Scope of The Ecarlate Company (as if displayed in the 'Industry' section of a certain encyclopedic sidebar):

• Aerospace
• Automotive
• Broadcasting
• Chemical
• Construction
• Culture
• Electronics
• Energy
• Entertainment
• Fashion
• Food
• Financial
• Information technology

And all of this could be yours too, but mostly it is mine, it is to myself, and it is myself who takes. More mundanely the Ecarlate Company operates Europe's largest private airline, but mostly Mother spends her time building bridges over the Messina Strait, something Pliny the Elder proposed, with which proposal every Roman Emperor consorted and finally Charlemagne disposed of the will to do, and in your world it is what every politician swears to do; it is totemic for the Italian lawmaker, sprightly running or freshly elected, to employ that empty synecdoche knowing damn well and remembering all too often who really receives the subsidies from the European Union and who runs out the clock on a machine that prints money for as long as a timer's ticking - we'll take heroin out of Afghanistan, coke out of Colombia and under my stewardship we will connect Sicily to the rest of Southern Italy. Mother is two millennia over age of majority and has ruled over this island that so badly resisted union with the arrogant Aragonese and the nationbuilding scholars of Dante's Tuscan which so dutifully constructed the fake of the Italian language almost continuously until 1890 at which point her sails pretended to have an allergic reaction similar to those whose two theatrical masks are legumes and Epi-Pen to the winds of Atlantic Capitalism blowing in, full force as a cold front downstream from popish/Papal Rome to Calabria from which in your life there are no roads into the Mediterranean and only vermal cracks highly sensitive to even the most of constructive criticism or the constructive in any sense overland of which there are so many that they form a siphonophore to be christened by demotic colloquium 'road'. Organized crime naturally precipitates, constructs and somehow resists industrialized capitalism, all the more swell for Mother. After the failed unification in the early nineteenth century and crackdown on organized crime by the Anglic of the central Papal citadel, American colonial transplants - primarily Northeners of the always segregated coasts, central and early heritable benefactors of the rape of Caribbean and the enemies of the wholly reconstructed South where railroads run through Texas, West Virginia is the democratic heartland, so blue as to upkeep the facade of progress and the value of every vote to the present and gangs of Mesoamericans roam and scalp ranching whites on the payroll of the land itself, those men from 'Bureau Hotel' as it is now called - the Sicilian Mafia I know moved down here to this Treasure Island, home to generation on generation Sephardic Jews both established here before the failed Reconquista and during, home to the Umayyadic People of the Final Book also arrived with all of the stolen secrets of the Renaissance on these shores in the course of the same catastrophe and the Arabs from whom no length of carpet was not rolled out, dealings with which made Mother her trillions, the Port-Caliphate of Sicily, and the Keepers of This Thing of Ours were bought off with parliamentary positions, pizzo to pizzicato-voiced prim and proper clerks and czars, men of clipped bursts of fastspoken long-on-the-page nouns-technicalities, and a pledge of allegiance whose murmurations come with much more evident enthusiasm than its cousin that is profaned on the regular by a population of Christophile automata, all people of the Golden Plates be they Protestant or Baptist for Mormonism is the American Exception and the American Individ indivisible by anything but machetes and mortar and the sight of slightly more expensive shoes, some sixty to seventy times greater than that of this island. Mother came to the shores of the failed continent with self-issued warrant for Andrew Johnson ("Expelled, gagged, and cowardly, Mr. Andrew Johnson, infamous embarrassment to Lincoln and a signature to the most traitorous acts in American history, left power as demanded by the legitimate will of the people and the heart of Liberty and went most appropriately with the Devil. One of the greatest thieves in the yet still unwritten American history, Mr. Johnson now enters history also as to date one of its greatest cowards") and a decree to herself penned in third person to unmask every cotton field as a killing field and every man with whose blood its ruinsoil is fed to be free and honorable, and so hung from longleaf pines high up enough for an audience with God the traitors, lives amounting to short leaves whalefallen deep in the hole of the outhouse, or else hung emasculated from mockernut hickory mocked nuts, in pleading postmortem spasms of the throat as the body puffs in rigor mortis screaming I surrender to the supreme Reason of egalite liberte fraternite from the Pyranees to New Orleans. With her came Dolor, who made things dolorous for the unlucky elect indeed, who yet remembered what the Spanish did to the Inca, Aztec and the Maya, born of the Will to Revenge and well-met by Mother as a mercenary fighting for Napoleon switching sides for property and honor having creviced the entire continent blowing up ships departing for the New World from European ports or else taking them hostage and doing mercenary stints under various monarchs in pursuit of devaluing the unit's performance as low as it takes to reach brimstone, tracking the newly designated convict, each slaveowner and all his drunken and opiated kin expendable for further expenditures - open season on high value hide, all rodential strata looking to find proof of secondarily white supremacy and primarily the echo of coins in some cave where the sound may yet delude you that what jingles are your returned millions, reunited with you at last, billions of rapeborn pennies whose exchanged dollar mothers were beaten by their face and underboot all come to Daddy at the bottom of a pit. No matter how far and wild the West a price on one's head is a sovereign order whose sovereignty is where you meet your end, and now it is written into the law as the White House, a three-dimensional figure, is calculated by volume to contain more soot shit and blood than yet still to go to their graves consulted ancient Romans, Greeks, whose secrets they, inheritors of the already lopsided and aborted Democratic Idea, claim are proffered pro bono with consumption-cholera the contract. It figures that this shape is a prism, a stable of opinions shat into powderwigged halfmorphine men. All Mother had to do to make the south a human zoo where the scheduled feed is raw herring on moldy bread and