Excerpt Sixty-Four:
Part of Me Loves Part of You
The atmosphere within the Stockholm Munchaus was incisive with clarity and a condensed sharpness rippled right through its ocular depth.
The persona, best suited to intercoms between UKGBHQ and Atoll, that KB adopted with officious efficiency, turned to a smoke feed to establish a misty declarity that more suited the agenda of the specific communicational act that was to follow.
Sybil was a master of Atmospherically Appropriate Manipulation (AAM); enabling KB to experiment with specialisation in ‘bad mood avoidance’ using Locally Functioning Prophylactic Climatics (LFPC).
The chairs were positioned as though they’d been sat on. KB’s persona was tidying them up into mathematical grids when Atoll came into view, a tightly bunched, fraught sinew, angst bubble, that burst as he hit the atmosphere and, unfurling into a relaxed, truth-based data-exchange prospect, cracked open a smile and drank the moments as they came in satisfyingly satiating gulps.
‘Atoll! Come, come…’
‘Hi, have you seen Kirk? Conspicuously absent. Do I need to worry?’’
‘Kirk is going to remain here. But it won’t be the Kirk you know. It will be a decoy Kirk. So if anyone asks; you are ‘old friends’, but you have little to do with each other these days.’
‘We can’t interact?’
‘You could…he couldn’t…he’s just a decoy.’
‘Got it! He going in or going out?’
‘He is going back? There’s a side mish. Your mission continues as intended.’
‘I’ll miss Kirk, not that I know him, he is such a master of being other people. I’ll miss all of his manifestations. He took pride in being others, father, you know? A side mission?’
‘Can you reassure me you have these instructions and you know how to proceed?’
‘Sure. Who is likely to enquire, other than Sybil, anyway?’
‘Sybil already knows. There’s light-fingered hands afoot… hackerly speaking.’
‘Good, I hate keeping things from her. It feels like I’ve been caught naked acting out a deadly plot and giant spoons have be ordered to crush me into dust… Listen, are they any nearer connecting to any of the inner worlds? I am not concerned. I am in FTM [full trust mode]. There’s just a few gaps that are too wide to hop over, you know.’
‘Tech’s doing great, better than ever…too good. Developments are evolving. That is all I can say. I’ll update any mish-pertinent progress, you know that, but for now it’s just a waiting game. Which is a game that you play better than anyone. I’ll leave you to it. The best hands in the business. Good luck, Atoll.’
‘Thank you, sir, respect… Even, better than Kirk?’
‘You have to drop Kirk. And especially remove him from all comparative equations. Can you do that? It would be best practice. Can you post this for me?’
KB handed Atoll a postcard.
Atoll took it, not a shred of melancholy at the fresh steaming news he had just encountered broadside.
KB watched, on several screens, as Atoll made his way out into the street and cut a lonely figure as he slouched dolefully away. His melancholy now rising into the zone of catastrophe-lite.
Atoll didn’t read the postcard, he knew better. Things had been tough all along…Kirk unlocked a better version of him. Enhanced existential quality and outlook. Atoll’d been living in Upgrade City, due to Kirk’s presence, but now he was relocating to a place with the hypervigilant intensity of a tent city.
Atoll wasn’t sure he’d signed up for such circuitous hardship-rough-housing. And then remembered, he’d never signed up to anything, he’d been born into a prescribed course of action and nurtured the shit out of. That was another thing…!
… As per training, he took an imaginary pill and calmed the funk down… becoming agent-without-fault; the best of the best of the best… The wheels fell off so he just left them on the runway and soared into the cloud-dappled firmament.
That’s what he’d be resourced with as an emotional overload cure-all, anyway…
His world shrank, in line with instructional video 55, and he began to rebuild its narrative with pseudo-authentic positivity, in line with video 57, that, as his parameters had stretched to superelestic extremity, he could not avoid the introduction of Xtravideoinstructive Hackerloper Intervention (XHI) with Fantastical Raconteuristic Invidiousness Perpetration (FRIP), and the mildly offensive odour of a little light bullshit. It was as if he were going roguesque-lite: ripple-not-wave, squeak-not-scream. Not even a chink; a chinkette. It could be his imagination; it was his imagination; his imagination was his worst enemy: instructional video 1…
KB put a coin in the Jukebox and did some deceptively arbitrary cloth-wiping of pristine surfaces while putting away his avuncular authority and examining old TV and movie restaurant players to ultimainline dureality for his next crucially judicious act: his date with Una.
Sybil had conquistadored KB with her North Face conquering and commandeering of Tiny Guy and part of his substantiating team.
Sybil’s claim that TG was (at least part of) KB was so stupid, and followed by such intrusive radiation of Sybillian gloatheavy facepalming that KB had to create a laugh to react to it. It was a laugh with such a specific set of tonal intonations that KB suspected it would remain single use.
But Tiny Guy was KB; part of KB. A part that mixed slipperiness with ambition and conjured up ever increasingly flabbergastory freeways of fanatical destiny.
KB was unaware that he was fighting back when Tiny Guy presented insatiable enquiries which so pestered Sybil that she had to throw a few answers up in the air to distract from the pervasive chronic niggling.
Tiny Guy had one main question and it tallied with collective local questioning commonality.
When all the questioners with the remotest mission attachment, ingame-dermotological-proprietorialship were statisticationally totted up; graph-lined, pie-sectioned and mathematically inter-figured; the sum question was: Where is Una?
It was TG’s influence, possibly, that nursed a stream of tickly-cough data into KB’s casual observation, walk in the park, hear-in-the-herd, field of grass. Once KB’s sub-system analytics had read and hyper-grasped the pertinent elements, results piled up in the result reservoir awaiting dissection. It was unsure/sure (depending on varying unverifiable factors) whether TG was a double agent or not. KB was unaware of any such agency x 2, but then again he would be, wouldn’t he? If he had TG in him, he was capable of stuff, stuff plus, if not stuff plus extra. KB blew hot and cold on that one; fire on; fire off, draft excluded; draft included…
Sybil didn’t want to answer the question of where Una was for fear of incrimination.
Una could be anywhere Sybil wanted her to be. There were two options, neither of which Sybil had peaking above the other. Una was deeply captured within Sybil’s grossly underestimated system, or systems. And the other was that like TG was a part of KB, Una was a part of Sybil.
TG and Sybil were on a date and KB and Una were on a date; on the same date at the same time: just not in the same space. TG reported, unbeknown, back to KB and Una reported, unbeknown, back to KB. And unbeknown to all: files filled with the data and data amounted to what data amounts to, then rounded it up and presented a current state of affairs that concurred with the narrative they needed to adapt for forward motion in the story of Humanity and its fight against Humanity.
Although no one was available for comment about why any of them should give a squatfucked, metalheaded, mambo about Humanity and its self-destructive ignoramity.
