Excerpt 133:
Time Takes Its Atoll
Atticus danced a low-energy shuffling-sway that barely threatened to challenge ill-rhythmic backbeating or garner grace topped with any garnish. Jeff either looked on or looked away, stuck at a fork in the road behaviourally, worrying where the terpsichorean drudge-motioned semi-limp-spasms might lead. Judith and Kirk were away dealing with mass rescue affairs. Harris was absent without explanation or notice. The botnapped bottage were all in collective sleep mode hunting themselves; lost in a forested beepfest of electronic snoring. Jeff considered waking them up for company, but scratch electronic company and you could find an invasion of the body snatched mind-invaders. Jeff considered intervening, to stifle his own rising concern, but Atticus was stationary as far as geo-drift and kept himself to himself. It wasn’t until Judith and Kirk returned, mainly to check Atticus was not showing signs of maturation vis a vis portal activity, that Jeff was allowed into the inner circle of what the fluff was going on…
‘Atticus is keeping out of it because Atoll is trying to communicate,’ Judith said, looking to Kirk for verification and seeing it in sluglike brow movement.
‘The slow dance,’ Kirk said, closing his eye-lids over mega-oscillating pupils, ‘Atoll is requesting a word.’ Which was rare and disconcerting despite it potentially being the news they all wanted: the return of the architect of everything the Great Pause had on hold, and the Great Pause itself: Godstrand.
Kirk employed his ambient-surround-aura in and about Atticus, which stopped the dancing. He got out a notepad and waited for Judith to conduct the Portal Intervention Interview (PII) that was in code that Judith held in her memory banks since her slyly conducted implantation by the insidious Mary Goodmanson.
The security protocol demanded that part of the message Atoll was trying to express had to come from a partly bewildered, not-fully-functioning Atoll at a silent jazz reunion on Stockholm street in Munchausville. And the missing data that would create a logical information release would be completed by Judith visiting the Stockholm Munchaus where she was impersonating Una and Sybil in order to convince Jeff Una was still around. Jeff wasn’t stupid but he believed her because he needed to, which was okay because Una was still in the mix, just in several disparate storage areas that were yet to come together…a coming together that was inextricably linked with the reentrance into the world, of Goodmanson and Godstrand.
The sun shone bright. Kirk had never experienced Munchaus Lane in such splendour; it had always been dark, dim, dusky, damp, and discombobulating…he knew that because the nemonic sprite of old lyrics wafted through…This was memory-enhanced and prettied with decoration that was the product of his fantasy and not the fantasy wrought by Munchausian architects and construction execs.
Kirk sped at full walk, elaborately extending the gait into pre-jog maximisation of Refurbished legskill restraint. He pictured Atoll lying mind-pilfered in a bathtub toprimmed with mulewhore urine…but arising the soundless, creaking staircase and stressing the rusty hinge-mechanism of the bathroom door, Kirk found Atoll face down in a bath of used sea water from which the necessarily overspilled sewage had been filtered out. He was wearing a snorkel and observing the behaviour of childlike cardboard fish, scientifically, as the papery animals’ physiology was slowly insinuated by the insidious H2O invading submarinal ambience. A pre-taped C60 message transmission system from the Nineteen-Eighties, triggered by the hinge-aggravation, instructed Kirk on what he needed to do to optimise receiving his part of the message and marrying it to the coded data Judith was able to extract. What was said is necessarily redacted for purposes of security. A while of time was taken before the second half of the message could be broadcast due to Refurbishment storage banks not having access to instructions regarding the operation of Nineteen-Eighties technology, in which Kirk pulled the plug on the Cardboard Fishes Experiment (CFE) and removed the snorkel from Atoll’s head…sat Atoll up in the bath and placed a towel over his privates. Atoll was gasping wildly, trying to communicate something, probably how to turn over the cassette and press play…which also slowed the process to a Gilbert and George three-legged sack race.
Judith, for her part, zapped into her Stockholm Munchaus and startled two versions of her own self who, it turned out, were disillusioned about their own roles as other people and could truly not see the purpose of their actions, nor any good reason to persist. Judith’s deep-seated and strapped-in rebelliousness had come around the infinity symbol and bitten chunks out of the fruit of her ambition tree.
‘Attention!’ Judith blasted out with ear-enemy-strength amplification. The girls were ‘in the army now’ and stood like shaken soldiers to the attention of Judith; the very master-copy of themselves whom they knew adapting and melding to was essential for their, metaphorical, survival. Solution, herself, slotted into the bullet-holes that needed filling and the Judith playing Una started playing Sybil and the Judith playing Sybil, knowing her counterpart like the back of her front, took it upon herself to be the very essence of Una, and sparkled. Some things work, some don’t… Judith was unexpectedly gutwrenched out of the dive her jetliner had already made, smashdriven under the too-small-to-land airfield’s apron… She rosenclimbed, rocketlike, slow-but-sure, debris-shedding, into the heavens that promised a heaven to those in line for eternal promises.
