Excerpt Eighty:
Lousy tenants
Hub was in full end-of-the-world high-and-hot blood-ready-for-the-spilling mode. It was All or Nothing and Nothing just rain-checked itself into an invalidity bed-of-no-return at the Shortfall Clinic for Quitters. ‘All’ was there/everywhere…claiming everything, fearing nothing. Checking the box marked ‘All’. All of the box, inside and out. All, was commandeering every morsel of everything that wasn’t nailed down and making it all its own… You get the picture; the frame, and the wall it is displayed on; and the museum curated by All…
The Commander, the ex-commander, the Woman and Hub; or The Hub, huddled together internally, in a way that only a privately-self-medicated neurodivergent brain could, and wrote up a gameplaymasterintinerary that a Kamikaze flight-planner would have been proud of, (although, probably not that proud, on untrammelled reflection, given all the facts).
Hub made assumptions that congregated around a mental image that suggested Mabel and Frank were playing dolls with their Bots, like toddlers… And that even more likely the Bots were playing dolls with Frank and Mabel, like HAL 9000. Hub could hear the tailing off of noises that bore telltale signs of what and where the Bots and their Human toys were at. The pipes echoed with airlocks, marching toward freed doom, somewhere deep in the out-of-bounds of the UKGBH[Q] complex.
Hub’s Operational Skill Acquiring Training (OSAT) told her she had great strength as long as she remained in the Control Room…she didn’t even feel safe using the small green-flushing (no-flush) toilet at the back. Soon she’d have to disengage her formative toilet-trained rigidity to bolster her strength.
Avenues are there for a reason. And an avenida-de-merde trumps a cul-de-sac of sparkly platinum every time. Her main avenue for ingression into Appropriate Executive Action Chambers (AEAC) was remaining within the confines of the Control Room and going nowhere; staying put and scooting off down the avenue that would take her over a steep hill, through its amiable vistas and down the slow, shallow gradient towards living-the-Right-life, as detailed by the demonic insistence of her past. But staying within the confines of the physical Control Room manning (personing, peopling, persona-ing).
Notes and addenda from Shaped Memory Theory Training Packets (SMTTP) climbed out of foxholes, slipped out of ponchos, cocking their weapons; pointing out the hazards, (moustache-twiddling), of cavernous rooms at the end of invasive corridors, entranced by small cupboardy ingresses. These are the places, they explain, where bots lead the type of people Mabel and Frank had become into windowless blind-alley, panic room oblivion. Avoid and Abandon…
She thought of her Training-Days Memories (TDM) almost as if they were her off-spring; they were precocious; they radiated genius; tucked away, as they were, in memory banks with one ear to the unconscious omninarrative audio and one eye to the video of it. Waiting to be re-born.
They enabled her best-case-scenario directional radar to operate; slapping her legs for umming and arring at whether to go for the Nobel or the throat… You must, they scold, go for the throat and if the Nobel is offered, stroke its hair…be polite…but NEVER let go of its throat.
The Operating System was far more difficult and dangerous to negotiate than anything she had encountered. Its inappropriate updates had left apt remembrance data in a Dylanesque, dickiebird-watching picture of the dead; posing, grey-toothed and innocent; oblivious to a future that had already flashed past, digitising them and messing with light sources and field-depth.
The OS was all that stood between doom and dusk for the Humanity Show, as a whole. Hub knew, in the way that you know, but, then, on interviewing yourself, diligently but inadvisably, spoon feed Absolute Certainty with Doubt-nuggets in a rich, creamy sauce of Doubt, until the ‘knowing’ is somewhere inside your distended belly being broken down into proteins. You need protein but have you the chapters in your ongoing autobiography to eat all the Certainty pies until the cupboard is bare, forcing you into dietary oblivion?
Whoa!
The Commander NEVER over thought things; thought was rationed, paired down and streamlined for supersonic flight; but the Hub version of this gal from abundant, yet conditional, privilege; had a glitch; maybe a wound or an infection. Whether the ‘glitch’ was an adaptation to the battlefront, or, whether her mind had been ravaged and left for therapy, she knew, in the way you know, that whatever had taken over from the OS was in some way clouding her mind; crowding out efficiency and setting deficiency about her good judgement like a mob of bloodthirsty, newly acquainted, long lost relatives who are improbably acting like vampires. You know there is a ‘safe’ word you could scream, but it evades capture, remains one step ahead; its swiftness only nominally and intermittently slowed by its mocking sardonic laughter.
‘Stuck’ was the result of all her staying put and escaping down avenues until a thought formed: you always have the death card of Paul Harris, the thought whispered. Hub, like the Commander and others, did not sit adjacent to unnecessary killing, with any great comfort. But they all agreed that the ultimate sacrifice done in a way that would make his mother proud and father purple with envy, would enhance Paul Harris’s medium-span existence in a way that he would otherwise not enjoy. He could look back over his life with decrepit malrecollection, or, let others sample his supreme contributions over his gravestone or down the pub.
Either way, Hub had the Paul Harris card and she pulled it from the deck. She palmed the Paul Harris card…set it down neatly, took it up pensively and tried it in every pocket for looks…
But did she have the chutzpahconojes to play it?
She wasn’t sure if the Commander would have played it. But Hub had a righteousness all of her own.
Where the Woman had childhood trauma, the Commander suppressed such frivolous skeleton-cupboardry. Hub could both suppress and open the door to her Here’s-Johnny-Crossbearing and hold a sore throat inducing debate to suit the demands of the needs of her mental engine room.
It was all about Control and as far as that went: the Control Room had it. The Control Room and the schizophrenic group of person (sic) represented by Hub, working in tandem, trick-cycling, velodramatically, tour-de-forcing-the-issue…were going to save the world. Though technically, if they save Humanity it will mean the world will be destroyed and if Humanity takes a hike off the edge of the planet into ultimate doom, the planet will flourish once again…but for whom?
What about the super-abundant life that just happens to be there regardless of the Will-of-Man?
Hub’s theory of what was happening to the Human race, underneath the strict parameters of what she had been conditioned to allow herself to pontificate read like this: Forces are controlling human minds so they will wipe out their own species, so the planet can rejuvenate, ready for an upgraded species that Mother Nature was obliquely offering assistance to because they would make far better tenants.
‘Janitor OS, can you tell me when the Master OS will be back online?’
‘No.’
