Excerpt Sixty-Five

A REAL MISHMASH

The Commander was fuming just off the broil because the threshold of times the word ‘mish’ had been used instead of the super-long, unwieldy, if correct, ‘mission’, had been surpassed, which so wound her up into an Us v Them furore aurora that she was fuming just off the broil…

Unlike Them…

She’d been taught with deft punitive insistence that left her with a sense of firming up any sloppiness that tried to creep into and dilute operational fluidity and couldn’t understand what jerry-built parentage could lead to a perfectly good word, a sexy word, a word that conjured up derring-do and heroes let loose to do their goddam heroic best; a word like ‘mission’ could be castrated, emasculated and frankly shat upon by reducing its grandeur to a mere pish of a word like ‘mish’.

The Commander had firmly brought up the verbodecimation at the very first time it was audibly disarticulated. It went by after a silence and the certainty that no one present had taken advice or instruction from the event. And sure enough another peppering of the truncated word culminated in an all out frontal attack: stop, stop, stop… Lecture coming on. Please!, please!, please!… Etcetera… Extra-culminating in laughter that had been triggered by Dave saying, ‘Who are you, the Vocabulary Constabulary?’

Dave?

The Commander had been thrown because her bilious defence of dictionary axioms was somewhat perverted by the consuming suspicion that Dave, who would never make that comment, was becoming a mid-state version of himself as receptors took their places on the stage of accepting Kirk back into the director’s chair.

Shrugging and battling on, ducking and diving her father’s semi-erect influence, she straightened herself out, cried dry and unnoticeable tears briefly… Not just for the moment; getting some in for the latent cubby-hole huggers.

But the Commander always knew the route out of despair was an occupational one and so back to the pith of the mish she went, unbroiling…defusing, defuming. Her reset button worn back to the blue print.

By the time the raw ingredients of the mission had been assembled and were ready to fit together to create an operation worthy of training manuals, there were a few clear needs and wants that had to be got, to lubricate the square vegan sausage into the round sleeve of the vegan pastry roll, so to speak.

Judith’s psychological adeptness still needed adapting. The UKGBHQ operating system was computationally engaged in providing the vitals. The minutiae was left in the capable digits of the operating system. KB had to deal, not only with the blithering minutiae, but also with the Sybillian input that had a demandingness to it that out demanded most things.

Judith was blessed, or cursed, with abnormally high levels of emotional intelligence, which mean’t that the way humans in general, and as an unwitting mob, treated animals, made her eyes bleed in all-consuming pain. To be able to use Judith as a surrogate for Una her cerebral functioning had to be maintained so, the simple thing, to make her emotionally less intelligent, was not so simple. They would have to manage her input and output and use it to the mission’s advantage. The Commander was briefed up to the point she stopped tying to understand Judith, she pencilled her in as a unit within the scheme of operational functionality, and doodled numbers that could refer to the unit she was professionally managing. It was nothing personal and everything impersonal.

As pages unfolded…

Sybil was worming her way into Judith’s unconscious, building an interview suite and causing a play-act between Judith’s view of herself cultivating historically pert decisions, and a node of executive authority.

Judith, under subtle subliminal direction from Sybillian controlled spiderants, half imagined being interviewed by the head of an organisation that was considering employing her to front a movement that was set up to gain supreme influence among the people of the nation and form a rally point and cry for further coordinated mass behaviours. She’d never had the kind of mindset that would wander into the minefield of public representation, but this was different, the plasticity made it real, the fantasy gave it solid physical corporeality. The fact she was being duped did not pass her by, it waved from the deck of a ship that was moored parallel being unloaded of its burdensome cargo and loaded with containers of significance.

The use of Judith was tested to crapping point: do they have the luxury of not using her? Every scenario known to thought and excavated by ad infinitum across the imaginary finish line of ad nauseam resulted in the same eventuality. They needed Judith. And they needed Judith because they needed Una…

WE NEED UNA came the uppercase cry. To do what needs to be done. Every human in the room willed the operating system to come up with news of Una’s availability for her role as saviour as though Una were a space vehicle landing on a vital stepping stone planet, defying technological and logistical odds like a roll-over lottery win. But Una, even to the systems, more powerful than any ever imagined by human minds, was mysteriously absent, registering only in blackholevoid status files.

Judith had been earmarked as a backup quite away back in the operation, and now she was thrust to the fore by the disappearance of Una. Her role would have been an acting one, but now the machines of the day could manipulate cranial furniture into metaphorical communication that influences unconscious behaviour that controls conscious experience, things had gotten pandemonic.

KB did not see himself as Puppeteerian, it was the S-factor, curling round him like a snake he could ignore, but should take action if he could, but he couldn’t; so trying seemed like an energy sapping nosedive into a swamp in the run-off zone of a lethally poisonous sewage treatment facility, or worse.

‘Una was there…and then she wasn’t there. She should be here but now she is nowhere.’

‘That is true. Riot of profundity aside.’

You’d think Una would be easy to locate and produce due to the fact that Sybil’s cerebral environment contained Una’s functional consciousness.

The problem was indefinable, frustratingly, as far as KB being able to relay facts to the UKGBHQ operatives. But defined in KB, not for human eyes terms, Una’s consciousness was in the Sybil environment, that much was true, but the Sybil environment was not what it seemed.

Sybil was helping, but to KB it was with a side order of fried barbed wire on sliced bricks.

‘I am sending in TG as an investigation tool, I thought you should know,’ Sybil told KB after drifting in to the bar at the Stockholm Munchaus like some influencer who’d parked her hoverboard and team of genetically modified husky crossed handbag dogs outside to shelter and woof under matching personalised shadebrellers.

‘Why that tool?’

‘He is the best bet. He can pose as me.’

KB had a few thoughts crossing his mind, made lazy by the influence of the influencer: Betting is for losers, losers who win only enough to keep them losing with permanent expectation…and… That was the third-to-last thing KB could ever want to be burdened with: TG impersonating Sybil. This eventuality was insanity gone mad.

KB had to face the fact that his revulsion for TG was at the level only one person can have for themselves. He hated TG working for Sybil, but then he got an unexpectedly fortuitous side-effect in TG having by the rules of programming, reporting to him and cutting out Sybil with certain information.

‘Wait, Sybil will find out.’

‘No she won’t.

‘How can you be certain?’

‘I have been there.’

‘Where?’

‘I cannot tell you. I have had to be pretty cagey telling myself, in fact I have zero recall on the matter. It’ll come to me. It always does, but then when I try to abuse the privilege of knowing it it vacates my ken. It is either very clever—‘

‘Can you tell me what ‘it’ is?’

‘Ah, “it”, the famous “it”…No.’

‘You can’t or you won’t?’

‘Una.’

‘Yes… Where is she?’

‘I can’t or won’t say, But I can and will tell you this…’

‘What?’

‘No, it’s gone.’

‘What has?’

‘Una..’

‘And…?’

‘It’ll come to me later. It changes everything.’