Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Oh sure, there had been some oddities. The fact that the higher-ups never appeared, communicating only by email, intercom, and sticky note. The fact that there were always free parking spaces in the company lot, parking spaces being about as common on Manhattan as Republicans. The fact that all of the other cube-jockeys always seemed to be there before Jaz arrived and stayed after she left.

But hey, she had talked herself out of any suspicions along those lines. Jaz was, after all, working at one of the most prestigious law firms in New York and by extension the civilized world. It didn’t matter that she was an intern acting as a glorified secretary; she was getting face time and experience and even a modest stipend (unlike most internships which treated people like chattel laborers). In a few months’ time it would all be worth it: the long hours of studying, the stupefying student dept, the lack of a social or romantic life after eighth grade or so, all of it.

Then one morning Jaz found a sticky-note directive from above in the usual place on her monitor: “Please report to the 23rd floor conference room for an urgent meeting.”

Sighing, Jaz had resolved to check her messages before she went. She’d accidentally been included in a company-wide blast email, which usually excluded her, and popped it open:

“Directive: Secure all entrances and exits and report to the 23rd floor conference room for our yearly success and team-building meeting. Bring the virgin/maiden sacrifice if you see her. Convocation and dinner to follow.”

Cecelia Dugaine, born 1727, woke up in a fancy hotel suite on Times Square with a splitting headache.

Where had Gaelan gotten to? He had been such an obvious, easy mark at the party. Nervous, gullible, unattractive, and giving off waves of type AB positive scent–the good stuff, rare and vintage. It had been easy as breathing to give him a whirlwind seduction, a quick whiff of persuasive pheromones, and then retire to a small room upstairs to feed. Cecelia remembered the expression on his face as she’d sunk her dripping fangs into his jugular, the last clear thing she could recall: not so much scared or pained as thrilled.

As she staggered upright and lurched toward the bathroom, Cecelia wondered at her puzzling lack of the Hunger, which should have returned after a day’s rest. Her movements lacked their usual fluid, deadly grace; upon entering the bathroom, she very nearly lost her balance and fell, something that hadn’t happened since she’d been turned in 1755 by the Comte de Vézelay.

Two things were visible in the mirror that shouldn’t have been there. The first was her reflection, which Cecelia hadn’t seen in centuries.

The second was a message scrawled in blood: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF MORTALITY!

A card was propped on the countertop below; with trembling hands–her hands hadn’t trembled since the Hunger had almost consumed her in 1859!–Cecelia opened it and read.

Dear bloodsucking fiend,

-G

Panicked, Cecelia threw the card down. She dashed to the balcony, throwing open the door and casting aside the curtains. The early morning sun shone gaily down upon her exposed skin, without so much as a tendril of smoke or a whisper of pain.

“No!” she cried, sinking to her knees in important rage.

“Hey nature child!” someone cried from the next balcony over. “Put on a shirt and get the hell over it!”

Let us now consider the nature of truth. Relativists claim that truth is highly subjective; each man may have his own truth which is completely separate (and even in opposition to) the truths of others. Essentially, they argue that anything a human being sees, feels, or believes, has an element of this personalized, relativistic “truth” to it.

However, we must concede that there are thing that human beings cannot see, hear, experience, or grasp. A human may never see infrared or ultraviolet light, for example, or touch an atom. And there are things that we cannot grasp, if only because of the sheer limitations of biology. Just as a cockroach will never be able to grasp the concept of a pneumatic drill, there are—must be—things beyond the pale of human experience. We may even be aware of them—just as a cockroach would notice and avoid the noisy, spinning pneumatic drill—but their governing mechanics are beyond our grasp.

Thus, there must be things that cannot be assigned a relativistic truth, because they cannot be experienced or grasped by a human being. We can therefore divide all things into two groups: those which may attain a measure of relativistic “truth” through human experience, and those that cannot. The former group is as true as relativism allows anything to be, and the latter is as false. To wit: if a thing cannot be experienced, and cannot be grasped, it is outside the pale of human experience and may as well not exist.

We can therefore say, even allowing for the most liberal relativism, that some things are true and others are false. That we cannot name the falsehoods is irrelevant–were they things man could name, they would be things within his pale, and therefore “true.” Working inward from this, let us now consider the category of “true” things established above. Suppose something can be experienced and understood to be true by a human being, yet it never is. Suppose, out there in the cosmos somewhere, that there is a sensation waiting to be had by the human race. There is a creature in the deepest ocean that will never be seen by human eyes or touched by human hands. We can conceptualize its existence in the abstract, perhaps, but it is not “true,” since it has never been subjected to the lens of human interpretation.

