Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

There once was a gull, who went by the name Gull, as did every one of his kind
And every day it flew over a harbor town with mealtime at the fore of his mind
Landing on the porch of an old sea dog who age and much care have made thinner
The old man’s was alone but he opened his home: “Hello Gull, want some of my dinner?”
Gull landed nearby and with a polite cry took the veggies and steak he was offer’d
But one fine day, coming in from the bay, poor Gull saw the porch was deserted
The old man was not there and with all due care poor Gull searched high and low
Hopping around the old man’s place Gull saw it opened adjoined onto a meadow
His keen eyes saw prints from the old man’s paws leading straight into the field
Following on the wing, Gull heard an odd thing: the old man begging someone to yield
His dear old friend was facing his end; he’d been cornered by a fierce wild bull
With a hoarse raspy cry the man begged not to die and heartstrings of Gull did he pull
Gull didn’t want his friend dead, he wanted to be fed, and so he pecked the bull’s back
With the blood that he drew, a taste that he knew: it was beef that he’d just attacked
Letting loose a loud cry, to Gull they did fly: his brothers and sisters in arms
They merged into one, swooping down from the sun, and the bull did they greivously harm
With newly formed limbs they grappled with him and tore off the offending bull’s jaw
As the new gull-man did slide the dead bull to one side, the old man looked on in awe
“Let’s get you home my old friend, and those wounds let us mend” said Gull with laughter
Sharing a tender kiss, with nought more amiss, together lived they happily ever after

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The company had offered much more luxurious lodgings, but Maria didn’t have much in the way of worldly possessions. A week’s worth of clothes, a week’s worth of uniforms, and a keepsake or two. Everything else she needed was on the network or carved onto her living skin.

So the company had agreed to set her up in a smaller place in the Al-Baghdadi Towers. A bed, a desk, a closet, a bathroom, and a window. They wouldn’t let Maria keep the rest of the housing allotment, so she’d donated it to a colleague she barely knew that had five kids.

When she wasn’t aboard a ship, Maria spent her time in her apartment, on her terminal. It filled a whole wall, and she carefully subdivided it with news feeds, entertainment, and a little pornography just for kicks. Whatever she focused her eyes on broke in across the audio feed, and with a single programmed gesture she could expand anything of interested to fill the space.

Needless to say, it had all been programmed before Jessie had died. The upper corner had always been the Jessie feed, and half of the things buzzing in from the network were originally selected to be Jessie-pleasers, Jessie-conversation-starters, Jessie-impressers.

Now, on her first day home from a long voyage, Maria sat in her chair, glassy-eyed and unfocused before the terminal, legs propped up on the desk before her. She wore only her favorite pair of jeans, her Jessie-jeans, and the sloppy polish drying on her toes was quite forgotten.

Lit from behind by the setting sun of Mesopotamia Prime, it struck Maria as just the sort of thing that Jessie would have enjoyed. That naive sense of wonder, that excitability…they had been the perfect counterpoint to Maria’s instinctive cynicism and misanthropy.

A message from corporate jumped across Maria’s feed. Limply, she brought it to the fore. “What is it?”

“I see that I’m interrupting you again.” It was Lassiter, unfazed by the relaxed posture and dress code showed by his contactee. “Shall I call back after you have finished wallowing in self-pity?”

“You’ll never call back in that case,” sniffed Maria. “I’m having my mail delivered to self-pity these days. I’m on the verge of renting out my place over in self-loathing and making it official.”

“The rents there are outrageous, and corporate won’t issue a housing scrip. Try self-doubt, I hear all the executives have summer homes there.”

Maria liked Lassiter. He was no Jessie, but he understood where she was coming from and was always happy to roll with the punches and do a little light verbal fencing. He also did not condescend, and if he worried about the accounts he managed, he at least respected requests not to hangwring over it. “I’ll take a tour, see how I like it.”

“While you’re planning that, corporate has a contract offer open for you that you may be interested in,” said Lassiter. “Details are inbound, but you know I like to talk everything through to give it that personal touch.”

“Hit me with the deets, giant talking head,” Maria said.

“There’s a high-risk courier job open, leaving day after tomorrow. Details are classified conditional on acceptance, naturally, but suffice it to say that the legitimate government of Celebes II has great need of something we have the ability to sneak through a blockade.”

“Hmph,” said Maria. “Hazard pay?”

“Hazard pay, hush money, playing ball bonus, and full survivor benefits,” Lassiter said. “The works.”

