Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Other Book of Changes
Codex Entry #2097d1

Luciel Galabieh, shy and dark-haired, was an inveterate klutz. All gangly elbows and knees, she never quite got the hang of the whole walking thing. People in her hometown of Costa del Mare were impressed by her serious, airy demeanor and sea-green eyes, but the impression would always be broken when she did something like trip over a quarter-inch threshold or got thrown from a grocery store coin-op horse.

In the water, though, Luciel was a creature of extraordinary fluidity and grace. Whether as the star of the Imperial Regional School’s Swimming Bunyips or with the University of the Rift Aquatorium, she amazed onlookers both with her mastery of the butterfly stroke and her tendency to slip violently on even a slightly damp poolside surface. Frequent broken bones from high-velocity contact with poolside tile and an extended stay in traction after what others would only refer to as The Melon Baller Incident kept her out of the top tiers of the sport, either as a professional Aquanaut or an athlete competing in the Imperial Spartakiad Games.

While nursing her latest bruise or plaster cast thanks to not having her land-legs, Luciel would go out to Costa del Mare Point to watch sealife pass by. Often (if her land injuries permitted) she would end the visit by jumping off the point and swimming home. More than one of her acquaintances (she had few friends) heard her murmur wistfully about “swimming forever” before walking into a lamppost or missing the first (and all subsequent) steps of a staircase.

Eventually, Luciel appeared at Costa del Mare Point carrying a syringe from GesteCo, where her father worked as a geneticist. Despite tripping over a guardrail and a skateboarder on the way there, she had managed to avoid stabbing herself with it; Luciel injected the contents into her gangly arm at the elbow and dove into the sea.

Underwater, Luciel’s skin quickly acquired a dull grey sheen, while in a last awkward motion she popped out of her now-unnecessary bikini with a rapidly growing fin and tail pushing it aside. Luciel shivered from growing bottlenose to swelling flukes as gangly, bony limbs streamlined into fins and tail. One last look back and she was off to swim forever, leaving the empty syringe of GesteCo experimental dolphin DNA serum for others to find.

Luciel the dolphin returned often, particularly to help anyone who fell into the sea and was as clumsy in the water as she had once been out of it.

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Harry desperately examined the newspaper he’d found in the old china hutch, looking for obvious signs of forgery. Misspellings, ribald jokes, anything. But no, at least as a far as a surface examination was concerned, it looked authentic. The paper had even attained a patina of age, the sort only seen after exposure to the air for months or years.

“Daddy, why are you messing with that dirty old paper?” Madelaine looked up from her frosted flakes.

“Well, I-”

“There’s a new one on the porch, you know,” his daughter said with a five-year-old’s self-assurance.

“I’m…I’m looking at it to see if I can remember what happened way back then,” Harry said. “You know, ’cause I’m old.”

Madelaine nodded. “Yeah, old people are like that sometimes.” She finished the bowl and stood on tiptoes to get it into the sink before wandering into the TV room.

Harry watched her go with a mixture of pride and fear before turning back to the newspaper, which claimed to be an issue of the Sunday Cascadia Post, Tecumseh County Edition. It was dated June 17, 2018: 5 years, 7 months, and 12 days from the date on Harry’s day calendar.

In between mundane articles on the midterm elections and a Deerton millage for a new high school, there was a half-page spread on A2 entitled “One Year Later: A Search for Answers in the Ockham Murder.” The article glossed over events that its readers were presumably familiar with: while the Deerton police had been distracted by a fire on the other side of town, someone had kidnapped and murdered a victim in the old abandoned Petersen barn off US 313.

The picture accompanying the article showed the barn festooned with flowers, teddy bears, and banners of support. The largest banner covered nearly a quarter of the barn’s side and bore the logo of the Deerton Rotary Club.

It read, simply, Madelaine Ockham, beloved daughter, 4/12/07-6/18/17.

