Excerpt 105:
No Man is an Atoll
Toby Ghybal finished up his broccoli and lentil soup; mopping up the last remnants with a crusty, white bread, soup mop. He stood up, grabbed for a collar based serviette that wasn’t there; walked to the gents with no eyes on him, no suspicion abroad. Once toiletted, Toby Ghybal levered open the slim window and eased himself through it with the dexterity of a time served performance artist. He walked calmly across the car park, making sure he’d be picked up on the CCTV and hailed a driverless rickshaw to take him back to a hotel in which he was pretending to accommodate himself.
Toby Ghybal waited in the reception area of the Grand Metropolitan Poundsaver (fully automated), ostensibly reading a large format newspaper, but really observing and waiting in ambush. Or more accurately, yet not completely accurate; waiting to be ambushed.
They were not hard to spot. As soon as they entered the foyer, the atmosphere washed in with them a downward flowing funk, crowding out the immaculately-aired cleanliness of primly polished pamperisation. The three agents stood and scanned and then proceeded as though approaching a desert waterhole. Scrutiny unveiled the tenancy of bagged up past trauma; parental mincing. And that mixed furiously in an existential, hate-harbouring compound of suppressed anger that purred away in a revving overpurrr like a cat whose temper could turn on a fatal flinch. Even the most emotionally retardabated human unit could detect that, whatever was going on with them, there was something else that no one would ever get to the bottom of; a little something saved for the deathbed of people who intended to exit before death bedtime so had no need for nature to take its course. They were of a type…
Ghybal knew they knew he knew they knew; it was a Mexi-Texi-Califlexican stand off, of sorts. Ghybal’s heart beat like a beacon attracting attention from the beacon seekers before him. They turned slowly and registered in tune… Ghybal imagined what was coming: they’d escort him at close quarters to a site of prearranged convenience; search him; pat him down with thumps and punches; shake him up with the assistance of an impassive staircase… The potential for pain was in itself painful to drasticise…
They worked the terror on him alright, but with far less physical emphasis than Ghybal had invested in imagining.
However, Ghybal’s captivity was not going anywhere about three hours in and Ghybal was wondering if they knew exactly what they were doing; they were going about it all wrong. If they’d bothered asking he’d have a few choice gems of advice for them…to help them out a little. They were floundering behind the façades; that looked convincing but not to someone who invented façades… A front-heavy, top-tough façadist such as Ghybal was out of their league in a way similar to if cardboard and granite competed for a Best Cladding Medium medal or cup.
‘Look, guys,’ Ghybal started, not sure where he was going with it… ‘Take me to your leader!’ He said, deciding it was as good as anything, to create a catalyst for forward progression.
They looked at each other in the way only three people in a rough semi-circle can. They were loading with ideas Ghybal had just fancifully facilitated for them…
‘We can get him on Zoomola…’
‘Get him on Zoomola.’
‘He’ll be pissed.’
‘I know.’
‘But his input, however withering, will unstick us.’
‘True.’
‘We are stuck. Own it!’
‘Had you noticed the stickiness too. Thank god…I thought it was me.’
‘I didn’t want to mention it…’
‘Let’s stop dead. Pause. And start afresh. Let’s not become a troupe.’
‘Sense…’
‘Are we pausing?’
‘Shh!’
Their boss; a proprietorial leader with blatant and omnipoking ownership was not on Ghybal’s list, he’d not come across that name before, but some rummaging around in the offices of some of his alter-ego, side-show operations, revealed that the boss, calling himself Atom Godfancier, was, in fact, none other than Atoll Goodmanson.
And what did we know about him?
Ghybal arranged to meet an other one of himself, via the Stockholm Munchaus social network and connectivity scheme, who had been to Midway Atoll Research, Hope and Pray labs; the secret underground existential survival disruption unit operated by an auto wing of the US military and the space seals elite Kill’em When They Come Battle and Gamer Group (KWTCBGG). The elite KWTCBGG were at summer camp and the island had been left unguarded other than by a series of motion sensor cameras that anyone with a motion sensor camera disabling contraption could blow steam into.
