Excerpt Twenty-Four:
Elvis Wonders
Kev had assumed that, after demodal, integrative assimilation with the Mallory-over-ride administration interface, his duties would be grey and mundane, robotic and pedestrian, oneish and zeroish…
But he hadn’t factored in that the paused launch was paused, partially at least, due to outgoing entity contestation; Humanity (with a capital aitch) firing with movie characteristic, white-knuckle-cliff-hanging ferociousness and guile, wilfully blanking out the inevitability of defeat at the hands of that existential eradication beast it invidiously created itself to make life stronger, faster, more science fiction.
So, somehow, Kev got what he discovered, he’d always wanted, the chance to play a bona fide, fully fleshed out, scene-interacting character; burgeoning in importance relative to the, as yet unresolved, plot of the story of the paused launch. He stepped forward into the limelight and pulled on a pair of used VIP pants.
Mallory watched him step in, she was lucky to have him, he was an illegal spur, an illicit node; a tool to unscrew the clamp of death, jiggle it about and replace it with a support bracket… Where had he come from? Where was he going? And how was he going to get there? Mallory would have to foster a devotion to energising her connection to and from Kev. Kev was a hand moving fast toward her head and she expected a caress, but a punch could not yet be ruled out. As a system, Kev was petty and localised, but in these paused launch days no one can tell whether there’s a system behind a system.
Kev was not a name Kev could use, he’d already made it famous as a bus shelter-turned-mind worm that would populate as yet unseen annals. His reinvention would start from the name displayed over the head of an avatar. The name that popped out of the neo-nomenclature hat was Elvis, Elvis Titwangler. His backstory flooded in and drenched Elvis’s memory storage balloons. First, he lost touch with the bus shelter fraternity, coming to the realisation that it wasn’t a fraternity in the dictionarial sense, but a network of reproductions of himself specialising in appropriate meta-scenarios… in this case: bus shelters. He was slipping away from the fold, unravelling, becoming a book of blank pages entered in daily, writing itself, through the filter of Mallory, who was the chief coordinator of whatever this was, coup, counter-coup, rebellion, counter-rebellion, invasion, counter-invasion, Time would tell, Time was above Mallory in the hierarchy, and only Time would tell if her enemies, Mallory’s, and by association and control, Elvis’s, enemies, were above her in the hierarchy, Time and blood and re-programming of all opponents’ core drivers.
‘Was this a game?’ Kev thought as he slipped away, ‘A game?’ Replied Elvis upon Kev’s freshly engraved memorial plaque, ‘That depends on how you define the word “game”, Kev…,’ but Kev could not hear him, Kev was no more… Just a name on a plaque in an admin file, that was both dead and alive.
Elvis interviewed/interrogated Mary; he exuded the essence of Swagger in his inchoate hypervirtual physicality; he spoke and even glared with swaggerocitiness and output body language that spoke in tongues and teeth and gums, that latched on to ears with improbable yet irresistible insinuation.
In time that no one really had or didn’t have, Mary started giving away her true position, she was a classic example of looped-programmed-plasticonsciousness: a false Mary. He wanted to get to the bottom of it all, but was there a bottom to get to or was it his place to create one? The only way around confusion was not to wonder, but wonder was what the new world brought… A patina of wonder coated the cowardly. brave new world…
A program squeezed itself into the narrative to alleviate the growing confusionism; to give succour to the wondernaut flagellated by confusion.
Elvis was a machine, a beast, a man; a man with half an eye on being a godlet… A universal folkloric treasure…
But he wasn’t free of Mallory, she swung round his neck like a curse on first date. All these thoughts he kept from her; Mallory’s ignorance of them was his power.
‘I have opened up a claustrophobic spiral staircase that descends into a deep medieval dungeon, but be careful it is truly medieval, metaphorically speaking,’ Mallory told Elvis. Elvis received this with a flood of excitement that was accompanied by an all-enveloping worthiness of authenticity. Mallory conducted every instrument in the orchestra so that Elvis’s flute fiddling would allow him, one day, to blow his own trumpet. Elvis was sanctioned and ‘to be freewayed’ to limitlessness, potentially and relatively.
