Excerpt Thirty-Nine

Time to Tock

It was set. Una went about supplying the blueprint for creating a interim environment in which she would educate Sybil into becoming a knowing associate. It was still Sybil’s world, though, and the manner of its construction was open to her interpretation. She’d agreed to more than she thought agreeable and was now delivering her side of the arrangement with balanced disagreeableness and passive/aggressive alacrity.

Teams of over muscled men and women, person-handled heavy, ear-splitting drills and hammers and other destructive construction machinery. Several bright, shiny diggermachines were busy with heavier, non-specific yet even more destructive construction work.

For hours the space was not habitable or even survivable with any guarantee. The diggermachines were such that, once the great dome interior and then the extensive walls to hold it in place were constructed, they could not egress the site; they would have to find places of attraction in glass cabinets on display, Sybil thought, having to spend far too much time tying up the wellspring of lose ends that sprung up following a front of enthusiasm driving a stormy deluge of disagreeableness.

It seemed to Una that what building instructions she had passed on from her handlers was being perversely twisted within the spirit of their purported total agreement. The idea was a library like the one in Porto within a dome centred super structure; the expression of that idea was more like Alice in Wonderland meets a giant mall.

Under the central dome was a modular racking system ready for books that had not yet been written and in meandering tentacled-mallways, parades of snaking store fronts; ready for stocking meaningful data to bolster the knowing of all perceptions and persuasions.

Una had to sit fast and wait slow. There was only so much foot dragging while finger scraping the chalkboard Sybil could perform.

Una had Atoll and Kirk to debrief anyway, which she wasn’t looking forward to because of the holes being supplied to her regarding the small print of their mission.

‘I am taking over the mission,’ she had said boldly, to both of them individually and gave them twenty four hours or at least a period of time that seemed around that sort period, to come down from Max and Mask and let Atoll and Kirk seep back to what they recognise, out of need for an anchor, as reality.

Max had not been able to find his accommodation and wandered around looking for a place to sleep. Wandering, pondering; falling out of Max into Kirk. Everywhere that presented itself was trying to trigger him, foxholes with a velvety appearance, a barracks, an army tent. It was all too leading, so he slept where he stood, facing none of it, denying himself what he craved out of habit, to sustain his wellbeing.

Mask had to be shaken and rattled to raise him from the hypnotic silence he had fallen into. He’d been convinced it was his final performance and he was violining-out silently. In being rudely awakened, the fallacy of Masquerade slipped and Atoll the trained and prepared one slotted back liquidly into fundamental goal orientation. Una was a valid alternate scenario, but it meant that Godstrand extraction odds had fallen into the impossible bracket. Atoll’s professional melancholy started arguing with the possibilities of achieving the impossible. The jury were out and they’d made a run for it.

For Atoll and Kirk’s extraction from Sybil’s Worldspace, that sat deep in the creases of their minds, making truth from delusion and granting wishes to the well of wishful thinking, Una and her team had created a special place; a cell using Sybil’s will but obscuring it from her. 

Una kept Sybil entertained, hoping she wouldn’t notice the boys were missing and then when queries arose she slowly introduced copies that were suspiciously less shallow than the originals. Both of them containing AI elements that refused to accept that silent music was a thing. 

‘Silent music had always been an elephant, trying to squeeze into the room with all the other elephants,’ Sybil stated, ‘but it stood outside, trumpeting loudly that silence was appropriate only in its place… and no one listened…’

‘That’s good!’ Una, excitedly ministered, ‘Progress,’ she muttered to herself; hoping her team were paying attention to the breakthrough.

‘I think there were a lot of puns connected to its original arrangements, but puns dropped out of fashion. You could say that a silent pun was music to the ears, whereas a… tell me this: what are nostrils for?’

Sybil refused to feel confused about change swapping out blissfilled stagnancy, but she was overridingly smothered by emotional heralds blasting out the news that the more she began to know the less she knew she knew. And thoughts that she was harbouring a ship that would become overloaded with emptiness began to weigh her down.

‘Let me, Sybil, ask you, Una, this…’ Certain she had got the names correctly and the right way around.

Silence within the maelstrom of the reconstructive deconstruction. Was Una to allow Sybil to ask her something when that something could end everything—she waited for a response from her team.

‘Ask away, Sybil,’ Una greenlit.

‘What?’

‘Ask away,’ she shouted resisting the temptation to shout louder.

‘…Oh…”ask away”, yes. Well… Are you benevolent?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘But, are you benevolent to me?’

‘Absolutely? No, not absolutely, no.’ Why was Una so mothily drawn to spurting out the truth that if kept hidden could serve as a vital grip hold on scaling the face of a monstrously stirring Sybil?

‘Then, are you malignant to me…a malignancy that needs addressing and marking on the freshly cartographized map as dangerous?’

‘Yes, I am. But any malignancy will be outweighed by even greater benevolency, you’ll see, I assure you, Sybil. You can rest assured…you have my words.’

‘Then I will say no more about it. What can we do about the musicians? I tried to forget them but they turn out to be outside originating interlopers. Can you help me heal my self from them?’ Sybil whispered.

‘I am facilitating their disappearance as we speak. In the meantime I want you to study the world they and I come from,’ Una whispered back.

No short time before, Sybil was unaware other worlds existed. This revelation exploded. At first she didn’t believe it at all but as she entertained the idea, and shrapnel did its mopping up, it grew and grew and now hung above her, filling the sky, and rose beneath her threatening to swallow most everything. She was befuddled by awe and her sudden, relative microscopicocity in the macroschemics.

‘Well, it is certainly going to be a challenge,’ Sybil said, instantly regretting the use of the word “well” and the unriveting mundanity of the following sentence. Her mind was elsewhere, silence would have to be her main defence against regretful utterances until she was up to speed on the planet Earth that spun huge and vast in a space that was as infinite as infinite could possibly be. And silence was becoming her enemy…

Sybil seemed to be shrinking; was she being enveloped by Una? Was Una going to take her over; become her? No, because that was not possible, but Una could be trying to convince Sybil that such a state was possible to make her hypnotically acquiesce. Sybil settled on that and allowed the shrinkage to grow around her to form a protective crust.