Botchi

Cosatch wandered aimlessly through the township’s backstreets, amalgamating the data that had been received in droves throughout the preceding days. The orb he had encountered had enthralled him, yet its purpose eluded even the most perceptive of his tutoring appendages. Always frank with himself; Cosatch’s demeanour revealed that he was a little troubled, and his heavy eyelids bore testament to the anxiety-fuelled weight resting on his emaciated shoulders. He broke out into tune, swamped in pathos, designated to all:

“Dream me a new denim two-piece, dream me a new denim two-piece
Whether a tracksuit, a black-suit, a biblical flack-suit……
Dream me a brand new denim two piece…”

Due to the events of the previous day, even this uplifting number did little to alter the general mood of Cosatch McMillan. He decided to travel to Three Mile Ford; herein a solution would be closer. The pages of his notebook showed him the way with its built-in Ford compass, and the driving plimsolls were employed once more. Satisfyingly wheel-spinning to impress the pertly fresh teenage girls situated outside the outlet of ‘Waco-Taco’ on the corner, Cosatch sped north, salivating as the chromium plate slipped once more. The shadowy hulk loomed on the horizon as Cosatch decreased his speed to adhere to the demilitarised zone’s legalities. The smoking shells of war-torn M-56s littered the exit road, itself in a desperate state of disrepair. Cosatch’s bulbous jellies did not enjoy the ride on the pothole-strewn stretch, lambasting themselves over the smoothly finished nylon of the front seat. His gift for the Chief gone, Cosatch stopped briefly at Simian Flat’s motorcade accessory store, where he decided to purchase a boot-full of fig, Chief V’s preferee. Examining the darkened mass of sodden matter, Cosatch could not reason why the Chief was so enamoured of the product, and decided to query it come the exchange. Flexing his mind to accommodate his mission, Cosatch simply sat in his car.

He was close now. The rigmarole of entering the Ford was a displeasure he enjoyed in spades. Fashioning the card into as flat an appearance as he could, Cosatch slipped it into the receptive slot on the outbound gate, entrance 46. Whispering his personal password into the monitor, a gravelly voice beckoned him into the complex. The prism duly towered above him now, its regular beauty undermined by its bleakness. Punching the keys into the codal lock found on exit-lounge 64′s main entrance shaft, the gravelly voice returned with a simple demand.
“Password, McMillan.”
“Multi-functionalism on a platter of retributional warfare”
The shaft clicked twice and allowed Cosatch inside. To his surprise, he saw no sign of the Chief’s security tenders. Cosatch sat back and let the car come under control of the automated shaftway which took the car spiralling up into the docking bay quadrants of the prism. The shaft rose up at an acute angle and the lights on the ceiling whipped past at an unprecedented speed. Cosatch could not even focus on the austere décor of the basement silos as he thundered as fast as a cocky schoolboy on a BMX through the shaft. The route ceased spiralling and Cosatch’s vehicle entered a rhombic series of turns before levelling into a regular pitch with a hint of upcurve. Cosatch recognised the format; he would soon enter Formica Five, the vast segment of the docking bay allocated to the reverberations of Anderson’s Wheel. Cosatch of course being Auxiliary G105 of the Ford’s itinerant workforce.

As the car gambolled gracefully into place, Cosatch drummed his fingers on the steering wheel in eager anticipation of the arrival of the docking warden. Cosatch noticed that the outer shield of the prism, which was visible beyond the lithe irradiation hemming, was a peculiarly tender blue. This invested the scene with a kind of arcane lyricism and gracefully accentuated the Chief’s statue that stood erect and proud like a teenager’s phallus, about 12 yards from the centre of the huge bay. The beauty of his surroundings made Cosatch retch uncomfortably but somewhat paradoxically almost eased the tumultuous ferment of his soul. But no, nothing could quell the sorcery of such youthful rambunctiousness. This was the part of his infrequent visits that he enjoyed the most: the burgeoning anticipation of the advent of a quest for half-truth. How he loved to gently bathe in the fringe of its dawning.

