The Woman Who Died a Lot

The Special Operations Network was formed in 1928 to handle policing duties considered too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. Despite considerable success in the many varied areas of expertise in which SpecOps operated, all but three of the thirty-six divisions were disbanded in the winter of 1991–92, allegedly due to budgetary cutbacks. By 2004 it was realized that this had been a bad move, and plans were drawn up to re-form the service.

Millon de Floss,

A Short History of SpecOps

E

verything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?

In the case of a good bottle of wine, probably not much— although the very act of consumption might make one believe otherwise. A well-lazed summer’s day should not expect too much of itself either, and sitcoms never die. They simply move to a zombielike existence in rerun heaven. Of the remaining two—the end of one’s life and that of our species—regular subscribers to my exploits will recall that I had seen myself die a few years back, and, given my past record, it would be probable that much useful work would be done between then and now. As to the end of our species, the possibility of annihilation was quite real, well documented, and went by the unimaginative title of Asteroid HR-6984. Whether the human race managed to figure out a worthwhile function for itself in the thirty-seven years until possible collision was dependent upon one’s level of optimism.

But it wasn’t all bad news. In fact, due to a foible of human nature that denies us the ability to focus on more than one threat at a time, the asteroid was barely news at all. HR-6984’s convenient lack of urgency and its current likelihood of hitting the earth at only around 34 percent had relegated it well past such front-page news as the stupidity surplus and the current round of fiery cleansings by an angry deity. Instead the hurtling lump of space debris was consigned to pop-culture damnation on page twelve: Sandwiched somewhere between guinea-pig accessorizing and the apparently relevant eating habits of noncelebrities.

My take on it was this: A 34 percent chance that something might happen was also a 66 percent chance it wouldn’t

happen, and, given the rocky road our species had traveled to get here in the first place, these were considerably better odds than we’d seen so far. As for finding a collective purpose for ourselves in what might potentially be the last thirty-seven years of our existence, I was always struck by the paradox that while collective purpose might be at best unknowable and at worst irrelevant, individual purpose was of considerable importance.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The events described here occurred during a busier-than-usual week in the late summer of 2004. A week that began with a trip into Swindon in order to find myself a job and ended with a pillar of cleansing fire descending from the heavens, a rethink on the Wessex Library Service operating budget, and my son shooting Gavin Watkins dead. The last one was a serious downer—especially for Gavin. It’s a long story, and with a few twists and turns that take a bit of figuring. What the hell. We’ll just run the story in real time as it happened and worry about the logic afterward. My name is Thursday Next. You’ll probably have heard of me as “the one who improved the ending of Jane Eyre,” but even if you haven’t, it doesn’t matter. You’ll know me well enough soon enough.