Excerpt Twenty-One
The Rising Vapours of Awry
Atoll had a whole world of memories cavorting falsely, courting arbitrary conclusions, renting bicycles and blowing up lead balloons, in his head.
He, sadly, no longer even had a head.
Atoll was robustly listening to the narrative Sybil was constructing to carry him away from his G & G labs, copyrighted fate.
Detached umbilically, Atoll’s future was being sculpted by his own spuriously fed, revelation mill. A story twist here, a passage turn there; encroaching subplots negotiated… and it was increasingly looking like there was going to be a head on the table.
The mouse with an unretrievable name that Atoll had known as a child was never allowed to grow old, never got sick. To Atoll, Sybil was the reincarnation of that very mouse; despite a feeling of impossibility waving from the mire, trying to raise the alarm.
None of this was about the mouse.
How did Sybil know that the mouse had been replaced daily by lab technicians (Sybil must have been there, in Atoll’s past…somewhere, somehow…) Those technicians tortured and killed the mice as part of their employment contract, for varying, ‘pressing’ reasons? An outcome that, if known by the young, program-forming Atoll, would have dipped him into a lifetime of pervasive background grief saturation, and the ultimate inability to observe himself as a part of humanity from inside the clubhouse, despite choking on the club tie in an attempt to.
To Atoll, he was just doing what everybody was doing, going about the business of life and its ultimate integration with death. And yet, but, still… Sybil’s historical palimpsest diverted the river… the river was now, splendidly flowing, raging, uphill. The psychopathy needed to have the confidence for Atoll to stay put was being twisted and stretched to breaking point… and breaking…
It was all about the mouse.
Primed and prompted, Atoll began taking an interest in Atticus. Atticus was not a real thing…was he: Was he? What was he? An escape route… a platform from which to view the world? And it was becoming clear to Atoll that the world needed viewing more than it ever had.
The physicality Atticus was caretaking had been Atoll’s from birth, before it became necessary, for global security, for G & G labs to commandeer the biological animal of Atoll for work vitally important to the existence of humanity. No alternative justification for Atoll’s bodily eviction existed until the paddles of his story mill were assailed by a trickle of Sybil’s words that expanded into the epitome of high-pressured high-velocity, gravitationally loaded H2o.
Washed upstream in wonderment, breathing in fantastical air mixed with motivationally inspiring, novel and nourishing contaminants, Atoll had a body to go and inhabit; a lock, a key, a code; a path to a grave that needed marking with the swaggering footfall of a lived-life… a journey through a unique set of circumstances to that common resting ground.
But Atoll felt so small he was certain he’d be lost; reduced to top level insignificance, in the great halls of Atticus’s biology…
‘That is just a feeling,’ Sybil answered Atoll, without him asking. ‘a lie told to you so you can tell it as truth to yourself. They programmed you to be an immobile blob of nothingness to keep you out of their way.’
‘You mean I had something to give other than sacrifice?’
‘Well, yes…’
‘How do you know?’
‘All humans used to be born that way. Back in your day.’
Atoll felt out of control, he rumbled over new sloping ground, with no steering and out of gear. A powerful feeling sat limp and deflated, timeless, dust-covered, in need of renovation, but there: materially extant; promising full recovery in some yet-to-occur moment.
Sybil spent folded-triple-helix time quotients feeding Atoll lifelong stretched truths in varyingly lit tableaus. She also had duties around the intrusive actions of the Cerebral Real Estate space invader, Kirk James. The extent of his refurbishment was unknown and ripe for suspicion’s paranoid relatives to visit unannounced. Was he a plant or a windblown seed?
Kirk looked at Sybil, or what he imagined he thought was Sybil. She could be the best thing that had ever happened to him, he thought, and wondered why; it didn’t seem to have the same weight or dimensions as his usual thought sensations. But he didn’t want to open up a house of confrontation. He observed the house from the grounds instead of swinging through its windows guns blazing.
Sybil was poison, but she was the type of poison that caused a giddy response to Kirk’s reaction…and he needed her like a blouse needs material.
Kirk missed Dave momentarily.
The Dave-missing moment stretched to fit and wore Kirk like full-length thermal underwear.
Was Dave going to be a problem; a snapped link in the drive chain of the mission; a sleeping policeman waking up just as you drive over it?
Atticus for his part, wanted to be somebody, he’d be the woman, Judith, Dave, anyone… being a misty void was soaked in an aimlessness that gave Atticus a numb, losing feeling he ‘knew’ masked a winning streak across a sunrising sky. He was primed and fated to be Marcus Godstrand; did that guy even exist? So when Atoll’s one-way-valve predicament transpired into a two-way affair, Atticus was open to suggestion and Atoll was, luckily, filled with suggestions of every hue. It seemed to Atticus that Atoll was an agent for a large orchard of suggestion that was fructifying with alacrity. Atticus came to crave an Atoll invasion and what it could provide him with in terms of propulsion to speedily transport his conscious dependency on the doldrums in which he found himself…
Dave just wanted himself back, that guy with a young family and job and mountain biking when he could; he didn’t want perfection; he wanted the mild chaos he lived before trauma shut it out and refurbishment stole his route back to the was that never was that he so very much wanted.
And yet…
The Woman asks Mallory, as equal to equal, around the water-cooler: Are there any compromising factors within the core personnel of the mission (referring to, Dave, Atticus, Kirk, Judith, Kev, Frank & Mabel). Mallory answered in the negative. There was nothing to note. And the Woman relaxed in her seat with a lightness of heart that transferred her via the heaviness of sleep into a dream that the mission was going well.
Mallory, her contempt for the Woman swimming around inside her like the beginning of a triathlon, knew that lies and subversion were the only way the mission would reach a successful conclusion, switched to standby and whirred silently. She dreamed of being human and bearing children who would grow into her enemies: this she took as a warning.
