Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“There was an…incident…once while I was making a microwave dinner. The resulting confluence of space and time flung me back into the midst of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the 10th century BC. I was their king, and amassed the riches of an unspoiled new world before an errant lightning strike sent me home. I directed my subjects to bury their wealth at a given spot on my departure, and I leave now to reclaim it.”

Sherrie folded her arms. “A simple ‘none of your beeswax why I’m going to Peoria’ would have done, Rick.”

“Ah, but where’s the sport in that?” Rick deadpanned. “I prefer to build a towering artifice of sarcasm every possible opportunity. In addition to being personally edifying, it makes it all the less likely I’ll get asked inane questions in the future.”

“You mean the future that you’re off to the next time you heat up a burrito?”

“You of all people should know that burritos are not used to travel to a when, but rather a where,” said Rick. “Granted, that ‘where’ has a fifty-fifty chance of being Baja California or the handicap stall in the men’s room, but that’s neither here nor there.”

Smith reeled backward, blood splurting from a split lip.

“Go on, ask me again,” Jacobs growled. “Ask me again about my wife.”

“I…I don’t wanna…” All the bravado had gone out of Smith’s eyes. They were wide now, scared. Animal eyes.

The bartender was moving, most likely for a weapon. Instinctively, Jacobs lashed out and snatched. He didn’t realize he was holding a 20-gauge pump-action until he saw the barrel in his hands.

“Ask me again!”

“D-did you ever find out…who killed your wife?” Smith sobbed.

“All of it!”

“M-maybe took a…a l-look in the mirror?”

Jacobs viciously slapped Smith with the butt of the bartender’s gun. From the sound it made, Smith might have lost a tooth or had his jaw shattered.

Everyone was staring. Jacobs could feel their hard, judgmental eyes boring through him like searchlights. He pumped the shotgun’s action six times without firing; the loaded shells falling to the ground were the only sound in the bar besides the beating of Jacons’ own heart.

The bartender said something as his gun was returned. Jacobs didn’t need to hear it. He walked out slowly, half hoping that a spare shotshell box under the bar would end it all before he could pass the doorjamb.

People start wandering, dazed, out of their cubicles. There’s no possibility of doing any work, even without he papers lying around your office. There’s inevitably some vital communication, some crucial detail, that’s locked away online. You see some of the more active go-getters using their smart phones, but more often than not they’re checking personal sites or looking at tiny funny cat videos rather than trying to be productive.

You find yourself talking with people you rarely see upstairs about things you didn’t know you had in common. That feeling in your chest at not being able to work seems about 50% annoyance and 50% relief. No, sorry, I didn’t get that report done. Network outage, remember? A deep and secret part of you wonders, wishes everyone would be sent home without pay. People begin to trade in rumors of a cause. Squirrels in transformers. Idiots with backhoes on the interstate. Fuses blowing in the data center.

Perhaps, if the outage lasts long enough, you’ll grow more contemplative in your conversations with yourself and others. What if the network never returns? EMP pulse, terrorist attack, corrupt disc, file not found, forever. How would you manage your life, pay your bills, entertain yourself? There’s been a network for twenty years, your entire adult life. You panic a little, trying to remember wha toy can from a less-wired childhood. It’s the addict’s panic on realizing that the next fix may not be coming.

You recall a colleague saying something over lunch, half in jest. He said that, when the inevitable Big One drops and civilization comes crashing down, alien archaeologists looking after us millennia later will be puzzled at why our civilization produced nothing after 1950 or so. Stuff that will survive–paper, carvings in stone–haven’t been made in about as long, and everything else is either digital-only or soon will be.

It’s a sobering thought, one that the glee of a half-day or day off can’t quite chase away.

I was riding to work on the first train, as usual, and looking out the window at the countryside I’d seen a hundred different times before.

And then–I don’t know what triggered it–a flood of memories came back to me. Sights, sounds, and images from a long-ago and long-forgotten dream. Usually they fuzz away into nothingness before you’ve even fully woken up.

But once in a while, they come back.

I had a vision of a little town in a valley, mostly wood houses with just a few modern buildings mixed in. Snowy in the winter to the point of being practically cut off, dreamy and hot in the summer with long sunbeams glinting off brightly-painted porches.

I remember a little house–my house?–with an open porch and a swing and a bright yellow paint job.

I remember waiting for someone, someone I loved, someone I missed or was missed by during long and hard winter nights.

But I can’t remember their face, their name, or what brought us both to that little yellow house in the snowy valley.

“No, that’s not it at all. Costs are going up and profit margins are shrinking, so over the last couple years all the major airlines have been operating under the principle of ‘just in time.’ Planes arrive just in time to take off for another city, crews get there just in time to take off. Computerization has made that level of precision theoretically possible. It ought to be a ballet of jets, gas, and pilots.”

“That doesn’t explain why the flights are always late.”

“Yes it does. Let me paint a picture for you: there’s bad traffic in Los Angeles. The flight crew is late getting in, so their plane is late to Indianapolis. The same plane is going to Detroit with a different crew, and the old crew is flying to Atlanta. Now you have three delayed flights due to one fender-bender on the beltline. A complicated system with a lot of moving parts and a lot of humans will break down, and those breakdowns create ripples throughout the system. So, inevitably, ‘just in time’ becomes ‘never in time.'”

“How do you know that?”

“Used to be a pilot.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“You mean aside from the stress that drove me to the hospital three times in my last six months? Aside from the one frequent flier that was so angry about the delay that made him miss his daughter’s wedding that he stabbed me with a fountain pen? Aside form the fact that my dream of seeing the world wound up being crashing in a Hilton on six different continents?”

