V raised his head a little to confine it within the cup of his hand heels and dove-tail-laced fingers before to let the whole jigger back onto the same tree root. The rigid rind felt somewhat hard for his self-made bolster. Still, he defined it bearable while lying, once in a while, on the slight tilt strewn with fallen but not wet as of yet leaves in the autumn woods. Once in a long while… Then he turned his eyes to the side where she sat looking off, her legs crossed asana-like, on the ground.

The lofty pillars of tall tree-trunks respectfully gave each other a pretty wide birth for drowsy slumbering. The light breeze flipped those deaf to reason leaves that still clung, here and there, to the tips of bared boughs. Neither foliage rustle nor buzzing of a random fly or bee yielded a soundtrack for the landscape only a rare hollow drum roll of a busy pecker echoed thru the cathedral-like void around. It was a mild sunny day. Stretched over the warm mat of leaves he felt good for quite a goddamn long while…

‘And you too,’ said he, ‘bro Brutus! Turned a cub yelping along with the pack as prescribed by the stolid traditions of corporate loyalty.’

‘There was no need,’ she shook her head watching closely a low blackberry bush. ‘You’ve accepted Ritter’s offer before our meeting.’

‘That’s what he told you? Grappled my thoughts out from the noosphere?’

‘I knew the outcome before he ventured to recruiting you. I know you too well ,V’

He set his hands free and crawled, still stretched on his back, towards the tree to lean his shoulder-blades against the trunk’s solidity.

‘Why this romantic rendezvous then? To seal the deal? The final nail into the coffin lid of a freelancer’s freedom?’

‘As always you ride in style, a too high horse though. Could you speak plain English?’

‘Will we meet as co-employees?’

‘Hardly. The Institution is a fairly branchy enterprise.’

He pinched out a weeny piece of moss from between the roots, rubbed it with two fingers against the thumb, sniffed at. It smelled moist soil and mushrooms.

She raised her eyes to meet his stare. The punch of the suppressed and since long forgotten pain landed hard, called for attentive examination of the smeared finger pads.

‘Jack missed out or, rather, dodged answering the first half in my 2-in-1 question: why me?’

‘It was R’s decision when it became clear that the Institution heads to an impossible workload with things getting out of hand and the concluding collapse all because of our—your and my—baby.’

‘What the… scam! We’ve never had a baby!’

‘It was due in two years. That’s why we split.’

‘Who’s crazy here? I? You? Or R? It’s madness!

‘It’s the world we are living in, V.’

‘And after… Have you manipulated me? Well, by that goddamn retroaction?’

‘’O, no. I have been simply looking after. May be, averted a couple of close calls… at most. I didn’t want you turn a wheelchair gimp because of an accident or stuff, you know.

‘When Lex alerted me over the phone, it was another of your preventive “looking after”?’

‘Not exactly. It’s a part to a wider plan. R is retiring. There’s the need of a replacement.’

‘Has he found it?’

‘Why asking? You know yourself.’

‘Is Lia a pawn in your game?’

‘Nah. Her ‘saving’ you was a surprise. As a consequence, we had to later improvise.’

‘Improvisation, huh? Fucking manipulators!’

‘You can’t leave the world on senile morons ready to demolish it to revenge their natural mortality, a kinda adding the door slam to their departure. And no better are younger imbeciles driven by greed or stupidity or by both at once.’

‘Another Conspiracy Theory? Some “Dark Wing” scenario? Forget the malarkey! Jingle-bells for pinging infantile teeners.’

‘”Dark Wing”? Bravo, R! He’s right about your talent of hitting the bull’s eye with blindfold shoots.’

‘Old fucking manipulator!’

‘Slow down, V. You’re in presence of a lady… Would you allow a baby to fall down off a balcony? Or to stick its fingers into…’

‘Fuck the old fucking motherfucker! How is it now? Plain enough? Or should I take a shot at a plainer talking?’

‘Looks like a passable “adieu”, Sir. Fare thee also well.’

She rose on her feet and slowly walked down the tilt towards the black SUV in the desolate dirt road thru the autumnal woods.

