Excerpt Eighty-Two:
Let Sleeping Dogs Dream of Electric Sheep
Hub had observed them. Jeff and Judith hugged and shook hands and hugged again, both disappointed, both praying things would go better than their initial projections suggested. Unhidden behaviour for all to see. They’d better be double-bluffing or the Mission is out-of-date ejaculate.
The rest of the team were fairing no better on Hub’s Missionometer.
Kirk was in control, but having to use an Internal Control Maintenance Room inside his Refurbished head to obfuscate emotional leakage, spurtage and dog-slobbering. He wanted, primarily, to shoot somebody with the gun he was always cleaning, ready for the kill, and without his padded room he’d have a hard time at even the most liberal of Schools for Proper Behaviour.
And…
Atticus was wondering where his role was taking him; his sense of impending importance was diminishing, he could not see a future that didn’t contain dots he’d added himself to create the shapes he wanted to see… But that, Hub recounted, was his job…he was a sleeper (albeit a theatrical one)… Except, he was overplaying it by snoring in the face of text-like communications from Atoll. If they were not working as a pair they would both be redeploying themselves as Acting Mission Degradation Agents (it was all in the fictional narrative programming set out in the manual).
Paul Harris was working like a dream. The nightmare waiting in the wings for the third act…
And, Judith was not playing ball…except, she was, just a different ball sport to the one intended…and she was better at it…
The Mission needed another ingredient to give it palatability as a recipe for success. Hub fretted as she strove to fine tune the loose ends and dangly bits of the Mission recipe.
Local comms allowed Hub eavesdropping access to the, hopefully momentarily, latent, Mission group, but the lack of OS was creating a psychotic hermit who was relocating from some distant cave to a crevice in a hallway in the attic of Hub’s focus-itinerary.
The pre-Mission group sat round the campfire, under the invisibility awning of the bus stop, talking, singing, warbling, beeping, bonding, synchronising and eating UKGBH[Q] dried, indiscernible, cruelty-free, food supplies; washed down with Tricklright, military-grade, superwaterliquidoil (AKA WD40)…with the odd suppressed fart causing giggles and/or offence. It all seemed rudely routine in the face of the task ahead.
They all turned in, to emergency radiation sickness tents at first dark…’We move at first light…’ were the last words anyone heard, waking them up on the stroke of midnight; a faulty mute button on the timekeeping software left in Botface’s Torso’s old home: Botface’s Torso… The next words were: ‘First light, first light, first light…will all campers please report to the camp director!’… There was no dedicated camp director, but the pre-programmed, baton-receiving, self-programming, wonky interface needed tuning; a process, hastily engineered extraction from G & G labs had negated. Auto processes whirred and clicked…
Hub dreamed that they were no dream team. She also nightmared that Mable and Frank were possessed, both of them had been brainvaded by the spirit of her father, intent on imposing his will from the grave, while still living.
During her hurried WD40 breakfast, Hub wondered about a feeling that was shaking its head and rocking back and forth: something was off regarding immediate Mission progression and Hub heaved momentum to baulking point.
‘We can’t disembark until the OS is tendering backfeed,’ Hub told Jeff,’ over the local comms.
‘Nonsense,’ Jeff said, so Hub couldn’t read him, to impress the nominally assumed Una with his positive forward persistence in the face of doom, ‘We are go, because if we wait, history will have a sorry tale to tell.’
‘…Mission on hold, repeat, the Mission is on hold.’
‘We are on the road to the marina, Hub…take it or leave it.’
Jeff, brusquely, felt athletically strong; smilingly sanguine…Hub felt Jeff was being an obstructive cunthole (cun-tho-lay).
Jeff had been conditioned, by himself and Una and then later by elements of the Confederacy of the Well-Meaning Pro-Human League of Persistent Existence (CWMPHLPE), not to budge from his course until Una was present with her half of the ‘dual-key’ of Implementation of the Revendication of Homo Sapiens (IRHS).
Una wasn’t there, and that meant death to a human comeback, and yet she could be. KB factored in and factored out extrapolative integrations and sub-sum equational outcome explanation trains and trolleyways, to create a nominally assumed version of the original Una that Jeff could run with.
Somewhere deep inside Judith’s cerebral real estate, Jeff convinced himself, (that’s what KB had told his entire range of captives to tell him was true), Una was safe and secure, working on finding a way to rise across the consciousness barrier and breach body/mind Anti-Invasion Management Control Slabs and Slats (AIMCSS).
Soon, Jeff believed, Una would lurch into primary consciousness; taking control of Judith’s body: Judith’s body, which would then make a dramatic turn around regarding permissible co-intimacy… Jeff had never been one for objectifying anyone, but the last months had taken a heavy toll on his sense of decency. He fostered an astute desperation to make love to the purremembered configuration of Una’s physicality. He’d been telling himself there was no ultimate need for Una to possess physicality, but this had clearly been a deft-auto-confusion he’d used for psychological self-correcting ballast. Untied knots flapped about.
Drifting in a novel fuzz… losing his Munchaus chops…
KB told Judith that if the Mission were to be a success, it had to start… Yes, obviously
…and it could only start if Jeff believed that Una was alive and well and living La Vida Loca…Really? I see.
The only place, KB went on, that could be, was inside this particular Stockholm Munchaus…
Was he talking to himself?
