Early Riser_The new standalone novel from the Number One bestselling author

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘Then you know all about Project Lazarus?’

  ‘Actually, I was very junior,’ he admitted, ‘logging data mostly, equipment maintenance, tea, bit of laundry, cooking, that sort of thing.’

  ‘We found out about Project Lazarus yesterday,’ said Foulnap, ‘and quite by chance.’

  ‘So, what is it?’

  ‘One moment,’ said Dr Gwynne, making safe a booby-trap detonation device on the door that was attached to not a single Golgotha but two. Unlike Fodder’s, these looked to be live.

  Dr Gwynne and I Winter embraced; he smelled of burned-out electric motors, pear drops and solder. Once we’d parted I took a step inside the room and looked around. The ceiling was ornate plaster, and the wooden panelling and glass-fronted cabinets suggested use as a library in days gone by. There was a fireplace at one end, long disused, and most of the floor space was taken up by machines liberally festooned with blinking lights, knobs, dials and switches. Sitting on a bar stool in the middle of it all was a nightwalker doing probably the most complex tricks I’d ever seen with a yo-yo. She looked vacant enough, but was connected to the machine by a series of wires glued to pads on her head. When she yo-yoed, the trace on the oscilloscopes jumped and danced.

  ‘That’s Wendy,’ said Dr Gwynne, indicating the nightwalker. ‘She’s helping me with my nightwalker retrieval experiments.’

  ‘How’s that working out?’ I asked.

  ‘Somewhere between frustratingly slow and fiendishly elusive,’ replied Dr Gwynne. ‘Have you met Josh? He’s a recent acquisition.’

  I turned, and sitting on a wicker chair was the receptionist from HiberTech. He was reading a book and chuckling occasionally.

  ‘Josh defected from HiberTech,’ said Foulnap, ‘and brought Wendy with him. Coffee?’

  I said that would be very welcome and he told me to have a look around, so I walked over to Josh.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Worthing,’ he said in a cheery manner. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Outlook stormy with a chance of scattered death moving in randomly from all points of the compass.’

  He laughed, told me that weather forecasts were often wrong, and showed me a pencil that was sharpened on both ends.

  ‘I call it the “Twincil”,’ he said. ‘Always a problem breaking the lead, right? Now all you have to do is turn it around and – bam – keep on drawing.’

  ‘It’s kind of useful having an eraser on the other end.’

  ‘I thought of that too,’ he said, producing a pencil with the eraser on both ends. ‘This is the “Biraser”. You can make twice as many mistakes, and unlike a conventional pencil, it never gets any shorter. What do you think?’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just have two pencils?’

  He stared at me for a moment, blinked twice then handed me an after-dinner mint.

  ‘What do you make of this?’

  ‘It tastes just like an After Eight mint,’ I said, suddenly realising how hungry I was.

  ‘To the casual observer, yes. But in reality it’s an after-dinner mint mint – to eat after you’ve eaten your after-dinner mint. I call it an After After Eight.’

  ‘Do people like after-dinner mints that much?’

  Josh looked thoughtful for a moment, then said quite simply: ‘I do.’

  ‘Here,’ said Foulnap, handing me a coffee and a plate of shortbread, which I ate hungrily.

  ‘So, Josh,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘tell Worthing here what you told us.’

  ‘Not much to tell,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know the precise details, only that Project Lazarus aims to have everyone on Morphenox.’

  ‘That’s been a stated aim for over thirty years,’ I said.

  ‘This goes one step beyond. Morphenox-B will be marketed as a slightly cheaper alternative, but carries a higher-than-normal propensity for sleepers to become nightwalkers. Quite aside from the greatly increased revenue on drug sales, there will be a large resource ready to be redeployed and rented out as a hugely profitable and uncomplaining workforce. Nightwalkers will be collected directly from Dormitoria and taken straight to redeployment centres so there can be no chance the truth will come out.’

  We were all silent for a few moments.

  ‘How do you know this?’ I asked.

  ‘Receptionists know everything,’ he said simply, ‘and d’you know, all of this is so fundamentally wrong. I have little expectation that I’ll live to see the Spring, but if I can help bring down Greedy Pharma, I’m so going to take it.’

