Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“So what have we got here?” said Lampwick O’Malley, investigating detective, Magical Affairs Bureau.

“Well, the deceased came running at Officer Strasser, screaming like a banshee; Officer Strasser, thinking that they might have been armed, shot them with 17 magic missiles,” said Lt. Burke, chief uniform on the scene.

“Whew! Good reflexes on that guy,” said O’Malley. “Put him on paid administrative leave while we fill out the paperwork. Oh, and make sure the perp’s wand is tagged and bagged.”

“Oh, there was no wand, sir,” said Burke. “Turns out the perp was not holding anything and was also on fire, sir. Seems he was rushing toward Officer Strasser in search of aid.”

“Ah well. Honest mistake,” shrugged O’Malley. “See that a wand turns up anyway, with its serial number sanded off.”

“Got it, sir.”

“So why was the perp on fire?” O’Malley said. “Drugs? Was he doing firesand?”

“Oh. No, he was apparently trying to refill a lava lamp with actual lava from the Elemental Plane of Fire,” Burke said.

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“The lines are just…so straight.”

“Don’t act so surprised. Given an infinite universe, it was inevitable.”

“What kind of geologic processes could have created this sort of thing? Life and civilization readings were negative.”

“Look, why are you so upset about this?”

“I know that anything is possible in an infinite universe, okay? But that still didn’t prepare me for Plaid Planet.”

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The hermit crab scuttled merrily around its holographic enclosure, to general acclaim and applause from the members of the club.

“It looks so lifelike!” said Nex. “How did you manage it! My holographic axolotl is nowhere near as good.”

“Well, I started with video footage. There’s not a lot left, but combined with descriptions I was able to work out a pretty good pseudorandom algorithm.”

“What about the eating behavior?” Zak asked.

“I looked in the genetics database and analyzed a few peptides. It was a best guess, but I think it was pretty close.”

“Yeah,” Nex agreed. “Very close. Considering they’ve been extinct for a hundred years, it’s definitely the best holographic animal so far.”

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By this point, the remaining House Depository megastore employees had accepted that Shawn had gone completely feral, due to a combination of whatever had been in Sissy’s pills and general hypoglycemia. The priority was containing him and tying him down with nylon straps from the loading dock before he could bite anybody else.

Corralled by JJ on one side and Devin on the other, Shawn had retreated into the plumbing section, gibbering as he flitted between the imposing bathroom fixtures. Cartigainer ordered JJ and Devin to head in, either to catch their wayward coworker or at least to flush him out into a trap laid by the stockers.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” JJ said, her face red. “You want us to go into that porcelain jungle along with nothing but a polesaw without the saw? You saw what Shawn did to HD the Bear!”

Cartigainer looked over his shoulder at the teddy bear in a purple Home Depository apron, its head torn off and stuffing spilled from its torn belly like fresh offal. “We’re all in mourning for HD,” he said sadly, “but his sacrifice is in vain if we can’t catch Shawn. Now get in there.”

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“So.” Ms. Lancaster folded her arms. “You were assigned a report on microclimates.”

“That’s right,” said SJ, irked at being held back after class. “But I did an experiment instead. You said we could.”

“Oh yes,” Ms. Lancaster said, gesturing to the box on her table, which contained a very damp thimble. “So you thought you’d be a smartass and give me a wet thimble as a ‘micro climate.’ Very cute.”

“It’s a real microclimate!” SJ insisted. “I put a lot of work into it. That water is rain.”

“Uh huh.” Ms. Lancaster said, writing in her gradebook.

“It’s not my fault that the ambient humidity was too low for it to work right away,” SJ continued. “But it’s been an hour, it should be just about ready.”

“Uh huh,” repeated Ms. Lancaster. A moment later, she jumped and instinctively pushed her chair back violently at the sound of a peal of thunder and a crackling of electricity from the thimble, which set part of the box on fire.

“See? What did I tell you?” SJ said, triumphantly. “Microclimate. Just like what’s-his-butt was saying about a tempest in a teapot.”

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The Jourmungandr was nearby now; that was evident in the frequent tremors and the blazing sky. Prof. Xi estimated that the atmosphere would become incapable of sustaining life in another twenty minutes or so, after which the reserve oxygen in the expedition’s tanks would be the only option.

