Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Nobody was surprised when young Chris Boyle began spending most of each day playing a new computer roleplaying game. Weak, awkward, and practically abandoned by latchkey parents, Chris had long sought immersion in such fantasy worlds. People did think it a little odd that, despite the time Chris seemed to invest in the game, none of the usual symptoms of intense game use (paleness, weight gain, pizzaface outbreaks) seemed to appear.

Quite the opposite in fact.

Rumors that Chris had beaten up perennial tormentor Daryl Dupine were confirmed by the appearance of the latter some days later with a shiner and assorted other bruises. At Track and Field Day (AKA Let The Gym Teachers Earn Their Keep For Once Day), Chris astonished with first-place finishes in track, shot-put, and weight lifting despite having no prior affinity for those events and no time in between playing games on a laptop to develop them. At the end of the school year, people had no more answers; even steroid use required a modicum of exercise to work, and school photos confirmed that Chris was significantly taller and more muscular than was explainable.

It wasn’t until just after school ended and Chris came into the town square riding a dragon, wielding a flaming sword and sporting engraved full plate armor that the situated became at least marginally clearer.

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Dr. Dana D. Eggebrecht’s field notes from June, 18XX

…that the split among the Ide is so acrimonious is odd given that it was so recent and brought about more by a question of policy than any true religious, geographic, or ideological divide of the sort that divides modern tribes or nations. Indeed, the Ide share virtually the same traditions and beliefs with a particularly interesting eschatology. My guide, from the Lower Ide, has brought me to what the settlers in Paradise Falls call “Splinterstone Cave” to show me rock paintings, hundreds or thousands of years old, made by his ancestors.

According to him, they detail events that will bring about the end of the world.

The painting shows a people as one, hunting and farming and gathering. They are then split by what looks like another group of ambiguous figures that could be other people or some sort of spirit or demon. One of the other figures, which are drawn in lighter shades than the dark ochre of the paleo-Ide, seems to cross over to their side. The others–Ide and interloper–then battle. The last area appears to show a variety of strange creatures intervening and carrying the darker Ide upwards.

My guide tells me that the story is so: A group of strangers will arrive sowing death and dischord, and one of their number will fall in with the Ide. In the process of reclaiming them (or perhaps to rob the Ide of what is rightfully theirs; my guide admits that there are multiple interpretations) there will be a massive war between the Ide and the interlopers. Both sides will have their lands ravaged and destroyed, but for their valor in the final battle the gods of the Ide pantheon will emerge to destroy the evil interlopers and bear the Ide to the rich grounds of the next life.

I will admit to some frustration with the Ide and their primitiveness, to say nothing of the stubborn townsfolk of Paradise Falls. But this legend is a dire portent indeed; in the eyes of at least some Ide, the arrival of the Paradise Falls settlers has set in motion a chain of events that will bring about the end of the world. In their well-meaning ignorance, the settlers are swelling the ranks of those who would battle them for that reason alone. For even if they will not fight for a prophecy, the Ide will surely fight to protect their lands.

I fear that events will soon unfold that will not only see an end to my work, but bring about an apocalypse of a sort for both the settlers and the Ide.

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“GesteCo has been…diversifying. They’ve got some interesting trees at their experimental facility in Xinjiang.”

“Trees? You pulled this whole Deep Throat cloak-and-dagger thing for trees? Look: GesteCo is the international leader in artificial gestation, test tube babies, and designer kids for the rich and famous. If you can’t give me something juicy along those lines, there’s no point in talking.”

“Trees can be interesting, Mr. Whitacre. For instance, have you seen the GesteCo tree that’s been making the rounds at bioengineering conferences? They say it can produce human stem cells.”

“It’s easier just to collect those from newborns.”

“You’re not listening, Mr. Whitacre. Inside the trees: you must look inside! It is both a wonder and a horror that will, I think, be well worth your time.”

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A memetic entity…it sounds like the fevered dream of a madman, doesn’t it? But think about it for a second. A meme is nothing more than an idea or behavior, after all; it’s cultural DNA. And just like real DNA it spreads, reproduces, and mutates. Kind of like a virus where the symptoms are not nasal discharge and death but cute pictures of cats and catchphrases badly translated from the original Japanese. Everybody knows that viruses aren’t technically alive by most definitions.

But they’re disturbingly close to it.

Richard Dawkins used similar language in The Selfish Gene, of course, but only as an analogy. Imagine if the memes we pass around encoded some of the other aspects of true life, like homeostasis (maintaining a constant state), growth, or response to external stimuli. By some definitions memes already do this.

Imagine a highly evolved meme that takes the form of a very catchy song. Once you hear it, you can’t get it out of your head and find yourself constantly singing it. The melody fits together well enough that changing it is hard (homeostasis), other people hear it and take up the song (reproduction), it changes gradually to avoid becoming stale (adaptation) and annihilates other songs competing for attention (consumption).

