Excerpt 111:
Militarised Dreams
Hub snatched ten minutes to secrete into her sleep diary. She’d hoped to thieve a light nap, in and out, without attracting any attention, but horrendous nightmares raged nearby, in groups of a hundred plus, trying to get to her; trying to tell her something via the medium of fright. They’d abducted her past; incarcerating her memories in a barbaric and distorted forced-labour of self-flagellation.
Her emotional shrapnel wounds and scars dragged her down through the sod to a place of deadened dead-endedness away from the main theatre of dreams. Fighting was always counterproductive; she knew that her acceptance was paramount. She did her old meditation; listening to her breath…she rose; enlivened; climbed into her designated living position. She cut the octopus’s snake arm umbilical cord tentacles and swam up to the surface. The ship in the distance was going away or coming too; it would not be long before she knew whether she was being rescued or abandoned, again…
‘Hub?’
‘Twelve.’
‘Sorry to disturb you but there’s been a development.’
‘Twelve minutes somnambulant recuperation and shit goes to buggery.’
She saw, standing over her, a blend of Frank and Mabel; lucidly undreamlike as if it were a dream. But a dream would have felt like being part of a trilogy and not the audience of a double act. Mabel and Frank looked so smug and self-contained within themselves and each other; they exuded an intimacy between them, that was not extended to any other party. They had vibes oscillating that could only have been born in their own twisted fantasies. At some time in the last millennium it pierced the fabric of reality and climbed like a cuckoo into a partridge’s pear tree. Waking meant too much foreign input invaded her victimspace; they had concern, dutiful and selected along professional lines of action.
‘You’ve been out for two hours or so, Hub.’
‘Nonsense. What’s this development?’
‘It is the remaining mission contingent…they’ve gone haywire,’ Frank or Mabel said, in meshed audible unison.
‘They’re ignoring boundaries,’ Mabel added; Frank concurring with subtle headgestures; silently lip syncing.
Hub got out and up from her navy regulation hammock and started towards the coffee machine that was standing cold in the area known as Little Italy.
‘We switched the coffee on earlier, but—‘
‘There is no coffee, beans or instant…we’ve double-looked everywhere in the area.’
‘It’s not worth losing your life over.’
‘That is debatable…anyway.’
Whether that was a joke or a serious comment was unclear…
‘Frank ordered some from the nearest supplier but their drones are down.’
‘They are trucking it via remote Segway, but can’t give us an ETA.’
‘We were hoping it would have been delivered by now.’
‘I’ll keep an eye on the entrance and let you know when it’s delivered.’
‘Okay…now…what’s all this about?’
‘There’s been some bleed from mission encapsulation into the lives of local inhabitants that contravene operational directives.’
‘What have they been up to? Who are the culprits?’
‘It’s Judith O. I am afraid, assisted by the refurbished, Dave character…’
‘Kirk James?’
‘Yes, Kirk.’
‘What’ve they done?’
‘Murdering people!’
‘Claiming they have authority.’
‘And it is all verified?’ Hub asked, shocked. This wasn’t factored in…it wasn’t possible…and yet.’
‘Yes, we wouldn’t bother you with it unless it was cast iron.’
‘Cast. Fucking. Iron.’
Hub imagined herself in a darkened room, humming a frequency the might drape forth the reinstallation of everything good about life over the top of the bad that had loaded into her consciousness with a casual chronic persistence and irritatingly gruesome familiarity.
Not that any visual recoding was proof of actuality in these days of perceptive machine manipulation, but she still watched the shaky CCTV footage, too real to be fully and unquestionably accepted, of Judith O. and Kirk James entering premises: farms, offices, and yards and shooting people in the head, slitting their throats and subjecting them to lung burning fatal gas attacks. Even if the recordings were all fake it didn’t mean none of it happened. Set up or conundrum Hub needed to get to the bottom of it. Judith O. was pencilled in as the saviour of the next generation; leader of leaders, scourge of the autonomous puppeteers of electropandemonium. Things couldn’t progress if Judith O.’s behaviour was so sketchy.
Hub felt the world turn as it clicked like a key, unlocking a vast desert of evil where goodness had been driven out with machinelike biblical exuberance.
‘I want a report on my desk—‘
‘There’s a report on your desk.’
‘I don’t want any input from mechanistic assistance. Is it techfree?’
‘We are forbidden from one hundred percent tech free.’
‘What do mean? Who by?’
‘It’s just a thing,’ Mabel and Frank said, the higgledy-pigglediness of which alarmed Hub’s sense of decorum like a firework in handkerchief at a snot rally.
The brief silence carried an element of sanity to it, but was soon bastardised by the fulmination of the ‘last great killbot’. ‘Us. We are not playing games, lady commander.’
The unit seemed to switch off.
‘I thought you had those things under control.’
‘We thought we did.’
‘Turns out they are in control.’
‘There was nothing we could do.’
‘There is outside input we hadn’t expected.’
‘Has it gone into standby?’
‘It is saving energy.’
‘What for?’
‘Killing.’
‘And murder.’
Hub’s hair, that she’d pulled out…and teeth vacating their gummy foundations…circled the sink’s plughole before disappearing not to be seen again, until she woke up.
Her self-status report: was she dreaming, yes. Was the bit about murder and killing and the takeover of stupidly dangerous security bots (killbots) that were treading a thin line between foolproof and idiotsimple sabotage, part of the dream?
Hub looked at Mabel then looked at Frank and looked from Frank to Mabel and back trying to establish factual equilibrium. The fact alarm rang and the facts assembled ready for duty…
Shit, yes, she thought…the murder and the killing was going to pile on top of the killing and the murder…and…it was just the realised potential of a world her father had warned her would come to pass.
