Excerpt Thirteen:

(Part One)

Shelter

 

 

Kirk within Dave, Dave without Kirk, Judith, and Atticus (Né Atoll): he of many potential personality outcomes, crowded the small, heavily tech-ready bus shelter. The three of them adding up to an operational number more like six or seven. Safety in numbers; safety in bus shelters: ‘safe-house’ bus shelters. Also, to top this, the commander woman joined them; presumed dead, but more alive than ever, aroused, expectant. They’d left her in a gun battle, which could have taken place or might have been a ruse… Rising panic asks little of the gods of information.

‘Did you kill them?’ Dave asked, brutally, if she had, and accusatorially, if the ruse was an ongoing scenario.

‘You need me,’ replied the woman, breathing laboriously.

‘Or else?’ Dave replied, without thinking too much; presenting a brusque bravado that seemed to be a storefront displaying goods other than actually sold on the premises.

‘You’ll be needing an undertaker,’ the woman said, staring at the ex-marine.

Dave backed off, having thought a little. He could taste the emotional charges firing out of the woman. And that taste in the back of his throat beckoned him into the sewery canals of his mind where he was ambushed by jagged-edged, dragon-foe’d flashbacks. He was left fighting on two fronts, out-gunned on both.

The three agents had all been turned by machines and had fallen into an alliance with maverick, self-serving, algorithms. The only saviour coming, they believed, was non-biological; nature was their enemy: plastic grass and concrete trees the forest of new opportunity. Whether they were right or not was still in the tumble-dryer. Either way, they were fucked off the life register, erased from the existence ledger, by the woman; commander turned executioner. She was proving herself indispensable, despite her abuse of the dairy mother and her babies.  Those agents were there to kill Judith as sure as a young animal is sent to ‘market’.

The woman had explained to Judith that she (Judith) was an unwitting combatant—she’d been modified by G & G labs to serve as a contingency plan should the Marcus Godstrand revendication process fail. What the woman meant was going to take some time before it translated into a meaning Judith could grasp.

Judith was swamped by revelation that seemed to have crossed over from a different dimension. Her starter-motor tickled her dead engine; her dead engine giggled lightly, before descending back into a comatic slumber.

Ibiza had been a life-changing vacation after all. What did it all mean. She asked the woman, but the woman could not tell her. It was secret information. So secret that Judith herself was not privy to facts concerning her own biological existenceology. She was grateful that the unstringing of the material that held her in life’s hammock had unravelled for an outside reason and she was not at fault; she was not faulty, not by her natural narrative, but by an interloping, usurping re-write: she’d been invaded…She was occupied by a foreign power.

Was it terminal? She couldn’t run with the ball so she dropped it, and dropped it, and dropped it…no she was bouncing it…

Judith peripherally scanned her team: Dave: an ex-military, full-time PTSD, spent-case; throwing bricks, with arms broken by bricks, with the befrightenment of a terrified terrier protecting a bone from his own skeleton. To look at him, she thought, to amuse herself, you wouldn’t think he was a famous surfer from the beaches south of LA… He’d never been to Vietnam, she thought, and then thought: he had, but it was renamed Afghanistan. He was still there and would never leave… Brando leaves, Coppola leaves, the cast and crew, but not Dave. Dave no leave.

She slid Atticus into her field of vision: Atticus, a man trying different characters on, and destined to be schizophrenic until he finds the one that fits.

And now the demon brains of the outfit, the woman, a commander; of what? Of whom? Her, Judith? The woman was an abuser of animals, killed calves, took babies from their mothers, but still maintained a control over Judith. Judith was a lamb to slaughter, she thought; solidarity with the lambs and sheep. Poor lambs, poor sheep… But never poor Judith. It crossed her mind that she was being kept ill by the animal holocaust, and maybe it was a form of Munchausen’s by proxy exercised by the insensitive to deny the sensitive their crack at taking over the world and making it a less barbaric place, could be, unlikely, but then likelihoods, have, in these days proven to defy accepted rules and guidelines. She could escape the slaughter; she came from the species of gods.

