The Woman Who Died a Lot

by Jasper Fforde

  Soon after I trotted down from the third floor at Booktastic and made my way toward Shabitat, where Landen was hoping to buy one of their huge trademark Flipdate clocks. I found him in the glassware section. The trouble about having a huge house was that it was easier to double or triple up on things than carry them from the kitchen to the dining room and back again, which meant we needed three of everything.

  “You can get an entire set of glassware for only fifty quid,” said Landen, looking at me for a moment before digging out his cell phone.

  “It’s ugly,” I said.

  “Ah, yes,” replied Landen, dialing a number. “But before it was expensive and ugly, and now it’s cheap and ugly. So everything’s changed.”

  “Has it?”

  “Sure. What was your new office like?”

  “Pretty cool.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “Windows . . . a door, a phone. A large red one. A hotline.” I narrowed my eyes as I tried to remember what else I had seen. “I bumped into Jim Finisterre. Who are you calling?”

  “Stig.”

  “What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “Just a job we have to do. All three of us.”

  “Can I know?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “I like surprises.”

  “Stig?” said Landen. “It’s Landen. We need you.” He paused for a moment and looked at me. “We’re in Shabitat, glassware section. . . . Yes, I know they’re ugly. See you soon.”

  He snapped the phone shut and looked at me with his head on one side. There was a brief silence. Not one of those companionable silences that are quite enjoyable but an empty, cold silence, of people soon strangers. And that was when I had a peculiar feeling. One I hadn’t had for a while.

  “Landen?”

  “Yes?”

  I leaned closer and lowered my voice. “I want to make love to you.”

  “What, here?”

  “Well, no—we could find a hotel. I’ve not felt it this strong from well before the accident—probably that holiday in Greece when you’d lost ten pounds and we had dinner at Arturo’s. On our own. No kids.”

  Landen said nothing and stared at me. I frowned. It wasn’t a bad feeling—quite the opposite, of course. But it was unusual, and that worried me. Even following the accident, I still wanted him in a “that would be nice if I weren’t feeling so shitty,” sort of way, but this was like being a teenager again—that sort of lusty yearning that is born of fresh discovery and young hearts bursting to be free.

  “Say something,” I said.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Anything. ‘Me, too’ would be good for starters, rapidly followed by ‘Does the Finis Hotel rent rooms by the hour?’ To which the answer is ‘Yes, notorious for it.’”

  Landen gave me a weary half smile.

  “If I were to say, ‘Nothing should disturb . . .’” he asked, “what would you say in reply?”

  “Nothing should disturb us . . . in the Finis?”

  “No, it’s a password. The one we swapped on parting less than two hours ago.”

  “Oh, yes. Nothing should disturb . . . that . . . No. I can’t remember.”

  “And why do you think that might be?”

  He said it in a sarcastic manner that he normally would never have used on me. Not unless we were having a serious, balls-out, door-slamming “I don’t know why I sodding married you” row. But then the penny dropped and I looked down. I wasn’t holding a walking stick, I felt no pain, and I was standing upright, without a stoop. No wonder Landen could tell I wasn’t the real one straightaway. I hadn’t walked this well for a while.

  “Shit,” I muttered. “I’ve been replaced.” And I looked stupidly around to see if the real me might be somewhere close by. I wasn’t, so I looked back at Landen, who raised an eyebrow.

  “This is a novel approach,” he said. “A Synthetic aware that it is a Synthetic?”

  “Wait, wait,” I said, knowing only too well what we did with Synthetics. “This is different. I’m me. I’m conscious, I have some of the real me’s memories. Maybe not all of them, but some, and enough.”

  “You say you have,” said Landen, placing his hand in the pocket where he kept his pistol, “but that’s what you’re programmed to think. Try to make a run for it and I’ll drop you where you stand. The first time we killed one of you, it was hard to explain—until the second one turned up.”

  “That’s what Stig’s coming to do, isn’t it?”

  “As divisional chief of SO-13, he’s legally empowered to destroy unlicensed nonevolutionary life-forms, and that’s what you are, my friend. But before we get to that, what do you want? Why does Goliath want to replace my wife with one of their own?”

  “I don’t know. Or at least if I do know, it’s not readily apparent to me. You’d really kill me?”

  “Without a second thought. Still want to make love to me?”

  “In an odd kind of way, yes,” I said, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. “But listen, if this is me and I am Thursday but weirdly in another body, you might actually kill me for real. And that might be it. This could be the final vessel for my consciousness.”

  “Fascinating,” remarked Landen. “You must be a Mark VII or something. None of the others were so articulate.”

  “Or knew they were Synthetics?”

  “Right. But first things first: What did you do with the real Thursday? It’ll save a lot of time.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know. They always know.”

  “No, I really don’t. I have no recollection of being activated.”

  “So you say,” said Landen suspiciously.

  “No—to me I’m me.”

  “In that case think back to what you can remember. I want my wife back.”

  “Okay, okay. I was still in pain and had a stick when I left the library. It can only be between there and here.”

