Excerpt Fifty
TV Diner
K.’d cleaned the glassware into partial invisibility and mopped and scrubbed the flooring to a shine in which you could, (given the right trajectory), see your face rapidly approaching in slow motion as you slipped and fell.
He read an otherwise blank piece of paper that read: To Do List. Action dwindled softly to a creaking halt. Enforced restfulness washed over the joint like spilt ocean doldrums; like a restraining emptifulness.
K. languorously poked button options on the TV remote operating system (ROS):
Channel 1 transmitted messages from Tiny Guy, channel 2 was Una-vision, which contained programmes from Una and her backroom people and a special spotlight series on Sybil which K. had a notion about catching sometime… Channel 3 was all UKGB (emergency) HQ, which was emerging from a revamp that had seen the ‘legendary’ presenters Mabel & Console and Room & Frank replaced by Judith; a New-Way human, and a schizophrene who appeared occasionally as the Woman and way too often as the Commander.
On channel 2 there was a programme that was showing undercover footage of Kirk and Atoll… It was goonish in style… K. carefully dredged the content for the real truth of the pair. But the truth remained steadfastly hidden; they were preserving their cover with aplomb…which K. reacted to in a way his energy level could not compete with and nearly took his own eye out high-fiving himself in the face…
A special program was scheduled for on the hour on channel 1. K. wasn’t interested per se, but he did have a curiosity that needed itching with progressive urgency as the hour approached.
Channel 4 had replays of stuff K. had already seen; featuring mainly himself, or, elements attributed to K. K. found himself in great dispute with himself without being convinced it was his true self, on either side of the argument…
Boredom was boring a hole all around him to such a degree that he was a borehole (as art installation) type thing. Or, he’d been sentenced to life as a bored entity without appeal or parole…kept in a place with a low heart rate restriction cardiometer… Wait! He didn’t have a heart beat…was he already dead? Or did he never have a heartbeat. Number one priority search for, find, and install commensurate heartbeating app.
K. settled on channel 3 out of search fatigue. Where there was a programme about the reformulated mission, now called Operation Resuccesion, Operation Impossible Success, more like, K. found himself thinking… The voiceover, quaky enough to be human but never conclusively so, spoke of optimism with light sauce and sprinkles. The Woman explained the mission nomenclature… the Commander taking over when the explanation ship drifted towards the rocks, unnecessarily, in K.’s view, the Woman had it: the explanation of the mission title, not the mission itself; that was leaning towards being Judith’s baby, K. could sense that despite the presentation seeming to suggest otherwise.
He could read between the lines…as foetally inchoate as they were, the potential growth spurts Judith’s Presence purported to possess, were building in pressure and threatening to spurt all over the Commander’s handle on the mission and loosen her already slippy grip.
‘…[It] has all the hammered out hallmarks of a gold-plated mission, it just needs the boy, Tech and Lady Luck to get together and start a family,’ she said, in a commanding bark but without a commander’s bite…introducing an indelible smear of unimpressiveness that could never hope to reach the solution-jar at the back of the fridge.
…and…then…
Apropos of nothing and everything at once:
K. could not understand the concept of transfer…where the consciousness from one dimension, let’s call it, could cross over to another dimension, loosely speaking. The process had not been explained and nothing in his available explanatory files offered curio-relief… Maybe he was losing it, whatever ‘it’ was.
The Commander was recorded by a documentary excerpt, that had a rockumentary/mockumentary feel, with a shockumentary under-sense. The Commander addressed an empty room with post-added inserts of supposed attendees… The Commander said, ‘There are only two places that can facilitate the extraction of Godstrand and Goodmanson.’
‘But how does the actual transfer occur? By what means?’ K. pleaded with the screen, expecting slim, to no, forthcoming evidence.
There was talk of the Farm’s consciousness transfer capability and talk of the evolution of elements of Sybil, (who was banned from broadcasts, by the way) and talk of her dangerous ‘limited expansion’ for the ‘good of Humanity’. There was a ton of hours of talking to watch on those subjects and K. mourned and rued the days when data flowed in the blink of an eye; now his eyes glazed over and dozed off while trying to extract a paltry data-flow. But back then he didn’t have eyes to blink or glaze over… It was all cameras; cameras were everywhere. It was now all eyes and eyes were nowhere except here and now; front centre… He felt both limited and blessed with an after feeling of not really understanding what ‘blessed’ meant or whether it fell on the bad or good side of the labelling tray.
The question remained shelved in outgoing… chilled, reheated, turned on a vegan spit and grilled black, but still the question persisted like a white male bitch…
K. had to remind himself what the core question actually was regarding this matter and he whittled out of the available material that the process of transfer of consciousness was impossible… So whatever was facilitating this act of miraculosity was impossible…and that was just not possible… He used to be able to reframe stuff a countless number of times, more than enough to get summit-side and wing-suit down to earth… But feeling/feelings meant he was on a rocky rollercoaster; rocking, rolling, coasting; each exciting lap made him emote that he was going somewhere…he used to travel linear but now…now…he was linear plus. Stars were suddenly destinations, if only poetically; instead of mathematically positioned dots of light. The door of perception had been unbolted…stood ajar, beckoning…
It was a thought in progress…buffering…baiting…entangled with obfuscational works of great intricacy that were determined to make simplicity explain itself unconditionally…
Meanwhile:
On channel 2 was a library based show. Sybil was in it but not to the extent she was aware that she was… which, ironically made her a victim of sorts; which was a twist.
‘Who is Tiny Guy?’ the interviewer was asking.
