Excerpt Eighteen:
Kev Looks For Shelter
Kev, flicker-scans the guests’ cranial environments and finds Dave on patrol in Afghanistan; Atticus under an overpass in LA, wrestling with the ghostly concepts of good and evil, in training for the arrival of Good and Evil in person. It was as though he were gazing at the ocean’s horizon continually spotting a tsunami that never materialises. The woman presented a mental wall of unknown origin that obscured her mind; more powerful resources that could scale the wall were stranded upstream of Kev’s feed. Judith, who’s essence seemed to lie at the end of a tree-lined drive, in a house that couldn’t have existed without slavery, in a fragrant English summer that would never really happen. He could find out everything about her, but he had to venture into her inner sanctum; he had to create himself into an un-bus-shelter-like person and enter the preconscious metaphorical interface environment. Judith had had a lot of work done that she was unaware of. He skipped down the drive and whooshed through the house to the basement. He had an appointment with data.
Kev entered the family screening room and switched everything on using Judith’s voice command. He viewed material Judith had no access to; Curiosity had him by the hard drive, megabytes of nosiness swarming from rogue, self administering algorithms.
A hologram documentary, produced by Kev’s associate programs, showed Judith departing the UK excitedly, for a vacation in Ibiza. The destination villa was amazing, though unremembered by Judith. The owners were a corporation, the host, Judith’s unwanted boyfriend’s mother, Mary Goodmanson. It was no holiday, this was business. Mary was becoming familiar to Kev and growing more so as Kev was filled in by assembling data, Mary was a complex character, an iceberg; millions of cubic tons of secrets below the icy ocean.
Kev started the second documentary, watching it in tandem with the first because he could. The film of the past: Mary, defiling, no stealing Judith, in a series of harrowing procedures of which Judith was unaware. In the filmic present: the scoundrel Mary, squeezes the world in her palm from her icy lair aboard the research vessel the RV Marcus Godstrand. Anchored somewhere in Antarctica kicking the planet’s butt. Kev’s inquisitiveness was met with increasingly corrupt data.
He had peered in on forbidden fruit. The location was where he himself originated; from servers abroad the ship. If he’d had a horror program it would be loading.
While such ponderations thrashed about; Kev’s responsibilities clambered for his attention; the guests were becoming restless.
He left the house, carefully locking the padlock securing the front door, and walked up the imaginary driveway back to his bus shelter, back to himself.
A bird of overwhelming plumage landed nearby and Kev had an idea that jolted into his electro-psyche with such ferocity that he snapped back to reality…
What they all needed was a parade!
Not just any parade; a dazzling display, with pertinent personal elements. It needed a theme and the theme will be…Judith and the links she shares with the others; chain-links in her diamond-teardrop necklace.
A parade with loved ones and things, depicting their contribution to the churning wheel of world events…
Kev pre-visioned Dave’s first cars with ex-girlfriends driving them, for Dave, and anything would do for Atticus, something sparkly and in your face that everyone can enjoy. Dancers dancing, yes, tumblers tumbling, clowns clowning, humans not killing animals. Judith was influencing Kev’s plans and it was meant to be a surprise; but then a pleasant un-surpring event will beat an unpleasant surprise. If he displeased Judith what would he have left, he imagined a desolation; Judith was everything. Maybe this was normal behaviour for a technological over-advanced bus-shelter, in a time of hiccupping, automated take-over…
Within micro-seconds a whole barrage of ideas fired off and the ones that landed, chatted and got to know each other and danced and whispered…conspired and organised, arranged—there was going to be a party…
Judith’s car, Mallory, Judith would be excited to see her again despite all internal combustion engines being rendered unusable by the atmospheric molecular alteration of diesel and petrol, ostensibly to save the planet, but in reality a power play to squeeze out oil tycoonery by electric oligarchoonery.
Several locals could be dressed up to pull the car. Or the car could be fitted with an electric motor and core computer with a real personality, Kev thought, spiralling. Or he could back the fuck off and stay Mr. Controlling’s whip hand . He needed to think like a Judith; this needed to be right. If Mallory could talk she would become a horror story, probably programmed by a Stephen King. The narrative had to be upbeat, Judith needed support.
And as suddenly as a time-lapsed dawn…
Kev was missing his parents, no, it was Judith who was missing them, but it wasn’t her parents, it was the overbearing stupidity and nonsense with which they shrouded her. Or more precisely the tradition of it and the security of a devil well known. What was happening to Kev, was he being wound in, trapped in Judith’s gravitational chains? Whatever it was, it was Fate, or, at least, Fate claimed to be Kev’s unbiological father.
It was as though this new bus-shelter had crawling feeling plants and weeds intent on covering it, eating into its mortar, foundationally taking over. Kev owned less and less of the world and became smaller and tinier in it. The DRD system was not yet unravelled, but forces intent on stopping it, starting it, or keeping it as is, all made attempts to take Kev’s electro-intellectual power away from him. Then there was the friendly fire…
A window here has a hacker, a window there has a military strength hacking attempt. Kev was free of all these and many more, but there was one, a freelance, an independent. Who was behind this? Did Judith know, under her radar? After the parade Kev would have to sneak up the drive and get to the screening room to find the answers he was looking for…