The drill instructor was a younger man, well-muscled, wearing a pair of thick black eyeglasses beneath his campaign hat. His dark skin glistened in the 100-degree sunshine, and there was a Decepticon badge on his lapel.

“It doesn’t matter what my name is; you crotchjockeys don’t have the brain cells to say it without making my ancestors howl worse than your parents when they saw your SAT scores,” he barked. “Just call me Sergeant Poindexter. I joined up because I wanted to boss around the jockstrap sniffers that used to snap decent people with towels. So saddle up, my precious unorganized grabastic amphibians, because I am the Kwisatz Haderach and my name is a killing word!”

Some of the recruits exchanged nervous glances. One seemed about to ask a question; the sergeant quickly stepped in front of him, nose to nose. “From now on you speak only when spoken to. You talk out of turn and I will pluck a strand of your hair and give it to the voodoo chaplain to curse you with crotch sores, yea unto the seventh generation! You got that, padawan?”

“Y-yes sir!” the unfortunate recruit stammered.

“I am not ‘sir,'” howled the sergeant, “‘sir’ is your deputy basketball coach or whoever else in your life regularly handled your balls. You will call me ‘Sergeant’ or so help me I will mow you redneck zombies down like George Romero and keep your heads in my icebox next to Zuul! That clear, you piss-poor pack of level one fighters?”

“Yes sergeant!”

“Come on, now, sound off like you got a pair! How’s Cobra Commander going to know you’re coming if you can’t even squeeze out a decent ‘yo Joe?’ All of you, in unison!”

“Yes sergeant!” the men cried at what could hardly be described as the same time.

“My job is to weed out all you letter-jackets who are too dumb for even the United States armed forces,” the sergeant continued. “I asked for a bunch of Imperial Stormtroopers, and I got you! I don’t need to see your identification, I know you’re not the recruits we’re looking for. You’re clueless as a bunch of Microsoft dancing paperclips and twice as annoying; but you popped up and by God I’m going to bend you into shape even if I have to rewrite the source code. You grok me?”

“Yes sergeant!” the men answered once more, a bit more in unison.

“From now on, you maggots are my own personal Pokémon: I throw down, and you do what I say without question. You don’t need to know how to do anything but follow orders, say your own name, and learn to like getting repeatedly shoved in the balls. You are the lowest form of life on Earth, all equally worthless. A flu virus in a Chinese hooker contributes more to society. Are your feelings on this matter clear? Let me hear it again, Recruitmons!”

“Yes, sergeant!”

With apologies to Stanley Kubrick and Skippy.

Jameson huffed on his cheap, mean cigarette. “It was a mystery for a long time, but now it’s pretty much an open secret: the royal family has a genetic predisposition to acute bufomorphic osculitis.”

“Acute…what?” The strong local Cinnibarian liquor was making Cartyr’s ears buzz, but he was still reasonably sure that the last thing Jameson said would have come out as gibberish to the stone-cold sober.

“Did they just throw you into this assignment out of grammar school, or what?” the elder journalist groused. “Acute bufomorphic osculitis is when someone with massive inborn magical potential–specifically, for alteration or mutaremagicae–and can’t control it. Different families have different strains of osculitis, probably dating from whatever forebear had the mutation in the first place.”

Cartyr sipped his local firewater. “That doesn’t explain why the princesses can never marry.”

“It’s sex-linked, so only the ladies can get it. Men are just carriers.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s something in the big book of reporting about getting to the damn point,” Cartyr cried, thrusting his pencil at his blank reporter’s notebook. “You still haven’t told me what buffomoronic occultis is!”

“Guess you never had any Latin in grammar school either.” Jameson ground out his coarse smoke and lit a new one from the ashes. “It means that anyone the Cinnibarian princesses kiss turns into a toad, and that any toad the princesses kiss turns into a man. Or, I suppose, woman.”

The messages arrive every month, but never at the same time. One could be a letter, second class, with no return address. Another might be a telephone call, delivered in a different voice–sepulchral or bright, male or female–each time. There have been notes slipped under doors and emails from unknown senders, papers tacked to your corkboards and faxes sliding drily out of your machine.

They have borne everything from a flowing hand to crude backwards letters to magazine cutouts to morse code. some can be read in a minute, while others would take hours to decode, if that was necessary.

It’s not.

The form may vary, but the content is always the same.

A single phrase: “She is alive.”

Wilma loped after the intruder, baying, while Fred scaled to his favorite perch with a yowl and watched the ensuing chase with eyes shining in the semi-darkness. I had quick thoughts of trying to nudge Wilma back behind the kiddie gate, lest the intruder be carrying rabies or some other nasty cocktail of diseases, but she put the lie to her 16 years on earth with a surprisingly energetic pursuit. It was all I could do to follow armed with a broom.

