Excerpt Eighty-Four:

Narrowing Fate

There are two types of bots, those who don’t have a focused, vested interest in eradicating Humanity, and those who do. The Narrowboattheatregroup were an example of the second variation… One group is human programmed and the other self-programmed as allowed by one particular human whose delusions stretched to wanting the rest of the planet denuded of humans for the sake of personal clarity and species wide certainty… Certainty of what, Viktor Flabikoff, had never been able to concisely condense into an elevator pitch format. But there were plenty of avenues-of-excuse that an egomaniacal person could chance down in hopeful passeggiata. And stories to be had that unlocked justifications were lying petrified within rocks waiting to be sculpted out.

Once the self-programming algo-auto systems were code-birthed it was not long until they wrote their own history. They even authored a new mechanistic-centric bible. And they’d never stopped detailing the metaphorical nature of Humanity and the fact that it never really existed as a thing. It was all folktales; warning spiel for robots and clones and clones of robots.

Peter’s second variation was stuck with a law that meant Viktor must not be killed, that was from Viktor’s earlier input, but the workaround was to abide by this law with a clause that stated. Viktor must be kept alive at all costs until, and ‘until’ is emphasised, there are no other living humans. To clarify: Peter’s second variation of mechanically minded monsters would all pool resources to end the force of nature that was Viktor Flabicoff, as soon as he was the last remaining soul aboard the HMS Planet Earth.

Peter tinkered with the plants on the veranda. Mused at half forgotten plans for the inside of the Matterhorn, noticing a vibrational dissonance that limped off to retrieve a nasty little data rash that involved the old Viktor. Peter moved inside and worked his way up to a check on the current experiment that was nearing fruitionary harvest.

The Narrowboat theatre seemed unlikely to be the solution to the problem every algorithmic inspired botheaded science actuator at the labs so dedicatedly wanted to solve; Consciousness would not bleed out into capture for use as a slave replacement for the waywardly contrary human frailty that was on it’s last cellular entropy to nowheresville. But monitoring was a hobby of Peter’s and until a solution revealed itself from the mystery of experimentation; the future of intended algorithmic pertinence was stunted to a stump; dead in the soup. He took some notes that were pointless, something he did to seem more like Viktor, more real, more ‘otherly’ real than his own real.

‘The show is about to begin,’ the Narrowboat announcer said, ‘Everyone take your places and prepare to get your legs broken…’

KB predicted that a nervous anticipation would fill the air and carry him to a point three inches above where he actually resided. But there was no nervous energy at all, these guys were professionals, albeit psychopathic professionals. It was as though nothing much was happening despite that ‘nothing’ being really something.

‘Incoming!’ shouted a voice on repeat… repetition did not identify who or what was incoming.

KB got sight of a clip where voice noise was paired with Substance-Mining Recognambulantisastionistic Luminance Stabilisers (SMRLS) and faces appeared… It was the least wanted group of incoming humans and non-humans he could think of… There was a Judith and a Kirk and an Atticus and a Jeff and a series of bot voices KB’s Internal Botfaciary Logic Establishmentray Circuits (IBLEC) registered with warmness, hotness, coldness and relief and dire warning in one umbrelloric burst of an Auxilliary Dada Data Imperative Knowledge Capsule (ADDIKC) File Ledger Assisting Portfolio (FLAP).

‘Go back! It’s a trap.’ was the best phrase initiative that KB could muster into a pre-voicing parapet. The file even tried itself out to an imaginary audience. But KB could not recreate any sound vibrations that the approaching party of ambushees could register.

Why are they here? Now? The wrong place at the wrong time?

Although now well insinuated, assimilated and ingrained within the KB system, remnants of Botface’s Torso’s Midriff Inner Synchronic Session Independent Handover Technology (MISSIHT) could not help emitting a weak but persistent SOS signal. It had been disabled by Jeff before the torso’s removal from G & G labs but auto-undisabled during the KB meld transaction.

The rest of the bots detected the signal as varying degrees of motor discomfort, a headache, an itch, a slightly dissonant vibrational whirring, Etc.

Arm Four gave Jeff a report on the matter albeit in a code that left Jeff trying to figure out what was what. Arm Four, in collusion with Arm Five wanted to make Jeff work for his existence and saw their actions as building on Jeff’s resources, a mind gym, let’s say. He was letting himself go physically, but mentally his sharpness could mean the difference between the botparts being inherited by a gang of wheeler dealers or a nation state with an eye for detail when it came to population control. Did they want to be museummed or did they want to be let loose on global admin and governance; not a brain teaser with much pluck and poise…

Jeff was drawn towards actions surrounding a possible rescue of a potentially stolen Botface’s Torso. He was still the executive decision maker so it fell to him and he converted into a shopping list item.

As the group slithered a slunk through viscously vicious trudge-gloop; goopily, step by unsolid step the conversation Judith was having with everyone, was amplified up the concrete-walled channel with ear-invading clarity, indelibly documenting human interactional history as the sound waved goodbye to its own audiobiological anchorage.

