First Among Sequels

by Jasper Fforde

  “No. I’ve been working on Spike’s weird-shit self-help book: Collecting the Undead.”

  Damn and blast again.

  I recalled a news item I had overheard on the tram home.

  “Hey, do you know what Redmond van de Poste’s Address to the Nation is all about?”

  “Rumor says it’s going to be about the stupidity surplus. Apparently his top advisers have come up with a plan that will deal with the excess in a manner that won’t damage economic interests and might actually generate new business opportunities.”

  “He’ll top the ratings with that one—I only hope he doesn’t generate more stupidity. You know how stupidity tends to breed off itself. How are the girls?”

  “They’re fine. I’m just playing Scrabble with Tuesday. Is it cheating for her to use Nextian Geometry to bridge two triple-word scores with a word of only six letters?”

  “I suppose. Where’s Jenny?”

  “She’s made a camp in the attic.”

  “Again?”

  Something niggled in my head once more. Something I was meant to do. “Land?”

  “Yuh?”

  “Nothing. I’ll get it.”

  There was someone at the door, and whoever it was had knocked, rather than rung, which is always mildly ominous. I opened the door, and it was Friday, or at least it was the clean-cut, nongrunty version. He wasn’t alone either—he had two of his ChronoGuard friends with him, and they all looked a bit serious. Despite the dapper light blue ChronoGuard uniforms, they all looked too young to get drunk or vote, let alone do something as awesomely responsible as surf the timestream. It was like letting a twelve-year-old do your epidural.

  “Hello, Sweetpea!” I said. “Are these your friends?”

  “They’re colleagues,” said Friday in a pointed fashion. “We’re here on official business.”

  “Goodness!” I said, attempting not to patronize him with motherly pride and failing spectacularly. “Would you all like a glass of milk and a cookie or something?”

  But Friday, it seemed, wasn’t in much of a mood for milk—or a cookie.

  “Not now, Mum. There’s only forty-eight hours of time left, and we still haven’t invented time travel.”

  “Maybe you can’t,” I replied. “Maybe it’s impossible.”

  “We used the technology to get here,” said Friday with impeccable logic, “so the possibility still exists, no matter how slight. We’ve got every available agent strung out across the timestream doing a fingertip search of all potential areas of discovery. Now, where is he?”

  “Your father?”

  “No, him. Friday—the other me.”

  “Don’t you know? Isn’t this all ancient history?”

  “Time is not as it should be. If it were, we’d have solved it all by now. So where is he?”

  “Are you here to replace him?”

  “No, we just want to talk.”

  “He’s out practicing with his band.”

  “He is not. Would it surprise you to learn that there was no band called the Gobshites?”

  “Oh, no!” I said with a shudder. “He didn’t call it the Wankers after all, did he?”

  “No, no, Mum—there is no band.”

  “He’s definitely doing his band thing,” I assured him, inviting them in and picking the telephone off the hall table. “I’ll call Toby’s dad. They use their garage for practice. It’s the perfect venue—both Toby’s parents are partially deaf.”

  “Then there’s not much point in phoning them, now, is there?” said the cockier of Friday’s friends.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Nigel,” said the one who had spoken, a bit sheepishly.

  “No one likes a smart-ass, Nigel.”

  I stared at him, and he looked away, pretending to find some fluff on his uniform.

  “Hi, is that Toby’s dad?” I said as the phone connected. “It’s Friday’s mum here…. No, I’m not like that—it only happens in the book. My question is: Are the boys jamming in your garage?”

  I looked at Friday and his friends.

  “Not for at least three months? I didn’t know that. Thank you. Good night.”

  I put the phone down.

  “So where is he?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” replied the other Friday, “and since he’s a free radical whose movements are entirely independent of the SHE, we have no way of knowing where or when he is. The feckless, dopey, teenage act was a good one and had us all fooled—you especially.”

  I narrowed my eyes. This was a surprising development. “What are you saying?”

  “We’ve had some new information, and we think Friday might be actually causing the nondiscovery of the technology—conspiring with his future self to overthrow the ChronoGuard!”

  “Sounds like a trumped-up bullshit charge for you to replace him,” I said, beginning to get annoyed.

  “I’m serious, Mum. Friday is a dangerous historical fundamentalist who will do whatever it takes to achieve his own narrow agenda—to keep time as it was originally meant to run. If we don’t stop him, then the whole of history will roll up and there’ll be nothing left of any of us!”

  “If he’s so dangerous,” I said slowly, “then why haven’t you eradicated him?”

  Friday took a deep breath. “Mum? Like…duh. He’s a younger version of me and the future director-general. If we get rid of him, we get rid of ourselves. He’s clever, I’ll grant him that. But if he can stop time travel from being discovered, then he knows how it was invented in the first place. We need to speak to him. Now—where is he?”

  “I don’t rat out my son, son,” I said in a mildly confusing way.

