Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Fire Rescue squad pulled up just as the bucket brigade had begun to beat the flames back. “Hold it!” cried their chief. “Back away from that blaze!”

The bucket brigade meekly did as it was told, knowing that there was little point in interfering with professionals like the Fire Rescue squad. Deploying, the squad took up positions surrounding the conflagration.

At the chief’s word, they began to douse the flames with kerosene, butane, coal, and matches. It sputtered and smoldered for a moment as the last of the bucket brigade’s water evaporated away, then coughed forth with renewed vigor.

“How are you feeling?” asked the chief, laying a hand that was made of glowing semisolid magma upon the shoulder of the fire elemental that had been rescued from death at the hands of the bucket brigade.

“I think I’ll be okay,” the elemental, a salamander from the Quasi-Elemental Dimension of Ashes, said. “I just need to finish burning up this city block and get my appetite back.”

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I never get tired of it, the thrill of discovery. I’ve talked to some people who, with some regret in their voices, bemoan the fact that there are no longer any blank spots on the map.

I disagree.

The entire map is blank until you see it. Descriptions are faulty, pictures lie like rugs, and people are falliable.

No place exists until you have seen it.

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Bucephalus “Ransack” Roller Jr. was born to a blacksmith and cobbler in Henthigh, a highly urbanized region known for its strong drink, hearty food, and thick accent. As a lad, Roller helped his father Bucephalus Sr. in the arduous task of shoeing horses and forging tack, as well as pulling out the occasional errant tooth or setting the occasional broken bone. “Bucephalus” means “oxhead” in the Old Tongue, and it has a long and proud tradition in the Roller family; needless to say, Ransack hates the name and tends to threaten physical violence against anyone who uses it.

The nature of Buchaphalus Sr.’s work with animals and the occasional surgery was good training for an adventurer, exercising both body and mind. But Ransack never had much aptitude in the forge, and after a spectacular incident involving a horseshoe that became a tiny iron bomb, he found employment elsewhere as a bouncer and then a night watchman, where his strength and keen intelligence were both in demand.

When Ransack was about 18 or 19, the Kingdom of Henthigh fell to a revolution after a decade of misrule by the insane King Incitatus IV. The youth earned his nickname by leading a mob armed with clubs and tools to a nearby barracks and ransacking it for supplies to equip the rebels. Unfortunately, the rebel coalition fell apart at around the same time Incitatus did, and no sooner had they his head on a pike then they began infighting. Ransack, despite his valuable services, found himself blacklisted and was forced to look for work elsewhere.

After sailing from Henthigh, Ransack worked a variety of jobs: mercenary, schoolteacher, carny, prospector. Mercenary was the profession he defaulted to whenever his current venture fell through. He didn’t subscribe to any particular ideology or creed (though he remains a semi-devoted follower of The Traveller) he tended to sell his services to those on the popular side of uprisings or those outlying settlements abandoned by central governments. His early experiences taught him that the rich and powerful rarely tended to give the poor a fair shake, opting instead for a fair shakedown.

Ten years of job-hopping and mercenary work later, Ransack returned to Henthigh in an attempt to settle down once the People’s Democratic Republic of Henthigh got its act together. He brought with him a young wife he had met as a schoolteacher and wooed as a mercenary: Tabitha Hye. Ransack and Ms. Hye-Roller had twin children while he made an attempt to make an honest settled living in Henthigh: Dyse Roller, a son, and Paynte Roller, a daughter.

Tabitha had expensive tastes, though, acquired in her homeland of New Guernsey. One day, Ransack returned home to find his wife and children gone, having packed up and abandoned him on a trampship without leaving a destination or forwarding address. In the ensuing twenty-odd years, he has attempted to find them from time to time with no success. Both Dyse and Paynte would be about 21-22 years old now; their father did his best to train them in the ways of combat and hostage negotiations before they disappeared.

Ransack is tall and sturdily built, with a receding hairline that he caps off with a salt ‘n’ peppa ponytail (more salt than peppa) as if to show that he can grow all the hair he wants, he just can’t get it to take direction. As a man in his 50s, he wears spectacles: a pair of pince-nez bifocals for close work and a much sturdier pair of wrap-around-the-ear combat glasses for scrapes. Damage to the combat spectacles gives him -1 to his, destruction of the same confers a -4. Damage to the reading spectacles gives him a -1 to perception and charisma rolls, destruction of the same confers a -5 to perception and a -2 to charisma. He tends to wear a many-pocketed wasitcoat over shirtsleeves and keeps a neatly-trimmed mustache and goatee.