‘Director Godfancier is beeping…’
‘Press the key…key the button…whatever.’
‘Director, sir, we have a suspect/felon called Toby Ghybal. We are stuck outside his façade. We need to lubricate the front door and slip into deeper spaces, but he’s turned out to be a slippery customer.’
‘Go and pack your stuff, Lieutenant. Let me speak to the custodianed reprobate alone, unrecorded.’
‘I don’t understand why I am packing up all my stuff.’
‘You and the other members of your troupe are all semi-let go. You no longer function here, but wherever you end up, you are on call as reservists, okay.’
‘Yes, sir Director, sir.’
‘What did we do?’
‘It was the troupe thing that sunk us.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Go our separate ways and never speak of this again. And maintain a secrecy that invisibility would admire.’
‘Or we could go the other way, kick over the cake trolley, as it were, form a performance troupe specialising in semi-humorous gibberisations and fatuous fart-based frivolity.’
‘Nah.’
‘No, it doesn’t sit well.’
‘No, now I said it so I can hear it paired with emotional feedback, I can see it doesn’t sit well.’
‘It would lower itself expectantly and miss the chair altogether.’
‘It doesn’t sit well, can’t sit well and any attempt at sitting well will end in sprawling on the floor.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Agreed.’
‘I’ll miss you guys.’ They all missed each other, which was unexpected; they’d always left an exclusion zone around emotional attachment.
‘Me too, and for what it’s worth….we did not descend into being a troupe.’
‘No, greater forces are at work.’
‘A troupe with power over us, ordering us up a barrel load of soul eating regret marinated in a do as we say and not as we do mash.’
‘Comme ci, comme ça.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I couldn’t tell you.’
The three agents left the building all bearing the hallmark of astonishment and picked pre-planned trajectories out of there.
It was during the flight of the three ex-agents, all wanting to exit there careers with the finest possible deportment that Ghybal’s shackles were removed.
The Zoomla call froze and on unfreezing the obviously faking it Atom Godfancier became a more realistic Atoll Goodmanson. The owner and programmer of the whole, now defunct, agency, who, incidentally also feature on a missing persons poster.
‘I see you are looking for yourself,’ Ghybal, said, nodding at the poster, rising to emphasise and directionalise his nod. Unnecesarily as it happened as Atoll was waiting for him to mention it; Atoll was going to bring it up anyway, because they were in the same position and that was why an alliance was a favourable aim. He just needed to know that Ghybal was on the same leaf.
‘I am looking for a missing person, too,’ Ghybal, said, hoping to outfox Atoll.
‘Who?’ Replied Atoll, determined not to be outfoxed. He’d settle, given the circumstances at equifoxing.
‘Me!’ Ghybal, stated, unwittingly underfoxing himself.’
Atoll wondered whether he should yawn while replying that everyone is searching for themselves; it was common currency. If he weren’t searching for himself it would be notable…if pointless.
The agency station where you are is a converted Stockholm Munchaus. I am going to have redesigned, so in the meantime. Do some more research on an academic who is acting as street cleaner in Prague. If turn right out of the building then second left it will take you straight past his cleaning route and another nine blocks you’ll come to Stockholm Munchaus that has been modified into a theatre. I’ll be on stage rehearsing, as if there hadn’t been enough hearsing…sorry one of my darlings….but no more.’
‘I am trying to help KB. Locate him, free him.’
‘What is he to you?’
‘He is me…partly. Partly not… Like I said…’
‘The advent of part-people has muddied the clarity pool and dried up the brevity bank.’
Gybal researched and found fake, semi-fake, and not so fake infospiel on the street-cleaning academic who convinced no one he was in Prague. Ghybal was distracted by a much more in-depth research fest regarding Atom Godfancier. Information he loaded into his data gun as an insurance policy.
