Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Editing Omnipedia was, for me, a gateway into a much wider world: a world of pedantry, nitpickery, teapot tempests, molehill mountains, and vicious olog-hai trolls.

This was seldom noticeable at the surface level, aside from the occasional contradictions in spelling, form, and content that one would expect from an encyclopedia people made up out of whatever happened to be within arm’s reach of their computer. No, to get to the real juicy meat of the Omnipedia, you had to look at discussion pages, where people fought each other WWI-style over anything and everything.

Names and spellings were particular bones of contention, especially when there was a choice of American or British varieties. Being a former history geek, I would have been more apt to side with the British had their beloved spellings and words not been so hilariously quaint (subjectively, of course, but such was the case to the other people squabbling over it).

We’re all used to British spellings and their use of superfluous and supernumary letters, but it was the battles over vocabulary that were truly intense. Should it be called ping-pong or whiff-whaff, for instance? The sillier the words, the more passionate the argument:

“We should call them thumbtacks!”

“The accepted Commonwealth term is fidgy-divots!”

“I’m from Austrailia and we call them swopdobbers or swoppies!”

“In Canada we spell it theumbetacke!”

Most–well, nearly all–of the incoming links were spambots, but not of the traditional kind. Your Catholic spambots tended to visit pages, leave a link that a child of five could identify as spam as a comment, and scuttle off. Your unorthodox Protestant spambots, of which there was an increasing profusion, simply visited your site.

It was easy for Chen to explain the former: every incoming link helped boost a site’s search ranking. Even though the engines supposedly corrected for link quality, they could be overwhelmed by an avalanche of low-quality links. There had been a huge scandal last year, after all, when the H. B. Dollor retail chain had been caught buying spam links to puff up its retail site. But the visiting spambots posed more of a problem.

Chen found it was easy to spot them, at least: 90% ended in .cz.cc, the web address for the Cocos Islands, an obscure Australian island territory with 600 people and an anything-goes approach to e-commerce. He was certain that the visits were either intended to draw curious web owners, automatic link checkers, or other creatures that might follow the gossamer spamstrands back to the pages that had vomited them forth.

He was about to put all those theories to the test.

“You sure this is the right address?”

Ruttort Produce looked as if nothing remotely resembling produce had darkened its doors since before the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. The grocery’s walls were overrun with ivy, faded advertisements for products that no longer existed, and provided much-needed shelter for generations worth or rats and roaches.

“I’m sure,” Carson said. He pointed at the floor, where the dust was disturbed by sets of human footprints.

The trail led into what must at one time have been the store’s office, only it was doubtful that the long-dead store manager had ever dreamed of anything like the high-powered computer terminal and backup unit humming on his desk.

“Look at this,” Carson said, pointing to cables that snaked across the ground. “This spot’s only a hundred yards from the main fiber-optic pipeline to downstate. Tapped into it like this, Johannes can read the mail of everyone in six counties.”