Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  I so had objectives. And, as I said earlier, a couple of spare aces up my sleeve.

  We bumped down the entrance slope to the underground car park and through the shock-gates to park, then made our way into the building by way of a service elevator and along a corridor.

  ‘This is the way to the Project Lazarus labs,’ I said, suddenly recalling the route. ‘What about the apartment facing the quad with the generous rations, abundant hot water and a nightwalker valet?’

  ‘All in good time,’ said Aurora. ‘There’s someone who needs to speak to you before you start to work for us. Orientation, I think HR call it.’

  We moved through the door marked Project Lazarus, the lab unchanged since I’d been here last. We took several lefts and rights and walked through some swing doors, then found ourselves back in the circular room with eight corridors leading off towards the cells.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Aurora, and moved away.

  I stood there for perhaps ten minutes, then, thinking that Birgitta might be somewhere near, started to look around. My eye caught sight of the door with the glass panel, behind which was the room that contained the barber’s chair and the copper device the shape of a traffic cone.

  ‘Curiosity doesn’t kill cats at all,’ came a familiar voice, ‘curiosity is the very bedrock upon which this institution is founded. You want to see more? Come and have a look.’

  It was the Notable Charlotte Goodnight, and she appeared quite friendly. She opened the door and stepped inside, beckoning both me and Aurora to follow. Slightly wary, I complied. When I’d seen the room last, there had been a nightwalker on the table, but now the room was empty, the machine switched off and dead.

  ‘This is a Mk IX Somnagraph,’ explained Goodnight. ‘It can both record and play back dreams.’

  ‘You can record dreams?’ I asked, trying to sound surprised.

  ‘Indeed we can. There are five hundred of these in a converted dormitory down the hall. I’ll spare you the technical details, but we use them to redeploy nightwalkers by inducing simple dreams to overwrite their limited skills. The more Tricksy the nightwalker, the more complex the duties we can get them to do.’

  ‘If this is company orientation,’ I said, ‘it’s kind of a steep learning curve – shouldn’t you start with the photocopier and where the milk is kept?’

  ‘I don’t appreciate impertinence,’ said The Notable Goodnight, ‘but you are young, so I will overlook it this once. Where was I? Oh yes: while we have every confidence you will become a productive member of the company, we need to ensure that you understand what we do here, and how best policy can be implemented while still maintaining a morally correct framework.’

  I didn’t say anything. Not much I could say, really.

  ‘We’re all small cogs, Charlie,’ continued Aurora, ‘even The Notable Goodnight here, but we only work in the big machine by meshing perfectly. And when I say big machine, I don’t mean the Ferch Llewelyn Dynasty, Europia or the Northern Fed, I mean the advancement of the human race. This is real progress, Worthing, above politics and corporate stock value. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so, ma’am, yes.’

  ‘Good. So why were you harbouring Birgitta? And don’t tell me simply because she can draw. We’re beyond all that now.’

  I stared at her for a moment. When you’re in the hornet’s nest it’s probably better to act like another hornet, or, if you can, a bigger one. Dealing with Gary Findlay had taught me that.

  ‘I believe she’s still alive in there,’ I said, ‘processing thoughts and memories while trapped in a Dreamstate so deep it can’t be detected. I’ve heard of others, too,’ I added, ‘anecdotal stories that were enough to convince me.’

  Goodnight and Aurora looked at one another.

  ‘You’re a keen observer,’ said the Notable, ‘which we like. And you’re right – we’ve known that for a long time. But muse on this: at the last count, Morphenox has saved over fifty million lives in Europia alone, yet created only twenty-five-thousand quasi-sentient nightwalkers. You’re too young to remember pre-Morphenox days, but life was a constant cycle of death, loss and stalled societal and technical development. This was never a war against the Winter, but against wastage – the lives that couldn’t and shouldn’t be lost. For the massive benefits of Morphenox, there would have to be victims.’

  Aurora picked up the story.

