Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Anime is just too weird for me, man,” Caleb said. “It’s like seeing regular Saturday morning cartoons ground up and regurgitated by someone’s really twisted subconscious.”

“How d’you ever expect to be taken seriously as a geek with that attitude?” Sean replied. “Here, we’ll get you started on something easy and non-threatening.” He began rummaging through the stack of pastel-colored keepcases.

“No, really, let’s just watch something-”

“Here, how about Dimensional Galactic Rogue Outlaw Roku?” said Sean, blindly waving the case. “It’s about a schoolgirl who’s last in a long line of Galaxy Warriors and has to fight off the Tentacleoids while going through Ariabachi High. Also she reverts to a jellylike omnigel when she’s angry or stressed.”

Caleb bit his lip. “Uh…no.”

“Okay, okay, we can try Bio Sword Arc Unlimited. It’s based on the legend of Joan of Arc, except in modern-day Kunioshi Prefecture. Junior high student Jan’nu Daruku is touched by the kami Hachiman and granted the power to shape her limbs into weapons to fight an invasion of mutant deep-sea squid roused by nuclear testing.”

“I’m sensing a pattern here,” Caleb sighed. “No.”

“What pattern? Those are totally different shows!” Sean snorted incredulously. “Fine, we’ll go super-basic: Initial Ghost Priestess Salvation. Yuki Tanaka learns that she’s the reincarnation of Kamakura period empress Fujiwara, and the only one who can save her classmates from the return of the subterranean cephalopodal elder race that cause the collapse of the shogunate.”

“You might not be familiar with cordyceps unilateralis, the ‘zombie ant fungus,'” Dr. Donovan said. “In nature, it affects the behavior of ants, causing them to climb to an optimal spore dispersal point while the fungus devours them from the inside.”

Senator Chandler made a face. “I hope that’s not what you’re showing us large-scale,” she said. “I’m fairly certain there’s a Geneva something against things like that.”

“Oh no. We’ve improved on it quite a bit. We can engineer the spores to produce an incredible range of complex behaviors in their hosts, after which they’re broken down and excreted. Say hello to cordyceps unilateralis candida.”

Donovan opened the shades, revealing a second group of rhesus monkeys–this one playing Texas hold’em poker.

The projector stuttered for a moment as the projectionist changed reels. After a moment of distortion, the newsreel began to flicker on the silver screen.

“Central City News Corporation presents: News on Parade!” the announcer intoned, sounding to all the world like an overeager color commentator at Central Stadium.

“Crime Watch! Be on the lookout for these notorious gangsters, hoodlums, and criminals! Report any sightings to the theater management or the nearest CCPD dispatcher! Remember, these vile persons may be in the theater alongside you!”

“That’ll be the day,” Günter muttered.

A man appeared, sneering into the mugshot camera. “Rex Fuzzgaze, the thought-stealer! This diabolical Liverpudlian sorcerer has perfected the subtle art of mind control, impressing others with his gaze and using them for his nefarious purposes! Do not approach!”

Günter snorted. “Needs to see a barber about those eyebrows.”

An unassuming-looking businessman, well-groomed, holding his card with no clear expression. “Pendleton Carvey, the mad mechanical genius! His nefarious automata held up the Central Reserve just last week! Wanted dead or dying!”

“Probably didn’t have enough to occupy his mind during his day job,” Günter opined.

A woman, very pretty except for deeply sunken eyes and stringy hair. “Macha DeVries, the mutant mistress of ghouls! An accident at a university labs has placed her in a state of living death with command over the recently deceased! Won’t be taken alive!”

“Hmph,” said Günter. “I don’t believe that one for a moment. Too fantastic.”

“You’re right about that,” his seat neighbor croaked, stretching a pale, bony hand into her bucket of popcorn. “The camera adds at least ten pounds.”

“This is boring, Dad. Who cares about girls so much they’d go to war over one?”

I lowered my copy of The Big Book of Greek Mythology, sensing a crack in my plan to give Sean a classical education through the medium of bedtime stories.

“W-well, Helen was really just an excuse for Agamemnon to send an army to Troy,” I said.

“Armies are boring,” Sean sighed with a cynicism unbecoming a 7-year-old. “Uncle Dave’s in the army.”

This wouldn’t do. “Well, the army was just an excuse too,” I said, groping about for something to grab his attention. “They were really just…just androids, to make sure no one suspected.”

Sean perked up a bit. “Suspected what?”

“Suspected that…uh, that Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus had superpowers. Agamemnon had…super-strength. Achilles was invincible. Odysseus could shoot lasers out of his eyes.”

“So they had a bunch of robots around so no one would wonder how they beat up all the bad guys all by themselves,” Sean said. “But how’d the war last 10 years?”

