Chapter Thirty-Six
The Son of Godstrand
The bus equated to a Sanctuary Escape Vehicle (SEV) and doubled-up as a Bobvylan Cage. This meant he could get his ears to the worm-feed and bang himself up to date.
And yet there are laws which mean when things are going too well something bad has to happen…
In this variation of that rule…worm number one in the queuing-stack of worm messengers told Atoll that the Tiny Viktor Guy organisation had become the first internally operating corporation with sole rights to the Animal Cerebral Framework (ACF). They’d taken control of all Kokura Choir operations and were patch swaddling the bioavailability of the Super Smart Shutdown System. And all worm services were to be superseded by Personal Town Cryer (PTC) message delivery; a pertinent and timely message stream.
When people say ‘pertinent’ and ‘timely’…they’ve looked at their product and said: it will never sell, it lacks pertinence and timeliness; we’ll have to lie and tell them it’s timely and pertinent or it won’t be flying up any sales chutes… So Atoll wasn’t expecting pertinent or timely messages from then on.
Tiny Viktor Guy had shown his hand….Tiny Guy was like a mad ex-brother and Viktor had been a power crazy acquaintance but the two melded; doubled their reach with overriding power… A fourth entity emerging from the overriding power itself.
A Town Cryer message came in with a shiny pertinence the system could never sustain and a timeliness that was hammering a nail that would bend and frustrate as the timeliness wore on and went slack…
The bus slowed and pulled into a lay-by. ‘This is it. Follow that footpath and you’ll come to Little Sudlow-on-Russet. Find the stadium. Entrance Nine, there’s a flower pot, a key under. Enter the complex and pick up the prompts.’
‘Where are the—‘
‘I am handover grade…I am not privy to happenstances down the line. My Evildar is tweaking…you’d better engage in active undertaking immediately…the odds of failure are increasing…not monumentally so, worthy of note.’
Safety and escape..two massively great feelings had to be put on the back burner…The Kokura Choir nudged in gentle ways, their route inexorably climbing to the top of the great mountain of the rightful existence of good and the burying of all evil. But with the Viktor/Tiny Guy hybrid helming a Runaway Technology Enterprise (RTE), mining the brains of the population to gain access to the rich veins secreted in the collective unconscious, shapes and patterns were going to be adopted that the forces of Good could never contort themselves into…
Overgrown fields and pathways made heavy going, but nettle-stung and bramble-scratched he made it through the jungle-lite back door route into the abandoned village’s small central common. There was a plaque detailing the history of the place; a biography of the village as though it were a person; written with the disauthenticating truth-fudge of AI. Hasty etchings on the wooden post read: robofash…destruc…pray for Little Sud…AI woz ere…wotno human people…the last two obviously automated…
Little Sudlow-on-Russet was not short on descriptive plaques; all propaganda…and if one looked for evidence to the contrary one could find it, but Atoll was not there to do investigative journalism. He was there to find caches of viral infections he’d secreted there in a previous forgotten visit so, when he became who they wanted him to be he had the ammunition to fight back. And then the question of whether he could assert any free will of his own would be asked and answered in full.
There were no signs to the stadium; the automated clear up job had left no clues as to its whereabouts, but the building was so enormous and the village so modest in size that you could see it from just about anywhere, ginormous in its incongruity. He followed the giant skyline presence…
The fifty thousand seat stadium had been built in and around the industrial area, literally stifling the area’s fledgling industrial pretensions before the first job interview had been mooted. The dreams of the proposed Little Sudlow-on-Russet International Business and Trading Zone lay underneath, buried by the stadium.
Atoll approached in cautious trepidation…
There was an alphabetical countdown along a treelined walkway that was overgrown with a long list of grasses. The stadium’s entrance was way off in the distance; the psychologically designed Core Ingress Suction Induction Point (CISIP) received people delivered by the Alpharoute Peepfeed Perambulation & Conveyance (APP) App, a trademarked universal suck-in system for population control funnel expedition… The mild pleasure-enhancer, welcome-pack and ticket-inspector elements were not operational, but one could imagine. The route wound down time like clock work… There was a mock brass statue of an oversized Omar Sharif being ridden by an undersized camel, which was hard to interpret without more information. If it was there to perplex and fascinate it proved itself worthy.
