'No one did. I can only tell you now because you are a full agent – didn't you hear what was in the pledge?'

'I see,' I said slowly. 'What's UltraWord™ like?'

'As Libris states: "The ultimate reading experience". The first thing that hits you is the music and colour.'

'What about the new plots?'

'I didn't see that,' confessed Miss Havisham as the elevator doors opened. 'We were all given a copy of The Little Prince updated with the new operating system – but Pageglow™, WordBuddy™, PlotPotPlus™ and ReadZip™ are all quite dazzling in their simplicity.'

'That's good.'

'But something just doesn't seem right.'

'That's not so good.'

We walked along the corridor to where the Text Sea opened out in front of us, the roof of the corridor lifting higher and higher until it had no discernible end, just swirling patterns of punctuation forming into angry storm clouds. At the dockside scrawltrawlers rode gently at their moorings while the day's wordcatch was auctioned off at the dockside.

'Like what? A problem with the system?'

'I wish I knew,' said Miss Havisham, 'but try as I might I couldn't make the book do anything it shouldn't. In BOOK V7.2 you could force an uncommanded translation into Esperanto by subjecting the book to a high "G" manoeuvre. In BOOK V6.3 the verb "to eat" conflicted with any description of a pangolin and caused utter mayhem with the tenses. I've tried everything to get UltraWord™ to fail but it's steady as a rock.'

We walked beyond the harbour to where large pipes spewed jumbled letters back into the Text Sea amidst a strong smell of rubber.22

'That's where the words end up when you erase them in the Outland,' mentioned Miss Havisham as we strolled past. 'Anything the matter?'

'Junk footnoterphones again,' I muttered, trying to screen the rubbish out. 'A scam of some sort, I think. What makes you believe anything is the trouble with UltraWord™?'

'Perkins called me the night before he died. He said he had a surprising discovery but didn't want to talk over the footnoterphone.'

'Was it about UltraWord™?'

Havisham shrugged.

'To be truthful, I don't know. It's possible – but it could have been about Deane just as easily.'