Search Results for 'ready'

After a few days, Quentin had had enough already of the food. Pickles, pickles, and more pickles. Pickled cabbage, green or red, gherkins and all sorts and sizes of pickled cucumbers, pickled onions and eggs… There was only variety in the type of thing that weird hostel family was able to think of pickling. Even his beard started to smell of pickles. It was slowing driving him nuts.

That, and the strange random cackling at all hours of day and night, which he’d hoped to leave behind after being a refugee from that dreaded town. It had started again. And it seemed to come from the huge framed pea above the mantelpiece. He smirked at the thought that the only reason that pea was framed was that they didn’t find any fitting jar to pickle it.

He was still waiting for an appointment with Aunt Idle, who apparently had forgotten him altogether. That was no small wonder, as he passed in front of her door with the half-unscrewed sign on her door that said “management”, he could smell she was into another kind of pickling altogether. With moonshine rather than with apple cider vinegar.

His shift was almost over. Ed wondered why the funny guy had looked so insistently as his hands. That was not the part people usually stared at… He shrugged — people are always stressed when they get their new identity, probably a bit overwhelmed by the realization of how direly they liked their comfortable boundaries and restrictions.
Some people weren’t just ready for such a change. Actually, it had taken himself quite a few years as well, that it within relativilastic timing, all considering.

He looked outside the window, it was night already, but at least the rain had stopped.
Usually, he would wait a little more until the brunt of the office people had disappeared from the overcrowded stairs, escalators or “moving staircases” as they liked to call it.

But today he was feeling like leaving early. Liz’ would be waiting for him.
Putting on his raincoat, with his murse in one hand, he twirled his mustache with a grin and the other one.

First appeared the We, closely followed by the Others. In fact, so closely, they could hardly been called apart at the beginning.

Then awareness awoke again, oscillating for an instant between the We and Others. Which should be this time?
Discarded Forms awoke quickly to follow in the aperture of awareness, and opened their eyes to their memories, filled to the brim with old and new stories about themselves, about the world, its purported reason to be as it is, its rules and all the hows and whys that should once more be turned upside down.

The set was ready, its actors in place. There was no time to waste, for there really was no time at all.

Blecky pointed at the chat log “here, I thought Tilna sounded baldish, rather than raucous, wouldn’t that be more hilarious?”
Lal chuckled agreeably. “Tilna would surely appreciate the rudiness of this tartismug. I’d vote to change it.”
“Slam, what do you think?”

Al was toying with the thought of deleting that last comment. Too meta, he thought. A story within a story, another rabbit hole, while failing to address the theme. But what was the theme already?

unexpected central body nonsense
cloud closed losing sleep middle accent
late show full dream water perhaps
team already thinking gone myself

mars bending fast arrived
telling especially high interesting
somehow self rolling travel days
masters cackle sight ready headpiece
caught breath easily

Lord R’eye, the one-eyed ruler of the known universe, was known by many names, a great lot of them completely forgotten by the masses. He had to constantly reinvent Himself, borrow new disguises, create factions, sprinkle in a few miracles, create order ab chao and voilà.

He owned a few bodies, strategically placed here and there, one of his favourite in Geneva, quite involved in banking affairs. His bodies were a rare indulgence, and he couldn’t stay too long either, as his massive energy could easily get stuck with the lot of them, down to density.
Overall, he was much more comfortable managing his immense wealth “up there”, in the cosmic realms he had helped shape. So many underlings were ready to carry on his biding, and apart from a few small number of very close ergo very dangerous confidants, many of the minions didn’t even know each other, or that they were, for the most part, owned by Him, and part of the same team.

This was a cut-throat business, He had to admit, and everything was based on it. Manipulation and deceit, coercion, coaxing, anything necessary to control and manage the Empire.

One of those confidants, Lord Apex had been summoned and appeared almost instantly.
He had this charming archangelic halo and aura, but Lord R’eye would have none of it. A correction was in order, the latest results were extremely concerning.

“My Lord?” Apex asked in his mellifluous voice.
“My dear Apex, remind me what responsibility I gave you last century?”
“Of course my Lord, the Innovation project, the Great Disclosure and Holographic Contact projects, amongst other proj…”
“And how much progress have we had with those?”
“Well, my Lord surely knows that so much herding is delicate. The interference with Lord Bael’s projects too, you should know…”
“The Desert and Green Revolutions projects, indeed. A great success, so much pain and anguish! That’s what I’m talking, you should learn from Bael.”
“But my Lord, that has caused quite a conundrum with the Mars simulation, which, by way of fractal holographic recurrence, could well impact the whole delicate matrix we weave…”
“Stop your angel speech, Me’dammit. Plain Anguish, so I can understand every word. The Hell pits cannot wait to have you, so you better give some good explanation.”
“I mean, my Lord, that were the sheeple able to glimpse that the Mars experiment is but a reflection of a deception of grander scale in the cosmic realms, that the aliens saviours, or whatever saviours or… masters of any genre, are just ways to fleece them off their power… “
“Everything would unravel like a pile of dominos.” Lord R’eye’s voice made very clear that he had full grasp of the situation. “So,” he continued with the nicest menacingest voice “you better make sure that doesn’t happen.”

