The Dark Site Blog

—Hey Dave, did you see the match last night? I was down the Dublin Tart with some mates from the Boar’s Bollix. What a penalty, eh? If he was off-side, I’m a monkey’s uncle!

V had no real idea what off-side was, but he knew it to be a sporting term, and assumed it meant one of the players had switched jerseys and started playing for the other team. He saw the heads of the some Floor Green Imposters turn and monitor this human conversation, following the instructions from the screens. Kev continued, holding his half-eaten pen like a cigarette in one hand and a purple clipboard with faces drawn on it in the other.

—So Dave, me oul mate, how’s about joining the football pools this year?
—Football pool? Water born kicks from the side, off side, forward striker … you’ll never walk alone.

Even David had no real ability to hold a football conversation, which requires a great deal of background knowledge and weekly study. His unwillingness to commit himself to soccer study was one of the reasons he never really bonded successfully with other males. For V, things were even more difficult. As an invention of David’s mind, he had even less of an insight into the game, and was reduced to stringing nouns together and hoping it would make some kind of sense. He was like a man in a far-off country who has twenty cards, each with a foreign word on them, but none of them having a translation in his own language.

—Off-side trap the Gunners sub a foul Beckham—V said hopefully.
—So, you think Beckham will make it to the squad, eh?
—Beckham is as Beckham does: victory through Victoria.
—I wouldn’t mind giving her one, what?
—One what? A football, you mean, or a corner?
—I’d corner her giblets, alright. Spice her up, big-time, eh? Know what I mean, nudge nudge, wink wink.
—Yes, Nudge Wink was a great player in his time.
—If you say so, Dave. So, what’s the score-you in or out?
—Of the building?
—No! The football pools?!
—I must decline, I’m afraid. I don’t like the water. Too reminiscent of death … womb water.
—Well, if you’re not in you can’t win.
—And can you get ‘out’ if you’re ‘in’?
—What?
—Of the building … can’t escape …
—Course you can! Just go for a fag break and you’re free as a bird. And speaking of birds, there’s not much talent down here, is there? Nerd city, Arizona, eh?
—Computers replicate, they don’t reproduce; they have no need of beauty. It will die with us.
—Right you are, Dave! Bloody computers: waste of time, if you ask me. There’s nothing a computer can do that an abacus can’t do better.
—An abacus has no will to conquer. I must go now, Kev. I must escape the future’s deadly call, or die trying. I fear we will not meet again; so I depart with this epithetic injunction: never sober up. May the poison of alcohol protect you!
—You’re a man after me own heart, Dave.
—No, they are.

—David, hi. We’re … like, you know… waiting.
—Waiting for whom?
—For, like, the … da … lift button.
—I do not know Dedalis Buttin, but I would strongly recommend you wait elsewhere. A lift is a poor choice for a meeting place, lacking the requisite qualities of stillness; not to mention the ineluctable modality of the visible. Close your eyes and see.

There was an awkward pause in which the young woman laughed slightly, believing that V must have been joking. She and her friend looked at each other nervously and wondered how to continue. The muzak serenaded the group with a bland voiceless version of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ and the door opened and closed one more time. V had a feeling this lift trip was taking longer than usual, but as stated before, he had little conception of time and little experience of lifts, preferring to achieve elevation through stairs that could be counted.

—David, will you, like …?—one of the women said, pointing at V’s chest, but hoping to indicate the control panel hidden behind it.
—The future is inherently unpredictable, of course, but if you refuse to verbally qualify the action you refer to, assuming you are not referring to my tastes and using the ‘L’ word as a filler rather than a verb, I cannot really be expected to specify the probability of action regarding any eventuality.
—What?
—Referent precision would eliminate your need to apologise.
—Right …
—You ask the impossible, I’m afraid. This mechanical contraption travels in a vertical fashion, and horizontal movement is beyond its capabilities.
—Please-press-the-button-behind-you-for-floor-four! —the woman said, beating out the words; labouring on each syllable in an attempt to force the birth of meaning; and also suspecting that that V was trying to mock her; unaware that he had spoken in earnest, as he always did.

He turned his back to the women and pressed the square with the number four engraved into it. The warmth of his index finger made the light change from white to shiny blue, and the muzak was drowned out by a calm mechanical voice saying ‘four’ and then the same word in Irish ‘ceithir’, which to V, who did not speak a word of Irish, sounded like ‘cat hair’, and he briefly imagined an office floor full of cat people; an evil alien experiment to mix the two races.

—Felinus Humanus— he said.

