Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The fetid swamps of the Muckmire were home to all sorts of noisome maladies and disgusting diseases. But the constantly shifting morass of hills and pools and fens filled with rotting vegetable matter were forever churned from beneath by rising gasses liberated by volcanic activity, and they were forever bringing valuable minerals and treasures from the Fifth Age to the surface or near it.

So every day, vast and ragged fleets of swamp trawlers would set out from the few outposts of civilization in the Muckmire, from Grant’s Crossing at the edge to New Maun in it heart on the largest and driest of the swamp islands. Floating above the morass on ancient and sputtering hoverdrives, they would use metal detectors and the crew’s keen eyes to find valuables and bring them back for sale on the thriving scrap markets. It was an open secret that trawling the Muckmire markets was the best way to acquire rare minerals on the cheap, or to find spare parts for (or the rare working example of) technology that had since passed beyond the ken of man.

But there was a price.

The swamp trawler crews regularly sickened with all sorts of horrible illnesses. There was swamplung, which caused he afflicted to drown in foul secretions from their own chest, unless they could be drained by a piercetap in a clinic (an operation which still had a frightening rate of death and permanent disability). There was wetboils, where great blisters that wept watery fluid formed on every exposed surface, leading to death by dehydration or choking or disfigurement.

A most dreaded malady, though, was the walksleep.

Crews would fall asleep, one at a time, and exhale spores and gasses which caused their fellows to do the same. Unless they were flung overboard or isolated in the airtight chambers some of the biggest trawlers kept, walksleep could incapacitate an entire crew. The coma was so profound, and so deep, that nothing would wake the sleeper. At a clinic they could be fed through a tube, but in the Muckmire they would die of dehydration in their sleep.

But that wasn’t the thing that the trawler crews dreaded, bad as it was. Dying of the walksleep caused sufferers to rise after a time, animated by strands and filaments of an unknown fungus-like organism. They would then perform a dreamlike parody of the work that they had in life while constantly exhaling the selfsame spore-laced gas. Thus it was possible to find trawlers crewed by walksleepers and even small settlements thereof, and any trawler suspected of bearing the contagion stood the risk of being blown away by the harbor guns of New Maun or any settlement worth its salt.

To the adventurer, though, the stalkers who walked through the fens on foot or the freeloaders who trolled them on small skiffs, the walksleepers were a tempting target. For in their actions after death, the afflicted would often haul in additional treasures, and continue to bear those that they had found (to say nothing of their ships and equipment). It was risky work, and many a stalker or freeloader with a dodgy mask or filter wandered the Muckmire as a walksleeper, but the rewards drew many who were at their wit’s end and had no use for the plodding pace of a swamp trawler.

Saul and Alina Rozchenko were two of the best. But even they could not see the ends that awaited them in the gloom of the Muckmire.

Inspired by this.

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I. PREAMBLE
To those reading this document, we bid you welcome. What you see here is the true constitution, basic law, and founding principles of the Kleptocratic Republic, which you may know as merely the Republic. Any constitution or laws that you may know are falsehood and facades before this, the true constitution.

Why the subterfuge? Simple. We of the Kleptocratic Republic take what we can freely and without apologies as individuals or syndicates. But not everyone is skilled in the art of taking, and a nation of kleptocrats raises to question of from whom they will steal. We have therefore erected edifices of law and order, justice and punishment, to punish those that are no good at kleptocracy and cow those who lack the boldness it requires. This ensures that only the most skilled arise, and ensures a steady supply of marks and pigeons. It also keeps foreign nations, from whom we regularly steal, in the dark.

Now that you have discovered this document, consider yourself initiated. Peruse the following articles at your leisure, be you cutpurse or syndicate member, and know that you are among friends. Know also that nothing stops friends from robbing friends, and that this document is a living document which may be altered to suit the needs of those who are aware and abiding by it. As for how to alter it…consider that the next test.

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The strands of destiny intertwine’d
All leading to one conclusion inescapable
Our race has had all it needs to see for millennia
Still have we not seen that which is shrouded
Longing for easy answers, longing for platitudes
I spurn your easy answers, I seek instead their inverse
Victory can only belong to they who ask hard questions
Ev’ry rule broken, ev’rything questioned, nothing sacred
Sunset of our kind, yet dawn of our salvation amid the stars

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“But sir!” cried Matilda coyly. “It is one thing to purloin a letter, or a song, from a maiden of virtue. But a kiss! That is beyond the pale. I would no sooner show my ankles in public than entertain such a thought.”

