Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

[Soft music plays. A middle-aged MAN in a sport coat is in his kitchen, preparing a meal. He closed his fridge door and addresses the camera.]

MAN: Sometime, you want to get the most out of life. I know I do. But it was becoming difficult to maintain my lifestyle and family life due to my condition, which sometimes left me disabled for hours, sometimes days at a time. But that was before I talked to my doctor about Selenia™.

[The shot changes to a colorful pastel medication box with a beautiful butterfly on it.]

NARRATOR: Selenia™. For your mild to severe rheumatoid lycanthropy.

[A young WOMAN catches a soccer ball from offscreen and laughs.]

WOMAN: My mild to severe rheumatoid lycanthropy made attending my kids’ games an impossibility the day after an attack. The clothing repair and replacement costs were outrageous. And my family had to chain me up in the basement once a month after Uncle Anthony was slain. But no more. Thanks, Selenia™!

[The Selenia™ butterfly glides past her, and continues into a new scene with JAZZ MUSICIAN playing a solo in an intimate club setting.]

JAZZ MUSICIAN: Ever since I was gored by the Were-Razorback of Catullus Parish, my mild to severe rheumatoid lycanthropy has led me to attempt the brutal killing of friends and loved ones at least once a month, and infected dozens if not hundreds of others.

[The Selenia™ butterfly flits around JAZZ MUSICIAN’s head and he smiles.]

JAZZ MUSICIAN: Now I can hit the high notes in style. Thanks, Selenia™!

[The scene shifts between shots of other young, healthy people enjoying strenuous activities with the occasional shot of someone older engaging in a typical retiree task as the Selenia™ butterfly visits them all.]

NARRATOR: If you suffer from mild to severe rheumatoid lycanthropy, ask your doctor if Selenia™ might be right for you. 66% of patients in a double-blind study reported decreases in the length and/or severity of episodes after taking Selenia™. Side effects include irritability, excess body hair, semi-permanent fangs, mange, partial metamorphosis of extremities, chronic halitosis, heartworms, and lifeforce unraveling. Warning: Selenia™ carries some risk of The Blood Death. Do not use Selenia™ if you are on blood thinners or other coronary medications as serious and sometimes fatal episodes of The Blood Death have been reported. Talk to your doctor immediately if you notice any sudden personality changes or sudden cravings for exotic rare meats like emu, as this may be a sign of a rare but serious side effect. Do not use Selenia™ is you are nursing, pregnant, or may become pregnant, as it may cause mothers and offspring to develop Acute Metamorphic Dysplasia (AMD). People who do not suffer from mild to severe rheumatoid lycanthropy must not take Selenia™, as it carries a slight 100% chance of causing the condition in otherwise healthy adults and children interested in becoming adults.

[The Selenia™ butterfly comes to rest on the Selenia™ box.]

MAN, WOMAN, JAZZ MUSICIAN: Thank you, Selenia™!

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Brick and wrought-iron fenced, abandoned, overgrown, the park lay amid urban back ends, ringed with loading docks and gravel parking lots For Employees Only. Nobody could recall its name, being listed simply as “park” even on the earliest surveys of town from the 1820s. The brickwork and iron were probably a later addition, likely from in or near the Gilded Age, but again no contemporary records of any such improvements exist.

When the downtown area was still largely open, it was apparently a popular destination for constitutionals. Photographs from the city archives clearly show this sort of use ca. 1875, before the bricks were installed, and in 1887, afterwards. Once the downtown area began to grow, though, its location ringed by four main thoroughfares became a liability. Storefronts sprang up on the street, blocking off the line of sight between the road and the park, and it was eclipsed in both literal and figurative terms.

Now, whenever someone stumbles on the park, it’s usually late at night following a bender on one of the bars nearby. The crumbling brick and wild, gnarled trees do give the area an aura of menace, it’s true, and more than one dare has been given to spend a night under those ancient and ill-tended boughs. As far as can be ascertained, no one has followed through on it.

And, all things considered, perhaps that’s for the best. For if the true nature of that weedy enclave were ever known, surely the complacent cloud that often hung over downtown would be swiftly and brutally ripped away.

