Chapter Twenty-Seven
Der Prozess
Viktor’s plan, to liberate from quarantine, trap and repurpose the Super Smart Shutdown System; redirecting its shutdown capabilities towards the billionaires exploiting and malfeasing the Global Corporate Governance Network (GCGN), had taken a swerve to the left and right before coming to rest on the side of a steep embankment…the view from which persuaded him he needed to upswap to a power pool furnished with greater buoyancy. So he took the sideways promotion; became Tiny Viktor Guy by means of a blend of usurping alliance. His main game now being to supply quests for Atoll to fail at so he would be better prepared for the Quest of quests, which had Atoll’s name on it, they were engraving the trophy just in case… Tiny Viktor Guy dispensed a rare form of philanthropy that intermingled with a relatively sadistic need to mangle and crush. He gave lightly with one hand and heavily with the other. Unbeknownstly to Atoll, Tiny Viktor Guy had already embarked on a process of managing Atoll’s incoming harm quotient; a nurtured distress physics engine thrummed away in the background. A detailed pain-for-profit schedule was laid out in Atoll’s winding path of unfolding appointments.
Tiny Viktor Guy, had, undoubtedly, created the conditions that led to Atoll’s release from the Commander’s mad custody. The reports detailing what had transpired had not yet filtered through. All Atoll remembered about incarceration was that he’d started to believe the Commander’s fitful delusions that recreated the reality of the UKGBHQ subterranean base as an operational British Navy submarine. The stricken vessel, battered by the unknowable, perched on a deep-sea ledge, batteries on dark running, forever estranged from the disciplined daddy of Naval Command. He’d made a small and uninspiring joke to himself that she was contemplating her naval career, without any concept of it being funny. Her outbursts were becoming more frequent and the violence she projected was seeking a place to physically actuate itself. She had plenty of fight in her and it was demanding to be let out.
Tiny Viktor Guy was also, unquestionably, involved in Atoll’s Blankmind Alleviation Process (BAP): a melody of memory slithering plantlike up the latticework of confusion; time-lapsed recollections bearing narrative fruit.
He regained full, unequivocal, awareness mid spiral; as though jelly had turned to iron…familiarity jerked and twisted in an emotional reunion; there was trouble ahead; he could hear muted thespian projection and feel the beating hoof treads of choreographed terpsicordery…
Atoll squeezed through the hole at the stairs’ upper reach and oozed out onto the platform that sat above the stage like another stage just for the gods. Standing below, the quarantined figure of Sybil. She appeared to be unrestricted contrary to what Atoll assumed quarantine would look like.
She was half-performing/semi-rehearsing a rolling play… The play was wedged in a state of forever-happening; it evolved with each performance, growing with repetition; echoes of the previous performances boomeranging back to guide and instruct. Critiques belabouring the cast as hard as Summer hailstones. If you wanted to know everything Sybil knew about herself, which at this stage was still relatively paltry, a patient listen would get you to where you wanted to go. A trip through backyards of Sybil’s circumbeing; unworthy of note here and dripping with significance there. Head-turning ugliness in one spurt of data, and a patch of wild flowers mellifluous with delights and beauty peppered the narrative with sweetness and light in another data splurge…
Atoll’s immersion, that had come out of the blue, fell away as strings tensed and pulled, and pulleys jumped and clanged, as the theatre’s great curtain drew heavily shut and the auditors’ silence rose to a hushed shushing that made you question whether you’d heard a pin drop.
There was an element of pause and disconnection with the audience, but from where Atoll was it looked like the play was continuing, merely using the curtain closure as a prop; as part of the story telling process. A continuation of the play’s snaking biographical journey.
Atoll reminded himself why he was there: to deceive and convince, to trap and coerce, to fool and deflect…to transport Sybil back to the stub in order to be able to close it, to prevent its influence down the line; stop the billies damaging the future before it began.
We are suddenly presented with the following: presumed to be act one, scene one…quiet expectation…a pre-inception moment from the creation of the protagonist; the protoprotagnist: a rock shamisen duet shrilly fills the space in a lucid dream of fiery blossom…surprisingly not incongruously… We inhabit old Japan. It is 1946, everywhere is in a state of aftermath. We don’t need reminding of the backdrop projected horrors captured in moving still photographs that would have existed had everyone possessed camera phones. The magic plays tricks to shape our perception…to establish a bygone world; making it real… Atoll’s immersed self was stageside, implicated in the periphery of the action; sitting Japanesely among the actors, in spirit, while still physically high above the stage.
