Excerpt Six:

Kirk’s First Mission

Kirk James was travelling to meet Judith Callas, to extract what information he could about her boyfriend. And then on to the Spa Hotel where her boyfriend, who was either, Atoll Goodmanson, or Marcus Godstrand, was sheltering. Either way, the target needed escorting to the US and delivering to a location not yet specified.

Project Refurb had been scrapped due to the scheduled Britgov, Universally Autonomous Administration System, take-over. Kirk had been sequestered by an out-going manual government department; illegally, according to the incoming system, and loaned to G & G labs. 

Although the G & G role in the autonomous revolution had been mere raindrops in the ocean, those droplets contaminated the out-of-control autonomy as it levelled out to create a new world formed entirely of ocean. Damage limitation, for humanity, was looking at the last piece of real estate being on the summit of Mount Everest, as a win. Mary Goodmanson had her eye on any morsel not gobbled up by autonomy.

The train’s motion soothed the sleeping bird part of Kirk’s brain, but the woman who sat opposite him did not escape evaluation. Some refurbished part of his mind accessed data and precis’d it in a concise, trademarked, video-in-the-minds-eye demo; sort of a dream crossed with a hologram; a kind of integrated, unconsciously controlled Wikipedia with added ultra, doesn’t describe it well. 

He knew within a string of jagged moments that she was a freshly-ex-government agent, most likely fleeing the autonomous tsunami, scorching earth behind her.

The trains were running better, if anything, with no human interference. Even cataclysms have silver-linings.

He wanted to tell the woman something; a nugget she could foster and admire, but there were barriers on what he was allowed to form into communicable data. At first this was frustrating but he trusted the system as it proved to be correct on every call. 

She was a cold person, rendered into that gloomy, damp, perception-cave by suppressed trauma. He could delve around, extract a few a tips for her, on her recovery—but she doesn’t even know there is anything wrong because she has never had any comparative thought processes; she just thinks all minds have the same freakish shadows and poisoned barbs. Her life is dedicated to living with discomfort and repelling the threat of danger: maleness that unbeknown to her, represents her casually cruel father…with disciplined paranoia.

To Kirk, she was blameless, but she was here to kill him. She was commanded by handlers who were meant to be on the same side as Kirk. There was something more to the situation than his refurbished magnificence could fathom.

The only link could be G&G labs who had tweaked his refurbishment, maybe they’d tweaked him past morally acceptable parameters; it was possible. Any questions regarding G & G labs would have to go on hold for now.

A radio receiver was embedded in Kirk’s skull, which had not yet received anything. He was expecting a communique from Mary Goodmanson, his new boss, but first he had to throw a woman off the train.

Excerpt Six (b):

Judith’s Odd-I-Say

Judith pondered on her parents’ apparent parenting: were they a supernatural ‘gift’ from the Devil herself, lying in wait in perpetual ambush; traps baited to entangle her in their terrible pursuit of self-ignorance and casual, un-thinking cruelty? 

She was sitting at a wobbly table in the snug at a pub to where she had once followed Atoll, unveiling his peculiar behaviour as a solitary pub goer. And after a tenacious stake-out, the fact, glistening in the harsh light of day, that he was doing nothing to contravene even the most microscopic of moral codes.

If people were decent and honest she’d leave them alone: an ethical clause etched into her ethos. But she had no compunction bothering anyone whose idea of normality is the daily torture and killing of sentient beings. Arrogance and greed had a lot to answer for, not least the animal holocaust, that Judith could feel happening, helplessly, all around her. 

These people were unwitting psychopaths, rendered mad and mean by advertising and chirpy, bullshit-laden truck loads of squirming lies and fetid, all-pervasive deceit. She couldn’t deal with the fact that she was one of them. A species to end all species’.

We all seem to live in this den of fantasy, from where we sit, she thought, uncontrollably spurting fountains of potential; potential…potential, potential…potential… When, in reality, outside the den what waits us is not potential, but entropy: we’re straddling flying coffins with wings, that dive steeply into a communal urn built solely for our ashes… The only point to being here; breathing this rare-in-the-universe occurrence of air, is to stop massacring and torturing our human and non-human-animal brothers and sisters. 

There was more to her theory pyramid and it was ascending daily, yet the puzzle revealed no identifiable picture. 