toad-in-the-hole was a military coup and install herself as president and Bob's your uncle - and it should be expected statistically that perhaps a man in your family literally is your Uncle Bob. And here on the Mainland, the ancestral home of the mocked nut and the karmic debtor ghostflagellant they welcomed warmly Mother and the civil servants accredited via the Conflict Resolution Test where one is expected to know every point of ethnic tension and every crime against a designated nation or faith and speak even the most ancient of Greek to assist those whose memory stretches from the founding of the city, no, the polis (and furthermore should you want to know just what it takes to go from mafioso to the only guy keeping hands off the big red button: "to become a civil servant one has to know, as a matter of course, Modern Standard Sicilian and the second language may be English — the standard accent taught in Sicily has, interestingly, long been Irish, Arabic, French, or with a special exemption from a small bureau of dedicated language officials, it may be any one 'strategic language for effective Mediterranean diplomacy' not already included in the list; these languages are Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, and Albanian (the Tosk dialect is conventionally taught in Sicily except where Arbëreshë classes are used locally), which are subject to an additional set of stringent requirements, including a gauntlet of three oral exams in difficult subject areas, the last of which, the nondescript 'conflict resolution test,' also intensively tests knowledge of international affairs, local culture of geographical areas relevant to Sicilian foreign relations, and even the ability to keep one's calm under intense pressure; these languages are considered far harder to be certified in, but they can often make one's cursus honorum path much faster and come with extensive recognition (those who pass the exams are recognized ceremonially every march, which is televized and broadcast on state radio) and career benefits, especially in jobs involving writing, speaking, and international affairs"), functionaries and mayors of all manner of postcard town returned to their prior occupation: extrajudicial 'settling of the matters of honor' … now on the enthusiastic invitation of the population, and beheadings and well-negotiated hostile takeovers of construction companies follow, representing a harmony as perfect as that of the three Abrahamic faiths tolerance of which and the history of which are taught in equal measures in schools on the island Calabria was to become a province of during the construction of the bridge across the Messina Strait and a testament to the virtues of the welfare state where one may learn whatever he sets his mind to while living in housing made available by the graces of the Queen, who is Mother, who raised in 1920 hundreds of triskelion flags on the shores of the Free SIcilian State after thirty years in exile whiled away additional to the mission on the Americas which started while Bathys Augustenburg, Mother, was still the thousand year queen of volcanoes and uninhabitable archipelagos under the islands of which are Svalbard vaults of stockpiles of banned research chemicals, the full history of human experimentation given implicit consent, welcomed by her own people as enthusiastically as the Calabrians who felt abandoned by the Papal States and made an underdeveloped extractive client province that meets the slothful ends of the shithole tourist attraction ungrateful to not be part of France up north; once Mother landed to take back what was always hers the composition of the bodies of the Anglo puppet army resembled that of the White House after she was done with it, greatly helped by chemical weapons which take a way with breath to work and take it away right after, Swiss cheesing machine guns, making more lactose product than the Swiss after the enlightened moral judgment that perhaps Swiss killing Swiss for a Napoleon that lost at Waterloo is not the way to go - what we can all agree on is banking, and magics which transmute whole solid internal organs into hydrofluoric acid whose corrosive pools take out everyone that steps into them and spread far and wide by dancing feet marching away from a fight ringing in modernity, resonating inside the constitution of every pallbearer in the distance awakened again to a deathcommemorant's sole purpose. Generally, if you want your enemy to assume your intellectual capacities are at a level where even they may feel prideful in their own and thus underprepare for a battle where the weapons of the future are not even in the consideration, you ask your woman on the inside to relay to the Chiefs and Commander that you will be attacking by sea over the Strait of Messina in bad weather, a strait that, while narrow is notoriously deep and volatile - a reckonable and pulchritudinous body of water, and not dropping from the first warplanes to grace the European continent which in your time fought World War I and in my time fought and was nothing and no war because I was not yet even born, but it is a veritable fact that no global conflict took place. Earth stood still, in Earth Standstill - a negotiated world peace benefiting the patriarchal Ecuneme and those who live from sixty to a hundred years, where a world policeman sitting in a tollbooth in a garden of branching driven - alcoholic or chemical? modest or opulent? blind or deaf? - paths, who himself is just the drives because Nietzsche, the misunderstood orator made to give his implicit consent as much as classical architecture signed on the dotted line for its likeness to become the neoclassical architecture which impregnates the boundaries of the personal hell that has not yet been seen by a single man even as he wanders around inside whiling days under direction of a reflexive and reactionary dictum he cannot be certain whether he receives from above like he cannot be certain that if he can see with his mind's eye, the dissolving fragmentary image a Sumerian tablet that in erosion becomes its semantic opposite but to whose intention none are privy to and even whose author felt nothing but antipathy in its composition, and whose edifice is the purity which exacts punishment, stillborn columns the apparently acknowledged legacy of the Suffragettes - cognitive dissonance returning women to the kitchen, the illusion of choice to become the homemaker, did not even believe humans were even a single thing-in-itself but many spurs, called New York City or Cincinnati, whose namesake is Cincinnatus: farmer-emperor finding his analogue in the seemingly peaceful pilgrim-destiny manifest. Cincinnatus, inheritor for no reason, finds himself imposed onto time – made part of a succession. Meanwhile, on NBC…