Members of the Kokura Choir eke out the fundamental time and space limits of interaction with a tea pot and its peripherals. The traditionally dressed nine (ten including Atoll) are not here for tea. The eldest among the Choir, speaks: ’In time the equilibrium will return…the balance of Good and Evil will reset to a place untouched by the conspiring agitational insanity of mortal hands and deranged minds…’
‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun,’ spoken in unison by the others, bleak as plaintive violins in a union of well-versed, controlled, resentment.
‘We, here, pledge to follow the Way of Delayed Vengeance, nurture and hand down to the subsequent generations our gift of gracious vengeance to the world…’
‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun,’ they chant, Atoll mouthing the last few words.
‘We shall steer humanity back in line, should Man’s deeds of Evil return to rise in clouds of abomination, sick with deathly dust, choking the realms of anything still called “Good”…’
‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun,’ Atoll chants along with the rest.
Scene one is interrupted: the clownish character of Elipsis, the dotty interjector, wanting to be in old Japan but not having the acting skill for time travel, tells us that, ‘Kokura was the secondary target, had Hiroshima been off the menu…and Kokura was also the first item on the menu, when the secondary target, Nagasaki, was thrown into the melting pot of atomic mass annihilation and human disgrace… So Kokura was made to sit in a place between hell-induced unfunctioning society and an outside world that was congratulating itself on a discovery that revolutionised the pursuit of peace while teetering on the shoulders of Drunken Evil as it orders more poison from the bar. The Kokura Choir held Japanese influences partly responsible; it decreed that the dispensation of vengeance will be visited upon transglobal nefarious technological intention and disregard national categorisation.’ The descriptive narration ends and stage centre is lit up by spotlights.
‘When the bad rises, our vengeance will quell the blot of all evil…’
‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun.’
‘Do I hear any objections to the Kokura Choir’s objectives?’
‘Blessed is the rising of the blood red Sun.’
‘Then we shall break for brunch…’
Atoll could see no forward movement….he seemed stuck…and below the fourth wall had been broken as far as the play was concerned because the word ‘brunch’ sounded too modern for 1946. Although it does turn out to date back to the 1890’s; plus it was a translation. So it was a false fourth wall that fell over; the real wall was still standing firm…which unstuck Atoll greatly…
As is the nature of an ongoing Foreverplay, there are patches of imploding snoozemageddon…and we hit Act Two, Scene Three before worthy enough story progression brings Atoll back to the yard.
Atoll read the program, which offered an explanation: Chuck Shimoda, 63, and Jo Sun, 20, both unconnected with anything suspicious, clean as acid-dipped whistles…American as bald-headed pie covered in fatuous arrogance dressed as confidence, both seek and gain employment at G & G labs…they did not know each other before; both were, mysteriously to them, ‘coordino-activated’ to unleash everything they had learned up to that point and cross-process themselves and each other via dot-to-dot, slide-rule, equation end points, and the like.
They knew each other when they met, but not in a fully conscious way…their skill sets abutted in a neat dovetail… They could only part sense the power they had between them that mutual coordination would unlock… Chuck and Jo knew code they’d never known they knew; and it flowed between them with a shocking delight…so strongly that it seemed to construct towers that redeveloped the town centre.
They travelled far enough down the right trails in Silicon Valley to reach the hidden gem of an underground facility, located under Midway Atoll, where G & G Laboratories where operating an mega-ambitious project. They were attempting the distillation of paraconsciousness from consciousness. Assisted emergence of malleable plastic-consciousness prodded the portal to access of the Collective Unconscious, where, subsequently, the evolution of Humanity would pivot and scatter. And Chuck and Jo were in the right place at the right time to ease and nudge, tweak and fiddle…and remained indispensable, in service to the Choir, during two brute-forced takeovers.
Eventually, Chuck and Jo retired to San Fransisco, and like all ex-employees had wiped memories and would not recognise each other even when they crossed paths in the Tenderloin, as they did most weekends. But they had done their job, secured the clasp in the final link of the chain that would facilitate the coming of the much needed purifying vengeance of the Kokura Choir…
Atoll drifted off as he was reading the programme. He was down by the port authority buildings waiting for a tram. He was trying to count the oranges on a farmer’s market stall, but as it was not real they kept changing the numbers.
