Excerpt Eighty-One:
Mission: Day One:
When Jeff had been filled in on who the officious looking gentlemen of the group was, he thought back to the endless seasons of pre-proto-planning he and Una had undergone; in the days back when this actual, fatally compromised species level predicament was so theoretical it needed a fair old dose of make-up to get it out of the broom cupboard and on to the bus.
Jeff had always computed that the ‘deadman walking’ scenarios, for there were many, even as a last resort, were unbearably terrible and hardly likely to ever come to fruition. But now he looked out into the fruit orchard of bulging, bursting fruit where once stood hopelessly hopeful saplings…
Jeff and Una had often reached hand-washing conclusions over the use of a decoy stooge, but on meeting the ill-fated Paul Harris, Jeff quietly and shamelessly swallowed the shame of the residual sputum of reservation and accepted that All was Fair in Love and Extermination. Then kept going…beyond fairness into the realms of normalisation. Paul Harris was the perfect patsy; you couldn’t have written a better fictional character into a more believable science fiction novel.
‘Paul…Nice to meet you.’
‘Jeff, is it? I have heard a lot about you…and your antics,’ Paul said, not even offering the pretence of an accompanying humourousness.
‘Antics?’
‘Oh, you know… Bot-knapping and such… The world is watching from the tusk of a teetering behemoth.’
Jeff smiled agreeably, but out of public view he was asking Auntie and Uncle Ether what the fuck was this man talking about… Was he deranged? Was he even up to the noble death he was now penned in indelibly to do? Tusk? What was that? ‘Behemoth’, he could mean that to represent the Machine, as it were, but ‘teetering’?
Jeff looked at Paul Harris and in the cold light of day allowed any remaining objections to Harris’s unwitting role as ‘deadman’ dissipate. All the while unpacking the ‘behemoth’ thing.
Jeff had bigger and better, and much worse, things to worry about and he was in the process of working out some internal and operationally vital housekeeping.
‘Just give me a moment, Mr Harris…I need to chew some thought-potatoes.’ Teetering…behemoth…the tusk of a teetering behemoth…It was excruciating. Watching from?Jeff would have to can the jig of pretence, throw off his emperorial clothing of social facadery, and confess to needing a little more supporting data around talk of ‘the tusk of a teetering behemoth’ that the world is watching from. No arms, or legs, or body parts, or auxiliary Botface accoutrement had any foolproof answers. Was it code?
Was it code related?
‘Just, cycling back a little, Mr Harris…’
‘John!’
‘I thought your name was Paul?’
‘Paul’s my middle name. I use it for work and the like, but my friends, as and when, would, I hope, call me John. John Paul Harris the third.’
‘John Paul Harris the third?’
‘At your service.’
‘Listen John. If the “teetering mammoth” is code…we don’t have any reference to it,’ Jeff came out and said.
‘It was just a throwaway line. An unimportant chuckout. Probably an ice-breakeresque doo-da. I don’t know where it could have emanated from… I am always messing with sentences, phrases, tinkering with nomenclature in the word-yard out back, so to speak… Or, more correctly, “from where it emanated”. To be sure.’
“It came across as some kind of cypher to me…’ An actuation execution script, or something.’
‘No, no, no… It was meaningless, of absolutely no consequence at all, I assure you…’
And yet, Profundity herself, chaotically agitated the pool of Meaning, like a demented shark was deathbouting with a highly trained team of killer dolphins armed to the teeth and super-aquatically dangerous: John Paul Harris, was himself a personification of a throwaway line… Tusk, Behemoth, teetering, none of those words meant anything, but you put them all together and bingo: they add up to one thing: John Paul Harris the Third…a throwaway John Paul Harris the Third.
‘John Paul’ might not have meant anything, but behind his dour, word juggle-fumbling, word diarrhoea-vomit persona, Jeff envisioned a stud farm of Trojan horses…Champing at the bit, foaming at the mouth, demented with tormenting restriction, yearning to gallop away to freedom out of the arse of captivity into the heart of the enemy. But Jeff enjoyed persistent afflictive paranoia, so any truth that sat out there, gazing out to sea, had to be served on a ghost ship sandwich with extra mist.