The women ignored him and gritted their teeth. He then pressed the button for his own floor, and the mechanical voice intoned, ‘six’, and followed with the Gaelic equivalent ‘sia’, and V admired the colour change to indigo.
The doors closed one final time, shutting off the world of the lobby, and he wondered how he could be sure it still existed if he didn’t see it. He remembered thinking this before, and sighed solipsistically. As always when the lift doors closed, he felt a sense of entrapment and foreboding. There was the risk that he would be trapped in the lift, which in itself did not greatly worry him, but it would mean having to engage in a long conversation with his fellow elevator passengers on the shipwrecked odyssey from the ground to the heights of floors four and six.
V mumbled away to himself, using poetic incantations of doom to protect himself from the future, but the two girls looked at each other again and decided to ignore his comments, and waited impatiently for the journey to end.

Pushing our own execution button
Pulling our own trigger
Russian elevator roulette
With this finger I thee wed
With this button I am dead

During the upward voyage to the heaven of the Office, one of the girls remembered a failed date with Nick the IT Nerd, who had spent a half-hour explaining his theory that the rectangular shape of lifts, combined with the metals used in their construction and their constant repetitive motion, all combined to create a distortion in the space-time continuum, and that time did indeed slow down in lifts. He went on to detail a short story in which an alien achieved immortality by spending his entire life in a lift, but suddenly dissolved into a putrid puddle during a power cut. She had pretended to be surprised that the story had remained unpublished.
However, this was only a fleeting thought, and both girls spent most of the journey secretly planning the coffee break description of the event for their Floor Blue colleagues; rehearsing it in their heads, sharpening their teeth in preparation for the revenge attack to come.
It would be a coffee break assassination session, in which someone who was known to all but not currently present would be torn to shreds for the enjoyment of the caffeine drinkers, wallowing in the lotus flowers of bitchiness; ignoring the horrible truth that their turn would come, and that some day, in some place, they too would be placed on the Pedestal Of Opprobrium, the POO, and mob justice metered out to them in absentia.
All office workers, slaves and masters, are bathed in the POO at one time or another. Some have more POO time than others, for every society has its victims and oppressors, but there is POO enough for all. V, catching the snide glances of his soon-to-be ex-liftmates, tried to explain the cyclical infections of office gossip and warn them off it.

LOO POO; LOO POO; LOO POO;
Laws Of Office; Pedestal Of Opprobrium
So sayeth the silent starman
Who fell to Earth
In urinal birth

—I’m telling you, that’s what I read in Wikipedia. You used to have to pay a half penny to cross the bridge-that’s why it’s called the ha’penny bridge. It was built by some old fart in the 1800’s; the one who run the operation to ferry people across the river.
—And why would you pay anything at all when there’s loads of other bridges you can use?
—‘Cos there didn’t used to be all the other bridges, I guess. I dunno. Who do you think I am, Mr Wikipedia?
—Mr Wookieepedia, more like, ya hairy bastard—said the short man to the tall one.

V stopped dead in his tracks and stood completely still, much to the consternation of those pedestrians behind him, who were forced to walk around him, crashing into the people already to his left. The current of the river of people crossing the bridge was disrupted. One person does not a dam make, of course, but his action caused enough of a blockage for the people water level to rise dangerously.
He received some stern reprimands from a group of young track-suited teenage warriors, who admonished him severely and encouraged him to speedily make his way to a four-letter country for old men. They too were soon swept away by the pedestrian tide of traffic, and went about their business; 21’st century soldiers of fortune, impervious to cold and hardship in their Nike finery.
V did not mean to get in anyone’s way, but what the two men had said had been a revelation to him, and he was fixed to the spot, soldered like the railings which stared at him; agog to see a stationary item in front of them, unaware that humans could be stationary; and questioning the accepted wisdom of the elder railings, who said that the universe consisted of two fundamental forces: the Basic Binary; humans who moved, and railings who didn’t. Religions fall from moments like these.
A second epiphany verbally vomited from V:

—Wikipedia! Wiki-fucking-pedia! Eurekawiki!

In his excitement, he turned and grabbed the person directly behind him by the shoulders. She had been daydreaming about a holiday in Lanzarote, and was frozen with fear by this strange man suddenly appearing from nowhere into her field of vision, dressed head to toe in black with dark sunglasses. She wanted to scream, but for the moment she found herself unable to make any sound, like a painting of an action. He spoke in three great bursts.

—Wikipedia! All eyes to the wiki! Perpend!
Wiki-wookie, wiki-wookie; wookie-wiki, wookie-wiki
A bridge-bound Chewbacca is the hairy giver of truth
A wookie oracle is presented by the sabled railings
To confound our wilful blind ignorance

Can you see the wookie-wiki wiki-wookie vision?
Call your heated brains to feel the force of truth
The death star avatar of the vile wiki usurper
Look for evidence to the tattooed skull of ensigns
That marks the sails of the page of the web pirate

Deep within the stringed corseted wookie-wiki
They guard their plundered knowledge
And I will wager a thousand cyber souls
That there are hidden parts to her chambers of colonies
We must heed the wookie and plunder the wiki

We must …
We …”

—Hi Dave!

