Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Other Book of Changes
Codex entry #90R1114

City officials are pretty sure that the population of Imami Monkeys were introduced when the Imami Zoo was ransacked during the Anarchy. New World monkeys of several closely related species escaped and soon interbred, finding the tropical climate and relative abundance of trees and skyscrapers much to their liking. Though troops of the much-diminshed Eastern Empire soon returned to restore order, there was little that could be done about the monkeys. They became such notorious pests that the Imami City Chamber of Commerce actually began offering bounties on their tails as had the ratcatchers of old; the local chapter of Humans for Ethical Animal Treatment protested, but even the regular harvests of tails did little to control a population with few natural predators.

Perhaps the most notorious of the Imami Monkeys was the leader of a troop near the Knackery, the officially unsanctioned but nevertheless open and tolerated school of tame magic and alchemy. Called Raider by those of the Knack, the monkey had even brown fur in contrast to the white and black patterns found on most of its compatriots. There was such intelligence, such malice, in its actions that many of the Knack claimed that Raider must have been exposed to wild magic or radiation from the Big One that had dropped offshore during the Anarchy. Maybe both.

Raider’s troop constantly tried to gain access to the alchemy building, probably because of the sweet smells that many of the ingredients issued forth. They’d tried breaking in, propping doors open, picking locks–every conceivable bit of mischief. In the end, the troop waited until Docent Algiers had loaded up his truck for a trip to MagiCon in Attica to strike. The Docent escaped with only a few scratches, but every last potion, salve, and tonic he carried was snatched away or shattered. Raider made for one vial in particular, a concoction of formaprogressa that had taken years to brew and which the Docent had hoped to sell for a tidy profit.

Safe in the abandoned apartment block that served as the troop’s den, Raider allowed the others to become drunk or disoriented by the other stolen goods before sneaking off to imbibe the formaprogressa. Luckily, the others were making too much of a racket to hear her–for Raider was indeed a she–shrieks as the fluid did its work. Rapidly denuded of hair and tail, Raider grew from three foot two to five foot five in seconds. When the magic faded and she looked into a mirror stolen for that very purpose, newly blue eyes stared back; only short monkey-colored hair was any indication of her original form. That had been the plan all along, to use the others to evolve herself to something more becoming the power and comfort Raider craved.

Well, the first part of the plan, anyhow.

Six months later, posters urged Imami residents to vote for Rae D’Erre, a fresh new face in city politics, for mayor.

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“If the world ends tomorrow…”

“It won’t.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“It’s been tomorrow in Auckland for hours now. If anything were apocalyptic, we’d have heard about it.”

The Vyaeh are a mercantile empire, and generally content to exercise suzerainty over the systems that they control. However, this policy does not apply to species that resist them: the Vyaeh annihilate such lifeforms as an example to others, and incorporate survivors into their economy as slave laborers or into their military as slave troops. The Vyaeh euphemistically refer to these as “conscripted races.”

Krne
The Krne, known as “giants” to the humans that have encountered them, are a huge race of bipeds employed by the Vyaeh as laborers and combat shields. Herbivores from a high-gravity world that was among the first conquests of the Vyaeh, they are not a terribly bright race but have been known to rebel (especially when coerced by more intelligent beings). Absent orders, Giants will often adhere to their simple instructions for weeks, if not months, unless given new directions in Krneese. They have been known to use rocks as projectiles, but are incapable of using most weapons with their large claws.

Following the Vyaeh conquest of the Tuy’baq, their engineers began integrating the latter race’s advanced cybernetics and networking technology into their military/industrial complex. One of their earliest experiments was in cybernetically enhancing the Krne, with the idea that the creatures could be made more tactically useful through increased intelligence. This proved to be a deadly mistake: the enhanced Krne, when deployed, promptly instigated a rebellion against the enslaving Vyaeh which proved to be one of the most destructive in history. It took ten years and thousands of Vyaeh lives to re-subjugate the Krne to the will of the Queen in Silence and the Orphaned Court.

“Then the thing went down, gushing blood like you wouldn’t believe. It was like a big blood-filled balloon had popped, spilling everywhere and rising almost to my ankles before the door opened and let it flow out. It smelled revolting, and permanently stained my shoes.”
-Unidentified SCNF mechanical engineer

“Mosquito”
An interstellar pest present on many Vyaeh ships. They secrete a corrosive goo that can be thrown as a projectile, and are also capable of attacking with claws and mandibles. Some Vyaeh ships have genetically modified Mosquitos to serve as combatants, enhancing their naturally tough carapaces and allowing them to spit corrosive goo at higher velocities and with greater accuracy.

“Hey! These ones swat back!”
-Unidentified SCNF mechanical engineer

“Roach”
Another interstellar pest present on many Vyaeh ships, the Roach is a native of an unknown low-gravity planet that floats by means of a gas-filled body. It ordinarily attacks with its sharp mandibles, but in its mating form the Roach will explode at the foot of any moving organism, coating the target with toxic spores. Some Roaches have been mutated by enterprising Vyaeh crews to serve as weapons of sorts; the mandibles they use to attack are capable of piercing light armor, and it enters its mating stage twice as fast, producing a larger explosion and spores which impart a deadlier toxin.

