Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“You got the job, kid,” Dennis said. “Kid’s birthday party. Standard clowning, but with the possibility for tips above and beyond the listed pay rate if you do a good job.”

“Oh gods,” said Squids. “Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods. I didn’t actually think I’d get the gig. Oh gods. What am I gonna do?”

“You’re gonna do a little kid’s birthday party,” Dennis said, “and be grateful that his grandfather’s raising him on old Bozo tapes.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Squids said. “I’m part of the Disguise Club. We meet once a week in disguise and just…you know…hang out. It’s all right,” Squids said, though her painted smile did not budge. “I dress like this because it represents what I would like to be: more outgoing, better with kids, less concerned with what people think of me.”

“Great,” Dennis said. “This is your chance. All the details are in the packet. You need a ride, or you driving yourself?”

“But I’m not any of those things!” cried Squids. “I’m a smartass, sarcastic, stick-in-the-mud who smokes.”

“Well, no smoking at the party, for sure,” Dennis said. He took another look at Squids, seated and trembling, and had a momentary swell of empathy. His daughter was only few years younger, after all, and he felt the same swell of fear and self-loathing whenever he had to speak in public.

“Listen,” Dennis added. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Nobody is who they present themself as, especially not people who seem to have everything all put together. Those folks who go out there every night to entertain? They’re just as scared as you and me.”

“But how…?”

“Fake it,” Dennis said. “Pretend. Pull one over on them. You’re already halfway there with that makeup, now go the rest of the way. The idea, Miss, uh, Squids isn’t to stop being afraid. It’s to get so good at resending otherwise that it’s second nature.”

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The spirit wavered. “I cannot pass on from this mortal plane until I slay an evildoer.”

“Should be easy enough,” said Al-Arjun. “I know some evildoers that could use slaying.”

“Oh?” He’jan drew an ethereal blade from is scabbard. “Like this?” He lunged at Al-Arjun in a practiced, savage manner.

“AAHH!” Al-Arjun’s squawk was cut short when the blade pierced her chest. It passed harmlessly through, like a shaft of light.

“Oh,” she added. “I see. Tough to slay an evildoer when you can’t interact with the corporeal world.”

“It’s all I can do to stay standing on the ground rather than sinking through it,” said He’jan sadly. “I have tried many things. I even arranged for a criminal to be caught for a crime that led to his execution. Nothing.”

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On September 8, 1889, local law enforcement reported to a disturbance that neighbors had supposedly witnessed, though after the fact the name and information of the informant mysteriously disappeared. Dr. Pike and the members of his commune had not been seen for months–since at least December 8, 1888.

Police found the compound in disarray. They found the body of a young woman in the main laboratory–she had bled to death in a manner that could not be accurately ascertained, although the coroner later compared it in broad strokes to postpartum bleeding. The remaining members of the 23 disciples–of whom there were, at that point, only 6–were found at various places throughout the compound, lifeless, but without any visible wounds. Dr. Pike himself, writing furiously in his journal, was found alive, seated before his “Electro-Mechanical Messiah.” Eyewitnesses describe the mechanism as “ticking weakly” though by the time of the formal inquest it was no longer producing any motion.

Under questioning, Dr. Pike insisted that the female follower, his “Mary,” had imbued the Messiah with a spark of life, but that the voices of the 23 had deserted him and he feared that he had made a terrible mistake. Only, he wrote, by “starving” the mechanism had he been able to prevent a catastrophe. When pressed as to the nature of this catastrophe, Pike would only say that he had been “fooled” and that the motive power that had filled his Messiah was “no kind and loving God of any sort.”

After a perfunctory trial, Dr. Pike was found guilty of murdering the members of his disciples and was executed by hanging. Even on the gallows, Pike maintained that he was a hero for averting catastrophe, though he reportedly did not resist his fate, describing it as “just punishment.”

As for the “Electro-Mechanical Messiah,” it passed into the collection of one J. Albert Tillmann, a Chicago eccentric and amateur Spiritualist whose menagerie of curiosities was well-known at the time. It was believed destroyed after an 1899 fire consumed his house.

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09:05 Hole is 10 ft in diameter. 2 men in hard hats observe it from nearby.

11:50 Hole is 25 ft in diameter and at least 10 ft deep. Traffics cones have appeared, redirecting cars around the site. 6 men in hard hats are observing it.

1:26 Hole is 100 ft in diameter and at least 50 ft deep. The bottom is lightly flooded from broken and breaking water mains. 12 men in hard hats watch the hole as watery mist drifts down upon them.

2:31 Hole is 1500 ft in diameter and at least 100 ft deep. Several major telephone, fiber-optic, and data lines are severed. 19 men in hard hats watch the hole from a nearby ridge.

