Jasper Fforde - The Well of Lost Plots

There was a roar of applause; he was offering everything they wanted to hear, buying the inhabitants of the BookWorld with hollow promises.

Tweed spoke into his mobile footnoterphone.

'Miss Next wants to have her say.'

I saw Libris touch his ear and turn round to stare at me contemptuously.

'But before the vote,' he added, 'before you say the word and we move upwards into broad sunlit pastures, I understand we have a Jurisfiction agent who wants to offer a counterpoint to my statement. This is her right. It is your right to ask for proof if you wish — and I most strongly request that you do so. Ladies and gentlemen, things — Miss Thursday Next!'

I murmured into my mobile footnoterphone.

'Go, Mimi, go!' [25]

Everyone in the Starlight Room reacted slightly to the distant explosion. Tweed steadied himself and spun round to glare at me.

'What was that?'

I patted him patronisingly on the shoulder.

'It's called levelling the playing field, Harris.'

Hamlet and Jude Fawley exchanged glances and shrugged their shoulders as I walked up the steps and looked out at the crowd. Heathcliff, for whom all of this was merely delaying his moment of honour, glowered at me angrily. Oddly, I didn't feel at all nervous — only a sort of numb elation. I would do some serious throwing up in the toilets later, but for now I was fine.

'Good evening,' I said to the utterly silent audience. 'No one would deny that we need more plots, but there are one or two things about UltraWord™ that you should know.'

'Grand Central?!' said Tweed uselessly into his mobile footnoter-phone. 'Tweed to Text Grand Central, come in, please!'

I didn't have long. As soon as TGC knew what had happened they could write themselves another footnoterphone link.

'First, there are no new plots. In all the testing that has been done, not one has been described or hinted at. Libris, would you care to outline a "new" plot now?'

'They won't be available until UltraWord™ is online,' he said, glaring at Tweed, who was still trying to contact Text Grand Central.

'Then they are untested. Second,' I went on, 'UltraWord™ carries a thrice-read-only feature. This means no more book lending. Libraries will close down overnight, second-hand bookshops will be a thing of the past. Words can educate and liberate — but TGC want to make them a saleable commodity and nothing more.'

The crowd started to murmur to one another. Not one of those murmurs you usually get in the BookWorld, just a descriptive term, but a real murmur — seven million people all discussing what I had just said.

'Orlick!' I heard Tweed shout. 'Get to TGC — run if you have to — and get the footnoterphone repaired!'

'This is preposterous!' yelled Libris, almost apoplectic with rage. 'Lies, damnable lies!'

'Here,' I said, tossing Deane's copy of The Little Prince on to the table right at the front. The displacement field technology worked perfectly — a single book landed on each of the hundred thousand tables.

'This is an UltraWord™ book,' I explained. 'Read the first page and pass it on. See how long it takes before you can't open it.'

'Tweed!?' yelled Libris, who was still next to me on the stage and becoming more agitated by the second. 'Do something!'

I pointed at Xavier.

'WordMaster Libris could refute my arguments with ease, simply by rewriting the facts. He could have unblocked the book already but for one thing — all the lines are down to Text Grand Central. As soon as they are up again, each of these books will be unblocked. Perkins was murdered when he found out what they were up to. He told Snell and he was killed too. Miss Havisham didn't know but TGC suspected that she did, so she had to be silenced.'

The Bellman had risen to his feet and was walking to the front of the stage.

'Is this true?' he asked, eyes blazing.

'No, Your Bellship,' replied Libris, 'on my honour. As soon as we get back online we will refute every single claim the misinformed Miss Next has made!'

The Bellman looked at me.

'Better get a move on, young lady. You have the crowd but for how long I have no idea.'

'Third, and more importantly, all books written using the UltraWord™ system can be fixed direct from Text Grand Central — there will be no need for Jurisfiction. Everything we do can be achieved by low-skilled technicians at TGC.'

'Ah!' said Libris, interrupting. 'Now we get to your real point — fearful of your job, perhaps?'

'Not my job, Libris — my real home is in the Outland. I would applaud a BookWorld in which we had no need of a policing agency — but not one where we lose the Well of Lost Plots!'

There was a gasp from the crowd; seven million people all drawing breath at the same time.

'No need for plotsmiths, echolocators, imaginators, holesmiths, grammatacists and spellcheckers. No need for Generics to be trained because characters will be constructed with the minimum of description necessary to do the job. I'm talking about the wholesale destruction of everything that is intuitive in writing — to be replaced by the formulaic. The Well would be dismantled and run instead by a few technicians at TGC who will get Ultra Word™ to write books with no input from any of you.'

'Then what will happen to us?' said a voice from the front.

'Replaced,' I said simply, 'replaced by a string of nouns and verbs. No hopes, no dreams, no future. No more holidays because you won't need or want one — you will all be reduced to nothing more than words on a page, lifeless as the ink and paper that you will become.'

There was silence.

'Proof!' cried Libris. 'All you have demonstrated so far is that you can spin a yarn as well as any plotsmith! Where is your proof?'

'Very well,' I said slowly. 'Mrs Bradshaw? The skylark, if you please.'

Mrs Bradshaw produced the small cage from beneath the table and handed it up to me.

'I have seen an UltraWord™ character with my own eyes and they are empty husks; if an old book is read in UltraWord™ it is very good — but if it is written in UltraWord™ it will be flat and trite, devoid of feeling, the SmileyBurger of the storytelling world. The Well may be wasteful and long winded, but every book read in the Outland was built there — even the greats.'

I took the skylark from the cage.

'This was the proof that Perkins died for.

I placed the small songbird beneath the ImaginoTransference device and the skylark's description was transmitted to the audience.