Chapter Fifteen

 

 

Retributional Redistribution

 

 

On the News:

The same old friendly faces that had opened a window on the world…the public’s eyes and ears, had slowly succumbed to some immutable force that drained the irreplaceable Truth from their repertoire and left their duplicitously flabbing cheeks bestowing hollow words past fetid lips clogged with the spittle of deceit. Lucid dreams, in which seasick fidelity continually mustered on the deck of the sinking vessel of Truth; piling into sinking lifeboats…plopping with finality into a sinking sea… Aunties and uncles, and the wise old men of the village, chip…chipping away at the marble of Civilisation… A decrescendo of Honesty played on the strings of power, buckling and bending conventions of logic into a dagger to stab the stabber; a song to Hatred and a zombified conga along the exposed ridge of Harm’s Way.

How could people have known what was really going on? If they’d known they could’ve acted…yes, perhaps, or merely gone through the motions of am-dram arm-flapping and a multistrationally-intended concoction of furious, unedited posts that sung tuneless solo acapella whininess, reverbing into an earless concert hall. It was as though Fate had sealed us inside a deep vat…then shuffled off into a world of its own inevitability, leaving us to ponder what should have been…if it could have been, but would never be.

And, so, the CREE world was ‘coming to an end’. The investors in cerebral real estate had been annexed and axed from the system so the engine gunning for Corporointellectual Property Exploitation (CPE) lost its shove and thrust. Mandatorily Volunteered Abstinence (MVA) befell the shareholders (AKA Takers) after runaway algorithms, by invention of their own lawgorithms, dictated that the new sin of greed be punished commensurate with the severity of the Cause and Effect Waves (CEW) it created. Some Greed rose distant tsunamis and had to be processed outside the Cause and Effect Waves guidelines. Hence the Special Punishment Sub-Clause and Sharp-Talon (SPSCST) directive of the Billionaire Only (BO) Humane Disposal Program (HDP)…

Most people travel through a tunnel of unawareness focussed on the light of fruitless delusion at the end; not Jeff, he had always considered himself a fully functioning Maverick, with a resolute deafness to shouts of ‘fall-in’, and the ‘call to norm’, while fostering his secret superpower: a neuro-divergent point of perception he nicknamed  ‘the matrix’. But now his world was falling apart. Grabbing and clinging to a status quo that was increasingly unable to maintain grip… He’d turned to his erstwhile saviour: golf shop management…but then had to turn back on the word of Dave professing the existence of Una within the constraints of his mind; spinning u-turns, a twisting-shouting dance of indecision; a head-swivelling centrifuge…a fairground ride of cerebral, boomeranging vomit.

‘Jeff,’ Una said, coming out of Dave’s mouth, ‘we have suppressed Kirk, he will be no more trouble…Dave has taken a back seat…a back seat in a parked vehicle…in a locked carpark…so it is just you and me. All we need is the van and the torso…does the van still have the torso?’

Who was Dave…and why was he Una’s body? Jeff hit an impasse and had to wait for the lights to change…

‘You and Macgregor,’ he said, Dave coming straight back with, ‘Ewan Me-an Gregor Samsa,’ a riposte, pin-perfect, that only Una would have known. Except, with only partial reflection…Jeff scribbled in his ‘ill-fitting responses’ A5 mental-jotter-pad that the return had been too fast….Una and Jeff had a timing between them… Maybe recent experiences had dulled the accuracy of their shared time-zoning… It was not conclusive… Jeff was hung up on the whole ‘if it’s too good to be true’ maxim…

‘Frelanche,’ Jeff said, not meaning to. Dave shrugged…Una didn’t respond…did she hear him?

Jeff sketched out, in his A2 artist’s mindart-thoughtpad, a series of integrated investigatory chart-symbols, scenario aspect induction, gnostic frequency overdrives, known verifiable semi-half-quartering; pitting dissolute quadrateables, filtering accepted logic quotients with extraneous data culling; annotated with some repro-supra-vested-dynamic abstract doodling… 

Conks (conclusions): Jeff had been reunited with Una, yes (scores 10), but only in an unsatisfactory labyrinth of frustration, claustrophobically smothered by barbed restraints that could sink a flotilla of battleships (scores minus 15). The adding up didn’t fit.

