Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Commander!”

Soderquist sighed and reached for the headset on his ansible. “Is that you, Karlsson?” he said.

“Yes, it’s me. Something…something’s happened on Xyvatba!”

Xyvatba. Pronouncing the name was enough to generate a headache measurable on the Richter scale, and the thought of dealing with its indigenous Xusargt inhabitants was enough for another. Of all the species in the universe whose biochemistry was similar enough to humans’ to make communication possible, they had to be the most irritating.

“Let me guess,” said Soderquist. “You lost another translator unit to religious fanatics who think that communicating with artificial spores violates some deeply-held tenet of their religion.” The Xursargt, who had evolved from a long series of vaguely fungoid creatures in symbiosis with ambulatory herbivores, communicated entirely with modified spores that were released into the ambient environment.

“Sir, I think-” Karlsson sounded more panicked than normal, but he tended to call for support from Soderquist at the sector level every time the Xusargt secreted spore-impregnated psuedo-mucus on him (even though he had been assured that it was sterile and a form of endearment).

“Or did they start preaching at you again? Trying to secrete the sacred spores of Ebzhyna in your direction and not taking no for an answer?” Soderquist snorted derisively. Ridiculous superstitions like that had been proscribed on Earth for centuries now, a fact the commender thanked his lucky stars for (just as a figure of speech, since actually appealing to any stars, lucky or not, would be illegal).

But that fact made species like the Xursargt all the more anxious to proselytize. Their spores largely fell on deaf mechanical receptors, though an anthropology team–which Karlsson served as a liaison and security chief–had cataloged the Xusargt belief system in nauseating detail. Soderquist had reviewed their reports in the course of his duties, about Ebzhyna the Merciful and Loving, the Great Spore who Reigns on High with Barigt the Sporefather, he of the Redeeming Spores who would one day return to assume His true believers heavenward as clouds of pure and holy spores.

If he never had to read about it again, it would be too soon.

“Commander-!”

“Spit it out then, Karlsson,” said Soderquist.

“They’re gone, sir,” Karlsson said. “All gone! Our Xursargt escort turned to spores and vanished, and now dark bloodspores are raining from the heavens! There are earthquakes, and the men have been reporting a glowing Xursargt approaching our position! What should we do?”

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This post is part of the January 2014 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Retro Gaming Icons”

NARRATOR: It all began with an idea.

[DR. JOHN CARLTRON, Distinguished Emeritus Chair of Interactive Media History at Southern Michigan University, appears in an excerpt from an interview]

DR. CARLTRON: The name of the Musjido Co., Ltd. has long been the subject of speculation; the official company line is that it is a contraction of the Romanji phrase “Musekinin-Jigoku-do,” roughly “let the irresponsible ones be banished to hell.” Reportedly coined in response to the firing of Musjido’s first batch of employees for laziness, the name stuck. The company was a small regional developer of pachinko machines before the war, and it entered the lucrative home arcade market in January 1984 with its “Home Electronic Pachinko Computing Engine.” Retooled as a cartridge-based game system for a worldwide release, the redubbed Musjido Multimedia System (MMS) was an astonishing success.

NARRATOR: For the 30th anniversary of the Musjido MMS, Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Films (in association with Liberty Pictures) presents Behind the 8 Bits: a documentary event reuniting Musjido employees, fans, stars, and more.

[ROBERTO, star of Musjido’s breakout hit Roberto’s Adventure, appears in an excerpt from an interview]

ROBERTO: But-a moreso than the-a fame, it’s-a really the-a memories that-a I cherish. For-a my first title on-a the-a MMS, I had-a to punch salamanders on-a my way to-a fighting Yukke the-a Salamander King. I still-a remember screaming when I got-a their slime all-a over my gloves the-a first time!

