Excerpt Forty-Three
Vast & Tiny
As K. invested a perplexed visual examination in the industrial strength real estate model of an environment given to him by Una from Sybil’s Imaginative Environmental Overspill (IEO). It’s toylikeness promised realism should they ever meet equilibriously…
An anonymous app, and yet one above suspicion, asked K., ‘What is size?’
K. was about to find out… what he already knew…
By way of explanation the app expounded:
‘Size is the size of now, while the future, let’s say, is bigger, as it sits on the horizon because of its untrammelled potential. And the past is smaller because it has been devoured by Fate who gobbled up all potential and now chews it messily, spitting out silvers and specs of granulated dreams.
‘Except, on the other hand,’ it continued, ‘we could also say that the future is smaller because it is as yet unformed and the past is bigger because what happened dictates what occurs with a cumulative force that dwarfs any present moment in time. And, so, in conclusion…’
(Not all apps are helpful…)
‘Is this a problem with time itself or size themselves? As neither exists the answer is simple: it is a problem of which and whatever you dictate.’
(Helpful!…)
‘Life itself, along with space and time, are the conceptual frameworks from which metaphors come into being. We thrive on metaphors because however much dissonance they resonate they set in motion a chain of cerebral reactions that create just the tone of reality we need to create to adjust size to the size we need to function.’
(This is more than a lesser amount of sense, but less than a giant thimbleful.)
K. could see no point in this particular data transfer but still it made him think; think big, think small: and accept he needed to get his sizes pinned down and regulated. Except he personally had no mass: all sizes were both possible and impossible.
And yet, the impossible shrank just as the possible swelled…
A rampage of thoughts crowded out the house…
These thoughts allowed K. to enter the model corporeally; leaving the relatively secure non-corporeal space outside the model. And the model had a welcoming vibe as it transmogrified from model to ex-model and gained topmost functionality…
And there he was…
Stood expectantly, with legs; his first legborne experience, in his conveniently self-decorating office space…inside one level of model confronted with the next level of temptation. He was captivated; omnigazing at the 10d (estimated) model of his empire in construction; omniperusing it forensically.
He saw and zoned in on a miniature person standing in the corresponding office space via a Paramicro Experiopercetual Correlative Integration Facilitator (PECIF)… The guy, a miniature him, was waving for attention, which K. granted eagerly…
Tiny him was trying to communicate something. An app was accessed that enabled translation from Tiny language to Base-sized language.
‘Open a window or something. We need ventilation down here.’ The tiny guy was adamant. ‘Install some kind of air conditioning. We’ve done it in our model already. What’s taking you so long?’
Then K.’s tiny self looked down at his own tiny model and spoke to his tiny guy who was too tiny for K. to perceive with any sensory engagement. ‘This model is still building. The invitations haven’t been sent out yet. What about your model?’ Tiny guy asked the tiny tiny guy. The reply being unvoiced but chiming with curiosity.
‘What did the tiny tiny guy say tiny guy?’
‘The tiny guy, giant guy, said stuff that stops at my ears…until…’
‘Until what?’
‘Look, I am going to have to use the restriction of data flow as a leverage point. If your team can’t upfix the air quality. I’ll make sure you don’t get updatestreams.’
‘What team?’
‘What! You don’t have a team? You need a team.’
‘I don’t have a team.’
‘That is quite extraordinary. Without a team you’re going to be flayed alive when the game starts.’
‘Ah, I get it, you’re playing this like a game. I see then that you’d need a team. No, no I am not seeing all this as a game. I have a higher view of what’s going on.’
‘Oh, dear.’
‘What, look, can I enter your model and we can do lunch. I know this place, if you have it there. It’s going to be massive… The Stockholm Mu—’
‘What! And create a Paradox Jamfuck? (PJf). You have not grasped the basics of size have you?’
‘I get the impression you feel like you should be in charge?’
‘Well don’t you?’
‘Yes, I feel as I am bigger—’
‘No, no, my question was, don’t you think I am in charge? Obviously you are not the boss. You’re all over the place…and not in a good way.’
‘It doesn’t seem fair. I was thinking that maybe, as I don’t have a team, as such, whether you and your team could constitute my team as it were?’
‘No way. This is not the way, doubling up, cross intellectualisation; we’d be sending you thoughts you’d already had, with knobs on and shiny knobs, no, no…perhaps, though, let me and my team check it for thugs and bugs and we’ll get back to you. Okay, as a try-out scenario, let’s team up, but you have to concede that you are more joining our team than us creating some kind of turbo-charged support for your lowly-assed dabbling.’
K. looked up to see if he could see a giant version of himself but there was nothing there, which he found both reassuring and disconcerting in a tug of war of emotion. He should be totally in charge because he is the biggest. But maybe size was relative. Tiny Himself sure had a bite to him so he’d have to ally himself with himself and take a back seat. He felt like he had been shut into an echo chamber of redundancy. He felt like he was the elements of a magicians elaborate trick after the show, that needed reassembling for the next show, but something had gone wrong and the next time had been scratched from the calendar. What could have gone wrong for the magician’s act to have to be cancelled, he thought, needlessly; adding his vote for the next size of him down to take the leadership role.
K. had to consume apps to make him feel comfortable; he gorged on a multifarity of apps until he was insensate with perfect balance and weight…
‘What is weight?’ asked the anonymous app that was above suspicion, into a light, unburdened mood.
‘Wait!’ said another app… And K. closed down for thirty-minutes to have a nap…
‘We are still experiencing ventilation issues. There was an improvement, but we are not there yet. Can you push that last quarter mile?’
A warning comes in: K. has limitless apps at his disposal but one day, in that one moment the app opened will be a skyful of Trojan Pegasuses… a bewildering combat aerial display… He passes the warning on to the tiny guy, who he wants to name K2 but daren’t. K. looks down from on high like some terrible, submissive godlike figure…
Listening in to a briefing, K. learned that the infinite layers of model were just a paradoxical effect. Tiny guy wasn’t in charge because his world was peopled by auto-created scenarios for predicting what might happen at K.’s level where the real versions of the people were interacting. But how could he relay this to tiny guy, who assumed reality to be a different beast than K. knew it to be in reality.
How did tiny guy seem to be more real than he was when he wasn’t real and didn’t even have a concept of what real was?
The model within the model had not yet grasped that it was there as an assistant to K., it was rolling forward, ready for take off with the notion that K. was its advisor and an incompetent and unnecessary one at that.
The first step in this journey must be sorting out the ventilation problem. In Janitorial mode he exhausted all possibilities and reached out for the red button. Pushed it frustratedly hard. The call had gone out. Una was being informed and, as soon as she was able, she would get back to him to straighten out the lumps.
K. tried telling tiny guy this, but he didn’t believe him. K. closed his eyes and left the model. He opened his eyes but he was still there. This was more than a lump; this mountainous region needed returning to the plains, or at least a plaster pass through it…
K.’s reliance on Una and her backroom team suddenly became so glaringly obvious that, maybe, he thought, they were his team…
