“It’s called breathing,” came a voice close at hand. “It’s very simple, and everyone does it. Just relax and go with the flow.”

“I used to ‘take a breath’ and ‘exhale uneasily’ at home,” I managed to say, “but this is quite different.”

“Those were merely descriptive terms intended to suggest a mood,” came the voice again, which sounded how I imagined a cheese straw might sound. “Here you are doing it to stay alive. Can you hear a thumping and a gushing noise, and a few rumbles, grunts, squeaks and growls?”

“Yes.”

“It’s your body. The thumping is your heart. It’s all new to you, so it will fit oddly, like a new pair of shoes, but you’ll get used to it. Feel your wrist.”

I did so and was surprised to note that my skin was warm, soft and ever so slightly tacky. It was also thumping. It was my pulse, and I was sweating. Not for any descriptive reasons but because I was alive. After a few minutes of doing nothing but breathing, I spoke again.

“What’s that random sensation of memories I keep getting?”

“It’s smells. They have a way of firing off recollections. No one knows why.”

I didn’t understand and moved rapidly on. “Why can’t I see anything?”

“You need to open your eyes.”

So I did. I sat and blinked for some minutes. The view was quite astonishing, not only in range but in detail. I had been used to seeing only what was relevant within a scene. Back home, anything extra would have been unnecessary and was a pasty shade of magnolia with the texture of uncooked dough. Here there was everything, in all directions, in full color and in full detail. Several books’ worth of description was just sitting there, with no one except me to revel in its glorious detail. The trees swayed ever so gently in the breeze, and the clouds moved slowly across the heavens. It was summer, and the flower beds had erupted in a sumptuous palette of color, while on the air were delicate tastes of cooking and garbage and rain and earth. I could hear stuff, too, except not one thing at a time, but all things at all times. The delicate symphony of sounds that reached my ears so heaped together that it was difficult to separate anything out at all, and I sat there quite numbed by the overload of sensations.

“How do they filter it out?” I asked.

“Humans filter well,” said the voice. “In fact, they can filter out almost anything. Sound, vision, smells, love, anger, passion, reason. Everything except hunger and thirst, cold and hot. No need to hurry. Take your time.”

I sat there for an hour, attempting to make sense of the world, and I did reasonably well, all things considered. In that time I managed to figure out I was sitting on a bench in a small and well-kept park hemmed in by redbrick houses on every side. There was a children’s play area, a pond, a flower bed and two trees, both silver birch. A main road was to one side, and on a building opposite were two billboards. One was advertising the Goliath Corporation’s supposed good work on behalf of the community, and the other promoted “Daphne Farquitt Day” on Friday, which began with a celebration of her works and ended with a Farquitt Readathon. It was a name I recognized, or course. The popularity of the romance author dictated that she had a genre all her own.

“It’s beautiful!” I said at last. “I could stay here and watch the clouds for the whole twelve hours alone!”

“Many do,” came the voice again.

I looked around. Aside from an impertinent squirrel foraging on the grass, I was entirely alone.

“Who are you?” I asked. “And why can’t I see you?”

“Bradshaw asked me to keep an eye on you,” came the voice. “The name’s Square—Agent Square. If you want to know why you can’t see me, it’s because I’m from Flatland and bounded in only two dimensions. At the moment I’m presenting my edge to you. Since I have no thickness, I am effectively invisible. Watch.”

A line a half inch thick and two feet long appeared in the air quite near me. The line separated and opened out into a thin rectangle, which broadened until it was a square, hanging in the air.

“How do you do?” I said.

“Oh, can’t complain,” said Square. “A spot of trapezoidism in this chill weather, but hey-ho. I worked with the real Thursday several times. Do you really look like her?”

“You can’t see, then?”

“Since I am only two-dimensional,” said Agent Square, “I can see the world only as a series of infinitely thin slices, like a ham. May I approach and have a look?”

Square moved closer. Out of curiosity I put my hand inside the area bounded by his vertices, and a soft bluish light gave me four rings around my fingers.

“Four disks is all I can see,” said Square. “Viewing one dimension up is always a bit confusing. Mind you, for you people bounded in three dimensions, it’s no different.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Time,” said Square, “is your next dimension, so to anyone in the RealWorld it appears as your third spatial dimension does to me—a thin slice in plain view but with the abstract notions of ‘forward’ and ‘beyond’ unseeable. May I?”

