One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [18]
“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