Excerpt Ninety:
A Judithian Looking Una
KB was getting comms that were sort of like a cross between texts and dreams. It wasn’t ideal but was unquantifiably better than no contact at all. The working tag was Kettlecomms, which needed work.
KB had been backed into the kettle situation by unseen and molecularly improbable forces. He faced a new foreign territory; stark and shadowless. The empty plains of infinity stretched outwards to melting horizons, the sky of drenched blue, with capacity for a billion Suns, inverted-ocean-like above. Yet shoots were growing in the barren land, unseen There were powers that were were assailed by a crushing nemesis and powers that weren’t.
Sybil, Una and Judith were taking it in turns to establish the world as they saw it…they indulged in a mime-like wordless interaction of charades to import concepts they could share without the snooping Audiocell Admin constructing complexities that would come back round and execute bad-happenings.
Vis-a-vis the Narrowboat Theatregroup, they had scripts that showed them befriending the human baited victims and then using cult cultural references to lead them down a Storypath into an avenue of narrative emotional implosion. For instance: the Punch and Judy show they had lined up, without Punch, he’d left years before, his part was played by Malwario and the play they enacted was that of Malwario and Juliet, one of Shakesperio’s hidden plays. The faux-seaside style entertainment began lulling its captive audience, even boring them with holes that submission could latch on to… Until the Climax, pants at half-mast, ran amok among the Narrowboat Theatre viewing congregation; late at night, during the evening break in the 24/7 play, off-script, ad hoc, subtract activities conducive to the story being told.
As the performance carried on well into sleep, the sleepees were directed to believe the actors were puppets, and puppets were real…you know what dreaming can be like! The bottage had a story to tell the humanage, redirecting their belief of what was happening, as fiction, to what was occurring in non-fiction.
On the Judith side there was a great deal of movement. If KB could ask questions back he would ask if the Judith side of things, let’s call them the Judithians, were able to intervene in the Narrowboat Theatre mind massacre; overriding the impulses and intuitions of the MIssion team to remain and ride the scariness to its ultimate conclusion.
Of course, Una and Sybil had it covered plan-wise, they’d spent the last few months ironing out wrinkles in the tangled fabric of the uniforms and costumes of their plots and schemes.
Judith was in both places at once. The Stockholm Munchaus; her Stockholm Munchaus, and, on the barge of demonic frolics. She had not developed the techniques of dual-conscious, data-later, mental-rental processing. But there was an answer to the question: Are we going to roll over and expire? And the answer was, No!
Judith was a specialist in her own forward rolling governance, she had a duty to the Will of Justice, and a Drive that was stopping for no one outside her own brief. At least, all this was welling up like a shitstorm.
Back in the diner, in the English pub area, with a crackling fire of lung-polluting logs. The three mavens were proffering prohibited postulations.
‘Judith!’
‘Yes.’
‘If you extend to me “You time”, I can lift us out of this situation and lower us into another, better situation, with relative ease.’
‘And, which situation would this be?’
‘The “narrow” one.’
‘I see, yes…’
‘I’ll have to…’ she was going to say ‘think about it’, but the intention to think about it was the technically coded go-ahead for Sybil to inhabit her mind and body for the duration of evacuating Mission personnel from the Narrowboat Theatre’s threatening environs.
Sybil was subjected to a rush of feeling; a novel whole wholesomeness, for a full minute… She dwelt there in the wholeheartitude; there in Judith’s body, running through all the possible potentialities pertaining to a long stall, so she could keep the feeling going for as long as possible. It was not possible… Squatting laws applied, the feeling was in free-fall, it was unpowered flight with a thermal reliant flight plan.
KB was simmering. Was this it? Was that, that? What would become of his eternal elements? Etcetera, Etc. etcetera… His simmering stopped: was there anybody out there? His metaphorical fingers criss-crossed with digital lattice integration, artfully.
Judith, licked her mouth and stood up slowly outputting shades of shadow from her light-starved outline. ’Everybody up, we must leave now or there will be terror in each sip and in each sup…’
Una had researched bot code and passed on the information to Sybil. Sybil emitted synthetic noises through Judith’s natural throatware.
The team and peripherals went from standby to ‘don’t barge’ in the blink of a lazy-eye. Discipline, thankfully thought better of in-fighting and excellent use of the scant exit capacity was maintained. Okay, some bottage was left behind, perfection never really lived authentically. The encapsulate team discapsulated; the first rung on the ladder of escaping.
Paul Harris’s digger guy, ‘luckily’ knew of the junction where modified lock apparatus was blocking the ingress of water to the marina stub. He merely opened the lock and the flooding started. He hoped there was no one in the line of fire of the narrow tsunami… But Hope could juggle dirty bombs every other Tuesday. The team were slipping and sliding back towards the marina as the deadly wave slogged its way south at an outpacing velocity and bone-fracturing mass.
