Closer Oceans

By Jacob Hamilton

One need be an outsider to know how and when to escape. Closer Oceans is the story of four young men looking in on a society where AI and enforced ennui have pacified manhood for the sake of comfort and made them each despondent enough to achieve escape from it. As outcasts refusing to keel, they like all men who ever found their worth are forced into exploring the undiscovered while confronting the old world.

Mankind is much older than any of their ambitions and strife though, and the four find themselves hurtling into a submerged and trembling world where the hardened and brave see utopia distanced before them by the exploitative and crooked who are selling its view.

Voyaging into extreme stress and joy, they are guided by the truth that value within oneself is incorruptible when it is for the goodness in life. So when nature chances to take them in again, this time with its every thorn sharpened, they know their paths are their final stands for grace, or for the fall.

The optimism of youth keeping its head up is the force majeure against oldness' bequeathed doom; Closer Oceans answers youth's call for help when the heaviest decrepitude is all around it.

 

200 pages, available in paperback and eBook

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Grange Publishing
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399948142

Book preview

CLOSER OCEANS

BY JACOB HAMILTON

Copyright © 2023 by Jacob Hamilton The Grange Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-3999-4726-8 (paperback) and 978-1-3999-4814-2 (ebook)

Published in the United Kingdom.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Cover designer: Rafael Nobre

www.closeroceans.com

CONTENTS

01.

Into the wormhole, beneath the floorboards 4

02.

Dr. Pecan on: whose soles grip to the slope of sanity 9

03.

The farm of Alex Bloom

24

04.

Closer Oceans, the profoundest depth of curiosity: a voyage thereto

35

05.

Grim realities of the new realm

48

06.

The Unremitting Day

66

07.

The Toylarena

81

08.

The Pilgrimage: Out There

112

09.

The Glacial Canyon

128

10.

Note to my readers

133

11.

The Wheeltubs

135

12.

The Kerb

149

13.

Every man’s fight for his ground, his homestead 169

14.

The lung breathed, the heart beat,

the men and women did.

191

15.

Transcriber’s Soliloquy

194

CHAPTER 1

INTO THE

WORMHOLE,

BENEATH THE

FLOORBOARDS

4

My aunty was a public librarian in a town where reading levels were consistently of the lowest in the country at a time when books were being dig-italised and the libraries themselves moved to more crass buildings or replaced with hotels. I knew her as an ex-librarian because of this, and outside her house a private mobile library would visit on Wednesdays from which I collected books, while on Fridays I went to a private library that had been built in protest of the nationwide pulping. These literary expeditions ironically only happened during my days-off school and were attributable to illness in the beginning. To thereafter be frequently absent, I learned, the escapist must employ genius in the theatre of bunking if he is to be a dedicated skiver. Goldfish first, then hamsters, my stricken grief at their short lives passing was remedied each month through my absenteeism, as to push the bite of death away from a child, and the ratio favoured four goldfish to every haggard hamster (for I would implore my parents to buy the most run-down, last-chance-saloon looking hamsters in stock).

My illness accounted for the untimely survivors and certainly living next to an aquarium was serendipitous in being able to browse fishes for deficiencies or adding ground crackers to their feed, and thus accumulative time was gained in libraries. Silence became a tendency that separated me from my classmates, who 5

never went to question my routine absences, and on one Friday I woke up to a belly-up fish and within the hour was at my aunty’s door. She greeted me not with her usual look of inconvenience, but sullenly told me that the library had burned down during the night. It was not then understood how, though half a dozen irretrievable collections from local authors had been destroyed. Slightly off-site, she had precautioned a cage where stowed away were mint edition classics that had circuited private libraries as to preserve them: Don Quioxte, The Odyssey, Ulysses, Robinson Crusoe, what have you, as well as obscure titles by unknown authors in defunct languages with exotic cloth covers and indecipherable patterns and frayed book-marks and in one instance even a book with pressed butterflies inside its cover. Woe betide my unchecked happiness at these stoic survivors though, because as if nature hadn’t proven its distaste enough, it threw another element their way when an undredged river adjacent to her house overflowed and destroyed them.

Years passed and I grew out of my skiving, but continued visiting my aunty to collect her books and play chess. I became an 18 year old who was lost between thinking of girls and classic literature. The remainder of my time was spent being a handy-man, far from the literary canons, when one morning at my aunty’s house I began work on the boiler pipes underneath the floorboards, oblivious to the discovery that would determine the course of my life.

6

The underground crawl space formed a tunnel that connected to the street’s neighbouring houses and water damage was evident everywhere despite years of drying. After a clueless evaluation in my inexperience, a few prods here and there, my good intentions were wasted and I composed my excuses for leaving. Exactly at the moment before resurfacing, my torch shimmered at something behind the drop-down ladder, which on inspection was revealed to be an enveloped package, wedged into a rotted beam.

My aunty thought nought of it, seeing how old WWII letters were being continually found and was as one of her generation who lived in the past but resigned the war to the unspoken pre-past, then beginning to light candles to counter the sporadic blackouts.

These introductory remarks have been of my recollections; I have aged, I have aged eight years since then. This will be my 21st Christmas, a holiday diluted by age and one lacking surprise. I have found the unwrapping of any mysterious object to reignite that fleeting childlike wonder within myself though. And call it underhand-ed, sneaky or innate, but discovery is enjoyed most in private, like a mountain lion feeding in its cave. Many discoveries are superfluous or immediately exploitable and squanderable, however some are needed for the universe to survive; they are its lifeblood and belong to everyone. Therefore to anyone reading you must understand the weight that such a discovery bears on young shoulders, average ones, as I try to translate one man’s raison d’être and perhaps mine also; these revelations remarkable to the youthful mind and the sagacious one.

