Excerpt 130:
Village ‘Life’
Kirk was coming from behind Judith in an almost choreographically angular circumstanciality. Judith could have been counting him in…counter equating joint equilibria for purposes unknowable…he had his hands in his pockets and a partially discernible whistling noise emanated from his vaguely pursed lips.
She’d said to Tiny Guy, referring to Sybil’s tasked objectives (AKA antics), ‘If she calculates how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall, as they sung, she’ll be destroying the space inside the Nuclear Nonsense Cancelling Cavern. And turning it into a club, no doubt.’
‘What?’
Gai Ti Ni, to keep faith and honour his pretence could not access the joviality draw for the supplies needed to interact, or even join in, with Judith’s solid yet superfluous banter-lite. The only viable option was to reach high; switch aliases… It just happened that Tiny Guy had just the character ready to hand, pre-dusted, off the shelf…a little something he’d been working on unconsciously; unbeknownedly…the kind of remote island cottage industry in full production that Tiny Guy was gifted with…
This earnestly apt alias would not only fulfil the Communication Complex Brief (CCB) needed, but also likely, set the impetus in motion for a finale of the slowly bleeding overarching narrative to arrive much quicker than anyone had anticipated. The alias was… ta da! …Let me introduce you to one, James Kirk-Smith, a flawless Kirk James impersonator. James Kirk-Smith was to Kirk James what a glove puppet parrot was to a stuffed parrot toy. Kirk’s refurbishment anxiety was frothywavepeaking; perpetually about to crash and break upon a shore of sandy insanity. So Kirk-Smith had to walk a thin watery line. But that was why he’d spent so many hours in the thin watery line gym…
The change was not subtle… Gai Ti Ni had gone, the new alias looked up to the clouds to help the decaying memory of Gai Ti Ni on its way and Judith followed the new player’s gaze. And Kirk, who was now within fingering distance, hands still pocketed, partially eclipsed; visible at both sides of Judith, looked up too, as if losing his soul in an internal conversation of deep understanding, as if a higher-knowing had risen wholesale; as if Refurbishment were all it had cracked up to be.
‘My name,’ said Kirk-Smith, ‘is James Kirk-Smith…’
What James ‘time for tea’ Kirk-Smith didn’t have, that Kirk James did have, was a spiritual, emotional invasion that was propping Kirk up against the barrage of incoming friendly fuckfire that would otherwise have sunk his battleships and left his good self floating semi-buoyantly on jetsam ‘one cheek in the dinghy in a sail-flapping breeze’. Refurbishment had its limits and Kirk was tippy-toeing along a crumbly narrow vertiginous ridged-back reptilian sky-line as it snored so loud it could’ve woken up a sleeping Enlightenment in time for the end of the Dark Ages. Refurbishment Development Friction Floundering (RDFF) kept nagging in bite-back mode. One of the experiments, carried out without any regard to the subject’s welfare, was LoveBug-0, an attempt at marrying the first-night bride of Amorousness to the unkempt groom of fabricated respectability, just for the attempted scientific kilometerage into the desert of perceived legitimacy: Shit Experiment In Shit Experiment Out (SEISEO). The dodgy ‘first-harm’ causing ended up facilitating an accidental emotional ‘buddy’ (AEB) for Kirk, who was not capable of controlling otherwise dysfunctional and dysregulated outbursts, something that didn’t mix unthreateningly with the specialist weaponry Kirk was designated to employ. They needed a way of suppressing outbursts instantly if his Neuroemotional Taserthroatkill (NT) response began to compromise mission mellifluousness. Refurbishment could have been something big but the whole project got buried after funding fell off. Also mechanical versions of the flesh and blood Refurbishment end-product were more capable and flying off several different production lines at a fraction of the cost and minus the fragility of the need to experiment with spiritual, emotional braking systems. And to clarify what the braking system was: it was named: Il Professore. A system so adept at braking that kirk’s tyres squealed until his rims were sparking like the practical demo weld-off at a welder’s conference and annual show.
Anyway…
Duck-quacking protocols were installed; etcetera-etcetera-ducklings followed in a waddling line…
Judith had repeated, ’If she calculates how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall she’ll be destroying the space inside the Nuclear Nonsense Cancelling Cavern,’ then paused, and then added, ‘And turning it into a club, no doubt,’ and this Time they were in business.
