Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Remember well the cautionary tale of Akfas the Wizard.”

“What’s the cautionary tale of Akfas the Wizard?”

“There once was a wizard named Akfas who supposedly was incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous. It was said that he often took the form of a mighty bear and roamed the woods looking for mischief to cause. So when the local village noticed a bear with a wizard’s hat in their woods, they were terrified, avoiding it and even feeding the bear to keep Akfas at bay. It was only after years of this that they realized that it was not a wizard at all, but just a bear with an old hat on its head. The moral is, what seems terrifying may not be what it seems.”

“So was the bear harmless?”

“No, it mauled a bunch of people.”

“This is the stupidest fable I’ve ever heard.”

In the year NE 177, an astrophysicist discovered a revolutionary new kind of wormhole. Small and stable, it could connect any two points in existence instantaneously across time and space! But there was a problem: it would react explosively with most metals and plastics, disassembling them on the molucular level! Worse still, anything living put through the wormhole was never seen again, vanishing into some undetermined nexus trap along the Einstein-Rosen bridge! This meant that, due to some immutable laws of the universe that are not yet fully understood, nothing synthetic could pass through, but anything living would disappear!

Naturally, it was put to use delivering pizza.

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Wormhole Pizza™: we don’t know why it works, but it just does.*

“Walk me though it again. Help me see your reasoning.”

“Okay, so dragons are lizards, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But they’re not real. Never were.”

“Okay, with you so far.”

“What’s the closest thing to dragons that ever existed?”

“Uhh…”

“That’s right, dinosaurs. But they’re extinct, right?”

“Right?”

“WRONG! Not all dinosaurs are extinct. Birds are dinosaurs and they’re still around.”

“…I’m sorry, it’s still a huge leap to call penguins ‘tiny ice dragons.'”

“You just have no sense of style.”

“That cloud looks suspiciously like a spaceship, don’t you think?” said Elo’Niss

“And that cloud looks like a wild mud-weasel,” said Engineer Xamket. They loudly uncorked a bottle of Obet mush-ale and took a swig. “But you don’t see me getting scared even though it’s a natural predator.”

“It’s a Vatna Incursion-Class marauder,” Lt. Cutec said. “Here to rescue me, I suppose.”

“Rescue you? I didn’t think rogue Vatna maurauders rescued people,” Elo’Niss said. “I thought wild, indiscriminate slaughter was their modus operandi.”

“I think maybe the lieutenant means that they are here to rescue him from this predicament by rescuing him from his life,” Briee said.

“CONTAMINANT DETECTED,” H0-1D barked for the umpteenth time. “RECOMMEND FULL NUTRON PURGE.”

“Wait a moment,” Cutec said. “Dr. Briee, are Vatna vulnerable to neutron purges?”

“Only if they have protons.”

With a weary hand, Lt. Cutec pressed the flash-frozen bread into the toaster, hoping for at least the warm smell of reheated and freshly toasted bread to provide some relief. The toaster trembled violently at someone attempting to use it for its intended purpose, before beginning to buck wildly on the surface of the table.

“Is it…supposed to do that?” Cutek said.

“I dunno, I’ve never used another toaster,” said Elo’Niss. “A human thing, really. But I do know that Engineer Xamket rigged up a miniature virtual intelligence core and matter-antimatter reactor to it.”

“Are you telling me,” said Cutec, “that the toaster is haunted by the vengeful spirit of an antimatter-powered virtual intelligence?

“It’s haunted, but it’s friendly,” Elo’Niss said. “It helps me make d’olh, after all. What human toaster has ever done that before?”

“So,” said Lt. Cutec, “my report to the Star Confederation on the state of this outpost will include a drunk Obet chief engineer, a Zypger weapons officer who blew up a planetoid with an illegally modified maser cannon as ‘target practice,’ an Ebzhyna counselor who somehow derives actual sustenance from the mental illnesses of the crew, a human medical officer in a medically induced coma, and a maintenence robot that repeatedly attempted to purge organic life from the station using a neutron surge. Am I leaving anything out?”

“Hey! H0-1D is a very confused robot, but it’s trying its best! It’s not our fault that it regards biological life as contamination!”

The shape was only visible where its form blotted out the stars set in the great dome of the sky, but as it capered and cavorted, Warts had the sense that it was a felid…an impossibly huge, or perhaps only impossibly thin cat made out of the very stardust it blotted from the sky.

“You are attempting…to understand me,” it said.

“Th-that’s right,” said Warts.

“Tell me. Do you understand yourself? Why you want what you want, why you need what you need, why your body works as it does?”

“I…no, not really,” Warts replied.

“Then let us dwell no more on you understanding me, or on me understanding you,” said the star-cat. “For if we cannot understand ourselves, what use is there in understanding others?”

“It is the Professor-Wizard’s opinion that a being’s physical and metaphysical forms are divisible, in that the one can be set free of the other,” said Assistant Il-Bhig.

“I assume, since the Professor-Wizard is still quite visible, and audible, to us…that this has not yet been a success?” said Inspector Revilo.

“The first experiment relied on finding a songbird with a very high Ω value,” said Il-Bhig. “When we found one, the Professor-Wizard attempted to use the focused crystal nexus to seperate its physical from its metaphysical.”

There was a long silence. “Well?” said Inspector Revilo. “Was the Professor-Wizard successful?”

“The bird is invisible now. It still sings, and we can occasionally see seeds disappearing, but it seems to be quite physical still, and we have not bee able to recapture it for some time. The Professor-Wizard does hold out some hope that it will mate and produce half-visible offspring.”

So hear me out. I think that ducks are behind it all. Ducks and their allies the geese and the swans. Not the grebes, though, or the loons. They are on our side.

Think about it: before the rise of mankind, ducks and their allies could move about freely and migrate as they pleased. But we put a stop to that, with all our hunting and our terraforming and our pollution. So what is the solution? End humanity!

That’s why all those flocks almost caused World War Three when they appeared on military radar. That’s why they suicide bomb planes. And it’s why they take over parks and claim them as their own. It’s all a long con to drive humanity to extinction.

They’ve been manipulating us all along, and no one has clean hands. Wake up to the truth! This may just seem like a duck related conspiracy theory, but I swear it’s true.

“Remember,” said Nevah, “the Arachneons prefer to wear headgear, and this says a lot about their intentions. We want to see them wearing their finest silk creations, towering gossamer edifices that are a testement to the beauty and strength of Arachneon culture.”

“Okay, right, sure,” said Agazaw. “And if their intentions are hostile…?

“Then the Arachneons will arrive wearing headgear made out of their defeated enemies, to intimidate us. Generally this means long bones formed into sculptures bound together with silk, but they have been known to use drained and mummified corpses for the same purpose.” Nevah shrugged. “It should be pretty obvious, I think.”

“Got it,” Agazaw said. “Spiders wearing hats, but in a nice way.”