Judith had given the woman a sharp wake-up to the reality of the cruelty of dairy: maternal instinct defiled, babies massacred; all in the name of udder-juice. Judith had tested the woman on what she’d learned: she hadn’t. She clubbed the idea of a cruelty-free cup of tea to death in front of Judith. ripping off her own epaulettes, demoting herself to the rank of recidivist animal abuser. A haze of unforgivable shame misted over the woman; dissonance danced a mad, incomprehensible gig. Of course, the woman was oblivious, of course she was.

The woman’s arrogance, fed by ignorance, starved of compassion, was of the swaggering, look-at-me-me-me-mommy, nursery-nanny-loved, soul misfiring, kind. She stank of privilege that had to be repaid by displays of arrogance and superiority; a collective attempt to persuade the Ego that Might is Right, (as long you team up with Might and Might has chosen for its team).

Judith had loved and lost twice within two days, or one day, or was it three? Her misanthropy was unaffected, two deep loves rubbed out, expunged by cold reality; revealed as pickled fancies on a cake of emotional bullshit. She’d been through worse, this wasn’t going to trouble her unless she let it—she filed the seed of pain away in a file called ‘compost, water and bury; sprout and exit the allotment before you get tangled in overgrown weeds’: she was not going to let it bother her in this moment, but later, stored up; its dammed, dry lake would fill: it was, inescapably, human nature: you can’t fight human nature: you ARE human nature…

No bus would ever stop at this bus stop again… it was now a shed-shaped folly as far as the public transport system was concerned; a monument to the most inventive and self-destructive species Mother Nature has ever aborted. Some busses would pass, while they still could, hijacked, stolen, borrowed, commandeered, but stop? No, not any more; not in this climate.

(Part Two)

THE WAIT

Time dragged, tangled and snagged; all the while flooding away with implacable irreplaceability. Judith went over what the woman had told them: they must stay close, keep as a unit. The immediate future was a headache of worry; they were stuck in a slippery-sided bowl of oceanic water.

When suddenly the naggy, snaggy, tangled-draggy, tango paused; the dissonance-dance desisted; Judith was asleep, of this she was certain. She was back home, in bed; okay so far. Underneath her home-made bed, in the decoy nuclear shelter, her parents busily dealt in their unsavoury pet pleasures. Nothing concrete could be picked up by Judith’s senses, but an accusatory worm wriggled relentlessly, its insinuations, town-cried from the village stocks; shouted words that amounted to: those perpetrators of parental privilege are employed in butchering a local girl…nice girl, pretty too (was), rough family though, unfortunately… who had wandered into their web of fatal finality, eyes open, expecting sanctuary, receiving contrary succour. 

Drifting inward and outward in swirling dream-dust…separation.

Judith wanted to go back to the dream because it withheld information she thought she wanted to hold. But instead, climbed out from the space beneath her bed and came to in the bus shelter… how did she get under the bed, it was off limits, was she in deep trouble? Just a dream…just a dream she remembered, before waking fully up, and continuing with other, off-dream business: she’d been tied paralysingly tightly to her bed and above, in the mirror, she could read the words ‘GET IN’ tattooed on her bare flesh, she guessed, ironically, just above grossly detailed devil’s horn’s, situated a tad North of the mouth of her vagina. She wondered what three words betrayed its location.

Until, in the crisp, salty breeze of Doughton High Lane: …on one side sat Kirk and the other Atoll, except those ships had sailed: Dave was the Marie Celeste and Atticus was the Titanic, still getting rid of passengers to find and keep that one personality that fate had not bothered to choose to captain his vessel.

Good luck to you both, wherever you might be, she thought, suspecting they were having it easier than she was. Then she checked reality: Atticus; check, Dave, check, the commander woman, still there, thank God… They’d be needing her, like hole in the head; to breath through, which sucked as she was a casual, unthinking animal abuser. Judith had entered her in the ledger in red Biro; the woman’s callousness towards the cute and the furry had not gone unledgered.

