Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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.)

“Don’t make it out to be more than it is,” Dawson coughed. “People have jammed signals before and they’ll do it again.”

“Maybe in the 30’s, when anybody with a tricked-out radio had a stronger signal,” Knud scoffed. “But since the Korean War ended? A digital, encrypted signal? This is unprecedented, Daw.”

“Unprecedented, huh?” Dawson retaliated. He lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of the old. “The only thing that’s unprecedented is that your man isn’t a flake. Somebody jammed the limey IBA in ’77; said they were an alien with a message of peace but it was really just hippie granola crap about nukes.”

“Maybe so, but-”

“HBO had its signal hijacked in ’86,” Dawson continued, counting the examples off on his fingers. “Somebody kvetching about how $12 a month was too expensive. What are we charging for a premium package nowadays, anyhow?”

“Inflation is-”

“WGN and WTTW were both hijacked on the same day a year later,” Dawson said, delighting in the interruption. “Some schizo, probably. Did a bad impression of Max Headroom and spanked himself on the ass with a flyswatter.”

“Nothing since Reagan then,” Knud countered.

“If anything, it’s easier for them now. Time was you needed a dish and a power source. Now all you need it a computer and the skills to make trouble with it.”

Mikey had long been accustomed to the old wagon–falling asleep to the gentle humming of its tires as heard from the cabin at speed, listening to the faint pitch changes as the automatic transmission shifted as it carried Mom away to work, the little pieces of meals and toys long past that would sometimes resurface on or under the seats.

But the new car was alien.

It was far too quiet, meaning Mikey was distracted by the beating of his own heart when he tried to nap. It glided unnaturally up and down the driveway without any of the comforting sonic cues that spelled out M-O-M. Its interior was cold, sterile, with a clinical smell and none of the stains with stories attached. Worse, Mom wouldn’t allow any eating or drinking anything but water.

It wasn’t long before Mikey was throwing tantrums and demanding the old wagon back. He fancied he saw it downtown sometimes, moldering in a used car lot or bearing a new family of usurpers.

Heyburne rubbed the bridge of his nose with tobacco-stained fingers. “One of the conductors at the station, Sam Wireve, saw the guy first. Says he ran up in a huff, said something to him, and then ran away.”

“Huh,” Griffith said between po’boy bites. “What’d he say?”

“According to Sam, ‘the ootheca.’ His words, not mine.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?

“It gets better,” Heyburne continued, fingers still pressing and eyes closed. “Ed Sporgene in the 7/11 says he saw the same thing: old guy, worn-out clothes, ran in and said something to him before making a quick exit.”

“Same thing?”

“Ed claims the guy said ‘he serves newsprint.'”

Clep Sperch wasn’t particularly notable for anything. Plenty of men his age lived on the outskirts of town, supporting themselves through disability payments, welfare, and whitetail deer hunting. No one in town looked twice at people in grimy hunting camouflage mixed with international orange balaclavas and gloves moving in and out of the main street bar and grocery store.

Yes, Clep was keenly aware of his lack of notoriety. On some days it rankled him and he pledged to do something to bring himself back into the limelight whose warm gaze he hadn’t known since a shattered ankle ended his run on the track and field team at Earnest C. Sturm High School.

Then, one day, Clem Sperch found something wrapped in a waterproof tarp down by the creek behind his trailer. Even before he saw what it was, he had a sense that what he was looking for had arrived on the wings of a kind angel.

“It just doesn’t make any sense…the patient’s cyclase enzymes are somehow not functioning properly, but the tests don’t show anything unusual…well, except for the fact that the electron micrograph images keep coming back with technical errors. Flipped images. Damn machine must be on the fritz.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. It has to be a technical error.”

“It’s funny you use that term…Clarke had an old sci-fi story by that name, about somebody who went through a CPT violation and had their body’s chirality–its ‘handedness’–reversed. They starved to death because their ‘left-handed’ body couldn’t accept ‘right-handed’ food proteins or enzymes.”

“Are you honestly suggesting that this person when though a COT violation, whatever science fiction onsense that is?”

“Of course not. But the chirality of their cyclase enzymes could be reversed somehow–it would explain everything except your bad attitude.”