Note. The following is the tale of an impressed figure, it is also a travel guide. Many parts may be tackled with a partner, or partners. For an optimal experience on an iOS device it is recommended that you “Request Desktop Website” in your browser. Our setting is a cruise ship.

Parts

1: Moderator 4 Moderator; Seeking Client-Host relationship
2: Porthole to a conversation
3: Assailed
4: You Paid Extra for the Good Air
5: Fata Morgana
6: Engineered 4 UR compliance
7: Colour-Assisted Hierarchies
8: Residual hemorrhaging, and secret longing 
9: Modeling your perfect pair
10: Forced to LARP: Press-ganged pop-cultural reenactment
11: Supper
12: And after the eleventh hour the computer said: U got dumb eyes m8
13: When the geo-pol terror play gets 2 real
14: Algorithms feel no guilt

Close the air quote, a recent acquisition. Something of a sadsack entertainer - neglected their duty, gone astray… Can you Shanghai the already crimped? And the cruise ship! How could I forget? - it's stuck, in a nebula, or a whirlpool, or does it matter? It's vast, we're slow. Oh? the crew?

Dutifully restrained.

HICCUP
The Jewel of the Night Sky

Waiters wait, shovelmen shovel. Metaphorically, for our beautiful vessel is powered solely by the colour green…

This, perhaps startling revelation, was the direct result of mass logo re-designs and accompanying shifts in corporate hue 🔀️ Red was divorced and Orange abandoned. Following a sojourn in Blue, we slipped back into the Secondaries then the Tertiary, before the great chlorophyll fetish began. A virtuous wave of such pigmented magnitude it resulted in the abundant supply of clean energy.

Long-dead operating system grassy-knoll green. Transubstantiated from pixel to energetic-tincture by means unknown, guarded, sealed tight with Intellectual Property Paneling™. A miraculous colour for many, and inadvertent irony for the masters of extraction… Though their pain was sharp, they rallied; erecting new methods of rentism and dearth that swiftly curtailed the oppositions post-scarcity jubilation.

But I digress, and so the waiters wait, and the First Mate fondles their genitalia with abandon, as we, bold and star-blind, press on.

HICCUP
In ever cascading circles.

Of course mutiny was once considered, briefly. I assure you: Vee Tee Cue. Very Tough Questions were raised:

1. Is there an alternative to this gaseous space? this watery zone? and-

2. Why does the vessel list to starboard by 14 degrees?

In the academy the issue was approached from every angle. Close read and frothy, critically discussed.

CHORUS
Ah!

But that slithering doubt, that trickle-down acceptance

HICCUP
How it sets in

…and so it was noted, softly downward:

The skeuomorphic page truly soaked in piss. No matter the number of guest-speaker panels, project launches, or seminars held, they could not stem the tide. Future consigned, and subsequently forgotten…

Then there is YOU, you degenerate little voyeur. Remotely accessing a bodycam, or was it a nose cone cam? A Bayerische-Motoren-Werke mono autonomous cam? It was? Oh how titillating! how extra-judicial. And what does this expropriated Point. Of. Pleasure reveal?

HICCUP
Interlaced-four-hundred-and-eighty

Unfortunate. No-no, there's no need to feel embarrassed… I'm looking forward to spending time with you too, but, hush now… I hear something.

SOUP
and, and, and!

GANK
An illustrious career.

Presently however: SOUP finds herself recalling the past 48 hours to Uppercase-X-GANK-Underscore-Uppercase-X. A uniformed figure and necropolitical technologist…

GOUNCE, a humanoid form of indeterminate age and flattened origin, mistype of an export format-

muh, muh, oh, ah, rer, puh, guh.

You try to disconnect

HICCUP
but a jingle sells you a supplement

CHORUS
Spotter, spotter!

Hit interference. Switch feeds, or try to…

HICCUP
Caught in the act

You dip into the gap between connections

CHORUS
Spook-mole-judas! Six thousand eyes!

You’re rightly accused of voyeurism, dragged back- a blow to the head. Flash of maritime signal.

CHORUS
Spotter, spotter,

HICCUP
Trapped in the bounding box.

You protest, attempting communication in the language of your assailants,

HICCUP
A blow to the head.

but you meant no harm!

HICCUP
A pitched kick-

CHORUS
Quisling-fink,
peeping-fink!

Unearthed and oozing⇾ a recreated Mancunian canal⇾ a live-streamed archeological dig at a blacksite⇾ a network-connected septic tank ⏩️ You cover great distances with imperceptible latency, but still they come.