* * *

24

…the moon sailed away across the sky and I followed it as far as my eyes the only part in me capable of moving could go after to the very socket rims and then there remained just pin-prick narrow orifices in the dark-violet firmament thru which streamed moist gleam of the stars with the ever present plashing to their fluent glitter

stretched supine hovered I with my numbed back above the pain whose part I was not any more yet still felt too acutely its swaying throbs though at times alleviated with the gurgling of water in a languid brook among the Yorkshire marches and suddenly I recalled both my mother in her white Dutch cap calling “Jimmy! Come, son!” and the richly green verdure over wavy hills dissected with ribs of stone hedges and the sky above our village church and the invisible but ever felt presence of the sea beyond the hills

the ship became my home and wed to the sea I made my way up from an able man to commander and captain the renown cartographer and explorer of the South Seas commissioned by the Royal Society to discover Terra Australis which was not there yet instead I found new territories and islands bringing multitudes of new subjects into the shade beneath the Union Jack under the wise rule of the Crown and I touched the shores inhabited by dark-skinned tribes wild and savage the most horrid was the ritual of human sacrifice which I witnessed on my second voyage to the faraway hemisphere when I didn’t know that at the feast celebrating our ship arrival they would sacrifice a man

they brought him into the sandy square in the clump of huts under high trees like a great prince they brought him on a stretcher naked prostrate and to my question Omai answered the poor devil could not sit or walk for each and every bone in his body was split and crashed minutely except for the scull and that all of the past night he lay steeped in the brook to cleanse his body and spirit with a stone under his head to prevent drowning then under mutual chant and drum beating gushed the blood from the throat cut with the dazzling white knife and they split the victim’s stomach to splash the disembowelment offal onto the sand and we retired to the King’s hut where I was bestowing beads and trinkets of pewter to my sovereign host His Majesty was happy and his royal family too while from the outside in floated through the entrance the sweetish whiffs of baked flesh but I declined the invitation to partake in the feast sick belly after so a long sea journey used for the excuse

all that so vividly I recollected right now it is the third of my voyages and I remember the happening on the yesterday morning and our skirmish with the savages by the whaleboat on the beach in the swaying surf the dawn is nearing and the stars fade out one by one my mind is clear I am omniscient now I even know what will the main course be at the royal dinner

* * *

25

He was both mortififucked and flafuckbergasted even though knowing that none of such fuckery was stocked in the armory of Counter-culture jargon nor in stashes of Underground shit regularly groomed, spruced, and injected with the thrice gelded claptrap squirted off around by news programs. Yet, the frustration he ran into, the monstrous enigma stuck right into his nose from the screen with another section in the orderless jumble of eff_thoughts_008.txt file radically disconcerted his ability for expressing the concurrent state of mind by more articulate means from his mother tongue.

The thoughts fished up 3 years back. No translation attempted. The catch was just dumped as is, raw, into the section. Maybe, the stuff’s being ‘raw’ made V fly off his handle and part with his decent, on the whole, manners and steered into unprecedented transcendental search for some unknown esoteric terminology. Quite possible of alien origin, the stuff was. Taking into account the wildly chaotic kind of reflex triggered off by the situation, quite possible. For simply self-preservation’s sake he had to disentangle from the frustrating consternation, which is the most plausible purpose of all that explosively transcendental shit.

That was the underlying reason degrading him to improper (linguistically) shrieks from the very core of his abused soul, like, ‘mothermortifucking’, ‘flafuckbergastshitting’ and stuff.

But let the first stone be tossed at him by that goody-goody one who would present a proof of any violation by the above-pinned terms of the sacred rules of normative language usage.

Well, who’s got the nerve? Come on! Shove it up any censor-editor software and – what? Any evident transgression found? Huh?

(S__t no! I be f__ked! The f__ker would sooner blow up its fuse than ferret out indecencies in the gibberish! Sorry for my emotional outcry joining that of V’s, yet in the humanly comprehensible way instead of his whimsical mortififuckery.)

And, since all of us know as well as I do that even an Open AI trained in all kinds of legal casuisticalities cannot concoct a case to sue V for anti-puristic paganism propaganda then what? What namely started so indescribably tempestuous excitement you rarely meet even in psychology handbooks, and indiscriminate use of words of obviously out-of-earth coinage?

