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Apology: During Beyond Cyberdrome IV: "One We Made Earlier" Matt and Sms suffered hallucinatory flu and it was all too like a Philip K. Dick story... Since we can't remember a thing of what actually happened (Aside from 'acting' in a couple of other performances and the original venue burning down), we submit this story instead.

LIVERPUDLIAN TIME-SLIP.

By Sebastian M. Stubb

On cue with the script, Rugg Gravelling felt his hand wave. His voice joined those of the other two in the cheery chorus of "Hello!" and he thought, My body doesn't need me. Seconds ago, we were performing a pastiche of a 1960's puppet show and now, suddenly, we're here. It's the virus. Eating away each layer of our media archetypes, weltenshauung by weltenshauung… The timeframe moves, but the hypothalamus is misaligned. Autonomically, he swallowed a Fruit-E and watched the other two go though their pre-scripted enthusiasm as the resurrected Gestalt of Peter Friendly and the Friendly Friends. It's always mid-twentieth century references, pondered Rugg. Our Jungian Eden. Consulting the bones of dead childhoods as a meta-voodo…

"And welcome to Beyond Cyberdrome Four!" chanted Eme, wearing the traditional screemgreen Crumpleshirt and Wideankle pants of the Peter Friendly figure. Only a machine rattle came from his throat. They've taken my voice! He thought. I'm being excised from the noosphere, sense by sense.

"And in this instalment, I'll be showing you how to make your very own mechanical pet!" enthused Neige, the attractive girl dressed as the Perky Val archetype; pure, clean lines, leatherette boots and tight-fitting Wubfur sweater. The crowd coalesced, caffeine-hungry, awaiting the first tiny mechanical deaths.

Not the twentieth century. Thought Rugg. Something much older. Above, he felt pillars rise to Corynthian decadence and the hands of the crowd formed down-stabbing thumbs. Catharsis is an invalid therapy, he thought grimly. It only feeds the neurosis. Is this Eme's damned plan? Becoming ever simpler, through a copy of half-forgotten telescreen Newsclowns and then what? Some spastic dummies made of wood and string? Beyond the ranks of waiting little robots, he felt the robots Mentafactur's desire that they continue. At his chest he felt his badge, like a cancer. He had found it on his shirt at the beginning. It said, 'I've been Rugg all day and no-one's noticed'. It's true, thought Rugg. That's exactly what's happened, but how did they know? Or am I making it happen because the badge told me to? Am I that open to suggestion? Do I secretly crave for non-existence? In his heart he felt it to be true.

Setting down the first sacrificial robot, Neige felt it twitch. I am Perky Val, she thought. And through this fetish figure She is more real than me. She dropped her Antiflu handkerchief as a signal for the mechanical pets to tear at each other. I'm Virally proofed, she thought. My female empathy is registering the delirium of the other two. I must be the control for the group. The Superego. Without me they are lost. Smiling, reassured, she walked back towards the others. Above, a telescreen showed her from a split second in the past.

"This certainly is very exciting!" enthused Eme. Fixing his face to a smilestyle from a childhhood tele-image, he felt it harden like plastic around his teeth. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw someone gluing faces onto plastic ninepins… another reference to the puppetshow or a precog vision of a future event? He concentrated on the Friendly Peter patter about the things in the pitch and yet found himself drifting elsewhere. This event should have happened in the Discopit but the pit burnt down. Coal black wiring and mirrors shattered by the heat. The last time we saw Ewok, was in there. Suddenly he realised that he had no idea where Ewok was. Perhaps it was us that died in the fire? Are we still there, underground, whilst these simalucra follow the script we left. Again, he was bothered by his badge. He kept it secret inside his shirt, but he knew what it said. It said, 'I built this Eme out of matches and string'. Whoever built these badges, he thought desperately, knows us. Knows me, better than I know myself. It's an attack. A denial of my selfhood, placing another's teleology upon my existence. It had to be a lie. Someone, he reasoned, is out to destroy us. Unless, he realised coldly, it's one of us.

"It certainly IS Eme!" grinned Rugg. No change. Like clockwork trains.

Suddenly, Eme realised that he hadn't read the other's badges. It hadn't seemed important enough until now. Glancing at Neige, he realised with shock that she had pasted something home-made over her badge. That's an ob-com trait, he thought, or paranoid, preventing us seeing it. He'd known she was hiding something from the first.

