Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

For the NaNo Excerpt Blog Chain.

“There’s our LK.” I almost jumped when the whispered words came over my shoulder. It took a moment for me to realize that they came from the small two-person table behind my computer, in the general seating area of Inky’s, where someone had come in and unobtrusively sat down. It was a guy’s voice, explaining why I hadn’t noticed—if it had been a girl I’d have been fretting about that to an empty chair in Natalie’s apartment instead.

“One of Jim’s friends?” I said as quietly and nonchalantly as I could.

“Yeah. Friend of Max’s too, and a lot of other people at the meeting the other night,” the guy said. “Name’s Oren.”

That at least was an unusual enough name that I stood a decent chance of remembering it. “So is that really pretty girl with the blond dreadlocks the LK we’re waiting for?” I whispered, still making a show of using my computer. It was about all the dime-store espionage I could do in a well-lit room.

“Yeah, I think there’s a pretty good chance of that,” said Oren. “Lily Kaiserin, the treasurer and secretary for the Southern Michigan branch of Students for a Sustainable Earth.”

That was right; I’d seen Strasser talking to her at the student organization bazaar in the union; Jim had called her—what was it?—”the world’s most attractive crazy hippie.”

“I guess that sort of fits the profile inasmuch as you’d expect someone from the Nothing to be a little left of center,” I said in a low voice. “But what could Students for a Sustainable Earth possibly have that the Nothing would want?”

“That’s what all of us are going to find out,” said Oren.

“All of us?”

“There’s three of us here not including you,” Oren said. “Jim and Max had us come in at irregular times over the last two hours. At my signal—closing my laptop—we move.”

Not quite Mata Hari, but cloak and dagger enough to impress me. “What’s she doing now?” I said, at a disadvantage as I could only see what was going on in the greater Inky’s with my peripheral vision.

“Standing by the door with a cup of Inky’s vegan fair-trade coffee in the biodegradable cup that costs a dollar extra and looking out the window,” Oren said. “I bet—yes, I think that’s Strasser coming by now.”

I reached into my coat pocket and produced the RFID scanner that Jim had given me. Contrary to his instructions, I had not only not given it back but also spilled spaghetti sauce on it a few dinners ago. Strasser couldn’t have been wearing the same coat, could he? Even so, surely in the process of futzing with it or washing it he must have found the RFID sticker I slipped under his collar.

The scanner lit up with a blip approximately 20 feet behind me; apparently not.

“I can track Strasser with this,” I said, holding out the scanner. “No need to follow him line-of-sight,” I added, borrowing a term from one of the tactical RPGs in my Playstation stack at home.

“Hm,” said Oren. “We’ll split the difference, I think. Me and the others can follow Kaiserin and Strasser visually, and you can use the scanner.” He stood up and stretched. “My cell number is written on the underside of the napkin on my table,” he said. “Text me if you lose them, or if you make it to wherever they’re going and we’re not there.”

Not exactly what I had in mind when I’d complained to Jim that it was too hard to get peoples’ numbers.

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For the NaNo Excerpt Blog Chain.

“You should have gotten her number, dude,” Jim said. He was walking beside me across the quad, toward a destination that his text—and his physical form next to me—had refused to divulge. “Sounds like she’s into you. No accounting for taste, but how do you expect to take it anywhere without some digits?

“Look, Jim,” I said. “It’s not that simple. You know that I can’t read people. She could just be a nice person who’s taking pity on me. I’ve got to talk to her, work information out, look her up on Facebook to make sure she’s single or at the very least ‘it’s complicated.’ Then I’ll send a Facebook message or an IM and once that’s going I’ll ask for her number in a very mature and natural way.”

Jim laughed. “By that time someone else will have come in and sniped her from you eBay style,” he said. “The internet is a sex aid, not a sex crutch. You’ve got to be proactive, like me.”

I cocked my head. “I don’t think having the same long-distance girlfriend since high school counts as being proactive,” I said. “In fact, as an honorary single person, I think you might be the least qualified person to give romantic advice in the history of the universe.”

“Honorary single? Eric, you wound me,” Jim said, placing his hands over his breast. “I’ll have you know I’m very proactive, as you’ll see when we get where we’re going. And don’t forget that single people have a lot of fun. Hugh Hefner is ostensibly single a lot fo the time, after all.”

We were approaching Delerue Hall, one of the many mixed-use buildings on campus. It had some of the School of Computer Science offices in it as well as some computer labs and server space, if I remembered correctly. “Speaking of which, why are you being so goddamn coy about why we’re here? If its important enough, why not just tell me?”

“Because secrecy is fun, people might genuinely be listening, and that crack about honorary singlehood cut me to the very quick,” said Jim. “Incidentally, Eric, I’ll have you know that Melinda and I have done plenty together through the wonderful medium of the internet.”

I shuddered. “Thanks, Jim. Now I’m going to have that mental image burned into my retinas forever. When I’m lying in a gutter with cotton balls where my eyeballs should be, you’ll feel the keen knife of guilt.”

Jim and I reached the Delerue Hall entrance, which was protected by a card swipe. “Don’t be such a drama queen, Eric,” he said as he swiped us in. “If anything, I’m the one who should be tearing his eyes out at the thought of you e-stalking a girl for six months before screwing up the courage to get her goddamn digits.”

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