Industrial Moron

Calcutta, Bengal, India, 1994.

Lupton spat an insect into the dirt and aimed his Bullet down the
street ahead.
It flew by a small group of street children loading edible garbage into
an otherwise disused baby carriage. The children seemed barely to
notice the Bullet, being no more life-threatening than any of the other
confused chaos and projectiles that combine daily to form the sensory
soup that is early morning Calcutta. The Bullet tore obliviously
through this almost living sprawl and hub-bub on its unstoppable
trajectory towards a second cart, this one full of broken metal scrap
and car-parts.

The bullet scraped along the side of the cart with the grinding wrench
of grazing steel before ricocheting back, amid the brief and
incomprehensible yells of the cart's owner, into the sprawl of the
street and back under the control of an only slightly rattled Lupton.
Another insect landed in Lupton's teeth and some other manner of grit
struck him in the left eye, causing him to swerve momentarily towards a
ruminating white cow passively observing from the side of the street.
Lupton pulled in the clutch and kicked the machine into second. Despite
its age, the Bullet responded, allowing Lupton to right his trajectory
effortlessly before taking a right turn into Sudder Street.

He opened the throttle of the aging Enfield and its engine groaned to a
higher pitch as he steered his course for home, the bike's frame
rattling; its handlebars shaking his arms to the elbows. He tightened
his grip, straightened and leaned back as the Bullet accelerated and
dragged itself and its rider forward. As man and machine pulled ahead,
a large pale object loomed into Lupton's peripheral vision. He glanced
sideways to left to see an Ambassador rolling alongside him; he
accelerated to pass it.
The Ambassador accelerated. Lupton peered left again to catch they eye
of the Ambassador's driver. Beyond the window sat a bearded European
man of refined and well-groomed appearance who continued to fix his
gaze dead ahead as he accelerated further. Lupton opened the Bullet's
throttle to its fullest point and lurched ahead of the Hindustan before
pulling in front if it to take the left turn. He looked up at the
street ahead. He braked. A cow blinked and ruminated lazily in his
direction as he slammed on both brakes. The bike swung left and started
to fall away from under him. Lupton held on and heaved upwards. The
engine screamed in protest, the tyres screeched in agony, the cow
looked on and chewed.
The Ambassador kept on rolling.

As Lupton struck the radiator grill of the white Ambassador, he felt
the bike drop from beneath him and briefly saw it spin away into the
market stalls lining the road. He tried in desperation to grab hold of
something but there was nothing left for him to anchor himself to and
he found himself grappling at thin air as he splayed upwards and
forwards to the Hindustan's bonnet. He found himself paralyzed,
stationary and stranded in a snap-shot outside of time. He could see
the people around him looking on in detached half interest; the cow
chewing ambivalently. The beaten old 1964 Enfield Bullet, broken but
raging amid the wreckage of a food cart, and the driver, the
cultured-looking middle-aged bearded European staring, neither in fury
nor in fear, but in a detached awe and apparent disbelief at the
unwashed, unshaven road-trash currently pivoted atop the bonnet of his
otherwise immaculate Hindustan Ambassador and gazing, equally agog,
back at him. Their eyes met for long enough for them both to register
each other's images. The tanned,
long-haired and odorous example of psychedelically-clad drifter that
was Lupton and the refined, though equally startled, white suited,
greying fifty-something, that was the Ambassador's driver, a trail of
crimson blood trickling from above his left eye.

Lupton just had time to ponder which way he would fall, before the
moment-outside-of-time passed as abruptly as it had begun and the
windscreen of the Ambassador rushed forward and slammed into him, his
head bouncing off its shattered surface with a dull thud. His flailing
legs whipped up behind him and their weight propelled him up onto the
roof of the car. He slid along its polished top, then down, feet first
to the rear bumper and slumped, broken and semi-conscious in the road
behind. As blood and darkness descended over his blurred vision, his
head immovable and his consciousness fading, Lupton mustered all his
available mental powers and focussed them on trying to read and repeat
to himself the number and make of the car which was already revving its
engine and spitting grease and oily exhaust from its pipe and Calcutta
road-grit from its rear tyres into his face as it fled the scene, its
horn blaring and its engine racing in desperation to escape.

The first thing to leave him was the sound, followed by all feeling
from his legs and lower body until the lights went down altogether and
he was left broken and alone in the darkness.

* * *

Consciousness found Lupton with no arms and lying inside a marshmallow.
That he was in a marshmallow he surmised from the texture and colour
that surrounded him. That he had no arms he deduced by their absence.
He lay trying to ascertain his identity and to recall recent events, at
the same time pondering the nature of the marshmallow and, somewhat
casually, his absence of arms.

