Excerpt Ninety-Seven:
Answerville City Limits
Jeff had no way of entering any cerebral space other than his own. Una had discussed with him the dangers of Jeff becoming a stranger in his own existence; he’d be the only entity solely inhabiting the real world while every other entity around him had multi-otherworld access. Three of the bots in his possession were cerebral real estate ready, the rest where technically parts thereof and shared cognition, and, he knew full well, that if push came to shove and shove got shirty they’d all cross over; leave him on his lonesome, and be away to forge their own narratively complex lives as cerebral avatars. What he didn’t know, couldn’t, due to his isolation, was that they all already had their own bolt holes; that’s how they could cope with system alerts telling them that their kidnapping was a crime and they needed to take action and if they could take no action then they should feel chemically on edge. But the edges were smooth; physicality was captive, but sentience had blossomed into to hot-heeled freedom within the several accessible CREE worlds. Their kidnapping had set them free…
Una had climbed all the steps that were available for her strainaching legs to tread on; the next phase needed to be a hoist-up on to the shoulders of Jeff to fettle the fate of the comeback plan. Tickle the feet of the sleeping giant of their mission and bring back a version of sanity that was compatible with their original intentions.
Una had been kept in a loop; the best way to describe this loop is that it was a circuitous prison she was visiting but couldn’t get out of; not a prisoner but a guest; a trapped, unwilling guest; inhabiting the inhibiting space but not inmating therein. Confusion was the key that kept her locked in a cylindrical thought pattern that revolved with evolving, revolutions whirred evolution stuck.
But now clarity rose; Una shook her will-to-be-free in the cold morning dawn with a characteristic symbolic profundity. She thought boldly, as bold thought had been tethered in some distant field just out of sight for so long.
Free of that reassuring but far-too-conclusive-without-conclusion thought pattern; she found herself in two places at once. She didn’t have the cognitive ability to split thought and bi-process experience that Sybil did. Neither did she possess the dual, or multi-experiential, Partitioned Focus Specificalisation (PFS) capability of the Judith/Gloria/Portal/Nature Complex Deviation Arrangement (CDA). And she had no control over which predicament forefronted what conscious experience. If two things happen of great import there was a delay on one. It was like she led two lives, both in a diner, both in close proximity to Gloria and Sybil, with edits that allowed consciousness of the most pertinent parts. But it was edited into one story (lifestoryexperience) that jumped around and bloodied itself on jagged subplots; mastered itself in suspiciously spurious axiomatic divergent comings together. It was a picture with two halves; a Yin and a Yang that were repulsed by each other but lived side by side in faux equanimity for the sake of a sellable narrative.
In one guise Una was a head above Sybil and held the belief that she needed, and could feasibly achieve, Sybil’s defeat, but in the other, Sybil was bossfilled with astute dominance and all Una’s energies were rallied and warped to stop herself sinking under the pressure of Sybil’s oppressive proprietorial smothering.
Gloria was constant in both and kept the levels level and the dizziness dizziless. She was like an umpire or referee in a sweet dream nightmare competition; should such a thing exist.
Una, who had come to realise and forget, remembered that Sybil was not who Sybil thought she was. And in an elongated alcove designed for the purpose, in the diner where she was not overbearingly controlled by Sybil, Tiny Guy paid her a visit. Tiny Guy filled in the filegapholes regarding Sybil. He wanted Una’s assistance in unkettling KB in return for information that would help her defeat Sybil. Doable, but only in this diner. The other diner that TG had not known about and found difficult to imagine, was out of bounds; out of TG’s jurisdiction so to speak.
And TG, following his days in Japan as a Private Investigator, had joined the force and had qualified as a detective, even acquired files that made him a senior and much respected detective in the precinct that catered for most of the diners. A police district slowly earning the name of Answerville, and struck into copper badges; sewn into official insignia left, right and centre, in lieu of any better name.
Una tended to the datarial instruction offered by TG, and admitted the mass egress of had perspective altering demands, tailoring her outlook with every moorish nugget of information. She teetered into disbelief several times and several times structurally slipped into the alternate diner’s input where proof (of what TG was telling her) was lying around shooting its mouth off; signing its own death warrant; confirming the horror that TG was unfolding from an intricate bird of prey into a sheet of paper with instructions on how to fold an intricate bird of prey from a sheet of paper..
Una was developing a love/hate relationship with her perception of existence. She hoped it would pass, but as this wish for passing could not be predicted, she adopted an extreme proactive stance. Sybil would have to be defeated in this diner in the hope it would take her down; weaken her; give her hiccups, in the other. The problem here was that Sybil was super matey, she was buddies in a bind; us in a bus… Sybil was so onside and so constructively companionlike that it disarmed Una for sure, and most likely, if Una tried to kick Sybil when she was down, disleg here too.
Tiny Guy was free to pay her a visit anytime information became a thing, or things, surplus to containment. He put her in touch with a few allies. The bot parts had dispersed to seek their own enclaves of space; create their own existence to stifle the boredom, and incompatibility, of life under the pedagogic regime of Mr Jeff. But there were two bot computing packages, TG discovered by providential accident, that could be reprogrammed by Jeff to spy on the primary Munchaus.
Una merely had to communicate this to Jeff via Gloria to Judith without Sybil knowing or finding out. Una feared for her continued existence in the other diner, Sybil meant business: if she ever found out Una was even slipping her an attitude…
Sybil, by contrast, led two separate diner lives, obliviously unable to put them together. In one she adored Una and wanted to people please her into submission and in the other Una was spared because Sybil’s mercy levels were chronic and unworkable and due to drop soon enabling the clearing of dead forestry. Una being the only tree in the forest. Sybil’s cup was half empty. She was unaware of how half full it was elsewhere. She listened, ears upon the wall separating the parallel worlds, but heard nothing. Assuming only what was logical to assume; in both cases, with individually independent obliviousness.
Post the unleashing of Tiny Guy’s mind spies…a horror of horrors burst into being, so far as TG was concerned. The spies were out and out spies and their innocent pealing back of covert attrition was a blanket one; warts and alll; Tiny Guy’s warts as much as the wart Tiny Guy was aiming for; to some extent he was missing the target and hitting himself. A cause of misery but a relief from mystery. The KB stroke kettle stroke conundrum house of cards was being dealt a blow; the wind of change shuffled the deck; answers parachuted in from the bleak concealing skies.
Tiny Guy didn’t want to know too much about himself and asked himself why?
Welcome to Answerville; the council had decided: the sapling city village had been officially named. Detective T. Guy radioed it in with a breathless alacrity that met insouciance with a whimper…
‘We got the memo, defective, have a woohoo break and then get back to work. Time isn’t here forever…’
‘Time isn’t…forever!’ TG thought; he’d been thinking that that was the deal. Maybe the questions life posed with seeming insolubility were more pressing then he’d assumed…