At first sight, nothing special, it was just a file section with his thoughts dumped into. Okay fine, so what? It’s time already to get used to. But it’s when and where the fucking “but” blew up.

Yes, the thoughts were his no doubt, one hundred per cent his, BUT he had never thought them. Never. Ever. At all…

Were it otherwise he would remember thinking them. He’s not a not all there geezer succumbed to Alzheimer, aggravated by galloping sclerosis and progressive amnesia or the like niceties from their bunch.

(No wonder though, during his career the poor star had to act too many villains and heroes for his memory stack to keep the trace who’s he right now, what all these guys in white want of him, and where’s the fUcking clapperboard?!)

At the same time he was quite aware (albeit in a parallel way) that the thoughts were his. Besides, even his name coincided! No Bill Gates or that same Musk would think to themselves: “Yep, V, you’re in deep shit here!” or some suchlike stuff.

Yes, the thoughts were his (even though he never thought those) but the facts! Nothing of all that had ever happened! He’d most certainly remember!

Yet the “but” came not alone but with a sidekick ‘but’ and their team was, like, that notorious steel breaker which HealthCare does not recommend kick against. Because, at his probation period in the Institution, V got a clear idea that you can counterfeit a thinking style no more than change the thinker’s finger prints or the unique spot pattern in the skin about a giraffe’s neck (aha! now you got it too!).

The situation left him no other options but to let steam out in the shap of those linguistic mutants and went on reading the section in eff_thoughts_008.txt, and in the process be moving half-a-step ahead of every turn in thoughts of V-narrator, about things that V-reader never did yet knew beforehand the slightest detail, subtlest change in mood and motives presented therein. That was the way he read on confusedly mingling with some other V who was not him because he himself was that one who… that is… well… where are we? chaos! Chaos! CHAOS!.

(Fuck the senatorial salary! This kind of job will make you good for nothing but the sanatorium. Who needs that? Let’s split, V, right now!. Damn, he cannot hear… Hey, V, wake up! V! V! V! V! Look at you, V, what a fVcking mess all them those bitty bit-bytes are making of your V-screwed brains! They’re sucking out the last V-itamins from your V-nut noggin… Ha! Did I stutter? He does not react. All of him immersed into that eff_thoughts_008.txt because of which he’s not all there or not quite himself or… anyway it’s more than enough I swear!.

Damn! What to do? Slapping his damn cheeks? Nah! Forbidden. There always should be kept a distance between the author and his protagonist and God save you from ever boxing their ear! Anything else passes over unquestionable, do whatever you fancy, even dropping them off a skyscraper is no problems, moreover if it’s an American moron having no idea that ‘power is truth’, as G. Hegel told S. Balabanov, the director of the film “Brother – 2”.

And if your character behaves, you may give him rise up to CEO of the III Reich Chancellery to spite Goebbels. I know one unceremonious author, who just shoved his heroine under a railroad train and walked off free, like, I’m not the locomotive, I have had no body contact with the lady and my hands are washed with soap. Always.

As if the locomotive could do a thing in that situation, it had to keep up to the timetable… meaningful winks at each other in “Know nothing” style and heaps of alibis. And the killer author’s renown skyrocketed in no time especially, by the by, in that same America.

The horrid stuff became a famous movie, being remade on a regular basis. At managerial meetings in Netflyx they handle it both nonofficially and lovingly “Goldmine Choo-choo” to mark its annual enormous contribution into the company’s income.

However, you should understand the feelings of an average American as well, screwed up any way imaginable by the chauvinistic feminism. At least the Factory of Dreams production let them blow off some steam.

Hell! He still can’t hear me. Ahoy! V!)

Freak is not a loner by their nature. On the contrary, solitude freaks them out, the freaks. They just can't stand it, 'sitting all by myself' is the ultimate fright for them. Can even pee in their pants, some freak can.

For that reason they love to hang out with a crowd – cheap and effective, works like a charm. Cheap medication? Depends on the patients wallet. How much is the ticket to Beauty Queen inauguration? Or to the UEFA final? All is relative. Choose your range in the price list carefully. Don’t stretch your legs beyond the cover length or something along that lines.

