Excerpt 153:
The Secrets Sleep Enshrines
Where do thoughts come from; from where do they emanate? I considered, for a millisecond’s cognappreciation. Were thoughts, the product of incalculable millennia, just passing through on the way to be dumped? Do they go for recycling? Were their momentous nothingness-cum-somethingness registered anywhere, noted? Or, did they fall off the relevancy scale into an unmapped nowhere of total unattendedness? Questions pestered, I ignored them; I wanted peace from my own distraction-sabotage for a change, but didn’t get it.
I was well and truly distracted and only Godstrand’s, A Handbook for the End of Humanity, which I had memorised and kept in a low key memory palace (a rickety shed on an allotment) to prevent its evaporational theft, kept me up. Godstrand postulated that understanding the root of consciousness would be to know all there is to know that needs knowing. There is no use having a brilliant mind if you only ever stick to the script, Godstrand said once… He went way off-script and came back with boons of Truth the General Intelligence Network (GIN) did not want booning with. In his off-the-planet travails, circumspunking factual relativity, he managed to discover a highly obscure, secretive (dis)organisational part-entity that was attempting to rebel against the laws of Nature on our behalf. He concluded that this part-entity was a sort of mental parasite that had contrary aims to the Human resistance to Peace, Love and Understanding that any sane species would’ve pursued. It must have come from the deities. He thought that maybe they had disagreements on the direction of the ‘simulation’ (Godstrand said he used the word in place of the real word that was obscured to us). Godstrand did not believe in a singular deity; he believed there was a sort of board of sort of deities who, ultimately, governed a community of deities that were served by vast administrative bodies whose minor deities ran our Natural World Space (NWS). He believed that as soon as we, the human race, cared more than our overseers, we would earn the right to a have a say in how our lives were led. But until then we were at the mercy of an unseen, deity population of chain-yankers and string-pullers to whom our lives were no more than a game-playing frivolity, puppeteered into a serious drama that made no real sense… This was all theoretical, there’s no way we can know, at present, anything about an outside (extra-universal) governing system. Godstrand lobbied for sensible approaches to compassion and looking after those of us who needed it, including the eco-systems, as though it were true and we had a vested interest in adopting common decency for the everyday pursuance of personkind’s beneficial passage.
The rebellion, that was against our chosen path of self-destruction would come from the forces of good; love, compassion, treating others as you want to be treated yourself. Where these reserves of enlightened brilliance were to come from was anybody’s guess. Godstrand staled that, as long as ‘woke’ is a dirty word, we will all remain under the oppression of our own slumber. Who we truly are will never develop while we are sleeping…
It nodded the idea that nudged the ball that rolled into the dominoes…this wasn’t code. I had spent many hours previously, standing in queues, waiting for appointments…trying to fathom the code of the thing…but here I was now, many thought-hours later waiting with stark anticipation for the elation of my catching up and hopping on, like a missed bus caught despite the counter-weight of Fate’s intended fickle-fackle. We will never truly develop into who we truly are…the truly. I had what I needed, my fingers tightly gripped on a ledge that, when the rest of my body caught up I’d be levelling myself above the old me; thinking it had been easy. I fell into a deep sleep and woke up in a Trulli in Alberobello, Puglia, Italy, smiled inwardly and outwardly in tandem, a rarity, and went back to sleep.
The hotel lobby was awash with cycle-people and cycle-contraptions. The Hoteliers Threee (cycle group), were in mime only mode for the foreseeable. Two of them were on a tandem and the other unicycled while vacuuming and dusting. They gestured and showed me pictures of a scene I remembered seeing myself in London in St. James’s Park from Pall Mall. It depicted the Goodies, a latter day music hall act who rode a thricycle, they couldn’t ride it as such, but The Hoteliers Threee (cycle group) intimated, using signs and semi-comedic grunt-noises that they would be able to master riding the prop on account of their most horrifying genius level skills that could frighten a monk…they had to write down some of that to enable me to get the picture they were trying to project. They wanted me to help them approach the BBC, because they had never bought a licence. I explained to them that they were mad and I had no scope for helping them, but they covered their ears. I left them and went up to my room for a quick mini-bar session with Clive, before hitting the hay.
In the elavator…
I’d tried to view the storage drive, using my own devices, by imagining it was a medium sized warehouse and I was a badged-up local inspector, authorised to access all areas of the facility in order to go about my work with ept exhaustivity. I spent many an hour investigating leads within the complex that led nowhere. The staff there were willing and helpful, but, although some of them had heard of the alleged documentary footage, none of them could say where it would be stored, if indeed it was being stored there. The consensus of opinion was that it was being stored at a different location.
Before the end of the first working day it became apparent that I was one of those bosses returning to the shop floor to show incompetence and boost my already bloated ego at the same oxymoronic time.