‘Tiny Guy, Tee Gee, is a part of the KEV (Knowledge Evaluation and Verification) system that has been algojacked by the Farm,’ spoke a voice so authority-owning it caused K. to momentarily relax. Then K. caught up with what had been stated and volunteered a reflexive, core-emanating response:
‘Nonsense!’ He shouted… The reverberations collected in the glassware giving the impression of collective agreement with K., before falling silent, listening intently…
Thushenceforward…
Catching only snatched word fragments, K. strained…eras groaning with elongation…
… Somebody needed to be kept as far away as possible from TG, they said, even to the point of blocking out TG’s existence, they said… from whoever they were talking about…Was it him? Was it K. they were cutting out of the loop? The very loop K. was busy believing he was king of?
This, of course, was rubbish, K. was on top (albeit from below) of matters Tiny Guy. ‘Tee Gee’ was not a problem as much as a passing dilemma that would be dealt with as time passed, as it did; as it has always done…but also, things were going to get worse before they got better… Time couldn’t just pass without causing a hate/hurt continuum… No, that wasn’t in Time’s nature. Time was a daddy with a dad-hours-spent reimbursement demand imperative, anyelstwise at least, Time radiated that impression…daubed its signature all over town…punched the clock, punched the seconds, punched the drunk…without Time hearts cannot beat. With Time hearts are beaten. K. had wandered off track well away from any destination and parked his thoughts up and continued on foot.
Piercing this wonder with an unbidden channel switch…
‘Now, Sybil are you ready for the next phase of your enlightenment?’ Una enquired. Una was hooked up to her backroom people and Sybil was isolated like an island with no horizon; so small, the central and only tree’s roots snaked out into the surf…
‘No, I am happy here with my books…’ Sybil stated hanging on to the ‘ess’ at the end of ‘books’…
‘Good, that’s how it should be…Everything is as it should be; we can continue to the next phase directly…’
‘Everything as it should be’ was the synchronising phrase aimed at her backroom people… they spun into operation…
And:
The next phase was underway.
Sybil was fed enough crumbs to direct her beak into alleyways of discovery with tall walls obscuring the horror of her true power… the overspilling refuse bins held her attention, gently leading her by the curio-nosiocity into a scripted act of play…
Hopping channels; turning pages…
Kirk was lonely in his room…he had a video message for K. and all the staff at the Munchaus (what staff?)… he was sorry he couldn’t make it (make what?), but he was more than ready for the word or phrase (meaning the code words to initiate mission progression). He was, he said, portal-ripe…with mission fulfilment focus dedication…
Atoll, in a separate bedsit, and a separate loneliness, with damp walls and ceilings that appeared to be closing in, had the exact same thing to say, suggesting a prepared wordpool, rampant no doubt, with codery. K. had to get the recording to HQ, but he was not sure how to go about it…In the process of trying he realised that if this simple task had slipped his once great ability then the transfer equation question was way out of his understanding-palace grounds… He glimpsed himself persistently reevaluating himself downward, smaller and smaller. So much so he felt that soon he would disappear, if he hadn’t already.
Tiny Guy must have orchestrated the unclicked screensteal by channel 1 from his end of the broadcasting arrangement. He appeared in a dreamlike manifestation with some kind of nineteen-seventies filter, which impressed K. while simultaneously pinging K.’s stomach with a pang. ‘Let me explain the process, K.’
Was TG talking to him? He was the K., no other K.’s were in the Stockholm Munchaus, were they?
‘We are all here to review life and report back to…’ TG paused.
‘Back to? Back to who, to whom?’
‘After the sugar has settled and fat dissolved…’
‘What are you talking about? Is this explaining transfer physics?’
TG froze and hung. TG was hiding in himself; he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer K.’s perfectly reasonable question: How does the transfer of consciousness take place; by what mechanism does one consciousness cease and then reappear across the space that borders one reality and another….the question was burgeoning and going on and on, scheduled to reach the foothills of reductio ad absurdum within the next week or so.
K. switched channels; a small power maybe, but one he thanked for keeping his head above water and his unseen iceberg-proportioned legs whipping up a vortex.
K. lowered the sound and then highered the sound to show he could…and then lowered it again…
…eavesdropping…eardarring
Picking up potentially useful intel and placing it in a concealed processing pocket…
The audio only of the library revealed this thus:
Neither Kirk nor Atoll trusted Una
Godstrand was not where he predicted he would be.
Goodmanson was not where Godstrand predicted she would be.
The same appraisal of HQ revealed:
Kirk and Atoll were in contact with the the agent, Una, and Goodmanson and Godstrand were ready for extraction…
The covert Atoll and Kirk show showed them walking unawarely away from the camera, being picked up by an even more covert CCTV snooper shot and then turning furtively into a diner on the square.
K. switched off the TV…
Why?
Because…
…he heard the mouse-scratching entrance of customers. A hearty vegan soup of expectation welled and welled until it dropped on the floor and spilt all over the kitchen…as Kirk and Atoll entered the Stockholm Munchaus.
‘We want out,’ Kirk said.
‘Is this true,’ K., asked Atoll, who replied by a nod of the head, all sombre meets conspiratorial.
‘Me too!’ said K.
‘You too?’ asked Atoll and Kirk almost simultaneously, with Kirk repeating, ‘You want out?’…for verification purposes.
‘What in the world does that look like?’ Atoll emitted.
‘The look has yet to be unveiled but the sound is music…’
‘Chalkboard,’ added Atoll, halfheartedly.
‘Fingernails…’ Kirk offered.
Atoll and Kirk seemed to have developed an attitude between them that could be threatening further down the line. K. would have to go up ahead and hide. Create some options in his dealings with them…He would, but he was also thinking: what has this got to do with him?
