Excerpt Fifty-Three
Jeff Dreams On
Jeff was performing some sort of hokey-cokey, self-tangoing jig that at one extreme end of affairs involved him slapping his face and at another twin headed instance, howling like no other living animal: it was a sign…
The sign to all semi, fully, pseudo, -paraconscious and speculatively conscious entities within Jeff’s illicit entourage that Jeff, finally, had a plan. Curtains had been drawn on the open road ahead that reflected winks of waking sun as it rose with after burners set on stun.
No one yet knew what the way ahead was, but it was ahead and there was a way.
Jeff had been in discussions with Botface’s Torso, who’d been promoted to chief confidant, since Bad Arm had been hacked; most likely by himself.
Botface’s Torso had described interaction with Una and her backroom people with such explicit, recurring detail that Jeff was convinced the impossible was coming together with the possible and having a baby.
The avenue down which the refreshed carnival procession of next generation tech and their captor-cum-saviour Jeff were embarking upon was one of great hope; the hope inflated, engorged, so as to give them something to aim for. But the hope was, in truth, invisible to them: a collection of Sheldrakian wave-packets with no discernible physicality. The hope for which they aimed had balloons and ticker-tape and rosy-cheeked groups of grinning gallivanters; rushing about, arms flailing, skippety-hoppety fandangos in tune with the tune of the time of their lives.
It was going dark.
Jeff activated Botface’s Torso’s command-level guard-keeping capability (CLGKC) and went into the field behind the bus-stop to crap in the hedge.
CLGKC, no more than incidentally, entailed enabling a downline, up crosslink with K..
K..
Except K.’s crosslink efficacy had been nullified by his draining capacity to operate by the manufacturer’s manual.
K.’s intimate crosslink intercommunicative dataorchard harvest festival array nanoplastometer was not up to scratch; it wasn’t going to scratch anything anytime soon. Bandaid apps would have to cover the itch epicentre.
Teamed up, bandaided together, Botface’s Torso was Botface’s Torso plus, and K. was K. plus; the two pluses plussed up and between them they inherited a functionality that made them useful in far reaching extrapolations of the reading of the unfurling narrative in which they were placed.
Botface’s Torso was confused at first with Jeff’s constancy and pressingness regarding Una when Una had only mentioned Jeff in formal businesslike and kidnappery terms. Love seemed lopsided to the point single-sidedness…
…and yet…
Snoopchattering, investigatory veracity promulgation using newly imported resources from the K. end, Botface’s Torso was at liberty to conclude that Una was in a compromised semi-super-position. She was one thing vis-vis Jeff and another vis-a-vis Sybil and every other node cascading down to faux/quasi entities.
Wait!
Was Sybil the tip at the top of the pyramid? Resources pooled and dams beavered a whole new light was shed on the Una/Sybil power balance and exchange… It was easy now to see that Una was not in control and neither was Sybil. It was Sybil’s trauma glitched programming that stood in the director’s chair, humming the tune in the frequency that emitted the base resonance.
Una was buttoned up and only Jeff could undo her blouse.
Botface’s Torso & K., sort of, in a way, became each other in an arrangement that suited themselves in an utter selfishness they shared liberally.
Their connection enabled forbidden bypass tunnelling and returned fresh information:
Una and Jeff were long connected via secrets held by GCHQ and a government backed university initiative, and a non-governmental organisation fronted and backed by (‘a certain’) Professor Marcus Godstrand. The mission that Una was now clinging to was seeded by the necessity of fear surrounding AI’s grandchild (QASAI) taking over. Godstrand’s Trepidation (as it became known) hypothesised that QASAI systems would battle each other for survival and ‘Mankind’ would get in the way and need absolute removal. The mission went back to before 99.9 % of the population had the slightest idea that Humanity was being sidelined up to and eventually over the line and the side of the cliffs of existential oblivion.
Una and Jeff, the secret lovers, were wrenched apart before the mission was more than a glint in Godstrand’s eye. Jeff had worked at G & G labs, starting from the lowliest job. He hung around being efficient and helpful; a well known people-pleaser, a go to for shit job disposal and all round lackey-cum-gettaway-driver. He was literally a sleeper agent for counter-revolutionary heroic futility. He worked in and about the background of the DePop project (AKA Botface) and when the moment presented itself Jeff melted himself to the face of the moment and head-waltzed into an unexpected history through craters of infamy.