It is to myself and it is mine, and not only time.

The problem goes roughly something like this. You walk noneffusively into a conference room and you're surrounded by all the same suits you see everyday and all the same frosted windows unshielded from the glare of the high eternal winter sun that prove thermodynamics like a big lake proves the curve of the Earth. I, you run things around here. You're not really beside yourself at the moment. You don't want to go to your own office that you can only access by standing in an elevator for thirty minutes descending into the core of the Earth. And you don't want to put a gun to own your own temples there, shoot, watch the grey matter blackened from the record of the event. And when you do do this thing you're not doing right now where after the hole in your head is as absent as the blur on a hallucination when you take your glasses off you braid your own hair up in a single long peasant girl braid. And you turn and face whichever audience is present or absent or presently absent and fire off a greeting. The usual. "Good day." I, you say this when I, you answer phone calls and every time you, I enter a room and they recognize who you are, who I am and shivers run down your back because I can only stand by out of reach for so long. So far yourself is following myself. Spectator, shadowing. I'm inside the conference room. Most things here are made out of African blackwood - it's not actually much of a matter of aesthetics, it's mostly a better of tacky misappropriations of funds for interior decor, being that it's the most expensive lumber in the world. The long table in the center of the room that you have to take a full minute hike to against the backdrop of a polyphonic choking back of breath so that its mere exhalation may not tell on you. Let them hate so long as they fear you. The interior of this room hasn't changed much in the past half-century, which can also be said for what this room is for and what decisions are made in it and what things are discussed leading up to the making of decisions. The only thing that's changed, and this is old news, is that I've used armed thugs, indirectly, to go around the entire European and North American continent making everyone inside face the wall in a series of quick coup d'etats. The big one's coming, the management of the matter of the only one that yet has some potential for resistance.