[The scene shifts to footage from Roberto’s Adventure while ROBERTO continues to speak. Highlights include Zone 1-1, fighting Yukke in Zone 8-8, and dying in multiple ways to 8-bit salamander attacks]

ROBERTO: You would-a think that-a my fondest memory would-a be punching Yukke into-a the lava for the first-a time. But-a no, it-a is still the-a first salamander I punched. It’s-a been 30 years, and-a I’ve punched millions more-a, but you never-a forget your first.

[MONDO MAN, cyborg star of the multi-platinum Mondo Man series from Rockcom, appears in an excerpt from an interview]

MONDO MAN: Before the release of the MMS, Rockcom only made arcade games. End of line. But the success of the platform led to them starting the series with me. End of line. The original game was programmed by three college kids, but it’s still the template for all games of the same sort ever since! End of line.

[The scene shifts to a montage of Mondo Man gameplay, mostly from Mondo Man 2. Clips include the legendary spike drop in Spike Man’s stage, the notoriously difficult block-jumping segment of Lava Man’s stage, and a montage of 10 different ways to die in the first Doctor Vile stage]

MONDO MAN: How do you choose a moment that stands out from the MMS era, with ten games in ten years? End of line. I could mention the fight against Mushroom Man in Mondo Man 6 or the introduction of the dash mechanic in Mondo Man 4, or even the Mondo Jet I was able to ride in Mondo Man 5 through Mondo Man 10. End of line. I can only say that each time I defeated ten evil cyborgs, unmasked the villain to be Doctor Vile in disguise, and demolished his Vile Fortress, it felt like the very first time. End of line. I’ll always be grateful to Musjido and the MMS for giving me the chance to shine before my developer all but abandoned me. End of line.

[More clips of interviews and gameplay continue to scroll silently in the background, including F’SCOT from Fitzgerald’s Quest, AREOLUS from Subterranoid, and FIGHTER/MAGE from Dragon Fantasy I]

NARRATOR: Behind the 8 Bits, coming this fall from Kyoto Processed Ricepaper Concerns Films in association with Liberty Pictures.

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“Russ! Hey Russ!” Jordan poked his friend and classmate across their table. “Check out the girl waiting for her latte.”

Russell put down his book and looked up. Sure enough, there was a brunette there waiting for an expensive coffee-based drink. “Yeah, so what? She’s kind of cute, but so is half of the line. That’s just how Stubb’s Coffee is.”

“No, no,” whispered Jordan. “Her coat, look at her coat!”

Russel didn’t see anything strange about the girl’s coat, a standard designer affair that looked trendy but couldn’t have held off the bitter cold very well. “It’s a coat,” he said drily. “Definitely a coat.”

“The light, the light!”

There was, Russell could see, an LED-sized red light shining at the bottom of the young lady’s coat, near where the zipper started. It didn’t correspond with any pockets–the jacket didn’t have pockets, it was too trendy for that–and the material was too thick to let light bleed through.

“I’ll be damned, there is a light on her jacket,” he said.

“What do you think it is?” hissed Jordan excitedly.

“Jordan, it’s 2014. It’s the future. Marty McFly gets here from 1985 last year. Everything has a light on it. Could be a USB heating jacket that’s almost out of charge.”

“Oh,” said Jordan, a little crestfallen. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Unseen by either of them, the lady collected her latte and left, slipping around a corner. “What is it?” she cried into her communicator, concealed in what appeared to be a normal jacket. “Couldn’t whatever message you have wait until I wasn’t in public?”

“You’ve been found out,” was the only reply. “It’s time to cut you loose.

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“Okay, our target is leaving the house,” said Central Control. “What have you got for me?”

A pause on the frequency. “We can have a furniture truck that takes up half the road and putters through intersections to make him miss the light on Stephens Drive in two minutes,” said the operative from Traffic.

“Excellent. Do it. Okay, that gets us to Van Buren Avenue,” Central Control said. “We need something on Van Buren before he turns onto Grizzly Drive.”

“Car accident?” said an operative from Disasters.

“Negative. We don’t have any agents there in civilian cars,” said the Traffic operative. “All we have is a groundskeeping crew.”

