Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“So you see, that’s the miracle of EctoCo,” said Madison Grobb, EctoCo COO of BOO. “Ghosts are immortal, already know everything they need to do the job, and are not legally considered people. So we can put them to work to serve the living in a variety of mential jobs once they’re raised.”

“How do you compensate them, or at least force compliance?” asked Blaire Burroughs, the WSJ Correspondent for Underutilized Labor. “I’m assuming pay is out of the question.”

“Of course,” Madison laughed. “I mean, what would they even spend it on? No, the patented PolterAmp™ technology that allows for ghosts to affect the material plane more efficiently works in reverse as well; by dialing in a negative resonance value we can cause them to partially or fully dissipate, the former being painful and the latter being permanent.”

“What happens to a ‘dissipated’ spirit?” asked Blaire.

“We leave those question to the philosophers,” Madison replied. “Ah, we’re just about to raise one now.”

She steered Blaire to a patch of earth, containing mortal remains and a restless spirit, which was undergoing PolterAmp™ testing. As they watched, the ghostly ectoplasmic figure of a person rose from the earth, confused and disoriented.

“You there, what was your job in life?” Madison said. “We’ve got openings in low-level assembly work.”

“I…in life, I was a…steno pool typist,” the spectral being said in a hollow whisper.

“Oh. Ew. No one needs typists anymore.” Madison looked over to the PolterAmp™ tech running the equipment and drew a finger across her throat. “Purge it.”

Blaire watched, raptly taking notes, as the tech smashed a red button and the spirit was torn to pieces as the device inverted itself. The remains and hallowed earth were sluiced away as well to make room for the next occupant.

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Thanks to its large size and asymmetric shape, the pumpkin had repeatedly resisted attempts to tame it. The thing had repeatedly tipped over on the porch, often rolling about and knocking things over. It had blocked the door several times, forcing Frank to go around the back way to get out of his own summer house. Worst of all, it had proven to be entirely impenetrable to the carving implements he had available, bending two knives.

When he final attempt to decorate the gourd with paint failed due to its knobby surface, Frank had enough. He chucked it into his front bed and beat is with a hoe, as if setting an example to the other gourds there.

Once the exceptionally mischevious pumpkin was literally beaten to a pulp, Frank finished packing and left for Florida the day after Halloween. He returned in May, only to find his entire front porch overgrown and begourded. The children of his vanquished pumpkin had risen, it seemed, and they were out for revenge.

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“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” shouted Sedgewyck.

“Oh, the tea is a little hot, so I’m adding some ice cubes to it,” said Rags. “So it doesn’t burn my mouth.”

Sedgewyck rose, furious. “WATERING DOWN the tea? COOLING the tea? This is an insult MOST GRAVE, child!”

“I wouldn’t mind a spot of milk or a bisuit to dunk myself,” said Codswallop.

“You INSULT me, sir!” screamed Sedgewyck. “This is the ancient ELDER TEA, passed down from our forebears who were first wrecked here, and you are DISRESPECTING IT!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Rags said. “I’ll take the ice cubes out.” He reached for a teaspoon, only to have Sedgewyck swat it out of his hand with his cane.

“It’s too late! An insult this grave can only be answered with blood!”

Codswallop had reached across the table for milk, which he had quietly added to his tea. “Are you sure about that, Sir Sedgewyck?” he said mildly. “I have found you and your people affably amusing thus far; it would be a shame to shed your blood over something as trivial as the temperature and composition of tea.”

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“I think, with all the brown and the gas cells, it looks like a loaf of bread,” said SA-1.

“Bread is not made of high-pressure sulfuric acid made by a runaway greenhouse effect,” said SA-2. “It is an obsolete, if artisan, form of sustenance.”

“But imagine if you were on the surface,” countered SA-3. “It would look like…a bread sky. Or something.”

“Again, this is a toxic, high-pressure world with a surface pressure and temperature that leads to rivers of liquid lead and corrosive rains,” said SA-2.

“Ha!” laughed SA-1. “But imagine if you could land there and look up at that bread sky. Before you were crushed and melted.”

“Baked and sliced,” offered SA-3.

“Buttered and toasted,” SA-1 replied.

