Excerpt One:
ATOLL GOODMANSON
Now, Atoll Goodmanson’s consciousness fades in, he’s already searching for Marcus, finding only desolation with rising panic. The inaccessible world of Marcus Godstrand echoes emptiness, shouts dead.
Last night; those women Atoll had attached to, been swept along with, or swept up by, to a hotel: bar, elevator, room, oblivion…they’d met in a pub where Atoll had gone to drink alone, as an antidote, to what, Marcus, and his unwanted twilight presence? Regrettably, now, probably.
He muses on a scorpion, of sorts, its sting spent, eying a disabled clown wearing children’s face-paint, with unbelievably human eyes, cops eyes.
His life focus had been on keeping off radars and being chameleon-like, bland, blending in; there were no threats worth dwelling on.
Now it has changed…
…he’d been flattered, who wouldn’t be: you’re human, suffering from a deficit of human physical attention, interaction, contact, and, dare he think it, love, and someone, anyone, comes along with a hamper full of it, creaking open the love chest…
…suckered in, spattered out.
Self-pity raises it’s hand, me! me! me!
Yes, Self-pity?
The thrown pot of excuses takes shape; Atoll is the victim in all this. Stop! Put your hand down.
They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble, these undercover instruments of whoever controls the government. Let’s not go there…
The last memories of Marcus queue patiently, but patience has run out and Marcus runs in…with a very Marcus classic…
‘The ego uses a fictional narrative programming approach to getting what it wants from its sole, communicable animal presence.’
Marcus’s countless sayings and phrases, one for every occasion, with the perpetual theme of humanity extinguishing itself via technology, ride into town with the carnival, whirring, bright lights, great bite marks of wisdom scarring the landscape.
But alongside…
Did he ever really experience Marcus Godstrand, or had he created it all in some brassy symphonic madness?
Beneath the surface of denial, chanting sweetly in his ears; a soothing stream, babbling; something was wrong. Atoll’s last contact with Marcus, he now remembered, was wildly disturbing. Marcus had obviously felt an existential threat; in as far as he existed at all. Nothing of the interaction was familiar despite a decades old relationship. The last encounter repeated:
In that theta wave sleep/wake state, he was there, deep into last night, Marcus, his arrival into Atoll’s reality announced with a shock. Breathing hard, irate, where he always was, on the edge of an infinite, empty stage, in front of a darkly obscured, empty auditorium.
Marcus’s voice, comes in like a machine gun…
‘WHAT…THE…FUCK?’
He repeats himself decibels reduced, perhaps Atoll couldn’t hear the first burst, lost in its own loudness.
‘What the fuck!’
Atoll remembered making a noise in response.
‘Those women!’ Marcus shouted, spit forming an atomised cloud. ‘Now you are in a spider’s web, and bound, and your gizzards are going to be ripped out.’
Atoll just thought of the silk bindings holding him in place, and how comfortable they would be, how protective. And great vulture spiders doing what they deemed necessary; a tough love, but a love none the less.
Marcus then descended familiarly into one of his lectures, the information became unprocessed data, flying over Atoll’s head…
‘They’re cops…blah, blah, blah… The end, the end of me and you and the end of, blah, blah, blah,’ he went on.
Then a name stood out, rose and exploded, bringing with it a cortisol flood: NMBS (AKA No More Bullshit—AKA Nasa Musk Bezos Saud), a corporation that got strange and then went autonomous and started mass takeovers, a global wave of invasion.
Technology, as Godstrand had been warning for years, had to be subjected to nannying, avuncularity, parenting, brothers and sisters, a good family, maybe even not so good. But technology is out into the hood, into the control of the gangs, the thugs, the doomed doomers.
Years ago Marcus had done a full TED talk, where he’d warned of the theoretical ability to become machines. Indicating that he suspected a crypto-fascist, elite group already had the technology to do so…
The digression faded.
‘You’ve been drugged,’ Marcus screamed.
‘What?’
‘And they have sent out for more drugs, for me.’
‘Why?’
‘To get me, They want me. You’ll be okay…’
It could still all be a dream, of course. This option hung in the air. The nature of their relationship, which was conducted in a ‘dream related neural environment’; a Marcus term that meant nothing to Atoll.
His mind goes in and out. And then…
Atoll was making himself acquainted with his new, current feelings. He felt free, cut loose from a rusting, barnacled old anchorage, but still wrapped in spider’s silk. A freedom so encompassing it was like a new best friend.
He’d been in the dark too long. The light beckoned. He felt he had a new understanding of everything and needed longingly to put it to the test…
His eyes opened…
He didn’t recognise the ceiling; he pre-visualised the trip to the kitchen and a steaming mug of tea, which got him raised to a sitting position and he bounced to his feet in, one, two, three.
He was in a studio flat that he was seeing for the first time, and as he inched toward the door, which was a short but terrible distance given his new physicality… Of course the door was locked. He scanned the tiny room for tea-making facilities, but had no desire for tea, or anything else.
It seemed to Atoll that this was now how it was for ever more with an overriding feeling of acceptance.