“I’ve heard all that before.”

“What you may not have heard,” Lassiter said, “is that the promised flexibility includes the ability to transfer these benefits to any corporate account on completion or expiry.”

Maria sat up, suddenly at intense attention, leaving a smear of half-dried polish where she scraped the edge of the desk. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that this includes your…other…account,” Lassiter said. “I’ve seen your balance sheet.”

Silent for a moment, Maria nodded. “Get it in writing for me and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

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The Exalt has seen it again and again. A flowering species, a burst of static across every band of visible and invisible radiation, and then…nothing. Some of them burn out, truly, floundering on the cinders to which their planets were reduced. But many more survive, only to withdraw themselves from the world and ensconce themselves in virtual coccoons of their own creation.

When their cooling remains are found, when every drop of energy has been wrung from their suns and worlds, their evitable awakening is as shocking as it is short. In the Exalt’s travels and observations, it has often seen and remarked upon the fact that these virtual realms are often simulations of the wider galaxies, sidestepping the real problems of interstellar travel in favor of a pale shadow thereof.

For what real universe can compare with the universe within?

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“Earth has changed so much.” The spacesuit made One’s voice crackle with static. “Hard to believe we evolved here.”

“Well, what do you expect?” said Two. “Our ancestors left long ago, and they exerted a powerful hold on this planet. We took ourselves out of the equation in order to stop that and let evolution take its natural course.”

“Still…look at those trees. Look at all the snow on that mountaintop! It’s not the pictures we’re used to seeing.”

“Well, the atmosphere verges on being poisonously unbreathable too,” said Two drily. “The gas mix is all wrong. We’d have a few minutes of gasping at best before we passed out.”

“I wonder,” One said. “Do you think that, maybe, someone or something evolved in a similar way that we did? I mean we left plenty of relatives behind.”

Two glared at One through is suit visor, his feathers ruffled. “Highly unlikely,” he said, clipping his beak shut on the last syllable for emphasis.

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“Where did it come from?” Sammy asked.

“Nobody knows,” said Tilly. “Dad says some people say it was aliens. Some people say it was the government. He thinks it just evolved that way, maybe as a totally new way of things evolving, too.”

Bethany raised her hand. “Does it hurt?”

Tilly shook her head. “Nope. Maybe it you press me real hard there, but that hurts no matter what.”

Ms. Culligan nodded. “Does anyone else have a question for Tilly?” Her tone made it clear to kids used to playing “guess what teacher’s thinking” that they hadn’t yet asked the right one.

After a moment of unusual quiet in the classroom, Mikey raised his hand. “Can we catch it?” he said.

“Only if you touch it,” said Tilly, “and then put your fingers in your mouth.”

Ms. Culligan quickly got up and strode to the front of the class. “That’s only true if you’re not on the proper medication,” she said hastily. “Since Tilly is joining out classroom we will all be on the proper medicine which is 99% effective. There’s no danger of anyone else catching it whether they touch Tilly or not.”

The teacher put a hand on Tilly’s shoulder and began guideing her back to her desk. The kids, mollified but still interested, stared at their new classmate. More specifically, they stared at the azure crystalline deposits protruding like diamond freckes from about her eyes and on her upper arms. Most of them had heard of the crystophage from the news or conversation around the dinner table, but it was an affluent school and few had ever seen it.

“What happens…you know…later?” one of the kids whispered. “They get bigger, don’t they?”

“I’ll be shiny and strong,” said Tilly. “Like Dad said, a totally new way of evolving.”

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What most readers fail to realize is that the Walrus was a metaphor for a corrupt and jowly king, the Carpenter was a metaphor for the urban bourgeoisie hostile to the monarchy, and the oysters were a metaphor for the oppressed masses who feel the depradations of both.

Eventually, once the oyster-proleteriat had been exploited to its fullest extent, the Carpenter attacked King Walrus. The latter defended himself with terror and oppression but could not stave off his final fate at the hands of an assassin’s blade. Far from being a more benevolent ruler, though, the Carpenter only redoubled the exploitation of the oysters. Sessile and complacent, easily led about by jaunty songs and slogans, the oysters’ class consciousness lay dormant.

Did the author hold out hope for a revolution that would put the means of production in the hands of the hardworking oysters? Or did he merely resign himself to a grinding cycle of oppression so complete that any relief would have to be generations, eons in the future? Either way, it is clear that his is the most scathing critique of late capitalism of its time, and that we living in the time of later capitalism would do well to heed his warnings.

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