"Archy. Archy! Archy wake up. No. I mean be conscious here!"
Even through the uneven half-slumber nodding in the car on the way to the gated 'safe house' in Kent, Archy was aware of Purple's warm yet urgent confusion. Something in the looming and zooming clarified and he was there. In 'The Circle'. Slumping forward in a chair. He sat up with a start.
"Hmm? Ah. Here I am, Purple. What do you want?"
"You know you won't be left to sleep for very long between now and 'The Collision'. You know they won't let you sleep then, when the whole world will be watching. We can't give you experience of it as it happens, as much as we'd like to. You will have to see it as the world does. In the lenses of orbiting cameras."
"You brought me here to tell me that?" Archy was a little incredulous. Would Purple would be offering him curtains to pick out soon? "But now I am here - while the black MI5 car transporting the worn-out me is negotiating narrow country roads shaking me like a potato-sack, it seems - let me ask you a question?
"Oh!." Salad Face became apparent nearby. "I thought you might. Fire away, then."
"Can you see into the future or not?"
"In a few words - not entirely and not far.
"Let me tell it in terms of your own culture.There was a man called Laplace who in 1814 considered a demon who knew the position and momentum of every atom in the universe and therefore could predict from that point all the future points. Someone should have asked him how that would help him not to 'step on my blue suede shoes' or how Joseph Heller would write 'Catch 22'. But anyway, it turns out on the atomic scale there is neither position nor momentum of any fundamental particle until one does an experiment to find it. The universe works behind the scenes, and it does work without anyone worrying - let no one lose any sleep over it - in statistical aggregates and waves until particles are demanded of it. Such is the relativity of the observer to information.
"Oh, and there is Chaos too - really complicates matters of prediction!
"But a lot can be done. And after all. Hey! Archy! It's us! Laplace would never have guessed, though all of us in our infinity together couldn't hope be His demon or the Victorian recording angels. It just doesn't work that way. Yet, we think we can say, in this little group, with a fair amount of certainty, that Humankind will survive and develop - though deep dark tragedies are nevertheless in store on the way there. That, unfortunately, is human nature."
"Archy warmed a little to Salad Face in this speech. He realized the being was a powerhouse and resented having to operate at a lower level. Ha-ha! The guy/gal had more teasing in for him/her, If he ever saw that blotchy face again.
................................
And as Archy tumbled in to his clean sheets in his neat safe MI5 bed and crashed out to unconsciousness, he realized he had foreseen or strongly expected at any rate the end of his serial dreams. And the last thoughts before oblivion were that he would miss their stability their insistence, yet that he needed his freedom, his true, though lesser.
"But if you see them again, Archy. Ask them about death," someone said in his ear, mouse-like as the little engaging hero of Dumbo......'I am your subconscious mind....Hic!
...............................
There were Archy badges, Archy T shirts. Anything about himself he had been foolish enough to divulge, the saleable item had been made and sold, and sold out, indeed.
He liked holes in stones on beaches. Beaches had been scoured for genuine 'Archy Holey Stones'. Innocent stones had been violated by drills on an industrial scale for the cheaper approximation. Then of course some quick selling items weren't actually stone at all. Never-mind. They were Talismans of some power, the main mind assumed.
