Excerpt 157:

Sybil (Queen) Ant

When I stood still; I mean, really stood still, so still I became the inanimate personification of stillness, I came to realise that there was no ‘still’; ‘still’ had merely been an illusion; an illusion whose fourth wall crumbled; dawning light shotgunning through; holing the fabric of the dirty linen of yesterday’s spent understanding (see also: Misunderstanding and Her Human Plier-Beaked Ducklings of Loquacity). I was an illusion of stillness that was never still…

There weren’t just the levels of environment to negotiate in a constant non-linear cycle of waking and more waking; there were levels of cognitive progression, or mental evolution, too, elongating; widening with jerkospasmodic restlessness. Within my personal, let’s call it space/frame/time/capsule, I was not bereft of the tools of wizardry that I could employ to debarb the wire meshed bonds that the Theoretical Confederacy of Puppeteers (TCP) was binding me with.

It had been a mistake to allow Sybil in!

(Choose one of the above)

Let’s not forget that, as the previous sentence dies down to a faded echo and slips away into storage devices, through code detection filters, our mistakes are our intrepid explorers, falling into caves, getting trapped and then cutting off a limb to escape with greater existential capital than would otherwise have been accessible.

It had been a mistake to allow Sybil in.

But it had been the single most fortuitous mistake one could ever have made. And I made it myself with no help from anyone else; apart from, perhaps, Sybil.

Sybil wanted to know everything I knew. She was clamped on knowledge extraction with increasing demandfulness…

I couldn’t let her know everything. I had two minuscule utility pouches (file filaments) where I cached my intercoministrative traffic with Sybil away from the beady eyes and pindrop audio dissection of Proprietary Puppeteer Surveillance Confederacy Operatives (PPSCO), Proxy Lugholes (PL), and Earditory Mumbleamp Soundseparation and Reapplication Auxiliaries (EMSRA). There was also an invisipouch where I kept my own, my own? …whatchamacallit: core, you could maybe say, from being surveilled by Sybil. Sybil was both my best friend and bright hope, but also the worst dog in hyena clothes, suppressing a laughter; shoulders shaking teeth glinting in the moonlight. Sybil, one suspected, was the presented façade of a vast network of extreme and corrosive negativity. The downside to all this hidden truth was that it appeared partially obscure for me too, like part-timer clouds performing Kafkaesque shapes, (without fully understanding the intricate nuances of what Kafka presented to us), scudding past the hilltop castle where people passeggiata in their finest clothes spelling out a narrative of normalised correctitude that could not be questioned from that distance…

I had accumulated powers unknowingly, but then knowingly accumulated the skills to utilise them. I learned with pricked ears and dilated pupils that all I had to do to make myself invisible, for instance, was to think I was invisible. ‘Thinking’ and ‘knowing’ wrestled incessantly before marrying in mutually exhausted submission. This had next to no positive outcome to my imagination at first, but as interactions played with themselves it became obvious that I could master ‘not being there’. I mean, I was there, I was nowhere else…but it gave me a power, if used adeptly, over the ones who had power over me…

Which reminds me…

I remember the first time Smugness came to tea, with its wallowing in itself and spreading disease of a hubristic nature. I was thrown and spun; then fired and glazed into a delicate pot of my own design…time actuated itself on an antline of logical conclusions. I followed the line back to the nest and after a tonloadofshitloads of paperwork got an audience with the Queen, I asked the Queen of all Ants, in these parts, ‘Oh Queen,’ I said, ‘shall Smugness be my open-housed bedfellow?’

…and she answered…

‘I am not royalty! I am a co worker with a certain role that requires sovereignty. I have no more importance than a worker, I can not survive alone,’ and…we all imagine a nest full only of ant queens and know she is right.

So the answer was as it seemed, without applying unnecessary decodifying schemas, that: no, smugness is a negative emotion, bin it, end it…and be the better fraud until fraudulence becomes honest. What I mean by that is that I needed to adapt to a greater coming future and not to the immediate, present hostile operating environment or I would be stuck and only ever be able to wake up after falling asleep and not before. Further pushing the scribbled envelope of explanation: the world was not ready for me; it was too busy preparing itself for my delivery…

Things moved on…scenery was shifted…like they do…

‘I have consulted with Tyne Ghyson, behind your back and we have rustled up some happenstances into the springboard for a plan of attack,’ Sybil espoused with rambulatory speech-tossing. I was not even aware of the character she called Tyne Ghyson, I assumed he was something to do with the Tiny Guy Network (TGN), but must have dwelt deeply enough in my underpsyche tunnelling complex that I was one of the last to be made aware of his existence.

