ExcerptSixteen

Call Me, Maybe.

The woman was hanging on to the plans and plots and schemes of the outgoing administration with white knuckled claws; an adhesive agent maintaining partial operational viability among the shattered edifice of power: a salutary exercise in futility.

‘The laptop!’ said the woman, somewhere between a quiet shriek and a town cryer aiming his practice bellow at not waking the neighbours.

‘I know where I left it, too, by the entrance,’ she continued, into the void of a zero-input response.

The machine behind the system that populated the skeleton sub-systems of the bus shelter could not detect the woman with any depth as she was working on ageing, pre-smart-data that could not be accessed due to some kind of official secrets interference, back-log bureaucracy program. More sophisticated technology was on the shelter’s way, that would enable detection of the woman’s intentions, and turn over her bucket of secrets to make a public access sandcastle to sift through, open source, so all can see whether she is an enemy of the new people, with a minutiae rating that could show such intricacies as whether she had been breast-fed and her sensitivity to light. (for ‘new people’ see: ‘machines’, ‘hybrids’.) Until then, a little intuitive interpretation was necessary; artificially intelligent guesswork. Unless stressed into loquacity, the woman leant towards the laconic. Her ‘I know where I left it, too,’ and ‘…by the entrance,’ mean’t to the interpretational resources available to the bus shelter that she was beavering a dam of concealment.

‘I’ll have to go back and get it. It is better that I go on my own,’ said the woman supplying the bus shelter with a deep crevasse, oozing with juicy data concerning her true intention.

‘Hey, “What’s your name?” I’ll come with you, Dave said, bluffing, he wasn’t going anywhere. He looked for a reaction, but lost his nerve and didn’t follow through. The fact he was trying, gave him a gentle heart warming pat on the back that made his tummy rumble.

‘Yeah,’ Atticus said, in a responsive, yet immediately regrettable attempt at allying with Dave’s aborted mutiny.

‘We need the laptop,’ the woman emphasised.

‘What for?’ Atticus blurped, feeling densely implicated.

‘One of you has a code on a stick,’ the woman scorned with scattered penetration.

‘I don’t have a stick,’ Atticus responded with hollow patchwork, delivered too fast; delivering a vegan meal before the chef had even turned the oven on.

And the woman looked at Atticus as though he were mad; and the madness projected on him, expanded and saturated his presence…so that…as determined as he was not blink first, he looked away, where, in the distance he felt the madness subside. And there he was consumed by the presence of wild, arboreal, sulking beasts.

With a sudden inevitability no one wanted, the woman up and left, running like an athlete back towards the hotel. For a moment they all felt helpless…abandoned. The HMS Mother Hen’s wake, lapping into stillness.

…but…

Deep in the metaforestical forest, a twig doesn’t snap on its own… 

…and…

The welling of emotions, experienced by the three bus shelter inhabitants, cheer-led by vibrational fear hitting a ceiling crowded by sensors, activate the bus shelter’s auxiliary, sub-program, assistance app. The shelter, in non-technical parlance, was (emergency) enabled; para-consciousness synchronising with ambient consciousness, assessing, engaging, entwining; being…

The bus shelter, had already selected a name and chosen a gender for ease of communication, but kept its electronic tongue still. The introduction had to be accepted by the three citizens of the post-old/pre-new, interim world, with optimal synchronisational fluidity.

An approaching anomaly would have to be dealt with first…

…because…

…there then came a weirdo. 

Presenting himself as a local man with radiance and status, but being viewed as a total loser, having exited the stained-glass window of human age potential viability, he was seen scrabbling up the foothills of a mountainous scrapheap-cum-crapheap.

He was batting with his own balls, and intended to receive no return volleys. He served them a plate of cold spiel he’d cobbled together. This situation; a captive audience, was a deep pool by the side of a dried-up stream and he stripped off for a dip in it.