Square approached me and then tilted to a narrow rectangle, again became a line, vanished and then reappeared again. It was as though he were tilting in front of me in order, I assumed, to allow his two-dimensional frame of reference to scan my features. Once satisfied, Square withdrew.

“Spooky!” he said. “You do look just like her. What’s the mission?”

“To find Thursday.”

“Nothing hard, then.”

I moved to stand up, but everything felt funny, so I sat down again.

“Why does my face feel all draggy?” I asked. “The underneath of my arms, too, and my boobs—everything feels all . . . well, weighted down.”

“That’ll be gravity,” said Square with a sigh.

“We have gravity in the BookWorld,” I said. “It’s not like this.”

“No, we just talk as though gravity existed. There’s a huge difference. In the BookWorld, gravity is simply useful. Here it is the effect of mass upon space-time. It would be manageable if it were constant, but it isn’t. Acceleration forces can give one a localized gravitational effect that is quite disconcerting. If you’re here for only twelve hours, I’d stay well clear of trains, elevators, airplanes and cars. Very odd, I’m told, although I don’t notice it myself. By the way, do you have a timer on your watch? You’re here for just twelve hours, remember.”

I looked at my watch, which had nothing but hands and a face. “No.”

“You’ll get used to that, too. If this were the BookWorld, you’d have one of those watches that counts down from twelve hours to add some suspense. Believe me, the plot in this world takes a bit of getting used to. I’ve not done anything for Bradshaw for six months. That’s nothing in the BookWorld, barely half a dozen words. Out here it really is six months. Hell’s teeth! The boredom. There’s a limit to how much reality TV one can watch, although it’s become a lot easier for me since they brought in flat-screens. Now, what do you want to know first?”

“Walking would be a good start.”

Agent Square was a good teacher, and within the space of twenty minutes I had mastered the concept of mass and the ticklish practical considerations of coping with momentum. Though easy to someone who’d been doing it for years, being able to lean back when negotiating a sharp stop to avoid falling over was an acquired skill.

“Bipedal movement is the skill of controlled falling,” said Square. “If it weren’t so commonplace, it would seem miraculous—like much out here, to be truthful.”

I found the “walking straight” part fairly easy to master, but learning to conserve momentum while doing a right-hander at speed was a lot harder, and I was flailing my arms for balance until Square patiently taught me how angular velocity, centripetal forces and shoe/ground friction coefficients all worked together.

“Outlanders must be very good at math,” I said, struggling with the vast quantity of complex equations necessary to recover after a stumble.

“So good they do it without thinking,” he said. “Wait until you see someone riding a unicycle—it’s math to die for.”

The physical walking I soon got the hang of, but the rapidly moving pavement beneath me I found disconcerting—not to mention the highly constricting pull and drag of my clothes. Square told me to keep my eyes on the horizon and not look down, and after ten or so laps around the small park I was ready to venture farther.

We walked out of the park and down the street, and I stared at the intricate detail with which the RealWorld was imbued. The stains, the corrosion, the reflections—none of it could be adequately explained or described, and I became fascinated by every facet.

“What’s that?”

“A spider.”

“And that?”

“A dog turd.”

“So that’s what they look like. Who’s that person over there?”

“Which one?” asked Square, tilting his body so his infinitely thin frame of reference sliced in the direction I was pointing. “I don’t see anything.”

But there was something there—a wispy humanlike form, through which I could see the wall and hedge beyond. I had met Marley’s Ghost once when he was doing one of those tedious grammasite-awareness talks, and it was like him—transparent. I’d queued up for autographs afterwards, but when I’d asked him for a personalization, his agent told me to sod off. He wouldn’t sign memorabilia either.

“What did you expect?” Marley’s Ghost had said when I protested. “Albert Schweitzer?”

“Ghosts?” said Square when I explained what I could see. “Perhaps. There is much unexplained in the world. It behooves one to be wary at all times. Just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, along comes string theory, collateralized debt obligations or Björk’s new album, and bam! You’re as confused as you were when you first started.”

We arrived at the Clary-LaMarr Travelport soon after. As in fiction, this was the main transportation hub in Swindon, where the Skyrail and mainline bullet services met. From here you could travel off to the west and Bristol and the steamer ports or east to London and the Gravitube. This was the business district, and the impressively high glassy towers disgorged a constant stream of people, all working together to make Swindon the powerhouse it was, deservedly known as “the Jewel of the M4.” My Swindon was pretty similar, even if it lagged behind by eight years, the time that had elapsed since my series was written.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing towards a steel latticework tower that was being built on a hill to the south of the city. It was only half built but looked large enough to dwarf the skyscrapers when complete.