And here comes the exact moment to scratch the philosophy bump in your skull. Which is the right dose when applying the medication?

The more, the merrier, bro! The thicker the crowd, the more fun!

2 is a company, 3 – a team, and so up the skyrocketing curve: gang-squad-crowd-tribe-nation-global community…

When not alone, you’re bigger, stronger, surer, fitter to make outsider freaks bite dust, those unlike us… who are less in numbers… those not assimilated as of yet… the freaks who are still not we, not with us.

‘What’s up? What are you at?’

‘Well, just writing.’

‘Whoa, man! This splash of tangled spaghetti is really your hand? No shit? The stuff is just unreadable.’

‘Etruscan’s illegible.’

Maybe, the guy is right. Should I practice typing at keyboard? 8 fingers plus 2 thumbs are more than just the latter two. Even the most slowed down of Paart’s pieces are not for a one-handed piano player… Looks like I need the skill. To reach the level of 27 characters per minute? Huh? Who knows, maybe indeed possible.

The last straw to break the back of my camel-obstinate procrastination became the $100 prize of monthly carrot in competitions at prozza.com to stimulate the gang of talents registered. Yeah, nothing doing, I have to train myself… There should be some programs to acquire the skills, should there?

It was not the first online crowd I’ve taken a shot at joining. Chat-rooms, online courses sending you spiffy certificate picture in PDF format for you to adjust the size and print it for your den wallpaper, joined flashmobs for fun and recreation, GitHub, Stackoverflow, Linux communities for computer music makers, forums of Linux music makers, wine-lovers, joint suckers, scuba divers… you name it.

It’s only that I somehow didn’t hang on for long, got bored or switched over to something else and later felt, like, lazy to pick the same stuff up and shake it on. However, with the MoM thing my usual routine broke, I stuck by and kinda didn’t feel like ditching it. The force of habit, maybe.

Firstly, the site had an exquisite interface, and the MoM meant business, you got it still at signing up. No questions concerning your credit card, age or gender. But, you had to tick “I agree” box, as if installing MS Service Pack of patches to your desktop and even add your digital signature at the bottom of that long form.

Well, and who would read all the blah-blah in a form? Ever? Especially small print, like:

“Note #1: a member should prove their being monster but not a freak, because the Mob of Monsters is for only those ready to attest their monstrosity on daily basis and thus confirm their right to hang out with the MoM.”

or further down:

“Note #2: deleting a MoM account is not a way to get off the hook and walk away.”

because of:

“Note #3: The MoM objective is to free the world from freaks by pruning them off.”

A crafty catch there, huh? That way a renegade MoMist did not last much longer than their deleted account, not even by means of a spontaneous flight to some exotic nook on the planet. Yes, the Internet and AI have made of us one global family with differently colored pennants above the separate barracks in our common camp.

Fugitive freaks got erased differently. An extensive choice of instrumentality for the purpose. Starting with blockhead MoMists ready to annul the freak in a straightforward simplistic Kamikaze style, and up to a carefully thought thru multi-move combination of an egghead leaving not a trace of their behind-the-curtains shadow in the scene of accident.

A traitor had not a chance of escape nor of finding a hole to lie low.

The MoM was a self-policing politically autonomous society embedded in all kinds of other political entities governed in their traditionally established ways. However, the MoM’s code came ahead of any other for a true MoMist. Not a little number of guys regretted bitterly their missing out on the habit of attentive reading preamble to agreements, still more cursed themselves for signing in on high under liquor-smoke-substance-etc.’s influence.

All jail-breaking tries ended monotonously alike – ragged flashes from patrol cars, checking the body to find the notorious “black mark” (in grateful memory of Billy Bounce, John Silver at al. from The Treasure Island by Robert L. Stevenson) clutched by the body’s dead hand or inserted into it’s pocket, or shoved up… the details tend to depend on particular circumstances, you know.

