*
There was a peculiar set of values in play at Mulligan’s. Dr. Pobbible setting their science loose on the streets served their purposes in a way, letting them break laws scot-free as it were. Still, profit wasn’t part of their purpose, nor not getting a cut, nor was profit even released from those broken laws, not money profit, not always, and while they were intent on removing Grace from the profit end of her scheme to sell street booms, essentially leasing their intellectual property, they discreetly let the enterprise flourish for anyone else involved, an enterprise veiled in a dark, back alley way, under the guise of low brow elegance. It seemed elegant. It seemed smart. Well, after all, it was all about smart.
Blowing up brains. Smart, very smart.
In time, if you’re determined to be learnering, you’ll learn about Mulligan’s obsession with self-defense, in every manner conceivable, be it via attack, defend or run and hide, and that was just for starters and they started with more. They studied self-defense in all of it’s occurrences, be it that of tulip, squirrel or bouncing baby girl, especially baby girls with access to explosives, even just hammers. To their way of thinking, self defense was one of the body’s main reasons to exist, and it tied up a lot of memory, and a lot of true and pure will.
Right, for as much as one might be self-destructive through diet or what-have-you, or even by flat out suicidal-ness, the pure will of the body is to use any input one puts into it to it’s advantage, acting like a loyal dog, excluding as much waste as it can and storing away what it can’t exclude as best as possible, maybe assuming the higher operating system will find use for it later. It’s the self-defense directive, and it can barely go haywire. Totally blown to smithereens, yes, but it will be directing your life to it’s end and the end, as if they were one and the same. Pure will, if you’re in the market for some, Mulligan’s is a seller. Now and then it makes to Branson’s, too, and if so, in the Spring, to be found in row 19 next to last year’s garden supplies, but if you’re in a rush, Mulligan’s is the place to be.
|m|*
It’s been around ever since it’s been around. No mathematical proof could disprove it, or try to. We’re talking about nemesis motion. Think drawing a chalk line and then returning that chalk line to the piece of chalk without forgetting that the chalk line had existed. And then survive the nightmares.
There’s nemesis motion, nemesis MOTION, and NEMESIS MOTION. The middle motion might need explaining. Just sayin'.
Let’s keep it small today, before it got as big as yesterday. Just know this, as long as yesterday passes, the future keeps on growing and going.
Enter Grace Pobbible, intern, what she was then. Grace didn’t know what. She was fearless and hungry, and money smart. She was also very smart. But she just wouldn’t behave. It were as if she were born with too much ‘G’. Or maybe too many. As big a problem as could ‘B’.
Just kidding about the ‘B’, not so much the ‘GGG’s’.
The hidden name on her secret shoppe read TRITON. Was it a code? No one understood it, but some ones knew what it stood for: Booms.
“What have you heard about them?” asked Emilee Spo. “Are they safe?”
“Would you be more prone to try this if they weren’t?” asked Jug.
“You never know,” she said. Emilee was slipping, had slipped, and saw her future dissolving just like that. Just keep adding more water. She needed an A in organic chemistry and needed it badly. It would make all her grades look better. So here she was in an alley on a Thursday night after dark when she should have been studying, or anywhere else.
On the other side of that alley was Estate Street. Just about every business on Estate Street, the main college drag in Bossche Bol, was attached to apartments and other variety of rental unit, and, here and there, dark rental cell. A dark rental cell is dark space, often criminal, sometimes there, sometimes not, sometimes there again, available for unaccounted room in a rental unit, such as the few feet above everyone’s head where lights and fans don’t nest or dangle, where dark business could take place on the dark market. Where nefarious exchange could be made with or without walls having to take place, although they could help; make things warm or cool and cozy. The dark market, in existence ever since crime organized by buying it’s first politician, the dark market where all criminals and politicians and other traitors to quant?m intelligence thought they could hide forever. And just might, until long after one can care to care. Peek a boo.
