Excerpt Sixty-Two

Embarking on a Giant Woof!

The Commander was top side of the buttons and although between them, KB and Sybil created an allegedly megalomaniacal monster, overall as an operating system they needed to give feedback conducive with an artificial intelligence that was in the service of the Human master and not freelancing all over the jousting scene and poking holes in sacred cows and riding rough shod over sprawling knights.

‘Can you work out a route to the Farm and feasibility study on what resources our team possess to counter any negative pressure they might encounter… please…OS?’

Of course KB had it all worked out in advance; pre-loaded by the Ex-Commander, Commander’s predictability, but gave it a credible hour and a cheeky five in order to create the correct amount of conducivity.

KB was raking through the archived Mallory files to find out more about the Third Way and what it meant for the future of humanity when he discovered that it was made up. Mallory citing boredom relief as the culprit, a side narrative gone rogue. Judith and Dave and Atticus were in a position to take the made up nonsense and plug up holes in their identity created by the mission. They had all three decided that they were above the mission and everything the mission needed to achieve could be done along the way; the Third Way.

Except, it was a lie; a lie of convenience that had grown into a fertile landscape of productivity.

It left the three of them with a nursery tic that got them almost doing an am-dram All for One and One for all tri-gesture.

KB wanted to consult Sybil and, even though, creepily she was bundled with him in the operating system of the UKGBHQ, there was a procedure.

Procedure as follows (redacted version):

He made a visit to the Stockholm Munchaus, which was not as simple as it had previously been, with added security, presumably to guard against potentially active elements cobwebbed within the system. But also directed at him, he suspected. A small neon signature sign, which appeared to read, ‘Tiny Guy’s’, supplied clues as to the proprietorial authorship’s origin. The ‘Tiny Guy’s’ blue neon signature had appeared top left of the Stockholm Munchaus sign. That was about right, TG was a blue-neon type of puffed-up bloke sort. The light bleeding into the original sign represented TG’s narcissism colouring everything it stank up as its gas cloud permeated authentic normality with its cartoonish, yet earnest, barbed ridiculousness.

The environment had a very zonal feel, and on reflection off site, as on site KB was limited by computing disruptability, the zonality had faux-free-will-prisonomics daubed all over it. The open plains were a painted backdrop that was unenterable.

What it was, was…

…a quarantine zone that held other elements in its own quarantine dock, or prism. 

He’d rules to abide by; chant along with…

…but…

…once at the Haus, playing the role adapted for him by Tiny Guy via Sybil, ‘whistling’ within accepted melody boundaries, KB had to checklist a precise communication regimen…

…which entailed the following:

He wrote, stamped and posted a postcard in the street box opposite the Haus entrance, across a bit and down the street; up nominally being left and down being, equally as nominally, right. Then he put a dime in the juke box, once back inside the Haus. Some time later there was an automated delivery, one could hear some sort of drone aircraft. A USB style stick was plugged into the port, clumsily located on the back of the jukebox, nearest the plug end, and Sybil’s recorded reply was played.

‘Using my Tiny Guy facility I have already modelled a narrative-burgeoning and a realism inspired, wholistic, para-mirror-pathway (RIWPMP), so that the reality they enjoy is as real as the reality they are slotting into seamlessly and with executive action actuation. This would not be possible outside of the general pause situation.’

At first, KB had forgotten the question he’d scribbled on the back of the last postcard he’d posted. Then he remembered and realised that Sybil was referring to the ‘mission’ ‘team’ and their Farm infiltration gambit. From what Sybil was attempting to communicate KB surmised that: They (the team) just needed to get there (the Farm) and the (Great) Pause (due to the incapacitation of QASAI systems) would allow the mission’s coup de gras.

Did she say Tiny Guy, he thought he’d heard her say Tiny Guy, but sureness on this matter evaporated under scrutiny. Tiny Guy! Tiny Guy, remember him? KB asked himself. Yes, two types ‘o more than sorta kinda, KB was Tiny Guy…once, unconsciously…sure, in such a derisible, pathothetical unconsciousnessly manic way. 

Sybil was controlling TG’s actions somehow. Although they were probably, deservedly, controlling each other. She’d infiltrated by Trojanning and was puppeteering a ‘lost’ part of KB himself, albeit a ‘dangerous’ ‘lost’ part KB wanted nothing to do with. Sybil had found his lostness and turned it to her advantage. There was something sad about the situation, but KB couldn’t grapple with it because the subject was subject to suppression. Whether he himself was governing that suppression, or whether the suppression was being applied from a Sybillian direction, was up for tender, but one thing was for sure: KB did and did not, simultaneously want a reconnection with the Tiny Guy aspect of his operational capacity, no sir, or yes sir, where applicable. The new data had resulted in a fifty/fifty set of numberated outcomes.

It was etiquette, it seemed, not to mention the gaping chasm of the lie Mallory had created around Judith and her assistant lieutenants on a flagrantly fantasy-forged dreamroad to a Higher Human Animal (HHA). They eked out a path across the inconvenient chasm with scant ladders and ropey carabiners. The alliance was ultra-strong, giving itself credence and baptising a God-given bill of rights. They were on a flatteringly false path that would meet a giddy dead end or branch out into liquid veins of travel. KB and Sybil hung in debate like a hall of resting bats.

