The Woman Who Died a Lot

But I didn’t get up. No one I knew in SpecOps had been given a clear bill of mental health for decades. In fact, it struck me now that it was possibly a disadvantage. After all, who would ever do the stuff we did without being a little bit nuts? Victor Analogy had run SO-27 for twenty-six years and was never ranked higher than a NUT-4: “prone to strange and sustained delusional outbursts but otherwise normal in all respects.” I had respected Analogy a great deal, but even I felt slightly ill at ease when he confided in me with all seriousness that he was pregnant with an elephant, foisted on him by an overamorous server at Arby’s.

“Actually,” I began, “I think someone might be trying to kill me.”

Chumley stopped what he was doing and stared at me over the top of his spectacles. “Oh, no,” he said, “I’m not falling for that. First you say you’re fine, then you say your not. We call it Hamlet syndrome—an attempt to get your own way by feigning insanity, generally by saying what comes into your head and talking a lot. Mind you,” he added thoughtfully, “it works a lot better if you’re a prince.”

“I’m not kidding,” I replied. “Goliath is out to cause me harm.”

I stared at him earnestly, and he narrowed his eyes. It was true, too. The Goliath Corporation and I had not seen eye to eye over the past two decades. They no longer controlled SpecOps but had run the police force ever since the entire service had been privatized.

“In my experience that’s hardly evidence of delusion,” he said. “Goliath is out to get lots of people. Being wary of multinationals shouldn’t be paranoia, and more a case of standard operating procedure.”

Goliath wasn’t universally loved, but since it employed almost a fifth of England’s workforce, no one was keen to rock the boat. Few ever dared to speak out against the behemoth.

“I see,” Chumley said, pen poised above the “signature” part of the certificate. “And what form does this harm take? Assassination?”

“I’m too valuable to assassinate,” I told him. “They’re more interested in attempting to access information by impersonation. There are people who might talk only to me about information that Goliath is after.”

“They’d have to be good impersonators to fool people who know you well.”

I thought for a moment. I wanted to aim for what Analogy had been given: a NUT-4. Anything saner and I was probably too normal; anything more insane and I’d be disqualified. I wondered what Phoebe Smalls had been given. She was utterly sane—but smart, too, so I’d have to assume that she knew the system as well as I did. She’d probably go for the same. It would be a delicate task not merely to feign madness but just the right level of madness. I leaned forward.

“It’s not the sort of impersonators you imagine. The Goliath Corporation has made considerable advances in the manufacture of Homo syntheticus,” I told him, “and for a few years now they’ve been manufacturing Thursdays who try to pass themselves off as me—six times that we know of.”

“Did you take these synthetics to the police?”

“The police are run by Goliath. I have a feeling we’d be wasting our time.”

“I see. And where are those Synthetics now?”

I stared at him thoughtfully. Although the Homo syntheticus were wholly artificial, they appeared sentient. If they were shown to be legally equivalent to neanderthals, we could be convicted of murder. If they were deemed illegally spliced chimeras, we were in no trouble at all—and could even claim a bounty by presenting an eyelid as proof. I decided to play it safe.

“I have no idea of their precise whereabouts.”

He stared at me for a moment, attempting to gauge if this idea could be real or was only a complex delusion.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m going to make you a NUT-2: ‘generally sane.’ Seven Thursdays? Interesting.”

It was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough.

“There weren’t seven,” I said quickly. “There were ten.”

“Ten?”

I counted them out on my fingers. “Six synthetics, two fictional Thursdays, me and my gran, who wasn’tactually my gran— just a version of me that I thought was my gran, hiding in our present rather than hers. She had to spend the last twenty years of her life in gingham and read the ten most boring classics.”

“I’m sure there was a good reason.”

“Because she—I—changed the ending of Jane Eyre. It was an Illegal Narrative Flexation; they would have liked to let me off, but the law is the law. Oh, perhaps I should have added that for much of my career I’ve worked for Jurisfiction. It’s a sort of policing agency in the BookWorld, the realm that exists beyond the other side of the printed page.”

“You’ve been there?”