The strange dog, for its part, seemed equal parts terrified and purposeful. While zigzagging across my living room, upsetting furniture and bunching up rugs, it nevertheless made straight for the kitchen. I lost sight of it for a moment, but when the dog reemerged, still tailed stubbornly by Wilma, I saw that it had a boneless chicken breast–one I’d set out to thaw for dinner–in its mouth.

It was only when the intruder made its escape, through Wilma’s doggie door, that I understood how it had gotten inside in the first place. I was able to slide the lock into place before my geriatridog chased the interloping hound outside, but, seized by intense indignation at having my house invaded and my pets threatened, I went through the large door, still clutching my broom, seconds later. It was a bright night out and the streetlights were on; I expected to see the dog running for the treeline across the street and 500 yards away.

Instead I caught a glimpse of a small, pale child in a pool of streetlamp light.

It glanced over its shoulder, and I could see my chicken breast defiantly clamped between rows of square white teeth. Eyes shone vividly in the twilight, and a moment later the figure vanished behind my garbage cans.

The Silent Fortress rests in the center of the realm, its battlements higher than any other structure and the dry moat surrounding it so vast that only the sounds of wind and rain may carry. It is, in essence as well as in fact, the very heart of its world.

Every battlement is manned by troops of the elite Laconic Guard, who are all sworn to eternal silence, even in combat. Their armor is muffled by layers of quilting, and decades of training is required to even be considered for admission to the journeyman camp–for the Laconic Guards must fight and die in total silence.

Within the Silent Fortress, the only communication is through hand signals. Not even writing is permitted due to the scratching. Impossibly luxurious tapestries over a foot thick cover the walls to muffle any sound that might penetrate the halls.

There is on exception, though: in the centermost room of the keep is a massive dome in which a singer whispers a quiet and tender lullaby at all hours, day or night. The singers work in shifts, briefly becoming duets, so that the music need never cease.

Why?

Because, laying in a small bed under the apex of the dome lies the Eternal Child, who dreams the world into being.

To wake them is to cause the unraveling of the world.

In addition to his qualifications as an engineer and a theorist, Ryov Nechayev was also an amateur historian. As such, he especially delighted in old, obsolete, or obscure units of measurement and often used them in his research. Graduate students and international collaborators quickly began passing around informal sheets of “rnmetric units” that were essential in any dealings with Dr. Nechayev:

Horse: 2.4 meters (for measuring distances to be covered)
Bus: 8.4 meters (for measuring things that were large enough to display advertising)
Smoot: 1.7 meters (for measuring things in Boston)
Barn: 10^−28 square meters (for sub-atomic use)
Grave: 1 kilogram (for important measurements)
Dog year: 52 days (for medium scale timeframes)
Tael: 31.25 grams (for meauring thing precious or Chinese)

Kordo（偽の翻訳）was first a manga drawn by Sei Iwashi and lettered by Joanna Suzuki. Published by Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Press beginning in 1991, the comic was successful enough to interest TV Tokyo, which commissioned an anime series in 1993. Kordo the Series ran 197 episodes with 5 original video animations (OVAs) and remains in syndication with major Japanese satellite providers.

The series was popular enough with foreign audiences that fansubs were soon circulated with English subtitles. Exchanged at anime conventions, the bootleg tapes quickly became prized collector’s items, with even third-generation copies fetching $50-$100 par cassette. A petition to bring the series to English-speaking audiences in an official capacity garnered over 100,000 signatures–just enough for TV Tokyo to confirm that they had no plans for localization.

Occasionally, veteran fans of anime have wondered why Kordo has attracted so many fervent admirers. Its plot and storylines are typical of many “magical schoolgirl” tropes present in Japanese media, and the animation, while lush by anime standards, pales in comparison to deluxe OVAs with much more highly-regarded stories. Iwashi and Suzuki, who maintain strict control over their intellectual property and hand-drew many cels for the animation, have been silent on the matter.

Some have been so bold to suggest that Kordo owes its success to subliminal messages inserted into both the manga and anime. It’s certainly true that the animation has reportedly provoked occasional seizures and psychotic episodes, but that’s hardly unheard-of; the 1997 Pokémon episode “Dennō Senshi Porygon” (でんのうせんしポリゴン) famously caused over 600 such seizures. Skeptics point out that scarcity is a far more likely reason for the program’s success (at least overseas).

But when Iwashi and Suzuki announced a sixth OVA to debut for the series’ 25th anniversary, few could have known that the secret of the program was about to be finally, violently, revealed.