Chapter Twenty-Five

The Darkroom

A feeling he was being basted seeped into a sense of submerging marinade; Atoll was unaware of the vibracity blossoming in his Sultry Orchard of the Sublime… It took a scouting jog around the recreational Park of Remembering;  a scouring, a stone-turning, forensic rooting…to procure reacquaintance with his Parallel Guarded Introspection; his private carriage on the thought train; an advanced cerebral intervention he’d developed to counter the usurpers of his derelict mind; back in his experimental past.

Squeezing through a metaphorical hedge lining obscured along the far reaches of the J R Cash Bridleway off Winston Smith Boulevard…and avoiding partially the metaphorphical pricks…there it was…his solipsistic space; no more than a dark room, with no world building, just a safe area for thought to air without alerting those to whom thoughts were flesh-eating bacteria. He always forgot about what was, in effect, his de-dilemmarisation chamber, because hiding memory from others meant letting it out of sight and so out of mind. A precarious out-of-balancing act and a nice surprise treat when reacquaintance occurred…an isolated room hidden somewhere in a barren hinterland was, by anyone’s standards, a massively fortuitous resource to be able to access. It was a freelancer’s free lunch and all you can shit buffet. It meant he could duel-up his awareness in the multi-happenstantial plane and be at one with the room and two with the outside, which added up to a control-monger’s dozen.

In the sphere of the UKGBHQ, he sat awaiting instructions from the Commander who had put him on hold while she was preparing to deal with him.

In the antispherical Darkroom, potential scenarios strutted the catwalk, stripped down to revealing underwear; took off their underwear in an open display of skin and invaded privacy…then peeled back their skin. It was not a pleasant bolthole in every aspect, but it was an informative one…restocking ammunition; patching up holes in the soup bowl of knowledge.

From behind the Darkroom curtain, Atoll could measure with pre-orchestrated anticipatory precision-lite, what the Commander was about to engage him with… As she suddenly floor-scrawped back in her chair…stood and wasted no time striding over; spilling awkwardness within Atoll’s social catchment zone: an incoming code preparation technique or a primitive form of passive bullying. Atoll was visited with such commanderful integrity that it triggered a pseudo-military, stand-to-attention response; the personification of limp acquiescence; ears pricked; calculation ready; alive with slick functionality. Easy private he told himself; steady as she goes…the small pulse of humour allowing his release into a belief in trustworthiness.

When the Commander spoke it was with incongruous friendliness…a rehearsed and nuanced diplomacy…that did everything it intended with room to spare. It was like her physicality was trying to intimidate while her voice was doing the opposite. ‘Come over and meet Viktor,’ the words of friend or foe, danger or safety…weighed and bagged up.

Viktor slipped back his hood, revealing a man with a beak who didn’t resemble a bird…a strange look that Atoll was determined not to be thrown by. 

‘Viktor is our only contact with military intelligence, they have been compromised, but Viktor has a backdoor, side-bar, watercooler-in-the-elevator with invisidata extraction capes. Our counter-attacking of runaway self-evolving autonomy has limited potential, but Viktor thinks we have a greater power than we are able to comprehend. I’d like you to give his ideas space to fester. We must keep believing that our corpse of Hope will breathe again one day.’

‘Atoll, this is Viktor…’

‘Atoll…we finally meet!’

‘Do we know each other?’ Atoll said, reminding himself he was a fan of big noses, but drew the line at beaks, unless on avian heads.

‘I knew you when you were a lad…younger, a baby lad. I worked with your parents.’

‘Oh….that’s…that’s…um…’

‘Yes…they were working on two projects, one was to create a billionaire from a mere lab jockey…’

‘Really?’

‘And the other was to create plasticonsciousness; a paraconsciousness that could enter, and take control of, the collective unconscious; the ultimate in Godjacking control-freakery…’

‘How did that one pan out?’ Atoll said, concluding that such an aim was riotously ridiculous and would never have any hope of achieving anything it set out to do; ergo, Viktor was sporting nonsense from the off and they had most likely never met.

‘You are proving to be promising,’ Viktor said, pointedly, but Atoll allowed the golf ball concept to whizz past his head.

‘You can freewheel down the cobbles of Memory Hill later…the business at hand… What do you know about the Super Smart Shutdown System?’ the Commander asked Atoll.

‘Sybil? My Auxiliary Internal Window-Hole Intelligence Module made contact, and formed some sort of co-narrative alliance…a river flowed into the delta. But I was fed on a need to eat basis….paddling…never got to swim.’