Kirk-Smith laughed at the joke for the sake of synchronised iteration but managed to maintain a quarter-to-an-eighth-snarl just in case Kirk had any ideas.
The ghost of Gai Ti NI moaned imperceptibly…
Kirk-Smith’s act being so perfect that Kirk reflected unwittingly a sixteenth-of-a-snarl that spoke tales of doppelgänger space invaders…and hinted vaguely of a kind of hell where Kirk was his own worst devil of demonry…supported by a sulphur-like scent that nobody could pinpoint the source of…
Rules were rules, and so…
As Judith had her right-hand man. The rules of the dominant running space insinuated an ‘in’ for Kirk-Smith to introduce his co-worker…
‘This is my coworker, the artist-type from down under…this is Carla from our South American office.’
‘But she is Australian?’
‘When I said down under, I mean’t down under of North America, South of the Hollywoods.’
‘Hollywoods?’
‘Yes.’ Carla piped up, ‘my ancestors were Bulgarian. A lot of people are, you know, these days.’ Which would have confused, but geography, since the Pause, was not a precise administrative science; maps had an autocartilogical way of fabricating coordinates with undocumented whimsicality. What Three Words Now?
‘She sounds stupid,’ Kirk-Smith, barked by way of pasting over a crack of his making, ‘but believe me it is due to problems with translation, she’s actually as slick as a…’ but could Tiny Guy get Kirk-Smith to elaborate?
‘Yes, I can sense that,’ Judith said, applying horizon-fixant to the evolving foundational subsidence of the collective throughline.
The fact that Carla was really Sybil and Sybil was doing the Sybil version of weighing the hand to guesstimate the body’s (Judith’s) swinging weight while measuring up coffin sizes (for Judith) and what have you, was not registering on any progress charts or tot-up scales.
Override had gone roughshod and taken off the glove puppets…
Everyone, if pushed or even capable, remembering back, would recall a deep rumbling, buzzing oscillatory Muzak arrangement with evil-adjacent cyphers written into its score, and of course the persistence of nasally detectable sulphur, when formulating the narrative of this occasion… And yet none of it happened in that way…forces were at play. It was only after the fact that reality was glued and sculpted into the solidity we all need to look back and whimsically bounce on the past until we get high enough to reenter the present so we can dissect potential futures into the raw material to construct good pasts from…Cycling, recycling, tricycling, quad biking; wheels make the world go round.
Carla whispered to Kirk-Smith in a Sybilian undertone with an auto-interrogatory mid-tone-balance that sounded to the Tiny Guy lurking just beneath the Kirk-Smith surface that Una was trying to communicate with him. These things are never simple, of course. Tiny Guy had heard the odd yet recurrent SOS style semi-aborted communications from Una that were barely distinguishable from background frequency modulation before, but this was extra-specially differing in its quantity and quality. Una apparently had something to say that came from a place of mad boiling urgency.
So…
Tiny Guy earmarked a listening channel for word-seeker apps to locate and retrieve for later listening and went back to his full involvement in the Kirk-Smith impersonation of Kirk.
‘Such a charming little village, this, it is such a shame it has to go,’ Sybil mumbblewhined with a subtext that huffed and puffed like a volcano long overdue a good laväspew…
‘Go? Where?’ Judith replied.
‘Where we all end up sooner rather than later.’
‘And where is that?’
‘You don’t know? How quaint…and how bizarre…how bunnyfucked with kittens of frivolous naïveté,’ she said doing air squiggles to enforce the diacritical accoutrements of the word and further show her syntactical authoritarian execution of linguobarbarity like the flash of a highly polished saber. She twiddled the ends of what moustaches she had. Adjusted her pants like an artistic type of liberalista. And while trying to burp for an effect and as a filler, she got handed a sneeze from deep within, sucked in air like a manic turbo-fan and dealt the atmosphere a pattern of sneezes that under micro-slow-code-feed appatistics revealed sizeable data input from Una and her supporters.
Carla Phraedo looked at Kirk-Smith and Kirk Smith looked at Carla Phraedo; two looks became one and they both sloped and strode off in opposite directions, disappearing behind cover.
