narcotic transmissions

The Italian Job

Spiro blinked up at the display in Boba Maxx. It flashed showing something he couldn't quite identify, an orb accelerating up the spectrum. The text announced that the final member of ABBA, Agnetha, had transmigrated into a planetary body, joining her fellow group members in a prestigious orbit around the solar system. Maybe it was one of those moments that you were supposed to remember where you were and what you were doing when it occurred like the moment when Werner Herzog had been sworn in as world president, back whenever that had been.

His handset vibrated. A gig. Minimal Italian. It's a shame it wasn't a Plus+ contract, but it'd pay for brunch. The postcode seemed a bit unusual, but its seemed like there was a route that avoided going via Stratford if he could find the right manhole. He shook the handset to reset its gyro. And arrow indicated the alley across the road. He checked that he was equipped for the gig, hit the confirm button for ten minutes and skipped out into the busy road.

A Bimmer caught him almost immediately. He glanced off its roof, danced over a black cab going in the opposite direction, and came down without too much x-axis shift. He followed the alley, it had lost most of its pavement to infrastructure updates to the tangle of pipes beneath. The arrow held steady and then shifted hard left into an open doorway. He scrambled down the steel staircase. Down was always slower than up. Sure, up was more of a crunch on the leg muscles, but at least you could do two, or sometimes three, steps at a time. Down gave you the free lunch of gravity, but it was a step at a time and they were fast paced, you had to pay attention to every single one of them.

Hit the next floor down, follow it around to the right. The arrow was turning red, the next shift was coming up. He kicked the door open: GPO tube slide. He dropped himself onto the nearest segment and dropped flat. The tube roof was maybe a centimetre above his nose. He kept an eye on the handset screen. He was heading in the right direction, and his timing was good. The green on the arrow was turning orange. Each time the slide passed through a depot he counted. He had about five seconds to spring when his exit came. The whole slide bounced as someone dropped into a slide a few behind him, maybe someone else with a Minimal Italian gig, or maybe a Zippo Guy.

He'd done Zippo gigs in the past. Your equipment had to be 100%. When the boss raised a ciggie, you had to be at the table with a light by the time it reached their mouth. A second strike could lose you the whole invoice. Maintenance wasn't so tough on Minimal Italian. Yeah, you needed a full load and fresh spice, and your action needed to be good, but there was some leaway.

Orange turning red. Next exit. Spiro sprang from prone to his feet and off the slide. Exit left. Concrete steps. They were kinda steep so it was a two step climb. His legs would be sleek after this. Three floors. Nearing the top he could feel and smell the evening breeze. The handset said this brought him out behind M&S with three minutes grace.

Fast walk. Don't run. Arriving at the gig out of breath wasn't a good look. He turned into the street. Nice leafy avenue. The cool air steadied him down. He took two pauses, he needed to be exactly on time, nothing was worse than hanging around like some unwanted furniture while they served up in the kitchen.

He pushed through the front gate and took a moment to brush a spider web off his shoulder. He rang the doorbell and breathed easy. She was a tall, spare woman with grown-out curls in an evening blue kimono. "You got the action? Right through this way." She led him through to the kitchen. The scent of basil and oregano hit him like a truck. He brought the rod out of its sheath.

She sat at her dining table. He gave it a beat and took her lead. He ground the pepper onto the dish with an easy action. He paid attention to her eyes on the dinner. A slight inflection and he withdrew the mill.

"Good action," she said. "That's a nice old rod you've got there." She poured herself a glass of red. "You got another gig lined up?"

"Not immediately, Ms. Kitchener."

"You drink?" She poured him a glass.

1.

Sally stuck around to watch them wrap up the coffee tables and other small furnishings. The backwards of cardboard that they moulded around the corners with parcel tape were the inspired neo-baroque of the removal industry. Balloon folders and their ilk had never impressed her, that was merely a matter of pressure management. This however she could have watched for hours as a child. "You're so cool!" She gushed at Vladislav. He couldn't understand a word she said but grinned back and accepted a cigarette.

Marco, the leader of the gang, was out at the front organising the Tetris of boxes and furnishings into the vans. Two in total. The house plants would go in last. A few delicate treasures, and the Minitel and Ericofon, she had already carried over ahead of the main move. Demjen, the biggest of the guys, was carrying piles of crates taller than himself, sometimes with the assistance of a strap, and at other times through a sheer bloody-mindedness of balance and momentum.

It was strange to watch the rooms slowly reveal rectangular absences that the sun had not touched in years or decades. She had already hoovered away a considerable mass of dust and another round would be needed once the place was fully clear. There were patches of damp that would need some treatment, but she had been told that a specialist would be coming in later in the week to deal with that.

