Chapter Twenty

The Bleak Winter of Bad Gods

Moments when there was no Voice gave way to the voiced moment, ‘pssst,’ the Voice said, out of nowhere, launching a vessel with crucial buoyancy that Atoll couldn’t float by unnoticed… Adjustment was needed to facilitate, breathing was essential for synchronisation…

The voice would listen, to identify gaps in Atoll’s working knowledge, before mapping the foundations of a Disgapulative Investigatory Incision Procedure (DIIP). It’d go away into the Fuggulousness of Unknowing and return, baring the very puzzle pieces needed to complete the picture.

‘I am going to place the gaps like stepping stones across a river delta of data and flood them with logical conclusions,’ the Voice stated.

Its was all heavily coded and delicately ciphered. If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know. The shallows were deep and the deeps shallow…with a deep/shallow/deep intertwixated smorgasbord of illusion-lite finger-bytes casing every single word-chain above five syllables. 

‘Do you realise?’ The Voice asked, seemingly requiring an answer: Atoll went over old code management seminars, code school, cipher academy and other miscellaneous and sundry educational intakes, but had nothing, except the ‘five syllables’ rule. ‘Realise what?’

‘My secret special modus operandi throws gibber at the noded interfaces and gets undiluted jabber out the back end…’

The sense started to flow from the other side of the code wall…’gibber’, jabber’, ‘back end’, none of it meant to mean anything; it was a cryptophoric precursor to the initiation of heirographic codification. It took more time than anything else. Code woven mountain ranges of blanketry filled the horizon’s skyline silhouettes.

Atoll dialled in a record snowfall dump over Central Park as an antidote to the stifling heat he’d dialled up on Griffith Park’s hazy views over the LA basin and San Fernando Valley. He went back and forth between the two…this created a cycle of mind-state-alternate-switching that aggravated the exposed boundaries of thought restriction. He looked out at LA and thought of all the lifestyles and careers that were undergoing realisation and imagined his own insertion and success fructifying in the Californian sunshine. Then, he’d rush downstairs and do the same on the East coast.

It was usually in times when his own mind had slowed and the rat-a-tat-tat of things and stuff that demanded attention, ticked over with a hum-de-dum-dum, that the Voice fired up; thissing and thatting; thying and thouing…putting the world to rights.

The Voice rarely used the word ‘code’ but did repeat the phrase, ‘In the world of Code even a clock is right three times a day,’ frequently. It meant nothing more than the commencement of ‘Rapid Talk Insemination’ (RTI), when the Voice would generate vast mind-palaces built on the say-so of coded construction.

The Voice unearthed tentacle-trenched networks of story; recounting folk tales bristling with moral and meaning and varying smatter-fields of code potentiality. The Voice possessed a relentless resolve in the pursuit of medium to high story delivery. Intonation and tone had to be examined for decipherability; even pronunciation could not escape the need for forensic microscopification.

The Voice, upbeat interpretation harbingering a downbeat ill, as twists had become a pattern, told Atoll a tale of a young man who had never been allowed to live his own life. This tale took a lifetime to recount; its main character seemingly being subjected to torture-lite in real time, time after time…

This Unfortunate had been born into the experimental world of his scientist parents, who had always prioritised science over parenting. Everything about the protagonist in this story swapped and turned into stagnant pools where his life of doom-laden paucity trod water in naive appreciation. Atoll felt the pitter-patter of pity as the guy was tenderly ripped into strips by the claws of angels. A soulfelt whimper shivered in sympathy for the victim of human menace. As the telling persisted fiction began to be left behind; nothing sudden…a striding out into fields of faction and then beyond…up to fresh pastures of documentary in 16k, finessed-pixel-fidelity.

The Voice said, with an oft-repeated raconteurious familiarity, ‘I can see him now…drugged and reliant on the support of an oxygen tent, hooked up to banks of machinery. Lost in world’s Mother Nature never bade him entry. Life, to him was test after test between appraisal, evaluation and assessment; ramped up challenges fed to him like the magazine into a hungry gun in an anti-war movie. They pasted him over with merciless sterility; released him into the wild they had wilded up to the outer parameters of limitation. All to see if he would make a viable ‘human’ component of a highly dubious and thinly theoretical hybrid entity. 