Judith was beginning to wonder what she should be thinking about what they were doing when Tiny Guy put in a request to enter her Stockholm Munchaus space and Sybil and Una both put forward a proposal for a meeting semi-simultaneously.
There were buds of progress in the Fall of confusion.
‘Kirk, can you tread water here while we take a munch moment t the stockrecess,’ Judith asked Kirk.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied without thought, suddenly realising that that was what he was going to have to do. What he really wanted was growing in assertive maturation with a view to branching out, but life had shown him that procrastination was a handy tool while it still had its out-of-the-box elasticity.
Judith vacated the present currency for the sake of internal clarification and opened up the bar to allow representative entities from the Sybil and Una camps to customerise her establishment.
While Kirk kept vigilant in one way and in another he marvelled at the experience of having set eyes on an unmirrored version of Refurbished perfection. Was it love? He thought, did he love himself due to Refurbishment manipulations or was he a common old plain narcissist who wouldn’t know what shame was if he was drenched in a giant cup of it. Kirk had forgotten that he had his own love expert onboard expersplaining how love is in theory without the practice. Il Professore spoke out of duty…sloshed by cold splashes of wantoness…‘No, no, no, no, no…auto-obsessionary misterbationing is a side-effect; a ramification of the castratobollacato of Il Refurbishmento. You want to know what love is? Love? What it is all about? Intrinsics, specificalationistic whatwithouts’n’ins? Then you must follow me on our journey of discovery; the words must be tailored; sentences carried out with exactitude and physicality drenched in the gooey fluids of meaningfulness and resultant rashes of significance-in-excelsis. Love will find us when we find it. It, Love, is two one-way streets that join to make one two-way boulevard of maximised existence…’ he said. And then added, ‘in theory…’ sotto voce.
It was all this theory stuff that was putting Kirk off. It was like school. All he wanted was to have his way with Judith and be done. The whole love-lessoning vibe was lessening love. But the Prof. had an addicting pull that was full of expectancy, so Kirk maintained an even stick approach. Even while he was speaking to himself he retracted the doing Judith and being on his way jibe… That was mercenary and objectifying. Forgive me Kirk, Kirk asked himself…don’t we want to be the better Kirk? He agreed with himself, submitting improvement proposal files…
Tiny Guy brushed himself off for the Judith meeting in Munchaus territory. In a development (most likely a series or evolving proliferation of developments) the venue was now called the Meeting Place and Museum of Aliases Munchaus Space (MPMAMS). As absentee owner Tiny Guy expected more, all the while he was being shovelled lessness… ‘Here’ had become a place he found unrecognisably familiar; a headsworth full of distortion that fractured the Normlike and issued forth alien-adjacent, seemingly outsourced, farfetched interventions that wildly swarmed above the sensosphere of understanding. All this made Tiny Guy a host to unruly parties of nausea so he applied for an edited highlights and got the redacted version…in snippet form; in Quickliness App Datamode…
Upshot City… Brevity’s cold crisp Winter forest mountain fountain, so to speak… Spoke, briefly…
Sybil was there for destruction, complete annihilation and now there were not just road blocks but road removals. She’d inherited obligations and responsibilities that just did not conform to the new reality. It was like satiating a need for obnoxiocity by fire-storming a Rest Home for the Terminally Tired when a fart would’ve done the business…and a follow through would have been over the top. Sybil sifted thorough contractual clauses, sub-clauses, using clause-tro-phobia Apps. She could not go over the wavy lines or she’d be compromised. She hated staying within them but in doing so she could keep all the compromising inside and not have to outsource to the potentially terribly catastrophic Overmaster Programinputters, who obviously cared about material gain than they did total destruction…
‘I need you to guard and manage the village. Can you do that. I will send you refugees from the cavern fall-out areas. You must accommodate them until we can move them on to more suitable destinations,’ Judith told Carla…
There was nothing for it, option paucity being maximal, ‘Yes, Si, da, da, dit, da…whatever…’ Carla replied. She was left feeling unnecessarily malleable and manipulated and started to rectify her amorphous sticky-liquidity by counting the ways Tiny Guy was going to get his comeuppance during his long decline into a state of no longer sustaining entropy…
