Excerpt 120:
Hats and Boots on the Ground
Unbeknownst, even to the Notarati, Tiny Guy was on an enforced retirement plan of sorts. He was THE Mr. Hinge Pin. He was Chief Facilitator. King of kit and caboodle. And everybody would find his loss superdeprivatory. So it couldn’t be, not at this juncture in the historical churning of life and death on Earth; it just couldn’t…
But with K., a vital component of the system, reduced to steam, bekettled, Tiny Guy was alone, negotiating the trip-hazard of an unsupported high-wire. The upward of seven aliases that had adopted Tiny Guy in persona constituted a well rounded out team of huge and vast capability potential, but then potentiality can rise up like a Phoenix dragon or slide down like a mountainsideful of lost footing.
In the rarified world of pretence within pretence, Tiny Guy’s aliases had adopted a state of Otherhood; distant, fractured. Some claiming never to have existed despite the obvious existence of the claim being proof to the contrary.
Tiny Guy had invented, developed and nurtured Alternate Tiny Guys (ATGs) that were so real they’d adopted hyperpersona status; becoming aliasalien even to Tiny Guy’s psychofundamental hostmind of internalised Himselfness.
He had all, most of, the data needed to come to conclusions that once roped up could abseil all the way down to the top of the next level. But he needed at least three of the aliases to be there to meet him.
He needed to fool himself so that when he sold the lie it was a truth he’d adopted for reasons of security that trumped insecure truths.
The theatre of war had been backed into three raging fronts.
There was Little Sudlow-On-Russet where Mayor Draco gazed into a ripple-pool dreaming of a tsunami, organising a wave machine; ordering more water. And Harris, the dead man walking who had become a semi-dead man lying on a beach, supping cocktails.
In Great Sudlow-On-Russet the Jeff-napped kidbots, or kidnapped Jeffbots, were preventing complete cooperation because they were stolen and missing and their return subject to demands and conditions. And someone from G & G labs, the government or some authority needed to ask for their return to kit out the solution-ball with a pair of roller-skates… Situation unforthcoming.
And now, the inauguration of Middle Sudlow, a double trouble, cellularly twinned, as it was with Nether Russet a Dark Matter Mirror Settlement (DMMS) required by a new law introduced by the Great Pause Environment Caretaker/Catsitter (GPEC/C) and (what can only be termed) outside influence (OI); influence that was above question and below answer; befiled in some parallel universe that protects lawmakers and victimises opponents.
Questions lying around the quizz-yard such as: is the OI for or against Humans or Machines? Unasked and left to rust into a weedy mangled answerlessness.
No one would ever be able to conclusively decide whether Middle Sudlow and Nether Russet fulfilled a function or were merely window dressing. From a Human perspective there were pluses and minuses and from the Machine perspective there was infinite complex calculation…
A potential human revival enabled by the technological moratorium was seen, in reality, as a false hope, but as of late Reality came across as a bit of a has-been who didn’t know what she or he was talking about.
Tiny Guy needed to get back in the game; produce performances in all three theatres of war and hate that would shoehorn the socks off of historical narrative inventors and algorithm installers the planet and cloudosphere round. Forging Peace from Hate and Love from War, but not necessarily in that order.
Tiny Guy needed new disguises, not new, old ones, refashioned and blended into a mix of new oldness and old newness, to clasp and clutch the intel that would push gen-sit-knol (Generalised Situational Knowledge) into its historical placeholder.
Tiny Guy’d been ‘sleeping rough’ at the ex-Kev, disused bus-shelter-cum-bus-route-escape-chain arrangement, biding his time, smoothing its hair and fur and combing its passage…filling out the colouring book in shades of grey. Celebrating the hues of Blacks and Whites with uniform equality… White turns black. Black fades to white…
He had waited for that moment to arrive. It had to be a big enough moment to pick him up and sweep him along.
A bus, unscheduled, loaded down with arms and explosives and a wipeout ready posse of footballified militiamen looking for trouble to blame stopped to avail itself. Letting off a party of poopers several militiamen took a team dump behind the shelter, passing round a shovel and roll of quilted bamboo paper, pilfered from some sanitary emporium shithouse. They all got back on the bus and the meaningfully intended meaninglessly contributory micro-force indicated and pulled into their own trafficless autodrama…Tiny Guy stalled the engine for them, because he could, and because to allow scans the system was processing to create a report that might engender worthwhile avenues to plant trees along.
The assessment was that they had some full-bloodied mission with halfhearted objectives flipping around like a cake in a cold frying pan. They needed help whether they knew it or not and Tiny guy was going to give it to them; in exchange for strategic gameplay support.
Connections were made, transfers initiated…
Tiny Guy’s contractual specifications were allowed to slip from A through to Z in the minds of the B-road bus brawlers in a comprehensive and overriding way; they slipped out from under the control parameters of the feverish spell of the beasts of mad intent that were driving them and into a negligee of hope that flirted with light shows at the end of the illuminating tunnel.
They turned, with purpose, left…a sign pointing to the Sudlows; a gravitational intent drove them zestfully to energising elevation…gruff laconic cynicism transcommunicated into the chitter and chatter of a conspiratorial achievability clothed in hefty weighty altitude of ambitious intention. They had all suddenly heard of this, or that, Tiny Guy, knew him as a real time father-of-fate, brother in arms and avuncular Svengali…none of them could wait…even though if you asked them individually, none of them could delineate what it was they couldn’t wait for. Paradigm shifts and epiphany-led enlightenment lit the way ahead…until they came to the low bridge… Before enlightenment you do the laundry; after enlightenment, you do the laundry. Once seasoned and sauced, Tiny Guy thought, you guys are going to provide the ingredients for a Tiny Guy Alias revival the likes of which the world has yet to glimpse. But by now the bus was wedged firmly under the low bridge and the biological contents had alighted. An abandoned farm three miles upstream had already been commandeered by Tiny Guy’s associates on the ground from the cloud, as it were. And directions to their new base were transmitted through comms that had long been assumed dead.
A new dawn, a new day, the world turned in magnificence; it’s direction falling profoundly into the path of the group…who, ready for anything, needed a name to prove it; so people would know what they were getting and giving them a chance to stand back and allow the hazardous whirlwind of tough justice through to slap down some cheek…
