Jasper Fforde - Early Riser

‘That’s Wendy,’ said Dr Gwynne, indicating the nightwalker. ‘She’s helping me with my nightwalker retrieval experiments.’

‘How’s that working out?’ I asked.

‘Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive,’ replied Dr Gwynne. ‘Have you met Josh? He’s a recent acquisition.’

I turned, and sitting on a wicker chair was the receptionist from HiberTech. He was reading a book and chuckling occasionally.

‘Josh defected from HiberTech,’ said Foulnap, ‘and brought Wendy with him. Coffee?’

I said that would be very welcome and he told me to have a look around, so I walked over to Josh.

‘Oh, hullo, Worthing,’ he said in a cheery manner. ‘How are things?’

‘Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass.’

He laughed, told me that weather forecasts were often wrong, and showed me a pencil that was sharpened on both ends.

‘I call it the “Twincil”,’ he said. ‘Always a problem breaking the lead, right? Now all you have to do is turn it around and – bam – keep on drawing.’

‘It’s kind of useful having an eraser on the other end.’

‘I thought of that too,’ he said, producing a pencil with the eraser on both ends. ‘This is the “Biraser”. You can make twice as many mistakes, and unlike a conventional pencil, it never gets any shorter. What do you think?’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just have two pencils?’

He stared at me for a moment, blinked twice then handed me an after-dinner mint.

‘What do you make of this?’

‘It tastes just like an After Eight mint,’ I said, suddenly realising how hungry I was.

‘To the casual observer, yes. But in reality it’s an after-dinner mint mint – to eat after you’ve eaten your after-dinner mint. I call it an After After Eight.’

‘Do people like after-dinner mints that much?’

Josh looked thoughtful for a moment, then said quite simply: ‘I do.’

‘Here,’ said Foulnap, handing me a coffee and a plate of shortbread, which I ate hungrily.

‘So, Josh,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘tell Worthing here what you told us.’

‘Not much to tell,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know the precise details, only that Project Lazarus aims to have everyone on Morphenox.’

‘That’s been a stated aim for over thirty years,’ I said.

‘This goes one step beyond. Morphenox-B will be marketed as a slightly cheaper alternative, but carries a higher-than-normal propensity for sleepers to become nightwalkers. Quite aside from the greatly increased revenue on drug sales, there will be a large resource ready to be redeployed and rented out as a hugely profitable and uncomplaining workforce. Nightwalkers will be collected directly from Dormitoria and taken straight to redeployment centres so there can be no chance the truth will come out.’

We were all silent for a few moments.

‘How do you know this?’ I asked.

‘Receptionists know everything ,’ he said simply, ‘and d’you know, all of this is so fundamentally wrong . I have little expectation that I’ll live to see the Spring, but if I can help bring down Greedy Pharma, I’m so going to take it.’

He fell silent, then suddenly piped up: ‘Might this make me RealSleep’s Employee of the Week? I’ve been the EOTW for sixty-two weeks running, and it would be a shame to break my record.’

Foulnap said he would see to it personally, and we left Josh to his somewhat eclectic thought processes. We settled in another part of the room, while outside the wind blew around the museum’s rotunda with low moans, whistles and shrieks.

‘So,’ said Foulnap once we were seated, ‘I know you don’t have the cylinder on you, so we need to formulate a plan to retrieve it. But first: tell us your story from the very beginning.’

‘I’m not sure I know where to start.’

‘You’ll know the beginning easily enough; it’s when it all started going weird.’

It took me almost forty minutes to tell my story, and throughout that time Foulnap and Dr Gwynne stared at me, nodding quietly. When I’d finished they paused for a while, gathering their thoughts.

‘Tell us what happened when you played the cylinder again?’ asked Dr Gwynne.

I repeated how I had seen the gathered nightwalkers’ partial retrieval in the Cambrensis . The doctor was fascinated by the notion that retrieval could be accomplished by a collection of well-chosen words.

‘Did they rhyme?’ he asked.

‘They sort of rhymed,’ I said.

‘Then I think chosen not for their actual meaning,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘but for their rhythm, cadence and associative function – a subconscious therapy. It explains the partial recovery you observed.’

‘We might need a Somnagraph to effect a full retrieval,’ said Foulnap.

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ I said, now realising that Shamanic Bob and his wild conspiracy theories didn’t actually go far enough . ‘Why were my dreams identical each time?’

‘The Somnagraph is a device that records dreams on a wax cylinder,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘and was originally devised by Thomas Edison in an odd collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Edison famously recorded a woman dreaming of a cat in 1904 and then played it back to a drowsy audience of politicians and the military, who were astounded. As you saw, it’s not just the pictures and sounds but an entire sense of being. You take on their character, remember their memories, feel their passion, their hate, their fears, their frustration.’

‘I felt the love Webster felt for Birgitta,’ I said slowly, ‘and through him, the love that she felt back.’

‘Do you still feel it?’

‘Yes.’

‘And that’s the problem with continued overexposure to Somnagraph-induced dreams: the emotional memories have a way of flooding into your waking hours, causing reality confusion until you have no idea what’s real and what isn’t.’

‘Moody, Roscoe and Suzy Watson,’ I murmured. ‘They had it night after night. And then nearly me.’

‘Bingo. People go insane in the Winter, and yelling about hands and Mrs Nesbit is random enough to not raise any suspicions. HiberTech recorded Don Hector’s dreams and then used the residents of the ninth floor of the Siddons as disposable assets to try and figure out what he did with the cylinder. And by using Dream Avatar technology in the form of Mrs Nesbit to communicate, there was no risk to HiberTech, and every risk to the subject.’

‘But all without much luck, right?’

‘Right,’ said Foulnap, ‘because Don Hector trained himself to dream only the one dream – and spiked it with a nightmare to dissuade anyone from poking around.’

‘The hands.’

‘Yes, the hands.’

‘From the scraps of information available to us,’ continued Foulnap, ‘we think Don Hector discovered an improved Morphenox-C that didn’t generate nightwalkers at all. By then, the redeployment and transplant industries were booming, and HiberTech management really weren’t interested. We figure he decided to go public with what he knew, recorded nightwalker extraction protocols on the cylinder and was trying to get it out until his death – and beyond.’