“Excellent!” cried Central Control, loudly enough that the transmission broke up into static for a moment. “Have them close off a lane.”

“Central?” said Traffic. “A lane? Groundskeepers?”

“If anyone asks, they’re mowing the lawn.”

“But you don’t have to close a lane to mow the grass.”

“Lanes have been closed for less,” said Central. “And the point of the exercise is to annoy the target and make them late for work, not to make sense. You do it, and you do it now.”

“Done.”

“What next. Disasters?”

“We have a few cyclists and pedestrians that can jump out in front of their car on Grizzly Drive, and some motorists standing by who can back out really, really slowly. Not much more than that, not with this short notice.”

“Do it. All to gain time for our big finisher, you see.” Central chuckled slightly. “Construction? What have you got?”

“Oh, it’s a beauty, Central,” said the Construction operative in a heavy–but well-pleased–smoker’s voice. “We got a road closed to ‘replace pipes’ on Grizzly just before the turn the target needs to make.”

“Replace the pipes?”

“Wouldn’t you know it, they’re digging in the wrong place,” laughed Construction. “Oh, and there’s no side street that gets around the blockage. The target will have to go back to Van Buren and take the long way around.”

“Excellent. Great work!” crowed Central.

“Oh, that’s not the best of it. The target’s usual parking lot is closed for construction as well–we’ll think of some excuse–and the other lots are all full. The only one with any spaces is a 10-minute drive away, and Traffic has cunningly lain in several motorcycles in full size spots and people parked across the lines to make notionally free spots unusable.”

“Brilliant,” said Central, voice crackling with approval. “There might even be a promotion in it for you.”

“Just doing my job.”

It was hard work, cutting together a conspiracy to infest a target’s life with tiny annoyances. Death by a thousand cuts…a fitting punishment for someone who had dared to tailgate and then cut off the leader of the Illuminati in his blood-red Firebird near Indianapolis.

There was still more work to be done, however. “Hello, Flights of Birds?” Central said into the radio. “How many incontinent seagulls can you have on station, and how soon?”

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I was ready to march up to the offending car to give it a piece of my mind.

My guide pulled me back. “Let it go.”

“But you saw what they did! I just-”

“Let it go,” he repeated. “Do you know whose car that was?”

I shook my head.

“President Mbudye Dawacadu. Leader of the Republic of Luba for the last thirteen years.”

I gasped and took a fresh look at the car as it rolled through the stoplight. “That? It’s not even a limousine.”

“No, it’s not,” my guide replied. “It’s bulletproof and bombproof, but you’d never know that to look at it. President Dawacadu enjoys driving throughout his country incognito, sometimes behind the wheel himself.”

“Why? Why would anyone, much less a dictator, go out with no security?”

“Do you know how Dawacadu came to power?” my guide asked.

“No clue,” I replied.

“Before him, the country was ruled by President Waran Kunyakua, who took over during the Cold War by executing the democratically elected Communist in office. Kunyakua was a big, boisterous man, and he put statues of himself up everywhere and renamed streets after his family members.”

“And Dawacadu was one of his soldiers?”

“No. He was a professor of economics at the University of Luba. He was also a writer of some note, and he wrote an essay praising the new regime which was carried in the newspapers. President Kunyakua liked it so much that he made him a minister in his new government.”

“And then he overthrew him?”

“No. Dawacadu became Kunyakua’s most loyal man. He did as he was asked without question and with great efficiency, from having political opponents jailed and murdered to emptying the slums in the way of government railway projects. But he learned, always watching and remembering.”

“So?”

“Eventually, Kunyakua’s megalomania got the better of him and he began to lose supporters at home and abroad. When the end came for him, Dawacedu was in the presidential palace within a week. Why? He watched, and he remembered. There was blackmail for some, bribery for others, but before the year was out all the dangerous men were dead and all the trustworthy dogs had bones in their mouths.”

The car’s taillights had faded to points of light in the distance. “That doesn’t sound all that different from the other guy.”

