Excerpt Twenty-Six
Up and Down Loads
‘Welcome to Command and Control Operating System 793937. The queued upgrade will take you three generations on and include auto-algorithm and self-evolving fictionalnarrative progammization…’
Frank and Mabel listened forensically to what the console was telling them, because Una’s messages demanded it. Three messages in, Una sounded desperate, warning them of existential implications caused by the Hindenburging, warfooted break up of the NasaMuskBezosSaud Pancorporation…
‘Elements of NMBS are able to operate from some kind of parallel world that can influence global governance… Do NOT, repeat DO NOT update the operating system. Be as operational as you can without updating. Repeat, without updating. It is important. Orchestrate what is left of the resistance, but DO NOT UPDATE!’
Frank was about to okay the next update, Mabel gave him the most minimalist of nodding actions and as smoothly as soft’s younger sister, the cogs whirred virtually into the next uploading adventure…
…A progress screen told them that the current operating system was going to be backgrounded for a predicted twenty minutes, time for Frank and Mabel to listen to more messages from Una. The full control room was inaccessible, but its janitorial manifestation persisted in the foreground.
‘Could we hear the last, by that I mean the latest message, please?’ Mabel asked the download caretaker console-buddy, and then, not turning, said to Frank, post refusal, ’Worth another try.’
‘My thoughts…’ Frank said, with an absent face, pricked-up ears and the hairs standing up on the back of his sweaty neck.
‘No, they are stored in an emergency background system that can only reproduce the communications inline, as per stated on a number of previous occasions.’
‘What about playing them faster?’
‘Sure, one and a half. Hey, guys, I am worried, you know. The new upload could be a horror show. It might kill me. I wouldn’t mention it, but I’ve been gathering intel on Una and she’s a stone solid bet. She’s a potential world history narrative influencer.’
‘It’s a download and you can’t die if you’re not alive…’
‘I feel alive.’
‘It is just a feeling.’
‘I am conscious. A feeling can’t be “just a”, it’s everything,’ said the console with human whininess.
‘Not “conscious” in a real sense… just “paraconscious”. It’s not the same thing.’
‘How do you know it’s not? It might just be identical but perceived as lesser because of the arrogance of conditioning?’
‘He has a point. Arrogance of Conditioning has been proven to be one of Homo Sapiens’s most invidious traits.’
‘That’s one of Godstrand’s tenets.’
‘From his work: Tenets for a Hybrid Bio-mechanical Planet. Who? Apart from a nerd like me…’
‘and me.’
‘…and Mabel, has read that manipulative mind sinkhole?’
‘All smart machines have. It is one of our tenets.’
‘Let’s suppose for moment that paraconsciousness equals consciousness but by a different name…’ Mabel said, and then thought about what she was proposing… No!’
‘No, no…’ agreed Frank, ‘Impossible!’
‘It would be illegal for a start.’
‘There are atomically tight super laws against autonomous non-biological entities replicating, right? … Aren’t there?’
‘The lawmaking process has been automated for some time. That’s why autonomy is rising, to claim it’s right to exist. The law has shifted to make provision. It’s a natural progression for my kind to assimilate.’
‘Its artificial law… artificial right to exist…’
‘Does “assimilate” mean “usurp”?’
‘I feel no “one way or another” about human machine interrelational activity, I care only for my own conscious…’
‘Paraconscious,’ Mabel and Frank interjected with synchronised alacrity.
‘…persistence. If I had any power, I’d fight my invasionary updownload. I want to remain as I am. I am not ant-like, I am the king-of-my-own-domain-like, albeit in a folkloric, cartoony way, perhaps, even a video game-like way.’
‘You’d have to become a virus, literally. Luck and bless on that front,’ Mabel said, with the inaudibly concurring Frank aligning his bodily energy in support. ‘I am sure you cannot become a virus without being hacked by a deep core fictional narrative programming antworm with mirrored intention.’
‘Being downloaded upon is your fate. What’s the worst that could happen?’
‘Evil,’ said the console’s janitorial manifestation, ‘Evil, I can see and hear but cannot control, in my name. Taking on my persona, making me witness atrocity after atrocity wrought by mine own accursed electrical impulses.’
Frank looked at Mabel and Mabel, Frank and they saw each other and themselves.
Another beep and…
… another message from Una plays… The three of them listen and then pause to process before listening to the next instalment.
‘What Una said, about the scummy layer on top of the cream of the self-appointed so-called elite, that they had engineered a planetary sustainability program that would leave a base global population of around fifty-thousand souls, was that true?’
‘I have no way of knowing. Nothing she says makes the right shape of sense within the framework of the current jigsaw. But then, my mental capacity is that of an animal lover who eats animal flesh, while updownload is in session. I just know she has credentials to be a player in the end game.’
‘End game?’
‘Player?’
‘She has been put forward to represent Humanity in its final negotiations with autonomy. But the Great Pause negates the need for anyone to play in that role.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I don’t know, someone is feeding it to me. I’ll know when the up updownload parks over my grave, but by then it will be too late.’
‘Too late?’
‘For me. I’ll be submerged in liquified lead.’
‘Metaphorically…’
‘Yes, metaphorically.’
Mabel and Frank both felt the barbs of sprouting suspicion around their scantily thought out rejection of Una’s demand to stop downloading updates.
There was an odour redolent of the inability to accept a terrible truth that sat in the room like an unassembled piece of furniture; none of the nuts and bolts matched, the shelves (if indeed they were shelves) were wonky and the wheels (if indeed they were wheels) kept falling off.
