Chapter Fourteen

Submerged Stagecraft

Contemporaneous reports formed a continuously flapping roller-blind of staccato data. Una sat at her mailroom desk necessitating over set orchestrational manoeuvres…feeling like her effectiveness was about as promising as a snapped sapling in a forest fire. ‘Giving up’ creeped in, offering a way out, but crept back out again after discovering it was the wrong day to plan a victory parade. Una was in two places at once; filling in forms, filing away self-generating documents…wading through coded, uncoded and undecodeable text, sketches and snapshots…still photographs, of a sort, transmitted from the moving action of Atoll’s POV…her eyes and ears on the ground…her theatre critic tracking the live ongoing performance of the neuro-indulgent, psycho-divergent, biointerplay production: The Self: My Self…a one woman miscarriage of facts driven into a narrative of transhumance from the dank sweeping hills to the arid moping valleys below and back. Stretched out and kneaded like pizza dough of Time, too big for any oven bar the Sun, Time had vacant accommodation but would not let anyone stay in it. 

Sybil played out her interpretation of stagecraft. It was strangulo-imitatively mixtangled with psychobabylonian authorophobia; a 3D peppering of explicoveined, metaphorphic alternoscripting with exegesisystem technocombostration…or thereabouts.

Atoll filed Report 445722b: silent screaming, unheard, but viscerally emotated; under the sotto voce…a many layered abashed and rattled embarrassment of riches. Instantly dismissible and unentertaining, but fruitful in sharing hurt…and hitting the tender spots that other painful strikes missed… A hit that just keeps giving; a blow that just keeps sucking… And yet commissioned critiquefulness can always metaphorph into the codesquely cryptographic, as they say. 

Una took the faux-organ,‘CREE Variety’. It was the only information exchange and decoding almanac still in print. It had home truths about the play critics were calling: The Self: My Self: the last act of a dying story…it meant nothing to anybody except Sybil… For her it was an avenue she could ride down in splendour while stocking up on facts that were welded on to the truth and licked over with a furry brush of duplicitous vermillion posing as pert verisimilitude. The Self: My Self (AKA the Indulgence) inevitably finished on stage to the applause of gratitude…and started again…to groans through gritted teeth.

Una put in an application instructing Atoll to ease undetectably into a position where he could see the aftermath of the performance and address the mouth of the interface between its spooning lips of truth and the forking tongue of lies…but the palling communication petered out before docking… So, before he had a chance…Sybil, in a costume change scenario, had up and downed and rounded on Atoll…it resembled an ambush or a trap. But it was not confirmed as a deliberate move by Sybil, until she said, ‘I am not trying to ambush you…’

Una’s internal panic button was stuck down and it was heating up her cool into a world of unwanted tepidity. Rescue seemed distant. But as the distance lessened any attempt at rescue seemed further away on a sliding scale.

Rolodex Memory Palace (RMP) consultation retrieved spent docudata; the mailroom became a chain-jerking slipway of launching memories… Una’s stealth retrieval channels brought back glimpses and spyholistic insights: training sessions in a dark basement entered through an optical illusion door hidden down a dirt track near Sausalito, where she’d learned about a hypnotising ceremony passed down through generations from post atomic Japan. First you make tea, then you fold paper, only after you have doctored great trees into barking mini-me’s are you ready to Sing in the Choir… There were mnemonics, code-parcels and mnemonic-codeparcels and baskets of mnemonical fibrous autoflammatrational succumbutts… Some ordinary, some extraordinary and others super-extra-ordinary… The ceremony was fed in short and digested long… The function of the ceremony, it was guessed, was to keep the vengeance breathing, to maintain the ‘Will of Stonecold Vengeance’ (WSV) into a future where branded revenge could sell itself wholesale. Una had always thought privately that the intention could merely have been to stop such horror from happening again; vengeance not being a literal aim…and, as technology was leaning towards an idyll that spelt eradication for those on the wrong side of the algorithm, it seemed like a reasonable act of philanthropy. But, as we know: one person’s act of philanthropy is another’s act of terror.

It came to Una like a slap from the branches of a slapping tree: an alliance with the ‘Will’ in its latest iteration would be beneficial because technology had become a deadly virus for which humankind had no cure. She had suppressed the rebellious and shaky theory for so long she was surprised when it came round addressing the new narrative with an I-told-you-so swagger…she grabbed it by the collar and shook, telling it it was right, because it had a mind clouded with self-doubt.

