Lost in a good book (45 page)

What had Mycroft said before he left about his R&D work at ConStuff? Miniaturized machines,
nanomachines
barely bigger than a cell, building food protein out of nothing more than garbage? Banoffee pie from landfills? Perhaps there was going to be an accident. After all, what
stopped
nanomachines from making banoffee pie once they had started? I looked out of the window. Aornis had gone.

“Do you have a car?” I asked.

“Sure,” said James.

“You’re going to have to take me over to ConStuff. Dilly, I need your clothes.”

Cordelia looked suspicious.

“Why?”

“I’ve got watchers. Three in, three out—they’ll think I’m you.”

“No way on earth,” replied Cordelia indignantly. “Unless you agree to do
all
my interviews and press junkets.”

“At my first appearance I’ll have my head lopped off by Goliath or SpecOps—or both.”

“Perhaps that’s so,” replied Cordelia slowly, “but I’d be a fool to pass on an opportunity as good as this. All the interviews and appearances I request for
a year.
”

“Two months, Cordelia.”

“Six.”

“Three.”

“Okay,” she sighed, “three months—but you have to do
The
Thursday Next Workout Video
and talk to Harry about the
Eyre Affair
film project.”

“Deal.”

So Cordelia and I switched clothes. It felt very odd to be wearing her large pink sweater, short black skirt and high heels.

“Don’t forget the Peruvian love beads,” said Cordelia, “and my gun. Here.”

“Excuse me, Miss Flakk,” said James in a slightly indignant tone. “You promised I could ask Miss Next a question.”

Flakk pointed a finely manicured fingertip at him and narrowed her eyes. “Listen here, buster. You’re both on SpecOps business right now—a bonus I’d say. Any complaints?”

“Er—no, I guess not,” stammered James.

I led them outside, past the Goliath and SpecOps agents waiting for me. I made some expansive Cordelia-like moves and they barely gave us a second glance. We were soon in James’s hired Studebaker, and I directed him across town as I switched back to my own clothes.

“Thursday?” asked James.

“Yes?” I replied, looking around to see if I could see Aornis and shaking the entroposcope. Entropy seemed to be holding at the “slightly odd” mark.

“Who is the father of Pickwick’s egg?”

I get asked some odd questions sometimes. But he was driving me across town, so I thought I would show him some slack.

“I think it was one of the feral dodos down at the park,” I explained. “I caught Pickwick doing a sort of coy come-hither dodo thing a month back, with a large male near the bandstand. Pickwick’s amour plocked noisily outside the house for a week, but I didn’t know anything had actually
happened
. Does that answer your question?”

“I guess.”

“Good. Okay, pull up over there. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

They dropped me by the side of the road, and I thanked them before running up the street. It was already quite dark and the streetlamps were on. It didn’t look like the world was about to end in twenty-six minutes, but then I don’t suppose it ever does.

32.
The End of Life as We Know It

After failing to get Landen back, dealing with Armageddon didn’t really hold the same sort of
excitement
for me that it would later. They always say the first time you save the world is the hardest— personally I have
always
found it tricky, but this time, I don’t know. Perhaps Landen’s loss numbed my mind and immunized me against panic. Perhaps the distraction actually helped.

THURSDAY NEXT
,
Private Diaries

C
ONSOLIDATED
U
SEFUL
S
TUFF
was situated in a large complex on the airfield at Stratton. There was a guardhouse, but I had coincidence on my side—as I walked into the security building all three guards had been called away on some errand or other, and I was able to slip through unnoticed. I rubbed my arm, which had inexplicably twinged with pain, and followed the signs toward Mycro Tech Developments. I was just wondering how to get into the locked building when a voice made me jump.

“Hello, Thursday!”

It was Wilbur, Mycroft’s boring son.

“No time to explain, Will—I need to get into the nanotechnology lab.”

“Why?” asked Wilbur, fumbling with his keys.

“There’s going to be an accident.”

