Konsk: The Great Takeover of the Place

44. Back, At The Little Big Farm.

There it was, the book, lying before him but now it was really there. He felt the paper, marvelling at its texture and the indentations made by Learner’s forceful use of a ballpoint pen. Trueman gave a little chuckle and sighed with a huge contentment at the very sound, for it was the chuckle of his old body, his real body.

He was back! He was really back, at the Little Big Farm, his Little Big Farm, in the kitchen of his own home. There was his cup of tea, the brown mug with the LBF logo. It was still steaming! He shook his head in utter astonishment and rose, shaking, to his feet, his feet!

He felt the swell of his paunch, softly bulging over the waistband of his brown corduroys. He touched his face, his head, the bald patch, the beard, his beard! Oh, it did indeed feel like home!

He shook, his whole body trembling at the sheer audacity of the experience, the paradox of so familiar a novelty, just to be in his own body again. His heart beat rapidly and he breathed more deeply, striving to control the rush of adrenaline, the surges of emotion. Shivers began to run up his spine, wracking his body with increasing intensity as they rose. He found himself automatically clenching his shoulders and pulling in his head as the sensation reached his neck, effectively cutting off the feeling, though leaving him slightly stooped.

Let’s be rational about this, he thought to himself.

He looked more carefully around. It was definitely home, though no one was about. The light was on, the energy-saving bulb casting a soft, welcoming illumination over the table. Through the window, the early morning light streaming in. So he had been there all night, reading from the book, Learner’s book. Yet someone had made him fresh tea. Could he hear the faint sounds of conversation from outside, in the maze garden? Spicer perhaps, with Dawn?

As he began to take in the whole experience, the voyage to the future and the adventures there, his return, he began to fully realise where he was; tears filled his eyes.

He was back at the Farm, the Little Big Farm, his home! He turned to the kitchen window, leaned on the wooden drainer with its washed, neatly stacked sets of plates, bowls and cups waiting to be put away (Dawn had obviously been busy), looked out over the green of the maze garden and beyond to the sweep of ancient meadow, the cluster of gorse and birch that marked the lower boundary of the hanging valley, the craggy fall to the broad river below.

Above the far horizon, the morning sun glowed brightly through distant cloud and mist, rising slowly. Almost he felt that he loved it but swerved away into mere thoughts, of what a very fine landscape it was indeed.

He opened the window, sliding the sash upward, feeling the slight chill on his hands, inhaling the many perfumes of Dawn’s straggling maze garden, a waft of marjoram from the earthenware pot just outside the back door, as though someone had brushed past it only minutes before, the subtle fragrance of the anise hyssop, a delicate aniseed, the drift of mints from the sides of the path further into the garden.

He could picture Dawn, walking through the garden, turning her head from side to side as she went, greeting the plants delightedly. Strange how he could see now how she might feel them to be friends, returning to her again each spring, richer and fuller. She would have trailed her bare hands and arms lightly through the mints, savouring the burst of scent as she went to look out over the meadow, the grasses draped with cobwebs, jewelled in condensation from the morning mist. His vision blurred with tears.

“Dawn,” he whispered.

Then, now, now, he scolded himself, no need to get so emotional; let’s be rational about this. I’m somewhat dislocated after an unusual experience, an admittedly extremely unusual experience. After all, it is not an everyday occurrence for a rational, scientific mind to have travelled through both time and space, to have occupied another body, experiencing a radically changed reality through a different sensory apparatus, and then to have successfully returned.

There is after all a logical explanation for all of this and it will be my undertaking to provide the world with a coherent analysis of the whole experience, and, furthermore, to develop a theoretical basis for a new understanding of time and space which will generate predictions that may be rigorously tested according to the scientific method.

Yes! From this moment on, the world is changed; the bastions of conventional thinking have been shattered and it is up to me alone to bring the searchlight of truth to bear upon this new knowledge.

For one moment, Trueman stood, poised at the window, a vague smile upon his bearded face as he pondered the immortality of such a radical scientific breakthrough, a real paradigm shift. Then, almost immediately he doubted himself. Perhaps he had just dosed off and dreamed the whole thing! The thought shook him to the core of his being.

