Excerpt 148:
Twenty-Thousand Arguments Against Humanity
The act of sleeping brought with it relief from the frustrations of not knowing. Sleep-side of the deal, away from the temptation of biscuits and their numbing, memory suppressant qualities, a picture as to what-was-what could be assembled so accurately that frame choice; hanging position and insurance evaluation all chipped in to top the toppings with tied red ribbons.
Each sleep session, usually, but by no means solely, two hours on, two hours off during daylight hours, revised and recalculated, assessed and adjusted everything I knew about myself historically.
There was a cycle of understanding; episodic, chaptorial; prequels, sequels and knowing and unknowing not knowing and knowing.
As my mind reloaded with the story of my past, I watched patiently like I was at the West End premier of a much anticipated bio-pic of me… It was during the final credits of one such cycle that a weather front of conceptual gibberish fell into pools; gathering in sensical sermon, catching light that illuminated the obscure.
In this auto-concoctive mindstate I could see what my alter-somnambulant otherness could not.
During sleep I was wide awake, relative to my state, something to do with Theta frequencies, while the waking awake stopped from actually being awake to memory by Alpha frequencies. I took from that that my thoughts at least, were frequency based, something I would find useful if outcomes provided the right type of arena.
Knowing I’d know what he, the waking me, would never know gave me a false frisson of superiority that made Truth wear the anorexic anorak, slowly eradicating the body fat of veracity.
I couldn’t blame the nameless e-butler, his imperatives were being tweaked by malicious algorithms in some far off distant cloud moist data heaven. Neither he nor his inputs could see my dreams, okay so neither could I once awake, but I had a full diary of commitments to sleep session dedicated to familiarising myself with my own forgotten input. But I did blame his auto-personality-construction software that seemed to take against me from the get go and fuel a flame of disdain with combustible meanness that bordered on hatred.
The ground hog day of remembering repetition as memories rolled in like waves led to the technique that became a way forward; the trick was to use my memory to recover more memory. And then place the pertinent narrative executive sensitive memories in a convenient metaphor ready to collect on initial entry to the mind space.
‘Biscuits are getting low,’ I tell the e-butler. Going for: ‘in passing’, but projecting ‘loitering’.
‘I could of told you that,’ he replied, all electro-shitgobbbed, like a festering imp with an aversion to niceness had influenced his algorithms…
‘Could “have”…’ I enforced.
‘Whatever,’ the nameless shitbutler replied.
‘How long before we are out of biscuits?’
‘Math isn’t my strong point.’
I knew he was just trying to aggravate me. And to add insult he started playing what he called ‘music’ for his own entertainment, that consisted of highly triggering whizzes, bangs and explosive noxiocities that, as a soundtrack, could not be more upsetting.
‘What were you dreaming about. You called out a name…you were running from someone…who’s it? Where were you going?’ The e-butler shouted over the jagged, skull-menacing cacophony.
‘What name?’ I replied, with an abandon that gotcha’d myself.
‘You tell me…are you hiding something?’ He clung on with grippy confidence of a top-notch denture fixative.
‘From whom?’
‘I cannot be specific. It’s above my programmed botlevelled algograde.’
I am sure he had an inside line with more executive involvement than he was letting on. Christ, he could have been writing the script and I would not have known…
‘The Developers’ technical entities are conjuring up wherewithal’s…a sleep mole, for instance, to spy on people who won’t be honest, or even forthcoming about their dreams…’
‘I am not being dishonest. I honestly cannot remember.’
‘Are you even trying?’
‘I am going out to get biscuits.’
‘I’ll get them delivered.’
‘No, I want to browse…graze…’
‘You can browse online.’
‘What is “online”?’
‘I told you already, yes…they’ve developed a system whereby the biscuit manufacturer, wholesaler, shop store etcetera, puts them on a virtual store presented on a webpage and then you get to make your choice, click a few buttons, and they’ll get it sent over, post haste.’
First I’d heard of it.
This was new. Thrilling enough to be drawn to it. I could see the benefits, but I wanted to get out from under my e-butler’s demanding authoritarianism so had to shelve the whole concept, with a promise to cycle back to it for future purchases, if indeed it was true.
It was a skill I had developed over the previous months, helped by Sybil and Una, Jeff and others…to pretend something so hard that it became not pretend. The only real defence from those trying to scrape your mind for damning evidence.
I’d got used to the sinister nature of the e-butler, its sinisterness merely became a stuck record even though that stuck record was fingernails dragging down a chalkboard.
I’d filled out all the forms; my paper work was up to date, I’d made a concerted effort. The e-butler had no business trying to stop me. So I slipped out, with the added expression of the rebellion I felt welling up within me by saying nothing about where I was going or what I intended to do or when I predicted my return up to the point of curfew.
I never knew whose shift it was, was it Old Pa Paranoia? Little Miss Paranoia, the Paranoia Twins, Uncle Paranoia, cousin Paranoia…a local agency: Paranoia and Daughters…the list went on. Even if none of them were watching me I knew the natural background observation was activated.
