Excerpt 149:

Looking Back to Leap Forward

All he needed to do was fit into a potted sketch of an old manifestation of himself to convince the New Calderans-cum-old-mission-personnel to convey their thought-casting with absolute trust and place faith and good humoured interactional affinity in an oppositional integration scenario. 

He left his first person self in the unperturbed enclave of Meon Sea end of the portal and dropped back down a level, to what was Middle Russet, in third person mode. He found himself in the midst of everything he had left behind; back-pedalling at the top of a waterfall and just needed to find a barrel to squeeze in to to negotiate his descent.

The inverted dome-cum-cone of Middle Russet had lost all predicted familiarity upon the first visual access clues of Tiny Guy’s (as Cody) return. From the inverted nipple that acted as the giant anus actuating shroud the entire area had been overgrown by trees, creating a bushy carpet effect that on close up perspectivity became a canopied ceiling; a standard, sloped and forested arboreality.

At first the New Calderans held their ground facade-wise, preferring to maintain the status quo…they were New Calderans, tribal, shaman guided, closed locally, while globally spiritually rampant. It was convincing, on first speculation, but the jarring arrival of veneer stripping strangeness clunked and flittered them back into past lives; unstatusing the quo. They were not just New Calderans; a New Calderan tribal convening agreed, they also had the musty recollective ancestral might of Old Middle Russetonian DNA. 

Ice melted and water boiled as they showed Tiny Guy around the place, taking in proof that beyond the lip of the crater there was no longer a habitable space. Kirk reported on survival levels outside the cone forest; shouted out with refurbished hyper-loudness once a week, a schedule that had dropped from several times a day.

As far as their cognitive abilities allowed, Cody, (now reverting to more of a Tiny Guy version of himself), had disappeared into folklore, become the tale of an Alareer kite. They had a hard time reconciling the current Tiny Guy manifestation with the master of disguise and holy good will who had left in pursuit of saving personhoodkind. And never returned, but now inconveniently had, with a betwixt contrariness. Maybe it was that he had left to save humanity and returned empty handed; saving actual humanity had always, mostly, been a subject too vast to talk about with any specific lack of embarrassment.

‘I am here for my memory,’ he stated, throwing it right up in their collective face; they would need time to process what that meant and how they could respond. First, he suspected, they would require closure on the whole ‘his leaving thing’; a synopsis of his known whereabouts with a hasty timeline stitched into it. They worried anxiety into a precipitous mountainside pen with their disconcerting facial fisognambulations. ‘Take me to my memory,’ he continued, inadvisedly, attempting humour that aborted itself to allow common sense to prevail over the joke book.

Scanning the eye-vibes of the assembled old mission crew, he saw that they were unaware their hope factor, which had been low from the get go, at a 3, had dropped into minus figures. They had crumbled into crumbs. An ad hoc assessment had to be hurriedly made… Without the crumbs reforming a workable biscuit his memory would not be able to be accessed, not for the today that was forever.

Occular interactional confabulation occurred…with spiral synchrochancification parameters. High-risk iris stripping stipulation lens data revealed the following:

Jeff had lost control of a beard that would have looked better on someone with a ludicrous headshape. The beard had taken over and demanded more attention than the sunken dead-energy eyes that maintained a deceasing observational role in the upper echelons of his face out of courtesy to his brain.

The commander was dwelling in semi-deactivation. The mission’s end, more a lull to her, that needed occupational resurgence. Her eyes suggested the presence of some control and swam naked in pools of pain and distress with the resignation of a long last sigh. The never ending battle caught in a surreptitious tea break. Gloves on, lance up. She was a sleeping hornet’s nest just waiting to be kicked.

Kirk’s refurbished eyes spoke of lasers, thermal imaging and covert photographology. They darted around with creamy hypervigilance to any slight suggestions of heightened threat and remained on high alert for involuntary preemptive counter-attack cartoon miscues.

Atticus blinked a lot; looked away in the main, low in belief that he was the owner of his own eyes, like he was renting them and the landlord, eyelord, could have him evicted at any moment. He was a nest site waiting for pissed hornets looking for a new neighbourhood.

Judith did a great job of looking lost and found and knowing and inquisitive all at once. Tiny Guy could see the intended charm, but having known her from before, also knew she was hiding more than she was displaying. Like a shop selling slugs with a snail in the window display.

