Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Oh, god,” Claudia moaned. “Here she comes.”

Jeanette craned her neck. “Who, the bartender slash waitress?”

“Yeah. I can’t stand her.”

Claudia’s friend cocked her head. “How can you say that when you don’t even know her?”

“I’ve been coming here long enough. It’s my third place between work and home. I know everything there is to know about her despite never saying a word or even exchanging a meaningful glance, and I don’t like her.”

Jeanette was used to Claudia’s misanthropy and snap judgements and tendency to complain when she had nothing else to talk about. But she was also very bad about being baited into discussions with her friend because of them. “Explain please.”

“Look at her. She’s the lucky kind of girl that’s effortlessly beautiful no matter what she does to herself. I’ve seen her hair in every color of the rainbow and every length from Rapunzel to Yul Brynner. I’ve seen a piercing come and go and sometimes come again in every piercable membrane on her pretty little face, earlobe to septum. Every time she shows a little skin it’s either freshly inked or freshly de-inked.”

“And this is a problem because…?” Truth be told Jeanette’s skin crawled at the idea of someone jamming a needle into her that wasn’t filled with lifesaving medicines, but she understood that many people differed with her on that topic.

“Because,” growled Claudia, staring daggers at the barmaid, “seeing her effortlessly look awesome despite all that will make people get the wrong idea. They’ll start thinking she looks good because of all the mismatched clothes and awful haircuts and glitzy bod-mod, instead of crediting a very good hand of genetic cards. People who should never even look at a tattoo parlor will wander in. People who couldn’t wear a pixie haircut to save their life will try it out. Or, God forbid, some horny douches will pressure their girlfriends to look like Ms. Effortless with horrifying results.”

“So you think, in other words, that our barmaid’s good looks and penchant for alternative styles puts her at the eye of a hurricane that will destroy all that is good and dear about the fashion world for the more buttoned-down?” Jeanette drawled.

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“Well, that’s it. No more boilermakers for you,” Jeanette sighed. “And starting tomorrow, we’re going to try out the bar where the bartender’s a quivering mound of pale flesh.”

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Dale’s Remote Piloted Drone loomed large on Cam’s viewscreen, attached to one of the many pieces of icy debris that made up planet HD 11765d’s ring.

“Cam and Ev,” Dale’s voice said. “I wouldn’t have figured you two to be the ones to find me.” His transmission was a nightmare of static and interference, with no video link. With a start, Cam realized that he was transmitting from his RPD to theirs rather than simply linking to their pilot stations on Earth, which was a lot more reliable and less expensive.

“Switch to a earthbound link, will you?” Ev said. Her image on the left of Cam’s screen was scowling. “I can barely hear you.”

“No,” Dale cried. “I’m totally off the grid here, at least as much as that’s possible. I’ve hacked my RPD to pieces to keep their prying eyes away, and I’m not letting them listen in on an earthbound link.”

“Who’s ‘them,’ Dale?” said Cam. “The government that set up the remote relay network? The company that you leased your RPD from? The people buying the mineral and colonization rights you’re charting and selling? This whole thing has always been about listening in. It’s the only way to cash in.”

“Wrong!” Dale cried. “Wrong. I’m on the cusp of something big, Cam. Really big. If they knew…knew for sure…they’d disconnect me.”

“Big whoop,” Ev said. “You’d lose your RPD and have to get a job on Earth instead of sitting in your apartment hooked up all the time.”

“No…that’s not it at all,” Dale said. “If what I’ve found is true, they can erase me as surely and completely as you trashing a bad song. If what I’ve found is true…there isn’t an Earth to go back to, at least not one we’ll ever be able to reach.”

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Hetasa, the merchant city, had a long tradition of independence despite owing ostensible fealty to many entities over the years. It had been everything from a kingdom in its own right to a de facto empire, a province of the Empire to a subject of the Emirate, an free city to a unit of a much larger territory. But to the Hetasans, all that was strictly secondary. The city, and the House of Iora that ruled it, were eternal and unchanging.

Tales are still told in dark alleys and nurseries of the time the great Emir decided to remove the House of Iora from power and replace them with a satrap of her own choosing. The guilds and associations and merchants had worried the satrap to premature age and death from a heart attack inside of a year; the Emir, frustrated, had restored the House of Iora to power after it swore fealty to her. The city had quickly calmed, and when the Emirate collapsed Hetasa had endured almost unchanged.

The House of Iora took power in the earliest days of the city, overthrowing the noble house of Xyri and bringing the other nobility into line. The Iora had revived the ancient traditions of the Assembly of Nobles and the Assembly of the Humble, and used the illusion of participation and consensus to forge a rule more ironclad yet more unobtrusive than any a would-be despot could hope to establish.