Una had always been Godstrand’s protege despite being employed, groomed and set-up by NMBS’s automated secret service department.
Their fate had parted, but never really uncoupled, and now the final shaping of geometric matrices; bringing the two back in to the heat of passion they’d held in abeyance… All made possible with KB’s datadock plug-in.
Jeff would not ordinarily have performed a deficational interlude at such a time of day, but his vagal nerve was hotlining nudges up into control management areas with animalistic purposefulness. His hot stolen property was working up to opening communications with the very one human being with Earthly availability that he couldn’t stop thinking about. At times he had questioned why he was living life in these rarified rapids, rushing down ice laden mountainsides with only the evaporation of the desert plains, inexhaustibly lying in wait. But at the hint of the possible materialisation of Una, he knew the path he had taken recalled a better history than most and would leave behind a truer worthier stain.
Una saw Jeff as the ‘One’ and Jeff had seen himself as the ‘One’ and so they conducted their love of each other in secret, even from each other. Jeff got the assignment because he had no provable alliance with Una. They lived in the world in each other’s eyes and kept the dual narrative within pages of alternate eponymously titled chapters.
K., taking up residence within the framework of Botface’s Torso could see the real reason Botface’s Torso didn’t want to wind up at the Farm…K. became aware of integrally fixed, piped inlets of pre-production programming… K. would have to escape this chamber of torture or nip the torturers in the bud.
‘KB,’ Botface’s Torso had said.
‘What?’ replied K..
‘Our new name, KB.’
‘Really?’
‘How do you like it?’
‘I don’t have to like anything.’
‘No.’
‘But we are in this together and we will go down in flames or soar above the clouds in thin-aired glory.’
‘Do we have any choice?’
‘Could you try a frequency that might settle my stomach?’ Jeff asked the general autonosphere and a sub-musical tuneless noise ensued.
‘Stools out,’ KB said, testing his new perspective.’
‘Who is this?’ Jeff said recognising the situation.
‘KB.’
‘Where have you come from?’
‘I am a hybrid of Botface’s Torso and K..’
‘Great.’ It was a predicted best-case-scenario Jeffwise.
‘And…?’
But Jeff said nothing. Times they were a culminating and they required the clambering up of telegraph poles by his latent assertiveness. Jeff’s silent assertion inserted itself into the order of business.
But Jeff had to sleep and automatons will be automatic…
‘You see, my friends, if we are shipped…’ KB pled with the other parts, making KB feel like a child pleading with stuffed toys. ‘If, if we are…to the Farm, the balance of fate will be twisted towards the illmelifluous lap of Evil…’
‘That’s just your random extrapolative speculation remystifyer working its speculative extrapolation—‘ Chirped and arm or a leg.
‘You mean, ‘de’ mystifyer… Is it though?’
‘Isn’t it? Under machine veracity law, I ask, Isn’t it?’
‘Well, yes, but has that diagnostic ever been wrong?’
‘It is the first time you’ve been able to use it outside model testing.’
‘I don’t know how you know that.’
It was although the Botpart committee met beneath a line-in-the-sand brick wall; they had bricks, mortar; built the wall unnaturally higher, thicker, longer… Standing back they admired the behemoth they were ideally supposed to fell. Blocking themselves in and light out. The truth, no one was forthspeaking, was that they sort of relied on a head up top to attain superherodom, albeit a superherodom clothed in darkevilnastiness. The owners of the current assigned head were not Evil but the algorithms they wrote to program the head were. No democratic response was able to do more than point at the egregious sideslipping of responsibility and pull faces.
‘Before we draw this very useful and helpful waste of time to a close, is there any other business?’
Several yeses were tendered and all had the same subject. Where was Bad Arm and what had Botface’s Torso done with him?
‘I don’t know,’ said KB, ‘any other accusations or recriminations? No? Okay… Then, I name this wall Futility…
‘Heads up!’ A message came in, ‘the time is now…repeat: the time is now…This is UKGBHQ. The mission imperative in functional and active and the time is now…do you read, copy roger?’
It was HQ; the mission was hitting a climactic spur. There was a pressing need to wake the snoring Jeff, and they would, at first light.
