Excerpt Seven:

TWO MINDS VISIT

Kirk is thinking much faster than anyone he is likely to meet. 

He was the only refurbished unit to make it out of the project alive. They’d had him out beta-testing, at the time of Project Rfrb’s decommission; working as a traffic warden in central London. Undercover, testing basic hunter-killer mode settings; raising revenue, paying for his own development.

The knife wound from his would-be assassin was irritating him; it was healing super fast, but hurt necessarily to stop him re-injuring it. Refurbishment wasn’t perfect, but then, un-refurbished, the train lady would’ve ended it all for him. He’d used his powers to give her a soft landing so she’d live to tell the epic tale of how she encountered the only living refurbished human and survived. Refurbishment benefited not just the refurbished… It was a force for great good in the world; albeit a derelict world that needed, and was getting, an Autonomous upgrade.

He was standing at the end, or beginning, of a gravel driveway on a suburban housing estate; Judith’s last known address. He’d dropped into Atoll’s flat and gathered bundles of data that was still being processed. 

There was no way to get to the front door of the bungalow without touching gravel. Welcoming his new potential, Kirk was working out, partially unconsciously, how to get to the front door with a silent footfall; a feat not humanly possible; purely a programming exercise, a game to stimulate and program his young and fast-growing systems.

Evidence from Atoll’s flat concerning Judith was in the mill too, and he’d hoped to get sight of that before engaging her, but the auxiliary system deployment was being held up by global politics and he needed to press on.

His systems, which must be, he thought, somehow, cloud based, were still initialising; unforetold resources coalescing and introducing themselves to each other, forming an inter-exchangeable communications plane in a server, creating a virtual parallel dimension. 

Kirk was a para-species of one and wondered who non-refurbished people had become to him, he’d have to refer to them as ‘muggles’ until a better name presented itself. For the first time ever he found himself funny. Was he being funny. Is that what it was? He couldn’t be sure. He just got the sense that his new, refurbished comedic ability would be wasted without an audience of some kind. There were imponderables. When his internal/cloud systems sorted themselves he’d be able to pose a queued barrage of questions, firmly positive he’d get an accurate answer…

Judith looked out of the lounge window at the man standing at the end of the driveway, she imagined he was a simulated character waiting for her to see him before he moved, but he didn’t move…

Judith felt terrible about Atoll, not so much that he was missing and drasticized as worst case scenario, but that she felt a sense of moving on, at last; a rejuvenating relief that decency and grief would not allow her to enjoy; quite rightly and properly.

She was resting her head in her hands on the back of the sofa, in treacherous reverie, by the time the creature moved; he walked towards the closed end of the close; they were both moving on. He was a human being with a life she did not have access to herself: an unattainable, unknowable essence, until they do start simulating us with absolute fidelity. Was she sad? She felt sad…was this what sadness was…

It’s a close… He’ll be back…

Kirk’s onboard assessment calculators had flagged up a potential problem; a stalker of sorts, a familiar stranger. Kirk had witnessed this person before, during the Project: a friendly stalker; a nice surprise, possibly, in some ways. However business stood in the way. Behind a hedge at the end of the close, cornered…a terrified and cowering male, mid-forties. Hector Kendle, technician on Project Rfrb…

‘Are you going to kill me?’ he said, without looking at Kirk.

‘I don’t know, Heck, I’ll just check, hold on.’

‘You should. G & G labs—‘

‘Yes, technically, you’re included in the kill list, but—’

‘Shit, Dave?’

‘There’s no hurry…Kirk!’ Kirk corrected…

‘Hector!’ Hector said, thinking it was his own name that was in doubt, as everything except an escape route is when faced with death.

The Dave thing was a rabbit among the lions, shelved above the fireplace for the third act. Hector seemed to know Kirk as Dave at some point in the project, and at some point after this mission, Kirk is going to have to find out who this Dave is…

‘You can run, Hector, I’m busy, I’ll get to you in order of importance. It’s administratively… tidier…’

Had he been Chekovian, before, with the fireplace concept? What was Chekov to him? The plays were stodgy, but the short stories sublime. He’d never read them, he didn’t need to, refurbishment had literary benefits too.

