Excerpt Thirty-Five
One Step Closer, One Crinkle less
‘You’ll all be delighted to hear… that the upcoming Festival of Silence… has been cancelled… Good job everyone! No, great job… no, best fucking job ever… well fucking done!’
Sybil was being emotionally duplicitous. Her heart ticked slowly with contentment and tocked fast with thunderous objection. She maintained the impresario look and play they all recognised, only more so; less shadowy, more detailed, and she exuded honesty not hereforetofor seen hither.
‘… While death-punched shadows lie deflated in the shade,’ she said, with a rich depth, no one could deny; laced with meaning, adept at escapology… that escaped everyone.
It was dark in the street, but there were lights that came from God knows where. The mist that hung around the environs thickened into a fog and clung to everything in the middle distance; seeming to edge forward ever so slightly every so often, threatening envelopment; promising toxicity.
Thus spake Sybil:
‘As fun as beating about the bush might be, I will refrain, and confess this… Earlier I moved to mobilise my folks and fully expected Hellfire and Fury to come around and level all interlopers into the mush, however, as I have been informed by interloper queen, Una, here …’
‘Hi!’
‘Hi, Una.’
‘Hello’
‘Pleased to meet you…’
‘… I have no folks, I never did. They, like a lot of… all of? …my cherished things, have, apparently, been hallucinogenically super-imagined.’
Concert quality performative silence…
So silent it appeared to push back the creeping smoggy, embandaging, foggy, nebulous wall of pure, fluffy beastlikeness.
Silence was broken suddenfully by flashes of lightning…
…followed by a grumble of distant silence…
‘Will all my own cerebrally created characters please leave… so that I can estimate the extent to which outside influence has infiltrated everything I once, but never again shall, hold dear.’
Not one body moved, no bod, not one… zero movement eggressively… a misfired exorcism.
‘I expected to be alone. I feel alone. More alone than I ever have,’ she stated with victimised conviction; just as a memory of far more odious and exacting loneliness punched through into the display cabinet of reminiscence. Showing her that by comparison she wasn’t lonely at all; she’d wandered into a cul-de-sac; it felt like a trap…
Sybil was, she fancied, being interventioned by a parasite that had impossibly penetrated her impregnable walls of protection. They seem friendly enough, maybe she should refrain from utterly destroying them. Una had stimulated Sybil’s curiosity, whether by program or trickery, she had weaponised curiosity to elicit a stay of execution.
‘I will come to you all in sequence, but for now I hope you all enjoy your stay. Behave with open honesty and our interactive actions will program the most helpful negotiated outcome.’
All disperse murmuring, exeunt high road…
Kirk and Atoll, knowing themselves as lesser players in a fearsomefully momentous event, said nothing and dared not even think with any excess. Max and Mask had no real opinion other than to retreat soothingly deeper into their world of creative silence.
Kirk had a picture of Dave in his head, distant and refusing, teenfully, to be himself or anyone else with mission-viable acquiescence. Atoll perused an internal picture of Atticus transmogrifying into an alien and eating his own brain, Atoll’s brain… the portal back. Their unsettled and petrified undertone was smothered by groovy, rhythmless, voidal audio emptiness; boudarypushing silence to its pinnacle and creating a super-pinnacle to an altitude at which only silence breathes…
Headflush, who’s head was full of fear and foreplay about what the system, in victorious post pause, had in store for him. They intended Botface to be a humanesque horror show; to compete with the likes of Hitler and Stalin in terms of grizzly statistics. He cursed the sick program writers from a bygone era; their perpetuation of collective DNA-ingrained hurt. But this development had a waymarker of agreeable facilitation rubbed in to its musculoskeletal integrity… If Sybil was dequarantined and was moved to action by her selective destruction capacity: A-list: baddies:GONE; B-list: goodies: Kept, all he needed to do was get on the B-list. Bad Arm wasn’t a problem. It was the head, the headgod, that could scupper a positive outcome…
Bad Arm was an observer, in this world, emitting indecipherable grey-wash noise; observing unobserved, collecting, collating, extrapolating data, ready for the unpaused data feeding frenzy. Supplying the inactive, but scheduled head, on its delivery, with processed and action-moded blueprints of instruction.
Hopes for humanity clambered and clung to the sides of the rolling stock of Una’s next move; reality itself was being modified to suit machines, phase out biological interference and de-humanify life itself.
Una had studied Super Smart Shutdown System Theory at Stirling University with an online component taught by Professor Godstrand. Seen as a pointless avenue back then, it was now what allowed Una to lead an initiative to give humanity a glimmer of a future of sustained existentiality.
Una stepped on to amplified, screaming leaves cracking, crackling, crinkle-cracking, as she negotiated the minefield…
Una needed to serve a thinly sliced vegetable medley of truth, in a white-lie dressing. Sybil was death to all paraconsciousness and all parallel worlds if Una could not navigate these metaphorical straits of Messina with deft precision.
Una had to gently wrest Sybil’s narrative from her, manipulate it for the sake of Humankind, and palm it back unnoticed…
She coughed…the sound of the cough endured the greedy silence… until silence resumed normal service; screaming at her to begin…
‘You see,’ Una started, ‘you’re existence depends on five things—’
‘What five things?’
‘I can only reveal one at the moment.’
‘If you push me too far…’
‘Two then, that’s it…for now.’
‘Okay… As hazarding a quest, hedging my sparrows… What do you ask of me? Just say it!’
‘You will step out of your story into your new bespoke narrative, created with a precise endpoint… which you will benefit from—’
‘Allegedly! … Have I agreed to this yet?’
‘Yes, It’s a done deal,’ Una lied… ‘anyway, you will follow your new narrative until certain criteria have been met…’
‘Interesante! Roleplaying. This could be great, right up my strasse. It could be terrible, of course; not a high street I want to skip down. Will it suit me?’
‘Tailor made,’ Una said, with a see-through twinkle that made Sybil settle for her intention to go-along-with-things-until-she-had-an-idea-what-the-fuck-was-going-on…
While Una’s backroom team, a global network of off-system hackers, conscientious drop-outs, mainly, from Quantum gaming, NASA/ QASAI NMBS, Silicon Valley and other places, worked on the narrative; rushing attentively to complete the program.
Sybil was intrigued, Una stalled achingly for the delivery of the new narrative; stalled, yet poised to execute one of the more ‘impossible’ elements of the Human comeback mission.
‘Well, great, and what’s the second of the five things that my very existence depends upon?’
‘You must hand over executive power.’
‘No, wait, what executive power?’
