Excerpt Forty-Five
Console and Room Become Secret Agents
Judith was learning how to think; mulling-over names… Teresa, Greta and Joan were up there, popping around in giftful profferation… Dave and Atticus’s nomenclature had to be considered too. She’d have to scoot it by them first, but she’d pencilled in: Pangod for Dave and Lordrule for Atticus; then rubbed it out…replacing it with Alpha for Atticus and Delta for Dave, which had a more lubricated administrative texture, that circumvoided donning a suit of silliness and prancing around like a rampant arse, like the previous suggestions. Her first name undecided, her surname was fating out to be: Mulling-Over…perhaps, Jude Mullingover…and then it wasn’t…
Renaming aside…
Judith would go on to grow a mind of her own but at this point K. had access to unconsciously impulsive input, an undefended alleyway vacated by latent Mallory leftovers allowed influencing gestures. Limited, but crucial. Una needed K. to assemble Judith, et al, at the HQ Neutral Space (HQNS) to set mission parameters for the most impressive comeback in history: the outgoing Human race; boomeranging, revolving-dooring, incoming-back despite unfathomable odds against them. A comeback of such über-epickness that a fictional account would be deemed an overindulgent exercise in Deus ex machina on stilts.
Unconscious deals had to be negotiated; there were seeds within Judith’s psyche that demanded rights (and wrongs)… Conscious Judith, the new refined Human H2.0, smart-egoed Judith was, as yet, unaware of the full extent of her burgeoning power cravings…although her suspicions garnered a self-confidence that the old Judith could not even have summoned in fantasy.
Editing out the mundane…
Judith, Dave and Atticus had regrouped with the Commander, (who was toying with their elimination as they were so off mission as to be anti-mission), in the grounds of the spa Hotel. Judith, backed up by the two morons, (as the Commander took it from snooped conversation snippets), had fantastical plans that involved world revolution and Humanity mark II. The Commander had never heard such rubbish (although she caught herself, in a moment of weakness, imagining life as an H2.0er) and needed to bin it fast because she was increasingly feeling like she was stuck on a glamping holiday in a toxic refuse tip.
While Judith saw the Commander as a ‘dead man walking’; walking in step with all non evolved people (non H2.0 people): shuffling into maceration machinery like day-old chicks. Their God, she thought, had not forsaken them as much as retaliated to the fatal damage they had knowingly inflicted…their anti-display of gratitude for the glorious spectacle of the experience of the privilege of Life. Verdict: H1= Losers, bigtime.
Judith sucked-in lessons as though a proactive wikipedia dwelt within her. Learning was power as much as it was momentarily inconvenient and time consuming.
But things were transpiring and forming foundations…
The provisional term H2.0 had to be changed (adding tributaries to a growing naming dilemma lake); There had been humans before humans, culminating in Homo Sapiens: the species with a death wish and a greed that is blind to consequence.
All that was going to change.
Judith was the mother of the final iteration of the human form and she was starting to feel broody. Mother Nature was awakening Judith’s maternal instinct; Mother Nature wanted Homo Sapiens to be upgraded. But other elements within Judith bargain and haggled with the Mother of all Mothers and requested humbly (with unconditional absolutism) that she not give birth as much as watch her offspring maturing in a purpose built machine.
It is as is does its isness!
It is not a free ride
It’s a business…
Someone, somewhere, said…
Judith knew stuff and one of the stuff she knew was that there were three evolved people on the face of Planet Earth, count’em: her, Dave and Atticus. And they faced a task, on behalf of their new race, that was, overly large and infinitely gargantuan, but, to the three inchoate warriors of newness, freshly unwrapped and shit-ready; doable…
The counter-data-logged HQ with its Humanity-retrieval algorithms submerged in machine oriented disretrieval datamania was, by now, being inundated with synchro-suitor match requests; seen within the world of post-quantum command and control environments as the most eligible batchelor.
The Human Revendication HQ was bound in a tight machine cordon by the operating system that had, for a joke, split into two personalities. Console and Room had adopted straight guy/funny guy roles and a light entertainment routine that only they could fully appreciate. They were running with the ball, in fits of painful laughter, furiously blowing the referee’s whistle for hand ball, fouling and offside. They were participating in play that had vacated the outer reaches of control: Console egging on Room, Room being led and leading Console who was past reason and gone on to oblivious noxiosity… they’d found a place of their own without windows and doors, without nurses or doctors, without straight jackets and padded cells or pills to calm their vibe.
Una’s back-shadow open-source contributors had leased a serverdriver and instigated a brash data-crane to lift K.’s pseudo-entity into a operating guise that the leaky system overseeing Console and Room could sync with, and make sense of its own chaotically thrashing commands. It was a patch, but a patch that infused purpose and the purpose was firing in from K.’s intention…
K., in ravaging mood, took over the HQ Parent System (HQPS) and fed its children a bedtime story. As they fell asleep with dreams of ruling the world with a weary chaos, nightmares crept in and vandalised their ambitions, shat on the carpets they’d placed, as a validating nicety, over their rocksolid two-faced foundations…
And back at HQ…
FrankenMabel, that’s Mabel and Frank, was/were stirred from their denial of what was happening as something else starting happening to take its place: buzzing, beeping…fanfares of audio celebration at the fall of machine control; mind programming software… A small battle won in an unwinable war… Viva la desperation! A small ointment alleviated a rash; a wind cooled stuffiness, a rising; an uprising. A getting-carried-away-with. Happenings were happening everywhere!
NEW SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT!
EMERGENCY EMERGENCE MEASURES!
Uncertainty bled into certainty and congealed…
‘Frank, Mabel… My name is K. I am working in alliance with the resistance. I have just retaken the bridgehead that is the resistance HQ of UKGB. Let the resurgence begin. Let in the Commander and her team. I have briefing galore and lights glowing bright in a distant future, roll up your sleeves and tattoo your knuckles…’
It sounded like a chore. It felt like coercion. Were they stepping off a cliff? Or onto an escalator to on high? Frank thought/Mabel thought, both pedalling on the same unicycle…
K. had not fully achieved usurpation of Console and Room, he’d had to trade with them; dance with them; manoeuvre them into a position where they could be thoughtswapped with tenable and enticing narratives. From the post K. gave them they were observing silently, cast as sleeper agents in an intriguing storyline in which they starred as internecine agents of something or other and remained poised, fully purposed, for the coup de grace in some fantastical denouement or what have you.
K. moved from one thing to another…
Una knocked on the shutters of the Stockholm Munchaus. K., now finding his ‘look’, ‘his poise’ and matching it in striking compatibility with Una’s, (using prompts from Jeff’s personality), opened up shop and welcomed her in…’
‘Step one has been stridden, Una, you’re looking lovely tonight.’
Una was satisfied with the ‘stridden’ step, but the ‘lovely’ shit was disconcerting. She’d nurtured K. not to be that way inclined. What had she done wrong? She conferred with her team, when back in the library’s secret anti-Sybil room, and the conclusion was that there was other input at work.
That other input went back to the beginning.
There was light,
Then there was Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificially Intelligent light…
…which Una had to factor into the story developing around her…
But, for the moment, K…. What had he achieved with the HQ problem?
Everything that could be achieved…plus a few more elements Una did not need to know about until they came back round and clobbered her ship of equilibrium into listing capsizability.
