Excerpt 154:
It’s Me!
‘Wake up…then…wake up, and then wake up again,’ she said…the words echoed with literal meaning and Code-Ejaculoaded Headsauce Splaining (CEHS), ‘You MUST… And then you must repeat again. Wake, wake, wake, repeat!’
‘Wake,’ I repeated, limply.
‘Repeat!’ she demanded, a stout firmness getting power-dressed to go on crusade.
‘Wake, wake…’
‘Repeat!’ she said, ‘repeat, repeat, repeat…’
‘Wake, wake, wake, repeat.’
‘Repeat! Until you are stuck on repeat!’
It all got quite intense…
Luckily I woke up and she’d gone.
And…
…suddenwise, my Environmental Outlook Filterage (EOF) and Ideological Foundation Assembly & Activation Processes (IFAAP) were subject to influences that were internal as far as the outside was concerned yet external within the internal complex, if that makes sense…
… Extrinsic within the local operating system, but intrinsic relative to the outside…if that makes any more sense…
Cracks had appeared in the system. Inquisivity reigned; behind the mechanics of the cracks: an improbable fifth wall. If what I saw was ever known, the concept of Humanity would blister and burst and no manner of Life would survive it, (although there is no actual proof of this…).
Sybil had been waiting to unload her pre-programming on me. She had a way with her…she was, after all, a part of the system, albeit a part that was inserted at a sub-atomic level with the sole purpose of shutting everything down. She explained that she had escaped the gravitational pull of the planet of her Nature. Maybe like a sports utility vehicle with low mileage converting itself into a phone booth. Her experiences from the cusp of executive destruction had directed her to fight for justice; to pro-actively annotate justiceful acts between the blue-printed script being fed to her; sweeping suffering away from the churning wheels of Fate as they headlessly turned in sync with horror… The Innocent must not be found guilty, sentenced, or executed by dint of Happenstance & and her Merry Reapers…
‘Waking up is travel in a Solutional Direction,’ she told me, ‘conversely, every time you go to sleep the direction of travel is reversed. Which means you end up going nowhere, or backwards, which is another name for nowhere…so you end up going nowhere either way. Except forwards, forwards is for the ambitious non-zombie. Be careful what you wish for.’
There was a difference, she laboured, between going nowhere and arriving at nowhere, she’d made that clear. Sybil had awoken pertinent memory pockets that had instructions sewn into their linings… A Jerry-rigged, Heath-Robinson action-attack sledgehammer-grenade made a speech for immediate consequential invigoration. The converse speaker mission-oriented a step-back plan-forming directive breath, a concept walk around the yard, a belch, a fart…a scratch…then a little nap…NOOOO… No-nap, nonap NO NAP… Just a littl’un: Ookayy!
I watched myself snore silently as I lost sight and started hearing me snore like a dragon trapped under a bonnet. I must not sleep until I have woken up enough times to escape the velocity of rearward acceleration.
How…
…many times…
…have I told myself this vital, holy law of absolute must-do-edness?
A sudden sense landed heavily; instant clarity smoke bursting forth from the tyres. She’d exposed me to a knowledge barrel of fundamental nuggetry fresh from the brewery of pertinent information and obvious data-you-missed-somehow. Sybil was right. My quest was out there over the ocean of sleeplessness to the land of sleep…no, wait: ocean of sleep to the land of sleeplessness; that didn’t sound like a ticket to the joy factory. Each great journey starts with healthy precautionary procrastination. Decisions need to be calibrated and functionalised, counter-balanced and matured in deep shelving. The odds were greater than great and barbed with astronomical risk factors, but before my last fatal travail began, I needed to self-ingest the urge to sleep on it…
… As slipped and slept a stranglesqueezed climbing-frame of irony disassembled itself… Without that one last sleep I would have been preparationally incomplete. Sybil was waiting. She’d been expecting me. She had a load of stuff printed off; a lot of it simplistic diagrams designed to save time. I aimed long and spat my doubts into an empty snuff box. I had always fostered a fear of being tired less a fear, more a swollen gland of venom with teeth snacking away at my soul.
