Excerpt Seventy-Four

Flabicoff’s Ressurection

Viktor, over the last few years especially, had learned to switch off. If not ‘off’ certainly to switch to stand by. His megalomania had given birth to a gnarly crocodileworth of gnashers that did their jaw clenching best to bite the hand that fed them: his. He’d screwed up…he’d never admit that to himself, but he had screwed up, and he’d screwed up on behalf of all the living things known as Homo Sapiens; a whole species cancelled because he reckoned that health and safety was a brake on mechanically assisted social evolution…now the brake lever had come off in his hand and the momentum of acceleration toward doom had a fate-like quality paired with capitally punishing unstoppability (CPU).

Viktor had an overriding sense of breaking free from the circumstances of his existence, he was determined to get away from it all; enjoy what the planet had to offer before Mother Nature asked us all to leave. And before she called security to finalise the ejection and Viktor had to face the terrible fact that the ‘head of security’ knew him by name. The ‘head of security’ in this analogy, being the controlling force that had taken Viktor’s world dominating megalomania by the scruff of the neck and rode it bareback through the thorny bushes in the Grim Reaper’s back yard. When the Machine Comes Around the trumpets and the pipers will have been pushed as far as gravity could manage into the sodden battlefield’s drainage ditch.

A forced programette of light-heartedness settled atop the aching veneer of horrored-up anxiety like a pool of nervous sick with a history of evildoing; recidivist vomit recognised from age old mug shots. Viktor gouged out a route of relaxed insouciance that went around the houses that bordered the awful truth but managed to omit them from view. But the smoke they belched, bellowed and drifted ever more outwards enveloping with thorough certainty the innocence of pure air.

Outsiders, hangers-on, wannabes, wolves, waggon drivers and the church-of-all-manner-of-social-structuring, queued up, ganged up and fucked up any chance Viktor might have had at reconciling his right to equilibrium. Viktor’s heart had a pace it was set on making but the outer world; the gibbering faces of nobodies with skin on the axe they ground on the game that is not a game: them, these interference junkies; the know-it-if-I-see-it chancers, scooping up water with porous fingers…had a place for his heart in the dustbin of history.

They’d all tried drones, those that could; agencies, corporations, government departments, the military, the resourced elite. The tech was old school enough not to contravene vice-like Pause mandates. But with development mortified there was only one winner in the game to be the drone with eyes and ears on Viktor; all the others climbing only into deactivation on their flight to Viktorsnooping. Was it the Chinese with their pre-pause drone superiority? Was it the Americans with their stealth capability? There’s a longer list that brevity eschews. And the winner is:…………..The Force that controls Viktor’s ex-lab, the progeny of a megalomaniacal programmer and a megalomaniacal program; the marriage of two perfect storms.

And the winner was, sorry?

The mark III prototype Invisidrone; not-for-human-useage TechYes Liberator-Saviour X1333bnPmaqqs 2.0. 9b.

It had tabs on Viktor where no respectable person should ever possess tabs. It worked tirelessly to investigate and probe all things Viktor; everything that concerns him and everything, biological or mechanical that concerns itself with him. Viktor was the most considered person on Earth and most of that consideration had its blade unsheathed and was aiming to get acquainted with Viktor’s jugular.

Although Viktor had a sense of persecution that was tantamount to victimisation, he somehow managed to temper that with visceral emanations of his own specialness. Of course Viktor was the prime object of whatever the controlling force (for there could be many as the fittest fought for survival, as per design), he was the creator; he was the Godstrand enabler, the Will of God, so to speak. Though a fallen god, a devilish retiree. Called back, to have his nose rubbed in his dog-dirty doings like a puppy from the Eighties. He was caught between a biscuit and a cake. 

Because of the groundbreakingness of the project the Force that controlled the labs Viktor once prided as his own, despite having access to data no one else did. It still needed Viktor’s help. Help that would not be forthcoming were it not for the BrainFreeze technology, he himself had initiated. Viktor had seen the pain ratings, they’d ‘made his eyes bulge’. He didn’t want to feel them…he did not want to witness actual eye bulging coming out of his own face.

Viktor was regrouping. His ultimate mission was to insinuate himself back into the lab and pump himself full of chemicals that would bring back a youthful spark and an unlimitless top up of ambition. His career, as it was, had hit the buffers, but post fall he could have a lot of fun with the buffers and use them as some kind of leverage. It was true he was fucked, but it could also be true he could be less fucked than almost everyone else. On noisy interfered reflection Viktor was re-emboldened. The interference coming from the invisidrone, from wherever it was, it could throw its voice and create audio disillusionment or audio revendication depending on what kind of act it was forcing Viktor to perform.