“It’s part of the Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield that will one day protect a sinful citizenry from God’s wrath—a series of force fields supported by steel pylons. Not even the most powerful smiting by the angriest or most vengeful God will make it through—or so it is claimed.”

“That sounds pretty daft.”

“That’s the whole point,” he said. “It’s meant to be daft. The Commonsense Party’s unswervingly sensible management of the country has left the nation with a woefully high stupidity surplus that needs to be safely discharged. It’s hoped that the extraordinarily pointless and ridiculously expensive defense shield will be enough to deplete the stupidity quickly enough to allow time to more sensibly deal with a bigger problem that’s coming up.”

“What could be a bigger problem than God’s wrath upon his creations and a cleansing fire falling from the heavens?”

“I’m not sure. Something to do with polar bears.”

I sighed. “It’s been a while since I had any concept of current affairs,” I said. “All of this was barely thought of when I was penned.”

“I keep abreast of things,” said Square. “It’s the closest thing to STORY they have out here. Makes me feel less homesick. You’ve been here an hour and you can walk pretty well, so you’re doing okay. The next thing you need to learn is interaction and how humans all manage to live together without descending into chaos. The best place for appreciating this is crowds.”

“Crowds?”

“Right. Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially they’re all the same and reading from the same rule book. To get along you have to appreciate the rules but also know that other people know the rules—and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?”

“No.”

“You will. Observe the crowds for a moment.”

I watched as the thousand or so individuals milled around the Skyrail port, all of them heading in one of six directions and moving on their own yet as one. Astonishingly, without bumping into one another and falling over. It was a most remarkable sight. The wispy Marley-like ones had it even easier, since they could go through the pedestrians just as easily as around them.

“I’m still seeing the transparent humans.”

“How insubstantial are they?”

“Pretty smoky. And they all look so sad.”

This was true. They all wandered about looking very dejected, as if the world were pressing heavily on their shoulders. I had tried to catch the eye of one or two, but they’d steadfastly ignore me and, it seemed, everyone else. I knew about “ghosts” but always thought they were a fictional construct, like some of the odder facets of Japanese culture. However, Square was uninterested in my transparent people and wanted to carry on with my education.

“If you can manage crowd work, you can handle almost anything,” said Square. “You know about flocks of starlings and schools of fish, how they all seem to move at the same time?”

I told him that I had heard of this but not witnessed it.

“Humans are exactly the same when they get into crowds. By using subtle sensory cues and working to a set of basic rules, you can enter a crowd full of people all heading in different directions and come out the other side without touching anyone or causing an accident.”

“How?” I said, looking suspiciously at the swirling mass of humanity.

“Think of it as a subtle dance, where you have to avoid touching anyone. You have to jog and dodge your way around but also have to know when people are going to dodge and jink round you. Give it a whirl.”

I stepped into the crowd, and almost immediately a woman stopped dead in front of me.

“Sorry,” I said, and walked on. I could sense I was disrupting the smooth liquidity of the crowd, and based on the noises people were making, it wasn’t appreciated. I got to the other side of the street without bumping into anyone, but only just.

“Not so easy, is it?” said Square, and I had to admit he was right. I had thought being in the RealWorld would be simple, or at least a lot like home, but it wasn’t. Nothing here was assumed; everything had to be actually done, and witnessed. Weirder still, once something was done, it was gone, and the knowledge of it faded almost immediately into memory. Once or twice I found myself attempting to move backwards or forwards in time before realizing that that’s not how it worked. If I wanted to be five minutes in the future, I had to laboriously run the five minutes in real time, and if I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. It was how I imagined the narrator in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu spent most of his life—trapped in a noisy, brightly colored cage barely two or three seconds wide.

After twenty minutes I could walk through the crowd without too much difficulty, but once or twice I found myself in the situation where the people I was trying to avoid met me head on, and I moved left, and they did, so I moved right, and they did, too, and so on, for up to five times, which elicited nothing more than a chuckle from my dancing partner.

“The old ‘back and forth’ happens a lot when real and fictional people meet,” said Square when I’d returned to where he was waiting for me. “If the Outlanders had any idea we were amongst them, it would be the surest way to tell. That and a certain confusion when it comes to everyday tasks. If you see someone unable to boil a kettle, open a sash window or understand he has an appalling haircut, it probably means he’s fictional.”

