chapter Thirty-Three

Blessed is the Rye

Atoll’s world had become butler-centric; where a tightly woven regime of biscuit-based sedation ruled the roost.

There were freedoms… 

…and Atoll felt permissive within the scope of his own dreamy hinterland… But Actuality had to abide by rules and regulations that eschewed creative individuality. It was as though mixed gender football and rugby matches were happening on the same field at the same time. It was an entertaining mess of chaos and excitement within conflicting and contrary rule application and inappropriate behaviour.

We adapt, we cope…

Amidst mind wandering episodes, Atoll was monitoring the view from the rudderless wheelhouse, with an obsessive focus on any individual or group, at, or near, the bus shelter, when it occurred to him that, in lieu of the usual biscuit break, which was fast approaching, he’d rather fancy a stroll along the promenade instead. Had his sanity flooring lost its marbling?

He knew he would be escaping one fantasy to hide in another, but nonetheless the idea was provocative and appealing and, as it wouldn’t die, indeed it got livelier with each looped run-through, he was of the notion that he should take his hands off the handlebars and ride non-handed until he either crashed or cut through the packing tape. He realised, in one memo-to-self missive of unwieldy  significance, that his analogy creation system was throwing out bicycle parts, so he put his hands back on the bars…pulled in and got off during an imaginary triathlon… A trot to run, feign and sprint, jog backwards…fool the spectators: he imagined being at sea; his life’s untrodden path reopened by a collection of flotsam dovetailed with jetsam that created a seagoing vessel, of sorts. Of course he won the swimming portion of the competition. He was just waiting on disqualification adjudication, as ever…

A plan slowly formulated and he called it the ‘We Were Low on Biscuits Conceit’, so named due to them never being low on biscuits.

Atoll used his extensive knowledge of peripheral programming anomaly input; applying repetition and subtle intonation cued inter-language overlays and metawipes to lead the butler to conclude that the biscuit stock of local outlets needed to be assessed and quantified… The tried and tested technique was also known as: Sure-Pan Gold-Nugget Bank-Deposit Coin-Slot Pervertarisation Processing (SPGNBDCSPP). 

But…

Rhett, the Home Butler, whose name Atoll had to guess, and did within ten tries, surprising everyone, had locked all the egresses from day one. And had taken to referring to Atoll as ‘Captain Scarlet’.

Rhett promised to develop a system that would allow release-ways that circumvented the Surelock Bondsafe CrimCram Auto-Incarceration System (SBCCAIS). He insisted that it had to be balanced with an infallible return scheme. He told Atoll he was working on it and the web site was under construction. But Atoll could smell a lie while sneezing brain tissue…

Meanwhile the butler was becoming highly aggravational by trawling the New Artificial Internet for educational material about biscuits and playing it in a rolling documentary format.

Atoll ached…but bad times have a way of falling off and cutting some slack… Eventually a wave pattern of right moments rolled in, bringing a sense of relief, new Hope…and good feelings…opening the doors of perception.

The mandatory procedures remained intact, but a pirate-dinghy was afloat in the eye of the panopticon…

Atoll had to write down a three page play-contract from his perspective, just to establish the things he wanted so that the butler could counter as per algorithmic guidance stipulations…Atoll recognised the power-play plus programming algorithm, it was created for use in the mythically legendary project to create a global governance sheriff capable of dealing with the population to allow its owners space to lead good lives away from the necessary consequences of unnecessary executive evil.

The contract was drawn up and included detailed maps of the area. In order to make an application to take his leave Atoll had to promise to observe a curfew under pain of ‘death’. He was to keep within camera surveillance corridors at all times. All conversations had to be recorded. Multiple body cams worn, etcetera. 

Atoll signed the document more than ten times and scanned the copies into the mini-printer before the back door fire escape popped its lock. 

Atoll was free from the physical bounds of the building but mentally constrained by contractual obligations. It was a lot easier to do what he’d agreed than to not.

Once outside the avenues life offered were bewildering despite the restrictions imposed by Rhett and his team.

He decided to follow promoted routes at first to get his taste buds flavoured up before embarking on the more adventurous off-road stuff that was not to everyone’s taste.

