Jane Actually

century struck her. The idea that if you lost your wife you could ship off your son to a relative seemed bizarre, but then she remembered the complications of Charles Dickens stories and also some of the scandals from the southern branch of her own family.
    She’d read long enough to have finished her first cup of coffee, taken advantage of the one free refill and then used a shift change to sneak in an additional refill. Having seen the movie had certainly helped. She thought she would not have gotten as far reading otherwise and was already looking forward to Emma painting Harriet’s portrait. Of course the more interested she became, the more she felt the loss of not getting the job.
    She was thinking she might get a sandwich to counteract the pit of coffee in her stomach, and was calculating how much money she had when her cell phone rang.
    She answered it absentmindedly and heard a flat, digitized voice in response to her “hello.”
    “Hello Miss Crawford, this is Jane Austen.”
    The surprise of getting a call from a disembodied author was a little too much for Mary and she dropped her phone to the table, where it bounced and fell to the floor. Mary let out a little cry that brought the attention of others in the coffee shop. Several well-meaning people bent down to pick up the phone, which resulted in no one being able to pick it up at all. And so it took some time before Mary was handed back her phone, fortunately still working. She heard the digitized voice saying, “Hello? Hello?” with a fake interrogative accent.
    “Miss Austen, hi. I’m sorry, I dropped the phone. I didn’t expect … I didn’t know you could …”
    “Quite all right, Miss Crawford. Melody always says I shouldn’t call, but I am unable to appreciate why getting a call from a disembodied person should be so much more upsetting than talking to one online. I fear the intimacy of telephonic conversation remains a mystery to me.”
    “No, I’m not upset,” she lied, for dropping her phone to the floor certainly would indicate she had been upset. “Just surprised.”
    Austen’s response took long enough that Mary thought perhaps her phone had been damaged. Then Mary realized the pause was the consequence of the author forming the words in her mind and then projecting them into the AfterNet field, after which the terminal translated those words into speech.
    She’d already grown accustomed to the pauses while speaking to Austen in person—or whatever it could be called—but over the telephone, the pauses were more distracting.
    “Well, I hope you’ll find this a pleasant surprise, but I wanted to tell you that I … we have chosen you to be my avatar, if that will be convenient.”
    “Yes, very convenient,” Mary said, and silently added:
especially as I was just wondering if I had enough change to buy a sandwich.
    “Good. Would you be available soon? I don’t wish to rush you, but …”
    “I can begin immediately. Or now. I could start now. I mean I can be there in …” Mary didn’t finish the sentence for she realized she didn’t know where there was.
    “Oh, I wish I could make this thing laugh,” Jane replied. “I am told the effect is rather too horrible for words. Tomorrow will suffice. I believe the avatar agency will allow us the use of a room where we might start practicing. I … I will be honest, I do not think we were at our best for the mock interview, but I do think we improved.”
    “I am sorry, Miss Austen. I’m afraid my acting classes didn’t cover … but I really think I got better.”
    “No, Miss Crawford, please do not feel the need to apologize. We are both new to this and with practice we shall become accomplished, but it will be hard work. And so we begin tomorrow morning, say at 10 o’clock?”
    “Yes, that will be fine, Miss Austen.”
    “Please call me Jane. If you are to be my voice, we must become fast friends.”
    “Thank you, Jane. And I would be pleased if you would call me Mary.” Mary wondered at the formality of her reply and realized she was starting to slip into the role.
    “Thank you, Mary. Oh, Melody reminds me you might want to arrive a little earlier for the agency will undoubtedly want you to fill out more paperwork. Until tomorrow then.”
    Jane rang off and Mary put away her phone, slightly dazed to have had her first phone call from a dead person and gotten a job. But after contemplating her good luck for a minute, her stomach reminded her that it was