Chapter 7
“Sarah, now that we have secured Tom as your patron forever and a person who won’t come into my bookstore no matter if his house was on fire and I was the only bookstore where he could buy a book on how to put it out. Can we talk about computer security classes here at the library? It would be a valuable hour or two for your patrons. You would also be saving them a bunch of money. It is criminal that people are charged to remove this malware, when all they are doing is installing a program and letting the computer run for a few hours. The actual time spent actively doing anything might be fifteen minutes and you’ll be lucky to find someone to do it for you for less than one hundred dollars. Many charge two hundred or more. Even if you don’t know how to do it, you could just open Gemini or ChatGPT, and they can walk you through it step by step. But the fastest and easiest way to deal with malware is to be smart enough to not let it infect your computer in the first place.”
“Laura you are preaching to the choir, we have computers that we let patrons use and we are constantly cleaning malware off of them. We hand people a page, before they use the computer with instructions on library computer usage, sites not allowed like porn sites, hate group sites, that kind of stuff. We don’t filter anything, but we do restrict sites, because kids are always walking by, looking at what people are browsing. I don’t know how many times I have walked by and seen the very sites that we restrict on the screen. Then the patron is offended when I boot them off the computer for the day, for breaking the rules. Then they claim they didn’t know. I tell them I handed you a sheet with the rules, there is a copy of those rules taped right to the table by the mouse.”
“Sarah, people have an aversion to reading instructions, which is what I like to do if I download a new program or game with a nice thick manual. Is to play around with the program for a little while. That way when I do read the manual, I’ll know what the author is talking about especially if it’s a jargon filled manual. Because often the manual writer doesn’t explain all the jargon. That’s because everything is rushed, the programmers are making last minute changes to the software, minutes before release, yet the manual was created weeks beforehand. So you get your software and the manual and they don’t match perfectly, then you have to go onto reddit or the software’s discord and get help from other users. It’s such a backward system. Instead of rushing to a release date, the software and manual should only be released when it’s ready. Can you imagine going to the bakery for a pie and being handed a half baked pie, with a sheet of instructions on how to bake it, but the cook baked it three quarters of the way and the manual thinks it was only half baked. You go home, follow the instructions and you have a pile of ashes instead of a pie.”
“The manufacturer would probably lose money if the software wasn’t released on time. It’s always about the money, Laura.”
“I know Sarah, so how about the classes?”
“I think it’s a great idea Laura, when can you teach the first class?”
“I can’t, we have a TV show taping on the grounds and they have been having some issues so I need to be on my property. I’m sorry, I thought maybe your IT department might be able to run it.”
“I hate to perpetuate a stereotype, but I’m afraid in this case, I must. Our IT department is one guy. He barely speaks to me, if I told him he had to get up and speak in front of a group of people. He would stand up and walk out of the building and I’d never see him again. Then because it was your brilliant idea to terrify him, I would be dropping off malware laden computers daily at your store for you to clean and return to the library. Is that what you’d like to see happen, Laura?”
“Ah, no.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so, maybe you could trick Lucy into doing it. Tell her it would be good mojo for your store, she could even wear a Genre’s t-shirt to advertise your store while she is here. Maybe even recommend some books that you stock for more information about computer security best practices.”
“Well we don’t stock any nonfiction books but our sister store does and they could be shipped directly to the patrons home address. Alright, I will go back to the store and talk to Lucy. If I can convince her that it will be good for sales, she’ll do it for sure.”
“Why do you have the poor girl working on commission?”
“No she works on a salary, but she is very diligent and if she thinks it’ll help sales, well she would almost certainly do it. But the whole point is to make people safe, so if you have some good books on computer security you can give Lucy the list and just have her recommend those.”
“But that won’t help your sales, Laura.”
“This isn’t about making sales, it’s about having people make smart choices online. Maybe we could ask folks to drop off computers that they are replacing, then we could wipe them, install linux and you guys could give them to new homes. But for the time being lets focus on computer security. Speaking of which, I need to get home, a scan I was running should just about be done.”
So I left the library and went back home to check on the laptop, when a nice little trap occurred to me. I hoped that I wasn’t going to catch anyone in this trap, but unless they did something nefarious then I wouldn’t catch anyone.
***
When I got home the scan had indeed completed, I rebooted the computer and Offline defender found one threat.