No evading these surprisingly dexterous luddites, regressives versed in denial of service, brute forced into more smart-enabled-excrement.

HICCUP
Rave stabbed

Parsed, quantized, put back together. Squeezed through the intestinal nodes of a framework with a footprint elsewhere, more desperate, where sweat is still wrought with the whip not the gym class.

Dragged back, dunked again. Vision of a flayed face.

CHORUS
Spotter!

Another kick to the head.

Your brain fades in. A walla walla classic fills the air: busy bistro ambiance number two dot WAV. It's fuzzy but... through the gabba-induced fugue state, perhaps you also detect a hint of Cosmopolitan dot AVI? Opening your eyes: blurry figures come, and go, reinforced glass, rare alloys, squinting: multi-tiered decking... A serendipitous floating chyron with slight signal delay blocks your lower-third. It reminds you where you are, because you had forgotten.

Another jingle, Star Cruises: Jewel of the Night Sky.

HICCUP
A fine cruise line.

Hazily you recall the jovial representatives, each stressing the newness of this chartered route and vessel. Propulsive, progressive, a glimmer in their eye… An emphasis upon the diversity on offer. At great expense all the electrical outlets had been reconfigured. Types A through N - the classics, automotive and serial bus too. Flat blade and receptacle, round pin and nongendered, Schuko, TOSLINK, and don’t forget the ground, or the green CHAdeMO, or the…

You recall something shiny, gleaming on the desk, and large windows, yes, very large. Tinted.

HICCUP
Green.

Many storeys up. At least it appeared that way. Or was it a video loop?

HICCUP
A seamless wall setup?

Rectilinear shrouds and the smog has edges. YOU drift back to the present, the looped murmur - but it’s a squat room now, not that great atrium.

CHORUS
A very good chroma key.

A smell, a smelly man, directly in front: Suited blue with institutional adornment. It sounds as if he's speaking to you - Best you pay attention.

You recognize the voice - GANK, and attempt to blurt something quite pathetic:

Choked up, nothing escapes. Without language you gesture a feigned innocence of all prior breaches of privacy. Trail off, take another whiff. GANK stares. You detach the smell from the figure - A compressed antimicrobial polymer. Pungent, though not altogether repulsive, standard among crew quarters.

GANK
You must have walked here from the atrium.

Perhaps you weren't paying attention?

GANK stares. You search again for some stable ground, something to fill the vacuum-

A drawn out parp of consternation.

The outline of GANK fizzes, dissolving into a flattened display, and then into an image of a ship. The stricken vessel drifts amidst a pall of text and greys, lilacs, then finally a Klein blue. You think of tit and Anthropometry - a flash- correct yourself: the Gaze, Agency, contrast of suit/bare skin, U-turn: thoughts of sponge relief, switchback: the lapis lazuli of medieval madonnas, turn again -

A live feed?
A remote probe? 
A distant tannoy gurgles something.

Peering again tentatively, you survey your present location:

In this case “Ship” is perhaps a misnomer, the word unable to convey the scale of the structure in which you find yourself. Viewed from bow or stern, it was closer to a seafaring ziggurat than any traditional vessel, the structure rising in two stepped slopes to a blunted top deck while descending below the surface in a mirror of the above. In profile a series of these vast forms had been extruded along the Z-axis and then coupled with elaborate scaffolding. A four kilometer inedible Toblerone, intersected by a slippery navigable plane.

The display and squat space recede, replaced with a funneling slope through which you slip. Faster than refresh rate you descend, through post-draw-distance gloom, and into the pop-in of the atrium - where you land without incident, without… surface collision.

You remember the Port of Jean Claude, yet you can't remember boarding the vessel, nor the collision with the malevolent image glimpsed on the display. That Yves whirl of dust and gas, water and… text boxes.

ℹ️ intermodal interlude:

HICCUP
See Em Ahy, Sea Gee Em
Evergreen, Yang Ming, and Maersk.

Sixty footer, Grimaldi and Grieg,
Wan Hai, Shandong,

Beached!

Stripped asunder

Sixty Three, Forty Six,
Twist-lock and corner-cast

Oh Seawise Giant! Happy Giant!
Oh to rest- at Alang, Chittagong, Gadani

See Em Ahy, Sea Gee Em

Oh to rest!
at Alang, Chittagong, or Gadani

With no knowledge of how you entered and with no visible means for escape - you reassure yourself of your history: the problems, the good times. You try to imagine the flags of the embarcadero, but the image does not come easy.

KAIZEN
THE POOL... IS FULL.