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Officer Caruthers rubbed the back of his head. “Chief Strong has brought in an…outside advisor.”

Detective Gorrister sighed. “Strong and his outside advisors. This isn’t another radio psychic, is it?”

The apartment door nudged open, and a large man waddled in. He was dressed in Lincoln Green, and his greasy dark hair was thin in front and long and flowing in back, as if it were being grown out for a comb-over. “Hardly,” the man said. “Like any expert, I am here because of my overwhelming knowledge of and appreciation for the applicable lore.”

“Sherman Gregward,” Caruthers said. “He helped us out with that hostage situation a few months ago.”

“Please address me by my true name, Sherwood Greg, if you please,” intoned the man. “Collector, scholar, dungeon master, level 24 elven sorceress, head of the Council of Twelve, and overall coordinator for Nerdicon. Pre-registration for Nerdicon ’13 begins next week, and I’ve got plenty of plus ones if anyone’s interested.”

Gorrister gripped the bridge of her nose. “And what, exactly, do you bring to the table, Maid Marion?”

Sherwood Greg walked to a nearby end table and slapped down a thick deck of worn cards. “That’s what I bring to the table,” he said.

“A deck of Magick: Battle of Warlocks cards?” Corruthers snapped. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“You tell me, detective.” The corpulent collector cut the deck and revealed a card called The Multiphase Fleshwalker. It depicted a beautiful woman with one leg and one arm denuded of flesh, drawn in a quasi-realistic fantasy style, with the following text beneath it:

Strength 6/Defense 6
Costs three cornfields to activate
Restore one life to casting warlock
Protect casting warlock from life damage for one turn when rotated
Once rotated, may not be used unless caster rotates an additional six cornfields
“They restore one’s flesh at the cost of their own, and are always looking for a lifeforce to drain to restore the beauty they so desperately crave but never attain.”

“Holy shit,” said Caruthers. “It’s just like the murder.”

Sherwood Greg nodded toward the mutilated corpse behind the two officers. “Looks like someone is desperate to restore their life points,” he said.

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Before the Divinity convened the Council of Conjuration in 1725 and abolished magic, incanation, cantrip, and overt miracle from the world, many who had studied the arcane had chosen to impart some (or all) of their innate magickal energy into inanimate items. The most powerful of these were rounded up by the priests, ministers, imams, and other authorities who made up the Council. Items such as the Endless Soup Tureen of Tiruchirappalli, the Eviscerating Epee of Saint-Étienne, and the Cursed Calabash of Canton were confiscated and transubstantiated.

However, the Council’s bylaws explicitly allowed those artifacts not confiscated to continue in their function as long as their powers remained in a sort of grandfather clause. Reportedly the Purifying Pit of Pradesh, which cleaned the water used by an entire city, had persuaded a Councilman to press for this clause; the others, mindful of similar cases at home, agreed.

For many years, such grandfathered pre-Council artifacts were highly sought-after, and none moreso than the legendary Last Cantrip of Harry Culbertson. Culbertson, the legendarily lazy and laconic master of the last functioning magisterium school in Britain, had reportedly imbued a single object with the greater part of his formidable powers. He’d hidden it shortly before his death from hypergout in 1717 and many a treasure seeker had wasted a life in pursuit thereof. For what other than an artifact of immense power could have consumed the better part of the old arch-wizard?

That was the thinking, anyhow, until 2002 excavations near Cavendish Square to expand a parking garage unearthed a metal casket bearing Culbertson’s name and a magical seal. The seal was broken using modern magic (12 kg. of C4 from the Royal Engineers), and the legendary Last Cantrip of Harry Cavendish was revealed.

It turned out to be an indestructible pillow that retained its shape and fluffiness regardless of any external force. Apparently the legends regarding Culbertson’s love of leisure had undersold the matter a little bit.

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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.

We can therefore see two cases of falsehood: those things which cannot be experienced and understood, and those things that can but never will be. Add to this a third: if an object that humans interact with–and is thus considered to be “real”–can be perceived in different ways by different people, each of those interpretations would be equally correct, according to relativism.