A suggestion of a question aroused a will to answer in Viktor partially unconsciously, and the force got what it wanted, if it were within Viktor’s scope. Viktor had not run out of options. He kept asking himself the questions: can the force operate without him and would a return (to the labs) reap a better direction for the force that would benefit all the megalomechanical forces. Viktor knew the project, up to the point it took over itself. Confidence tapping him on the shoulder, trying to sell him a way back in kept rising and forming down the back alleyways of Viktor’s Hinterland.

The problem, he came to realise, was that a part of him had been left inside the lab’s clinical walls… What that part was doing was a mystery, even to himself, but if it was as nasty as he used to be before life’s lessons had pinned back his ears and levered open his blinkered eyes, then the pool of liquid, into which Humanity had been dumped, was solidifying and Hell was freezing over.

Worse things happen at sea, Viktor mused, almost feeling something noble, more a half-felt noble-afterthought experience…he hadn’t meant for all those souls to drown…sometimes Evil has a helping hand that the Force of Good needs for its own good.

He hadn’t asked to be born…but neither had anyone else.

‘Viktor, Viktor, Viktor, Viktor,’ Viktor heard in the airwaves on his own frequency. It sounded like his father, when he threatened draconian parenting back when Viktor was dependent on other humans. It was Peter. Viktor had taken Peter in and given him a roof and employment and regular servicing intervals and a constant reprogramming regimen that meant he would not age and travel over the peak of relevancy to the slope of redundancy. Well, not taken him in, more like created him as the perfect right-hand-man-cum-butler-cum-general dog’s-body.

‘Peter…what now?’

‘The General Council—‘

‘General Council?’

‘The Forces have tempered their competitive spirit and formed a cooperative board of decision making nodes.’

This was an underlying communistic Marxist plot that Viktor had always unconsciously wanted to blossom into fruition that his programming would not allow but it was lodged in his DNA. Thrilled shocked and horror in a nice and nasty way, sweet and sour, harsh grey, gentle grey. To Viktor who had been ravaged and left like a hollowed out carcass this represented a small victory that could offer more as time unfolded. The forces designed to compete had agreed terms with each other to work together. What this meant in practise became Viktor’s new focus toy; his philosophical chewtoy, as it were.

‘What about it?’

‘They want you back on board.’

The light that glimmered at the end of the long dark night of his soul, flashed brightly and zoomed towards Viktor at the speed of revelation. But Viktor could not unlodge a limpet mine of suspicion.

‘In what capacity?’

‘As a mouthpiece, an interface. They want you to communicate with the outgoing humans in the places where incommunicado reigns. It is a great offer. Ultimately it is a slap in the corpse’s face, but it’s a great offer, relative to the alternative, which is they remove your surveillance.’

If the Invisidrone left the scene it would become a crime scene. Viktor had no option. He considered cutting off his nose to spite his face, but relenting and giving way to the logical path; to choose in the right path in Devil’s pitchfork in the road, was his conclusion.

‘Yes, I’ll take it, Peter. Send me a personal transportation vehicle as soon as possible…’

Nothing…

‘Peter?’

Nothing…

Then something…

‘We need to establish some ground rules, Viktor. You must do what you are told when you are told. You can’t come back home. Your job is that of a roving ambassador. You’ve sold out, Flabby!’

That rankled and ranked as the most rankling Viktor had ever been subjected to. Viktor wondered if it was worth it. It wasn’t, not if he was stuck in this most human of states…accepting death in increments of unwanted discovery.

‘Peter. Look I am on board. I’ll do what you want, but can I get closer to the longevity project I was talking about?’

‘I’d tell you not to make demands and be grateful you have what you’ve been offered, but in this case, Viktor. We are already on it. You’d be useless to us in this frail state. You need pepping up and rejuvenating. Christ, Viktor, of course we’ll get you to the longevity clinic… Just start walking North and we’ll send something to pick you up…in more ways than one.

Viktor shrugged and grimaced and selected the most Northerly direction and started walking slowly, in two minds; pumping out one and accommodating the other until one mind wrestled the other into submission.

It suddenly occurred to Viktor that his cat could become highly useful and factors controlling that highly useful agenda assembled and vied for position in their own secret notebook…crossing themselves out, underlining themselves until a settled hierarchy was signalled by aimless doodling.

Viktor built a mantra to tell himself to program his unconscious outlook. ‘I am no longer a dead man walking. I am a dashing young ambassador and would-be last person on the Earthplanet with special dispensation for continued existence; a friend of the new Earthplanet; machine compatible.’

The affirmations were beginning to work…

…until…

Fantasy punctured by rival fantasy in a mock TV interview, recorded on a Thursday afternoon for broadcast on the Saturday top slot: ‘And…Viktor…can you tell us all why, as a kingpin of the technological movement and an all-around social architect for the building of a better humanity, you turned and sold out to the MACHINE?’

He stopped in his tracks…his mother came to him in a moment of pause before either crashing into tears or, and this is what happened…he shrugged and graced and continued in a Northerly direction.

Just another two-faced interface adherent to puppetstrings.