> Threat detected: Trojan:Win32/Agent
> Status: Removed
I did another quick scan just for the fun of it and that one came back clean. Perfect, so I carried the laptop downstairs to the store and stuck it under the counter. Then I went outside again to speak with Phoebe and Pappy, to see if they had made any sales and to let them know that the show would begin later tonight at five. They had two A-Frame signs, one was set up on the sidewalk near the driveway, the other was right by the open front door of the bus. Both signs said 'The Urge to Read' a traveling used bookstore.
Pappy sat at the wheel as if at any moment, he might drive off. Phoebe was lying on her back on the bench seat directly behind Pappy, reading ‘Divine Right's Trip’.
“Hi Pappy. Enjoying the book Phoebe?”
“I had forgotten how much I loved this book, I haven’t read it in over fifty years.”
“I’ve got dibbs on it Laura, you’ll have to wait your turn.”
“Don’t worry Pappy, I actually have two copies. I have a softcover of the novel itself and I still have my original Whole Earth Catalog, where you only get a few paragraphs per page. I’d read a few pages about Divine Right’s adventure before getting lost in the catalog. It was very distracting but also so cool. Do you want to borrow my softcover?”
“No, I can wait, thanks Laura, I’m focusing on sales right now.”
“Have you made any sales?”
“No, but Phoebe made a couple of video sales to Woodstock.”
“Well tonight the opening episode is going to begin around five, I don’t know how late you’ll want to stay open.”
“We’ll stay open until they turn the lights out, right Pappy?”
“Yep, we’re here to make sales.”
“Phoebe we can set up a table for you out front, if you want to do some calligraphy classes and Lucy could put it up on our website to draw in customers. I do hope once the filming starts that you’ll get some business.”
“Just having the video terminal means we generate sales for everyone. We’re just starting out and Pappy and I don’t need much more to exist Laura, just get enough food for the three of us and Pappy’s house, my trailer and now the bus. Life is so cool. I had wanted this for fifty plus years, now that it’s here, I’m going to suck the marrow out of every moment. Be here now, man!”
“You sound like Divine Right, Phoebe.”
“He was pretty smart for a stoner. Or at least he gets there in the end. But it’d be cool to do some classes while we are here, and I don’t want to let Willow down.”
“You two could never let Willow down. Your happiness is more important to Willow than book sales, as long as you are making enough to stay off the Renaissance Festival tour. I think that is why Willow revived her dream of opening up Urge as a bookstore. So you could stay in Woodstock fulltime. Do you need any calligraphy supplies? There is a stationary store in Saranac, I could send someone if you tell them what you need.”
“I’ve got everything, if you bring me a table I have a few lawn chairs, Pappy do you want to sit outside with me while I do some calligraphy?”
“Sure, I’d like that. Besides Urge needs a rest, I just drove us all to the moon and back again, so after the cold of space a little sun in Lake Placid sounds nice.”
I went into the store to get a folding table, and grabbed Lis to carry a couple of folding chairs. If Phoebe got any calligraphy customers they’d need a chair to sit in while they wrote. I’d barely had the table set up before Phoebe started making a sign out of a standard sheet of paper. But I enlisted Lis to help me drag out this huge whiteboard that Anais bought to solve mysteries with. But now Phoebe could use it to advertise her calligraphy. I want to take the introductory class at the very least over the next nine days that they are here. As Lis and I were bringing out the whiteboard, Bobby arrived with bank box full of paper files and a USB drive with video files of the evening before.
Once we had set up the whiteboard and I’d given the markers to Phoebe, Phoebe sprang up from her lawnchair and wrote Calligraphy Corner Classes, five bucks. All written in a beautiful flowing calligraphy script.
Bobby and I walked up to my room, I took the box from her and placed it on my desk. Bobby sat in the folding chair that her mother had occupied just a few hours before.
“Bobby, did your mother tell you I had spoken to her about the sabotage surrounding the bake off.”
“Yes she said that you accused her of sabotaging the contest herself in order to generate interest in the show, through gossip and possibly local news coverage, that kind of thing.”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“What do you think of that theory?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean?”
“I mean do you think your mother has sabotaged the contest?”
“No, my mother would no more know how to infect her computer than she would know how to do brain surgery.”
“All you need to do nowadays is open ChatGPT, ask it how to infect your own machine and then ask for the steps to disinfect it. The AI will cheerfully tell you how it is done and how to undo it.”
