Chapter Twelve
The Doors of Perception
Maxizillion Ninjaminja had hit a mean streak of equilibrium, chased through with a kneaded, dough-like equanimity; a quietly, excitingly cool type of smorgasbord of sliced-ice fields as far as eye’s could strain; an evergreen cemetery of symmetry of all things being equal; a feeling that should have its own descriptive cypher: a squiggle indicating the idyllic… The equilibrium attained concept level brilliance, forming a shape in his head that every thought passing through was relatively compared to, taking at least part of it as its own.
There was that…
…and then…there was this gritty terribleness that wandered in, projecting itself all over the comfort of the furniture…
Mission Kirk, the military asset, Kirk James, fluidly transmandated from rocket booster to moist firework in the flick of a Bic… Refurbishment was leaving Kirk. Which meant Kirk would have to leave too; Refurbishment was Kirk’s identity, without it he’d just be Dave. Dave was a dark and distant vacation of past regrets Kirk was keen not to readopt… He searched for a way out of reentry into the laggard-sphere of rampant uselessness…he modified poetry while he still could, for succour and soothfulness….do not, I repeat not, go gentle into that dumb Dave… Rage, rage with Refurbishmental sagacious might…morning, noon and night…
He had, on the face of it, only been a novel entity with a sink or swim pre-estimation of potential…he swam; it’d been a good swim while it lasted, but now the sinking came to drag him back down to the ‘wonderful’ world of a mouth-breathing coterie of bottom-dwellers; to plumb the depths of stagnation; soar the heights of endlessly repetitious mundanity… Kirk had been somebody and now that somebody was evaporating.
Dave, a 1900’s kinda guy who was never going to be ready for what the Twenty-First Century was carrying in the gaps between its teeth… Dave felt like he’d gone to Hollywood and done endless auditions; clung to a chain of lifelines that always died off in a pattern of going nowhere on the spot…and then returned….his pride mushed-up…his potential-quotient tarnished…but a returning hero nonetheless, with auto-generated memories of heights that saw, and were blinded by, hope and dreams…the distant stars in his eyes, had for one short moment blasted him with the full glare of the Sun…illuminating the scene, igniting fires…singe-blurring his vision.
Minuses didn’t have the exclusivity they would have hoped for…there was a plus…he was at UKGBHQ…he always fancied taking up golf when the time presented itself. Maybe, he thought, with the end of the world being nigh, and Kirk’s retirement, now would be a good time…
The Commander found out from the Virtual Satellite newsletter, updating Pause Related Circumstances (PRC) that Refurbishment would be releasing Dave from the contract and he would be returning to himself sans Kirk.
She could’ve worked with Kirk. He would’ve deflected her underlying hateful resentment with aplomb. She found the prospect of working with Dave parsibly tremulising. The Commander saw others as vessels passing in the open sea. Some were sampans and others, vast tankers that took miles to stop and even more miles to turn round; her colleagues in military intelligence were nuclear submarines. To the Commander, Dave, the shell of Dave, the caretaker-managed, demi-dormant brain, acting as a distribution nest for a Refurbished version was listing. Kirk’s personality, a motor torpedo boat, was diametrically opposite Dave’s marine craft representation: a pallet rendered semi-buoyant by empty barrels.
In a dream she witnessed herself blowing off steam, summoning demons by reenacting unjust scoldings her father had meted out to her. Using Dave as a mannequin to dress in her own therapeutic outrage… But there is no therapy in dreams, just the insistence therapy is wanting.
Kirk was diverted by an internal dance of buffoonery that led him to ‘let in the builders’…unpremeditated construction was building itself; he was applying the handbrake, but it was a liquid form that wouldn’t stick…and without Atoll’s input…agreements crossed themselves out; funny faces graffitied themselves over cast iron accords. A small extension at the back…an area pert for development…partitions here, a knock-through there…
What took shape was something that had the appearance of a café (caff) serving all day breakfast, with a ‘three for one in one day’ offer: breakfast, dinner, tea…or brunch lunch and a midnight crunch…wealth over health. A trough and scoff… Just the kind of place that only Dave, of all the entities tangled up in the CREE happenstance, would groove-ride round the lip of until the velodrome needed resurfacing…
Next door, the two caretaker-clone Sybils were running the Atoll diner jazz club; they’d de-jazzed, re-tuned; turned it into a ‘think easy’ refuge for cloned individuals, joint entities and their partners. Atoll’s trademarked world-relevant, spiritually titivating silence was lost in the noise of their mismanagement.
Although the possibility seemed unthinkable, Kirk, managed to forge his way from the Stockholm Munchaus area in the epicentre of the entertainment quarter, back to the bedsit. He was having to rely more and more on Dave as the odds of success dropped. Kirk, not yet fully Daved, was getting heavier with every stiff, limping movement as he clodslapped up the stairs. Atoll was lying in bed. Kirk was not going to die on the hill of bed envy…
They we both ill in the sense of their physical presentations breaking down and cracking up.
