Jis for Industrial Moron Pt2

Udaipur, Rajastan, 1994

Not bad.
You've got Lupton where you want him.
You put your pen down on the yellowing melamine surface of the table,
its rusting tubular frame wobbling as you lean forward to reach for the
yellow-plastic-wrapped block at its far-end. You draw the crudely
sealed lump towards you and unfold a Capstan paper from the pack
nestling amid assorted other drug-related paraphernalia. You unclip the
stainless steel knife from your trouser-belt and pull out its blade,
positioning it in the dying flame of a candle-stub waxed to the
upturned lid of your hash tin - the only light in the midnight of your
powerless single room. The blade sparks and spits momentarily then
settles into its new home and slowly blackens. You remove the blade and
wipe away the soot with a rag and peel back the yellow cellophane from
the block of Pakistani delight.

Wafts of sweet and sickly burning scent rise as the warm blade sears
and passes through the rich darkness of the opium, making it bubble
against the hot steel. You inhale the ascending vapours and bring the
blade over to the paper, smearing the black tar evenly along its middle
from end to end. You snap a Commando filter-less in half and crumble
half the contents onto the black smear of poppy-honey. It sticks like a
fly to paper and you roll a perfect cone with careless precision and
survey your prize briefly before slipping it between your salt-dry,
chapping lips and leaning forward, drawn like a helpless moth to the
golden yellow of the flame. You inhale and immediately exhale sharply,
a plume of golden light shooting out from the end of the cone. You suck
in sharply again, this time causing the end to glow orange and a cloud
of white smoke and dark promise to fill your throat and lungs. You
smoke the reefer greedily, again burning your stained lips. The sweet
smoke fills your lungs and your world goes dark again, you release a
plume of grey and fall through space into the softness of the bare
wooden bed and sink; and as you sink, so you rise. Like a phoenix,
released from its earthly shackles, your mind frees itself and floats
above your inert body, lying corpse-like and useless on the wooden
slab, and takes to its nightly voyage through time and memory. On opium
wings of light and timeless oblivion it sails off into the midnight and
drifts away across the lakes and deserts to the distant Himalayas which
call it back time after time to its eternal home in the hills.

Through time and space, on its never-ending journey it takes you back
to Vashisht, Himachel Pradesh and you are sitting at dawn on a balcony,
watching the sun rise over the crest of a mountain peak, the moist air
thick with the scent of marijuana and lush foliage. You find a chillem
loaded and ready and you light up and sit back and let the world
unfold.

* * *

As he propelled himself through open space, the visual cortex of
Lupton's brain started to reconstruct a fairly routine array of
realities to fill the void. With each step the factory was
systematically reconstructed for Lupton's benefit by his own mind. At
first just a wall, floor and ceiling, and then as his legs propelled
him to the left, the second of the testing rooms was reconstructed
immediately, just as it had been before - Blind, prototypes, equipment
and all.
Lupton propelled himself through the second testing room easily, almost
as a rewind of his earlier passage. He prepared to transcend the first
room with the same ?lan of memory reversal, back to his marshmallow to
have his arms removed and his brain sucked out by anti-thought, but
something unexpected and, Lupton suspected, sinister occurred. Mid-way
through his memory reversal, the Blind held him by his new arms and
seemed intent on halting his self-propulsion - something of a
disappointment for Lupton, who was just beginning to enjoy the rhythm
of his own yomping.

The Blind held him until he had overcome his own momentum then one of
them - the larger and possibly more feminine - moved in front of him.
It peered into the hole that was apparently at the front of Lupton and
through which the light came in to be constructed into things. It
peered intently into the hole, smiling sympathetically, or possibly
apologetically. Lupton often had trouble telling whether the Blind were
being sympathetic because they thought they new better than him or
apologetic because they knew they knew less. Either way was immaterial.
As long as a part of Lupton's brain insisted on constructing
anti-thought and allowing the Blind to believe that they were in
control of it, he had little choice but to do their bidding. This
quandary continued to occupy Lupton as the hole in his front focussed
and attempted to decode the blind thing and its intentions. It was
gesturing with a spare arm towards a roughly padded cube. Lupton
searched his lexical banks. They politely suggested the classification
"chair". Lupton made an appropriate facial gesture and oozed some drool
down his chin. He checked the word bank which genially concurred that
"chin" was indeed the best label for the blob of bone beneath his
oblong. "Mouth" suggested the same part of his brain.