“Umm…”

“Aside from all that? I just needed a change of pace.”

Misty Jennings had won every beauty pageant the town held, but she lacked the movie-star good looks (or the money to acquire movie-star good looks) to compete at the regional or state level. She therefore had to take the unprecedented step of inventing pageants to compete in, in order to maintain her status as a big fish in a little pond and to pad her resume for what she no doubt thought would be her triumphal entry to the regional scene.

Thus came about the Miss Highway Patrol Troop 117 Pageant, the Miss QuickStop Gas Pageant, the Miss City Parks and Recreation Pageant, and of course the Miss Haverton Oil and Gas Extraction Company Incorporated Pageant. There were always entrants enough to fill out the ranks from among the county’s starry-eyed young ladies, and Misty was if nothing else savvy about how she did things. Promotional considerations were often handled out of her own pocket; she usually only took home half of the advertised first prize by private agreement, and she was quick to trade “favors” for judges and sponsors to work practically pro bono.

That was the genesis of the Miss Dounton Street East Contest, which everyone expected would be much like the various iterations of a Misty Jennings coronation that had gone before.

They were wrong.

People were always dropping by Harry’s and asking the same question:

“How come you sell boats? Ain’t no lakes around here.”

He had developed a variety of answers to this, depending on the asker. Potential customers got this response: “It’s right off the highway ramp and Lake Collins is just 20 miles down the road! Plus, we’re the only boat shop between Harrierville and Fort Collins.”

People just stopping in to use the restroom got a more succinct one: “Buy a boat, and I’ll tell you.”

Folks Harry recognized, or who arrived on foot, or who he plumb didn’t like got served from a reservoir of sarcastic responses: “These boats work in the air.”

“Oh, so *that’s* what I’ve been doing wrong!”

“Those are boat-shaped novelty RV’s.”

“I wants to sell planes, but they said that was just crazy.”

The voice at the other end of the line was pleasant, but with a faint far-eastern accent. “Mr. Sanderson, we’ve had quite the time tracking you down.”

“That’s why I wrote under a pseudonym,” Sanderson said. “It’s kind of the point.” He thought about hanging up, but if someone had gone to such great lengths to track him down, he might as well hear them out.

“Of course, of course,” the voice said. “My name is Nokin Kobayashi, and I’m with the San Francisco branch of Sunstar Games.”

Sanderson could already feel a headache building up. “Let me guess: it’s about the High Score series.”

“Well, yes,” said Kobayashi sounding both relieved and a little embarrassed. “I’m sure you know how successful the series was–and frankly, I have to congratulate you on such a marvelous idea. Selling novel adaptations of video games to young readers? A masterstroke for the educational market.”

“So I told myself at the time,” Sanderson grumbled. The residuals had certainly made it easy enough to work on other projects, but those books were never intended to be his sole scrap of notoriety. That’s what the pseudonym was for, dammit.

“The reason I’m calling, Mr. Sanderson, is that we’d like to use aspects that you introduced in your novelization of Blaster Squad Attack for the upcoming next-gen sequel. We’ll give you full credit and compensation, of course.”

“Not in a million years.”

I used to think like Descartes, that there was a real world out there to be perceived and that it could be perceived correctly. People who suggested otherwise were whiners and dreamers and gadflies seeking some nefarious purpose.

Do you know what shook that certainty to its very core?

Colors.

I did a fair bit of studying abroad in my day, since students with skills applicable to agriculture are always in high demand. As such, I’ve spent time working with irrigation and pest management projects among the Tswana in South Africa and the highlands of Vietnam near Dalat. Tswana and Vietnamese are both very different language, one more straightforward and guttural and the other mellifluous and tonal. Both lovely languages, cruelly overlooked by linguists stumbling over themselves to study Basque or Trobriandese.

But you know what they have in common?

Both use the same word for blue and green.

That’s right. They, and many languages like them, don’t make that distinction. If a precise hue is called for they might specify “like the sky” or “like a leaf” but as far as perception goes, the two might as well be one.

That idea, that simple idea, shook me to my very core.

Sean Ross had been born in a missionary family that had fled China during the communist revolution when he was only six years old. Since then, though decades of life in the United Kingdom and the United States, through the rejection of his parents’ faith and his embrace of Marxism, China had exercised a strong and romantic hold on Sean’s mind.

When the mainland opened up to foreigners during the Deng Xiaoping era, it was natural that he’d seek to travel there. As a geologist, albeit one who had formulated some radical notions, the Chinese made eager use of his talents both in the field and training students. He spent part of nearly every year there, despite a disillusionment evident in his writings as China liberalized economically.

As Sean’s specialization was endorheic basins and desert topography, he often did work in and around the Lop Nur salt pans in Xinjiang–a marsh in the final stages of drying into a desert and fed by a dying river. The topography, alternately wet and dry with vast and mutable sand formations, fascinated him, and the distance from Shanghai and Beijing seemed to appeal to his Maoist sensibilities.

All in all, he was an undeniable asset to the Chinese, and a powerful advocate for them abroad. This made his sudden and inexplicable disappearance from a survey team campsite all the more troubling. It was something of a mark of respect, albeit one tinged with a propagandistic need to save face, that led to an entire battalion of troops and an air wing being lent to the search.

The Chinese even arranged, at great expense, to bring in Sean’s ex-wife and a group of former students to consult with the search parties.