Excerpt 152:

The Trickcyclist’s Code

‘Barbarellarised, babbed, barbed,’ a voice said, unrecognisable, but the tone and substance spoke volumes as to who it might be. Which was confusing: was this an internal job or had the extra-external force found a comms channel and decided to chip in? It would count as proof I am not alone…

I had a memory gap. I knew that one of Tiny Guy’s aliases had filmed a documentary about the MBS take over of NASA and the subsequent NMBS scandals. The alias, Barn Larschen-Manding, had stored unedited raw footage from the documentary but had been intimidated by security forces not to proceed with the project.

‘And you want access to the raw footage?’ the voice said, either as a member or associate of my inner workings, or, an outside agent either a god or a hack.

‘Clive,’ I said semi-involuntarily, in a slow motion mode that dragged.

‘Not Clive, but I played Clive, the e-butler, pre-vadge.’

‘So who are you now?’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am…’ I thought I knew, but while contemporaneously hearing my own explanation my tongue uncoupled the answer carriages; hooking up to a question, ‘sorry, who are you, exactly?’ I blarneyed, shunting from the yard.

‘You.’

‘No, you?’

‘You, I am you.’

‘You are me? Am I you, though? I don’t think—’

‘Meon Sea was a Meld-Shop Mall-Mind Thought-Skatepark Rendition (MSMMTSR). I was drafted in to see you take the right rails to the right station. It was a performance or two, no more, no less.’

‘Are you outside the “thing” or inside my head?’

‘I am the “thing”.’

‘You are the “thing”?’

‘You can only progress with me as your guide in a way that “we are we” and “you are me” and “I am you”.’

‘Great!’ I said, in lieu of being able to make sense of what he was telling me. Thankfully sense arose during processing, ‘great,’ I repeated, less pressured, more gentler.

‘Have you cleared your mind from everything the past holds?’

‘Yes,’ I replied, because that was all he needed to know.

A sleepy form of avoidance called…I had no heart for question and answer tennis on an overgrown grass court that hid stinging nettles and prickly thistles. ‘I saw a man kill himself on a prickly thistle once you know he wasn’t trying to but the thistle saw to it he did,’ I said to myself as an aside; apropos of nothing as I slid deeper into escape.

While in a Somnambulantic Protectional Environment (SPE) state I was all for edging my way toward a productive move. And, as it was…

I went back to the hotel room. It was paid till the end of the week. Where I gazed into an empty mini-bar not sure what was going on. I just knew the entity that was Clive the e-butler in a previous incarnation was not able to detect where I was despite manifesting in the back of the mini-bar. He thought I was just there: being, but had no idea I dwelt in a rich fantasy world that allowed me to run rings round his attempts at trying to tighten the bonds he assumed he had criss-crossing the torso of my intent.

I picked up the retro-phone on the suspiciously too solid iron nightstand by the side of the rickety matchstick hayfilled bed and there was a knock on the door. 

It was as though the picking up of the phone actuated the knocking. A muffled multi-voice didn’t translate through the reinforced lead of the door. The spy hole revealed an empty corridor, but the muffled voices persisted. I opened the door, prepared for up to nine people, and the three house stooges appeared radiating a mixture of attention and disinterest that fought each other for superiority. Blank expressions, incongruous in such a hallway, offered no clue as to what harm they were intending to exact, or whether, indeed, harm was even on the day’s agenda.

‘I was just checking to see if the phone was real, not just decorative,’ I said, in an eagerness to move the situation along to something more easy on the brain cogs.

‘Oh it’s real…’

‘Would you prefer it if we stocked the mini-bar…?’

‘You’ve been staring into it for long enough.’

‘No, I don’t partake, it’s fine…I was just talking to an imaginary who uses the mini-bar as a focal point.’

What I was telling them was undoubtably strange. The fact they didn’t get ‘strange’ from it was yet another layer of strange strapped precariously on top of a roof rack on a hover car driving through a whole world of strange. Maybe they all had their own ex-e-butler; their own prepossessing authoritarian, mind-buddy Clive. Then the worst of the assailment hit me with a hellfresh alleyrotten question: Were all three of them Clive?

I’d been right about Clive all along, without really putting it into a must-face control-file to-do-tray. I needed to shake him off, remove his influence from my internal executive workshopping. He was on the payroll of the nefarious action group’s executive committee. The kind of pay-rolling that was snowballing, I’d’ve bet. Clive would never not be up to stuff. Including not being Clive anymore. He was elusive while being in the background of in your face.

The mini bar had been stocked with non-alcoholic beverages and vegan snacks, after a long drawn out negotiation. I waited until the three hoteliers had gone on their break and watch them trick cycling off towards the communal park where they had a private cycle display arena which attracted many local types who assembled to gawp and gawk at the cyclomaniacal performative ingenuity. I imagined what rehearsing looked like, before disengaging and bringing back my interest in their business to my business.

