Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The curious thing about Vandenberg’s Arch isn’t the technique used in its construction. It’s fairly mundane masonry, built by a civilization with a firm understanding of the arch. Nor is its location particularly puzzling, as it’s within a glacial valley that’s been inhabited for millennia, with easy access to quarries.

No, the curious thing about Vandenberg’s Arch is its angle.

The arch is set into a sheer cliff side that falls down to the river below. However it goes up, and it goes up at a nearly 45° angle. If it were meant to bridge the river, there is no cliff of similar height on the other side, simply long low set of rolling hills. If it were meant to provide a way down to the valley floor, it’s most assuredly pointed in the wrong direction.

the edge of the arch is crumbled, and material has clearly fallen away at some point. But the no debris on the valley floor, nor is there any nearby, and no indication of what the construction’s original size or purpose may have been. Vandenberg himself, describing the arch in the travelogue that wound up indelibly attaching his name to it, said “it’s as if someone got it in their head to build an arch to the stars.”

There are some crackpot theories which would see him proved right.

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Heyward Banister was a local carpenter on Elsewhere Isle who was well-regarded for his acumen. In preparation for his retirement, he built a set of three duplexes to rent out for a steady income–the Banister Arms Apartments.

But, whether due to illness, dementia, or a previously unknown obsessive-compulsive streak, Mr. Banister refused to certify the buildings as complete and ready to be rented. He insisted that their stairs were “wrong,” and furthermore that they had to be fixed before he would suffer anyone to live there.

As a result, the Banister Arms duplexes saw their staircases rebuilt in their entirety three times. Landings appeared and disappeared. The angle and steepness of steps changed. After the second rebuild, Banister was seen angrily tearing out his days-old handiwork. Asked by the local paper what had happened, Banister simply said: “There’s a problem with the stairs, and I’ve taken steps to correct the problem.”

Ironically, it was the steps that would be the end of the rebuilding process. Midway through what would have been the fourth rebuild, Mr. Banister took a step onto nothingness and fell from the second story to the ground, breaking both legs. His medical bills, along with the sunk costs of rebuilding the place so many times, led his wife to finally step in. She declared the apartments livable and had another carpenter finish the stairs.

To the day he died, though, Mr. Banister insisted that the steps were “wrong” and would loudly declare such to anyone who would listen. “I just know,” he’d say, “people are staring.”

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It’s the wreck of the S.S. Llama. It was 15 weeks out of Lima Peru with a cargo of llamas, the llamas were originally intended for a large-scale agricultural experiment in California, the so-called Llama Scheme that saw them as a way to terraform the desert and make it bloom.

The S.S. Llama foundered in a rare typhoon on the shores of Elsewhere Island, which was then known by its Spanish name of Isla de los Piedras (Isle of Stones). The ship broke up on the rocks for which the island was named just after midnight, disgorging human and llama alike.

Despite being dashed against the rocks the entire crew and all but one of llamas were saved. The only llama that they couldn’t save was Swimmy Dave (actually a female), the only one who loved to swim; he swam in the direction of Santa Monica and was never seen again. Legend has it that there have been Swimmy Dave sightings all over the Southwest and rumors of a secret llama colony persist to this day

Survivors of the wreck founded the first llama farm in North America on Elsewhere Island, and when they were approached by search and rescue ships, they refused to leave their new home and instead traded soft llama fur for badly needed supplies such as steel pans, medical kits, and toilet paper.

50% of the modern inhabitants of Elsewhere Island descend from these original unwilling colonists, as well as 100% of the llamas. Alas, inbreeding in the llama population means that llama farming is a very minor portion of the island’s economy today and most lot of farming is done strictly for subsistence or artisan purposes; most modern llama fur comes from llamas in Tibet.

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Not many people know that dromedary camels and Bactrian camels can interbreed. Their hybrid descendants usually have either a large misshapen hump or two humps: one small, one large. Their descendants are fertile and can produce further hybrids, though anything other than a first-generation female hybrid and a male Bactrian camel tends to produce offspring that is runty and bad tempered.

In the 1880s interested in the potential of camels to be used as beasts of burden in the vast interior of the Great Sandy Desert, British husbandry experts attempted to breed a Bactrian dromedary hybrid with three humps. Through a careful and expensive program of crossbreeding and back-breeding, they were able to produce a three-humped dromedary named Herbert in 1891.

Named after Lord Kitchener, the senior British Army officer who took a personal interest in the project, Herbert proved to be a hardy and sturdy beast of burden. With his three homes he could travel 75% further than a dromedary camel without water, and he was also capable of bearing a 50% heavier burden. While having three people ride him turned out to be impractical, Herbert was easily ridden by two people if saddled in the areas between his large humps.

