Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I don’t want to bother with flight plans or cargo manifests or all that jublub,” said Jai.

“All that what?” said Myassa.

“All that jublub. You know. Stuff. Crap.”

“From the context it’s clear what you meant, Chandrakant,” Myassa said. “I’m just reacting to the word you used to convey the concept.”

“Is the language I use really of that much concern to a security officer?” Jai said, flustered. “You’re kind of undermining my authority as captain here.”

“Two things, Chandrakant” Myassa said, stabbing a pair of fingers into the air. “First, you’re not the captain. You’re the owner. There’s a difference. Get used to it. Second, you undermined your own authority the second you uttered the word ‘jublub.’ What language is that, even?”

It’s just something my father used to say,” replied Jai. “Don’t worry yourself about all that jublub. It’s probably Hindi or something.”

“Oh no, I’ve heard Hindi and that ain’t Hindi.” Myassa jutted her chin forward, pulling her hijab forward when it threatened to come loose. “Hey, doc! What language would you say ‘jublub’ is?”

Dr. Strasser looked up from his workstation. “It is not a word found in any dictionary or any of the tongues of man,” he said in his deadpan way, such that Jai couldn’t be sure is the old geezer was joking.

“Taos, do you concur?” Myassa said, clearly relishing the interplay.

“Collating.” There was a pause as the ship’s AI considered its response. “No matches found in database query, Ms. al-Thurayya. When I have recieved permission to access the planetery data networks I can conduct a more thorough search.”

“That won’t be neccessary, Taos, thank you,” Myassa said. “And how many times do I have to tell you to call me Ms. bint Leya bint Raaheel al-Thurayya?”

“I am sorry, Ms. bint Leya bint Raaheel al-Thurayya,” said Taos in his flat affect.

“So, in addition to mocking my speech and undermining my authority as captain you’re deliberately confusing my poor old AI, al-Thurayya?” said Jai.

“You knew there would be consequences when you used the word ‘jublub.'”

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It had been a long night for the group of students holed up in Tammy’s parents’ holiday house in the mountains. First, a fierce storm blowing in off the mountains had put the kibosh on their plans to smooch each other out in the sunshine and at the lake. Then the power had gone out; when Bernard went to check the breakers, he never came back.

Eventually, the indoor smooching had stopped and the others had gone looking for him. Michelle had found his body, with the head sucked clean off, stuffed in an upstairs broom closet. She’d also seen a dark shape darting across the landing, and wet webbed footprints soaking into the carpet.

That had been enough to interrupt the smooching, if only briefly.

Picked off one by one, eventually the group was whittled down to the last two. They were cornered by the murderous creature, the shadow that had decapitated all their friends, out by the pool. Illuminated by the spotlights, it was fully visible for the first time: a monstrous, bipedal frog!

Tammy accidentally fell into the pool, horrified at the sight. Erica tried to grab her hand but the frog dove in after her first. Swimming faster than Tammy could sink, Erica couldn’t look away even as she was sure her friend was a goner.

And that’s when they came between Tammy and the pursuing megafrog: giant tadpoles, tails writhing, whose faces were the faces of every head the prowling amphibian had gathered. It hadn’t just been hunger or bloodlust, but a horrifying circle of life that had driven the creature’s depredations.

Batting the tadpoles aside, the frog swam greedily for the flailing Tammy. With her last gasp of breath, she entreated the only person for aid that she could think of in her final moments, the only one she was sure could rescue her:

“Help me, Mr. Darcy, you’re my only hope!”

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“Oh my God!” buzzed Harold. “Cindy is dead!”

“No! Oh, no!” Her sister Katie rushed over to where Cindy lay on the sidewalk. “It’s not fair! She was only seventeen years old…she’d just come out of her shell…she’d only had sex once…and now she’s gone!”

The others raised their voices in a mournful wail.

“Then again, we’re all going to die by tomorrow,” Katie said. “If we’re not eaten by birds first.”

Buzzing in agreement, the assembled cicadas–none of whom had functioning mouthparts as an adult–dispersed to try and do their business in the 8-12 hours of life remaining to them.

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Buy Glorbl! shrieked the billboards lining the boulevards.

“This all looks awfully familiar, doesn’t it?” said John.

Presented by Glorbl!” proclaimed a plaque at the corner of a building, long abandoned and beginning to sag under the weight of many years.

“I suppose it does, after a fashion,” Mary said. She shook her leg to free a flier (Glorbl’s the One!) that had been pressed against it.

As they continued down the road, they noticed that the density of Glorbl advertisements became newer, better preserved; the infrastructure was as well. “Looks like the middle was the last bit to fall apart,” John said.

The ad copy became more desperate as well: from Glorbl Needs YOU! to Please Help Glorbl Help You! to Glorbl: Too Big To Fail!. It had been pervasive earlier, but the city’s core was overrun with advertisements that were more vibrant in their faded greens, pinks, and yellows. In time, the place was practically wallpapered with the stuff, and the fliers and Glorbl promotional detritus was ankle-deep in drifts.

“What do you suppose Glorbl was?” asked Mary.

“Everything, by the look of it,” said John. “At least at the end.”

Mary nodded. “Evo One to Evo Mother, come in Evo Mother.”

The speaker on her spacesuit–required to filter out the poisonous methane atmosphere that everything on Eta Carinae IV breathed–crackled in response: “Roger that, Evo One. Status Report?”

“Another extinct one,” said John. “Looks like this bunch was after something called Glorbl, or at least that’s what the translator makes of it.”

“Roger that, Evo One. Come on back.”

Just like Betelgeuse VII and its Ynyyxr, the Sklog on Aldeberan II, and Canis Majora Prime’s Vxleen, Eta Carinae IV had yielded a dead civilization that had gone into its grave relentlessly hawking itself to death.

“There’s a lesson here somewhere,” said Mary as they lifted off. She cracked a bottle of Vin Fiz Neo, downing it in great gulps. “But I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”

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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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