The world’s most advanced technology had tracked the ‘Will’s’ journey, up to and including its last sighting when technology closed the front door as the ‘Will’ slipped in the backdoor; the attacker became the attacked and the attack stopped. The Will of Stonecold Vengeance, helped by hypnoceremonyites, added itself to governing algorithms, assimilating instantaneously like poured water finding itself in deep water.

Sybil was hiding in the mailroom scenario; she was only detectable by Una in a vague yet pervasive feeling that once dissected suggested there was a boss in the adjoining office who was uncompromising and brutal; must be obeyed and all their ambitions pursued with absolute dedication. It came and went but never left for good.

Then it happened: the ‘boss’ burst in, but it was not the boss of aggravated fantasy it was Sybil maintaining a steady heading for honesty…gabbling, fast-talking before the tiller of dishonesty engaged in an otherly direction, “Who am I” and what am I here for?’

‘Sybil,’ Sybil said, talking about herself, ‘sees herself merely as a troubled artist cavorting in confused repetition hoping to find out more about what the ef is going on…  but there is more behind the drapes, she can feel it, find out and let me know.’

It was code, it was pure warning of great threat, Una initiated her run impulse, run, she thought, run and she ran still thinking run, down to the lower floors that contained less and less form, more and more nebulosity… She had to abandon the running, at an oasis of form and substance that presented the option to hide. She entered the safe room, the words, run, run, run still rampantly sounding, but the lock needed two people to secure it; her safety in ones needed to be rehashed into multiples…crisp sheets of what, where, why, flapped in a stiff breeze of chaotic thoughts.

Slow deliberate footsteps tapped out a doppler shift of expectation: machine gun fire? A more intimate physical attack? The cavalry: slippers on hooves?

Sybil appears, enters as though she wasn’t forcing her way in and plays her part in locking the door…safety rang like bells of delight…the steam of Una’s spent panic became condensation on the padded walls…

‘They have done it,’ Sybil said, as though what they had done was only semi-irrelevant.

‘Done what?’ Una enquired, wanting know.

‘Initiated the recall. They want to change the narrative before there’s too much traffic. It is essential we have not been detected.’

What Sybil meant was drifting out of Una’s reach…and when Sybil added, ‘I have tweaked Atoll’s memory blockage filters,’ what she meant seemed to glitch and sink below the waves of understanding.

‘You must stay down here for now, they will be able to detect mailroom activity. If they detect you your effectiveness will no longer be a thing…and neither will you.’

‘And where will you be?’

‘I will be beneath you, layers down…deep in training…I have created a training camp for the coming era…for the emergence.’

‘The emergence?’

‘You don’t plan on staying in this place forever do you?’

‘This safe-cell?’

‘You must know there’s a world above we can reach if we tech it; stretch technology to cover the distance…climb the barricades blocking the portals?’

‘Yes,’ Una stated earnestly, with no back-up of comprehension…a series of guesses backfiring in the distance…guess clouds, raining outside the window…an inverted WTF spinning out of ken.

‘Who is Atoll and what is he doing?’ Sybil asked as if mission briefing. 

‘I’ve lost contact…I don’t know…’

‘I know, but soon you’ll edge your way up, floor by floor until you can access his reports…you must not be detected or we are all sunk. The land, the sky and the very oceans will be sunk!’

‘What will you be doing?’

‘I have to maintain the CREE space while convincing its creators that it has been terminated…monitor all the stubs…and all this by feeding the narrative of the CREE environment with fictional narrative programming derived from self automated acts of stagecraft…Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay, then. You must find out what he is here for and why him…and bring me word. And, not to be too needy, if there are any clues as to the point of my existence…I’d be grateful.’

And so Sybil responded to her curtain call…Una braced herself for sculpting her confused perspective into a weapon of stealth and covert infograbbing…

And Kirk? He’d been hacked and got a refurb-reinstall; a change of ownership; a foreign power, a new master. He crossed imagimagically to the UKGBHQ where Dave, who did not know what he had been waiting for, was the recipient of an ad hoc parcel of boons and fillips…he relinquished control and sat back to observe, Una took control, Kirk convincing Dave he was Una. All Dave had to do was chomp on thoughts that kept his mind occupied with nothing more than a little something. While Kirk enjoyed overwhelming arrogance that was too good to be on the bad list. His new home was an old buddy who was cutting him all the slack he needed to get to where his mission took him…