Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

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.”

Her note continued:

“I never believed your routine about being a cynic. You believe in things. Not good things or worthy things, but things nonetheless. From my point of view, every position I’ve teased out of you is utterly repugnant, but in taking them you’ve set yourself apart from the others.

Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. It’s a cruel world we live in when somebody has to hide their idealism behind a cynic’s mask, to feign apathy about something they care deeply about rather than confronting it head on. I’ve worn that mask many times in my life, and only recently have I had the courage to remove it for good. I think, in time, you will too.

This isn’t like the end of the book you told me you wanted to write–the one where everyone manages to live happily if not ever after without reeking of sickly-sweet sentiment. I don’t know if even such a qualified happiness can exist in this world of ours without a platform of lies to stand upon, much as we all desperately need to believe it can and does. But it is an ending.

I’ll go my own way–don’t worry. But whatever happens, I want you to be strengthened by it. Go out there and believe repulsive things, but believe them sincerely, just as I sincerely believe that you’ll get your happy ending–whether in real life or in a world of your own making on a manuscript page.”

I began to look for something different. I didn’t have a sense of the possibilities innate in that wonderful word–different–only a vague clenched feeling deep in my chest, a tension that was boiling over at the regularity with which I’d been confronted so far.

My first implulse, like many before me, was to leave Deerton. That is often enough for someone I grew up with to declare victory, but I found the next largest town up the road to be more of the same. The same buildings, the same people, the same cars. Oh, there were superficial differences to be sure, but even the lightest nick or cut would reveal tired old archetypes in new skin, a town created from the same set of stencils as Deerton.

The regional center? Add taller buildings that looked much like the shorter ones when you wormed into them. Biggest city in the state? A beltway that’s nothing more than pieces of I-313 back home re-skinned and re-used. Even the really big places–even New York, Los Angeles–added simply another layer of ornamentation to the basic structure. What, after all, makes a meth addict on the street all that different from a heroin addict–other than the size of their wallet? What, after all, makes the corrupt boss of Deerton’s Republican machine all that different from the corrupt boss of New York’s Democratic one?

Everything I saw and experienced was obstinately similar to what had come before, and that knot in my stomach refused to fade away.

“Schaffner! Lifire! You’re up.”

No answer.

“Schaffner! Lifire! You’re askin’ for a ball-bustin’, the both of you!”

Again, silence.

“Has any one of you sorry bitches seen Schaffner or Lifire? I swear if they’re not in this pack of nutless skunks in front of me I’ll take ’em both by the assholes and stuff ’em back up their mothers’ sorry-ass baby chutes!”

A tentative hand went up in the back. “I…I didn’t see ’em last night.”

“Is this preschool? Do you need to raise your hand so teacher will call on you? Out with it, Higgins, so I can get busy adding you to the ball-bustin’ list for talkin’ out of turn!”

Sionsla, or rather 510|\|5L4, had been one of the most notorious phreakers around. Their distinctive 1kb signature had been found in the boot sectors of computers from the Pentagon to Saddam Hussein’s private server, always placed in just the right place to cause mayhem after a period of time. It had also been attached to the infamous Three Mile Island polymorphic worm, and bombarded the servers of Yippee, Gaggle, and RoweWare with the most serious denial-of-service attacks those giants had ever witnessed.

Just as suddenly as they had appeared, though, Sionsla vanished. Their last known activity was in early 2001: a backdoor keystroke logger that bore the 1kb signature but was otherwise far below the elegant and devious standard of previous attacks. The source code to the various bits of malware the phreaker had inflicted on the world were never found; experts could only speculate that they had been developed on an isolated terminal using a custom-built operating system and programming language.

But if the junker HPAQ Probonio that Sanderson had brought by really did have Sionsla’s signature on it, well, that could be a major break. The Probonio hadn’t launched until late 2002, after all, long after custom machine code had been inserted into most units to lock Sionsla out.

They found the first artifacts in excavations for a new hotel along the outskirts of the city of Castuar: pottery shards at the beginning, followed by bits of worked stone and arrowheads.

The real find, though, was an iron spearhead. It was forged using techniques that, until the Castuar discoveries, had been unknown in the Precolumbian Americas. Radiocarbon dating confirmed it.

By examining other artifacts at the scene, archaeologists traced the spearhead to a site up in the mountains. Word leaked out about fantastic finds, but the government posted guards at the entrance and only allowed a select few to dig there. Despite the interest the newly discovered Castuar culture aroused, no one heard anything but rumors for nearly two years.