Slowly, the stumps where his arms had once been began to pull forward,
tightening and stretching the tendons between his neck and shoulders.
The active part of Lupton's brain could foresee what was going to
happen. He tried to hold his head in position, pushing it down into the
soft base of the marshmallow, but the confection was no match for the
mechanical process underway in his upper body. With the industrial
inevitability of lock-gates, his tendons stretched to the heaving
contractions of his neck and shoulder muscles and his head began to
roll right. A part of Lupton's brain knew that soon enough the "Blind"
would come to fill him with their heinous anti-thought, but for now
that same part of his brain was relieved to be active and receiving
data, albeit confused.

He pushed further and harder into the mallow, but there was no stemming
the roll of his head. As his stumps continued to pull forward a string
of spittle started to spring down from the side of his mouth - equally
uncontrolled and distorted into a tortured oblong, its bottom lip
folding out and down to the right, in apparent pursuit of his ears
which, transported by his head, were being re-aligned by whatever
manner of magnetism was drawing head stumps and all, towards the
west.

As the rotation of Lupton's head continued, so the pain increased as
the cramps tightened their grip on his upper neck and lower jaw and his
body contorted and twisted beyond any control that Lupton or his brain
could muster, his will having been usurped by the "Blind" and their
omnipotent anti-thought.
Lupton's head reached its fullest natural extent, the skin of its jaw
and neck stretched to a taught membrane across their tortured tendons,
but the anti-thought would not be content with the west and as the cogs
of his neck continued to revolve, his head rolled on, apparently headed
south. Lupton's head had reached the fullest rotation his vertebrae
could allow, and yet it strained to go further, wanting to twist itself
into destruction. Lupton tried to let out a moan of pain from his
salivating oblong, only to find that the anti-thought wouldn't allow
it.

His vertebrae started to creek and grind as his left tendon stretched
to breaking point. Lupton's stumps pulled harder, his neck buckled and
his throat tightened until, as the spittle hit the mallow and lowered
itself to the floor, his body ground to a halt and with no more warning
than it had started with, the process reversed and like a piston
releasing steam the cogs rewound with the same inevitability and
unstopability as before, allowing Lupton's stumps, neck and head to
slowly subside back to their original positions. Lupton's head felt
heavy and loose as he let it sink into the pink of the mallow and a
pool of his own spent saliva. After a few seconds, or maybe days, the
light quality inside the mallow began to change and newer, fresher
light started to ooze in to replace the stale light that had been there
before. The new light brought some sounds in with it in the form of a
creek, and Lupton's acute visual senses picked out two forms within a
rectangular vessel or orifice from which the new light seemed to be
pouring.

The life-forms were blind but plodded purposefully toward Lupton and
his head and found them both where they lay in the mallow, using
whatever dulled sensory mechanisms they possessed. They hauled him to
his lifeless but twitching legs and made some sounds of
incomprehensible "Blind-gibber" before replacing his arms for him. As
usual, this limb-restoration procedure was accompanied by a passage of
blood through Lupton's upper body and a pleasant tingling sensation
which said "all will be well" and then smaned.

The blind continued to mumble and gibber as they led Lupton towards the
rectangle of light which, a part of his brain remembered, contained the
factory. The factory was as he remembered. White with a smell of
vulcanising solution and the ammonia they used to create memories and
fear. He was led down the main conveyer, past secret rooms bearing
numbers of prototype intelligences still under construction, into the
first of the main testing rooms. The first testing room was a hum-drum
affair containing a number of neatly-ordered rows of storage slabs,
some containing prototypes. These prototypes were inactive.

Between the two rows of slabs stood one of the factory's programming
devices - an ingenious box of coloured lights which fed the core
processors of the Blind and prototypes alike with the information they
were permitted to ingest and assimilate. Only the blind themselves were
showing any interest in this particular programming machine, whilst the
prototypes stood around like statues, looking incredulously around at
each other and at Lupton as the Blind milled about seemingly unaware of
their presence.

One of the prototypes stared at Lupton. Lupton stared back, they both
looked around at the
half-dozen or so Blind as they glided around somehow missing the
furniture and gibbering.
Another prototype joined in the gaze-exchange to form a triangle - much
safer - of prototype
consciousness. These three, at least, knew that there was some sanity
left in the world and that hope could still prevail. There was a gibber
of excitement from two female Blinds as the machine fed their heads
with the crucial information that a being was to be endowed with
several million tokens. There was a murmur of excited approval from the
female Blinds. Both prototypes exchanged stares of wide-eyed
incredulity with Lupton and with each other before the conveyor carried
him and his escorts on to the second testing room.

The second testing room was almost identical to the first but with
pink slabs, a faint odour of something sweet mingling with the
vulcanising solution, and female prototypes. The Blind were of mixed
gender and only four in number. The machine in the room had different
programming. On this, apparently more advanced apparatus, several
suited beings were proudly announcing their new plan to buy fresh air
from poor countries in return for poisoned gas in order to maintain the
standard of living of those people who could afford the air. This was
followed by a series of colourful attempts to promote the latest
bad-air technologies to the Blind. Most of the female prototypes
appeared uninterested. None exchanged looks with Lupton. One was
looking out of a transparent section of wall. Two were reading hinged
blocks of paper. The Blind waited with palpable excitement for further
programming.
Lupton's blind escorts directed him to the far end of the testing room
where his vision constructed a doorway. He passed through it and his
escorts urged him towards another glowing area of fresh light.