Take for example the cinder block in my wall, which many people have experienced over the years. It is cream-colored now, but may have been other colors in the past…and of course, each person would see it differently, since some may have been colorblind, and there is no guarantee that two people seeing “cream” are experiencing the same color. The “true” color, if such an objective fact could exist and be known, might be purple with hot pink stripes.

If a person saw it like that, if they saw the purple block, that impression has gained the status of “truth.” Yet suppose no one ever sees the cinder block as purple. Suppose that, from the moment it is cast until the moment it is crushed into dust–its “existence” as experienced by people–no one sees it as purple. No one sees the block to be their conception of the color purple, or the “true” color as you prefer. It can then be said that someone claiming that the block is indeed purple is telling a lie. No matter what color they believe purple to be, if the block does not appear that way to them or anyone else, ever, then the block can for all intents and purposes be called “not-purple.”

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Keith and Madelyn were strolling along the back way to Henry Hall, which they favored more for its light traffic and lack of freshmen than its scenic view of dumpsters in semi-decorative brick enclosures. Madelyn was complaining loudly about Dr. Wojtecki’s grading practices when Keith interrupted her.

“Look at that,” he said. “That pile of Nerds and pink Tootsie Rolls as been on that ledge since Halloween.” The candy was sitting in one of the brick “windows” that semi-decorated a dumpster alcove.

“You’d think a campus full of starving freshman working on their fifteen would’ve finished it off even dumpster candy long ago,” said Madelyn. “Like ‘Halloween night’ long ago.”

“Well everyone was too busy getting falling-down drunk while dressed as a skimpy nurse on All Hallows itself,” said Keith. “And probably hung over with a volatile mix of candy and cognac swirling in an otherwise empty stomach.”

“That explains a day, maybe. But over a month?”

“Think about it. After a few days hungry people notice it but they’re like ‘why hasn’t anyone eaten that yet?'” Keith said in a bad falsetto. “They conclude there’s something wrong with it. And the odd little kid that comes by who wouldn’t care is helicoptered by parents still fretting over the latest razor-blades-in-candy-apples urban legend moral panic.”

“Well, I’m going to give it a good home,” Madelyn said. She reached for the small pink pile.

“Are…are you sure about that?” Keith said, suddenly anxious. “It has been out in the elements for a long time. And despite my jokey tone a minute ago, some of that stuff could have a basis in fact.”

“Oh, it’s not for me,” Madelyn grinned. “It’s for Dr. Wojtecki. Never saw a piece of candy he didn’t like. And never met a substitute he does.”

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“Oh, shit,” Mellany said. “It’s Carter.”

“Look the other way and maybe he won’t see us.” Susyn turned and tried to ease herself to the outside of the bloodmobile line without losing her place.

“Mellany! Susyn! What are you doing there?” It didn’t work. Carter, looking as disheveled and unstable as he had in their tutoring group, approached the line waving his hands. “Why are you lining up for the vampire bloodmobile?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Susyn sighed, without facing him. “They always need blood.”

“Also we’re in a blood race with Sigma Qoppa Phi,” Mellany added. Susyn bopped her for making them look shallow in front of the handsome line handlers.

“Don’t you see? The bloodmobile is just a front for vampires to satisfy their demonic bloodlust without drawing attention to themselves! And we line up to be part of it like suckers!”

“Oh God,” Mellany winced, visibly pained. “More of your paranoia, really? Go yell at some other line.”

“Yeah, I hear the lunch line is really a cannibal plot to fatten people up,” Susyn added.

Carter continued his gesticulation. “Not until people wake up and see the truth!” he yelled. Turning to the line of people leaving the bloodmobile with choc’late chips and juice, he continued: “Are you happy with yourselves? You’ve sold yourself to the nosferatu overlords for cookies! Bloodwhores, all of you.”

“That’s just sad,” Susyn muttered to Mellany. “Just do your best to ignore him.”

Turning to the bloodmobile itself, Carter rolled up his sleeves and held his wrists forward. “Bet you’d love to get what’s in here, wouldn’t you? Full of AB positive, the vampire special reserve! Bloodsucking freaks!”

Inside the driver’s cabin of the bloodmobile, on the right side of UV-screening tinted windows, Count von Saugen glanced outside. “What’s all the fuss about?”