“Uh…the Trojans had robots too,” I said, trying to recall plot bits from Sean’s cartoons. “Lots of ’em. And superpowers. Priam could mind-control. Hector had super-speed. Paris had mutant healing factor.”

“Hmm…” Sean said.

“And Helen was a cyborg,” I said quickly. “The Trojans weren’t just in love with her, they wanted to use her technology to make an invincible army.”

“Wow! What happened next, Dad?”

I turned the page, hoping that what he was about to hear wouldn’t warp his appreciation of the classics too much.

“You understand, the translation will have to be approximate,” Smiths said. “A lot of heiroglyphs is context and inferential.”

“Just read it.” The revolver was argument enough.

“The Aten had no form, no voice, only will. Arising from the darkness of all which exists outside the Maat, the divine order of the cosmos, it first manifested as a weak and guttering spark. Only by associating itself with the bright disc of the sun was the Aten able to attract the notice of mortals, who came to view it as an aspect of their sun god, Ra. In this way, the Aten was first able to whisper into the ears of the chief priest, the Pharaoh. Over a generation, the whispers grew strong enough for the Pharaoh, and by extension his people, to allot the Aten a place in their great pantheon of deities. And when an aged and infirm ruler gave way to a young and impressionable one, the whispers grew ever louder.”

“Keep going.”

“In those days, the Aten was possessed of a great love for those whose belief had allowed it to escape from the darkness of the Duat, the underworld, but also a terrible jealousy. Through the Pharaoh, it insisted that the old gods were to be swept away–the whispers so insistent that the young ruler soon came to be preoccupied with his new religion alone, to the ruin of the nation. The Divinity, which existed in the guise of the many local gods at that time, reacted by withdrawing itself from the land. The Aten was unable to cope with the subsequent widespread famine, plagues, political upheaval, and general chaos, great though its powers had become. With the death of the Pharaoh from illness, the Aten was cast down from its lofty perch, and the light which represented it faded once more as successive rulers ought to erase it from their history.”

Smiths paused. “S-shall I keep going?”

The gun again, flashing in the torchlight. “Please do.”

“Cast once again into darkness, the Aten grew bitter at its fate, and came to resent the mortals on whom it had depended and whom it had once tried to love. It gathered its strength once more, slowly, and resolved to complete what the long-ago Pharaoh had once begun – the sweeping away of the old world for a new. Rather than co-opting, it would create anew. But although its strength returned, the Aten could not set its plan in motion.”

“For it yet needed mankind: its beliefs and its aid.” The words came from the darkness before Smiths could translate them.

Sovenal was rushing toward the ministerial platform when he brushed roughly up against a burly man hurrying in the opposite direction. They might have muttered something–maybe a curse, maybe an apology–but the martial music outside was too loud to make anything out for sure. Abruptly, Sovenal’s pace slowed as he neared his destination, and he couldn’t suppress a ragged cough.

Among the crowd below, Gelnika strained to see what was happening on and around the balcony of the People’s Palace. He could see Tavis, the smug bastard, standing beside the Minister, but there was no sign of Sovenal or any of his men. When the minister stepped froward to speak, there was no mention of Secretary Tavis’ treachery or the last-minute appeal from Ambassador Ijke. Instead, he heaped a fiery call to arms on the populace and troops below, calling for a swift attack by bayonet and shock on enemies of the state. Not only that, but the troops assembled for the National Day celebration were to march directly to the front.

“What the hell happened?” Gelnika hissed into his radio. “Sovenal!”

No reply but static.

Once the square had cleared out, with the troops off to their slaughter and the populace off to their celebration, Gelnika slid through a gap in the Palace fence and began scouring the grounds for any trace of Sovenal. He found the Undersecretary lying on the floor a few dozen yards from the ministerial balcony.

Sovenal had bled out through a carefully aimed small-caliber shot to his femoral artery.

He continued reading:

“Day 144. I placed an old newspaper over the railing in the stairwell to my office because I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not being cleaned, which dates back to the mummified cockroach I found up there a few months ago. It may have been roach royalty, placed there to maintain the use of his body in the afterlife, but it was still incredibly disgusting, and I had to clean it.

Since I’m practically the only person who takes the stairs rather than the elevator, I’ll time the janitorial crew to see how long it takes them to discover and remove the paper. If my suspicions are correct, it will be here longer than I am.”

The next block of pages had been torn out, and the writing continued on Day 288.

“The newspaper is still there, having yellowed imperceptibly over the course of my experiment. I find it astounding that the stairwell hasn’t been cleaned in so long–the janitor’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. Perhaps it’s emblematic of my time here, which has often seemed like a hamster wheel. Didn’t I process these same reports some time ago? I feel like the neverending torrent of paper passing through my life has begun to twist in on itself like an Ouroboros. That’s not a good thing to feel, that one is as disposable as that newspaper and just waiting for a clean-up to realize it.”

