One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [70]
“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