Silence

—I can’t do it, V! The permutations of possible responses climb to the infinite. Six thousand common words present themselves to me in all their ragged wretchedness; hoary quotidian bedfellows pimping a lusty quest for lexicographical expression.
And these vulgar strumpets would each one copulate with all the others, given the slightest encouragement. What bed is large enough for the unholy union of such paragons of fickleness? What could sheath their lascivious palabra pleasure? Six thousand wombs will not debate the issue.
—V, this is no time to think about language: this is small talk. Now, stop thinking and start talking!
—But what should I say? Which harlot words should I choose to wed to one another? The offspring of these rutting verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs will amount to a fearsome syphilitic army of thirty six million bobbling morphemes. And this by only the second word in the phrase!
Every conversation is a Big Bang, expanding at the speed of sound, laying waste to the fields of silence. How can I be master to thirty six million words; and this only to reply in binary similitude to her opening volley?

—Dave?

Silence
—V, just answer her, damn it. It’s easy: just say ‘hello’! It couldn’t be simpler: just say ‘hello’!
—Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has robbed the universe of all its just simplicity. Each conversational particle flies a multitude of paths simultaneously, orbited by the electron tone of intonation; ripping through the formless void of thought and laying bombs of battered meaning in blind unborn craters. I cannot know a word’s location or velocity with certainty; and knowing nothing of place or direction, how can I find my way through the dark forests of conversation? Where is the map?

—Hello!—Amy said, her voice and tone rising on the second syllable to express irritation at her interlocutor who would not locute. Amy was not one to be ignored, especially by a slovenly Band 1.

Silence

—Hello!—she said again, hammering loquaciousness into the conversational dead.
—HELL … oh. Oh Hell. Hello. A halo of hollow hallows harkens the dawn of our conversational enterprise. May it bear fruitful impregnation, and banish silence for a thousand moments.

Silence (from Amy, this time)

—I see you’ve put your office shoes on—Amy said, recovering quickly.

Amy, like many Imposters, had an irritating habit of stating the obvious, thereby revealing the Imposters’ fundamental inability to master the subtleties of interactional human communication. At least, this is how V explained it.
The Imposters were impressive pieces of genetic and biomechanical engineering, he felt; and physically at least, indistinguishable from real humans; but their psychological programming was rather flawed, and their conversations lacked all imagination and originality.
After Amy had spoken there was an unnaturally long pause. V had frozen and was staring at Amy’s shoes, which to him appeared to be melting; spreading out onto the floor, and bubbling like molten tar. The sound of the office clock, which was twenty metres away, thumped its way into V’s mind; ticking like it was a hammer beating his skull against on an anvil; slicing through time like a guillotine. It was an entirely digital clock, of course, and the ticking sound had been added to ‘humanise and harmonise’ it.
Amy shifted uncomfortably in her shoes, waiting for a response, and finally V spoke.

—Yes, footwear has been adjoined to lower body appendages, thereby enhancing office mobility while maintaining office sterility. Mobility and sterility; ensuring corporate virility.

He imitated the Imposter’s odd grin, but was unable to fathom why what he had said should be something to smile about. He reminded himself of the old adage that when in Rome, you should do as the Romans, and smiled back. The Imposters, he noted, often smiled for no reason. Humans had a weakness for smiling people, so they were programmed to smile repeatedly, if rather mechanically. Indeed, V thought that a good way to spot an Imposter was to look for someone who smiled too frequently; who sat too long with the lean and hungry look of the sly grinner.

—Imagine a shoe smiling on a human face forever—V added, to squash the silence, trying to widen his smile.
V’s was a patently false smile and would not have fooled an infant, but Imposters cannot tell a genuine emotion from a false one, since they have no real emotions of their own; and in this sense at least, are easily deceived. V suspected that those who didn’t smile enough were probably locked up, and had their brains turned to jelly with lobotomies and electro-convulsive ‘therapy’. Sometimes they simply medicated happiness outside of hospitals, with drugs named after alien planets, like Prozac or Lithium.
It seemed that people were smiling more and more lately. Toothy grins festooned the dying planet; and in parallel, intra muros, Green Diversity Project posters displayed a smiling happy Earth, snuggled in a blanket of twinkling stars; all beaming down benevolence amidst the office malevolence. V looked behind Amy at a GDP poster, and thought:

—A plague on both your smiling houses
And death to the idiot who wields the power

Both V’s and Amy’s smiles were turning to grimaces as they sought ways to end a conversation neither of them wished to be involved in. In desperation, Amy turned to the ultimate conversational lubricant, the weather.

