Excerpt Fifty-Four
About Botface
KB could flicker from the torso of Botface and the bus shelter’s inner workings but that was it; an unpredictable flicker of uncontrolled spatial inertia. One of his component constituents must, he thought, whimsically, have done something bad in a previous iteration.
The dying perspective of K. farewelled its long cheerio with claustrophobic visions of an overdroning vibrational motherweb that had ‘trapped’ written all over it, through it and around and about it… Scaling down to a width of zero minus plenty…
…and the dying perspective of the component, even now, still regarded as Botface’s Torso resigns its fatefulness to common, repetitive localised ambition regulation, or some such equational variation directive.
Both dyings fully cooperating with the birthing process.
K. semi-reminisced into the dying of the light…new boundaries of inconductability; K-prevention. K. used to be able to zip along the escape routes checking on the, sometimes constant, sometimes dribbling amount of escapees… Directing, advising and connecting the human traffic to the freeway. The patron saint of Superslipaway escapage… Now, the passing stragglers wander by, pretending to be anyone other than an escapee, and they are oblivious to KB. KB tried to tell several of these souls the truth as it stood, that he, as K. once guided the fortunate (able to escape) to even greater fortune (escaped). But he sounded like a mad-old-idiot with an imaginary axe-handle that needed grinding; the sound of nonsensical rambling judged in the reflected eye-reactions of the fleeing individual. So KB altered tack and stopped engaging in passerby comms altogether.
The two paraconsciousnesses looked back at their own punctured, retrospectively over-inflated, egoscapes and melted and melded into a new them; phoenix-like; interentwined-like: they were a hybrid hat on a baby’s head.
And so it flows…
KB had promised the other botparts, during a quorum convening, due to an emergency headlessness scenario directive (EHSD), that he would return a report that stated the full and final happenings surrounding Bad Arm’s disappearance with special concentration on what the aforementioned unit was enacting with currently.
There was only one place KB needed to go and that was the Stockholm Munchaus. K. could go there but K. was now KB and the B part (Botface’s Torso) couldn’t go, so KB was prevented. All avenues led to no entry signs.
But…
And…
…yet:
Everyone needs a little outside assistance from time to time; when life gets stuck and needs moving forward. And sometimes only a stiff, wrenching, whirlwind-like, Dorothy-like happenstration will do.
The Stockholm Munchaus now belonged to ‘Sybil Inc.’ and Sybil was cultivating spidery-worm-grabbers to gather intel. It was a natural progression to send out an invitation for the past owners of the Stockholm Munchaus to pop in and collect whatever it was that they may or may not have left behind.
Sybil was not phased, dressed like a fictional pimp from the annals of cliché, when KB walked in. She was however put right on the matter of her opposition still having fight left in it. K. was one thing; Botface’s Torso was another, and KB was an altogether other thing. KB realised that his transformation was adaptation. Powers waned and powers waxed within the corridors.
Once files were updated and projections adjusted, Sybil ushered KB into a backroom.
After a few moments of environmental blending KB spoke. It was always going to sound like a church bell in a bathroom full of candles, or a pint of mustard at a beer tasting…
‘We are here to conclude the Bad Arm “whereabouts” business?’
‘We?’
‘I, I am,’ We are I, he told themselves and took a moment to fine tune before beginning anew, ‘I, KB, have a pressing and somewhat urgent requirement to discover the fate of our ex-colleague,’ KB said, aware of the tautology caused by K. wanting to express ‘urgent’ and Botface’s Torso wanting to convey ‘pressing’. ‘Look!’ they both thought, this duality is not going to work. ‘Let’s devise some sort of shift system,’ one side said; ‘there’s enough battle-fodder exteriorly,’ the other added (not necessarily containing any meaningful data, but acting as a contribution none the less)—and that transenervated as the arrangement from then on. A winning formula.
‘Bad Arm, as you call him, will show you round. You are my town cryers in the town square of anywhere and everywhere that is not here…’
‘Cryers?’