“No!” he exclaimed suddenly. “NO!”

Surely not, he thought, surely not! Could he really have just fallen asleep while perusing the madman’s work, dreamed of an impossible, idealistic future, where no one seemed to be in a rush but rather took the time to savour life and experience? Perhaps that last cheese sandwich had effected him, producing a vivid semi-lucid dream state?

Oh no! Surely not just a dream! What of Rhia and the three amazon’s? They could not just be figments of his sleeping imagination, even after strong cheese! No. Why, one of them had shagged him and he’d really liked that Rhia woman, even if she had reminded him of his little daughter, Catti.

That brought him up short. Had she reminded him of Catti? He struggled to recall her face but could only remember that she was somehow scarred, a tracery network of damaged veins. Now he was definitely worried; did the fact that he had associated this Rhia character with his daughter suggest that she was after all merely an internal component of his own divided self? Did that in turn support the theory that it had all been a dream?

No. No! He felt determined but how could he tell, how could he prove it? He had not the slightest shred of evidence to convince anyone that the experience had been real. Even himself, he thought, he could not even prove it to himself!

And then he froze, initially attempting to suppress the spontaneous thought but it was no use. He let out a little groan as he allowed it to surface in all its glaring simplicity. He would have to go back, would have to go back and in some way prove it was real.

Voices sounded from below, breaking him out of his depressive reverie. The speakers were still hidden, probably on the steep, south facing slope where he had planned and initiated the inappropriate and disasterous main garden. They were returning from the meadow. He pulled back from the image of them coming to meet him; better to go now, he thought, suddenly determined. But first, there was something he had to do.

Trueman hurried from the kitchen, galvanised into action, entered his study. He took a brief look around at the room, the critical events map on the roll of wallpaper, the chalkboard with its scrawl of equations, bits of code and diagrams, the cork board buried under layers of notes, more taped to the walls when he had run out of space including several drawings of Catti's, one of which he hadn't noticed before, a blackly scrawled monster that presumably represented Learner's manky beast.

And there on his desk, his once beloved workstation. He let his hands rest lightly on the ungainly beige, bulk of the 24 inch monitor. It all looked so ugly and awkward now. He nudged the mouse and after a while the monitor came to life with the aquarium screen saver; a blocky, purple fish peeped from behind a coral covered rock, a trail of rather square bubbles jerking towards the top of the screen. He couldn’t help but laugh. What an earth had he been thinking of when he’d coded that? Oh well. Mostly harmless.

Trueman typed in his password (the square root of PI to nine decimal places, each alternate digit translated to the letters of the alphabet, according to their ASCII number) then he waited, and waited some more, boggled by the clumsiness of the whole operation as the computer began the laborious process of recognising its various components and bringing them back on line.

This was like being in the dark ages again when compared to the sheer elegance of the studio GUI or even just the maths crystal. If in fact they existed outside his own dreaming mind, he thought, gloomily. He shook his head; only one way to find out.

But first he would leave himself a trail, something he could find and recognise in the future, if it existed; the virus. He began to type rapidly at the keyboard, ponderously navigating his way through the 4 megabyte hard disk, a capacity he had previously thought to be huge. Buried deep within the filing system he reached his black hat directory. He'd started to code viruses, more or less before they'd been invented, as a form of exercise really, he'd never released any. Now he had a purpose for one and he already knew which one.

Here it was; BLACKDOG he'd called it. Now why had he chosen that name? It made him laugh, a little hysterically, at the possible madness that he was complicit in. For the definition of the psychotic, as he had originally labelled Learner, was one who was not aware of his own insanity, or the dislocation of his personal perspective of reality from that of the consensual viewpoint. Was he then mad, to believe in this possibly dreamt future to such an extent as to allow it to guide his current actions? To be completely honest, he did not know, yet.

