This Blue Ball

This Blue Ball A Weblog Novel
Presented by Wayne Miller
Version 1.0
http://thisblueball.com
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
© 2005 Wayne V. Miller
The following is supposed to be a novel. The text is not my own, but signed over to me
by a man unknown to me but for a few communications through email. When he first
approached me, I was surprised that my spam filter let him through. "I've tried several
times before," he admitted. "Why in the world," I replied, "would you give me this to be
posted online? Why not post it yourself?" "Because," he wrote back, "for me it is not
fiction. But it must be fiction, and so someone like you, who could never believe in its
contents, must be the author." "I'm not the author," I sent back to him, rather indignant,
"and I would never present myself as such. In fact, if I were to post this for whatever
reason, then it would be with our exchange prepended to the document." Almost
immediately, he replied: "Perfect! Your attestation will provide the very evidence I desire;
in this case, nothing could appear more fictional than the truth."
We communicated a few more times, but I could make no more sense of what he wrote
me than what I've picked out above. I suggested a pen name or anonymous publication,
but he insisted that such border fictions would undermine the fundamental one. When he
sent me the document, I couldn't help myself, first from reading the whole thing, then
from suggesting a number of changes and edits for readability. He accepted them
wholesale, and then added: "Now the text belongs to you." None of my subsequent
emails were answered; the email address ceased to exist. His name proved to be a
dead-end.
I've researched as much as I can without seeing any piece of the text confirmed or even
suggested in reality. None of it appears under anyone else's name. Still, it is against my
better judgment that I share the document on the Internet, more or less as it was shared
with me. It is protected -- and freed -- by a Creative Commons license. Make of it what
you will.
Note:
Go read the last page to see the preamble. It is the 39th entry, but it was placed first in the
text. Read it now, or when you've finished the text.
Weblog: This Blue Ball

No. 1 -- There won't be dates in this weblog, for reasons of security and caution. Entries
will appear no more than one a day, but not necessarily when I've submitted them. As we
progress you'll get a sense for why I am so obsessed. Perhaps it will suffice for now to
point briefly to the genesis. I am dedicating this little website to the memory of a good
friend, whom I never met, a self- designated hacker by the nom de raconteur of Craig
Phissure. A small number of years ago, hacker Phissure came across what he thought was
undeniable evidence of the existence of aliens -- extraterrestrial intelligence. In an effort
to publicize this discovery, Phissure established a website and founded a society with
some dozen of his closest associates, a group which he officially dubbed the Society for
this Blue Ball in a Big Black Void. I don't think the other members thought much of this
name, inasmuch as its acronym did not play on a sexual or scatological function, but they
recognized and respected Phissure's role as leader and dominant voice. The "Frequently
Asked Questions" portion of the site was a monument to Phissure's style and influence,
and we'll have occasion to return to it by-and-by.
What the FAQ won't show is that within six months of its publication, a series of
mind-boggling coincidences removed every society member from the surface of this blue
ball. Each death in turn was deemed an accident, except one case involving a gunshot to
the head in a dead-end room in a seedy hotel. They all had a certain plausibility -- a
single-car accident here, a heart attack there, a hit- and-run over there -- if you did not
tally them out and timeline them. Since these were for the most part virtual associates,
spread across the continent, there was no one person left to do that work.
The website disappeared shortly after the untimely death of Craig Phissure, may he rest
in peace. Not only did it disappear, but the fact of its existence became impossible to
prove if one did not have the site mirrored locally, on one's own drive. All the major
search engines displayed no knowledge of the site. Whois and other registration sites
denied any once or present ownership of thisblueball.org. Attempts to repost any amount
of the original texts led to servers crashing, files disappearing