"So, all of the last bits in the spare room are staying, Ms. Kitchener?" Marco handed her a full inventory of everything that had been put into the vans. It seemed somewhat meagre for all of the aeons she had spent here. He lit up a Marlboro. "And the destination for the new flat is in Quatrefour. The move is from Quatrefour to Quatrefour?"

"That is correct," said Sally, "but don't forget to take the route labelled All Around the Houses. It will take you out across the Peripherique and through the Outer Autostrada, before coming back in through the West Access Road."

He shook his head. He had puzzled over this. "Would it not be easier to just drive straight from here along The Broadway to the West Access Road?"
"From one perspective that would look like the most straightforward option, but the whole circuit needs to migrate, your vans are part of the dynamo, you see?" She knew he wouldn't, but he was trustworthy enough to follow her instructions. She handed him four fifties. "You and the boys should get yourself a nice dinner at the Service Area on the Peripherique."

Marco grinned at the tip. "Thank you, Ms. Kitchener. Demjen in particular gets very hungry after he's been loading all day."

"I think they've got a Happy Eater and a Flunch out there. You should be able to eat like kings and make an early start." Sally saluted the three of them as they started up the vans. "See you tomorrow morning, lads!"

2.

The empty flat made Sally feel awkward and uncomfortable. She could come back to do the final clean on Thursday. Billiamina Carrow had advised her to hire a professional to do the job, and that was probably even good advice, however Sally felt that there were some jobs that you had to do yourself.

She had booked up a room at the Ibis Styles Villejuif. It's main attractions included sauna, gym, basement pool labyrinth and views of the Octagon Shopping centre. The front desk service was so blandly efficient that she found herself in her mini-suite without any awareness of the intervening minutes. She checked back out in the corridor: a tessellated blue and grey carpet extended in both directions apparently endlessly. A number of doors looked like they had only recently closed and might recently open. Some barely audible music.

The mini-suite included a bathroom, a recessed area for the coffee and mini bar facilities, and was in all respects what would be called anywhere else a double room. The view was of the northwestern rampart of the Octagon Centre's multistorey carpark. Some bluish light spilled from the front of the centre to the left and there was an early evening buzz about the place. Traffic darted around below noiselessly, except for when a bus or lorry came around the corner and she would feel rather than hear the mass of the vehicle braking or accelerating.

After a few false attempts she activated the big flat screen on the wall. BBC World News 24 Plus+ was too hi-res to be watched for any appreciable length of time. She flicked between a lot of channels. When and where had they all come from? She remembered Channel 4 becoming a significant part of the landscape a long time ago, and then never really understanding what Channel 5 was for, and now all of this. Most of them were brands that you could find in a department store, but as TV channels. Finally she settled for some Russian mafia soap operas without subtitles that she left running at a low volume.

Digging through her wheelie, the smaller iteration of the once and future wardrobe, she found a black silk suit and some dark ballet pumps. She inspected the look in the vast and unusually clear mirror, undid one button, put on some very black shades, and wandered out to the hotel restaurant.

3.

The dinner menu was largely composed of mains on beds of diverse grains, served with various species of reduction or involved something that had been crushed or drizzled, possibly both although it was unclear from the description in which order these procedures had occurred. Anything that suggested a specific regional or national style was immediately an object of suspicion and the use of foreign terminology could only compound this error.

Sally ordered salmon and immediately forgot how and with what it had been prepared. The surprise would arrive like some particularly agreeable form of amnesia, she hoped, as the tall glass of pilsner appeared as a cool golden deja vu. She sipped and considered the other diners: the larger percentage of them were elderly, everyone who was younger and unconfined by older relatives had found somewhere either cheaper or hipper to dine.

Behind the bar in the centre of the restaurant, a tower of wine bottles rose several stories into the air. If it hadn't been secured by a steel and glass structure, festooned with fairy lights the tower would have been nightmarishly dangerous. The slightest vibration bringing the whole edifice down into an explosive spray of white and coloured glass. Even diving beneath a table would not offer any certain protection as bottles crashing to the floor would burst in all directions. The safest place to be would be suspended at the summit of the tower watching from the apex of the storm as diners were flayed below.

The fish arrived. Sally was pleased to notice that they had thought to include a considerable slice of lime. Had those potatoes been crushed? What device had been deployed in the operation? She peppered them a little, as well as the beans which had been caught in the same drizzle as the fish. Someone either coughed or laughed suddenly. She searched for the source without success. Clearly they had recovered quickly from the fit of humour.

"Is everything alright, madam?" a waiter asked. The question seemed to broad for a simple answer, so a nod would have to suffice.

4.

