Excerpt 112:
Stuck in Amazement
A freshly reimagined Stockholm Munchaus was unveiled; built on what was once called the Grassy Knoll some ten clicks out from the town clock that sat in the dead centre, giving the town a heartbeat and point of measurement with potentially infinite scope.
Just to be clear, this is not Little or Great Sudlow-On-Russet, this was a town that existed within the minds of all humans and some non-humans, generated by Pooled Integrated Sheldrakian Wave Frequency Field Abomination Intrusion (PISWFFAI). This was the world where the rich were sent after paying all they had into the Infinite Longevity Pot (ILP) so that the privileged had no need to succumb to the natural release from life that ordinary folk welcomed with crossed fingers and futile expectation.
There was a Grand Opening (GO). Sparks arced and danced in colours no one’d ever heard of; shades of fun-to-come swamped the ambient vibratiousness. A welcome of warm gravity awaited all. A spoonfed-silver sweetness clogging up the airways and stairways of the footsteps to heaven. A gooey, sticky duvet to get buried in with marshmellowy suspension and a promise that whirled around the room like a storm of delight… The composite hotel and creche, had an integral eatery: The Who Shot JFK diner. Canapés topped a jungle of fruit and vegetable feastlike portions of undergrowth.
But nobody came.
The organically generating cerebral real estate was expanding faster than the available applied imagination of its inhabitants. About two billion souls were stuck in ante-rooms and portal reception areas; entrance lounges and checkpoint squeeze-throughs…but no one, very few anyway, were entering and exploiting the Neurally Generated World of the Future (NGWF). Almost the entire world emigration population of the CREE immigration contingent were fabrically entwined in a great constipated blockage.
In limbo; dead to one world yet unborn in the next.
And the Great Pause meant that transit was one of those actions that had been moretoriumed.
Almost the entire population of the world’s privileged and wealthy was moretoriumed in one great constipated poo of a half-life non-world. The ‘I told you so!’ crowd’s stock skyrocketed and the ‘This wasn’t the plan!’ lot; a primary class of the most cleverly advance organic being on the ailing planet were royally fucked.
But people are people so, relatively, the not-so-rich became the rich and the whole dilemma of who deserves to live forever and who deserves a life deficient early bath, returned to occupy the minds of the greatest authoritarian minds of science and amateur political punditry. Amateur because professional politicians were banned after it was discovered that taxpayer’s money was being used to light cigars. And as all politicians and most scientists were now machines they did not need cash; they needed time and space to enacted their given algorithms.
You could see the latest incarnation of the Stockholm Munchaus brand from the Stockholm Munchaus inhabited by Una and frequented by Sybil and from the Stockholm Munchaus nearby in which the conscious spirit of Sybil dwelt, visited regularly by Una, if you looked and if there were no other Stockholm Munchauses blocking the outlook parameters, which there were, so you couldn’t see it. Sybil and Una had had to rely on flyers that were distributed using Nominal Expectant Forefront Insinuation Calibrations (NEFIC).
‘Hey, Sybil…I have some news.’
‘Hi, Una, me too.’
‘Is yours good or bad?’
‘Neither. Neutral but maybe bad leaning.’
‘I have similar but scootching toward the good.’
‘One.’
‘Two’
And on the third count they both blurted out the same information in their own manner, in their respective Munchauses semi-simultaneously, which dually aligned to create one message from two inputs in two different places: ‘There is going to be a Grand Opening, about ten clicks from the town clock. On, what was, the Grassy Knoll.’
The problem was that the people whose problem it was, that the inhabitants who were the other half of the sky were stuck in-between the life they had but would die from (deathlife) and the life they’d bought and was forever (foreverlife), were not people any more the administration had automated and the automation, although perfect, was not sympathetic to human frailty and had no comprehension of death, which was reasonable because neither did their programs.
