One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [69]
The professor led me to the back of the workshop, past the entrance to a scrubbing device for declichéing otherwise healthy idioms and down a corridor to a door obscured by several discarded packing cases and a stack of unread copies of the almost fatally dull JurisTech Review.
“We haven’t used the Jumper for over eighteen months,” he explained, struggling with a padlock that had grown rusty with age. “Not since the imaginatively titled ‘RealWorld Travel Ban’ banned all travel to the RealWorld.”
“Why the ban?”
“I didn’t ask, and neither should you. If anyone at the CoG gets wind of this, you and I are nothing but text.”
I didn’t like the sound of this.
“But Bradshaw—”
“Bradshaw is a good man,” interrupted Plum, “but in matters like this he’d deny he even knew you. And me. And himself, it it came to that. I agree with him. To maintain the integrity of Jurisfiction, I would accept being reduced to a bucket of graphemes. And so should you.”
He left me thinking about this and pulled opened the door. He paused, the interior of the lab a dark hole.
“You can leave now if you want to.”
“No, I’m okay,” I said, even if I wasn’t. “Let’s just get on with it, yes?”
He turned on the light to reveal a large room that was musty and hung with cobwebs. Occasionally there was a low rumble, and dust trickled from the ceiling.
“The Carnegie Underpass,” explained Plum. “It runs directly overhead.”
In the middle of the room was a large machine that looked like a collection of sieves, each lined up one in front of the other. The sieves began with one that might have been designed to make chips, so long as you could hurl a potato at it fast enough, and the rest were of rapidly decreasing mesh, until the penultimate was no more than a fine wire gauze. The last of all was a thin sheet of silver that shimmered with the microscopic currents of air that moved around the workshop. Beyond this was the wide end of a copper funnel with the sharp end finishing in a point no bigger than a pin—and beyond this a small drop of blue something-or-other within a localized gravitational field that kept it suspended in the air. Around the room was an array of computers covered with more dials, levers, switches and meters than I had ever seen before.
“What exactly is it?” I asked, not unnaturally and with a certain degree of trepidation.
“It’s the Large Textual Sieve Array,” he explained. “Although the construction and methodology of Textual Sieves remain generally unexplained, they can be used for a number of functions. Cross-triangulation searches, the ‘locking’ of text within books—and, more controversially, for making fictional people real, even if for only a short period.”
“How long?”
“I can send you out for forty-eight hours, but Bradshaw insisted you go for only twelve. As soon as that time is up, you’ll spontaneously return. We’ll send you in at midday, and you’ll be out at midnight—pumpkin hour. If you want to stay longer, you’ll have to Blue Fairy, but then you’re there for good and you’ll have to suffer the worst rigors of being real—aging, death and daytime television.
The twelve-hour pumpkin option suited me fine, and I told him so. I’d heard many stories about the RealWorld, and although it sounded an interesting place to visit, you’d not want to live there.
“So how does it work?” I asked.
“Simplicity itself. You see this howitzer?”
He pointed at a large-caliber cannon that was pointed directly at the sieves. It was mounted on a small carriage and was gaily decorated with red stars and had THE FLYING ZAMBINIS painted on the side.
“You are placed in this cannon and then fired into the array at .346 Absurd speed. The mesh of the first sieve is quite broad, to break down your base description into individual words. The next breaks the words down into letters, and then the letters are divided further into subcalligraphic particles, until you hit