Returning upstairs, Sally discarded the black silk suit here and there around the mini-suite. Things were getting dangerous for someone on the Russian mafia drama, bodies were piling up and ammunition was running low, possibly that Japanese kitchen knife would get used sooner or later. Ah yes, the fountain of blood, the grasping of the neck and then the topple from a tall building.

The bathroom mirror's gaze was pitiless as Sally brushed her teeth with a newly-acquired brush that resembled some piece of high tech sports equipment. Both brush and paste were, she noted with satisfaction, from the professional range of their respective companies. Sally had graduated long ago from having amateur teeth, and under the inspection of a mirror of this clarity the distinction showed. She stopped brushing for a moment to touch a scar to the left of her right shoulder. She couldn't remember which side her heart was on. It was possible that she was ambidextrous, after all most people have two lungs.

After rinsing, she activated the blind. It hummed a low B flat and blocked out the view of the Octagon. Snapping off the TV the room ascended into near silence. In an anechoic chamber you can hear the sound of your own blood. She attached a small speaker to a Minidisc player and set it to track repeat. A touch of brown noise in the room.

The bed was wide enough for two, cool blankets rather than a duvet. Two pillows were excessive, especially if they were this thick. She flung one off the bed and switched off the light. The blinds were form-fitted and blacked the whole room out. In case of emergency the bathroom was to the left... no, it was to the right. Perhaps the bathroom was ambidextrous. In the uninvestigated darkness the quantity of bathrooms just began to proliferate. Conveniences. The new Quatrefour would need conveniences, perhaps like those ones in Tokyo with glass doors that turn opaque.

Within a few moments Sally was asleep.

5.

It was a little like a toilet roll, if you didn't push the analogy too far. Wherever you unrolled it, streetlights sprang up, post boxes, parked cars, pedestrians moving towards their predestined destinations. Making it too much of a boxed-in grid was the wrong was the treat it, it also needed to be treated with a certain degree of redundancy: streets might run parallel or arrive at a destination through different workarounds; a maze rather than a labyrinth, although that was not to say that it was intended to confuse or make the residents lose themselves; that was entirely up to themselves.

It was a little like fan-folded continuous stationary, if you didn't push the analogy too far. Different types of residential accomodation from single storey bungalows up to low-rise towers and beyond, parades of and for shopping and business; things that could close down and become repurposed as venues or galleries, but not too many of those, demiurgery wasn't the same thing as as gentrification, or if it was it was always avoidable.

Sally padded around in the dark building and rebuilding. Sometimes she lifted whole armfuls of the bogroll that made up the infrastructure and flushed them in one or another of the toilets that she couldn't see. The whole procedure was apparently soundtracked by Sewerslvt and had the potential to go on all night. Later it became more like papier mache sculpture, built up into peaks and valleys, painted in the vibrant colours of a Hundertwasser.

Sally wasn't sure that she needed to be here for the process. If a world was being reborn here, she had never wanted to establish herself as any sort of mother of anything, and rather resented having to be so hands on in the process. Finding a neighbourhood was the way that it was often described, you'd approach it at street level and find elements of the neighbourhood becoming familiar, as if you'd already lived there or grown up there. The place finds its residents. Constructing the borough, however unconsciously, made it difficult to approach the place from the inside, it was the problem of the author or composer, although she didn't have the luxury of a desk drawer and several years, to reapproach the material as if it had come from another hand.

There was a ringing out in the room. A pulsing red light on the phone allowed her to locate it, after falling to the floor over the edge of the bed. "Good morning, this is your 7AM wake up call, Ms. Kitchener. We hope you slept well."

6.

Sally signed the sheet and handed it back to Marco. Everything had arrived and in good time. She'd attempted to help with carrying a few boxes up and down the stairs, and the boys had tried to talk her out of it in languages that she did or didn't understand. "I can't just watch you doing all this. No, I won't carry anything that has any risk of injuring me." Sally reassured them. They laughed, whether they understood or not.

The new place was second floor. There was an elevator that wasn't strictly speaking a transport system for furniture or boxes, but the beautiful curved staircase was a pain in the arse for carrying anything up or down. Sally had taken a few armfuls of her paperback cubes up and had appreciated this factor. The paperback cubes were twin-stacks of books that were roughly the same size, inside a carrier bag, that had been taped both ways with parcel tape. They were modular and could be stacked in any space that was free in the vans, but also they could be carried several at a time, depending on your ability. Democratic packages.

There was a room that Sally had designated at the studio; the second largest room. The majority of the boxes and paperback cubes had been stacked in there. It was stuff that she could unwrap slowly over the next week. The most crucial corner of this was the vinyl boxes, these she had kept from the last move, however many aeons ago that had been, because finding boxes of the correct size and stability for vinyl was near impossible. She found to her satisfaction that these had been delivered the correct way around. Given standard conditions, all of them would probably still play.