A test expedition to Alice Springs in 1892 produced extremely positive results, not least of which because Herbert was generally gentle in temperament and fond of his handlers. Lord Kitchener gave his personal go-ahead for the husbandry experts to breed an entire herd of three-hump type camels for use in Australia.

Unfortunately, Herbert himself proved to be sterile as a result of the extensive breeding put into his birth, and further experiments failed to lead to a three humped camel that lived longer than a few minutes after birth. As such, the program was terminated in 1900, and Herbert was put on display in the Melbourne zoo for the remainder of his life. He was a great favorite of children in his time there, and was housed with a female dromedary jokingly named Fitzgerald by people who knew perhaps too much about Lord Kitchener’s personal life.

Though Herbert himself died in 1918, he gave his name and image to a local Melbourne rugby club that played as the “Three-Humpers” until 1967, when the changing nature of the word “hump” made the moniker untenable.

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Some people think that being out alone in the void must be exceptionally lonely. Those are the people who have never realized how lonely a crowded room can be, how desolate a busy city square appears to someone whose pursuits are of the mind.

Out here, on the ragged edge of the void and what is known, I am immersed in a crucible of creation. I can marvel at sights that no one else has ever seen or will ever see, sights no better or worse off for having been observed. Glistening nebulas in the dark, stars in the throes of a violent death, black holes messily devouring entire solar systems.

The most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen is a binary star rising over a planetary ring on an Earth sized world. With a blue star and a red star set against rings of shimmering gold, and of vast plain filled with spindly biomass almost resembling Earth’s fields, I lingered for almost an hour, speechless.

I think in that perhaps the most striking thing about that vista were the strands of gossamer poison in the air. It was a cyanide-based ecosystem, one without a planetary magnetic field of any size to keep hard radiation at bay. Literally everything in that gorgeous tableau was capable of ending my life, and even the hour that I did stay wreathed in an environment suit probably shortened my life by a year or more.

But it was worth it.

The most beautiful sort of deadly loneliness.

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Nerdicon has taken this trend a step further with the addition of a permanent wedding planner to its staff. During the one-week span of the convention, dedicated members may attend up to five weddings a day, with interested parties able to fill out the guestbook with cosplayers of their choice who charge a nominal fee for their appearance.

“Naturally, Klingon weddings are most popular option,” says Sherwood Greg, overall coordinator of Nerdicon and head of the Council of 12. “While health and safety regulations prevent us from using genuine pain sticks or real bat’leths, Nerdicon is able to offer a high level of verisimilitude.”

Sherwood Greg goes on to say that other popular wedding options include elven weddings, stormtrooper weddings, and anime nuptials. “We have a fairly strong divide between people who want to be married as Tolkien elves and people who prefer Dungeons & Dragons elves,” says Sherwood Greg, “but luckily we have enough cosplayers to fill out either.”

One wedding option that is strangely unpopular is superhero weddings. “We’ve actually never had a superhero wedding,” Sherwood Greg says. “The closest we’ve gotten is Superman and Lois Lane, but even that didn’t last and they showed up at the subsequent Nerdicon for a divorce, which we are also able to grant thanks to our Spock also being a notary public.”

Asked why superhero weddings are so unpopular, Sherwood Greg speculated that the frequent deaths of spouses in superhero comics and movies gave people a sense of foreboding or of tempting fate. “Everyone worth their salt knows that Peter Parker’s love life is a mess,” says Greg, “and nobody wants that for themselves. It is also especially tempting for our guests cosplaying as villains attempt to disrupt the ceremonies. That’s not a problem in a Klingon wedding, were disrupting the ceremony is in fact part of the ceremony— look it up if you don’t believe me— but in a superhero wedding it’s a real mood killer.”

Susie Palmer is planning a stormtrooper wedding with her longtime girlfriend May Withers. “I know there aren’t any stormtrooper weddings in the original trilogy, or even in the—noncanonical— prequels and extended universe,” Ms. Palmer said. “But we still feel like having our union blessed by two rigid rows of galactic fascists and presided over by Darth Vader and the Emperor himself is preferable to going before a Republican notary.”

Marcus Dingman, a stormtrooper who was hired off the Nerdicon convention floor to attend the wedding, had nothing but fond wishes for the couple. “Sure they’re paying me 10 bucks to stand around and look intimidating as the Emperor give them lightsaber rings to cauterize each other’s fingers with,” he says, “but it’s really all about the love. I’d honestly do it for a nip of their wedding buffet.”