Strike now from the image the suits, whose maggots are barely radial, and place in now The Rat — Malus Mala. A name heard across apple orchards worldwide, I'm sure (so The Worm is better then, maybe.) She's the one with the blueprints of the building. She needs an exit strategy, almost as badly as you need an exit strategy to get out of a failed pump and dump. I kind of liked her the first time we met. Darling told me 'You know, I don't think she likes you.' I made my reply: 'Oh, but she will… Wait, what makes you think she doesn't like me?' Behind the back of myself Mala calls me a Cultural Marxist. Darling was made to attend one of those pensions, you call those 'private schools' I'm told while living in poverty, and so she knows what a 'mean girl' sounds like. I did not detect this tension our first conversation. Rewind now and be the judge: 'Good day, Ms. Mala. Yourself appears as old as time.' (It's flattering because she craves the ancience, or maybe I'm just calling her ugly.) 'Why hi Augustenburg.' 'It is not within the purposes of this conversation for you to use that name.' (I am elected official Grand Treasurer Ariana Navashino. One N. She calls me by the name of Mother - it's not even on my birth certificate.) 'Well, you spend all your time out of touch of reality. Aren't I being nice telling you who you really are? You have to call your own woman a man.' 'But I never call her my husband.' 'I did take notice of that.' 'And it is within the range of my own recognition that you're fucking my grandmother.' 'Fucking? She doesn't fuck. She's waiting for her marriage to resume.' 'But you do want to fuck my grandmother. Or her cousins.' 'So that your deal then?' 'Indeed it is - yourself provides myself with the blueprinting, and the schematics are bartered for an airlift into where you can find yourself a free cousin of hers.' 'You're awfully willing to share for an oldschool feudalist.' 'The barter taking place inside this conference room is quite suited to Medieval times. Land for a wife.' 'Weren't Marx and Engels for the ending of agrarianism, insofar as its byproduct was that it could take out blood feuds and thus bride kidnapping?' 'Myself's terms are only your safe passage inside the barrier where nothing non-human can't be. There is no bridal guarantee.' 'So it's everything but the girl then, huh.' 'Everything but the girl for the building and everything and everyone but the girl left alive, yes.'

