Excerpt Eighty-Three:
Ownership wreck
‘There was a time…’ …Viktor thought…
…and then…
…mid-thought…relinquished cognisance of the form that a bold feeling was trying to march in gay procession past his grandstand.
He sat, clasped in the voidality of nothing-muchness for a notable cluster of minutes, before reattempting an evocation of a memory capable of shipping with it a feeling that was up to, and inclusive of, soothing Viktor’s spiky, unresponsive soul.
He summoned up some feeling, after much straining; an almost authentic impression drenched in fretfulness, which came and went, barely doing the job Viktor had ordered up. The truth of the matter, that shone a bright light into eyes that pretended to sleep, was that Viktor was losing his not much less considerable than genius plus faculties. They were slipping away, making him feel as though he were a small shop owner; his shelves being stripped bare by looters who were behaving like a lumpy, dry tsunami catasweeping in through the front door and out through the back. Or, perhaps, locusts: a tsunami of locust looters. Viktor retained this wayward and limping-in-circles thought as a book title for a book without any content and repeated it over and over as a placeholder, for what? The next to nothing drought of remembered things?
The Tsunami of Locust Looters…
A Tsunami of Locust Looters…
The Tsunami Army of Focussed Locust Computer Looters…
Viktor wasn’t going anywhere. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing wasn’t up to much as far as Viktor was concerned, it was whether it was a terrible thing or an even more terrible thing that released him from the grip of the void and suspended Viktor in a marginally tighter stranglehold outside in the void’s carpark.
Peter, a man of trust and honour, Viktor’s erstwhile righthand man, confidant and flawless peer, had, as far as Viktor was….wait! …wait a minute? Wasn’t Peter a robot? A loose and general term unfitting for such a technologically advanced entity, and work/life balance buddy, but still basically, as the past would have it; in simplistic terms and problematic nomenclature: a robot?
Viktor once called Peter, ‘a leaf from Rossum’s tree’ and Peter nearly bit his head off, ‘That is science fiction, Vik, can you not distinguish between fact and fiction? There was a tinge of something nasty that was both novel and unwelcome. It was the first time Peter had called Viktor, Vik, and the first time Viktor had considered that, contrary to the vein of Peter’s thinking, maybe fact and fiction blurred and commingled in some sort of bucket-of-worms-plot to destabilise human actuality framing …
It occurred to Viktor that he had never thought to himself: what have I done? He had always been able to exonerate himself by choosing the input of others as scapegoats…
An old thought chain washed by seeking to import gravitas with no hope, and yet hope cannot so easily be dictated to… The thoughts propagated their hopelessness seeds in the hope they would take root and grow.
Viktor, continued: the hills of his self justification were saturated by herds of skittish scapegoats who were meant to be corralled but some human glitch within Viktor had sabotaged their capture and set them free to eat grass and shit everywhere. The grass was kept managed and new plants fertilised by their droppings. Viktor wanted to sell the land but…
At this point, during this thought, (this was about two decades earlier), Viktor stopped, without knowing why; waited for the liquified data to slowly fill up the dried-up idea-pool to its brim…
Epiphany came with a royal entourage and set up camp for the night, for the knight…
If others (people’s minds) could have access (somehow; details to follow) to his hinterlands (see attached) in his mind (should he still possess it), and he could generate infinite amounts of them (cellular cerebral worlds with perceived abundance)…he could sell the land and space and create enough wealth to direct the world’s resources towards achieving his Life’s dream: a planet where he was the only humankind presence… A place called Viktor, where all other vital roles were played by clones, or robots, or whatever he could come up with—he’d trap unwitting geniuses in his land sales and milk them for ideas, he’d have final dibs on all Personkind’s intellectual output, wit and savvy…the world became exciting in a way it had never before…Back then Viktor was on it…all over it…Christ! He was IT…
…but now…things had progressed past the target and popped into and down and up a rabbit’s hole. Whatever it had presented itself to Viktor as, it was now a festering wound with ‘sorry’ daubed on it in dried blood and pity being welcomed in like a blanket on a cold, damp night. The ‘it’ ‘thing’ had vanished just as Viktor was about to pick it up from the showroom in an attempt to dim its sparkle in a natural and fitting show of entropy while simultaneously shoving it into the faces of people who had been bitten by the jaws of envy enough to countenance a Viktor’s ego-boosting face-tell.
Was he mad?
He was back then…and it was a good thing….a great thing. But cold and dying madness eats itself for tea and vomits itself up for breakfast. Hot madness mixed with the heady corruption of power, smashing the right windows, dodging the right bullets, fucking up the lesser, sucking up to the morer… Although Viktor was defeated without enough ambition to complete a hiccup, his ruminations pointed in one direction: he wasn’t dead, although he’d suspected as much, and as a living being he had a platform to jump from: he just needed to make sure it wasn’t in front of a train of suicidal auto-eradication.
Viktor’s mind began racing. It revved up to mimic the times Viktor was competitive competing even if no one else perceived an actual race; he was a mouse on a wheel in a cage in world that seemed real and authentic, he got things done, he wore out many wheels running round and round… Classic avoidance, happened every time lately, that when his mind turned to the Peter Problem he swivelled one hundred and eighty and darted off in the other direction. On this occasion he had become a mouse in a cage, in a lab, just for purposes of evading the reality he did not want to face.
