Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“All right,” Graves said. “You may now open your packets.”

Elbows and hands jutted awkwardly at the briefing room table as the participants broke the paper seals on their briefing folders. A destroyer was not a spacious ship to begin with, and packing the room with people had not helped the innate claustrophobia.

“You’ll have time to review the materials on your own,” the officer continued, “but I must emphasize that this is top secret, eyes-only information protected under the Espionage Act of 1917 and Title 18 of the US Code. Penalties for any leakage are severe.” Graves held up and rattled a cardboard box on which bars had been sharpied. “That’s why all your devices are in phone jail and will remain there until we land.”

Amid grumbles and moans, Graves activated the built-in briefing screen. It showed a large circle centered in the South Pacific, outlined in red, with a dot at its center. “Is anyone familiar with this?” he said.

“Point Nemo,” said Norah. “The place on water that is furthest from any land. Pretty close to the sunken city of R’lyeh from Lovecraft.”

“Yes, that’s right. Remotest spot on water, and aside from the occasional ship, the largest patch on the planet with no humans,” said Graves, pointedly ignoring the Lovecraft reference. He clicked a hidden wireless pointer, and a series of small red X marks overlaid the area. “We use it as a satellite graveyard, since they are less likely to hit anything important.”

“Did something unusual crop up in the graveyard?” Jamesson said, adding a sotto voce ghost moan.

Graves pressed his lips together, as if musing extending the sentence Jamesson’s Samsung in phone jail. “Yes,” he said.

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One day, Nick Sexton walked out of his job and into a lucrative second career as a con artist.

It was around the time the election was overturned and the court struck down term limits, and Sexton had been in the teacher’s lounge, watching events unfold and stewing in anger. Then he’d had an epiphany.

If lying and cheating is what got those people there, then what the hell was he doing there, being honest for no gain whatsoever? He could face down a classroom full of snot-nosed seventh-graders, so what terrors could the world possibly hold beyond that?

And Sexton’s lies and scams, well, they wouldn’t get people killed. There were always people with more dollars than sense.

And so he walked out of the teacher’s lounge and down to the computer IT lab, where 1000 expensive titanium computers were being prepared for the latest crop of rich, spoiled private school brats. Flashing an ID badge he had palmed, he had the techs load up the units into the van for a ‘software upgrade.’

The next day he was already two states over, having stopped at every pawnshop in every town he passed through to sell a laptop. When he ran out of those, he sold the van. By the time anyone knew to look for him, he was gone–with about a quarter million dollars in cash, to boot.

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The howling was a cacophony, making it almost impossible to hear a word when Peyton spoke: “What is all that racket?”

Marshall looked into the distance, at the dim glow dotting the hills. “The Dogfires have been lit,” he muttered.

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I stare down the barrel
Of the Great Filter
On such vanities as these
Every alien civilization
In the observable universe
Has come up short
With extinction to follow
I should feel honored
For such illustrious fellows
But instead I just feel empty
All those far-off worlds
Those alien ecologies
Novel life forms, chemistries
The same mundane problems
As little old me

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“Call me Rudolf,” the Landsknecht said. “Here, have a drink.”

He held out a stein of water to Georg, which the captive was just able to grasp by straining at his chains.

“Very kind of you,” Georg said, between gulps. His speech was slurred but intelligible given the swelling of his jaw and around his orbit. “I can’t say as your friend have been as hospitable since I’ve been their guest.”

“Well, Landsknechte are just doing a job,” Rudolf said. “Some take it a little too seriously. I do not. Your men fought bravely with inferior equipment, and killed six of my men. Six! It’s been a long time since we took that many casualties in battle, and even then it was against pike and shot. You took those men down with swords made from sickles and scythes bent into pikes.”

“And you ran them down for it,” Georg said. “There were close to a thousand of us.”

“Well, now there are five, give or take. Your leader has already been beheaded; might be able to see his head out your window if you lean just right. The rest of you get to share his fate once certain niceties are decided upon.”

“You came to gloat?” replied Georg.

“Defeat is the common fate of a soldier; it won’t do to wail against it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a shred of compassion,” Rudolf said. “You and your peasant boys fought well against impossible odds. If you’d had our equipment and training, you’d have taken the field and we really would be rid of all nobles and kings, just the way you wanted. I’m tipping my hat to you.”

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Masks required to shop here

As I watch you walk the aisles

Please wear a mask for the health and safety of our employees!

Nostrils flaring, lips wet

Masks are required – Management

I wonder if you wouldn’t mind

We appreciate you masking up

Just telling me

We love our customers! Please wear a mask

That you don’t care

By order of the governor, masks are required here

If I live or die

Local ordinance: masks required for all

It’s just as cruel

Masks are required – thank you for understanding

But saves me the suspense

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At this point, Großchnabel and Rohrsänger appear to have realized that they were, in fact, excavating the ruined core of a 5th-dynasty pyramid, albeit one that had been so extensively vandalized for stone that it was scarcely recognizable. In response to their cable, the University of Stönn dispatched an excavation team, which was able to arrive onsite very quickly, much to Großchnabel and Rohrsänger’s astonishment. This was because the team had just completed excavations for Borchardt at Amarna, and had been scheduled to return home. Großchnabel’s letters and cables to Prof. Ermann emphasize his displeasure with the excavation team, noting their sullenness and many acts of petty sabotage, in comparison to the praise he tended to lavish on his local Egyptian diggers.