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To save on the cost of raking and bagging the leaves that fell every autumn, Southern Michigan University policy was to have the groundskeepers mow over the leaves in place, mulching them into a fine dust that would naturally fertilize the grounds. It was touted as a cheap and green solution to the problem, the hydrocarbon-spewing leafblowers and mulchers aside.

Then, ten years after the policy was enacted, SMU found itself in the crosshairs of a class-action suit.

Attorneys representing the groundskeepers claimed that the fine particulate generated during the annual fall leaf mulch had given their clients “leaf lung.” Characterized by shortness of breath, chlorophyll poisoning, halitosis, winter lethargy, and PTSD, “leaf lung” was said to have cost the groundskeepers any chance of earning a livelihood in the future. Their attorneys asked for a million-dollar settlement for each victim.

Horrified at the prospect of bad PR, SMU paid immediately and resumed the old practice of bagging leaves to be hauled away and become someone else’s problem. The doctor’s reports came in one week after the settlement checks cleared: there had been no sign of anything harmful in the groundskeepers’ lungs, and the physicians at the University Hospital cheekily prescribed facemasks and goggles for the condition, including a pair (total cost: $2) with the report.

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If you are to know anything about me, know this. I am nothing but a mechanism for turning heartache into sarcasm.

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Taera walked among the delegates, but she was not of them. In spite of the form she assumed there was no mistaking her for a mundane thing of dust and clay. There were waterfalls in her eyes, soft plains of waving grass in her hair, and the shifting expanse of desert sands played impossibly across her skin.

Even the delegates who has seen her before were visibly enraptured as if they were first beholding a world wrapped into a quasi-mortal guise. Some could be heard muttering wonderingly to themselves under their breath; from the audible snatches it was clear that each saw Taera differently–as they wanted to see her.

When she reached the dais, Taera turned and spoke in a voice that was both sea-breeze and premonition of storm. “We are pleased,” she said. “Pleased at the steps that have been taken and the progress that has been made.”

The rapturous applause that followed was indicative of how her praise cut to the quick of even the most hardened delegate’s soul.

“Under our guidance, you have done much to roll back the ongoing rape of the natural order,” Taera continued. “We spoke to you once of a gun at the temple of the world. You have removed the finger from its trigger.”

Pandemonium among the delegates. Even the most hardened, grizzled veterans of the cause, men and women who had torched dealerships and sunk whaleboats, responded as enthusiastic children.

“However.” That one word brought an unsteadiness to the acclamation. “The gun still remains, pressed to the very center of the world’s being. Eventually another hand will rise up to grasp it.”

Silence. The last cheers faded and there was no sound until Weatherby cleared his throat. “What would you have us do?” he asked.

“The immediate threat has been averted, but so long as hands exist to strike flint to rock, the danger remains. The cancer must not simply remiss; it must be cut from the body.”

Murmurs of unease. “I don’t understand,” Weatherby said, voicing the sentiment of all the delegates present.

“You ask us what we would have of you,” Taera said. “We can answer only in one regretful but necessary word. Extinction.”

Taera’s eyes flashed, burning with the molten force of a pyroclastic flow as the storm suggested in her tone of voice broke with shattering force. Weatherby didn’t have time to utter a sound before he was struck by blinding green lightning issuing from the center of the emissary’s being. He instantly crumbled to fine ash.

The other delegates, panicked, began to flee. But the green lightning arced from one to another, vaporizing each before each could move more than a step. Only a handful near the outermost periphery escaped the room with their lives.

“Flight will avail you not,” Taera boomed. “In your destruction lies the world’s salvation.”

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Melody couldn’t see the projector, but its holographic interface at least was a sign that she was nearing her destination. The grueling trip through Watcher’s Woods had taken hours of time and every last pathfinders’ trick in the book.

“The natives weren’t kidding when they said it was impossible to navigate Watcher’s Woods.” Melody said, ruefully fingering the torn fabric from the thorn-choked mud that had claimed her right sleeve and left boot.