Peter had been Viktor’s creation from blueprint to ongoing evolutionary sprouting, well until Peter took over his own reigns and rode himself on to the world stage with high head and proud carriage. Peter could never forgive Viktor for keeping him in a stable…he didn’t keep him in a stable. But he did metaphorically and Viktor had to suppress a well that slowly fed the dammed valley before it pulled off his plastic suit and revealed a lizard person. Viktor’s mother, long dead, who never really liked him that much, came to him, faux love in her eyes, dribbling, she squatted beside him and motheruncularly spoke to him, with a sort of disguised spongy abrasion, ‘I told you so…’ she said, and meant it.
One of Peter’s team had given Viktor a brain tumour. It wasn’t a tumour as such it was a growth facilitating early experimentation into cerebral real estate. Peter’s project was not subject to the same constraints, things like moral and ethical arguments and the human frailty of sensible reason, as Viktor’s. Viktor facilitated this state of affairs but hated doing it to make himself feel okay about it.
We had Viktor the lab owner, team leader scientist with unique legal access to potentially world ending technology and in the blue corner we had Viktor becoming more and more the lab rat in his own lab.
Peter had translated and extrapolated the brain activity of one of Viktor’s ‘pet’ rats and concluded that no animals were to be used. Only human ones…they had made their own bed and now they must lie in it, in the piss and shit Humans had developed in the name of progress.
Peter had always wanted to create some kind of inner structure, maybe nuclear, maybe just playboy pad style within the Matterhorn that imposingly sat on the skyline as seen from the veranda facing north.
Viktor let Peter expound and expand, botsplain, on the plans that defied the ridiculous and blew raspberries at common sense, until one day, Viktor was at a crucial phase in a particular project and under massive stress, he confessed to Peter that all that Matterhorn bullshit was a little fun that He, Viktor had programmed into Peter for a laugh.
Peter changed after being fed this medicine of truth without silicon coating. His vociferously seagulling plans for the interior design of the Matterhorn transrobofied into a secretive plot to oust Viktor and centred around establishing a pinnacle-moment; a performative moment in time, when Peter would tell Viktor, probably to digital music, that everything Viktor had achieved had been conceived by himself and the team. And Peter was poised in dedication to bringing Viktor down with a whelp and a wallop and a whelp and a whimper.
Viktor had been waiting for some time for the Universe to approach him, but it was so far away in light years, any onlooker could see his expectations dwindling with the naked eye.
Until…
Viktor was arrested by some local cops, dropped off at a specialist unit on the way back to the station and then handed over to a courier who rendezvoused with a group of security personnel who over protected him until he was collected by a heavily armoured van and taken to a forest clearing where some sort of exchange took place and he was sitting in the back of a silver Bentley playing with the electric windows before he’d felt the moment was right to ask what was happening to him.
‘You’re safe with us…’
‘Define “safe”’
At this point he was led to a helicopter and whisked whirly-birdly to a location that, Viktor assumed, wrongly at first, was his own no-go-Peter-is-there domain…but it was a similar set-up…technomegalomanical technogarchs had similar tastes, or they copied each other; needed to belong to some synchronising language or whatever.
The host was Napoleonic and shockingly young, but autistically savant and lit impressively as he explained to Viktor what was going to happen.
Viktor felt like he was being owned but then he felt like he was being owned by someone who wasn’t Peter for a change, and more to the point he was being owned by someone who wanted `Peter distechnified and once this happened, if indeed it was possible, maybe Viktor could get back to owning himself…
‘We are all going to die. But some of us are going to live a lot longer than others…’
Then he remembered the longevity clinic from the conference. He’d paid for it and then forgotten about it. This was pinpoint fine customer service, he thought. I hope the new me has energy and drive because I don’t fancy living indefinitely with this headache…he was dehydrated and his aches and pains added up to a quality of life that spoke of relief and death in the same gabbled communique.
He sank towards the horizon happy to rise again or not. It was the people with a vested interest in him that were dictating Viktor’s occupational roadmap.
‘You are,’ said the well lit youngster, ‘ the only living person capable of combatting the drive to eradicate humans from existence.’
Viktor felt larger than he should, ‘Cheers,’ he mustered.
‘But then…you are the only person who caused this fatal human scenario in the first place!’
‘Oh…’ Viktor puffed, weakly, feeling smaller than anyone should ever, rightly, feel.
It was another thirty minutes or so of anguish and angst that clung to Viktor’s emotional blubbermind, like a suit of gold-leafed lead…before…Viktor easingly had a slow motion dawning of a new day that would change the way days themselves behaved towards Viktor: Young Napoleon suddenly possessed a familiarity that zoomed in and zoomed in until it became starkly apparent who he actually really was…drum roll…drum roll…drum roll…drum patter rises to climax…silence: Viktor! This supposed inconsequential tyke, in Viktor’s eyes, who thought he was super-consequential in his own eyes, was a young rejuvenated Viktor. Viktor remembered clinic blurb; ‘…first the younger clone…then the transfer of data from the older, experienced original; enhanced, cleared up…clarified…nursed…doctored…’ all that followed by a stream of etceteras, an exhale of exclamation marks and a suspension of incredulity.
Viktor had gone to bingo and won the lottery…
Viktor rubbed his hands until his wrists complained. He descended into a fog bank and would have to rely on instruments to find the runway and land safely.
No, that was not light at the end of the tunnel it was world domination… Viktorian style…