Furniture, some of which was clad in Vladislav's beautiful cardboard bulwarks, was mostly in the largest room, that would become the study or library, as necessary. She checked the inventory and paced out into the other rooms, the sofa was not anywhere to be found, either on the inventory or the flat. She connected the Ericofon to the socket and tried Marco's number. No reply.

Sally felt an obscure deja vu, she'd often bought new sofas after shifting from one place to another, and had no idea where those sofas had gone. Maybe this time she should press the point and... the Ericofon was ringing. Not Marco, but Eloise. Jesus, she wished that she'd never followed up her urge to get back in contact; it was always something about Eloise's daughter's ballet lesson or whether her son had autism, or any single thing that she could not give two shits about.

Did that make her a bad person? No, she didn't have time to come along to the school to see the first performance of Disco Swan Lake. Moving was too stressful at the moment.

She wondered whether the bossman shop on the Boulevard sold Polish beers.

7.

To understand the relationship between the Boulevard and Mombassastrasse you needed to have traversed the passage around the side of Müller that carried pedestrians from one to the other. Müller itself, once you escaped the perfume and aftershave aisles at the front, was a potential treasure trove of bath smellies with a somewhat hit and miss media section. The two key thoroughfares also met at Esperanto Plaza with its near incomprehensible tumble of fountains depicting the life of John Chrysostom.

Cafe life flourished in the squares, or tried to against uneven weather, and a curious tranche of green, The Rise, carried broken teeth of ancient walls to a vantage point which afforded views across Quatrefour and a meeting place for young people with plastic bottles of wine. At this stage of exploration, the revised district resembled nothing less than a city break on first arrival.

Greggs was still in place, as was Thalia, and WHSmith was now located beyond the railway bridge. And that was the strangest part, the railway bridge led, as expected, to a railway station indicating that like Wassgotterspeck West and East the district was now visible on the transport grid. In the cool of the station building, whose ticket office had been authentically shut and replaced by ticket machines, Sally traced the lines and discovered the inconsequential name Elmford Brook. It was almost impossible to imagine it hadn't always been there, and unlike Wassgotterspeck it evaded drawing attention to itself.

Mombassastrasse was a huge resource for bossman shops of all types - Turkish, Indian, West African, Chinese - while the new bright boba tea vendors along the Boulevard provided a broad range of Ramyun and snack products at elevated prices. The Windmill was a curious interchange, one side of which thronged with fast food eateries, while the other was largely composed of failed internet cafes and vape shops, along with the Salvation Army fortress containing a whole floor of secondhand furniture. It was in here that Sally searched for a replacement sofa: too large, too small, those wooden arm rests would not survive dozing manoeuvres...

Several days later a blocky corduroy couch was hefted with some difficulty up the staircases. The front door had to be temporarily unhinged to give enough space for it to be carried into the lounge. Over a short time the lounge had been the library and then the study before defaulting to its current status. It was the second most settled room in the flat, only the small bedroom being already more complete in itself because once the wardrobe had been reassembled it had been a mere matter of dropping a futon mattress on the floor and a pile of recent unfinished books beside it.

Meanwhile in the lounge, once the coffee table had been shifted in front of the new sofa, it looked like it had been there for years already. Sally tested the left hand side of it, and then the right, before placing two op art cushions against the arm rests and falling into an unscheduled doze.

1.

Once in a blue moon, Sally was required to take a duty cycle at the Studio de Télé-réalité like everyone else. Once in a blue moon was for these purposes once every 4096 days, a a duty cycle for these purposes was a period of 24 hours, although the minutes were 64 seconds long for a reason that she had long forgotten, and since it had been a while since she had taken a duty cycle, 4096 days to be exact, a systems guide was provided at the studio to remind anyone who had forgotten how the equipment racks functioned in the studio.

The Studio de Télé-réalité was a cube four metres square, although the space outside to studio itself extended out into blackness indefinitely. In the centre was a simple steel bed with no mattress over its steel grid surface, because it was not designed for sleeping on. Beneath the bed were five cathode ray monitors of various types. The largest of these at the moment was showing a locked off view of a subway, another two smaller ones howed in perspective the keys of a piano, one from the left and the other from the right, the last two monitors at present showed interference, although one was significantly bluer than the other.