7

I had locked the package in my grandfather’s garage, on top of his workbench beside tool catalogues, appliance manuals and miscellaneous receipts and letters and then forgotten about it. Figuring it solitary, it is in this misting space I have spent subsequent winters turning over its contents: documents, or rather a manuscript, bound together by nylon under the unextraordinary title ‘ I heed Mr. A. Bloom’. The papers are a tinged yellow and written in flammable ink, dated at least 90 years by my estimate of their typography and in intact condition. My research has concluded that no records attest to their existence which leads to my belief that they are original scripts.

It is due to a fear of being unable to express them fully, through my lack of qualification and some words being unrecognisable to any lexicon, that has restricted my task to translating their contents unabridged and providing grammatical clarification. The better judgement of authors of colossal importance to not write before 30 is being ignored; they have to be told.

I promise to not lose a second more to explanation.

8

CHAPTER 2

DR. PECAN ON:

WHOSE SOLES GRIP

TO THE SLOPE OF

SANITY

9

Vulturous crows encircled the carcasses of mills in that industrial graveyard and land of chimney stepping stones. Pocked by 100ft white-brick walls, one of the structurally burnt and abandoned factories as nondescript as the others Tony had entered into the grave and de-boarded entrance of; he was an outcast, pushed out into that sad land and unawares to his entrapment in it, which he now recalled to his captors, the panel.

‘You found the body hanging there?’, asked the lead physician.

‘Yes, as I said, the building was one I hid out in during my youth. The body was new,’ Tony said.

‘And you maintain the second rope was not yours, though planted?’

‘The tramp was dangling there. Who planted it were the ones who caught me.’

‘Were you induced by substance before entering the building?’

‘Which county is this?’ Tony asked.

‘You mean you don’t know?’ Pressed a member of the panel.

10

‘Well of the sterile white walls and lab coats before me, this to me seems like a sane asylum. Psychotic bin. The stories you hear are of being transported ju-risdictionally, out to the countryside, off of your soil.’

‘You need not worry about the location, you will be well cared for here.’

And Tony as reproachful to this information as he was clumsy in his word choice, was led away from the panel, oblivious he had been through his trial.

ZAP ZAP ZAP sounded the electrical rod as the young woman went to pick it up, while with her one green eye looking at Tony, the other crooked, black and marbled, she spoke to him.

‘I’ve done thirty experiments for Dr. Pecan,’ her throat knotted. ‘My admittance to the Psyche-dome relied on it.’

Quacko Dr. Pecan entered with a glass of green-hued hydrogen peroxide and slide her other hand on the electromagnetic conductor’s dual, twisting the hertz into the thousands.

‘I...we have consulted the ethics committee, and...

furthering the study is less important than your well-being...we need healthy males...please, please ignore the fussy busy body guidelines and your papers have been signed over by your lead physician...

your comfort is our priority.’

The notch ticked into the ten thousands.

11

‘20 hertz is, is, is is for the busy bodies yes. Are you ready for twelve thousand, because you seem ready for thirteen.’

The machine rattled and sparks were visible on the electric rod.

‘It is paramount your safety. Thirteen-five – the nerve endings in your spine triggered by these newly animated neural pathways will provide synapsual insights for decades if we continue ethically applying this directly to your cerebellum, aligned with panel guidelines, and it’s nearly fourteen...This may prick, impotence only proven in 1/15 males under ten thousand, yes, all was explained to you, your comfort priority.’

The black eyed assistant jumped in, shaking from the voltages’ magnetic field and hovering the rod above Tony’s temple.

‘I paid my dues. I got experimental credit,’ she said.

The room was serenic: well-ordered notes, white desks, two attractive women; yet barbarity predis-posed therein. Tony stepped away from the frothing agents.

‘Tucked away in these pristine recesses hang the limbs of diseased men, men made diseased by you, the drooling lab coats who pleasure in diagnosing the trapped until turning good men rotten.’ Tony said.

12

The main siren mentioned one does not learn that without repercussions and signalled for one of the gowned goons on standby to remove him. Tony observed silence as he exited the room, for packets of energy in the form of a hazy weight, followed by black and blue orbs swept over him, knowing that their disclosure would exacerbate his treatment. Battery-farmed energy harvesting – hearsay to him previously – wherein organic youth could survive; those wading in their prime strength years’ end might have their eyes suggestively led elsewhere and have their energy replaced with others, unless they keep the story the same, know their energy and refuse to look through another’s eyes. Your crusade will have its crossroads; trust in your determinations of your imperceptible qualities and keep close to the base-line of a natural life, he considered. Outside where confined to a 50ft corridor and with voodoo being chanted from a cell, seven more goons rushed and pinned him down, preparing to administer the panel-approved poison from a cleaning bucket.

‘Do you know I have an undisclosed medical condition that should you induce by injecting toxins into my bloodline, uhm bloodstream, which impels a chiefly rabid reaction and deterioration into paralysis, your asylum will close and you will each be sent to sweat shops? So to you lummox, take your boot off of my face and to you hag, you shouldn’t be smoking here,’ Tony said, where gradually their understanding became refrain and then compliance.

13

Dusting himself off, Tony walked to his cell which as at the far side of the building’s courtyard, remembering the route from being dragged along it on his first night. No patients were allowed to be there un-accompanied but his speech had resigned staff to their back office to recuperate tactically. A melody was being sung from within the courtyard and he paused by a bush, looking to an old man quavering a tune.

‘Too da loo, too da duda yuda ya,

too da loo da ya.

They can’t see; they can’t know; they can’t take the bright old sun.

They can’t sigh; they can’t wait; my eyes will piece the peace undone.

Oh, I know they won’t change.

Oh, but we must treat them so.

And because my old eyes are too