Two things about the House of Iora excited mild interest and off-color jokes among outsiders: the fact that the ruler was styled “Last Among Equals” even though the reverse was clearly true, and the curious coincidence that the ruler of Hetasa and the head of the House of Iora was inevitably a woman. Unlike the Empire and the Emirate, where large families fought amongst one another over claims to the throne, there was inevitably–no matter the ruler’s consort–only a single heir born into the house every generation, a daughter. Sequestered in a temple during their minority and only presented to the public on coming of age, the Iora women were invariably highly able–a fact some attributed to the strictness and isolation of their upbringing. Some argued that no line could sustain such ability over the long term, and that some of the Ioras must have been adopted, but the strong family resemblance they demonstrated generally buried such concerns.

But, in truth, there was far more to it than that. If, during the reign of Iora XXVI, one had managed to penetrate into the temple sanctum in search of the young Iora XXVII, they would have found only empty rooms and a staff with their tongues cut out. Similarly, the grand marble effigied tombs in the City Palace hold nothing but a few motes of dust.

Hetasa has, in fact, been ruled by the same being since the Xyri were overthrown nearly one thousand years ago.

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“I need someone to mold something for me,” said Davis. His fingers trembled at the thought, and the crystals clutched within clinked together with low and resonant musical tones.

“Well, I am a molder, so in that sense you’re on the right track,” Caroline said. She’d led Davis into a nearby Grant’s Crossing greasy spoon; they sat opposite a molder cook who was busily shaping the dry infertile dust of the Permeable Lands into unwholesome dishes. “Put those down before you break them.”

Davis laid the crystals on the table, and Caroline delicately tapped one, smiling as it gave off the proper note. They were among the few things it was impossible to mold into existence, even in the Permeable Lands. “I need you to mold a person for me,” he said at length.

“Oh, is that all?” Caroline said, sounding bored. “You can put half of those away. Give me a brief description of appearance and personality and what name you’d like them to have. Complex clothes are extra, and don’t you dare try to remove them from the Permeable Lands unless you want a pillar of dust and a pissed-off molder.”

“No,” Davis said, trying hard not to adopt a condescending tone despite the youth of the girl he was addressing. “Not just any person. Not a new person. Someone that I used to know.”

Caroline recoiled. “Someone alive?”

Davis breathed a deep and racking sigh. “Dead. My daughter.”

“Now that is a whole other thing,” said Caroline. “Take those crystals back out. Do you know what you’re asking for? We’d need to go to the very heart of the Permeable Lands for that, the most permeable of the permeable. I’d be unable to work on anything else for at least a month, and you’d be responsible for all incidental travel expenses.”

“Can’t…can’t you just create her like you did with that fake bar, all those fake people?”

The girl glared at him. “The bar was an illusion, sand and dust suspended in the air and given a little color. Nothing solid, nothing alive.”

“From a description? I’ve read your ‘Molders’ Creed’ and it’s all about how creation lies in the whole, not the details. Complexity of result isn’t necessarily complexity of input?”

“Yeah, but think about it. If you gave me a description, I could mold someone. It might even look superficially like your daughter and act like her a little. But it would still be my interpretation of her. You’d be paying me to create a third-hand copy. No, for a job like this I have to have your thoughts–everything you ever saw your daughter do or say. I need access to your most intimate perceptions of her.”

“Is that what you mean by the most permeable of the permeable?” asked Davis.

“Precisely,” said Caroline. “It’s damn hard to alter anything once it exists–you might remember that from the Molders’ Creed too–and to get the information I need for your daughter, that’s exactly what has to happen. It’s still not going to be perfect: the molding will be based on your memories, after all, not any kind of objective reality. It’s a fool’s errand, but at least you’ve found a molder who will at least try to give you something close to what you want rather than just a cheap and unsatisfying simulacrum.”

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This post is part of the January 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “the number 13”.

They were there almost every time Dr. Rajab Sizdah drove by: an overweight couple, shabbily dressed, behind the wheel of an old van parked on the corner of 13th Street and Cambridge Drive. Dr. Sizdah, in his immaculate Mercedes, couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose at the piles of used tissues and fast food wrappers accumulated on their dash.

The fact that the pair was parked in a narrow street just before the entrance to the doctor’s gated community was another annoyance. Sizdah would have to inch by them every time, and if there was another car coming he’d have to stop, often in mid-turn, to let them by. He’d stare daggers at every inch of the filthy old Fiat Tredici van when that happened, from the peeling roof paint to the THR 1313 license plate, even as the pockmarked occupants looked past him as if they were staking out the veterinarian across the street.