On a lease, criminal room rent, dark room once that space became place taken, was hidden within the rental unit rent. On lease paper, and in the space repository mind of city hall, a dark rental cell, a dark rogue as it were, was taxed within the rate of it’s rental unit rate, it’s paper rental rate, and all was well and accounted for, especially - magyck-ally - the rogue rental cell. The same piracy applied to income tax, but that didn’t concern the city government of Bossche Bol. On the dark market, that criminal room might rent out at ten times or a hundred times more than what was on the lease paper, with it’s own dark tax-return slithering upwards through the sewers. Dark business on a dark market where dark government thrived without consciousness of itself, and any breed of self. All safely hidden by darkness, wall-less-ness and heads turned the other way.
Grace Pobbible wrote a paper on dark business, dark government and dark market. It’s what got her her internship. It was that knowledge that got TRITON up and going. TRITON the shoppe TRITON. It was dark, but not criminal, yet. It was unheard of and she was just testing the waters to see what would happen. She really just hoped to make enough money to cover her expenses. In point of fact, she wasn’t paying any rent whatsoever. She might have taught dark business a thing or two. You go girl.
Mulligan’s knew what she was coming in, that being a little too comfortable with the dark market, and knew there would be trouble, but she had an upside. Up up up. All the way up.
Back at Emilee’s encounter, it was the early days and Grace ran TRITON, the boom room, completely on her own, without leaving a trace. At least not a trace that wouldn’t disappear in the light of day. It only took a quarter of a no to make it all disappear. Anything at all disappear. “How much do you need to remember and how fast?” asked Grace.
“The more the merrier,” said Emilee Spo. She was feeling a little giddy. This was crazy-ville - alleys, clandestine meetings, skipping out on her standing Thursday night malt shoppe date with Howard. It felt just like the time Jug took her along to score that heroin. Cheney true black. That stuff had been killer. Made Vader pink seem like training candy.
“That’s no answer,” Grace scolded. “I can get you two hours for two weeks, two weeks for two months, or two months for two years.”
Emilee scrunched up her face. “What are you talking about?”
“I told you, Em,” said Jug. “Go with two weeks twice.” Emilee scrunched in Jug’s direction.
“This is crazy. I’m going home. All the way home.”
“Wee wee wee,” rhymed Grace, poetically challenged as she was. She reached out and grabbed Emilee by the arm. “Listen, Missy, I put a little nick in your brain and you’ll remember the last two weeks verbatim, and when and as often as you wish.
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Verbatim, every word you read and heard, exactly as you read and heard them, even if you didn’t realize you read or heard them. And that’s just for starters.”
“I meant little nick.”
“Oh,” said Grace. “Think smaller than a regular nick.”
|m|*
Grace Pobbible brought to the street, for the sake of needy college students who couldn’t get by by any other way, street booms, an infallible way to pass a test. Not just pass, ace it with flying colors.
Needy? In need of A’s. Not just artificial A’s, not C’s disguised as A’s thru scamming and cramming, A’s backed by quant?m knowing that would generate mo
re A’s.
What did it cost? Here’s the hell of it, for one thing it cost part of your brain taking place. Not so much your brain as your mind, relocating it, a speck at a time, in the passed. Yes, the passed, not the past. The past does not exist. Yet. It’s one of those projects Mulligan’s and their associates are working out. Even such associates as Grace Pobbible providing the necessary brains, nicked as they might be.
Within the darkness of TRITON, as in the backroom where Grace operated, the boom room she liked to say, was a chair that seemed be-speckled in a pure blue, ghostly light. Whether it transmitted or absorbed wasn’t discern-able. It was almost like an infinitely fine dust and Emilee saw that it stuck to her where it touched her, and dissolved away. The light that didn’t touch her seemed to bounce up a short ways into the near atmosphere creating almost a cone of illumination revealing only the chair and anyone near it, that being Grace and a little of Jug. Were there more light one would see the set up was mostly show, although it showed a little too much for Grace’s intents. The rest of the business space was trashed, covered in grime with used tires and chunks of wood lying about, all invisible due to the light, light as it was.
“This will hardly hurt, but it will some,” said Grace.
“How much?”
The Return of Triton Page 3
