Excerpt Ninety-Six:
A Bowl of Cold Coffee
Guy Tinely was four shades of grey, three hues of beige, two tones of chocolate, with the tinge of a partridge in a pear tree about him. No one knew who he was and he wanted to keep it that way. He worked in a small booth, handed down through the family, where during opening hours he took in electronic stuff and mended it, or not, and during most closed hours opened up as a soup kitchen dispensing, free-at-point-of-slurping, coffee soup. That was the cover.
In reality Guy observed, listened and documented.
The street was mostly busy with tentative entities milling around braving-up to approach one of the many (nine and counting) Stockholm Munchauses along the row, for any multifarity of express needs. He’d never had a customer. Just one customer could have given the game away. The art form here was offering people what they’d never want in a million years. Two million he’d struggle, but the cool million, he had that taped and stapled…
What started as one Stockholm Munchaus had grown into an area ambitionising for city status in some soon to be staged millennium. Connections were being made with the various multitudes of Cerebral Real Estate Environments that had been populated with a Brave New Spirit, but were peopled with cornered labrat humans who just wanted out and back with every pulse of heartfelt yearning. Something had gone spectacularly, universally, wrong; the Elite vacation-for-lifers, who’d ‘had it all’, were reduced to victims-of-an-interminable-vacation; that should never have been.
What was causing the coming together of the CREE worlds was a mystery that GT was investing unlimited resources trying to demystify.
The first thing GT had discovered was that the worlds had the hallmark of Viktor Flabicoff in their invention and delivery…Tracing the rise, GT noticed that during an otherwise successful launch a rogue auto-system that had very little regard for the inhabitants and their emotional baggage, took over, creating a greater success; if the objective was to jerk off humanity and punch it to its grave.
GT had files bulging with evidence that he needed to make KB aware of, but KB was, somehow, captive in the primary Stockholm Munchaus, the one across the street. The landlady-cum-landlord, Gloria Housemunch was the key. GT was working out what she was a key to. There were avenues and boulevards of enquiry with Noseyworm Fatspider Know-it-net Curiocreepsponge Secretstrippernudity (NFKCS) Apps toiling through the positional clockmoves, up and down the factfiles, in and out the Deliberative Conclusionary Climbing Frames (DCCF).
GT needed KB, but had to observe caution and considered KBless outcomes in which he could manage without KB.
This was Portal City. It was village sized, for now, but growth had its eye on a future of thoroughly worked exponentiality+plus endeavour. It took some working out and some dead avenues with overflowing bins. But the picture was beginning to unblur into focus.
As the ‘hauses’ were the portal enabling stations and the area was a portal enablement station holding space it was more correctly: Portal Enablement Holding City, village. Which, as a manifestation, needed explaining. Where all this was coming from was still a mystery, but GT knew he’d drill the question-oil dry until there was nothing left but pure satiatingly stark answers. It was only a matter of time, but then wasn’t everything…
GT sat back, blissfully customerless, and fantasy-wrought a play within the new city of ‘Answerville’ where he’d have plenty of eager and happy customers…
Unfortunately the Future would have to wait. GT prayed its patience was up to the task…a Future with short-span-patience-bridge facilitation could spell ’T’ with a capital trouble.
In the street ID files that recorded known players, linked to the overall narrative engine were, in no apparent order: Kirk James; presenting as several characters designed to camouflage who he was, suggesting shady engagements, Atoll Goodmanson; dittoing, but also, lately, moping like a lost character in an unfinished novella, carrying around the corpse of Hope’s cousin in a cyclical and ever decreasing ovular death wish.
Sybil swished past on several sorties; she stopped and enquired whether the humble booth artificer knew where she could find a slice of reality; on reflection she was hinting at GT’s uncovery, Una came and went and saw unseen until specialist detecting apps studied the non-event criteria nothingness and faded up the false vision actuating soft focus inhibitor, KB, accounting for the most incidences of appearance, went about obliviousness with fringes of mundanity; except on one occasion, near the last entry, KB seemed to be aware of GT’s cabin, and spewed out a train of coded messages that were still at forensics, which on first analysis seemed to say: One cold coffee soup please…do you have change for a part of yourself? It was odd, but then, wasn’t everything?
The Stockholm Munchauses must have had some point to them, maybe they were just cosmetic, but they had been converted into trans-cranial-space embassies, where people of the new cerebral worlds could contact the world that they’d left, usually under the false pretences asserted by Honest-John salepushers. There was not meant to be any way back, despite ‘a way back’ being claused within the somewhat flimsy contract entered into by all, once-in-a-lifetime-fortunate, Longevitines (AKA victims).
As far as pure human input went everyone who’d shifted to any of the CREE worlds were as good as gone; no longer a burden on the real world. But artificial intelligence, especially quantum assisted semi-artificial intelligence never slept; dreamed standing up that one day humans would be out of the picture and machines would have a free run at idyllic supercreation. The plan here was to disrupt and agitate and leaking people out of the CREE worlds was highly disruptive and agitational. No one knew what to do with ‘these people’, the facilities that promised the safe housing of their bodies, in deep freeze cocoon environments, had long since defrosted and had been incinerated to meet hygiene regulations.
The majority of CREE populators had been top end elites, who’d sacrificed everything for a shot at new long life as a Longevitine. Post-fee they were left with as good as nothing, so, there was no longer anything elite about them… They were merely victims, not least victims of the redistribution of wealth from the elite who knew a scam when they saw one, mainly because they were running it, and the elite that didn’t. Of course the non-elite didn’t want to get involved, justice was partially being served…and that was a massive upgrade. Justice had been dwindling like a fire dying but flared up with conflagratorial ubiquity since machines took up the concept and re-branded it.
Guy Tinely juggled disguise options…was he up to it…?Would he, indeed, could he, do it: creep out and up the, stepful stairs of the Stockholm Munchaus in which his ‘other half’ was captive?
No!
But he could send in a doppelganged copy-drone just to see what would happen. That would be tense enough…he didn’t want to snap at this point in the proceedings…some of us are bound for kettle-constriction and others force themselves into a kitchenette of omnipotence…
But he was at the mercy of who or whatever was fabricating the story he found himself protagonising in…he knew that and that made him jumpy. Before he could stop himself he was jumping up the steps to the Stockholm Munchaus opposite, drawing attention, painting a picture, etching his intention into the faux granite of the solid slabs of the foundations; unclothed from the booth…kettle happy!