Meanwhile: the masses, souls awash with the cheaply spilt blood of distant relatives, long exiled into estrangement, enemified…why? Arrogance and Greed, feeding each other, egging-each other on, and on, until they devour us all and finally, and fatally, themselves… 

She’s wearing her low-tech ‘reality/bullshit’ detector: a t-shirt with an inflammatory slogan on its chest. She sees its short, sharp, explosive paragraph as armoury, weaponry, speaking truth to the quotidian monster of the human form. It reminded her of the deadly Monty Python joke, sketch. Chuckling…until she remembered a girl hitting her in the face, for her parents, not Judith’s, the girl’s, they’d been upset enough to hand over their sheriff’s badge to their ten year old and encourage pre-teen, carnivorous fightback. Judith had just shouted ‘Up the revolution,’ apparently alluding to an old TV show called Citizen Smith, an instantaneous device to stop her punching a child, and losing. It was a draw, but a winner was her instantaneousness and its moral rectitude; it showed Judith that behind her almost universally considered oddness, there was a force of good. Which made almost everyone she knew, bad. The chuckle came back, albeit processed, like the food they served in this Hogarthian, animal abuser’s progress. She envisioned a painting, in which she was, incongruously, Joan of Arc. The wall of smugness that she was building was dismantled as flames, crackled and lapped up the canvass.

Her father had tried to drown her once. It was life-lesson of rare importance. Like coming up for air, life is a short gasp. The ‘underwater’ being pre and post death, the ‘gasp’ being otherwise measured by ‘four score years and ten.’ Life could most probably have a longer and more luxurious feel to it, she thought, if animals, in all their innocence, weren’t trapped on death row, being shot…sliced…stabbed…gassed…bludgeoned…shocked…suffocated…and…macerated, in every moment conceivable to the human mind.

The room now had a familiar fuggy atmospheric pressure to it because her torment had not be inaudible. She knew how to regulate the pressure by now; releasing it by remembering parental oppression until the room’s pressure dropped relatively. She alternated: Her parents had built a shelter under a bed, which was constructed by a local swinger-acquaintance who happened to also be a carpenter. And gifted it to Judith for her birthday, placing it in her room, satanically in the centre. The space underneath her bed, which was forbidden to her, reserved for Armageddon, tightly chained and padlocked. Her nights were often animated by the goblins who lived below, who had a twisted logical need to help her by harming her. They weren’t goblins, in the goblinaic sense of the name, but calling them goblins seemed to hurt them in some way. One day, she yearningly considered, technology would enable her to enter her dreams and end the goblins’ reign of terror. One day…

She’d been staring at a self-conscious man, who was enjoying a lump of suffering, finishing the rendering process, digesting and then shitting out what was once an animal, who would have made a much more adorable companion than his tart-faced bitch of a saggy-arsed wife, who was working away at the rendering of another carcass. They saw sophistication, she saw savages; a see-saw of sophistication and savagery.

‘That’s right. Eat murdered animals. Why not? Making others suffer is a choice, right?’ She blurted out as the knife cut into her empathetic response system.

‘Do you want me to call the police, I will.’

‘No you won’t’

‘Arsehole!’

‘You know as well as I do, there is no police service.’

‘Call them, Dave.’

‘I will.’

‘Is all you do a waste of something?’

‘We will press charges.’

‘Insist on it, you’ll be doing time.’

‘What cop show was that from, Starsky?’

‘You need locking up, love.’

‘Hah, the police don’t exist as a human entity, love. Get with the programme. Good luck getting an algorithm to wipe your arse for you.’

A guilt-ridden bysitter, a ruddy cheeked, farmer-looking type importantly carried his phone outside ‘to get reception’.

She knew he’d be put through to an autonomous data reception system and his self-wallowing complaint and request for assistance would be stored in some server along with her missing Atoll report. The lawlessness of it felt bewilderingly adventurous; this was the new wild west, she should get a gun, maybe; powerful water pistol or a paint gun: red paint would splatter a strong message. She could get hold of some illegal stuff of some description. It works both ways: if the law has failed, then the law won’t apply itself to her either: it’s a brave new world for brave new people, and she didn’t want to be left at the bus stop waiting for a bus service that had been cancelled.

And while she had these thoughts, the otherwise unactioned report of a mouthy vegan, hating on perfect respectability, was circulated within the patchy, ingoing/outgoing global intelligence system and picked up by two illegal (to the incoming autonomous governance system) entities. One was a paramilitary unit set up by Animal Ag to fight the rise of veganism. The other was a repurposed, refurbished agent, working for G & G labs, seeking to locate the person closest to Atoll Goodmanson, in an attempt to discover whether anything of Marcus Godstrand can be salvaged.