‘If we stay inside the shelter,’ the woman had commanded, with an overriding whirlwind of absoluteness, bulled-up by a foundation of underlying militaristic absoluteness, ‘we will be safe,’ and, ‘It is imperative we get to the Technicon Exhibition in East London.’

‘Why?’ Judith asked. The woman had just told Judith, over-nicely, not to ask her any questions. Judith looked for the minutest of reactions to her contrariness, detecting nothing. She’d need a machine to prove it, but she was certain that inside, deep in the woman’s workings, electrical and chemical interactions were constituating into a heady mixture of perturbation… or some comparable biological behaviour. Judith had already rubbed the women up the wrong way by telling her she sided with a machine regime that created an animal equality existence, against a human regime that dolled out medieval attrition to animals…describing human humanity as a corrupt biology, eating away at itself, digesting death, regurgitating death; forcing its own death illogicalities on innocents, non-combatants. She had an appetite to rub the woman up the wrong way some more. ‘Right’ was on her side, and it lay gift-wrapped, bulging with incontrovertibility, waiting to be opened. She unwrapped it, pulled out a pistol and fired at the woman: a flag with ‘right’ embroidered on in luminescent pink popped out.

And:

This socially upturned situation; this new wild world of outrageous faction, where women like the woman were staring armageddon in its evil-eyed butt, chin up; stiff upper-lipped, was to Judith, the Promised Land. She’d never considered choices and optionality before. Her parents had led her to a sweet shop full of carrots and hoped she’d be their bunny. Now the sweet-shop was full of unhealthy, tooth rotting sweets that made her eyes bulge; she wasn’t going to kill herself on those invitingly packaged candies, but she was going to give it a fucking good try, or die in the process.

Judith remembered the woman had said, visibly managing her anger, ‘We are all on death row. We are all wounded—’

‘But that doesn’t excuse forcing defenceless animals to have to do the same, in front of our guys who are sensitive and feel the pain—it makes our death row into hard labour, and torture….’

‘Who do you mean by our guys?’

‘The emotionally intelligent, the—‘

‘Psychobabblonians…’

‘The Age of Aquarius has dawned, my…’ My what? Calf-killer, calf-killer, calf-killer…

Then an invasive, far from inaudible silence…

Judith had then reassessed the situation, she would have to be sovereign leader, her, Judith, when it came to matters of compassion and considerations of life extending far beyond the blind reaches of arrogance. Sticking for one moment, recurring, on how many esses ‘reassess’ contains as a word; wondering if the new era would contain such intricacies as shaving an ’s’ or two off such a word…

In any event the woman could not be trusted outside her blinkered sphere of anthropocentric, planet-raping traditionalism. She WAS the white middle-aged man; the culprit. Caught red-handed, pants down, fucking the planet and all who sail on her.

Of the four, sat on a bench in the small bus-shelter on a quiet road, the woman knew more about what was going on than any of them so she was the leader. She’d put the hours in. Judith had to relinquish control, for the time being. She’d be forced to compromise and condone… what terriblenesses?…and to what degree? This was going to test her in a way she’d never been tested, probably.

‘The DRD system,’ the woman had said, ‘was unable to start up fully, but was emitting three second bursts every nine hours, and one was due, after that we can move.’ It all sounded a bit dramatic, and improbable, but it was all they had to go on. ‘The trouble is,’ the woman had continued, ‘there was an out of sync, random burst of less than a second that could mean we are sunk, but let’s remain buoyant as long as we can.’ 

So, this was what she’d meant. The four of them, sitting on a bench, in a bus-shelter on a quiet road, in the countryside: old version. Current day, wild world lunacy version: they were in a life-raft, waiting to be saved by the same technology that was trying to kill them; sharks of technology circled, high-seas of technology swolling and swelling gigantically about them; this was no kitchen sink drama. It was bath time!