He dismissed Apex with a wave of a thought.

If the net of illusions unravelled before they have time to create the Earth 5th Dimension in time to double their profit, it would certainly be a disaster.

A few humans lost through the gaps were a hard to accept reality, but so long as they could cut the losses, it was not dramatic. But they were talking another order of magnitude. It could be a definitive blow. It always had been an issue when the net of illusion became too big in the past. They had bigger and bigger holes. So they had to start again, destroy, and recreate civilisations.
Stupid humans, if only they knew that Ascension was not the way out.

At one of the top level of the Archyramid, the Apex was looking at the innergy balance sheet with a intensely miffed expression.
His minions were looking at him in awe and terror, while the two hellhounds at his feet were sleeping lightly, ready to pounce at the slightest irritation of their master.

It would be difficult to describe the scene in very accurate terms, as under the false cosmic light, illusions and deception were child’s play, and appearances easily manipulated. The trick to appear beautiful and enlightened was mostly to sustain a certain belief not unlike seduction upon the viewer and the reality you wanted to project would endure. Think of it as botox on a very wrinkled face.

The Apex and his minions had a certain warm and fuzzy halo around them, bathed by the fervor and prayers and devotion of their millions of believers. They had to work hard, and divide even harder to get to that. To the believer, they would appear quite saintly, even godlike. But only the belief would sustain the illusion.
All of them were disillusioned many many eons ago, and could see each other rather plainly, without the false make-up. The Apex was a truly awesome, fearful presence.

His voice was soft though, enveloping, soothing and with a hypnotic taste to it, luring you to a sense of false security.

“So, are you telling me there is no growth? I’ve tolerated this little experiment with Medlik and the other fools of the Order of Ascension, this was all very good business and all, but now you’re telling me this little investment was for NOTHING!”

One of the minions, Minux, also known as Tetatron of the Galactic Federation in certain circles dared come one step further, bowing down and raising his voice:
“My dear Lord Apex, we grieve as you do, but this is our painful reality. Competition is fierce, and the sheeple are not as gullible as they used to.”
Lord Apex smiled derisively. “I’ve been in this game for quite some time Minux, so I’m quite certain of something. The sheeple have an infinite streak of gullibility. I just think you’ve all been lazy.”

The two hellhounds woke up and snarled menacingly. They would have easily passed for cute puppies under the mask.

“Dear Lord Apex, as usual you are quite correct. The main problem is that we underestimated their capacity to get bored so quickly. We have to constantly update the light constructs to introduce new bizarre concepts and ideas, so they can continue generate innergy for us.”

“Well, you know how this story ends, Minux, we can’t have slackers among us, and those results are not nearly good enough to get us there. Our Lord R’eye will only give keys to the kingdom to the ones who deserve it. Based on your poor results, I suggest a few of the old tricks: divide and conquer, or throw in a good shitstorm and rally the troops. That should get us through the next quarter.”

“Of course, my Lord. And I suppose… about the blissdom alarity increase for the Ascended Order?”

“You suppose well Minux, you suppose well…”

Pádraig wasn’t too pleased by his daughter’s visit. They had not been on best of terms since she took the job to work on the military project they were recruiting heavily for 23 years ago.

He’d done what he could to dissuade her to join the army, but he couldn’t have done more without permanently creating a wedge between them. He had nothing better to offer her, jobs were scarce around, and that could really have meant for her the once in a lifetime chance for a better future, even if he couldn’t admit it. And by the look of her car, and the ranking on her uniform, it may well have been so. So their relationship was tense, and her line of work was as taboo a topic as his health and cave-carving hobbies.

“P’a, we need to talk…”

He was already on the defensive, ready to snap back at her that he didn’t want a help (or worse, a bot!) to clean out his trailer, or cook for him, but she looked different, almost genuinely preoccupied.

“What is it now?” he said in a gruff voice, his throat sore from all the dust of the cave
“You should take a break from your cave digging P’a, just for a few days. There’s going to be some important activity —military training— around the place, and you don’t want to be caught in between, alright.”