To KB, KB & Sybil felt like a new way, a fourth way; the Fourthway perhaps. KB knew that was too unwarranted a concept to set out on the stall he presented to Sybil for her to palpate fruit and vegetables to gauge their freshness, but also assumed, correctly as it happened, that she was thinking identically in unison on that very specific conceptual unwarrantedness. They were both having to dispel a Fourthway drama narrative from their agenda. It would be sugar to a sugar eating parasite, or like Tiny Guy’s lab grown super piranha persona being offered a nibble. 

They’d have to bolster the burgeoning of the Thirdway before any Fourthway could gain any numerically logical traction. Without, virtually ground up creation of this theoretical human species-level movement, there would be no movement.

KB postcarded Sybil to arrange a face to face; false moustache to dark glasses; faceless facefulness that would follyfoot the observational stance of any undesirables. The two faces met at the communicational interface:

‘I’ll bring my guy in on this one,’ Sybil served.

‘Tiny Guy?’ KB returned.

‘No. I have guys, not just one stuffy old secondhand-suitcase nobodiguy,’ she volleyed, backhandedly.

KB could feel that the very sound waves delineating a Tiny Guy denial-complex were carried in discreet packages of data all marked: ‘Lies’ and ‘Truth free’ and ‘Truth-light’, ‘Lie-heavy’, etc. The metaphorical tennis was a stroke of genius, but nothing more than a racket to dislodge the grip of his attention.

‘We need to take Judith from the store cupboard and fashion a window display from her perceived potentiality,’ Sybil said.

KB was in full agreement but disagreeability chipped and chonked amidst the concept’s wranglings. TG’s signature repeated infinitely, at least high-countburdenly, in the reflections in the shop window as seen from across the street. However good the shop version of Judith and her Thirdway looked; pristine, fengshuid on display, there were desecration’s spoiling KB’s focus, bruising his intent.

‘Agreed! We are with you,’ KB said, trying to create the illusion of a more rounded multifarity of personal channels, with the ‘we’, than just the monotonous KB, mainline-outta-here that had evolved as his go-to presentation to the world, ‘We have some interesting, if obvious, ideas… I’d like to hear TG’s slant on affairs.’

‘We are keeping TG out of this one?’

‘How?’

‘Just…to not mention his presence. Pretence can distance one from the Unwanted.’ 

‘Even though he’s the engine foremostly driving the team bus?’

‘He’s not the engine driving the team bus. That is ridiculous.’

‘I said “foremostly”. We are known for our strong ridiculousness filter applications…so I don’t recognise that slander, thank you!’

‘Let me give you my slant,’ Sybil barked, gathering up the slack. We are moving on. Tiny Guy no longer exists…’

Shock! An on the hoof exorcism… Tiny Guy would be cross.

‘…I am rehashing nomenclature as a brakelock on TG usage. TG is no longer the former and becomes, as of now, the latter, which is: TG! I hereby pronounce these anomalistic elements ’T’ and ‘G’, T & G, Tony Graham: Tony Graham… To be known furthestevermore as TG. And only as TG. TG meaning Tony Graham. Tony Graham the only TG on the lists at Camelot. Are we understood?’

If anything, a little overunderstood, KB thought, but, obviously couldn’t say. But he did say:

‘I will approve the move, we will, but I can’t say I, we, approve of it…’ KB said, clutching at mumbled placation over the heads of numbskulled prevaricationary obstinance, ‘… “TG” it is, then.’.

KB had a horrible thought that TG was taking over, eroding Sybil’s sovereignty. At first his assumption was that she was embarrassed about having taken over a large domain of KB’s partially conscious narrative hinterland, but on reflection it was more like Sybil was having a dispute with TG that was troubling her…this mysterious Tony Graham who no one knew anything about…Tony Trouble.

They interluded, parted, regrouped and connected with Annotated Visual Interscape (AVI) for ‘any other business’ and wrapping up loose strands of data, as follows:

Judith is in the throes of remodelling; around her natural core, there is much fight to explore and harm to be shaken loose. Judith will carry the story of the Thirdway human to its climactic conclusion. Preferably with an unexpected yet inevitable endpoint. Fooling the automated governance decision makers.

Judith and her team will have to convince misinterpreting self-evolving algorithmic fictional narrative programming governors that there is a sprouting mark II human species: Homo Compassionus…perhaps, or, Homo Give-a-Shitus? What’s in a name?

Agreement reached in principle, they moved onward. And back at UKGBHQ…

‘Commander… The sun is rising orange, red and the black, sky turning blue,’ this was the launch code. The woman snapped into Commander via ex-commander…

…’And the code is green?’ she said. Words she never thought she’d hear herself say.

‘The code is green and green is go,’ KB concluded, in voice lifted from the Commander’s heady old days of training to be better than her father could be strict enough to expect.

‘Team!’ she shouted, emotionally breaking wind; turning to the sleepy, room-bound carriers of the Existential Torch of Humanity (ETH).

With nothing approaching alacrity they assembled, before being squeezed through the mangle of the final, heart-racing briefing experience… They now stood upon the cusp of the next phase of the Human struggle to extinguish its own atrociously egregious record of behaviour towards its Mother Environment. To begin again, as if nothing had ever happened. Negativity whirred away within the human collective arrogance, but a positivity bomb was about to explode with great violence, which was going to reset the cycle. The question, to be answered later, attempted to be answered, after all this is successfully missioned, is…

Will it be the same old story, or will a new, more worthy, less greedy, more compassionate, less brutalesque narrative be forthcoming?