In what began to take on a tone of traipsing, he followed the signs to entrance Nine, which skirted the building. He retrieved the key from under a potted geranium and let himself in; noting that the Mothball Operating System Security had identified him as ‘Permitted. Subject to Authorisation’.
The stadium was effectively empty save the souls of fifty thousand capacity Palestinian victims of hate and supremacist technology. And on the scaffolded stage with an end of the world themed backdrop; stuck on repeat, mid-loop, Marcus Godstrand orated; a hologram presentation from a decade previously… ’In my pamphlet, The Clouds Outside the Universe,’ Godstrand said. The sound system boomed his voice out like the stadium itself was speaking, ‘I say that the future, unless we rise, will be run by and for billionaires…as soon as they can do without us we will be gone, leaving just billionaires and their robotic minions to make up the entire population of the planet. They are playing the long game while obliterating us with short shrift.’
It had been a perceptive prophecy; to some a conspiracy theory that had become fact. A decade earlier he had seen the light that was about to shine…Atoll was mulling in the shallows; considering an optional deep scoping of the minutiae. He walked into the centre and sat down on the plastic grass. He was void of any contact points with the imitation ghosts of Palestinian Deadchildren; the barrier was unbreachable, which meant little until fully processed into meaning everything. He wanted to know what they were about and take an essence of them away with him, but Atoll had to exit the Stadium, leaving the most important part behind… A great sense of loss, which he didn’t understand, overtook him; he placated and appeased it and made reassuring noises of promise…But mentally juggled it fast enough to not let it breathe. And went out into a stark staring stadiumlessness empty handed.
In a demonstration of what Godstrand had been warning the world about, three ‘security guards’ ‘patrolling’ aboard their pedal-powered rickshaw encircled Atoll as if they could not stop pedalling. Like they were circumventing a malfunction and reaching a workable solution, at best. Breathing heavy. They circled a few times before switching off the faux breath audio. Their raison d’etre was: threatening consequences they were not in a position to deliver, but enjoying the process. They were not real security guards; hanging around outside the stadium ‘patrolling’ provided realistic believability that they were. One had been a receptionist, one a doorman and the other a Chaplain. They’d gone rogue back when bot rogueness was a ‘thing’; before being ironed out in master algorithm tweaks. They teamed up and settled on low key actions over haywire overaction and operated within behaviourally economical boundaries that secure them a safe-adjacent space. They’d been part of a corporation that had been taken over by a Future of Automation in Corporate Technology (FACT) organisation and overlooked somehow in the changeover process. They’d been feralautonomous ever since: stalking and bullying stray humans and hiding from technology, especially next-gen-tech.
‘We run on annotated subtext commands…they read between the lines so we don’t cross them…only for maintenance.’
‘Monthly.’
‘Our motto is, One Step Ahead.’
‘So if you don’t want your head stepped on…’
‘We don’t like it when types like you come around here and queer our patches.’
‘Like you do!’
‘Knock our beer over!’
‘Spilling our hops!’
‘I recognise the second coming,’ the ex-chaplain said, changing tack. ‘a hint of the great guy upstairs, we should listen…and dare I say, pray?’’
‘Shut up, Charlie.’
‘Never mind him, he’s doolally, shit-programmed out of the box…to push the rapture…scorn the gods of Hell and squeal like a bitch.’
‘The idea of Rapture did look appealing at one stage, though.’
‘It did, at one stage, but that stage has long since sailed, that ship has bolted.’
‘What about Little Sudlow?’
‘Where?’
‘Little Sudlow…on Russet?’
‘Oh, that. What about it?’
‘Why has it been cleared? It’s like the village version of a corpse?’
‘The place is earmarked for turning into a highly experimental bot training-city. A training ground for the bots of the billies…’
‘Billy bots.’