Before coming out to the Studio de Télé-réalité, Sally had taken some time to choose what she would wear for the duty cycle. A comfortable off-white bra from M&S was her first immediate choice, and the Wrangler jeans shorts that she had owned since 1991 was also a no-brainer. Less usual or immediately practical was a pilot's harness that she had found in a Sue Rider shop the week before. She felt that it was civilian rather than military, although she had done no research to confirm or deny this. Her final choice was a pair of grey socks with several holes in them. She wasn't sure when she had originally acquired these, but after rediscovering them in the laundry she had taken them with her to ensure that no-one threw them away on account of their state of repair.

In addition to the five monitors beneath the bed there were several others around the studio: two slightly to the left of the head of the bed. A cluster of eight to the left, some of which were LCD, plasma or cathode ray, and one of which emitted a constant high pitched noise; to the right were only four and they were almost evenly positioned along the bed, however they were also periodically superimposed with projections originating from the left-hand side which would also sometimes project into the gloom above. There were no monitors at the foot of the bed or above: the space above was largely occupied by speakers and tannoys of different sizes and resolutions, although some LEDs occasionally winked from those that had gone into standby mode.

Leafing through the systems guide, a full explanation of the dials, readouts, displays, blinkenlights as well as the control systems connected to them. Sally let this level of detail wash over her. For the most part, if she needed to switch any monitor off in an emergency, she could easily locate the off button. There was also a master control system located on the bed. It was rather like a wood and steel pizza box that had been opened to reveal not pizza but more controls, dials and read-outs. The only other object on the bed was an old Sony portable TV that was rather charming but also didn't seem to work. She had heard tales about someone called Smithwick who had once fixed this during their duty cycle, but the repair had only lasted a few months. It was difficult to estimate when Smithwick might return to perform the same miracle again, and indeed whether he would be inclined to do so.

The main purpose of the area at the end of the bed was found in four large plastic tubs: remote controls, a lot of remote controls, some of which had working batteries, some of which had laser pointers incorporated into their design. If you could find a remote with working batteries and a laser pointer, you could send the beam out beyond the racks of equipment and out into the dark to determine that yes, the blackness continued indefinitely, although sometimes the dot would touch something in the intermediate space, although it wasn't really possible with such a small dot to get any real idea what it might be.

Sally fiddled with a hole on the bottom of her right sock, which flared up momentarily green and lavender as an image of a stock car race was projected onto it. A coup was failing in one of the monitors to the right, and three of the cluster on the left showed an eye, a nose and a mouth, although not necessarily from the same face. Some white noise panned rhythmically for a few moments, and was succeeded by a TV ident that seemed to slow down. She picked up the systems guide and tried to find whether it explained anywhere why minutes were 64 seconds long here. There was something about the minute calibration menu on the master control system. She took of one sock to mark the page, while searching for the instructions on activating the main menu.
On two screens that she wasn't watching birds flew across open skies.

2.

In every hour you accumulate an extra four minutes, but if those extra minutes were also 64 seconds long then you would clock up another 16 second in these alone, and that was already a quarter of one of these augmented minutes. The inflation was either in attention or in a lack of attention: if you paid attention to it, the augmentation would take hold; if you didn't pay attention to it, the augmentation would creep in through the back door.

Sally spent some time beneath the steel grid of the bed. Not too much time because the cathode ray monitors became quite hot, and for some reason she felt that this would make them more brittle. She didn't want to fall into a screen, although perhaps if she secured her pilot's harness to the grid above her then she would be suspended safely above them, bathing in their glow. The less-blue of the screens that was showing interference had a hint of something in the noise. It was like. Magic Eye picture. If you could focus on a point behind it you might see the Taj Mahal or you might see the moment that you step out in front of a speeding bus.

"The blinkenlights on the multiplexing processor provide a human-readable 4-bit insight into the current state of operations at any given moment." Sally read this statement several times before letting it go. It could become a distraction from the job at hand which was to access the main menu. She dialled a few threes and then realised that she wasn't sure whether that few was two or three. She carried on dialling them through sheer habit and the blinkenlights on the panel rotated widdershins. Was this what they meant by "human-readable" and if it did, she was fairly certain that counter-clockwise meant that something was very wrong, whether in 4-bit or otherwise.

She flipped the off toggle, good simple binary and counted to ten. Sally wasn't sure when she had adopted the habit of counting to ten between switching off and back on again. It was, she realised, a generational marker or some sort. It couldn't do any harm to count to ten, and indeed it couldn't do any further harm to count to sixteen. She switched the master control system back on, and read the blinkenlights like a human, which is to say with a superstitious awe in the face of the unknowable.

She referred to her second sock bookmark and dialled three twice, counting them out aloud. A numbers station started chiming out from a rattly old speaker above. Following her instinct she followed the numbers as they came, dialling them in. After a while she realised that there could be a lot of numbers on this station. If she put too many into the master control panel, would it become bloated and swell up to crack its wooden side-panels. The numbers stopped. A little bit of Bach before the racing results from Goodwood. The master control panel was apparently undamaged but remained inscrutable.

