Excerpt 160:
Kettlemen Till We Die
Lesson three-hundred-and-something:
Misfires can be as destructive as fires…
I woke up in the same place, at the same time, five times over… Determined not to worry…I sat there, drenched in my own anxiety, humming and whistling a nonchalant recollection of greatest hits while suppressing a whiny, piddle-pool of self-inexplicableness wrapped in a tea cosy of matted strands of confusion.
I’d hoped for better.
But just to back track;
I’d found my way into the kettle somehow…
…and now, somehow, I needed to find my way out.
I asked around and was told about my situation vis a vis the kettle; escape notions were futile notions; escape was impossible. I found myself unable to agree despite knowing less about the kettlomics of the situation than they, the natives of the land of kettle, did. I girded my resources in preparato gusto magnifico…resolving to make true by using truthing, truthe and thruthbolstering Apps and App-Ops if I had to; the necessity to do what needed to be done and not succumb to the inalienable physics of the thing.
I mingled among them; mumbling with a well rehearsed actorishness; spouting intermittently with sage sprinkles of showery input.
Judith dolefully dug weeds in the garden of betrayal; her knees indenting the sod with resentment cups. She was never going back into work. She recited the chronic mantra: was this it, while knowing that it had been it,itnhad gone, it was shot by the starter’s gun, it was always falling at the first hurdle, it never didn’t miss hitting a wall down the back straight, it was committed to climbing a mountain on the home straight…and on the summit: the starting blocks and a starter gun to the head…
The unrefurbished-Dave-cum-Refurbished-Kirk ill-matched consortium portions, hovered in the dim spaces between light and dark, totally uncommitted and totally committed in a conjoined assault on the world of action and the world of inaction. Lodged in a pushmepullyou vegan aspic…
Atticus was keeping his thoughts neutral so Atoll could have an easy ride when he returned; his only real thought output concerned the very real possibility that Atoll was lost forever. The very emotion of loss was a placeholder; an Atoll-shaped hole.
New to the kettle my celebrity status was of the viral meme starburst variety…until…newer arrivals usurped my almost royal highness; they streamed in, oblivious to their actions, deplatforming my star performance: the whole baby-children-parents-grandparents-great grandparents gamut of life-in-death trundled in like a people displaced placing themselves in the spotlight that could only really illuminate half a dozen at a time of the hundreds of thousands of those who slept in heaven’s doorway holding out for the martyrdom they deserved. Slipping in with the bomb outcome victims and the sniped and the tortured death throes of the returnees from Hell itself, were the two most needed on the outside; to facilitate my kettle egress optionability, which took a downturn prospectwise to somewhere below zero. The Professor and Sybil adopted the guise of real beings while in the kettle and I could never fathom why. There was something about kettle life that made them mortal in a restrictive way, they both lost their magic and worked their mundanity like an ongoing chore.
Most disconcertingly Sybil and the Professor, who normally filled their canvasses with great breadth and depth, made only the shapes that fitted within the bounds of the restricted reality the kettle imposed upon them. They had remained hope-filled and constructive; they had even banded together to form a management company to control all the ex-canal boat theatre company renegades who would otherwise be pestering with impish fragmentising and demon-faceted ghoulishness as a matter of course. They had a number of pre-performance projects in the rehearsal can; waiting to be maturated into kettle-wide exposure…except…it was a ruse to control them and not a pipeway out on to the stage for the act of mind-terror…with frills, they all craved…
K did not appear in any physical form but spoke through the PA system, his tone laden with doom like a waiter bringing an ununpacked pallet to the table straight from the wholesaler…having detoured the kitchen and come through a main window after removing the frame and some breeze blocks.
‘It’s like a portal into a different world,’ K said suddenly, without any audible precursors.
‘What is?’ I said, after an exponentially multiplying silence and a dribbling telegraph of precursoring snortitude-lite.
‘What?’ he replied, in all honesty.
‘No…I was just saying “what is” because you said “it’s like a portal”, and I was just wondering what it was that was like a portal,’ I said, not even feigning the appearance of someone attempting the baseline objective of carrying off an intelligible sentence. K didn’t answer…he had changed, and I assumed that must be due to the melding he’d betwathered with the Botface’s Torso’s Dioparalaxosis Nexus Granticular Spiral-Triangulation (DNGST) debacle. I’d need to speak to Jeff to get up over the technicals of that conundrum, but both Jeff and Una had run for the hills. One assumed they’d be back at some point, guns blazing, feet-first, collars-up, arms-flaying, hackles-rampant… But what they were actually doing dangled. A Tiny Guy corporate engineer had been sent to make a report on where they were at. Until then I had a stolen piece of tech that was hypercapable, but how hypercapable was being processed with Guessware and Bewareware Imp-apps.
I’d always understood that K and I would meld and I’d get back a whole lot of what I’d lost; but now he appeared to be just a pattern merged into the hi-tech fabric woven with Botface thread. In his mind, I believe he still thought he was a bus route escape chain janitor on call. Botface’s Torso had been a maverick and a revolutionary threat to the Botface system, but this had been trickery designed to insert Botface into the K system. Never trust a torso…
It wasn’t until Sybil sniffed out the Botface intention odour that any knowing existed about what in actuality was occurring. K could not make any executive decision regarding any business the Botface Corporation might have a vested interest in. He was unaware himself; his own trite narrative going off on a side hustle with a delusion hat, coat and shoes. K was happy enough to be functionally void.
The Botface saga unfurled…
Botticelli and Facchiolini were two Italian-American techmonsters who joined forces, Botticelli with advanced robotics and Facchiolini with a biomechanical nextgentech QASAI-ready operating system, who’d been bought out in a back-alley, stormy-night-on-Wall-street takeout-drag-down-stitchenstein…crosshammer-deployment-execution, buddy-assassin, drug-n-grab-n-own. What had been an operation to bring a personal assistant, friend and confidant; an intimate ally with global connections making everyone ‘platformed and invincible’, became, under NMBS control, the prototype for a global police force of Botface Sheriffs with sovereign-judge-n-jury software boasting an Executive-Punishment Array (EPA) that only just squeaked tantalisingly in below the Cruel and Unusual Threshold (CUT).
Jeff had already been employed by G & G labs before the predicted take up of the global policing system project was actuated; farmed out by NMBS. Jeff and Una’s noble and salvational intentions were crushed and desiccated by the Botface Torso pan global project to slip out of G & G management and into K. Jeff unwittingly carried the Botface seed within the Botface’s Torso Trojan Horse, enabling it to jump to K and then enter the kettle…
And as Sybil had posited a long time previous, the kettle was somehow linked to world programming…
If I ever got to leave the kettle, I had to be clear of K, K knew this without being able to communicate via the usual channels or coded variations; that is why we had not melded; a safety feature.
In time…
Part of my mind had started turning to the prospect of eternal kettle living while other parts surrounded that part and taunted it with chants.
The kettle stifled my ambitions; stifled the hopes and dreams that led to ambits; stifled the imagination from supplying combustible material to the oven of Life.
A lot of potential meaning dropped off…many, many theoretical stabs at a better future waned.
But this helped me zone in on my own identity; an identity that had been elusive to the point of distraction: I was a kettleman now…bound to do what kettlemen did….the kettle was, in effect, a window where I could display everything I had in one place so that the Others could pass by and ignore me or express their delight at my existence.
Either way.
Ways were being had…