Lupton appeared to be waking up. It also appeared that the large blind
escort required him to reposition himself spatially and this "chair"
seemed to be a means to that end. Lupton was unsure, knowing the
fickleness of the Blind as he did, whether this "chair" would herald
nastiness, pleasure, pain, further examination or needles. Uncertainly,
he allowed his legs to shuffle him towards the "chair". A host of
"muscles" then allowed him to acquiesce to gravity in a controlled and
even movement until he found himself reclined, though nervously, in
this "chair".

He awaited further instruction from the Blind, who appeared
uncharacteristically sheepish. They too shuffled away, slowly at first
and backwards in a series of straight "lines" until they apparently
considered themselves to be at an appropriate distance and in position,
at which point they stopped and stood "looking", not at Lupton, but
around generally.
Lupton continued to wait and watch. Not wishing to incur the wrath of
the Blind, he avoided
their gaze and focussed his attention instead on the other prototypes
in the testing room. The prototypes were always discernible from the
Blind by one of two characteristics. Either they sat motionless,
staring into Time, waiting for their head-holes to construct something,
or gibbered around maniacally, constructing too much - either way they
showed no direct interest in their surroundings, unlike the Blind who,
despite their sensory deficit, continuously surveyed their domain with
a unique combination of detachment and nervousness Lupton had never
experienced in any other life-form.

In contrast to the prototypes, Lupton was interested in his environment
- positively absorbed in fact. The word-bank had begun to kick into
action and was labelling all the material objects that Lupton's brain
had constructed from the light coming into his head. As he scanned, his
lexicon labelled - "picture ...
floor...plate?chair...spittle...leg...light...priest...
tea...chess..."
Lupton jerked involuntarily. His word-finder had spat out 'priest' at
a man in a frock, gliding through the testing-room with a book in one
hand. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. Lupton relaxed a little and
continued to scan. In the corner two prototypes were engaged in a
curious exercise. They were rearranging a selection of coloured balls
on a table. Lupton scanned more closely in an attempt do discern their
intent. Several weeks passed, which reduced themselves, in time, to
handful of days which in turn condensed to few hours until, eventually,
months later, a minute or so had lapsed. By this time of course,
Lupton's colossal intellect had deciphered the rules of engagement of
their task. The object seemed to be to direct a white ball in order to
strike as many other balls as possible. The white ball was propelled
via the horizontal wielding of a tapered "stick" approximately four
feet in length. Each of the participants took it in turn to batter the
poor white ball in order to study the multitude of possible angles of
impact it might cause between orbs. The only other procedural dictate
seemed to be that under no circumstances should a ball go into any one
of the six gaps distributed around the edge of the table. The only
aspect of this activity which made any sense to Lupton was that neither
participant seemed at all interested in it.

He ignored the table people, who had started staring at him anyway, in
order to scan the remainder of his surroundings. They were
predominantly white, though punctuated with occasional coloured blobs
of padded matter which a part of his brain seemed to understand and
label as "furniture". There were also a number of prototypes and
Blinds. Lupton's consciousness rolled slowly back into action and
started to suggest that some of these prototypes were 'observing' him.
He became a little agitated inside, but found himself unable to turn
his head. It occurred to his huge brain that, because of this temporary
stasis, he may also have appeared to have been 'observing' them.

Lupton's nervousness increased. Some part of his brain clicked into a
default setting and the cogs in his neck once again started to rotate
his head. This time towards a hole in the wall plugged with "glass". A
"window", suggested his word bank. Lupton was getting sharp.
He focussed his eyeballs on the "window". Its "glass" had a curious
fluid quality which interested him. It seemed to be comprised of a
multitude of colours of ill-defined shapes which constantly migrated
and re-arranged themselves, wandering and roaming like fuzzy amoebae
around the surface of the "window". The upper portion seemed to be of a
dull pale blue, relatively even and stationary in comparison to the
lower part, which was a confusion of migrating blobs of varied
intensity and hue, twisting and shifting both form and position. Lupton
focussed his eyes on one of the blobs. To the amazement of Lupton's
brain, the blob became less distinct while the "glass" in which it
lived became better defined.
Deeply odd.

