Cold Call Porlock

There are some things that can push a monkey into doing something which might reveal his true simian identity to the public, but Jay Diamond is made of sterner stuff than even most modern humans are in today's society.

"Mister Diamond? Mister Jay Diamond?"

"Yes?"

The voice on the Smartphone changes pitch, becomes higher, as if what the young woman says next is a genuine enquiry.

"I'm Cheryl. And how are you today, sir?"

Without thinking, or indeed, any feeling regarding the matter what so ever, the Colobus monkey punches in today's pin code to activate the appropriate app. This will do battle with the software backing up the cold-call so that he is neither committed to buying anything, nor discovered to be using such an illegal program by the Ad Police.

And he knows the enforcement section of The Treasury would be extremely interested in discovering he is running an open-source version of SnotCall, reconfigured with a few additional twists he downloaded last night from a dissident in China. The exchange between his device and Cheryl will be satisfactorily completed in a few seconds, just as if it is him who is actually talking, and will be achieved at the least possible monetary cost to his bank account.

If the public persona Jay presents to the world cared to any degree, it would pique him that if he just hung up or swore he would be charged much more as a penalty. But Jay Diamond is playing a role to fit in with what anyone else is doing as they endure the conditions of today's society. He does not want to be discovered. Economic growth has been deemed so important to The State that the public has been forced to do its part and for the last seven months everyone has been obliged to accept at least twenty cold-calls per day, or face harsh sanctions.

Still, when the Ad Police finally bring him to account, as they undoubtedly will, he will be held accountable for far greater crimes anyway when they pas on their information. Because Jay Diamond is not just any talking monkey.

For a long time, he has been living on borrowed time. One day someone is going to discover he is actually a toy come to life and he doesn't think the reaction is going to be to his financial benefit. Jay Diamond stands just over fifty centimetres tall, has a head almost as large as his rotund body, two dark brown, glass bead eyes and a goofy smile. He used to fit in the palm of his owner's hand and has no idea why he grew to this size now that he is alive.

He'd be a freaky novelty. One undoubtedly used to advance the economy. Fiscal conditions are so fragile with the limited resources available in the solar system, anything would help. Humanity is only now addressing over-population with the Pension Intelligent Quotient Euthanasia Act, but The Treasury is already pushing for a lowering of the age at which people are tested so that the economy is more skewed towards the young.

Even though he is secretly extremely exuberant (outward demonstrations of emotion apparently carry connections to subversive behaviour), Jay wonders if he'll become a lost soul if forced to advertise the new replacement for the extinct banana.

When he has a drink in the evenings, Jay can vaguely remember moments of brief existence when his child owner's imagination triggered something at the quantum level. At least, for his owner, Barcelona Cottonby, he ran around and played with her as only the toys of children and mad people do when others aren't watching.

But the universe is in constant flux. It never stays the same. Not even on the cosmic scale. When Barcelona reached her eighth birthday and began to have some comprehension of the adult world, Jay Diamond once again became totally inanimate, just as he was when he was bought for her. He was left to sit on an attic windowsill, even though he still possessed memory as a result of her play and got to unblinkingly watch the world go by below.

But something had to respond in the universe, to compensate for what adults were doing. And the legendary creatures of myth and legend existed for a reason. They compensated for the general suffering and ignorance endured by ancient peoples.

When modern humanity took the steps that led to the global population allowing itself to be manipulated like so much blind cattle by businesses and the powerful, and not care, the universal equilibrium in the local space-time continuum was upset.

The mathematics of social media was understood much sooner than people gave inventive marketers credit for, and personal information became an individual's most valuable possession. But they mostly gave it unthinkingly, for free, as businesses and governments knew they would. The majority of humanity lost its soul and the energy had to go somewhere.

Jay was one of the lucky benefactors.

Even with the observable proof of entanglement, physicists never grasped that there is a link between the energy of creativity in the universe's more intelligent entities and the energy used in the oppression of it. Some religious folks did. They called it the battle between Good and Evil. God and Satan. Life and Death.

While it may have appeared to those who gained control over humanity that they were, well, in total control, as their heavy boots crushed the soul from most people, creativity bubbled up and out to compensate. Sometimes it even leaked elsewhere.

And gave life.

For two years, four months and three days, Jay Diamond, toy Colobus monkey, now gown to epic proportions from his previous diminutive, furry incarnation, has been an underground conduit for abstract expressionism. As he came to understand he was truly alive, and after a perilous existence with enough comedic and ironic incidents to fill several children's ebooks, Jay decided he would take the opportunity the universe had given him and express himself through art.

With his latest app dealing with the call, Jay picks up the faecal matter he gathered from various animals in the zoo this morning and throws it at an illuminated pane of glass etched with various translucent images of politicians. He is filming the process and will later extract segments to augment the stop-motion animation he made last week of flower seeds growing and blooming. He figures that a few more additional expressionist smears will complete his latest project and his movie will be ready for upload later in the day.

His phone rings again and he flings the crap as hard as he can. The prime minister appears to catch most of it in his mouth.

Jay Diamond is an internet sensation, but he doubts whether any fans have discovered his telephone number. And even though his public contacts are conducted with a soulless, dissolute attitude – they think his image is an animated avatar – as a way to maintain his cover amongst all those humans who have been ground done into acceptance, he allows himself a genuine reaction.

"The more you take from everyone, the more like me you'll create," he says to the Smartphone. "From unreality comes truth. Cometh the hour, cometh the toy."

But at least Jay Diamond can still get annoyed, unlike the drone humans who give succour to the Ad Police and think the economic situation demands their subservience.

If only it wasn't for the bloody phone, which keeps interrupting him, he could get some decent art done.

"I think I'll call this, The Man From Porlock, Number Five."

Jay Diamond has become a massive fan of Coleridge.