After a further period of excavation, Großchnabel and Rohrsänger reported finding evidence of an undisturbed chamber carved in bedrock below the structure, which they had taken to calling the Pyramid of Seth-Ka based on a misreading of a funerary inscription, preserved today in the Stönn archives as a rubbing (the actual meaning was closer to star of ka, believed to be a poetic name for the pyramid itself). They also found mounting evidence that the pyramid had been sealed and abandoned before completion, though their letters and communications to this effect are vague at best.

The next round of excavations with a fresh crew were due to begin in July 1914; Großchnabel and Rohrsänger remained at the site with their Egyptian workers while the majority of their crew, aside from five volunteers, returned to Cairo. This, unfortunately, happened to coincide with the July Crisis, which led directly to the outbreak of the First World War. The entire University of Stönn excavation crew, less the five volunteers, was interned at Alexandria upon the outbreak of war, and a small detachment of British and Egyptian troops was dispatched to arrest Großchnabel and Rohrsänger as well.

When they arrived in early August, they found that the dig site had been completely abandoned. The local diggers’ families reported that they had not returned, the site was full of valuable abandoned equipment, and in their brief and cursory examination of the dig, there seemed to be no sign of the subterranean chamber that had been reported earlier.

A typhus outbreak at a Cairo internment camp resulted in the deaths of all surviving members of the Großchnabel-Rohrsänger expedition in early 1915, and no general search for the men was ever carried out. After the war, the Daqqa pyramid complex area became part of a major military base, first under British and later Egyptian control. By the time the area was open to civilians again, in 1979, any evidence of the fates of the seven Germans and twenty-seven Egyptians who had disappeared was long gone.

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Hoyt tapped his chin. “You a student of history, Mr. Ross?”

“I’ve taken a class or two,” Ross said.

“There’s a little episode I’m quite familiar with from 1525. German Peasants’ War. You know it?”

Ross looked over at his aide, listening with one hand cupped over the receiver. She shook her head. “I don’t know much before 1776,” he said.

“Peasants were real mad, storming castles and overthrowing lords. They had the nobles outnumbered a hundred to one, but the rebellion was crushed and thousands died. You know why?”

“I have a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

“The peasants wanted to negotiate. They thought the princes were reasonable men and they had reasonable demands. But the princes were just stalling for time until they could get cavalry and cannons in place.”

“You saying I’m just stalling you so that we can find you and kill you?” Ross said.

Hoyt grinned. “That’s probably what you think. But you know what? It’s a good idea, and I think I found a good use for it.”

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With the fall of the Valois monarchy, the privileged position of the Roman Church was, for the first time since the Wars of Religion, in peril. The Revolutionary Assembly attempted to provide an alternative for Valoise that would emphasize the new revolutionary virtues of reason, humanism, and empiricism.

However, there was a strong reaction from the more conservative members of the Assembly, who thought that there ought to be a reform of the Roman Church rather than its outright replacement. This debate occurred at a key point during the Constitutional Convention of the First Valoise Republic during which there was fierce debate on what, if any, mention of religion there would be in the constitution itself.

This resulted in the Cult of the Empty Throne, a compromise written into the First Valoise Constitution that, in the true tradition of all great compromises, pleased no one. The Cult encouraged the veneration of an ornate, unoccupied, throne, both as a symbol and an actual throne retrofitted into Roman churches. The churches themselves were declared to be Empty Throne Rooms.

Adherents were encouraged to “fill the throne” with whatever suited them–the traditional god of the Roman Church, a deistic being, the concept of reason, or quite literally nothing. By allowing worshippers to choose whatever was sat upon that throne it was hoped that both the proponents of a new ‘Religion of Reason’ and the old Roman Church would be able to coexist in the same space.

Instead, both extremes stayed away in droves. Despite lavish spending on Empty Throne processions and a three day Festival of the Throne in the capital, the converted churches were almost empty on the designated days. Worse, the idea quickly became a laughingstock among enemies of the new regime both domestic and foreign. The Czar of Poccnr famously declared that he was flattered by the Valoise Republic providing him with so many fine thrones for his victory tour.

The fall of the First Republic put an end to any official support for the Cult, and the ascension of the Emperor resulted in its total proscription. The few remaining priests and devout adherents were rounded up and imprisoned, with the Imperial Chancellor noting wryly that a year later there were only fifteen dedicated Thronists in Valoise prisons who had refused to recant. “Were I so inclined,” he said, “I could end the Throne in Valois with a single cannonade.”

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The protective equipment was onerous, to say the least. Polarized glasses that turned everything a mealy shade of monotone. Dull beige plastic that zipped up over everything. The face mask that made most emotions invisible. And of course the noise-canceling headphones, which enabled flawless communication but also broadcast a dulcet, neutral tone that would have been sleep-inducing if not for the caffeine pills.

Thus protected, the GFA agents penetrated the site in twos. As the squad rookie, swept up in the mad dash for more agents even before his program was complete, Mayaguez was paired with Rogette.

“Look at these poor fellas,” Rogette said as he led the two-man recon through what had been an office building. He gestured to the forms of white-collar workers slumped at their desks and in the hallways.

“But they’re not dead,” Mayaguez said, pushing one of them with a gloved mitt. The man grunted and pushed back, his half-lidded eyes fluttering.

“They might as well be,” Rogette grumbled. “Completely lost to the real world, enmeshed in a fantasy so compelling there’s no awakening from it.”

“The Plague of Fantasy,” Mayaguez whispered.

“That’s right. And once we get them quarantined we’re going to make this place so dull, so depressing, that not even a single spark of imagination can gutter to life. It’s the only way.”

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