Then imagine if the song was somehow self-aware. Perhaps it communicates by varying the words.

Or imagine if the meme that was passed on was the suggestion that, some hours ago, you had seen and spoken to a person who does not exist.

There was a time when I would have thought all this speculation about a memetic entity was strictly academic, and interesting thought exercise in the Dawkins vein about the way our culture changes and shares information.

But that’s before I met one.

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Institute 22. Conspiracy wonks go nuts over it, saying that it was the Soviet equivalent of Project Blue Book: an official investigation into UFO sightings. The things I’ve heard from hardened nutcases about it…they seem to think that it’s some hidden archive with all the proof they’ve ever wanted about flying goddamn saucers. As if the Russkies were somehow worse at keeping secrets than Uncle Sam or something.

I’ve been to their archive in Moscow, and I can assure you that it’s not like that at all. UFOs are pretty tangential to the whole thing, the real purpose of which was to watch the skies for advanced or experimental Western spyplanes or drones. With between four and five million troops in the Army alone, that was a lot of eyes. No wonder we had such a hard time getting anything short of a satellite or SR-71 over them.

But for anyone with the fortitude and knowledge of nomenklatura Russian terms, there are a few sightings, no more then 5-10%, that lack official explanations. And there are reams of papers, written by someone with an overactive imagination or too much exposure to officially banned Western pulp sci-fi (or both) about the supposed, potential, or imagine effect of unknown technology on Soviet military hardware. There are also papers declaring the whole thing a waste of time and money.

Just like we did.

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When they moved the tiny Ombudsman’s Office into McDonnell Hall across campus, its old location was absorbed by its neighbor, becoming an extension of the Records Office (its emergency fire escape in point of fact).

The university had placed a standard sign on the footpath leading by the old Ombudsman’s, largely because it was so tucked away in a much larger building that people were always walking right by it (and then walking right by the sign in the Records Office that said “OMBUDS OFFICE THAT WAY” to ask the secretary for directions). But when the office moved, it was superfluous. The Records Office had its own sign on the other side of the building and there was a sign on the door for anyone who tried to go in.

But did the administration take it down? No, of course not. Instead, at great expense, they removed the informative part of the sign from its frame and replaced it with a blank square in one of the school’s colors. So it became a sign that took up valuable real estate, was constructed in the same way as all the other campus signs, but conveyed no useful information. It irked me, walking as I did along that path nearly every day.

Once I became frustrated enough with the absurdity that I took a marker our of my bag and scrawled “ce n’est pas un signe” on it. I don’t know if my French was up to the task, but it sure made me feel better. In response, the administration (again presumably at great expense) replaced the featureless, informationless colored square with a fresh one.

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Colette Hays had gotten it from her mother: a Christmas sweater too ugly for even a bad sweater party (if such things had existed in 1978). It was in the pattern of an American flag, with alternating stripes of red, white, and green with hollyjolly brown for the canton. Each stripe was filled with knit Santa hats, snowflakes, and mistletoe leaves, while the canton’s stars were represented by little jingle bells that each hung by their own little yarn string.

After wearing it once for the benefit of Mama Sears and enduring a rash for three days afterwards, Colette gave it as a gift to her sister-in-law Josie Sears the following Christmas. Josie couldn’t fail to grasp the significance of this, living as she did in Florida. It was duly rewrapped and presented to Colette for Christmas 1980.

Colette decided that it was time for escalation. Using a vacuum sealer that her husband used for meat products, she packed the infernal sweater like a cut of subprime beef and returned it to Josie. For her part, Josie carefully removed the item from its packaging and twisted it into a PVC pipe that her husband, who ran a plumbing supply business, sealed at both ends.

The contest escalated gradually but steadily, and by 1990 had reached proportions large enough to be mentioned in local newspapers. Always careful never to damage the sweater, the women had delivered it to the other soldered into a coffee can, sealed in cement, welded into a safe, crunched into a car (a 1975 Chevy Vega that had been reduced to a 2-foot square cube), and covered in molten glass.

The last straw came when Josie tried to cover the sweater in a protective asbestos glove and set it into solid steel. The seams failed and the sweater caught on fire. In keeping with the friendly (and at times not-so-friendly) rivalry that had developed, Josie returned the ashes to Colette mixed with potting soil…and a note inviting her to share any produce that grew from it.

