The Artifact

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Lasar Tarrell was not a happy man. As he sat in the head office of Galacticon Publishing, Inc., he stared glumly through the window giving him a view of the humming activity, and brooded. A thick, black cigar was clamped between his teeth, enfuming the office thoroughly with thick, foul-smelling smoke. Nobody ever complained, however. All of the whirr was completely mechanical. A millennium ago this place would have been a hotbed of tom hair, small intrigues, cigarette stubs, budding romances, gripes about the boss, harried editorial assistants munching their way through the ever-present slush pile, worry about deadlines…. As Tarrell surveyed the smoothly functioning office, he thought how much things had been improved since the Terran Collapse and subsequent Galactic Amalgamation.

Of course he missed having nobody to chew out except his placid Editor in Chief, sole other human occupant of the office, but that wasn’t the real problem. The slush pile was bigger than ever, but it had lost its old savor. The usage and grammar were invariably polished, and there was a distinct lack of silly spelling errors. All manuscripts were flawlessly formatted and printed, submitted on discs which Tarrell simply fed into his own computer for preliminary screening. Nobody ever sent in a ragged pile of yellow lined sheets written by hand. Tarrell, in fact, had never heard of either pencil or pen.

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