Excerpt Eighty-Eight:

Dial-A-Phone

Paul Harris held narrowboats in a special mind-folder in a sweeping cursive scribble titled: neglected loves. As a kid he’d enjoyed a Holiday with his parents to Llangollen where they’d hired a narrowboat called Jessy of Wheelock. The young Harris had even got to do some steering, which loaded foundational cravings for power and control into his psyche… Those motivational towers of potential had never undergone significant reproduction as Harris drifted into adulthood and floated towards disaster; the disaster that he now tiptoed on the surface of the minimal ice crust that would soon become his ceiling of limitation. The dreams that had been instilled had been tied to the mooring and left to creak in the wind after that holiday ended…all subsequent trips being all-inclusive Costas and easy jetting, Ryanairing, luggagelessness.

On this narrowboat his emotional elevation gave him a better view of a past he wanted to catch up with him…but he couldn’t make it; he’d have to wait…except time was not on his side; Paul Harris was in the cross hairs of Time’s sniper rifle.

A reminder of his own personal wasted potential always set him off on the same rollercoaster, sitting in the same seat, feeling the same sickness…

Among the units and personalities he had found himself amongst he was the misfittest…all the other were misfits who were fitting in with each other, albeit solely due to the excessively dire circumstances, but he was on the periphery of the periphery; they were outside the solar system, but he was outside the galaxy…and from experience the nearest thing of any interest outside the Galaxy was The Dark Voidal Space with its sheets of black velvet and peppery backdrop of starry-eyed holes.

He had theories he kept to himself, he’d learned the craft of emitting his own outgoing communications; to allow only packets of data with optimum return and minimal invidious comeback, but had practical pragmatisms to offer when he could get a side in edgeways amid the ego-narcisist-omania that flourished within the group of humans and echoed closely in the actions of the attendant bottage technology.

The backing and forthing of group consolidating word bolstering; textbook team orienting, raged on. Harris had no axe to grind but the knife that needed sharpening was the upholding of his department’s pride… he was duty bound to do what a good civil servant must in times of chronic, species demising ill-health.

‘I think it would be worth calling Hire-a-Drone to make a quick survey up the canal to see if there is a breach. The canal is empty for a reason.’

Everyone regarded Harris before being overridden by a disregarding conclusion that slid away and closed the lid behind it.

Dial-a-Drone, or Hire-a-Drone, had been an inchoate service that failed due to its initiation being via a taxpayer theft scheme, ( fatbackpocket syndrome motivations), and not as believed the Great Pause. Harris knew his Dial-a-Drone was operational because he had constant automatic emails telling him to release the last drone to end the scheme, while getting personal emails from an official (from his third home in some expensive wealth ghetto) who was financially benefitting from the scheme, suggesting Harris perpetuate the extant conditions vis-vis the Dial-a-scam…scheme. The official had been in a position to cancel Harris and that was enough of a justification for the delay in scheme ending button pushing. 

There was group shock at Harris saying anything at all…no one needed reminding of Harris’s situation, but after a pause, everyone levelled off. It was a good idea…and yet the idea that one could rent out drone time from an App was ridiculous and the extreme end of the likelihood scale; the unlikely end. Tech was paused.

‘Where on earth could we get a drone from in this day and age?’

‘I know,’ offered a dormant drone that was in someone’s sports bag.

‘Where?’ A smattering of voices chimed and chirped inquisitively… crowding the bag from where the voice emanated.

Expectation rose…a salty sea swell of the felicitous opportunity.

‘…G & G labs…’

…and fell with a mass that left stomachs ten feet up in the air in cartoonish catchup mode.

‘Come on…I mean…in reality, actual reality, actuality… Harris?’

‘I have a beeper, a pager, an E-crayon and a window where I can write instructions… Everyone in our department was issued with one. The system was never fully operational and only ever amounted to an elaborate selfie system, which angered me, but now I can see a use. It was a one off, beta test. Each of us were instructed to initiate one run and then to feed back data analysis reviews…I never used mine, but there is no reason it can’t work.’

‘Harris, can you cut to the chase?’ Hub said, over the local comms, sensing everyone was losing the will to listen effectively.

There was every reason it wouldn’t work. The increasing dampblanketry of the Great Pause had ceased all smart-drone bottage. Even G & G labs had dropped operations. Within the present group there were nine drone and drone like objects, parts and drives within the Bottage Protection and Operation Aurazone (BPOA), some of them New World Creation technology; all of them were ‘grounded’ (limited in operational viability), all of them ‘emasculated’, some of them seething with resentment, and one, plotting to overthrow whatever entity was responsible for the abominable dronicidal maniacalistic buffoonery (Colin, a prototype aggrodrone).

There was a general, unspoken yet pervasive, sense that Harris was among the most boring people any of them had ever met. Sure, he had his saving graces, the main one being his unwitting acceptance as a dummy-in-the-line-of-fire for the cause, but his delivery and content did the opposite of arousing flight and fight systems it was more effective at the activation of snooze and dribble features. He must have worked on his delivery style to make it so monotonously boring, it smacked of proactive deactivation.

Harris penned in instructions, detailing what he was doing, which was interesting and/or useful to a zero amount of people and non-people.