If it worked, what would it prove, he mused? Possibly absolutely nothing but it might be enough to convince him, even if only momentarily, that he was Harold Trueman, of The Little Big Farm, who had travelled to the future to occupy the body of the INCO, rather than the other way around, an improved, neuro-cortical operant, a psychotic mass murderer who had once dreamed of a strange but compelling past centred at an entirely fictional location called The Little Big Farm. Best not to think about that too much

It took more time to establish the connection to the embryonic global network, ARPANET, the modem squawking gaily, then a little longer to log in to his remote mainframe as an administrator. He copied BLACKDOG onto the distant mainframe's hard disk (a monstrous 20 Megabytes) and sat back for a moment. Then he ran the executable file and it was off, into the global network, doing its simple task of subtly altering Zoob, adding a hidden back door. Then he was done.

He left the workstation up and running, as a final afterthought deciding to change his password to something more straightforward. After all, he thought, this mission may be one way, if I go anywhere. He thought briefly and typed in his daughter’s full name, confirmed the change, then pushed the swivel chair away from the desk.

He took a last look around his study, realising that in many ways he was eager to get away from it, to return to the strangeness of that future with its awesome interfaces. And interesting characters, he added, feeling a sudden urge in his loins when he pictured Nonna. Even if they are only fictional. He chuckled. Madly? He hoped to find out.

In the kitchen he was brought up short, poised half way through a stride. The book lay as he had left it. So too the tea, though it was no longer steaming. So were the others.

“Alright Troom,” Spicer smiled sheepishly, “You been reading, then?”

Trueman looked at the youth, the once confident, gaunt, leather clad figure, who seemed to have suffered so much after reading Learner's tome; and I assumed he too had gone mad, thought Trueman, colluded with Learner's insanity. How wrong was I, I think.

The diminished Spicer sat on a chair at the kitchen table and hugged his knees. Learner hovered behind his left shoulder, eyes wide and bright, looking expectantly towards Trueman. Catti trotted over to him and hugged his leg, giving him the big-eyed, flutter-lashed gaze that melted his often cold heart. He bent down to her, his hand cupping the back of her head, tousling her unruly hair.

“Fresh cuppa, Troom?” Dawn said casually, sliding a steaming brew towards his place at the table.

He nodded a wordless thanks, unable to meet her eyes yet longing to look upon her, to go to her and hold her, as he had held Nonna. He sat before the book. Little Catti tugged at his arm.

“We been seein’ dead stuff,” she chirped gaily, continuing in response to Trueman’s shocked look. “Doggie kilt a rabbit! Bit it’s bleedin’ head off! Et it all up.”

Spicer tried to hide a sheepish grin, being largely responsible for the youngster's broad repertoire of swear words. To Trueman it felt something like a farewell party. Even the dog was there, sitting on the floor on the other side of him from Catti, wagging its bent tail and making vaguely excited burping sounds whilst dribbling endearingly and occasionally licking its trembling chops. Was that grey fur stuck to its teeth?

“Daddy has to do some work now, sweetheart,” Trueman said and patted Catti’s head. Was there a sense of foreboding, deep within? “He might need to go away for a time.”

“But he’ll be back?” the tot asked hesitantly.

“Of course,” he promised.

He could not delay any longer. Some things, he thought, are more important than personal concerns and desires. He raised his hands to them, palm upwards.

“I need to read,” he stated simply, “in silence.”

Spicer and Learner exchanged knowing looks.

“He nose,” Learner whispered at first then began to squeak in excitement. “He knows ‘e nose ‘e does! He bin and back he come. Oh dem hippy hippos! Be careful, he be jee be careful!”

Trueman nodded generously to the misnamed madman.

“We shall see,” he said, adding, “my friend. We shall see.”

Learner glowed with happiness and tapped Spicer sharply on the shoulder.

“Likes the cover!” he chattered, “Likes t’bloody cover, dun he? Eh?”

Spicer grinned and Trueman at last allowed himself to look at Dawn. The grey green eyes seemed wholly innocent as she smiled at him. He couldn’t long maintain the gaze, lowering his eyes to her full lips, glistening with gloss, already applied even so early in the morning. Then the long curve of her neck, hollow in the throat, curve of the collar bone, shadow of cleavage. She unconsciously drew the collars of her shirt together.