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Not everybody could withdraw into the comforting reality of their chosen Virtual Space, though. Some rejected it, but many who would have liked to live a life of digital leisure couldn’t afford it or couldn’t be spared.

Many of them opted for Filtered Space instead.

The procedure was simple: the same wet neural interface was installed, but rather than being networked to a public or private Virtual Space, a small flash-memory Filter was installed. Unobtrusive and wireless, it served as a mediator between the real world and what the Filtered Space user experienced.

Based on a set of surprisingly simple and user-designed heuristics, the Filter reinterpreted the stimuli of the outside world in such a way as to make actual events seem to be part of a more fantastic reality. Fantasy, science fiction, steampunk…there were dozens of Filters and even more settings within them. A simple janitorial job could be a lot more exciting on a space station, after all, or in a grim film noir cityscape.

Many people who otherwise lived in Virtual Space would hook up to Filtered Space during the rare instances when they had to move or be moved. With the proper IT support, the process could be managed seamlessly, without interrupting the magic of their virtual worlds.

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The dreamworm is named not for its physical form–for it has none–but rather for its way of tunneling through the subconscious and drawing its sustenance therefrom.

It’s often held up as an example of an utterly alien form of life, but there is considerable debate if it in fact is alive at all. Much like a virus, the dreamworm seems to exist solely to propagate itself and is entirely parasitic, unable to perform any actions without a host. Some have argued that dreamworms may in fact be using dreams to do more than sustain their reproduction, but because they are so difficult to isolate and study, this remains at best a controversial supposition.

All that’s known for certain is that the dreamworm takes the form of a recurring character or image in the dream of a sapient being. Dreamworms that exist in other animals known to dream, like dogs, have been hypothesized, but as animals cannot communicate their dreams, this presents a number of problems and remains an open question.

The recurring character or image can be anything: a setting, a prop, even a person. The only thing that is known for sure is that the character or image is never something the dreamer knows to exist in waking life. There are similarities, and it is theorized that the dreamworm draws upon existing dream-images and modifies them, but the actual images are always sui generis unique.

Dreamworm reproduction occurs when a sapient being describes the dream to another. This transmission can be verbal or through a medium such as art–anything that makes another sapient think about the image as presented will do. The infected will then begin seeing a dreamworm of their own, typically the same one they were exposed to. Over time, though, the dreamworms do have a tendency to mutuate based ont he usual content of their hosts’ dreams. They have also been known to arise seemingly spontaneously.

This mutable tendency makes classifying dreamworms a nightmare (no pun intended). There seems to be a number of quasi-stable families, and some dreamworms are not known to mutate at all. The Gray Man, for example, is a highly virulent dreamworm that takes the form of a faceless man in mid-century gray business attire. During some of the larger outbreaks, such as the one reported by Army psychologists on Tinian in early 1945, up to 90% of the resident populations were infected by the Gray Man.

Infections can result in loss of sleep, loss of restful sleep, and subtler psychological effects. The dreamworm infestation on Tinian was later blamed for a spate of 13 murders and 29 assaults at the military base there, for instance. Eventually–particularly once they have reproduced–the dreamworms disappear in 1-2 months. Whether this is due to some immune response of the sapient mind or simply the creatures’ natural life cycle is unknown.

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Pauline found Maria where she often was: lounging in one of the cargo holds with the door open.

“You know I don’t like it when you do this,” said Pauline.

“And you know that I don’t like being interrupted when I’m doing this,” said Maria in turn. “Alas, we are at an impasse.”

Pauline planted herself in front of her shipmate, blocking the latter’s view. “It’s dangerous. What if you fall out?”

“Then I will lazily swim back,” replied Maria. “I know how to do it.” Dressed only in what was required to avoid slipping beneath the dress code, Maria held a smouldering cigarette in one hand. The intricate tattoos with which she had gradually been covering every inch of her body that didn’t ordinarily show in uniform were on full display, including the in-progress ink that had been interrupted at the outline stage by their sudden departure.

“Sunburn or worse, then,” Pauline said. “Your Scandinavian skin burns easily no matter how much you scratch it up. And solar radiation doesn’t screw around.”

“It is the closest thing to excitement that I get on this tub,” Maria said languidly. She walked the cigarette between her knuckles, unflinching at the pain when it left a trail of second-degree burns. “It makes me feel alive, knowing that all it will take is a slip of the ship to give me a fatal dose.”

