One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

  “We haven’t used the Jumper for over eighteen months,” he explained, struggling with a padlock that had grown rusty with age. “Not since the imaginatively titled ‘RealWorld Travel Ban’ banned all travel to the RealWorld.”

  “Why the ban?”

  “I didn’t ask, and neither should you. If anyone at the CoG gets wind of this, you and I are nothing but text.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this.

  “But Bradshaw—”

  “Bradshaw is a good man,” interrupted Plum, “but in matters like this he’d deny he even knew you. And me. And himself, it it came to that. I agree with him. To maintain the integrity of Jurisfiction, I would accept being reduced to a bucket of graphemes. And so should you.”

  He left me thinking about this and pulled opened the door. He paused, the interior of the lab a dark hole.

  “You can leave now if you want to.”

  “No, I’m okay,” I said, even if I wasn’t. “Let’s just get on with it, yes?”

  He turned on the light to reveal a large room that was musty and hung with cobwebs. Occasionally there was a low rumble, and dust trickled from the ceiling.

  “The Carnegie Underpass,” explained Plum. “It runs directly overhead.”

  In the middle of the room was a large machine that looked like a collection of sieves, each lined up one in front of the other. The sieves began with one that might have been designed to make chips, so long as you could hurl a potato at it fast enough, and the rest were of rapidly decreasing mesh, until the penultimate was no more than a fine wire gauze. The last of all was a thin sheet of silver that shimmered with the microscopic currents of air that moved around the workshop. Beyond this was the wide end of a copper funnel with the sharp end finishing in a point no bigger than a pin—and beyond this a small drop of blue something-or-other within a localized gravitational field that kept it suspended in the air. Around the room was an array of computers covered with more dials, levers, switches and meters than I had ever seen before.

  “What exactly is it?” I asked, not unnaturally and with a certain degree of trepidation.

  “It’s the Large Textual Sieve Array,” he explained. “Although the construction and methodology of Textual Sieves remain generally unexplained, they can be used for a number of functions. Cross-triangulation searches, the ‘locking’ of text within books—and, more controversially, for making fictional people real, even if for only a short period.”

  “How long?”

  “I can send you out for forty-eight hours, but Bradshaw insisted you go for only twelve. As soon as that time is up, you’ll spontaneously return. We’ll send you in at midday, and you’ll be out at midnight—pumpkin hour. If you want to stay longer, you’ll have to Blue Fairy, but then you’re there for good and you’ll have to suffer the worst rigors of being real—aging, death and daytime television.

  The twelve-hour pumpkin option suited me fine, and I told him so. I’d heard many stories about the RealWorld, and although it sounded an interesting place to visit, you’d not want to live there.

  “So how does it work?” I asked.

  “Simplicity itself. You see this howitzer?”

  He pointed at a large-caliber cannon that was pointed directly at the sieves. It was mounted on a small carriage and was gaily decorated with red stars and had THE FLYING ZAMBINIS painted on the side.

  “You are placed in this cannon and then fired into the array at .346 Absurd speed. The mesh of the first sieve is quite broad, to break down your base description into individual words. The next breaks the words down into letters, and then the letters are divided further into subcalligraphic particles, until you hit the silver sheet, which has holes in it one-tenth the size of a polyptoton. After that,” he concluded as he tapped the large funnel, “your descriptive dust is compressed in the Pittmanizer to a concentrated pellet of ultradense prose, where the several thousand words of your description take up less space than one millionth of a period. Put it another way: If all Fiction were compressed to the same degree, it would take up the space of an average-size rabbit.”

  “I like comparative factoids like that.”

  “Me, too. This tiny speck of you is then injected at speed into a drop of AntiBook, where your essence is rebuilt into something closely resembling human. By controlling the Sieve Array, I can drop you wherever you want in the RealWorld.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Quite a lot, actually,” he admitted, “but only fleetingly. You’ll barely have enough time to scream before it will be over. The return is not so dramatic. You’ll simply find yourself in our arrivals suite, which is just behind that door.”

  “Do you have any advice?”

  “I’ve never been there myself,” confessed Plum, “but they say if you can handle the first ten minutes, you’re good for the whole twelve hours. If you can’t hack it, then just find a quiet wardrobe in which to hide until the free return brings you back.”

  I found his comments disconcerting.

  “What is there that one might not be able to handle?” Professor Plum made a clicky noise with his tongue. “It’s highly disorderly,” he explained, “not like here. There is no easily definable plot, and you can run yourself ragged wondering what the significance can be of a chance encounter. You’ll also find that for the most part there is no shorthand to the narrative, so everything happens in a long and painfully drawn-out sequence. Apparently the talk can be confusing—for the most part, people just say the first thing that comes into their heads.”

  “Is it as bad as they say it is?”

  “I’ve heard it’s worse. Here in the BookWorld, we say what needs to be said for the story to proceed. Out there? Well, you can discount at least eighty percent of chat as just meaningless drivel.”

  “I never thought the percentage was that high.”

  “In some individuals it can be as high as ninety-two percent. The people to listen to are the ones who don’t say very much.”