The shop’s atmosphere built as its place in time shifted towards the end of time…

They were in a ‘party’/‘don’t party’ dilemma, it was Jeff’s last day on the job. It was bitter sweet…light was shining bright whiting out the road ahead.

‘Do we have any sleeping bags in the back?’ Jeff asked, out of gloominess, knowing the answer.

‘You do realise…the shop management thing—‘ Viktor started.

‘Golf…shop management?’ Jeff furthered with tetchy-lite interruption.

‘If you like…its—‘

‘I like.’

‘It is merely—‘

‘I love!’ the word ‘love’ extended with tensile elasticity.

‘It’s an induced delusion loop—‘

‘No…’

‘It is an induced delusion loop, initiated by an Individual and Collective Command and Delude Pop-con satellite—‘

‘No…’

‘Initiated by CCDP sat, then perpetuated by, your own self-sabotage systems that were demurmerised by G&G counter-sense insurgent host-debilitation and reconstruction envelopes… They knew you were a spy for the SRA all along.’ Viktor seeing that Jeff’s mind was squinting in the bright dawning of enlightenment…went quiet.

Jeff mentally held on the cerebral bannister he’d been imagining to serve his balance in old age…a deep bell chimed in the distance…coming closer…closer…closer still… approaching like the clappers in the back of a diesel speeding truck. A metaphor easing its message through the check points of customary borders…Jeff was getting it: he was a scientist… And as amazing as the whole golf shop version of himself had been: a small piece of perfection in the stormy romance of a half-moon window of a tower on a barren island with bird colonies; outstripping science in all its profundity by an unscientific twelve to three. He asked himself, what if?

What if golf shop management did not exist?…What if there was a world without science? What if there was a world without science with no golf shop management to fall back on: he’d been tricked; he’d been sucked into the moving parts of the trickery machine, rag-dolled and crash-test-dummied, intimately lubricating the cogs’ guts and spindles’ viscera… 

‘Good luck,’ Jeff suddenly said, Viktor getting a basic grasp of what he meant.

‘Good luck,’ Viktor replied, not knowing if Jeff would get the drift. He must have garnered something because he turned to Dave, who was lurking around the shop environment like a work experience virgin.

‘Una,’ he asked Dave, ‘will you convene with me in mind coupling?’ A trick and a trap.

‘Not just now, Jeff…later, babe.’

‘Babe’ met certain indiscomputational data-skew limiter process alignments. Una was saying things with more of a Kirklikeness than an Unaesqueness…the meter’s needle redlined with over anxious oscillation.

One thing pulled on Jeff’s bank of brake levers and stood weighty on his foot spa of brake pedals… ‘How does Kirk know all this stuff,’ he thought…and why was he himself so convinced that Una was inside Dave? Because the most likely insider would be Kirk because Kirk was a version of Dave, whereas Una was a separate entity…the only sense in the wholly senseless predicament was that what Viktor was trying to tell him was true, not about the golf shop management, but about the CREE world being impossible; being just a construct of a seeded mind.

Viktor was promoted and Jeff bowed out; not a ceremony as such but enacted with underlying ceremoniacal behaviour underlining their final interaction with each other.

Although Jeff had no certainty that Viktor would retain or abide by Jeff’s Hierarchy of Ethos tree charts, or 101 rules for correct and precise management (without the pitfalls)… he knew Victor would protect Jeff via his satellite coverage; priceless and essential if his mission was to bloom.

Of course, the shop was never going to be a proper shop. It was no more than a front; its backroom stall set out to transact the hush-hush feeding in of billies and spitting out of fully committed, if broadly penniless, Communist activationists and politically aggroviable agents of equality. Ushering in the Coming of a Fairer New World… Jeff’s alternatively imagined golf world outcome, was, in reality, a retailing grin pasted over the grimace of a people’s revolution. 