As he turned the page, a loose sheet fell out. It’d been rudely shoved in and bore a date too far beyond the last one in the book (which cut off just short of 900).

“Day 2018. The paper is still there. THE PAPER IS STILL THERE. It should be ribbons by now. I know a thing or two about paper and it should be disintegrated but it’s not. It isn’t! I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t lightening, reverting to its new state, and if I won’t soon be compelled to remove it while descending the stairs backwards. I…I need to get out…”

Everything seemed to be drained of color by the overcast sky, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Once Allen had crossed the threshold, it was as if he’d stepped into an old, faded photograph of Barryton–not the real thing.

“As you get closer, there are a few things you’ll have to watch out for,” Carson had said, after his attempts to argue Allen out of the expedition had failed. “The cold’s one; I’ve never been all the way inside, but it’s been down to 40 on the dog days.”

“I’ll pack a parka.” Allen pulled his coat close about him, recalling his flip response; it didn’t seem to help. The thermometer on his wind gauge read 60, but he still felt chilled to the bone.

Carson had said more, of course: “The…silence…is another thing. It’s hard to describe but damn unsettling. You will quite literally be making the only sounds you can hear; there will be nothing else. Sound doesn’t carry well either, so even talking to yourself won’t do much against it. And I wouldn’t recommend drawing attention to yourself, anyway.”

“I thought you said it was deserted,” Allen had said. “Dead.”

“It is, but…there’s still something about that place. I don’t know what you’d call it…a presence, maybe. Like something’s watching you. Not so much as a blade of grass has grown there in decades, but something has kept the others from coming back. You’d best go cautiously and armed.”

Moving throughout the deserted streets as the temperature dropped and the silence grew all the more deafening, Allen came to understand what the old man had been talking about. Despite the fact that all color, motion, and sound seemed to have been sucked out of the world, he didn’t feel lonely.

He felt watched.

“Have a seat,” I said, gesturing Harriman to the beat-up chair that comprised my office’s lavish guest quarters. “What brings the OET to my doorstep?”

Harriman sat. “The Office of Extranet Technology is, as you may know, involved in an ongoing investigation of a rather serious security breach.”

“I wasn’t aware of that, actually,” I said. “Haven’t been following the evening news much. Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Very serious,” said Harriman, steepling his fingers. “A rogue program has made its way into our network from the unregulated sphere outside, and has begun enslaving–some of the boys call it ‘zombifying’–our secure systems to run unauthorized processes without user input.”

“I’m not quite sure I understand…technology was never my strong suit, aside from what I need to know for my job,” I said. That wasn’t entirely true, as I knew the workings of the game net like a master sensei, but now didn’t seem to be an opportune time for such a confession.

“Suffice it to say that our systems are being used, illicitly, in an attempt to bring down the network through the mass distribution of malicious code,” said Harriman. “You can see why the OET is involved, especially since we have been unable to perfect a software solution to the problem, and the hardware solution is…inelegant.”

“Inelegant how?”

Harriman removed a pistol from his jacket and pressed it to my temple. “Like this,” he said. “Your cranial rig has been compromised, and an immediate shutdown is authorized, so long as you are advised of the circumstance beforehand.

As soon as the ‘help’ button was pressed, a holodisplay popped up, complete with an animated menu and digital voice. “Congratulations on your purchase of an Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword. The Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword is designed for brush-cutting, display, sword-dancing, ceremonies, and garden use. Use of the Exotech Inc. Utility US-7 Sword in contravention of the End User Agreement will result in voiding the limited warranty. By unsheathing the Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword, you agree to be bound by the terms of the license contained within.”

“How can I agree to be bound by the license when I have to unsheathe the sword to read it?” said Percival.

“Query cannot be processed. Warning: use of the Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword as a utensil or carving knife can result in heavy metal poisoning. Contact the nearest Poison Control Center if you serve or have been served food with an Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword. Do not lick the blade.”

“I don’t care about any of that, goddammit! Just tell me how to use it!” Noises and shapes were growling closer, perhaps drawn by the whispered argument Percival was having with the sword’s basic AI.

“Do not attempt to use the Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword as a weapon. Any attempt at offensive or defensive action will result in an automated call to our friendly network of service centers and a voided warranty.”

“What? Whoever heard of a sword not meant for combat?” Percival said, incredulous.

“Query cannot be processed. Due to its high heavy metal content, use of the Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword is a violation of domestic and international standards regarding safe workplace environments and war crimes. Use of the Exotech Inc. US-7 Utility Sword in an improper manner may lead to charges being filed with the International Criminal Court.”

“Just…just give me a demo of the brush-cutting feature!” Percival cried. They were almost upon him as he argued with his only weapon.

“Brush not detected. Proceed?”

“Yes, yes! Proceed!”