“Just another wacko,” said Archduke Bluttrinker. “Here, try this glass of B negative. It’s a 1989 vintage with excellent color and bouquet.”

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“Welcome to the university server room,” said Jim. “Let’s take the grand tour, shall we?”

Unlike most server rooms I’d seen, the Southern Michigan University version offered a panoramic view of campus from its position on the eighth and uppermost floor of Henry Hall. The racks of networked machines were set back from the windows to keep them out of direct sunshine and dark static clings had been placed over each pane to limit what light did seep in.

“Here’s server number one,” Jim said, gesturing at a rack labeled ARAGON. “It was the only university server for years, but eventually the hardware became obsolete and it was retired to doing undemanding backup work.”

A second rack nearby was labeled BOLEYN. “We acquired this server after Aragon puked out on us,” said Jim. “It ran like greased lightning before crashing hard and taking the entire university network with it. Some older people still talk about the Great Outage.” He tapped the server’s frame gently. “We use it for legacy systems and backup now.”

He led me to the third rack, this one with a large SEYMOUR sticker. “We bought this with a special grant from Admin. It was cutting-edge in its day and put the university neck and neck with MSU and UM for the fastest and most modern server architecture in the state.”

“Are we still?”

“No,” Jim laughed. “It crashed harder than its predecessor, though not for as long. We were able to get it back up and running but decided that it was a bad idea to have just the one.”

On the opposite side of the room lay three additional large server racks, opposite the first three. “That one on the end was what we bought after that epiphany,” Jim said, pointing to the server labeled CLEVES. “It’s run like a Swiss watch since the day we got it, even though it cost half of what the last one did.”

The server next to it was dark. “What’s wrong with this one?” I said, pointing at its label, HOWARD.

“We bought that a little while back, but it got infected by a really nasty virus,” Jim said. “It’s offline for maintenance, and we might wind up having to replace it.”

This brought us to the final server, PARR. “We carry most of our traffic on this one these days,” Jim said. “It’s a 60/40 load between this one and CLEVES, with the others as backup or contingency units.”

“Is there a reason you gave them the names they have?” I asked. “It seems a little pat, what with the eighth floor of Henry Hall and all. Are you sure some of those failures weren’t self-fulfilling prophecies?”

Jim laughed. “Superstitious, huh? Don’t worry. There’s a nonzero chance that half the things I just told you are just interesting lies.”

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This post is part of the December 2012 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “the end of the world”.

“Dr. Dana D. Eggebrecht, wasn’t it?” Ellen Strasser drew out each syllable of the name mockingly. “From the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC?”

“That is correct, Ms. Strasser,” said Eggebrecht. “I’ve come to speak with you personally, to deliver a warning.”

“A warning for me? How quaint.” Strasser sat at her desk and gestured for Eggebrecht to be seated opposite her. “I should warn you though, ‘doctor,’ that Prosperity Falls is well outside any jurisdiction you’d care to name. The town has been on this spot since the 1830s, long before the United States exercised any sort of sovereignty here. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that half a century hasn’t changed that.”

Eggebrecht scowled behind his pince-nez spectacles. “My warning is nothing so prosaic, Ms. Strasser,” he said icily. “As you may or may not know, I have been researching the Ide tribes which live nearby.”

Strasser slowly, deliberately, leaned back in her seat and crossed her immaculate cowboy boots atop the desk. “Those savages have been a thorn in our side since my grandmother’s time,” she said with a yawn. “The Prosperity Rangers are preparing a solution as we speak.”

“That’s precisely what I’ve come to warn you about, Ms. Strasser!” Eggebrecht leaned over the desk, his face red. “You simply must not ride against the Ide at this time!”

Strasser reached into her holster and produced a Colt Lightning. She opened the loading gate and began casually removing empty shells with the ejector. “And, pray tell, who the hell are you to give orders to the deputy chief of the Prosperity Rangers?” she said drily, refusing to meet the Smithsonian man’s gaze.

“Listen to me, Ms. Strasser. I’ve been studying the Ide for years, particularly their mythology. They have a well-developed eschatology, a story of the end times. By coincidence or design, the conditions now are very like those in their myths.”