Biographical details change on the fly, hair colors cycle. Birth dates, states of origin, all flip when presented with new data. Allegiances become porous, spiritual beliefs surfable. Policy stances switch with such speed it is surely beyond human comprehension. None can gain the upper hand, and a ceasefire ensues. Ending as quickly as it had begun, each mutable candidate filed away for server R&R before the next confrontation.

You catch a glimpse of dashing-blue on a gangway, four in GANK-like cuirass, their quarry a buttery individual with sine-waved scalp. You consider pursuit but a series of glyphs erupt in your vision. You lose yourself again in the interface: most pleasing, hand crafted. Rival manufacturer, a slight nod toward the more outré of past century typographic design… The display scrolls so matter-of-factly you can't shake it's words.

KAIZEN
The central processor:

HICCUP
re-routed

to endlessly reconfigure the present. The sensor array:

KAIZEN
realigned

to receive only the most surface recalls of the past. 

HICCUP
Treading water,

KAIZEN
stuck in the nebula

A most uncomfortable predicament! Though you’re unsure if this is happening Now, to YOU, or, if you had just caught the cold-open to some fictional broadcast… You survey the scene: things, sights, signs! The sight, of the Star Cruise logo. Cyclical in design, viridian in colour - The onset of nausea. A ninety degree turn, a long deck, sequential text on display:

You picture adolescents slipping in your stomach contents on the high gloss simulation of a floor. You dash for the latter of the signs, crossing the distance instantaneously…

The bathroom drone is sidechained to vomit and let's be frank - you don't feel quite yourself. In fact, you experience your present expulsions of bile externally, vicariously. From ten feet up and from 45 degrees. Observed and observer, angled-down, peculiar. Quick flash - a more intimate view, of the retching figure, the wretched you? A quick peek in the mirror to find the real YOU?

HICCUP
Spit.

Ah, an older model. Aftermarket olfactory processor, imaging elements sub-par… a string of errors in your erotic targeting locators - A surveillance network, with a text-to-speech impediment... best if I stick to the talking.

HICCUP
Spit.

HICCUP
Spit.

I must state upfront: there are too few stalls, and there have been malfunctions... but the design, Oh! What. A. Delight - Soft-warmth, large-frond. To begin we have chartreuse venetian shingle designed in Foshan-Guangdong, each 8x11 tile machined with 6 axis precision, and topped with child labour filigree.

Cool tile, glazed eyes. Every surface baked with reactive composites that self-adjust to changes in humidity, body odor, and fluid levels. Now, the bidets. The finest jets and genital amenities, probing and cleansing with meticulous armatures, all food safe. A retractable bio-film doubles as sandwich platter, ideal for any self-pleasure lunch.

Moving on: tenderizers and lubricators dot the fine grouting of the backsplash, a spritz of talc from one, a gush of aromatic from another. Each fondling with such slippery tenderness you could be forgiven for thinking them not artificial.

Beyond the reach of the hygiene armatures you find a cluster of unsanctioned User Additions. Lens-flaring and globular, adherences of dubious craftsmanship.

HICCUP
“Lout and lecher!”

Now, the Bowls. Wide, but not too wide, perfect height and with a vandal resistant finish. The beauty of it almost enough to keep nausea at bay. Sound proofing with Bose-Corp-White-Noise-Boost-Mode™ eliminates even the loudest rectal ululation or gastric eructation. Again food safe and voice activated. Or, for more discrete communications - a display compatible with subdermal Near Field Chips occupies each jutting between-leg console.

HICCUP
Cut.

Come closer now, is that a faint glow... emanating from that third stall? You see it too, don't you?

Cut. Peering through the stalls imaging system: A vomit spattered avatar, unbinded and T-posed. Further down, preserving the toes of this Away From Keyboard... you see them. The most resplendent golden pair! You thank the stars and extend a probing armature from below the bowl. Slowly, a spindly arm, the feral cleats flutter, hesitate.

You shoot for contact-

Miss! The pointed pair dart, up and out. You cut again- reflection, mirror feed- recursion,
blinding gold and a glimpse of artificial lace. The pair whisk themselves through the hermetic spa-seal, and away from local surveillance.

Garbled and furious you attempt pursuit - Minimal lag. Across wider networks, into quadcopters, service drones. You zip past a feed of what may have been GOUNCE in a crawl space ⇽cycle back ⏸️ The sad figure gone. ⇾Forward again ⏩️ Tracking⇾ a visor feed, a navel embedded field sensor, a ceiling mounted black blob. You visit new mirrors, fresh stalls, intimate encounters ⏩️ but still nothing.

