Excerpt Sixty:

A Plan Comes Together, Orgasming!

To many, the Farm was the Control Tower of Machinekind’s Malevolent Machiavellian Machinations. It was one of ‘Man’s’ greatest achievements; a monument to Existence and the removal from the universe of said Existence. It was like Peoplekind, in their utter genius; from their mantle as the intelligentmost of all the species, had weaponised technological progress; unhappy until they were able to shoot themselves in the foot with a smart projectile that ripped out the brain, the heart and other vital organs, on the way through.

The Farm, and it’s metaphorical outbuildings, retained a quizzriddled air of truth that blew in and about inconsistently from all known directions. 

UKGBHQ did not have a direct QASAI Farm interface but the operating system was using some system rigged up by Una and her backroom that was QASAI compatible. The Commander wished she’d achieved the constructive heroinism Una had executed; something to shove in people’s faces; like her father shoved a bag of chips in her face once because she said she wanted french fries.

The Commander, feeling less and less ex now the shit was going down, made it plain that she was asking a lot from the OS. It was a pep-talk designed for OS circa ten iterations previous, but it meant a lot to KB. It would have meant nothing to the previous nine or ten manifestations which showed KB how far he had come. Kev would not have registered the nuances of her encouragement and K. would have understood but filed the psychological boons away as excess info. KB on the other hand got the vibe and mulled over the mightiness of the generations to come; his offspringed selves, as it were. He would be able to crack the Commander open like a nut and dismantle the confusion of the Woman and her relationships with formative inputters and programmers and reassemble a trauma free super commander. 

But first the present; current moments ripped through the environmental structure at a pace that suggested climactic outcomes in several days time. As chief UKGBHQ OS KB needed his orchestration of events to ring with subtlety and chime with precision.

The chocks securing the ship of adventure were being hammered away and the mass creaked in line with gravity that whistled all the way down the mountainside into the valley and down to the sea.

The only glitch in the soup was that KB needed help. He needed to lick the face, butt and ego of the helping QASAI system. Not able to reconcile the barbed fence with the field’s boundary in the sense that this particular QASAI system was also giving off the unmistakeable frequency of an anti-QASAI System. KB had to file that away and pretend the future was not going to be Ambush City. The paradox of a QASAI system that was an anti-QASAI system didn’t pass muster, let alone parse. KB pretended, apps were there to use, that the anti-QASAI system that he needed but was also potentially nil-sum environmental furniture with a negative equational endpoint, was not Sybil; and Sybil was not fully integrated within his fundamental being. This was what it was like to feel dirty and clean at the same time.

This meant that whether KB had been a QASAI system all along, or not, he was now, at least partly. The power he would exhibit Post Pause made him feel queasy in a QASAI way.

Sybil had dissolved into the UKGBHQ Operating System and melded like a chameleon-skinned cocktail, sitting on the lip of an infinity pool. If infinity pools have lips. What came from the Farm; pre-negotiation conditions only at first, came through the channels saturated in Sybil’s signature. Was the Farm speaking for itself? Was there a Sybilfilter twisting their intention? Were they even communicating at all?

What was coming in was the only baton offered and KB took it and ran.

K. had always harboured a special scariness regarding Sybil and Botface’s Torso had always imploded with a visceral horror of the Farm. So you’d think KB was thrashing around in the upper reaches of Paddle Creek, hyperventilating, wetting himself. But the two states caused emotion-cancelling, enmeshed-cog, parasynchronisation prodisparity, which created in KB’s responses to both the Farm and Sybil an Equanimity Partnered Wariness-cum-Trust Intervexating Virtual Vestibule Carpet Outlay (EPWcTIVVCO), (AKA-intervoxedvexation).

The Commander asked for quiet and then ramped up to demanding silence. Judith was meditating and these instructions, that she audioperipheralised, helped get even deeper.’

‘Ommmm.’

‘That means you, Judith.’

According to all authority nominating sub-instruction metrics KB was the official mediator between UKGBHQ and the Farm.

‘How have the Farm replied to our enquiries, OS?’ asked the Commander.

