Chapter Twenty-Two

Tiny Guy

‘Don’t sign anything! Get out of there!’ came the mailroom shouts; froth-topped waves of roiling urgency.

With a scampering sprint, Atoll exited the New York detective agency that, despite its apparent authenticity, and truly splendid views, was a cover for yet another Vistamatic Trudisplay marketing operation. So convincing. So disconcerting.

Once in the safety of a mezzanine foyer, some three storeys up, outside a progressive dance and offensive self-defence studio, Atoll composed himself. The kind of debt those views get you in is debilitating, smothering. He would not be at liberty to go about his freelancing knight-lite escapades lifestyle if tied down by such debt.

‘The person you need to see was the person we asked to see in the first place…’ the mailroom chided.

Atoll felt a cold blast of injustice at the guilt the chiding made him take on. It wasn’t his fault. Imagining himself getting to the Head by springing out of a giant cake, the climax of a circuitously baked entrance channel, helped him over the hump of perceived injustice, but the guilt simmered…

Atoll needed an audience with the Head. He was concerned, perhaps overworriedly, that the Head would be Botface’s Head; a monster by any recognised general grading system.

The mailroom and Atoll willed each other to come up with some idea that might enable a visit with the Head. Obviously, Atoll said nothing, but his backrunning imagination, would not sit still, busily persisting with giant cake plot variations. If they had been living within the confines of a slap-stick cartoon, Atoll’s genius would’ve shone through the game’s physics.

What he really needed was the saturating sagacity of the Voice, whom he missed heartfeltedly. The nitty question arose: what would the Voice say? And the gritty answer had to be along the lines of: go to the roof and jump off.

Typical Voicey. It sounded at minimum brash and at maximum stone-cold-potty. Leaving the giant cake scheme aside, Atoll examined the words of the Voice (what he’d guessed the Voice would’ve said) and reasoned that the Head, if indeed that was its name, being in charge of security and public safety would not allow a stranger to walk in off the street and jump off the building onto the street without system notification and decisive execaction. You had to hand it to the Voice; it knew what was what even when it wasn’t. It was a plan that, as ill-advised to the minds of the unknowing as it was, presented Atoll with a way out. The timing had to be perfect; the ‘jumper’ narrative had to climax with the Head, directly or indirectly, being the hero with happily ever after presenting itself as a viable option. The plan could not be nipped in the nuggets prematurely or the straight jackets would come out to stop play.

Atoll was taken by the idea of offensive dancing. The studio he was in the outside foyer of taught a modern version of unathletic Capoeira mixed with a magician’s touch of sneakily positioning oneself for a first strike coup-de-gras move; the don’t twat about with the surprise application of devastation, shimmy and shock doctrine.

Atoll was mentally applying the techniques displayed in graphics on wall-charts outside the closed studio to the delivery system he was beginning to formulate for onward sale to the Special Forces (dessert division): the giant cake ambush assault….

A jolting train of incoming data, via the E-Tannoy, dissolved Atoll’s giant cake plot, which was nothing more than a fantasy-generation overthought being transmitted from an outdated program loop sent from the lab to calm and nudge into neighbouring ruts of co-narrative, but also to manipulate, modify and reprogram.

‘Will…a mister Goodmanson…please proceed to the entrance of the Vistamatic sales department situated on the antepenultimate floor in relation to the roof. This is a direct order from the Head. To avoid transference related outcomes will mister Goodmanson please make his way there immediately?’

The mailroom was betwixt formulating advice other than to go, be wary and don’t sign any documentation.

The E-Tannoy played the recording of what it had just said.

Was this it? An audience with the Head. The whole general mundanity rules-while-it-sucks, had created the impression that the Atoll meets Head outcome was going to take a far more circuitous route, maybe even involving a dark night of the soul before the climax. But this looked like it was going to end sometime during the first act; Atoll hoped whoever was running the show was making sure the puzzle pieces were in place before moving on.

