The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

“Remarkable!”

“Stay relaxed or it will go,” said Mycroft in a soothing voice. “Try this one.”

There was a blur of movement and the scene shifted to an inky-black starfield; it seemed as though I were traveling through space.

“Or how about this?” asked Mycroft, changing the scene to a parade of flying toasters. I opened my eyes and the image evaporated. Mycroft was looking at me earnestly.

“Any good?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I call it a Retinal Screen-Saver. Very useful for boring jobs; instead of gazing absently out of the window you can transform your surroundings to any number of soothing images. As soon as the phone goes or your boss walks in you blink and bingo!— you’re back in the real world again.”

I handed back the hat.

“Should sell well at SmileyBurger. When do you hope to market it?”

“It’s not really ready yet; there are a few problems I haven’t quite fixed.”

“Such as what?” I asked, slightly suspiciously.

“Close your eyes and you’ll see.”

I did as he asked and a fish swam by. I blinked again and could see a toaster. Clearly, this needed some work.

“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “They will have gone in a few hours.”

“I preferred the Olfactroscope.”

“You haven’t seen anything yet!” said Mycroft, skipping nimbly up to a large work desk covered by tools and bits of machinery. “This device is probably my most amazing discovery ever. It is the culmination of thirty years’ work and incorporates biotechnology at the very cutting edge of science. When you find out what this is, I promise you, you’ll flip!”

He pulled a tea towel off a goldfish bowl with

a flourish and showed me what appeared to be a large quantity of fruitfly larvae.

“Maggots?”

Mycroft smiled.

“Not maggots, Thursday, bookworms!”

He said the word with such a bold and proud flourish that I thought I must have missed something.

“Is that good?”

“It’s very good, Thursday. These worms might look like a tempting snack for Mr. Trout, but each one of these little fellows has enough new genetic sequencing to make the code embedded in your pet dodo look like a note to the milkman!”

“Hold on a sec, Uncle,” I said. “Didn’t you have your Splicense revoked after that incident with the prawns?”

“A small misunderstanding,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Those fools at SpecOps-13 have no idea of the value of my work.”

“Which is?—” I asked, ever curious.

“Ever smaller methods of storing information. I collected all the finest dictionaries, thesauri and lexicons, as well as grammatical, morphological and etymological studies of the English language, and encoded them all within the DNA of the worm’s small body. I call them HyperBookworms. I think you’ll agree that it’s a remarkable achievement.”

“I agree. But how would you access this information?”

Mycroft’s face fell.