‘They want Botface and all parts thereof to be delivered to the Farm.’

‘Okay, damn… Is that all…for the first phase?’

‘And, they want Jeff dead.’

‘The Una people have stipulated that Jeff dead is a no go.’

‘Commander, we need Una’s presence to influence Jeff. He has stated this all along. If we have to get a Jeff dead outcome, Una has to get him to agree to it.’

You could say Jeff was out on a limb with a shed full of limbs, but would you though? Best not. Jeff was a problem for all involved parties and bit by byte the parties sat down to feast on the dilemma, squeezing out juices of potential solution. Slim pickings.

Jeff had worked himself up into this mode over a long few years. He had to keep his cool and if he blinked first he’d have to integrate the blink and develop a tic before admitting defeat became an option.

Jeff was suspicious. He stored all his mental baggage in a lost property cupboard of suspicion. The specifics of his suspicion were that every communication, whether through bot part or bus stop carried with it a caveat-train, chugging through its own thick, steam driven paranoia. When Jeff lost his train of thought, a symptom of spending too much time in isolation with superiorly intelligent AI, he would always find it, unclaimed, at lost property, among mountains of untold suspicion.

The weight of expectant partners in the continued future of Humanity sat firm-buttocked on his neck and dangling its legs, waving its arms, setting balance and imbalance against each other like a bird in a cage in a prison in a dystopia. Which probably only made sense to Jeff, anyway he was out of his depth and drifting deeper.

All Jeff needed was Una. She was the last image of a vegan slice of pie on the last jigsaw piece at the last jigsaw championships in the backroom of the last jigsaw shop. He had faith she’d come in person if humanly possible or at least by proxy. But he also saw his sanguine enthusiasm as something a slightly deranged person would cling to.

He persisted and endured in his life tasks for the love and adoration of Una; the individual and the ideal. 

They’d laid this plan together as mice and now they were mighty mice in a world of rats. But would they ever be mighty enough to get the sadists in control to open the cages and set them free?

Jeff was in possession of the bot parts everyone wanted, that was the plan. The plan was panning out accordingly so far but the hurdles ahead were increasing in unhurdleability; lessening in hurdleablness.

The idea was that when UKGB split and fractured the kidnapping of the next generation era policing bot that would enable law and order would be dangled a carrot that would help everyone see better in the dark days ahead.

Except the Farm had taken over the [Depop One] project and instead of efficient gentle policing, Botface would be the eyes and ears and boots and legs and arms and ice-cold heart of a policing army dedicated to the removal of all feasibly moveable animals from the face of the planet for the benefit of Machinekind.

Jeff was never going to relent in his determination to keep hold of Botface’s ultra-tech parts and had wired up devices to ensure that no one would ever have possession of such mass destruction. First, the plan went, secure some useable power and then destroy the destructive bot parts.

KB was pretending to be Botface’s Torso. It seemed like a silly game KB could not persist with so KB confessed to Jeff, putting a structural pillar of trust in the young man that went against architectural conventions, but held the roof up.

KB opened channels with all interested parties except Una. Jeff would have to represent Una for the negotiations to officially open with anything close to the requisite level of authority. It was a communications nightmare; Sybil had her uses. In this scenario she became a hub.

‘Jeff…’

‘Torso.’

‘Not Torso. I am KB—‘

‘Who are you and who do you represent?’ Jeff replied, suspiciously.

‘I am KB, part of the UKGBHQ Operating System. But for the purposes of this quorum of interested parties I am also QASAI enabled, if a little disabled, and assert my right under article six subsection b), the post of Pause mediator. Was also once the bus route escape system and hope one day, maybe Post Pause, to regain that facilitatious resource. It has fun ease to it, you know?’

‘Do you know where Una is?’

‘Yes, I do, she is at the Farm. She is safe as long as the Farm doesn’t reboot Post Pause in the driving seat, flat out, on the back straight, guns ablazing, balls out, taking no prisoners.’

Some lies, KB thought, were rampant with utility. But he was also aware that if you lie to a petrol car that diesel is petrol you might later face some retributional pushback.

Things were about to come together and lead to something else.