Everyone but the girl. Mala's condition for handing over those blueprints after her resignation from New York Bureau was the survival of one ex-quack, age 3500, who sold curealls to the Victorians. Among Bureau execs is the tradition of televised 'socials' that take place on superyachts and can balloon to the scale of Vatican City inversely proportional to the moral scrupolosity of its owner. This quack proved to be a mainstay of those and a much-despised personage among the onboard cooks who were marooned inside the floating cabins of infinite toil and rapid-progress liver disease gone as of yet unmentioned by anyone in their employ, especially mum about it are those who eye the incomplete will and wish to take the whole of the McMansion and the shell companies for having been the insular hominid's one sole companion. Her current venture is that of biotechnology, venereal as the diseases the hominid proves to be an easy carrier of, often through no fault of apekind's own. Rapid and accurate blood testing - at the forefront of improving QoL for patients of diabetes; Type 2. Medical research which is really industrial research is scarce on Type 1 and the treatment-in-waiting is multiple amputation, as diagnostically inevitable as wisdom tooth EXO. The advantage is obviously the scarcity of blood required for readings, which to a vampire is somewhere around the nutritional value of a single eighth of a Wonder Bread slice. She is relaxing on the upper deck talking to some mooch about the risk of Charlieplexing to his business model because he's trying to sell time to the clock - all computer clocks are in some way delayed, he is trying to market a placebo nuclear clock - and so he had to cancel the Rise and Grind Alarm Clock, which would wake a hustler from a power nap at 15 minutes from moment of alarmset without a millisecond of delay, because of a self-conscious revelation that if the thing were to be opened up all the same circuitry that would empower the thing to be mass produced in the first place and keep him running at just the loss all startups run at instead of more loss on making the product do what it actually promises to do would be revealed and obviously reveal the thing itself to not be accurate, which is impossible because all nuclear clocks in the world currently power time servers, which you can only access remotely and within the service-faculties available to a member of the general public or a disruptor can only take a sample of how off the clock on the device connecting to them is, as it is impossible to make any digital clock truly accurate due to internal oscillations within the circuitry and adjustment to the timeserv is ultimately only momentary. This same thing would befall the app version, especially since the market he's trying to sell to mostly use iPhones to portray themselves as upper class within the bounds of fake-it-till-you-make-it (rental cars and Balenciaga, dollar-store instant noodles, eye-corner view of loanshark): you can't just swap in a new clock on top of the normal UI. This is not permissible within the walled garden ecosystem. The device only responds to the internal circuitry, which quartz oscillation - quartz was valued by the Greeks and is now upstaging the LARP Traditionalist.

The production company handling this broadcast is at the disposal of myself wholly, obviously - and the disposal of almost everyone at this boat is at my own whim, at least the methods. An ivory tower in a literal capacity too - aboard are many from the Heavy Industries, the Japanese monopolies, who still use seals of ivory to sign binding documents. (I've privately heard complaints about the introduction of vegan options to the Mitsubishi Friday Conference.) The goal is to secure the quack - Mala can't ask for her beach house in the Bahamas to use as a hideout while I make the arrangements if the quack is dead. The blades spin black and rapid - a crow flew through Magritte's infinite window, the open ocean. Denpa are now arranging for a sudden change into wide-angle - seems innocent enough, these are news type helicopters, all of the appropriate broadcast equipment inside. This is not running on tape delay. Inside everyone the ship is ushered onto the upper deck with great apologies - they need a shot with everyone onboard in frame, it'll take just a minute, yes, you can stuff that coke into your pockets for just a bit, sir, we'll key out any incriminating particles should you be too unsteady for it to not go Houdini on you, thank you for your cooperation. News helicopters are trolleybuses, armed helicopters are planes. The feet of a news helicopter are handrails at best. Not even training wheels, just the support appendages. An armed helicopter usually has proper landing wheels, but armed variants of transports exist - the only thing distinguishing this member of the flock is just a little bit of girth. Nothing a miracle weight loss pill can't fix (although no one onboard ever got one off the ground - advertising preying on body image is reserved for the 'grey market' - here grey means alien and alien means anywhere outside the Anglosphere - South Korea, Americanized as it is, is in a precarious position. It is openly advertised to patients of diabetes; Type 2 - this is not even relevant because often disruptors don't really have a product - these are all Silicon Valley types, where the quack is a time-echo: predecessor and successor - the definition of successor here is someone who experiences successive moments continuously). Among the crows is a dove looking for an overturned ark. The payload is a rocket. Perhaps reputationally too, speak no ill of the dead. This necessarily reduces the amount of people that know that the readouts on devices compatible of the quack's miracle prick are either stochastic or selfsame on every occasion. Hear that? I do, sitting in front of the grid of monitors, the Sober Oracle that truly knows the future because it exists suspended in the hourglass grainshift of present-becoming-past: a time-echo as much as the quack, present-previous-prescient (PPP), receiving remotely every angle accessible to the production, or to suggest another deabbreviation, PPP: Point-to-Point Protocol. Programmers think they know the best solution for everything (a phone with a 2 minute auto calldrop during a hold sold to small business operations where stepping away to look for something in inventory is essential and often takes more than 2 minutes and where the person on the other end can hear they've been dropped, leading inevitably to lawsuits, as punishment for not using their better, new computerized hold which drops the call in 3 minutes) and are uniquely suited to governing the world - I govern now the world via transmission over the air, powered by programmers.

