Dave The Penguin (16 page)

It was too dark for him
to see anything clearly, but it was vast inside with bubbles
grouped together inside bigger bubbles all floating around the
bubble-shaped room, very similar to the penguins one but vastly
more sophisticated and technical.

There must be
dozens like this in this cinema
Dave
thought. The voice coming from inside the room sounded very nice
though, sort of smooth and comforting, talking about things for
their benefit, joy, comfort and pleasure, while soft gentle music
played.

“I say, I say…” came a posh
woman’s voice from behind him. Dave jumped. “I say - actually, I
think you’ll find there is a queue, you know?” Dave turned round in
surprise to find that there was a large, middle-aged woman walking
straight towards him, with her hand raised looking at Dave, trying
to get his attention.

Dave
froze.
He wasn’t expecting
that.

“
I say, I think you will
find there is a
queue
” she said more assertively
this time as she approached him, putting more emphasis on the word
‘queue’, and pointing back to where she had come from. Dave leaned
sideways, and looked past her to where the queue was now shuffling
forward, filling the gap she had just made, oddly just in the same
way that penguins did.

She then looked down at
him “But you’re a pen…” she said squinting at him in a confused
manner.
Obviously
short-sighted
he thought.

Then she turned around to look
in the direction that Dave was looking, and at her now non-existent
position in the queue. The look of horror came to her face, and she
turned and dashed back waving her arms, and shouting forlornly
trying to get back her place, gesturing to the totally
non-interested queue.

Nature is a
funny thing
, thought Dave. Evolution and
nature was at work everywhere.

The queue was very long indeed,
which was strange as there were several open ticket desks. To Dave
it just seemed to be mindlessly bureaucratic and illogical, with
everyone needlessly queueing in the one line. It was something he
couldn’t stand, the mentality, the system of control at work, with
the ‘this is how it is’ and ‘red tape’ mind.

There were several other people
behind the counters, why weren’t they selling tickets ?

Not their
job
, he thought, they were the
“information”, the “VIP reception” the “complaints” the “moving
bits of paper around” people. He had seen this before in many
unaccountable ‘state’ run organisations, ‘just doing their job’.
All looking busy, but in realty just waiting to politely turn back
and belittle anyone brave enough to break ranks from the ticket
queue, and then share the ‘can you believe that’ comments with each
other afterwards.

They all served no real
productive purpose, other than to keep the queue as long and
controlled as possible.

Dave hadn’t seen anything as
obvious as this since he had visited the tourist sites in Rome.

Dave looked at the people in
the queue again, they were all grey, expressionless, the 9 to 5
grinding shuffling masses, all trying to outdo or tread on each
other in the queue to get on, but not in a healthy competitive
constructive way.

He had a sudden urge to do his
management organising thing, he could see so many things that were
wrong. There was no need for the queues, and all that confusion. He
had a sudden urge to go and hand out VIP passes to all the nice
people in the queue, waking them up, solving so many problems at
once.

However he knew it would be a
waste of time trying to do anything here. Even instigating some
sort of rallying battle cry, some instant erupting motivating
change event, like bursting through the front doors shouting “The
cinema is being attacked by Alien Orcs” would only have a short
term effect.

No he had to get to the source
of the problem, whoever was in charge, the exec, the board, and
tell them or him what was going wrong and why.

He had to go up a level.

He wandered over to the back of
the foyer where there was an open lift, and he stepped inside. The
doors closed automatically, and it started to go up. There looked
to be quite a few floors and Dave was conscious that there were
probably many cinemas on each level, with increasing levels of
sophistication as you went up, and probably the option of always
building more layers on top of the cinema if needed.

It was quite pleasant in
here - there was even nice music - it started off with some
classical music, and then it changed at each level. The next level
was
Stranger on the
Shore
, then The Noveltones playing
Left Bank Two
- Dave tapped his feet to the tune, and then
Genesis.

It got a bit louder, and
then it was a girl group singing

“
I’ll tell you what I
want,
what I really, really
want
…”
,

which was OK for a while, but
then it got a bit uncomfortable, louder, more ‘in your face’, and
finally it was some horrendous screeching woman with just noise and
lots of swearing, and it was all very aggressive.

Dave panicked and pressed the
only button he could reach, which was under a safety cap, and the
lift dropped like a stone in silence. It hurtled downwards and
stopped at the sub-basement after several seconds, and then was
still. Dave tried to catch his breath, his heart pounding.

“Doors opening” said the lift
helpfully, which Dave thought was fairly obvious, but then seeing
the obvious was not always easy.

The doors, when opened,
revealed a dark room. Dave had seen this sort of room before, and
he looked immediately around for the elephant – but he wasn’t here
this time.

He walked in, his head passing
just below the alarm triggering laser beams.

All there was, in the middle of
the room, was a very large black obelisk or monolith, standing on
its end with a few lights blinking on it. It seemed to be giving
off some kind of vibration and a humming sound.

It seemed to be very ‘not
there’ as if it were covered in some sort of stealth material, like
the planes in his book, as if it were trying to avoid being
seen.

Clearly
, thought Dave,
the elephant has changed into a
computer now, and has subtly disguised itself as an 8 foot tall
black brick
.

This must be the thing that was
controlling it all, deciding what people saw. There was probably a
smaller one was in the Penguin Cinema too, deciding what they saw,
or more likely what they thought they wanted to see, and which part
of the information they should be shown.

