Excerpt 121:
Dashed, Doomed and Deluded
Atoll Goodmanson spent what felt like years and months doing daily routines in and about the abandoned lifescape environment where the number one grandparent proto-Stockholm Munchaus had rooted and bloomed into a stage. A stage that supported a refurbished human (Kirk: mechanical extent unknown), the manifestation of a Super Smart Shutdown System (Sybil: posing as a silentjazz impresario: groovgrained in the presence of silence), and himself (Atoll: a plant; programmed for perfect interaction metalogistics, but always falling short, always waking up from the dream before the climax).
Good times though…he recalled some snippetulisations of the creamy cool silence as it pulsated within and without him in partially demented cracks of ecstasy with waves of pure soundlessness….the digression excused itself and went on its way with a mutually fond farewell. Atoll waited for the inevitable to come along; but he had been waiting for so long the inevitability element had passed its sell by date.
Thoughts had bobbed bashfully into a leery logjam at the dam wall; coalesced, congealed and inter-collaborated to present to their thinker a proposition to stir the waters; wave up some ripples; to swallow with draughts of coldtruth from the draining mountain levels before their convergence with, and intermingling in, the sea of lies. Where the tides of deceit and winds of deception spume deadening latitudes of actualfactualisation that negate safe passage…
Atoll, metaphorically, uttering codes and picturing cyphers learned obliquely from his days as a lab-rat-puppy-prisoner at the Midway Research and Conquer facility, climbed into the cupboard. Its loose backboard served to trick mirror neuron reflections into travelling with the developing fantasy that Atoll was on the move from the now dead Stockholm origin storyboard to a re-written other place.
The other place was the portal space that was more than just a space that was still emitting the signals that described itself to attuned sentience as a stage abutted by a dark and grainy auditorium; a setting for all manner of angels and demons; a place of worship, a place of learning, a place of establishing what truths welcomed investment over truths whose white knuckles could be hammered and allowed to let slip into a double act of gravity’s weak force and the ground’s unyielding, concrete bra’d bosom.
It could have been decades; there was no time-monitoring. Atoll had been literally doing nothing on a yearly basis, killing time, toying it like a cat, laying it bare. It was as though he had entered a museum of important artefacts and removed items one by one, tick by tock, from their cases and displays and despoiled them with relish; corrosive, unremitting relish…
He wanted a place to call home for the training that had absorbed every personal whim into a controlled frenzy of watching and waiting for the one true cue. So when he climbed, metaphorically, back into the stage area through a ceiling trapdoor that connected to the loose board at the back of the wardrobe in the soiled room in an empty world. The literalness of the situation would have made those with humour heavy leaning to laugh in a range that fell somewhere between a titter and a guffaw. Moping around, stage centre, were two figures, even in silhouette form at an obscured distance, they waited in suspended narcissism for Atoll’s objective functionality.
It was Marcus Godstrand and Mary Goodmanson, by all accounts the progenitors of the pre-extinction, post singularity, current endgame malaise that consciousness was enduring. Atoll’s regretometer registered multiple redline crossing infringements that needed to be brought back under suppression before re-introductions with the science-mafia, technotyrants that Goodmanson and Godstrand had become, or most probably had always been. The trap door was sealed its metaphoricality reaching a threshold. Atoll stared at the G & G labs pyramid-top hierarchy, caught in a split moment… his nerves revving, mind whooshing, like a parachute failure in the fog… There was no time to waste, his job had always been to facilitate Goodmanson and Godstrand’s crossing from simulation to Reality on their (theoretically potential) return from the frontierlands of Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligent, neuro-mechanical-biological (Biomech) environment discovery.
Atoll drifted back into an early iteration of himself as a normal boy who had been sequestered by the authorities in the name of world security, in the face of non-human threat (although all non-human threat had human origin so was perfectly natural and expected; even predicted by sci-fi fantasists). Growing up, he had been framed as the Boy in the Bubble. A disorder concocted to allow the bubble of life to manipulate, program and position the young man into fitting the modus operandi of a government/private investment tool that was sharpening itself as it cut the natural cloth of Life and weaved its own synthesis over the thin veneer of Fate.
