Meet The Gang

This introduces the Main characters and takes us to the beginning of the first mission.

ENGINEER:               Just talking to myself

It’s a tradition in the old and mad

CONNECT: Wouldn’t want to deny you tradition

the Engineer should have some tricks and perks.

ENGINEER: Ready for your work? How’s your grip Connect?

CONNECT: Ow! Actually it’s bad, caught in a door

all the science of the three worlds of mankind

the genius of this perfect age of light

can’t make those fucking doors run smooth!

ENGINEER:                    True, well

rest your wounded hand, it’s your mind we need

no human hand can grip the wheel of time

still, turn, flick back and forth like a DJ

un-spool events

CONNECT:  And scratch them up sometimes

mixing and re-mixing, no human hand

or material force, but Brain Surgeons

don’t go to work with their feet, lungs or dick

and if a guy turns up with broken legs

a runny nose and a case of the clap

it’s safe to say his minds not on his job.

Small things Engineer, tiny tiny things

you know how disasters grow.

ENGINEER:               Who else could?

we un-twirl them like the Norns, drunken fates

that pick out figures from the tapestry

of life, bending needle fingers to stitch

out tortured faces and grim sign of death

taking out the white and black, painting in

the blue and gold of peaceful sunset skies.

CONNECT: Yeah sunsets, nice. Then you must know the rule

of three, or more, disasters having no

one cause or simple excisable root

but are made of three or fifty or five

separate threads, each so small they can’t be seen

and so it seems that each events a thing

alive. Time squirms wriggles and shifts under

the hand, it struggles, fights to re-combine

it’s like strangling a jellyfish to death

one cut won’t do it, we must trace them all

each as small and slight as a sticky door

or a sprained hand

enter Speaker

SPEAK:        Grip! Hey Engineer what’s up?

CONECT: Hey Speak, we’re just practicing on bullshit

SPEAK: Oh No! Looking for tiny flaws again?

did someone stub a toe or graze a hair?

Your hand ha ha it’s finally happened

your one mistake the one that damn’s us all

or will the fear itself create your doom?

Are you paranoid enough or too much?

too late Connect!

CONNECT:      Very well very well

SPEAK: You missed a crumb of dust on a forks tip!

A fly’s egg!

CONNECT:  alright alright

SPEAK:                  A gnat’s dick!

A micro meteorite just killed the Pope!

ENGINEER: Speaker enough. Are you ready for this?

SPEAK: Oh I’m alright are you alright my dear?

throw me anywhere I’m adaptable

the most adaptable most changeable

it’s why you gave me the job after all.

I’ll counterfeit a world of faces, pass

from name to name to child woman and man

slip on their personal stories, histories dreams

a cloak a slap a breeze like a shadow

over the eyes upon a summers day

half seen and half forgotten even then

like the gap between two leaves, the spacing

and direction of a snails curling shell

one of hundreds crawling in a garden.

ENGINEER: Your skills I know, are you ready to act?

SPEAK: I do little else

ENGINEER:              You know what I mean.

SPEAK: Have I the grit to do what must be done?

Yes I think I know what you mean, do you?

To be the futures furthest tip, the hand

of the hand that stretches back to the past

whatever blood and guilt accrues to you

begins with me because I wield the knife.

From punctured flesh to blade that firmly rests

inside this hand which sits upon this arm

to heart and mind and thenceforth on to you.

I wield the knife and you wield me but who

wields you Engineer?

ENGINEER:           Victims of the past

and the will of mankind to make it right

SPEAK: We bleed to heal ourselves, well that makes sense.

CONNECT: It won’t need to turn out like that again

our controls are finer now and our skills

are improved a great deal, there’ll be no death.

enter Sense

SENSE: And if there is the guilt includes us all

we’re all in this together, act and thought.

ENGINEER: Welcome Sensor.

SPEAK:                   Eyes.

CONNECT:                      Sensor hey what’s up?

SPEAK: What have I got in my pockets?

SENSE:                               Just lint.

I need no magic powers to work that out.

SPEAK: And keys! You fool! And what are they made of?

Now tell their composition and their state

of motion and the lock and the address

that they were made for and if it still stands

and tell me also of the fingerprints

written in invisible grease and specks

of grit and also of pollen and soils

which they have rested on.

