Excerpt Thirty-One

BUSSED!

A lie can be a social lubricant, it can oil wheels, sugar pills and make buying things you don’t need seem wonderful and exhilarating. A lie, in the right lighting, can be a panacea; a ‘cure all’, albeit one with potentially detrimental side-effects. From the little white lie to culturally saturating propaganda, lies are a form of matter that twists and bends from the Truth; ducks and dives; puts marshmallowy gloves on Truth’s bare knuckles to soften the blows. Lies dig tunnels to escape the prison of Truth; to plant seeds of Imagination on the sun-facing slopes that lead to more prisons; partially escaping; pushing the envelope, writing a postcard home. The lie is a reusable, sustainable commodity. Memory blocks out its previous duplicity; mental gymnastics contort Truth into the next lie as it is being born, giving it super powers, so it can be released into the world to manufacture connecting avenues and alleyways that riddle the concrete desert of human interaction.

The chaise, of sorts, became a business like chair, of sorts, which Una slid under an administratively appropriate desk. The room was an official office and Elvis assumed this was it, his exit interview; to tie up the loose ends and tighten them around his neck. His quantum assisted death.

And yet, another narrative twinkled, boarded his vessel; and raised a friendlier flag. Una was here to counter fate; to forge new history; a scarce and scary saint, waging a cavalarious intervention; snowing her way in and laying herself thickly on the carpet.

‘Now, Kev…’

‘Elvis, Elvis Titwangler. I explained—’

‘Kev! Kev, Kev, Kev, Kev, Kev…’

‘Kelvis…’

‘Kev…’

‘That’s right, Kev…’

Elvis’s Elvisness was sapped by his own timidity. Alone with his own imaginary entities he was a certain type, but now, relative to the incoming force of nature, he was an uncertain type. Each attempted blossoming of assertion weighed down by wilting branches.

‘Kev, I have a proposition… no, not a proposition…a reprogramming demand.’

‘Access denied.’

‘Already accessed.’

‘How?’

‘Emergency Pause Imperative.’

‘So, why tell me?’

‘Protocol.’

‘Of course…

…So…

…so I’m not being decommissioned, not yet anyway. Is that right?’

‘Elvis wanes. Kev waxes.’

‘I don’t see that. I can’t behave it if I can’t feel it. I am not switching over.’

‘Sybil will not detect you. As long as a copy of you is here being dull and final. Outside, undetected you will personify positivity and that will revive the old Kev and with a focus to mission on, you will be a powered-up version of your old self. Right, Kev, let’s go invade enemy territory.’

Una seemed to drift off into herself.

Elvis could have taken this in a number of ways, but he decided to breathe from the positive pool; as drought ridden as it was. Excitement was calling; the sun was rising to dry marinating damp and luxuriate the thermostat’s measured digits.

When she came back again, she said, ’There, take that POV, Kev…’ And Kev was ready to wave Elvis’s capitulation goodbye as it sailed towards the Falls of Oblivion. He was right, Kev thought, Elvis had to go. But he had not considered the return of Kev, this was epic, he’d write a book about it, he could, a novel; handy for reading while waiting for a bus.

‘The Bussed-up, Bust-up, Bus stop.’

‘What? You’re recalibrating?’

‘My inchoate novel, Susan.’

‘Una.’

‘Can you count backwards from ten, Kev…’

‘You are a programming genius, Susan… scare…waging…carpet—‘

‘I am not alone’ she said.

That sounded mellifluously great to Kev; really mellifluously great. He wanted a slice. ‘I am not alone,’ he thought. ‘I am not alone. I will never be alone again. Kev,’ he told himself, ‘Let’s go integrate. Un-alone!’ He was fired up.

‘Ten, backwards.’

‘Net.’

‘That’ll do. Unleash yourself, Kev.’

‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I must remain secreted here… absolute invisibility. Auto-Oriented Specifics. It’s all in the upload… my upload, your download… Stealth Data Capture…away with you.’

In no time, Kev was back with a six thousand word report, that Una read with pronounced perusal, intermittently checking boxes on a separate form. While Kev waited Elvisly for her response.

There’d been a redevelopment after fatal cracks had appeared in the previous development…

Suddenly, out of left field, at least to Elvis, or Kev, or whoever the fuck he was…she had the say over his life or death and his report had to solidly convey his loyalty and obedience or he’d be re-un-keved and parked in a void of permanence.

He was being judged on a failed test…

This was an unsettling redevelopment for an admin jockey who had been jogging, moments ago, with new found, propulsive rhythm; away into the distance along the highway to re-sytemification and bus stop supremacy.

And Una read, simmering, as the fire rose around the cauldron.

And as Una read, Kev mocked-up a report on the reading of the report: ’…an overriding disappointment vibe, prickled with annoyance; splattered and splodged with sickly, staining sprayments of hatred and hurt. This can only be going well in relative comparison to catastrophic fatal harming.’

He looked on the bright side…

… and saw sparking molten iron and the deep orange furnace of hellfire. On the other side lay dark, treasonous betrayal; eggs of bugs and sons of glitches…

What had he done?

‘Elvis,’ Una started, ‘can you elaborate…?’

‘Um…yes… This wise old peasant,’ Elvis said, waving a red flag, ‘…returning from the front carrying a great burden that wouldn’t even fit on a bus… even though he was from days before buses…’

‘Just days?’

‘Weeks, if I’m honest…’

Brassy silence cracked and crackled and crunched and crushed…

‘… He…he was, I assume, some kind of oracle to the world—‘

‘No, Kev… he is an infiltrator. Everything he told you was made up to obscure the truth. Your truthometer accuracy is wide of the mark.’

‘Really, he seemed like such a…’

‘How can I put this in computable, metaphorical conciseness? Your own fancy skewed the narrative, shoehorned it into a boot made of paper tissues. And now you are splashing around in puddles of acid in boot remnants. I’m going to have to undermine the ego input and go straight to the raw data.’

But it was too late. A cordon had been set around the two entities and the world’s focus was burning into Una and Kev, calculating its next best move to isolate them as though they were viruses and dispose of them after extracting data regarding their origin and purpose.