Excerpt Ninety-Two:
Demons in the Haus!
Judith O. had her palpable physicality, law abiding interactionally defined and provable corporeality, but to Mallory 2, et al, reality draped itself with enduring fake authenticity over every scene like a Dalíesque timepiece. She (her multiple Othernesses), lived in a world of enhanced fantasy, and the ‘Otherness’s’ ‘Othernesses’ had drives of their own that continued to annoy and startle and impress Judith O. as she received activity reports in her nightly unbridled-dream-fact-dissemination workout sessions.
Judith O’s Mallory 2’s multivarious personaisations had differing roles within the Cerebral Real Estate Environment as well as the tagged-on Parasitical Environment World Spaces (PEWS). The most productive area outside the Cerebral Real Estate Environment walls was the Stockholm Munchaus. Judith O’s specific Stockholm Munchaus creation, unconsciously orchestrated for housing common, relevant Mallory 2 co-conspirators, was a diner with an American twentiesness to it, walls adorned with large format photographs of 30’s German Beetles that AI had creatively manifested, but had never happened physically in any universe, until then…
Judith O. saw everything with clarity and everything myopically all at once. Macular degradation, immaculate perception, good vision, bad vision. Boa Vista, mal Vista… She was Dark, she was Light; in a world of light and dark. Terrible-as-fuck to some and the saviour of the not-quite-valid-meek to others, with some vice versa shit going on. She envisaged a greyed-out disguise, perhaps, an invisibility cloak of fashionable unquestionability that even the intimate parts of Mallory 2 remained illcognisant of. And got it.
Judith O. was aware that in disguising herself she would not know who she was, but the act of disappearing would lead to discovery of new data that was lodged within and without herself; slamming doors on white knuckles clinging on to ignorance; opening windows into insight, and the conquering of the lofty false summit of Self Knowledge.
Judith O. backed off the Stockholm Munchaus interactions, installing an alterpersona, a preferable proprietor; who was given the slowly hurried and witshort nome de schizo, Gloria Victoria Champion
Gloria got indistinct glimpses and intuitive bursts of animalistic biologicality, but never anything hold-on-to-able. Judith O. did not exist, to Gloria, but if she did she always noticed her… A mysterious limb-con-trolling stringplay was intrinsically combatting free, or at least inexpensive, will.
… But such a force was way above her current understandability rating; blocked from ever being unriddled; sealed infinitoriously in an unopenable enigmafile…
Yet Judith O. influenced Gloria with an ass-kicking motivational whirlwind of impetus like a strong wind bends the deportment of a mime artist. So that negotiationswise she kept all opposing parties at the table; banging their heads together long after the nurses and doctors had gone home. Gloria didn’t know how she had come to be such a hard-headed negotiator, but she thanked and cursed a higher power for it; and got on with the job…
When KB wheeled himself in to Judith O’s (Gloria’s) Stockholm Munchaus it as not clear to him whether he was KB who’d subsumed Botface’s Torso (and Botface’s Torso was making some radical re-un-subsumation backlog, sidegrind, fandango, riftspan), or, whether he was Botface’s Torso sitting atop KB’s grave, crumbling like a biscuity sandcastle built on an avalanche.
To Gloria, KB’s visitation meant that her Munchaus world was given a status level that had Due Story Stakes (DSS) in any narrative that weaved its way around any record entry involving Stockholm or Munchaus. It was like opening day, festive with forced smiles and gingerly wanton hope.
Gloria wanted to get across that she understood (KB) in a way that only someone in her position could, ‘Who do we have here? KB, I presume,’ she said, searching the Botface lookalike, as seen in the brochures, and sensing the KBesqueness that the Good Soldier Svejklike individual expermiated.
There was silence from all hemispheres.
With Gloria eventually asserting her superiority status as landlady and female mootlordperson elect, ‘ID check verifies your KBness, with a little cocky underlying Botface vibe…challenging you, keeping you on your toes.’
‘Good,’ KB simply said. He hadn’t been totally sure IDwise, so the verification extended a platform he could use to flap and paddle to the shore with dry feet so any full body meditation could begin from tip of his toes in fine physically ordered rectitude.
KB was, he told himself (peptalking, pepsplaining), a survivor. There were times when just surviving was a limp puddle stain and others when the act of surviving became an art, and the very thing one needed to extend life expectancy values. A skill that placed an individual on the top of a pile of other individuals who were surviving with less aplomb and/or dying with an inescapable carriage of artlessness.
‘How can we help you?’
‘We?’
‘Me, and there are protagoplayers and bitparters too, here…’
‘Now I am inquisitively suspicious, my inquiring mind has gone to places where everyone has two faces. Are these introductions to novel entities, or am I au fait with them?’
Gloria gestured to several monitors and on one, a Sybil type, talking with the sound off in a Sybil-like setting, and on another, an Una type doing the same in an Una-like way.
Gloria needed to extend no more additional information for KB to be able to fill in the sew-by-numbers tapestry of the overarching story.
‘Sybil and Una? They are here? Are they safe? Are they secure?’ A popping nodule, known in these troughs as Mr. Panic, rose briefly before settling…in the mud under the thornbush…eyes scanning supervigilantly…
Gloria supplied no answer while posing a question…
‘Are you alone?’
‘Unfortunately not. I have a coterie of blackguards and postmodern demonapes atugging at my, whatcha-ma-callit? Soul.’
‘That is interesting…you think you have a soul?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Well, it depends…anyway. Where are you housing yourself these days? Didn’t you manage that bus stop escape system during the Jeff Botnappings? How is Jeff? How are the bots fairing, under the circumstances?’
‘In a kettle. I am being housed in a kettle, and the less said about that the better. I have hit the bottom,’ KB said, his words reverberating, hanging, threatening eternal echo, then shushing out of some vaguely respectful sensibility.
‘Well,’ Gloria continued, hardening her stance and summoning a proprietorial theatricality that whether called for or not called forth, performed illustriously, illustratively, without hesitation unabreviation, ‘everyone should experience hitting bottom. Only the cursed hit bottomlessness… or…don’t because they can’t…because there is no bottom, for them. Bottoms are vital…and hitting them…is…’
The subject needed changing and the Autodrone Audio Roomspeak (AAR) system piped up, ‘It’s Happy Hour at the bar and today’s specials have been uploaded to the specials board. Wooo-a-hoooo…’
AI music played loudly but you could still hear the sound of human musicians turning in their graves.
‘That’s a big wooo-a-hooo to you too boo boo…’
Gloria, once adapted, had a close interactional facedock-bond with KB, and their relationship, which was all about connections, blossomed and fructated. KB auto-retorted in DittoCollabMode (DCM). A meeting in a nondescript diner that had the unseen potential (looking back) of becoming a conjoined Empire spanning the globe; all globular objects…
‘Ecstatic Happy Hour now on the clock…Be the Demon your inner twat craves… Cancel concerns of cacophonous consequences… Dance with the Devil, swing on his horns, clod hop and stomp on his mammalian hooves… Dig it, bury it…go to its funeral service reception and party like its Humanity’s last weekend…’
The Haus was rocking…