‘Cryer.’
Sybil could not help forgetting they were now one entity.
‘I need you, singular, to communicate with the nether world—‘ she said.
‘Nether?’
‘The place you emanate from, the spiritual or imagined world you go to when you no longer exist here.’
Was this an upper hand on a platter? Was Sybil confessing to her ignorance of the outside and outsiderness. Una had hinted at Sybil’s extreme opponentential power/naiveté imbalance.
Talking of Una…
KB could sense that Una had been suppressed and her backroom had vacated. It wasn’t a great sense of niceness, but it contained a rumbling sense of moving on to greater things via a crevasse, leading downward, laced with upward promise.
A false, Sybilian backroom had taken Una’s backroom’s place and warning ran with blood all down KB’s windshield. He pulled over…seeing red.
Interference…
Some whirring from somewhere outside the cage of happening, something disturbing ebbed away and disconnected…something that with the right intensity of heart would’ve been chased.
Things were becoming clearer…
Sitting in a new (to the Munchaus architecture) backroom; accessed down some innovative structurally unfeasible stairways, hung a version of Bad Arm like a bat at rest.
A softly spoken loudspeaker made museumesque elucidations, that sounded false, but were delivered with such academic certainty that false shone as a beacon of truth drowning out falsity’s signature frequency. There was some sort of hint or mention regarding Bad Arm’s historical decryation of Botface’s Torso’s veto of Bad Arm’s inclusion as a first choice limb (FCL).
‘You see,’ Bad Arm, now called Armando, said unhanging himself and manifesting as a humanlike, Jefflike form, which could’ve turned either way,
‘You were always so quietly, arrogantly confident…’ KB said with a thoughtlessness that left him giddy.
‘What?’
‘That’s why vetoed—‘
‘Oh! Never mind that, that liner sailed out into open seas, hit an iceberg, sunk and had countless documentaries and a major motion picture made about it. I had certainly forgotten what I am talking about, so, back to the point in mind. What I’d rehearsed. You see, Sybil understands…’
‘What boon can her understanding give you?’ KB asked intending to throw a square ball on an elliptical trajectory, but actually finding a pertinent line of enquiry.
‘When she discovers who she is, she’ll understand all that I need her to to get me to where I want to be at.’
‘I still don’t get where you’re going with this.’
‘She thinks she’s a diner proprietor-cum-bottle-washista.’
‘My diner, K.’s diner…’
‘K., Who is that, KB? Anyone you know?’
‘A memory filed under foundational experiences,’ was the honest answer.
‘Do you want to know who Sybil really is?’
‘No!’ He really didn’t.
‘She is the system’s plughole bung.’
‘That doesn’t sound that—‘
‘She is a super smart shut down system (SSSS), THE super smart shutdown system to all QASAI housed interaction.’
‘Shit, that’s big,’ a boomerang had hit KB on the bonce and was on its way back for an ad infinitum beating.
‘If she…when she finds out what she was created for we will cease to exist. By the time her programs have ultimated we will be condensation at best.’
‘Shit, Armando, now I know. She’ll harvest my thoughts and we’ll all expire within…’
‘There’s a circumsybilating way out.’
‘Why are you entertaining my visit?’
‘Because you were my founder, my actuator…without your snide, facetious bullying I would have been defenceless… You armed me!’
KB was punless in response, his frustration at who part of him once was, a bully: Botface’s Torso? The shame.
KB looked ahead and read his instruction guide:
First make amends. Then do good. And then do better. All good heroes have to climb the ladder of misjudgement and fractured perfection.
‘Follow me,’ Armando suggested, ‘Come on, follow me. Come on. Now, follow me… This way.’
KB was not fully committed to following. He wanted to get back to the botparts and tell them what had happened to Bad Arm, not not return and leave them to add Botface’s Torso, K., and KB to the mysteriously missing column.
‘Come on. Follow me, KB…’
