One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

24. Goliath

“Well,” said Flanker as we sat in the plush interior of the bullet train, “we’ll be at Goliathopolis in an hour, and your debrief can begin.”

“Mr. Flanker, sir,” said one of the accompanying heavies, a small man with a rounded face and a crew cut like a tennis ball, “have you checked she’s not one of ours?”

“Good point,” said Flanker. “Would you be so kind?”

The two heavies needed no extra encouragement, and while one held me down, the other clasped my upper eyelid and peered underneath. It wasn’t painful, but it was undignified. Plus, the agent looking at my eye had been eating an onion sandwich not long before, and his breath was pretty unpleasant.

“She’s not one of our Thursdays,” said the agent, and they released me.

“I’m delighted to hear it,” I said—and I was. There were now only two possibilities for who I was: me or Thursday. “Potblack killed them all,” I added, “and had them buried in the Savernake.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” replied Flanker airily. “Goliath no longer conducts experiments into synthetics. It’s against the law. Oh,” he added, “I forgot. We are the law. Shall I come straight to the point? We’ve been contracted to complete Phase One of the Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield by the end of the year, and the penalties are severe for noncompliance. We’re not in the business of paying out severe penalties, so tell us where the secret plans are and we can release you and drop all the charges.”

It felt like covering for a character in a book without being told what the book was about, who was in it or even what your character had been doing up until then. I’d done it twice in the BookWorld, so I had some experience in these matters. But at least I was beginning to understand what was going on.

“The plans are in a safe place,” I replied, assuming they were, “but if you think you can simply ask questions and I’ll simply answer them, you’ve got another think coming.”

“Oh, this is just the preamble,” said Flanker in an unpleasant tone, “so I can tell the board that I did ask you and you refused. We can cut the information out of you, but it’s a very messy business. Now, where are the plans?”

“And I said somewhere safe.”

Flanker was quiet for a moment. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you have caused Goliath?”

“I’m hoping it’s a lot.”

“You’d be right. Just getting you off the streets is a small triumph, but we have other plans. The Goliath Advanced Weapons Division has been wanting to get hold of you for a long time.”

“I won’t help you make any weapons, Flanker.”

“It’s simpler than that, Thursday. Since you have been so devastatingly destructive to us over the years, we have decided that you would make the ideal weapon. We can create excellent visual copies, but none of them have the unique skills that make you the dangerous person you are. Now that we have you and that precious brain of yours, with a couple of modifications in your moral compass our Thursday Mark V will be the ultimate killing machine. Of course, the host rarely survives the procedure, but we can replace you with another copy. I’m sure Landen won’t notice. In fact, with a couple of modifications we can improve you for him—make the new Thursday more . . . compliant to his wishes.”

“What makes you think that I’m not already? If he were only a quarter of the man he is, he’d still be ten times more of a man than you.”

Flanker ignored me, and the bullet train moved off. We were soon zipping through the countryside, humming along thirty feet above the induction rail. When another bullet train passed in the opposite direction, we gently moved to the left of the induction wave, and the opposite train shot past us in a blur.

I stared at Flanker, who was sitting there grinning at me. If he could have started to laugh maniacally, he would have. But the thing was, this didn’t sound like the Flanker in my books. Pain in the ass he might have been, but Goliath lackey he most certainly wasn’t. His life was SpecOps, and although a strict rules man, that’s all he was. I had an idea.

“When did they replace you, Flanker?”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn’t you. Shit you might have been, evil-toady Goliathlackey shit you most definitely weren’t. Ever had a look at your own eyelid? Just to make sure?”

He laughed uneasily but then excused himself to the bathroom. When he came back, he looked somewhat pale and sat down in silence.

“When was I replaced?” he asked one of the heavies.

I’d not really given them much thought, but now that I looked at them, they also seemed to be vaguely familiar, as though they’d been described to me long ago. There were plenty of Goliath personalities in my book, but the litigious multinational had always insisted that no actual names could be used, nor realistic descriptions—they went further by denying that anything in the Thursday Next books ever took place, something that Thursday told me was anything but the truth.

“This morning,” said one of the heavies in a matter-of-fact tone, “and you’re due for retirement this evening. You’re what we call a day player.”

Flanker put on a good face of being unperturbed and picked up the phone that connected him to the central command for the bullet train. Before he could speak, the other heavy leaned forward and placed his finger on the “disconnect” button.

“Even if I am only a day player,” said Flanker, “I still outrank you.”

“You’re not the ranking officer here,” said the other heavy. “You’re just the friendly face of Goliath—and I say that without any sense of irony.”

