When writing this, I kept having the strangest feeling that I’ve written something like this before. But if I had, I couldn’t find it. Weird.
Textworms
These… things… are conceptual descendants of “printer’s devils” and the like; and pretty much everybody involved in, and aware of, the situation wants the devils back. At least you could communicate with a printer’s devil. The only language Textworms understand is the one spoken by a burning flame.
Textworms represent entropy in textual form: they ‘live,’ dormant, in specific passages and paragraphs in specific books. The rule of thumb is that not all poorly-edited texts with hideous grammatical errors will host a Textworm – but the worse the editing job, the more likely it is that that particular volume will have a Textworm infestation.
All of this would be academic, except that a Textworm’s reproductive cycle involves human brains. Textworms can ‘smell’ people who work with the written word on a regular basis; when they find that is sufficiently ‘ripe’ the Textworm will jump into that person’s mind and deliberately damage his ability to write just enough to ensure that the host will be making any number of grammatical howlers in the near future. Once the host has degenerated to the point where her prose is visibly suffering, the Textworm will ‘die.’ Its ‘corpse’ will eventually spawn three or four more Textworms, which will jump from the host body and into a new set of poorly-edited texts. There is, of course, no cure; hosts rarely die, or even suffer permanent damage to their writing ability – but having a history of Textworm infestation is an excellent way to become susceptible to other kinds of mental infestations. Somewhat nastier ones.
…And that’s why the Center for Disease Control has a black-ops liaison with the American Library Association. And why the ALA has a secret book-burning division. Because Textworms burn real nice. …ly! …They burn very nicely!