Chapter Ten
A Serenade of Sublte Sibilance
Soon after the arrival of a package, or parcel, the mailroom became swamped…and then, after rapid time bursts (that seemed not to possess any restraint or safety rail) the mailroom manifested as a pool, like the ones people swim in, and Una herself, at variance with what she desired, seemed to overspill with spurtsplashing and sploshspatter all over the mailroom pool’s finite lip into some kind of timeout spillage tray. It felt to her as though about thirty-percent was metaphorical and nine-percent metaphorphical, with the rest being made up of quantum fact disaggregation and Simulated Dark Matter Residue (SimDarMatRes). This predicament put her in mind of how her heart used to beat faster and, perhaps, louder under stress; a reminiscence of the old days of physicality and the dilemma of whether this was a wobble on the road to success or a fall to the manury ground of failure.
Several day-lengths previously, things were approaching a very nice normality of even keel with a smooth passage (VNNEK+SP): in what was a dreamlike perception; rooting in a dreamlike construction housing… Una typed…tippety-tip-tapping away for hours at a time, not for any administrative reason, but to maintain the practical constructive narrative-swingline, using casual persistence and dogged repetitiveness. It was the only course of action that brought Una’s reality into line with the reality of the space. Her new home was big weird and she was getting weird with it.
She dredged up evidence from the memory banking system container vessels. She lodged her findings in a quantum pertinence box that spat wild conclusions out, that were then edited by the conclusionometer and then processed by integration with narrative progression conducivity and developmental health scenarios…
Her field of vision widened and the background receded in a dramatic ominous headshot of realisation; rash red-flaggery jostling by; a swelling river of monstrous emblematic crimson bursting its banks…a raucous parade of rowdy red flags marching harsh-stepped and drum-thumpen through the mailroom’s sketched avenues.
She saw the parachutes and ran for the hills.
It first appeared as an unaccounted for, dumb assistant helping out Atoll with a project he and Kirk were working on. It was no more than a convoluted App that had been employed to educate and stretch them, removing a certain amount of male juvenility out of their system; work out and ease out latent traumas that were driving their giant construction vehicles like toys and get back to the construction face with renewed maturity. So they both allowed leeways and bys to rush past…mitigationally.
Una was sent an assistant, which was impossible without the mysterious force being involved. Worryingly quickly and wholly inevitably the force became a vital component and took control of the wheel and set a course to uncharted waters. Despite the fact they were already in uncharted waters. Which meant the dark force probably had charted areas to gain an upper hand.
The new assistant presented a report delineating the new order of play: Madame S. impresario of the only two clubs in town (construction had unexplainfully stopped) had relinquished Atoll of the executive command he’d been naively sharing with Kirk. No one could know this from where they were, but the assistant did.
The two builders had become musos, to whom she was ‘muse’. An actively domineering muse with the tools to crack the vaults holding their hearts and tamper with any evidence suggesting they still had minds of their own. Emotionality was always going to be an unpredictable force and a weak point if any infiltration were ever made into the system. But this, as Una discovered, was coming from within. The force was a form of ‘brainwalker’ able to cross psychic boundaries and synchro-normalise between world and space. She had read about it one sunny afternoon in May.
Una remembered a trip to Japan…where experts told her about the Kokura Choir, a group seeking vengeance; vowing to generationally pass down the will (The Driving Will of Kokura) to avenge atomic demons when the time to strike struck. They’d used the power of story to program future actions…and hypnotism-led brainwashing techniques.
Una had gone on a Godstrand retreat in the mountains, in Andorra…where the idea that a super smart shutdown system could be created from the original vengeware algorithm and introduced into an emerging BioWare or QASAI system framework.
She pieced together what evidence she had and sat in the dark, dwindling executively.
…while back in the land of CREE:
Kirk had taken over Atoll’s bedsit and Atoll had moved a few doors down the High Street to a theatre space he’d thrown together, that retained a facade of a crumbled old theatre. The entrance was boarded up and dangerous, access could only be had by using a trap door in the bedsit’s roof space. It didn’t match up and didn’t quite make sense physically, but the small jobs that were mounting had a mindcreep all of their own.
The reality, within the irreality, was that they had started a pair of pseudo jazz clubs… While what they were actually doing was stalling; a safety stall written deep in general commands that they were not aware of, which was a reaction to unseen manipulation; a malign misalignment thick with malevolent intent.
The current analysis of the state of step one of CREE development reported a mysterious, unpredicted force that it labelled a Mysteraneous Mortalistic Mummifactor with whom the main actor, Atoll, and the imposed add-on, Kirk, were both engaged in play; but they were the game and the MMM was toying with them. And their go to defence mechanism was to not be themselves and wait for the threat to pass.