When he complained about it to his receptionist at the ophthalmology clinic, or the doorman at the community gate, Dr. Sizdah would always become irate when his listener fixated on the unluckiness of a car with a 13 license plate parked on 13th Street. Sizdah didn’t have the patience for such superstitious nonsense; his family had left Persia in 1980 to escape that sort of ignorance. But on the few times he’d been irritated enough to report the slovenly Tredici for illegal parking, the police could never locate it.

On the second Sunday in January, Dr. Sizdah was returning late from an emergency surgery when, much to his annoyance, the van and its unsavory occupants were in their usual position. The doctor idly reflected that they must have a serious grudge against the veterinarian before he began his turn; too late he noticed that there was a Lincoln coming the other way, forcing him to once again stop halfway out of his lane and glare at the obstructive Fiat while the other car lazily glided by.

Dr. Sizdah didn’t see the black Silverado coming around the bend ahead of him, and it’s safe to say that the Silverado didn’t see him.

After the collision, when the doctor was lying bloodied on the pavement surrounded by broken glass, he was surprised to see the ugly, fat man and woman leaning their greasy heads over him instead of the hoped-for paramedics.

“We’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” the man said.

“A very long time,” added the woman. They took Dr. Sizdah by the shoulders and began to drag him away.

The good doctor was never seen again.

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
SRHowen
areteus
bmadsen
pyrosama
Angyl78
gell214
randi.lee
ConnieBDowell
writingismypassion
Aranenvo
MsLaylaCakes
Amanda R

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People are always making the mistake of either underestimating or over anthropomorphizing animals. The truth is that they understand much about us, much more than we would suspect, but do so in a profoundly different way.

The animals of Huntgren Wood had long known that man was a dangerous predator, one that used a strange and sometimes invisible throwing claw to kill from a great distance. But generations ago they had also noticed that some humans would stalk and go through the motions of hunting but not take a kill. They would raise a strange appendage to their face–like but unlike the one they used to throw claws–and yet nothing would burst forth, only a quiet click audible only to those extremely close.

Prey animals thought this another inscrutable behavior of a predator, much like the way bears would sometimes climb and claw at beehives despite their lack of any real meat. The predators, in turn, felt it was play-hunting of the sort they had engaged in as youngsters fresh from the den–the humans were no doubt practicing stalking a kill before actually taking it, largely because that’s what the predators themselves would have done.

It fell to the birds who lived on the edge of the wood and fed on the strange and miraculous self-replenishing trees near human caves to uncover the true secret. Their love songs incorporated what they had seen and heard, and the birds of Huntgren sang of humans stalking with the strange square hoofs and then retreating to their caves, only to produce strange miniature forests and animals with which they decorated their caves. A curious coyote confirmed the tale with a terrified squirrel, while a bobcat received a detailed and matching account from a housecat it was half-courting, half-stalking.

Each clade of the forest dwellers reacted to the news differently. The predators felt that the humans were stealing their essence, drawing some kind of nourishment from it, and vowed never to be thus captured. The prey, especially the deer, felt that the process was akin to being gathered into the next life, where their traditions held that they were forever safe from predation. They felt there was no harm in the process–perhaps even some good–though they continued to be skittish as it was often difficult to tell a human’s intent from a safe distance. For their part, the birds and squirrels made a game of it, delighting in moving out of the way before the human could bring its capture-box to bear.

And that’s all it was–yet another inscrutable activity by an inscrutable race–until the oldest and grandest stag in the forest began to feel the twin horns of disease and old age and decided that a human capture-box and eternal life on a cave wall would be the only fitting end to his reign.

Inspired by this image.

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However, the most successful interdimensional coffee franchise was, by far, Quantum Coffee LLC GmbH. Headquartered in Dimension X, they operated many coffee companies (or the equivalents brewing things like Kjrdrn beans) on uncounted worlds. Some, like Stubb’s Coffee, did not explicitly acknowledge their parent company but regularly sent checks and received shipments anyway (this explains the otherworldly taste of the “holiday coffee” Stubb’s serves from September to February, incidentally, the drink originating in the Jjjrrnk’Blgmf Festival on Ixl IX).

Despite the fact that Quantum Coffee was founded by carbon-based lifeforms, its bestselling product is and will likely continue to be Causticoffee, which is off the pH scale and has to be served in special magnetic containment cups. A form of molecular acid, it will eat through anything from steel to the fragile innards of any lifeform whose biochemistry is not based on a specific silicon atom.

