She pulls away from her parking spot, crunching past the chapel and onto the path back onto Great Cambridge Road. Janine tells her auto to let Frank know she’s on her way. Perhaps the two of them should open a bottle of wine after dinner and have a serious chat tonight. Funny, but after everything that’s happened, it’s Dad’s comment about Por-Qui having a new owner some day that weighs on her.
Have they left it too late? Is she too old to be a Mum herself now?
“You’re only as old as the things you do.”
“Yeah, I knew you’d say that, Dad,” she murmurs.
Janine smiles as she drives home, thinking that if she and Frank do have kids, at least they’ll always be able to talk to their Granddad.
Even if they can’t believe a word the effing b says.
Copy
To kill time while he waits, Derek decides to buy a copy of the book he hates more than anything in the world.
He opens the glove compartment and pulls his KindleBlaze free, causing a few other things to spill out into the footwell. He doesn’t bother picking them up, just whacks the little compartment door shut. Then he sits back in the driver’s seat, shuffling to get comfortable. His lower back aches. A fresh burst of pins and needles along his thighs makes him wince.
Two bloody hours, he’s been here.
Two hours waiting for the call.
Derek takes a deep breath. He can’t smell the inside of his car any more, but the air is thick and humid. Rain drums against the roof, flowing down the front windscreen in tiny rivers. It’s mid-September, and this year’s hot summer has turned into a seriously wet autumn. Seems like it rains every day now.
He glances through the side window. The pavement is dark and wet. Bits of rubbish are being swept along the gutter into gurgling drains. None of the people walking along notice him, as they hurry through the downpour. He’s parked in a side-street in Mayfair, not far from Green Park Tube station. Swanky part of town. Not what he’s used to. Further up the road, the lights of restaurants, wine bars, art galleries and expensive hotels glow hazily through the rain. Even on a night like this, there’s plenty of people going out for dinner and drinks. Something Derek hasn’t done for... no, he doesn’t want to know how long.
He’s not there to enjoy himself. Waiting somewhere central makes sense, since he could be going anywhere in the London area tonight. Once he gets the word.
Derek opens up his KindleBlaze tablet in reader mode: a folded two-page book made of illuminated memory plastic. It activates in his hands with a musical chime, and the exterior shines with the covers of the books in his current reading list. That always makes him scowl. The old push-button Kindle Classics were clunky and heavy, but at least other people couldn’t see what you were reading. Nobody else’s business, is it?
One of the two interior pages lists his collection, while the other displays everything he might like to buy. His car is a 5G hotspot, so the KindleBlaze is already online and synced with Amazon. Adverts play. Recommendations flash. Offers tantalise.
The book he’s after is right there, on the first page of the Top 100 Bestsellers chart.
Box Clever and the Secret City
(Box Clever series #11)
Author: AB Foster
Type: Kindle eeBook (all
models)
Language: UK English
(Other language versions)
Classification: PG-C
Rating: 4.5 stars
(923 customer reviews)
Price: £39.99
A number snags Derek’s eye. Eleven books. Eleven! This is the fifth so far this year. They’ve been coming out at a ridiculously fast rate – one novel a month, nearly. Back in the old days, it would take a lot longer for AB Foster to publish a Box Clever book.
Yeah, thinks Derek, but it’s not her writing them any more, is it?
His eyes defocus when he tries to read the blurb, which is as clichéd and inane as he expected. Instead he glares at the cover. The hero dominates it, of course. A muscular young black man, with a square jaw, broken nose and sharp brown eyes. He’s wearing the red padded gloves, vest and long shorts of a boxer... plus half-moon spectacles and a tuxedo, with a fountain pen behind one cauliflower ear.
Box Clever: a professional heavyweight fighter who had an accident in the ring and woke up with an IQ of 200. Although boxing was all he had ever known in his old life, he is now so intellectual that he finds fighting abhorrent, preferring to use his brain to solve problems rather than his fists. It remains a mystery whether his sudden intelligence was an accident or the result of some strange experiment. One day he’ll find out who or what made him this way. In the meantime, Box has adventures around the world with his friends, always trying to avoid violence, even if sometimes his IQ lapses and renders him dumb in the middle of a dangerous escapade.
Despite being aimed at a Young Adult audience, everyone’s heard of the Box Clever books. Something about the character caught the public imagination when he first appeared. Kids loved Box’s combination of brain and brawn, his funny quips, his knock-out right hook. Parents approved of his think-before-fighting attitude. Amazon approved of his sales figures, and promoted him everywhere. A book review on Guardian Online called him ‘The adopted child of Muhammad Ali and Sherlock Holmes’, a phrase that went viral and led to the popular hashtag #adoptedchildof, which did a lot to cement his early popularity.
So now there are eleven books in the series, with a twelfth on the way, even though there’s only meant to be bloody six of them!
Derek stabs a finger onto his KindleBlaze to buy a copy of ‘Box Clever and the Secret City’. It downloads instantly into his collection. He isn’t aware of the sneer on his face as he starts turning digital pages, fingers not even brushing the memory plastic.
