“I like comparative factoids like that.”
“Me, too. This tiny speck of you is then injected at speed into a drop of AntiBook, where your essence is rebuilt into something closely resembling human. By controlling the Sieve Array, I can drop you wherever you want in the RealWorld.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Quite a lot, actually,” he admitted, “but only fleetingly. You’ll barely have enough time to scream before it will be over. The return is not so dramatic. You’ll simply find yourself in our arrivals suite, which is just behind that door.”
“Do you have any advice?”
“I’ve never been there myself,” confessed Plum, “but they say if you can handle the first ten minutes, you’re good for the whole twelve hours. If you can’t hack it, then just find a quiet wardrobe in which to hide until the free return brings you back.”
I found his comments disconcerting.
“What is there that one might not be able to handle?” Professor Plum made a clicky noise with his tongue. “It’s highly disorderly,” he explained, “not like here. There is no easily definable plot, and you can run yourself ragged wondering what the significance can be of a chance encounter. You’ll also find that for the most part there is no shorthand to the narrative, so everything happens in a long and painfully drawn-out sequence. Apparently the talk can be confusing—for the most part, people just say the first thing that comes into their heads.”
“Is it as bad as they say it is?”
“I’ve heard it’s worse. Here in the BookWorld, we say what needs to be said for the story to proceed. Out there? Well, you can discount at least eighty percent of chat as just meaningless drivel.”
“I never thought the percentage was that high.”
“In some individuals it can be as high as ninety-two percent. The people to listen to are the ones who don’t say very much.”
“Oh.”
“There are fun things, too,” said Plum, sensing my disappointment. “You’ll get used to it in the end, but if you go out there accepting that seventy-five percent of talk is utter twaddle and eighty-five percent of people’s lives are spent dithering around, you won’t go far wrong. But above all don’t be annoyed or distracted when random things happen for absolutely no purpose.”
“There’s always a purpose,” I said, amused by the notion of utter pointlessness, “even if you don’t understand what it is until much later.”
“That’s the big difference between here and there,” said Plum. “When things happen after a randomly pointless event, all that follows is simply unintended consequences, not a coherent narrative thrust that propels the story forward.”
I rolled the idea of unintended consequences around in my head. “Nope,” I said finally, “you’ve got me on that one.”
“It confuses me, too,” admitted Plum, “but that’s the RealWorld for you. A brutal and beautiful place, run for the most part on passion, fads, incentives and mathematics. A lot of mathematics.”
“That’s it?” I asked, astonished by the brevity in which Plum could sum up the world that had, after all, made us.
“Pretty much,” he replied glumly. “And some very good cuisine. And the smells. You’ll like those, I assure you. And real sex—not like the oddly described stuff we have to make do with in here.”
“I assure you I’m not going to the RealWorld for the sex.”
“When tourism was permitted, many visitors used it for little else. Anything that is impossible to describe adequately in the BookWorld was much sought and, coincidentally, usually beginning with c: cooking, copulation, Caravaggio, coastlines and chocolate. Will you do me a favor and bring some back? I adore chocolate. As much as you can carry, in fact. And none of that Lindt or Nestlé muck—Cadbury’s the thing.”
I promised him I would, and he opened the hatch at the back of the cannon.
“Good luck,” he said. “Don’t worry if it seems a bit odd to begin with. You’re made in the image of the flesh-and-bloods, so there’s nothing you can’t figure out as long as you keep your wits about you. It helps if you crouch tight, like a hedgehog. It’s why Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was so good at moving across.”
I crawled inside and crunched myself up into the fetal position. Plum instructed me to hold my breath when he reached the count of two, as it helped to have a breath in you when you arrived, since breathing out can give a good indication of how breathing actually works. I thanked him for the advice, and he closed the hatch. I looked along the barrel of the cannon to the muzzle, and beyond that to the series of textual sieves that would chop me into the smallest component parts imaginable. I admit it, I was nervous. I waited for about a minute in the gloom, and then, when nothing had happened, I called out.
“Sorry!” came Plum’s voice. “I’m just winding her up to speed. If I don’t get you to exactly .346 of Absurd Speed, all you’ll be is a tattered mass of text caught in the sieves. If I fire you too fast, you’ll be embedded in the back of the laboratory.”
“What would happen then?”
“Paper over you, I suppose.”
I wasn’t particularly reassured by this but waited patiently for another half minute until I heard a faint whine that grew in pitch as Plum counted down from ten. When he got to five, the whine had grown so loud I could hardly hear him, so I guessed when two would be and took a deep breath. I was just thinking that perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea after all and I should really be getting back to my series and staying there for a sensible period of time—such as forever—when there was a noise like a thousand metallic frogs all croaking at the same time and my body was suddenly skewered by a thousand hot needles. Before I could cry out, the pain passed, and after a low hum and a sensation of treacle, Klein Blue and Wagner all mixed together but not very well, there was a brilliant flash of light.
20.
Alive!
The “Alive” simulator at the BookWorld Conference is one of those devices that all characters should try at least once. The experience of being real has two purposes: firstly, to assist characters in their quest for a greater understanding of people and, secondly, to discourage characters from ever attempting to escape to the RealWorld. Most customers last ten minutes before hitting the panic button and being led shaken from the simulator.
I heard a gurgling sound, a heavy thumping and something odd in my nose that generated backstory memories I hadn’t had for a while—something about going for walks in the park when I was small. It was dark, too, and I felt a pain in my chest. I didn’t know what it was until, with a sound like a tornado, a hot gush of foul air erupted from within me and blew out of my mouth. Before I could recover from this shock, I spontaneously did the opposite and drew in an equally fast gush of air that cooled my teeth and tasted of pine needles.
“It’s called breathing,” came a voice close at hand. “It’s very simple, and everyone does it. Just relax and go with the flow.”
“I used to ‘take a breath’ and ‘exhale uneasily’ at home,” I managed to say, “but this is quite different.”