Jasper Fforde - The Woman Who Died a Lot

“Did you take these synthetics to the police?”

“The police are run by Goliath. I have a feeling we’d be wasting our time.”

“I see. And where are those Synthetics now?”

I stared at him thoughtfully. Although the Homo syntheticus were wholly artificial, they appeared sentient. If they were shown to be legally equivalent to neanderthals, we could be convicted of murder. If they were deemed illegally spliced chimeras, we were in no trouble at all—and could even claim a bounty by presenting an eyelid as proof. I decided to play it safe.

“I have no idea of their precise whereabouts.”

He stared at me for a moment, attempting to gauge if this idea could be real or was only a complex delusion.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m going to make you a NUT-2: ‘generally sane.’ Seven Thursdays? Interesting.”

It was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough.

“There weren’t seven,” I said quickly. “There were ten.”

“Ten?”

I counted them out on my fingers. “Six synthetics, two fictional Thursdays, me and my gran, who wasn’t actually my gran— just a version of me that I thought was my gran, hiding in our present rather than hers. She had to spend the last twenty years of her life in gingham and read the ten most boring classics.”

“I’m sure there was a good reason.”

“Because she—I—changed the ending of Jane Eyre. It was an Illegal Narrative Flexation; they would have liked to let me off, but the law is the law. Oh, perhaps I should have added that for much of my career I’ve worked for Jurisfiction. It’s a sort of policing agency in the BookWorld, the realm that exists beyond the other side of the printed page.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Many times. I can read my way across, or at least I could before the accident. My mentor was Miss Havisham, who was terrific so long as you didn’t mention the wedding, and Emperor Zhark, who is a barrel of laughs when he’s not subjugating entire star systems in his tyrannical and inadequately explained quest for galactic domination.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Remember how two weeks went missing out of Samuel Pepys’s diary a few years back? That was me having an off day.”

I continued in this vein for a while, outlining various adventures I’d had in the BookWorld. I talked about the ongoing metaphor shortage, Speedy Muffler, the witheringly tiresome internal politics at the Council of Genres, about imaginotransference engines, UltraWord, Commander Bradshaw’s gorilla wife, Melanie, and the first time I was attacked by grammasites. I ended with an account of the reason for my current physical state during an assassination attempt in a quiet corner of the Thriller genre and how Red Herring had been responsible.

“Was Red Herring a red herring?” asked Chumley in some confusion.

“No,” I replied reflectively, “but his name was. By calling Red Herring Red Herring, it made people think that he couldn’t be a red herring as it was too obvious, so his name—Red Herring— then became the red herring when we found out he wasn’t a red herring. Simple, yes?”

“No.”

“I agree it’s complicated,” I said with a shrug. “Working in fiction does gives one a somewhat tenuous hold on reality, but it’s not the hold that’s tenuous—it’s the reality: Which reality? Whose reality? Does it matter anyway? And will there be cake?” “And was there?”

“Was there what?”

“Cake.”

“Generally speaking, yes.”

Dr. Chumley rubbed his temples. “I think I preferred Spike’s sharpened spade earlier. At least that had a sort of uncomplicated creeping menace about it. The BookWorld? It’s all very confusing.”

“I’ve spent most of my life confused,” I replied. “You get used to it after a while. There’s a lot to be said about merely having a hazy idea of what’s going on but generally reaching the right outcome by following broad policy outlines. In fact, I’ve a sneaky suspicion that it’s the only way of getting things done. Once the horror and unpredictability of unintended consequences gets a hold, even the best-intentioned and noblest of plans generally descend to mayhem, confusion and despair.”

“I see,” said Dr. Chumley, tearing off another certificate and scrunching it up. “I’m going to lower you to a NUT-3: ‘mildly aberrant behavior with occasional long stretches of lucidity.’”

It still wasn’t enough.

“So the whole BookWorld thing doesn’t make me nuts?” I asked, semisarcastically.

“We do try to avoid that particular word when making a diagnosis in our profession,” said Dr. Chumley with a sigh, “but sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of doorknobs. Where does that put me and my profession? Trying to sort out the real nutjobs from the partial nutjobs? Or just in a state of muddled damage limitation?”

He took another deep breath and slumped facedown on the table.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you that. We’re really just meant to nod and say things like ‘Aha’ and ‘Go on’ and ‘How does that make you feel?’ It would have helped me a lot more if Spike had told me he baked novelty cakes rather than killed the undead. And no, it doesn’t make you nuts—as you suggest, it might actually be true.”

Damn. He partially believed me.

“Before I worked here,” he said with another sigh, “I would certainly have thought you dangerously delusional, but the SpecOps standards of reality are pretty broad. Here’s an example: I had Captain Henshaw of the Odd Squad in here yesterday. But it wasn’t our Captain Henshaw, it was Captain Henshaw F76+, apparently on an important trade delegation from Reality-F76+, where everything is pretty much identical to here—only everyone has two heads.”

“That’s a bigger and more bizarre claim than the BookWorld?”

“Not really, because Henshaw F76+actually had two heads.”

“Did he argue with himself? I always wondered about that.”

“Quite a lot actually— that’s why he came to see me. But there they were. Two heads. So, you see, what you say might actually be true. Might not be. But might. There you have it. NUT-3.”

It wasn’t going well. I had lose that extra ranking. NUT-4 or nothing.

“I have something else I need to share,” I said.

“Yes?” replied Dr. Chumley from where he was still resting facedown on the table.

“Yes. I . . . think I’m pregnant with an elephant.”

“An elephant?” he asked, lifting his face from the table to stare at me.

“Yes—foisted on me by an overamorous server at Greggs.”

He shook his head sadly. “Now I know you’re trying to pull a fast one. Everyone uses the ‘pregnant with an elephant’ gambit to be downranked. I think Victor Analogy used it first.”

He smiled triumphantly and pulled the pad of certificates toward him again.

“You’re a NUT-3, my girl, and nothing you can say will change my mind.”

“What about the fact that I think my mother was a snail named Andrew?”

“ NUT-3,” he said firmly, and continued to write.

“That I have a dodo named Pickwick, who is the oldest in existence?”

“Perfectly plausible,” he replied.

“How about the fact that my son would have been given the job of ChronoGuard director general due to his expert handling of Asteroid HR-6984 that hasn’t happened?”

Dr. Chumley looked up at me and smiled. “Listen,” he said, “if you give me any more of that ‘pretending to be mad’ act, I’ll disregard all that BookWorld stuff and you’ll be upgraded back to a NUT-2.”

Blast. Foiled.