‘It has become clear,’ Sybil told Una; who feared the coming of an interminable lecture over the top but by the side of the data heavy information she’d gleaned from Sybil already, in another life at the Munchaus down the road and round the corner but probably in another dimension, ‘that we must seek to open the floodgates, the sluice chutes and breach dike walls…etcetera. So we can entertain the masses. Only then can we take them apart and reassemble, or discard, them.’
‘We have just had this debate in the other place, and yes, we should….but can we…help those who are portal-bound?’
‘What other place?’
‘You know!’
‘Just checking.’
It didn’t occur to either of them, that if the block unstuck and the mass of ex-elite novel CREE inhabitant units spilled out onto the canvas of the artificial world like an upset tin of paint, Sybil would have a whole court of Sybillian law to judge and prosecute and find guilty and wanting…expulsion from the perception of life…
In a shadow satellite remote consciousness of Tonto Guyzeebo, a plastic poodle manufacturer, industrial entrepreneur and, wanna-be, sorta, oligarch was download with uploads form the share holders, who rarely spoke directly. but as it was the annual meeting, or some superspecial meeting, or get together, there they were telling TG to stop Sybil and the CREE terrorist, Una, from making waves by opening floodgates.
‘What is that?’ TG asks.
‘That,’ replied whatever power it was, some intermediary evolved from a jumped-up self-conducting orchestral App., ‘is nausea. Nausea was a functionality TG did not welcome. ‘What and why?’ (code for what is it and why is it?).
‘Not wishing to be twee, nausea is there to help steady the rush; perhaps you need rest or reflection or both. It says. something is not right and continuing without it being put not wrong would be an error of dumb repetition.’
‘It replaces flashing lights?’
‘Well…yes.’
‘And beeping sounds and vibratory alerts?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
TG suddenly felt more grown up. His childish behaviour had always concerned him, like elevator Muzak, and he’d wondered if it would ever pass… This was good…he could buy into it…the price was nausea…purchasing power none-the-less. On, and in, reflection TG welcomed the nausea and, although somewhat disconcerted, worked with the nausea to establish its raison d’être; to override the alarm it rang out and face the intruders head on, brain in gear, house in order, walk in the park, hellsapoppin’, Charlie Farnsbarn. The nausea ramped up and started winning and TG didn’t know what to do except bow to it, hold back on his own, pale and wan, remedy suggestions.
‘We need you to infiltrate at least one of the Stockholm’s carrying the Sybil window elaboration expression data and position yourself.’
‘Position myself? For what?’
‘That will be communicated to you in good time.’
But somewhere in the TG complex: a filing cabinet in an office block in a central business district; the knowledge of Sybil and her intent, sloshed about in a tank of anxiety, making noises that conjured up black magic and doom laden fate.
As his newly minted nausea subsided, TG had a revelation: he came back stronger, cleaner, taller. His gold standard had increased by four carats. In the medium to long term Nausea had made him feel better. And feeling good was what it was all about. Get that trick down pat and you run a house-of-fun with a serious maze in the back yard. A place to lose yourself in the hunt.
In the coming days TG got lost trying to find the centre of the maze, while hoping he would find a sign at its core… He needed direction; a mentor or guru versed in Godstrandian metaphysics. But when TG hit the central heart of the beating maze there was but one envelope with one name on one sheet of paper, folded once: within: Great Sudlow-On-Russet…
All theoretical roads led to Great Sudlow-On-Russet…and in the coming days, TG, extracted from his amazing adventure, would comb the lanes and footpaths of the Russet Valley for the uncharted hamlet.
But all physical roads led to the Stockholm Munchaus conglomeration where, amongst this new puzzling maze, a portal to wherever Great Sudlow-On-Russet nestled, hid.
All of a sudden, it seemed, TG had two missions that stretched the impossibility dough into two giant pizza’s that, TG felt unqualified to adequately top; he needed KB…but he was finding it hard, due to the instillation of new memory parameters, to remember who exactly the hell KB was…