“Biomechanics at this scale,” said deBlij, chucking ruefully as he uncorked his last bottle of wine. “I never would have guessed it, even after all we’ve seen.”

“Is now really the time for drinking?” said Lozowiak.

“Of course!” deBlij said, pouring the wine into a silver cup. “Xi’s device will either work or it won’t. Worrying about it at this point is pointless. We’ll either see the thing driven off, or we can toast the toothy horizon looming up to swallow us all whole.”

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In a universe that is infinite, it stands to reason that all things either have existed, or will exist. This is simple probability, simple infinity. This means that, somewhere in the infinite reaches of this or some other cosmos, there is a planet with an ecosystem made entirely out of candy.
Yes, air of sugar vapor reacts in a cycle to fall from the sky as syrup, only to wash back into the basin of a sugar ocean where it is borne on taffy tides. A galaxy of glucose, as it were, with continents of chocolate.

Easy enough to imagine. But now suppose for a moment that you consider the inverse. For there is out there, somewhere in the infinite expanse of reality, a being for whom our simple Earth *is* that candy world, For their bizarre and alien digestive system, everything we are, from the air down to the lithosphere and all parts in between, is a delectable sweet that tantalizes their every taste bud (or equivalent structure).

To us, such a monstrous being would be terrifying indeed, especially if they arrived and began to gorge themselves and were of a scale that made their feasting known. But would it not be the same for us if we approached the candy planet, mouth awater and bib securely tied?

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“I’ve heard of such a place as this,” Codswallop said. “It is an oasis from which the sands of hourglasses are gathered.”

“Won’t just any old sand do?” said Rags.

“No, it must be sand of exceeding fineness, so that it tumbles properly. It must also be finely attuned to the passage of time itself, which may explain some of the…chronological anomalies…we have been seeing.”

“What else do you know about this, er, hourglass oasis?” Rags asked.

Codswallop tapped his cane thoughtfully on the stone. “My mentor once told me that the sand is harvested almost exclusively by old men and young lads—the old men that they might feel younger, the young lads that they might feel older. Perhaps, in this, you and I are in the perfect position to cross the anomaly safely.”

“But what about an old man feeling older and a young, uh, lad feeling younger?” asked Rags. “Feeling is one thing, but if these are the sands of time or whatever, couldn’t that kill someone old or make someone so young they get un-born?”

“I suppose we’ll find out,” Codswallop said. “For we need that water to survive, and I don’t like our chances in the desert stumbling across another oasis.”

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Pota worried that there would be no place for his family to live, for the available land was small and quite crowded. But he lacked the ability to move anywhere else, as his wife’s knitting was the family’s sole support. Desperate to contribute despite his infirmity, Pota began to pray to the earth, day and night, to provide for his family. In this way he hoped to repay his wife’s hard work and his own room and board with divine favor.

One night, he received an earthquake as if in response to his latest round of prayers. He soon noticed a column of steam rising from the nearby ocean, and within a few days a volcano had capped the waves, knitting new land out of lava floes just as Pota’s wife knit new clothes from fibers. He set out the very next day, and was the first person to step upon the land—it being uninhabited, this made it automatically his fief and he its chieftain.

Though it took the volcano many years to attain its full size, and many more for it to begin abounding with rich island life, Pota never forgot his claim, nor did his descendants and heirs. In time, they took possession of the island as their own, and raised a thousand generations of successors.

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From the same government think tank that brought you Precrime, it is our distinct privilege to introduce Prepost! This simple system promises to revolutionize postal logistics, allowing packages to arrive before they are even ordered!

The process is simple. Our precognition experts, whose exact nature, physical state, and location are not for you to know, will reach out into the aether with their minds and every time they find evidence of a future order in your name, it will automatically be placed in the here and now. Your account will be charged, and the item will arrive before you even knew you needed it!

Now, some folks may call this an overreach—after all, the future is always in motion, and who are we to say that a future order will be placed? Setting aside that our proprietary methods, which certainly do not include psychics and sensory depravation tanks, we have two mechanisms which will make the system of Prepost universally appealing. First, full refunds if we deliver by mistake, since the system is not optional and everyone is enrolled by default with no ability to opt out. Second, and the part that will really fry your noodle if you let it: many of the orders our Prepostal Masters see are, in fact, placed by them, creating a causal time loop from which there is no escape. Fighting future progress will only make it stronger.

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