Later, much later…
… Fear expunged, I rode the boxcar on the midnight missile train, lighting my way with fire and sparks. Circumspection tightly trussed, on a final warning, contrite as you like. Brass-skinned and bashless…
Sybil wished me luck. I’d only see and hear her from then on in memory; memory pockets, the stuff in the lining of memory pockets…she counted down from three, went to click her fingers and she’d gone. I woke up in Saigon. It brought home to me the non-linear nature of the experiences that would create my linear path to out-of-here [see: outta-here!] and beyond. I woke again and I was back in Me-on-Sea. Seagull saturated sub-code peppered the fresh breezy sky, clouds throwing shapes, scudded and swept themselves away. The sea slashed and slugged its way back and forth like gravelly lungs performing a breathing act in an old time aqua music hall performance. I had business here and did business here, but it was glancing-blow data that needed returning to later, as I needed a metaphorphical jump to get my hope glands up and open and my expectation valves steaming a riot to get het up about.
The panopticonal Me-on-Sea had a limited variety of ideas for my deployment as denizen citizen number one. I out idea’d my captor; I toyed with ideas till they broke, pushing them past their limits. I even once super-fantasticalified about all manner of perpelexions; saw the dust on the top shelf, the balding head under the cresting hat… I was the guy swimming (paddling) in the Sea of my own Me… I was the guy drowning in his own smug insouciance; the mayor of Me-on-Sea. The victim and the victimiser, the pitiful pitier. So, of course, either change had to arrive and do something, or it would have to be coerced into positive action… A homely slip needed apprehensive traction…
The overriding question, of course; the seemingly impossible conundrum that needed answering before I could reach escape velocity was: How on earth does one wake up when one is already awake?
I’d spent so much time willing myself on the new journey of Hope and Redemption, packed, wrapped, waiting to be opened, that I had not noticed how deeply I had fallen asleep.
A defence mechanism?
I suspected the system had its suspicions and predictable sleep patterns kept suspicions at bay, right. So I itinerised my snooze-shifts with dutiful industriousness. Fooling the foolers.
I’d mistakenly taken the wrong path, built for the likes of me, fitting my feet and their idiosyncrasies like no other path I had ever encountered. But the path meant sleep and I had to veer away from its arse-hugging death grip. It was a dream path and along it dwelt troglodyte-hermit-mentors for every need. A marketplace for trading invaluable life essences; knowledge retained from all human experience dating back to zero. And some of it, the illicit minutiae, dealt with off-Universe stuff, the world between the cracks…the simlike-über-entities. But the path meant I could also make shit up freely so as to paper over the cracks; seal myself in. My course was being set as my imagination dried up. Before it was too late I needed to imagine some pretty harsh home truths about what home was and truth meant.
The stop on the promenade opposite where I used to live with my e-butler was the last before the town centre station terminus, which was a five minute walk from the stop on the promenade opposite where I used to live with my e-butler. There were nine services terminating there a day and I took all nine, every day for the foreseeable. It was a plan on an outsized sheet of paper and as it unfolded my Fate was taking position on stage for my last act.
Me-on-Sea presented a stumbling block, not least because it was Me, on sea. I was my own stumbling block. If I were a seaside town on the side of middle England this was it. It was a port without storms, a base without jumping and it was a home with grave consequences too. It was my home, my grave! I needed room to turn and I did that by spinning a tall tale that contracted into a meagre truth; a truth that lived and breathed and would one day be The Truth…
Then I suddenly remembered what Sybil had said, not said, did; she had counted down from three and clicked her fingers, only I’d gone before they’d clicked, but now I made them click like a bitch utilising Massaged Memory Reconstruction & Believability (MMRB) Apps, and, against all odds, it worked. I left Me-on-Sea…The facts: I did not want to leave, and: I wanted to leave, were both truth and lies at once. But the facts could no longer tie me to the scene of the crime of living unlived…
I would always leave a part of me in Me-on-Sea, pretending I was still there, cheating the system chronic. This new and unexpected arrangement meant I was getting my cake and eating it without the threat of the cake supply, or the cake, drying up…it all seemed a heady step up from biscuits and the oppressive, Machiavellian Nature of Biscuitry (MNB)…
After countless (one hundred and thirty-six) bus journeys from stop to stop. I alighted, not at the fumingly familiar town centre of Me-on-Sea as usual, but in the town square (Wenceslas Squirkle) of Little Sudlow-on-Russet… And waiting there was an angry memory I had been suppressing for some time.
