A Journey to the Heart of the Millenium Dream

Chapter 10 - Loud and Random Noises

"We need to chill out for a while." "yeah - we're getting way off."

"Thing over there says RELAX. It's a sign."

"Bits of board with a message painted on usually are. Let's go."

We are in a large white room. All the angles are wrong. Scratch that, there are no angles, just curves in off white.

"What is this place?"

"It's Colonel Wilma Deerings private squash court." I explain.

My consultants face sets new standards in the field of blankness.

"eh?"

He dosn't have the same deep, wide and complete cultural background as myself. Wilma Deering binted around with Buck Rogers. A fine looking woman who understood that there is no such thing as too much lip gloss.

"What I was trying to say," I say, "is that this place looks like the not too distant future used to look like."

"yeah. I guess." He looks around again. "Was the future supposed to be grubby white?" he asks, "The future was supposed to be grubby OR white, never both."

The place is kinda relaxing though. We relax.

"Listen" he advises.

I hear bongs and chirps. Relaxing, reverberating bongs and chrips.

"I listen. I relax."

"What you hear is part of a piece of music which was composed for the Millenium - it lasts exactly one thousand years. It's a machine built from those neat bowls and bells from Tibet."

I decide not to argue the case that it takes over a thousand years to compose a Millenium long track. I am too smart to fall into that trap. They probably only had a year so what do you do? Hire three thousand composers working in shifts. Hey presto! One thousand man(composer) years. Easy.

Or possibly they used monkeys. I guess we'll never know.

All things considered it is dull and there are screaming children. We leave.

Shit. I'm crashing.

"Tooo ti-t-tired."

"Hah." he says and searches in the depths of the pockets of his combat trousers.

"Here."

"What is it?"

"About two grams of caffine and a splash of morphine to take the edge off."

"Hmmm"

A little while later I check back in, with a painful mental crunching sensation, to see how my body is doing with. While caffine may not be illegal, in high enough quantities it can be fucking harsh. What's going on anyway?

My consultant seems very excited. He points at a sign. The sign reads:

WARNING! LOUD AND RANDOM NOISES BEYOND THIS POINT!

I look blank. He points at my t-shirt. The slogan reads :

I (HEART) FUCKED UP NOISE

Ah. He's right. We do like our nasty noises.

Inside is a complex grid of speakers intended to disorientate and disturb the listener. Children cry. Woman whimper. Men grit their teeth and hurry on through. My consultant grins and runs around reading signs and examining diagrams.

A jet flys over, or under, or behind us. Maybe all of them. I can't tell.

The caffine switches from stimulation to nerve chaffing.

Someone comes up from behind me and starts screaming at me. I turn around there's nothing there.

Machine gun fire lets rip. They're trying to take me out. I cunningly throw myself to the floor.

There's wasps coming for us. I hear them.

"I need that insect spray now!" was, in retrospect, the wrong thing to start shouting.

My consultant is not happy when we are asked to move on, and out, due to my state of hightend awareness. Or "hyper fucking caffinated paranoia" as he calls it.

While one jumpsuited dome lackey herds us out of the chamber, another is jabbering into a radio. That can't be good.

Two large and mean looking chaps in the dome livery are pushing through the crowd towards us. We make ourselves scarce.

©2001 totl.net. This article should be blamed on Chris but he did have help from Steve and suggestions from everybody. Notice for stupid people: not everything in this article is one hundred percent true. Bits of it might be.