One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

This was an astonishing suggestion. The imaginotransference engines were the machines that transmitted the books in all their subtle glory from the BookWorld to the reader’s imagination. To shut them down meant that reading—all reading—had to stop. I exchanged a nervous glance with Whitby.

“You mean the Council of Genres is going to shut down the entire BookWorld?”

Alyona Ivanovna nodded. “It was either that or do it piecemeal, which wasn’t favored, since then half the BookWorld would be operating one system and half the other. It’s simple: All reading needs to stop for the nine minutes it requires to have the BookWorld remade.”

“But that’s insane!” exclaimed Whitby. “People will notice. There’s always someone reading somewhere.”

From my own failed experience of joining the BookWorld’s policing agency, I knew that he spoke the truth. There was a device hung high on the wall in the Council of Genres debating chamber that logged the Outland ReadRate—the total number of readers at any one time. It bobbed up and down but rarely dropped below the 20-million mark. But while spikes in reading were easier to predict, such as when a new blockbuster is published or when an author dies—always a happy time for their creations, if not their relatives—predicting slumps was much harder. And we needed a serious slump in reading to get down to the under-fifty-thousand threshold considered safe for a remaking.

I had an idea. I fetched that morning’s copy of The Word and turned to the week’s forecast. This wasn’t to do with weather, naturally, but trends in reading. Urban Vampires were once more heavily forecast for the week ahead, with scattered Wizards moving in from Wednesday and a high chance of Daphne Farquitt Novels near the end of the week. There was also an alert for everyone at Sports Trivia to “brace themselves,” and it stated the reason.

“There you go,” I said, tapping the newspaper and showing it to the assembled company. “Right about now the Swindon Mallets are about to defend their title against the Gloucester Meteors, and with live televised coverage to the entire planet there is a huge potential fall in the ReadRate.”

“You think that many people are interested in Premier League croquet?” asked Razumikhin.

“It is Swindon versus Gloucester,” I replied, “and after the Malletts’ forward hoop, Penelope Hrah, exploded on the forty-yard line last year, I would expect ninety-two percent of the world will be watching the game—as good a time as any to take the BookWorld offline.”

“Did they ever find out why Hrah exploded?” asked Whitby.

“It was never fully explained,” put in Ivanovna, “but traces of Semtex were discovered in her shin guards, so foul play could never be ruled out entirely. A grudge match is always a lot of fu—”

Her voice was abruptly cut dead, but not in the way one’s is when one has suddenly stopped speaking. Her voice was clipped, like a gap in a recording.

“Hello?” I said.

The three Russians made no answer and were simply staring into space, like mannequins. After a moment they started to lose facial definition as they became a series of complex irregular polyhedra. After a while the number of facets of the polyhedra started to lessen, and the Russians became less like people and more like jagged, flesh-colored lumps. Pretty soon they were nothing at all. The Classics were being shut down, and if Text Grand Central was doing it alphabetically, Fantasy would not be far behind. And so it proved. I looked at Whitby, who gave me a wan smile and held my hand. The room grew cold, then dark, and before long the only world that I knew started to disassemble in front of my eyes. Everything grew flatter and lost its form, and pretty soon I began to feel my memory fade. And just when I was starting to worry, everything was cleansed to an all-consuming darkness.

#shutting down imaginotransference engines, 46,802

readers

#active reader states have been cached

#dismounting READ OS 8.3.6

#start programs

#check and mount specified dictionaries

#check and mount specified thesauri

#check and mount specified idiomatic database

#check and mount specified grammatical database

#check and mount specified character database

#check and mount specified settings database

Mount temporary ISBN/BISAC/duodecimal book category

system

Mount imaginotransference throughput module

Accessing “book index” on global bus

Creating cache for primary plot-development module