“Absolutely
impossible!
” he scoffed, throwing the doors open to reveal a mass of spinning red lights and the raucous sounding of a klaxon.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Wilbur. “Do you think it’s meant to be doing that?”

“Call someone.”

“Right.”

He picked up the phone. Predictably enough, it was dead. He tried another but they were
all
dead.

“I’ll get help!” he said, tugging at the doorknob, which came off in his hand. “What the—”

“Entropy’s decreasing by the second, Will. Are you using Dream Topping in any of your nanomachines?”

He led me to a cabinet where a tiny drop of pink goo was suspended in midair by powerful magnets.

“There she is. The first of her kind. Still experimental, of course. There are a few problems with the discontinuation command string. Once it starts changing organic matter into Dream Topping,
it won’t stop.
”

I looked at my watch and noticed that there were barely twelve minutes left.

“What’s keeping it from working at the moment?”

“The magnetic field keeps the nanodevice immobilized, the refrigeration system is set below its activation temperature of minus ten degrees—what was that?”

The lights had flickered.

“Power grid failure.”

“No problem, Thursday—there are three backup generators. They can’t
all
fail at the same time, that would be too much of a—”

“—coincidence, yes, I know. But they will. And when they do, that coincidence will be the biggest, the best—and the last.”

“Thursday, that’s not possible!”

“
Anything
is possible right now. We’re in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement.”

“We’re in a
what?
”

“We’re in a pseudoscientific technobabble.”

“Ah!” replied Wilbur, having witnessed quite a few at MycroTech Developments. “One of
those.
”

“What happens when the final backup fails, Wilbur?”

“The nanodevice will be expelled into the atmosphere,” said Wilbur grimly. “It is programmed to make strawberry-flavored pudding mix and will continue to do so as long as it has organic material to work with. You, me, that table over there—then when someone comes to let us out in the morning, the machine will get to work on the outside.”

“How quickly?”

“Well,” said Wilbur, thinking hard, “the device will make replicas of itself to carry out the work even faster, so the more organic material is swallowed up, the faster the process becomes. The entire planet? I’d give it about a week.”

“And nothing can stop it?”

“Nothing I know of,” he replied sadly. “The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really.”

“Aornis!” I shouted at the top of my voice.
“Where the hell are you?”

There was no reply.

“AORNIS!”

And then she answered. But it was from such an unexpected quarter that I cried out in fright. She spoke to me—
from my memory.
It was as though a barrier had been lifted in my mind. The day on the Skyrail platform. The moment I first set eyes on Aornis. I thought it had only been a glimpse, but it wasn’t. We had spoken together for several minutes as I waited for the shuttle. I cast my mind back and read the newly recovered memories as my palms grew sweaty. The answers had been there all along.

“Hello, Thursday,” said the young woman on the bench, dabbing her nose with a powder compact.

I walked over to her.

“You know my name?”

“I know a lot more than that. My name is Aornis Hades. You killed my brother.”

I tried not to let my surprise show.

“Self-defense, Miss Hades. If I could have taken him alive, I would have.”

“No member of the Hades family has been taken alive for over eighty-three generations.”

I thought about the twin puncture, the Skyrail ticket, all the chance happenings to get me on the platform.

“Are you manipulating coincidences, Hades?”

“Of course!” she replied as the shuttle hissed into the station. “You’re going to get on that shuttle and be shot accidentally by an SO-14 marksman. An ironic end, don’t you think? Shot by one of your own?”

“What if I don’t get on the Skyrail? What if I take you in right here and now?”

Aornis sniggered at my naïveté.

“Dear Acheron was a fine and worthy Hades despite the fact he killed his brother—something Mother was very cut up about—but he was never truly
au fait
with some of the family’s more diabolical attributes. You’ll get on that train, Thursday—
because you won’t remember anything about this conversation!
”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I laughed, but Aornis returned to her powder compact and I
had
got on the train.

