Excerpt 155:
Ticket to the Bridge
It was almost impossible to get a ticket. They were so thin on the ground they resembled a single ticket lying there on the ground on its own. Rumour had it there was one ticket from one outlet. Get to the outlet and you had your ticket. In the end, outlet undiscovered, I found the ticket lying on the ground just where I had imagined it to be.
A brand new fifty thousand seat (count ‘em) stadium had been built in and around the industrial area. The Sudlow-on-Russet International Business and Trading Zone had been abandoned half built due to a lack of local industrialocity; finding the kind of stuff an industrial operation needed to function in those parts proved next to delusional… Most of the locals it had provided with passive, employed-for-the-sake-of-it employment now ‘worked’ up at the stadium.
As the letter ‘Z’ was considered contentious, if not dangerous; if not fatal, the outer of the twenty-six car park zones started with ‘Y’. The lots; some meagre in square footage by comparison to other vast ones were devoid of all vehicles, but car-ready should any motor-dam break or Tsunami of horseless carriages transpire. The long sapling-lined walkway leading to the core’s Ingress Suction Induction Point (ISIP) provided alphabetic orientation to soften the tedium of the long approach. A bronze and brass statue of an oversized Omar Sharif being ridden by an undersized camel graced the pre-foyer reception fountain to perplex and entertain; fascinate and enconversationalise. There were no ticket-collectors or ticket reading machines… My ‘golden’ ticket became an extraneous slip of thin card, its value as a memento would be tested in the approaching days as the event itself receded down the memory stacking chute.
There were brain scanners, which presented little to no threat, but there was also an experimental mind-scanner that pushed threat into the realms of carefree malignant harm. The machine scanned memory retention windows and a deep scan of everything one knew about everything. The nex-gen-tech was named, Infinite Ape Crowbar Crate Access Memory Warehouse Rampage Utility (IACCAMWRU), but needed a ‘coin in the meter’ to get it up and running; and that wasn’t looking like it appeared on any menu. A sticker on the machine’s face stated it was optimised for maximum convenience; believability wilted in the breeze.
The main event began…
I made my way towards the root of the sound system’s expulsion of the rhetorical wizardry and emotionally entangling oratory of a master; the master, The Master of Masters: Marcus Godstrand. I felt his words first, then began to hear them more clearly until they took over everything.
‘In my pamphlet, The Clouds Outside the Universe,’ Godstrand said, coolly. The sound system boomed his voice out like the stadium itself was speaking. I moved until I could see, at the other end of the stadium, the solid life-perfect hologrammed majesty of Marcus Godstrand. He gestured, as he ranted to an invisible, inaudible crowd as they scooped up and chugged down the waves of stark genius with lusty malice aforethought…
Words that had been imprinted on my lost memory resurfaced like a great white shark that thinks it’s a dolphin…
Godstrand’s speech rose to a crescendo…as it dipped into curtailment, poems and never ending lists of names brought forth thoughts of the exit and those wide open carparks. I got up to leave, feeling heavy with unprocessed code and had to steady myself before leaving in silent solitude via the stadium tour, which I did, fortuitously, need my ticket for, that swept around and out of the gargantuan edifice that had, apparently, been built originally for executing women, children (inc. babies) and male non-combatants (some males are just not suited to being warriors, there is no shame in that.) But when arrangements fell through, due to complications involving compassionate common sense, with the foreign power that was outsourcing its mass murder, the stadium became a globally prominent empty space costing the working class taxpayer billions.
The data witnessed during the rally had been collected and analysed without any executive input from me and just as I was about to book a room at the Hotel on the Squirkle (Bijou boutique meets Botticelli), so I could sleep and process the code potential from the stadium experience. It occurred to me in a sudden rush of being better than myself, for a change, for a moment, that I needed to wake up, just the very opposite of what my docking vessel, (which was attempting to anchor at the bottom of Niagara Falls while approaching from the top), was trying instinctively to achieve. Sleep seemed like the best approach to avoiding the long flushed drop in watery thunder; all alternatives dimmed their lights and were not for hire. I fumbled around in the dark, in vain, for switches.
I recalled the elements of the stadium tour that stood out, like: the population of Little Sudlow-on-Russet wouldn’t fill the toilet cubicles. Not that they’d been asked to try. Haha… And not mentioned on the recorded tour was the grass that was topping out at many varying lengths so there was no doubt that however far from the ground your knees were there was a grass height to match.
And what might not have happened at the stadium itself but did within the Processing Aftermath Polyframe (PAP): the lights went off and the dark moved in fast and appearing in stadium-filling ghostly entanglements of limbless spaghetti and other pasta shapes and textures: the children of Gaza, holding their babies and parts of baby; insinuating damnation on all Humanity. Doing nothing else much. While a voice remembered, spoke, ‘I am the pitch inspector…they hired me to listen to the notes the ground emits to check it is tuned right.’