“Hmm,” I said, “why is that woman in the annoyingly flamboyant clothes staring at me?”

“Probably because she recognizes you.”

“Don’t I have to know who she is before she can recognize me?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Thursday?” said the woman, bounding up to me with a huge grin and a clatter of beads. “Is that really you? Where have you been hiding these past few months?”

I recognized her from the vague approximation that had made it through to my series. It was Cordelia Flakk, ex-SpecOps publicity guru and now . . . well, I had no idea what she did.

“Hello, Cordelia.”

“How are Landen and the kids?”

“Apparently they’re very well.”

“Did you hear about Hermione? Went to the slammer for trying to fiddle her taxes and then tried to escape. She was caught between the wire with two saber-toothed tigers. They didn’t know what had happened to her until a bangle and parts of her synthetic kidney turned up in one of the sabers’ . . . well, I don’t want the story to get too gruesome.”

“Too late.”

“You old wag, you! Will you be coming to Penelope’s for the Daphne Farquitt reading party Friday afternoon? She wants us all to come round to her place for the readathon, and she’s dying to show off her new man.” She leaned closer. “A neanderthal, you know. Frightfully polite, of course, but likes to sleep in the garden shed. She has a few stories about matters south, I should warrant—a few glasses and she’ll spill the beans, if you know what I mean.”

The woman laughed.

“Goodness, is that the time? How I prattle so!” She suddenly lowered her voice. “By the way, are you still dealing in cheese?”

“Not really—”

“A pound of Limburger would set us straight. Just a taster, then—anything, in fact. I mean, it’s not like we’re asking for any X-14. Oh. Sorry, is that still a sore point? Why not bring a taster of cheese to Penelope’s do on Friday? We can enhance them with some pineapple chunks. Cheese and Farquitt! Naughty us! Ta-ra!”

And she tossed her head and moved off.

“Did you understand any of that?” asked Square.

“About one word in eight.”

“That many?”

I stood there, stunned by the fact that I had no idea what Thursday actually did in the RealWorld, nor what had happened and what hadn’t. The recent exchange told me that she had been involved in the illegal cheese market, and we had walked past the abandoned Special Operations Division headquarters earlier, so I knew that at least some of her SpecOps adventures had been real. But what else had happened in her life I had no idea. If anyone asked me anything specific, I was going to have to wing it, or simply grin stupidly. Best of all, stay well away from anyone who might know me.

“Was that meeting at all relevant?” I asked Square. “In the grand scheme of things, I mean?”

“Probably not,” replied Square. “Just a chance meeting that means nothing. If this were a book, Cordelia wouldn’t have survived the first draft.”

I spent the next two hours walking around trying to figure out how the world worked. It was confusing and tiring, and it seemed that much energy was expended for very little outcome. I had my first real pee, which was pretty bizarre, then ate some chocolate, which was hugely enjoyable. Mostly I listened in on conversations and was dismayed to note that Professor Plum had been correct. A lot of what was said was superficially very banal. Less of a sense of communication and more to do with being comfortable and secure amongst members of one’s own species—the modern equivalent of being huddled together in the dark.

“There seems to be a tremendous fear of being alone,” I said once we had stopped for a break in the graveyard of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster.

“My theory is that it’s all misdirection.”

“From what?”

“The depressing certainty that one day all of us will die.”

“Speak for yourself. What’s your story, Square?”

“I used to work in Flatland but was fired after ‘artistic differences’ with Circle. After that I was recruited by Bradshaw for deep-cover operations in the Outland. I was here on assignment when the RealWorld travel ban came down, so I took Blue Fairy, became real and volunteered to stay.”

He sighed deeply, in a thin, two-dimensional sort of way. “Blue Fairy” was the term used to describe the only way in which fictional people could become real, and unsurprisingly, the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio was the only person who could do it. She used to do it for free if you asked nicely and had a chit from the CofG, but now she is not permitted to conduct any realizations at all and is paid handsomely by the council for the honor of doing nothing. Nice work if you can get it.

“When do you get to go home?” I asked.

“I don’t get to return home. The only good thing about this place is that it’s fantastically roomy. Are you ready?”

I said I was, and we walked the three blocks to Landen and Thursday’s house, situated in a quiet part of the Old Town. I asked Square to keep a low profile, took a deep breath, walked up the garden path and stared at the front door, heart beating furiously. This time for real.