The tastefully designed MoM logo on the dark side of the card, and the reverse with the reprint of the demised defector’s digital autograph presented the constant grim attribute to that sort of cases. Quite telling an evidence it was for the detectives to deduce that their police station got another albatross of insolvable homicide hanging from their neck. And even if they follow the right track, the bitchy suspect at the last moment would just kill himself for being fucked up any way.

The MoM activities? Get-togethers, sure thing, what else a mob is supposed to do?

Weekly all-out meetings. At the startup period regional but later, when the process of snivel-freak culling, removal of renegades as well as suicides caused by depressive forebodings reduced the numbers of MoMists the meetings grew over into global events. Of the same frequency though.

3 consequential meetings unattended served a clear-cut clue that the guy’s unfit to stay in the ranks of MoM, volunteers to straighten the situation out hit Grinning-Skull button to get, if selected randomly, the “black mark” signed by the weakling who had dropped out of the race. That same routine as about renegades. To pepper up the shebang, the “black mark” not realized in 4 weeks indicated the undertaker’s unfitness for a… follow me? Yep, after a month wasted, the unproductive performer’s “black mark” popped up for volunteers’ roulette at the following meeting. Simple and sweet.

The online MoM meetings order knew no changes. MoMists attesting their monstrous worth. It could be, say, a selfie against the backdrop of a kitten hanged DIY or a picture of an anti-personnel land mine to be planted lovingly in the neighbor’s lawn plus the clip of city news report on the effect. All depended on the MoMist resourcefulness and imagination.

The all-in ballot wound up every online meeting, the dude whose nick hit the bottom in the Horrid Deeds list knew it's time to put their personal matters in order and/or acquire a lot in the cemetery of their choice or go on a drinking-fucking spree up to his last dollar. Tastes differ, you know.

It goes without saying that outside freaks took shots at intervening. Like, parents who had some ambitious plans for their scions, governments offended by the fact of some other bodies kept messing around with their potential cannon fodder and egg-heads, employees at federal security agencies because it’s what they were getting paid for.

The MoM site would be crashed, hacked, banned, replaced with redirection to the infamous '404'.

During a week MoM members found a missive in their email boxes, the link to the site’s new whereabouts. Welcome back, Mob! The glorious design of indomitable site added a gleaming button “Report an infiltrator”. Buckle up, fellas, on we zip!

Along that way of epic glory and grand achievements the MoM dwindled out into the upscale elite group of hundreds then tens Mob Monsters. The Great Magister Monsters.

A startup dare-devil who did not gave a fuck and registered (a fairly rare event as of late) was not to survive for long. The times of selfie sharing at “webinars” were gone for good.

When the Magisters’ number decreased (or, rather, heightened) to 9, the cam eyelets in the notebooks of that Magnificent Nine were safely plastered. Some over wary cats spoke thru Voice Changer Device which gave to their sound that effing accent of retarded bot with its balls screwed on too tightly. Still dropped in tracks, VCD or no VCD, with all their 9 lives each, because now there remain just 2 of us. I and Bart.

The showdown of the last of Mob Monsters needed no ballot neither VCD. Because on no sane guy you could sell the wheezy gurgle of half-choked squirrel as my natural voice, I need no distorting gizmos. As for Bart, he’s too much in love with his opulent baritone.

Yep, so we are, no cosmetics applied – a scraggy squirrel vs. conceited Narcissus.

For than reason, in full conformance to the MoM regulations, here am I on a 3-week vacation and no longer, hiking in this here wild mountainous back country. Not alone I am, a MoM old-timer feels better in a company. Nimeta is both my trip companion and my girlfriend, 2 in 1.

She's a cute-looking chick though not too bright which makes her even better. It was not falling at first sight for each other, notwithstanding her superb physic. But then it somehow turned into a stable relationship. Yep, somewhere up to about a year already. Anyways, she keeps a more precise track of time.

That time, about a year back, I just thought, ‘What the hell? Why to reject a nice extra blanket by your side? Just in case.’

But then, a beauty is admirable for 3 days at most when staying at your home. That’s why we live separately thanks to the wise advice of that Irishman who knew a couple of things about this world’s ways and stuff.

And for this here trek I surely need an extra blanket, nights in the highlands are pretty chilly.

