“Great story, Craig!”

Graham slapped him hard on the back as he walked past.
Craig, unfortunately, had been so engrossed in his work that he hadn’t noticed him approach. As a consequence, this shocked him rather more than it might have, and he cried out in surprise, “Jesus, Graham! What the bloody hell?”
He grinned at him, his wide, ugly lips contorted into a vicious smile. “Great story yesterday,” he said again. “I loved it! ‘Woman Runs Herself Over.’ Utterly brilliant. For some reason it made me think of my wife—and in a good way for once.”
“That means a lot coming from the worst editor in the history of the industry,” Craig quipped, his eyes flicking back to his monitor where he was writing yet another article which may, or may not, turn out to be utterly brilliant.
“Where do you even get this crap?” he said with a sneer, inhaling a long drag on a cigarette. Having it lit indoors in their office was technically illegal, but he would often argue that such written rules didn’t apply to the press, especially since it was only technically an office. “I mean, it was the worst kind of tabloid crap, but that’s what sells. And, I like anything that makes me laugh.”
“I made it up,” said Craig. He grinned to himself. “I make up about ninety percent of the articles I submit to you. You never check them, so it doesn’t matter.”
Graham tilted his head off to one side. “Of course it doesn’t matter—that’s why I never check them,” he said with an uncharacteristic outburst of honesty, quite unbefitting anyone working in journalism.
“I mean,” continued Craig. “Sqwawker Press is one of the worst news websites in the entire Western world. Our audience doesn’t come here to be informed, they come here because they don’t know how to operate search engines properly.”
“Nobody reads the news to be informed, period,” agreed Graham. “They read it to be told they were right all along about everything, to be reassured that they’re just better than other people. That’s pretty much why I got into the job in the first place.”
Craig nodded. “And our audience clearly aren’t better than some breeds of dogs, but at least they’re not stupid enough to run over themselves with their own car. Some idiot tries to rob a gun shop armed with a knife, nobody cares if it’s true or not; the only truth that matters is that it wasn’t them. So I figure we throw out entertaining articles citing an unnamed victim, and nobody ever cares, right? Hell, we’re doing these semi-literate morons a favour.”
“Sounds about right to me,” Graham agreed. He was a desperately loathsome person, and was frequently described as such by his own wife, who had only married him because he drunkenly knocked her up at a party. Why he married her was even more baffling. “Thing is though, you don’t have to prove anything to me. I realise these things matter to you, but I know the truth is that you didn’t make it up at all. It’s still a great fit for our business-model, and as long as you keep writing the same crap that’s befitting a journalist of your calibre, I’ll be happy to publish it.”
“Interesting!” Craig said, rubbing his chin. “Why would you think that I didn’t make it up? I’m the guy who lost a proper job at a prestigious national news outlet after getting caught with three other journalists snorting cocaine off the breasts of a hooker.”
Graham nodded. “I always wondered about that. Could you really not tell she was already dead?”
“I could not—I’m not a doctor. So, with my horrendous grasp on reality and poor adherence to societal norms, why is it so hard for you to believe that I made up a story about a woman who accidentally ran herself over? I mean, I have no decency or moral fortitude whatsoever, let alone journalistic integrity. I even put that on my resume when I applied for the job here.”
“You used every word in that sentence correctly,” Graham told him. “That puts you head and shoulders ahead of most of the garbage we get in here.”
Some of the garbage they got there took an interest in the conversation. A head poked up, belonging to an ageing, slender man with long hair that had turned grey while waiting patiently to be properly cut. He had hollowed-out red eyes and an uneven goatee beard. “Easy now,” he said in weak protest. “I—like—try my best, man.”
“Shut up, Ralph,” said Graham. “Smoke some more weed and keep your head down.”
“You shouldn’t speak to Ralph like that,” said Katherine, the only other qualified journalist in the office. She had the kind of face that suggested she was either as in-bred as the Royal Family, or had been modelled on a small pony.
Graham nodded. “You’re right there,” he agreed. “That’s the way I should speak to you!”
She grunted and shook her head.
Graham beamed a happy smile, taking a moment to enjoy the simple pleasure of insulting his staff.
“It’s just fiction, I promise you,” Craig said, looking rather confused about just exactly why his explanation wasn’t finding its mark. “I fabricated a woman who had a flat tyre. She got out of her car, leaving it in Drive while she checked on the wheel. By some freak mishap, mixed with her own stupidity, the handbrake failed and the car rolled over her head, sparing the world from having to deal with one more idiot.”
“That’s beautiful,” Graham said, gazing out from his twisted thoughts. “That’s how I dream my wife will leave me. At least it is now.”