Quantum refuses to comment on its sales figures, leading many to speculate why Causticoffee, which is toxic to 90% of the chain’s clientele across every dimension, is such a strong seller. It’s the clear favorite of some lifeforms, it’s true; among some like the Rypl Causticoffee has become a cultural staple, and the 4Ploq have been known to use it for ritual purposes.

Others note the large corporate purchases in bulk and speculate that entities like the Hegemony use Causticoffee to degrease dark matter engines or to dispose of used interdimensional drive cores that are strongly basic (off the other end of the pH scale). Some rumors are conflated, placing the Unseen Emperor as a secret silicon-based being that harbors a strong fondness for the stuff and stockpiles it in his infinite paranoia.

Whatever the case, the really remarkable thing about Causticoffee is that occasionally carbon-based lifeforms order it by mistake. Most wind up with smoking holes in them; only one is known to have survived. And, oddly enough, that occurred when a load of Causticoffee beans and magnetic containment mugs were delivered to Hopewell on Earth by mistake…

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Nobody’s sure what happened; the texts are filled with wild speculation and the sages are silent. It’s true that for almost a thousand years the city of Aura had been gripped by a change in the local climate. It had been a chilly if fertile land when the settlers had first arrived, refugees from the collapsing Empire, but the climate had steadily worsened. By the time of the incident, no one could remember a time when the city wasn’t artificially heated and trading its expertise in weaving the subtle threads of magic for foodstuffs from the south.

Chroniclers describe Aura as a city of great learning and even greater hubris, where the normal and customary laws regarding moderation in the use of non-scientific powers was ignored or mocked. It had streetlamps before any other city in the former Empire, albeit ones lit by will o’ the wisps rather than electricity or gas. Citizens never bought any of the furs traded by other settlements in what had become a cold and unforgiving northland; their magics kept the city at such a tropical temperature that scholars from the distant, steamy Hegemony often lived there comfortably.

It may have been that overuse, that flaunting, of power that was Aura’s undoing. Or perhaps it was merely the vengeful spirit of a northland that had been too long defied. Either way, all communication with the city stopped abruptly one day. After a worrying end to the regular trade caravans that plied the route between Aura and Kynemeguta, scouts were dispatched.

They returned with tales of desolation. The town was dark and cold, with ice and snow choking every avenue. The people were frozen where they had stood, some with their hands thrown up as if to resist some terrible threat. They and their city remain there to this day, a prime destination for adventure seekers…and a warning.

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The woman’s eyes shone with an unnatural and electric light. “When the occupant of the simulation reaches this point, when they are aware of its nature, protocol dictates that they be given a choice.”

Jean looked at the strange digital creature before her, so familiar and yet so alien. “Protocol? I don’t understand.”

“You have discovered the simulation in which you exist. Ergo, it can no longer serve its intended purpose. As such, you will be offered a choice, and the system will proceed along a path that you designate.”

“What…what choice is that?” Jean’s knees wobbled at the thought.

“You may choose for the simulation to be terminated: you will be released into the outside world. Warning: this system possesses no outside information. It cannot comment on any way in which your life, memories, appearance, or any other factor may differ between the system and the outside.”

“And the other?”

“You may submit to a manual overwrite, which will reset the simulation to a time six to eight months ago in your perception. This will remove any memory of your discoveries but will allow life as you have known it to continue.”

“Wait,” Jean’s head spun. “Are you telling me that I may have made these discoveries before? That I might have gone though this whole process a hundred times only to ask for an…an ‘overwrite?'”

The projection was silent.

Jean thought of everything she could: her home, her job, everyone she knew, everything she loved…there was no guarantee it would be there on the ‘outside,’ that she would even be who she remembered being. She wasn’t sure she could condemn that all to oblivion so blithely.

But would living a renewed lie be any better?

“I need some time to think this over,” said Jean.

“You have sixty seconds,” said the projection. “The decision point has been reached and the choice must be made.

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“Listen. Richards Furniture is built on a squeaky clean base of family business and support.”

“I know that, okay?”

“We count on people trusting us. You remember how Grandpa Richards used to give out free chairs to sell dinette sets. You remember how he had us clean the restrooms as our first job in the place, since that was the first thing people coming off I-75 would judge us for.”

“Look, it was an honest mistake, okay?”

“We have ‘Nicest Restrooms on I-75’ on our billboard for a reason. It tells people that it’s okay to stop just to use the restroom, and maybe buy an armoire.”

“You act like no one’s ever made a spelling mistake before.”

“Yeah, well tell that to the people who see the ad for ‘Incest Restrooms on I-75’ the next time they drive by.”

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