My Pen Name (The Other Mike)
A few years ago a man with my name (same name, exactly) began publishing fiction on the platforms that I was using. It’s like he just appeared out or nowhere wearing a mask with my face on it. Normally this wouldn’t bother me, but the newcomer’s writing was terrible. It read like pig latin translated by a dyslexic. I put a lot of effort into polishing my work, but the other Mike didn’t, and I worried that people would mistake his books for mine. So now I use Ishmael Cheedy as a pen name. I told the famously paranoid sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick about my situation when I met him in a dream, and he asked what I write about. “The usual, and some anti-government stuff.” “Then the other Mike is an agent,” he said, “a G-man who’s been tasked to discredit you.” He told me we needed to find the agent, and we set off through a Dickian world of swibble and flapples and autofacs. We questioned several of the masked inhabitants. None were who they claimed to be, and quite a few were space aliens. Then we came across a downed surveillance drone. Dick prepared to stomp on it, but he withheld the boot when the drone told us it had the information we’d been seeking. It said that the other Mike was the product of an artificial intelligence program. The government was using A.I. to churn out bad writing in my name and the names of thousands of other people deemed to be dissidents. The aim was to discredit us, as Dick had surmised. He contacted some friends in “the resistance” and they released an artificial stupidity program, to counteract the A.I. The A.S. found its way onto government computers and went to work writing stupid legislation, stupid political speeches and so forth. And, surprisingly, the work it put out was more intelligent than anything coming from our actual leaders. Our society began to heal and the other Mike’s books disappeared. Then at the end of my dream Dick asked me to tag along as he revisited one of the shrinks who’d treated him for paranoia. He didn’t go for therapy, he just wanted to say, “I told you so.”