Harris went silent, his tongue hanging out and then said, ‘There…’ Everyone watched and waited in slow motion…

Whether anyone believed he had initiated some drone assistance…or whether they thought he had merely thought he had, became irrelevant some hours later when Harris, quietly monitoring his device, that seemed like a child’s toy, said, ‘Okay, breach detected.’

The ‘toy’ now shone as a beacon of lower tech outshining higher tech. It was confusing, but with a beauty that awespired bottage and humanage alike.

Judith shouldn’t even have been there according to the authorities but she was and she was The Landlady, as it were, of the Stockholm Munchaus where everyone with pie residue on their finger, so to speak, had assembled.

It was Judith’s space and she had created several rooms out back with advisors and counsels. The way ahead was battle-ridden and the path yet forged would be circuitous and bumpy and full of holes.

In one room Judiths were wrestling each other with grunts and moans. In another they were knitting in tippy-tappy-clicky silence.

Judith entered the room that mattered. It was a small cell with freshly painted padded walls and no ceiling. In a jar on a plinth was KB. She had only three questions she could ask KB. Then she had to exit and reenter before another three questions were allowed. It all seemed pointlessly bureaucratic.

She’d read a book called the Monk of Misery, she remembered the title but that was about it. The monk never left his cell…just created worlds within it. He’d lost all ethical anchorage and sailed out into the ocean of iniquity by imaging sex rave party orgies with other ‘like-minded’, religiously oriented, ascetics, all of whom had a real version who would never have succumbed to the riotous indignity of which his imagined versions partook.

She called more and more of the book, realising how silly it was. It must have been in the inappropriate teen genre. It was simplistic but contained cerebrally erotic fantasy that was fraught with complexity.

She couldn’t find a damn answer worth a pickled spitball because her questions were side-sprawlingly incompetent. Out of the cell she had formulations, but in-cell her mind tripped over its own foul tackle.

As nothing was coming form the questioning, Judith retreated to her inner persona at the Stockholm Munchaus, a place where answers flowed more than beer and food for thought was on the menu.

She found herself positing a thought experiment-like foray into philosophical investigation…

‘If I were the only person alive,’ she said, apropos, apparently, of zilch, ‘I mean the population of the world was made up solely of me…all with my level of intelligence and ability to grasp certain ideas, then what would the world look like?’

Una and Sybil jumped on it, both as frustrated as bats with jobs in the movie industry.

‘There’d be no flight,’ she said, starting a list that would take the Moon to Alpha Centauri and eighth of the way back, ‘no population explosion, no language, no animal holocaust. Do we have the time to list all these things that would not exist if I were the only human, duplicate ten billion times?’

‘No!’

‘No!’

‘There’d be no machine takeover, no global genocide, there’s be peace, and love, and rest before more love…’

‘Okay!’

‘I am losing the point and the plot.’

‘If everyone were me…I’d be alone because I would have destroyed them all…it is my fate…’ offered Sybil with an honesty that showed she was ready to move to higher levels of interference in ‘world events’.

‘I would live among elitist egomaniacs who believed in a Marxist fair-for-all world, but still managed tolerate their own ego above the hoi polloi.’ Una’s honesty seems to pull a veil of shame over her face that she shrugged and wiped off…

The Stockholm Munchaus was doing its job; the truth serum of its atmosphere was functioning correctly. Nobody liked it, but everyone applauded it, and themselves.

Honesty made for a platform they could all cling to like a life raft in a sea of lies, and from their unique perspective spy a hidden cove where a new world could be born.

Judith got an electrical assistant to usher the ladies to the back of the joint.

‘Can I ask you about The Third Way?’ Asked Una.

‘We don’t call it that anymore it has been rebranded.’

‘What do you—‘

‘To be more precise, it has been debranded, awaiting rebranding—that is what you can help us with.’

‘Branding aside…can ask you—‘

‘No, not until it has been rebranded.’

Judith lead Una and Sybil to the cell with the jar on a plinth, at great risk, but even greater reward was pencilled in if it all worked out for the best.

All Harris needed to do was remember the phone number of Dial-a-Digger, a man with a digger, and a phone…what was it now? Was it, Make the Earth Move? It was, Make the Earth Move… Harris rang….the group held their collective breath (continuing individual respiration where needed)….’I can do it tomorrow, ‘early start,’ said Fred Bullwark, ‘We’ve had some sprouts and turnips that’ve worried a few here of the locals, but the light has spoken, so that’s surmountable…it’s the shape of them…it is worrying…but he who shits first is the Devil toenail, so they say…’.

Early next morning a big diesel engine could be heard starting up not half a mile away. Initiating the morningrise and ablution headache situation.

Just as light had performed its last level up the tarpaulin at the stern rippled and rustled until it got attention that in turn raised a full alert to the gassy entity at the underside of the tarpaulin.

It was the Clowncaptain…

His entrance spoiled by giggles and titters in response to the rustling noises sounding like rectal-wind-expiration-malfunction. He waited for the evaporation of embarrassed mirth, wishing he could start over with less humiliating sound effects, cursing the existence of immature toilet humour and making it walk the plank before zoning in on equilibrium and launching his offensive…

‘Aye, aye…’ he began.