Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“All that exists are a billion tangential experiences which are incorrectly called the real. People have struggled for years against the notion that nothing is objective and subjectivity poisons any hope of truth or reconciliation between beings, but it remains an inescapable fact.”

“That’s a rather dim outlook, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps. But it is and remains the only outlook.”

I never understood why Annie Gross set up her practice in town. There was an optometry school at Osborn University just a few miles down the road, so the county was always overrun with eye doctors looking to set up shop. Usually they stuck around because of spouses or children or love of the area–all reasons which, as far as I knew, didn’t apply to Dr. Gross.

Then there was the indelicate subject of her name. I knew, of course, that it was a German name and didn’t mean anything particularly bad when her ancestors had borne it across the pond, but that didn’t make it any less of an issue. Heck, Wanker is a semi-common German surname too, but that doesn’t keep people from discreetly spelling it Vanker when they emigrate. She could at least have spelled it Grosz or something.

Despite that business always seems to be good; I never saw a waiting room that wasn’t full of teens and adults. That may have had something to do with Dr. Gross herself, of course. Me, I was always too shy to make eye contact with her–ironic, I know–and would bury my nose in the waiting room books until called.

That could be a little dangerous, though, because more often than not they were Dr. Gross’s old textbooks, full of lurid color photos of diseased eyeballs leaking pus or escaping their sockets. In that respect, at least, her name was apt.

“Near as we can tell. After that, Engineer Abbot sounded all stop without any input from the bridge and ordered the fenders out.”

“Why would he do that? They weren’t in port and no communications to other vessels are recorded.”

“Look, I’m just telling you what I see. GPS confirms that there weren’t any transceiver-equipped vessels nearby at the time, and that’s the the last order entered in the log. You saw the fenders when we boarded.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense…”

I parked between two black Jeeps of identical make, model and year today. Slotted right in between them. I have to wonder, when I see things like that, about the greater designs lurking behind such everyday coincidences.

Or maybe, just maybe, they had hoped for a white Hyundai to sit between them, the ultimate contrast. Like ivory and ebony on a set of 88 keys.

The far northern realm of Sannikov, the only remaining bastion of civilization in our world after the great conflagration. Even in the shadow of such destruction, war rages on between two mutually hostile groups: the Daqin in the north, and the Seres in the south. Its cause long forgotten, the conflict serves only to threaten the fragile embers of civilization that still flicker.

Despite the relatively small population and land,the fighting was nevertheless fierce and seesawed back and forth with no real gains.

That is, until recently.

Soldiers of Daqin have recently been emboldened, attacking with complex strategies and new weapons never before seen, or imagined, in Sannikov. Suddenly, the war seems in danger of ending not in stalemate but in the annihilation of Seres and all its people.

But Andrea Bergstrom & Associates didn’t pay Cynthia to do that. No, her job was going through the slush pile.

Every day, hundreds of letters from would-be authors arrived at AB&A, looking for one of the agents to represent what the writers were no doubt convinced would be The Next Great American Novel. Junior assistant editors got to wade through the muck, looking over query after query and routing the ones that seemed decent upstairs for a second look.

“What would you do,” Cynthia read, “if you learned you were a vampire princess…” She stopped there and chucked the letter into a wastebasket she’d set up, one labeled ‘Vampire Shit.’ Oh, it’s true they were hot now, but with the press time and the concurrent glut on the market–plus the fact that most were unspeakably dire–Ms. Bergstrom had decreed from on high that they were no longer to be considered.

Cynthia opened a fresh one. “Izzy Connington had everything in life: a hot boyfriend, a fast car, and the prom queen’s tiara. But that’s before she became a vampire…”

Paper was roughly balled and flung into the VS basket.

“Kyra Heartache and Nostra Rameses. Friends and lovers torn apart by the ancient feud between vampyr and mummies.”

VS. VS, VS, VS.

“How am I supposed to get there?” Harvard had said.

“Scam your way through, Harv,” Pa had said. “Scam your way through.”

Harvard had taken those words and made them real in his trek so far. A few card tricks on the waterfront rubes earned enough to take a trolley to the train station. A lonely-looking older cashier had provided a ticket to the next town over on credit in exchange for a date. Harvard embraced a dizzying number of aliases, a multitude of lies, and even a touch of the old grifting slight-of-hand Pa had tried–and largely failed–to pass on.

It took nearly six months, but Harvard eventually found himself on a train platform in Chicago, ticket to Manhattan in hand.

It was only the beginning.

“Hah,” Schroeder said. “People hear ‘air cav’ and they get to thinking about Duvall in Apocalypse Now. Ride of the Valkyries. Attacking a beach just to do a little military surfing.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s ‘air assault’ now, for one,” said Schroeder. “Not air cav. No more foofy blue hats or buglers for us. Not to mention that half the stuff they showed in the movie you couldn’t have gotten away with even in ‘Nam, and stuff you could get away with in ‘Nam will have you up against a wall these days.”

“So what is the same, then?”

“Speed. We get in quick, get out quick, and leave a lot of oily smoke on the way. That part’s never changed.”

Now, elaborate pranks–or “hacks” as they’re called–have a rich history at MIT. It’s a predictable side effect of bringing together so many intelligent, technically-inclined people and placing them in an academic pressure cooker; hacks were nothing more than a release valve.

To execute a great hack was also to court a sort of immortality. Who could forget, after all, the Great Dome Police Hack of 1994? On the last day of classes, a group of hackers had moved a full-size facsimile of a campus police car to the top of MIT’s Great Dome, complete with flashing lights, a dummy in an authentic CP uniform, a valid campus parking ticket, and a box of fresh donuts. Any number of electrical engineering majors had gotten laid off of exaggerated or fabricated tales of their involvement in that one.

Andrew Germand’s hack, though, would eclipse them all. And unlike the cheerfully anonymous pranksters of 1994, everyone would know its mastermind–even as they were powerless to do anything about it.

Meediv balked at the suggestion. “We agreed upon our price earlier,” he said.

“Yes, but that was before you delivered the merchandise. You broke the first and oldest rule of the business: don’t deliver the guns and ammunition at the same time.”

Ogaden’s men had surrounded Meediv by this point, holding the assault rifles they had just been sold.

“Take this as a friendly lesson,” Ogaden said, clapping Meediv on the back. “The next time you sell weapons, you won’t make the same mistake thanks to this generous gift. Unless you’d prefer to experience the irony of being shot with your own guns, of course.”