Excerpt 136:
The Botress Monolgues
Commander Bott had assembled the bots under her Influence and Control Parameter Parasol (ICPP); choreographing them through a dynamatic, yet aesthetically authentical and judiciously balanced, if a little sequinned, if a lot cheerleaderesque kitch, gallivant-mime through the lanes, and in and out of the cul-de-sacs of Great Sudlow-On-Russet. The procession half-stopped to a quarter-stop and then the inevitable full-stop beneath the mock balcony protruding from the facade of the village inn that had been renamed the Queen & King’s Head. A picture of two thrones side by side each with severed and be-crowned heads, presumably operated by some system concealed beneath the royal seating…like some royal Punch and Judy head-theatre…
Commander Bott, through a loudhailer, addressing the mocking balcony, put forward her plans for the attention of a certain, if yet unrevealed, Tiny Guy; publicly addressing him whether he was there, as folk-conspiracy promised, within the audio-wake earzone, or not, making free-to-ear airwave data available to those with the operational sound-option listening capacity. Piggy-backed baton-exchange would almost definitely bridge-hop the pertinent paraphrases to Tiny Guy’s camp, if not to him, or one of his aliases, in person, or persons…
Tiny Guy was suffering from a pervasive multi-causal life-management hyper-reluctance, preventing him from showing any of his faces. Navigational ineptitude took over the Synchdepth Intercommunication-Swingbridge Clarification Optimisation (SISCO). Integrational harm-doing was folding itself from soup to soufflé.
For sure…
He was making too much of it; overthinking it into a barrel of infinite ingredients; he stood on the Foreshore of Rationality, determined this time to turn back the tide, or at least coalesce somehow, the incessantly wavy liquid into something solid he could cast aside into the dunes of sand.
There was a problem…
Tiny Guy could not access his Master-Persona (MP) and he was stuck with few alias options that gave him the power-presence he needed to govern the flow of civic ideas towards the fan of social destiny… He preferred, outcome assessment-wise, to remain anonymous, denuded of face-features, which he notched up as an achievement. But which led down a flight of stone cold steps to an empty space that echoed primarily with bitter self-abandonment. He could fool everyone all of the time…but only by fooling himself and becoming the fool. Everyone sucking on the hem of the fool-fabric, so to speak.
‘We, all of us, here and now, and or whenever, need a leader, a strong and dick-tatooed…sorry…spell-checker, dictatorial, leader. But…but I am butter frail human,’ Commander Bott shouted, robotically, hailing tinny, apparently leaning on fictionally reconstructobated memories delivered within a cloud of spell-checker hellishness: your Joan of Arcs, with a little of your Bravehearts mashed in. And, on reflection, interspersed with a spruce cataloging of Greta at the outset…peeking, then veering and diving away with incalculable inappropriateness into wander-lands of Commander-stroke-Woman pre-bot angst manifest-infest-ation… Historical wounds; time-travelling without a script, behaviourally unpredictable…pop-up prone, drop-in shocktroops, rock-up avalanche… ‘I have no physical heart…’ a long, shiny pause, resplendent, in showroom condition, eked out extra pips on the time-machine punch-card… ‘My spiritual heart was removed from its cavity…’ the exact same pause, reused with judiciously applied deep creative artifactual utilisation, ‘amid developmental trauma…the heart I had always held close, hurtfelt, chewed by salivating, gummy demons summoned by inadvertent, wayward gropes at futile escapism…the chimes toll for thee….what soared then soured. Was Truth so ugly it needed dressing in false finery? Was the Truth the Elephant man?’ Then a pause…that took an ugly turn, looking back grinning as though the turn were beauty dressed in ugliness for the purposes of sustaining and promoting ugliness as a thing of beauty. Was it the truth that was ugly? Beauty a distraction, a lie? Or was the world just a mass of beautugliness that was open for interpretation?
Commander Bott, thinking of a nomenclature tailoring to Botress, Commander Botress, it seemed like the way to go, according to everything she understood about natural flow. She was also talking, letting the words assume a libertarianism her authoritarian programming found alien to a giant insect/lizard degree. Through grotesquely imagined subtext annotation, she continued…
‘…was always fractured by parental forces…forces fielding infantry…artillery…far superior to my own feeble toy soldiers who fought bravely in the nursery wars but succumbed to the crushing reality, the bombs and bullets of reality that the enemy outgunned them with. My mini-mannequin cast plastic troops stood no chance, to a man, cut down in their prime…unpainted…buried in memory…turning in unmarked graves like turbines, marking the hours of death passed…engines of thrumming regret…power source of revenge…’
The best pause integration of all time, studied in classes…promising nothing…it could even have been the end of the monologue…but, no, it wasn’t:
‘My father was a complete cunt…’ There! She’d said it. It came out of nowhere and to nowhere it declined banishment. Unwrapped, cooking in its own juices, keeping close in nostril and parts of the mind activated by shock and embarrassment; a flight booked, a fight scheduled… She didn’t know, carelessly, what it meant, but floods of internalised tears so intense the electrical circuits of the robotic frame that she sat in was threatened with sparky compromise. The fact that it had no relation to the rest of the communication seemed odd to say the least, but all those present possessed minds that could wade through its swamp and keep their feet dry, luckily.