“What is it?” asked Wilbur, who had been staring at me as the memories of Aornis came flooding back.

“Recovered memories,” I replied grimly as the lights flickered. The first backup generator had failed. I checked my watch. There were six minutes to go.

“Thursday?” murmured Wilbur, lower lip trembling. “I’m frightened.”

“Me too, Will. Quiet a sec.”

And I thought back to my next meeting with Aornis. At Uffington, when she posed as Violet De’ath. On this occasion we had been in company, so she hadn’t said anything, but the next time, when I was in Osaka, she had sat next to me on the bench, just after the fortune-teller was struck by lightning.

“Clever trick,” she said, arranging her shopping bags so they wouldn’t fall over, “using the coincidence in that way. Next time you won’t be so lucky—and while we’re on the subject, how did you get out of the jam on the Skyrail?”

I really didn’t want to answer her questions.

“What are you doing to me?” I demanded instead. “What are you doing to my
head?
”

“A simple recollection erasure, Thursday. I’m a mnemenomorph. My particular edge is that I am instantly forgettable— you will
never
capture me because you will forget that we ever met. I can erase your memory of me so instantaneously I am rendered invisible. I can walk where I please, steal what I wish—I can even murder in broad daylight.”

“Very clever, Hades.”

“Please, call me Aornis—I’d like us to be pals.”

She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at her nails for a moment before asking: “I saw a beautiful cashmere sweater just now; it’s available in turquoise or emerald. Which do you think would suit me better?”

“I have no idea.”

“I’ll get them both,” she replied after a moment of reflection. “It’s on a stolen credit card, after all.”

“Enjoy your game, Aornis, it won’t be forever. I defeated your brother—I’ll do the same to you.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” she sneered. “When you can’t recollect anything about our meetings at all? My dear, you won’t even remember
this
one—until I want you to!”

And she gathered up her bags and walked off.

The lights in the nanotechnology lab flickered again. Wilbur and I looked at one another as the second backup generator failed. He tried the phones again in desperation, but everything was still dead. Death by coincidence. What a way to go. But it was now, with only two minutes to go, that Aornis lifted the last barrier and I clearly remembered the
last
occasion she and I had faced each other. It had occurred not twenty minutes before at the ConStuff reception. It hadn’t been empty at all; Aornis had been there, waiting for me—ready to deliver the
coup de grâce.

“Well!” she exclaimed as I walked in. “Figured this one out, did you?”

“Damn you, Hades!” I retorted, reaching for my pistol. She caught my wrist and pulled me into a painful half nelson with surprising speed.

“Listen to me,” she whispered in my ear while holding my arm locked tightly behind me. “There’s going to be an accident in the nanotechnology lab. Your uncle hoped to feed the world, when in fact he will be the father of its destruction. The irony is so heavy you could cut it with a knife!”

“Wait—!” I said, but she pulled my arm up harder and I yelped.

“I’m talking, Next.
Never
interrupt a Hades when they’re talking. You will die for what you have done to our family, but just to show I’m not a total fiend, I will allow you one last heroic gesture, something your pathetic self-righteous character seems to crave. At precisely six minutes before the accident, you will begin to remember all our little chats together.”

I struggled, but she held me tight.

“You’ll remember this meeting last. So here’s my offer. Take your pistol and turn it upon yourself—and I’ll spare the planet.”

“And if I don’t?” I shouted. “You’ll die too!”

“No,” she laughed, “I know you’ll do it.
Despite
the baby. Despite
everything.
You’re a good person, Next. A
fine
human being. It will be your downfall. I’m counting on it.”

She leaned forwards and whispered in my ear.

“They’re wrong, you know, Thursday. Revenge is
so
sweet!”

“Thursday?” asked Wilbur. “Are you all right?”

“No, not really,” I muttered as I saw the clock tick into the final minute. Acheron was nothing compared to Aornis, either in his powers or his sense of humor. I’d messed with the Hades family and now I was paying the price.