SENSE:                    My friend I will

and more I will speak to you, of all things

that can bee seen and sensed.

CONNECT:                     And one thing more.

You’ll tell us if our deeds have undone time

and reset whatever fracture began

in the place we are sent, the Tsunami

of unknown and unpredicted event

that spirals out of the past and strikes here

a fractalizing tide that wipes us out.

SENSE: I know my work I will keep steady watch

I’ll stand like Janus with bisected face

one eye upon the knot of time and one

on your mission and all material things

that occur inside the loop where you work

but only material, I can read minds

as fluxions of force, as chemical fire

as molecular clockwork but never

never all at once. I can’t read the whole

as one or penetrate the soul, beware

to know the minds of others you must guess.

ENGINEER: And not let power blind you to the truth

that your two enemies lie in shadow.

Are shadow. Absences. lack of knowledge

you can see action but never intent

can see the trembling web, not the spider

so although you may see all that proceeds

inside a room or State you won’t see all

the motives and the dreams that made it so.

SPEAK: And what’s the second Engineer?

enter Seer

SEE:                                 Yourselves.

You don’t know what you don’t know and can’t see

your minds machinery is all you have

to apprehend the world. it’s limited

by history and personality

each individual brings only that

which grows from their experience of the world

and if something occurs which slips between

the engines of perception you’ve built up

it won’t be seen at all.

SPEAK:                  But you will, See.

CONNECT: Seer and recorder.

SEE:                       I’ll keep my eye

trained on things that pass.

CONNECT:                    You mean trained on us.

SPEAK: It’s a fair cop detective.

CONNECT:                         Commissar?

ENGINEER: I have told you before the Seer is not

policeman or informant for the group

SEE: I’m just a bureaucrat guys, I record

the actions and procedure in the loop

just data for the stacks I have no cuffs

I can’t arrest or break anyone’s head

take a look, no badge and no uniform

I’ll try to stay out of everyone’s way.

SPEAK: And watch us for mistakes.

CONNECT:                         Disloyalty.

SPEAK: I’m sure that won’t distract us from our work

having your beady eyes rolling around

like marbles.

CONNECT:     Peas.

SENSE:            I place some value on

another set of eyes inside the loop.

Eyes not bent on some other complex task.

looking for the invisible spider?

Do I have that right? For something we missed?

ENGINEER: Looking for something you could not have seen.

SPEAK: Like touching your elbow to your own nose.

SEE: That’s about right.

CONNECT:                And writing it all down.

ENGINEER: It’s nearly time is Maker late again?

SENSE: Again.

ENGINEER:    Who turns up late for time travel?

I’ll have to have a word with him on this.

beat

enter Maker

ENGINEER: Oh, hello, lost you way?

MAKE:                            Had to fix door.

ENGINEER: We have employees, robots and A.I’s

the resources of several governments

a budget in the trillions and you stopped

to fix a door?

MAKE:         It was sticky.

CONNECT:                    Ah ha!

MAKE: What happened to your hand?

CONNECT:                         It.. never mind.

ENGINEER: Ready now oh master of brute matter?

MAKE: Hey Speak, Sense, alright there Narc, yeah I’m good

I’ll make whatever’s needed for the task

just please no living things not even bugs.

ENGINEER: You are not cleared for biological

so the matter does not even arise.

Now. For the reason that we all are here.

SPEAK: To identify the Bishops killer!

ENGINEER: No Speak.

CONNECT:           The candlestick.

SPEAK:                            Professor Plum.

SENSE: In the drawing room?

SPEAK:                    I thought he was quiet.

MAKE: Give us the time and the place Engineer.

ENGINEER: The cold and implacable machine minds.

MAKE: Gargoyles

ENGINEER:       The name is apt for the sit round

the actions and commencements of our lives

as if they were a castle set in space

menaced all around by the surging tides

of the oceans of happenstance and chaos

that fret and tear the walls of what we are.

These cold minds have sifted infinite sands

gramming out each crystalline event

weighing the surface of each mica chip

and jig-sawing the whole of them as one.

CONNECT: The gargoyles found a flaw.

ENGINEER:                      Indeed they have.

Some new moment now wakes inside the past

it stretches out its limbs and turns its eye

to us. Even now it begins to move.

We must go quickly, here’s the place and time.

The halls of a western power at the end

of the twentieth century. Go now.

And good luck.