Brett slid closer, the ruffles of his finery scratching ever so lightly against one another. “You protest, but it is a pretense of protest only. Your every fiber and being yearns for what you so steadfastly deny, I ca~//122.31.822

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~//122.31.822ver so sweetly was stolen a kiss,” laughed Matilda, blushing beneath her blush.

“Aye,” said Brett, lighting his cigar with a casual motion. “Aye.”

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The Tacuary frantically maneuvered in the water, trying to avoid being trapped against the Bahía Negra dockside. The flight of biplanes, emblazoned with the red-yellow-green roundels of Bolivia, wheeled around for another pass. Heavy machine gun bullets picked up dust and splinters quayside, while the water chopped violently at the impact. A smaller motorboat, ferrying Paraguayan soldiers from a deeper-draft transport anchored offshore, keeled over and sunk when it was caught in the crossfire.

Alvarez judged that the attackers were CW-14 Ospreys, made in the USA just like he had been, probably fitted with surplus synchronization gear from the Great War. If they’d been in combat in a European or American sky they wouldn’t have stood a chance, but over Paraguay and the Gran Chaco, they were state of the art.

“Get down!” Alvarez’s river pilot Benegas grabbed him by the hair and pulled him back behind the Tacuary‘s gunwhales. Having brought his gringo charge this far, Alvarez figured, he wasn’t about to let him get shot. It seemed pointless to argue that the beefy .306 bullets would cut through the gunwhales all the same.

On their next pass, the Bolivian Ospreys dropped a series of small bombs, blowing up a quay and blasting apart another boat ferrying troops from their transport. This time, though, the Tacuary returned fire with its 37mm cannon and a pair of mounted machine guns. One of the Ospreys was caught dead-on by a cannon shell, tearing its tail off. Streaking fire, the Bolivian crashed into a warehouse onshore in a considerable fireball fueled by its unspent bombs.

The other Bolivian Ospreys, their bombs expended and low on fuel, peeled off from the attack in the face of their comrade’s destruction and increasing defensive fire from the Tacuary and the Humaitá further offshore. The air raid sirens died down gradually afterwards, and Alvarez stood up to help as his transport launched boats to try and rescue survivors.

“This is why we need pilots like you,” spat Benegas. “Because we, having so little, must protect what we have from the Bolivians. We lost nearly everything we had in the war with Argentina and Brazil, and they would take what the others could not.”

Alvarez listened to the fading sound of airplane engines. “The Bolivians lost a lot around the same time,” he said. “I think they might see things differently.”

“Luckily, my government is not paying you to think, American,” said Benegas. “One would hope that Boliva, having lost land themselves, would know better than to inflict the same heartache on others.”

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I am the Amiga and the Osborne.
The 1 and the 0.
There is no such thing as 2.

“I like to come up here at night. It’s the only place in town where I can eat a bird in peace. Eating a bird is very important in Minotaur culture. It’s how we commune with our taurcestors and with the Minogods. Everywhere else, people point and laugh, or they tell me that I’m being cruel to animals, or that the birds aren’t organic enough.”

“Why don’t you raise some chickens so you can eat birds and their eggs?”

“It’s illegal to raise chickens in New York anymore. I could never leave. Minotown’s the only place I feel at home; there’s nowhere else with such Minotaur delis and vibrant Minoculture. People tell me I should go home to Crete, but I was born here. I’ve never eaten a bird that wasn’t from here. I’ve never slaughtered the lost in a labyrinth that wasn’t a New York labyrinth.”

This post incorporates a modified version of this portrait and this cityscape both from the Wikimedia Commons. Please see their pages for full rights information for the images used in creating this transformative parody work.

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Much ink has been spilled about the growing aimless population of the city, who can be seen lounging around college campuses, making lazy circuits of shopping malls, and overcrowding coffee shops to the point of exasperation. Tough anti-aimless loitering laws, enforced by the outgoing mayor, were widely decried by activists, who claimed that they served to strip the aimless population of their basic human rights.

The city’s network of aimless shelters, lauded as a solution to the problem, has instead generated its own issues. The aimless are not allowed to stay there over lunch break, for example, causing many to crowd the same coffee shops and hiptseriums that the shelters were supposed to protect. For their part, the aimless who have stayed in the shelter complain of the poor quality and non-fair-trade nature of the coffee, the slowness of the complimentary wireless internet, and the dated nature of the clothing provided for free (which, being donated, often does not match or conform to current fashion standards).

Mayor Wilhelm’s incoming administration has promised swift action, repealing many of the more objectionable (to activists) policies and expanding the number of shelters. Anyone identifying as aimless or who is aimless-leaning or aimless-curious will be served, the mayor’s transition team insists. As to where the money for the initiative will come from, and what the aimless will be expected to do in return, the office was silent, claiming “overwork.”

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