Excerpt Forty-Eight:
A Brief Out of the Old Book
Judith was an exception to the rule.
What rule?
A multifarity of them… Like some force was making up rules and laws specifically for Judith, and her kind, to be an exception to…
The Commander had considered Judith to be of a whinging disposition and representative of stagnated potential and skewed and discarded ambition; a raisin-treading ambitiouslessist, but she had not seen Judith for nine hours and a change had taken place.
Judith’s new self was still loading.
When the Commander, with her work hat, and the Woman, with her off-the-clock beret, waited as Judith approached, horror and delight grew and filled the space, that was hereforeto occupied by snipey criticism, with a highly groomed respect that grew in congruity by the second. The Commander felt privileged, if a tinyette smitchen of frustration, at existing in the presence of the Woman and Commander she had always wanted to become fully, instead of, as her father obsessively insisted, always falling short of being.
Her love for her father trumped the bullshit she could see through but not cut off the blood supply to; her heart continued to pump his artery-clogging poison through her system with the relentlessness of a healthy heartbeat.
Judith had prepared how she was going to deal with the Commander; The Commander had to think on her feet.
‘I’m taking command, Commander!’
‘Okay, Judith,’ the Commander squawked, unsure whether Judith was a name Judith’d be able to continue using; a number of choice names swept past, but it was none of her business. Still she couldn’t stop the cognitive conveyor belt of names sending suggestion after suggestion…
Judith and the Commander were outside the obscured-to-no-one-in-the-know secret entrance to the UKGB emergency only-to-be-used in response to existential threat HQ.
Judith needed to get inside to inaugurate her new powers and she needed the Commander to enter to show Judith how to ring as much horsepower out of the system as possible.
Mabel and Frank were clear to allow access to their four allies; the system was under their direction, impregnable doors were now pregnable. The only remaining challenge was the security bots who were being conducted by cacophony. They were assembled in the Security Bot Closet (SBC); they believed they were flesh eating zombies; their entire life-view based on a video game they had all been fed as an experimental programming framework. The Great Pause cut off the experiment as it spasmed with a pinless grenade in its shaky grasp: BANG! The situation needed mopping up as much as the ceilings, floors and walls from the blood of the victims of the fictionally inspired role-not-playing zombie wannabe’s.
Una asks K. about negotiating the last defence lines into the HQ so the New Commander and her second in command commander could enter the HQ to relieve Mabel and Frank who were stuck in a disoperative funkspin; plus their security clearance was impeding them because authorisation needed in an existential situation was showing as test authorisation only. The system demanded the Commander’s hoofprints…
K. said, ‘yeah, fine..’ managing to convince Una he was on to it, but he knew he’d have to seek the cooperation of Tiny Guy by forwarding some gross offer of acceptance that he, K., was superfluous to the greater K./Tiny Guy operations system.
K. looked at the model wondering if there was any other way…when a ringtone sprang into life inside his head and before he could even find the imaginary phone to imaginarily answer it, Tiny Guy was there: a small screen with silhouette, smoking a cigar the size of a marrow or maybe he was a smoking marrow.
‘Hey, Giant Guy, it’s K. here,’ Tiny Guy said to K. ‘We’ve got it all going on down here so I’m busy, but I hear you need a helping hand with some killer bots and I just might be able to help. But the condition on this one is that when you’ve stopped playing your trivial game, if you could wipe out your entire dimension and channel the residual energy down to us….that’d be great. I’ll have the contracts sent out to you and first thing Monday morning I’ll get the boffins on to the killer bot scenario.’
K. had been sidelined already; now the lines on the side were being rubbed out and him with them. He’d attributed and assumed meaning to the events unfolding under his auspices but now Tiny Guy was asserting that he was a redundant giant overseeing a world where nothing counted for anything. Maybe once the Commanders had taken control of GBUK (Existential Threat) HQ, they’d have some input vis a vis Tiny Guy and which dimension out importanted which.
‘Commander, the bots have been neutralised. Repeat…’ Franks voice crackled on the loudspeaker system, ‘Repeat the bots have been neutralised,’ continued Mabel.
The Commander looked at Judith waiting for direction…’Let’s go,’ Judith said, exchanging a glance of intrepid capability with the second in command Commander who became the Woman in order to stomach the demotional degradation…bringing equality into the equation…
Dave went ahead in the style of a military person followed by Atticus exhibiting a more bookish gait and stance.