You feel dizzy and though you lack the haunches to do so, instinctively attempt to sit down.

Posterior frustration aside, you ponder your disembodied state and adjust to a new inner drive…

You commandeer a mothballed UAV, a Sikorsky, and return to the atrium. There you see SOUP plying their wares: re-tooled and re-distributed Oh Bee Jays and semi-corrupt Tee Ex Tee's. The defective keys to production.

ℹ️ Involuntary rapid-prototyping suicide was up 17% Though much of this was down to poor docx rather than user error. It was not unheard of for firms to intentionally leak fatally flawed CAD files to the black market in order to prove a point.

SOUP
Exotic! Exotic!

Still reeling from disembodiment shock, you tentatively navigate the criss-cross decking of official pathways and ad-hoc contributions.

Looped clouds grease the rim of the upper decks, a lard lathered Constable. There's a viewing platform - stay awhile, make dream imagery of that gelatin sky.

SOUP
White, green, blue, blue! purple, and gold!

A linear wave gust reaches you from below. Looking down you see a quadrangle - and in it the spasmodic irregularities of decrepit flesh.

Pulse code modulations, sweat, begs, wet slaps and torn ligaments. Mercy! A hundred exosuited geriatrics. Vibrating ancients, the sagging brought taught, released! and then pulled again. The deck shudders as the plimsoll line is reached…

SOUP
Exotic! Exotic!
Tone it!

Tunneling in four dimensions, you feel the first wave- dull thuds, the fruit of our orbit. Scrapes- A dirge, of dejected flotsam, lagan, excremental jetsam. The vessel purging a new landscape from its innards while carving a path through it.

You wade the cast off aesthetic, eight thousand lines collapsed into four hundred, compression affect. This sludge: fleshly-mechanical with chrometype of course, and hint of purple, then comes the cartoon short skirt, big big eyes in the right colour to “pop”, detritus spewed tactically into networks. Self care wrapped in flat design, and an exabyte of activism. Sweat sheen cranked to a hundred and fifty as the tech-brigade perch atop the algo-gen dung heap. Waste hybrids > White wall > a blur deconstructed by the press release. All aliased with a wink then flattened with a nudge.

Sound signal - a reprieve and the arrival of the convalescence home. The geriatrics disembark. Stretched and lubed, chamois on anodized. A fresh batch of the recovering strapped into glistening machines. Sound signal - The newly power-assisted begin to lurch.

SOUP
White, green, blue, blue, white, green…

Perhaps we should seek a ticket for tonight’s show in the Forum? Or, we could grab a rental pastry; indulge in a pleasant glide through the Piazza?

HICCUP
Tried and true

Warmed black cherry Clafoutis? Mendiants, or Tarte Tatin?

CHORUS
Countless petit four,
mille-feuille?

A croque-en-bouche!

CHORUS
Éclair, croustade,

Puits d'amour!

CHORUS
Flaugnarde…
charlotte…

The upper decks were Anti Access / Area Denial smoothed with tasteful shrubbery. Looming over rows of artisanal bakers was the citadel. It’s keep and moat anesthetized to the point of invisibility with glass and official lighting. It looked like any other office in which the calculations of aircraft design software had played a part.

Though the furnishings of the piazza were not bolted down, they were monitored closely with a sentry trained on each item. If any chair leg were to move more than double the legs total length in any direction a warning shot would be fired, and the same would occur if any item were to move at a velocity greater than 9kmh toward the patio perimeter. While to move a chair beyond the 3ft perimeter itself was justification for an automated kill. Needless to say, girthier patrons had to be careful when readjusting their seating, and children would frequently be leashed to a Parking Pole…

As you peruse the patisseries’ offerings you hear a commotion. Turning you see GOUNCE flailing amidst a crowd at another bakery. The entities cartoon bark grating and untranslatable, the bustling patrons visibly shaken. Face to floor the disproportioned GOUNCE snakes, sniffing at ankle and toe.

In a frightfully quick display, GOUNCE accosts a middle aged gentleman, a non-binary grandparent, and an anthropomorphized ocean buoy. Ripping skirt, and tunic from each in an attempt to further reveal their footwear. The buoy blinks, vanishes - a prosumer grade graphic of a coastline fetishist. The middle aged man freezes, tumbles - the inanimate mascot of an offal deli. The grandparent battles admirably.