“Thank you,” Trueman managed, not knowing what else to say, “for the tea.”

She laughed and shook her head so that her hair bounced, a strand remaining coiled on her cheek.

“That’s OK, Troom,” she replied huskily.

Spicer pulled the rolled up workshop manual from his jacket pocket, sat forward in his chair and smoothed the cover roughly beneath his grimy palm. He began to study the exploded component view of his motorbike's two-stroke engine, gnawing at the skin around his blackened fingers.

Dawn drew Catti aside to the hallway where the morning’s finds had been piled on the telephone table. These included various pieces of twisty wood, several stones, amongst them both white and rosy quartz, or smokey bacon as Spicer called it, some lichen which had been dislodged from a tree and a rusty bit of iron, purpose and origin unknown. The two began to examine each piece and arrange them on the table, talking in low whispers, Catti occasionally turning to stare at her father. The dog stood up and lumbered over to Learner who bent towards it, as though to listen to some secret message.

Trueman lowered his gaze to the book. With a quiet sigh he turned back the pages to remind himself of the content. He chuckled at the early, scrawled drawings of what he had at first assumed were ancient undersea creatures and now knew to be the hippos, states of mind or belief systems. He nodded. To travel safely through their space one must remain detached, hardly differentiating between self and other. If one moves too close, one separates out from the undivided flow, suddenly there’s a self, this is me, and an other, that’s everything else. There’s a particular perspective of reality, a limiting perspective which in turn is a trap.

He turned the pages, moving forward. Once within a hippo, then there is access through a specific tube to unique individual viewpoints or instances of that concept. Yes, like The Little Big Farm as an instance of the home hippo. He was excited, feeling as though he was getting closer, circling, spiralling in on some important revelation.

The outside world faded from his attention. Coincidentally, or synchronistically, or perhaps even correspondingly, all became quiet; Spicer, engrossed in the inner, tactile re-construction of his engine that he knew from many a re-build, could feel the shape of the gudgeon pins, the cold, case hardened steel, the tightness of the fit through the piston and small end bearings, the maximum tolerable play.

Catti, absorbed by the intense though silent interplay between a smooth purple pebble and the tuft of lichen. Dawn, crouched by her on the floor, her hand stroking the tousled hair, delightedly absorbed in the child’s wordless, ritual play. Learner had squatted on the floor, hiding his face in his hands, the dog darkly entwined with his legs.

Outside the birds fell silent and a cloud passed over the face of the sun, darkening the kitchen at The Little Big Farm.

Trueman considered where he had been, or rather, where he still was. Somewhere, somewhen, he looked out of the body of an INCO, sitting in the media centre HQ at that vast Stadium, wearing a hat with a pull down visor displaying the visual representation of a studio, itself containing a screen on which was a digital version of the very book he held in his hands now. He nodded; that should do for the point of attachment. Now all he needed to do was divest himself of himself. He smiled at the conundrum.

He turned a page, looking for help within the book. He came across the drawing of a seated figure, reading from a book, the book. The elegantly simple Pythagorean equation giving the relationships of the sides of a right angled triangle was shown arching upwards out of the figures head. There was a caption in green crayon, not unlike a speech bubble in a comic. You are dying, was all it said.

And he was. The heart began to hammer loudly. He was surprised that no one else noticed. He fought momentarily with a surge of panic which he dismissed as merely ego concerns and allowed to dissolve into the broad flow of his consciousness. A little thought nearly surfaced, manifested as Spicer scratching his chin. Then nothing.

Another thought strove to rise as Catti tapped the telephone table with the purple pebble. There was a brief flurry of ideas to do with death and transformation; outside a chaffinch announced repeatedly that it was here, that predators should come and get it, now! Now! Now! Then it too fell silent.

Something like a tube opened to his left. He entered into it.

Thanks for reading. Comments welcome, nay, requested! Guidance is always useful. Thuis version of Konsk will no doubt be further revised so your input can help shape the work. Take care. Hwyl! Chris.