Chapter Twenty-Eight
Limerance: Shallow Grave Between the Sheets
There must have been something wrong with him all of a sudden, because her face transformed from manifesting a standardness that had its own charm, to displaying a ship-launching beauty that took nothing but what it wanted and left everything else in a desecrated pile of aching loss and oblivion.
They were behind the crates, stageside. A veil of anxiety, Atoll never knew he had, lifted as though some corrective process was taking place; a reshaping of perceived actuality. It occurred to Atoll that he had never really belonged to anything or anyone just at the moment it was being made emotionally clear to him that he was going to belong to Sybil and the system she orchestrated. The moment he saw her standing there beside him, crateside, he’d realised he’d been begotten by some greater force. She’d taken up the reins and he’d whinnied, yes, and perhaps whimpered a little. He poked his own objections but they sat in staunch silence, arms folded… He’d been queuing outside that mysterious nightclub of Life where maturing young things go to gain the knowledge to move on with the power of tribal ceremony. She took him under her wing and smuggled him in; by the time they hit the dance floor her name was tattooed on his chest…
Atoll had intended to stay out of the performance focus zone, but the act spread out, (as if the narrative had risen and reached out for more story fodder), to encompass the crated area nestled prop strewn on the stage’s apron… Atoll became included involuntarily and wished heartily for a break in the performance for a rehearsal fix that could lead him into the action seamlessly, but then the play stood still; frozen in drama, a snapshot of quotidian mundanity, and the Pressure Gods let their collective feet ease off the accelerator pedals.
Atoll and Sybil, the two of them distinct from all others, performed an initial data swap that burgeoned into something akin to byte-happy-data mania. She could see right through him, informed by a death-versus-alliance indecision that was busy making up its mind….whereas, his view of her stopped right where it was and chased its own tail. She was leaving the final decision to his conscience, and how dedicated he would be if amalgamated into the general scheme of her ongoing being, and how willing he was to completely cut off from all previous loyalties and obligations. Compliance, in excelsis, offered salvation. Her authenticity levels met thresholds, on paper and off.
She was a person about which assumptions had been manufactured, which explained why everything he had previously been told about her was lodged between negative doomtrudging and nasty sludgebuckets. But the information surrounding her; the scaremongering and deliberate character assassination, was biased to the point of propaganda. The Super Smart Shutdown System he had been trained exhaustively in had evolved and the tools he had accrued to counter the threat of it were all blunt.
She could either read his mind or had read the notes pertaining to what his mind had been set to do; she knew all about Viktor and his plan to abduct her and modify her badbilly shutdown sensitivity parameters in order to close the stub… ‘You think Viktor sides with anyone but himself, or his multiple personalities?’
She did not seem to know about Viktor upgrading to Tiny Viktor Guy, and that, at least, was weaponizable against her as insurance, but then, in a blurt of willing weakness, he said, ‘Neé Viktor, now Tiny Viktor Guy.’
Her face flushed with update-spasmodics momentarily…
‘The plan,’ she said, ‘to close the stub…typically Viktrovian…while sounding productively positive, necessitates Viktor, now Tiny Viktor Guy, owning and running the repurposed stub, which is a conflict of interests…leaving Viktor, Tiny Viktor Guy, as the one billionaire, as dangerous as ten standard billionaires. We must rapidly develop some greater plan shapes.’
‘What about the children?’
‘About the children.’
Atoll had not understood the full inter-actual fundamentality of the situation. He wasn’t going to get it any time soon so Sybil stepped in, ‘they are a virus, an untreatable infection. We are infected. One of the symptoms is an overwhelming urge to spread the contagion to all perpetually operational nodes.’
Atoll checked himself and detected some truth in what she was saying; a truth that magnified and evolved. He did indeed have a developing sense of purpose in the widening expectation of spreading the word; he just needed to fully grasp what those words were in order to explanotrate them fully… As Atoll honed in on experiential feedback reports, the presence that was in and all around him became apparent…he had the virus alright: Bobby, Rob, Bob and Robert. He was already developing a dominant sense of public duty to spread it as far and wide as possible… It felt totally mad yet under control; a feeling supported by vehicular delivery of super-doable objective fruition.