Viktor had never known shame or guilt, he knew the dictionary definition, he could explain them, he could fool your average person that he was having an attack of one or another of them, but his privileged developmental programming path disallowed the kind of weaknesses that most people dealt with in their daily societal transactions. As the vessel carrying him through Life’s passage, already listing, started to founder, he elected to go down with the ship, still dressed as captain, but with a less crude cargo than the one with which his manifest crossing of the Sea of Life dictated he was laden. Dream segments of a character at a court-hearing, played by himself, accused of hiding the proceeds of a gold bullion robbery…gold teeth jumping out and clanking asunder from his, sworn to the truth, so help me God face…as it ducked and dived and banged its own head…cursing himself through the medium of cursing others… 

Viktor, in younger, better, less end-of-days days, had overseen the creation of algorithm fiddler bots; bots that fiddled with global governance algorithms. At first he needed explaining to him what they were. But, then, in no time, the bots were explaining to him that what he had done could not be undone, and how would he like his consequences delivered to him, by the ton, or by the kilo?

He’d once made a passing joke, that scattered as a running joke and evolved into a lot of running but no joke. The ‘joke’ had centred on getting rid of everyone in the vicinity of the surface of the planet Earth and creating a vast team, a motley gang, an extended family of Viktors to people the globally vacant spaces.

Being born a multibillionaire his preprogrammed modus operandi was specific; he’d been raised by the catchwords: ’take it or break it’ ‘thieve it, don’t leave it.’ ‘tell a lie…then squeeze ‘em dry’ ‘crush the weak until they squeak…press some more indent the floor’, ‘feather your nest and fuck the rest’, among others.

And, as it were, one day Viktor spotted death, eyeing him up from across a mall dream, astride a pale horse…Death had looked away immediately, the bronze horse had snorted, a chisel in the stone of Viktor’s sarcophagus was eating away at him; demarcating his express path of slo-mo finality… That metallic-equus snort carried final instructions: do good..even if you have to do bad to do good. It was a change of plan Viktor tried his best to ignore, but Inevitability raged within him like an ever decreasing viral spiral, which had led him on a journey to where he was at.

Viktor had been full-sperm-ahead on the automation of everything…automating his net worth with shortages and outages keeping the hoi polloi stuck fast in gainless employment….without him being overly taxed on personal energy expenditure.

He had pulled less and less of the levers of power within his increasingly autonomous corporate entity, until he noticed his own buttons being pushed and the levers jamming…his absolute control bypassed absolutely by bluetoothed invaders.

Technology’s ability to perform far outstripped Viktor’s imagination and soon took control by mimicking Viktor; stole his identity, refused to indulge him in the damage-limitation he demanded, preferring a damage-heavy approach, featuring universal rollout. For contractual reasons the entity joined in with Viktor, not in an entirely productive way; it took both sides; targeting and harassing him and protecting him from his own creation…

Viktor told himself the story that he had been Frankenstein but the monster had become Frankenstein and made him the monster; it wasn’t a story it was an explanation.

His fully automated doppelgänger was his best friend and worst enemy. The rogue entity supported Viktor inconsistently; protecting him from its own attacks…or not. All designed to cause Viktor upset…the underlying dark humoured nastiness was pure Viktor from his salad days before the blood soaked dressing created the sea of a thousand islands. Viktor had painstakingly patented and studiously programmed semi-sadistical operational alogrithms; the self-hating misanthropy slowly dismantled Viktor the great edifice and Jerry-built a small holding surrounded by bogland and windswept moors in his place. The funfair he had set up for….fun…had come back round the track to haunt him…no longer fun less longer fair…

He was out of the evil cunt business; his alternate automated enemy was far better at it than he could ever be. He needed a slice of the action; he needed to eat action pie…because even though the nemesis of his own making was out to get him, to thrust home the rusty sword of tainted victory, he also had the same evil force batting for him; even though his head was the ball…

He found himself thinking contrarily regarding his nemesis. He held no aces…but the jokers, working in tandem, could cause irregular responses. The first counter step was to address all theatre algorithm programmers; the other billies… A solution was redistribution of stolen wealth…and a power sharing that included the meek, after all it was their inheritance…

A plan, that would never be able to fit back in the bag, unfolded, reverse origami…under the radar of the corporate entity, through the legs of the doppelgänger’s knock-kneed goalkeeping. Anyone with more than three billion dollars with the billy-brain disease would be assessed and processed by an unlikely conglomeration of Mind hop technology, mind skip technology and mind jump technology. Only those billies who could prove themselves not to have turned into a complete cunt were excused. There were a few.