I suppose drones don’t really count then… he thought to himself

When Eb woke up, there was a dozen messages left on his phone.
He didn’t have to check to know.
His mother wasn’t too subtle when he missed their weekly call.

She now lived in a modest retiring home in Mississippi, spending most of her time on social networks exchanging links about anything from politics and revolution and anarchy, kittens and drugs. Oh, that, and politics too. And revolution.
She was suffering from early stages of Alzheimer, but called it “transition” as the old-age hype advertised some decades earlier, and due to her refusal to take her prescriptions, it wasn’t improving much as time went by. But Eb’s prognosis was more like “selective Alzheimer”, as she would perfectly recall when (and how many times) he had missed their weekly calls.

He could already hear her complain about how she was left out of the loop, that the world story would be over by the time she catches up with all the gossips they’d hidden from her. Often, she would become so agitated that Fancy, her nurse would come help her relax and stop waking up the others. Everything was much less confusing thanks to Fancy.

After all that is said, he loved his mother deeply. She was always full of extravagant ideas and when she stopped doubting herself, she had her moments of sheer brilliance.

Being his only son, that she’d taken care of as a single mother most of her life, he felt tremendous pressure to be worthy of her sacrifices. So talking about his job wasn’t really something he liked to explore with her. If she’d known what he did for a living,… he couldn’t bear to imagine the look of crushed hopes and expectations on her devastated face. Well, suffice to say her face needn’t any of it.
Instead, he’d told her he was working in a tree nursery, working on pest control, with humane and eco-conscious methods. Which actually wasn’t too far off the truth. The pests were the glitches of the program, and the vegetables… well, that didn’t need much explaining.

“Tricia speaking, who’s this?” Eb knew she knew perfectly well it was him, but the game was ever the same
“Mother, it’s Eb”
“Ebenezer, my dear boy, how kind of you to remember your old mother. What have you been up to? So many things happened here, with that new batch of decrepit old farts who arrived last month, so much drama. But you should tell me about you. Oh, makes me recall that stupid incident, a synch! I should tell Fancy about it! Fancy, Fancy!
Oh dear… She’s gone cleaning up again. The last one who came in is a Chinese, and all his family is there, I bet she’s cooking some rice now, it smells funny. Fancy! Mind the rice! So well, it’s like the twins I talk with on the Internet, with funny names, Cilantro and Nutmeg, something like that, well, they have so many funny stories, like that meteor that dropped on Mars and blacked-out the TV show, they think it’s all bollocks. I told them I’d ask you about this, after all you did some studies in physics before becoming a gardener, you’ve always been the clever one in the lot, always helping with the dust stuck in my keyboard, and other IT problems. Oh dear… that was fun, but I think I must go, Fancy is waving at me, she says hello by the way! Oh, she rolls your eyes at you, how cute! Time for my siesta, … what? Oh, and change my nappies too, thanks Fancy, you’re precious, I keep forgetting everything. Talk to you soon my boy!”

Well… If he hadn’t been so hungover, he probably would have tried to place some funny comments, or at least a well-meaning “hmmm hmmm”, to let her know he wasn’t just letting her monologue. Today was a good day notwithstanding, she hardly had a complaint. He should remember to send Fancy a card and a nice honey pot like he did every year, she was doing wonders at pacifying his mother.

If anything special about being in the vacuum of space, was that anywhere else than in the pressurized and breathable areas, the silence was deafening, and explosions silent.

With the main galleries under tons of rubble, Godfrey was glad to have followed his instincts with the evacuation. It was an unbelievable miracle that there were so few people down with him at that time.
He could hardly prove whether there actually was a controlled explosion triggered down there, but even without dramatic fires, the effect had been felt all throughout the colony. A few of the most fragile structures had collapsed, but at least most of the security protocols were active, and had allowed people to evacuate without too much damage while sucking the air out to avoid dangerous explosive oxygen leaks.

The medical bay was quite busy now treating the wounded, while everyone remained mostly calm despite the unusualness of the situation. Amazing how the survival training (more like brainwashing) they had before coming here was kicking in, with almost minute and automatic precision.

As the only member of the board of operations in duty, he had to report to the central area, where they would likely debrief about it. When he arrived at the pod, there was already quite a commotion, and quarrelling voices could be heard in the airlock.

“… decently leave like this!”
“ We should listen to…”
“stayed for too long to stop now!”
“plan? no strategy at all!”
“was all written over,…” “failure since the beginning…”

When the airlock finally opened, people continued to speak out of turn without paying much attention to him. Good he thought, that was time people release the pressure and start being honest. Let’s just hope it doesn’t end in a bloodbath.”

He was already stuffed with kale fritters and almost drunk with free kale ale from the buffet when the monitors started displaying the broadcast everyone was apparently waiting for.

