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“Clearly your project was designed to humiliate Wyatt. You couldn’t resist gloating over dinner on the first night, and Wyatt was mortified by what you’d told him. He yelled at you that what you were doing would ruin him. Then he tried to buy you out. I assume you declined?”

“The price of preserving literature isn’t one that can be paid by men like him.”

“Exactly. So the question becomes: what could you possibly have done that would ruin Wyatt Lloyd? The answer is simple. You’ve invited three people on this train journey: two art curators and a book reviewer. All three of them are reading The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock by Erica Mathison. All three of them have fresh copies, bought in a bookshop in Darwin. One copy is newly signed, from a reclusive author who never does appearances. All three of them, respected intelligent women, think it’s absolute genius. Why? Because Erica Mathison is your art project.”

If you’re playing along at home, you’ll know Wolfgang was at 94 mentions, and Erica was on 12. Added together as per my rules for aliases, that puts him on a certain magic number.

“Oh, you’re much better than Alan,” Wolfgang said with a smirk.

“That’s why you have a Gemini pen,” I said.

Wolfgang made a great act of pulling off an invisible mask from his chin to his forehead. His eyes sparked. “You’re looking at Erica Mathison. Wyatt didn’t know it was me. I set it up through a company, with an international account and a PO box for him to send contracts or whatever.”

“Or a pen.”

“Indeed. My plan was to sell him the most basic, abjectly dreadfully written pulp”—his wet lips popped with disgust on the P—“and he lapped it up. Like a dog. Then he made it into one of the year’s biggest bestsellers. Proving my point: true art is undervalued, and commercial art can be concocted.”

“You didn’t exactly mind the commercial aspect, though, did you? Simone told me your sales are likely miserable. And yet you pulled up to Berrimah in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Jaguar. You’re not exactly Robin Hood.”

“The spoils are part of the point,” he said, sneering. “It’s irony. I can explain it to you if you like.”

“You can justify it however you want. For the record, I think you’re a hypocrite. But you are a man of convictions, and the point of the experiment was always to unveil it. That was what you were telling Wyatt over dinner: who you really were. You were also telling him that you were going public. That’s why you invited these influential tastemakers, people whose opinions you respected. You let them in on the joke, signed their books, basked in their adulation of your genius.” The comments that had so appalled Simone, from the supposedly respected professionals over such a trashy novel—genius . . . true vision . . . a revelation—now made sense.

I paused, glanced around the room, then turned back to Wolfgang. “But none of that’s quite ruinous—that’s what I couldn’t understand. Your thesis could be to set out to prove that anyone can write a bestseller. Sure. Mario Puzo reportedly did that with The Godfather. Or maybe you wanted to highlight the financial excess that some books, some writers, receive. But at the end of the day, none of that matters. Millions of people are still going to read Erica Mathison. Wyatt might be embarrassed, but Gemini’s profits must be through the roof. The Death of Literature demanded something more dramatic.”

Erica Mathison was supposed to be a huge middle finger to the establishment; she was supposed to take them down a peg. Veronica Blythe had said this herself to Simone: It’s people like you who could learn a lot from this book. I was pacing now, working my way into my deductions. Aaron had slowly moved to the back of the crowd. He’d finally cracked his professional veneer, pulling up a stool at the bar and unscrewing the cap from a bottle of vodka.

“Erica Mathison isn’t real. But here’s the kicker: neither are the books she wrote.”

At this, Wolfgang’s smugness dropped for the first time. He knew I had him all figured out.

“It was never as simple as writing a book that you consider beneath you. You created The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock using a computer program. Artificial intelligence wrote it for you. That’s why you were reading a textbook on AI coding the other morning, The Price of Intelligence. AI is open source now, everyone can use it. Hell, my uncle used ChatGPT to write his website. Why not use AI to write a book? You said yourself on that panel that in fifty years books like mine will be written by machines. And that”—I jabbed a finger at him—“is dramatic enough to prove your point. Wyatt Lloyd’s new bestseller was written by a computer. He’d be livid. It’s almost worth killing for.”

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