“Well, you know that, because you know a lot about computers, but the only thing that my mother knows about AI is what they say about it on TV. One day on the news they report that AI is going to find a cure for cancer and the next day they report that AI is going to take every job in America. All I know for sure is that mother would no more think about chatting with an AI than bobsleding.”
“So you are certain then that your mother is not the saboteur.”
“Yes, completely certain.”
“Alright Bobby, maybe your mother had you do it.”
“Me? No, it wasn’t me. I have no motive.”
“If your mother asks you to do something you do it right? That’s what your job as her assistant entails, does it not?”
“Yes I do what mother asks within reason, but while I’m younger than my mother, I’ve never had a technical bent. I’m not stupid, but my interests lie elsewhere.”
“Where is that Bobby?”
“I don’t really want to say.”
“Bobby, anything you say in this room is between you and me, unless I find out you somehow drugged Niall and almost killed him.”
“I would never do something like that. I don’t know just how diabolical you think my mother and I are, but we don’t have the knowledge. I don’t know where to buy drugs besides the dispensaries where you can buy marijuana. I can’t prove this stuff to you. But we just don’t know any drug dealers.”
I had been relatively easy on her, much easier than I had been on her mother, it seems I’m going to have to push harder.
“If you really want me to believe you Bobby. Tell me where your interests lie?”
“You are as nosy as my mother, fine if you really must know. Fan fiction and web novels, I’m sure that doesn’t meet the high standards of a bookseller. But it’s what I like to do. I am slightly obsessed with it, maybe more than slightly.”
“Alright, no judgement. I read a couple pieces of fan fiction and actually loved them. It was great being transported back to a world that I loved. One fandom or multiples?”
“Really Laura you know about fan fiction?”
“Yes of course, after I read Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell which I loved, I had to see if fanfic was actually any good. One of my favorite romance authors, Ali Hazelwood started out writing Star Wars fan fiction. I even know about web novels, I really want to read the Wandering Inn and Beware of Chicken. The fantasy book club read the Wandering Inn and I listened to them discussing it and it sounded really interesting, especially the goblins. So come on, I showed you mine so you show me yours, are you into one particular fandom or multiples.”
“Mainly the Lord of the Rings.”
“I read two different Lord of the Rings fan fics and I remember thinking as I was reading this is the closest I’ll ever come to reading Lord of the Rings again for the first time. The first one I read was Home with the Fairies and the second had two books, Don't Panic and Okay, Now Panic. They were both much better than the stuff I edited that year. I felt like going in shaking my boss and telling him we have to stop publishing the dreck we have been. I have seen the light and it is rising over Middle Earth. Ok Bobby, prove to me that you love Middle Earth. What are your two favorite quotes?”
“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future.” Galadriel of course, and Bilbo’s “Not all those who wander are lost.” I throw in a third just because it is funny “All’s well that ends better.” Hamfast Gamgee.”
“Alright, Bobby, anyone who knows all those Lord of the Rings quotes can’t possibly be evil. So do you read or write or both?”
“Both, but lately it’s been a lot more writing and not as much reading. I’ve been kept pretty busy organizing this contest, I’ll just be glad when it’s over. Yes, Laura I know that makes me sound like I have a motive to sabotage this thing, but the sabotage has just added to my workload, not lessened it. I’ve had to do double the work of finding a venue then finding another. Before you solved the champagne shipping issue for us, I was calling every trucking firm from Plattsburg to Albany. I handled all the travel and hotels for the contestants. When all I really want to do is write.”
“Then you should submit an application to Bianca, we have seven openings in our collective, you’ll live simply. But the food is great and we have a chore wheel, but most of us knock out our chores in under an hour a day. The writers get to write the rest of the time and I have the store to keep me busy.”
“But I only write fan fiction, I’m not a real writer.”
“If you put pen to paper or pixel to screen, if you put down words in any manner, you are a writer. It doesn’t make you a good one, but you are a writer. Just because someone writes literary fiction doesn’t mean he is a good writer, just that he is a writer. Nonfiction, fiction, and fanfiction all writing in my book. What have you got to lose submitting a few stories? I would imagine that Bianca wouldn’t give you one of the free slots, you’d have to pay room and board but it’s really cheap compared to the rest of the world. You could even tell your mother, You are just moving from one mansion to another.”
“I don’t think she’d allow it?”