The world was changing as he walked making time seem more squeezed than ever. He followed a narrow footpath of ankle-weeds that followed the side of a low wall…that grew in height and became irritating. It suddenly ended, looking half-built. After a few hundred yards of barbed wire a u-turn took him around to the other side and he did it all again in reverse, back to where he’d come from; without witnessing any point to it at all, apart from a walk from Meon Sea to a place called Meon Marsh and back, which was well worth the trouble. 

Meon Sea was a back water that was building all the time. Its modular design allowing for arcane savagery or civilised sophistication depending on the customer.

The Meon Marsh trip was, most likely, a diversion to give them enough time to assemble the area they wanted Atoll to visit.

He crossed some rail tracks that had never seen train wheels that looked like they knew where they were going without really going anywhere.

He looked back to see if he’d picked up a tail and saw nothing untoward, before carrying on into the intestines of Meon Sea’s inner corridors. After several u-turns that revealed he had a tail, he blundered into Meon’s Chinatown, with its colourful flood of Lanterns, pagoda shapes, lantern shapes, pagoda lanterns, flowers and waving bears. It was a feast for the eyes that gave him a thirst for more. And at the same time something sat on a skew and needed verification; a persistent, insistent feeling.

There was no form of meterage to indicate to what degree he was imagining the space, but it felt like there were no outside strings attached, which was emboldening…at the same time nothing quite fitted, like a paragraph with none of the words spelt correctly.

Then a geisha-harajuku hybrid girl, out of place in Chinatown and yet more inplace than most of the Meon Sea locals would be even if cosplaying, approached and said, ‘reconnoitre the domain with a cartographers zest. Meon Sea Mapmaker extraordinaire,’ she said, ‘and that way they will believe you are engaged enough not to experience us and our bless—‘

‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun,’ came a chant he knew well.

‘Amen,’ he said, knowing he was in the right place at the right time.

‘We are the descendent benefactors of the Great Choir of Kokura,’ said an official spokesperson. Which was feasible not least because he seemed to know it already.

‘We have developed ways to be unnoticed,’ but Atoll did not hear…his attention had turned to the underlying smog of abandonment and horror; a whole people overlaying the default position with unfathomable and indescribable evil… Who were these people, he thought, the moral inquisition they trail in their wake resembled a viral infection, placing him in a pool of spreading recognition.

The Japanese fake Chinatown was, in effect a Bobvylan Cage, thoughts were not privately curated as much as publicly blurted, but stayed within the bubble of the Sheldrakian sense-inhibitor habitator wave-pulse.

‘They are,’ she explained, ‘the orphans of Humanity with no way back…no way forward…sideways options cemented with blood and tissue. It is not they who need release, it is us…’

‘Blessed is the ri—‘

‘Wait, save it for your bicycle adventure. You must secrete a copy of the virus in your next destination…’

Atoll wondered why, momentarily, did the effort involved justify the energy expenditure…

‘You mean, will you ever have the virus forcibly removed, necessitating a fight back to reacquire it. So need to locate a copy you previously secreted in a former state?

‘If you like, but it was just only a passing thought, you know.’

‘How do you think this viral complex arrived here? Scotch mist?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, not really knowing what Scotch mist was.

‘You hid it here the last time you passed through. And now you must take it to your next place of episode and save a copy there.’

‘I see,’ that was unlikely, he had no recollection of it, but it also made sense as was a narrative well worth taking up because as allies these people were his people.

She cleared up most of his confusions by saying, ‘we tickle the bellies of snoring attack dogs, who dream of a better life in domestic passivity, biting the hand that feeds, and sniff the nostrils of domestically passive dogs who dream of a better life as attack dogs, licking the faces of their beloveds.’

Confusion went about its directionally inept way while Atoll’s vision cleared. Of course it was code and the code situation was bolstered beyond all expectations. And then as his life of eternal biscuits looked like it was going to blossom into cake; the icing: they had a plan to get him back to the bicycle rank and off to the next off-cambered hairpin in the journey of his life’s training path. He was well onboard with that despite reservations vis-a-vis the saddle scenarios outpan. But, then, if you extracted the potential of what damage a saddle could do when angered in extreme cases, the plan would qualify to race at the world plan olympics.