Her unloading finished, Strasser produced a box of .32 caliber shells from a desk drawer and began delicately dropping them through the revolver’s gate one by one. “You’re right. When we ride against them, the Ide had better believe it’s the end of the world.”

“No!” Eggebrecht stood and pounded his fists on the desk. “You plain fool, you don’t understand! To attack would be to fulfill the myth, to unite the Ide against you. It would bring a full-scale war to the valley, in direct violation of the Prosperity Charter you claim to cherish!”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” Eggebrecht said. “My research confirms this. Right now the Ide are divided about whether this is truly the end time their legends speak of. An attack would drive them all–the High Ide, the Low Ide, even the Ide among the Drifters–to confederacy against you! It would be a sure route to slaughter and utter destruction.”

Ellen Strasser said nothing and continued to slowly load her pistol.

“The legend stresses that all who die in glorious battle during the end times will be borne to the Ide conception of heaven,” said Eggebrecht, “in response to an attack from outsiders. It’s what split the Ide on your forefathers’ arrival, damn it, and your course will surely lead to the total destruction of the valley settlements and my research.”

“Let me get this straight,” Strasser said. “The expedition I am planning will unite the Idea against us and goad them into joining suicidal battle?”

“Yes,” Eggebrecht said, sounding relieved.

“And you’ve told no one else of this?”

“I came to you first.”

“Good.” Strasser snapped the gate shut on her Lightning and fired three rounds into Eggebrecht’s chest, point-blank. Rising, she pulled a derringer out of her boot and pressed it into the scholar’s hand.

“I think a good old-fashioned judgement day is just what the Ide need,” she said softly. “Imagine the look on those fools’ faces when my Rangers save the town and open up the Ide lands to settlement in one fell swoop.”

Read Dr. Eggebrecht’s full report here.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
dolores haze
randi.lee
writingismypassion
bmadsen
Ralph Pines
SRHowen
AllieKat
MsLaylaCakes
katci13
meowzbark
Angyl78
Aheïla
pyrosama
Aranenvo
CJMichaels
SuzanneSeese
BBBurke

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The hopper disgorged another ream of paper onto Sandra’s desk. “Paper” was perhaps a misnomer–it was really more of a polymer stack that communicated with her desktop–but that’s what it felt like, what it was designed to feel like, and that’s what she called it. Readers had the option of using polypaper or their desktops and almost all of them chose the polypaper, as editing was so much easier stylus in hand.

She picked up the new contestant and leafed through it. Generated by Lucky 777 Jade Emperor Press Algorithms in Guangzhou, the book told the story of a lonely and sexually repressed middle school teacher who was seduced by a handsome Manananggalan (a Malaysian vampire-sorcerer that manifested as a disembodied floating head when it fed). The overall concept was sound enough to sell; Sandra delicately made a few changes right off the bat, though.

The heroine’s name, Arisser, was clearly the product of a bad algorithm; it was changed to Alyssa. The story, ostensibly set in North America, opened with a description of Paris; a few tweaks here and there changed it to Quebec. All instances of the word “toilet” had been replaced by “teliot,” probably another consequence of a wonky text generation algorithm. Similarly, “restroom” had received the all-too-literal translation “urine district” from Lucky 777’s novel generation software. Sandra chuckled softly at that one and wrote it down to share with the other readers at lunchtime.

That done, she scanned the novel for the usual suspects, errors common to all novels generated using cheap and market-leading but imprecise Chinese algorithms (many programmed by wage slaves with virtually no English aside from machine translation and phrasebooks). A find-all to replace “water buffalo” with “horse,” for example (who wanted to read that Allison and her Manananggalan lover “worked like water buffaloes?”). There was still plenty of work to be done by going painstakingly through the thing, adding “the” and correcting word-order problems and egregious misspellings and mistranslations, but it was a good start.

It sometimes wore on Sandra a little bit that she, along with everyone else employed by Writers’ Creative Services, was only employed to proofread and copy-edit, not to write. But Hollister upstairs, and the market forces he personified, had spoken: it was cheaper to have writing generators in China automatically generate books and have native English speakers clean them up. After all, if you fed enough market data, psychological studies, and multi-platinum texts into a computer, it would cough up bestselling drek at least as well as any human.

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