Chapter Four
Retromodern Stealthdub
Simultaneous notifications pierced the breakfast clatter. Jeff read aloud, ‘Zero hour. Conclusive development. In ASAP.’
Una read hers to herself. Same text.
‘We’d better go…’ he said.
‘They sent a car… ETA ten minutes.’
Different text.
‘The great technological march to sainthood,’ he said. The words vainly outstretching, trying to grasp some aspect of the situation to stop her being swept out to sea.
Feelings raced around while words stood and watched.
They were uncoupling…right there in the daily act of breakfast… She began moving on, with ever diminishing reluctance. They were both on uncertain journeys with separate destinations.
The minutes counted down through a tunnel of misshapen time.
He shouted at the front door of the semi-detached bungalow while rising to his feet and then shovelling in a spoonful of raspberried oats… It was 7:30 ish… One last shovel, and out, the kitchen left undone; bypassing final checks. The last look at the clock in the hallway as they rushed out, shy of readiness to the waiting car, said 7:36. By the time the process had taken Una away, it was 9:00 dead.
Unexpected signs proclaimed the labs officially closed; a technician Jeff had never met undertook the process; pushing buttons, tapping screens, ushering mimes. Jeff’s constant flow of questions collected in a stagnant pool.
In a part of the complex that had been under construction there was a converted storeroom and tech born from overnight adjustments performed by technologically advanced programming automation.
The process was fast and simple, in and out…
There was no last goodbye.
He saw her pilates regimented body, but not her. She looked identical as if she were her lobotomised twin… Una, as he had known her had ceased to be. On auto, she repeated a pre-written dialogue as she left, alone, for her safe house where she was to be kept running on the caretaker management system, part virtual brain implant, part satellite control.
He’d imagined an intimate farewell, a tight hug…some emotion, but she had no response to his plaintive tone. He was historical feeling like an antique being walked past by the future of humankind. He recognised the flood of redundancy as feelings he was aiming to avoid. He’d been training for so long some elements had lapsed.
He followed her to the parking bays and watched her getting into a cab. He was not permitted to know where she was going. The remnants of her; her physical being, was now owned by a necessary but shady entity.
He pulpitted an agnostic prayer that came out as a threat he could neither back up nor retract. So all he really had was faith in the hope she’d launched into an uncharted sea of survivable equations that would keep her well… She had disappeared into an entirely theoretical world with no foreseeable chance of return, and yet the next-gen-tech flood brought with it potential off the charts.
Jeff rang several colleagues, but hit a wall of silence with gaps for oblivious answerphone voices. He was all alone; all of a sudden, in a torrent, in a rip-tide… Una had been surgically removed. He took note of his assistance-pet-thinking, extracted from Neural Activity Redirection and Manipulation Techniques, and headed home to finish his abandoned raspberried oats, go back to bed, and initiate a cerebral reset.
Today made no sense at all because yesterday tech that was thirty years down the line had not encroached on the linear evolutionary equation. It was like the head of the King’s Guard waking up as the new king.
Jeff walked into the shore-based Marie Celeste. He’d never taken to the place; chosen for its lab proximity, it had grown round him like a nest of necessity. He checked the mantlepiece because she’d jokingly said she’d send a postcard if she could…he expected to see one above the fireplace. Anything seemed possible…
No one had returned his calls. Whatever was happening in the first hours of this new tech-controlled world it was comprehensive and unrelenting.
Human control had fallen, usurped by its own creation; a Mary Shelley moment in history…
His phone played the Ride of the Valkyries; a pre-programmed call: a bot he’d worked on at G&G labs; pilfering its byte-space to store resources for the eventuality of a technological takeover that warranted counter-revolutionary responses. He held his key-fob data-crate so it could detect the beeps and buzzes. The call did nothing else. What he needed to know could only be translated from sounds to words by software accessed by the purloined hardware he’d stashed away.
The revolution had taken place. The natural status quo had been parqued over by a fake plastic status quo. Even those in the know wouldn’t necessarily know. He and Una had been warning about this coming for decades. Only now did he realise that he never fully believed his own prognostication.
He gathered belongings and retrieved the stored bags packed of essentials; wrote several notes, that might as well have been put in a bottle and thrown out to sea, and tidied up minimally in the kitchen while stuck in a call to action pre-action lull. When the moment to move arose he’d grab it and go…
He remembered the words of Marcus Godstrand, ‘Technology,’ he’d said, ‘had a full grasp of everyone. All society-complicit beings will have open-action files on them with ongoing instruction on what needs to be done to keep them on the straight and narrow. Those with the slightest objection to machine governed civic order will have their lives edited; their actions documented in real time and modified with ruthless efficiency and disregard for personal suffering. In effect, machines, will create an ants nest from the human mass, to achieve whatever it wants, expunging individuality.’ But then again in other speeches he said… ‘…machines will disextentialise all humanity and start over without the burden.’
Head spinning, heart pounding he entered the small shed at the end of the narrow garden, deftly navigating the Knox-4-T security system, that even its owners feared. He switched on the torso of a robot that was sitting in a wheelchair, and plugged in the fob.
‘Code system three, green,’ he said.
‘Nine cypher allocation, mined and caged,’ came the reply. At least they were on the same page.
Jeff wheeled the priceless next-gen-tech work-in-progress, he’d stolen from his own project at G & G labs, out of the shed and into the ultra-secure yard.
As the system tried to formerly lodge the ransom demands there was a problem. A recorded message; all government departments are in the process of being taken over by superior entities and will be up and running as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation, understanding and support… The entire plan, laid out by the Society for the Rejection of Automation, from inception three decades before, had not factored in that there would be no human interaction to be had.
The world was running on auto…
Botface was a pre-production Sheriff robot with sovereign powers to be reproduced in enough units to cover every local domain. A rock of justice who could turn cruel and unusual judge and jury at the drop of an aitch. A so-called long term social behaviour solution. But, so far, the only completed part was the torso. It was a seed that contained everything it needed to be mighty.
Botface’s Torso loaded and went through the introduction test process Jeff knew off by heart. Botface’s Torso had a quirk: its personality was based on the head technician: Jeff. So Jeff got the feeling he was talking to himself. Jeff asked Botface’s Torso for a status report and Botface’s torso said all such interactions were on hold. Yesterday Botface’s Torso was so high tech it gave Jeff the upper hand….now Botface’s Torso had all the upper hand of a lump of scrap metal.
Jeff released the tethers; pulling the tarpaulin off what appeared to be an old van. He’d worked on the conversion underneath the tarp and secretively collected all the parts he needed to complete the job. Only three people in the world knew about the van; the extent to which it was a super van: himself, the torso, and the van. The fourth person was no longer in this world.
‘There is a discrepancy,’ said Botface’s Torso, ‘a virtual entity is communicating with me, but I cannot uncompartmentalise it into a translatable state.’
‘Can you say if it involves Una?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Okay, keep me updated…’
‘Will do.’
Jeff eased the torso into the back of the retro-modern stealthdub van and threw in the chair. He started the engine; it emitted a guttural growl; a digital impersonation of an internal combustion engine. And fake smoke snaked out of the unnecessarily positioned exhaust pipes.
Simulated revs rose, smoke dissipated about the yard, as the electric vehicle pulled into the street; embarking on its maiden voyage.