3:58 Hole is 1 mile in diameter and the bottom can no longer be clearly seen. Evacuations of nearby residences have begun, and the hole now cuts across a major east-west artery. 51 men in hard hats watch the hole.

5:30 Hole is 10 miles in diameter and is beginning to influence weather patterns. Several rivers and lakes have disappeared into it without a trace. A state of national emergency has no effect on the 554 men in hard hats gazing into the hole.

6:49 Hole is 100 miles in diameter and the pressure difference between the surface and its depths has led to hurricane-force winds and storms. While the purpose of the hole is still not clear, experts believe that its current growth rate will be catastrophic. Men in hard hats continue to watch it, though their numbers can only be estimated.

11:59 All is hole. There is no other; no other is left. Even the men in hard hats, watching, are hole in their uncountable millions.

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Surviving newspaper accounts and photographs from Dr. Pike’s tour of his facility represent some of the only documentation of his later thought processes and experimentation. He showed reporters what he called the “First Iteration” of the Electro-Mechanical Messiah, which was photographed and described by one witness as “a collection of bizarre brass and steel, partially built into a heavy drawing-room table.”

“The First Iteration is mostly mechanical and electrical, but we intend that each succeeding iteration will add in more biology until it is in perfect balance and harmony,” Pike is recorded as saying. “Instructions to me, relayed through electrically amplified seances from my 23 mentors, have provided all that I need for my Mary to imbue the machine with a spark of life. Then, inhabited by the messiah of the universal consciousness, it will direct us in the next iteration’s construction–possibly building it on its own!”

When one of the reporters asked who the “Mary” was, and how exactly she would imbue the machine with a spark, Pike merely winked and said that it was as simple as giving birth. He refused to divulge any further details. There were several women among the disciples present that day, and the interviewers speculated that the “electro-mechanical Mary” was one of them.

Needless to say, the episode did not have the effect that Dr. Pike intended it to. The articles made him both a laughingstock and an object of intense religious fear, and most of his significant backers withdrew in embarrassment. Deprived of the funds needed to continue, Pike’s followers largely deserted him and his final experiment was attended by only a handful of his most faithful adherents.

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Clark pulled Gunderson aside. “Your first shipment of one hundred revolvers, the ones you promised would be as good as any Colts the Yankees could make? Well, they exploded.”

“How many of them exploded?” Gunderson said. “We can replace a few-“

“All of them,” Clark said. “They all exploded.”

“Surely not all of them, you can’t have-“

“All of them!” Clark snapped. “We have to test and proof each one before it goes into battle! You made the cylinders and barrels out of brass, and they exploded!”

“They are made out of gunmetal, as specified in the contract,” Gunderson said. “If that metal isn’t suitable for making guns, why, then-“

“The contract is for metal guns, meaning steel! Gunmetal hasn’t been used to make barrels in a hundred years!”

“I mean really, how could you not confuse a metal called gunmetal, which is not used to make guns, with the metal used to make guns, which is gun metal but not gunmetal?” Gunderson said, lamely.

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Albertson, frustrated, ran a hand down his face, momentarily smoothing out his many wrinkles. “Go over it with me again.”

“Well, of the seventeen people that applied to the help wanted ad, we had to reject one who thought we meant ‘lawn’ instead of ‘clown’ and showed up with a weed-whacker,” Albertson’s personal assistant, Dennis, said.

“Good to know that I didn’t hallucinate that one,” Albertson said.

“We have five others who were dressed as, and I quote, ‘death metal clowns who pose significant copyright problems.’”

“In addition to being a little harder than I want my five-year-old grandson to rock,” Albertson sighed.

“Of the remaining eleven applicants, four were dressed as famous clowns from horror movies, three as supervillain clowns from comic books, one was a prissy college boy trying to do commedia del’arte, and one was…how did you put it again, Mr. Albertson?”

“John Wayne Gary, restored to life through some satanic pact and allowed to once more roam the earth,” Albertson said. “If I’d known how hard it would be to find a non-psycho clown, I’d have raised the kid on Disney instead of Bozo. Bozo worked for me, it worked for his no-good dad, but damn if it isn’t backfiring now.”

“That leaves only Squids the Clown, the sole female applicant,” Dennis said.

“Oh, yeah,” Albertson said. “Little miss sunshine with the pink hair and green diamonds over her eyes.”

“Real Name: Emilee Verde. She has no references, no experience, and was decidedly un-jolly, as you say. But her application does say that she wants to be ‘friendly, outgoing, and sparkling.’”

“She was also the only one who wasn’t disturbed or terrifying,” Albertson said. “Call her back.”

“Are you sure?” Dennis said.