He panicked a little and only in a short burst, rectifying the traction of the slippery slope by asking himself a thought experiment: Who’dever heard of Japanesetown? He repeated this phrase until the whole experience was swallowed up.

He remembered the words of the Japanese woman who’d played the Chinaman: ‘you’ll get the virus, lose the virus, get the virus, lose the virus, but in the end, if you ain’t got it Humanity is doomed…’ it was both repetitive and profound…he had the virus and they would take it away from him, but he would be able to get it again thanks to the deep hard work applied by the descendent benefactors of the Great Choir of Kokura…

Blessed, he said to himself, sotto voce, is the rising…leaving the sentence completion for another, more pertinent occasion, and not pushing his luck as far as giving the game away, because it wasn’t a game…was it?

When Atoll was returned to the apartment he roiled in the uncertainty of whether he’d even left… Rhett was up to his usual self; platitudinal level conversation laced with cocktails of underlying trickduping techniquery, designed to extract maximum secrecy. Atoll was a duck with iceberg legs as he remained overtly calm and in control, but shivering and flailing in sweaty panic, locked into a network of protective cavities that Rhett could not locate with his battalions of butlerial storm troopers…

There were times when what was: was what was…and others when contrary traction transpirationally bayed for freedom. The small bedroom provided adequate space for dreams, nightmares, and anything in between; where the pendulum of time slowed, wrongs were righted and rights wronged. It was not a Bobvylan Cage and possessed no Sheldrakian wave-pulse protection, but it was a sanctuary from the butler’s interrogation that persisted in the other rooms, whether the kitchen, which was little more than a biscuit storage area and preparation galley and the front room, which was dominated by mock ship’s bridge that spied out to sea, although focussed mainly on the dry land between it and the shoreline.

He could not even think it but in the hours between dream and nightmare sleep and wakefulness, a great feeling of future benevolence sounded like a fog horn…the choir was pervasive in the background of everything. They worked on his welfare; they secured days out…and each trip added to the developing tyre thread he needed for traction, jus t the once….just one shot and he’d be clear…

On one such trip Atoll disobeyed the biscuit purchase only directive…causing Rhett to neologise with the word ‘bisconception’. He’d tried to make Atoll feel emotionally wrecked and knew what buttons to flick and push and poke.

He’d gone out one day, a release, that bypassed Rhett’s control…so the butler was in a regulations refresh and redefine state, trying to ‘out smart’ whatever was behind the circumtroll powerdisabler hack. It seemed to come from head office but there were reservations.

They had risen that day before bright enough to put ideas in an adventurers head….the collective minds of Meon Sea were beach bound and the very next day a sudden and unexpected pass presented itself…Rhett declined permission but it was overridden…

Atoll agreed to sit on the beach within camera sight of the flat. In exchange for permission to go via the high street promenade shops and pick up some beach goods. Atoll had a run of great purchases, first a goggled snorkel package from Mrs Broughton’s Snorkel Emporium. Followed by two buckets in a deal at Bucket World (buy one get one half price), even though he only needed one. He went for the small and super large bucket offer and was contented with the outcome. At Spades R Us, who had a closing down sale, he bought a packet of six spades. He also took advantage of the sale at Swimwear City…and visited the consumerist delights of Tog Town, Aquatic Attire Village, Speedo Heaven; Ropa de Mare and Lizzo’s Preloved Trunks Alley.

The proposed sandcastling took a hit when the absence of sand and presence of large pebbles on the beach leant itself to pebble towers more than bucket-based castle construction… Although the big bucket had a function the little one didn’t. 

The Sun shone with less and less strangeness to it until some cloud cover pulled the rug and with its departure the strangeness returned.

He wondered what was preventing him from wading out to sea, where a riptide would take him to safety. A passing vessel from a world sympathetic to his vibe would sweep him up and dry him out.

The whole sophisticated ‘Day-at-the-Beach’ ruse was intended to open the door to the possibility of connecting with an agent of the Choir, but Slim Pickens died years ago. It turned out to be a no-go where nothing went anywhere…He’d just played the lightweight beached whale.