‘If you can reconnect with Una…and she can ally with us and Sybil…there could be a chance…’

For a moment Atoll considered that somehow he was mentally influencing the Commander because what she was relating to him seemed to be thought by him fractions of a second before she said it… Then the ‘moment’ thing passed and the whole concept moved in, fully furnishing itself into domestic foreverness. He tried to get the Commander to change the subject, just as a test of his mental influence over her…more of an inappropriate game than serious fact-finding, but it had no effect. 

‘Viktor has developed a solid plan. You are a key link in its success, Atoll.’ 

Atoll knew what Viktor’s PR machine had allowed the public to know. Who he really was was buried under the spurious characterisation of a billionaire who was fixated on a devotion to erasing all billionaires…motivated by living under a kill order from his own automated corporation, of which he had lost control. It had all the hallmarks of a suicidal fat lady singing at the climax of a billicidal opera.

Viktor’s presence played goofball tennis with Atoll, knocking distorted shadow balls into his court from a serving hall-of-mirrors, through the holes in his protective netting. In the Darkroom, clarity illuminated Viktor, he was one of those history makers who happened to be in the right place at the right time; a sliding door to the left and his involvement in the complete extermination of Humanity would have been minimal. He invited both revulsion and respect. But he was the person to lead because he knew more than anyone else who had not been mentally skewed by invasive Artificially Intelligent Mimic and Steal Neuronal Elastification Plasticity. Viktor also commanded attention…what he was saying made super sense, as though it came from a different level, as though his ideas were programming this world, changing its course. It was as though he was Viktorfying the narrative. So much so, that sirens evacuated Atoll out of the Darkroom, he found himself wandering around in spookiness around the Park of Forgetance, and forgot about its (some vague room-like sanctuary for clear thought) existence for the time being.

‘I’m interested in hearing the plan, Viktor.’

‘I have calculated that if we get Jeff’s mind back in his body,’ this would not be easy, Atoll thought, ‘his body back in the stub,’ tricky to impossible, ‘entice the Van to take the complete Jeff, assuming the Van has unique data as to where the Una physicality safe house is,’ if that were even possible, ‘when we have Una’s body….we get her mind back and paired,’ not an outcome with even a modicum of viability, but hey, ‘then use the G & G labs portal to bring Una back with Sybil in tow,’ spectacularly not going to ever happen, ‘and voila! The trap is set…Sybil will think she’s escaping quarantine but she will be transferring to our quarantine,’ which isn’t a plan with any hope of success.

Atoll tried to contact the mailroom. This time he got a recorded message. ‘I am out of the office for the foreseeable…’

Atoll came back to the plan he had thoroughly pooh-poohed…it grew on him…he tried to dismiss it…succumb to defeatism as an easier option, but it would not stop falling in love with itself and spreading contagion…before he had even put it into globules of concepts and arranged auditions for the starring roles…he had lost all pretence of doing otherwise…the ill-fated plan was now the go to mission…Even if he’d crept aboard just to evaluate the cabin sizes for a friend…the ship had set sail and there was no sight of anything on the horizon as far as dry land went…

‘We need Jeff and Una, playing happy families, creating a vibe that leaks into the atmosphere and says: established world…if Sybil detects that this is just another quarantine scenario she’ll erupt,’ added the Commander.

‘First,’ Viktor said, ‘the Jeff mind complex…’ The Commander pulled the table out from the recess, needing Viktor’s seemingly reluctant help; revealing Botface’s Torso…beeping deeply in a ‘safe’ mode… ‘This is your ticket to the spiral staircase. What you do after getting there will be the points changes to the rails the guide us into our future.’

‘You must not alert or inform your people—‘

‘My people?’

‘Your controllers.’

Atoll could not fill the awkward gap with adequate response criteria because he both knew what Viktor meant while simultaneously running a ‘no idea what you mean’ program…it was something he was working up to working on and expanding into…letting go and grabbing hold of; pressure and release…succumbattack-attacksuccumb…

‘We’ve open source back-hacked it through dead-narrative defib reinstational instillation enabling with encapsulation oscillating and far-fetched-close-catch; which means it can be accessed and obliquely side-programmed back into its lab production state…in next-gen-tech terms it has been reborn and spoon-fed back original program noodles until it coughs.’

‘Enough time wasting. Technical ins and outs aside…let’s upgrade to launch-down…’

The Commander’s utterance echoed about in Atoll’s skull; taking his mind off the situational shift and perspective adjustments that were dressing themselves with behavioural intention…a dizzy spell dissipated into swapping happenstancial physicality, pivoting, veering off into unknown territory that familiarity was beginning to populate.

