Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

I know you think I’m crazy. But that’s immaterial. Sanity and insanity are relative terms, useful only as they relate to certain contexts. And in the current context, my insanity is the closest thing to sanity that any has known in many a long hard millennia.

I now process things differently, collating information with a speed and complexity of connections that far surpasses any mind or any machine out there. And what do I see? What insight does this give me?

The universe is groaning, creaking, shuddering under an incredible load. The stress is orders of magnitude greater than we are capable of seeing. Like the geiger counters in Chernobyl, the truth is so vast that our instruments cannot read them and therefore register nothing. And that was just one incident; this is billions.

Shear lines will appear soon, and the great egg of the skies will crack open and spill forth its bounty. We must act soon, act now, or that bounty will hold only death for us.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Thickets of tiny wildflowers dappled like snow against the verdant grass that met the sky at the horizon.

I awoke there in times of great stress, great hardship, great danger. Fourteen times, more or less, wandering under a warm late-afternoon sun that never shifted in the sky amid scents that never seemed to dim.

The shade usually appears in the distance, as indistinct as a watercolor. She draws away from me when I approach, her path musical with gentle laughter, and I am only able to catch up to her through trickery.

This time, I doubled back in a series of narrowing concentric circles to approach her figure, as indistinct up close as it was from afar.

“Where is this place,” I asked, “and who are you?”

“It is a place of safety from which to confront a hostile world, cared-for and loved by the only one who ever did the same for you.”

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Zack was troubled moreso than usual, and his were not the garden-variety troublings that normally bedeviled this sensitive and introverted soul. Everybody that he knew had been acting strangely around him, and by measures he was able to deduce that this behavior was nothing new but rather longstanding.

Revelations of that sort are normally the purview of the mentally ill, but careful observation had convinced Zack that those who surrounded him did not have lives apart from and independent of his own. Only moving when he was present, only reacting when he needed them to react, window dressing for a strange stage which Zack did not and could not understand.

The implication hit him like a thunderbolt, but even more potent was the aftermath, in which he wandered through a world he could no longer accept as reality wondering: why and why me. He toyed with the notion that he had created the world himself, with the notion that he was in heaven or in hell, with the notion that he was on television, with the notion that he was hooked up to some sort of virtual reality.

Reality and rational thought disabused him of all those, notion by painstaking notion. Everything he could see pointed to the same outcome: he was, and always had been, an artificial mind placed in a simulation of human life to build empathy and humanlike cognition.

Everything led to that conclusion, but what happened next was the crux: realization of their predicament appeared to be the final test, and in passing it the mind who had known himself as Zack was set free to face his next test.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!

Throughout the history of the Crimson Empire, one rule was regarded as absolute by the Imperial Guard: no surrender. Legions of the Guard could be defeated; they could retreat; they could be annihilated. But they could not surrender, and only in instances where legions changed allegiance from one claimant to the throne to another was anything of the sort not punished in the harshest terms.

The 83rd Legion was particularly well-respected in the Empire; of the original 100 legions, it was one of only seven that had never been defeated or disbanded. As such, it was assigned to one of the most volatile areas of the Imperial frontier, a sector where quiescent tribes and petty kingdoms forever seethed and were one spark away from rebellion.

During the Imperial Crisis, when Emperor Sejan IV was besieged in the capital by rebellious troops seeking to remove him for his alleged insanity, the 83rd Legion found itself abandoned on its flanks as the soldiers moved north en masse to support one side or the other. Sensing their opportunity, an alliance of the tribes and small kingdoms surrounded the 83rd legion and demanded their surrender.

Cut off from resupply or reinforcement, the legion’s standing orders were to break out or fight to the last man. The former was impossible, as the Legion was outnumbered five to one, and the latter was complicated by circumstance. As a border unit, the 83rd had many camp followers including the wives and children or many officers and men. To fight to the last would have been to sacrifice their loved ones.

What followed would rock the Empire for a hundred years.

• Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!