He bent over the book, cracked it open, broke its spine, and started to go to work on the meat of it. It wasn’t pretty, carving it up – crafting something entirely new from the flesh. Hinge words swung through the new orbits of a redefined functionality. He was working it until it was unrecognisable.
Milk the text – a first draft. He found it filling. It was a manual that he had stolen from a Reality Engineer, who had been smoking Reel in some back alley dive that, if you dug down deep enough into the historical narrative, had been an opium den.
Bentley had been a Headitor, but had been struck from the record after butchering his Bloop Hen, and force-feeding the sandwiches to a a fracture child who was an obvious Edit Echo. It had caused a temporal cul-de-sac to spring up around the enforced crisis.
The Reality Engineer, Gila Tarriff had been someone he had trailed from Came-Bridge University, where there had been some illegal Mind-Farmers, to Locksford,and Decanterbury, and then back to Cave-Entry, before ending up here in Eschaton. He had caused a Stop Clock to manifest, and the hungry creature was now chowing down on the Engineer’s remains.
What did he hope to get from the book? Data of course – what else? Data that would allow entry into a Grey Library facility he had heard that this book came from. The entry codes were buried in it’s DNA, and whereas with any other medium you couldn’t steal data quite so easily, horizontal gene transfer in the left to right reading pattern of the Reality Engineering Guides was relatively easy. Easy if you could get one, easy if you had Engineer blood to power it up; easy if you knew the interrogatory code you had to spool in between the lines.
Grey Library ingress points did not make for easy entrances, and he had to fire up a flexibility transfer stint to prevent existential collapse in the transfer.
He was greeted by silence, and he knew something was growing there. In between the shelved thoughts of the grey betweeners, one might have to travel the dangerous penumbra of a universal subconscious framework. He spotted a librarian and he rushed them, jamming a vampire feed right into their forehead. He was in. Time for a rewrite.