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The work of a botanist had long suited Alan Greene. There had been endless jokes and jibes from schoolmates growing up about his “Greene thumb” and Alan was perfectly happy to tend to his garden, which blossomed beautifully with tender care in a way that human relationship could never be relied upon to do. He wrote extensively; even though his ostensible specialization was ragweed and sunflowers and other Asteraceae, his knowledge was far broader and found expression wherever it could, from academic monographs to gardening magazine articles. His home in Hopewell, near campus, was a popular stop on the parade of homes due to its massive and carefully maintained lawn and flowers.

When he retired, Alan bought property in the Upper Peninsula near the old SMU field station that had closed in 1974. With quite the nest egg saved up–he had never married, girlfriends always pulling up stakes claiming he loved his plants more than them–he’d invested in a property out in the middle of nowhere, roughly halfway between Paradise village and Whitefish Point. It was equipped with a geothermal heating system, its own well, and a greenhouse almost as large as all the other rooms combined.

Infrequent visitors found the lawn to be an order of magnitude more impressive than the old Hopewell property, bursting with artful arrangements of flowers and grass in front and a garden bursting with produce around back. In the winter, heated by the geothermal pipes and the occasional cylinder of propane from Paradise, the greenhouse was a beacon of life, often snowbound.

When Alan’s remains were found in his garden nearly a year after his last trip to town, investigators were astonished to discover seventeen previously unknown varieties of flora growing about him–a last will and testament of sorts.

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In the aftermath of the Great Lakes Storm of 1913, an extratropical cyclone that had caused twelve shipwrecks and more than 250 deaths, the lakes had given up what they had taken slowly, reluctantly. Five of the ships were never found; some bodies washed ashore days or weeks later. One ship, the Charles S. Price, was found floating upside down near the mouth of the St. Clair and was not identified for weeks (even then requiring an ex-crewman to identify the dead).

Of the many unsolved mysteries in the wake of that storm, the Tawas Bay Hulk is perhaps the most puzzling. On November 12, 1913, as citizens of the small lakeside town of East Tawas were digging out of the more than 24 inches of snow that had fallen during the storm, a ship was spotted out in the bay, presumably having been swept in by the gale and partly grounded on one of the shoals near the Tawas Light.

The Coast Guard was busy with rescue operations elsewhere and hampered by downed telegraph lines, so enterprising citizens and members of the lighthouse station crew made their way to the ship. They found it completely abandoned, with no bodies or personal effect onboard. Curiously, they also found that the ship lacked a name, registration, or any other papers. Despite being a 40-foot craft which would have required a medium-size dockyard to construct, there were no maker’s marks, plaques, or other clues that could even establish where the ship had been built.

When the Coast Guard was able to respond, they found that there was no mention of any such craft in what records they could uncover, and their Canadian counterparts were equally puzzled. Despite the fury of the storm and the haste with which the ship must have been abandoned, its crew seemed to have been very thorough at removing all traced of their presence; only a few scraps of paper with illegible scrawls and mass-market navigational charts remains. The cargo hold contained nothing but empty crates and broken glass.

Stymied, the Coast Guard seized the ship and auctioned it off to pay the costs of the recovery operation. Commissioned as the John Doe by a Saginaw navigation company with a sense of humor, it was unpopular with crews who regarded it as a cursed vessel. It sank in a 1967 storm, and remains an item of mild local interest to this day.

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It was said by some that the ex-blacksmith Ainstio had gained incredible powers overseas, perhaps on crusade or as a pilgrim. His skills with a forge were well-known, but the legend was given further credence when claims began to circulate that he could forge not only metal but flesh.

Rumor held that, for a fee, Ainstio would work with hammer, tong, and anvil to reforge a person into whatever beauteous shape was desired. People came from leagues around to offer gold and silver to the blacksmith to rework a supposedly homely spouse or loved one into a radiant beauty. His isolation on a headland only increased the illusion of a skillful ascetic, and even the local duke was soon a customer as Ainstio’s coffers grew rich.

After all, he did produce results.

Not long after, though, suspicions began to circulate. Ainstio had warned that the process was injurious to mind and memory, as anyone who has ever suffered a hammerblow to the head can attest, but the inability of the newly reforged beauties to recall key events or languages was nevertheless deeply suspicious. Eventually, the local duke resorted to torture to extract the truth from the beautiful young woman supposedly reforged from his homely political bride.

While it’s possible that the young woman lied under duress, her tale was damning: she spoke of the “reforged” being given to Ottoman slave traders in exchange for younger, more attractive captives taken elsewhere and a cut of the profits. Fear of being returned to the Barbary markets kept them in line, and each was given a small amount of personal information gathered from the “reforged” to memorize.

The duke led an army against Ainstio, seizing his lands, family, and confederates. The blacksmith was hung from a gibbet while the duke attempted to trade the others in exchange for those who had been sent to the Barbary slave markets.

There are still those who hold, however, that Ainstio was undone by lies and that his skills were real.

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