  “I’m your son, Mum.”

  “And I wouldn’t rat you out either, Sweetpea.”

  Friday took a step forward and raised his voice a notch. “Mum, this is important. If you have any idea where he is, then you’re going to have to tell us—and don’t call me Sweetpea in front of my friends.”

  “I don’t know where he is—Sweetpea—and if you want to talk to me in that tone of voice, you’ll go to your room.”

  “This is beyond room, Mother.”

  “Mum. It’s Mum. Friday always calls me Mum.”

  “I’m Friday, Mum—your Friday.”

  “No,” I said, “you’re another Friday—someone he might become. And do you know, I think I prefer the one who can barely talk and thinks soap is a type of TV show?”

  Friday glared at me angrily. “You’ve got ten hours to hand him over. Harboring a time terrorist is a serious offense, and the punishment unspeakably unpleasant.”

  I wasn’t fazed by his threats.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked.

  “Of course!”

  “Then, by definition, so does he. Why don’t you take your SO-12 buddies and go play in the timestream until dinner?”

  Friday made a harrumph noise, turned on his heels and departed, with his friends following quickly behind.

  I closed the door and walked through to the hall where Landen was leaning on the newel post staring at me. He’d been listening to every word.

  “Pumpkin, just what the hell’s going on?”

  “I’m not sure myself, darling, but I’m beginning to think that Friday’s been making monkeys out of the pair of us.”

  “Which Friday?”

  “The hairy one that grunts a lot. He’s not a dozy slacker after all—he’s working undercover as some sort of historical fundamentalist. We need some answers, and I think I know where to find them. Friday may have tricked his parents, the SHE and half the ChronoGuard, but there’s one person no teenage boy ever managed to fool.”

  “And that is?”

  “His younger sister.”

  “I can’t believe it took you so long to figure out,” said Tuesday, who agreed to spill the beans on her brother for the bargain price of a new bicycle, a thirty-pound gift card to MathWorld and lasagna three nights in a row. “He didn�
��t stomp on Barney Plotz either—he forged the letters and the phone call. He needed the time to conduct what he called his…investigations. I don’t know what they were, but he was at the public library a lot—and over at Gran’s.”

  “Gran’s? Why Gran’s? He likes his food.”

  “I don’t know,” said Tuesday, thinking long and hard about it. “He said it was something to do with Mycroft and a chronuption of staggering proportions.”

  “That boy,” I muttered grimly, “has got some serious explaining to do.”

  30.

  Now Is the Winter

  One of the biggest wastes of money in recent years was the Anti-Smite shield, designed to protect mankind (or Britain, at the very least) from an overzealous deity eager to cleanse the population of sin. Funded initially by Chancellor Yorrick Kaine, the project was halted after his ignominious fall from grace. Canceled but not forgotten, the network of transmission towers still lies dotted about the country, a silent testament to Kaine’s erratic and somewhat costly administration.

  M y mother answered the door when we knocked, and she seemed vaguely surprised to see us all. Landen and I were there as concerned parents, of course, and Tuesday was there as she was the only one who might be able to understand Mycroft’s work, if that was what was required.

  “Is it Sunday lunchtime already?” asked my mother.

  “No, Mother. Is Friday here?”

  “Friday? Goodness me, no! I haven’t seen him for over—”

  “It’s all right, Gran,” came a familiar voice from the living-room door. “There’s no more call for subterfuge.”

  “It was Friday—our Friday, the grunty, smelly one, who up until an hour ago was someone we thought wouldn’t know what “subterfuge” meant, let alone be able to pronounce it. He had changed. There seemed to be a much more upright bearing about him. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t dragging his feet when he walked, and he actually looked at us when he spoke. Despite this, he still seemed like a sad-teenager cliché: spots, long unkempt hair, and with clothes so baggy you could dress three people out of the material and still have enough to make some curtains.

  “Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  I fixed him with my best “Son, you are in so much trouble” look. “You’d be amazed what I can understand.”

  “Okay,” he said, drawing a deep breath. “You’ve heard that the ChronoGuard is using time-travel technology now in the almost certain knowledge that it’s invented in the future?”

  “I get the principle,” I replied somewhat guardedly, as I still had no idea how you could use something that had yet to be invented.

  “As weird as it might seem,” explained Friday, “the principle is sound. Many things happen solely because of the curious human foible of a preconceived notion’s altering the outcome. More simply put: If we convince ourselves that something is possible, it becomes so. It’s called the Schrödinger Night Fever principle.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s simple. If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it to be good, it’s a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it’s that, too. Thus Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation—even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology.”

  “I think I understand that,” said Landen. “Does it work with any John Travolta movie?”

  “Only the artistically ambiguous ones,” replied Friday, “such as Pulp Fiction and Face/Off. Battlefield Earth doesn’t work, because it’s a stinker no matter how much you think you’re going to like it, and Get Shorty doesn’t work either, because you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions.”