A single Hellfire missile costs a hundred thousand dollars American, an M31 rocket roughly five hundred thousand, a Hydra 70 is significantly cheaper at just under three-thousand dollars. We chose the Hydra not because we couldn't afford the better options. We chose the Hydra because we're trying to throw almost everyone onboard into the goddamn sea and see the entire chassis of the ivory tower made unscrappable Babeldust. Just the one would be a cinematographic waste also. We have all these broadcast helicopters with all these possible feeds and they can't just hover idle about a rich people retreat all the time with most of the hard work done by small stalkingbulbs on deck that exhaust themselves as much as the occupants: one zoom, one cut every so often. During this time, inside the parallel Eternity belowdeck, the coast guard (which I paid off to keep mum about the entire operation) begins evacuations of the working classes to unmaroon them from this unhabitable island of tipless toil and complaint and back into witness-protected Polite Society.

A signal is given now with a conspicuous fast POW-veracity Morse blink by the chief of staff of the coast guard into a stalkingbulb lens mounted on the side of the ship, a spyglass-cam, that is transmitting to the armed helicopter. The small receiving monitor, an ancient portable CRT of the kind that would sit nicely inside a bag of potato chips, shuts off. The trajectory of the rocket is calibrated with null precision, aiming straight for the center of the deck, causing immediate dispersal in every direction that a compass has a hand for; the target's plight now is that a compass only points north, towards Ultima Thule, whose existence is/has to be as sure in that moment as the faith that enables a blind leap.

This might as well be a blind fire: the framing the action is supposed to suggest, a structure forced only by the now wholly aleatoric unforceable content, is that of a terrorist attack with stolen ammunition. Cameras are kept off of the departing lifeboats, which already have crossed the horizon to fall off the Earth, as the total reaches six-thousand dollars with a shot that should awaken now the quick decisionmaking of the hull's cremaster muscle.

Vultures are playful, curious creatures of easy handleability in captivity if you just can get past the smell - the childlike curiosity of a terrorist with first time access to a weapon of mass destruction is palpable, if only through the smog of religious conviction. My eyes follow the trail of emission. Hear that scream? It's in the red. The gain is hot, the blood cold prior with enmity and private chealing scandals w/r/t the occupants turns now to the first fever, the first heating of the Earth's core.

This is Denpa's finest work: granular as the visual snow of rocket tail inches from your face and granular as the deflections the occupants in their former lives made to daddy's money, that one time a full decade past they were weaned off allowance, perfect in the sound color contrast of low bodythunks against remnant deckwood that soon turn to subsonic bubbling as the limpid that bleed turn submersible and the higher (only a couple hundred hertz up) frequencies of desperate screams for help (the highest sound a human can emit is a young female child hissing through teeth, which tops out at about six and a half thousand hertz), those jumping operatic white swans on unforgiving dark water taking now actual leaps of faith overboard, like the quack, who holds onto another of the small cameras mounted on the side of the structurally compromised ship, on whom the lens is trained in a solely tertiary manner.

The Liberian flag convenience descends from halfmast to total polefall crushing a VC man's skull throughout the flatscreen statue-slabs of the mythic and embodied Oracle showing past-prescience with a slight delay among the feeds that you can see when they actually run concurrently, those feeds are angles for private viewing, remote - to see inside the truth knowing what future is.

With the earnings call dropped after three minutes on hold courtesy of the Microsoft PBX phone system, let's turn now to the crux of the issue. The quack knows that I know, or at least she had a hunch - why else would Mala resign? She has to be working with whoever is orchestrating these things and the allegiances of the Mirrors are clear. Orphe, Orpheus who looked back into the Underworld (one of the victims that looked up into the circling eyes? / Orpheus who worships the mirror that Narcissus, I, looked at myself in, watching myself, the only perfect body, masturbate, the cumstained mirror, the pond of the eternal image), sees me as God pretty explicitly. The quack knows that, like the rest of her life, this is mere choreography, mere chronography - the time-echo of her traveling circus where the resonance of a for-rent gospel choir would reveal the God-Frequency of the anti-cancer herb, mere writing of history. The spyglass cameras were mounted onto the side of the ship for the convenience of the crew's escape, put on the boat by the coast guard attaché that usually ensures the security of these yacht socials, and she knew that history wouldn't take her down with her, she could look Oblivion's Prison in the eye as the Hollywood strings swell slowly and know that there is no placeless Door but that which separates from the Titanic.