Tiny Guy, lost in the smattering of onlookers not quite qualifying as a crowd, lowered the wide brimmed fedora-cum-sombrero he’d borrowed from Carla, and took mental notes…scratching away at the ledger in his head’s eye. All anyone noticed was the hat so TG had free rein at not being noticed facially. He was safely camouflaged from the temple down to the chin up, helped by the words on the hat proclaiming: this is not a hat and an AI’d picture of Renee Magritte kissing Salvador Dalí on his melting clock lips. I must, he briefly considered, not return this hat. Phraedo didn’t need it anyway…his loss in the self-lubricating ether of hat-theft was disturbed by a sharp wordpunch that left a knuckle-mark on the wordometer…
The Commander, growing up, as Commander Kid, had always been an extraneous factor in everyone else’s ‘other’ business; seeming not to fit in to any presents that could ever lead to any futures…the fact she was still around, sipping tea-water at a lone table in the canteen-of-Life, even in part-machine-form, as she now presented, showed there was more to her than met the lenses of portrait or landscape.
A cavalry of sorts, horseless, without trumpet or flag; hands in pockets, metaphorically speaking…turned up despite their uncavalriness…a cavalcade of ex-ungentlemanly gentlemen posing, inappropriately, as schoolgirls from a bygone era, arrived. And it was one of their bowler hat days. And since you can take the man out of ungentlemanly you can’t take the ungentlemanly out of the man…whatever that means, the intended eighties-cum-seventies (also see: 60’s) London stockbroker look was more than subtly Clockwork Orange. A lot more! Dare it be said, semi-possibly, Carry On Clockwork Orange mixed with Digital Lemon Hellzapoppin’… Cocktails on the lawn.
‘Commander, my father was of the cultish variety too,’ the headgirl (+) chanced…producing a flop that sidled past the clapping of hutzpah admirers.
‘Cultish?’
‘I’m afraid this gentlemanly-cum-ungentlemanly thing’s dropping us way below the plimsoll line. Of course, I mean, cuntish. I do apologise…I mean…for not saying it how it is…’
The whole mob, attempting to be a smart ensemble, needed to embrace the fullness of transition from yob to upstanding citizen via comic book schoolgirl; not a route much trod, but nevertheless, even a Noddy-car can get you to the station. And they would…with an admirable persistence.
Commander Bott can’t look perplexed, not like the Commander used to, the robotic physicality in which her mind was contained hadn’t the programming of motor-motion mani-p-ower. This expressive lacking was made up for by an instructional read out on her lapel. The words ‘Mmm, how perplexing’ flashed on and off in red…
‘Not to be lost in over explanation,’ she said, because the threat of being lost under an avalanche of explanation rumbled into a very real potentiality zone, ‘I fear I must repeat, and this is very much told to you from me in an Eve Ensler spirit, we both emanate from the Cuntlands. We are mutual comrades from the cuntological cuntocracy the cuntologists cuntfest of cunty cunt… But did not say what she feared to repeat, leaving the dangling atmosphere be. Sprinkled in fairy cunts.
She’d never been able to say the ‘C’ word since a formative years experience involving a hairbrush and some punishment pants, a revolving nightmare of abuse…dressed up in propriety. A barrage of surprise attacks camouflaged as solid parenting. Her humanity stripped off to roam the universe, not quite a ghost…eternally in denial and abstinence…
The Chief Gentleman calls for a hat change, if only to distract himself, et al, from the ‘C’ question and answer interrogation overspill.
In other news…
Fezes broke out. Tommy Cooper impersonations banned; mild references, top five funny lines tolerated for the first seven and a half minutes, or so, before the Cooper/Fez link was severed and North African vibes took over…inevitably slipping into the groove of the Casablanca movie lounge; night boat, palm tree, saxophone, sand and rythmo-melodic Madness.
Commander Bott summoned her botressanoes. It flashed up on the ‘do it’ register and registered on the ‘do it now’ spontaneity uninhibinator… She simply dog-shout-whistle-screamed, ‘Alliance…’ And everyone knew what she meant. They just had no intention of going along with it, even if they’d known how to go about it. The stable door was open and the (pretend) horse bolted it shut again (institutionalised in a box).
There are leaders and followers, it is just human nature…After some substantial leading stalked by some earnest following, posing as a prospective takeover candidate, the ‘alliance’ looked like something, forged as it was from a nebulous shout into the ether, it steamed as if breathing heavy, resting a while, poised for the coming immediacy, rippling, neutral humoured ready for anything; rough and tumble, smooth and smart… A universe of etceteras awaiting…
They all paused and went right on pausing until…
Silence spat dry gobs…of nothing…giving all it had to offer, relinquishing control to the power of… (the power of what, we’ll never know, I am sure)
Considerations rounded themselves up and got to know each other, preparing for the Great Consideration Dance-Off and Group Pyramid (GCDOGP) building…
‘I am now called, Commander Botress…for reference…any connection with any other persona is historically cut off and cauterised. End communique…’