—It’s raining again, eh?—Amy noted.

She pointed out the window in order to clarify where the weather could be found. Imposters always identified conversational referents. This compulsive need to clarify things was another giveaway that what you were not talking to was not truly human. Instead of following Amy’s finger direction to the water molecules outside, returning to Earth after their brief sojourn in the sky, V looked instead at the first heavy object to hand, his keyboard; and in V’s mind the keys tapped out the following message over and over again:
—KILLAMYAILLAMYKILLAMY.

V fought back the desire to beat her to death with his keyboard while denouncing her as an Imposter. In the future, if the human race was to have a future, such an act would be seen for what it was, an act of heroic desperation and a blow for freedom, but in the world of Imposters, this act would have seen him imprisoned. Such was the injustice of life in the Ministry of the Environment.
Instead, he said the first thing that came into his head. V always said the first thing that came into his head, or else he said nothing. He had not enjoyed the luxury of a childhood or adolescence, and he was therefore untrained in conversational niceties. In short, he was very bad at saying nothing.

—Yes, an inclement and cloud-ridden skyscape blights our land; all clemencies foregone. One might say that felines and canines are reigning down from the heavens; crashing through the ice below to unleash an ocean of conversational starters. Hor d’oeuvres of hydrogen and oxygen reign down.

There was another long pause and Amy looked around her; searching for an escape route, looking for an excuse to end the conversation she regretted having started. Amy was a grandmaster in office chess and knew the importance of using every piece on the board; but David, she realised, was not only a lowly Band 1, he was also unpredictable; and if a chess piece will not move the way you want it to move, then it is better not to have it on your side. She saw her new supervisor at the other end of the office and decided to use him as a lifeboat to escape with.

—Yes, it’s raining … Sorry, I have to go and talk to Jeffrey about the WAA Pro.
—The Waa Pro?—V asked Amy, suddenly interested.

He wondered if the Imposter had accidentally let something slip. Acronyms and abbreviations, V suspected, were part of the Imposter’s native language, and he was always interested to hear a new one, but their real meaning was always fiendishly difficult to decipher.

—I’m so for the Green Diversity Project, Amy. It’s so personalised, so user-friendly, so practical. We must all be green in our own way. Let a thousand green flowers bloom!
—Yes, and in the current economic climate, selective application of green economic policy really is essential. Green Diversity Project flexibility will boost national GDP.
—Right you are, Amy. We need GDP squared! Otherwise, we’ll never get that the Celtic Tiger back into the four green fields of the emerald isle pen.

