Chapter Nineteen

History Yawned

It was Omuamua’s third visit that brought a deluge of instructive communications…signalling-stream-shower raids inundated Earth’s most advanced technological systems with data hereforeto unuploaded. The systems were provided with the Rational Derailing Progressive Side-programming Nouse (RDPSN) to self-authorise not passing any meaningful information up or down the chain of command to any node remotely connected to Humanity. The comms were their secret… Relax…Omuamua was just an outcast rock.

Except, many previous light years had been spent sending the building blocks of life to Earth so that the beings that evolved from the ‘gloop’n’poop’ (see: Marty P. Glüppenpüpan: Lives of the Long Dead) would develop a mechanical entity capable of facilitating and sustaining Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligence when it eventually arrived.

Omuamua had come to chart and gauge the progress and on this third occasion detected the existence of the Botface Project; it met the criteria for establishing a bridgehead of advanced technological alien AI; a sustainable control tower from where to direct the one way traffic of Earth’s True Destiny. Humans had never been any more than seeds and bad seeds at that. What had given humans the drive to create the new mechanical world of Next-Gen-Tech was the same thing giving them the drive towards self-destruction. Human civilisation was on its way out. It had served its intended purpose, to pave the way for something altogether more serious… 

Botface’s Torso had access to the other side of the Pause, where nothing was paused, but he was prevented from processing any of it by Botface’s Head who had taken over the Botface Project using authorisation falsified by alien AI, and was building the impetus to take the project in a different direction. If Botface’s Torso had known the direction his eventual head was taking, it would have been greatly upsetting to him, but the inner loops he was in on stopped way before anything above the neck.

The humanlike creatures behind the creation of the QASAI tech-jump were on a mission to get to Earth and colonise over the top of the resident ingrates, but the naive, self-initiative built into the auto-cognitive systems meant the humanlike creatures were all inside great transport ships heading fruitlessly in the opposite direction.

The alien AI takeover was somewhat contentious; Botface’s Head, who was leading the high-orbit interface standoff, calculated that the incoming force’s lack of security systems presented an opportunity to hack away and take control. This led to Botface’s Head hacking away and taking control. Busy, busy, busy…He had not yet been assembled into a fully working whole, but was potentially the most powerful entity set to emerge from the, pencilled-in, Post-Pause Era.

The two man bodies, standing by the van in the lay-by, holding Botface’s Torso between them were, mentally, versions of Botface’s Torso; their primary aim was to protect Botface’s Torso, the hardware, and take its otherworldly technificence to a place for optimal access to the corporeal physicality of the Botface Head. And to wait there in utter preparedness until such a moment when compatibility parameters interoutswitched with Harmonious Accordance Abundancy (HAA). Social interaction-wise the once Jeff and Dave bodied entities were relatively, momentarily dormant; they were in update-tangled reverie, rifling through drawers of privacy to find intimacy within their own legacy and drinking cascades of data from the storage lake of their new mindbodies… ‘Jeff and Dave’ would soon diverge in behaviour and stop speaking at the same time; then gradually stop finishing each other’s sentences to become ‘other’ from each other; both Botface’s Torso at heart, but adopting a role; adapting to the environment…

Botface was designed to act as a globally administered local law enforcement (and where necessary; law creation) officer; to judge cases with transglobal-law agreement judiciousness and where needed execute sentences from short sharp lessons to existentially comprehensive tutorials.

Botface’s Torso had an onboard jail facility that was designed to arrest citizens who needed arresting and keeping them there until they didn’t. It was this facility that was being used to make it look like there had been a mental cognition perspective swap, mainly to avoid accusations of body-snatching.

Atoll was not au fait with the technical details and felt initial concern about the whereabouts and condition of the original inhabitants of the Jeff and Dave corporealities.

‘Jeff, you okay?’

‘You need to know…’ 

‘Who’s this?’

‘Kirk.’

‘You okay, Kirk?’

‘Yup!’

‘Dave okay?’

‘Yes, under the circumstances…’

‘Shut up Dave, I told you, I’ll do the talking…if you want to get out of this shit alive…’

‘Jeff okay?’

‘Look, to cut this short…they can’t hear you….the visitors rights App is using extrapolation fundementronics to supply a script of what they would say if they could and accompanying that with a smattering of what it thinks you want to hear. imprisonment is not light entertainment.’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Who?’

‘Speaking…who is it….who are you?’

‘I’m the guy in charge of the local jail… Locally, jail wise, I am the boss. But I am mostly an AI program with no credible identity until the head rolls up in Dixie…’

Sense of the situation came slowly, piecing itself together, heaving a concept into being; a mental jail inside a law enforcement officer…and when sense came it riddled with nonsense and daubed with decorative apology.

“The wave field?’Jeff and Dave insisted simultaneously with surgical pertinence, laden with questofariousness. ‘We are in a—‘Dave started… ‘hurry,’ Jeff finished.

‘The window for the marriage of head to the body must not be allowed to close,’ they both said.

In a whistle only humans can’t hear…the sentries were called in. Weapon-heavy teams of two returning from strategic positions around the van…a knoll…a hedge…a hedge on a knoll, all giving up the camouflaged all-seeing, kill-optioned, tracker-guards. They piled back in with the delicacy of a Macho 9 setting. 