Lupton attempted to focus his eyeballs harder still, but could manage
neither to cure the "glass" of its migratory-pattern disorder, nor to
better define the physical aspect of the "window". He tried to focus on
one small area in an attempt to make the less predictable portion of
this "window" entity disappear or at least temporarily de-construct it
from his world - as he had clearly managed to do to the table-people,
the "Blind", Jack the Needle and the rest of the factory Alas, to no
avail. Lupton relaxed his eyeballs.
Boom! Shanti.
Something truly incredible had occurred. Quite inadvertently and
apparently by simply relaxing the eye-globes in his head, Lupton had
somehow caught the "window" unawares and it had metamorphosed into
something else entirely. He had succeeded in projecting his
consciousness into a parallel and hitherto unknown dimension in which
existed a ... - Lupton's brain went into overdrive - a "car park".
There was more. This "car park" seemed to contain "things". Not just
any "things" but cars and people and tar-mac and white lines and an odd
miniature chicken-like creature, with a bright yellow triangular
face, presently engaged in the act of whacking its head into the floor
apparently in an attempt to wake itself up, or kill itself or transform
itself back into the "window" of which it had until recently been a
part.

Lupton almost gibbered with glee. He stretched forward a flap at the
end of one arm to touch the creature and reassure it - it was, after
all, very tiny, maybe one-thousandth of the width of an eyeball - but
the flap's path was blocked by some invisible field, cold to the touch,
which rang out with a low and almost tuneful thud - "far-womph" it
went. Lupton thought. Could this field be some remnant of the
"window's" earlier form? Might it be that it had disappeared in one
aspect while remaining in another? Could it be that he had somehow
succeeded in seeing through the physical screen of the "window" into a
parallel realm which had been there all along? If so - Lupton's genius
was starting to burn with its former brilliance - if so, were others
aware of this other world? It was possible that some of the prototypes
were aware of it. The Blind, of course, had no way of perceiving such
dimensions.
As Lupton ruminated, a figure caught his eye. It was the frocked
gentleman who had earlier startled his word-bank. A part of his brain
recalled the word "priest", while another accessed all priestly and
priest-related references. This was a fairly straight-forward exercise
as Lupton knew something about priests and their habits. The parts of
Lupton's brain put their heads together to find an explanation for this
new quandary. Although it was obvious to Lupton that the world he was
now observing occupied the same time as the one in which he was now
sitting, he could not at first understand how this "priest" had
relocated himself through space. This was particularly nagging as his
brain seemed sure that the solution was so straightforward that he was
surely missing the wood for the trees. He relaxed his brain and
concentrated his eyeballs at this "priest". It was approaching a
prototype which was practising sitting on a grass verge next to the
"car park" in the car park world.

The prototype seemed to recognise the "priest" as they focussed their
eye-holes at each-other and began moving their mouth-holes although -
and this was the biggest problem for Lupton - they appeared not to be
eating anything. As they moved their mouth-holes they contorted their
"faces" into strange shapes as if trying to disguise their identities.
Their head-balls also moved around. Up. Down. Side to side. They then
flapped their hand-flaps, stretched their oblongs sideways and walked
away in opposite directions. Lupton was flabbergasted. How on Earth had
the "priest" transported himself into window-reality and why on
Car-park would two people disguise their faces, flap their arm-flaps
and then repel one another. These questions were trivial, however, next
to the main question to which Lupton presently addressed himself - the
mystery of eating without food.

An as-yet unused part of Lupton's brain now introduced itself with a
suggestion. That suggestion was called "speech". The same portion of
brain simultaneously prompted his head to re-position itself laterally
and to scan the alternative world of the testing room, which his brain
immediately reconstructed from the light coming through the front of
his head. He soon realised that many of the prototypes and Blind seemed
to be moving their mouth-holes without eating. Lupton surmised that
this also might be "speech".