None of the top floors were accessible from the building without coded entrance to a small utility cubby that had a false ceiling that led to a retractable ladder that climbed past two dead floors that were taken up by the workings of machinery that was ready for a jump in technology that would enable the top three floors, as one element, to detach and transport themselves, as some sort of terrestrial spaceship, to wherever the Head wanted them to go, within reason. That was all in the dream plan stages but nevertheless worth noting.

The floor had all the accoutrements of a bona fide sales operation. One could easily imagine being dragged to the fantastical sea-bottom of a purchasing ocean and drowned in debt…and loving the process. But the place also had a dead quality to it…there was no view….the Vistamatic windows were switched off leaving a plain wall as the view. There was nothing to see here once Atoll had examined everything multiple times…the only logical thing left to investigate was a spiral staircase that looked familiar and gave Atoll a flash and frisson of anticipation at the idea that the stairs could lead to the balcony overlooking Sybil’s quarantined theatre stage…but there was no time for wishful thinking. Atoll had to get to the Head; and they’d laid out an assault course of obstacles to test his prowess portfolio.

But why?

Was it some form of physical coding systematic with mental porcupinificationary outstrataring?

Atoll knew where the stairs would lead if they’d existed in his head, but reality’s contrary aims would take it somewhere else; reality was merely a counter-fantasy backed up by the master program. He had no other choice but to follow the realognosis interfusion mismatch routine. Wherever the stairs led mentally, physically the spiral staircase, one of a unique pair, led to a private penthouse.

As he entered the vast and cosy warehouse of a room, he noticed first a smell; it was oddly redolent of investigation; it said: those who sniff around here will engage in uncovering knowledge to advance to greater things. It was more of a promise than an odour and soon dissipated. If only Atoll had the service of one of those Tindogs who could explain in detail what smells meant; and plus: gave you a good understanding of the world of scratching…but no such robohuman service unit was feasible using current technology.

At the room’s centre was a display tank; an extensive model world encased in some glass-like Technologik Tedeschi Wundergeheimnis (TTW); a model railway overenthusiast’s misspent life’s work hermetically sealed with fully independent operationality…but there were no rails or trains, or stations, just an impenetrable network of miniature buildings that defied physical architecture in a Gaudi meets Dalí in Picasso’s head jumble of disconnected visual meaning.

The tank sat there with utilitarian abundance.

If you kept a human in a cage but wanted it to live as natural life as possible; privacy…among other needs (see: Humans and Their Weird Desire for Self-Imposed Havoc), this would snatch at the ticket to Nirvanaville.

A delicately whispful domestic drone minihumetted and whiskwhined into Atoll’s partially perplexed eye-space, ‘Tiny Guy will see you now,’ it said, mimicking someone from Atoll’s past who he couldn’t quite recall…he’d have to pass on the inquiry to the mailroom. 

There was some kind of Identity Phasing Façade Facilising Diminishment Actuator (PFFDA) at play; Atoll felt his mask slipping down his face; entering a state of Involuntary Otherwising… It felt to Atoll as though he was meeting the great Tiny Guy via some sort of docking system, which felt unduly elaborate, but its elaborateness still had time to be proven duly.

The phrase, ‘while you have choices you still mean something,’ popped up from nowhere, briefly, and then went back to from whence it came. He could stay silent or blurt something out; these seemed to be the options on the menu. Avoiding the mask around the ankles predicament was paramount.

‘Tony!’ Atoll blasted, cocksure as they come.

‘Tiny!’ came a much more authoritative voice, but slow and bristling with a traction Atoll’s utterances could never possess.

‘Anatolli!’

‘Atoll!’

‘You see…’

‘See what?’

‘You don’t like it. Do you?’

How do these characters know what I like and what I don’t like? Presumptuous or what, he thought, with a lengthening stridence that ran the red lights down the avenues of arrogance with a wheel-spinning swagger.

’S’pose,’ he said, with rigidless limpidity… The mismatch of Atoll’s internal gung-ho vagabond with his outwardly nebbish runt of a runt made Atoll felt like he’d reached an impasse; the road ahead had become a series of tricky foot and hand holds that needed to be negotiated in a critical order. And he’d had to leave the car in a space marked ‘Towing’.