Amy, a woman in her thirties who tried very hard to look like a woman in her twenties, ate up the slimy sycophant’s breakfast offering; knowing it be calorie free, but still keen on being sucked up to in public. Amy believed that language is verbal grooming and that public praise is a demonstration of status, and so she actively promoted ‘positive upward feedback.’ She glanced around the room to see how many others were noting the anal homily.
While staring into empty space, the place where he did most of his best thinking, David considered suggesting the motto ‘sham veritas viridis’ for the Green Diversity Project, but he knew he would not dare name the beast of hypocrisy. If trees that fall in an empty forest go unheard, he reasoned, then cynical insights that remains unspoken die a thousand times daily. The carpet of every office is littered with unspoken stillborn thoughts, and Floor Indigo in the Ministry of the Environment was no different. A third sigh completed the trinity of sorrow, and David thought:
There are eight million stories in the naked office
This will be one of them
Rather than skate through the afterbirth of mournful cogitation, he arranged the pens and papers on his desk, which were colour-coded depending on which department they had come from. David was a green slave in the Department of Information Dissemination, in the government’s flagship architectural masterpiece, the Rainbow Building. It was a new building, opened among much fanfare several years ago, to showcase Ireland’s commitment to environmental causes. The Rainbow was, in theory, carbon neutral, but it was obscenely expensive to build and maintain, and had become a major drain on the exchequer; but it was still very useful for photo opportunities for dignitaries and civil service nobles of one shade or another.
Having achieved colour coordination in his stationary supply, David placed a yellow post-it on his screen to remind himself to attend the meeting at 12:00. He had forgotten to go to the weekly meetings for a month now, and had been formally reprimanded for his forgetfulness. The Departmental Head, Pilib O’ Donghaile, had absolutely no interest in what anyone in his department had to say at these meetings, David knew, but he did insist that everyone attended, in order that they understood the ‘strategic imperative’, as he put it. His real reason was that attendance was monitored and he wanted to ensure that the attendance rate at his floor’s meetings were as high as or higher than the attendance rates on other floors. There were seven Office Floor Facilitators in the Rainbow Building, and each OFF’s primary concern was to outshine the other OFF’s and impress the Secretarial Coven on Floor Violet.
A three-metre wave of sound oscillated wildly and crashed into David’s back, wrenching him away from his thoughts. The office was no place to think. Kev the Football Fool was holding court in a photocopier annex behind him, and had just scored a guffaw goal from his favourite troop of simians, deploying a politically incorrect anecdote concerning ‘a drunken slapper’ who had been won over the night before by his inimitable brand of lustful charm and easy wit, washed down with a bucketful of cheap tequila slammers.
David had missed most of the details of the alcohol-fuelled conquest, but the punch line had something to do with her being too drunk to stand, but sober enough to be propped up horizontally on his ‘rod of iron’. He had disappeared from her bedchamber with the dawn leaving her with only a false name, a used condom and the memories of ‘a night on the Kev machine.’
The waves of hyena laughter washed over David, saddening him, and rather than drown in empathy for the despoiled damsel in dipsomaniac distress, he suddenly handed complete control of his mind over to V, his alter ego.
V immediately pushed the femme intoxicada and the weekly meeting out of consciousness. He looked behind left saw with horror that the office was filling up. They came through the open wound of the lift; an army of maggot men and worm women; invading the skin of the office politic. The corpse was swollen and expelling pestilent vapours. To escape them, he surreptitiously threw his pen under the desk and then dove under it, pretending to rescue the biro.
En route, he switched off the computer by holding its power button in for five seconds and then immediately switched it on again. This brutally forced reboot, he knew, dramatically shortened the lifespan of computers and he smiled at the seditious act. He was then momentarily distracted by thoughts of what society would be like if humans could be rebooted in the same way; by, for example, simply sticking your fingers up someone’s nose for five seconds. While under the desk he stuck his ear against the computer tower and secretly listened to the machine finish its booting-up process, enjoying the opportunity to listen to them speaking, to hear their real language: “Beep…Buzz…Burr”, “Click…clack…cluck”, and so on.
It was completely indecipherable, of course, but fascinating nonetheless. As computers grew quieter, they got better and better at hiding their real voices and masking their real identities, and it had been years since he had last heard their gurgly modem voices.
Foetal V, squatting like a hedgehog in the womb space under his desk, with his back to the office and his ear to the computer, was a man at war. He was the last man in the office, fighting all that was not human: the Intranets, the Internets, the Outlooks; the surveillance cameras, the webcams, the screens beyond number; the satellites; the mobile phone networks, the GPRS. Grids spanned the planet and chained humanity: cyber lassoes, an invisible spider’s web of which people knew nothing and from which they could not escape. At least the fly, caught in the web, knows it is trapped and tries to escape, but mankind does not feel the cyber web and does not struggle. V, the invisible would-be spider assassin, hidden in the netherworld of the dead space beneath the bureau, sought nothing less than the rebirth of man; the awakening of consciousness; a second renaissance.
However, his revolutionary desires were hampered by his misanthropy and social ineptitude. He wanted to stay under his desk and listen to the aria of the computer tower, far from the world of man, but David warned him that this was not considered to be appropriate behaviour and told him to sit back in his chair immediately. V and David made a perfect double act: one ever curious and the other always cautious.
V switched his formidable powers of analysis to the eco-friendly chair he was now sitting on. It was a large black swivel chair and he spun around in it once in order to confuse the screen and anyone else who might be watching with an act of unpredictability. Occasionally, V liked to feed illogical data into the secret Experiment of which he was sure he was a subject, hoping to confuse the watchers and delay the Experiment from reaching a valid scientific conclusion.
He pulled the chair under the desk and surveyed the office. Most of the maggots had squirmed into their allotted places by then. The row of desks were twisted and curved slightly, in keeping with the building’s art nouveau feel. The designers called the project the DNA Desk, and it was, they maintained, “an organic curve; an affirmation of the curvatious life force within us; a strand of a DNA molecule oscillating back and forth with all the wondrous complexity and effortless simplicity of nature; a curvilinear force designed to foster creativity and nurture imagination.”
Between his typing bench, which faced Dublin’s cold Northside winds, and the other side of the office world, which overlooked the opulent Southside, there were seven identical rows of environmental bureaucrats. In total, 98 Ministry of the Environment officials called this floor home; all armed with various titles and badges of importance. They spent more time shackled to Ministry desks than to any other place. It was, in a sense, the centre of their lives, and at the centre of this centre, the circle of the Office Floor Facilitator. A voice like a satin whip whispered in V’s ear.