He grits his teeth every time he comes across a product mentioned in the text. They’re always highlighted as a link, allowing you to buy whatever it is instantly. Box Clever glancing at his Apple iWatch. Sergeant Conway taking scene-of-crime photos with her GoogleGlasses. Polly MacIntyre making a desperate call for help on her Nokia Moro 900 smartphone. Derek knows some authors earn more money from these ‘organic adverts’ than they do from actual book sales. Who cares if it makes a novel feel like a catalogue, as long as you make a little extra cash, right?
But it’s the story itself that Derek’s interested in. That’s what he really hates. Because he’s seen it all before.
Well that line’s not new for a start, he thinks as he highlights a sentence with his fingertip. Or that one. Or that one. And here, as early as page seven, a descriptive paragraph identical to the opening of the fifth book in the series. Phraseology, sentence structure, all too similar to be coincidence.
Even the titles – they couldn’t even be arsed to make up something different! Book 1 in the original series is called ‘Box Clever and the Shadow’s Challenge’, so what do they call the first of the new ones this year? ‘Box Clever and the Phantom’s Gauntlet’, for God’s sake! Did they think nobody would notice?
All of the new releases are knock-offs. ‘King’s Riddle’? The second book’s called ‘Emperor’s Puzzle’. What about ‘Psychic Snare’? Oh, not at all like the third book, ‘Mind Trap’. And the one on his KindleBlaze right now, ‘Secret City’, actually lifts paragraphs directly from the fifth book, ‘Hidden Citadel’. It’s like the entire original cycle has been... well, recycled.
Nothing new. Nothing original. A blatant copy.
“What’s wrong with you people!” he says aloud. “Why can’t anyone see it!”
But he knows the answer. Who pays attention to the words, when an eeBook offers so much more?
Derek makes a poke-forward gesture to activate the car’s smartwindow. The front windscreen starts displaying information inside the glass. Vehicle status. Insurance details. Traffic alerts for inner London. Local weather report, claiming sunny intervals and clear skies. These and more appear briefly before tucking themselves away to the side, ready to be
expanded if needed.
Derek’s auto is there too, always appearing on the nearest available interface. His profile glows, rain streaming behind it.
7.54pm Friday 16 September
2022
Derek Thorpe
Gender: Male
Age range: 31-35
Orientation: Straight
Relationship status:
Single/Unavailable
Current location: Shepherd
Street, Mayfair, London W1J
7HR
Status update: [None.]
Hi Derek, hope you’re enjoying
your evening! Here’s the
selected feed since 6.02pm:
0 friend requests
0 direct messages
0 calendar invite
0 personal videos
0 referred videos
0 status updates
...
He wishes his auto wouldn’t keep listing all those feeds. Derek cut himself off from most of the people he knew a long time ago. There’s hardly anyone in his Circle any more.
His profile picture is at least four years old. The smile looks genuine, so it can’t be recent. He glances across at the other picture of him, an internal security-cam display which shows him fidgeting inside the car. The differences shock him – seeing his past and present selves side by side is a weird Dorian Gray moment. It’s like twenty years have passed, not four. Black hair greasy, veined with grey. Jaw unshaven. Bags under his eyes. Lines around the mouth too deep for a man of 35.
Derek swipes all that away. He makes a plucking gesture and flicks ‘Box Clever and the Secret City’ from the KindleBlaze onto the smartwindow. The text appears and starts scrolling down at what his auto knows is Derek’s normal reading speed.
He keeps flicking, copying the rest of the eeBook’s contents onto the larger screen, one by one.
The audio recording, chirpily narrated by one of EastEnders’ current leads.
The links to Box Clever websites, forums, blogs, vlogs, feeds, reviews and other books.
The soundtrack, a fully-orchestrated score plus some upbeat dance tunes, each cue playing whenever the reader gets to the relevant chapter.
The digitally drawn images, over a hundred of them, popping up at key scenes to help the reader visualise what’s happening in the story.
The music video for the accompanying pop single ‘Box To The Top’, recorded by last month’s Brit-Factor runner-ups, currently number 27 in the UK Hourly Download Charts.
The inbuilt computer games, a mixture of puzzles, quizzes, platform run-and-jumps, first-person shooters and 3D immersive adventures.
The CGI animations of Box and the other characters, talking, running, joking, fighting, dodging explosions, acting out the story in short segments chapter by chapter, or running together as a 90 minute cartoon.
The strident, exciting adverts for Box Clever action figures, Box Clever board games, Box Clever posters, Box Clever lunchboxes, Box Clever underwear.
“Same old shit,” Derek hisses.
Tossing the KindleBlaze aside, he leans back and folds his arms. Everything he’s transferred off it flares across the smartwindow, filling the interior of the car with light and noise and music and voices and sound effects. And he swears again, hating the lot. He knew he’d hate it. That’s why he bought it, to feed his hate. This isn’t a book, he thinks, it’s a bloody circus, it’s a bloody joke!
All eeBooks are a joke. He wasn’t keen even when the first electronic books came along in the Noughties. The ones you read on gadgets that looked like cheap grey toys left over from Soviet Russia. They were just computer files, they weren’t real books.