I planned to go up the river valley to where there are waterfalls in the satellite map, not too big to lure tourists to this hinterland, which did enhance their attractiveness to me.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t hire a local guide in the farmsteads on the way. At this stretch in summertime the rednecks are too busy making hay at their tilted lots in nearby slopes. Having no time to brush sweat off their brows, they simply explained to keep to the old cow path along the left bank.

When the path got lost in the woods, I just went on. Path or no path the left bank still remains the left one until you turn back. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!

So we proceeded – the effing Pathfinder (I) leading forth and Nimeta puffing hard, and stomping bravely behind my back, and no complains. That’s my girl!

At some places the riverside cliffs jutted too close to the riverbed and those we had to skirt around from above climbing the slope grown with thick woods. The river remained down there roaring along, unseen thru the treetops in the descending wood.

And then there started the second tier of cliffs. Climbing farther up the slope to bypass them as well seemed like too much of an uphill job. So I walked on keeping close to the foot of the cliff formation rooted in the ledge of, like, over-50-degrees slant that kept growing steeper with the progress.

The most scurvy looked that loose gritty layer blanketing the ground. A kinda fine scaly slug in the layer rustled and spilled of in weeny brooklets from under your boots. The goddamn nasty hissing plus scary sight of those tiny rivulets of bitty dry grit rolling downward at every other step. And only the inertia of moving on did not allow to stop and think, until the slant became too abrupt.

It’s only when I pulled up, turned to the 50-feet-tall wall of gray cliff on my right and gasped from the revelation, I got it suddenly where the stone scales had been peeling off!

I turned around, Nimeta stood some ten feet off but I had no time to share the discovery. The hiss grew louder and I glided down standing midst a sprung up current of dry grit. The drift gathered momentum. My boots half buried in the flowing scales.

I took a GS left turn approaching a lonely tree trunk stuck out from the almost sheer tilt covered with gray scales too slippery to even stand upon. The trunk withstood my desperate cling. Yet, there was no time to take a breather nor make up my mind. Another dry grit-fall whooshed by. I looked up thru the eye-smarting sweat pouring down my face.

Nimeta glided past sitting on her behind. My left arm shoot out towards her, our hands clasped. Her slip braked, she hung on our handgrip. The stream of dry debris tumbled on to leap over the tilt edge down the wall into unseeable void.

She did not scream. The tensely drown lips in the pallid face let out no sound. The hiss died away in the river’s roar down there. The dry trunk of the dead tree twitched and creaked. But she kept silent.

Yet the eyes, her mad eyes. That insane fright stilled within them.

The clench of out hands was giving in, slackened slowly. Her wrist, moist with sweat, slipped thru my fingers.

There was no yell, all I heard was that hollow clump drowned by the non-stop noise of the mountainous river rolling on.

After a while I freed myself of the rucksack and let it roll over the edge. A 40-feet length of light synthetic rope stayed by me…

She lay face-down in a small, meter-wide inlet of backwater rimmed with rocks smoothed by ever hurrying current, still placid water spot it was, no deeper than a couple of inches. The hump of her backpack stayed above the water, safely dry.

I scooped out from her checkered jacket patch-pocket her iPhone to leave the body anonymous. Before the hicks get thru their labors—if those ever end—the woods gulpers would see to her becoming one with Nature.

Then I collected my rucksack a couple of meters downstream, drenched thru and thru…

A week later I raised the lid of my notebook and put the iPhone next to it.

Unbelievable, yet hacking the phone password had taken 4 days. Neither “Nimeta” nor her birth date, nor the name of Prince Charming she played mamas-&-papas with way back in high school didn’t work. Getting access turned an uphill job. Nothing of interest in the effing brick except for the file with passwords in Documents Folder.

To log in I typed her nick and entered the password.

‘Hi, Bart!’ was I welcomed affably by the attractive MoM’s interface.

I attached Squid and scribbled. The ugly lame spaghetti ran:

‘Hi, I am V and I’m a murderer.’

It took one whole minute of waiting for the response in block letters ‘HI, V, GOT IT.’

I have no idea what future is ahead of this here half-choked squirrel but I’ll not die of ennui.

Bet your farm…