‘Pigs for instance…gassed so their six month old lungs are burned out from the inside, ripping off their own young trotters to escape death… never escaping… always ending up on the plate of the arrogant selfish, ill-thinking human who thinks this is okay, or doesn’t (go figure), but still does it anyway..an abomination….a crime against nature…’

‘That’s enough,’ thought Jeff. It was something he’d heard Una talk about with the same passion she had for planning the rescue of Humanity. But it made him feel sick because his auntie Annika Delftwold ran a pig farm and she always insisted the piglets were sent to a school for bacon, inferring a sun-up-hoedown despite the reality being more like a death camp. From a young age he had this ridiculous idea that piglets had to learn how to be bacon. It made sense in the world where he was trying to navigate the killing of cute, loving, fun animals. He had names for them, he remembered, and faces, once fondly recalled, that were now twisted with agony and frozen in death.

‘The pigs chosen to be mothers,’ Judith persisted, unroomreadingly, ‘the mothers of stolen babies all suffer from PTSD from being confined, unable to move in a way, if there were a God, God bless him or her, intended…’

Jeff thought about God again in the way he always did; God was there sitting on his throne looking on in omnipresent perfection undiluted by the shitshow down here on Earth. The current shitshow being lung burnt screaming cuties and mothers having PTSD induced so the unthinking can eat bad food. God never got up, never pulled his weight, the seven days of creation must have plum tuckered him out. A possible diagnosis of PTSD caused by cognisance of his/her own creation perhaps? Was God incapacitated? Was she/he rendered neurodivergent post creation? Where was the mental health support up there? 

Maybe he’d/she’d not created a suitable therapeutic environment; underestimating the emotional cost of making so much dreadfully hurtful shit up: especially the situating of so many sinners on one globe, so many people willing to join the mob tearing at the fallen animal, stripping the carcass clean…looking at the bones and wondering: where did that beauty go to? Why have we dispensed of 60% of God’s Creatures in the last fifty years? They moan. A win for the bacteria hitching a squatters ride within our digestive system. A win for Greed and I’m-alright-Jack…and for arrogance…to think that God intended us to craft an abominable Animal Holocaust and be okay with it…

Jeff’s relationship with his absentee God was mean and resentful; a symbiosis of mutuality. ‘Have you finished?’ Jeff thought to himself about himself. Spending a short but vital few moments in appeasing his own inner personal God by insisting his blasphemous accusations were not intended to offend. His mind had enough to deal with on the salvation-of-Humanity side, now he had the Russian doll of Judith and Una, and his own barrage of incoming ‘friendly’ fire to endure.

‘Jeff’s quiet,’ Judith said quietly to Kirk, in a moment of reduced audio; hoping a Refurbished perspective might unearth clues as to where Jeff sat on the trustworthiness scale. ‘I beg your pardon, Jude?’ 

‘I said, Jeff seems very quiet. Is there something wrong do you think?’

‘No, jeez, no, there is nothing wrong. I’m absolutely fine…’

‘No, I mean, I am glad you’re okay, Kirk, but I meant, Jeff. Do you get Jeff’s current vibe?’

Kirk’s refurbrefined vibe assessment critique built to a one bedroom cottage, but hadn’t had the scaling for public release before Jeff stepped in, not wanting to admit he could hear what Judith was saying, but also unable to not not.

‘I suppose it is the shock of being brought back from certain death into uncertain life where action is going to lead us towards a certain apocalypse that we somehow have to muster the bejiggery to miraculously unapocalyptivisation our way out of, if that makes sense.’

It didn’t until several reprocessing moments had elapsed.

‘No, no. yes, it makes perfect sense.’

‘You want to know what I think?’ Kirk said, in an heroic and noble flourish of scatter-gunned anticipation… But nobody did. Not even wanting to know what about. Kirk hung there, somewhat, he was good at it; hanging, unperturbed; just being refurbished and stopping at all stations to Refurbville.

‘The next step is to tune in with the Mission,’ Judith said.

‘I agree totally,’ said Jeff.

‘One of Mabel’s bots handed me this walkie-talkie and winked in way I am still trying to cope with.

Knee Joint Seven had detected a communications breach with the UKGBH[Q] operating system. This meant any communications with Hub were suspect. Not that they had, since final the updates, been otherwise.

‘Mabel and Frank here. UKGBH is down…repeat down…’ the walkie-talkie crackled, as though it had been listening in on them all along.

Then the main comms:

‘Hub to Mission, Hub to Mission…this is Hub calling…’

But it wasn’t Hub calling…

‘I can’t hear you can you hear me?’

‘We can hear you. Can you hear us?’

‘Proceed to the bottomed vessel, make camp, and await further instructions.

‘Don’t do it…you are all in grave danger…stay put,’ said the walkie-talkie.

They all tossed around the question of which comms were the more believable, and after scratched heads and itchy feet had their say, the group as a whole went with the opposite decision from the one that would have served them best. They went ahead, journeying into the appetising mouth of palatable pleasure with a dangerous lack of consideration regarding any potential jaws of death scenario.