  He fell silent, then suddenly piped up: ‘Might this make me RealSleep’s Employee of the Week? I’ve been the EOTW for sixty-two weeks running, and it would be a shame to break my record.’

  Foulnap said he would see to it personally, and we left Josh to his somewhat eclectic thought processes. We settled in another part of the room, while outside the wind blew around the museum’s rotunda with low moans, whistles and shrieks.

  ‘So,’ said Foulnap once we were seated, ‘I know you don’t have the cylinder on you, so we need to formulate a plan to retrieve it. But first: tell us your story from the very beginning.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know where to start.’

  ‘You’ll know the beginning easily enough; it’s when it all started going weird.’

  Night in the museum 2

  * * *

  ‘… The invention of the Somnagraph by Thomas Edison would not have been possible without the Somnaécritaphone, invented thirty years previously by M. Gaston Tournesol. With Tournesol’s device, the content of a dream could be logged as a series of dots on a sheet of carbon-coated tin. Tournesol was working on a method to read the dots when he died in the harsh Winter of 1898 …’

  – Early DreamTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng

  It took me almost forty minutes to tell my story, and throughout that time Foulnap and Dr Gwynne stared at me, nodding quietly. When I’d finished they paused for a while, gathering their thoughts.

  ‘Tell us what happened when you played the cylinder again?’ asked Dr Gwynne.

  I repeated how I had seen the gathered nightwalkers’ partial retrieval in the Cambrensis. The doctor was fascinated by the notion that retrieval could be accomplished by a collection of well-chosen words.

  ‘Did they rhyme?’ he asked.

  ‘They sort of rhymed,’ I said.

  ‘Then I think chosen not for their actual meaning,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘but for their rhythm, cadence and associative function – a subconscious therapy. It explains the partial recovery you observed.’

  ‘We might need a Somnagraph to effect a full retrieval,’ said Foulnap.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ I said, now realising that Shamanic Bob and his wild conspiracy theories didn’t actually go far enough. ‘Why were my dreams identical each time?’

  ‘The Somnagraph is a device that records dreams on a wax cylinder,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘and was originally devised by Thomas Edison in an odd collaboration with Sigmund Freud. Edison famously recorded a woman dreaming of a cat in 1904 and then played it back to a drowsy audience of politicians and the military, who were astounded. As you saw, it’s not just the pictures and sounds but an entire sense of being. You take on their character, remember their memories, feel their passion, their hate, their fears, their frustration.’

  ‘I felt the love Webster felt for Birgitta,’ I said slowly, ‘and through him, the love that she felt back.’

  ‘Do you still feel it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And that’s the problem with continued overexposure to Somnagraph-induced dreams: the emotional memories have a way of flooding into your waking hours, causing reality confusion until you have no idea what’s real and what isn’t.’

  ‘Moody, Roscoe and Suzy Watson,’ I murmured. ‘They had it night after night. And then nearly me.’

  ‘Bingo. People go insane in the Winter, and yelling about hands and Mrs Nesbit is random enough to not raise any suspicions. HiberTech recorded Don Hector’s dreams and then used the residents of the
ninth floor of the Siddons as disposable assets to try and figure out what he did with the cylinder. And by using Dream Avatar technology in the form of Mrs Nesbit to communicate, there was no risk to HiberTech, and every risk to the subject.’

  ‘But all without much luck, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Foulnap, ‘because Don Hector trained himself to dream only the one dream – and spiked it with a nightmare to dissuade anyone from poking around.’

  ‘The hands.’

  ‘Yes, the hands.’

  ‘From the scraps of information available to us,’ continued Foulnap, ‘we think Don Hector discovered an improved Morphenox-C that didn’t generate nightwalkers at all. By then, the redeployment and transplant industries were booming, and HiberTech management really weren’t interested. We figure he decided to go public with what he knew, recorded nightwalker extraction protocols on the cylinder and was trying to get it out until his death – and beyond.’

  We all fell silent. If Don Hector had tried and failed to make all this public, I wasn’t sure how any of us lesser mortals could do it.

