Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

This post is part of the April Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s challenge is to describe one of your characters in 50 words or less and then have that character interview you.

Peg Gregory has found herself in the place she’s always dreaded—a dead end. Stuck hauling supplies to a backwater planet no one’s ever cared about, there’s nothing to do but sell homemade beer and lob verbal grenades at her crewmates. They claim Peg’s being insubordinate; she finds it liberating.

“So, what special kind of madness has you thinking of signing on with the United Nations Transport Service?” said the recruiter behind the desk—Peg, according to her name tag.

“Well, I love to travel and see exotic places, but space travel is expensive,” I said. “I figure that a tour with the UNTS will let me get a good bead on spaceflight and maybe pay back a few outstanding student loans. See the universe, earn some scratch.”

“Of course. How do you feel about endless expanses of boring blackness, punctuated with beat-up hulks of stations and eight hours of leave on a pissant rock with fewer inhabitants than your high school and about as many opportunities for sightseeing?”

“Not…as good,” I replied sheepishly. “But a rock’s a rock, and I’ve only seen one so far. I also think you’re underestimating my high school. The ceiling tiles had some really interesting rust stains.”

Peg rolled her eyes and filled out he requisite line on the application. “Let me ask you this, then: ever get seasick?”

I nodded. “Once, but in my defense there was a swarm of jellyfish involved.”

“Imagine the worst, pukingest, colon-twistingest part of that, and multiply it by a hundred. That’s launch and soft landing, every time, all the time. Also happens when the gravity goes out, which happens a lot on the rattletrap tubs they throw you on. Ever see vomit in zero-g? You’ll be able to write a master’s thesis on it before you’re done with training.”

My stomach churned just thinking about it. “That’s why God invented dramamine.”

“Yes, nothing like a drowsy helmsman on a trillion-dollar tub.” Peg drawled, filling out another portion of the app. “Afraid of heights?”

“Only when I’m near the edge, and even then peer pressure will get me to the lip. I even went all the way to the very edge of Victoria Falls once, on a dare from my brother.”

Another part of the form scribbled in. “You do know that space is nothing more than one gigantic neverending drop, right? You’re always on the edge.”

I shrugged. “Seems like you are too.”

Peg gritted her teeth. “You know what? I was trying to save you from making the same mistakes I did. But if you insist, then screw it. I’m filling out the rest of your application for you. Top marks across the board.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Yoghurtelf – (link to this month’s post)
COchick – (link to this month’s post)
Steam&Ink – (link to this month’s post)
xcomplex – (link to this month’s post)
pezie – (link to this month’s post)
aimeelaine – (link to this month’s post)
auburnassassin – (link to this month’s post)
Della Odell – (link to this month’s post)
Juniper – (link to this month’s post)
Proach – (link to this month’s post)
allmyposts – (link to this month’s post)
jkellerford – (link to this month’s post)
LadyMage – (link to this month’s post)
dolores haze – (link to this month’s post)
Inkstrokes – (link to this month’s post)

“The Kirik Deep. Not particularly deep when compared with some of the great oceanic trenches, but nevertheless the deepest part of the ocean that isn’t an active or former subduction zone.”

Jenny fiddled with her microphone. “And…you’re sending a robot down there? One you built for the purpose?”

“Yes. We hope to collect some specimens of creatures living there, as well as a bit of diatomaceous ooze.”

“So…you’re going to an unremarkable part of the ocean to send a robot down, and you think that this qualifies as newsworthy?”

“Not unremarkable, no. No part of the ocean floor is unremarkable, but the Kirik Deep is part of the abyssal plain, not a trench, so the creatures there are subjected to pressures only a few orders of magnitude less intense but whose ancestors have not been subducted to that depth.”

Jenny switched the mike off. “I see. Well, we’ll be sure to let you know if the story runs.” She sighed to herself, wondering how she could spin something with such a low sensationalism quotient to her editor, if only to get reimbursed for coming all the way out to listen to a marine biologist prattle on.

“Why the hell do trees have to dump this shit on my car?” Lucas whines, clearing a swath in the pollen and plant debris covering his car with the back of his hand. “Why can’t they just drop their leaves and leave it at that?”

“You don’t want to know,” says Caleb. “Just wash it.”

“Yes I do,” Lucas replies. “You’re a bio major. Tell me.”

Caleb sighs. “No. You won’t like it, and then I’ll never hear the end of your whining.”

“You’ll never hear the end of my whining if you don’t.”

“Fine,” says Caleb. “The pollen? Plant sperm. The little stalks all over your car? What do you think makes sperm?”

“You mean…” Lucas begins.

“Yes. The trees have sex with the world and then their penises fall off. Onto your car.” Caleb is smiling by the end, as he sees Lucas’s expression turn to horror.

“UGH!” Lucas cries, recoiling. “Great, thanks! Now I’ll know that forever, thanks! I can’t un-know it!”

“You asked.

Companies and governments “seeded” vast sectors of space with remotely-piloted drones and the infrastructure to support them–automated repair stations and a network of tiny, cheap hyperspace relays. They took advantage of the fact that propulsion and communication technologies had evolved far faster than the ability to put a human in the driver’s seat. A person traveling at speed in one of the remote drones would be reduced to chunky salsa even if they’d had air to breathe.

But with the relays in place, a person with a decent connection on Earth could pilot a remote drone nearly in real-time, doing surveying and exploration work that completely automated probes couldn’t. And they could sell the minerals they found and potentially habitable sites for future colonization, if the technology ever appeared.

Cam had cashed in his college fund to buy a rattletrap of an RPD, and he spent close to ten hours a day hooked up to its interface, exploring places he’d never see with his own eyes and scraping together just enough cash from what he found to keep the operation going.

