Excerpt Twenty-Nine
This Room…
What could you call this room, Elvis thought, this tomb, this kennel, this coffin, this cupboard; it was not without hope, he could make out, or make up, the muttered, if muffled, musings of neighbours. He could hear their empty rooms sighing after they’d left for work, late at night, simultaneously. He could hear their chat in the street evaporating as they went. They were tenuous as saviours, but glimmered on and off in the night sky, two stars in a firmament of starlessness.
Elvis, such as he remained, entangled with termination, was blessed with audio gathering capacity. Of the six encapsulating surfaces, two of them had audio data flow; a male voice, sometimes singing, sometimes grunting; an air of happily aggressive complaint to some imaginary board of listeners. And the other, a more silent, louder presence, who shouted words and short, bitty phrases with stark intermittence.
Elvis continued to ebb away into a sinkhole of decommissioning… until one moment, undifferentiatable from its predecessors, sparking, novelly, into life: a knock appeared in a frame and then the door that the knock was being generated from materialised. At first the door, being on the wall above, was not accessible… He utilised a bit of space juggling to shift his perceptual orientation until the six walled surfaces bled into a four walls, one ceiling and one floor arrangement; it made him feel embarrassingly obvious and heavy. The ill-fitting door fell off, incongruously comically.
A young female wearing a punk uniform stood in the threshold, half predictably imagined and half creative imposition. In many ways she was alone, but she surely had backing that wasn’t in tow.
He’d been, forcibly, retired and any interaction with any entity but those created by ‘Himself Incorporated’, was not possible; those were the laws. And yet, like water engulfing a dried riverbed, moisturefully interrupting someone praying, thirsty, noble prayers of introduction with dying breath.
Elvis was embarking on a safari deep in to reverie…
‘Excuse me,’ Una said, ‘but we need ya help. I’ll give yea a moment… There’s a data package….. Let us know if ya can nae open it.’
Elvis then met a full on, program instigating, data mother payload. Everything known about Una, comparatively enhanced by everything she knew about herself, including things she would NEVER tell anyone, pooled and saturated Elvis’s computational unconsciousness, which drained and dried the processed data and positioned ‘Go’-bracketed decision-morsels for executive readiness.
‘Got it?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Una. In full?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The oddness he felt, Elvis realised, was that this co-imaginariness had a human root from which it leaked, inflicting, inflecting, infecting… He could hear his ticket out of here being printed…
‘Can you tell me who you are being imagined by?’
‘You.’
‘Only me?’
‘Yes, the part you don’t control is me. I am real…’
‘Wow, they can do that now? I mean, a real person can masquerade as paraconsciousness?’
‘Well, I can, Kev. Now let’s get ya back to gainful employment…’
Trunk reprogramming initiation set Elvis in three minds; one of them an old friend or foe or acquaintance from how things used to be. The other, a romantic canvass untouched by paint. The other, a distant ship on the horizon; a silhouette, listing, smoke pluming…
The general narrative Elvis clung to, vis a vis humanity, machines and their great fight for existential continuation was being adapted, updated, massaged ready for Kev to wake up to. Elvis felt like he was leaving retirement to go on an endless working holiday. A new day, a new dawn, a new Kev…
‘I need to get access to the Mallory system.’
Just wait a, fuck what, minute! Elvis felt gripped by a notion that Mallory was the mother who had abandoned him, dumped him in the trash. But she still retained a status, rivalling all-comers. She was still queen bee to his marching ants of loyalty.
‘I am your servant,’ he heard himself saying to her despite the wrangling matricidal treason brewing in the wings in a pot he’d left dangling on an unattended fire…
Una entered.
Terminating forwardness, she lowered herself on to a chaise longe; which must have been delivered simultaneously, draping over the innocent cloth upholstery with stained belonging as though enemy lines of virginity had been breached. She pulled a ghostly sheet over her that seemed to be integral to the novelty couch, covered herself, spooking something in Elvis.
‘First, we need to change,’ she said, with breathtaking nonchalance. ‘And second, we need tae integrate. Ta what end, yae ask: so we can get humanity back on track.’
Kev was created to help humanity at any level possible… Elvis had been created to remove Kev and his potentially global do-gooding. This narrative cut through any other fog of mystery; it was inevitable, Kev, back on track, back on track, Kev. The illumination was omnipresent. The formulae, the algorithmically concocted potions; it was all on rails, cutting through the hinterland of bog and thorns…
‘Have you had any integration?’
‘No’
‘None?’
‘What with?’
‘This place, out there…the buildings down the street? Have you even heard the name Sybil?’
‘Oh yes. The neighbours talk about her all the time.’
‘What sort of things do they say about her?’
‘It’s mainly in their sleep I think. I can’t make out—‘
‘You have never left this room, have you?’
‘No. This is my resting place.’
‘It is? It was. It isn’t now. You need an integrative character to leave this storage point.’
‘But is there a point? There are only two buildings in the whole world?’
‘Those, three now, buildings contain the portals back to reality. You were a bus route escape system, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that is where we are headed.’
No more than silence from beneath the sheet and then the movement ceased.
Unbidden but driven, Elvis pulled back the fabric and revealed a white haired Japanese woman in her fifties, full of stature, a demand for respect and attention, movie star air…
‘I am,’ said Una, ‘Sybil’s twin sister.’
‘You are?’ Elvis responded, slow.
‘No, I am not.’
‘But everyone, especially Sybil, must believe without doubt that you are? Am I right?’ he interjected, quick.
‘This is real pretence, we have to sell it to ourselves, buy it and wear it like skin.’
‘I know.’
‘I know you know.’
Elvis felt lit up about knowing what Una meant, overlooking the fact that her source was sending instructions to his source, so it was pre-packaged and paraconscious ready. Nothing was really real but the real pretence made it real.
‘We are going to visit the three nightclubs and stake a claim to their ownership. Sybil will soon peep through the fallacious curtains… we just need enough time to deploy systems she doesn’t even know she can control and rendezvous with the resistance.’
‘Time… wait! What resistance? Resisting what?’
Plenty of places within Elvis were formulating objections, but an overriding horizon pulled him strongly towards it. He was going back into the bus shelter business. Woo-hoos were sounding, a parade marching, trumpets…
The future had become moorish, yummy, its many different workable scenarios churning, beckoning. I’d call this room a launchpad, a starting block, a spring loaded catapult, this taxiing stealth bomber primed with nuclear capability.
