Chapter Thirty

The Bellowing From Below

Eerie cries shattered the silence… Screaming waves shot skyward from the mouth of a cave in the valley below, as though a start-line of high-pitched muscular race cars had ignited into an exasperated, fire-spitting chorus…demanding everything, expanding and invading the fragile soundscape, overrunning and conquering the peace.

Dave was too busy being Jeff to be startled, and Una was vacantly suspecting a victorious comeback of sentience and had turned inward as if gazing out to sea at an upcoming tsunami. 

Thirty or so Flabikov lookalikes gathered in the reception court yard mustering section, their detection systems set to executive action overkill; backflipping into a frenzy…

Atoll attributed the sudden shattering to glitch run off, but Sybil knew from experience that it was a trap set to ambush; a binding web, tentacles stretching out with palms up in fascinated questioning, ready to turn its hand to clawcraft and the extinguishing of resistance.

‘Our need to investigate will strap us into the seat and they will turn us into crash test dummies.’

‘Is that your take?’

‘It is my forecast! …given the evidence.’

Atoll thought Sybil was being fanciful about the fervent calling sounds and beckoning noises. But he began developing a curiosity for the beguiling rapturous clamour as it was bemoaning its pleas with a vulnerability that demanded attention… It creeped up several scales and shone atop many a chart… His need peeled away at reason; his want yearned and scraped at scabs of restraint; itching to go take a little look… At which point he knew Sybil was correct: it was a trap.

A simple thought test was: where is there a valley near here? The answer was there wasn’t, ergo there is no cave emitting noise that makes you want to go down there and investigate. Don’t believe everything you hear. He’d gotten there in the end and now here he could rustle up a remedy of sorts. Ear defenders, change the subject, focus away from the noises and sounds that promise to furnish our satiation with miraculous happenstance properties. The noises, oh the noise…look away; the cost of knowing is far too steep…travel down to the valley below is not readily equatable to the miserable attempts at trying to climb back up non-existent slopes.

They are attacking. Your resistance is low. The wailing fervour contains within it a core of melodious song, catchy, catchy…

‘Snap out of it,’ Sybil commanded, ‘count to nine!’

‘Nine? Why not ten?’

‘Indeed…’

‘Listen,’ she shouted, demanding attention for Atoll’s own good, shoring up his gathering weaknesses, ‘We are going to have to work on your personality, they are working at it from their end so we need to work on it from this end.’

Atoll understood that to be code even though it turned out to be screaming white-knuckle-literal after an elapsed timeframe of regurgitated reconsideration. The fact he had a personality that needed work was superflownover by the fact people were working on it from both ends.

An urgent message wormed its way into his conscious inbox: ‘They are honing in with specialist delving program incisions. Although Sybil is perfectly safe and unaffected, precautions are being formulated and a set of stand-by scenarios has emerged into the best practice folder. The ghostvirus must be protected.’

The moral infection was mutating and now included all murdered children within Palestinian territory; the movement was growing. And went by the name: Dead But Not Done. Ethical infection preservation was non-negotiable.

An express messenger-worm hurriedly delivered vital data that was soundtracked with the kind of weary trumpet blasting that symbolised extreme threat potential. We need to be on the move, ‘static’ is our nemesis. 

Were the worms coding? A worm zipped in, deposited its missive and shuffled off: ’You must run! Take the supplied identikey to Sybil’s hidden book depository.

‘Take the train then the canal, store the virus on the Lady of Trent and cycle to the nearest town,’ Sybil urged via the worm messaging system, ‘it is vital that you use a bicycle…’ That butt-rankled and he wanted to apply for terminal deferment. ’You don’t have to sit on it, just push it and make it obvious you used it to get there. As long as you project the illusion of using the bike, exploiting its cyclical footprint, prove the working of its chain, cog and pedal inter-action with the spoke, tyre, rim arrangement… Be bicycle, keep it on two wheels and your returns will be boonful.’

The door burst open and all speech departed as if sucked out of the room cage…

Atoll was ushered away by a well drilled team of Flabikov doppelgängers, evading identification by dressing as the Village People, and avoiding suspicion by breaking into sporadic YMCA, sometimes tribute, sometimes parody, song and dance. Nonetheless catchy and easing ears harmlessly away from potentially fatal audio-assassins that were abroad.

Sybil sent Atoll a worm… ’To prevent my noise poisoning I will shelter in the Sheldrakian shadow-field created by power outlay substructuring surrounding Jeff and Una’s interlocking connection proto-synced metracolls with each other. The signals are weak, but continuing to strengthen… Oh, those becursed noises of the Calling… They will assume I have been trapped by Una and Jeff and try to manoeuvre in a final solution for the Super Smart Shutdown System. But they will never win. True and honest rightness cannot be stifled for long. I will remain here to facilitate my trap…until Una rises back into play.’

And further instructions extended…

‘If you go out back of the property and follow the alternating breezes you’ll be led to an escape portal in the grounds of one of the billies we are retaining to mop up remnants after the last strugs have left. Board the steam train and stay there until they unhook the front carriages and, as it is already in a compatible sphere, use the directional prodding of Vistamatic Trudisplay windowage.

‘Is there anyway to access and exist within the Trudisplay system…’

‘No.’

‘Good.’ Atoll had a pain-avoidance vigilance-disturbance that wrapped around a tacit memory of saddle damage.

A flood of worms; each building a part of a new story network provided Atoll with a picture he would otherwise have missed. Built round the fun of reading him a daytime story they told tale of an investigative journalist working for the Harmful Artificial Technology Monitor that had employed Artificial Intelligence in an attempt to bring down a project that was developing a modular human mind to insert into the QASAI system. The system was ready to take control of the global population, all it needed was an internal human consciousness authorisation filter to circumvent the baked-in security algorithms that were stopping ‘runaway’ human programmed artificiality. 