“What’s really bad is when you come on some poor sap they killed, rotting before your eyes and festering with hundreds of the things, still tiny and feasting on his flesh.”
-Rebecca Sears, command crew

Cyborg
A cybernetic organism of unknown origin, possibly human or human-like. They are employed as light tanks in many remote Vyaeh garrisons, and are equipped with slashing claws based on those of the Krne as well as percussion grenades that can be set to explode on a timer. Some models are employed in major Vyaeh garrisons for crowd control, and feature a hardened carapace, percussion grenades, and a flamethrower.

The species from which they are derived is unknown, but intercepted Vyaeh transmissions indicate that they are a relatively new weapon and that the secret of their creation is jealously guarded by the Orphaned Court. SNCF personnel who have encountered them in combat have described their appearance as “disturbingly human-like” but no intact specimens have ever been captured, as they self-destruct upon death.

“If you skinned a guy, turned him inside out, and drove a tank up his ass, you might have something about half as ugly as these sons of bitches.”
-Former SNCF Security Officer Popovitch

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I still remember the time Sean tried to do a wolf whistle and a copse of trees showed up and chased him across town.

Turns out he’d done a “wold whistle” by mistake, and the trees of the Old Town Wold hadn’t been happy about it.

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There is a book that exists, a book of prophecies, a book with no name. It was created and released by the Madfather for the sole purpose of sowing insanity among mankind.

For the book contains an accurate record of everything that is yet to come, set down in clear and unambiguous prose. Every scholar, every fortune-seeker, every dilettante who has read it has gone mad and spent their days gibbering in a cell or worse.

Why is that? the uninitiated, the ignorant wonder. What’s so maddening about the future?

Unlike the books of literature, the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, which supposedly drive the reader mad through sheer wrongness, the book of nameless prophecies offers only truth, only fact.

But what truth, what fact.

Think about it. What person could fail to go mad at reading their own history in exacting detail, knowing they can do nothing to change it? The ultimate fate of mankind–indeed, of the Earth–in the far future? With the next few moments of a reader’s own perusing of the book near the beginning for good measure.

No, children, you must beware the nameless book of the Madfather and seek it not out, lest you share in that unhappy fate.

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Dorothea Burke 1947-1975
She said “I’ll be right back.” We’re still waiting.

Franklyn Merrill Wright 1978-1999
A petty thief killed resisting false arrest. “Just cuz it’s wrong don’t make it Wright.”

Alba “Margie” Williams 1882-1951
Her twin dreams were to live forever and to visit Paris. One of them came true.

Nolan A. Reynolds Jr. 1901-1962
A dog that doesn’t bite can still push you off a ledge.

Sonja Cain 1966-1995
Lost to altitude sickness: died raising Cain.

Bernard Wong 1969-1999
Mixed up with Franklyn Wright during initial interment. “These undertakers, they don’t know Wong from Wright.”

Eunice Lisa West 1968-2002
Died from venereal disease. “Go West, young man, go west.” They did.

“This store is terrible,” groused Harold, intentionally complaining in front of the ladies who worked there. “Everything is too damn expensive.”

“This is a dollar store, sir.”

“And there’s no selection! None at all!” Harold continued, gesturing at aisle 27 of 53. “I tell you, if my name hadn’t been drawn out of the hat for the office party presents, I wouldn’t even be darkening your goddamn door.”

“Wow, buying Christmas presents at the dollar store,” one of the shopgirls murmured. “Pulling out all the stops, aren’t we?”

Harold began to walk down aisle 27. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” the other shopgirl said.

“Why the hell not? I have presents to buy for everyone at the firm and this aisle is 50% off.”

“That aisle is for wizards and the magically inclined. You need to have a good grasp of the seelie and unseelie worlds to make it out. It’s full of stocking stuffers.”

“Hah! The day some frump in a red vest tells me what I can and can’t do is the day I give my part of the office a raise!” said Harold, defiantly setting off down the aisle. “I don’t care if Merlin himself is in there.”

He walked confidently away as the ladies shook their heads and moved off. True to their word, the aisle was full of little baubles perfect for stockings–and perfectly priced at 50 cents a pop. Most were little carved gnomes and gargoyles. Harold examined each, looking for something that he was sure he wouldn’t want for himself.

Looking back, he noticed that some of the curios seemed to have shifted position. Shrugging it off, Harold kept browsing. The next time he turned around, the geegaws seemed to be even closer.

There wasn’t a third time. Tiny claws closed in on Harold from behind, and everything went black.

The store clerks found him the next day, stuffed and mounted as if by an experienced taxidermist and set at the end of row 27. “I warned him there were stalking stuffers down there,” one said. “Can’t say I didn’t warm him.”

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It seemed the more bright and neon and wireless the world got, the greater the distance was between ordinary people.

There was a park bench that offered a good view of downtown, from the skyscrapers to the bright channels of red and amber flowing about them like titanic jugulars. He’d sometimes come there on warm summer nights to linger and look, a speck among specks, with everything that had an off switch silent and cold.