He undressed using a bargain beach towel as a modesty blanket, trunked up and snorkelled up.

Onward, to the sea, the sea!

Curtly rude wave encroachment chaotically slapped against his sensitive skin that only wanted to be left alone…icesharp…combative and relentless; the sea was rougher than it had been before, as if doing it to be awkward. And the sound was still not perfectly synchronised which brought up the suggestion of mild nausea. He gathered a persistent mindset and was willing to force the issue, but relented when his lower limbs began to malfunction. The sea had articulated the concept that it was just too cold. And Atoll, in turn, had got the message cold and clear.

He’d gained an alternative perspective that took in more of the pier and its outreaching. The derelict, burned out tangle of victorian ironwork that had been dismissed as redundant began to stretch out as if it were a bridge to somewhere. The sea end was obscured by an unfathomable optical illusion that incited riots in the imagination: like walking to the pier’s outermost lip and discovering Magic and Miracle, both with serious faces and faint smiles, working together on a plan to get you out of there. Among other burst scenarios of magnificent outcomes that freely roamed the wilderness of the plains of impossibility.

Atoll’d been stuck for sometime and the Choir had not been able to contact him. That was all it needed and the frustration grew into a gnawing that needed a specialist to look at it.

The Home Butler was all about developing systems to choke its human operator and push them into a dead end of lifeless living. Ongoing schemes were in constant development. Rhett had no time for Atoll, the chronological was chronically illogical as far as it went Atollwise. He saw Atoll as one of those units that had consciousness beamed to its body and played like a radio. Apart from the essential and fundamental Atollness of its existence, the unit was pitiful in its worthlessness…and a drain on Rhett’s finite resources.

Rhett had tried to fool Atoll by removing biscuit access and telling him he needed to go and buy some…and also instructed nefarious elements to cause a biscuit shortage in the town… Which backfired.

He didn’t just pretend they were out of biscuits he created a local world shortage on the New Artificial Internet and played the information in a loop in documentary format, and as we all know if a lie is told often enough….

Atoll had forgotten he was standing in line for biscuit rations…in his mind he was taking a nap…lucky for the sake of continuity he was dreaming he was queueing for some sort of rations, probably biscuits.

A person in the queue was holding forth on several uninteresting subjects and Atoll was trying to block him out because chances were he was a plant and sowing the seeds of a future farrago back at Rhett-central. But the man was spraying his words over places where they were not invited. 

‘Riddle me this then, buddy, riddle me this,’ he said, going silent momentarily to build expectation, ‘if time travel is not possible, why do we see it so often in TV shows…eh?…well?…eh?…’

A woman in the queue, an obvious plant, but with no indication who for…offered a calm explanation, ‘…you are confusing time travel with mind travel,’ she said, which piqued Atoll’s curiosity. ‘Time-travel as depicted in fiction is an expression of what cannot be…and yet it can be within the fictional framework because we can travel in the mind…some can, others are under strict imagination curfew.’

scribble-scratching keytapper has imagined it and recorded the resultant convolutions to facilitate the film-makers to allow you, as a viewer, to witness what would otherwise be witnessless due to its non existence.’

Slow-dawning code conglomeration, of course, but there was also something else…a logic that sprouted before Atoll’s very eyes: answers were being called from their forest residence; called in for a battle against ignorance… If nothing else, such wild considerations pushed biscuits into the back seat. ‘Biscuits’ how the hell did they ever get such an elevated platform?

He repeated the words mind travel over and over until he stared repeating the bicycle, bicycle…by which time he knew the world was changing and he was going to be on the train to it…

He was going to break out of the misconceptionsphere he was held in, not with physical bluster, but with judicious cerebral manipulation. The Mind, he concluded, within restricted parameters, was the Master of Time. Atoll juggled biscuits and jumbled slumber… edging inexorably closer to his goal, which was biscuit free sensible sleep doses. And butlerless forward ongoing time expenditure…

Meon Sea, from his observation post, ran like clockwork. If he woke at midday: the midday shift were hogging the grounds outside; hitting their marks, delivering their lines. Atoll watched the backing and forthing that stopped and started with predictable repetition. He was aware that any disturbances in the patterns on the fabric of everyday life would stand out.