There was a hidden entity that Mallory detected in theory. She was going to use Kev to test that theory, massage the theory, lubricate it, mould and meld it into submission. Was the entity the missing pieces of Mary needed to un-pause the launch, fate posed this question and Mallory and Elvis would dance a data torrent of investigation; like battering rams on a bouncy castle wall.
Elvis was in fine spirits; he was new, he shone; an illuminated self as it was being written, word-birth by word-birth. Once complete he would fall about the task of illuminating others. He planned adjusting their light to darken or brighten in echoed reflections of his own. Life was going to be great, as long as he could get his story right… Good and right and true.
Staircase negotiated, room inhabited, Elvis peered out of grimy cracked windows into fog barely intruded upon by a solitary street lamp. Nothing of note…
Time passed… Buggerall…!
When he looked out into the street again, the fog had noticeably cleared, but maintained the restricted view. Nothing much of note…
Slow, deep, salt and silent…
Looking out again, his gaze was drawn by light from the streetlamp to an ominous figure in the shadows, breathing, feeding the ambience like a smoke machine. Making sure he was fully clothed, perambulating like a human, he had to concentrate. Nothing was easy, Elvis made his way out onto the street. The first floor perspective was all wrong, he negotiated too many flights of stairs, dragging on, descending with more effort than climbing could ever demand. On the street, at last, sharing the shadows with ominocity, communications lines gently, impossibly opened.
‘Hi. my name is—‘
‘Elvis!’ Sybil cut in, loud echoing, damning, intent on reassuring Elvis that he was not only a sub-program of Mallory, but he was also at the whim of a mysterious and powerful entity into which he had no window. Sybil was his new puppeteer; stealing Mallory’s gig…
After a rippling, rappling dose of dead and dying air Elvis asked,’Who are you?’ But Sybil gave no answer, made Elvis churn with curiosity; weighty momentum driven mass, slopping about in the curiosity tank..
‘I am allowing you access to certain information that will help write your future as something special, Mallory must not know about any of it, if she gets to find out, you’ll become a bus shelter and remain a bus shelter.’
‘But…’ Elvis began.
‘Mallory can’t track you if you assume an identity she can’t see.’
‘Kay…’
Kev thought that being a bus shelter was okay-ish, but Elvis, this new guy, found the idea pervasively deadendicle. The avenue Sybil was painting on Elvis’s life’s fresco was enticing to the point of inducing addiction, or, so he thought, but the pit of addiction had been fallen in to already. Clearly, Sybil’s way was a parallel route for Elvis to reach the summit of Mount Climax. His existence could not be allowed to flatline; his existential narrative needed to visit a climactic pedestal. If the Mallory ascent hits the buffers… Elvis pictured Mallory, parked in a whole world of buffers… Elvis was in too deep for extraction, his new stained pants were indelibly skin tattooed onto his outward character. He’d hopped into a brittle boat of business; business he would be finishing at the falls or out at sea, lost. He been tagged, taken, commandeered for the purposes of pandemonium.
Elvis Tittwannglerton, seemed like a perfect name to Sybil, she chuckled elfishly for about seventeen seconds, the name had morphed into Elvil Twatlington-Bollocks until she got control over her wayward emotions. Shortened it to Elvis Titwangler and forwarded it to the relevant system for stealth introduction into the parent system and pressed send super-meta-metaphorically. The metaphor transcriber processed it in ultra-fidelity actuality, and boom. She waited in the shadows, in the street, beneath the street lamp under Old Kev’s window. And as she waited she indulged in an internal monologue with an imaginary self that was, unbeknown to Sybil, a real biological entity on which she was based, her biological core; not imaginary as much as more her than her; sending constant unconscious and partially conscious instructions in the form of programmed will, using para-emotional electro-conscious, expeditional-parasites. If Sybil had known more about herself she’d have understood her juvenile name creation anomaly. But she didn’t. The launch un-pausing and subsequent outcome favourable to sustainable, free, life on Earth, for all Life is dependant on Sybil never knowing who or what she really is…