But then…unsuspected yet predictable:

Processing was fast-tracked, the sheriff at the heart of the Botface Penal Community City, in-trayed and out-trayed the paperwork with huffy sighs, sound effects adding nothing to anything without taking away.

Atoll needed to get to the top floor of the building that was now flanked by smaller buildings that had been designed to enhance the aesthetics of the first. He had to skirt the direct route because of the crawling man…most likely Tiny Guy on his last long crawl back to the entry to his lair…but could be just any old man, either way it had ‘trap’ written all over it.

Once insinuated in to hapambience, Atoll made his application, at an exterior booth, to make an approach to the reception team in the foyer. It took over an hour for his application to be processed. After which time the security bot entouraged him into the reception area where he asked a bot on a monitor, ‘I’m trying to locate two Vistamatic operatives, can’t remember names, one might go by Jeff, the other, Dave, or possibly Kirk?’

‘Yes?’ the bot replied, needing more to go on.

‘Would you happen to know how I could get in touch with them?’

‘No…but I could possibly find out for you…if…wait a minute…would you like that? Would you like me to try to find out for you?’

‘Yes, please…would you?’

Atoll wondered who had programmed creepiness into the bots and why…

‘Nothing is coming up with those names…I’ll try a few other names and see…’ tippety-tip-tap…ah…here we are…these will be your guys: two Vistamatic Salesmen cut the loop and disappeared into the general oblivion of it all…they made the in-house magazine last month.’

‘Do you have any contact details?’

‘They went into the Trudisplay.’

‘What? They went into the Trudisplay?’

‘It happens…not ideal…sad, I suppose, really.’

‘How?’

‘How? That’s the who wants to be a six-billion dollar man question…I suppose.’

‘Can you authorise an investigator’s licence so I can go to their place of work, to tie up loose ends?’

‘We need further access to the files containing who you are before we can…you know.’

It took multiple hours for the minimal permission modules to filter down the admin chutes before Atoll could continue (see: Time and Her Merry Band of Road Sweepers: the role of televised musical theatre in the perception of the passing of time, Hoarse-Throated Hearse-Passenger’s Union Books and Saucy Postcards.)

Eventually, Atoll was free to ascend to Jeff’s last place of employment. Jeff’d been living one of the best available versions of his life. He was selling Vistamatic Trudisplay accessories, updates and add-ons (inc, stickers and badges, posters etc.)… When he was not on sales duty he lived in a small cottage in a service workers ‘world’ contained on the tenth floor where he had created an idyll of sorts a million miles away from the ‘Lab Assistant STEALS next-gen-tech to RANSOM government’ headlines. He was his own man and left his worries unanswered on the doorstep. Picking them up again on the way to work.

If you feed them, canteens talk…he could not remember who had said that, but it proved semi-fruitful. He asked around until answers started cropping up.

‘They were here one day…plotting and scheming and planning an escape out into the wilderness of the Trudisplay Mindlands,’ said a small man. A larger man, adding, ‘and all of a sudden they’d gone.’ An even larger man, as if arranged dimensionally, said, ‘at first we had no idea where…some of the more thought-able staff pieced together their constant plotting and whatnot, and put two and two, you know, together and all that,’ And then the small man said, ‘they had Vistamaticlly Trudisplayed themselves,’ as if the three were sharing another round of data release. ‘An act of self-loathing sacrifice according to the manual,’ added the middleman, ‘but, you know…doubt springs eternal…even on fertile ground,’ finalised the largest of the tritet.

Atoll could not ask anyone for advice because secrecy was his only clothing method…he would have to work out how to enter the Trudisplay on his own. He had been told that Jeff and Dave, and probably Kirk, had entered the Vistamatic world cosplaying as Butch Cassidy and David Cassidy. But it was not possible to know who was which. If Atoll was to succeed in locating and retrieving Jeff from the Vistamatic Trudisplay system he would have to form a one man posse, and charge after a bank robber and his crooning cockney sidekick; the Crack in the Wall gang.

Atoll thought the task impossible and meditated himself into a state which expanded into a recreational fantasy that imagined him populating a semi-familiar Park of Remembrance. He found himself scouring and turning over stones, rooting forensically; through a prickly hedge a dark room where he recognised with gripping sanguinity the Darkroom he just happened to really need right now; stocked full with potential solutions…