Flanker looked at me, then at the heavies, then out the window. He said nothing for perhaps thirty seconds, but I knew he was going to make a move. The trouble was, so did the heavies. Flanker reached for his gun, but no sooner had he grasped the butt than he suddenly stopped, his eyes rolled upwards into his head, and he collapsed without a noise. It was as though he’d been switched off. The Goliath heavy showed me a small remote with a single button on it.

“Useful little gadget,” he said. “All our enemies should have one. Boris? Get rid of him and then fetch Miss Next a cup of tea.”

The synthetic Flanker was unceremoniously dragged from the compartment by Boris, and the first heavy came to sit in Flanker’s old place.

“An excellent move,” he said with the air of authority, “to pit one of your foes against another. Worthy of the real Thursday. Now, where is she?”

“I’m her,” I said, suddenly realizing that while this whole Goliath adventure was kind of amusing, it wasn’t helping me find out where Thursday had actually gone. The sum total of my knowledge was that she’d been gone a month, was not dead, and had said that Lyell was boring. Goliath didn’t have her, so I was wasting my time here. I needed to get back to Swindon.

“Are you a day player as well?” I asked.

“No,” said the man, “I’m real. I check every morning. I know better than most that Goliath can’t be trusted. Now, where are you from and where’s Thursday?”

“I’m her. You don’t need to look any further.”

“You’re not her,” he said, “because you don’t recognize me. It surprised me at first, which was why I had to make sure you weren’t one of ours gone rogue. They do that sometimes. Despite our best attempts to create synthetics with little or no emotions, empathy tends to invade the mind like a virus. It’s most troublesome. Flanker would have killed you this morning if I’d told him to, and by the afternoon he dies trying to protect you. It’s just too bad. Now, where’s Thursday?”

Finally I figured it out. The one person at Goliath who had more reason to hate me than any other.

“You’re Jack Schitt, aren’t you?”

He stared at me for a moment, and smiled.

“By all that’s great and greedy,” he said, staring at me in wonder, “what a coup. You’re the written one, aren’t you?”

“No.”

But he knew I was lying. Unwittingly, I had revealed everything. Jack Schitt wasn’t his real name— it was his name in the series. I didn’t know what his real name was, but he would certainly have known his fictional counterpart. He pulled the phone off the hook and punched a few buttons.

“It’s me. Listen carefully: It’s not Thursday, it’s the written Thursday. . . . Yes, I’m positive. She could melt back any second, so we need to get her Blue Fairyed the second we’re on Goliath soil. . . . I don’t care what it takes. If she’s not real by teatime, heads will roll. And no, I’m not talking figuratively.”

He hung up the phone and stared at me with a soft, triumphal grin. “When are you due back?”

I stared at him, a feeling of genuine fear starting to fill me. My actions so far had been based on the certainty that I would return. The idea of staying here forever was not in the game plan.

“What happened to the Austen Rover, Next?”

“The what?”

“The Austen Rover. Our experimental transfictional tour bus. The real Thursday traveled with it on its inaugural flight and never returned. Where is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and besides, the Blue Fairy is fictional and lives inside Pinocchio. She doesn’t do any actualizing these days. The Council of Genres forbade it.”

“Better and better,” he said, waving away the second heavy, who had returned with my tea, and closing the compartment door. “So you are from the BookWorld. And I was bluffing—we don’t have a Blue Fairy. But we have the next best thing: a green fairy.”

“I’ve never heard of the Green Fairy.”

“It’s a concoction of our own. It’s not so much a fairy—more like a magnetic containment facility designed to keep fictional characters from crossing back. I understand that the first few hours can be excruciatingly painful, and it gets worse from there. You’ll talk—they always do. How do you suppose we managed to get the inside information necessary to even begin research into the Book Project? Perhaps we can’t make you real, but we can keep you here indefinitely—or at least until such time as you can’t bear it any longer and agree to help us. Make it easy for yourself, Thursday: Where is the Austen Rover?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’ll tell us eventually. A few hours of Green Fairy will loosen your tongue.”

“Goliath wouldn’t last twenty minutes inside fiction,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced. If this “Jack Schitt” was even half as devious as the one written about, we were in big trouble. Thursday had spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the Goliath Corporation didn’t get into fiction, either to dump toxic waste, use the people within it as unpaid labor or even just to find another market to dominate and exploit.

I said nothing, which probably was all he wanted to know. It was rotten luck that he’d been the one to figure me out. The real Thursday had once imprisoned the so-called Jack Schitt within Poe’s “The Raven,” so here was a man with some experience of being in the BookWorld.

“What’s your name, then?” I asked. “If not Jack Schitt?”

“It was a ridiculous name, not to mention insulting,” he snorted. “I’m Dorset. Adrian Dorset.”