3.

Sally recognised early and often that the Sony portable TV was beyond her competence, and even through some combination of luck and judgement, if she had been able to make it work, what would it add to the environment? Was she not after all, not lacking in monitors of one description or another? Even if she did make it work, what would be her ostensible reward, footages of the current season's horseracing in Tokyo?

She had seen some time earlier, and she wasn't going to dignify it by recalling how many hours it was, because those immediately became complicit in their inflation at a rate of four minutes per hour. No, some time earlier was a perfectly good description for how long it had been. In any case, sometimes earlier she had caught a broadcast of sumo wrestling. Great huge lads grabbing each others underpants. Going at it like bulls. They were like another species. Could she plausibly imagine some crash weight gain that would make it possible for her to take part in sumo wrestling? Not likely.

She retraced her steps to the second monitor on the right. The venue that was once a sumo wrestling spectacle. She traced the cables carefully. Most of the cables here were uniform black. There were of course occasional sprigs of RGB cables appropriately colour-coded, but for the main part the cables were black. Nonetheless, with sufficiently diligence she could trace these physical connections. How many wireless connections were there between devices here? Her mind quailed at the thought. Fuck the wireless connections, she decided.

Sally read the name of the receiver box out loud. She considered looking it up in the manual, but there were already two socks jammed in there. Next time, she resolved, she would bring many more socks with her. In many colours too. If there was one thing that the cabling had taught her it was that visual labelling was hugely important. She turned the dial experimentally on the box and the image on the screen shifted. Indeed the image was lost, however images were always getting lost, so she turned back the dial to see whether she could achieve some sense of causality. Maybe.

She jabbed at one of the buttons on the box and the screen abruptly stabilised into a stampede of cattle. Pretty good. She jabbed the next button: a news presented shuffling his papers and smiling to indicate that the broadcast was ending. Presets. Sally's mind rushed ahead: if she could learn how to program presets then... She grounded herself again: this sort of project required a lot of socks.

A fuzz of interference projected across from the left. Sally retrieved her socks from the manual and put them onto her hands to make shadow puppets in the projection. They squealed furiously in high pitched glossolalia; the best show in town, and then the projection died off again. Sally flattened the manual against the bed and rested her head against it as a pillow.

4.

Sally followed that long set of paths that don't lead to Stansted Airport. Why Stansted Airport? Well, because she didn't need to catch a plane anywhere from there, so it seemed like a reasonable place not to be going to. The furthest place from Stansted turned out to be the Windows XP wallpaper. The green hill of grass whispered softly, and in the blue sky two sock puppets emerged.

Sock 1: So what are we doing here?

Sock 2: You mean, in the Windows XP wallpaper? Waiting for some icons?

Sock 1: Unnie, we are icons. No, not this here here, but the other here: the Studio de Télé-réalité?

Sock 2: Well, every 4096 days we spend 24 hours there, and every minute is 64 seconds.

Sock 1: Why is 64 seconds? What's that about?

Sock 2: I can't remember, I'll do a Minitel search when I'm back home.

Sock 1: Where's home?

Sock 2: It's kinda in the course of arrangement, but it's where the heart is: Quatrefour.

Sock 1: So what are those bulldozers doing there?

A cohort of bulldozers rolled across the green hill of grass and over into the opposite valley where the unsettled fanfold paper street and thoroughfares of Quatrefour crossed each other haphazardly. The camera zoomed in towards the first bulldozer from which a dozen mechanical arms carrying cathode ray monitors and tannoy speakers emerged. Each monitor showed a different angle on a face that looked like it was underwater or perhaps should be.

"Manuel Wassgotterspeck!" Sally stepped out in from of the bulldozers. "What the fuck do you think you're playing at, you little twat?"

The bulldozers came to a halt. A half-dozen of the monitors swivelled to smile at the following cohorts. "You hear that? Sally called me a "little twats". That's how people are affectionate to each other. We're old friends, you know? Otherwise she wouldn't have called me a twat."

"No, it doesn't, isn't, wasn't, or whatever works in that sentence," said Sally. "It means that you are a repulsive nonce. Now, to repeat my lucid question that you failed to answer: what the fuck do you think you're playing at?"

"Lucid question," laughed Wassgotterspeck. "Very good! You see, you recognise what's happening perfectly. You're having another of your famous little afternoon dozes. Snore snore. Oh, woke yourself up! Have you found any coins down the back of the sofa?"

Sally put her socks back on and her hands on her hips. In that order. "If this was a lucid dream, you'd be singing Kumbaya by now. So drop the bullshit and peel back the onions! The fuck is going on here?"