“I promise though, I made it all up.”
“But I know you didn’t,” Graham said with one of his appallingly lecherous smirks. “Mrs Coulson, mother of one and husband of Bernard Coulson. A tragic death that the police have ruled ‘misadventure’ and her Bernard described as ‘something of a relief.’”
“No, Graham. You can’t just add made-up names to these things, or you’ll get into trouble. The trick is in leaving the details blank to protect the families, or whatever crap you feel like making up. You didn’t add those names, did you?”
“You can stop messing about now,” the editor told him, flicking the still-lit cigarette into a waste-paper basket where it smouldered impotently. “I’m not a complete idiot, even if my wife and daughters think I am—and tell me with depressing frequency. I liked your story, you sold it with a compelling headline, so I looked it up to confirm the details, just out of interest. It’s all there in the police records.
“So well done with that one, keep it up! Five stories like that a day from you, and I’ll make sure you get one of the nicer office chairs—one with a back. Ralph’s probably.”
Craig watched as Graham lumbered away, his suit several sizes too small and several degrees too stylish for a man like him. He shook his head and tried to forget that conversation, which to him had seemed even more bizarre than all the attention the media had given to one dead prostitute.
He closed his current article, the one where his headline read, ‘Local Spaceman Says Carrots Were Key.’ He opened a browser and began searching for the name that Graham had dropped him. Sure enough, there was a news article from a far more reputable sounding journalistic resource with the tedious headline ‘Roadside Tragedy Claims Mother of One.’ He rubbed his chin and frowned to himself as he read the details, which entirely mirrored his own work. He appeared somewhat concerned as each fact, one after another, checked out.
“What the hell?” he muttered to himself. “I was sure I made that up.”
With a mind addled with various drugs snorted from the breasts of various women—some alive—he could never entirely be sure of what was completely, absolutely and totally real and what was wholly, thoroughly and altogether fabricated. Most of his articles fell somewhere in the middle, although he didn’t normally bother to try to confirm this.
More confused and curious than interested in doing his job, he looked over his back-catalogue of journalistic triumphs, and found a recent story that had blossomed from his fevered imagination with the headline, ‘Bloke Nearly Loses Left Testicle.’ He smiled as he recalled that one, the tale of a gentleman who had suffered a minor accident in his car, clipping the curb as he went round a corner and accidentally crashing into a parked vehicle. The jolt of the impact dislodged a glass jar containing his surgically removed left gonad which fell out of a bag and began rolling around in the back. Not wishing for it to end up lost beneath the seat, he got out of his car to find it and was instantly killed when a truck hit him. The gonad was later recovered.
That one had been inspired by his ex-wife’s new boyfriend.
The best part was that when he submitted it, Graham had laughed loudly enough for the whole office to hear and had ironically declared, “You couldn’t make this crap up!”
Searching through the internet, Craig, rather disturbingly discovered that the crap he had very much indeed made up had grown from a kernel of truth. One Mr Groves, who was returning from hospital after an operation to remove a tumour from a very unpleasant spot, had met a fate exactly as described in his own story.
“This is weird,” Craig said loudly.
Along the desk, Katherine, a woman with the moral decency of a shark said, “What happened, did you spell everything correctly?” She laughed at her own joke, a hollow guffaw that whistled through her gigantic and misshapen teeth.
“Mellow out, guys!” said Ralph, his voice oddly grave.
“My stories are true!” Craig said with a curious frown.
“Your stories are meant to be true, you piece of crap. That’s not weird, that’s your job.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “But we all know that none of us does our job.”
“Fair point,” she agreed. “So what the hell are you going on about?”
“Well, like everyone in our profession, I make up most of my stories,” he explained. “I pride myself in just how little I actually care about any of this. I just write down any old crap that comes to mind when I’m sitting on a deadline. Graham doesn’t care about anything that happens after lunch because by the time he gets back to the office, his brain is mostly made of beer, so none of it matters one iota.”
“We’re journalists,” she said with a frown. “It’s what we do.”
Ralph nodded in agreement. “It’s funny because it’s true.”
Craig held up a hand and said, “But now I’m looking it up, it seems they’re actually true. They really happened, exactly as I described them.”
“So you copied them?” she asked, sounding like she was only half paying-attention.
He shook his head and scowled. “No, I made them up. I just came up with any old crap and wrote it down, but now I look into it, they’re true. But they can’t be!”
She took a deep swig from a cardboard cup of the world’s worst coffee. “That’s not how the world works,” she told him, citing conventional wisdom. “Things happen—or don’t—and then we write about them so other people know what happened, and what the correct opinion on the topic should be. It’s not the other way around.”