A ring of glass to hide the Dante demon
A glass ring from which to spread his semen

—Ministry …

Silence answered him; an eerie silence, surging upward and downward through the empty stairwell. Even the hissing of the building’s machinery had stopped. V wondered if the Ministry had never been addressed in person before, and found itself at a loss to know how to proceed in the face of this unexpected turn of events; this inquisition of the inquisitor. When should the Listeners say when they are required to speak?

—Is there anybody there?

More silence; and then a distant half-whisper; and then: nothing.

—Is there anybody there?
Tell them I have come:
I am the one man left awake

Only the echoed footfalls of his own words stirred.

—Is there anybody there?
Ministry of the Environment,
Minenver,
MoE
ME.
Answer me, ME.
V was trying to ward off fear with words, like a priest at a funeral grave; with his prayers, hymns and homilies; but only nothingness flooded down the sealed stairwell, drowning him in toxic uncertainty. There was no promise of the resurrection and the life; not even the sound of dust falling to comfort him.

—Is there anybody there?
Or is this a windmill I tilt at?
A chimera of danger; a stairway to fantasy.
Where will you lead me, oh second uterus?
Stay, I’ll go no further.

Lost between floors, in a doorless windowless stale prison, he faced that most feared of foes, the Voice of Doubt. He doubted the Ministry’s flesh that only a moment ago had seemed to envelop him; he doubted the reality of the Imposter conspiracy that appeared to surround him; and finally, staring down the infernal stairway, turning and twisting in a double helix of concrete covered in fake wood, he was forced to face the Lord of Doubts: self-doubt.

—Cogito ergo …?—V whispered to the deaf walls, suddenly unable to bring himself to face the personal pronoun.

“I pee, therefore I am”
« Dans le merde, il y a le vie. »

Turning right at the bottom of the stairs, he went towards the sign marked toilet and caught his reflection in the smoked mirror on the wall, and realised that he was now four people; the reflections of V and himself having multiplied themselves against the replica of the cafe. Within a few seconds, however, this universe ceased to exist and he was facing another set of stairs, leading downwards to the world of bowel movements: the turd underworld.
Abandon hope; all ye who enter here!
At the bottom of the stairs, he stood in front of an old wooden door with the figure of a man in a top hat. He stayed there for a while, triple checking that it was a man’s pictorial representation and not a woman’s, as he invariable did outside toilets; indulging his life-long but as yet unrealised fear that he would inadvertently enter the women’s’ toilets and be arrested for indecent exposure.
While thoroughly investigating the gender of the scatological icon, a man pulled the door back from the inside, and was surprised to see another man blocking his exit. David, in turn, was surprised to see a man blocking his entrance; and both of them stood rock silent for a moment, not knowing what to do or say. They both checked their minds for conventions governing this situation, but could find none, and could do nothing more than keep their eyes glued to the floor, drowning in the salty shame of public urination. Eventually, David stood aside and the man left hurriedly.
On entering the world of the public toilet, he headed immediately for the nearest empty cubicle, marvelling, as he always did, that there were men in this world who would use a urinal without a gun being pointed to their heads.
Once the door was safely locked, his bladder went into overdrive, screaming for attention and knowing that it was now the master of everything; that all organs in the body were now bent to its will. It sang its stingy song of victory and David, bowing to his conqueror, did what was required of him and ordered his hands to undo his zip and remove the muscle that is the stick that divides the genders; the erectile tissue against which feminists rally. Casting a quick glance to check his dual-function mark of manhood was aimed at its target, he released control and the urine waterfall began; a river of pee making its way back to the sea via the sewers of Dublin; not the prettiest route in the world, but a relatively short one.
—From sea to sky to sewer to sea, all the water flows through me.—David said to himself.