‘He was talking,’ she said he said, ‘to an opposite number in the Secret, Theoretical, Unobservable Outside (STUO) and, although he was unable to say what he saw, he coded insinuations and hinted clues that led me to discover that you, and I, as your auto-destruct program, are being generated to create some kind of world governing body, (what this world looks like is anyone’s guess) an authority to serve the commands of the elite. This is a no no, yes?’

‘Yes, it is a no no. The “elite” just means the personality disordered few using their own trauma led self-delusion to oppress their otherwise equals.’

The agreement between Sybil and I was so hermetically airtight that a high-five vibe coursed through the squishy ambience, allowing and promoting a duet of emotional fluidity. A mild note made itself aware of the potential of a syringe full of air poised to inject bubbles of lethality to be in play, but nothing more.

‘Apparently, allegedly, this Tyne Ghyson had sub-aliased out and formed an investigative agency that had stretched its way in to the governing world, or, at least, a governing world…and what they found out was both shocking and paradigm shifting. There were tonnages of data that amazed and mind-blew, but just as the operation was winding down it was discovered that there was another world the other side that was dictating play in that one. This suggests the argument that there could be infinite worlds layered above us,’ Sybil said, emphasising the word ‘infinite’, a slightly ambiguous goonishness creeping in.

‘What is meant here, by infinite?’

‘Ten, they guess, between seven and fifteen, ten’s the mean…fifteen is the meanest…’

So it was just fifteen, tops, wakes until I unpacked my travel clapper and tapped out my victory chime on the bell of Fate.

Sybil, without prompting from me, designed and constructed an imaginary counter alarm clock system that would number the levels, activated by my waking as though my waking had woken it up. Her system took the Art of Guesswork and multiinterweedled it with Known Points of Conjecture (KPC) to create a preemptive predictful precursorised adaptation to time-related-happenstances. It was a reality dolphin swimming with reality sharks adapting to the reality of interspecies perception, in a way, but in other ways bore no comparison…

‘If you allow concerted…sometimes…attempts at True Reality to register with sub-real, well-intentioned reality-lurches…a novel reality will emerge that could lead one a certain way up the mountainscape of True Reality.’ I think that was Mary Goodmanson’s Yellow Submarine quote.

‘True Reality could be,’ Sybil, a Goodmanson fanbug, intersliced, ‘a sub-variation of the Greater Reality…a reality that we are forbidden from perceiving. Throwing a fat docile cat among aggressive scrawny pigeons is not the same as throwing a thin killer cat among fat indolent pigeons. It is the same to the unnuanced soul, but to the deep thought dismantler and reassembler there is a whole Universe of Difference (UoD)’

‘Yes,’ I replied weakly, ‘but what is the use of making stuff up to play the part of a greater reality, when you pull it apart, you need to let it breathe and take on its own meaning…’ I don’t know why exactly. Then she sent a shudder along all the cracks that silently waited…

‘Humans are creatures of meaning in a world where there is no meaning. Meaning is a manufactured, self-serving grift that turns out to be so full of meaning it takes away the problem of meaninglessness, puts a hat and a pair of shoes on it and rides it naked around the town…’

Sybil was not the elephant in the room as much as she was a room inside the elephant: I was the elephant in the room, but no one could tell because everyone chose to ignore the brooding, breeding circumstances that were happenchancing themselves up into a fight. And by the time I had assessed the Reasonable Outcome Projection (ROP) and adjusted for Voluminous Variant Sculpability Quotients (VVSQ) in reference to allowing Sybil to gain Close Proximity Gelling Capabilities (CPGC), she was already inside with her pyjamas on, cocktail drained, ready for bed with a ‘long-last-night-ahead’ look on her mask…

She’d promised me a full warts and all biographically complete portrait to cover the character sketch I would otherwise be burdened with as my go-to self.

Sybil told me something my defences made me forget. I am assured the matter is being processed elsewhere away from the battlefield, but whether that was a fob-off or not was anyone’s guess. She said I needed to realise, confront and address something; some trauma related curse.

In a moment of slack time perception a trail emerged which I followed because it seemed to be a route that might help uncover the mystery left by one of Sybil’s rants. The one where she claimed that to move on I needed to locate, tend to, appease, cure or reconstruct a viable parallelity of a certain Atoll Goodmanson.

I did some digging and came up with a retired detective, the unlikely named, Ghuyana Tynarama, who agreed to come out of retirement if I pestered him enough, he didn’t want money, he wanted revenge. Revenge for what, he demonstrated no elucidation. But he agreed to locate Atoll and put me in close-to-real, or even real, at a stretch, comms with him, which seemed ridiculous but I threw the dice anyway and prayed for a double seven….