Excerpt 126:
Trophy Hunting
Tiny Guy’s cerebral output momentarily became an ideas factory churning out solutions. It did not last more than two minutes until the whole operation ceased; the factory went back to warehousing old ideas and production was unindustrialised down to a few shaky-handcrafted booth-vendor idealets. But the bundled goods sitting in Tiny Guy’s outer office were the dog’s bona fide business and they were resting in shimmering expectation; the crate creaked back and forth with quality and quantity as it girded its loins for shipping. By way of sandpapering the rough metaphorical surface, it has to be said that Tiny Guy was inspired by his own actions in approaching the miscreant-in-waiting Draco via Draco’s own Dreamspun Ideofantastical Reality Engine Phoneypalava Hollowclaim Resource Initiative (DIREPHRI). But instead of being a mock Munchaus inspector and faux Stockholm identifier, of sorts, he would pose as an authority. Dogearing the rulebook over infringements of conditional requirements regarding operations being carried out by Actual Hyperreal Stockholm Munchaus Verified Authenticatious Establishments (AHSMVAE). He could see gainful employment for most of his Aliases. The TG Employment Services Agency could provide cheap and nasty staffing to all the ongoing Stockholm Munchaus concerns and furnish TGHQ with an inside perspective compendium of narrative thread strands; do a nosy dentist infiltrating a clamped mouth of secretive teeth and gums. Happenfate’s story-flouting and Circumchance’s narrative nonchalance had to come to some sort of junction in the road to nowhere; a moment in time when Tiny Guy’s Craic Idea Unit (CIU) could spring from their militarised off the shelf racing buggy with storage trailer, and change history before it could occur…
Tiny Guy looked at himself in his physical entirety in the video mirror reverse reduction monitor albeit only glimpsing fractional elements of his cerebral magnoscope engorgement. He thought what have you done, on the one hand, and on the other thought boy, you’ve done it. What he’d actually done; what the results of its doing would achieve were not yet ripe; the fruit budding on branches outstretching with promises of blooming health. Once he had control of the Stockholm Munchaus cerebral real estate he would create new laws that would enable an exit area to establish itself within a pan-optional entryway to the place where Otherness was being perpetrated. Tiny Guy did not know what would happen, or where, or who Otherness was; he had a feeling he knew, but it was just a feeling that couldn’t be backed up with any logical explanation.
After several visits to autonomously run Munchauses with nothing to say but AI prattle, Tiny Guy came upon a venue with a vibe that shifted his frequency. As he descended the Albanian marble steps to the security grille where the hologram bouncer was housed nothing promised that human booty was abroad, but once inside the drama-quotient upped its settings and Normality strode forth with a swaggering gait it rarely had the trousers to match. The signature encryption above the entrance had traces of Judith and Una and Sybil…
A shock…that once unfrozen, dribbled with globlets of fearfulness and paranxious expectations of overwhelming battles ahead.
Under conversational questioning the current owners claimed none of those bodies (Una, Sybil and Judith) stacked up in the Nowness, but remnants, some would say ghosts, perhaps, others, just energy stains still clinging on ten wash cycles into it; remnants possibly.
Tiny Guy was aware that if energy was left behind when people moved there were certain byte tranches of data that could be extracted; certain odours remained that with Dognose R-sniff Apps (DnRs) can be wielded round from jangling incoherence to calibrated and parallel-parked meaningfulness utilising Nasal to Visual Constructivity Grid Analysis (NVCGA). Tiny Guy wanted (not want, had) to know where Una, Sybil, and Judith were and what they were doing. And more importantly how he could connect with them and get them onboard for the finale of the act…and what looked like the finale of everything else also. Their plots and schemes would have to be tailored to the new unfathomable concept of non-infinite time limitation, whose horizon was about to let the fading glare of the very last sunset cloud its future.