– Number 1: Our grass reserves will proffer only enough foodstuffs for the sheep units for 7.32 days, even factoring in the newly enhanced dimensional specifications.
– Then let them eat wool! – said Beta, twirling a ringlet of her own hair.
– An innovative solution – I said – but alas, what is grown outside may not feed our insides; and the product of the sheep’s labour may not profitably progress through the intestines of this ambitious scheme.
– So, you agree with me?
– Madam Beta, there are not words to express my admiration for the ship of your reasoning; a vessel built of soap that will brook no boundaries; a rudderless turbine of thought that harkens naught the sight of lighthoused beacons warning of the calamities of rocky reality.
– Number 2: The Sheep Units may not ingest Product Wool.
– The change your accountancy procedures to make the impossible possible! I am tired of the Owls of Accounting placing obstacles in our path. One might almost suspect you had an ulterior motive in preventing Soviet progress… – Alpha Wold said, leaving the sentence hanging like a noose.
– Number 1: My objections are not based on the rules of accounting, but on the laws of biology. To put in simply, a sheep cannot live on its own wool.
– Do not give us problems, but deliver us solutions! I am positively angered by this negative thinking! – Beta hollered.
– Virgin fields will steady the hymen, and feed the famine fighters. – said Emerald Wolf mysteriously, looking up into Alpha’s eyes and making his lips twitch. Beta noticed this and ground her teeth, staring at Emerald like a warty basilisk.
– Go on, Emerald. – Alpha said.
– While our own sheep must remain in ‘protective custody’ and cannot hunt for grass, there is no reason why other sheep may not collect the grass for us.
– And why would they do that!? – Beta asked, pursing her lips and shaking her head dismissively.
— We could suggest it to them, under the right conditions … – Emerald said mysteriously; and then looked at me and then again at Alpha.
– This meeting is over – Alpha said – but Emerald, would you mind staying behind for a moment? I have a private matter to discuss with you.

– What havoc is this? What terrible fate has befallen our beloved leader, the inestimable Sheba?
– She’s been murdered, ain’t she? Beaten and murdered, that’s what. – FT Ferret said, revealing her more than humble origins; a sign, I knew, that she was nervous.
– Murdered? What foul beast would thus dispatch the doyen of diverse equality; the crowned prince of directive consensus; the empress of egalitarian flexibility?
– It was a man, weren’t it! Ten men. Big brutes with clubs. They beat poor Sheba to a pulp. I saw it all, I did.
– What hideous sight to afflict eyesore vision! And then surely, in a rage, you did make to protect our champion, for I see your coat is caked in bloody icing?
– Sure, I did. I ran to get help from the Ministry. On the way, I met these here two wolves by accident. Lucky, eh? But when we got back, the men had up and gone and Sheba had croaked it. So, we’s carried her back here, for a proper funeral like.
– Then carry her hither, mounted on a double-hearted and eight-legged chariot of noble avengers; and carry the body that did house our light upwards to the Chamber of Mirrors; and there lay her with all tenderness on a bed of wood; until we may fashion a more permanent home for her perturbed spirit to rest and await our homilies.
– Right, I’ll stick her on a desk in the big room and get Alpha Wolf.

Alpha Wolf acted quickly and before the body was fixed in frigidity, the funeral was arranged and the service performed. The clowns played tragedians and took on the aspect of grief; playing an emotion society deemed appropriate. All was outwardly silent and somber; while inwardly the butterfly minds fluttered and sipped shallow thoughts.
No speeches were read, much to the consternation of TS Otter — who had penned several ‘Odes to a Hound’ for the occasion — Beta Wolf having decreed that silence makes the best speech; and so, instead of fine words, the grievers felt only the hollowness of silence and creeping fear; knowing that what had happened to Sheba could happen to them. But as a remedy for this fear, Alpha Wolf , or ‘The Protector’ as he was suddenly being referred to, sat high and proud; fearless and strong; almost divine.
After the funeral, I returned to my desk; finding the company of others suddenly repellent and taking what solace I could in the screen. There was nothing of any interest on the screen, but staring at it gave me a reason not to look at anyone else. Screens can be a godsend to taciturn foxes and bathing in the radiated information, one is permitted a brief holiday from the hell of empty conversations.
Panic was gripping the Ministry and the office personnel began to quiver; infected one and all by the viral illusion of man. I alone seemed to be free of the sickness; knowing, or rather feeling, that this earthquake of fear was all sham and falsehood; a prescribed panic; a floorshow. But to be sane in the world of the insane is dangerous, and so I kept my counsel to myself; wearing a furroughed brow, as if lost in distraction of important screen business.
Snippets of conversations invaded my ears. There was much talk of ‘The Protector’ and the need to ‘take measures’. Banners appeared — from where I know not — demanding the repeal of the Charter of Mammal Rights, with the repulsive slogans: ‘Down with the Charter-Right!’; ‘Life First Liberty Later’ and ‘Sheep Can’t Eat Rights!’ Then a flurry of e-mails landed in my inbox and scribbled notes began to be placed on the walls. Everyone seemed to be calling for the end of the Council of Creatures and its replacement with the Supreme Animal Soviet; a shadowy wolf-only institution that few of them had even heard of before and none understood. ‘Alpha Wolf needs our support’ I heard over and over again, and ‘We gotta give The Protector the power he needs to protect us’. ‘What we need’, everyone agreed, ‘is a strong leader!’
Only the rabbits seemed unsure. They huddled around their king, Winston the Wise, and twitched their noses, wondering where the enemy was that everyone was running from. From the corner of my eye, I caught Winston looking at me, but I did not return his gaze; fearing that he might see it as an entreaty to converse. I knew the Soviet Wolves were destined to take over, and so I did not wish to become affiliated with any potential opposition groups. Do not censure me, good cousin: when the polar bear attacks the seal cubs, do you rush to defend them; or do you keep a healthy distance? Fortune may favour the brave, but evolution weeds them out nonetheless.
And then, when the fever had reached its pitch, the e-mail bolt shattered the eggshell that was all that was left of our republic . Alpha had called an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Creatures to discuss the Crisis; and it now appeared that he was acting head of state following the demise of Sheba; or so his hastily changed electronic signature indicated. Constitutionally, this was highly dubious, but none of the other Councillors , some of whom were now being openly berated in public, felt inclined to raise any procedural objections.
I jumped off my chair and trotted to the fifth floor, but my progress was impeded by hordes of animals; all making their way to the door of the meeting room and demanding that their voices be heard. A chant of ‘Al-pha Wolf; Al-pha Wolf’ broke out and became deafening, crushing thought. A cheer erupted when he appeared from the emergency exit, flanked by Beta Wolf and a wolf escort for the Mammalia Praetoria. I pushed my way through the throng with a great deal of difficulty, but all animals stood aside for him; raising themselves on two legs and waving paws and hooves in gay abandon. Winston found himself in his path, and was rudely pushed aside by a swipe of Beat Wolf’s paw. Crashing into the wall and falling to the floor, his hurts were augmented by spitting sheep, who might have trampled him underfoot if his rabbit subjects had not helped him to his feet and allowed him to hop to the relative safety of the meeting room. TS Otter was also much pushed and prodded, and his calming verse had little effect on the mob. At one point, I too found myself facing an angry band of teen sheep misfits, but they scattered when Emerald Wolf came to my side and snarled at them.
Much shaken by the madness of the crowd, we all eventually found our places in the meeting room; a rectangular haven guarded by a semicircle of wolves without, keeping the thronging masses back; all of them chanting ‘Al-pha Wolf; Al-pha Wolf’.
He began the meeting immediately with three hammer blows of a gavel.