He liked the park because it was safe, regularly patrolled by the expensive kind of Department of Public Safety drones, the ones that had a real person behind them instead of a computer program. There weren’t many augmented reality pop-ups either–the programs that appeared to walk in the real world but existed only in his shades. If he hadn’t needed them for GPS and vision correction, he’d have done away with them altogether–being accosted by the insubstantial and the unreal was a stiff price to pay in order to cut down the monthly fee.

At this distance from the city, though, there was nothing but silence, light, and motion. It was profoundly lonely, profoundly disconnecting, but profoundly beautiful. The speck among specks preferred that kind of solitude to being alone in a crowd downtown. Ordinarily he was alone in doing so, with only a few dog-walking drones and DPS UAVs for company.

This time, though, someone else wandered into view below him on the gentle incline of the park slope a few hundred yards away. Without the shades she’d have been a blob of colors in motion, but with them she was clear as a bell: tall and slim, hair so light as to be practically pearlescent in the moonlight, wearing what might have been a slip or a formal dress. Even though a pair of heels was clasped in one of her hands, she was still walking on tiptoes.

It was a comforting sight, a little bit of humanity peeking through the mess of concrete, steel, and lightwaves. He noted with some pleasure that the girl seemed to be looking out on the city much as he was. She was still a million miles away–the city papers were full of people being maced and arrested for saying “hello” in the wrong way–but the mere sight, the mere thought, was a comfort.

Then, as he watched, the girl slipped free of the pull of gravity and began to float heavenward, dress billowing and arms spread. He pulled off the shades in amazement, but the blur of ascending light remained–she wasn’t augmented reality, at least not of any type he’d ever encountered before.

That shouldn’t be possible he thought, shaken. Even in this age of UAVs and drones, things needed wings or fans or something to fly. He felt a sense of eerie beauty and maddening confusion wash over him, perhaps the strongest feeling he’d felt in many long, lonely, and dour months.

An even stronger feeling came next: he had to follow her.

Inspired by this song and image.

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As discussed in the academic paper “From Concealed to Canon in 10 Years” from the monograph Neglected Voices (Southern Michigan University Press, 2011), the meteoric rise of the author Sarah Lincoln Camden among literary critics is in many ways unprecedented. While there are many authors who were all but unknown in their own lifetimes, like Emily Dickinson, they only ascended to their favored place in the literary canon–those works considered essential to a literary education–after decades of study and a gradual increase in popularity.

In contrast, Camden’s nonfiction writings and short stories were appearing in college curricula and reading lists less than five years later. “As far as I’m concerned, Camden is canonical already,” was the riposte of a famous literary critic when asked about it. “I don’t know of a single 19th-century American literature course that isn’t using at least one of her writings, and it’s on every comprehensive exam reading list that our department has prepared since 2007.

Naturally, part of that appeal comes from her life story. Born ca. 1888, the illegitimate daughter of a New York businessman and his African-American maid, Camden represents an intersection of racial and class issues that have long fascinated academics and students of history. Her education–according to her writing, provided for by her otherwise absent father–lends a probing, progressive, and intelligent angle to the writing that is often absent from contemporary perspectives regardless of race, class, or sex.

But far beyond that, the nature of Camden’s journals, stories, and other manuscript fragments are notable for the absorbing quality of their prose. “I was sucked in from the very first,” said academic Dr. Chris Stevenson, who helped unearth the writings buried in an obscure and forgotten archive. “The stories, the essays, the journal entries…not just windows on a less equitable time, but riveting reading in their own right.”

In short, Sarah Lincoln Camden is enjoying a remarkable rise to the fame and literary prominence that eluded her in life, all the more remarkable for coming over 120 years after her death.

There’s only one problem: Sarah Lincoln Camden does not and never has existed.

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The accident victim was by the side of the road, dazed, when the office found him.

“Are you the one who was calling?”

“Yes. Yes, officer, yes.” The victim was clearly disoriented, possibly in shock.

“Calm down, calm down. Are you all right?”

“I…I think so,” said the victim, his breath misting the late fall air.

Close inspection showed a possible broken leg and a bit of foamy blood near the mouth. “No, you took a good hit, son,” said the officer. “Stay calm while we wait for help to get here. Did you get a look at what did it?”

“No, not really,” the victim said. “It came out of nowhere, so fast, there wasn’t time to do anything…”

The officer looked down the road. The signs were all there, telltale marks of a deer-car collision. “Did you see where it ended up?”

Wincing, the victim seemed to think deeply. “I think…I think it ran away.”

From down the road the officer could hear his compatriots arriving. He left the delirious victim for a moment to speak to them.

“Is it another…?” one began.

“Yes,” the officer said. “Another collision. Car came out of nowhere and hit the poor boy.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do for him,” the officers of the Deer Police EMS Unit said. “But if the car comes back for us, we’ll have to scatter into the woods or freeze so it can’t see us.”

The responding officer nodded wearily, his horns dipping with his head. “Rules of the game,” he sighed. “Rules of the game.