The only power above; in the cloud that clings to the pyramid’s pointed pate, was the power of global finance in the shape of the elite of the elite of the elite’s board of Life-on-Earth management and governance: the Commercial Utilisation of New Technology Shareholders and, unofficially: the Saints of the Sanctity of the Survivabilty and Sustainability of Homo-Kerchingus (SSSSH)…
His heart rose as he voyeurised his old parental support team’s selected lack of support moments; memory raids mixed up with delusional interpretation; conspiracy theory facts…victimy protestations… His soul, for what it was worth, lurched forward in a vain attempt to flee, lacking the fantasy…flew with broken wings; and reached up to stop its rising, raging heart and attach to its ventral where it belonged. These caregivers-cum-harm-bringers were under the command and control of the Shareholders as far as their dealings with Atoll were interested… Caution pulled up a chair and sucked on a pondering-pipe as she rested back, thoughts allowing themselves to speak volumes and testify to the happenings that led to Atoll’s situation; aggrievement, privileged as it was… Elsewhere Atoll had a body to inhabit, a girlfriend, who must be out of her mind with worry… His life outside lurked and lumped around, his corporeality voided; caretaken by zombihood waiting for events to unfold; stalling for the moment his pointless, over-programmed shell returned to its rightful place…would anyone notice, even himself?
Atoll retired to his changing room, his inner stage, to grapple with the shapes of logic that were bubble-bursting around him like carbonated alphabetti spaghetti with a degree in confusion…
On the other hand he had not been in contact with Atticus for a while, a long while maybe, and things change in this era of hurricane force winds of technology. With his parents/nemeses hogging the stage there was a barrier to free exchange with Atticus through the portal without them taking over his mind, a mind he’d been happy to hump around in a three-wheeled squeaky fashion; heft up vertically laddered tight spaces; yearn a greasier pole to descend, because it was his own and not owned by outside contractors.
Even a covert exchange with a proxy Atticus would not go undetected. He felt bare; he felt like the black figures were going to diaper him, not out of necessity but out of dire expression of complete control and swamping subjugation; an upward draft for their egos to soar above the granite ledges of actionable living that they’d lost control of, without admitting as much, sometime back in the fog of distant memory.
What he needed was Tiny Guy. But to get to Tiny Guy he needed to pass through the portal back into his naturally assigned physical body, and now he would have to take the demi-gods Goodmanson and Godstrand with him and he was not decided on whether they would behave with unexpected expedient benevolence, or clod-hop-rough-shod over his very being with pert, inexhaustible malignancy. Something in him persistently pestered his private self-nurtured sense of ethical responsibility and circulated a rumour-stench that facilitating the two’s passage would constitute aiding and abetting a crime against Humanity. There was though, upon deeper, cleaner, wider introspection, only one course of action: the route to Tiny Guy’s roadside assistance meant driving over nails and rocks…
Atticus had reported via Tiny Guys published investigations, that Atoll had been stolen before birth and and put on a path that was on no map cartographied by his Own Private Destiny (OPD). He was conceived as a Public Puppet of National and Global Security; a great cause, yes…but at what cost?
He had been brainwashed to commit legal criminality; to play his part in the transfer of the stuck Goodmanson and Godstrand from the portal space back into the space from which they originated and where the extinction process that had inadvertently set in motion lived. His true mission was still under wraps and so it was curiosity that led the way to him ringing the bell of conditional submission; he would go their way in order to find his way.
Atoll’d learned a lot from a chance meeting with a passing acquaintance he’d forgotten about, called Tay Glaw, who one of those teachers in life that on reflection prove the idea that ‘when the student is ready the teacher will appear…’ He sided with Glaw, a useful ally, and as soon as this initial process was churned out and he was neck deep in cloying ordure, he’d find a way of ganging up with Glaw and rallying for a counter-insurgence.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Mummy, Daddy,’ faltering, in just the way they were expecting, and as he approached Marcus Godstrand and Mary Goodmanson, the catalysts of Accidental Humanless Futures… The spotlights flickered and the dark beats of the oscillating illumination showed two demons. The good of that being he had never seen these demons before; a sign he had developed his own horror movie demonisation perspective. The bad being that the hormones of Evil ran so rampant in his adversary/faux family that the good in him coughed a nervous cough and felt sickly…and faint…and doomed!