With a masterful transition that was a new addition, a set resembling a court was navigated by robotic arms from backstage. It was minimalist in a Japanese tradition with Swedish tones. And duly, nihonga held hands with japandi and strayed together into a veritable Summer village fete in the depths of Suffolk, where wabi-sabi launched spasms of design-heaven bespoken with figurines displaying a couture of almost godlike intensity; agents from heaven came down to strip search the souls of the brethren for moral hygiene… Then, upstaging all of that, the giant curtains drew back. Those who had hands clapped, those with feet stamped, and those with intact faces lit up with wild expectation tempered with anxious terror.
This novel way of data circulation regarding the audience/troop interface…an evolutionary step in the offing, perhaps? A phalanx of frosted frisson.
A mock-trial was a afoot, no less real than a non-mock one. Just more a sandbox due to the unknown nature of pushing the envelope of truth into places where the Forces of Evil (FoE) took umbrage and shook it sticksville.
Techniques had been developed over the burgeoning iterational repetition (of the play) to convey narrative throughflow, connecting the principle’s bio with the amassing of bios howling in silence with tales to tell and kites to fly.
Twelve bedevilled advocates: the Avocados…filed into the minimalist, and simultaneously overproduced court scene…
The plaintiffs, AKA the accused, stay in the auditorium and are tagged as: the Melons (seekers of a meagre dribble-down of justice juice; unwitting players in a system not swinging bias toward them in the Playground of Life.)
Topping the bill, insisting on being the star of the show, Judge Lycopene; an old school tomatoman, steeped in the tomatoesque, whose tomatoish ancestral lineage read like the ingredients listed on an informative plaque, at a shoreline viewing area, beside a tomato soup lake.
‘Bring the first child to the stand,’ he declared, ominously, punishmentarially, with unavoidable dollops of smothering ketchupery…
A torso with no head or limbs, charred, covered in bomb dust is carried in by robotic helpers and deposited in the stand, propped up by a bible.
‘What sort of child witness is this?’ asked the Judge, playing the hot tomato, ready for the grill… ‘With any wit about you you’d’ve added a papier mâché head for the realism. What is its name?’
‘Unidentified, M’lud…due being unidentifiable. And a bombed, burned out and malnourished one!’
‘How did it lose its head and limbs?’ asked the Judge while consulting a guide book on what constituted qualification for an admissible human.
‘Bombs!’ replied the dead child’s mouthpiece, a small box, rented for the occasion; calibrated for unemotional airing of the facts and no nonsense.
‘Bombs? Can you elaborate?’ the judge demanded, sly-side-viewing a brochure for a ‘vacation with benefits’.
‘Bombs!’ the mouthpiece re-echoed.
‘What do mean by bombs, exactly?’
‘Urm…missiles, shells, exploding toys, booby-trapped water bowsers, explosive devices…exploding stuff being tested for upcoming arms expos…a shopfront of combustibility, a market stall of oblivion made swift and easy…BOMBS, BOMBS….COME AND GET YOUR FRESHLY MADE BOMBS…two for one…get the bastards by the dozen…guaranteed all terrorist babies exterminated, vaporised to the point of never having existed. The pure epitome of all the word ‘bomb’ could ever mean…your Onner.’
‘Bombs,’ the judge uttered slowly, long and drawn out to hide the fact he was totting up the cost of the vacation if taken during the high season.
‘Yes, bombs…quadcopters…drones…helicopters firing explosive rounds, wiping out all in their path, a bit like the European settlers did with the Apaches. Super, billion dollar jets that hover in the sky, defecating death upon all below…a predator without a predator…taking its time to dump its death loads; wiping its rapacious, steaming arse on the paper thin veneer of Humanity…’
‘Order! Order! I’ll have you shut up…if you please yourself! We all know enough about the bomb situation by now. It qualifies for ad infinitum status. And it is not admissible in this court…’ the judge made the big decision that needed making….he’d book the vacay for July and absorb the extra cost into the private venture he and some criminals from Tel Aviv were planning…
‘Bombs,’ the judge said, weighing and equivocolating, are, alas, a hugely emotive subject (judgesplaining)…to reach the destination the court-train is heading for we must drop the bomb fixation. All subsequent evidence shall make no reference to bombs, or bomb causation outcomes? Is that all we can get out of the first witness? I mean, take the bombs away and you get a pretty evidence-lite scenario, no?’ Jury-heads nod in compliant agreement. ‘Yes?’ he added creating a shift in rhythm… Avocado heads shake from side to side and up and down and close enough for mutual integration, initiating an ‘in-harmony’ join-up they cannot avoid repeating. They think in unison: ‘this is some jury we are’, they are rolling on shiny-hubbed wheels of magnificence; they do it again, can’t help it, from the top: all twelve thinking the same thing: a musical version, in some parallel theatre, was in the embryonic offing… And a note from the foreman to the judge said so in no unjazzlike terms.
