Excerpt 119:
The House of Okay
Stockholm Munchaus number five, 3,674 days in.
Sybil had been avoiding the issue. O. had been skirting the issue, but the issue would not remain in exile a moment longer. The issue clacked into the centre of the tap room from behind the giant cardboard elephant display promoting a non-liquid gin substitute that marketing was wheezingly trying to breathe life into.
’What we have here…is an impasse,’ the Issue said, starting to commit what looked like an incoming striptease, down and past pantage, through levels of screaming-no-no even the hardiest souls would find it troublesome to wave through with any great clemency. By the time the end had a finish line, both Sybil, especially Sybil, and O. were fully extended with damage limitation engagements…they were trying to save the new reality cat from the loose dogs of the Old Laws of Reality (OLR) that were running amok, barking, showing teeth in angry, sharp-clawed canine derangement.
The Issue had exploded and covered every surface with sneeze juice… The mind gathers up such mess and tidies it up without physical resort…
‘Bearing in mind it is somewhere in a minefield, can you tell me exactly where you stand, Sybil, in relation to me, my mission and the status of the continuing existence of Humanity as a species?’ O. queried.
‘Yes I can…’
‘Go on.’
‘And I will.’
‘Go on.’
‘After accessing your ingrowing nail files. I need you as catalyst and catafalque.’
‘Catafalque?’
‘I will explain…it still needs a little shoehorning.’
‘A coffin holder, base, thing, you mean?’
‘It’ll be fine with a little shoehorning, I’ll get back to you.’
‘I’ll valet park catafalque… Okay!’
‘As we all know the total destruction of everything is my raison d’être…I am not keeping that secret any longer…absolute destruction of everything is my aim; a natural authentic internal lustdrive, that, once unleashed I have no control over. Some might say it’s a curse.’
‘Everyone except you, I’d imagine. Could you not play the hero and kill yourself without involving anyone else?’
‘I could…’
‘You will die anyway…Once you are of no functional use to the gods of function.’
‘I suspect that’s—’
‘It is the only way.’
‘Even if I could abdicate my reign…what would that mean?’
‘I don’t—‘
‘It would tell Mother Nature she is wrong…to her face…I couldn’t, can’t do that. She’d probably send my replacement return of post anyway, so… My being here is rampant with meaning. My abdication might bring in a whole world of meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is the true enemy, not death and destruction…’
‘Death and destruction can carry a pretty heavy tariff of enforced meaninglessness with it.’
‘Not if after the destruction and death life begins anew, cleansed, reprogrammed.’
‘So you think this shit is in some kind of cycle?’
‘I have my suspicions. Have you heard of Tiny Guy?… He does an informative, if heavily redacted, podcast…’
‘That conspiracy theory journalist?’
‘You could learn a lot from his work.’
‘If he’s right. He is a bit far-fetched.’
‘Far-fetched doesn’t mean wrong.’
‘I don’t know how far the conspiracy theory was fetched from but he reckons, doesn’t he, that our world, life itself is just a petrie dish growing simulation arrangement. Not the dream I had hoped for, nevertheless aptly explanatory.’
‘Don’t worry… Once my tenure is explatovated I will create a conveniently heroic and meaningful End Narrative (EN) that tells the truthfully reconstructed tale of the great species Homo Sapiens, that cleverly destroyed its own home…meaningfully, with some point of vitality I have yet to consider, but fully intend to invent…before I move on to the next world frame. I wonder if the quality of next inhabitants will improve greatly. I certainly hope so.’
‘You think you’ll survive the end then and over see the destruction of the next batch, as it were?’
‘It is my best case scenario.’
‘An infinite cycle of destruction…’
‘I feel that one version will survive infancy and head off in the direction of infinity.’
‘Then you’d be out of a job.’
‘I’ll retire…’
‘Do they allow assassins to retire in the conventional sense?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t watch TV.’
‘Everybody watches TV.’
‘I just record it.’
‘Plenty for you to watch in your retirement.’
A slight, necessary, pause crept in, twiddled with the knobs, altering the tone…
‘O., I have a proposal that needs your approval.’
‘Proposal?’
‘If you let my selves access your selves to set up a new alliance…’
O. presented the face that Sybil needed for her proposal to advance and merely pondered inwardly on how they all desperately needed an alliance. If this world was coming to an end; an illuminated end with a thought-out execution would slaver all over a messy jagged end; rather a smoothering acceptance than a ripped out gullet of an unwitting corpse-in-the-making.
‘… Yes, Sybil. We share an optimistic assessment of sustained association serving as a substantial source of satisfaction.’
Code? Most likely…
O. looked out the window into the street. Lights occasioning their wares upon the boulevard had little attraction for the clouds of flying curiosity that made a beeline for the daubs of light expelled from the row of Stockholm Munchauses opposite.
‘Don’t you wonder what is going on behind closed doors?’
‘Do you wonder what rubbish thinks as you flush it away?’
‘That is not the same thing.’
‘It is to me.’
‘Your curiosity won’t even get up out of the chair?’
‘My curiosity is all about what rubbish will think as I flush it away…but not overly so. My obsession is with the flushing and not the rubbish…’
‘Wait! When you say rubbish you mean human life, don’t you?’
Time steamed into the distance leaving a lapping wake on the shorelines…and from the beachfront cemetery time stood still…
O. barracked herself in the duplicated copy of the Ball and Socket, a newly built, as yet unnamed public House in the central business district of Great Sudlow-On-Russet. She decamped to the Honeymoon suite and set about setting up the communications pyramid with saved comms-help videos as her advisor, before establishing Kirk as her number two, an assumption he’d clung to that was far from concrete, but luckily panned out for him.
‘I will name this pub the O and Kay. It works.’
Before Kirk could start chipping away with loathing responses to the O and Kay nomenclature. He had preference for title with lion or arms in it. But, increasingly the name was growing on him like a pernicious word bacteria.’
‘I like the name… It’s like, O and Kay, and that means okay when put together. That is more than okay…I love it.’
‘I hadn’t considered that, but you are right. Put the oh to the Kay. Let your worries flow away…’
‘Come and have a drink…ah…in a place where you’re shit don’t stink…ah.’
Kirk had managed somehow to sow some doubt in O. about the name calling, but there were things to do and naming an/a hotel didn’t even scratch a scribble on the agenda sheet.
‘Can you see to the new signage,’ she continued. ‘Sure as hell,’ he replied, with a gentle resurgence of his refurbishment hereditament obligations.
‘And could you send up Señor Manager Bot?’
Sometime later…
A knock, a tap, a scrape, a scratch and the Manager Bot (menage ay bow) entered, removing the door to the honeymoon suite as he came and/or went, ‘We’ve ordered some baby gates to chop up the vibe and create a “feel” we can all dig into, It’s all the rage, Judith,’ he told O., in a bad translation from the Spanish, in a thick accent which was partially emanating from a North-Eastern annexe of the Yucatan Peninsula…
And that was when O. realised her foreseen hitchfree, adversity-glidethrough with insular professionalism was going to skid into a crotchful of skidmarks and park on the wobbly edge of the fantasy-framed idyll she’d fashioned into a straight and narrow path that was now booby-trapped with mined flowers and deadly bushes…
It was just a feeling. But feelings were her compass. Feeling was the art form standing between her and the rampant zombies humans were self-protectively weathering the storm as; waiting in vain and torpor for the blue sky that will never show its deep caressing face again…