Rugg watched passively as below him, the inanely grinning orange thing with polka dot spheres surrounding it's lower section was grotesquely coupling with the Dog-thing (Again, echoes of the Mid twentieth century!). Decorticate actions, he thought, blindly following it's last instinct. Gubble Gubble said the orange thing. It's a test, thought Rugg as he mouthed the pre-written phrases. But a test for someone else. I shouldn't be here, The badge says as much. It's a test and I'm going to fail because it's not for me at all. The weight of the unfairness was crushing, like when he was a child and had been punished when his cat was run over. I'm not the John Archetype he told himself, I'm not trained for it. I'm a Tynkyn Spinner. I know how to hold Entropy at bay with Gaffa, but there's always that telltale crack somewhere inside. This is an attempt to symbolically Exorcise the battle between man and Kipple, but Entropy always wins in the end. That's what we want to see really… the cogs and springs of our mortality artfully drawn out of these totemic little bodies whilst we pretend that death and decay is beneath us. Ritualised Transference, it leaves a bad taste in our mouths. A sacrament turning into our own worm-ridden flesh. God, thought Rugg. We truly are corrupt to make such a world of decay and destruction without even the faintest hint of redemption.

Cheerfully introducing the robot creatures as the script directed, Neige looked over at one of the major Mentafactur's of the robots. The Hanglammer smiled innocently at her and placed another robot into the arena. Oh god, she realised, the Hanglammer Thing will never stop. it's so unnaturally young, and yet so strangely serious… Seeming to play the game yet slowly inching it's way towards the centre of the world. As it said in the script, Neige picked up a cottonreel. Perhaps the Hanglammer isn't the thing made from cogs and wheels, but us, she thought. Perhaps it's our Gnossos. Our lack of humanity makes us see people as mechanical devices, when it's truly us that aren't human. Maybe it built us from the remnants of the things in the Discopit for this, to introduce another Cyberdrome. And then- what? She opened her hands, a tiny robot tumbled out onto the bench and crawled away.

An intricate mechanical bug was attempting to evade all the others. It's Guiding Monad gave it the semblance of free will. Rugg watched it scuttle blindly into the waiting jaws of a Knex Advertbot and thought grimy, that's us. An amygdala response, the tiny animal at the top of the spine that screams eternally in denial of mortality.

Swallowing another Ee-Z, Eme ransacked the buzzing colours for some solidity. Even the place isn't real, he pondered. It's based on a telescreen program about a Hotel. Even that is just a twin to another structure. But the mirror-twin hotel was destroyed by ice, somewhere in the Arctic, the submerged home to fish-nibbled corpses. Titanic. Their lives, re-enacted as a film with computer-scenery. And this twin; destroyed by fire. And now there is us. Each twin is attempting to resurrect itself through surrogates. Are we any more real than those American actors pretending to be British Edwardians? The corpses of insect-machines formed piles upon the ground. Avoiding the sight, Eme looked up. Signs of age-old decay crept over the plaster of the ceiling. This Hotel is falling apart, he realised. It's a PayScale 1 operation they're trying to run on P/S 3 funding. Idly, he wondered if they could make a deal, but knew it would never happen. Someone would screw it up for them and they just didn't have that kind of budget.

Christ, look at us, thought Rugg. How can we ever pretend to be the original Peter Friendly and the Friendly Friends? They had Old-style class. Looking down at the spilled multicoloured Knex sticks, he discerned a reading: K'an. The Abysmal. It makes sense when you think of it, Rugg decided. It depends on sincerity. I'm exactly the sort of person who would put some poor copy in my place. But then, if I'm a copy of that self, I should be able to place a copy in my place in turn… A line of stooges like Russian Natasha's. No, no. The copy must be incapable of constructing it's own salvation. It would have to have no memory of doing such a thing, even if it had a badge that marked it, a simalucra as a judas goat. Ergo; sum. With icy certainty, he avoided wondering if this had happened to Ewok.

Neige arranged Mousetraps in patterns. Little unthinking teeth she thought. The blind universe, empowered by our Hubris. Ignoring the distant voices of Rugg and Eme shouting for her to return, she concentrated on her task. There was a rightness in the patterns. A wabi.

"For god's sake Neige; come back! It's too dangerous!" From far, far off, Eme watched Neige walk unconcerned through the Vulvus Dendata. Time stands still for her, he thought. We are the ones that will decay first, and as a woman, she knows that. Something, thought Eme, is stalking us. Pushing us into the future, like embryos forced to their first taste of oxygen without the chemicals to volatilise them. Thank god we weren't here at the time of the fire or we'd be just more ash mixed in with the black mess that now lies deep beneath our feet. The scene of last years battle. They're preventing it happening again, to return to somewhere we'd made our own. The darkness of the original hotel beneath the ice, forgotten years ago, is breaking through, down in the Discopit. Ready to bubble up under our feet as we are trapped in this recreation of an almost mythical game… The Wagnerian symbolism of it is too obvious. Someone had to be behind this. Someone who hates us. Someone who knows me better than I do myself.

Watching Neige throwing out skeins of wool, Rugg thought of spiders. She's so assured, he thought. She seems to sit in the middle of change. Awaiting her time. Listening for the thing that jars with the world. As I sit here, paralysed with doubt, nothingness comes quietly to me, like stagefright.

