Excerpt 107:
The Indefinable Traits of Trust
Some spritely force within Hub had generated a self-conscious reaction to all outside interference. Paranoia built itself a panopticon tower with fixed stares and roving glances. She felt sure she was being watched, judged…sure that she sat high on the list of those who face execution. If she wasn’t being watched, she thought, what would be the point. Death, was coming…instigated by the lesser of two necessary evils.
Hub felt like an octopus cranking levers; de-buttoning, pre-buttoning and plain old simple buttoning device activation and deactivation, but she knew she was a giant squid perambuliquiding around in the icy cold pressure-crushing depths. She’d seen a documentary on her at some point in time.
She had to give herself the lecture as if Jesus, or her father, were giving her a one-on-one TEDtalk. The manual had been ripped up. From now on she was the manual. There were two scenarios: She was the boss/She was acting at being the boss; very different versions of the same act. One a butterfly wing that flaps the fuck out of the future or the other one: a chrysalis that fails to hatch. Adrift in the open, forgotten ocean, or on a floating stage in the packed and sold out luxury yacht marina; a rally, a speech…all power needs feedback; all sound needs ears…
Connections existed. She connected with the Mission, the backroom lot; Mabel and that other one…what’s his…Frank, those two. They were trustworthy with a capital ’T’.
She’d have them both to tea after all this was swept under the carpets of Hell. She thought of them and a ’T’ letter shape emphasised her affinity, her rapport with them until the emphasis became more like an ear worm for the inner eye. Various active pro-human revival sources linked links in the operational chain. All connected, all at her command… Obviously, though, somewhere inside she knew more than she was letting on, but emotional messaging dataways from her seat of knowing only knew how to communicate via the spaces between words; a deluge of data, redacted blank.
Did she know that M & F teams engaged in gamewarplay to death and beyond, were feeding her incorrect rivulets of data that spurred from the main riverhighway of veracity?
While the Mission was live, operational success had been dependent on the utilisation of Judith; she was the key, but someone had changed the locks! Somehow, Hub, probably as the Commander, would have to pry deeper into Judith’s psychological storeroom and sketch the newly airing demons on her inventory clipboard…
Judith was the archetypal girl next door who, after colliding with heightened reality in the form of state run covert shenanigans, she moved three doors down and acquired an indefinable glamour.
Looking back from times yet aired the ideal situation would have been for Judith to perceive a connection between her unconscious Stockholm Munchaus experiences and her conscious awareness as a vital leading role in the resistance. What Judith’s Munchself knew would’ve contributed to the Human Revivalist movement more than any other circumstance.
It was all in the report that Judith and Harris had gone to a nearby village. They needed to gauge local partisan support for the resistance. But after interviewing a large pie-chunk of inhabitants they gave up on the idea. No one they talked to was aware that there was a Pause, or that Machines were about to take over post pause. Obliviosity reigned! The Devil might care, but the good people of Little Sudlow-On-Russet did not.
It was unreported, however, that later, Judith went with Jeff and his personal auto-management system (not stolen from G & G labs) to another place nearby: Great Sudlow-On-Russet.
It was early evening and lights were visible in the buildings that made up the central area of the village that was smaller than its ‘Little’ namesake. They knocked on doors, tapped on windows; voiced coo-ees and anybody-there’s, until it was confirmed by Jeff’s tech that no humans existed there, no living ones at least. It was an auto-town (village), used, most likely by escaped automata who arrogantly assumed what they were processing was actual consciousness; which was fake as faux.
All this was sent back in coded report form to UKGBH for Hub’s perusal, but never got there. The F and M team’s disseminating every ounce of potential game fodder.
‘I suggest we move here.’
‘What’s wrong with the marina?’
‘It’s too safe and secure, homely.’
‘So is this.’
‘Yes, but not while we are strangers.’
Jeff’s tech had confirmed there was no danger from the ‘ghost tech’ that lived there; they might as well live in another, unmeeting dimension. The trouble was there were two other, more malignant forces planning a coinciding move to Great Sudlow-On-Russet: One being Frank’s team and the other being Mabel’s team. One bot stayed with Mabel and one bot stayed with Frank making sure their behaviour remained at a low threat threshold.
Meanwhile Mabel and Frank were beside themselves and each other. They didn’t want to intergravitate too close so as to upset the bots or drift too far apart and aggravate the natural forces that created a synchronistic perfection that no two animals had achieved between each other in the history of the evolution of mammals… So, in sum, they did the absolute minimum, while their two guardian jailerbots kept up appearances with the UKGBH manager, Hub; stringing her along; bottling her and crating her up for delivery to Great Sudlow-on-Russet; trussed up and spinning on thin ice…
Hub got the calls, first from Frank, then the dead Mission team…then Mabel, and then the miraculously suddenly fully functioning, back to the craic, UKGBH Operating System. All with the mindshatteringly, convenient-lite culminatory verdict…
Hub had to distance herself from Hub, adopt the Woman, or maybe, depending on happenings on the ground, the Commander, and decamp from her spider-guarding of the web of life; to a fly buzzing around a shop full of Venuses.
The Mission team were compromised; tripped up while standing down. The OS was yet to be proved. But at least she had full faith, and counting, in the two…wait, though…
Perhaps ’T’ didn’t stand for Trustworthy, maybe it stood for Traitor?
Hub held that thought until it became too heavy. The Commander flexed her muscles; picking it up, crumpling it in her palm… She spat out imaginary tobacco gobs with metaphorical bravura fit for a kamikaze deathbot marine commando… The comeback kid had died…long live the comeback king…
‘Game on!’ She said, (a strain of gusto and a hoot of relish; pre-victorious outcome all mapped out)… to herself…her selves.