  “Did you stop anywhere?”

  I paused, deep in thought, trying to figure out when Real Me stopped being Real Me and started being Synthetic Me.

  “Nope,” I said. “Nothing.”

  “It good likeness,” said Stig, who had just arrived. “But why made no attempt to stoop and limp like real Thursday?”

  “It’s much more impressive than that,” said Landen, referring to me as though I were the latest model of car or something. “It’s trying to tell me it has the real one’s consciousness and partial memory.”

  Stig peered closer at me. “The craftsmanship different to others. More hurried. It thinks it is her?”

  “It is me inside, Stig,” I said. “We met yesterday at the SpecOps office.”

  “Anyone could know that. What did we speak of?”

  I tried to think of the conversation I’d had with him.

  “It’s kind of hazy,” I admitted, “as if the handover between Real Me and Synthetic Me isn’t complete. It’s like when you wake up and you’re not sure who you are or where you are, or even your own name—you know, how rock legends spend the first two hours of each day.”

  “That sounds more like Thursday,” said Stig.

  “Yes,” replied Landen. “None of them ever had a sense of humor before.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “What?” asked Landen.

  “I can remember more of the password. Nothing should disturb that condor . . . something. And, Stig, we talked about what I’d been doing that morning, and something about shampoo being in a different bottle.”

  “Did that happen?” asked Landen.

  “Yes.”

  “And the shrink’s name was . . . Dr. Chumley,” I said as memories came seeping through. “And he gave me a NUT-4 because I was hoping to run SO-27. Shazza said to tell Friday that it would have been seriously good.”

  “Is that true?” asked Stig.

  Landen nodded, and I stared at the pair of them. They looked . . . well, spooked. None of the othe
r Synthetics had been anything like this.

  “What all this mean?” Stig asked Landen.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can feel the memories filter in, like I’m waking up to a new body,” I said. “It feels good, too—like I’ve never felt before. Ask me a question.”

  “What’s 3,598 multiplied by 9?”

  “32,382,” I replied without pausing. “Do you want to hear about every single monarch of England before the First Republic? I can give you precise dates of when they ruled, the name of their consorts and an estimation of their weight with a twopoint-three-percent margin of error. Give me a piece of paper.”

  Landen passed me a receipt from his pocket, and in a brief flurry of dexterity it was an elegant origami swan.

  “I can do this, too.”

  I picked up a glass vase and tossed it above my head. I closed my eyes, waited until I thought it should be coming back down and caught it in midair. I opened my eyes again.

  “It’s like being Wonder Woman,” I said, “only without the stupid costume. Don’t look up.”

  “Why not?” asked Landen, not unreasonably.

  “There’s a ninja assassin hiding in the rafters. But don’t worry, there’s no danger to us. He’s been there for six weeks already—probably waiting for a Romanian who can’t keep his mouth shut.”

  “You saw him?”

  “I heard him. And one of his eyelashes just landed on your shoulder. Want to see me juggle?”

  Landen and Stig stared at me. As my old memories filtered through to their new home, I could recall that no Synthetic Thursday had ever acted this way. From where I was standing, this one seemed not just as good as a human but better. I could have taken on Landen and Stig there and then if I’d wanted to. But so far as I could tell, I was still Thursday. And Thursdays don’t beat up their husbands and best friends.

  “Would you excuse me one moment?” I said. “I have to find me.”

  Without waiting for an answer, I ran out of the glassware department with Stig struggling to keep up. I raced out of the store, accelerated fast down the concourse and felt a surge of raw elation as my legs ran as they had never run before. I was stronger, smarter, fitter and faster—and if this one had never had children, my stomach was probably joyously flat, too. I skidded to a halt outside Booktastic and paused for a moment, hardly out of breath.

  I was still thinking when Stig arrived a few moments later.

  “You fast,” he said. “Really fast.”

  “When I left here, I didn’t have my stick with me,” I said, “and I ran down the stairs. But I remember swearing over the lack of a handrail as I went in—and also slapped another patch on my arse in the loo. So I must have been the previous me then.”

  “Booktastic big,” said Stig. “Why you enter?”

  “Probably putting The Thursday Next Chronicles face-out— I’ve done it before.”

  I ran up to Speculative Fiction on the third floor, again with Stig laboring behind. I found my way to the Next Chronicles, but found no one here, not even hidden behind the sofas. We started to search around the recesses of the bookshop, as the place was fairly labyrinthine; it wasn’t unusual to be lost in its twisting corridors, and once a Henry James fanatic had been locked in for the entire weekend.

  “What’s going on?” asked Landen as he lumbered out of the elevator, panting.

  “I remember now that she’s in the stockroom,” I said, pushing the door from its hinges. We found a pale figure of a woman in her underwear hidden behind a pallet of Colwyn Baye’s latest book. She looked terrible. One leg was thinner than the other and badly scarred, and her skin was a pasty shade the color of hospital inpatients. She was unconscious. I’d forgotten how tired and old I looked. Landen checked the unconscious me for vital signs.

