Excerpt Eighty-Five: 

Jumping to Conclusions

Tony Guyson sipped from his treble measure of expensively imported single-malt whiskey, thinking that maybe his cover would be betterly secure with an unpopular American bourbon, or indeed, a cheaply vile local Japanese beverage with a high alcohol content and a side-hustle as paint-stripper; the kind of liquid imbibement that gave status and a badge, or two, to prove you did it. 

He wore Noir like it was a second skin. A shadowy lighting hung around him like a deeply atmospherical group of gang-friends who were probably monkeys. He felt Noir. As he passed in the vast rococo mirror in the hallway at the Dive, Breathe, Die, bar and foot massage, he looked Noir; had the appearance of noirness; a dark and viable noirocity. He had himself fooled. But what about those representing otherness, would they perceive correctly what Tony was projecting or would his pretence fall from the starting blocks, before the gun, and topple over into ambulance fodder?

His detective genre persona had levelled out. It toned right up and he was nearly thrown out of the joint. He was rude to a topless foot-fondling specialist and too loud. But he took the manager’s last warning as a sign and toned down to a specific perfection for the good of the environment; so much so he synchronised with the whole goddam universe and left no cracks for doubt to plant seeds in.

He took a double-swigging knock-back with a salty confidence that said: this is a thing; I’m doing a thing…but…

He noticed he was being watched mid-swiggery, so he threw in a grimace as an endpoint and stared back at the gawping voyeuristic impertinence; adding a nod that, in principle, said nothing; leaving its interpretation to the eye of the intrusive beholder. 

‘Right on time… Can I assist you in any way’, is what the old TG would have said, but Mr. Noir said nothing while trying to maintain cohesive black-ops body-lingo that insinuated inherent Noirfulness, as the young Japanese looking girl approached. She looked well enough to play the part of herself if this were a movie, he thought, briefly… 

‘I am,’ she said, ‘a ghost…’

Tony’s persona meant he had to wait an age before replying, and move as though submerged in heavy oil… but as she was a ghost it would not matter to her. He needed to claw his way to the back end of the conversation for his hyperactive, childish curiosity to nod off; so data-amassment could conclude it’s prying-snort-hound business. 

TG had to free KB from whatever was trapping him. And the key to curtailing KB’s prison sentence was secreted here somewhere; hereorthereabouts… for Tony to retrieve and activate.

‘I am made of particulate matter,’ the young ghost-like, particulate-mattered woman said, seemingly working up to an elaborative description of why she’d approached Tony.

Tony had to say something, but there was a strict rhythm and time sensitive beat he needed to follow to keep his cover. He was a deeply noir investigator of a movie genre style, could be NYC, could be LA, or San Fran. He was illuminating dark and distant crevices of placetime and needed to register some manner of prompt…to get the woman to where he needed her to go.

‘Who is the oldest person you know,’ Tony asked the woman; a curve ball that whizzed past her ears like the bat was close behind; or so Tony thought, congratulatorily. But the woman seemed to get where he was coming from; seemed eager to hand him over to that very same ‘oldest person she knew’ who had just featured unwittingly in Tony’s opening gambit. The laws of awkwardness didn’t seem to have quite the same properties here as they did back home in Wheresoeveritwasville.

‘I need…’Tony put out there, slow, calm, with an undertow of suspected meanness that could go either way at any time, day or night… ‘…to get…’ he continued, steady as she goes, seaweed ’n’ limpets on the starboard bow… ‘to the bottom…’

‘Whose bottom?’

‘Whose bottom?’

‘Hooozz…bottom??’

‘No…’ Tony said, looking for a way out of slow-mode; looking for a way to times-up the speed without blowing his cover and spurting his reality all over the unsuspecting reality of other people; civilians…innocents…and their tables and chairs. Just before she was about to repeat what she was developing a habit of saying, Tony modified the subject enough to slap her out of the loop, ‘Who’s top?’

‘You stop!’

Tony stopped, good advice… He had triggered some kind of butt sensitivity; singing from the wrong thong sheet; he’d got off on the wrong foot. It was fifty-fifty what foot he got off on. Luckily he had another foot. Assessment landed like an aerial display team and taxied to the hangar. He’d been taking her for a ghost, but was she more substantial than that? Was his perception of what a ‘ghost’ was differing from hers? Maybe the conversation had fallen down into the gap between the difference? Or, and, also, maybe the ghost reference was fake; she was a fake ghost?

Irrespectively…

Objectifying young ghost-like, particulate-mattered Japanese women had to be added to the ledger of things to eradicate from his library of tools. To help him learn, Tony asked an imaginary waiter to fetch the imaginary ledger so he could make an entry with the Quilled Pen of Educational Import; spilling its indelible memory activation and retrieval ink. Marking in black and white the algorithmic intention of all forward progression. He imagined handing back the ledger to the waiter for safe storage before turning back to the job on the screen.

Tony had options, of course he did, but then, the whiskey had a few things to add to the overall interaction, so, mildly, but with a sanguinity large enough to rival Noah’s Ark building project, he said, ‘Take me to your leader.’

To cut a long story short; to circumvent the hours and hours of documentary bullshit TG’s admin system had to churn out to detail Tony Guyson’s findings as he used Data Snooping and Inform-the-State Suspicious Activity and Thought Reporting (DSISATR) to assemble a ‘what-would’ve-most-probably-happened’ cake, that was then mashed up and made into a crumble, that was then reassembled with a narrative to transmute spent data, to provide a Working Historical Narrative (WHN) that would make sense of the mass incarcerations that were ongoing within the general KB/TG systems; incarcerations that were symbolistic of an underlying internally emanating problem that seemed to be some kind of battle to the death with Reality on one side and Reality on the other side and every goddam innocent, guilty and greyarea-witlow in the middle waiting for green light to be universally shed.

There was a reason the technological/biological interface was head-butting itself; it was a reason in five stages: The Choir created a brainwave conducting box using a guardianless waif/homeless child they’d come across with such coincidence that it seemed like Fate had won the lottery and not forgotten them…

Two: the US military stole the box…

Three: Nasa nurtured the box…

Four: NASA became NasaMuskBezosSaud in order to do illegal things to the illegal box…involving making it into a powerful and conscious entity capable of policing, governing and running the world that NMBS was envisioning through its Evil-eye with a greedy squint.

Five: due to Trojan Cavalry Party Gift Offerings (TCPGO) the box took over…(and is now working on the sixth and final stage, all on its own).

TG was, however, not yet finished. His job was to forward findings; verification of said findings had to take place before TG could move on. But people within the system were already calling the current pervasive state of affairs: the Sixth Stage, or, the Final Stage…

So…verification seemed like a forgone conclusion.