  ‘We saw them more as the unsung heroes of the hibernatory revolution, unknowingly brave foot-soldiers, spearheading the fight against the horrors of the Winter to bring us victorious into the Spring. Those citizens, those nightwalkers, died honourably to make a better place for all of us.’

  It was an understandable point, just not a very ethical one. The victims, the Nightwalkers, had no choice in the matter.

  ‘And Morphenox-B?’ I asked. ‘What about that?’

  ‘Much more exciting,’ said Aurora. ‘The expense in manufacture was predicated on drug purity so nightwalker numbers were kept to an absolute minimum. But we were seeing it arse about face. More nightwalkers actually works for us. Cut a few corners in the manufacturing process and instead of a one-in-two-thousand likelihood of walking, Morphenox-B will give us one in every five hundred.’

  ‘With those figures, the nightwalker economy could be worth 4.2 billion euros to us within five years,’ continued Goodnight, ‘and will also be socially transformative: tedious and repetitive tasks will be given to workers who don’t know or care what they do and can work sixteen uncomplaining hours a day. Productivity will rise, costs will fall, food production will increase. And once their year is done, they get to be parted out and add immeasurable quality of life to thousands. True vertical integration, Worthing – everything of use but the yawn. I made up that slogan,’ she added proudly. ‘Sums it up well, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Best of all,’ said Aurora, ‘is that when Winter wastage falls, places like your joyous St Granata’s will actually cease to exist; the burden of endless childbearing a thing of the past. It’s win-win all the way down the line. But,’ she continued, ‘there is a very small fly in our very large ointment. The venerable Don Hector discovered a way to retrieve nightwalkers. He’s dead now, thank goodness, but he encoded it all on a cylinder which he then gave to someone connected to RealSleep. While that cylinder is at large, we are exposed, and we don’t like being exposed.’

  They fell silent and stared at me expectantly.

  ‘You want me to agree with you,’ I said, ‘but I can’t. Nightwalkers are alive. And while they are, you have to do what you can to bring them back. And you can’t murder them, nor part them out. Not for any reason, no matter how noble you think it is.’

  ‘It’s so easy to be judgemental,’ said Goodnight in a patronising tone, ‘but you must understand that we’ve done too much good for too long to have our work sacrificed on the altar of short-term, wishy-washy, woolly-headed egalitarianism. The benefits of Morphenox-B far, far outweigh the drawbacks and we are here to ensure the most—’

  ‘—favourable outcome is enjoyed by the majority,’ I said. ‘I know. I hear that a lot. What about this: “If you can’t have change without injustice, then there should be no change”.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘I can’t remember. Someone important. It’s annoying when that happens.’

  ‘The idealism of youth,’ she said with a dismissive snort. ‘We can’t fail, not now. We’re too big, too integrated into society. All that we’ve done. All that we can do. All that we will do.’

  They stared at me without speaking for some moments.

  ‘So what do you want from me?’ I asked.

  Goodnight stared at me for a moment, and then walked from the small room, beckoning us to follow.

  ‘I want you to meet someone.’

  She led me across to cell 4-H. I guessed who was in there but looked through the peephole anyway. Birgitta was lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling. Her hands were drawing circles in the air; pretend pens o
n pretend paper.

  ‘What are you going to do with her?’

  ‘Nothing for the moment, but she’s a good candidate for retrieval, and we do conduct tests from time to time. How about if we were to retrieve Birgitta right now? In exchange for the cylinder? She’d never know anything had ever happened. She’d be missing a thumb, of course, but that could be explained away as rats or mould or something.’

  I had to think very carefully on this one. I could have given them the cylinder, but I had a pretty strong feeling that once the cylinder was secured, anyone remotely attached to it would end up in the night pit covered by a spadeful of lime.

  ‘I don’t know where the cylinder is.’

  The Notable Goodnight cocked her head on one side.