They’d had to use AI themselves in an attempt to stop AI because traditional channels of investigation were dead; information travelled and settled in a time frame that journalists, investigators and researchers could not inhabit.

The journalist had uncovered details that should have been left hidden. G & G laboratories, in collusion with Western and Middle-East intelligence agencies, NASA, and private billionaire interests…were creating artificial consciousness to run global governance networks.

The scientists running the project were using the god given resource of their own son, which went beyond all belief and most legality.

From App to web-hub to podcast the story of Mary Goodmanson, Marcus Godstrand and their ‘project’ to create artificial consciousness was a major success and testament to human ingenuity and persistence. And yet a more detailed investigation shed light on a very different framing of a story. That of illegality, illicit science involving human rights breaches, abuse and neglect… At the heart of the drama was the tragedy of their own son. In their version of the story they gave birth to a son who would not otherwise have survived…a boy who could only survive in a bubble provided by NASA. Not every story of the relationship was a happy one.

It seemed to Atoll that there was an incessant worm monologue raging and assumed the biography was merely a cover code dissemination to allow him to seamlessly locate Sybil’s off-world property.

Sybil’s well hidden, perceptually generated property space was in a renovated piece of old CREE world that should not have persisted past shut down… Under narrative salvage operations had reinstated one of the original Stockholm Munchauses, disguised, badly, as a library. Signs proclaimed it was closed for ‘re-reading’. Atoll was flooded by memories generated by the unmistakeabiltiy of the place.

Atoll let himself in and walked through its gaping interior as it slept a deeply engrossed slumber; dreaming of the order it needed to keep its shape. He crept towards the back door so as not to wake a potential horror show. Once outside in the vast folded container yard, Atoll followed the subtle breezes as they shifted, directing him to the grounds of an English country estate with its own three-quarter length train set. There were five steam trains… The one he was breeze-blown to was puffing smoke in preparation for the off… No human figures were represented. Automated pointers showed him to his seat in the rearmost carriage. He sat down and opened the latest delivery barrage of messenger worms after slipping them into covert snakeskin protection security folders… And picked up on the last feeling he was having about the messages, which was that there was something he was unable to understand, obscured to a greater degree than he was up to dealing with…as though miscalculations were being made somewhere… But then there are always limits to what we are allowed to know.

A snake in worm’s clothing, came slithering in: ‘The relevance being…’

There was relevance at last, thought Atoll, I am all ears…

‘You…are…that…son…’

‘Who? me?’

‘You are a live paraconsciousness experiment.’

‘What the actual reality? …’

‘… You are a malleable subject in the creation of a plastic conscious entity to authorise and initiate the QASAI global governance system.’

‘That doesn’t tally. It doesn’t—‘

‘The good news is that the infection you are carrying offers a way out.’

‘A way out? Of what, and how?’

‘You are being taught to be one thing, mean and hateful…’

‘That’s two.’

‘You must use the lessons in the perceptual learning fogs that they push you through to shed light on your soul, reverse the program they are installing. You must struggle with your counter-belief and have faith in them being wrong.’

Atoll did not have the position to move into to better angle the light on what was being told to him.

‘…and the experiment is ongoing…happening in the current time exchange.’

Was Truth playing up? He’d need a little housekeeping to accommodate the novel pivot off the edge…time off to rearrange the furniture to make room for the gallows, no, not gallows, you’ve assembled it wrong, surely… It seemed like too much effort was needed to escape and evade or to sit and accept, pitching his tent between a rock and a hard place…resting his head between a cushion and a soft place… It was either sanity gone mad or fluff floating harmlessly by…

All this was followed by waves of forgetting that rose in an encompassing swell…easing, appeasing…before falling into watery oblivion. And, then, walking the lonely grey shoreline in blue moodiness, brooding…the washed up carcass of beached Truth grabbed on to him with one last lustful grasp from the receding tide… Someone had to be the son of Mary Goodmanson and Marcus Godstrand, the human lab rat. Did the domain of unlikelihood harbour deceit?

It was all traditional, worm enhanced entertainment with typically unfathomable underlying attempts at humour, the content of which he did not take as being actual reality or holding even a modicum of truth…and yet the sub-modicum quantum of morsels multiplied like bacteria…It felt like another infection was taking hold, but this one was devoid of benevolent vibes.

The train, although physically going nowhere, had generated perceptual relevance and constructed a portal to what looked like nowhere but was in fact a pocket of uncharted cerebral territory.

Did he believe it? The jury was out…waiting for the judge to sum up and direct… ‘Life,’ she began, ‘was like a laboratory…’

Picking up on that, Atoll agreed…but why so?

And then, as the Judge summed up and signalled the unboxing of the executioner’s pathway, she ended with: ‘Life is a lesson for us all…’

Atoll’s understanding was shrouded with questions that were in bed with selective meaning. He was the right fit…who else had the raw Fate lined up for the task of steering Humanity along the right path? What would Humanity do without his raw fate lined intervention?

A worm confirmed that Sybil was positioned in ‘quarantine’ it was all systems go. While outside the carriage was the same as if they had not even left the start position. Off the train, everything had changed, he walked a few paces before being hit by a catastrophic realisation: he’d somehow strayed into the Vistamatic Trudisplay; and knew at once that he was fair game with a target on its back. This had suddenly become about survival and whether his Fate lines even had an overarching story you could thread a meaningful narrative through.

Before he had the luxury of processing current data spools, a way out of the trap he’d fallen into was needed; to get back to the outdoor backend Stockholm Munchaus forest lawns that he was already beginning to yearn for…