“Well, I’m sure that Bianca won’t be asking for her input. If it’s a money issue you can always get a part-time job in town to cover room and board, that’ll eat into your writing time, but you never know what you could see out there. It might make excellent material for your next story or maybe the one after that. Hell you could be the next Ali Hazelwood, and become rich or at least richer. Would you like to see one of the bedrooms, they just have been redone. If you aren’t sure about signing up, the writers hold writer’s workshops which kind of simulates being in the collective, though those are more expensive, but still cheaper than a hotel for a week.”
So I took her up to the third floor and she looked in all of the unoccupied rooms. She liked the smallest one the best, she thought it had the best view of the mountains. I think that she would make a very agreeable roommate. I thought her mother was pretty awful for the way that she treated her, even more now that I have gotten to know the woman and of course we had bonded over fanfic.
Now just one final hurdle from me, we walked downstairs and I went behind the counter and got Bobby her mother’s laptop.
“Here you go Bobby, tell your mother that there were two pieces of malware on her computer and that they have been completely removed. She should change her passwords because it is likely that whoever hacked her copied her passwords. She should sign up for two factor authentication on every site that she uses that offers it. But the computer itself is as clean as the day that she bought it.”
I really hope that my trap isn’t sprung by Bobby, I genuinely like her. But if Roberta’s computer gets reinfected in the next couple of hours then the evidence is going to point clearly at Bobby. Then I’d have to disinvite her to the collective and that would suck. She is a writer, who writes for the sheer joy of writing, not for the profit. Fanfic authors don’t get paid, they can’t until they create their own intellectual property to play in. Which in a way makes them the purest of writers, the ones doing it for arts sake. Because they just can’t stand to see the story end in their beloved world.
If I owned the Tolkien literary estate I’d find the very best of the fanfic and offer a split on any profits made, then shop it around to the major publishers. It’d be a service to the writers that some have been toiling for years in their playground building something amazing. Curated fanfic could be a great thing for the original author and give up and coming authors a great place to begin. Not to mention for the fans of that particular universe. I’d have to ask the writers what they thought about it.
***
After Bobby left, I went into the Physical eBook room of the store. Lucy was arranging cards about the size of a paperback on the shelf. I picked up a card at random, it had cover art that Monique had drawn and published on her DeviantArt site. Lucy had used one of her covers for each of the classic eBooks that were in the public domain and that we were giving away for free. Along with using Monique’s art work, each ebook now contained a page asking that if you liked the cover art to please tip the artist so that future free releases would have the same high quality artwork. Then I read the book blurb on the back of the card.
"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" is a science fiction adventure novel by Jules Verne, first published in 1870. It follows the journey of Professor Aronnax and his companions as they explore the ocean aboard the submarine Nautilus, commanded by the mysterious Captain Nemo.
“Lucy, this is great, are all of these books already on the server?”
“Yeah, we are ready to open up. The customer just brings the Books Card to the register and we give them the link to the book.”
“And we are hosting the books on our own server?”
“Yes, an old laptop from the storage room. Why are there so many old laptops back there, anyway?”
“People give them to me when they upgrade, and I load new operating systems on them. Then if I know of someone who needs a computer, I have them ready to go. Like you did for Pappy, when you got your new laptop. We should use the pirate sites to distribute the free books.”
“But won’t that just dilute what we are trying to do here, Laura? If you push regular customers to pirate sites won’t they start getting all their books there.”
“No, we’ll use our own servers to host and distribute the books to our bookstores network of sites.”
“Alright then why bother uploading, wait I have it. We then become a world wide distributor of free books.”
She took out her phone and typed in ‘Tale of Two Cities’.
“But Anna Archive already has like twenty different English language versions of the book, Laura.”
“Right they do but look at the covers, some are just photos of an old hardcover, some are those generated covers from Calibre. It tells you the title and author, it conveys the information, but there is a reason why publishers always spend so much time and money on cover art. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but it is almost impossible not to. If you upload a book with artwork by Monique, it’ll do two things. What do you think those two things are, Lucy?”
“The cover art will lead to it being the most downloaded English language version, and people worldwide who download the book, because of the cover art, they will see the page asking them to tip Monique. You are targeting the people who appreciate cover art the most, they have all of these other versions to choose from. Yet they choose Monique because of the artwork. People who appreciate the artwork are more likely to donate to Monique.”
“Exactly, so the hope is, that Monique’s work will be rewarded on a worldwide scale. Encouraging her in turn to create more artwork for future eBooks you want to release. It’s a feedback loop designed to create more great free content into the future.”