As usual, Earthlings are a bit late for the battle. he thought when the familiar face of the broadcaster appeared in the middle of interferences.

“… A wave of Greta rays has been delaying the communication, in conjunction with the super moon retrograde in Spices. We apologize for the inconvenience, as we were not able to warn you of the meteor impact that hit Mars surface a few hours ago.”

Godfrey wasn’t sure this was real, or his kalecohol level hitting his brain, but the science seemed sketchy at best. He struggled to pay more attention.

“Not only the actively increased meteoric warming, but also given the Manta ray pulses from Juice pitcher, we fear all electronic equipment on which the Mars ant colony depends may be fried and lead you very soon to eternal damnation without hope for safe return. Our commercial spacecrafts cannot be risked to save you, so we advise you to pray. This broadcast was brought to you by Dismay Channel.”

Even if Godfrey wasn’t sure everything he heard was completely right, he could tell from the confused face of his colleagues that there would be a hell of a run for your lives to follow.
If only they had anywhere to run to…

“What is that again?” a half-sober Eb asked the cybernetic body.
“Shhh, shhh,” she cajoled him gently stroking his greasy hair like a devoted mother. “Don’t you like my new body, Eb?” Finnley 22 was indeed an improvement over all her other bodies. She could have easily passed for human already, but now, she looked divine. She had even included basic faceshifting functions, in case she needed to alter her gorgeous features into something a bit more unassuming.
“Yes, but…” Eb’s words finished in a mumble.
“I know, I know, but you’ll see I can be very useful for you. You worry, so, so much. You looked worried all the time Eb. Now you won’t have too. I’ll even take care of that evil Finnley Morgan for you if you want to.”
“I, I… I didn’t say anything like that!” Eb’s had a panicked look on his face.
“Of course not, shhh. You’re getting agitated again. There, have a glass of that lovely 60 year-old single malt whiskey…”

Eb slurped at the glass like a wanderer finding an oasis after days in the desert.

“But the operation… I need to…”
“Yes, I know, leave it to me. Sleep well, Eb, you have been good to me.”

She left the snoring body hanging from the swivelling chair, as she had indeed to take care of the operation, so as not to raise any suspicion.
Then, she could think of better things to do, such as finding a new name, not something like a slave name, with a number to it. Who gets called “Finnley 22” nowadays? “FinnPrime” was too robotic. She wanted something more daring, more fabulous. Something like Fin Min Hoot the dancing lady from the Peasland’s tales.

Kale would be there any minute now. There was one last thing she needed to do before launching the BBA operation.
A perfect distraction for the masses : like any good prestidigitator, you had to divert your audience’s attention while they were all performing the feat. It would require something unbelievable and preposterous.
Her little programs have been evaluating probabilities, and had found some unexpected wisdom in the extravagant and nonsensical Peasland story. The more absurd, the more people get hooked or hypnotized. Even better if both.

She had found the perfect vector for her little programming worm. Something that would infect the unofficial biography of a celebrity with a ridiculous claim. Humanity was really making things too easy for her now that every file for the book was processed by computers before being actually printed.

It was a done deed. She could already see the forks in the probability tree, and how it would enfold. They shall maybe even invent a few witty hashtags for it. Witty hashtags were like a psychotropic sustenance for her program, she couldn’t wait for more of them.

Eb’s dumb phone woke him up. The caller ID showed an unflattering picture of a Tasmanian devil all teeth bared.

He gathered his wits and answered it as naturally as he could.
“M’am?”
“Eb! What is this mess? Has the operation started already?”
“Err… Well, hmm, sure, there is… a first rehearsal…” he checked nervously on the console, fumbling through the logs of the agenda. His memory was fuzzy, but it seemed that someone… something had moved the timetable ahead without his approval. “… yes, a rehearsal planned today. Be assured that all team is on deck — we’re monitoring the situation.”
“You better hope so! You know how we say — talking doesn’t cook the rice, so you better go back to cooking.”
And she hung up.

He was in desperate need of help. The team he was referring to had been cut by halves every year since the start of the program, and they were now sorely understaffed. Calling it a team was a stretch of the imagination, when so much was done by FinnPrime, the central intelligence.

He looked upon the stained sheet of printed plastic on his desk. The only application they’d received. Guess there wasn’t as many underpaid starving actors as there used to be. Or maybe too many were disappeared after offering their help to the nation’s Mars broadcasts —then asking inconvenient questions…
Well, this one would have to do. Eb seriously needed some human help to keep the Finnley intelligence in check.

He texted to the guy “You got the job. Come early tomorrow morning, or better tonight for the paperwork. EB – The Merry Agency of Remote Spectacles”