“Does it? There are no posters, no statues. Most people would be hard-pressed to pick the president out of a police lineup. He watched, and he remembered: statues and grandiosity bring unwanted attention. What Luba needs is someone to dirty their hands to drag the country kicking and screaming into the present.”

I chose my next words carefully. “It almost sounds like you admire him,” I said.

“My cousin is dead because the president saw him spraypainting graffiti on one of his drives. And our national parks are patrolled by men with machine guns who keep the poachers at bay and the animals safe. I admire him and loathe him in the same breath.”

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HOPEWELL, MI – The Hopewell Democrat-Tribune has been receiving reports since yesterday of shortages at supermarkets and groceries in and around the city of Hopewell and the Southern Michigan University campus. With Winter Storm Hoth approaching and promising 10-16 inches of snowfall on top of the existing six inches, the Democrat-Tribune set out to confirm these reports.

“It’s a madhouse,” says Peace Waterlily, owner and proprietor of Peace Market on east Adams St. “We have been out of non-homogenized, organic, local milk since yesterday–people were coming in and buying 3-4 gallons at a time! When we ran out, they even bought the homogenized, organic, local milk until we ran out of that as well.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity, produce managers from many other stores agree that they have seen a run on organic milk in the run-up to Winter Storm Hoth.

“Not just organic milk, either,” said one such source. “We are completely out of locally-sourced free-range rBGH- and rBST-free beef. People are absolutely panicked that the storm will cut them off from their supplies of organic foods, and they’ve been voting with their feet and their wallets.”

Another source adds: “We’re out of soy, we’re down to the dregs of our tofu, and our hemp oil pills have a waiting list. Fair trade coffee? Forget about it–we’ve been out of that for two days.”

In fact, after a visit to several stores in Hopewell and near the SMU campus, Democrat-Tribune reporters found perilously-low stocks of all organic, fair-trade, local, and ethically-sourced foods. A concerted search of the largest such store in town, the Hole Foods Market on Estate St., turned up bare shelves and empty racks in the ethical aisles and freezers. A few cans of free-range local creamed eels, a few of vegan soy substitute wadded beef, and a lone carton of organic fair-trade corn nog are all that remain. The only pita bread is expired and has been trampled on.

An angry mob of shoppers formed outside the One World Market once news broke of the shortages inside. “I need kelp and gluten-free unleavened bread for my paleo-diet! Where am I supposed to get them if everyone is out?” cried one shopper who declined to be identified. Some shoppers were reportedly so desperate that they purchased products that were only partially organic, or which were not local, though the Democrat-Tribune was unable to confirm these reports at press time.

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“I’d like the billboard to read ‘Southern Michigan University: Home of MAC Champions’ with a picture of one of the SMU Fighting Grizzlies from each of the most popular teams. You know, football, baseball, basketball. Have one of them be a woman, but don’t put one of those girly sports like field hockey up there unless you want to get ready to clean out your desk.”

“But sir, the Fighting Grizzlies haven’t won a national championship since 1977, and even that was just the track and field team which was disbanded in 2003. Other than that, the only thing we have that’s close to a Mid-American Conference champion is the 1966 team. And they lost to the champion, with only that big cash-for-amateur-athletes scandal at the champion’s school leading to their championship being voided 10 years later.”

“A championship is a championship.”

“Fine, but how can we justify such a misleading billboard?”

“How many members of the Southern Michigan University Championship Team from 1966 still live in Hopewell?”

“I’m pretty sure most of them are dead, but I think Bill McAllister is at one of our nursing homes with senile dementia, and I know that even though they lived their entire lives elsewhere, two more players are buried at Hopewell Cemetery.”

“Perfect! That’s good enough. Have a galley of that advertisement for the billboard on my desk by Friday.”

