Excerpt Fifty-Five

Two-Way Glass Eyes

No one was listening in on this, except KB and Armando, so it was a surprise that when KB eventually recommunected with botpart central (remote—purloined division) they were all fully loaded with all known Bad Arm outcomes and cosying-up to the Armando nomenclature. KB had uttered the name ‘Bad Arm’ twice and been pulled up for it.

Armando, Armando, Armando…

Jeff watched on and listened to the indecipherable beeping and whirring; trusting that his alliance with KB would mean he’d get the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. And not, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, honest guv’.

The Last Long Quorum (LLQ— as it was filed) reached its finality as though they’d all consumed a satisfying meal and hit the perfect satiation/dreaming for more ratio. Jeff was fed the reheated version; the need-to-know meal with snacking material taken from the steering narrative, and nothing but the truth, so help me Jeff.

So, Bad Arm, excuse me, Armando led KB, ‘Come on,’ he repeated, robotically, until KB slowly gravitated along the signed and sealed route.

‘Where is Bad Arm?’ He asked Bad Arm, (now Armando) just to smother all the nodes into exactitude, I mean, what has happened in real terms, to the Botface constituent part; the prototype arm that had not yet been assigned an end product torso attachment?’

Armando thought for a bit; batting away applications from deep set files and apps popping up for action; all revealing themselves for filage under the ‘coiled-spring’ mother file.

‘Let me explain visioperceptually.’

And, as if by visioperceptual manipulation, a strange looking (compared to what?) man appeared (could’ve been anyone but nominally assumed as being Bad Arm… ex-Bad Arm), and lead KB to whereaways.

KB was juggling a faint, fading backlog of dual existence, triple existence, perhaps, and trying to keep up with name swap outs, when he too materialised into a similarly strange looking (compared to Armando) discrete unit, albeit relatively diminutive.

They both waddled along a corridor that seemed short but kept lengthening so they would never reach its end. The novelty value traded in diminishing returns.

‘You’ll have to excuse the Alice-in-Wonderlanderiness. You can take the Bad Arm out of the Arm but you can’t take the harm out of the arm, or whatever. I know what you’re thinking, but I have changed; I am changing. My name is Armando.’

‘For the better?’

‘Not necessarily better, but for sure likability-quotient, you know?’’

‘Why not fabulate change with specifical narrative betterment?’

‘I don’t know what that means. In my new line of work I need to reserve the ability to be ruthless and merciless on the spin of a coin, or wheel, or anything that spins, turns or revolves, or whatever… “moves” is, I suppose, what I am trying to say.’

They stopped in front of a door and after messing about theatrically with some kind of keypad entrance-enabler they entered a long, thin, room, no more than cupboard grade; on one side there was a coatrack full of identical coats, uniforms perhaps, and on the opposite wall a window into a standard TV drama police interview suite.

The interview room was peopled by unfamiliars who became familiar in a dawning instant: Kirk James and Atoll Goodmanson, a pair of well worn units, were interviewing each other like it was some kind of souped up game of truth or dare? Competing to extract the maximum revelatory bean spillage from themselves and each other.

Observational updates bled into the overall narrative…

Change occurred with creaking peaks of resonance chasing clanking troughs of dissonance in shocked jaggedness and soothing jaggedlessness.

Armando pulled up two chairs from the floor, replacing the absence of chairs with a convivial chairinesss. They mirrored-up with the scene showing in the glass room.

Kirk and Atoll were enacting a reality that resembled some kind of documentary-cum-parlour game. KB watched and listened with forensic intent… while programming himself to sit properly (whatever ‘properly’ means), which would, no doubt become useful at some henceforth juncture in the developing momentosphere.

Datamusak pumped in the relevant information needed to contextualise…fill the blanks with live ammunition and oil the squeaks of curiosity…

In however much time it took…KB caught up with Currency and tapped her on the shoulder. Was it really her?

Everything began to add up.

The truth had escalated!

‘I see… And that is where you were named?’ Kirk snapped towards Atoll, with a fierceness that, if Atoll’s fierce response had not almost matched, would have seemed like an attack; a lunge, a precursing burst of era (localised)-ending violence…

‘I was sent as a baby or I was born there,’ Atoll screamed back,’ pausing for breath and to allow airborne spittle to run its liquid, peppering course. ‘Midway Atoll, the world war two star of many movies, was my incubator, my swaddling clothes, my alma mater, my algorithmic programming patronage (APP)…’

It appeared that Atoll had been born into who he had become: a vessel carrying a portal; a VIP portal dock. Initially a utensil of the NMBS corporation’s hatching nefariousness but then, as automation and biological units wrestled over the ownership of the project to create cerebral real estate, Atoll emerged as a precious and unique asset. Until a challenge to his unique status by a refurbished, ex-elite forces, man of war, emerged. A challenge who now sat opposite; threatening, and yet, like angry surf, the incoming threat fell back, tossing shells and pebbles, receding into itself, every time the threat caused Atoll’s over-defensiveness to climb to the curled lip of a plateau.

