Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Seven minutes…” Mack said. “What can anyone do in seven minutes? Make seven minute eggs, walk a few hundred yards, write a note, sing a song, say hello. Waste it thinking of what to spend it on.”

He kicked a stone. “People today complain too much about what they can’t change.”

The digital watch on his wrist blinked incessantly. Mack resisted looking at it for as long as he could bear before bringing it up and shielding the display from the bright light with a cupped hand.

“A minute and a half,” he sighed. “At this rate, seven minutes might as well be seven years.”

Envision, if you will, the most absurd thing you can.

Go on.

What did you come up with? Zebras playing poker, perhaps? Or is that too tame? How about a living, three-dimensional Picasso painting? Each person has their own unique concept of absurdity.

Your conception of absurdity—things so bizarre or out of place as to be almost meaningless—is intimately linked to your own personal experiences. That, in turn, causes you to see some things as beyond the pale of normal experience and therefore absurd. Another person with their own experiences would make a different observation.

But what if there existed something so far from the realm of what any person has experienced that it would induce in everyone—you, your neighbor, an Amazonian tribesman—that feeling? So far from the realm of what any person has experienced that there’s no way to process it, and the only response is an insane cackle?

The dice scattered onto the board.

Two sixes.

Walt leaned over and advanced his tiny car twelve squares. “Marvin Gardens,” he said. “Who owns it?”

“Me.” Jim held up the deed. “Thirty dollars, if you please.”

The money was grudgingly peeled off Walt’s stack and handed over. “Is this what it’s really like to be in the real estate business?”

“Sort of,” said Jim. “But good luck finding a place in Atlantic City for thirty bucks a night. And I think they left out the casino and brothel pieces by mistake.”

“You deal with casinos and brothels?”

“More often than you’d think,” Jim sighed.

The butt of his gun was smooth from constant use, and Thomas fingered it nervously as he waited, tapping out a rhythm on the hard wood.

“Do you have to do that?” Mat hissed.

“Unless you have a cigarette, yes,” Thomas said. “Yes I do.”

“You’re distracting me,” Mat replied. “We need to be ready when they get here.”

“Ha! Do you think being ready will make any difference? You know what they did to the Fifth. Rolled right over them, and shot the prisoners. And our boys will shoot you if you try to run. The great menace from the East is on its way, and we’re going to crumble before it.”

Mat fingered his own gun, worn through another man’s use. “At least I haven’t given up.”

“That, my naive friend, is what makes you a fool.”

“Well, the nanites can learn. They can adapt. But they’re also very complex; each one is subtly different. That’s why we observe their behavior in the simulation, why we occasionally interact with them–if they perform poorly, how can they be expected to repair living tissue? They have to be destroyed.”

Chris raised an eyebrow. “How do you destroy a machine a mew molecules wide? They don’t make wreaking balls that small.”

Ramirez narrowed his eyes. “Plasma incinerator, smartass. We take out the good ones and put ‘em to good use, and burn the bad ones.”

“A plasma incinerator smartass? What’ll they think up next? What an age we live in!”

“How can you ignore the plight of our planet?” Kayleigh cried, thrusting her flier into Dr. Stewart’s face once again.

“Oh, I’m not ignoring anything,” said Stewart. “You kids are too young to remember the Love Canal, but it was big news in my day.”

“Love Canal? Is that like a carnival ride?”

“No, the problem for me isn’t the message but who’s delivering it. Imagine, Kayleigh, that you live next to a straitlaced conservative Republican. And imagine that he’s always telling you to quit smoking. You know he’s probably right, but the fact that he rubs you the wrong way and stands for everything you don’t keeps you from taking the advice out of sheer human nature.”

An instant message window popped open while she worked, attracting no notice until a second message arrived a few moments later.

millerpond1987 (6:31:24 PM): hey sis

millerpond1987 (6:31:37 PM): hows it hangin

Sharon’s typing stopped. She groped for the glass of water at the desk’s edge, only to knock it to the floor. Her other hand hovered over the keyboard, unsteady.

That was Paul’s usual greeting—the lack of capitals that belied his degree in fine arts, the terrible pun he knew she hated that invariably accompanied all his communications, written or spoken. Even the font color and style matched.

It was almost enough to make Sharon forget that Paul had been dead for nearly six weeks now.

The sun was setting over the tundra, painting the frosted hills a vibrant purple and softening the ugly edges of the huts at their foot. The traveler stared down at the rickety houses made of corrugated steel and plywood, and then looked over at the caribou herd, safe behind their protective fence.

As she watched, the sun caught the snow at just the right angle to erupt in a flare of light. The huts and fence vanished amid the glare, and for a moment it was as if they had never been there at all, as if when God knelt to make the earth, he had left this place completely new, utterly untouched, forever.

“Okay, how about this,” said Travis. “We can outsource our entertainment coverage to a firm in Liverpool. It’ll save us the time and expense of writing the news up ourselves, and since entertainment is a global industry these days, no one will notice.”

Murmurs of assent were heard around the boardroom table.

“Are you sure about that?” Jason said. “Need I remind you of our disastrous decision to outsource our computer science coverage to Pakistan?”

“That was never proven!” snapped Travis. “Here, take a look at my next slide. It’s a real-time mockup of how the site would look, complete with actual breaking news!”

The page loaded, displaying the following banner headline: Sir Nigel Westlake’s Departure Throws Spanner Into Works of New BBC Programme ‘Orchestral Colours’.

“Oh yes,” Jason said. “No one will notice that’s Liverpudlian, certainly not.”

Dr. Barrett could always be relied on to block anything the faculty senate tried to vote on, whether by ceaseless questioning, filibustering, or endless motions for amendment. Sam often remarked, and I was inclined to agree, that the old bag treated the meetings as her own private airing of grievances. She wasn’t so much participating as holding court.

That attitude had earned her the moniker of “Princess Senatus,” among the other senators which in the grand old tradition of academic puns wasn’t understandable to anyone without a PhD in something or other. Sam thought it was the funniest thing in the world, and was always trying to explain it to his undergraduates:

“See, it’s a pun. Augustus was the “Princeps Senatus,” the First Man of the Senate, and the word senator actually comes from the word for old man, so we’re really calling her the old man princess!”

In response, the students would try to text from behind their schoolbooks, and I can’t say I blamed them.