Jane Actually

laughed, much to the confusion of Jane.
    1 Of her six brothers, four had children. Francis and Edward had eleven apiece

The Fellowship of Austen
Stephen gets his copy of Sanditon
    S tephen opened the door to the bookstore and immediately heard the very excited conversation of those wanting to meet the famous author and then the voice of a store employee shouting to be heard above the din.
    “Please, if those of you waiting for the book signing could start forming a line outside,” the harried older man said, standing on a chair to be seen. The conversation rose louder with some voices heard in objection that the books would run out or the author would leave.
    “We’ve got enough books for everyone,” the man said. “And Miss Austen has promised that everyone in the store now will get their book signed. Just collect the stamped bookmarks on your way out. They look like these …”—he held up a store bookmark—”… and they’re stamped VOID on the backside. It’s the best we could do on short notice,” he added, somewhat apologetically.
    “I just want to buy the book. Do I have to go outside?” someone asked.
    The man was already stepping off his chair and had to step back on. “No, just if you want it signed.”
    “What time does it start?” another voice asked.
    “One pm” or “one o’clock” the crowd answered back before the man could respond. Several other questions were asked and answered, but Stephen tuned them out.
    He was relieved he’d be able to get a signed copy as Dr Davis had rather specifically laid that task before him. “I want a signed copy, Stephen. This person may well be a fraud, but I want it for my collection nevertheless,” she had told him, and he didn’t dare disappoint her.
    But he worried that being last in, he’d be at the back of the line. He thought his best strategy might be to hurry outside and try to be at the head of the line, but others had this same thought. After he collected his stamped bookmark and went outside, he was relieved to see the crowd wasn’t quite as large as it appeared inside. The crowd was also a lot less noisy.
    “We’re sorry about making you stand outside and we’re going to get everyone who needs it some water,” another store employee told them.
    Fortunately no one seemed to mind being outside and the shade of the store awning provided protection from the warm spring sun. Soon the noise increased as people began posing questions.
    “How are you supposed to address her?” an older woman with thinning white hair asked a rail thin twenty something Goth girl with multiple piercings. Stephen noticed she wore a large badge with the slogan “I Believe in Jane” surrounding the representation of Austen that had appeared in
Time
magazine.
    “I read you should treat avatars as the person they represent, so I guess Miss Austen.”
    “But it’s just an actress, right. I mean Jane Austen isn’t really here,” an older man, looking ridiculously tweedy, asked the Goth girl, whom the older generation apparently looked to for definitive information on the subject.
    “No, Jane Austen is really here. It’s not like Santa Claus,” she said, just a little sarcastically. “If there’s an avatar—and they wear some kind of AV pin—then the dead person … uh disembodied … then they’re standing right next to them.”
    “If it really is Jane Austen, that is. How do they know?” a middle-aged woman with long brown hair half streaked with grey asked.
    “They have to … I don’t know … it’s some kind of test or something,” Goth girl said, looking peeved that she now failed to be all knowing.
    “It’s a committee, an AfterNet committee, that vets the disembodied,” Stephen offered.
    “Sure, my uncle had to go through that when he died. It was pretty straightforward,” another man, in his thirties and wearing a Life is Good T-shirt, said.
    By now the orderly line that the store employees had arranged had devolved into a clump and Stephen found himself in the middle of it.
    “No, that’s different,” Stephen said. “Your uncle, did he register with the AfterNet before he died?”
    “Yeah, in the hospice,” Life is Good guy confirmed.
    “So it was easy for him because he’d had his field recorded,” Stephen said.
    “That’s right, his field fingerprint.”
    “But somebody who died before the AfterNet, especially a long time ago, has to prove to a committee that they are who they say they were. And if they’re