Craig made a pained thinking face. “The other way around,” he said with a smirk. “Like if we made something up and told people about it, and that made it actually happen?”
“No,” she told him. “The world doesn’t work that way. We just write nonsense and people read it while they take a shit, probably because they couldn’t find a decent game to play on their phones. We’re not changing the world, Craig, and we’re certainly not making it.”
“Here’s another one,” he said in surprise. “I wrote ‘Council Wants to Ban Politics’ and here it is. A small town wants to remove politics from their decision-making process. It’s exactly how I wrote the story.”
“Idiot!” she told him, which seemed fair. “You’re just crazy!”
“Strange things happen, dude!” said Ralph, butting. “One time I had a dream that I was a cat stuck in a washing basket. Guess what happened?”
Craig frowned, hoping against reason he wouldn’t tell them.
Shattering his hopes and dreams, he failed to not continue and said, “A dog attacked old Mrs Kenner on my street, biting her left nipple and knee so badly that she had to have seventeen stitches.”
“What?” Katherine asked, saving Craig the trouble.
“You see, I was the cat and I was watching, but I was scared of the dog, so I hid in the basket and didn’t see anything,” he explained. “So it really happened and I saw it, except I wasn’t looking the right way.”
“Is that even the same thing?” Craig asked, furrowing his brow. “I’m a bit lost.”
“Well, man…” he began, nodding with undue enthusiasm. “You have to think about whether we report the news, or if we make the news. Do we see the world and tell the world what we saw, or do we—like—tell people what happened, because it happened? And what happens if it didn’t happen before we said it happened, did it then happen because what happened was that we said it happened?”
“I have a headache!” Craig said. “I’m sorry I asked.”
“This again!” Katherine said with a roll of her eyes. “He said this before, something about if enough people believe something is real, then it becomes real.”
“Something like that, man!” said Ralph. “Something just like that. You have to look at the bigger picture. We tell people what to think, what to believe. They don’t question us because we’re the news—our job is to give them facts, and their job is to believe the facts. Make enough people believe a thing and that thing becomes real. That’s why they work so hard at telling the news their way. They know it’s true. People make reality, and we make the people create the reality we want them to create.”
Craig sighed. “That headache is getting worse.”
“I mean, just think about aeroplanes,” continued Ralph. “There’s no way a machine that heavy could defy gravity and fly halfway across the world stuffed with punters. Charge them a high enough fee and give them a boarding pass though, and it becomes too ridiculous not to be true. Their faith that they haven’t been ripped off is what puts them in the air and keeps them there, oblivious to the fact that it’s obviously impossible.”
“Let me tell you what I think,” began Katherine. “The world is a far stranger place than anything any of us could conjure. Everything we come up with, no matter how ludicrous, has more than likely actually happened to someone, somewhere. It’s a statistical inevitability.”
“So you mean like a coincidence?” said Craig.
“More a law of averages,” said Katherine.
“Nah, I don’t buy it.” Craig turned and stepped over to the corner office and began hammering on Graham’s door. He let himself in, and before the editor could even react, he stammered, “Unsound happenings are afoot, Graham!”
“Are you still on drugs?” he asked, not unreasonably.
“No,” he asserted. “Not today anyway—you don’t pay me enough.”
“You’re damned right I don’t!”
Craig took a deep breath. “Look, those stories I wrote—I made them up. I just pulled them out of my arse, no references, no nothing. Now, when I try looking them up, it turns out they really happened and are being reported on other news websites. Did you edit the stories? Did you add fake details? Did you sell my work to other sites, and if so, why aren’t I getting a credit or a slice of the commission? What’s going on here, Graham?”
Graham listened, mostly, on and off, and then said, “Are you still on drugs? Seriously?”
“I’m not on drugs!” he insisted. “But the stories I made up are really happening. If you didn’t edit them and sell them off to our competitors, then the things I’m writing are starting to become real. How is that possible, Graham?”
“Get out of my office and go and do some work,” the editor told him. “And don’t come back without enough drugs to share with me.”
Craig left, a gigantic scowl painted on his flushed, reddened face.
As he skulked out back to the main office, Katherine quipped “What’s the matter? You didn’t tell him what Ralph said, did you?”
Craig glared at her. “No, I don’t want to end up in a straight-jacket.”
She grinned, her monstrous teeth jutting through her lips haphazardly as she did. “Don’t worry,” she told him. “I just wrote an article to cheer you up. A balding, overweight middle-aged journalist died today when a freak set of circumstances led to him being crushed by a falling piano. My headline is, ‘Area Man Finally Faces the Music.’ I just submitted it—it will be out tonight!”
Craig’s eyes widened as she laughed hysterically.