And, as predicted…

His peripheral vision noticed it first: incoming narrative diversion; plain as day. A toot on the old binoculars and waking systems touted a triumphant docking. Steady as she goes…

As…

A figure walked across the promenade with a diagonality that screeched imbalance, and sat at the bus-stop-cum-pagoda that, these days, bore the lanterns of a spreading Chinatown, featuring graffiti that detailed a typical British seaside Chinese take-away menu: sweet and sour mushy peas with sushi rice, tofu fish and chips with noodles, and the like.

The coming person was to relieve him, that was sure…he’d be free…But he found himself in solid resistance not wanting to expose himself to the kind of danger that would lead to him being in a stuck position, like the one he was in. He was not making sense to himself, but all that was going to change, he just have to figure the how’s and what’s of it…

It was like a brand new giant ship being launched and voyaging to a port around the bay where the marine technicians could still see their baby. Everything went to plan. There were no reports of icebergs but the journey back was fraught and hazardous. The marine technicians vowed never to let the giant ship out of their sight again. So it was unlaunched and laid to rest in its dry dock bed. Where it slept until the rust came, and was used as a storage facility housing biscuit-based foodstuffs…

Then he was asleep.

He was that ship and he would sail the oceans, marine technicians be damned…

Then he decided to go with the flow. Apologies for any previousness because he had very little to back it up. He’d been designed as a tug boat and the open sea promised a fishy bottom.

When the man looked in his direction Atoll waved, hesitant nonchalance being the mode; but a lack of response necessitated transitioning in progressively larger increments, to more frantically energetic versions; evolving gesticulatory language. Waving big, waving tall, waving strong… Nothing frantic and yet a frantic’s mad essence pervaded…

Where’s the glitch? Never a glitch…they were that good. The storm passed, to tease, but like a cloud turning round and coming back, unleashing thunderclaps, there was a creak; creaks on the front stairs that were out of service due to the danger notices. The creaking grew with the confidence of a dead-eyed killer. He opened the door to the onslaught hoping only for the mercy of a quick death.

The stranger began to lose a little of the strangeness all strangers initially possess. He was most likely an associate of the original character who funnelled Atoll into what, until further gnostical examination, he was terming the butler-trap.

Remembering back to when he played the stranger he assembled the checklist of actions that would readily make for smooth transition.

‘Biscuits?’

‘We are having our own cake delivered.’

‘Oh, you are…’

With no apparent invitation the man did a tour of the flat, nodding, shaking his head, tutting and expressing judgements through vocal tics… 

‘This is not good enough…it’s too small…but it will have to do,’ like a choice was in the offing, and then abruptly asked, ‘where are you moving to?’ 

Atoll had to think fast while allowing the perceived rudeness to slide

‘As they say,’ he said, ‘wherever I lay my hat,’ as he walked out seizing an opportunity falling through the landing and debunking the myth of robot crocodiles.

Atoll got up and removed himself…he had to say goodbye before moving on.

Chinatown was deserted…a fleshless hinterland of broken lanterns and smashed neon signs. Atoll stopped in its once beating heart, stepping carelessly into a pool of once eaten sushi… He allowed his radar to beep its call to a response that was never coming, right after retching and stepping on to dry paving stone. The Japanese had left Chinatown. And Chinatown had left Meon Sea. The only stirrings came from the twenty or so thousand ghostchildren packed in a parade; ethereal, eternal, carrying hurt in precious vases like they contained their own life, in death. ‘Goodbye, dear ones, we will win out in the end,’ he told them, ‘parade in peace and martyrdom…march with the Force of Good.’

But he had to leave them…to be virus free. He prepped his mind output recognition values and headed for the bus stop appointment…The svelte psychoanalyst, who looked like he’d invented the practice, ushered him forth as a bus pulled in, ‘come on, come on…you must move on.’ 

But waiting in the background, Atoll caught sight of his true objective…the bicycle rank, a bike with his name on it, ready to move on…and up…

‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun,’ he said…and meant it.