Chapter Thirteen
Sooner
Jeff studied the shop entrance door as if he were measuring it…then looked towards the fitting alcove where Viktor was trying on shoes from a stack of boxes…’You know what it needs…a sale rack just by the door…what do you think?’
Viktor, wearing only one shoe, pad-clopped over. He surveyed the area as if interested in Jeff’s proposal, but his verbal output rearranged the subject…
‘What if I told you the CREE world was a scam…it never worked…it is not possible.’
‘What world’s not working?’ Jeff replied, repelling the incoming incongruence with an appropriate quantity of absent mindedness… The focus was shop management…had somebody got to Viktor…why was he going rogue all of a sudden…
‘Good.’
Viktor was testing to see that his, Mindcoup Orchestration Administration Unit, was exerting control over Jeff’s thoughts and flooding his awareness with Golf Shop Pro Manager Prompts 2.0. Jeff was, to all intents and purposes, and mind control, a shop manager with scant knowledge of technology, let alone next-gen-tech…
The security killbots, were going about their golf, holing-in-one; registering nothing untoward.
‘It works, but with a functionality that makes it something else…’
‘What does? Can you bring me the sale racks from the Eldrick’s memorial wall selection…’
‘The CREE world is entirely in the mind of the beholder, not generated by the neural output of hundreds of outsourced brains as described.’
‘Is this golf related? Can it wait until after the eighteenth?’
The straightjacketed part of Jeff that was still fighting tried to take in the information; suck it in to a place of intrinsic expression, but it wouldn’t budge; recognition sparked, but then died before it could ignite his mind’s dry wood storage shed. Instead it turned to liquid and formed rivulets as it skirted the edifice of his comprehension, seeking the least line of resistance to wherever gravity winded up…
The shop phone rang, the special one, red, modelled on a GPO rotary 741, wall-mounted, polished, brand new…ringing, not with an authentic clanging trill, but in a multi-tonal rendition of the Three Musketeers theme tune.
‘You’ve got to fight for what you want and all that you believe…’ Jeff sang along, while not being put off the business end of the day’s seaworthy shipping lane manoeuvres.
‘Hello…Golf World. Jeff’s assistant, Viktor, speaking…’
‘Viktor… (series of clicks, could be code, part indecipherable) The trees have gone down to the woods to play…’
‘What are they playing?’
‘Folk songs in woodwind and brass.’
‘Is the brass section as bold as yesterday?’
‘Yesterday is the new tomorrow…’
‘Tomorrow never dies…’
Jeff’s frustration was hollowing him out, whittling down sense into splinters; he knew he knew, but lacked proof, while the fact he didn’t know was well proven on a proving loop…grabbing at cognition just as it evaded his grasp. ‘Help…me!’ he pleads with Viktor, ‘tell it to the satellite,’ Viktor retorted, immaculately guiltless.
‘What are you saying?’
‘The first billy is on the way…tech startup-and-step-back, most likely…they are all anonymous…this one has been named: Exhibit A.’
The Skybike, registered to a Billy O’Naire, delivering Exhibit A. could be heard arriving…
‘It is time, Jeffery.’
‘Time for what?’
As the Mindcoup Orchestration Adaptation Unit loosened blockage and widened filterage values; pieces of clue-shaped bricks that had gone astray to live, arrived back where they fitted in…just needed assembling…the instructions were blurred but hope’s horizon loomed ever nearer, bringing with it a tree-line of leafy succour…
The Personal Avian Levitation (PAL) machine landed on the green of hole three…in-play golfbots worked around it, using Data Exchange Arousal Palpitations (DEAP) and Verified Organic Modulation Interrogative Terminals (VOMIT).
The man who alighted was average in most measurements except wideness; he had a wide quality about him that pushed average calculations into obscurity. Once out of the single-seat personal flying machine he was flanked on both sides by security holograms of cartoonishly monstrous henchmen, who were (comparatively) average in width but above average in every other measure as they maximised to intimidate. They were beamed from a low orbit satellite chain and were physically ornamental. Exhibit A strode towards the golf reception in a way that suggested he’d been coached. When he entered the building, the two animated goons vanished and Exhibit A was left looking exposed, although his wideness retained a mist of foreboding shrouded in a fog of forewarning. In an accent that could have been Etonian, he said, ‘If you walk slowly enough people think you are standing still, but it doesn’t matter how slow you stand no one will ever think you are walking… I live my life by that epithet…’
‘How was your journey…I hope it was pleasant enough…your personal flying contraption will be valet-hangared. If you’d like to take a seat, sir, our team will be with you shortly.’
‘I have to—‘
‘Take a seat!’