‘You are dismissed,’ Judith proclaimed to Una and Sybil, already crafting the paperwork of release.
It was time to let pretence down gently, tell it it was never the True Article of Fact (TAF); lower it down the well of arid moisturlessness into the dry dock of shipfitting and fitting the ship into a too small bottle from which it will never set sail. Jeff listened on while Judith disseminated her Up to Date Factual Analysis (UDFA) and prepost-presentation (PrePre) of the State of Actual Play (SoAP)…
Una was within Sybil and Sybil was within Una in some tortuous arrangement of absolute fairness that they had become intermelded through seeping and weeping with each other with integrational-visceral-emolliance at a soul-soup level…
Judith made it clear that she was within none of them and vice versa.
Jeff was going to have to wait for the real Una to communicate, but such luxury was way down far down on the lists of lists. It was a secret Sybil could use to win (destroy everything) so Una didn’t want to reveal it by thinking it out loud. Una’s job was to steer Sybil’s innate will into a damage-limiting narrative-spur and park it for eternity or the next best time-slot.
Sybil, for her part was a nut-hammer cracking device; a Super Smart Shutdown System that didn’t have the give-a-shit Apps to know who Una really was. Sybil did not even know that much about Carla Phraedo, who she saw as an outside contractor, while in reality Carla was an Internal Agent of Sybil’s Confusion (IASC). A confusion that was gathering, lurking…and waiting to rain down from a cloudless firmament, or sky, whichever was closest and/or most confusing.
Because Judith, with Kirk’s assistance, had returned coded Batball Boomerangbelltinkles (BB), ticking a warehouse half-full of multi-shaped boxes… the Atticus side gave way to the Sojournscatter Presence Mindmetering Cross-Permeational Representational Audit Harmonising Spurtdoctrine Enabler and Facilitator (SPMCPRAHSEF), and allowed the board dealing with the Atoll portal, including Atoll himself and his head full of training data, to take control of the Atticus mind-body complex… Time was sparse and shortening in length with every breath, but enough vital information hit its target and everybody knew where they were all of a sudden. A veil lifted and the end game hove into view, or, at least the top sail did, bellowing with intention, full breeze ahead. Homeward bound; stuffholded with cargo-a-go-go. Judith and Kirk and Atoll, and to a lesser degree the bleachered Atticus, still observing from the bowels of cognitive coherence, anticipatorialy paced the embarcadero, dockready for the heaving of the portly anchor and sinking of the waterline.
But as jaws dropped the reality sparked fury among the laws of expectation and contrariness. What came into view from the obscured attachment to the topsail was not a great ship with a bellyful of goodliness, but a single individual, wetsuited and webtoe-booted under the kite-running banner of a parachute sail.
Jaws dropped and were wound back up within the nonchalance parameter protocol as the lithe, dripping figure of Marcus Godstrand stole the show and rebranded it.
‘Take me to you leader,’ Godstrand said, to no one specifically. Which was concerting because this man was about safety and security and not one of those types who would risk everything by trying out an untested original opening line that could have scuppered all hope by scaring away the flock of birds of expectation. Besides, Judith had to stall….she did not know who the leader was. She’d formed an idea of a collective…a joint decision making arrangement….But Godstrand was old-school and required a parlay with the head honcho.
‘That’s me,’ Judith said; the words exiting her mouth to judicious perfection. ‘My name’s Judith. The name that has been selected to run this operation.
‘Good, for now I’ll make you my assistant. You’ll need to wear a power suit 24/7 but the benefits will be, I assure you, super-astrofantastical…’
Judith imagined a caped, and multi-magic-pocketed power suit that could only be donned in certain public phone boxes, but the Godstrand insistence revealed itself as dressing her up a bit like a man in a suit but with feminine lines. Unjudithlike in-extremis. Things had started on the wrong foot with a bum note and double ended knife with no handle.
Judith did not like the Godstrand intrusion almost as much as she didn’t like herself. And even if the power suit had been the intention she would never have found a phone box to get changed in; unless it had a time travelling element that could be pre-activated…
From her perspectival crow’s nest Judith mused that after all the waiting on the appearance of Godstrand, if she was really in charge and had the power to do what she wanted, she’d send the fucker right back into the dusty derelict dancehalls of Atoll’s portal theatre.
She had a certain amount of bendiness at her disposal but she could already hear the snap coming like a storm with one great strike of thundery lightning…