  “Alive?” asked Stig.

  “Very much so—just unconscious.”

  Landen slapped me around the face. First softly, then harder. This didn’t seem to have much effect, so he pinched me—twice. Nothing.

  “Any ideas?” he asked.

  “The upload takes less than half an hour,” I said, not knowing how I knew. “It’s a neural-bandwidth issue. And it’s almost complete.”

  I was now getting the deep subconscious stuff. The memories of childhood, the time our hamster ate its young—I was only eight. Never forgot that. Then other stuff started to come in, too, stuff I thought I’d forgotten. Arguments with Anton, long before he died in the Crimea, and my mother crying for her husband, the first time he died. But through it all there was one thing that was strong in the front of my mind: This wasn’t me. It was subtly different in ways impossible to explain. It was wonderful, but disturbing, too.

  “I know what we have to do,” I said quietly. “But first I have to prove to you that this was really me.”

  I took out a pen and scribbled a note on the back of my old Skyrail ticket. I took a step forward and slipped it into Landen’s trouser pocket. I hugged him, placed my cheek to his and whispered in his ear.

  “I love you. Now, do it.”

  14.

  Tuesday: I’m Back

  Chimeras took many forms. Many of them hideous and all dangerous. The hobby geneticists of twenty years ago had moved from the making of odd-looking pets in a garden shed to the work of a younger elite who called themselves “Gene Hackmen.” They’d make anything for kicks and giggles, and generally did. Famously, FunBoy-6 built a centaur from spare parts. It was a good effort and galloped elegantly, although due to having the cerebral cortex of a pig, it was prone to oinking. Stig had dispatched the creature without mercy. The Hackmen hated Stig, and he hated them. And that from a neanderthal, who thought that hate, like greed or envy, was the emotion of a species doomed to failure.

  James Crick, Hobby Geneticists: The New Dr. Frankensteins

  My eyes flickered open, and Stig’s and Landen’s familiar faces swam into view. My leg had a dull throb of pain from the hip to the knee, and I was cold—but then I was lying on concrete in only my underwear. It felt uncomfortable and pleasant all at once. I was broken, but I was me.

  “It smells of cat’s piss down here,” I said. “And, Landen: Nothing should disturb that condor moment.”

  I saw Landen let out a gasp of relief and brush away some tears.

  “Thank the GSD,” he said. “I thought you were gone for good.”

  “Not at all—the worst that would have happened to me was cramp, thirst and hunger—and probably the release of waste products, given time. I was simply waiting for the return of my id. My clothes? I’m freezing.”

  “You won’t want your own back,” said Landen, “but she must have arrived dressed in something—here.”

  He pulled out some quality-looking threads from a carrier bag pushed beneath some Daphne Farquitt boxed sets.

  “Chimera,” said Stig to the retail staff, who had popped their heads into the stockroom to see what the gunshot had been about. “Nothing to see.”

  “She was different from the rest,” said Landen as he helped me on with the clothes. “She was actually convinced that she was you—and had tapped into your memories.”

  “Landen, she was me. I was there. I was inside her. I was becoming her, or she was becoming me—or we were becoming each other.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Did she seem like me? More than the others, I mean?”

  “By a factor of ten. But I don’t buy into this whole ‘transfer of consciousness’ shit. It’s impossible for a whole bunch of reasons.”

  I grasped his forearm. “The note I scribbled down for you, just before I told you I loved you and you killed me. It says, ‘Two minds with a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.’ ”

  Landen pulled the piece of paper from his pocket and stared at it.

  “Okay,” he said, “I totally buy into this whole ‘transfer of consciousness’ shit. But what does it mean? That Goliath is out to replace people with copies of themselves, just better and faster an
d stronger, with an increased libido, a good head for figures and origami skills to die for?”

  “It looks that way. As to why, I’ve no idea. But she probably did.”

  I nodded toward where the body of the new and improved and now very dead Thursday was lying on the floor of the loading bay. A long trail of dark blood was pooling near a stack of remaindered Lola Vavoom conspiracy books.

  “We need get her back to lab,” said Stig as he pulled out his cell phone, “find out more.”

  “No one move,” came a voice.

  It was the police. A sergeant I recognized named Kitchen and two constables.

  “ SO-13,” said Stig, holding up his ID. “This chimera. Our jurisdiction.”

  They stared at one another for a moment. The friction in the air was tangible. SpecOps and the police didn’t really get along— mostly because SpecOps had seniority, and the police had a better canteen and a final salary pension.

  “ SO-13 was disbanded thirteen years ago, Stiggins.”

  “From midday today back in business.”

  “ Ooo-kay, but I’ll need confirmation from Commander Hicks.”

  “No problem, friend-O. You take charge? Not double-tapped yet. Maybe you take honor.”

  Stig drew his twelve-gauge revolver out of his shoulder holster and offered it to the policeman.

  The officers looked at one another.

  “It’s still alive?” asked the sergeant.

  “Always best make sure.”

  “ SO-13 reinstated, you say?”

  “From midday.”