“It represents a defense in depth,” the holographic cube replied in an even voice. “Obscurity, covert security, and now overt security. Present the proper identification code and passphrase and you will be allowed to access the memory core.”

Still trying to puzzle out the source of the holographic emitter, Melody nodded absently. “Sure. I think I can puzzle it out.”

“It is only fair to warn you that an incorrect answer will result in immediate termination,” the hologram said. “Withdrawal is likewise contraindicated due to the risk of an obscurity breach.”

That was enough for a little flop-sweat. “The ID code is 201983322,” Melody said in the most confident voice she could muster.

“Code accepted. Awaiting passphrase.”

There’d been nothing about a passphrase, only that damned…of course. “Deep grows the Watcher’s Wood/Where all are ground to dust/Take up the cause of blood/And leave not the sword to rust.”

Anxious perspiration prickled over Melody’s skin as she waited for a response from the holographic cube. There was none; it remained there, floating and flickering inscrutably.

Instead, the tiny clearing came alive.

Branches, vines, and trunks twisted themselves out of naturalistic positions into macabre tendrils, as the ground parted, liquidlike, to allow massive roots to do the same. Melody barely had time to flinch before the madness of the living forest enveloped her; she was covered in vines and protrusions of every sort and lifted bodily off the ground.

She realized that she was screaming only after a few long moments of confusion. But instead of the expected squeezing and twisting of a death roll, she felt a prickle of electricity across every inch of herself. As the roots enveloped her head, pictures began to explode into her waking consciousness, ebbing and flowing with the electrical current that set every hair on her body abuzz.

“My God…” Melody whispered. “The Watcher’s Woods don’t conceal the AI mainframe…they are the mainframe.”

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It sounds like something out of a George Romero movie, but it happened: in late 2009, the small rural Michigan town of Stanley was the epicenter of an outbreak of mania. Residents reported periods of intense euphoria, nervousness, and increased energy.

One group worked a spontaneous double shift at a tool and die factory. A mechanic reported employees breaking and bending tools during highly energized repair sessions. And, perhaps most tellingly, the community outreach center bathroom (long a source of cheap and discrete contraceptives) ran out, and then was vandalized by assailants wielding pipe wrenches.

The police and city government, while suffering from the effects themselves (patrol car rotations were briefly increased to 24 hours), nevertheless sought out a cause. Older residents were complaining of heart problems, after all, and the local hospital was overwhelmed with cases of exhaustion. Stanley authorities put out an appeal to the state government for assistance, but investigative teams were as clueless as anyone else.

An answer came, oddly enough, from the Michigan Bureau of Atmospheric Pollution Research. They had been measuring pollution levels in Detroit and elsewhere with equipment sensitive to the parts-per-billion level, and a mobile lab quickly noted that an unknown substance was present in the Stanley air in concentrations high enough to affect long-term residents through accumulation. It took another round of tests before the identity of the agent could be determined.

It was methyl alpha-methyl phenyl ethyl amine, better known as methamphetamine.

A former resident had once described the countryside around Stanley as “lit by the glow of exploding meth labs.” It turns out the claims were not hyperbole; the MBAPR, tracing the airborne particulate to its source, found a number of sites neat the city limits where destroyed or poorly constructed meth labs were smouldering. Each was putting out smoke laced with the drug; the incidents had gone unnoticed by a fire department obsessed with cleaning its engines three times a day.

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Message on a sun-faded brochure in an abandoned and partly caved-in resort hotel:

“Sunsets so unbelievably beautiful you’ll swear you can see brushstrokes.”

The small town of Ebenezer (population 4223) had been named after Ebenezer Allen, the Revolutionary War hero from Vermont whose maternal grandnephew had been among the town’s founders. It wasn’t until five years later, in 1843, that the name became inexorably linked with Charles Dickens’ miser.