  “Oh.”

  “There are fun things, too,” said Plum, sensing my disappointment. “You’ll get used to it in the end, but if you go out there accepting that seventy-five percent of talk is utter twaddle and eighty-five percent of people’s lives are spent dithering around, you won’t go far wrong. But above all don’t be annoyed or distracted when random things happen for absolutely no purpose.”

  “There’s always a purpose,” I said, amused by the notion of utter pointlessness, “even if you don’t understand what it is until much later.”

  “That’s the big difference between here and there,” said Plum. “When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward.”

  I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. “Nope,” I said finally, “you’ve got me on that one.”

  “It confuses me, too,” admitted Plum, “but that’s the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives and mathematics. A lot of mathematics.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, astonished by the brevity in which Plum could sum up the world that had, after all, made us.

  “Pretty much,” he replied glumly. “And some very good cuisine. And the smells. You’ll like those, I assure you. And real sex—not like the oddly described stuff we have to make do with in here.”

  “I assure you I’m not going to the RealWorld for the sex.”

  “When tourism was permitted, many visitors used it for little else. Anything that is impossible to describe adequately in the BookWorld was much sought and, coincidentally, usually beginning with c: cooking, copulation, Caravaggio, coastlines and chocolate. Will you do me a favor and bring some back? I adore chocolate. As much as you can carry, in fact. And none of that Lindt or Nestlé muck—Cadbury’s the thing.”

  I promised him I would, and he opened the hatch at the back of the cannon.

  “Good luck,” he said
. “Don’t worry if it seems a bit odd to begin with. You’re made in the image of the flesh-and-bloods, so there’s nothing you can’t figure out as long as you keep your wits about you. It helps if you crouch tight, like a hedgehog. It’s why Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was so good at moving across.”

  I crawled inside and crunched myself up into the fetal position. Plum instructed me to hold my breath when he reached the count of two, as it helped to have a breath in you when you arrived, since breathing out can give a good indication of how breathing actually works. I thanked him for the advice, and he closed the hatch. I looked along the barrel of the cannon to the muzzle, and beyond that to the series of textual sieves that would chop me into the smallest component parts imaginable. I admit it, I was nervous. I waited for about a minute in the gloom, and then, when nothing had happened, I called out.

  “Sorry!” came Plum’s voice. “I’m just winding her up to speed. If I don’t get you to exactly .346 of Absurd Speed, all you’ll be is a tattered mass of text caught in the sieves. If I fire you too fast, you’ll be embedded in the back of the laboratory.”

  “What would happen then?”

  “Paper over you, I suppose.”

  I wasn’t particularly reassured by this but waited patiently for another half minute until I heard a faint whine that grew in pitch as Plum counted down from ten. When he got to five, the whine had grown so loud I could hardly hear him, so I guessed when two would be and took a deep breath. I was just thinking that perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea after all and I should really be getting back to my series and staying there for a sensible period of time—such as forever—when there was a noise like a thousand metallic frogs all croaking at the same time and my body was suddenly skewered by a thousand hot needles. Before I could cry out, the pain passed, and after a low hum and a sensation of treacle, Klein Blue and Wagner all mixed together but not very well, there was a brilliant flash of light.

  20.

  Alive!

  The “Alive” simulator at the BookWorld Conference is one of those devices that all characters should try at least once. The experience of being real has two purposes: firstly, to assist characters in their quest for a greater understanding of people and, secondly, to discourage characters from ever attempting to escape to the RealWorld. Most customers last ten minutes before hitting the panic button and being led shaken from the simulator.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (8th edition)

  I heard a gurgling sound, a heavy thumping and something odd in my nose that generated backstory memories I hadn’t had for a while—something about going for walks in the park when I was small. It was dark, too, and I felt a pain in my chest. I didn’t know what it was until, with a sound like a tornado, a hot gush of foul air erupted from within me and blew out of my mouth. Before I could recover from this shock, I spontaneously did the opposite and drew in an equally fast gush of air that cooled my teeth and tasted of pine needles.

  “It’s called breathing,” came a voice close at hand. “It’s very simple, and everyone does it. Just relax and go with the flow.”

  “I used to ‘take a breath’ and ‘exhale uneasily’ at home,” I managed to say, “but this is quite different.”

  “Those were merely descriptive terms intended to suggest a mood,” came the voice again, which sounded how I imagined a cheese straw might sound. “Here you are doing it to stay alive. Can you hear a thumping and a gushing noise, and a few rumbles, grunts, squeaks and growls?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s your body. The thumping is your heart. It’s all new to you, so it will fit oddly, like a new pair of shoes, but you’ll get used to it. Feel your wrist.”

  I did so and was surprised to note that my skin was warm, soft and ever so slightly tacky. It was also thumping. It was my pulse, and I was sweating. Not for any descriptive reasons but because I was alive. After a few minutes of doing nothing but breathing, I spoke again.

  “What’s that random sensation of memories I keep getting?”

  “It’s smells. They have a way of firing off recollections. No one knows why.”