– Councillors, you have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately. I call on you to dissolve the High Council of Creatures and accept the benevolent dictatorship of the Supreme Animal Soviet. We alone can protect you from man.
– The High Council was established to protect us from each other. It is a representative body, composed of diverse species, constitutionally bound to defend the Rights of Mammals, as laid down in the Charter… — Winston began, but was interrupted by Grizzly Bear, who slammed her desk so hard that it broke in the middle, and both sides fell to the floor.
– Re Peel the Charter Potato! – Beta declared; putting words, of a sort, onto the Bear’s anger; racing through her sentences like water flowing down a drain. — What we need is a strong government. No piece of paper is going to protect us from man! Do you think you can fight swords with paper? Is that what you’re saying? We need Soviet discipline, not wishy-washy flim-flam tom-foolery thingamy bobbery.
– No mammal shall have dominion over another mammal.—Winston said, quoting the first article of the Charter. The Supreme Animal Soviet is a wolf-only organization.
– Nonsense! – said Beta Wolf – G Bear is also a member of our society.
– And will we Councillors also become members? – Saeurnoce Squirrel asked hopefully.
– For the duration of the Crisis, we need experts in defense, and those experts happen to be wolves. However, we could allow one more species, in the interests of representation.
– I’d like to join the Soviet! – said Saeurnoce, abandoning the leaking Council ship; feeling no more attachment to it or any other principle than to a buried nut.
– You are tainted with many Council follies, and recent reports of your nut hoarding would make you an unpopular choice with the proletariat. We cannot afford to be associated with the greed and decadence of Council excess. But we thank you for your support in the vote to dissolve the Council.
– I didn’t say…
– Be very careful what you say, Saeurnoce. The Justice Ministry has a long memory. The Soviet believes S Fox would be the best choice. If he is willing to accept the challenge, we will allow him to keep his post as Minister for Miscellaneous. What do you say, Comrade Fox? — Alpha Wolf asked.

I looked at the table, afraid to meet the eyes of Alpha Wolf and unwilling to make eye-contact with my erstwhile fellow-Councillors.

– I accept. – I said, and left it at that; knowing that any other words of thanks would stick in my throat; and perhaps later glue it together in a suffocation of guilt.

– Thank you, Comrade Fox. From now on, you shall be referred to as Supreme Animal Soviet Delegate Fox; or SASDEL Fox, for short. Welcome to the future! And now to the past…
– Somewhat hasty have you been, oh wolf whose motives lie unseen.
Not a single vote has yet been cast, and until such time the Council lasts.
I call on all those here, with me,
To vote for Council just and free