Tiny Guy wandered further, wondered deeper as he furthered his presence into the buzzing but person-free bar and diner space. Then upon an off-beat Tiny Guy heard the singing practice that was taking place in the back of the serving area…too loud and persistent to allow the bar bell he rang multiple times to percolate the earwaves of the whoever was creating the tumult, so he semi-snooped with an unheard warning cough and a telegraphing footfall. The noise the three blonde teenagers were singing stopped as Tiny Guy brushed up to the saloon-door to a nevertobecookedin kitchen area, the slight contact initiated an electronic response; banging the door open with inappropriate gusto. Which announced Tiny Guy with an insistent certainty that even he found intrusive.
‘And you are?’ said the most blonde of the triple crown of youngsters, whom, if he knew nothing else about these sudden strangers, he knew their singing aspirations were written in a dialect no one could ever quite grasp.
‘The Inspector,’ Tiny Guy proclaimed out of a necessity rehearsal could never have reconstructed, and showed his badge with three over-confident flashes one for each of the pairs of eyes, that was so well faked that he believed it’s authenticity himself which elevated his impersonation to a whole other level.
‘We weren’t expecting you…’
‘No…we weren’t…’
‘And…that’s why we we’re singing goon style…’
‘…because we were expecting Tiny Guy.’
‘Who is Tiny Guy? I have never heard of him, or her. I have never even heard the name before,’ Tiny Guy gambitted, with grim sanguinity; averting his inner eye from the spangling gotcha floodlights…
‘He is our contact. We can’t move on. Pass out of this cage of repetition, until we connect the Insistered Female Force (IFF) of our ancestors with the Dumb Male Docking Sheath (DMDS) of the Tiny Guy Organisation Complex.’
Tiny Guy, hit broadside, staggered, limped and ragdolled about a bit, metaphorically, and than sat in a chair he imagined for the purposes of recoiling and numbfisting, that fitted neither decor nor general or major feng shuiiness…and sat back into the trap the Famous Close-Melody Screamettes had sprung him in to. Now they knew he knew they knew he was Tiny Guy, the original; exchanges could be brought about to steer the story vessel into the narrative buffers of the Port of Climactic Preservation… as it were.
‘We are the Famous Close Melody Screamettes…’
‘We sing, we sing…’
‘And we sing…’ They sang.
‘You okay with that, Mr. Inspector man?’
‘I’m Tiny Guy, the original. Mothermaster.’
‘Your ID says otherwise.’
‘Look, look…’Tiny Guy said with calm, unflustered intention, but it came out, in the jungle-like-actuality of the available communication space, as anything but, ‘this, this,’ he said producing a piece of folded card he’d imagined proved who he actually was while contemporaneously remembering no such proof existed anywhere. Who he really was, was a nominal aspiration at best. And for the purposes of this situation he would have to align his identity with whoever they arrived at as an explanation of what his presence could be described as. He’d have to park in that parking space, wear those clothes and bark the woof the wolf no longer sounds.
‘We are mega-system-structure officers, tasked with locating the rogue Tiny Guy and finding out just what the blogging-spools he’s been up to.’
‘We have to find out whether the real Tiny Guy is an ally…’
‘Or, if he is an antagonist.’
‘Well, what are you?’
‘I don’t know. What are you? Who are your superiors setting this task?’
‘My mother is the fearsome legend that is Sybil…’
‘My mother, and grandmother are Una, the rebel leader of the Human revivalists.’
‘My mother is dead, but I am an unscheduled outspurt of the one they call Judith.’
‘Our forbears, our progenitors need to connect worlds. This one is closing soon, but there is a place in another world that is in progress and everyone is getting this feeling that we need to work together and stop sabotaging each other so our seed, in the form of one of us, even merely the spirit of usness is retained and propagated…’
‘You, Tiny Guy, are the chosen one.’
‘Unless you are a rogue version.’
‘But a lot of character work needs to be done…’
‘Like what?’ he asked, while interrogating his very soul as to the accusations of rogueness.
‘Personality disorder city.’
‘First, you need to know who you are. Knowing who we and the rest of this world are will help in that.’
‘We must get you back to where you came but in a different form.’
‘The world that spawned you sees you as a device acting solely with algorithmic parroting.’