With obsessive dread, Eme counted the flecks missing from the mirrored doors. The Bell contract should have protected us from this, he thought. Everyone knows Bell's the best money can buy in Anti-Entropic services. We shore up the main pressure of chaos down there, but it erupts elsewhere, bubbling up in a sink, like ooze around a milk pack. It's Karmic balance. We avoid the fire but the disaster will follow. Only our gestalt delusion would consider hiding from the Noumena. We tumble, unstuck into the nail-scarred walls of the present. Mad.

Time coalesced into a wax-like blur of one moment. Two girl in Oldstyle figurehug check offiskirts manifested and chanted simple ciphers. Like cabaret automata, their legs performed coy movements as their gleeful voices pierced the solidifying air. "E.J.F.! S.P.C. P.U. E.J.F.!" they echoed. Half-aware, Neige couldn't help but attempt to unravel the familiar sounding letters. All the words seemed to be connected with death.

Struggling to ignore the distraction of the girl-simalucra, Eme found himself thinking of the phrase "Die! Robot Die!". He had a strong impression that he had given this code to the girl-things himself long ago, but now it seemed directed at him. It was either an instruction or a threat. Far out over the field of self-lacerating robots, he heard a wave of laughter from the Mentafacturs.

Rugg watched a large box give geometric birth to a rectangular house-like machine. I can make this move by my will, thought Rugg. A symbol of home, of security. It can eat up all the other half-living things and cleanse the world anew. Like a giving mother. The house-machine sat immobile. It's my fault thought Rugg. I lack the will to make it move. I unconsciously wish us to fail.

Suddenly Eme knew their enemy. I feel the castrating bitch through the floor, he thought … spreading her bleached white, mitochondrian tendrils throughout the fibres of the treated wood. Something very old and yet very young, very hungry to grow. Still here from the last time! My ex-commonlaw wife. It's me she's after, he thought. The others are just in the way. Out on the field of polished wood, the robot-things blindly tore and smashed each other into ever more primitive wreckage until nothing was left that could move.

With dream-like inevitability, in accordance with the script, Rugg, Eme and Neige filled the Time Capsule with momentoes of their corporeality. A carton of milk, one of Rugg's socks, a posing pouch soaked with the blood of a small pink alien fetish. Though they may have thought to deviate from the pattern, no-one did. On the borders of their perception, they felt the Mentafacturs urging them to hurry. It's just a cardboard box thought Rugg. But we see it as a prayer box. A intercessionary with the future. Our gleichgeltend intrusion into the Phenomenal world.

"Where can we hide it?" asked Eme. One of them will know, he thought. One of them will have been told. Perhaps that's what's on Neige's badge. Her instructions.

"Under one of the chairs!" suggested Rugg. Christ, I'm sweating like a pig. Can the others tell? It's like I'm on fire! His script swam into focus again in his hands. Only a page to go. And then? On the wooden polished floor there seemed to be a whirl of mud and straw. Naked forms and a drumming noise. Blood of a knitted childhood archetype stained the varnish. Then it was gone and only the award ceremony remained.

Each award we give out, is a little proof that we exist, thought Neige. A little ontological time-bomb that echoes of us in another einginstaat. I am Tiamat, she thought, the begetter of worlds. "Wear this" she muttered "In remembrance of me". Don't let me become an echo, she prayed. A word that means less with each repetition…. Like Ewok. If only I understood my badge, she thought, perhaps everything would fall into place and I'd be more real. With German thoroughness, she had covered it over with stickkyback plastic and a false homemade label. The label said "I used to be vacant but now I'm engaged". Underneath, she knew it seemed to be some sort of instruction, but it didn't seem to be for her. I'm not PerkyVal after all, she thought.

There were only a few lines left of the script. Soon, thought Rugg, we shall be fighting each other for that last scrap of secondhand reality. "Goodbye!" they said, cliché-sweet, as chloroform. Then, the paper was blank.

The day was their own. As free and empty as their newfound lives as they delayed re-loading their boxes back into the Foord-T. Sitting about in the bar, the three of them idly watched the ebb and flow of fans leaving for the Mundane World. By a distant pillar, a man pulled down posters, revealing the Hotel's true structure. Eme removed his badge and stared at it. It no longer seemed to refer to him. Looking around, he noticed that no-one else seemed to be wearing badges either, though Neige was toying with hers.

"Do you think we'll see Ewok again?" asked Neige. Peeling back the stikkyback plastic of her badge, she read 'Place me somewhere East...Where the best is like the worst….'. It still didn't make sense, but now it didn't seem to matter whether it was for her or not.

Rugg exhaled thoughtfully, the thick oily cigaret smoke curling over the chairs like a thing seeking shelter. "He's still in the Disco Pit with us, or at sea" he said. "Your round Eme".

Rifling through his pockets for his billfold, Eme found a piece of folded paper. "Sorry, not money" he muttered as he unfolded the unfamiliar white material.

On it was written; "Script: Beyond Cyberdrome V".

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