“My five-year-old grandson has asked for a birthday clown, and by God I’m going to give it to him. Yeah, this ‘Squids’ wasn’t exactly a charmer, but she also wasn’t a psycho. Maybe she can fake it ‘til she makes it. Call her back.”

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By the early 1880s, Dr. Pike had amassed about 2300 followers–his stated goal. Most of them were simply wealthy donors, but a handful of them lived and worked with Pike in a secluded location he called the Mechanium, participating in seances and attempting to render the disordered series of visions Pike claimed to be receiving into a workable blueprint. Pike himself called his closest followers “the 23 disciples” but available records show their numbers fluctuating from as few as six to as many as 32.

Pike retired from the lecture circuit around the same time, devoting himself entirely to what he was now calling the “Electro-Mechanical Messiah” in almost all communications. Perhaps due to the failures of his first few iterations, which had parts fabricated at various East Coast machine shops before being shipped to Pike for assembly, a machine shop was assembled onsite and the design took on a more iterative approach. As Pike put it in a letter to a follower in Boston:

“It is my belief that we will not create a vessel that is not the perfect Electro-Mechanical Messiah simply because it is beyond the capacity of any mortal, even one who has been in contact with The 23 like I have, to achieve such divine perfection. Therefore it is my belief that we will build an imperfect vessel (one might call it a prototype or trial messiah!) which will then assist us in designing a more perfect vessel and then so on and so forth, iteratively, until we arrive at the end point and the new age begins.”

Construction of increasingly elaborate mechanisms was well underway by 1883, and by 1885 there were complaints from locals about Pike’s increasingly odd and noisy hours, as well as showers of sparks and occasional explosions coming from the property. It was for this reason, apparently, that Pike invited local reporters and photographers for what would be the only tour of his compound ever offered to someone outside of the 23 Disciples before his death.

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“Now we just enter the Schrodinger Splitter, and we’ll see one contestant head to the right and the other to the left, as a result of a quantum causality waveform!” Llesco’s synthetic voice, doing a spot-on imitation of a laconic mid-20th-century sportscaster, warbled over the arena speakers.

“Do you have any idea what those words mean, Llesco?” said its counterpart, Satsoc, with an early-21st-century drawl.

“Not a bit, Satsoc. Not programmed to! But it’s amazing technology, and what better use for it than blood sport with no lasting consequences for the spacetime continuum?”

“Sort of like using advanced, emergent artificial intelligence to do color commentary for said bloodsport?”

“Exactly!” Llesco said with artificial enthusiasm. In the arena, the Splitter snapped, crackled, and popped as the contestant took two differing skeins simultaneously, resulting in two nigh-identical copies emerging into the arena.

“Well, Herr Schrodinger has come through for us once again,” Satsoc said, “and the result is once again better than any mere cat!”

“For those of you just joining us, we’ll be referring to the contestant that comes out of the right gate as Righty, with their opposite number being Lefty. The rules are simple: murder, or be murdered.” Llesco sounded positively bloodthirsty despite its monotone.

“And don’t leave the arena,” Satsoc added. “Snipers are standing by to prevent any paradoxes, causality snarls, and CP violations. Not that I’m programmed to know what any of those are, but they sure sound bad.”

Below the speakers, the contestant was readying for the bout, the two copies doing brief, jumpy calisthenics before the bell rung and they raced off to find weapons.

“It’s a good thing that he’s such a sport, eh? said Satsoc.

“Considering that the alternative is a state-sponsored execution, I’d say they’re doing just fine,” replied Llesco.

Next in line, waiting at the opening into the Schrodinger Splitter, the final contestant of the day was already formulating a plan to break the cycle.

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If a random number generator spit out digits in sequences of random length and complexity, would you take the time to categorize them, define them, treasuring the rarer sequences? Of course not. You know, instinctively if not analytically, that numbers are infinite. No one number, no matter how novel, distracts from that infinite variety. It would be a greater waste of time than trying to categorize grains of sand on a beach.

But then, in an infinite universe, how different is everything we see than those random numbers? Orders of magnitude more complex, granted, but ultimately no more than the same sort of data with different bytes. Random arrangements of quantum particles giving way to more complex randomness. What is classification, what is knowledge, other than fleeting attempts to classify meaningless data? Naturally, there may be some meaning in the moment-to-moment, especially for the “numbers” so involved.

But in the wider scheme, what does it matter?

The is the ultimate problem confronting intelligent life here, now, and forever. Every sort that has arisen must grapple with the random meaningless of its existence, especially as it slides–inevitably–toward self-destruction. Some find meaninglessness, randomness, to be empty and hollow. Others see it as reassuring, even kind. In an infinite universe, we have all lived before and will live again; it is statistically impossible but mathematically inevitable.

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