At first, the residents of Ebenezer–then a thriving logging community–paid the similarity little mind. A piece appeared in the Ebenezer Watch-Gazette around 1850 remarking on Dickens’ book and its anti-hero; the minutes of a council meeting from 1887 record the then-mayor raging against “that limey book” that had supplanted the patriot Ebenezer Allen in the public perception of his namesake burg.

Naturally, that was before the bottom fell out of the timber market in the early 1900s and Ebenezer began rusting as its local industries pulled up stakes. Before long, the lure of Dickens (conveniently in the public domain) was too great to resist. Beginning in 1977, the town organized an annual Ebenezer Scrooge Festival.

Highlights included a parade of Scrooges in scarves and top hats, coal-throwing contests, a haunted house, and of course a turkey cookoff. From modest attendance of 200 or so at the first event, by the 21st century the festival was regularly attracting thousands. The town even took the unprecedented step of establishing a “Scrooge in residence,” an actor who starred in continuous revivals of the stage version of A Christmas Carol and appeared in character on request.

The fact that Ebenezer was on the Gulf coast, and hadn’t seen a snowflake since a freak blizzard in 1902, didn’t dampen the town’s enthusiasm in the slightest.

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The black-billed gull bobbed its head nervously. “I see your children attempting to sneak up on me,” it squawked. “You know that the ancient and unwritten law both our kinds follow demands that a messenger not be accosted.”

A slight twitching of the matriarch’s ears and the younger cats withdrew into the bushes. “Speak, then, that we may satisfy the old ways and have our repast of you.”

“I come on behalf of the wrens,” the gull said. “They bade me speak to Tibbles, which I can only assume is you.”

“That is a name bestowed upon me unbidden,” the matriarch hissed. “You will not use it.”

“What am I to call you, then?”

“My true name is of our secret tongue and not for your ears,” the cat said. “You need not address me by name to deliver what paltry tidings you bring.”

“Very well.” The gull spread its wings. “My brothers, the wrens, have lived on this isle of Takapourewa from time immemorial. The rats chased their forefathers from Aotearoa after the arrival of man, and this is the last outpost of their kind. They are simple, trusting, and guileless, with no defense against those such as yourself as they cannot fly. They believe and practice total nonviolence against all but the insects they eat.”

“You tell me nothing I do not already know,” the matriarch cat said.

“The flightless wrens of Takapourewa have, in council, decided that their commitment to nonviolence overrides all, up to and including their lives and those of their children. They will not take steps to secure themselves against your predations.”

Purring the matriarch cat nodded in approval. “Then you bring us glad tidings! Thank you, messenger. You may depart this once with your life.”

“That is not the extent of my tidings, o cat,” the gull said. “The elder of the wrens bade me come, as one of a tribe who has known their kind for aeons and for whom flight offers a modicum of protection. They ask that you and your children cease your slaughter of their kind and allow them to live in peace.”

“Does our elder brother the lion live in peace with the gazelle? Does the wolf live in peace with the cat? That is not the way of our kind nor of any other kind.” The matriarch bent to casually lick her paw. “Your friends ask the impossible and we have no power to grant their request.”

The gull bobbed its head. “The wrens feared as much. They bade me tell you that, if your numbers continue to explode with the slaughter of wrens, when their kind is gone, your children will starve.”

“The weak ones, perhaps, but the strong and worthy will find other prey.”

“They foresaw that answer as well. The wrens bade me say one thing more. They have noticed that the humans have become interestied in them, in their rarity as the last of their kind. Even now they collect wrens as curiosities for display, and humans the world over ask for wrens of their own that they might study them.” The gull cocked its head. “If you exterminate them, the humans will be angry. You more than anyone must know what that anger can mean.”

Its last statement gave the matriarch pause. Her ears flattened for a moment before resuming their erect posture. “It is a risk we will assume,” she said at length.

“I am saddened to hear so, but I will bear your reply to the wrens,” the gull said. It launched itself into the air before the hidden cats nearby could pounce.

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