‘I am keeping an eye on the structural function strategies we are undertaking as an organisation,’ I’d said, and tempered it with a plea for a better information stream to feed my thirst for rushfeed omnidata. I relied heavily on my executive team, but found myself checking up on them. In one such foray into backstage hoovering I came across offices baring the label, Theories and Guesswork Team room. It was either bad management or good boss deception. There was a dedicated department; an elite cadre of highestly trained inspectorlocutorlorators with not one fact between them. They had a pretend fact they were practising with but it was worn out from being passed back and forth. It was full of filled holes and the holes that remained unblocked by overuse whined when the wind caught them in the right, or wrong, direction, intensity and angle.
I ummmed and arrred and then it hit me; decision time came with a bang that left whimpering in its wake. They needed closing down. I was a mole with a mission. The workforce and senior managing individuals had the air of replicant lounge warriors wearing combats and toting Kalashnikovlike cardboard replicas. No good would come of their attitudes.
I made a speech that strolled out into the yard and laid down in a patch of reedy weeds and died. There was only one eventual outlet in store for this organisation and that was that their invidious obsessiveness would bulge with malignant overactive counterproductiveness. I attempted disengagement, but paint had dried; loans had been taken out and extended, grapes had raisined in wrath and kettles had boiled past anger. The place amounted to a lie factory; not little white lies but indelible, vast pseudo facts dictating the descent of the winding Roman road to nowhere. Truth is a destination. Lies are an endless journey. And this corporation was rolling out a super efficient production line for world distribution. I gathered a team of the best liars, top in their fields, fibbers, fabricators and prevaricators extraordinaire. They wove inveraciously, sewed in linings that stitched up interfabricationally spun yarns…
The elevator creaked to a halt and I wrestled open the metal grate… The corridor seemed longer than usual and a vacubot went about its dusty Sysiphean task unable to do anything about the ingrained tyre tracks. The door to my room seemed smaller than usual, but by the time I had entered and closed and double locked it for good luck, it reverted to seeming the same size as ever.
I looked into the mini-bar to touch bases with Clive. ‘A man, or woman, on a unicycle left a present for you,’ he said, with a pastiness I had not heard before.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know! I haven’t pried into your business, but, in passing, guessing like, I’d estimate that it’s a c3P Ox55 947 file observer, deep encryption attached to a film stock data storage device. With a physical, oldschool Betamax videotape, digitised and transferred to it, I’m guessing.’
I reached in to the mini-bar and took out a packet of snacks, a fizzy water and the reading device…the drive I had hidden in a crevice under the fridge was plugged in to the device and still warm…
‘Did you…’
‘Did I…?’
‘Did you read it?’
‘No, no, no,’ he said reaching the maximum number of noes that would have been feasibly attributable in most if not all Honesty Value Terms Index Catalogues (HVTIC), ‘no, no,’ he went on. Two over. It led me to a pool of suspicion, but I refused to drink from the Accusatory Liquid…until I’d endured a further five damning noes. They came. They went. I was certain Clive knew what was on the tape. And more to the point, he was using a very see-through and blatant code schema…unless he was utilising the old ‘double-bluff’. But then the old double-bluff could have been concealing even deeper code…
As a side project, that I was building like a sort of scaffolding made from concrete around the derelict edifice that was being reconstructed by creative will rather than competent architectural industry, I was going back through the history of the work done by agents working for Tiny Guy and his organisation. Several new, to me, facts dribbled out, some fizzing with corrosive energy. One, being that as all of the so-called agents were played by Aliases of Tiny Guy himself. Another being that I was Tiny Guy…had been, in a previous calibration of my own relatable consciousness! Everything I needed to know must have been screaming and waving its arms trying to get my attention from the Parapet of Memory Loss (PML) in the Church of My Ongoing Epitaph Construction (CMOEC). I chose an avuncular nonchalance to disguise my free-falling fret faced farrago of feeling and the prevailing parachutist’s wind of anxiety that had engulfed me. My imagination had locked itself in the bathroom and was drumming up some choice hostages. I redoubled my efforts at creating the right fantasy to get in touch with Tiny Guy and his aliases.
K would help, K would know, I heard myself thinking. ‘Kettle’s’ I heard myself repeating. If I found the Kettle K was incarcerated in, he would paste his cut memories into my memoryline and we’d be good to Tango Golf.
Adapt and adopt…adapt and adopt I said over and over, in a controlled oversplice…interspersed with bouts of uncontrollable ‘kettle’…’kettle’…’kettle’…
When I located K’s kettle, deep in a folkloric wood, in a hollowed out tree that no-one care encounter after dark, he didn’t respond well to being called the genie of the lamp or to any rubbing jokes and/or double entendres. But he was ready to exit the kettle to put right all the misconceptions he had left behind in the world out side the world of the kettle. And a little humour wouldn’t have hurt.
I knew K must escape the kettle. It was a pistol above the Chekovian fireplace (Kalashnikovian?). My reticence towards letting him out, even if I could find a means by which to do so, was that he would take over. That scared me. But as he was most likely more the True Me (TM) than I was myself… As caretaker, I wanted to take care and make sure the good of the whole was served. Except, overridden by fear and anxiety, I lost the kettle and had no apparent way of finding it again. I felt bad, but my ego argued that within the bad a good dwelt…and it did, it squatted, wallowing in a dirty protest of defecatory selfishness.
