Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I will be just a minute, dearie,” the old woman said. “Why don’t you have a seat while you wait?” Then, with that odd gait of hers, she moved out of the sitting room.

“There is something not right here,” Ixo said. “Something about the way she moved was unnatural.”

“I, too, am suspicious,” Wiss said. “Her charity, for one. This domicile, for another. How could such a lush place, so well-appointed, have avoided depredation for so long when we know the land to be full of murderous bandits?”

“Powerful magic?” Ixo said. “Perhaps she is a hedge wizard, or a retired sorceress of the Order of the Parted Lips. It would explain the oddities.”

“Why not use it, then? There were a dozen ways a cantrip could have made things easier just now.” Wiss’s brow was lined with concern. “And the Order of the Parted Lips always wear a broach.”

Their parley was interrupted by a sudden movement, which both noticed out of the corner of their eye.

“Did that chair just move?” said Ixo.

“It might have,” Wiss said, grimly. “What would a living chair say about this place?”

“The lure of a giant mimic, perhaps. Drawing us in with kindness so it can kill and eat us.”

The chair shimmied again, this time in full view of both, momentarily revealing the moist, pulsating nature of the object, with what looked like plush cushions being instead the papillae of an alien tongue.

“The chair is definitely alive,” Ixo said. “This place is definitely planning to eat us.”

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The bread, a fresh sourdough loaf. Thieu had baked it himself, using an oven he didn’t yet own in his kitchen ten years on. The dough, though, came from Grandpa’s old French-style bakery, gently pilfered out of the mixing bowl during the hostage crisis while Gramps was dealing with a customer.

The tomato was surprisingly easy. Thieu planted a seed and same back three months later when it was a plant laden with fruits. It took a few tries, reusing the seeds in each attempt as they withered or were stolen by pests, but soon enough a usable, even tantalizing, tomato emerged. The lettuce involved a similar process.

The cheese was even easier. Just a matter of leaving it in an undisturbed spot for a decade to fully cure, once Thieu had grabbed a wheel-in-progress from a local cheesery.

The meat, though. That should have been tricky. Thieu wasn’t about to wait for an animal to grow to adulthood or slaughter it on his own. But then, he caught a glimpse of himself–maybe a few years older–dropping off a package with a wink and a nod.

Put together, it was the world’s first non-linear sandwich, and a potent symbol of Thieu’s new technology. But as much as he wanted to eat it, Thieu had to admit that the sandwich was a potent bootstrap paradox, and eating it might end all time as it currently existed.

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Chon’pyn may have been a begazer, a malign hovering armored sphere of death whose eyes and eyestalks rained magical terror on its enemies, but it was also the head fromagier of the most respected cheesery on the Shield Coast. Wearing 13 small monocles to shield guests from its harmful rays, the eye-sphere led them on a tour of the cheesery’s aging rooms.

“You can see here our most coveted delicacy,” said Chon’pyn, gesticulating with one of its eyestalks toward a hall filled with floating wheels of cheese. “It takes 100 years to fully cure, and the process enables the begazers here to truly put their stamp on it.”

“So, wait,” said Leicharr. “Does that mean that you enchant it, or that you milk begazers?”

“Any other questions?” Chon’pyn said, ignoring the remark.

“You’re not answering me. Does this mean that the floating cheese is made of begazer milk? Can begazers even make milk?”

“If there are no questions, let me show you the salt cave where we age our Monkavian Brie.”

“I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS AND YOU ARE NOT ANSWERING ANY OF THEM RIGHT NOW!”

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Yesterday’s sky was purple
Today’s was a light red breeze
They say there’ll be grey tomorrow
A tornado to bring us to our knees

I yearn for a sky that is sunny
A small patch of blue will do
But as long as it’s bright and homely
I don’t much care what the hue

I just don’t want a sky that is angry
Its colors boiled over with rage
But it seems that way all more often
In this warmer, wetter, age.

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My best guess was that the building was an early Brutalist design, probably from the immediate postwar era of the 1950s. It was all concrete and rebar, right angles and no ornamentation, from an era when form followed function for expediency as much as ideology.

It was also being destroyed from within by a growing tree, one that looked to be about 50 years old itself. The tree, which had sprouted through a shattered window, had also broken through three walls and had sent runners or shoots in nearly every direction, seemingly dead-set on replacing every last vestige of the ugly concrete structure with its own wood.

“That tree has opinions,” I said. “Architectural opinions.”

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“It’s okay,” the psychologist said. “This is a safe space. I want you to unburden it all to me, judgment-free, and then we’ll go from there.”

“O-okay,” said Marco. “This is going to sound crazy.”

“We don’t use that word here. It sounds an awful lot like judgment.”

“Right. Well, you know how the moon is made of green cheese? They want us to think that’s a myth, they even faked the moon landing to say otherwise, but it is, and I know it is.”

“I see,” the psychologist said. “Go on.”

“Well, the green cheese is the most powerful thing in the universe if you’re a rat. It extends life, broadens the mind, and allows the truly gifted to fold space and time. Whomever controls the source of green cheese controls the universe, yeah?”

“Keep going. Let’s plumb the depths of this.”

