Excerpt Seventy-Three:
A New Physical Physique
Just before Tiny Guy had told KB that he was taking over Sybil’s quarantine facilitisation, Sybil had informed KB, via postcarding, that Tiny Guy had ‘tagged along for the ride’ and that she ‘wasn’t sure if her multiconglomerated totality could hold a devastating wall of rejection back from flushing TG out of the system’.
Hindsitically, Tiny Guy seemed more likely, in this case, to be throwing closer to the bullseye of Truthfulness than his nemesistical Sybilian opponantcy.
KB’d heard nothing from either Una or Sybil and he was hearing more than ears could stand from the TG output excellerator.
Then the cacophonous fanfare of sirens…
It was TG in person, not in person, but in dreamed simulactateous fabrication, sub-plotting underneath the general flow of fictional narrative:
‘KB, you must act, nasty agents are percolating from the Evil-minded sources and dribbling into decency, muddying the waters…’
‘Could you be more specific?’
‘I could, given more data, but with the data at my disposal…no.’
‘Go get more data, Guy… Come back and bring me conclusions wrought in swords of flashing memory.’
‘You’re giving me permission to dig and tunnel?’
‘I guess I am, Tiny.’
‘…Unleashing the dogs of war, at this stage, eh?’
‘Not the dogs, maybe the kittens…’
‘With your permission I will unleash a dog/kitten hybrid.’
‘…Okay. Listen… I don’t really know what we are talking about here…the word hybrid makes me uneasy…’
‘It is best you don’t really know what any of this means. You need to trust me. Well, trust is a little misnomenclaturic…but…’
‘I trust you will outcome situations as good as I could hope for.’
‘I like your enthusiasm… It’s that enthusiasm I love, it moves matter around and arranges it into otherwise inexistent shapes. I thank you for your shortsighted, if not desperate trust, and promise to run with the ball as fast as my tiny legs will propel me.’
So, on reflection KB had it all worked out, the way forward…TG was on it. TG would return, promtwithly, dataclad, brimming with succulent information that promised insight and curiousitonic nourishment.
Sometime later, about 0000.01 of a second according to the most accurate measuring devices, TG ‘pressed send’ and KB became the new owner of a freshly tarmacked highway of informationally packed answers that stretched out into wilderness like a life-line of lightning in a storm of destructive perfection.
Taking the initiative, KB went ahead, leaving Judith and Jeff to swap the underwear of familiarity and share the water of a soapy bath.
There was a sister system, aquatic in design that acted as an alternative escape route to the bus stop system. It would get Judith and Co. on the road to the Farm, but first, KB had to check it out.
He’d not needed to ask TG because TG had already created an exact, realtime copy that could be tested. The canal system and all who floated there were recreated and positioned to act with accurate as-if-it-were-real spontaneity.
Getting to the real place would be hasslacious so the facsimile provided instant modelling with an assuredness unrivalled anywhere in the mid-pause milieu.
There was a build up, a scene setting as it were. KB hitched a ride on telegraph poles to a walk way following an ancient walking path that used to be a railway. He leapfrogged three independently neglected, out of service CCTV clusters and arrived via several other electrical appliances at the Lock’s End Basin Marina.
KB scanned the marina, where a relatively shortish narrowboat awaited, in retirement mode, sitting on the dock of a bay kicking its habits. The entire marina, was seemingly empty on approach, but on closer up-to-the-edge style viewing, it became visually captured in it’s naked waterlessness. Distressed and shipwrecked narrowboatery clung to the gungy bottom prying for rain. The boat park was short one vital ingredient…that missing ingredient being H2O. All craft sat on the floor of the dry-assed marina atop a lining of sludge. They dreamed of heading out to sea, breathed in the salty air of ambition, but lounged around in their own lack of convenience. Their potential cancelled out, unable even to bobble, wedged into the crevice of rocked bottom.
Unable at first to locate his host vessel, KB surveyed the scene. The Lady of Trent ‘waved’ from behind a garish boat whose paintwork rode roughshod over the receding hills of tradition and etched a future that fashion might not ever entertain in a million years.
The Lady of Trent was Una and Jeff’s assigned boat. The modern copy of a Victorian coal hauler was atop of plan number one but slid down into contingency footnotes as the world grew from under threat to under existential demise. It had been fitted out with tech to assist them out of the area should things go wrong-shaped or resized with undesirability. It slipped its moorings on the banks of the river of revolution and weighed anchor in the doldrums of unwantedness, metaphorically. Now it squatted in the dry marina, its sea legs hampered by the lack of underlying fluidity; hope all at sea.
An advisory voicing stated the known facts about the marina and its connecting waterways. The plug had been pulled. There was no plug; there was a drainage vent system put in by the Victorians in case their Empire should ever falter and foreigners threatened to take over the highly advanced transport system.
Ignoring the Lady, KB rolled up his sleeves and his flared trousers into shorts, which gave him a sense of sartorial relief, and descended to the slimy slipperiness of the surface of the parched boat park. It was annoyingly realistic; lack of coordination, grip, tractional viability and twelve other senses involving orientation and balance, took charge.
The marina walls revealed an opening with KB’s travel direction intimated. Slow, decisive action snapped into radical karate moves, slip-sliding, jerkily standing solid between spasms of indiscreet wobbliness. KB laboured his way from the insecurity of the basin to the undelivered promise of slightly less insecurity of the entrance/exit gap. It would have been much easier if he’d walked the canalside but authenticity was the only booth issuing tickets to his destination.
Outside the trapped watercraft corral of the marina KB came to a t-junction. He held on to the wall to partially relieve realistic muscular soreness and reintroduce a modicum of perfectly acceptable stillness.
The left turn led South towards the great, if now paralysed, city of Londinium, and right pointed North with an eventual connection to the Highlands of Scotland and the Farm, and answers to existentially negative questions about the frailty of the sick patient of Humanity.
‘Hub to KB…Hub to KB…are you reading me?’
‘KB,’ he said, surprised by his own annoyance and how it blurted out and strutted at large in the communications ether.
His forward progress was impossible to measure within the narrative of having to ever arrive anywhere anytime soon.
‘Do you have an ETA?’
‘Boat OOA, repeat boat OOA.’
‘Understood,’ the Commander said, looking at Frank for guidance. Frank was blank but a bot spoke without lip movement due to standby wake-up issues, ‘Out of Action. ma’am.’
‘Ma’am’ was a process signifier, ‘OOA’ was term unused by humans but well known by others, apparently. A sign of the times she wanted to rip down and defecate on.
‘What alternatives can you give us beside aborting, KB?”
‘You’ll have to give me a minute, of your time, I’ll have to expend a month of my time…I’ll get back to you…I am heading out on foot and may be gone for some time…’
‘Shit,’ she said, ‘holy fucking shit.’ What would her father say to that, his authoritarian mind-prison festering, angering and violencing emotion into physical harm… ‘holy fucking cunting shit fuck…’ There, dad, take that, she thought as they waited for KB to materialise the next move in Humanity’s game of chess with a computer.
KB slipped North, sliding across any attempts to entertain Time and her passing tricks of light and dark in the shadows and glare of moment passing to moment in an unbroken chain of momentum.
KB was stuck in a constant and persistent battle with physics in a way he had herewithforto never perceived. It was both enervatingly thrilling and inconvenient, with a side of irritation that kept falling off the plate and pushing to the front.
