The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

arrival in thirty-seven years. Namely, just what algorithms were being used by the Asteroid Strike Likelihood Committee to account for the 34 percent likelihood of a strike and why this might be important. I got bored just as Friday wandered in and started to rummage through the fridge. “How was work?” I asked.

“ ’S’kay,” he replied, taking random bites from things. “Any news?”

“Not really.”

“Anything cool happen at Home De pot?”

“Neh.”

“Something on your mind?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’ve just eaten Pickwick’s pet food.”

“Ugh,” he said, and spit it in the bin.

“It’s the Destiny Aware Support Group meeting,” he said, after swilling his mouth out with water. “I’m not sure I want to go.”

“It might help to discover why you’re going to kill Gavin Watkins on Friday.”

He looked up at me. “I think that’s why I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll take you. We’ll leave at seven-thirty.”

He grumpily agreed, gave me a silent hug and was gone. I took Tuesday some hot chocolate to her in her lab and found the Wingco in with her. Despite Tuesday’s ongoing work to discover the value of the illusive Uc, she was also committed to helping the Wing Commander with his efforts to try to prove the existence of the Dark Reading Matter.

“What’s unique about early dodos is how they functioned with so few lines of code,” explained Tuesday when I asked them what they were doing. “Whoever first programmed the dodo’s brain must have discovered pretty quickly that it was possible to crash a dodo’s cortex simply by mild overstimulation. Watching a kitten while eating a cake and walking all at the same time would be enough to do it. And although a reboot would take only five minutes, the rebooted dodo would have forgotten everything it had ever learned, ever, which isn’t ideal. Rather than redesign the brain, they simply added a buffer to slow down the processing of information.”

I looked at Pickwick, who was sitting on the workbench with an uncomfortable “If you wanted a guinea pig, why not just buy a blasted guinea-pig?” look about her.

“Is that why she often reacts to stuff ten seconds late?”

“Exactly. But what’s more interesting for the Wingco is that we can pick up the buffered information on a wireless. The annoying static you get between Swindon-KZXY and Rant-AM is actually buffered dodo thoughts.”

“And this helps the Wingco and his Dark Reading Matter project . . . how?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not even the tiniest bit.”

“Watch.”

Tuesday carefully tuned in the Encephalovision through a standard wireless set, but this time without its being connected to Pickwick via the Avian Encephalograph.

“There’s nothing there,” I said, which was true, as only random static danced across the screen.

“Patience, Mum. We have to overstimulate her first.” It was surprisingly easy. While Tuesday showed Pickwick several marshmallows, the Wingco juggled some oranges, and then I, so as not to be simply a casual observer, recited the opening soliloquy to Richard III. Pickwick looked at all of us in turn, blinked twice and then stood stock-still.

“Ah!” said Tuesday. “She’s buffering. Wait for it.” We looked at the screen, and sure enough after about ten seconds there was a fuzzy interpretation of what Pickwick had seen. Juggling, a giant marshmallow and me, walking up and down. There was also more Dukes of Hazzard and her water dish. But then, after ten seconds, it faded. The buffering had ended.

“An ingenious discovery,” I murmured slowly, “but I still can’t see how this fits into the Dark Reading Matter.”

“We think a dodo’s buffered thoughts might be able to transit the Dark Barrier,” said the Wingco, “so all I need to find is an Imaginary Childhood Friend who is about to pass into the DRM with the death of its host and get the ICF to take a dodo with it. The dodo gets overstimulated by what it sees, and we read those buffered thoughts on the Encephalovision back home. It’s really very straightforward.”

“Is it?” I asked, not unreasonably, and both Tuesday and the Wingco went into a complex explanation of how a thing might be possible, which seemed to revolve around the fact that the ICF and the dodo would fuse into a transient state of semifictionalization that would permeate—at least temporarily—the Dark Barrier in two directions.

“I’m a fool not to have seen it myself,” I said, still not understanding it fully, then added, mildly suspicious, “Which dodo?”