I lean towards the screen like the hopeful conditioned audience with rot running riot innard, like the Caucasian feeling in the moment of descent, perhaps prompted by the elevation of the cremaster muscle during a change of pressure, kicked in the balls by realization that the plane is about to land, the need to dismount the seat and clap, the exact applause a God from the Machine in those chronographic template plays the quack finds herself within, archetypical, deus ex volucri machina - God from the Flying Machine. Dolor, who only calls Mother 'Augustenburg' (Claribel, unmarried and Geissler, married both call her 'Lady Bathys') and prefers not to speak to me at all in any circumstance, the hardened Latin American warlord looking to take revenge on the West, recruited into Bathys' entourage with money and a chance to assist an Islamic reign of terror across Catholic Europe from the battlefield at Waterloo (which Napoleon lost), is the one receiving the signal and checking visually that the perimeter is clear of any sign of mortal life, descends the payload-carrying helicopter onto the glade where the Christian dove disappears, having starved scavenging nothing from the overturned ark, considering turning to eating carcasses like the impure vulture but finding nothing unwaterlogged enough to survive and throws down a rope-ladder. She does not look at the quack. The quack lets out a 'Tch.' This moment is off air. Moments prior, Dolor made a show of finally shooting a missile at the broadcast helicopters, meaning that transmission is cut and the framing is complete, just barely missing the ones through which I view the final act of the presentation, the parts of the Quack's life that went previously unpublished, those unused on the broadcast, those in delay, suspended in past as much as her. The Quack climbs. The chronograph shows. Mechanical-Divine forces sapping attire professionalism (the interior cabin wet with her disgruntled suit). This is just like that time they ran her out of town by throwing mud and rocks at her. But it's not - the template is disrupted. Dolor speaks: "You. Mala wanted you alive because Augustenburg Jr. wanted you alive." The quack shoots back: "Of course it's Mala…. Augustenburg Jr.?" Dolor does not reply.

'Denpa' ('the electromagnetic waves made me do it'), the Tenebrae, shadow of reality, exit the scene by warping through spacetime with the equipment held above their heads like a zookept seal (the broadcast helicopters are whalefall for eight-meter tapeworms to fester inside for all they can give a damn about). "Arte did it!" "Mii did it!" Bouncing off the damn walls. These Tarot cartoons with harlequin orange-and-white hair, dressed in magicians' outfits, motion-tracking eyes. "Boss, was the monitor feed to your satisfaction? Arte wants to know!" "I'll pay you both handsomely with a mountain of candy and a new wall-to-wall stereo system for your bedroom." "Mii's honor!" "Arte's honor!" Doubled: "Import stereo?" "The one you have been extolling the virtues of at length to myself about." Both perfectly imitate a Panasonic brand ID from the eighties. The rack of monitors is a black screen. I roll the armchair back slowly. Denpa were born from nothing and all they care about is running the media - every misleading tabloid is their singleminded work. They are only information. Their card is the Black Joker: anything they say is the only thing to believe, much like getting The Fool in a Tarot drop signals change and chaos. Foolish shifts of personage occur at every turn inside Arte and Mii, the two halves of Artemis' media empire - child-nurturing bright young brains with the correct information. They hop-step merrily away holding hands incanting the brand ID until semantic satiation in their idea of the second octave back to their bedroom, a technophilic Lisa Frank OCD-hoard with a sacred geometry of shelving and yet more monitors than even the Oracle of each definition and each make and enough plastic to starve out all marine life and hold every free-floating/surface-attaching organism that mounts the undersides of their own overturned ark, a message from the land they one day will evolve enough consciousness to cross over onto and find only the destruction that made their home. Denpa get to uploading 'Our Bedroom Update pt. 2400', shot in five minutes and edited in fifteen seconds, to a certain short-form social media platform where they have a hundred million botted-or-not (ambiguity irrelevant) followers and adoring comments admiring their 'cute personal aesthetic'. They play scattershot epileptic electronic music of beyond-doubletime BPM with high-pitched vocals on the recently acquired stereo - a piece of serious gear meant for pristine Deutsche Grammafon classical CDs The problem leads you here, as if inside the time-suspension of the Monitoring Oracle or my own neurons that make each memory an immersively lived flashback - a motion without propulsion the inner ear can't say no to - that occurs in concurrence with the true present (Miller's method, the man who predicted the apocalypse as part of the Great Disappointment, used Biblical concurrences - lists of where certain words or phrases or characters are present - to supplement his theory that the Bible is its own interpreter - the Heavenly Sanctuary is the same as the 'sanctuary' that is actually an epithet for Earth), inevitably: myself and Mala's second meeting, where having had her criteria met and having the grudging consent of the quack to stay at her beach house in the Bahamas as part of her own Witness Protection Vacation to make sure first that she doesn't have any attempts made on her head after the inevitable that I hope to soon evite (into the flow of time), she slides the schematic of the entire building into the center of the long blackwood table which at its scale makes its rectangular shape feel like the silhouette of cheap mafia construction, just another concrete prison-tower.