Not like a thick, colourful novel. With a glossy cover and an embossed title you could run your fingertips over, stroking its raised ridges. A novel that you could flick through for glimpses of enticing lines, intriguing sentences. Inhale the musky page-scent, taste the tang of ink. Reading used to be a physical hands-on task, like having sex or being in a fight, you grappled with the book as it opened itself up to you, it soaked into you through all your senses, you really felt it!
And now, you don’t have to touch a thing. It’s all point, swipe, flick. Now nothing’s real.
Derek never expected paperbacks would become something that he missed. There’s still loads floating around, but all second-hand. It’s rare that anything is released in print now – it just costs too much. It took the publishing industry years to accept, but eventually the only way they could sustain profits was to shut down all the printing presses, warehouses, delivery trucks and pulping machines that physical books required, and just go digital.
But then after eBooks, of course, it got worse. Kids weren’t reading them, only older people. Kids weren’t reading anything. Too much like hard work. Watch it on YouTube, play it on Xbox, listen to it on iPod, share it on Facebook = easy. But read it? All them words? What, not even any pictures? Nah.
And so publishers started adding little extras. Audio-visual features, illustrations, music… anything to make it easier to engage with the story. Before long, the enhanced electronic book was the norm. A book where only about 10% was made up of text.
Even the term ‘eeBook’ grates on Derek’s nerves. There’s something clunky and artless about just bunging an extra letter on the front. In Europe they’re called dBooks, since they’re entirely digital, with the implication being that a dBook is a step up from an eBook. But the UK goes out of its way to avoid Euro conventions, ever since the split from the EU – something else Derek wishes had never happened. So now it’s eeBooks, like the Americans call them.
Behind all the gimmicks of an eeBook, all the toy adverts and video games and cartoons, Derek can see... there’s nothing. Nothing new. The Box Clever books of 2022 are just rehashing the originals, stealing the same basic ideas and regurgitating them to the public. Yeah, that’s exactly the right word: regurgitate. It’s like serving someone a plate of their own vomit, garnished with so many exotic sauces and condiments that they can’t tell they’ve already eaten it.
And it’s making Derek sick to his gut.
He scans all the crap bombarding him in the face, looking for the eeBook’s live feed. There amongst all the tweets, bleets and veets is the advert he’s looking for, flashing with urgency. A flick of his fingers expands it.
LIVE INTERVIEW AND
BOOK LAUNCH!
Friday 16 September 8pm UMT.
AB Foster, author of the Box
Clever books, will be
Webcasting a live Q&A session
prior to the launch of her brand
new novel
‘Box Clever and the Serpent’s
Gaze’. First 1,000 copies will
be digi-signed by AB Foster
herself!
There you are you little bitch, he thinks.
Derek taps the air, activating the link. He can’t be bothered to manually shut down each of the multiple windows blazing away, so his auto does it for him when he says “Close all others.” They vanish, as the smartwindow replaces them with AB Foster’s official site. There’s a countdown to the interview, which starts in less than a minute. On the edge of the site is a rapid babble of comments from fans around the world, eagerly anticipating the new book being launched today.
Once, a launch event like this would have been held in a bookstore. But there aren’t many of those anymore. Besides, the audience for this webcast can be measured in millions. It’s available on all the free digital channels, right around the world. A lot of people will be watching for the next hour.
Which suits him down to the ground.
Derek shifts in the driver’s seat again, trying to get comfortable despite the tension in every muscle. It’s finally happening. He knows he can expect the call any time now.
The webcast starts. Fanfare of the Box Clever theme – a punchy little tune, the one that plays whenever you open any eeBook in the series. An image of the interviewer appears, a grey-haired an
d handsome man in his late forties. As his deep voice rolls out of the car’s internal speakers, his words are automatically transcribed on the site. Derek knows who this is: John Crown, well-respected book reviewer and critic. He’s one of those people who appears on late-night talkcasts and newsfeed interviews, passionately talking about literary matters. Derek hates the dickhead. Just another well-educated parasite, born with a silver spoon in his mandibles.
Crown: “Tonight, it’s my great pleasure to talk to an author who has almost single-handedly rekindled a nation’s interest in creative fiction, someone who is as well-read and well-loved by young and old alike...”
“Get on with it you tosser!” barks Derek.
Crown: “I’m very fortunate indeed that she has personally invited me to discuss her fascinating and, at times, enigmatic career...”
“Fortunate, my arse!” Yeah, very fortunate that John Crown – a man who earned a book deal of his own just by talking about people with book deals – was ‘personally invited’ by Buchanan Publishers Ltd, the tenth biggest publishing house in the world, to ask the right questions and make their client look good. He wonders how much he charged them for this. Probably the same rate as the other glowing reviews he awarded to all their publications.
Crown: “This is a wonderful honour for me because, as you may know, I’m a tremendous fan of the Box Clever books, which I’ve consistently found to be engaging, entertaining and instructive, and my reviews reflect how much they’ve impacted upon me personally...”
“Thirty pieces of silver buys you a five-star Crown,” jeers Derek at his windscreen.
Crown: “...and so, without further ado, let me introduce the author who’s very generously given up so much of her time to be with us tonight: AB Foster.”
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