“Is this about your contract? About Jessie?” Pauline took a kinder tone, or the best imitation of one she could manage with her naturally strident voice. “We can talk about that, we can get a psychologist on the line, a grief counselor, a lawyer-”

“No,” Maria said. “You don’t get the luxury of an answer that simple. People are complicated, they act in counterintuitive ways, and often the things they want, the things they need, the things that bring them the most pleasure…often, those are the things that hurt and kill them.”

“But I don’t want you hurt or killed, and neither does the skipper, and neither does the company.”

“Well, if I am I am, and if I’m not I’m not. At this point, hassling me about it is only going to lower my quality of work. And I think the skipper and the company and you want that even less. So buzz off. This is my off-duty time and I’ll spend it as I please.”

Pauline seemed about to pursue the matter, but instead sighed. “This isn’t over,” she said, moving away.

“It is from where I’m sitting.”

Walking through the cargo bay airlock, Pauline cycled it and removed her helmet. She looked back through the bay window at Maria: sitting on a deck chair wearing only her unmentionables and an emergency helmet, the kind that sealed around the neck and relied on the human body’s natural skin tension for the body integrity of anything below the neck.

It couldn’t have been a pleasant feeling, sitting out there in a raw and raging vacuum with just a helmet and 15 seconds of useful consciousness in the way of death by decompression. But maybe unpleasant was what Maria, for whatever reason, needed right now.

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The Jovii are decidedly inhuman, gossamer beings of malleable gelatinous flesh and the equivalent of photophores and chromatophores. They can spread wide, taking in gas, to envelop and trap the particulate matter ans small hydowisps they subsist upon, or contract when threatened by an ammoniavore from the lower cloud layers.

Since evolutionary change has produced this effect in the long tentacles hanging beneath the Jovii’s jellyfish-like center of mass, it was through their instinctive mimicty that their intelligence and the sophistication of their neural nets was first detected. When an organism reshapes and recolors itself to resemble your probe, chances are it’s intelligent.

Once we figured out a little bit about how their neural net worked, we tried to communicate in earnest. For our part, we humans designed an artificial Jovii out of nanoscale materials and tried to reproduce the colors and subtle undulations and shape changes.

The Jovii responsed by reshaping their tentacles into human forms.

It’s astonishing, really, how well they can mimic us. They can’t disguise their jellyfish bells, but they can alter them to blend in with the gasses in which they live–the reason they evolved them. This creates the perverse illusion of female figures–and it’s usually females for some reason–appearing to move and act normally despite being in an environment hostile not only to human life but all carbon-based life.

As one might expect, communication proceeded rapidly from this point, and it wasn’t long before gas cylinders were designed that allowed the Jovii to interact with us on a slightly more personal level. But all these efforts at communication had an unintended side effect.

Love.

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Oldport Shipbuilding Co. was in dire straits by the mid-19th century, its major contracts for naval arms lured away by competitors and its bread and butter of Nantucket whaleships gradually dwindling away.

Many companies would have folded under the pressure, but OSC decided to embrace innovation. It was able to secure a contract from Lesbos Fisheries Supply Ltd. for a fleet of fishery support ships that would use new technologies to freeze whales and fish as they were hauled in by trawlers, allowing for fewer costly trips to port. Rather than simply construct simple ships, OSC decided to dazzle their investors with something new.

Using steam engines sourced from surplus Royal Navy ships laid up after the end of the Crimean War, OSC employed Irishman John Philip Holland to encase them in submersible, watertight, and fusiform hulls. Holland’s design drew inspiration from mako sharks, and substituted a jointed metal fin for a screw propeller. Norwegian explosive harpoons built into the vessels served to incapacitate larger prey, while a series of deployable trawling nets could be used for smaller fish. Either way, the captured sea creatures would be fedd into a series of whirling processing blades (which, when locked together, doubled as watertight doors for the bow).

OSC also contracted Charles Babbage to produce a series of sophisticated difference engines to control the ships; Babbage’s design was capable of following a number of simple commands and had the ability to re-coal itself from suitable stocks. The refrigeration plants were of a revolutionary design by Carl von Linde, early prototypes of iceless systems that would come to dominate commercial iceboxes for the next 50 years.

