Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

I was pointing to what looked like a trilby hat made from brass and covered in wires and lights.

‘Oh yes,’ said my uncle, ‘this I think you will like.’

He placed the brass hat on my head and flicked a large switch. There was a humming noise.

‘Is something meant to happen?’ I asked.

‘Close your eyes and breathe deeply. Try to empty your mind of any thoughts.’

I closed my eyes and waited patiently.

‘Is it working?’ asked Mycroft.

‘No,’ I replied, then added: ‘Wait!’ as a stickleback swam past. ‘I can see a fish. Here, in front of my eyes. Wait, there’s another!’

And so there was. Pretty soon I was staring at a whole host of brightly coloured fish all swimming in front of my closed eyes. They were on about a five-second loop; every now and then they jumped back to the starting place and repeated their action.

‘Remarkable!’

‘Stay relaxed or it will go,’ said Mycroft in a soothing voice. ‘Try this one.’

There was a blur of movement and the scene shifted to an inky-black starfield; it seemed as though I were travelling through space.

‘Or how about this?’ asked Mycroft, changing the scene to a parade of flying toasters. I opened my eyes and the image evaporated. Mycroft was looking at me earnestly.

‘Any good?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out of the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!— you’re back in the real world again.’

I handed back the hat.

‘Should sell well at SmileyBurger. When do you hope to market it?’

‘It’s not really ready yet; there are a few problems I haven’t quite fixed.’

‘Such as what?’ I asked, slightly suspiciously.

‘Close your eyes and you’ll see.’

I did as he asked and a fish swam by. I blinked again and could see a toaster. Clearly, this needed some work.

‘Don’t worry,’ he assured me. ‘They will have gone in a few hours.’

‘I preferred the Olfactroscope.’

‘You haven’t seen anything yet!’ said Mycroft, skipping nimbly up to a large work desk covered by tools and bits of machinery. ‘This device is probably my most amazing discovery ever. It is the culmination of thirty years’ work and incorporates biotechnology at the very cutting edge of science. When you find out what this is, I promise you, you’ll flip!’

He pulled a tea towel off a goldfish bowl with a flourish and showed me what appeared to be a large quantity of fruitfly larvae.

‘Maggots?’

Mycroft smiled.

‘Not maggots, Thursday, bookworms!’

He said the word with such a bold and proud flourish that I thought I must have missed something.

‘Is that good?’

‘It’s very good, Thursday. These worms might look like a tempting snack for Mr Trout, but each one of these little fellows has enough new genetic sequencing to make the code embedded in your pet dodo look like a note to the milkman!’

‘Hold on a sec, Uncle,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you have your Splicence revoked after that incident with the prawns?’

‘A small misunderstanding,’ he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘Those fools at SpecOps 11 have no idea of the value of my work.’

‘Which is—?’ I asked, ever curious.

‘Ever smaller methods of storing information. I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm’s small body. I call them “HyperBookworms”. I think you’ll agree that it’s a remarkable achievement.’

‘I agree. But how would you access this information?’

Mycroft’s face fell.

‘As I said, a remarkable achievement with one small drawback. However, events ran ahead of themselves; some of my worms escaped and bred with others that had been encoded with a complete set of encyclopaedic, historical and biographical reference manuals; the result was a new strain I named HyperBookwormDoublePlusGood. These chaps are the real stars of the show.’

He pulled a sheet of paper from a drawer, tore off a corner and wrote the word ‘remarkable’ on the small scrap.

‘This is just to give you a taster of what these creatures can do.’

So saying, he dropped the piece of paper into the goldfish bowl. The worms wasted no time and quickly surrounded the small scrap. But instead of eating it they merely conglomerated around it, squirmed excitedly and explored the interloper with apparent great interest.

‘I had a wormery back in London, Uncle, and they didn’t like paper either—‘

‘Shh!’ murmured my uncle, and beckoned me closer to the worms.

Amazing!

‘What is?’ I asked, somewhat perplexed; but as soon as I looked at Mycroft’s smiling face I realised it wasn’t him speaking.

Astonishing! said the voice again in a low murmur. Incredible! Astounding! Stunning!

I frowned and looked at the worms, which had gathered themselves into a small ball around the scrap of paper and were pulsating gently.

Wonderful! mumbled the bookworms. Extraordinary! Fantastic!

‘What do you think?’ asked Mycroft.

‘Thesaurean maggots—Uncle, you never cease to amaze me!’

But Mycroft was suddenly a lot more serious.

‘It’s more than just a bio-thesaurus, Thursday. These little chaps can do things that you will scarce believe.’

He opened a cupboard and pulled out a large leather book with ‘PP’ embossed on the spine in gold letters. The casing was richly decorated and featured heavy brass securing straps. On the front were several dials and knobs, valves and knife switches. It certainly looked impressive, but not all Mycroft’s devices had a usefulness mutually compatible with their looks. In the early seventies he had developed an extraordinarily beautiful machine that did nothing more exciting than predict with staggering accuracy the number of pips in an unopened orange.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘This,’ began Mycroft, smiling all over and puffing out his chest with pride, ‘is a—‘

But he never got to finish. At that precise moment Polly announced ‘Supper!’ from the door and Mycroft quickly ran out, muttering something about how he hoped it was snorkers and telling me to switch off the lights on my way out. I was left alone in his empty workshop. Truly, Mycroft had surpassed himself.

Dazzling! agreed the bookworms.

Supper was a friendly affair. We all had a lot of catching up to do, and my mother had a great deal to tell me about the Women’s Federation.

‘We raised almost seven thousand pounds last year for ChronoGuard orphans,’ she said.

‘That’s very good,’ I replied. ‘SpecOps is always grateful for the contributions, although to be fair there are other divisions worse off than the ChronoGuard.’

‘Well, I know,’ replied my mother, ‘but it’s all so secret. What do all of them do?’

‘Believe me, I have no more idea than you. Can you pass the fish?’

‘There isn’t any fish,’ observed my aunt. ‘You haven’t been using your niece as a guinea-pig have you, Crofty?’

My uncle pretended not to hear; I blinked and the fish vanished.

‘The only other one I know under SO-20 is SO-6,’ added Polly. ‘That was National Security. We only know that because they all looked after Mycroft so well.’

She nudged him in the ribs but he didn’t notice; he was busy figuring out a recipe for unscrambled eggs on a napkin.