Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 30

When Joakim opened his eyes again, he was with Julian in the cage.

"Look at what you made Hansl do," Joakim guessed Dieter said to him. "He's the nicest one among us, and you got him to use violence."

"Not much of a guru if I can't bring out new potential in people," Joakim said, rubbing his chest where he was hit with the hammer.

He noticed Julian had stopped pacing the cage like a polar bear in captivity and was sitting silently in a corner with his arms over his knees. Julian crouched down to him. "Are you alright, Julian?" he asked, but all he got back was a sob.

"Where are his parents?" he said to the four men in the room on the other side of the cage. There were Hansl, Dieter, and Friedrich, but also Alex.

"Back in Austria, I suppose, at their wit's end," Dieter said.

"We'll make it up to them, I promise," Hansl said. "It was a mistake to use the boy, like I always knew. We took out the implant again, you see?"

"I see a young boy traumatized for life. You will need to do a little more than feel sorry."

"He might have been dead by now at home, with his parents from the virus," Friedrich said. "Let us not forget we are the good guys here, stopping the demise of humankind by the evil Signal."

"What happened, Tipi? I don't remember," Julian sobbed when he saw Joakim by his side. He snuggled into his arms.

"Thanks to your precious token to Julian, with your phone number, once we could have him picked up from the child care and brought him here, we could finally contact you directly."

"So it wasn't the publisher after all," Joakim said.

"Who?"

"Of course not, silly," Kalisa said from one of the terminals of the computer on the other side.

"Kalisa. You're free! Get me out of here," Joakim said.

"I'm sorry, Jo. I'm afraid I can't do that." she said. "Remember, I am not your personal locksmith."

"Then kick their asses!"

"I wish I could if I were on the right side of the cage."

"But you are, you're there with them?"

"You give me too much credit for what are actually your own actions. So the question again is, what are you going to do about this situation. Don't focus on what you can't but what you can do."

Joakim looked around. The cage was empty except for a chair and Julian still whimpering in a corner. The bars were steely and sturdy and too high to climb over. He could try to argue his way out. He could have the lab-rats have his way with him. Or, he could not have been put into this cage in the first place.

"There you go," Kalisa said, as if reading his mind.

"Okay, let's try that again. Are you with me?"

"I'm with you all the way," Kalisa said.

Joakim positioned himself in the center of the cage and redid all the steps he had so many times before for the first time. As a beginner and the question "What is it like to be a mountain?" on his mind he let himself fall into the fictional realm, in a search for Gary The Storypolist.

Kalisa entered through the bars of the cage and sat behind Joakim.

"What is he doing?" Friedrich asked.

"Meditation," Alex said. "Connecting to the all so every problem disappears, and every person become unimportant in exchange for the importance of the all."

"Fine," Friedrich said. "If that shuts him up. Can we start?"

Dieter nodded. "Yes," Hansl said. "I'm switching on the implant."

But Joakim had already been in another realm altogether. He perused the bookcase of Gary's library. "No time to dillydally, Joakim," Kalisa said who was standing at the lazy chair across where Gary was sitting, or snoozing rather.

Joakim walked over to the chair.

"Hey, Gary!" he said. "We need your help again."

"No you don't," Gary said with sleeping eyes. "You can do it all by yourself. Yarn your tale, storypolation will do the rest."

Joakim sat down and held Kalisa's hand. He started with the denouement, resulting from petting the dog,  he pulled out five different contradicting Q-factors, threading them retroactively in a multitude of hooks. He mixed metaphors into similes and alliterated his allegories to create a parody of subplots. He introduced a narrator, with the voice of a ghostwriter with its own soliloquy full of run-on sentences. Soon, his draft was becoming a whirlwind of satire opening a rift in space and time. He reached with his hand through the rift. Loud quacks accompanied his arm through the rift and solidified into a token that Joakim placed on top of the humming machine in the room. He reached back. The rift pulsated and grew one last time to human-sized proportions before it would collapse. He squeezed Kalisa's hand. She squeezed back. Something then squeezed his other hand. "I will tell you what it is like to be a mountain," a voice said and then, before Joakim could look he jumped into the rift.