Excerpt 161:

Metaphorphical Misunderstanding

Where does life leave you when you can no longer access your imagination? Imagination is the nutritional intervention that grows meaning within your narrative.

That was where I was at. In a kettle, perhaps the kettle; being, but not superbeing…subsisting yet not hypersisting…transcending but not…etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum, etcetera… Life’s metaphorphical kettle. Sometimes a dead end means you went the wrong way, but othertimes a dead end can mean you’re fucked. This was an admixture I was sure, a hybrid. I’d gone the wrong way, I was fucked, but I was determined to wring the partygoers’ pants out and hang them up to dry before the dead became my end and the end became my death.

All of a sudden, with a predictability only found in popular fiction, the voices started; not the voices that were already running; they had a common universal quality. In this new development the voices had an altogether uncommon quality laced with a localised troop-mustering urgency that corralled the wild call of freedom for freedom’s sake and held it firm in a space where restriction bought you freedom and the only real freedom sold you into the realms of death. I was Rubik’s-cubing that conundrum when I gradually realised that the voices were perverting me with pertinent perceptions.

This particular voice was instructive, official and direct, and said, ’you need to bypass the Super Smart Shutdown System,’ which came across as invasive.

‘Do you mean, Sybil?’ I replied with paltrily assembled counter invasion properties.

’It is imperative the Shut Down System—‘

‘Sybil! …you mean?’

‘… it cannot be allowed to detect our comms…are you clear?

‘Sybil is my colleague and friend and I must ask, at least for enough respect for you not to refer to her as an “it”.’

‘Okay, Sybil. So it…she…cannot copy us, you must communicate via enveloped-file exchange flame-chewer proxy facsimile…can you do that?’

‘Hey,’ I burst out, pertinence be damned, ’what’s my name?’ curious to get an outside angle on it.

‘Can you utilise the latest version of EfEFcPF?’

A silence with a peculiar, grating, backgrounded white noise turbulence rendered time useless just for that moment. It seemed like anything could go anywhere…the thumping of heart beats in my head took over the solo in the silenced orchestral manoeuvres…

‘What name are you currently using?’

Not wanting to give even anything away I plucked, ‘Ben,’ out of the ether, in a tone that said…of course that’s my name, did you not know, you complete name-clumsy wazzock…and because there was a silence, I furthered, ‘Parkes,’ and affirmed with, ‘Ben Parkes.’ I was running with Ben Parkes but feared I would not be able to keep up.

‘You must meld all Sybilian attributes and meld with all the characters that are left before you become whole and reach the identity threshold you can sit on.’

‘Okay,’ I offered, ‘Gotta go, ‘I climaxed, slamming down the metaphorical phone, metaphorphically. It worked, the voices were silenced.

‘Who are you commsing with?’ Sybil asked, the edge in her voice could have sharpened knives and dulled them at once.

It made sense that she was the bad guy she’d admitted as much freely many times over in-between denying as much in a way that scattered guilt cushions all over the seating area…

Who could I get help from, I asked myself.

I needed a Tiny Guy; I needed the Tiny Guy and I needed him to assemble his alias army. I could see the Tiny Guy empire office block in my mind’s eye, but situating it into any accessible part of my mind seemed impossible. I was gathering stature while losing scope.

‘Call a meeting!’ I shouted, several times, but to no avail…

‘Would you like me to call a meeting,’ Sybil said, exasperating something in me like soft fruit that had been sat on. I did, so I said, ‘yes,’ curtly, setting the tone for the meeting. Too curtly for Sybil’s liking…introducing an air to the edge she was already displaying; splitting the narrative off to a less commodious entanglement, but hopefully; fingers crossedly, a place of greater purchase on the levers of power front.

It became apparent that Sybil owned a piece of everyone. It was mildly bewildering to think everyone present had sold out. But I couldn’t resist, or rebel, because I had commitments to the long game, irons in other fires, doldrum sails I needed filling with gentle breezes; and I’d sold out to the Sybil System Complex Arrangement, ball, pitch, posts and players; so badly I could only talk sport from the changing room that had no players’ tunnel, just a sportless hole maintained by extended metaphor that would never make it over the horizon to metaphorphicality.

‘Order, order,’ I said, leading me nowhere orderly.

‘Order!’ Sybil added, and like a switch order descended on the meeting.

In the silence that followed I had visual reunion with characters I had forgotten; an education in itself, as the remembering shaped back forgottenness, engulfing me with rapid calculations; mere confusions that came like coded data that was begging to be decoded… And yet it was all literal and codeless…

I wanted to tell them all about the development of the alien AI theory which was slowly dropping the conspiracy tag with a view to the theoretical part becoming actual. But, on internal investigation the file tag was still conspiracy theory level designated, so I let it ride.

‘Has anyone seen Tiny Guy?’

Everyone lifted their hands, they’d all seen him, except had they though, they all had different accounts that hounded common sense into a clearing and made a mockery of it to such a degree that the clearing became a whole clogged-up mess of uncleared mockery residue.

One of them, a couple of them, even pointed the finger at me, professing that I was Tiny Guy; exasperation breathed heavy…frustration beaded sweaty…anathema momma.

I’d been expecting an ‘I’m Spartacus’ kind of ‘I’m Tiny Guy’ affair, but all those present were left wondering whether they’d been intimate with Tiny Guy at the same time as wondering whether they’d ever even heard of him…

The Professor’s advice was to spend a few days imagining I was Tiny Guy and wait to see what transpired: I could become Tiny Guy or Tiny Guy might come along and redundantify the scheme. I wasn’t sure that what I had left functioning in the name of imagination would stretch into a believability performance pant.

Although waking in a different scenario seemed so far over the horizon it touched the moon when the tides were high, I woke in situ approximately where I’d dozed off…but there had been a change during my somnambulant recess where I’d dreamed that Tiny Guy was back, and, indeed, on waking he was: I was Tiny Guy, and no one was surprised. Least of all Tiny Guy. Least of all me.

Now I had an upper hand of sorts, I pulled on the ropes, like a plastered bell-ringer with a stress overspill.

Message to the voice, or voices, who wants, or want, to know my name…my name is, Tyman Gyflin.

‘Yes, Tiny Guy, we know… This is G & G labs…we know everything…because we created everything…’

I had not put the phone down with sufficient metaphorphicality after all, annoyingly. And I had to sit in my own shameful obnoxiocity until a naughty step, on my seized-up escalators, became available.