“Enough!” SA-2 barked. “It needs a designation other than M2859271b.”

“Call it Breadworld,” snickered SA-3.

“Yeah,” SA-1 said. “It’s the yeast we can do.

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“You look displeased, Zorpnor,” said Crumbulax. “Do you disapprove of my choice?”

“It is…very primitive,” Zorpnor said.

“Our force fields will provide the necessary strength, just as they do with your fragile tinfoil ship,” said Crumbulax.

“But it will surely begin to…decompose soon,” Zorpnor replied, turning his antennae up in disgust at the sight of Crumbulax’s new ship.

“In the absence of Earth germs and oxygen? I doubt that very much,” Crumbulax chortled. “But I have lacquered it, if you’re worried about all that.”

“I know you are a big fan of Earth culture, even though the terrifying giants who live there fill me with ghastly horror,” Zorpnor said. “But Crumbulax, I do not think it is safe, or wise, to build one of their primitive totems into a spacecraft!”

“Bah,” said Crumbulax, climbing into his jack o’lantern spacecraft through its garved mouth. “This is why you fly around in an unstylish box, my friend. No vision!”

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The bathroom was strangely immaculate; Lozow did not seem to have actually used it, preferring an outhouse and washbasin in the yard. Instead, he seemed to have given over the entire room to more models, with both the sink and the bathtub converted to wet/dry landscapes filled with miniature soldiers and other people.

The bathtub, especially, had been partly filled with dirt to form a small archipelago of dry islands, each lush with fake foliage and teeming with small figures seemingly assaulting the tiny islands thusly formed.

Chuck Lozow had apparently been in the middle of reconfiguring the waterscape when he died, as half the tub was a squadron of World War II US Marines locked in combat with a detachment of regular Japanese Army troops, while the other half was space marines in cerulean armor rooting out dug-in green-skinned aliens.

And, as there had been in each of the other rooms, there was a tiny Chuck Kozow in each army. He was a space marine holding a chainsaw sword aloft, a green alien exorting the crew of a rickety red tank to victory, a Marine sergeant on a radio, and a Japanese officer, sword in hand, leading a charge.

Chuck Lozow had rarely left his house after his parents had died, and never left town aside from his abortive time at university. But in the confines of that tiny bathroom alone, he had lived—hell, was still living—four lives.

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“My friends, the good people of Pickle Beacon, I am sorry to call you all here at such sort notice, and on a Friday as well.” Harvey Brineman, founder and CEO of Pickle Beacon, looked at his small but loyal staff across the conference table in the PB factory outlet, directly beneath the great green pickle lighthouse that beckoned travelers and tourists to savor the tartly prepared ascended cucumbers.

“Is if the FAA again?” said Janice Pickford, administrative assistant. “Tell them that unless they want to lobby Congress, we are one lumen underneath the legal limit.”

“No, it,s not the FAA,” said Brineman.

“The FCC, then?” Elle Braunschweig, brinemaster second class, said. “It doesn’t count as a billboard if it’s an illuminated object.”

“No, not the FCC either. I’m afraid it is our old…friends…at Broccoli Barn.”

A hush fell over the boardroom.

“They have built an illuminated broccoli that is exactly one foot taller than ours,” Brineman continued. “And significantly wider.”

Excited, perhaps even panicked, murmurs rippled through the room.

“I also have it on good authority, from one of our agents there, that they have recently purchased industrial brining equipment.”

“Surely they can’t-“ Quentin Cumber, regional manager, began.

“There’s no legal reason why they can’t make pickles, no,” Brineman said. “But I fear they, and that madman Harold Brassica, plan something far worse. Pickled broccoli.”

Pandemonium. Shouting, kicking of chairs. Gnashing of teeth, wailing. The room took several minutes to recover from this bombshell,

“My friends, a broccoli shadow will soon fall across our beloved Pickle Beacon,” Brineman said. “But I believe that we will endure, and in enduring, prevail.”

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Are you desperate for pickles? Does the sweet, salty taste of dill brined cucumbers fill you with a forbidden snacky longing? We’ve all been there, surely, but you and I both know that good pickles can be hard to find in this day and age. And by good, I of course mean bad. Vile, dive bar grade pickles, the sort that might be grudgingly sliced over a greasy pub burger. In an era of health food and holistics, they are a rare beast.

