Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Quickly, quickly,” said “Doctor” Strauß. “We have only a few moments before the effects wear off.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” groused Müller. He had been employed by Strauß and the Stuttgart Biergarten in central Kowloon for over a year, and he knew that the drugs slipped into the bar patron’s drinks wore off quickly, and that he had to attach the that didn’t keep the good “doctor” from berating him at every opportunity.

Müller attached the endocranioscopy harness to the unconscious patron’s head. The man, roughly tattooed and bearded, looked like an ideal candidate for some interesting neural patterns, but there was no way to be sure without a quick indexing scan.

“Bah, garbage! Nearly all garbage!” cried Strauß. “The man is a poser! Uneventful childhood, public schools in the United States…tattoos copied off of a picture on the internet! Never served in any navy, and…gott, still a virgin!”

“Fancy that,” Müller said. “Anything usable?”

“Bits and pieces only. A few sweeteners I can add to other patterns, and a decent breakdown in tears during a police interrogation for cannabis possession that could be tweaked into something usable. But not much else. Get the harness off of him and get him to the recovery room!”

Müller grudgingly pulled off the endocranioscopy harness and hauled the prostrate form, now beginning to twitch and mumble, to a filthy couch in the back. Bar patrons who legitimately passed out ended up there, as did customers who had been overwhelmed by imprinted or simulated experiences in Strauß’s underground memory parlor.

“Pussy,” snarled Müller as he dumped the poser onto the couch. “Fitting that your blubbering to the cops over weed will be the only part of you that lives on after this city eats you alive.”

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“Everything is always the same in the maze. It doesn’t. I think maybe it can’t.” The words came out shaky, starting and stopping, speeding up and slowing down, as their utterer rocked back and forth. It was almost as if the art and craft of language had been all but forgotten after long disuse.

“That can’t be true,” I said. “We’re talking, aren’t we?”

“That’s just it…the maze can’t change. Chip off a corner, make a mark on the floor, leave something behind, it goes away. The next time you look away, even to blink, it’s back to normal. I’ve tried. Oh, I’ve tried. Stare at the wall for an hour. Stare at the floor ’til the eyes water. It doesn’t matter. But we’re not the maze.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said, the ugly prickle of revelation beginning to grow in my gut.

“We’re not the maze, we’re not the maze. Out there, things can’t change. In here?” A tap on the forehead. “Things can change. Break. Heal. Breathing is fine, since whatever we spit out goes right back to being what it was. Never hungry, because I was full when I got here, I think. I think, I think, I think.”

“So why, then, did you smash the door?” I cried. “The one thing it looks like the maze won’t regenerate?”

“Don’t you see?” The cry was plaintive. “It’s been so long, so long. So unchanging, so unchanging. It’s all broken, up here, all broken. I needed someone to fix it, since I can’t do that myself. So I couldn’t. I couldn’t let you leave.”

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“Doctor, I keep smelling this awful smell wherever I go. I can’t describe it…it’s like the scent of burning hair mixed in with methane from a sewage treatment plant with rotten fish added to taste.”

“I see.”

“And I smell it everywhere. The house, the beach, the flower shop. The most powerful potpourri is helpless against it, it laughs at Febreeze, and scented candles are just balls of wax to it.”

“Well, we’ve run some tests, and-”

“Don’t tell me it’s something wrong with my nose, doctor. I’ve been to the best nose specialists in the country. The top nosemen have said that my nasal cavity is perfectly fine. So don’t patronize me, condescend, or insult my intelligence with any such talk.”

“Oh, I wasn’t about to. No, we’ve found the source of the odor, and I can assure you your nose has nothing to do with it, then.”

“So it’s an elaborate prank? I thought as much. I’ll have to double security, and-”

“No, your nose is just fine. It’s the scent-sensing lobe of your brain that’s the problem. We have uncovered a nasty tumor there, a real bugger.”

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STUDENT: If you think about it, I pay your salary. You’d better raise my grade.

INSTRUCTOR: I think you sorely overestimate how little they pay me, and underestimate how many students are at this university, if you think dropping out will affect my bottom line. With the way the money goes, you’d probably have a bigger effect on the football team.

STUDENT:…I’ll be good.

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