Stopping abruptly by the Honour book stall, your double HOLOCENE opens the duffel bag he has been carrying with him and begins depositing…

Stopping abruptly by the Honour book stall, your double HOLOCENE opens the duffel bag he has been carrying with him and begins depositing books in the stall's donations box-- five of them, every one a brand-new copy of the same book.

'Blood Type: Hecatomb', by H.S. Lastra.

"HOLOCENE... did you buy five copies of that book just to leave here?"

"Four, actually, one is an old copy of mine, annotations carefully redacted." He displays a slightly more worn copy.

The book flashes open for a moment -- you see that the margins are black with annotations furiously scribbled out on almost every page.

"Lastra's virtually unheard of here. I'm, you could say, pouring a new element into the city's psychic water supply."

"What good will that do?"

"I can trace certain changes in my cognition, unfolding to this very day, to my first reading of this book, and specifically the trepanation scene."

"I have reason to believe that this cognitive leap was set off by properties within the text itself, possibly letter-distribution patterns that correspond to certain proportions within the human brain."

"In your brain, HOLOCENE. No one else's works like that."

"I have reason to believe more people could be susceptible to its effects."

"Apparently, H.S. Lastra's fontanelle never properly closed, there was always a little soft spot left on the crown of his skull. Nowadays they would put in a metal plaque for that, but his just stayed open for his whole life."

"The trepanation scene is Lastra's attempt to make sense of the strange intuitions and visions which, he always felt, came through his naturally-open skull, and to re-create their effect for the reader."

"So, what, you want to give Portofiro some kind of intellectual awakening by leaving around copies of that book?"

"What? No, don't be ridiculous. I just want more people to read my favourite novel."

Smiling with a degree of mischievousness, he distributes the copies of Blood Type: Hecatomb through different parts of the shelf, hiding one amongst the self-help books, and then turns to leave.

"Trepanation, like... holes in the skull?"

"Good luck with that, I think hardly anyone uses this stall."

"Be that as it may, CASCADE... I can trace certain changes in my cognition, unfolding to this very day, to my first reading of this book, and specifically the trepanation scene."

"That analogy makes it sound like you're going to poison people."

"The effects are certainly long-lasting and dire, but ultimately beneficial."

"You want to fill me in?"