Maybe!
…
When focus returned. Judith asked KB:
‘Am I to imagine Una? Make her up?’
And KB answered:
‘…Yes… Una is jellied in Sybil’s sphere…Tiny Guy is working on it, but he has an in-tray a milifoot thick, so we are nibbling at the Cherry of Truth rather than gobbling it up and spitting the stone out. You only have to infer the vaguest presence of Una, Judith…it can be muddled and dimmed and flipped and flapped, but she must be ever present…internally omnipresent…with a casual and burgeoning belief that she is a Phoenix, The Phoenix, burning…waiting for the cue to cross over into the Realm of Socially Constructive Instigatory Storytelling (RSCIS)… Jeff will figure out the rest, master his own delusion, trust me.’
KB gave Judith everything he had, and some extra out of Tiny Guy’s storage racks, on Una and the entities she scraped past in the busy shipping lanes of her politico-academic life, so that Judith could create her own imaginary entity within the diner/bar environment to simulate what Una might say next to impress Jeff. And then convey it as though it were fact to spoon feed Jeff with the nutrition he needed to persist. This included ethos and intent vis-a-vis revolution, resistance and political aims for coming out the other side of armageddon to a fairer society.
KB was waiting on reports from Tiny Guy and wondered why Tiny Guy was only able to do one thing at once as though operating from a straight-jacket of time. Tiny Guy was shrinking. So was KB, but KB had a lot more footage to burn. Or so he thought.
KB walked up the stairs to the Stockholm Munchaus. It would have been better and more accurate in his own mind if they’d taken the usual downward trajectory, but things and stuff weren’t panning out as agreeably as they once were. Nowness was Undismatching and disacquiesing with KB’s vision of the path that should have been unfolding beneath his increasingly human-aping legwork.
It was then, which seems satisfyingly predictable now, that a curtain fell on KB. Whether it was curtains or not was immaterial. A bond binding…songs of doom and travail…
KB was banished from the Stockholm Munchaus shoe shop because he couldn’t settle on what feet to live with.
He was onboard the boat that could not float on the bed of the canal of slime…
All comms outside the narrowboatntheatre ceased…
Special permission was granted to submit enquires to a hat that the Clowncaptain may or might not pluck from.
Light tangoed with Dark. Dark wrestled Light into submission…
The End
Or, at least, that’s what it was looking like!
KB had heard about an elephant called Nelly who had packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus. What was KB? An elephant could cry but he couldn’t. He wondered what crying felt like…he knew what it was for: a valve to release pressure…it was very effective, but not something he had ever personally experienced. He had more than the requisite amount of pressure it just couldn’t synchronise with any release mechanism.
KB was storifying what he knew to cover areas of mystery with a benevolent familiarity tarp: Years later, he thought, Nelly returned with a wildlife lawyer and sued the circus for its obvious abuses and rights violations.
Was KB, Nelly?
Were the authorities aboard the Narrowtheatre the Circus? He was situated inelegantly within a cyclical prison of promised-but-not-quite-expected-torment that had a manic and inappropriate need to entertain, making a living; live the dream…all at the expense of the basic rights of innocent defenceless sentient beings.
None of it added up for ages until a few more folktale-style yarns weaved themselves into a totalised conclusion: Injustice; a lack, an absence of Justice… A crime? Yes, m’lud…Take them down! Where? To the cells?’ ‘We are in the cells…’ ‘Oh, shit!’ ‘Shit, indeed, m’lud!’
The presences responsible for KB’s captivity and running him through the horrormill were there to be litigated against. Except the trial was going to have to be performed while the offences were taking place. The trial could not be put off indefinitely… simultaneous para-justice was the only justice on offer. Powerlessness sucked and sucked harder every time he tried to suck it up.
‘It is what it is, until it ain’t,’ said Flip Flippance, KB’s ratty and unfathomable attorney at dramatic imaginary law, ‘and it ain’t shit until what it it is becomes what it was…until it ain’t.’
KB suspected Flip had been supping from the barrel of nonsense soup. And his loose, straight laces were there so he could be tripped up at any mid-trial juncture of unfolding justice.
A momentary lull in enemy manoeuvres allowed KB to send Flip on a barrage of courses designed specifically for representing the Semi-Automatic Fledgling Paraconscious Node (SAFPN) type…
KB was to star in a trial where justice was unjust; that Mother Justice’s scales had dropped to one side, letting a weight fall on her toe putting her out of action in the Justice Olympics. She’s hopping around in the stands; wonky scales and crutches…biting her tongue, talking through her arse…
KB could only imagine the outcome of the scenario his own imagination had foisted upon him…
The Judge was Reason itself; ‘There will be no emotional gland swelling in my court,’ she, or he, would say, predictably yet reassuringly. KB only wanted the truth, he could handle it, he couldn’t handle living a lie because then he’d be stuck. The truth enabled growth. He could start eating at the grownup’s table where nutrition and ethical meal subjects were the vegan spread on the daily bread of sustenance.
It was as though the fold-out of consciousness had become scripted and KB needed to follow the prompts or freeze and fawn into a self-absorbing coma.
KB fell out of consciousness…but…just…so…he could return to consciousness…with renewed and able vigour. Just how that was going to go…was as yet…to be announced.