  I didn’t understand and moved rapidly on. “Why can’t I see anything?”

  “You need to open your eyes.”

  So I did. I sat and blinked for some minutes. The view was quite astonishing, not only in range but in detail. I had been used to seeing only what was relevant within a scene. Back home, anything extra would have been unnecessary and was a pasty shade of magnolia with the texture of uncooked dough. Here there was everything, in all directions, in full color and in full detail. Several books’ worth of description was just sitting there, with no one except me to revel in its glorious detail. The trees swayed ever so gently in the breeze, and the clouds moved slowly across the heavens. It was summer, and the flower beds had erupted in a sumptuous palette of color, while on the air were delicate tastes of cooking and garbage and rain and earth. I could hear stuff, too, except not one thing at a time, but all things at all times. The delicate symphony of sounds that reached my ears so heaped together that it was difficult to separate anything out at all, and I sat there quite numbed by the overload of sensations.

  “How do they filter it out?” I asked.

  “Humans filter well,” said the voice. “In fact, they can filter out almost anything. Sound, vision, smells, love, anger, passion, reason. Everything except hunger and thirst, cold and hot. No need to hurry. Take your time.”

  I sat there for an hour, attempting to make sense of the world, and I did reasonably well, all things considered. In that time I managed to figure out I was sitting on a bench in a small and well-kept park hemmed in by redbrick houses on every side. There was a children’s play area, a pond, a flower bed and two trees, both silver birch. A main road was to one side, and on a building opposite were two billboards. One was advertising the Goliath Corporation’s supposed good work on behalf of the community, and the other promoted “Daphne Farquitt Day” on Friday, which began with a celebration of her works and ended with a Farquitt Readathon. It was a name I recognized, or course. The popularity of the romance author dictated that she had a genre all her own.

  “It’s beautiful!” I said at last. “I could stay here and watch the clouds for the whole twelve hours alone!”

  “Many do,” came the voice again.

  I looked around. Aside from an impertinent squirrel foraging on the grass, I was entirely alone.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “And why can’t I see you?”

  “Bradshaw asked me to keep an eye on you,” came the voice. “The name’s Square—Agent Square. If you want to know why you can’t see me, it’s because I’m from Flatland and bounded in only two dimensions. At the moment I’m presenting my edge to you. Since I have no thickness, I am effectively invisible. Watch.”

  A line a half inch thick and two feet long appeared in the air quite near me. The line separated and opened out into a thin rectangle, which broadened until it was a square, hanging in the air.

  “How do you do?” I said.

  “Oh, can’t complain,” said Square. “A spot of trapezoidism in this chill weather, but hey-ho. I worked with the real Thursday several times. Do you really look like her?”

  “You can’t see, then?”

  “Since I am only two-dimensional,” said Agent Square, “I can see the world only as a series of infinitely thin slices, like a ham. May I approach and have a look?”

  Square moved closer. Out of curiosity I put my hand inside the area bounded by his vertices, and a soft bluish light gave me four rings around my fingers.

  “Four disks is all I can see,” said Square. “Viewing one dimension up is always a bit confusing. Mind you, for you people bounded in three dimensions, it’s no different.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Time,” said Square, “is your next dimension, so to anyone in the RealWorld it appears as your third spatial dimension does to me—a thin slice in plain view but with the abstract notions of ‘forward’
and ‘beyond’ unseeable. May I?”

  Square approached me and then tilted to a narrow rectangle, again became a line, vanished and then reappeared again. It was as though he were tilting in front of me in order, I assumed, to allow his two-dimensional frame of reference to scan my features. Once satisfied, Square withdrew.

  “Spooky!” he said. “You do look just like her. What’s the mission?”

  “To find Thursday.”

  “Nothing hard, then.”

  I moved to stand up, but everything felt funny, so I sat down again.

  “Why does my face feel all draggy?” I asked. “The underneath of my arms, too, and my boobs—everything feels all . . . well, weighted down.”

  “That’ll be gravity,” said Square with a sigh.

  “We have gravity in the BookWorld,” I said. “It’s not like this.”

  “No, we just talk as though gravity existed. There’s a huge difference. In the BookWorld, gravity is simply useful. Here it is the effect of mass upon space-time. It would be manageable if it were constant, but it isn’t. Acceleration forces can give one a localized gravitational effect that is quite disconcerting. If you’re here for only twelve hours, I’d stay well clear of trains, elevators, airplanes and cars. Very odd, I’m told, although I don’t notice it myself. By the way, do you have a timer on your watch? You’re here for just twelve hours, remember.”

  I looked at my watch, which had nothing but hands and a face. “No.”

  “You’ll get used to that, too. If this were the BookWorld, you’d have one of those watches that counts down from twelve hours to add some suspense. Believe me, the plot in this world takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve not done anything for Bradshaw for six months. That’s nothing in the BookWorld, barely half a dozen words. Out here it really is six months. Hell’s teeth! The boredom. There’s a limit to how much reality TV one can watch, although it’s become a lot easier for me since they brought in flat-screens. Now, what do you want to know first?”