Coughing to maximise the potential of full attention from the punters in the bus shelter-auditorium, he sad, ‘My name is Dan Shady, Dan, Dan…thcwhheeep…Shady, thweick, thweick…I’ve not been able, forgive me, to unearth a word that rhymes with…with…oh what…Wait, I’ll have to go away and come back and perhaps then my memory will serve an ace…to this place, like mace, in the face…forgive me, don’t forget me…’

The three looked on, unaccepting; this was not happening…

‘Guess who’s back, back, back, back again…’

‘Oh, it’s Dan, Hi Dan.’

‘Who said that?’ Dan said, his question allying with the thoughts of the three sheltereers. 

It didn’t seem to come from the shelter, but it did sound like how a bus shelter would sound if it could speak.

‘Mind bowled!…That was mind-bowling…The pins in mein headskull have been flatted, good-style. I’ll be twatted, a bus shelter that can talk, on a route with no bus, so riders must walk… I’m speechless; without rhyme, which is more than I can say for the bus stop. What else can it do? Summersaults?’

Even at his point the bus shelter’s sensitive, awakening, sub-auto-systems were picking up the smell of the departed woman on the man who didn’t fit. The bus shelter embarked on a new program that worked out who the man was in a millisecond, but processing how to interact with the victims of the man’s intent took longer, probably too long.

Dan’s real name is knut, his mother was an agent for MI9 (Elite Profit Protection), and his father a stage actor. With benign predictability, Knut became an actor within the secret service community. Where he was favoured for undercover operations, convincing as he was at getting people to actively ignore him while he was garnering information. The ‘village idiot’ was an act. He was tasked with identifying the person who might be carrying the virus that was stopping the DRD launch, his team close by…

The bus shelter had nine viable options, but another, deep from left field entered the fray, a shot rang out and not acting this time, Dan sank to his knees as if disgusted, recoiling from the unfortunate part of his head that had just been blown off by a speeding, spinning bullet. Four other shots were heard by the three witnesses as they tried to come to terms with the movie that had just trailered before them. Nausea and fear rose to such a degree that the bus shelter was able to access further emergency resources; happily ready for the unfolding disaster to require his assistance…

In the horror and encroaching dark, crowded with shadowy vulture-like avian monsters, the three all felt one thing with dread, unspoken, unwhispered: the woman had returned.

She was pure evil in human form and steering their fate like a Captain Ahab; fixated on killing off technology and its exterminatory exigences.

The bus shelter, Kevin, examined the three who allowed the murderer into their midst to take over and control their collective fate; they were all in favour of her continued leadership, but they all wanted to fast-forward to the moment they no longer needed her.

The woman had to deal with a vague sense of sexual stimulation caused by the killings, she put it in a box and buried it, while she dragged the bodies of her colleagues into the undergrowth; she was, she concluded, an absolute psychopath, luckily, needed to be, and in the supernatural height of the aftermath of her godly destruction, she applauded her own twisted attributes, while smothering unattached shame with a bloodstained tarpaulin. She’d have to stand on the shoulders of miracles to get these wet creatures to East London and hand them over to G & G labs.

She sat back down on the bench inside the shelter, exhausted but winning. The three sat like innocent children cornered by oversized injustice and misguided brutality.

‘Hi, guys, my name’s Kevin. I am destined to be your protector and serve you in your time of need,’ 

The bus shelter, even as the sound was still dissipating, electronically cringed at what it heard emanating from its own speakers…and the name Kevin was so obviously a mistake. The bus shelter had woken up at a bad time in the history of technology. Was it too late, Kevin thought, to change his name to Ishmael? Could he make them forget all previous introductions and start with,’Call me Ishmael!’?

As if joining in the with the barrage of questions the clouds let go as much concentrated moisture as they could muster. A level of appreciation at being sheltered rose to ceiling height from the populated bench… Kevin was infused with a sudden and not unwelcome sense of wellbeing.