There were no mechanical eyes because all hybrids and robotic entities had powered down.

A folk tale inter-narrative fireside session was announced for the evening…and all minds were priming themselves for the telling they were committed to enduring.

Until the reconstruction of history, casual, point-circumventing became a sporting pursuit.

‘We all tried the…thing…but no one could traverse its innards.’ someone said, apropos of something and nothing.

‘Where did the…thing…take you, Cody?’ another chimed in, chirpily.

‘I ended up in a place called Meon Sea. I cannot imagine living anywhere more perfect,’ which wasn’t true, but seemed to justify his obviously resented desertion. ‘I’d love to live out my days there, stay on, but there is this portal, another…thing—‘

‘Anus?’

‘Vagina! A giant, you know…orifice thing…’

‘How can you tell the difference?’

‘If you see them side by side, next to each other…’

‘Did you try?’

‘What is stopping you?’

‘Why didn’t you pass through it already?’

‘I can’t take memory through, there is like a memory customs. I need to conceal and smuggle what I know that might hurt them, otherwise it gets confiscated. I must rediscover what I knew, what I have known, before continuing through Meon Sea’s portal…thing—’

‘Vagina…’

‘What is Meon Sea like?’

‘It is just me. That is why I am hoping the next…thing…takes me to a inhabited world where salvation awaits…for us all…for Humanity.’

‘So, you say we still have a roll, however obscure, in the mission?’

‘As I understand…between us, all of us here, we form an active organism. Our mission is still on, just that it is so covert, unrecognisably, we can’t detect it. Your role has been to store memory. And your new role is to play it back to me to help me on my way, the mission’s new pulse.’

‘How do we know that to be true?’

‘You could have killed Cody and come back here to kill us. You could be a replicant?’

‘I could.’

‘You could?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh!’

The conversation, which was never really much of a wowser, stalled. Introspection and mind-fumbling spoke plauditlessly from the Juliet balcony of communicational connection. Until…

Later. The scene slowly pulled itself together for a dose of momentous moments that seemed fated and unduplicatable…

The fire crackled and cracked and the flames strutted and danced. Shadows flickered and flitted among the branches and trunks of dusk peppered foliage. Shifted scenery rooted itself in attentive solidity…

Where…tales commenced…passed around like ancient artefacts, invaluable, priceless…

Time consumed space and space, time. Storytelling washed over them, secreting a dense moisture of understanding…leaking out, flash-flooding, embolstering aforethought mechanisms, hitting on hidden truth, being waylaid into deep valleys corroded by lost memory, obscured by well-meant battalions of the half-baked guards of numbskulling forgetfulness.

When the mist cleared the view from the ridge that followed the valley almost to the sea, was magnificent. It was a 3d map of the way out (anal) to a way in (vaginal).

Roundtabling it among the rough semi-rectangle of old acquaintances-cum-life buddies, they all had their jig-puzzled elucidations to contribute that, as they delivered them, splashed paint in between the frame of Tiny Guy’s warts and unwanted hair portrait. In his mind’s eye Tiny Guy assembled the coded information his Meon Sea self would need to learn to carry into the next level via the vulva-doored portal.

There was a natural break in the proceedings.

‘Who are we dealing with here?’ someone suddenly said, probably not meaning for everyone to hear.

But. Who were they dealing with? A beating heart of the dead mission had returned. Mission objectives were all skewed into a projected outcome that sat on a bus travelling perpendicularly to the original mission route.

Cody assessed the audio output of noises that revealed more than words were managing to convey…

‘I can hear you. I mean you no harm. What happens after I have left, with my coded memory compressed for smuggling, is that, if I reach and fulfil all my objectives…hopefully, the world will return to normal and you can all clamber out into it, if that is what you want to do.’

Then…

Recommencing of the sharp-end of the business interaction at hand:

Each storyteller laid out their narrative from differing perspectives with the honesty of innocence and the innocence of honesty. They weaved between them an overarching narrative quilt that opened up the way forward by illuminating the past; identifying true enemies; untarping the mystery antagonists and their networked harm and hurt imperatives. 

It was with an assaulted heart, a rejuvenated mission target and blustery bursts of ‘I knew it’ that Tiny Guy oozesqueezeoozed his shaking frame into the giant haemorrhoid raddled anus and was never heard of again…