I swept along the barely bustling, but rollickingly authentic, street that crossed the T of the unconvincing street in which the hotel was located. I walked past several cup chinking, cutlery scraping and chair positioning joints until I came to a place that was just opening up. All systems were go so I chaired and tabled myself at a cafe bristling with a bright red sign that contained two words I could not understand. I scanned for code; and conducted an overall with switch-positive, marmalazy jambience decoding and cypherloofer Apps. The waitperson, or waitbot, sidled up and paused, signalling a joint realisation; a mutual deja vu, or, Recognition Vagueness Syndrome (RVS). We regarded each other, and then ourselves: two tankerships hoving astern, port and starboard wakes achurning, deputy-skipper-stand-ins snoozing, all the while seabirds trying to squawk something amid the dark ocean spray. And then closing the cupboard door on the ghost of familiarity, assigning displaced pseudo-recognition as culprit leader, we disentangled and counter-shifted.

Definitely a waitbot, although she could’ve been a waitperson (the bot/not bot, dilemma raged). She rummaged around in her mouth and spluppled out a Krusty the Clown cigarette lighter and hard drive, ‘it contains footage from the documentary,’ she said, her mouth under serviette wiping cover. And as she disappeared into the building, she said, ‘Not a bot!’ Which I could not decode, nor bowl into any code lanes for skittling.

When she came with my bill, which she said she’d pay, as they were now closing, and offered the directions to a cafe that had won an award for their waitbots or botwaits or whatever.

I left with a sense of code-overwhelm and undecipherable perplexion, but I also had a vital lead; MacGuffin or not I’d be led where the lead led me. I’d got a bingo shout from the first number called, I wouldn’t have to bark up a forestworth of wrong trees before finding the right one.

Back at base I asked the three mixed and matched stalwarts of hosting if they had any kind of contraption that I could use to convert the hard drive into viewable footage, without fully revealing the facts. Maybe the obscurity threw them. They told me about their combined ‘alter-ego’ that peddled entertainment in the form of a bicycle display team called the Wheelie-Wheel-Wheelers. One had a unicycle and held the geographical centre of the display; another rode astride a behemoth of a penny-farthing, round and round in the orbit outside the unicycle but inside the Raleigh chopper; all of them faux-wobbling, clown ridden, with ferocious crowd-clipping, saddle-yoga and spin-cycle-circling…feats a plenty, feet awhirring.

…but they had no hardware with which to view my software. I might have ruined it by responding to the enthusiastic description of their performance that stretched itself under the umbrella of street theatre by saying ‘that sounds like fun,’ in an entirely patronising and disinterested vagueness. I thought I’d blown it. I brought them back into my fantastical way of thinking by manufacturing a shady international group of agents who go around locating and stealing software and were closing in with every third out-breath…sealing the deal by lying that they were anti-cyclist and were lobbying for a ban outside ploughed fields. A wave of mild panic drifted from left to right across the threesome and then rose slightly to a more severe form of panic radiating out from the centre, the Penny-Farthingist… 

They were code heavy, that was sure, but I was, although decipher-eager, not fully up to the task. I needed some support and I needed to take a nap to get it. I was awash with code and needed some down time to rebalance, but I would never rebalance until the hard drive had been accessed. Plus the fact I was scared now, the three bicycle artistes radiated fear I’d absorbed and mirrored. I’d introduce fear as a tool and then it had run away and come back with the Circus of Fear and pitched tent on a patch of land I needed to keep vacant for purposes of recreationally broad sanity.

I knew I’d escaped, at least for the next parcel of revolving moments, when I found myself thinking, under the deep-self massage of solitude, that the hosts’ display team should carry a name that included the idea of ‘tricycle’, as there were three of them…but sleep outweighed the progression to counting five-wheels and quinqucycle, Circle of Quints…before ‘release’ into a ‘safe’ space…

While dangerously, loose-lipped/tight-lipped, feigning/real wavering; truth will out and truth will in…Clive sat on the end of my bed, playing a sort of Robin Hood/Father Christmas figure, intent on robbing the children of gifts and storing the profits in a tax-free personal off-shore (Lapland, probably,) account.

He’d already viewed the documentary footage and assured me there was nothing untoward; it had been a red herring at the end of a dead and buried tunnel, (his words). And I believed him because that was what I found myself doing; until I fell asleep again and found myself on an electric tram that was going in the opposite direction. And belief in Clive clicked away with the tramline sparks and lost pertinence with every stop and go as we headed out into the suburbs.

If Clive was lying to me it, it would have to be out of coded necessity, anything else was sense free. Anything else would be a divergence from the path.