‘Something got between our vision and the horizon…’
‘I am sorry to see you go..’
Silence…
‘Kirk?’
‘Dave…Kirk has Elvised the building.’
‘Maybe we will meet again one day.’
‘Mightbe.’
Atoll, rose and drifted up the staircase…theatre bound. What remained of Kirk sat Dave down on the warm bed. He slowly reclined and in no time at all became the bed itself; his CREE material worldliness becoming extra comfort for the mattress…
Atoll entered the theatre space and was startled by a sudden change of intent. Una asked him with deep ASMR laced, quiet-authority to wait until the scene below could be processed; a cautionary lull… She wasn’t just a voice in his head…she was the life-raft he needed to save his soul from the sinking world around him…
Atoll was never talked to as though he was a responsible adult…he was made to feel like he was more like a pet than a mature person with independent determination. Una spoke to him like an equal, which was Kryptonite to his programmed script-reading self. She made him feel multi-dimensional…and some of those dimensions had reflective surfaces that illuminated even more dimensions that were being hung out to dry or smoked in a shed…
Una brought constructivity and notion-focus, both of which had a urgency tilted toward forward progress.
‘The stage particularly, but also everywhere in here, is a virtual Sheldrakian Cage, hazarding a guess, out of the influence of Pause control.’
Atoll looked down from the ledge above the stage… Sybil: drenched in limelight, acting up and down the wings…flapping about in thespian nudity…throwing her voice…catching the eye of beholders… she was playing herself, without being herself…
‘What is she doing?’
‘A background program is convincing her she’s in quarantine, but it is just a belief. She is going through an auto-process to extricate herself.’
‘What is causing it?’
The theatre space itself…it’s alive. We must appease it and build an alliance with it…’
‘With the building…’
‘More importantly it has outside connections…something has built a Service Roadramp (SR)… What ever you do, do not look out into the auditorium…’
Everything Una was saying made sense, so complying with her requests was merely adherence to the natural order of things as far as Atoll was concerned.
‘Who is she and how did she get into the CREE?’
‘Listen and she’ll tell us…’
Una had traced Sybil back as far as post war Japan and the aftermath of nuclear devastation…a group of victims sought vengeance. They applied a specific structure and Sybil, a virus embedded in the coding fabric of the CREE generation mechanics, planted by input technicians that had been vengeprimed by passed down hypnotic mimesis.
She had been rendered redundant by successive NASA and NMBS operations to divert and restrict the activity of the Super Smart Shutdown System. What we find ourselves in the middle of now is reinvigoration of the virus by a much later force seeking vengeance…enabled and supported by legacy Kokura Choir song sheets.
From up and above Atoll watched the play unfold…Una made a running assessment of the raw data…preparing a file for use in negotiations with Sybil’s Protective App Layers (PAL).
The off-stage apparatus whirred into action…Heath Robinsonian pulleys and levers…a bed appeared, a prop of the bedsit’s bed…it sat there like evidence waiting for accusations…and then stirred, a body appearing… it was no prop. Una diverted the feelings of horror beginning to fester within Atoll… ‘Look, Kirk has left his body. They are using it….which is more in tribute than mocking lack of respect…maybe a mixture,’ Una assured Atoll.
The bird-brained body of an ex-CREE world actor was put to good use as a foible to part-foil the cruxcoring devastation of Sybil’s baffling sabre thrusts…
‘Next-Gen-Tech is not possible…it is a lie,’ Sybil sang, why she sang it was not obvious; a tonal code maybe, ‘the CREE world, although possible as an individual, compartmentalised, imagined pseudo-quasi-world, could not function as a multi-entry space with shared cognisance and integrated narrative intertwangelment. The generation of a perceived world of interactions operating within the neural activity setting of unsuspecting others… I am calling bullshit…designating the CREE world a malign misleadment of the truth… The CREE world is a scam world!’
And the part of Sybil finding itself within the body of the once Refurbished Kirk James didn’t know how to react. Shocking even herself with fresh rewrites…
Una had to make some serious recalculations following the cankered sore of not being able to counter Sybil’s claims with a dismissal… What Sybil appeared to be saying; appeared to be true… The Sheldrakian Cage was preventing all externally vying restrictions, suppressions and philosophical dead-ends from actuating… Una could see it now…vivd, starting… It had to be true: the CREE world was an illusion…it certainly was a better explanation of the deus ex-machina impertinences that were coincidentalising themselves with inconceivable ubiquity…
But where did the truth end? Was the world before this one also false? It was impossible to tell.
‘We need to move closer…find out more…find some way into the auditorium without being detected by the forces that control it… The auditorium is our route out of here.’
‘Okay,’ Atoll said, limply. His input in the controls would remain negligible until changes were brought about by whatever tumbled out from the unfolding future, ‘why—’
‘Why do we have to escape?’
‘Because it’s in Sybil’s nature…she is working up to…in her Houdini play…escaping a counter narrative, returning to her own and shutting us down…’