‘If you can reenter via the cavern portal you’ll be more human, and able to interact, lead and take your place…if all goes well, in the world that will outlast this one.’
Tiny Guy scratched his head to quell the irritation of something much deeper than an itch.
‘Time is precious, a clock has been set. If you don’t complete this mission within the time frame, we have all lost ourselves.’
‘Life itself will become a historical report on countless cloned and pointless machine data dump schedules…’
Tiny Guy scanned the six eyes as he mock laughed, not intending mockery, but at a loss as what to dress his poked and prodded reaction with, and said, ‘Time doesn’t work like that,’ with the enthusiasm of the rotting matter in a long forgotten salad bowl.
‘Okay, so you know…’
‘But it probably does in the world you are destined to reach so it might be an idea to pre-assimilate yourself.’
‘True, but I think I have enough on my clock-face without having to deal with time factors on top of that. don’t you?’
The three blonde-headed pairs of eyes blinked a code that Tiny Guy did not register consciously but unconsciously set something off in him that was akin to an epiphany stick beating out a drumroll on a revelation cymbal.
Reality was asking itself some searching questions and answers were hiding. Counting to ten with eleven being the answer; nothing of any recognisable shape fitted in with any other shape, made up or not.
Tiny Guy wasn’t sure whether they were really who they claimed or whether they were really their mothers and progenitor putting up a front, but he felt, amidst his confusion, that he was taking a dose of his own medicine. Were they out-Aliasing him? It also struck him that his own Aliases could be posing as those posing as three young blondes, the objectification of using ‘blonde’ as an epithet raised suspicion…but also his paranoias insistence that this was the case smacked of protestething too much.
Besides…
He could hear, in the distance, except it was more internal than that, his Aliases, one and all, burbling and grffling and whatever noise the admixture of those two produces. His natural paranoia added plotting and scheming but no such activity was being enacted, not portfolio’d in the Aliases remit, except by Paranoia and her team of ruthless misanthropic gargoyles.
He imagined a more capacious seat and let it suck him in.
Had a snooze.
On waking, the three singers now sans blonde wigs and sporting various shades of non-blonde head hair, pottered around chortasking, humming and suchlike with delicate melodies that evoked roads to freedom from worry. The vehicle screeching to a halt when one of them noticed his arrival and made it public.
‘Have you located a portal, Tiny Guy?’
He had just been asleep and a retort depicting that act was being measured, but before its release, as a dawning thrust its chirpy chitchat into Tony Guy’s earscape; Tiny Guy realised that the asleep Tiny Guy he rarely met had been doing the workings out.
‘There is a Stockholm Munchaus that has always behaved mysteriously, once upon a time in a different life, acquaintances of mine, a Kirk James and an Atoll Goodmanson, posing as silent jazz musicians under the magnetic storm of your Sybil’s influence, lived and worked there. The good news is I suspect the portal could be dug from there. The bad news is that Sybil cannot be denied, her reason for living cannot be danced until midnight and turned into a pumpkin. Sybil held those two in bondage, of sorts, and her overpowering need for control constricted the duty they were there to perform. To help release Goodmanson and Godstrand in an attempt to save Humanity from dying out. And now it is common knowledge, apart from to you three, that Sybil has an unstoppable need to destroy everything…every…thing!
‘Well, if true—‘
‘It is.’
‘…then it changes the future considerably…’
‘Yes, from something to nothing…it’s a big change.’
‘I am sorry to be the one to break all this to you three…’ Tiny Guy said, secretly grinning; back on track to be less of a pawn relative to the pawns they became once put correctly in their place. The pettiness he felt was a pixel in the photograph that was in the process of capturing the moment in time that saved humanity.
Tiny Guy drew a line under the six-eyed threesome and wrestled tentatively but thoroughly with himself, playing both a genuine Tiny Guy figure and a rogue Tiny Guy look-a-like, in a competition for a trophy of truth that would act as a life raft in the gathering swell… Or sink him to the bottom of the ocean to be fed on by all the other Trophies of Lies.