It was all he knew so he didn’t perceive cause for complaint…but resentment is another matter, she operates underground manufacturing facilities; drives all-pervasive delivery systems. The young man, like a moth caught in a flame; like a pupae imprisoned within a chrysalis stopped in time by some weird and unnecessary experiment…got older while staying younger…sentenced to a freak’s life, his own input and output filtered through Stultified Castrational Tethering Submoronics (SCTS)… He was the product of others; secondhand without being preloved… The ultimate object of the project was to remove his humanity, replacing it with a marshalled part-humanity and marrying it to demonic, uncontrollable non-human (potentially inhuman) intimacy. They were creating the monster of monsters; the last great monster; that’s what they were aiming for.’

The story had been zipping itself into small bags of denouement; ready to empty into the one big refuse sack of old and told story; and on to the great landfill of human narrative.

Atoll wanted to throw light at the bleak winter of bad gods that had befallen the young, or possibly old, man in the story. Then in some kind of night; fumbling and stumbling to catch up; adrenalin leading the charge at suspiciously windmill-shaped shadows…it occurred to him, in vivid; the point of the pointless tale: he was the point, Atoll was the point…was he not? He was not…he was…was he? If he wasn’t, the question would have hit the buffers, but it kept on going, steaming into the night… And in the morning, bright and early, it sat there, burnished and brooding, raring to eat rails and chase sleepers…He’d hauled his ass aboard the caboose before realising…and chocks away…whistling shrill.

The Sun’s light fed into the Earth’s rotational reacquaintance with a newborn mellow sanctity… By the time Atoll was down the stairs and into a different time zone his freight heavy mood needed soothing, so he put the squeezed greenery of Central Park on the slowest setting, to elongate the sunrise, and stretch sanity into a secure consistency. He poured himself the plant-based breakfast of champions, his need for answers welling up into a water main that was bound to burst.

As soon as the Voice ‘appeared’ Atoll asked it, ‘Who am I? Do you know? Do you know who I am? Tell me.’

A pause for consideration that could have had just about anything read into it led to metastrophic, cataphonic, obliterative rebuilding of the pervading belief ethos.

‘Jeff, Dave, Kirk, Una, Viktor…’ the voice said, slowly, precisely in individual packets of nomenclature.

Atoll was expecting too little from everything the morning delivered and was not arranged in such a way to accept the incoming that loomed somewhere way above the clouds of expectation; a dot in the vast firmament.

‘…you are all the same node!’

Atoll’s mind raced past bleacher-stands full of screaming-questions…he’d flash past…just to run away again, lap after lap. The chequered flag, an empty limp board game, was the signal for him to stop chasing escape and face the anthems of those who would always beat him to the post.

‘Sybil is a different story, she’s classed as an Ineradicable Fabricational Outsurping Insider (IFOI)…she is not the same as you, but nonetheless part of you. Like an infection.’

It was hard for Atoll to place himself in all of the revelation but he was beginning to feel like there was proof on file: Atoll was manufactured…he felt like the product of someone else’s imagination. He did have assertive ideas, but none were serviceable, let alone actionable. It became obvious that physical laws were governing the situation that would not allow for any freelance shenanigans or shenanigan-like behaviour. Without being driven by some powerful outside force he possessed little form or function; his autonomous resources were meagre at most…he would never go with the flow but the flow was taking him with it. It was not clear whether he was thinking freely or merely reconstituting what they fed to him in pools of mental vomit.

To get to know who he really was he would have find out who ‘they’ were. Atoll knew very little about them except that they used subtle and untraceable communication directives to de-brief and issue a new briefing for the next phase; a feeling would emanate that seemed to have instructions attached…it wasn’t obvious but it was distinctive, like a smell within an odour hidden under the waves of a master stench.