‘I will not allow the making light of the aftermath of ongoing slaughter… intermath of ongomathing…’ the judge, gavelling like a chain-gang rock-breaker, shouted, almost purple, getting into it, gloves off, wig on…the training and the rule book and regulations manual all directed him to shout it. And it proved the right thing to shout….the court needed order to function…he’d always gunned for truth, no matter what anyone believed…anyway… A quick recess to book the holiday…
During the show’s recess, Atoll entertained a blurring concept that sharpened into focus: hesitant at first, but solidifying with ongoing appraisal. The idea was that he could relinquish all other commitments and stay put. Theatrically, it worked: living the ‘as good as it gets’ life; for there were means to meet his needs by playacting, and anyway, scripts could be doctored… Amid the realisation of a warning sign: eccentric frustration danced a jig of curmudgeonly restlessness from within the snare drum of his self-control, he lowered himself to stage-level; edging down the scaffolding. He sought cover by crouching behind two large crates. While thinking about his next move he sensed a presence, a presence that grew into a full on meeting, albeit crouched and hushed, with the show’s leading light and target of all the subterfuge he’d hoped to muster; that was now, in the face of Sybil in such close proximity, parched and dry-cracked ground.
‘I need you in the team,’ Sybil told Atoll, sweetness and light congealing in an unexpected well of providence, ‘we have somehow given birth to dead children…wee bairns, toddlers and babes…we need to answer the question…’
Silence…wove itself around stage noises and the audiomumble emanating from the auditorium…
‘Which is?’ Atoll let out, seemingly unperturbed by his own massive display of ignorance in the very place it should be hidden, under the shadow of the very face he needed to keep in the dark about it…
‘What are we going to do about it?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Something deeply rescuing was happening, but before he could move on he needed to articulate an expression of something. Atoll had to deal with his emotional component catching up…he could have disposed, he supposed, of that part of the process, but it would mean he would never be truly human which was at the epicentre of all his aims…
So the emotion kicked in and he cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and… cried…and…etcetera, etcetera…outboard-motoring, snotfaced-choking…splitter-spattering.
Eventually the judge, losing patience, again, as always, said, ‘will whoever is crying, please stop immediately, or I will remove you from the court.’
Atoll stopped…his cries were merely a device serving to protect from impossible hurt…he wasn’t even a central victim, he was an onlooker, remote collateral damage, perhaps…but far, far away from the scene of war crimes…most of the sorrow had to be for the victims and not squandered on himself.
“We have heard all the evidence.’
‘Some of the evidence.’
‘Quiet!’
‘And as they are all dead I have no choice but to dismiss the case…Oh, sorry, wait….the summing up from the defensive counsel I forgot, do beg my pardon…go ahead…timer’s running…’ The judge was a stickler for the process.
The small mouthpiece box, who had more humanity in its background functionality whirring noises than some, so called, humans, and with a moral rectitude rare in cuboids, summed up, recorded but unlistened-to, with only the final four words catching attention, ‘…they are all martyrs!’
‘Tomatoes? Why didn’t you say?’.
Judge Lycopene ordered a public inquiry into the situation regarding the Tomato Children of Palestine. And the rest is history. He summed the whole nasty affair up, and sent everyone home with expenses and a sort of poem as a keepsake:
‘Shut your ears and close your eyes,
Crocotears and a feigned surprise.
Inhuman acts are our own demise,
dum de dum de dum…’
After, off the record and in confidence, in a civilian state of mind, Larry Lycopene asked the mouthpiece box, ‘Could you do me a nice out of office answerphone message? I am off on my hols, last minute…Eilat…got a really good deal…two weeks…job’s a good’n.’