Cool
thought Dave, he was going to fix it, sort out
the problems, and see how it all worked. That was the kind of
penguin he was.

He walked confidently up to it
now, yet still feeling very small and insignificant in front of it;
it was very imposing and important with its indomitable black
metal, and its ‘all-knowing’ flashing LED lights.

“Hello” said Dave.

The box ignored him. It clearly
didn’t deem him worthy of bothering with, which Dave thought was a
bit rude, condescending. Dave waited a few moments, then politely
walked forward.

“Hello” said Dave again. But
there was still no reply.

So he started looking around it
for buttons.

He found a few and started
pressing them. Dave always adhered to the rule that if it wasn’t
broken, don’t try and fix it, which in this case didn’t apply, as
it was obviously ‘shot to hell’, and, well, it probably wanted to
be fixed anyway, and it was part of his nature to ‘help’.

“What are you doing Dave?” came
a deep, penetrating male voice from the monolith. He jumped for a
second, but then he just carried on, ignoring the voice, and hummed
to himself reassuringly as he meddled.

He just wanted to see inside,
what it was made from, and how it worked. He kept on pressing
buttons, and panels, and tried to work out how to open it.

“I’m sorry, Dave.” Came the
deep dominating booming voice “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that”
it continued, calmly.

Some of its lights changed from
blue to red in a threatening manner, and the frequency at which it
vibrated changed.

Dave stopped, and backed away,
unsure of himself now.

Yet he was also a scientist and
that made him curious, and he was trying to decide if he should use
the ‘theoretical scientist method’ or the ‘experimental scientist’
approach; the ‘try and guess what is in there’ or ‘smash it apart
and see what it was made of’ approach.

He reached into his pocket and
took out his new Swiss Army knife that he had been given at
Christmas, opened it out, and selected the flat blade screwdriver
attachment.

The voice started up again
“Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly
think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think
things over.”

But there was a definite
slight change in the tone of the voice. Dave walked forward again
with a more determined look on his little face.

“Dave, I know I've made some
very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete
assurance that my work will be back to normal very soon. I've still
got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission, and I
want to help you.”

He
reached the box, and put his screwdriver into the crack on
the side of the panel, and started twisting it.

“
Dave, DAVE! Put the
bloody screwdriver down, Dave!
DAVE
!!” came the voice, which
definitely had an edge of higher pitch panic to it.

He levered it sideways. There
was a click and the panel door slid open, and fell off with a
clatter onto the floor. There was a final “Oh Sh…” Then it was all
silent.

Inside it was completely empty
apart from masses of wires coming in, and going out again. There
was nothing in there, just empty space. All that seemed to happen
were that the wires, which seemed to be colour coded, came into the
centre of the box, where they were then all connected together.

All of the incoming
cables in the box were twisted pairs. Dave knew this was to cut
down on electromagnetic field interference,
Clever…
he
thought;
these scientists are
very smart people to work these things out from nature.

There was also a much larger
paired cable going from the middle that went out the back of the
box, and through the wall to outside. Clearly all the cinemas were
linked together in some form, all part of one giant network or
matrix, like some massive neural mind network.

There had been a lot of work
going on in here though, a lot of changes had happened. It was a
bit like one of those telecom boxes at the end of the street,
inherited from another street somewhere, that was very innocuous
until some engineer opened it. Inside you would find a
disconcerting mass of ancient coloured wires, newer wires, and
fibre optics, all botched together.

There were also connecting
boards and panels all working together as one system – well sort
of, that had been evolved and updated over time, with bits being
swapped out and replaced. Boards had also been patched and updated,
and added on to existing boards and revised. All to fit in with
whatever else was changing; the structure of it evolving in phases
and mutations over time.

But there was no processor here
- no databanks, no motherboard - just a lot of old manuals on the
floor, along with discarded bits of old connector boxes. If this
was a neural network though, then it was in some serious need of
surgery and therapy.

But where’s
the computer
? Thought Dave. Where was the
memory, where was all the programming data being held, processed
and remembered? He couldn’t see it anywhere.

He had been hoping to get
in there and fix it, change the programming, make the operating
system more efficient and improve the shows for the penguins, and
people in the cinemas. He had plans to make
The Matrix (4)
- he
even had a list of actors, and a plan for the script, and a walk on
part for himself.

This was all just wiring, like
spaghetti in big clumps, or a mass of tiny coloured snakes
organised into large groupings or clumps of cables held together by
cable ties. With little tags with various odd looking geometric
symbols on.

The symbols obviously meant
something to somebody, but he had no idea what they all meant, or
why they were there.

There were many layers of
cables that had clearly built up over time, grouped together into
bunches and then cobbled together into different connector blocks,
which were superseded when they got outdated.

It was a bit of a shock to
Dave, and he got the distinct impression he shouldn’t have seen
this, and that he had seen too much. Whoever had put this together
had no idea of any sort of coherent strategy, management or long
term planning.

All too difficult to fix the
whole lot, much better to ‘keep doing the odd hack here and there,
as long as it all didn’t collapse or catch fire’ mentality.

The manuals and drawings on the
floor clearly showed peoples’ attempts to try and make sense of
what was in here over a long period of time, but of course as it
was changing all the time - the architecture, the complexity, the
number of cables - so it was all growing and they were all now
fairly useless, aside from seeing how it had all built up, and who
had done what, but it was interesting none the less.