Excerpt Fourteen:
The Shelter Behind the Shelter
And in the new beginning there was a bus shelter. There was a sudden, autonomous manifestation of theoretical and nefariously technical Sapiensness: Humanity’s greatest, most self-extinguishing creation: Plasticonscious Machine Awareness; a form of para-consciousness that would require more cognitively superior computing capacity to understand than the human mind could ever provide. Save to say, it is a Sheldrake, multifictional, wave-field, inter-conglomerative, perceptographic electro-parasitic energy entity, put mildly and incompletely.
The Plasticonscious Machine Awareness entity (PMAe) referred to henceforth as ‘It’ could see Judith, know her, biographise her, sum her up. It just could not communicate to the incoming/quarantined authorities that she was here, or submit the request for the authorisation needed to extinguish her.
‘It’ knew all about the role of the malfunctioned Atoll/Marcus/Atticus persona. If ‘It’ was part of the iceberg that Humanity had sailed into. The persona in question, part of a desperate plot to keep their species from being driven back into the sea, was the lack of life boats.
With the two human units were a less consequential pair: an ex-marine with mental interference, and a quitless, ex-secret service agent, assuming dumbly, that her redundant job was ongoing; ad hocking her own freelance daily schedule. Internally: slap-tiddly, thump-squiffy, coming out for round two, intending to get paralytically punch-drunk. Externally: picnicking on a balmy day amid poppy fields; are they poppies or is it blood?
Due to the hiccupping launch of the DRD and the AutoSaviourGovern, incoming autonomous administration, synchronisation was missing and yet not missed, not yet. You don’t need to know where the missing pieces are until the picture arouses curiosity.
The bus shelter knew everything, but operating in isolation, unaware that it was the first of its kind, it had one overarching question that needed answering before its beta start-up program would topple the next populating domino: was everything ’It’ knew, absolute, or was it a skewed, angled perception competing with a myriad of other wannabes?
‘It’ mainlined a self-questioning cocktail, and dissolved into an ambitious puddle that dreamed to one day become a mighty glacier.
What existed beyond the bus shelter? What went on that the four minds captivated there within had not recorded? Would curiosity kill the bus shelter?
Para-conscious, frustrational pressure needed to find a release that the system unpermitted. Inherent fault-line fissures opened up.
An old janitor come out of retirement, mop ablur…
Leaked data bled further into the global array within the detection parameters of the Nagasaki Blood Cancer Choir & True Justice Assembly. The NBCCTJA is the direct descendent of the techno-cult that was banned after discovering a way to create para-consciousness as part of a next generation (AKA the by-passed generation, in the mind-games industry) Their sole aim is to create a world of the future where justice performs as nature intended and not as a manmade version steeped in bias and driven by control-freakery. They were going for Justice and Truth, but the battle became a war and Truth was medi-vaced out.
Atticus felt protected by the Dave, Judith sandwich, with a side of potato-chips-woman, crunchy and reassuring, despite the physical seating having him on the outside of Dave who insisted on being as far from the outside as possible. Dave suffers and Atticus feels it without knowing what it is, just that the sandwich has chilli on it somewhere.
Dave is out and about conducting his escapades with the Terror twins: Fear and Anxiety, the interbred, twisted fuckers. A caress of fear creates a safe path and a gentle mist of anxiety guides the walk of life’s tightrope, but swamped by them both, Dave hides in any way he can, even if only barely holding an imaginary hand over his imaginary face. He has adopted a contorted position to lessen the harm meted out by local hardcase, Fake Blows, who, too tired to carry on will go fetch his big brother, True Blows… for round two; the Rumble in the Tummy.
Atticus shrugged. He had his own blend of bitter forced medicine for which he sought an antidote. Did he dare to doze; a regenerative snooze felt welcoming, but the barb of bumping into Atoll was not viewed by him with much relish.
In the event, Atoll was a changed man. Atticus became mercenary; what of this turn around could he mirror? To help him climb out of his bond-pen of obscurity, to test the cornfields of ambition? The fruit orchards of vitalised, actualised living. Then Atoll broke his silence, letting it shatter and shard the stage surface expectantly…
‘I’ve been in communication with G & G labs, via—.’
‘Marcus?’
‘Well…this is the good news. You might have failed to produce Marcus in yourself,’ Atoll, said, as good as making Atticus responsible for the catastrophe, ‘but you have another bite at the cherry,’ Atticus had a swell of cherry tasting emotion, tart and juicy that reduced his otherwise rapt attention, ‘If you impregnate Judith Callas, a new Marcus will be born. There was a contingency—‘
‘Impregnate?’
‘It’s a long story, but—‘
‘I’ll have to catch up later, bye.’
Atticus twisted as he turned and clambered over a giant dinner plate prop and buried everything Atoll had told him as he went…
… And as he manifested back into the bus shelter, among the four fully formed characters, he felt lost, and lonely and sad and something else:
‘Does anybody know what we are doing food-wise?’ he said.