That’s where Pickle Beacon comes in.

Not only do we hand-brine our pickles. Not only do we carefully select only the finest cukesfor the process. Not only are each of our pickles brine-aged for at least seventeen weeks before we even think of seling them. Oh, no. We here at Pickle Beacon go further. Some fools might say too far.

Atop our factory outlet, we have an enormous lighthouse tower with a gigantic green pickle instead of a traditional light, and when a new batch of pickles are ready, we set it alight, notifying all that their pickle salvation is at hand. It may blind local residents. It may menace commercial aviation. But you will never be uncertain about when and where you can get pickles.

Pickle Beacon. Let us be your pickle light shining in pickle darkness.

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Lebedev came in grumpy, as he always did, condensation hanging from his beard in unfriendly icicles. Alexei admitted to himself that he dreaded the bitter cold of a kerebatic wind over an ice shelf less than he did the coldness of his superior’s stare.

“What is it now?” Lebedev snapped. “If it’s more problems with the survey equipment, I’ll wager it’s problems with the survey team that are truly to blame.”

“It’s not that, Commander,” said Alexei. “The ground penetrating radar is performing as designed and within normal tolerances. But…”

“But, but, but!” Lebedev mocked. “By Lenin’s beard, spit it out, or I’ll have you chipping pissicles out of the latrine for wasting my time.”

“We found another subglacial lake,” Alexei said. “A smaller one, nothing like Vostok.”

“Oh, is that all?” snapped Lebedev. “A real Hero of the Soviet Union, here. Look, Brasov, I do not need to be personally informed about every little pebble you find. It goes in the report, which I will read, at my leisure, with some hot tea.”

“There is a void in the lake, something displacing the water.”

“And?”

“It’s at the lake bottom. Radar telemetry confirms, across three devices and three operators, that the void is less dense than the subsurface water.”

Lebedev fell silent.

“It’s like an upside-down lake, contrary to the pull of gravity. A gravitational anomaly that my team is, at present, unable to explain.”

“Prepare the tractor and a drilling team,” Lebedev said quietly. “We leave at once. Not a word of this to anyone who does not already know of it.”

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VIPOIG: The thing you have to understand is that my ancestors, the Picts, lived in Pictland long before the Scots did. Our presence there is attested from the late third century AD; it is our homeland and natural place of origin.

INTERVIEWER: And what about the Scots?

VIPOIG: The Scots are squatters, a mongrel mix of peoples who moved in after the Picts were evicted by the Vikings. They don’t have any true rights to Pictland, as their origins are elsewhere–in Norway and Denmark, in Ireland, in England. That’s where their kinsman are, and that’s where they should return.

INTERVIEWER: But they’ve been living in Scotland for 800 years, and some of them are probably descended from Picts who remained.

VIPOIG: First of all, I object to your use of the term ‘Scotland.’ That’s a loaded, political, term used by those with an anti-Pictish agenda. The correct name for the area is Pictland, and I’ll thank you to refer to it as such.

INTERVIEWER: The issue still stands.

VIPOIG: They’re of course welcome to stay if they assimilate, give up their backward and violent religion, and generally become civilized enough to coexist with the returning Picts. But sadly most Scots seem to be satisfied to choose the route of violence and barbarism.

INTERVIEWER: It’s been said, by Scots, that those who call themselves Picts are invaders seeking to colonize Scot-er, Pictland and to drive people off the land they’ve inhabited for centuries.

VIPOIG: Nonsense. Do people call it colonization when you chase rats out of a barn, regardless of how long they’ve lived there? We Picts can manage the land much more efficiently than the people that were there before, who were running it in an altogether backward and savage way.

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t that the very definition of colonialism?

VIPOIG: That’s a leading question and I refuse to engage with anything so anti-Pictish. If the Scots are so upset, they can leave.

INTERVIEWER: But if your Pictland does not consider them citizens, they’re stateless and by definition can’t migrate.

VIPOIG: They can also keep to themselves, in their own areas, with their own government. As long as they’re properly supervised, of course, to keep them out of trouble.

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t that the very definition of apartheid?

VIPOIG: This interview is over.

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