  ‘Then we could redeploy Birgitta instead,’ she said, ‘next on the list. She’s very Tricksy so might be able to manage simple data entry. The problem is, one in every hundred do not survive the redeployment procedure. I can’t say it will be Birgitta, but we might have some bad luck.’

  The implication wasn’t lost on me. I was to play ball – or Birgitta died. But again, I had no guarantee that wouldn’t happen anyway.

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ I said, ‘but I don’t have the cylinder.’

  The Notable Goodnight stared at me again for a few moments.

  ‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’

  ‘I probably would, actually,’ I said, ‘about some things – y’know, like personal stuff. But not about this.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s perfectly acceptable and understandable,’ replied Goodnight, suddenly coming over all sunny, ‘we just had to be sure, that’s all.’

  She gave me a smile and then, the ‘orientation’ over, asked Aurora to show me where I would be staying.

  It wasn’t too far from the labs, no more than a flight of stairs and along a corridor. The proximity, I guessed, was not so much based on convenience, but on technology. If they wanted to try to coerce me into the Dreamspace in order to use more invasive methods, they would need a few machines to do so.

  Aurora showed me into the room and told me to make myself comfortable, and how I’d have to remain here until my security clearance was established.

  ‘We can’t have anyone from RealSleep infiltrating the facility, now, can we?’ she said with a laugh, ‘Reporting back to Kiki and whatnot.’

  I told her no, of course not, that would be silly.

  She wished me goodnight, the door closed and I heard a bolt being slid across. I stood for a moment, listening to her footsteps retreat on the polished wooden floor outside, then chucked my jacket over a chair-back and looked around.

  The apartment was spacious, warm and in good order. Two rooms, carpeted, all mod cons. Oddly, I kind of missed Clytemnestra and the charming grottiness of Siddons 901. I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and checked my collection of bite marks in the mirror, only one of which seemed to have an infection. I squeezed the pus from the wound, cleaned it with some vodka I’d found in the mini-bar and then changed all the dressings. I had a shower, found a bathrobe, climbed into bed and considered my position. The default plan was to simply stay awake as long as I could and deny HiberTech my sleeping mind, but on reflection that might not be the best strategy. I would eventually fall asleep after two days or more, but I’d be in a poor state to resist what they had planned. The best idea would be to go to sleep now, while I was still strong, my mind unmuddied by fatigue.

  So I switched off the light and stared at the ceiling, trying to get to sleep. It took an hour to do so. I felt the room darken, there were a couple of flashes, an all-consuming glossy darkness, and—

  Dreamspace

  * * *

  ‘… Dreams are nothing more than the random and wasteful firings of the brain, a mesh of thoughts and memories giving narrative to the sleeping mind by a cortex eager to make order out of chaos. A waste of energy, a waste of processing power, a drain on the life-fat that promises to deliver one from the darkness …’

  – Press release from HiberTech. Morphenox launch, July 1975

  I heard the gulls cackle before I saw them, punctuated by the boom of the incoming tide and a wind that whistled through the cable-stays that secured the funnels of the Argentinian Queen. I inhaled deeply of the salt-laden air, the freshness of the breeze, the gently rotting seaweed on the storm-shore. I opened my eyes and was back on Rhosilli beach in the Gower, the wreck before me, high and dry on the huge expanse of sand. The dream was exactly the same as it had been for the past few nights.

  More real than real, but for one thing: I wasn’t Birgitta’s Charlie, I was me Charlie, still in my bathrobe, covered in bite marks, dotted with blobs of iodine. It was the same dream, but instead of being first person Active Control, I was third person Active Control – this, I presumed, was Dreamspace.

  Charles and Birgitta were beneath the parasol talking in low voices, and every now and again they would laugh, and touch one another, and kiss. I can’t pretend that I didn’t feel some sort of jealousy, for I did – a dull ache in my chest.

  There was a gurgle of laughter and the young girl chased her beach ball, while Birgitta and Charlie exchanged their vows of affection, as before, as always, again.

