“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 s
howed 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.”