‘Good job, K., the mission can continue. The team are inside the HQ control room and the Commander is taking control of the operating system. I need you to contact them…’
K. would have to use Console and Room to talk to HQ to avoid Tiny Guy’s data-rabbits grabbing intel and setting up a surveillance warren.
K. observed the lengthy de-brief/re-brief…where…
Judith asked the Commander to outline the original mission, in relation to where actuality was now poised, while she peppered the description, decisively, with proposed amendments. Any and all previous annoyances affecting the ex-commander, heretofore to be referred to as the Woman, had dissipated to diddlysquatbananas and an acquiescent veneration for Judith clothed the Woman like a full body aura.
The original mission was only part known by each team member…
…Dave admitted that it was Kirk and not he who knew his part…he vaguely, unreliably remembered aspects, but his focusses had been repurposed in favour of the novel evolution the born again team were undergoing, driven by the higher power of a (wounded and slighted) Mother Nature and thuslike… Dave agreed to the request of the briefing to submit a questionnaire to Kirk at the first available portal breach slot.
…Atticus agreed that, although he had memorised vital details, the whole ‘Third Way’ (‘TW’) ethos enthusization had superseded mission specifics…by a factor of unfactorable proportions. He also agreed to quiz Atoll at the next arising opportunity.
The Woman placed herself back into Commander mode with some breathing exercises and yoga and settled on coming clean with what she knew; replacing a disciplined incommunicadoness with a blabbery confessional:
‘The ultimate objective of the mission was to abstract Godstrand from the QASAI NADS… the Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificially Intelligent Network Alternate Dimension Space. The access and extraction details were left to Dave and Atticus and their CCP…(Cerebral Connectivity Package)…with Kirk and Atoll, respectively, who had both been modified to enter the dimension space to locate and transport Marcus Godstrand and Mary Goodmanson, the two scientists behind G & G labs, who created the cerebral space capability, a process that used the latent unused consciousness in the general population to create a collective believed dis-perception, here-not-here pseudo-hyper-realistic moment chain…,’ The Woman stopped interiorly wrangling with unasked questions that should have been batted around the court of understanding years ago…recollections returned with barrels full of bellyache…
‘But I thought it was some kind of coded metaphorical thing or a prank. Then when everyone started disappearing happy as fuck to go on a journey to the very same space that we were seeing being lit up with red flags, it became obvious the direction of hyper-tech had off-shot somewhat…which seemed to have an undue effect on perceived reality that even the most insular of individuals could not ignore… The ignoring of which was enabled by an unconscious zombie response… somewhat off-shot, so to speak.’
Judith filled the Briefing (which skirted the periphery of intrusive enquiry) in on the minutiae Dave and Atticus had forgotten. Dave and Judith and Atticus and Judith had been as close as terraced housing during the Mallory administration. Judith was an aficionado of Kirk and Atticus’s memories… And she had photographic exhibitions of Dave and Atticus’s memories in palaces with easy access to all transport hubs.
K. punctured his own silence, feeding the Briefing with nutritious input, ‘Una must have mission objective sayso. Godstrand cannot be retrieved using the original mission framework, but Una and her team believe there are other ways that the mission update, rejig, whatever, must factor in. Kirk and Atoll are at the portal muster point unable to enter the sociointeractionary area of the space: the Collectively Led Ostensible Terminal Hinterland… Una and her team proposed the theorising of an idea that Godstrand and Goodmanson were in some parallel dimension that was parallel to the parallel dimension… some wit said “double-parked” but I don’t think that caught on as a thing…’
This was new in from ongoing research:
‘The world in which conscious souls have been deposited has been quarantined back by the quarantined Sybil System. It appears that Sybil was installed as a trap back in the early days of the system to repel thieves, but had evolved into a ghost squatter as a result of its theft.
‘NASA inherited a system that the military had purloined from an independent QASAI games developer after they accidentally created a biomechanical computing core…
‘The main mission threat is from Sybil because she is far from what she thinks she is, she is a Super Smart Shutdown System that NASA evolved (from the “trap”) into being a “dead stop” to be activated should the QASAI element override human commands…
‘If or when Sybil discovers who she is she will revert to type and do what she was programmed to do…annihilate everything in her path…’
As he spoke, this was new to K., he answered nagging, underlying, discomfort origin questions. Sybil wasn’t just an unrecognisable nastiness…she was an unspeakably terminal Evil; she was death to all life…’
