicting for thirty-plus years.

And it wouldn’t be some kind of matrix-like horror show, it would be a thing that came close to approaching—if not actually achieving—the singularity, and whatever knowledge you had would be augmented by knowledge that was out there, in the cloud, but instantly attainable with nothing more than the flick of an eyelash.

You’d sort of be able to just think your way through a task. Productivity would leap exponentially, by a similar order of magnitude to the one it did when offices switched from paper to computers, when computers went from command line to graphical interfaces. And then it would grow even more as people locked onto the idea and built things around the concept. It would no longer be point and click to open a document or application, it would be point and think. It was to be a 360 x 360 environment (he would have to remember that, point and think). The implications were well understood. But this was—when it worked—still very primitive, very much a proof of concept.

Michael had begun his research on this transparent man-machine interface during his master’s days. It was largely viewed to be an impossible, or at least not-yet possible, artificial intelligence sort of endeavor. But that was what appealed to Michael about it. And Michael viewed it as within reach, a natural step in the evolution of the graphical user interface, and as far as he was concerned, there was nothing in computing that had not seemed impossible before it had been done.

The way he viewed the black box (so far a name for it had not come to him) was that it should be simple. A proof of concept first. And so he had begun with the simplest possible version of an open source operating system, and then had built onto and around it with a combination of brain research and the help of the university’s gridded computer system (a reasonable facsimile of a super computer), and a tool he had spent almost two years helping to develop. A genetic coding development environment that enabled something akin to coding on steroids. You could go from concept to application at very high speed because now you could pull strings of open source code in seconds that might otherwise you might have had to hard code. And, of course, you had to be smart about what you were doing—you had to have the right kind of heuristic model.

And you had to have just the right combination of arrogance and stupidity and naiveté to think that you were the guy who could pull it off. The code was now so good, so elegant, that it didn’t take up enormous amounts of storage or draw vast amounts of memory or energy—it could fit easily on a modified laptop.

It had yet to work in any sustained sort of way, but that was merely a speed bump. Over the last few months, Michael had had glimpses, moments that had said, Dude, you are the Man. But these were mostly punctuation in the midst of long strings of nothing, of coding and research and theorizing.

His life during this time had been like crossing an ocean but becoming increasingly uncertain that there was another side. Until today.

The pixelation made him dizzy—a feeling like motion sickness—and then, as the image resolved, the sensation went away. Another one took its place. Mostly it was confusion. The virtual space he thought he had created—and which he had glimpsed—had disappeared completely. What was in its place was confusing not so much for what it was but for what it wasn’t.

Suddenly, when the pixelation had gone, he was not in a mid-winter computer lab in Iowa, but on a beach.

He reeled a little. Too little sleep, too much caffeine. He tried to reach for his desk, something to give him poise. But the beach was so real. Almost more real than real.

It was the same stretch of beach where he had been each summer for the last seven or eight years, and it was as real—the constant sound of the waves, the heat of the sun, the shimmering water—as if he were there.

In video games and computer animation, people talk about the physics of the environment, meaning if your car bumps up against a wall, does the wall react like a wall and does the car react like a car? Do sparks fly? Do metal and paint get scraped off? Do you careen from the force? Even the best games had physics limitations. Unless you programmed it that way, you couldn’t break down a wall, or dig into the earth. This all took enormous processing power.

Like a dreamer not sure if he was awake, Michael put his feet hard into the sand and could feel every last grain against his bare feet, the soft and shifting sift of it—no matter that he was [really] wearing thick socks and hiking boots. He stood up—in actual fact, he was still sitting—and walked across a stretch of sand and climbed up a sun-faded wooden stairway and sat down again. He couldn’t guess the season except to say it was summer, and he was wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and he had a view to the road.

It was the fragrance of the environment that was the most remarkable—the salt air, the vague scent of fish rotting—that made him think that the physics were beyond impeccable; they were remarkable, like nothing he’d ever seen.

On the stair, he could feel the heat of the sun-soaked pressure treated timbers against his feet, could feel the solid heft of them beneath him. Despite it being a virtual environment, he couldn’t help but wonder if he should have put on sun screen. A woman ran down the road toward him. This was no virtual woman, but a real, 3-D, flesh and blood woman. Her running shoes dug spectacularly into the sand at the side of the road; the muscles visible in her calves, above her shoes (the little white balls of footie socks), were perfectly rendered. Everything about her—her short, spiky black hair, the pale skin of her face, reddened slightly from exertion and damp—was perfect. There was no pixelation. There was none of the blur that you would expect from motion in any kind of display. None of that weird seasickness that came in video pans.

He decided to call out, just to see what would happen. Hey, he said, but she did not respond.

Since this world was not real in any conventional sense, it didn’t matter if he made a fool of himself. And it had been so long since he had been with a woman. He shouted, Hey, black-haired girl running on the side of the road.

This brought her to a halt, and the way her feet hit the sand, it sent splashes of sand up.

You’re beautiful, he said because she was, and since she was not real there was no reason not to.

The way she looked at him was peculiar—she clearly knew him. But since this was no more real than a dream, he said, I haven’t been laid in ages. You’re beautiful.

She laughed. She had a grin that could kill you, he thought. There was something in it that was almost magical. She had a brilliant aura of femaleness that left him almost dumbfounded (it really had been too long since he’d got laid).

Michael, she said, shaking her head knowingly, You’re the one who’s beautiful.

Okay, this was good. Not only did she know him—which, from a certain angle, could be interpreted as this just being his dream, his own erotic fantasy—but concomitantly he had the most intense sense of déjà vu he’d ever had. Both here and there: Here in his lab where he wore boots and socks. And there next to the ocean, with his feet in the sun-warmed sand. A sort of double déjà vu.

She came to where he was.

You think I could shower first?

He tossed her the towel he suddenly realized he was holding. Sure, he said. Or not. I don’t care.

This was a place where he had been and this was a situation—he knew this with absolute certainty—he had been in.

But of course this was not possible. There was something going on here that was completely beyond him, beyond his machine, beyond his code—and not something that the black box should have been able to do. It was a failure, but one of a spectacular sort. But the girl. He knew what she smelled like if you came close and pressed your nose against her neck, kissed the downy hair at its nape. He knew the taste of her sweat.

Michael wasn’t sure what to feel. Should he feel good that he’d created his own strange erotic paradise—but it was too soon to know about that—or good that at least something had happened without crashing, horrible because the environment he had been trying to create seemed to have completely disappeared, or totally and completely insane because this was just so spectacularly nuts that it defied every law of sanity he thought he knew.

Then, just as he started to follow her inside, the machine’s safety kicked on. Everything began to pixelate and now he was in his office again.

She, the girl, however, was still in his head. A glimpse of the curve of her neck, the spiky black hair, and then very pale down along the skin that rose from her shoulder to her hairline.

What the fuck was this?

Excerpted from The Final Appearance of America’s Favorite Girl Next Door by Stephen Stark. Copyright 2011 Stephen Stark. All rights reserved. To be published July 2011 by Shelf Media Group.