Kirk’s spare time was frittered away in his bedsit; routing out the source of stinking smells that defied neutralising… The room seemed to manufacture olfactory impertinences on a production line. He would stare at the medieval spiral staircase, one way system, baroque on the way down, rococo on the up spiral, installed for Atoll’s use only. It was for access to the roof space and from there the hatch to his new home; a state of the art Victorian theatre replica. It remained a private work in progress, Atoll was proud of; he tried out world creation building in microcosm and bred his own encouragement, not thinking about the real CREE world outside; this was his petit bolt hole of irreality; his pocket-bottom of fluff that would resist the most determined rifling.
With what little time the hours could spare…
Atoll rose from his bed and staggered towards centre stage, he was Julius, the most famous of all caesars; stabbed by characters he’d played himself… On the dark stage, invisible, even to the people who were not there…kismet Hardy…I knew him well. And, looking into the imagined eyes that were his own, he ceased caesaring and got ready for work…it was late afternoon and the nightshift beckoned. For the sake of what contrariness he still possessed he played some air guitar with ferocious heavy metal substance, but time was closer to where it was heading than it had ever been before…so, Atoll feeling maniacal, manifested a battle cry, a elemental screech, eloquent in description of pain, conveying happenstances, which stopped mid gist due to time constraints.
Nothing terrible registered as occurring…but…
There are slow-cooking ways to destroy…the boys were being fed less and less nutrition and more and more waste product. They were being deluded to create an intellect that sucked in waste products and processed them. A dull, rusty sword fires only blanks…
Kirk performed a last hair pamper and strode with a conviction propelled gait, through the door, down the stairs and on to the street… He waited, at the nearest lamppost for his partner in time. He worked on a conducive gait on the way there… At street level he ceased being Kirk James. The vibe was tidal; he stood on the shoulders of great highways that pointed to overwhelmingly magnificent horizons… He was the rising sea, stranding all others on a withering sandbank. He possessed forged identity papers that backed up his own assertions that he was Maxizillion Ninjaminja, the Man Who Creaks with Silence. A man who, through no fault of his own, was a great thrill unto himself…maxxed out to the maxx; riding an electronic hippo. He had access to spaces beyond cool.
Atoll spills garish, out on to the street, coolgaiting himself to Kirk’s lamppost. Atoll pretends not to be himself forever more and adopts, what one could call style with what one could call substance to become he who is called, with accent or just bland: Generalissmo Privado Masqueradino, AKA, Mask.
They greet speechlessly, save a name…
‘Mask!’
‘Max…’
Well, they’re here now…so…onward to work; the onslaught of inevitability…and the fuckduggery of twisted fate… They nod and eye-comm each other peripherally in a morning synchronisation ritual as they proceed past proposed-commercial outlets that will later be stocked with all the accoutrements needed by the newbie CREE world beholders heading out into their novel eternity… The street was, at present, more a of a lane; tree-lined with a mostly full complement of pedestrian furniture. Being silent musicians; sound meant pain, but there was unsaid stuff; rich veins down in the mine, waiting to be tapped, extracting encrypted data; machinery churning and thumping miles underground in deep shafts…
Their metronomic steps beat them to work. What could they say,? What word or phrase would let the other know what they didn’t properly know themselves, jigsaw pieces of their pictured reality were missing…They were shovelling salty sea from the rickety doldrum-possessed boat, vainly sensing the gold-laden wrecked-galleon below. Their underlying thoughts might have included such ponderational malpertinence as…‘Are we on the mission? Or are we sleepers? And what mission? Confusion had to be kept as an old friend and not re-introduced as an armed alien stranger. Fear minimised; anxiety soothed and comforted…
Punctuality was woven into the fabric of this existence, if they couldn’t make it on time, time itself could slide up and down to meet them, guaranteeing the vital function of punctuality. They had both wisely, long eschewed the impedimenta of whatthefuckism…and without so much as a contrary quarter-thought…lightly staired the basement ingress holding their symbols fast.
They were musicians, demonically genius in the silent music genre. It took all they had to give to maintain that façade; they approached it like coach-bullied athletes, they left their hearts on the pitch and their pitch at the door. Their primary existence-reason was to play, and play was work, and work funnelled them into the space from which they resonated with the universe…
Both were met with representations of the system running the show: Madam S. Her fluctuations calibrated to meet the vagaries of the path of both individuals. She made them believe she was riding a tandem with them but she was a unicycle girl by nature…
Max and Mask fed the clock until it was full of them and their timeless audio classic soundtrack, as the days bled into days their normality became less taxing, but taxes needed paying, they were no billionaires…the bill mounted; they had disappeared down the wrong hole.