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Lotion was extremely important to the Galaxians’ plans, especially after their invasion of Mortimer VI was foiled by a combination of dry cracked hands and a space flu of unprecedented virulence that was spread mostly through handshakes. As the denizens of a wet and watery world, the Galaxians we’re particularly vulnerable to losing moisture and acquiring age lines and wrinkles.

The official supplier of lotion to the Galaxian Empire was Griebel Brothers of Aloe IV. Their patented secret formula, designed to the Galaxians’, exacting specifications, was standard issue for all Galaxian ships of cruiser size or larger. Occasionally, those who chose to resist Galaxian conquest targeted vital lotion reservoirs and lotion supply ships in an attempt to stymie the invaders.

This was of course unacceptable in the Galaxians’ strenuous program of universal conquest, which had to adhere to a strict timetable with intervals measured in galactic standard picoseconds. Hence the creation of the elite Galaxian Lotion Rangers.

Armed to the teeth with the latest Galaxian military hardware, and given access to special reserves of lotion, the Rangers served to protect the vital flow of lotion from Griebel Brothers’ massive orbiting Lotionarim to the cracked elbows of Galaxian invaders throughout the galaxy. They also served as an emergency lotion delivery vector in cases where Galaxian troops were cut off and in danger of nasty scaly skin.

In the 300 years since their creation, the Lotion Rangers were undefeated despite fighting over 3000 engagements. Until, that is, they met their match in the nefarious Rash Riders of Blistex XII.

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For most people a roller coaster is a slice of death-defying thrills inserted into their lives, lives which otherwise politely obey death and invite him over for tea.

For me they have always been a singularly unpleasant experience.

The first drop, when your stomach maintains a holding pattern at altitude while the rest of your body goes into freefall, has always been an intensely unpleasant experience for me. Not to the point of making me sick, usually, but to the point of making me intensely uncomfortable and wondering why anyone would willingly subject themselves to such a treatment. Coasters with no drop are better, and coasters that are all drop are rack-and-hot-coals torture. I could never be an astronaut, since zero gravity is basically like a perpetual drop-at-the-coaster-top feeling. Something tells me that even seasoned coaster junkies would have a problem with that, considering the zero-G trainer plane is called the Vomit Comet.

But the physical sensations are only a part of the picture.

For adrenaline junkies, and indeed for most normal people, roller coasters are a source of pride, a test of manhood (I know very few ladies who are coaster junkies). Turning down a ride is the equivalent of refusing to hunt a mastodon, or perhaps sitting out a football game. Not only do people poke fun at you for doing so, they have a hard time conceiving why anyone would even try to stay on the sidelines.

And yet I must declare that I am a coasterwuss, loud and proud. Or, perhaps, soft and timid as I wobble over to the nearest trash can after a 400-foot vertical drop.

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This post is part of the December 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “250-Word Story Chain, or, The Blog-O-Phone.”

“Holy Hell on a Hershey’s.”

Old Man Wiggins looked over the scene of devastation on his property. His house was ablaze, lit up by an exploding snowmobile, his loyal dog Ginormous needed a quadruple-digit vet bill, and everyone on his land, trespassers or not, was running around dangerously like beheaded chickens.

“Well, that tears it. I’m not going this year.”

Wiggins pushed away the neural net interface that linked him to the mathematically certain predictive model of his property. If he left, a mob of those idiots from town would descend with their axes to chop up his trees, little realizing that they were key parts of the neural botany net that made Wiggins’ invention work. Every Xmas tree they cut down was another year to recalibrate the system by digging up and repositioning copper wires buried and snarled by roots.

The Seventeenth Annual Conference on Neuralpredictive Botany in Tampa Bay would just have to wait. Wiggins would email his paper, fine-tune the predictive simulation, and put up some more barbed wire and possibly a motion sensor with a laser grid.

He got up and went upstairs in search of a coffee as Irish as Colin Farrell, not noticing that the door was ajar.

“Grandpa?” Claire entered the basement after hearing a noise, and saw that Wiggins’ device, which he always said was a ham radio, was still on.

She sat down and slipped the harness over her head.

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