Running parallel and appearing to converge up ahead was the anxiety marinading fear that at any moment the Vistamatic dream could be his and he wouldn’t know what hit him, but would find out soon enough.

Atoll looked everywhere within the model, cauliflowering out from the pinpoint of the voice delivery point… there was no form that could be considered human.

‘What we need from you,’ Tiny Guy said, ‘is commitment, focus…and a staunch dedication to the mission happenchance has seen fit to bequeath us with.’

Atoll felt a back-hinterland of garbage land-sliding that promoted the suspicion that the possibility of Vistamatics being used to coerce him into something in some way, was a thing. Tiny Guy could sense Atoll’s unease, and with his trademark insouciance, accompanied by undertones of a master pugilist straining on the leash,’ he said, ‘Do you want to buy a Vistamatic Trudisplay?’

‘No!’

‘Good…shut up then!’

‘But—‘

‘Drop it!’

Atoll saw a pitiful life-turn ahead, devoid of Vistamatics; vision poverty, leading to chronic Vistamaticosis… But what he wanted for himself had to be back-shedded so that what the world needed could be front-porched…

‘Okay, Tiny…what is it you want from me?’ Atoll asked, telling himself he wasn’t rolling over without pressing cause. 

Tiny Guy fired off his spiel in a fusilade of bullet points that Atoll would be relying on the mailroom to process. Tiny Guy had said that Atoll was part of the organisation and the organisation was part of him; they were the same pattern just different colours…and this led to Atoll being stuck in a loop, but the loop made a distinct pattern that disappeared within the general patterning of current accountable happenchance…

‘…we have become concerned as an organisation…’ blah, blah, ‘that you metapersonally lack vital authority-challenging pushback assertions…’ What did that even mean? Was blah, blah code…or was he hearing blah, blah, instead of the intended communication?

The words trailed on, through thick and thin… ‘you have workable curiosity powered by light,’ hitting the highs of compliment and humming the lows of base behaviour and indiscretion (false accusations included), ‘Blah, you possess a tuned sense of truth…blah…and justice…blah, blah…’

Then some words…then some more words…more words and words and words and words…he hoped the mailroom was getting it.

and ends with the reveal and un unfortunate switch to real time speech and coinciding drop in pitch a diminutive ankle nibbler dissipating threat

‘The natural progression is a swap.’

What? A swap…the natural progression…he was all for natural progressions, a stickler for continuous micro-nurtured progression; an advocate of aggressive progression even…but…what kind of natural progression was this? Whose swap, he asked, as if he didn’t know.

‘I will bring the fight to the manipulatory engineers of abominated science, who find it unproblematical to gnaw on the bones of our souls,’ Tiny Guy stated, as though standing tall on a mound in the middle of swathes of mounted warriors, ‘the world you are being entrusted with abuts the world of raw unconsciousality…where you might swim in shoals of demons and angels in a sea of metaphorphical liquidity.’

An eerie silence was born; electrically charged with post-noise friction burns. The speaking was over and the transition to the big reveal was put in motion; background music and such…Tiny Guy was a super small exact replica of someone Atoll’s size…he wore a bathrobe and looked ready for something challenging, making Atoll feel underprepared; less than a sacrificial pawn; more of something that was about to be wiped up, no questions asked…

The process of swapping was unhurried, slick and painless. It was like Atoll was a spacepod inserting itself into an Atoll shaped door in the mothership where he was to reverse birth via suckling protocols. And then he was there; a proxy, a living man in the world of the dead, or a dead man in the world of the living…he wasn’t sure which. Now, apparently was time for everything that didn’t involve looking back, caution, or too close a logical examination. 

‘Well?’ Atoll shrugged, waiting for the mailroom’s response with something approaching a sour relish, ‘well?’ he repeated…as realisation’s engine had failed on take off and was about to have a run-in with the forces of gravity: Atoll had inherited an empire with neighbours who operated from a deep a revealing reservation of the Human condition…but Tiny Guy got the mailroom.