The brightness subsided to reveal two figures. Both were blind. One was
wearing an
over-garment similar in hue to the bright strip raining the new light
from above. The other wore blue and presented a religious aspect, both
in posture and countenance. It was female.
The first Lupton recognised as Jack the Needle. The second he didn't
recognise.
The sight of Jack the Needle jerked Lupton into awareness. His
surroundings became suddenly familiar and it was with a mixture of fear
and relief that he positioned himself for take-off in the central chair
of the small cube. Fear at the prospect of further anti-thought being
pumped into the purity of his system, and relief at the fact that this
procedure was at least real. The procedure was real inasmuch that it
involved the verifying aspect of all Lupton's real experiences. It
involved the only discernibly objective evidence that Lupton ever had
any more of what was real and what not. It involved the sole tangible
thing that could confirm for Lupton his physical existence in the
factory and the worlds beyond it. It involved the joyful relief of his
old friend Pain. Lupton looked straight ahead. There was a clock on the
wall. It had stopped at five past one.

Jack sneered his happy sneer and, like a stage magician, with a sudden
flourish and flair rarely viewed beyond Victorian music halls, produced
an apparatus Lupton could not recall having seen before. It was shaped
like miniature torpedo, transparent for the majority of its shaft, the
remaining portion blue.

Jack seemed satisfied indeed with his new apparatus and shared with
Lupton a conspiratorial, if malevolent, grin before producing, with
rather less of a flourish, the familiar elasticised apparatus which
formed both the entr?e and the hallmark of the needle-show. Jack
clicked the torpedo gimmick into a blue plastic sheath. The sheath had
at its base a needle. Neither Lupton nor Jack was surprised by this.
Accepted procedure required it.

As Jack tightened the strap around Lupton's upper arm his vision
constructed a perverse violet-blue worm of pent-up liquid rising like a
serpent from his lower arm; its blueness starkly and beautifully
contrasting with the lifeless fish-white of its host limb.
Jack leant forward, his new apparatus proudly poised between thumb and
fore-fingers. He positioned his left thumb in the crotch of Lupton's
elbow and guided the needle down towards the pulsing blue.

Lupton's eyes widened with a curious mixture of pleasure, relief and
perverse satisfaction at his new pain as the finely-quilled splinter of
clean steel first dented and then split his pallid white skin. The
membrane retaliated futilely before absorbing the steel splinter as it
slid effortlessly beneath the taught gossamer of skin and into his
vein. And then the gimmick. Not, as Lupton had expected, the inward
surge of anti-thought, but rather an outward surge of
crimson. It invaded the torpedo tube like a confused army of lost
particles; slowly spreading and exploring the apparent void before
consolidating and rushing forward en masse to spread
throughout the length of the vessel. Lupton looked up sharply at Jack
the Needle, his face abruptly slapped into a respectful and amazed
contortion of half grin, half gape. Jack smiled sympathetically but
said nothing. Lupton wondered vaguely but briefly what was going on. He
seemed to be experiencing an anti-injection. Clearly, the Blind were
taking a sample of his thought for examination, but - and here was the
rub - if his thought was coming out, what was going in? If something
was going somewhere, then what was replacing the something?
Lupton performed a rapid mental calculation. Logically, it had to be
the "somewhere". Lupton was being injected with somewhere! What could
be the nature of this "somewhere"? In order for the something to have
found a home, the place where it now was must have originally been
occupied by nothing. Lupton's brain searched for known things which
contained nothings. "Vacuum" his brain decided.

Was Lupton being injected with a vacuum? As far as he knew, he had been
in the factory for some time, but had encountered no vacuums. Where
could Jack have obtained such a void? There was only one place Lupton's
brain knew of that contained abundant voids. No wonder Jack was looking
so pleased with the torpedo gimmick, he had apparently acquired a small
quantity of bottled space. A notable achievement even by factory
standards. Lupton was impressed. He was having his thought replaced by
space! How very rewarding! Lupton grinned sincerely, if a little
maniacally at Jack who returned a calmly non-committal look.
Lupton was very satisfied with his new space. Jack seemed satisfied
with his new sample of
thought too and in due course eased the torpedo apparatus with its
incumbent steel splinter from Lupton with an audible 'foop' as Lupton's
outer membrane snapped shut over the wound. The usual procedure of
vulcanising and ammonia followed and the strap was removed by the
triumphant Jack who, thought sample in hand and space sample in Lupton,
muttered gibberish to the Blind who gestured Lupton to his feet.

Lupton stood with ease, despite the gravity which seemed intent on
keeping him stuck to the seat. His two blind escorts gestured him
towards a hole in the wall where the door used to be and Lupton made
his legs move. This was his favourite device for propelling himself.
His legs moved and his body followed towards the hole and the as yet
un-constructed realities that lay beyond it.