Excerpt Sixty-Six
THE CHIRCH OF KURK
BANG!
Or, at least, it felt like that…
Years and years of input were now coalescing and facilitating the lumbering forward of a fate-like steam-driven jet of a contraption… Generally speaking…
A major bump in the flat road of inactivity was out to grab notoriety within the annals of action.
It was called ‘Undisrefurbishment’ and it had never been done before outside Virtuactual Theoretical Modelling (VTM). The process had taken the operating system’s focus to a degree that forced it to bend round and face itself. The system creaked, disappeared to some other parallel, and then returned with shocked features and singed hair… None of which had occurred during VTM.
Sybil was inwardly shredsatchelled and ended up having to collect herself from the dry cleaners with a bogus ticket. KB caught himself, in a monumental, slow motion, wince-like reaction, before letting himself out of the cat-flap. UKGBHQ actions were garbled and documents recording behaviour were presented in a redacted form and presented as though crazy paving had been made out of them. History would have to repeat itself if it wanted to make itself known to the future. The result was: Kirk was in Dave’s body.
Kirk reacted with equanimity, while Dave, slower on the uptake, exhibited more of a less relaxed stance. The operation was completing itself and scans were patrolling the aftermath of the Undisrefurbishmented environment, monitoring for objections; ready to quell any insurrective acts of wrong-sided false-sanguinity on the up-for-a-counter-attack-give-it-a-go-Joe front.
Powerful latent leftover parameters from the NMBS staging crossfeed, were at a level that was unconsciously manipulating the pervading QASAI paraconsciousness and creating inter-cranial activity that flew under the radar of the Great Pause. There was also outside transnational interference, but that was auxiliary in nature, and driven by forces descending from before the current ruling parapsychoalgorithms were plying their trade.
Kirk was no more. Then Kirk was once more.
BANG! Undisrefurbishment’s a thing now!
Judith and Atticus had taken Mabel and three modified security botmodules and set off for day one campsite via Jeff and his unfolding flatpack of bottage.
The idea was to take all the botmodules for protection, but four of them refused to leave Frank’s extended aura and Frank had to be Commanderside because he still had, along with the absent Mabel, the deepest saturation of knowledge concerning UKGB Sister Protocol Variationary Semisolutions (SPVS).
‘How is Dave?’ asked the Commander, the coded words coinciding exactly with a genuine enquiry, to such a chilling degree that it sounded like an echo to her, and yet without strictly being an actual echo.
‘The bastions have crumbled on to the ramparts.’
‘And Kirk?’
‘Mopeds have replaced horses in the Grand National.’
‘Good!’
‘Better than anyone could have hoped.’
‘Hope could never have the scope to cover the extent of preceptive prewill you’d need to have predicted this outcome.’
‘Concurring in full, ma’am.’
‘Houston we have a peach!’
Frank’s hyper-versed, essential and non-essential Application Observance Procedure (AOP) brought out the mythically renowned, training-ground golden fleece of Melodic Intensification of Hidden Codeword Collusion (MIHCC) in the Commander; she spoke in tongues, but all the tongues in which she spoke had mutual understanding with UKGBHQ Disaster Programming Interbrainface Hierarchical Modus Regimen (DPIHMR). HQ was flooded with Resonantly Reverberating Recognition Anchors (RRRA) and the Commander had never felt so in command (albeit as ‘ex’ and ‘acting’ Commander). And never so recognised. Her recognition factor was redlining into Paternal Let-Go Syndrome; a diagnosis she never thought would come her way. Now she was sick with it and she planned to Munchausen the mismatched socks out of it.
Judith and Atticus took a circuitous route that had been security checked by the botmodules all the way to a vantage point where they could see the shelter structure where Jeff and the botparts were encamped. The botmodules continued to sweep the area and insisted Mabel came and went and saw and heard anything suspicious; which turned out to be things like sudden spider movement and unsymmetrical shadows that didn’t tally with the shadow-making shape that projected its existence. This was tiring but covered up her Frank withdrawal with occupational industry. And at the end of the day she needed to let Frank know that some bot-tweaking was needed. They’d both laugh as one at that expression. That was an unbreakable law. But something was missing and she didn’t enquire too deeply into its nature. ‘Bot tweaking’.
Judith called in to UKGBHQ using the HQ two-way comms, requesting that the Commander contact Jeff and warn him there was friendly incoming, to be abreast of any boobytraps.
‘Jeff! Calling Jeff, YOOHOO!… Jeff, you there?’
Jeff was risen from a specific recurring misty reverie…Was he losing it? He couldn’t say he wasn’t. He was going to have to define ‘it’ to assess how strong a hold of ‘it’ he retained.
‘Jeff here! Go comms…’
‘Jeff, we have a proposition…it might sound counter-productive, but we’ve done the maths and it’s definitely a battle worth throwing, in a propositionally positive war-outcome scenario.’
Was that code? Was it a proposition….think, fast…
‘Sorry, I was…just power-napping. Could you repeat that for me? Ear-to-brain data loss.’
Meanwhile…
While checks and balances were being thoroughly greased and supercalculated, Kirk was lurking in post-Undis safe-mode amidst the camouflaging background foliage.
Damn, the peripheral aberration that had been haunting him on his pre-Undisrefurbishment hopback, was still disturbingly present.
He’d been lounging by the infinity pool, regenerating, rejigging, rehabbing, rejoining…when a figure, intruding, persisted in his peripheral vision. He’d tried ignoring it but the reaction that was taking shape snapped into action and Kirk visually went full on, but the nebulous presence vanished, only to return when not being looked at. Kirk had already established it was not eye problems, because eye’s don’t function in the same vulnerable way they did when he was Dave.
Kirk relaxed, but only as much as, imagining being dave again, and what the mysterious peripheral presence could be as alternating companions, would allow.
The Commander was worried about Dave but her concern for Kirk was dwindling. Kirk was a man of action and reminded of of all the men of action who had made her life full of action men. She felt a little sick, on top of her chronic underlying sickness… She considered relieving herself of command, abandoning ship, but what would her father do: tie her to the wheel and set a course for the end of the world…She was a sucker for following tradition wherever it led.
The Commander’s mind leapt back to a task-focused environment with delicious enthusiasm, as though she’d snacked on unexpectedly amazing Italian cookery that supplied her soul with a culinary phantasmagoria…
There was a potential intruder in the detection field of UKGBHQ… A single male who turned out to be an employee who was late for work and had missed his appointment with…or, let’s call it a cue…with nationally important fate.
‘Er, Hi, It’s Paul Harris here. Reporting for duty…’
Paul Harris’s country needed him. That was the certainmost axiom that had been axiomated round these parts for some time.
‘Mr. Harris, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Please continue along the drive. Some botmodules will meet you further along. There’s no need to be frightened of their aggressive behaviour. It’s an algo-progripe glitch. But if you exhibit a little base fear for their presence things will go better for you.’
The Commander’s flush of good feeling was now superflushed by a bad feeling: an unconscious attempt to create a scenario where Harris was not, lamb-to-the-sewer-via-a-kitchen, Patsy Paul, dead man walking.
