Excerpt Fifty-Two
A Pie Chart in the Face
An exploratory flurry of sleety snow soon turned into a deluge of stair rods; alarm bells sang songs of immediacy around crackling campfires of warning lights that told ominous tales of epic, all-consuming conflagration. Windows were thrown open in one action; ticking shut in the next; time became all-pervading essence as rarified moments sped through; transterrefying in their own wake into progress-plowing bow-waves.
Each moment progressively shortening on its countdown to zero. Would destination zero account for nothing?
Who could say. There just wasn’t time.
HQ was a roiling lake; dam gates open, floods cascading down the valley…
The United Kingdom of Great Britain Counter Revolution Headquarters was locked on to terminal pathway manoeuvres (TPM); the portal for inter-state, co-cerebral transfer was aligned with the physical and mental attributes essential for primary mission progression.
Guys and non guys…! It’s on!
‘Are Dave and Atti ready, Judith?’ The Commander coolly enquired with over-stressed authority.
‘It depends what you mean by “ready”.’ Judith continued; impertinent, contrary-to-the-point-of-otherworldliness.
The Woman, and for that matter, the Commander had both known Judith’s ultimate contribution to the mission would be delivered unfit for purpose; the conclusion of Judith’s sum worth at count up time came at her/them like a punch from a fist trajectorising to connect with their noggin sent by carrier pigeon and announced in the local paper the day before.
Judith was never going to shock them with disappointment she’d already furnished them with enough predisappointment to induce a squeaky cognitive twitch (SCT) around mission objective fundamentality (MOF).
‘Are they, fucking, ready, Judith? Please,’ the Commander brayed, turning horse; loosening her reins of temper.
‘They have their orders and they are on their marks. The question is… Are you ready, Commander?’
The Woman/Commander was going to say: I was born ready. But then thought of John Wayne, hearing him say it on a 60’s TV clip…it reminded her of her father. Who she now suspected had also been playing a part; living a lie; but that can’t be true! The truth can’t be what you don’t want it to be…
She’d been born a tabula rasa; a flatpack unit of potentially unlimited utility, but she was assembled and paternally modified, moulded and manipulated into an unfledged being. The more she thought, the more his crown slipped as his throne tipped back perilously over a garbage chute.
As used (pre-loved) time receded under the incoming assault of present time; in what she recognised as a specific stress barraged predicament scenario, she answered:
‘It depends what you mean by “ready”?’
Was that a trap, she thought, that she had aimlessly wandered into? A forced faux pas? She instantly found herself looking at Judith’s upper hand waiting for it to offer her a way out…or clothe her neck region with a leash.
’You were born ready,’ Dave said, pleased with his efforts; expecting a contributors badge to be in the post.
A way out…of sorts…
‘Ready!’ The Commander confessed, lip steadying, mouth standing down. ‘Let us all focus on the mission.’…
Kirk opened his dwellings door because a slow-motion stampede of footfall, never before witnessed by the attic apartment corridors, first woke him and then put him into flight or fight mode, his physiology couldn’t decide which. So he went into ‘confront’ mode with a conservative and tentative 3 on the anger scale driving his intent.
The slow, thumping, stampede, swung heavily away before lumbering back round. It approached, stopped. Chillingly, approximately, just out of sight, at the top of the stairs, as if contemplating another lap before declaring its intended purpose. The barely breathing corridor was tense and icy.
The meaning was scrambled by judicious whispering levels, but wordsounds batted back and forth as Kirk strained to hear. He dare not leave the protection of the door frame, making him question his, taken-as-read-by-himself, legendary bravery.
Movement…encroachment; both sudden, both cased in an advancing threat: FRIEND OR FOE?
Who goes there?
Then:
… Atoll alone peopled the latterly physical emptiness with a face, fronting body language that closed in on Kirk fears; slanted at a pained and awkward angle.
‘Kirk, time is falling into sync,’ Atoll said. Kirk felt like waters were breaking and stroke-faces were drooping… and the need for action was rushing in like a brief tide.
Kirk shook off the dust, blew heavily on the rust and buffed away at the surface of what was to be actioned: the mission! Oh the Mission!
‘Falling into sync?’ Kirk replied, code words recalling themselves to the muster station, ‘then we’d better unplug the sync and let out the dirty water…’
Was that a feebly attempted but badly misjudged stab at a joke? Or a coded phrase?
Kirk couldn’t tell by Atoll’s reaction. They both had bigger things to terrify them. Kirk turned a page.
Atoll, mirroring, turned a page with him and read from the top.
‘We are not reading now, Atoll, we are doing.’
Atoll’s pained and awkward manner melted away; replaced by a demeanour of exacting determination. There was a rough road ahead and they were going to pave it with cobbles all the way to the buffers.
‘I’ll get my pants,’ Kirk said, sounding less manful than he deemed appropriate by his own pernickety standards.
You could describe Botface’s Torso as a pretty aimless fellow in some ways, not ‘pretty’, ‘pretty aimless’, not ‘aimless’, actually mellow is more apt. But ‘mellow fellow’ puts up too much drag resistance in the wind tunnel of verbum-tracto-aerium. Botface’s Torso was a bit part player without the rest of his body. With the rest of his body attached, as per NMBS intentions, he would operate a mega-distance away from mellow.
It was not like Botface’s Torso’s head was Botface’s Torso’s possession; it was a head assigned to him. It would be as, or more, accurate to call the prospective head: Botface’s Torso’s jailer and mental torturer in waiting…not even the head but the programming of the head. Not even the programming but the programmers… Or…
Worse…
… Maybe it was his head!
Destiny enacting its right to carry out its intentions oblivious to the hurt feelings of a sensitive torso.
… Maybe it was his head!
Botface’s Torso was just not able to commit to the vast, barbaric consequences that sat on the horizon’s face like hell had come uninvited to tea with more than an overnight bag…
While the head’s not here… the heart will fear…
The constant head updates were still documenting the head’s current location: getting tweaked at ‘berserk-head central’. The head’s public commissioning was subject to the blocking sovereignty of the Great Pause. The rest of the body parts, even those who were effectively sitting on the subs bench, were obliged to form a quorum, under emergency regulations necessitated by their head’s absence, and make decisions, or at least have discussions, about planning and plan activation. Botface’s Torso put forward a suggestion that the rest of them could live and perform well-rounded, manufacturer-gladdening lives and remain headless.
No other botpart took the comment past initial sundry and miscellaneous dump file status.
The problem Botface’s Torso had, that none of the other parts concerned themselves with, was that the place that anyone with any stake, down to a tent peg, in the UKGB comeback, seemed to be gravitating towards was the Farm. The Farm was the very establishment in which the pre-production prototype head (AKA De-Pop One) was residing. The pankillogenic, anti-philanthropic, mysanthropofile programming it was being kitted out with was intended to create, along with an unwilling Botface’s Torso, an Evilised and evil-eyed, eviltomaton. Not all men of science are psychopaths…but a few blood-curdling slices stain the pie chart a solid red.