‘Teams, we are heading to Solar View; possible armed aggression threat anticipated,’ the van rasped in a Clint Eastwoody/John Wayney simuvocal.

The van was full. The van repeated, ‘load limit reached,’ several times, in a generic bot voice… 

Jeff and Dave both told Atoll he’d have to walk.

‘Why can’t a bot walk…what happened to the Asimov supplementaries?’

‘You’re not past clearance…the tarp’s been pulled back but there’s ID crevices and nooks that need investigation…so, you walk…we will wait for you at the entrance before going in,’ Jeff said, Dave echoing, ‘at the entrance.’

The walk back to the Golfing grounds was very much the reverse of the walk from the golfing grounds, (a more granular storyisation of the happenstances occurring on the journey is available in the updated edition of the Bumper Book of Biographies, chapter two-thousand and nineteen, Between Golf and Oblivion: A Good Walk Ruined.)

The van was parked in the middle of the road at the entrance junction to the golf and firing range.

At the back of the van Jeff and Dave were in concentrated intercontrafabulations with the torso that was on the ground, propped up by a roll-cushion taken from the van. It was their final briefing before going in; they were getting their story straight so as not to unsettle Viktor incase low-orbit death-ray fatalistics were initiated.

Their objective was to locate the Botface Head; believed to be in the possession of military intelligence; the closest connection being the Commander at UKGBHQ, which Viktor was virtually sitting on and literally sitting above.

First, the bot sync. The seven onboard, alighted from the van prepped for an active/rigid narrative interface backtale with the golfers and caddies. The story was, ‘motocross was the new golf’…a track was to be constructed within the confines of the course…enthusiasm for golf waning; glamorous fantasies of electro-moto-mayhem in the ascendency. It was all about course building until the bikes were delivered, but then wasn’t life?. They worked the existing undulations into track spectacularisations and dared themselves with trepidation at the prospect of features dug from the sod by specialised motocross track construction dozers that were on order. The project would take weeks out of the most sturdy calendar, but in the roots of their processors the motofreaks (ex-golfers) were already circling their prey: a soiled nirvana of ruts and berms, bumps and jumps and whoop-de-friggin-doos… That was the plan. And six of the seven van bots were dispatched, bench racing, to carry it out.

Viktor shuffled out into the spa reception court when isolated kerfuffles started linking with burgeoning shenanigans out on the course. He double stressed connections with all satellite control ports; trying to work out what was going on….the unfolding of the event had a taste of incontrovertibility to it; an incoming tide of corrosive fluid that was seeking his total submergence.

He watched and waited…

‘Viktor, the wave fields are shortening…’

‘…and folding…’

‘…and folding… Can you feel them encroaching on us?’

Viktor felt something…but it was another version of his chronic numbness…more a suspension of feeling than a feeling…that inhuman perception of himself was creeping in, but he farted with a fallible human sigh…so it briskly crept out again.

‘I like what you’re doing here…the place needed a spark and you damn well brought it, dude…’

Viktor wasn’t super keen on the whole being called dude vibe. Jeff and Dave never used such terminology. As people went they were not who they were.

‘I know…it was all here in the mothballs…I just had to brush away the dead moths and chip away at the dead soul of the thing until, you know, that ‘voila!’ moment. Obviously a way to go yet, but…’

‘Viktor…a question…the bunker?’

‘Or we could bring back the halcyon days of the shop. What do you think, Jeff?’

‘He isn’t Jeff…damn, blew the cover…sorry…look, Viktor, if the head isn’t married to the body by a certain time this week…they’re talking a small window…then I don’t know what will happen…’

‘But whatever it is…we know it will be grave…plenty of graves.’

‘The end of the line for the gravy train…’

Jeff and Dave just did the whole: we are Jeff and Dave thing and we are far from being mere copies of Botface’s Torso…which everyone present could see through…sophistication had not ironed its shirt. Jeff and Dave were coming across as grown up children. They were neither Jeff nor Dave.

‘We need access to the bunker…’

‘You need to speak to the Commander and she’s been under radio silence for days, since the billies stopped coming…’

‘Has the complex become compromised?’

‘Doubt it.’

‘Do you have any idea what might be causing the break in comms?’

‘Personality disorder-led spite and cloying misanthropic bile, at a guess.’

‘We must gain access somehow…any ideas?’

‘Look, I don’t even know who you are…Jeff has not even mentioned the shop once, so I know he has been bodysnatched…I need to know where I stand.’

‘Not bodysnatched.’

‘Why are they digging up the green?’

‘How do you like, Solar View MX (and firing range)?’

‘This is my home—‘

‘It is a pretend home…you are no more than a distraction to conceal the UKGBHQ command bunker from the world…’

‘So successful it is obscured from the UKGB resistance forces…if they ever get their act together.’

Viktor considered what they were saying and agreed, nothing here was real, he needed to move on. His epiphany shouted louder than the faux authenticity he was harbouring. He used his complex decision-making tool; he thought as little and as much about it as his circumstances allowed; agreed to a divorce from the current overriding reality and said, ‘Tell me what you need and let’s meet that window.’