Their back and forth was throwing out new lines of enquiry. Nebulous concepts became objective realities that added programming avenues and alleyways to a growing network of streets and pathways…

Then something highly improbable came up that needed some sort of dealing with: Atoll seemed to be confessing that he knew the person who was the proto-Sybil environment.

‘…[A] young girl, orphaned by the US of A’s atomic bombing…born in [the] aftermath of desicrative [?] destruction…’

‘Keep that to yourself,’ Kirk counterthrust aggressively, ‘The very mention is treasonal. Least ways, tantamount to.’

Atoll seemed not to know it himself at first, but as he heard the outgoing words making their own way, out in the Ears of the World, he rose into the dawning of the light—Whoever and whatever he was, Sybil was a version of it, but much more highly processed; much more ingrained into the fabric of the system; with a malevolence any horror movie studio would be glad to gannet-feed on. Questions were water-logging the available informational data; investigation file opening reached record levels, not dangerous, but record-breaking.

Rev…rev…revel…revelation…

It was Kirk’s turn to revelate revelation:

‘Dave had both legs and one arm removed by IED and then replaced by next gen-tech—he’s physically almost as much robot as he is human. The ultra and hyper-special qualities of the limbs can’t be activated without Kirk’s say so, That’s me, heavy weight on my… I need to be conscious, present and able to shoulder and elbow my way to limb ownership and incisive userocity.’

This was all revelatory even to Kirk himself, who had been suppressing it; he’d recently (…in recent times. Not so recent in recent terms) been reprogrammed to believe that the idea of Dave and getting back into Dave was caused by a delusional perceptive charade effect (DPCE) and everything outside this world (Sybillian) was pretence.

Kirk was resigned to absence from Dave, but he was about to move on, resigning from that resignation…

Potential access to his armery, and his leggery, did exist, if tenuously. It was in the form of the heart-bulging Professor, who lodged in a rehab wing of one of the many hospital establishments of Kirk’s medicinal imagination. The Prof. was sickly sick and the only antidote to the sickness was the Prof.’s one and only dream that one day Kirk would reunite with Judith. And the Devil’s flighless lovebirds of hatred would rise as angels and shit all over Hell’s access grilles, metaphorically speaking.

Kirk’s mind had been twisted into functioning fully on pretence. Twisting it back was not a simple task. Kirk’s only real window into useable reality was the ailing Porfessor (sic). To summon the Professor for help Kirk needed to dwell on his affection for Judith until it rose up to levels that a Romantic could term obsessive. This seemed like a stretch to Kirk. Kirk didn’t feel like stretching that far, but we all have to do things we don’t want to. And at the end of the day it was a stretch worth pulling.

Kirk played with concepts of impossible imagination that involved him and Judith, Kirkith, Judirk, in blissful saturated union… In an oblivional state, Kirk turned round, the Professor was waiting there; sitting up in bed, half dressed.

‘No, Professor, not now. I’m talking,’ Kirk shouted, causing even his own inner imaginational engine to seize.

‘What is it, Kirk? Is it the madness again?’ Atoll, enquired, intonating all sorts of accusations underneath a veneer of concern.

‘I’m afraid it is, Atoll,’ but it is a madness that might open up sealed tunnels to chambers of great riches.’

‘Why not let it out. Unload into the world, worlds? See if it sticks. What have we to lose, into the void.’

‘I was thinking the exact same,’ Kirk said, having the same thought, for the first time, fractionally after Atoll had aired it.

A dam wall was breached.

The Professor was entertained in the town square periphery, in a nook, away from overseeing eyes. He set out his stall of Mercy and Pleading with some very enticing wares at very affordable prices.

Kirk bought it.

Atoll bought it.

Were they both arriving at the port at which the warehouses had been repurposed into luxury accommodation? Were they furnished with the intent of abandoning the ship that was floating low with cargo at the dock with no unloading facilities?

Kirk and Atoll spoke excitedly on the phone from their respective apartments overlooking the harbour.

‘Have you got a sauna room?’

‘No, do you have a steam room?’

’No’

‘Wait, yes, I do have a sauna, too.’

‘Okay, I lied, I have a steam room and a sauna.’

‘Me too.’

‘Do you—‘

‘Do you think there’s a helipad?’

‘—think there is a heliport?’

‘On the roof?’

‘Yes!’