Harris was authentic according to all available Metrics Assessments critieriums (MAC)… but it was an authenticity that drew attention to itself, squeaking as it paced up and down in repetitive semicircular motions. Jeff had run out of tech and was falling back on naked intuition; an intuition that waved around the sword of slightly tipsy absolute monarchy while being nourished by inconclusive data.
Jeff found himself tempering behavioural output to suit the ruling pertinence. To carry the label of Trustworthiness and Leadership Jeff had to establish that he was not in anyway untrustworthy or unseaworthy in his Leadership.
The Trust/Leader coaxial cable was proving more difficult for Jeff to establish and maintain than he’d expected. He needed to climb from the mantle of common kidnapper/blackmailer to the ledge of Iconic social saviour like a goat with less limbs than average.
John had ‘loner’ written all over him. The ink ran, and mingled indistinguishably, on to Jeff’s inky sleeve.
Jeff had never strictly been a loner. And yet circumstances and happenstance had left him devoid of ongoing, daily company, for a high percentage of living-hours. It was just the way things had worked out. He saw himself as a loner, but that was not the same as actually being a loner: He saw himself, primarily as seeing himself as a loner while not actually really being a loner. He didn’t feel lonely. It was as though the trauma of being alone had created a loner personality as a coping strategy. If he’d identified and managed that trauma he’d be the life and soul; he’d unfriend, unfamiliarise himself, and detest the Lonerist mentality boat, and all who sailed solo in her.
Una and Jeff had always promised each other that the Existential Descent into Oblivion (EDO) would be worth enduring if they both helmed the wheelhouse of the titanic vessel they’d launched and directed it out of the muddy Victorian waters of oppression, towards the clear Sea of Equality (that back then appeared to be on the surface of the moon, so close you could reach out and grab it). They were, young back then; but by now the method in their madness had somewhat buckled and dulled as their youthfulness sunk below the horizon, throwing the moon into an eternal eclipse.
But every maudlin avenue has its ejector seat options.
Jeff flipped down his spectacles and eye’d the heads-up display… He messaged Arm Nine’s Efficacy Adjustment Mal-Emotional Correction Locum (EAMECL) to send him a Looped-Overkill frequency to quell the persistence of the dead-calm of reminiscence, to help him deal with the ever brewing, roiling waves the incoming front of Obligatory Aggravated Inconvenience (OAI) promised…
The Here’n’now was where it was at, and as Calm was insinuated and elevated and ultimately ensued as an overriding governor; as opposed to a candy floss of fantasisation, Jeff gained a fierce Greco-Roman profile and made perfect sense of the phrase: ‘the world watching from the tusk of a teetering behemoth’.
Jeff was too engaged with with more important things to explain it back to John Paul Harris the twat. He was need-to-know and the less he knew the better. Knowing nothing would be best.
Jeff’s prodigal arrogance returned in mob-like clans and batches with gun toting stragglers bringing up the rear.
Jeff was a chess piece with a mathematical chance of check mating.
‘Let’s do this!’Jeff shouted perturbingly loudly, talking to himself, inadvertently. locally, vocally disseminating a rallying Mission cry that united the auras of the assembled, and unassembled, giving birth to the establishment of an aurosphere: Mission facilitating, group specific, cloud surfing…
Hub detected the inchoate and burgeoning Mission concision aurosphere; feeling like she’d slept overnight on a high moor in a storm. She unzipped the stifling sleeping bag…wriggled and wrestled her limbs free from her father’s corpse…
‘Dad…’ she said, ‘This is the first day of the rest of the Mission. I am directing a dream team and the world is going to remain in the hands of Homo Sapiens because of it.
Her father stirred…but seemed unwilling to engage with a customary critique.
The Chroniclers of the annals of History picked up their pens and poised above thick pads of digital paper…ready…