Big scores happened all the time–just never to him. So when he saw that a promising system already had a drone in orbit, he wished for the thousandth time that his tiny ship had some kind of offensive weapons.

“To this day, none know what happened,” Storyteller continued, drawing his audience in still further. “Some say it was the weapons of the old world, finally loosed form their old slumber. Others claim it was something new entirely. But all agree that on that day, and many since, the sky appeared to all the world like it had been sundered by flame.”

“I’ve met people who lived through it,” said Trixie. “Don’t think they’d even agree on that much.”

“I like Storyteller’s version better, even if it is a little embellished,” Kayla retorted.

“When Jasper left seeking the Legion, he claimed that a secondary purpose of his journey would be to learn the true story of those dark days, when so many died and so much changed,” Storyteller continued.

“What do you think happened?” Trixie cried.

Without skipping a beat, Storyteller responded. “I’m of the opinion that the world had grown hungry for the stories of old, which we still hear today. Stories of bravery, of heroism, of danger. The world wants us to tell stories like that, and to live them.”

Most–well, nearly all–of the incoming links were spambots, but not of the traditional kind. Your Catholic spambots tended to visit pages, leave a link that a child of five could identify as spam as a comment, and scuttle off. Your unorthodox Protestant spambots, of which there was an increasing profusion, simply visited your site.

It was easy for Chen to explain the former: every incoming link helped boost a site’s search ranking. Even though the engines supposedly corrected for link quality, they could be overwhelmed by an avalanche of low-quality links. There had been a huge scandal last year, after all, when the H. B. Dollor retail chain had been caught buying spam links to puff up its retail site. But the visiting spambots posed more of a problem.

Chen found it was easy to spot them, at least: 90% ended in .cz.cc, the web address for the Cocos Islands, an obscure Australian island territory with 600 people and an anything-goes approach to e-commerce. He was certain that the visits were either intended to draw curious web owners, automatic link checkers, or other creatures that might follow the gossamer spamstrands back to the pages that had vomited them forth.

He was about to put all those theories to the test.

Of course, I know I’m no Adonis: flabby in some places, bony in others, and gangly or ungainly throughout like a scarecrow built around a potbelly stove. I’ve got the pasty, translucent complexion only millennia of evolution in the damp Irish climate could perfect, and still blessed with bountiful harvests of acne well into my third decade even as time has brought most of my pizzaface compatriots of yore a measure of relief. Add to that the hunched posture common to Quasimodo and heavy computer users, and you’ve gone a long way to understanding why I’ve never had to live in a duplex.

But I’ve seen enough repulsive specimens of manhood strolling around campus with their hands in the pockets of someone with a good three to five points on them by the traditional metric scale to think that there must be more to it than that. My friends say it’s confidence, bravado, something you can fake until you make. But I’ve learned the hard way that it’s one thing to pretend you know what you’re doing when staring at a crowd of impressionable students and another entirely when you’re eying someone through the haze of a bad college party.

Mössner and Italesi were often cited as examples by believers in spiritualism and the occult, thanks to their deaths so soon after the excavations at the funerary complex of Teti II. Italesi died of scarlet fever while in quarantine at Port Said in December 1913, while Mössner perished the following year of a septic infection contracted after he was jailed by the British after war broke out.

Of course, that was patently ridiculous: British jails in Cairo weren’t known for their high levels of sanitation, much less if the prisoner was a suspected enemy alien, and there had been sporadic outbreaks of scarlet fever throughout the 1910’s on the Mediterranean coast. A pharaoh would have had to be far-seeing indeed to arrange a world war and an outbreak of unknown disease to kill those who violated the sanctity of his poorly-built rubble mound of a pyramid, and Teti II was a mediocre, forgotten ruler at best.

Nevertheless, when the entranceway to his pyramid collapsed a week after the death of Mössner, entombing 16 workers and two Europeans, the legend of the pharaoh’s wrath was established in the popular imagination, eclipsed only when Tutankhamen’s tomb was unearthed a decade later.

“The Ail thought the art of writing was divine, so they made styli idols unique in Bronze Age Mesopotamia.”

“Divine writing? I know some authors who think they’re divine, but damn.”

“It’s not that much of a stretch when you consider the first scribes were usually members of the priesthood anyway. I’m frankly surprised more societies didn’t follow the Ail in worshiping writing itself rather than its base content.”

“Whatever happened to the Ail?”

“Most of the artifacts we have are from sites that were sacked and burned. From that, people gather that they were wiped out by the Akkadians.”

“So much for the pen being mightier than the sword…!”

Mrs. Fairfax surprised me by looking out of the window with a sad countenance, and saying gravely—“Miss Eyre, will you come to breakfast?” During the meal she was quiet and cool: but I could not undeceive her then. I must wait for my master to give explanations; and so must she. I ate what I could, and then I hastened upstairs. I met Adèle leaving the schoolroom.

“Where are you going? It is time for lessons.”

“Mr. Rochester has sent me away to the nursery.”

“Where is he?”

“In there,” pointing to the apartment she had left; and I went in, and there he stood.

“Come and bid me good-morning,” said he. I gladly advanced; and it was not merely a cold word now, or even a shake of the hand that I received, but an embrace and a kiss. It seemed natural: it seemed genial to be so well loved, so caressed by him.

“Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty,” said he: “truly pretty this morning. Is this my pale, little elf? Is this my mustard-seed? This little sunny-faced girl with the dimpled cheek and rosy lips; the satin-smooth hazel hair, and the radiant hazel eyes?” (I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake: for him they were new-dyed, I suppose.)