As little as two months ago, I would have been waved across with nary a glance, but the heightened security risk due to the potentially inflammable political situation up at Racy Novel had made everyone jumpy.
I took a TransGenre Taxi as far as the Legal part of Thriller, then continued on foot. I took a left turn by The Firm and picked my way along a weed-covered path and across a plank that spanned a ditch of brackish water, the best method to get into Conspiracy without being waylaid by deluded theorists, who always wanted to explain in earnest terms that President Formby was murdered by President Redmond van de Poste, that bestselling author Colwyn Baye was far too handsome and clever and charming to be anything other than an android or a reptile or an alien or all three.
I took a left turn at the Lone Gunman pub, and walked past a hangar full of advanced flying machines that all displayed a swastika, then entered a shantytown that was home to theories that lived right on the edge of Conspiracy due to a sense of overtired outrageousness. This was where the Protocols lived, along with alien abductions, 9/11 deniers and the notion that FDR somehow knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I had hoped I might tread unnoticed within the genre, but I was mistaken. Despite avoiding eye contact, I was spotted by a wildlooking loon with hair that stuck out in every direction.
“There’s no such thing as time,” he confided, with an unwavering sense of belief in his own assertions. “It’s simply a construct designed by a cabal of financiers eager to sell us pensions, life insurance and watches in their pursuit of a global, timepiece-marketing agenda.”
“Really?” I asked, which is probably the only answer to anything in Conspiracy.
“Definitely. And the seal is not a mammal—it’s an insect. The truth has been suppressed by the BBC and Richard Attenborough, who want to promote a global mammalcentric agenda.”
“Don’t you mean David Attenborough?”
“So you agree?” he said, eyes opening so wide I was suddenly worried I might see his brain. “Would you like to stone a robot?”
“What?”
“Stone a robot. Just one of the first generation of mechanical men, designed to be placed amongst us in order to take over the planet and promote a clockwork, global cogcentric agenda.”
“I’m not really into stoning anyone.”
“Oh, well,” said the theorist as he picked a rock off the ground. “Suit yourself.”
And he walked off. Intrigued and somewhat concerned, I followed him to New World Order Plaza, where a small crowd had gathered. They were an odd bunch that comprised everything from small gray aliens to reptilian shape-shifters, Men in Black, Elvises, lost cosmonauts and a smattering of Jimmy Hoffa/Lord Lucan secret genetic hybrids. They were arranged in a semicircle around a tall man dressed in a perfectly starched frock coat, striped trousers and white gloves. Of his clockwork robotic origins there seemed little doubt. His porcelain face was bland and featureless, the only moving part his right eyebrow, which was made of machined steel and could point to an array of emotions painted in small words upon the side of his head. From the look of him, his mainspring was at the very last vestige of tension—he had shut down all peripheral motor functions, and if his eyes had not scanned backwards and forwards as I watched, I might have thought he had run down completely.
“They banish us here to Fiction,” said a rabble-rousing gray alien, pointing his finger in the air, “when we should be up there, in Nonfiction.”
The crowd agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment and clacked their stones together angrily.
“And then,” continued the alien, “they have the temerity to send robots amongst us to spy on our every movement and report back to a centralized index that holds the records of everyone in the BookWorld, all as a precursor to thought-control experiments that will rob us of our minds and make us into mere drones, lackeys of the publishing world. What do we say to the council? Do we politely say, ‘No thank you,’ or do we send their messenger home in a sack?”
The crowd roared. I didn’t know much about Conspiracy, but I did know that its theorists were mostly paranoid and tended to value conviction above evidence.
I was just wondering what, if anything, could be done to stop the needless destruction of a finely crafted automaton when the mechanical man caught my eye, and with the last few ounces of spring pressure available to him, he moved his eyebrow pointer among an array of emotions in a manner that spoke of fear, loss, betrayal and hopelessness. The last plea from a condemned machine. Something shifted within me, and before I knew what I was doing, I had spoken up.
“There you are!” I said in a loud voice as I strode into the semicircle of stone-wielding conspirators. “I knew I should have given you an extra wind at lunchtime.”
The aliens and Elvises and alien Elvises looked at one another suspiciously.
“Thursday Next,” I said as I searched the automaton’s pockets for his key. The crowd looked doubtful, and the alien ringleader blinked at me oddly, his large, teardrop-shaped eyes utterly devoid of compassion.
“Thursday Next is too important to trouble herself with the fortunes of a mechanical man,” he said thinly, “and she told me personally she would rather kneel on broken glass than ever visit Conspiracy again.”
This was doubtless true, and I could see why.
“You are an impostor,” said the alien, “sent by the council as part of a plan to destabilize our genre and promote your own twisted evidence-centric agenda.”
There was a nasty murmuring among the crowd as with fumbling hand I found the large brass key and inserted it into the socket located on the back of the automaton’s neck. I gave him a quick wind to get him started, and I felt his body shift slightly as the gyros, motors, cogs and actuators started to reboot his mechanical cortex.
“You’re the written one,” said someone at the back. “The dopey one who likes to hug a lot.”
The situation had just taken a turn for the worse. But since this was Conspiracy and facts weren’t necessarily the end of an argument, I thought I’d try a bluff. I reached into my pocket and held out my JAID shield. From a distance it might be confused with a Jurisfiction badge. I had to hope that no one would look too closely.
“Read it and weep,” I said, swallowing down my nervousness. “Make a move on me and I’ll have Jurisfiction dump forty tons of Intelligently Reasoned Argument right on your butt.”
“So you say,” said the small alien. “Elvis? Check her badge.”
The two dozen Elvises looked at one another and began to squabble as they tried to figure out which Elvis the alien was talking to, and once this was established, I had half wound the mechanical man. If it came to a fight, I wouldn’t be on my own.
“Steady on, lads,” said the Elvis after looking at my badge. “She’s not bluffing—it’s her all right.”
“I am?” I said, then quickly added, “Yes, I am. Now piss off.”
The small group hurriedly made some excuse about having to view some reverse-engineered alien technology hidden in a hangar somewhere in a desert, and within a few moments the clockwork man and I were entirely alone.
“Permission to speak, madam?” said the automaton once I had wound him sufficiently to reboot his memory and thought processes. He spoke with the rich, plummy tones of the perfect gentleman’s gentleman, but with a faint buzz—a bit like a bumblebee stuck inside a cello.