As the afternoon patrons surge in every direction the grandchildren scream unable to escape their tether. Jostled by the crowd you feel yourself slip, stumbling without legs, and as your accelerometer fails you see GOUNCE pursued again by dashing blue…

Your LOD’ing shifts until vertices fail to appear, splintered through a local mesh [no dead zone] circumnavigating interference, you’re reformed at a gateway: Midwest exurb, an old social platform.

SOUP
Blacked-out for a minute there?

Blacked-out for a minute there. It appears SOUP has made your acquaintance while you… weren’t here.

SOUP
I got you a ticket. It's set to be an unmissable event

…

GOUNCE has been found!

Though the skipping of assignments is unbecoming of an impressed man,
I do admire the bravery.

So brave. But what of that elusive pair?

CHORUS
Sought by all, caught by none.

“like you’re really there” - surround of Greco-Roman digital, a post-post-taste cycle once again at its periapsis. All portico and Elgin copy-paste, Doric morphing into Corinthian as the inefficient bump map loads in. Smash cut to overcast, green-grey filter so very sad. Zoom to column as it turns to limp noodle, slithers to floor w/ voiceover- “has erectile dysfunction got you down?”

Unsure of where you even are right now you decide to indulge SOUP and their technical proclivities…

SOUP
We begin with a few choices: Self-build or outsource? Fog-on-the-Tyne or the Mekong Delta?

CHORUS
all mine, all mine!

SOUP
Pay which small labourer a smaller fee to sculpt your perfect pair? 
A delicate balance of control, quality, and bottom line.
Though for now, we shall cover the self-build method.

CHORUS
Lattice, edge-split, bevel.

SOUP
You will require a strong base, and that in turn requires a heaping of strong references.

CHORUS
Cube, Vert, Face, and Cone!

SOUP
Raid your networks for imagery, ask inappropriate questions, pilfer the masters sandals.
Freeware, shovelware, bloatware? Open source or subscription?
Open the software of your preference.
Translating, rotating, scaling.
Master the fundamentals, subdivide the mesh and flip the normals.
…
Watch your topology!
…
Check the render, package the files, and congratulations.

A new marker with which to orientate yourself.

Twenty one fifty nine. With ticket in claw you find yourself in The Forum, a privatized network territory with high-capacity holo emitters. If you may permit me, I shall describe to you the scene:

Out of the dark with bundles they slink, staking claim to small patches of the square. A nightly demarcation of private domains, each erecting with patent carbon nanotubes near-imperceptible seating apparatus. As these lucky-seated settle in for the evening, the standing ticketed throng, that Wall of Gawking Flesh- Seethes with resentment, At THIS, And At THAT, and so the show begins ⇾

Re-cut children’s animations from yesteryear, the figures painstakingly remade and given holographic form with technology unavailable at the time of their first broadcast. Despite this, the images are afflicted by some bit-crushing filter, appearing more lo-fidelity than they ever were to begin with… You hear beyond the inoffensive musical phrases the sniffs of noses, in corners and mixed drinks.

Twenty two fifteen. GOUNCE is late. Overhead, text overlays ripple and swim: live testimonies of depressive episodes, recalled specifics of classic scenes.

SOUP
Season 9, episode 23, the finale part 1 tilde tilde tilde semi colon asterisks zero oh oh ohhh!

Bizarre, yet, you find it not an altogether unpleasant experience. You think about the old car park, was it a car park? The one you played in as a child. Torn-down now. Someone told you it was “unsightly”. The musical edit, vaguely familiar, rounds off the corners. Soothed back to the present - A preternaturally coloured character with an oversized head, saunters, weaves, followed, by an unusually dimensioned dog.

SOUP
GOUNCE has arrived.

Cultural necromancy at its finest, wet cheeks and salty lips. The Big Cry, here it comes.

CHORUS
blub blub blub blu bu bu bub ubub

A short line of dialogue, a sample, an undisclosed speaker. You remember this. An early season. YOU remember this. Toby Buck, board-skater, practical-joker, Toby Buck and his double-barreled dog, Toby Buck and Krispy-Star. With a body lined with holo-receptors, and face studded with mo-cap targets, GOUNCE performs the role admirably.

SOUP
On the way to the vets-

CHORUS
Ahh!

On the way to the vets, you recall the scene. The dog dies a couple of episodes later. Poor Krispy-Star.

SOUP
there, there

The oversized head and stretch-squashed dog continue to bob through the square, moving slower than you remember. For the Nth time everyone lingering, all re-living. The sky aflame with collective recalls: When they first saw it, where they saw it, how they saw it. You engage with the chat interface, each line taking form on the etched-ceiling: