Block One
a novel by E. G. Gore
Unlocks Saturday, October 10, at 10:10 a.m. Eastern.
Free to read. Draw what's actually there.
Visitor No. at the door
10 · 10 · 2+0+2+6 · 10:10
Block One
a novel by E. G. Gore
Out 10.10.2026
A broke retired art teacher links his brain to a stolen robot and runs it for president, to get the money out of politics and find out who's really been sitting at the desk.
Free to read. Suggested price: $10.10, or whatever feels right, including nothing.
Draw what's actually there.
Harold Horcross taught art in Paperton for thirty-one years. Then the pension that promised him "enough" turned into half a sandwich.
One morning at the Rusty Nickel, he watches the President freeze on live TV and turn at the hips like a desk chair. Nobody else notices. Harold does. He's spent his whole life drawing what's actually there.
What follows is a stolen humanoid robot, a brain implant, a campaign run out of a storage unit, a secret society that keeps its ledger in brown ink, and a woman in Youngstown with a glass jar who changes everything.
It's political satire for adults about money, power, and who gets to print belief, and it ends with hope.
Chapter 1
Harold
The Rusty Nickel is the last bar in Paperton where a man can still get a beer for under nine dollars, provided he comes in before noon and doesn't ask what brand it is.
I come in at ten-ten, the minute Dottie unlocks the door. When you're retired, you learn to schedule your despair like a dental appointment.
Thirty-one years I taught art at Paperton Central. Four thousand kids, give or take, and I taught every one of them the same first lesson: the trick to drawing a hand is to stop drawing what you think a hand looks like and draw what's actually there. Most of them never got it. They'd draw five sausages on a mitten and look up at me like they'd cured polio. But a few got it. A few learned to see.
It's a useless skill, seeing. Nobody pays for it. I can tell you that from experience, and from my pension statement.
The pension was supposed to be enough. That was the word in the brochure they handed us in 1994, printed over a photo of a gray-haired couple laughing on a sailboat. Enough. Nobody ever took a dime of it from me, either. That's the elegant part. They didn't have to steal anything. They just let the dollar rot quietly in the jar, year after year, until enough bought a sandwich. Then half a sandwich. Then the bread.
The number on the check never went down. The number just stopped meaning anything.
"Same?" said Dottie Nickels, who has owned the Rusty Nickel since back when a nickel bought something.
"Whatever's cheapest."
"That's what same means, Harold."
She slid it over. Eight seventy-five. I paid with my card, and the card reader thanked me, which is more than the dollar ever did.
The TV above the bottles was on the news, which it always is, because Dottie says sports make people fight and the news makes them drink, and she prefers the drinking. The President was at a podium. Blue curtain, flags, that seal with the eagle holding its arrows and its olive branch like it can't make up its mind.
A reporter asked him about egg prices.
"The American economy," said the President, "is strong and getting stronger."
Then he stopped.
In the book, the best ideas get shared, not locked away. So is the book.
It's a message in a bottle. Somebody tossed it into the water, not knowing who'd pick it up. You did.
It's released under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. Copy it, share it, pass it to anyone, as long as you credit the author and don't sell it.
If it made you laugh, or think, or look at a dollar a little differently, you can send thanks straight to the author. No bank in the middle.
Can't send anything? Share it with someone instead. That counts too.