It was made clear, somehow (likely some sort of relayed imprint electrochemical snatch-disturbance critical feathering system, or systems) that Atoll was to enter the sub-stub of the UKGBHQ control bunker and be the only entity to remain alive before being extracted. With a disturbing mix of emotions that fell under the wheels of dread, he told himself that they were not real and neither was he…which allowed some excitement at the prospect of progression from the current stasis, to seep out and seek gratification’s heady reward.

The Voice was not transferable and had to stay, ‘I will see what shananigan-like preverbalist pervandalism we can get up to here.’

‘No…I don’t want you to do anything…leave everything just how it is.’

Just what I thought…’

‘What?’

‘You’re a straight jacket.’

‘Whatever, just don’t change anything.’

Atoll was worried the Voice might audibly change the place so he disabled all voice activated control systems. And turned his mind to the prospect of a golf shop reunion as the pre-bunker lead in to the sub-stub action.

But chances were as chances did they’d have him embarking up the wrong tree-lined avenue. When he materialised he was in the bunker…and he wasn’t…he was in the bunker, inside Botface’s Torso’s jail. The final part of the mission was to enter the jail; it was all starting head to face… Unless he’d been edited with recollection redaction gates. Unable to connect with the bunker; he’d have to deal with the current situation and find his way back.

Botface had been designed to work as a local sheriff. Every area from small country hamlet to large urban sprawl would have their own ‘constable’ bristling with the technology to serve and assist, bringing a never hereforeto seen security and super-abundant crimelessness. The flip side being: The Botface Corporation had files on everyone and could eavesdrop legally on the spoken word and matched that to any online activity to create a criminality scale that catered for most personalities. Their snooper satellites could even monitor the the thought of anyone who had been conned into receiving Headsketch Mindfrank implants. Arbitrary thresholds decided how one was graded. The Botface Corporation had been set up to create the illusion of freedom within a captive population.

The jail was an Autodelusional Mental Inescapability Surrogate Space (AMISS) that was almost entirely supported by the detainee’s own mind that was being directed, misdirected and redirected directly and indirectly. Atoll had been trained in its use, if only theoretically, and his practical CREE world building experience gave him further understanding so he could translate the background working code; re-enter the looped interaction decipherer to enable the reassembly of the auto-directional command pivoting, subtiphising into brute-welted manual orchestrational fluctuation manoeuvres.

‘The bars are not really there,’ he told himself, calmly; refraining from adding: ‘But, then neither are you…’

The majority of ‘guests’ saw bars and a bad situation; the chariot of freedom, overturned in terminal steam expiry further down the savage road of death. But Atoll mused and chuckled…there was a whole world out there, hiding, waiting to be discovered…created first, and then discovered.

What he had come to understand was that the world beyond the cage was a construct of his own mind and he had been trained to use it; open up its highways and byways and use communications from the unconscious to discover the parallel world of himself. And this seemingly restricted adventure that, on the face of it existed in his own mind contained actually much, much more, because within the unconscious realm there were border crossings into the limitlessly vast worlds created by collective unconscious manifestation and generation of the internal universe.

First the seemingly impossible escapology; a jailbreak from his own mimd; so unexpected that the panopticon registering his every move and stillness was switched off. All he had to do was imagine ‘it’…bolster and nurture its fledgling creational physicality with tenable day to day mundanity and go forth and use its avenues and alleyways like veins in a reconstituted corpse.

Out of Atoll’s past training a building arose some ten clicks out into the supposed wilderness…it was a filing cabinet of memories; each storey a draw full of files…the contents of each file recorded in a format that could be translated into an interactive form of reality called Actual Actuality (AA). Each folder a room, or suite of rooms, capable of hosting characters to enact the code needed to decipher what data was being held. It was less a debilitating incarceration and more an enabling blast into the lake of knowledge and self-understanding…

Atoll slipped between the bars, and technically on the run, sought the kind of answers about existence that no other human had ever had the opportunity to investigate. Using the dense jungle of his own mind and the hidden caverns of the collective unconscious that were heaving below.