His Last Written Work

His Last Written Work

The man known as a child by the name Eric, but who changed it as an adult, was writing as fast as he could to create a greater change. He had great trouble breathing these days and was worried that this would be the one book of his that would never got finished, that tuberculosis would not make such an achievement possible. He sat up on his hospital bed writing most of his waking hours. Maybe in a day or two the book would be completed. He still had hope, despite the deterioration of his physical condition, the coughing and the difficulty breathing that would put a halt to his writing, and he knew eventually his life.

The idea for the book came in a flash when he was given a tour of the university near the hospital. One of the professors in the technology department had told him about one of the latest developments. It was manifested in a large machine that filled almost an entire room and could do a variety of calculations much faster and allegedly more efficiently than humans could. The professor was very excited about the future of this device, but it made the writer cringe when he thought could be the repercussions of such a machine. He felt that it could be very damaging if left to develop free of careful cautioning consideration. He knew that he had to write about this highly likely damage through the means of a novel.

As he always carried pen and paper with him, he began writing what he hoped would be his next book, and what he knew would be his last. He had sat himself down on a chair in the university cafeteria, pen in hand, paper on top of small table intended for the placement and eating of food. He had to stop writing several times when hit by a coughing fit that drew unwanted attention from the others in the cafeteria.. 

This was just a short time before he had to be admitted to the University College Hospital in London, which would be his last home, and he knew it.. Of course, his writing did not stop just because he was in a hospital, but there were only a few hours of each day when he could write without being interrupted by his disorder. Despite the effects of the disease that would eventually kill him, he felt confident that he would finish this work, as he had so many others before. After his first book came out in 1934, he wrote and published a book a year over the next five years, following this up a little later with three classic works that had made him so very well-known as a writer. It didn’t matter that he was sitting upright on his hospital bed, with his paper being supported by the upper half of his legs upon which he had first placed a book.     

Shortly after completing his written work, he died. The manuscript was automatically put into a box by hospital employees (unfortunately who were not readers and knew nothing about him but his disease), with some other of his possessions. These were given to a cousin of his, who promptly put it into a small back room in his house, there to be ignored. He knew nothing of the manuscript, so he did not try to have it published. The cousin’s eldest grandson, George, inherited the place after he died. The young man had no idea that there was an important  manuscript gathering dust in the back room. He was just glad that he had a home that he did not have to pay for.

George was a university student. One day he was asked by his English professor whether there were any stories told about the famous writer in his family. He replied in the negative, but said that there was a back room where he lived that had a lot of the writer’s possessions in it. His teacher asked if there was a possibility that there was unpublished work that might be there. This set the young man’s mind to wondering and hoping. That thought had never really entered his head, even though he had read all of his antecessor’s books, and had admired what the man had written. He was one reason why George was majoring in English Literature. 

As he took the bus home, he hoped that there might be a yet unpublished and never even suspected unpublished work to be found in the back room. He would definitely check to see what there might be there as soon as he returned home.

He went into the back room, and was not long in finding what he had desperately hoped to discover. It was a completed book still in the handwritten stage. To no surprise, the work contained a negative portrayal of the future, much like his two classic books had done. This time it was about technology. His Uncle George as he liked to think of him had written about the possibility of cars taking over the management of their driving, with occasional disasters to the humans that were helpless to override what their cars had mechanically decided to do. He had hypothesized that there would be developed phones that people became addicted to at the cost of talking to those who are in their company, even when they were sharing a meal. Television would no longer be free. You would have to pay for shows you wanted to see. There would be electronic ways of articulating prejudice and ignorance with little to no censorship to stop their negative, widespread effect.   Fewer people would be reading the more thought out texts that could be found in books.  And there would be a growing separation between teachers and students, the former having to communicate their lessons electronically from their offices, with students receiving their learning at home, often missing important parts of their lessons. But they would be able to purchase assignments generated by these mechanical plagiarists, as he liked to refer to them, using key words that the professors had given the students.

He had even written about the mechanical effects upon movies. Extreme violence would be highlighted by frequently generated special effects. More and more characters in movies would be the product of these mechanical devices, creating fewer jobs for talented actors, with a a more nuanced portrayal of human emotions and actions.

He had a name for this book, modelled on an earlier work. He had decided to call it “2024”, a kind of sequel in a way to his best selling book “1984”.