They had the kettle with them and in the kettle, as we know, was KB, but what we didn’t know was the entire Narrowboat Theatre Group, including the Clowncaptain, in a compressed form, were also inhabiting the kettle. It was an escape pod (doubling as an attack/parasite podette). From that morning on they would be grafted to KB’s mental musical arrangement; they would play in every orchestra he ever conducted…the dissonance creating depth; the depth creating danger; danger? Well, that was pencilling itself in for a madly inappropriate solo at some future, performance.
It looked like a common or canal Narrowboat Theatre had invaded his preciously too small space, but perhaps it was something else. He told himself, not really believing it, or not believing it strongly either way, that this event was purely a way of loading his psyche. Programming! He’d considered himself beyond programming, but, perhaps he’d been wrong. Maybe he needed updating, however seemingly harsh it all felt? A swirling, churning emotion he’d not clocked before, massaged his flesh with serrated impertinence and gall.
KB had to share the kettle even though he pretended not to.
It was important at this stage of developing technology that the bottage remain dry…it was a constant battle. Most modern technology emanated from areas with minimal rainfall. The intended adoption of specialised bottage as full-time, all-points bulletin, Police Judge and Executioners, UK. ( UK Executive Police Judges) had not been thought through the rain filter of the damp countries such as the UK. Until electrical short-circuitry could be circumvented the governing and controlling bots risked being as vulnerable as Triffids on a day to day basis.
The Mission team reassemble with sighs of relief at the marina having not met their end in a bad impersonation of a sewer. The unsecuring the lock securing the Marina Clubhouse and Dry Dock Whistle-Whetting Hideyhole was child’s play or as Arm Five put it: it was like having a deep chocolate craving and taking chocolate from a defenceless child… An entity within the kettle-bound ex-bargees adding: ‘And now you don’t know which is worse, the guilt of eating chocolate or the guilt of stealing it from a defenceless child…’ which on repeating made little sense. but there we were.
A phase was complete so under the agreement it was Una’s turn at playing Judith. Una repositioned and readied herself. Thinking would only elongate and deepen the trench of dicognification she found herself sheltering in so she just popped up her head and spoke to an unexacting Jeff, ‘I am here for the next phase, we need to work fast, put our emotions into a pocket in the vault. Judith has just had Sybil for a phase and now she has me…’ There were words that spoke volumes… Una kept ‘talking’ until she was sure Jeff ‘got the picture’ even though everyone else was ‘unalerted’ to the ‘game’ of ‘catch-up’ she had initiated.
Jeff had to ‘get’ that Judith was now Una without Una saying so. They’d agreed that years before, (without any serious idea that this situation would ever come to pass). It could pierce the upper reaches of ridiculousness, it was not the best course of action on reflection, but she had to stick with it. Luckily, Jeff impressed, as though he needed to re-impress her after the long separation.
‘Una?’ Jeff said, bewildered and entering into an emotional no go area, which he corrected, ‘Una,’ he continued with a flakey, plastic nonchalance,’ is that you?’ The rest of what he meant to say was suppressed by his own incredulous speechlessness. The Town Hall had done the business part and were already airing any other business.
He welcomed her home even though she couldn’t stay for long. They both skipped acts, fast-forwarded through action packed emotionfest conferences and converged at the ‘doing’ end once done: ‘How do you see your phase from here?’ Jeff enquired, with professionality that had a flair to it.
‘The next step is to get you all to the Farm. Do we have updates from UKGBH… The Commander?’
‘Hub, you mean?’
‘The latest updates are expected soon. I don’t suppose they’ll compete with ours.’
‘The Farm had been drifting further away. This as a good turn of events.’
‘What kind of speed are you up to?’
‘I have not been wasting time. I have been held in a quarantine confinement with world class library resources. It gave me time to think, off base, as well.’
They both wanted to know what that meant about their relationship but the space and time available crowded such amenable sauntering out.
‘I have been somewhat stagnating.’
‘The bottage has not been cooperative?’
‘Well, we are captive…’
‘Stockholm Syndrome can be a buddy, but it is still localised in Scandinavia…’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Don’t concern yourself, this is what I mean they are so full of bullshit, they are in Labstate Research and Development Mode (LRDM) and have no real world input.’
‘Whose fault is that, botnapper man?’
‘I thought I was learning from their extensive data bases but found out that they were making things up.’
‘We are on course, Jeff, you did a great job…the plan for you to create a focal point, when that was the last thing machine monsters wanted, has worked and that is down to you.’
The narrowboat that they had originally charted to get them Northwards undetected, slowly raised its garishly painted starboard as the water returned, straining at its moorings to be released.
‘Our chariot awaits.’
‘Great! Another stuffy, tight space to cram into. Why?’
In response Leg Four worked it out: the space that existed in all the headminds, imaginations and cerebral real estate environments could accommodate the displacement of the interior of the narrowboat they were in by a power of almost one trillion to the power of ten. And yet he told no one.
Una and Jeff were strangers of a unique variety…Jeff could not show affection for the body Una inhabited and Una felt a repulsion at the thought of encouraging such a state of intimacy; so with mutual unconsciousness they shrouded relations in a relatively formal façade…while seething and roiling…being eaten alive by a plague of hunger-demented Frustration.