Both Holland and Babbage left the project disillusioned by its rather crass commercial nature, but that didn’t keep OSC from manufacturing 100 of its “Shark-Class Autonomous Boats” or SCABs. The latter acronym was particularly pertinent as the fishermen and whalers based nearby feared that those boats would drive them out of a job. The SCABs underwent a series of spectacularly successful shakedown cruises, returning enough product to pay for their development and construction.

However, Lesbos Fisheries Supply–pressured by sailors–insisted that OSC had not delivered what had been asked of them and refused to pay for the SCABs or accept delivery. The breakout of the American Civil War also meant that OSC had to clear its slipways and harbor for a sudden influx of naval contracts. This led OSC management, unable to find a buyer for a product well ahead of its time, to simply remove the part of Babbage’s mechanism that ordered the craft to return to base. They would, it was thought, simply fish until their stocks of coal were exhausted and then sink.

Such was not in fact the case. Babbage’s innovative difference engines and Holland’s revolutionary design meant that the SCABs continued working unabated for many years. They simply dumped excess product when their holds were full or accepted coal as payment for the fresh fish they had caught. This led to them becoming a notorious navigation hazard as the difference engines powering them began to break down, and SCAB attacks were a fact of life for oceangoing vessels as late as the 1940s, with unconfirmed reports of attacks as late as 1996.

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The Threshaak people who lived near the mountain base had legends of a great and terrible god-beast who lived at the peak of what they called Chinshaashekresh. Mountaineers knew it instead as Mount Alexander Mackenzie, one of the most remote, challenging, and least climbed peaks of the Canadian Rockies.

Whether one called it Chinshraashekresh or Mount Alexander Mackenzie, the peak was of relatively little interest to mountaineers. It was not the highest nor was it the most difficult technical climb in the range. Primarily, it was notable for its remoteness and the fact that the Threshaak refused to climb it out of fear of a god-beast they claimed was so powerful that its mere visage could drive men to madness.

The length of travel time, involving a ride on a light seaplane as its final leg, turned off most climbers who had plenty of YDS Grade 5 mountains that were more accessible. But the legend ultimately attracted a camera crew from Monstrous Mysteries on the Archaeology Channel.

With their way paid and a TV special to film, the crew ignored the Threshaak and scoured the mountain for any trace of the supposed god-beast. The show was a hit, but not for the reasons that the Archaeology Channel had hoped; the crew found absolutely no trace of a beast but were instead dogged along the entire route by mountain goats who bleated late at night, defacated all over the equipment, and at one point butted a cameraman into a gully. Audiences found it sidesplitting, especially since the crew was attempting to parlay their utter lack of results into a serious, menacing program.

After the last Monstrous Mysteries people left, the largest of the goats climbed to the summit of Chinshraashekresh and bleated loudly. The clouds parted, revealing the form of G’Nilwarc the Annihilator, a great red-rimmed eye set in crimson and writhing tentacled flesh.

“You have done well,” said the ancient being in the tongue common only to things beyond time and space and mountain goats.

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Lake Nod was one of the many artificial reservoirs created by the TVA during the massive electrification push in the 1930s. Damming up the Soap River, so named because of the soapstone deposits near its now-drowned ford, Lake Nod was named after Joseph Nod, a pioneer in the area whose descendents remained in the area and evern worked on the dam.

Of course they were among the 3500 people displaced by the flooding, but at least they got a steady paycheck for a while. 

The generator machinery was never installed at Lake Nod or the Nod Dam, though. The project was abandoned in 1937 for unclear reasons, although the TVA cited structural concerns and subsidance. It was slated to be demolished before the reservoir finished filling, but the funding for that fell through as well–it was scheduled to begin in late 1941, as it happened.

The TVA put up warning signs, locked the structure, and walked away.

Over the years, Lake Nod began hosting a cottage industry of illegal fishing and boating. Officially both were banned because of structural concerns with the dam, and construction was prohibited downstream out of fear of flooding. But things were built anyway and people came anyway.

The Nod Dam itself became a popular target for urban explorers, representing as it did the rare opportunity to see the inside of a structure that, but for the lack of functioning machinery, was the equal of any other TVA structure. Authorities discouraged this, and people were arrested, but they were lackluster at both pursuits. There simply wasn’t the budget for effective enforcement.

The Interior Universal Investigators of Nashville, the IUI, scheduled a covert tour of the Nod Dam as their spring 2015 urban exploration opener. They entered just after midnight on April 30, 2015.

The first reports of downstream flooding and collapse began reaching the authorities almost exactly 24 hours later on May 1.

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