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 and various forms of intimidation: identity theft, surveillance by investigators for who knows