  ‘I love you, Charlie,’ said Birgitta.

  ‘I love you, Birgitta,’ said Charlie.

  A voice broke into my thoughts.

  ‘Where is this place?’

  I turned to find Aurora staring at me. She was dressed in a flowery blouse and a white skirt over a stripy swimming costume. She looked tanned and well, with longer hair less streaked with grey and a fuller body which made her look a good deal healthier than the lean overwinterer I had come to know. I guess in Dreamspace you can idealise yourself. She was still armed, a Bambi at her hip, while her unseeing left eye flicked around in its socket.

  Aurora looked around curiously, as though she’d blundered into a newly undiscovered cupboard in her kitchen, and was trying to figure out its function.

  ‘The Gower Peninsula,’ I said, ‘a glorious weekend, fondly recalled. A place to visit when in pensive mood, an escape from the real world, something to flash upon the inward eye.’

  ‘Very romantic,’ replied Aurora. ‘I remember that parasol. This is a dream from one of the orderlies we interrogated after the cylinder went missing. What was his name again?’

  ‘Charles Webster.’

  She clicked her fingers.

  ‘Right. Webster. Nothing came of it, I recall. So why are we here?’

  ‘This is the dream you’ve been projecting into my sleeping mind these past few nights at the Sarah Siddons,’ I said, ‘through the wall from 902.’

  ‘Nope, you got a fresh Don Hector dream recording all to yourself,’ she replied. ‘We replace them because they wear out after five or six playings – tend to get scratched and lose their detail.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘All I know is that I dreamt I was Webster in the Gower, then went to the blue Buick from here.’

  She frowned, then a flash of understanding moved across her face.

  ‘With a jump and a tear?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘with a jump and a tear.’

  ‘That’s a first,’ she said, genuinely impressed. ‘We record dreams on wax cylinder because Edison’s invention has never really been improved upon. But there is another, more practical reason. Do you want to try and guess what it is?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘It’s this: each cylinder records about eight minutes of dream. A single night’s recording can produce upwards of twenty cylinders. We kept Don Hector’s – there are about seven hundred dreams of his in storage – but we can’t keep them all, so the dreams we record from people of no consequence are—’

  ‘—erased,’ I said.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Aurora. ‘Whoever was on erasing duty that day didn’t do such a good job and left the remains of one of Webst
er’s dreams on the start of the cylinder.’

  I understood, then. Everything I knew of Birgitta and Charles I’d gained from a half-inch of shiny blue grooves at the head of a single wax cylinder. Without random chance to bring me and this cylinder together, meeting Birgitta under the car would have been only intriguing, at best, and I’d likely not have intervened when Aurora was going to retire her. Without her becoming my dream-woman, she’d be dead.

  ‘I’ll make sure this cylinder is trashed once we’re done,’ said Aurora. ‘Now, you know why I’m here?’

  ‘You want to know where the cylinder is.’

  ‘Full marks. Are you going to tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘You’re a bad liar, Charlie. I’ve been working the Dreamspace since before you were squirted out of the turkey baster, and I’m good at it. When dreams are your own, you have agency over them, but right now we’re equal actors in another’s dream. I can mould it the way I want it to go, I can mould you the way I want you to go. I can pull something from your subconscious that you don’t want revealed, and I can even have your mind sweated out of you, so you end up like that dopey orderly, no better than a nightwalker. What was his name again?’

  ‘Webster.’

  ‘Thank you. So … Where was I?’

  ‘Something about sweating my mind out of me so I ended up like Webster?’

  ‘Yes – good only for driving a golf cart. So, here’s the deal: tell us where the cylinder is and we’ll retrieve Birgitta and you get to go back to the land of the living. How about it?’

  I looked around at the beach, the Argentinian Queen and the parasol of spectacular size and splendour.

  ‘If I didn’t take the deal when offered by Goodnight, what makes you think I’ll take it with you? Besides, I don’t know about any cylinder.’