Cosatch sighed, usually the Docking Wardens where as prompt as cancer, only the staff at Hussain’s Amusements surpassed their brutal efficiency. Finally a door slid open at the back of the gargantuan room and out scuttled a gay tram, its horn parping in gay fashion. It was a surreal cross between Mardi Gras and a Nuremberg rally, with a hint of Jarre. Cosatch turned in his seat hoping to see a cameraman from You’ve Been Candidly Set-up, one of his favourite programmes when in need of a little schadenfreude on a Sabbath evening. Alas, no joy. Admiral Lozike restored a little aspect of sanity to the proceedings, alighting the gay tram with all the gay style of a brutal fascist.
“Disguise; clever eh?” demanded the Admiral. Cosatch wandered why Lozike had suddenly decided that disguise was a necessity, considering that he never left this area of Three Mile Ford.
“Yes Admiral”, replied Cosatch perhaps a little too weakly.
“YOU DO NOT APPROVE?” boomed Admiral Lozike, himself an expert in psychoanalysis, a career forsaken purely for the love of intelligence.
“Come, boy”, he added, holding out an inflamed palm as he did so. Cosatch studied the palm with great interest. The redness itself was a characteristic that rendered it unorthodox, but deep in the trench-crease palm lines scurried thousands of bug-like creatures in mathematical, positive formations, as though they had a job to do. The dislocated thumb, bent backwards at a strikingly obtuse angle of 98 degrees, appeared almost as a second wrist stump and this was indeed where the Admiral wore his diving watch, resistant to 25 meters. The cheap rings that adorned his digits were chunky and plentiful, slightly chipped from the actions in the interrogation rooms, notorious yet untalked about within the walls of Three Mile Ford.

“Come, come.” The speech broke Cosatch’s concentration and he followed the Admiral onto the gay tram, as it parped its gay horn and returned whence it came. As the tram slid into the walled partition and clicked itself onto the bufferlinks of turntable nexi, the automatic safety lines wound themselves around Cosatch and his companion. The boosters were heard starting up, and suddenly the pair were glued to their seats by the g-force, measuring 7 on the scale presented in donut-graph fashion on the fish-eye plasma screen. Cosatch’s face had torn slightly around the filtrum, and blood began to ooze out of the open, fleshy wound. Luckily, the delirious effects of the g-force distracted Cosatch from the mild pain of the face tear. Cosatch’s mind span ha’penny like as the nexi fired into multiple zone. Scraps of thought fleeted through his soul, caught fire like little stars, then instantly expired, replaced by others.
“How much is a Big Mac in Lille?” muttered Cosatch limply.
“Serendipity, serendipity, clutch, serendipity” yelled the Admiral who had also lost his marbles.
“I can’t climb to never because the journey stops in me” wailed Cosatch, blood spilling from his face onto his trousers.
As the nexi ground gradually to the end of its 2G negative pushover, Cosatch and the Admiral returned to a broad societal definition of sanity. Cosatch still clung bitterly to his seat and waited for the Bohmer assimilation to kick-in. The inside of the nexi shell shuddered and then a pale blue mist of gas began filtering through the grills situated under their feet.
“I love the smell of books in the morning” screamed Admiral Lozike as he always did during the precon stage of assimilation. Cosatch licked the Admiral’s face as the intoxicating effects of the gas kicked in. Admiral Lozike returned the sloppy compliment, but quickly, and the de-contaminating process was complete. Six hours of quarantine would follow, and would give the pair an ideal opportunity to discuss the various conundra that had presented themselves recently. The leather sofettes whirred into life in the entrance lounge, protruding from the crimson walls at a beautifully functional angle. The circular glass table that accompanied the sofettes rose majestically through the floorboards, on top of which stood a pair of proudly fragranced coffees.
“DTH,” offered the Admiral.
“Danka, bitte,” returned Cosatch, perhaps misappropriating his language because of the declining effects of the last few minutes. The gas had also repaired his filtrum, luckily enough.