I wanted to ignore the shear codeless stupidity of the fellow and his ridiculous conflation of the word ‘pitch’ and the other word ‘pitch’. The easy way out, to run and hide, was closest, but it became impossible once his identity fruitioned: for it was none other than the Prof. Il Professore et cetera, et cetera… I always had the feeling with him that life would be better without him; and yet I felt better when ever he was around. He had a fundamental quality…even though it was a potential fuck-up fundamental quality.
‘They say the stadium was built over and swallowed whole a small instrument manufacturer, mainly producing mandolins and ukuleles for the Italian and Hawaiian markets…’
‘Really?’ I expressed with a churning mumble, betraying a myriadopolis of tangentially dissipating disinterestedness and rampant indifference. Just after I had said it the corollary of what he was at the embarkation point of explaining fitted snuggly into place where sense came to performatively dwell, and I wanted to retrieve the miswordment; to create a world where it had never been uttered…but the Laws of Muttering would not bend…
Okay ‘pitch’…’pitch’…I get it…I told myself. Maybe it was me who was being stupid…it’s me…isn’t it…is it not?
Changing the subject, he said, ‘I will be awaiting ata every awakeninga, for succoura, for luvsplaininga…love-succouringa…succsplaininga…no boundariesa, justa unconditional lova, with a maybe a some odda, unavoidable-a, conditionsa a here a and a there a, smatteringsa and a so fortha.’
He always had to go on dragging the point through the sliced up eternal pie of Life and as he dragged and dragged I started to wain and a draina…
I felt blessed as I started the descent into the stages of sleep that beckoned like an as much as you can eat free lunch with a goody bag you can double up as a vomit containing receptacle… But before I went too far something shook me, and my senses returned; indignant and full of fightful-fist-clenching flounder fusculations… With not a little bit of panic rising from the whiskers and breath of the pursuing Injustice, and with the most unlikely turn, I indeed woke up.
I woke up on the trail; my long distance view obscured by momentary shortsightedness… The trail was heading up and down a tree-faced mountainside, although it could have been a hill, the rocks shiny with transit scuffs of unremitting soles placed by the stirring of the Adventurous Soul (AS). Down and up had a quick confab before up pronouncing itself the King of Ways… I was in a strange place, but the strangeness failed in its attempts to alienate me. Familiarity just sort of drifted in and took its place on the upward route while downwardly the strangerliness boasted obscurity, couched in revulsion for its own inner-self. It was not a destination but I admired the passion, however misplaced. So my onwards was naturally upwards.
I could not see the destination through my outward vision but inwardly through reconstructed sudden memory return I was at the chateau with lab extension architectural poetry with a carbuncle stitched on to its side like the lair of Frankenstein was an outer monster housing an inner monster and the inner monster’s inner monster was giving off a Russian Doll vibe.
Imaginative curiosity held my hand and chivvied me upwards. I let myself be lured with minimal resistance. Further and farther up the overgrown path that suffused track with patchy unserviceable roadway that had probably only been used during the construction of what I was beginning to pencil in as the lair of a Global Master Super Criminal (GMSC). I read the hand of my Fate and skipped forward to the unhammered-out specifics of a coming epiphany. I blundered on to the whereabouts of the venue of my own upcoming hammering. I was turning into someone else to deal with what was before me as my momentum, driven by a thirst for knowledge of myself, took me, via pauses for breath and muscular rest, to…who knows where? It was as though an implosive burstworthiness of a pre-sneeze handgrenade sucked in the cool mountain air…
And with a certain, sudden, fullness…
I was Napoleon…
I was coming home.
I was like a bird who had flown its nest, and upon my return, an imposter; the cuckoo, reminding me that I was not the one who was meant to be fledging.
I was not Napoleon; not for long. As I rounded a bend I undertook an involuntary personality swapchange into the full Viktor Flabicoff. I found myself worrying what state my old lair was in. I had left it with the impetus set at unlimited damage with an infinite destruction option…
…which made me pause for thought…
The world had seen Peter as a monster, he was a version of me in technochild form. I was hard on myself; aware of my inescapable monstrositinesss, but Peter was not up for my pejorative assessment. Peter was the personification of badder & better…
Who is Viktor Flabicoff? I asked myself over and over and as I continued up the winding path. Flabicovian orientation obliged. I’d left boundless evil in charge, which was a worry, even for me its creator. I came face to bar with iron gates and had a Rebecca moment. I remembered that the place was designed to give the visitor, especially potential investors, a Thunderbird moment. Then the moment shifted to one where I briefed myself that I would not judge and find fault with every little detail, as I was beginning to go down that route even before treading on to the footprint of the lair itself.
