Chapter Two:
A DAWN, A DAY, A LIFE (ALL NEW)
There was this guy. You might or might not notice him around from time to time, sitting in the back room of a condemned public drinking parlour or wiping his post breakfast mouth beside an empty plate at the yesteryear café in town. He was a relic from the ever present past that he dourly reflected on… Back in the day…etcetera…etcetera…ad infinitum.
The peace had been irreversibly disturbed by electronification, people were technomorphing from real to virtual. He’d not been left behind as much as he’d been hanging back from the precipice. Dragging his feet behind the curve of the headlong rush.
And of course, the wife had gone.
His mind had been unable to risk the small step onto the platform where answers opened up routes to enlightening destinations. Technophobia only piled fear on top of confusion. Phones had to have wires and TV’s had to have fixed mechanical buttons. Any more than three channels rendered the whole set inoperable. He could see his own clunky old fashioned redundancy in the rants that put the world to rights. It was like a glitch he could not download a patch for.
He’d had his day, it seemed, but where those days had gone and what good they’d done him remained elusive.
Why him?
Standard parents led to a standard childhood enlightened by a standard education. The chain held, binding him to standard further education that was only ever leading to a standard foot on the standard ladder of standard middle management. Standard relationship, standard off-spring to whom he was standard bearer for standard hand over to the next standard generation. And as he watched his standards slip into a sink hole of infertile potential; meal by meal, day by day, inching…teetering on the periphery of dead horizons; inevitability’s wending route led terminally to the depot of false promises.
And of course, the wife had gone, taking the child.
AI was taking over, he saw the crest of the first wave of invasion so got off the beach, headed for higher ground…
While in the neighbourhood loneliness carried out the threat it had been posing for some time, corrosively eating away at him. He’d tried advertising in the local paper. Several encounters revealed to him that his notions of social interaction did not tally with societal persnicketiness.
They were not going to stop being them; he’d have to work on himself before he could expect traction… The work in progress became an over-budget renovation project, out of control and viably inept…
And of course, the wife had gone, taking the child. It was all in the script of the horror version of the story, imbibed with every breath. He blotted his wife out. Her fallout; and the crash site strewn with inadmissible evidence.
He managed to climb the steep stairs to consult with an academic shamanesque forensic listener. Unprompted a faltering story emerged, it drove back and forth along side roads. A good day out was being had by all when the car veered on to the fast lane and truth bore down on them like a crushing defeat. A whistleblower resuscitating the relevant memories. The straight-jacket of an unexpectedly shocking crash site. The collapsed façade of innocence Humpty-dumptied on the cracked paving slabs… Exiled from a hinterland of manufactured falsehoods; relocating to the cruel ghettoes reserved for those who crash cars in fatal distraction, killing wives and sons; beheading Queens; and melon-heading Princely sons? A castaway to whom no punishment could ever be enough. The police took no action which made him feel that darker forces would have to prosecute some drop of justice…
The biographical documentation of his life had been bundled up and tied off, obituary written.
A joint Intelligence and military counter QASAI unit had an extensively redacted footnote to add when, after an exhaustive selection process, picking lonely hearts advertisers from local newspapers. The semi-autonomous deadly secretive project operating with pinprick accuracy selected the most perfect man for the job.
The downside, they’d broken gently, was that recollection of his past would have to be erased. Legally speaking they did not, repeat not, use any, repeat, with a nod and a wink, any untested tech on him (you must know by now that they actually did) that reran his crash from aftermath to precursor insinuating so much mitigation into his brain that he succumbed to feeling okay enough to sign on the dotted line for whatever they required from him. The signal to smile was awakened within him but didn’t reach his face until his memory had been erased.
He was signing up for what they were calling refurbishment. He wondered what a refurbished person would look like; a James Bond…an Arnold Schwartzenhousen? Maybe the incredible Hulk.
What they needed from him was a valid conscious signature to authorise the work they were doing. He was going to be integrated with a QASAI operating system that through ancient imbedded protocols could not operate fully independently without an executive human chaperone and board member.
He was primed, eked and eased…fed through courses; technical, practical, theoretical, psychological and ultimately, refurbishmental. They’d worked on his memory, using drugs and video environments. Slowly bringing forth dormant forces. He grew into engrossing games that installed vaults of instructional memory… Progress reports on his telling brain activity were stamped with approval. He swam upwards, stopping in stages, depressurising; the surface an ever more realisable place of rescue and resurgence.
Uprighted and repaired he faced what was left of the past; a gratefully bare recollection of himself slipping down the descent into madness, rabidly knocking on madness’s iron gates, begging not to be allowed in.
He was a freeman of the QASAI systematic complex…he overheard. He had not registered the caveats or read the contractual obligations telling him his refurbished foundation would always be the property of His Majesty’s Government.
Not just that, but…
Contrary to his imaginings there would be no physical change other than the relinquishing of his own physicality. Yes, he’d be recreated with superhuman abilities, but they were limited to a Perceived Ultra-Real Faux-Simulacrum (PURFS). The body he’d have to let go would be kept running by caretaker manager technology; kept ready in the unlikely case of his return. The mission was faring into uncharted waters. His destination was the G & G labs created Cerebral Real Estate Environment; and from there his observational mission would unfold into an as yet unknown world…
Zero hour came; he proceeded, unquestioningly, in trusting acceptance of his new found government department friends… There was a countdown through the tension.
It had been (over simplifiedly) explained to him that his thoughts would function on the back of thought-streams that ran the space. He was invading; his programmed thoughts would be using parasite channels, their ultimate aim to become dominant over the environment’s Auto-Evo-Algo Command Utility (AEACU) processes…
He was prepared for worse than the box his awareness surfaced in. The total dark turned into a cupboard with the introduction of light escaping from the cracks in an apparent door…
He couldn’t name a modern day superhero because his cultural updates were still pending. He assumed the identity of a generic superman tasked with fighting justice for the military and Intelligence services…a state owned asset…ready for what the opening up of a world of opportunity had in store… His eyes got used to the dark, his mind took onboard the incoming data furnishing him with an identity for the mission: Kirk James… He mulled it over briefly without much enthusiasm… Kirk James was there to do or die…
He knocked on the new door to the new dawn, but there was no answer…