"Well, if I must I must!" Wassgottespeck snorted. "But only because you described me as a repulsive nonce." The cohorts dissolved and Sally was back in the studio surrounded by monitors and stacks of equipment, but stood on top of the topmost rack looking out into the dark. Every monitor now showed Wassgotterspeck's underwater face. He gestured broadly and many other four meter square cubes identical to Sally's. "Look, there's Felix Walton out there! You can wave of coo-ee, but he'll never hear you. And over there is my old compatriot Greg Thoth, learning the manual diligently. They're all here. Everyone is comfortably and conventiently caged in their own little Studio de Télé-réalité."

"Get a clue, Manuel!" Sally rolled her eyes. "Comfortably and conventiently caged? Consonance is for fucking losers, which is your strongest suit, dickhead!"

5.

"What are you doing, Ms. Kitchener?" Wassgotterspeck panned around the stereo, peek-a-booing from one monitor or another. "You're not angry are you? I was just waiting to see what you'd do when you got bored and horny. It won't surprise you to know that Felix got there first. Within minutes, just the regular 60 minute ones, of being in his studio he was giving himself more attention than the monitors and blinkenlights. All over the floor-mounted monitors too." He laughed in Dolby. "No really, what are you doing?"

Sally dug into the tubs of remotes. Gathering anything with a laser pointer, and when she found anything that didn't but contained a working battery, she extracted the power cell. "You never played any platforms and ladders games, did you?"

"I enjoy a round of snakes and ladders," said Wassgotterspeck. "Ludo too, but Monopoly is my favourite. The late stage of the game when I hold the majority of the property and everyone is hopping carefully, bleeding money into my hotels, and praying that they can get sent to jail is so much fun for everyone."

Sally gathered together twelve remotes, as many as she could wrap the socks around; six in each. She climbed back up to the top of the racks at the head of the bed. Gazing down into the dark abyss, and switched on the laser pointers. "If there's one thing I've learned about your retcons, it's that they're almost always more shallow than they appear on the surface."

She projected two clusters of red dots down into the dark. At first only one dot found purchase, but exploring a bit she eventually mapped out a surface where ten out of twelved dots winked back at her. It was a bit to the right and a good leap out, but what was the worst that could happen. "You can't possibly be thinking of jumping?" Wassgotterspeck's face appeared projected onto a previous unseen block roughly twenty meters ahead and above. "That's not really a feasible strategy, now is it?"

"Not for you perhaps," said Sally. Something seemed familiar about the block he was projecting onto. "You only set up one projection screen? Isn't that a bit cheap?"

Wassgotterspeck's underwater face snapped onto another block to the over to the right and down. "Oh, I'm never cheap when the tenants are paying." He laughed.

The second shape made sense of it all: Tetris blocks. The darkness was coded from a paused Tetris game. It was a strategy she'd used herself before; deploy a strategy that appears to be unlimited in extent. "Well, don't wait up for me, dicksplash!" Sally launched herself off the rack causing it to topple into the void. Terminal velocity would prevent it from hitting her, as long as it missed the block she was aiming at, assuming that the medium had anything approaching natural physics. She hoped that Wassgotterspeck hadn't been too cheap about that.

"Bollocks!" Sally's heels hit something that felt like expanded polystyrene. It compressed under her, which made it difficult to get enough momentum to take a forward roll, but forward planning had given her enough of a lead to get across the surface before two routers chewed the back edge of the block off behind her. One of the socks with its six remotes followed them into the darkness.

The block itself wasn't going anywhere, although in some way it would be useful if it was, but the pause function here seemed to have a priority over physics. Sally flashed the spots from the remaining sock. Another block was located beneath this one, and although the dots were harder to make out, another beneath that. The danger would be if the pause mode was switched off, because then the blocks would descent onto each other.

Sally hoped he hadn't... The block started to descend.

6.

"The fuck did you do then?" Sandra is near to wetting herself. "It's like that thing in Star Wars where the garbage compressor is going to make our heroes very thin and no-one will ever even know that they were squished like a set of bugs." She drained her pint. "Apart from that was coming from across, while this is coming from above, but it's still doom however you slice it."

Sally tapped her nails on her glass. "Yours is looking a bit dry too. Now, whose round was it? Oh, it's mine!" She stretched cat-like. "Although now I think about it, it's getting a bit late and I was hoping to make an early start..."

"Sit right back down, Kitchener." Sandra picked up their pint pots. "And do not attempt to move until I get back with the next round. I want to hear the exact reason why you are not some sort of two dimensional bitch right now."

Sally sighed and lit up a Rothmans. "Fair enough, although you have to admit that you're sounding a bit like a Wassgotterspeck strategy yourself, yeah?"