Cosatch began to explain the various problems he had been having, both with his own perception of logistical expressionism in relation to time, but also with the orb he had discovered, and why it was imperative to align these findings to a possible disturbance at the plant, and distance these variables from the slipping plate in his head. The Admiral listened intently, carefully avoiding his face with his hands, so as not to interfere with the bug’s workings. Nodding at all the right points, Cosatch noticed like never before how much of a friend the Admiral had turned out to be. Funny really, considering the abstract torture he had subjected McMillan to on his introduction to Three Mile Ford, the violations of physicality extreme. Admiral Lozike’s technical understanding of pain was an education, his methodology absolute, and Cosatch gazed dreamily into the battle-hardened eyes. False tears rolled down the Admiral’s sexy cheek as a way of acknowledging the respectful mannerisms and Cosatch crumbled. This was normal. The very nature of the physical extremities both men had endured was the sole explanation for the hormone-ravaged, almost feminine interchange apparent in entrance lounge 668. Coffee and plush furnishings may add an aesthetic constituent, but mentality is a fragile kitten. Gesturing with his forelock in a ridiculous ovoid movement, the Admiral let out a prolonged whimper; his eyes clenched shut and his begloved digits gripped his ears fiercely. Cosatch was about to stroke the Admiral’s knee to soothe him but was distracted by an approaching booted footfall, rhythmically drumming against sheened perspex corridor. Cosatch prepared himself for the entrance; it had arrived earlier than expected and he had rather hoped to shake off his acclimatisation sickness before the exchange. The Admiral slumped like a gibbering clerk under the table and embarked on a very weak rendition of ‘Once Around the Butt of a Gun‘. Cosatch’s resolve was slightly greater; to calm himself in critical situations he always recalled the words of his mother’s suicide note.
‘Whither the thickets of time render thee null. Epithets not castanets are the rhythm of my tide. Give me yang not yin, less tonic more gin, and I’ll ne’er be mild in the presence of Khan.’

The translucent yellow and cyan doors of the lounge slid smoothly open and in strode Chief V, her black hair dancing gracefully over her perfectly formed shoulders. The Chief walked towards the hot beverage machine and punched in 301 – peach and chive soup. The machine kicked out a small plastic cup which was promptly filled by a shoot of liquid: boiling water. The fluid fused with the smattering of orangey powder located at the bottom of the cup and created an almost instantaneous but rather average hot drink refreshment. The Chief stared at the disappointing vomit coloured solution and mused on its metaphoric dissimilarity with the abstruse nature of The Leningrad Paradox. However, not only did the rapidly produced snack keep up with the pace of modern living, it was also the only known substance that could assist immunity to the beta refraction vapours emitted by quasi-quarantined outsiders. In the meantime, Cosatch had helped the Admiral back to his feet and was punching the weirdo mooncalf repeatedly on the sternum.

“We have depended for far too long on happenchance,” the Chief stated suddenly which brought Cosatch and the Admiral sharply to attention. “The new strategy must be deployed with a meticulous zeal. Cosatch, I am delegating to you the task of neutralizing K. Are you up to the task my young fig fetcher?”
“Reconciliation to inevitability is a germane yet fickle mistress,” Cosatch squawked loudly and nervously in response whilst attempting an insouciant smile to mask his embarrassment at this misplaced sophism.
“Your fear is perfectly understandable Bunny Thunder,” replied the Chief, allowing fondness for her favourite employee to spill over unprofessionally into a patronizing, if highly appropriate, pet name, “but let me recount to you a chronicle which will fill you with a hearty portion of courage and calm:

A long time ago a man called Urizen lived with his daughter Xandu just outside the town of Lom. They ventured rarely into the town and many of the town dwellers considered them a little strange. However, it came to pass that Urizen and Xandu were running low on broth and needed more before the icy winds from the Holth valley descended during the fourth moon after Juniper. Urizen decided to send Xandu to the town, as he considered himself too old for such an adventure. The relevant preparations were undertaken; Xandu collected mutton mittens, pulled her thick overcoat tightly around her rubenesque frame and bid her father adieu, looking back as she waved a little too meekly through the increasing wind. The impending dark of night loomed over the horizon like a blackened sandstorm, quickly enveloping the barren landscape of Holth. Urizen feared for his daughter, yet knew that an appropriate alternative was obsolete. His diminished health would not see him to the broth markets, the path being both long and treacherous. He simply looked at the sky and offered an elementary prayer:

‘Crimson waves of thy realism burn a woven path of lame anger,
Re-boot the system to repair thy idealistic natural charmist pleasures,
Risk all, risk all, risk all, all, all, all
As a monument of radical bolshevism, bolshevism, bolshevism bolshe…’

Urizen’s frail voice tailed off as the profitless nature of his warped prophecies took hold. He secretly hoped that he would perish in the winds as his daughter fought nature in the name of family, ridding himself of the most terrible secret.

Twenty years ago, Urizen had leaped upon his trusty steed, protected by a beautiful coat of oily feathers and log-chipping, to head north-north-west up the valley, where he was to meet Gloiance, a smith who specialised in spiritual ways of blending steel to suit all needs. His notoriously resolute 3-part copper/steel compound had found him fortune beyond the great valley, into the townships and further to the Great Downs of Emily. Urizen, however, did not need of this mass-marketed wonderblend; he required a more focused appropriation of Gloiance’s talents. A great warrior Gloiance had been during the rebellion and Urizen badly needed to understand the ways of the Holth Miltons who had defended the valleys during those treacherous years. Some of the elder inhabitants of Lom still, to this day, claim that Gloiance was responsible for . . .”

“Wait a minute,” Cosatch bumbled in uninvited, causing the emotionally fragile Chief to break down into a torrent of tears, “Isn’t this the one where Gloiance is martyred for his introduction of the sonnet which caused the gradual erosion of scientism in Lom? And Urizen is revealed as the progenitor of Crantrom Hurling?” Cosatch had been staring at the Admiral hoping for a pat on the head but mindful that a clip round the ear could as easily follow.
“Look at the Chief, Cosatch, that’s sixteen years work down the swanny. You have no idea. You’re f-f-f-fired. You can show yourself out. Oh, and your pension will be cancelled of course.” the Admiral bawled. As Cosatch crawled towards the door, he witnessed what he knew to be his downfall, the Admiral consoling Chief V with an orb identical in shape and size, though not molecular consistency, with the one that had so enraptured his being.
“Darleen, you hussy, why?” Cosatch whispered. When humiliated, Cosatch (in a standard act of transference) always projected his distress onto his long lost first girlfriend Leen Rubric; it was her somewhat protean image which he summoned now. Cosatch slumped through the door and lay as motionless as a lake that was undisturbed by wind, “Leen, Leen, Leen…” Cosatch whimpered pathetically “why did you never…”

“Admiral Lozike and Cosatch Mcmillan please come to attention,” boomed the nexi’s comm web whilst a mild electric shock was simultaneously sent pulsing through the pairsome’s scapulae. The Admiral and Cosatch sat up immediately; they recognized the voice of Chief V’s formidable right hand woman Boron Jetwell.
“Bohmer assimilation is now complete, please find your way to lounge 9.” the message continued. The Admiral seemed unaffected by the assimilation and he quickly unharnessed himself from the safety lines and began busily reconciling the nexi’s stability hub in preparation for their departure. Cosatch was a little slower readying himself for the briefing in lounge 9, he contemplated the mysterious nature of the dream he had just experienced. Why had Leen come to him now, now of all times? What could this possibly mean?
“Ready to go then Chesney” the Admiral shouted, a slightly smug grin adorning his chamois leather face. “The Chief is looking forward to seeing you. She seems to think you’re the man to locate…!”
“We’ll see,” Cosatch butted in, “we’ll see.”

Next chapter…