One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [20]
“One of those came down last night, and I’m here to find out why.”
“I see,” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointer nodding toward “Worried” as he looked upwards. “I will assist in whatever capacity I can.”
We made our way toward the regional offices. Sprockett talked and thought well for an automaton, and aside from a slight limp, his empty features and a muted buzz when he moved or thought, he was reasonably lifelike. I asked him where he was from, and he told me he was from Vanity—in a pilot book for a series titled The League of Cogmen, about the many adventures that befall a series of mechanical men designed by an Edwardian inventor. Sprockett had been initially built as a butler but soon transcended his calling to become a dynamic machine of action. A mixture of The Admirable Crichton, Biggles and The 1903 Watchmaker’s Review. When unemployment beckoned, he reverted to domestic service—butlers are more sought after than are action heroes.
“What was your book like?”
“Uneven,” replied Sprockett. “A fine concept, but lacking in legs to carry it off. Sadly, I have too few emotions to be engaging as a principal character.”
“Because you were designed as a butler?”
“Not at all—because I’m only a Duplex-5. The empathy escapement was never quite perfected before we went into production. I can indicate a range of emotions through my eyebrow pointer, but that’s about it. I can recognize your sorrow and act accordingly—but I cannot feel emotions nor truly understand what ‘emotion’ or ‘feel’ actually means.”
“But surely you felt danger when you were about to be stoned and relief when rescued?”
“Yes, but only in the context that to be destroyed would deny me the opportunity to serve cocktails—and that would contravene the second law of domestic robotics.”
Sprockett told me that his books were hastily printed, had not been read once in seventeen years and now, aside from a few copies in the circulation of friends and family, were sitting unread in a cardboard box in the writer’s garage in Cirencester.
“And becoming damp, too,” he added. “Sometimes rain is blown under the garage doors. There is mold and damp seeping up the print run—look.”
He rolled up a trouser leg to reveal a green patch of patination on his otherwise shiny bronze leg. His would be a long, lingering journey to unreadfulness. He would gradually look more tarnished and increasingly lost over the years until the last copy would be destroyed and—unless picked up in another book—he’d suddenly wink out of existence.
“What’s it like living in Vanity?”
“May I be candid?”
“I’ d welcome it.”
“We tend not to use the term Vanity anymore. It sounds derogatory. We refer to it as Self-Published or Collaborative, and you’d be surprised just how much good prose is interspersed with that of an uneven nature.”
This was true. Beatrix Potter, Keats and George Eliot had all been self-published, as was the first issue of Alice in Wonderland . I looked across to where the island of Vanity lay just off the coast beyond the Cliff of Notes. Even from here the high-stacked apartment buildings could clearly be seen. The turbulent waterway between Vanity and the mainland was swept with dangerous currents, whirlpools and tidal rips. Despite this, many Vanitarians attempted to make the perilous journey to brighter prospects on the mainland. Of those who survived, most were turned back.
“I’d like to come out and see the conditions for myself,” I said, the unease in my voice setting Sprockett’s eyebrow to flicker twice before pointing at “Worried.”
“No, really,” I said, “I would. You can’t believe anything you read in The Word these days.”
Sprockett demurred politely, but his eyebrow said it all—speaking of an entire genre kept marginalized, right on the edges of Fiction. The “Vanity Question” was one of many issues that had dogged the political elite since the remaking. The problem was, no published books liked anything self-published in the neighborhood. They argued—and quite eloquently, as it turned out—that the point of having similar books clustered