Marco breathed deeply. “Yeah. Well, the rats of Earth have known about this for a long time. That’s why they’re everywhere and why they live like they do. This world is their rat crucible, culling out the weak and the stupid. Once they have proven their worth, they are allowed to ascend to the Moonside Layer and begin their dominance of the universe.”

“Uh-huh,” the psychologist said. “So you were building a rocketship for your rat because…?”

“He’s on my side, you see. We’re friends. SO he was going to go up to the moon, make sure that it was full of rats, and come back and report to me. But that’s not going to happen, now.”

“Because you’re here, now?”

“No,” said Marco. “Because the test launches failed and the rat dummies were exploded. I would never put my friend in danger.”

“Yes,” the psychologist said. “We’re well aware of the failed launches. From the-”

“From the forest fires they started, yeah. I said I was sorry about that.”

“Well,” the psychologist said, making a few finishing touches on a notepad. “I think we have all we need to get started. Let me just go consult, okay?”

“You gotta believe me, doc,” Marco said. “That’s the total deal.”

“Yes, yes, we’ll talk soon.” The psychologist left the exam room and followed a winding path through the building, to a small office in a position of authority on the top floor.

“I assume you were listening, sir?” the psychologist said. “What do you suggest?”

A tiny chair swiveled away from a monitor showing Marco in the exam room, revealing a white rat seated there. “He knows!” it hissed. “Begin the memo-purge protocol at once!”

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“It’s a well-done illusion, perfect in almost every detail. But the well-trained mind can see through it.”

Feeling the sun on his skin and a light wind in his hair, O’Cir was inclined to agree. “This is too pleasant,” he said. “I haven’t seen a day this brilliant or bright since I was a boy, and even then I suspect that it’s been colored more brightly in memory.”

“Quite right,” Nil’tiac said. “If it seems to good to be true, it probably is. Whoever or whatever is creating this illusion wants us to be swept up in bliss, leaving us weak, distracted or vulnerable.”

“I wouldn’t know what bliss feels like,” O’Cir scoffed.

“I’ve only ever found it in the bottom of a mug or the curve of a pipe, and this is neither,” Nil’tiac agreed.

“We need to talk about your indulgences, friend, but perhaps now is not the time. The more pressing question is, if our every sense is being decieved, save perhaps our reason, how are we to break the spell?”

Nil’tiac looked across the idyllic field, the bright skies, the gently undulating grasses below the great single tree on a hill. Then something within the oil painting come to life moved. It was a cat, a tabby, and it was visibly scarred, notably grumpy-looking, and busily devouring a bluebird while keeping its one good eye on the interlopers.

“None of this is real, but that cat is suspiciously real.”

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In their wisdom, the founders of the Benthic Republic on the world of Oceana had brought with them a number of sea creatures from the old world, and they soon set to work breeding them into proper aquatic livestock.

It was sirenians that proved the most useful, as the Benthic were soon able to select them for increased mass, increased docility, and more milk production. The resultant strain was able to be milked for dairy products using a special apparatus, and provided a large amount of meat (and fertilizer) while requiring only open pastures of sea grass.

The venture was so successful, in fact, that offwolrders soon began to demand acess to these literal sea cows. The Benthics responded with a program to breed landgoing manatees for the purpose.

Some questioned the logic, noting that real cows could have been procured instead. But the novelty, and mild amusement, of the project won over, and Oceana was soon known as “the world where cows came from the sea.”

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“So let’s say that I argued that the sun was a really big lemon.”

“That’s dumb, I know it’s not.”

“Prove it.”

“Okay, well, lemons are all small.”

“The sun looks pretty small up there to me. Could be that it’s just a lemon of unusual size. If we stopped eating them, maybe they’d grow that big.”

“It’s too bright, too hot.”

“Reflecting starlight, just like the moon.”

“We can see it during an eclipse! It doesn’t have the little…side nipples…or whatever you call the things lemons have.”

“We’re seeing it head-on. The side nipples aren’t visible.”

“Why are you making this so difficult?”

“I’m trying to make a point about philosophy and fallacies and moving the goalposts.”

“Well, could you do it a little bit less smudly and irritatingly?”

“No promises.”

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The Hive had regimented its society much as its symbol, the humble honeybee, had. The beehive emblem, stark and yellow, was emblazoned on every piece of Hive equipment, clothing, even pressed into the food. Each settlement had reproduction carefully controlled to allow only the fittest to form the nevt generation of workers, who then toiled endlessly in fields and factories to provide for their fellows, for the young, and most importantly for the Queen.

There was little time for any individual activity–save for dance–and even less for pleasure, but it gave the Hive a great advantage in dealing with less regimented societies, and there were those who predicted that its yellow emblem would soon be stamped across the whole of the world.

But that was before the buzzing began. Before reports–impossible, cataclysmic reports–becan to flow in from the sentries. Before the streams of wounded, their proud black uniforms and yellow emblems in disarray, their skin swollen with welts. Before the skies of Hive Central began to darken.

Bees, it seemed, had learned of the society built in their imitation, in their mockery. And they were not pleased. It did not give them a buzz. Rather, it stung.

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