Atoll recognised the counter-perspective where his quarantining along side Sybil would be the preferred mode of onward travel; a moral diktat stood guardian and spoke freely and with abandon about ethically anchored seeds of great import, but Atoll seeped through its fingers with supramoral over-justification; wormhole-wording with weaselmole-hamper adjustifications and a blessing of righteous rectitude.
He did wonder where this powerful moral right to conquer and convert had come from… He chewed on it for a while…sitting bolt upright and spitting out verisimilitude; lightbulbing into a state of epiphany: the Kokura Choir…of the infamous stage play (aided by Elipsis’s description):
Chuck and Jo…
G & G Laboratories…
The old man of Kokura…’blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun’…
The Children of Gaza: they were the Gift of Vengeance that blessed the rising of the blood red Sun…
‘When a mass existential threat to Humanity is detected the Seed of the Gift of Vengeance will sprout from its dormancy…’ Convinced a threat to Humanity had been detected, Atoll was now in the business of the distribution of its nemesis. And all forward progression was now in a distinct form of motion that oozed traction from its very wheels…
The spiral staircase was hidden in a place Sybil would never find it, but Atoll took them swiftly there. Atoll disembarked from theatreland as though a blood transfusion had weakened the greasepaint that had coursed through his veins and put him under the spell of stagecraft…
They squeezed into the tightening funnel and spilled down the steps. At the bottom, additional alternate points of egress had been added, pointing to upgrade work done by Tiny Viktor Guy sanctioned entities.
Luckily they found themselves in the portal-suite deep below the UKGBHQ bunker-hub control-centre and nuclear submarine training unit; in the sub of the stub…They made their way toward the surface. They were cctv’d all the way, targets moving steadily toward the arrow tip of fate. Atoll was anxious about the inevitable encounter with the Commander. His fear maxed out when she appeared right before him. The walls and ceiling closed in fast, but stopped short of crushing him when Sybil spoke and reassured him she was merely a flawless, exact replication of the Commander.
‘I am going to play the Commander, be the Commander, be the play, reflect the Commander back at herself until she doesn’t know who is who, and seeks logical internal bypass devices to rectify her predicament, and in doing so, falling right into the flushing channel of the plan’s evacuation chute. It will serve to initiate self-reevaluation within her shame related ID circuitry. If we can neutralise the Commander it will pave the way to reaching the surface without dark forces climbing all over us. I can read her own mind back to her with double-feedback auto-perception overload…and ease in some cerebral tease augmentation…’
Meanwhile in the control and command hub, the Commander’s concern throbbed into action, ‘are we looking at a recording?’ Visuals of herself heading towards the bridge, were leading to confusion and she sought clarification. Mr. Paranoia sang warning-siren songs with stark nasal despair…while Mr. Threat came to tea; going straight upstairs to change; coming back down as the grim reaper’s German uncle on a messy reaping spree.
The Commander grabbed the Tannoy handset, ‘Please approach with caution,’ she advised, not wanting any harm to come from auto-security systems primed for hair-triggered overkill.
‘Am I talking to myself?’
‘Err…’ the ultra-sophisticated AI spox replied, unsurprised at what was transpiring.
‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes and no.’
The Commander saw herself, perhaps for the first time. Either physical laws were bing desiccated in a spiked mangle or her mind was capable of far greater inverted fantasy misperception than she had budgeted for. But that aside, she found herself thinking, hope against hope, there was seriously joyful life-enhancing fun and games ahead that circumvented the need for anyone else to be involved. The Commander was a miserly old hand at facial control. Her mind was doing handstands, juggling and spinning razor sharp exploding plates, but no one would be alerted to that fact by however deeply they perused her geometric physiognomy’s architecture.
She monitored herself closing in on the screens….zoning in…heart pumping. ‘What would I do?’ she thought, ‘would it be roughshoddery dished out in bottomless tureens, or earnest attempts at integratory autofucksation?’
‘One could always facilitate,’ she mused, with dark auto-masochistic-sadism, ‘the arbitrary barbarity of a thorough-going bastardess-in-waiting.’
‘Time is of the essence,’ the Commander said, off the top of her head.
‘What essence?’ the assistant replied.
‘The essence of time…’
‘How can the essence of time be of the essence of time,’ the assistant pushed going down the well-worn road of logic.
‘That is not what I’m saying.’
‘That is exactly what you said.’
She switched off the artificial personal assistant and paced back and forth to create momentum… If a rogue split-second required rapidity she would not be on the back foot.