  “It’s a beautiful principle,” I said admiringly. “Yours?”

  “Sadly not,” replied Friday with a smile. “Much as I’d like to claim it, the credit belongs to an intellect far superior to mine—Tuesday. Way to go, sis.”

  Tuesday squirmed with joy at getting a compliment from her big brother, but still none of it made any real sense.

  “So how does this relate to Mycroft and time travel?”

  “Simple,” said Friday. “The obscenely complex technologies that the ChronoGuard uses to power up the time engines contravene one essential premise that is at the very core of science: that disorder will always stay the same or increase. More simply stated, you can put a pig in a machine to make a sausage, but you can’t put a sausage in a machine to make a pig. It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One of the most rigid tenets of our understanding of the physical world. You can’t reverse the arrow of time to make something unhappen—whether it be unscrambling eggs or unmaking a historical event.”

  “The recipe for unscrambled eggs,” I murmured, suddenly remembering a family dinner we had about the time of the Jane Eyre episode. “He was scribbling it on a napkin, and Polly made him stop. They had an argument—that’s how I remember it.”

  “Right,” said Friday. “The recipe was actually an equation that showed how the Second Law of Thermodynamics could be modified to allow a reversibility of time’s arrow. That you could unbake a cake with almost breathless simplicity. The recipe for unscrambled eggs is at the heart of reversing the flow of time—without it, there is no time travel!”

  “So,” I said slowly, “the whole of the ChronoGuard’s ability to move around in time rests on their getting hold of this recipe?”

  “That’s about the tune of it, Mum.”

  “So where is it?” asked Landen. “Logically, it must still exist, or the likelihood of time travel drops to zero. Since your future self just popped up twenty minutes ago to make veiled threats, the possibility remains that it will be discovered sometime before the End of Time—sometime in the next forty-eight hours.”

  “Right,” said Friday, “and that’s what I’ve been doing with Polly for the past two weeks—trying to find where Mycroft put it. Once I’ve got the recipe, I can destroy it: The possibility of time travel drops to zero, and it’s good night, Vienna, for the ChronoGuard.”

  “Why would you want that?”

  “The less you know, Mum, the better.”

  “They say you’re a dangerous historical fundamentalist,” I added cautiously. “A terrorist of time.”

  “But they would say that, wouldn’t they? The Friday you met—he’s okay. He’s following orders, but he doesn’t know what I know. If he did, he’d be trying to destroy the recipe, the same as me. The Standard History Eventline is bullshit, and all they’re doing is trying to protect their temporal-phony-baloney jobs.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I become director-general of the ChronoGuard when I’m thirty-six. In the final year before retirement, at seventy-eight, I’m inducted into the ChronoGuard Star Chamber—the ruling elite. It was there that I discovered something so devastating that if it became public knowledge would shut down the industry in an instant. And the time business is worth six hundred billion a year—minimum.”

  “Tell them what it is,” said Polly, who’d been standing at his side. “If anything happens to you, then at least one of us might be able to carry on.”

  Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain lassitude across the nation?”

  “Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind-numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.”

  “Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end. But the thing is, it needn’t be that way—there’s a reason for it. The time engines don
’t just need vast quantities of power—they need to run on time. Not punctuality, but time itself. Even a temporal leap of a few minutes will use up an infinitesimally small amount of the abstract concept. Not the hard clock time but the soft stuff that keeps events firmly embedded in a small cocoon of prolonged event—the Now.”

  “Oooh!” murmured Tuesday, who twigged it first. “They’ve been mining the Now!”

  “Exactly, sis,” said Friday, sweeping the hair from his eyes. “The Short Now is the direct result of the time industry’s unthinking depredations. If the ChronoGuard continues as it is, within a few years there won’t be any Now at all, and the world will move into a Dark Age of eternal indifference.”

  “You mean TV could get worse?” asked Landen.

  “Much worse,” replied Friday grimly. “At the rate the Now is being eroded, by this time next year Samaritan Kidney Swap will be considered the height of scholarly erudition. But easily digestible TV is not the cause—it’s the effect. A Short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.”

  There was a bleak silence as we took this on board. We could see it all now. Short attention spans, a general malaise, no tolerance, no respect, no rules. Short-termism. No wonder we were seeing Outlander ReadRates go into free fall. The Short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification. It brought home the urgency to find the recipe, wherever it was: Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought—and more reading. Simple.

  “Shouldn’t this be a matter for public debate?” asked Landen.

  “What would that achieve, Dad? The ChronoGuard doesn’t have to disprove that the reduction of the Now is caused by humans—they only have to create doubt. They’ll always be Short Now deniers, and the debate will become so long and drawn out that as soon as we realize there is a problem, we won’t care enough to want to do anything about it. This issue is not for debate—the ChronoGuard cannot get hold of that recipe. I’m staking my career on it. And believe me, I would have had an excellent career to stake.”