  ‘So HiberTech beamed Don Hector’s dream into our heads to try and find out what he did with the cylinder?’

  ‘That’s about the tune of it.’

  ‘So where did the Birgitta dream come from?’

  They scratched their heads.

  ‘We’re really not sure. Dream induction is more of an art than a science. Even Thomas Edison was a little confused by it – and it was also professionally devastating for him, as he couldn’t find a useful way to bring the invention to market.’

  ‘One last question,’ I said, my head beginning to spin. ‘Where does Dreamspace come into all of this?’

  Foulnap and Dr Gwynne exchanged looks, but it was Foulnap who spoke.

  ‘To initiate a Dreamspace, you must record a target dream on a Somnagraph and then play it back simultaneously to as many people as you wish to interact with in that target dream.’

  ‘It would be like finding yourself in the Mrs Nesbit tearoom scene during the movie Brief Encounter,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘and while Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson bang on about how frightfully, frightfully hard it is to justify their feelings for one another, you interact with all the other Dreamspacers in the tearooms. But Howard and Johnson’s dialogue carries on unchanging in a continuous repetitive loop.’61

  ‘Shamanic Bob said the problem was about knowing what was real and what wasn’t,’ I said, ‘because when you merge the real and the fantasy, you can never quite define the boundaries.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘but Dreamspace was also highly dangerous. Psychotic episodes, reality distortions, paranoia, death.’

  ‘Far too dangerous for civilians,’ added Foulnap, ‘but the risk wasn’t an issue when used militarily. If detainees suffered a devastating neural collapse after interrogation, the official line was “so what?”’

  ‘Hooke told me that it was Aurora who was the expert at in-dream interrogation, but was keeping it quiet.’

  ‘Too true,’ said Foulnap. ‘She likes to pretend she’s the moderating influence at HiberTech, but she’s actually the opposite. Aurora enthusiastically embraced the intelligence-gathering possibilities like no other, and was by far and away the best at manipulating the Dreamspace. Could go into anyone’s head and take what she wanted. Go off-piste, so they said, and take the dream to wherever she wanted it to go. She could invoke nightmares, read your thoughts, delve into your emotions – anything. She’s extracted more secrets from sleeping suspects than anyone else alive, and has caused neurological damage to thousands. It was eventually her undoing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The story goes,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘that fourteen years ago she suffered a moral conflict during a dream interrogation, where the last vestiges of her decent self struggled with what she was doing. Unable to reconcile the dissent within her own mind she split into two people: one containing the very worst bits of her, and the other with the … well, faintly tolerable. They retired her from the military, put it about she was a Halfer and placed her in charge of HiberTech security. They thought all would be fine with the “faintly okay angels of her nature” side of her working behind the bar in the Wincarnis. Trouble was, Toccata wanted a career for herself and took a job as a Consul. Within ten years she was head of Sector Twelve’s Consul Service.’

  ‘Couldn’t HiberTech have just locked Toccata up or something?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ said Dr Gwynne, ‘because Aurora views her as a slightly loathsome younger sister who needs to be continuously looked after. Aurora has actually helped Toccata, put her in a position where they are in real-world conflict – part of their ongoing resolution and healing process, we think.’

  ‘Can they remerge?’ I asked, and they both shrugged.

  ‘The best neuroscientists are as confused as anyone over it,’ said Foulnap. ‘The simple answer is: no one knows. But this conflict you see out here in the real world? It’s probably ten times worse on the inside.’

  I mused on this for a moment. It kind of made sense.

  ‘So … what’s the plan?’ I asked.

  ‘We secure the cylinder,’ said Foulnap, ‘and find a Somnagraph to play it to the nightwalkers. We wake as many as possible, get them to Springrise and cause the biggest upset you’re ever likely to see.’

  ‘It sounds so simple when you say it like that,’ I said.

  ‘It’s more wishful thinking than plan,’ agreed Foulnap, ‘and more hope than objective. So: where’s the cylinder?’

  ‘At the Cambrensis.’

  ‘Good. We’ll need that – and a Somnagraph.’

  I told them the ninth-floor device was most likely hidden in a steamer trunk in the room next to mine, and after discussing tactics, Foulnap said he should call Toccata.