‘Okay, see ya, now,’ Hector said, taking advantage of what he saw as a welcome malfunction.’ Hector wanted to tell Kirk he was being used, exploited, and his real self, Dave, would object. But Hector had never been so scared and just wanted out. Maybe the world’s collide-path would divert before his importance on Kirk’s list meant his funeral, if they’re even bothering with funerals by then.

‘Thanks,’ Hector gasps, resentment undisguised, as he jogs his jelly-legs away, repeating what sounds like: ’Refurbished cunt,’ several times.

‘Sorry,’ Kirk shouted after him, ‘It’s just business. I wish you all the best. Good luck, man.’

There was no real list with Hector’s name on it, but the unreal list did some fine work, keeping Hector out from under harm’s dirty raincloud.

Kirk knocked at number 111. Inside, Judith went to answer the door, after a kitchen view from the 4k doorbell camera revealed the mysterious driveway man; did he have tarmacking on his mind?

‘Stop right there. What have we told you about answering the door to strangers?’ shouted the patrimatriachal beast posing as her parents.

‘Don’t ever answer the door because everyone is a stranger?’ she answered, complying, but not intending to.

‘keep away from the windows, Jude.’

They crouched together behind a small and timeless grandfather clock in the hallway despite there being no view into the hall to the front door. The knocking and ringing alternated for five to ten minutes. Judith kept herself quiet but wondered why… Then remembered… in similar situations in the past she had been struck across the head, the shoulder, the arm and the neck, oh, and the back…these had been programming years and the program still ran, surprisingly. Logic told her she was acting on outmoded data, but her biology clung to the lessons learned and kept vigil. 

When her parents were within strike range her biology ruled; it’s not that her parents would ever attack her in full awareness. They emanated from a time when slapstick with a victim was hilarious. So, naturally they couldn’t stop involuntary slaps cropping up from time to time, thumps or even kicks, knees and elbows, as part of an instantaneous, and understandable, reaction package. 

Why, though…why? The human jungle was full of ‘why’ trees. A life hacking through it won’t ever create a treeless zone where answer birds can roost. The world was strange and getting stranger; preparing human victims of strangeness for the most unfathomably strange part of life: death. What was that all about? Death had to be better than here; it had to be… what if it isn’t? As long as she doesn’t come back as a dairy cow—mid thought she leapt up with the alacrity of an olympic sprinter and opened the front door, and as if by magic, her parents where flanking her. The mother, on her right. Father, left, as always, creepily dependable, unwanted, but dependable. They were already apologising for not answering the door sooner with conflicting lies.

‘I was hoping you’d give up and go away,’ Judith said, but would have stopped herself if she could’ve. Her biology expecting a blow… wrong again. Both parents pinched her gently; they’d perfected pressure and release. The gentleness was setting 1 on a dial that went up to infinity, measured in millgrams. The man looked them all over…he knew… He didn’t react, but he knew… all there was to know. Their game was up. He was here to rescue her. Was he a rescue-dawg, a prince charm-fest… Maybe he would just help her out of infantile fantasising; her, unpainted ‘In-Fan’, program for dealing with parental overkill…She must patent that…

Kirk was facing a welcome-sandwich housed in unwelcome bread… ‘It’s good news,’ he said, at last, thinking that it was also bad news, really… ‘Atoll has been found safe and well,’ …thinking, his body has, at least… his actual self has disappeared and been replaced by some unintentional hybrid character… But that was too much information.

He needed to splice their conjoined-triplet unity. The live-processed aura was a conglomerate of demons, devouring an angel. This assessment can’t be right, he thought, but that was what he was getting. An ‘action’ file was opening within his internal admin complex. The one in the middle, called Judith, by the bread slices encasing her, needed rescuing… From what, specifically, was still to be verified…

…But he hoped, for her sake, a rescuer would come along soon.