'So, should I walk you through, Augustenburg? Or do you already have a full strike team and a bunch of corrupt structural engineers willing to point out the faults?'. Mala, malicious.

'Myself's assurance that I am at competence to ensure the smooth procession of the mission is maximal.'

I make unceasing eye contact with her. Hold music plays on the line for more than three minutes. Mala: Oscillations and resonance inside the circuitry of tension. Myself: Echolocation piggybacking off the time server.

Mala is about to lose some seconds - the mooch who could not build the app nor the alarm clock.

'Now, haven't you remembered this never took place?'

The first time I said those words in front of Mother she was horrified.

'Of course, I'll keep my mouth shut. Why, you think I won't die trying to play the good guy for them now? The guy who found the bomb at the Olympics was made out by the media to be the bomber - and you control the media. I'm screwed, Karl Marx. Not a word about this when I walk out.'

'Mala, if yourself may be so kind to remind myself what words you said at our last meeting and what tone you took?'

'…We met prior to this? I thought I'd just turn the blueprints over after we had that phone call and you guaranteed you know who's safety.'

We did.!

I retrieve the logbook where I write down the full 'guest list' of this conference room. I go back to the page where in the absolute middle of the linear-grid there should be an appointment with her. In that very central timelessness there is no year and there is no date and there is no phone number for Mala. There is nothing prior. The past has no prescience and no continuity. History suggests nothing.

'Oh, yes perhaps it was a phone call. But I remember very well us meeting.'

'You bastard.'

'In this very room.'

'Are you just getting back at me for talking shit behind your back?'

'Oh, so you have gathered. But now nothing in the world can prove that this prior meeting take place, so there is nothing for yourself to feel extirpated and in knots about.'

'I'm not going to swear fealty to you, you know.'

'I don't need you to.' If I could express tone or emphasis within the confines of my larynx, the 'you' would be italicized.

Mala takes her leave, spitting in my direction which I deflect and pH-neutralize with a blast of acid out of my hair and Res drives her to the nearest aerodrome all the way out into the weeds where the sky was once sacral and still is to the truthfully unassimilated Tengrists for transfer to an actual airport in Alaska with a one-way ticket to the Bahamas and a fake passport. I sit alone in the conference room. This will never have happened. The first time I demonstrated this trick in front of Mother my eyes turned as cyan as hers and I almost could become and replace her - the better Bathys. She can only change the water inside somebody's internal organs into 200 K lead, I can change every way of seeing. I can make the call home back into sensibility and awareness drop. The opening ever so slightly delayed drum machine pattern of the Cisco hold music with loud claps.