He stood there giving the impression that he was open to investing in the shop and the shop manager…but it was just a practiced look; a vibe, that he, like many billionaires had perfected to tease out the expectation of providence to create a supply of eternally grateful well-wishers… He knew that they knew he knew and he needed to keep low about what he didn’t know, so went to sit in the reception area to await progression…
Jeff and Viktor were working hard on the tablets…’logging Exhibit A into the system’ but really emailing each other with unprofessional chit-chat…
‘I don’t think he means “epithet”.’
‘Maybe it was humour that forgot to pit and raced us by with a deflating tyre.’
‘It couldn’t be code?’
‘No, above his pay grade…’
‘He’s a billy.’
‘He is a prince…code is king.’
The reception area was being watched with hiked-up anticipation by nine or so different agencies, all billy controlled, via jerky analogue video covert-surveillance equipment…the dimming eyes of the world’s elite had blurry focus on the pioneering event.
Everything whirred along like artificially intelligent clockwork; the billy, Exhibit A, was entering a glamorous world of infinite opportunity; a place where he could play gods and devil’s to his heart’s egoic specificatory intent…Automachination CurioApps studied his head noise and added up facial expectancy values…the man’s bamboozled brainscape was hiding an inner reality that was at variance with his public expression.
‘Close the shop and escort Exhibit A to the bunker…’
‘But, what about the—‘
‘You can open up when you get back…look I have made this,’ Viktor told Jeff, and flashed a jerry-rigged sign he had been working on: BACK IN TEN MINS (probably sooner).
Jeff fought his compulsion not to leave the shop; it spelt out a gateway to cobwebs and dust…it wasn’t just a work space, he lived there, it was his home. In a world with little meaning it was a whole world of profundity; it meant everything in a world where meaning meant little…
Viktor’s satellite had relinquished control, but Jeff’s electro-chemical psychopathy was striding onwards with momentum. Viktor had to resort to confession to allow Jeff to see what was going on so he could chase out false habits.
‘One of my many Pause-evading satellites has been influencing you to think shop. It is not really you, you need to snap out of it…it has no influence on you now but your auto systems are carrying on regardless…’
Jeff’s reaction was to assume that Viktor was after the top managerial role and was trying to get rid of him for that reason.
‘Did I tell you about the work of the SRA?’ Viktor asked with a brash suddenness that bordered on a threat of aggression.
‘SRA?’
‘Yes, the Society for the…the…reduction…or the restriction…regulation…of Automation…you were co-founder with, Una…reduction? restriction? regulation? pick one…’
‘The Society for the Rejection of Automation…’
‘Hole in one…You remember now?’
‘Let me think…’
‘I will leave you to your data retrieval reaping…’
‘Let me think…’
The Commander’s short wave radio crackled into life; haywiring… ‘Commander? (…series of clicks…could be code…part indecipherable.) The trees have gone down to the woods to play…’
A short gap for gathering…revs up…brakes off…taxiing on to the runway…
‘What are they playing?’
‘Folk songs in woodwind and brass.’
‘Is the brass section as bold as yesterday?’
‘Yesterday is the new tomorrow…’
‘Tomorrow never dies…’
‘The die is cast.’
‘Cast iron.’
‘The iron is in the fire.’
‘The fire is in the belly.’
‘The belly has gone to jelly.’
‘Add another item…’
‘Ad infinitum.’
‘An extra set…’
‘Etcetera…’
The radio went dead. The Commander banged it several times and cursed in sync. But she had everything she needed: Exhibit A was due to enter her bunker for processing.
Billionaires, to the Commander, were like a favourite uncle who visited and ate all the food and kleptomaniacally ransacked everywhere to take everything in a very locusty fashion. And then made you feel like ‘it’ was your fault, whatever ‘it’ was.
Back at the golf…
‘Hi, I am Jeff, I will be your guide to the precipice, as it were…not precipice, springboard…’
‘My name is—‘
‘Exhibit A…procedurally we are nomenclatorially inflexible. It’s a procedural thing.’
‘Okay… Take me to your leader!’
‘My instructions are to accompany you to the bunker…and if that works out well, hand you over to the UKGBHQ Commander…’
‘Is she your boss?’
‘She is the bunker mama.’
‘But is she the boss of you?’
‘I am freelance,’ Jeff replied, while code signals dashed around his cognitive purview…’freelance’, that word was barbed with indefinable weightiness…
Other than the ‘freelance’ conundrum, Jeff was back firing on a Salient Grasp Trajectory (SGT). He fulfilled his guiding role, but performed it vacantly because of the whole ‘freelance’ business and its consequent nettle-rash of agitation…
The bunker door released from its catch mechanism as they approached…
‘Jeff…Eyup!’ Dave said,
It took a while for Jeff to catch enough to embark on catch up procedure…SRA had stalked Dave up to his refurbishment and his minting as Kirk the national security treasure…Dave had been a study in dull man swept up by grief and self-loathing. It hadn’t been a pretty picture…and frankly, bumping into him at this moment was a bit of a shitter…
Jeff felt like he’d have to attend a week long conference dedicated to the explanation of what was occurring; before sense dropped on him like gentle snow, because it was hanging there in a pregnant sky not knowing who the father was.