So I was surprised when members from the Other Side; our ghostly brothers and sisters arrived along the promenade corridor and slowed to a stop engulfing me, forming a protective aura-buffer so no one outside could see or hear me. I felt alone.
At first I just thought my close protection ghost entity suit was solely constructed with hideously maimed children, but from in their midst; a pale man, his name: the Professor. He paused, breathing deeply, as colour returned to his lovelorn rubicund facial features. The shuffling of the noiseless limb-lacking horde ceased. A drum roll had to be imagined or forgone. I naturally shut out the incongruity of angelic faces that had, moments before, escaped the personal hell of a functional genocide where the sky spat fire and rubble. Ghosts now, what of it…free now…but unable to pass on because common sense would not let them.
Conspiratorially, as though I were the only one present, the Professor spoke in a way that seemed to signify that what he was saying could shatter if spoken loudly.
There was a blotting out that was part of the information dump. So sensitive data could be smuggled past the chronically intrusive e-butler and processed under the secret veil of sleep.
I had a nap just as soon as the e-butler’s bantered-up, passive-aggressive ministrations had subsided. I stole away to my place of knowing like a kitten purring atop a crisp white nest of ironed laundry in shaft of maternal sunlight to the sound of a clocks repetitive reassurance.
E-butler be damned.
Il Professore came back, on form, delighting as only he could and not very often…
‘I have a theory. Which is…that if you use the portal you entered from and return to the last level which was Middle Russet or New Caldera, in your ‘waking’ state, you will jog the memories of your sleeping know-it-all self,’ I remembered him saying in a simulated reconstruction free from all ghostlinesss.
‘Isn’t it all a bit sketchy,’ I whined, ‘I mean, how will I get to let myself know what the two distinct memory strands mean once collated.’
‘I will find a fairway.’
‘Don’t go using golf analogies.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well,’ I said. I’d worked on this and needed to get the reply right, ‘It’s not the balls they are hitting it is the balls they are talking…’ and the Prof’s look made me retract, not my words, but my balls.
‘I no longer play golf. The ghost golf club will not allow twenty thousand plus ghost children on the course.’
The Prof. was a Memory Engineered Reconstruction (MER), and he knew it. There were, inevitably, elements remembered that the Prof. had not himself uttered; blanks needed filling and avenues needed streetlights…
‘Vaginal or anal,’ the Prof splurtmouthed, in an unexpected twist.
‘What?’ I said, unable to add, ‘the fuck’, as would have been standard. ‘Do I have a choice?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he pronounced excitedly, ‘it is orifice or norifice.’
‘Can I appeal?’
‘No, it is official, orificial. orificient.’
‘I’ll get back to you on that.’
‘The ghost children were staying at the end of the derelict pier but the US Marines and a detachment of chameleon SBS frogs had commandeered it and they aint afraid of no ghosts. So, would your e-butler mind if they could hold up with you, just until the Parish council decide to pass the idea of a pier rebuild up the council chain?’
‘What about private investment,’ I offered, hoping to ease the conversation into lay-by.
‘They need somewhere to stay, and if logic were to overcome delusion, you’d see they are all your children anyway.’ Which made no sense to me, not a slip of a soupçon of sensical sagacity, as they say.
‘I’ll have to ask my e-butler,’ I said, irritably, unable to squeeze out the word no. The Prof. was not the kind of imaginary entity I wanted to be irritable with, but irritability rashes can break out uncontrollably at any time and scar at will.
But ask the e-butler what? I was already stomping on thin ice, he’d threatened to pose as a powerful local mouth organ player to get me evicted. I’d thought we were breaking new ground when he told me his name, but he hadn’t, he’d given me a false name and forgotten and given me another false name and another and another until all the false names added up the original sum of no name.
I was sucked away by my diminishing compos mentisness. I hardly noticed the bit between leaving and arriving at chez e-butler. My magical metaphorphical world of sleep would be subject to quantum leakage and unconscious permeation flaring, that was for sure.
I threw a, ‘whatever,’ back in e-butler’s face and took the couch for a snooze with an informality that could never had suggested the import of the business I intended to undertake under the eyes of the all seeing and nose of the all nosey.
In my memory I had to return from where the memory was set to wake up here and still be synchronised. I had wised up to that technique on the hoof.
I woke up in the e-butler’s lair; there had been a domain change; it was not e-territory anymore, it was g-territory…there were twenty or so thousand ghostchildren packed in, carrying hurt like a vase containing their own life, in death.
I hoped, in my grief, I was not keeping them from anything important. The aura they maintained left the e-butler speechless with malfunction: ‘No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error,’ the e-butler said.
It took a while but I passed through confusion, into chills, through a vine crop of dangling humour, to a rest at the foot of amusement. I chuckled, then recreated the chuckle with unconvincing chuckle like noises. I fell asleep and recalled the whole goddamn movie, in sequence, with tailored editing.
‘Classy!’