"So unfair!" Sandra huffed as she headed out to the bar.

Sally checked her Nokia. Carrying a phone was a bad habit; switching it on was one stage worse, but her neighbour downstairs was kinda cute. She gave this some thought: was she actually hot rather than cute? Maybe until she had unearthed further evidence, she was content to settle for cute.

"Soz, Sal!" Sandra put the glasses on the table. "They were all out of Zot glasses, so yours is in a Stella chalice. Fucking chalice! What do they think that wifebeater is? The Holy Grail?"

"Certainly puts a whole other spin on the whole Arthur and Guinevere relationship." Sally sipped her fresh Zot.

"Yeah, and that was a Frenchman again, wasn't it? Lancelot du Lac. Typical Sacha Distilled type." Sandra leaned across the table. "I'll bet that Wassgotterspeck is a fucking frog!"

"A French frog?" said Sally. "With that surname? Maybe German or Austrian. No, more likely Swiss. Most bad things are Swiss."

"The Swiss also speak French!" Sandra protested, before recognising that she'd been played. "Wait up! You've got the Tetris block coming down on you in the dark and you've got two options: stay on there and get flattened or leap out into the void. I mean, I think I know you pretty good, Sal, and I've always had you down as a leap into the void girl."

"Well, I still had a sock full of lasers to hand," said Sally. "The light will always defeat the darkness and in the moment when the dark seems like it will prevail, nonethless..." She took a drag on her Rothmans. "What was I saying? Ah yes, now my inevitable doom depended upon one thing: Wassgotterspeck being a good Tetris player, and you know who can win at Tetris?"

"Frenchmen?" said Sandra.

"It's an even narrower demographic than that: no-one. No-one can win at Tetris." Sally waved a circle in the air with her Rothmans. "It just gets faster and no-one wins, and besides, that twat hadn't been paying attention to his game. My greatest danger was being unlucky and the blocks interlocking. And so I played my lasers up at the block coming down at me. I could see where the longer end was, scrabbled a little further to the left and held on as it locked into the block underneath."

7.

The ground layer of reality. The surface was a bit like slate. The sort of slate that ten years ago people used to serve stuff on at gastopubs while braying "hiya guys!" at the customers. "You need anything else, guys, just yell, right?" They might add. "Hope you enjoy the food, guys!" Might be their final move as they saunter off after some energetic fingers guns.

There was nowhere to eat down here, and Wassgotterspeck swerving in on caterpillar tracks, catching a sock full of remotes falling from above only emphasised this by showering the area with buy-one-get-one-free vouchers. He leered inspite of himself, because he never really left that he was one of those leering guys. "I seem to have something of yours here."

"Is that all you've got?" Sally raised one eyebrow. "Whose are those remotes?"

"Mine, of course!" Wassgotterspeck extended several monitors displaying different views of his underwater face. "Everything here is mine, and that's all to the good. Soon everything will be mine."

"Why would you want that?" said Sally. "I mean, I know that everything won't be yours, and that pretty much no-one is deep within your thrall, but I'm almost clinically interested to understand why you want everything to be yours. In some vague manner I understood why you wanted underaged kids to be yours; that was because you are a sad old nonce, but power over everything; why did you feel that you needed that?"

Wassgotterspeck fell to his knees, or would have if he had knees rather than caterpillar tracks and a whole plethora of monitors and speakers. "You don't understand!" he raged. "How could you understand? Unlike yourself I was never handsome, eloquent, amusing or worth being around."

"To be fair," said Sally, "your still not."

Wassgotterspeck's eyes rolled on several monitors and the Dolby surround intensified across the speakers. "But you forget! These remotes might be mine, but this sock is yours!"

Sally nodded slowly. "Yeah, its got a few holes in it."

"Exactly!" Wassgotterspeck grinned. "The whole of your history. Your whole footprint, if you will?"

"And that was what you wanted?" Sally emptied the remotes from her remaining sock onto the slate of the ground. Laser spots flickering around and about. "You can have both socks if it means that much to you. Go on! Seriously, you're welcome to it."

Wassgotterspeck eyed her cautiously from several angles. "Really? You kept this when it was so comprehensively frayed and yet..."

"And yet there will be someone who gives a shit about me sooner or later." Sally scratched her head. "I don't know who, but it happens periodically. Do you ever get that? Ah yes, my mistake, but the point is that when someone is my best squeeze they will want to bin these socks and that will hurt." She scratched her chin. "While you, who are... fucking weird, will keep these in a fucking museum or whatever and I'll never have to think about the problem again."

Wassgotterspeck sniffed the two socks. "Can I see you again?"

"Not a fucking chance."