Tuesday, September 18, 2007

The EDD Diary #7 - "Stolen Donkey"

Weekending 03/08/07 EDD spam came in at twenty-one

Barney Sweeney called Elnora Goldman into the Headquarters of the Great Department. There was a formality in his gestures and tone that Elnora had only witnessed on a few occasions. This could mean only one thing. This was a serious meeting and a serious exercise.
“They called and asked me to open “the gate”, Elnora. I have no choice but to send you. You have gained popularity, within our circles, over the whole world. You have 36 hours to meet your first point of contact at the salubrious Lopez Club NY. Once there, sit tight. In terms of fullness of life, with minimal difficulty, these people probably have the best time of it. When you are given positive acknowledgement you will find the password in seconds. You will then have 30 minutes to set up the game-plan. Make sure you account for possible variations in the path. Well, it’s time to get started. You won’t regret this assignment, Elnora. And remember our motto, “Know no Failures”!”
So there it was, straight forward to the point and not an ounce of the personal. Admittedly, it was Elnora that had been experiencing what she could only call “new feelings” for Barney, of late. It didn’t mean especially, that he had been of her. That shoe shuffling and excuses for morning and afternoon tea meetings, could have very well been, just that, nothing more or less. However, she had grown a bit suspicious, when he would always come back for a refill the mornings she made coffee in the staff kitchen. He had instructed her, early on, in the art of plunger coffee, saying
“You might consider compressing the grounds after a full five minutes”
She had thought it kind of anal at the time but had taken his advice, it was simply all fuel to add excitement to her fantasies. Oh well, for now, that was in the past and she had to attend to gathering her numerous resources, before leaving.

Two days later, Elnora found herself in the midst of a gaggle of women all trying to talk at once. Nancy C Haney was the banker’s wife and in charge of overseeing a personnel of 150 000 men internationally. Katherine E Franks had aided many people through her altruism (with a little help from her husbands amassed fortune) and Murial Darden had been in hospital for prolonged periods at a time but continued to have the energy of a 20 year old, nothing could keep her down. In her words, if something seems to stop working just ‘fuck hard and give it a little kick’.
Elnora held her mask impeccably within this “peer-to-peer” communication tea-party. Taking slow breaths in, she reminded herself that ‘Just because the trace is shallow doesn’t mean it’s meaningless’
Of course, she was right because 14 minutes later she found herself being delightfully escorted by horse and buggy to an unknown destination, one that she hoped would prove fruitful. However, in the mean time, there was fruit enough sitting beside her in the form of Horacio Chappell. He was making a great show of steering the horses, despite the fact that it was his off-sider, Basil Macias, that actually led them. It was all very amusing really, especially for Elnora, who had been quietly sizing up both these men and was quite contented by the quality. She wondered if they would respond to the sexual stimulation she could afford them and if that would be considered as ‘posing a security risk’. Upon proposing this, Horacio almost got flustered, then realised, that Basil had good reason to view the female as the dominant sex. But Basil wasn’t having it.
'Damn! Why can’t you get a good hard man when you need it!' Elnora thought. Her mind momentarily wandered, bringing back memories of her last lover, ‘ Swan’. ‘Must have been my artistic temperament he couldn’t take’ she mused.
Just at that point, one of the horses let out a whinny that could be heard for miles.

The raven croaked from amongst the pink climbing rosebush, suspiciously eyeing off the two women in the garden. Lottie Hebert’s manner was slow and sedate, yet her mind was acute and Elnora’s attention was focused on every word. Lottie was in a ‘safe-house’, a sort of quarantine station, while she was being observed as part of an epidemiological study being undertaken to determine whether she was carrying a contaminant or not. This method was not supported by many countries, so there was a high level of secrecy around the operation. The contaminant was of a more energetic nature and had to do with Lottie receiving messages from another ‘life form’. She described it as a process where by we are all layers and that the actual path, or communication channels, flowed through the same layers. Sort of like the divide between left and right speakers.
Lottie had come under the authorities radar, when they were alerted to weekly queues, outside a suburban community hall. It was discovered that this woman was causing a huge public interest through her ability to impart universal secrets, knowledge and certain predictions around the current political and global climate. Things had got a bit hairy when a fundamentalist from the south had lurched forward during one session and cut her severely with a knife. At this point, the department had stepped in and whisked her away. She had claimed that she was only one of many women who had been linked to this greater knowledge. There was an implication that all these women had been injected with a viral body by an unknown life form.
A few of these women had been gathered and one of the experiments had them leashed to each other so that they could alert the observation team when they were channelling. Lottie, however, disclosed that most of the women could tell when a woman was channelling whether they were leashed or not.
Lottie was skipping all over the place, telling Elnora about how much she loved this shop in her hometown and at the same time how she often had depressive moods and as a consequence the ways in which she had had to strengthen the relationship with her partner, when she suddenly went hard as stone. Her eyes were the only thing that seemed to vibrate any source of energy. Elnora knew this sign and immediately hit the record button on her concealed camera.
After a few still moments, Lottie seemed to slightly shift, like a breeze had just moved through her. Then she spoke, it was not her usual voice, but one much deeper and more resonant, a man’s voice.
“If you decide to be nice and find her cat for her you will find him amongst a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes overhead, if he lives till morning, that is.
However you are here to find out the specific position and dimensions of the window. For this you must have faith in a word and obviously, a word which we can never apply, is not going to be a very useful word. You won’t get clearance unless you accept this and then you will need the special keys. We know, at heart, your kind does not relish conflict, though you have proven very able warriors, therefore once execution is set in motion the control will be passed to the next handler in the fault handler chain to ensure its safe delivery.”
Lottie suddenly let out a grunt, as if she had momentarily had the wind squeezed from her lungs. She then collapsed back into a faint.
Elnora rang for the orderly, then got up and walked out.
Moments later she stood looking over the canyon and into the distance. She watched the gods for a while, wondering what the hell they were, and how it didn’t seem to matter, for she had run into a hole of the very rottenest and oldest water.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!

Julie Vulcan said...

Thankyou! Yes the older ones were about trying to find my feet, how to go about this material. I think it began to click in around #5. This is where I started to find a way of working with the material and allowing the stories to unfold. I have not been so active on this site the last year but I still have all the SPAM and will return with more stories this year. Cheers Julie