Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘Goodbye, Worthing. I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure – but I can’t.’

I paused. Sure, this was a far riskier place than Cardiff what with volatile Chief Consuls, homicidal HiberTech agents, Wintervolk and the subzero temperatures. But I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be. Besides, there was Birgitta. Sure, she might be only three jam doughnuts from turning cannibal, but she was still my responsibility.

‘I’d like to stay, ma’am.’

Toccata’s eyebrow twitched.

‘You don’t want to be in Sector Twelve, I don’t want you in Sector Twelve. You’re a liability and a wild card and trouble seems to follow you like a homesick spaniel. And you’re bundling with Aurora, and no one who ever did that came to anything but grief.’

‘No, really, I feel at home here. First time since leaving the Pool. First time ever .’

‘You’re breaking my heart. Okay, let me spell it out: you’re fired. You’ve been lucky so far, but that’s going to run out, and when it does you’ll be taking good agents with you.’

She sat in her chair and stared up at me with her good eye, while the other contorted in its socket.

‘You’re done. We’re done. Go.’

I walked to the door, the heady buzz of comradeship I’d felt so strongly that morning now cracked and forlorn.

But I had an idea, and turned back.

‘You’re still here,’ she said, not looking up from her desk.

‘I think you should know,’ I said, ‘I was offered a job at HiberTech this morning.’

She slowly looked up at me and a red flush spread rapidly across her neck and cheeks. Any last vestige of friendliness she might have had seemed to vanish.

‘You wonky-faced piece of crap. You’re kidding me, right?’

‘No,’ I said, as innocently as I could. ‘Two-year contract, cash signing bonus, free puddings, apartment facing the quad – and a Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut allocation.’

‘I don’t know why they want you there, but it’s not for your charm, looks or experience. They’ll use you, spit you out spent. Working for HiberTech would be the worst career move you’ll ever make – and the last.’

‘You’re right,’ I replied, somewhat daringly, ‘I don’t want to work there. I want to stay in Sector Twelve, but if that’s the only option open to me, I’ll take it.’

Toccata put her pen down, leaned back in her chair and stared at me.

‘Well, I’ll be,’ she said, ‘you just played me. No one has ever dared play me.’ She looked almost impressed. ‘Okay, have it your own way: you’ve got a job. Filing duties for the next ninety-one days, inside the Consulate – and demoted from Deputy to Novice. There’ll be latrine duty in it somewhere, and you can do everyone’s washing and ironing. Pretty soon you’ll beg to go and work for Dowager Farnesworth. Okay, now piss off. Hang on, wait, one more thing.’

She got up, walked around the desk and punched me in the eye.

‘ That’s for lying earlier.’

I got to my feet and she punched me a second time in the same place.

‘And that’s for bundling this morning with Aurora when you said you wouldn’t.’

I left the office, head spinning, but at least clear on two points: firstly, that I was getting better at dealing with the Winter, and secondly, that the tongue-coming-out warning had indeed been an empty threat.

‘How did that go?’ asked Jonesy when she found me holding a cold compress to my eye in the washrooms.

‘I was told to leave, said I didn’t want to, was fired, reinstated then demoted to Novice. But I played her so I think she now respects me.’

‘Is that why she punched you in the eye?’

‘No, that was for lying and bundling with Aurora.’

‘That’s true, then?’

‘No.’

‘You’ll be fine,’ she said, patting me on the arm and chuckling. ‘Toccata beat me so hard with a broom handle when I first arrived that I had concussion for a week. It’s just kind of her thing.’

‘I wish she would find some other thing.’

I went to look for Laura in the filing room, and when she saw me she offered me a seat at one of the desks.

‘So, tell me about the Gronk,’ she said excitedly, drawing up a chair herself. ‘Did you actually see her?’

I repeated the story with as much detail as I could, which wasn’t much. I’d been unconscious from the moment she arrived to the moment she left. Laura made notes, and nodded vigorously at the smallest detail, but when I’d finished she looked disappointed. It wasn’t the slam dunk she’d been hoping for.

‘So no pictures?’ she asked.

‘Not a single one.’

‘Treacle has already dismissed it as Hibernational Narcosis,’ she said with a sigh, ‘ yours . He thinks you killed Lucky Ned and are now blanking it from your mind.’

‘Do I look like the sort of person who would bite off a finger?’

‘You bit off Gary Findlay’s ear.’

‘You heard about that?’

‘No secrets in the Twelve.’

‘So I’ve realised.’

She fell silent for a moment and stared at the floor. I looked around the room. My accelerated course at the Academy hadn’t included filing duties.

‘How does this work?’ I asked.

Laura, who seemed not to be able to feel down for more than a few moments, told me she loved filing owing to its ‘simple elegance’ and instructed me, with a worryingly high level of enthusiasm, how things should be done. Not the best or most logical way, but the SkillZero way – simple enough for everyone to use, yet complex enough to function efficiently as a usable database – and easily understandable by anyone with a pass in General Skills.

‘Shamanic Bob mentioned something called Active Control Dreaming,’ I said while we were laboriously updating minor details to the individual cards, and by a complicated series of notches and holes, allowing them to be cross-referenced in an ingenious manner.

‘Active Control is like Zebricorns and the missing 14th Ottoman,’ said Laura. ‘Myths with their roots in reality. Sure, Don Hector and HiberTech were looking into dreams you can control, but it’s difficult to gauge what success they had. After all, it’s possible you only dreamed you were controlling them.’

‘And Dreamspace?’ I asked.

‘Meeting inside dreams? Even more far-fetched. Anecdotally there were a few successes mixed heavily with an abundance of failure, but it’s a difficult area of research. Messing around with the hibernatory subconscious was never a risk-free occupation. There were stories of psychotic episodes, spontaneous sleepdeath, people supposedly trapped in the Dreamstate, stuff like that. Fortean Times talked about little else in the seventies.’

‘Trapped in the Dreamspace?’ I asked, and Laura looked at me, then shrugged.

‘It’s never been explained how the mind can return from deep hibernation; some say that the personality goes elsewhere. To a Dreamstate somewhere outside the body, perhaps – absorbed into the walls and furniture and plants.’

‘A state of displaced consciousness,’ I said, repeating what I’d heard Don Hector say in my dream. He’d been dead for two years, yet I felt part of his personality in me, alive.

‘Ghosts could be explained this way,’ said Laura, ‘and Wintervolk. An orphaned consciousness returning periodically using the power of another sleeper’s thoughts.’

At any other time I would have dismissed this as utter nonsense.

‘Lloyd thought the Gronk might be somehow related to Ichabod’s murdered daughter,’ I said.

‘I heard that too. Want to see a picture of her?’

‘Sure.’