  ‘She’ll only be on shift for another three hours,’ he said as he got to his feet, ‘and if we miss this opportunity we’ll be without Toccata for eleven hours – and have the added burden of Aurora to contend with.’

  Dr Gwynne also departed, saying he had to take Wendy back to her quarters, a converted janitor’s cupboard on the fourth floor, just below the rotunda. I sat there trying to make sense of how my situation had changed so dramatically, and in just a few hours. Last night I was dreaming I was working for RealSleep in a life-or-death struggle against a pharmaceutical corporation with only the slenderest grasp of morality – and now I was doing the very same thing, for real.

  ‘Hey,’ said Josh as he was walking past, I think to his quarters somewhere.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘what happens to you now?’

  ‘I get to stay in Sector Twelve until Springrise then try and make it back to Canada without HiberTech noticing.’

  He gave me his hand and I shook it gratefully.

  ‘May the Spring embrace you,’ I said.

  ‘And embrace you,’ he replied, then smiled, and moved off.

  I watched him go, then felt hungry and rummaged in my shoulder bag for my spare Snickers, while at the same time wondering if the feelings I held for Birgitta were actually mine at all, and not simply Webster’s, projected into my subconscious by the Somnagraph. I opened the bag as I couldn’t find the Snickers, and took out my purse, spare pants, paracetamol, the Polaroid of Birgitta and Charles and Laura’s Instamatic camera. No sign of the Snickers. The Gronk must have taken that, too. I looked at the camera again and frowned. All four flashes had been fired, even though I had replaced the flashcube after the attack by the nightwalkers. I looked at the back of the camera; the window showed I’d taken eight pictures but I could only remember taking four.

  Out there on the way over, when I was upside down in the snow and cooling rapidly, I must have taken four pictures of something.

  And that something may have been the Gronk.

  White-out

  * * *

  ‘… Although the shock-suit wouldn’t protect the wearer against the kinetic effects of a t
hump, it would negate the primary effects to the lungs, sinuses and Eustachian tubes, and greatly reduce secondary effects such as capillary rupture, internal bleeds and axonal shearing. The more modern suits have H4S, cooling and wireless, with a power pack to give ten hours’ survival down to minus forty …’

  – The Elegant Simplicity of WinterTech, by Emma Llewelyn WiEng

  It was half an hour before we were ready to leave, and we talked continually as we prepared. Toccata had been roped in to assist, despite her often erratic behaviour, which explained amongst other things why there were so many nightwalkers in the Cambrensis: she’d decided one day that no more would be retired or deployed, so had falsified the HotPot overheat to clear out the Cambrensis to make room. Quite how long they could be held there was never discussed, nor if this was a practical or well-thought-out policy – which it clearly wasn’t. But if it was a gut decision like the one I made about Birgitta, I totally got it.

  Dr Gwynne was not coming with us. He viewed himself as being possessed of ‘Fortitude Lite’62 but was good at technical support.

  ‘Good luck,’ he said as we were preparing to leave.

  I thanked him and passed over a scribbled note.

  ‘I know this is a long shot,’ I said, ‘and the weather’s bad and everything, but I have a suggestion as to how you could redeploy at least one of the Golgothas to greater effect.’

  He looked at the note and nodded slowly, then patted me on the shoulder, told me to take care, and we parted.

  ‘The plan is simple,’ said Foulnap as we walked down to the museum’s basement. ‘We go to the Siddons and retrieve the Somnagraph, then head to the Cambrensis for the cylinder. If anyone tries to stop us, we thump them.’

  ‘It has the benefit of simplicity.’

  ‘The best plans always do.’

  The museum basement was used mostly for storage and contained a fairground ride, an entire Railplane tractor unit and half-scale educational models of a HotPot, both the closed thermosiphon and sintered hotplate version. There was also a collection of the now unfashionable hyperbaric deep-sleep chambers and a moth-eaten animatronic giant tree sloth, which had been doing the rounds as they were on the brink of extinction. More relevant to us there was a Welsh licence-built Sno-Trac branded a Griffin V, which looked as though it had just been pulled off display.