Hacker: An Introduction to Eric Saunders.

The second foundational document is also a product of the vaunted Writer's Workshop classes that were necessary for all middle-school children. But before we take a look at the Odyssey to DOOM's Iliad, let's learn a little about the titan who penned our sophomore masterpiece, who has contributed numerous artifacts to the Archives and who has graciously allowed me to use his real name.

Meet Eric Saunders.

Saunders (as he was invariably known) redefined humor at our educational institution from the day he set foot in it, and likely would have done so for an entire generation, had he been blessed with the right stage. A gangly, wiry kid with unruly blown-back hair and a permanent goofball smile, Saunders drove to school every day in a car with a homemade bumper sticker, a collection of adhesive letters spelling "READ AYN RAND". He was the kind of student Harvard would call "well-lopsided"; something of a mathematical savant, he expressed an early desire to dispense with some of his classes in the humanities in the interest of taking more math and science. No surprise, from a kid whose math SAT score was 230 points higher than his verbal score. His grasp of English (and, as we will see later, Spanish, too) was, as one might expect, occasionally less than perfect, and often to explosively funny ends. He was a perennial generator of malapropisms and he frequently misunderstood or misinterpreted normal conversation, to a degree where he was virtually impossible to talk to for five minutes without some sort of hysterical communication breakdown ensuing.

It was so common that any mangling of the English language became known as a "Saunders", even when other people did it. Naturally, an archive of these occurrences, known as "The Saunders List", was created, and ran some fifteen pages; unfortunately, there are no extant copies. (If anyone knows the whereabouts of a facsimile or computer file of this great lost document, please contact me at once!)

He walked the hallways of high school a minor legend, his nuggets of inadvertent hilarity woven deep into the argot of his friends as well as classmates who barely knew him. Despite his professed preference for the hard sciences, he was nevertheless, like all secondary-school pupils, required to write, and one of his fiction assignments found its way into the hands of his friends after a peer review. A sui generis gem, Hacker somehow (as though tapping from a collective unconscious of linguistic insight) echoes the setting and sentiments of DOOM, while at the same time achieving pathbreaking levels of literary incompetence.

The story centers around John Jay Jackson, who lives a miserable existence in a Harlem apartment with no heat, "afraid to go outside because of all the gangs and thugs outside". He hears a crime being committed somewhere else in the building, but, in a noirish twist, refuses to cooperate with the police in the paranoiac belief that they might finger him as the culprit. He escapes, Orson Welles-like, through the sewer system to "a secret room in Grungies Bar that even the owner did not know about it."

He immediately leaves the safe house, then returns to it, then leaves again, and buys "a nice flame red sports car", in which he sits and deliberates for an hour before heading to "Wagon town in western Colorado" at a brisk 110 mph (177 km/h). Stopping at a convenience store on the way, he finds he's already being featured on America's Most Wanted, and after another harrowingly close brush with John Q. Law, he makes for a Motel 6 to spend the night, plugging in his "lap top" in the only sentence that could conceivably justify the story's title.

At this point, we encounter John Hawk, the detective who's hot on John Jay Jackson's tail. Intent on finding his man, he "ordered that every hotel to the west of Denver be examined". Soon enough he accumulates some hard evidence on Jackson's whereabouts, which "made Hawk go wild"; Jackson buys a new house (on Falcon Street; note the ornithological symbolism at work here) and has his car painted blue, but that doesn't stop the detective from following his tracks.

The denouement is riveting, but it wouldn't do to spoil the heart-stopping, grammatically illogical conclusion. Read on, readers.