‘I have Una…she is in there anyway…intact. Safe. Somewhere.’
‘In where?’
‘In here…inside my mind…Jeff….I know, crazy.’ he said pointing to his heart. Imitating a movie chieftain or something…
Great! How does one respond, thought Jeff…he wrestled emotions like he was twisting balloons to form a pack of greyhounds at an important circus audition that could usher in a burgeoning career; potential TV work on the world stage and Wikipedia’d immortality… He was fumbling not juggling something would have to drop we are a gravitationally aspicked life form…
‘I got my mind and body back but lost Kirk in the process…have you ever realised how weird bodies are?’
‘No…where is Una?’
‘Una is undertaking some kind of management, guidance role. Her office is closed at the moment but she told me to tell you: there is no such thing as a free lunch.’
Jeff had a constant backgrounded yearnscape dedicated to Una; her minimal return cut vital supplies of whatever it was that made us feel whole…
Was Dave above suspicion because he didn’t have it in him or was his retained refurb manipulating the deal? It crossed Jeff’s mind that maybe the refurbished part of Dave, the Kirk part, was posing as Una, fooling even Dave as to his true identity…but Jeff was never a friend of the far-fetched, so he dropped the unsymmetrical ball of conspiracy in a muddy puddle of doubt.
Una’d survived, which was the main thing, but she’d lost all her feminine mellifluousness, specifically the very feminine mellifluousness Jeff was yearning to be reacquainted with. Una was better than no Una, but Una as a voice within a framework of a man who radiated an aura of dullness…the whole thing had suspicious written all over it…
‘The SRA is back…still in the game…tech won’t win,’ Jeff imagined himself saying as a rally cry…but it would’ve sounded hollow…so he stopped it before it got any momentum…
‘Wait a minute Jeff,’ Dave started, ‘her, Una’s, office is coming through, “Where’s the van?”, does that make sense?’
‘Good question,’ Jeff retorted in response while thinking that it was an odd question that would need more examination…
‘Where is it…they say they need the van, Jeff…you had one job! They are saying…jokily, I think, though.’
He wanted to tell her, and Dave, about the shop and the wonderful world of golf marketing and retail…but he was too deep in hard thought trying to locate the van. That damn van had a mind of its own…and it was probably syncing with all manner of botware, that stolen torso for a start…’It might have gone rogue…can I speak to Una?’
‘We need the van…they say. They are pretty specifically directing me on that one.’
‘Can I speak to her?’
‘You need verification, we understand, Jeff, it is only natural.’
Jeff needed the van too. The van’s library stored the Get Well, Stay Well and Be Better series of self-help books, in whose sagacity, a gentle sanity was secreted. Insanity had gone mad and those books had the power to lobotomise. The trouble was that if it wasn’t really Una inside, and was in fact Kirk operating for the military intelligence mafia; if they got their hands on Botface’s Torso…Bristol fashion could wind up shit-shaped… Jeff thought about the safehouse and Una’s body going to waste there, ‘How can we get her back into her own body?’
‘It is not possible with current technology.’
‘You can’t say that with the ongoing next-gen-tech revolution…’
‘It isn’t a revolution…it’s a coup.’
Jeff nearly said: what’s the difference, but he knew what the difference was so didn’t. He was busy thinking that between Una’s mindless body and her mind in Dave’s body there could be some reconciliation, some kind of coming together that would satisfy the dung-flung agricultural spreading of separation… Questions abounded: could he spend the rest of his life with Dave’s body, even controlled by Una as it was? No he bloody well couldn’t. He did not accept the situation, but nevertheless set a ball rolling that would follow a Heath Robinson contraption’s circuitous route around the padded cell of the brain’s elasticity… Certain absolutes were hard to dismiss: shopwork was where it was at; everything else was chiff-chaff guano. But the Earth animal is adaptable and if guano is the way: the way is guano…
Dave was talking, Kirk was talking, Una was talking…too much talk…much…too…much… wait! Kirk! Where did he come from?
Jeff became self-absorbed with an unrelenting screeching mindparrot; relentlessly mindscreaming: freelance freelance freelance freelance freelance freelance free lance free lance free lancefree lance free lance freelance…frelanche…something clicked…he listened to the following silence, free from cerebral incontinence…then: nothing, but slowly dawning..it rose into his window of understanding, a shaft of light illuminating particles of pure revelation (revving elation): there was no such thing as a free lunch…
…and yet (disproving this assertion) the CREE world was the free lunch of free lunches… What was he trying to tell himself?
The CREE world did not exist!
The CREE world did not exist?
Somebody had said that already… Who? His memory refused him due recall…