Asked if the trend toward Nerdicon weddings will eventually become unmanageable, Sherwood Greg had this to say: “if people want to get hitched in costume, we’re happy to take the money. They’re already here for a world-class nerdy experience, and they’re likely already in costume. Charging them a few bucks for extras in the use of one of our Hollywood level backdrops isn’t hurting anybody.”

“Not that I would ever consider such a ceremony,” adds Greg. “I’m married to the con, and she is a very jealous wife.”

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Ellie was always a little concerned when Dr. Harrison pulled her aside. Nurses in the hospital were often on the ragged edge, and incurring the displeasure of one of the residents was a great way to get fired and poison a possible reference. But as soon as he mentioned the name Monica, unknowing sort of quiet came over Ellie.

“It’s happened again,” Harrison said in a low voice. “The cancer ward this time.”

“Tell me all the details,” Ellie said. “You know you can trust me with this. Who else would even believe it?”

“Monica drew a picture of our senior oncologist with a little girl on his shoulder. I’m positive she meant Dr. Shakur because they’re the only one in that entire ward who’s bald.”

“And?”

“You’re probably not aware of it because you work in pediatrics, but there was a girl in oncology with stage IV liver cancer. They had actually taken her off her regimen and were providing only palliative care, but the test this morning showed she’d gone into remission. Shakur was really fond of her, and was pretty broken up over the whole thing. When he heard the news, he went into the ward and gave her a piggyback ride.”

“Just like Monica’s drawing,” said Ellie. “When are we going to tell people about this? It’s the third time this month.”

“The fourth,” said Dr. Harrison. “I didn’t tell you about when Agatha Chambers died. You’ve got enough on your plate as it is. Monica drew her as an angel, it wasn’t anything disturbing.”

“I say again, when are we going to tell people about this? This could be a situation where curing every illness is one crayon drawing away.”

“It could also be a coincidence,” Harrison said, “or at least dismissed as one. Do you really want to be the one who squashes the miracle by trying to study it? By putting a price tag on it?”

“You sound like you’re afraid, doctor,” said Ellie.

“You know what really scares me?” Harrison said. “If I’m the one who lines up ruining that poor girl’s life and she decides to draw me in a noose.”

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It was really a rather remarkably freeing decision. Once she decided, Anna felt a lot of the stress and anxiety that had bedeviled her over the last few difficult months starting to peel away like layers of a rancid onion. Throwing on a few close that happen to be on the floor in the bedroom, and not even the least wrinkled ones, she went out to the balcony that she shared with the vacant apartment next door. In fact, she was the sole remaining tenant of her four-unit building, and one of only 15 people in the entire complex, a complex originally built for 100.

The others had moved away due to the spiraling downward trend of the neighborhood, which is the only reason and Anna had stayed: it was the only rent she could afford on her meager salary as a waitress and substitute teacher. The weight of that knowledge, and the various valuable things that have been burgled from her apartment over the past six months, were one part of the puzzle. The intense feeling of inadequacy that had dogged her heels all the way to South Carolina was another. Everyone had expected great things of the valedictorian, even if it was of a tiny rural school. Her professors at art school had been a rhapsody of praise and encouragement.

And yet here she was, the shadow of squandered potential hanging over her head like the sword of Damocles, until her decision.

She drug a lawn chair out to the balcony, one that until recently been serving double duty as a dining room chair, and set it near the edge. Then, she retrieved a bottle from under the sink, one that hadn’t seen in any use since her charcoal grill had been stolen.

Sam’s Club sold a big bottle though, and it was more than enough to soak every surface in the apartment in a dripping sheen of accelerant. Taking up a perch in the lawn chair, Anna lit a match and flicked it through the open door. Facing away from the heat, she listened to the smoke alarm sing its baleful song until it died.

Everything her life had been, everything she’d accumulated, was in that apartment. In choosing to sacrifice it all on an altar like this, especially one, like as not, to see her charged with arson, hadn’t been an easy choice.

But, as Anna heard the first sirens in the distance and the growing warmth behind her, she was convinced it had been the right decision. When they came, and asked her what was going on, she simply planed to shrug, and say “I needed to make a change.”

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“Aah!” Chris cried out as the fangs sank into her neck. A few moments of frenzies sucking later, and she whas cast aside.

“What do you?” She cried. “How be? Why talk no good?”

“Because I’m a grammarpire, my dear,” said the creature, licking its fangs. “I’ve sucked every ounce of good grammar from your poor body.”

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The entire field had bloomed while I’d lay unconscious, spreading a tapestry of boldly-colored wildflowers before me.

If it hadn’t been for that remarkable chance, and the warm sun on my face, I might never have gotten up.

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