After a stealth-cum-proprietorial half-dance into the lair’s gaping hole of danger, I started to get the gameplay synched with the floor-plan and Hunky Ying met Dory Yan.
I felt a speech intention well-up…my thoughts and feelings on the reunion of old bad bedfellows; to show admiration for the project and her nefarious conquests, but giving words to false feelings devaporised and I skipped praise because it really wasn’t due. But I also held back on the judgy criticism. The Evil World Project (EWP) had gone horribly wrong but as the intentions were so wrong in the first place the outcome was, luckily, pleasantly far less horrible than a successful outcome would have been. So I thanked everyone and wished them the best for the future; even though there was no one apparently there, I still could not relax incase this was all a front and evil was still kicking ass through the floorboards and wall spaces.
Peter, the Monster of Schysenstein, was a nervy vicar with a people-pleasing addiction compared to his forecasted evolution into the most untrusted of the Devil’s High Command; a devilgodlet of minglemangling malevolence… These days Peter wore cardigans and relaxed in a pair of comfort-worn slippers, rarely wearing any traditionally styled underpantage, never needing to. He had an addiction to porn that was frustrating any potential expansion of social endeavour, limiting them to sideways glances at what could be if only… This was a ‘man’ who’d fostered plans to initiate the Abandonment of Humanity…
And yet…
… As a person in the real world, he sucked; he sucked so hard the suction kept him from his programmed trajectory. Indeed a thorough assessment of his day to day ins and outs and ups and downs and throughs and abouts could detect no evil; none. His whole raison d’être had been Evil. His purpose had been to re-write the annals of Evil to a hitherto unmatched extreme. He’d been programmed to explode on the Evil scene, but, by all accounts, he’d dribbled up to it, unevilly, and sat down in a puddle of his own dampness, flat-buttocked like a churnful of Turkish Delight.
I dug and tunnelled the administration system. Core Privacy Operation (CPO) revealed that funding had dried up because Peter’s Admin Orchestration Command (AOC) systems were short of one crucial password. The money was there but could not be accessed. In any case the investors would have seen him as unfit for purpose, after an incident that led to Peter being called a philanthropist in public. So. To make ends meet the lair based operation had been taking in students; offering three-day residential courses in Evil. One of the reviews stated that the Evil learned was about as useful as the Moon being given a scarf for its birthday…pointing out that not one of the students had been harmed let alone gone missing or found murdered. It became a laughing stock and the only client-students were ironically motivated ones. Truly evilly intentioned types steered well clear.
The in-lair technology was advanced to the point of making people relinquish bodily control but this was now so old fashioned that it could be countered by taking a heavy dose of Imodium.
I re-activated the Operating System with my voice… and enquired about stocks of Imodium. Back-up generators kicked in and the place a whirr of old-fashioned lightbulb based warnings.
Peter sat back in a recliner, a remote in his hand, and was unstirrable. I plugged in an emergency charging lead.
He’d been running on outdated solar-panels and there had been a succession of Winter storms and then Spring fogs. His energy levels had been so low, gentle foot tapping was about the height of his physical activity. He’d not even had the energy to tap out a futile SOS call.
The mad evil scientist robot had not been updated for years so I tapped a reload update code into his emergency programming control box that was situated in the TV remote. He was missing vast swathes of data on the latest mass murder and how bad the world had got relative to his evil intention parameters. And I stopped short of total updation. I needed to keep the upper hand until he’d shown all his…
As tepid outcomes went this slipped into its story-sheath like five cucumbers into a glove-box.
Peter’s naivety outweighed his iniquity manifoldly, ’Death is waiting for an opportunity,’ he said, the mock tone of threat fooling no one, except, perhaps himself…
Uncoupling from whatever the Peter/Viktor intention/dream had been, I three-dee printed a supervegan health-breakfast with non-dairy cheese, doorstop-crust, berry-black pudding, tofu scramble and sat alone on the balcony waiting for the morning fog to pass, planting the seeds of ideas so that they could sprout unhindered by my personality-disordered oblivious misdirectionalism…
Nursing an orange juice that tasted like it was being squeezed as I was drinking it… Dismissing the idea that Evil had managed to do anything but defeat itself, despite its best efforts… It was down to me…which was okay because the whole Evil thing had been an error of ignorance and entitlement I was never likely to make again.
And then the fog cleared…or, perhaps, I just woke up again…
Vast sky-vessels hung in the alpine air just above the mountain tops. They didn’t advertise where they were from, but a part-memory chimed in with filler-detail that these were unmanned alien AI space ships that had escaped their creators.
Some tapping and clicking revealed more: they had not made contact, but sat there, immobile, in deep incommunicado mode. Earthling-generated fear had largely passed over time; they had become an inanimate backdrop rather than the previously feared invasion preamble.
The big question was, what had they been waiting for…and …the answer was: Viktor Flabikov…