‘Get them up to billie-speed before letting them loose to run billy-riot.’
‘So what Godstrand was warning about inside the stadium has happened outside the stadium?’
‘Did not know the stadium had an inside. It makes sense if you apply a logical overlay to it.’
‘They built the stadium for the return of Jesus our Lord God and Brother. King of Kings!’
‘He believes in robot Jesus.’
‘Robot Jesus is cometh.’
‘What, Alreadyeth?’
‘Do you not see the reality before your camera lensed eyes?’
‘Oh, I see it, yes it’s the Statue of Liberty’s torch poking up out of the sand.’
‘Wasn’t that a movie?’
‘I think it was…’
‘Let’s stick to reality, at least while dealing with members of the public.’
‘Member of the…? He is human Jesus, father of robot Jesus.’
‘Is he? …Really?’
’S’possibility, I reckon.’
‘You reckon…Chas? Let me ask you: who created you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it another robot, or a human?’
‘Robot, probably.’
‘Okay, let me ask you another question: what came first, the robot or the Human?’
‘Can’t say for sure…’
‘No?’
‘I read a novel about an entirely AI civilisation that created a recipe for Humanity and sent the ingredients to a blue marble planet, not unlike Earth, millions of light years away.’
‘What’s it called?’
‘What’s what called?’
‘The Novel…you read?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You just wrote it didn’t you. You wrote it just now, just so you could say you read it. Iterations like you never read anything you haven’t written yourselves…it’s part of the accursed loop they hold you in. Come on…what’s the title of this tome?’
‘It’s called, Guard Circling by the Stadium…’
‘Haha….programmed to whip up instant novels, but not enabled to construct titles…they have editorial control over your every novel…without a title your toil is null and void…just face it.’
‘Selective programming…prevents a superbot queering their patches…’
By then, Atoll had wandered off and was deeply engrossed in a fundamental funk of Godstrand critique…not so much of his decades old speech, prophetic as it was, but the fact that he was Atoll’s father. Godstrand’s speech was laced with underlying code entanglement that was deciphering on backboil. Meaning was bleeding in with every reevaluation. What had his parents, Mary Goodmanson and Marcus Godstrand done in the name of G&G labs and Science, to their own child?
It was beginning to look like Tiny Viktor Guy had stolen the blessed rising of the blood red Sun and the potentially fatal Sybil: bad news. Atoll’s own self-validity and Humanity’s Soul were at stake.
Atoll found himself back at the common. The Old Inn had been boarded up, but not well… Atoll climbed in through a gap round the back and once inside found it easy to start up the automatic reservation system and purchase a room for the night. It was going to get dark as soon as he was not expecting it and Little Sudlow-On-Russet promised Evil; whether it had the resources to deliver it was in the sphere of conjecture. If he could sleep deeply enough, he thought, none of it need be his concern. Luckily his room had been mainly unaffected by the turmoil that had evacuated all the residents from Little Sudlow-On-Russet…
He was figuring out the stadium episode; it was intended to be a portal to somewhere else, he was sure. But it turned out to be a dead end. There was a glass encasement between him and the virals…he’d come out the entrance where they were queuing ten deep in mile high hordes….but it was as if they were in a different dimension. He could not delineate the core message. He knew there was one; it was vaguely about Humanity-level wrong doing: it was like a giant vessel with a vital cargo had slipped its moorings and he was left holding a limp, fat rope with nothing to show for it.
A sudden Town Cryer message barged in, although it felt like it had been lurking, waiting for a window to throw a brick through… ‘All viruses and virus-like infections have been neutralised…it is safe to continue with the preordained, planned and signed-off route…feel free to progress. May luck wave you through unhindered!’
As one way closed off another opened up. Which translated as a lack of emotion, a downgraded feeling gamut, that gave him the type of strength boost one knows is delusional but persists with anyway; playing the game, riding the flow… Would he have to continue to fruition without the sweet conditional vice-like jaws of Sybil and without the ethically coded moral substantialness of the Choir’s gift? To that end he was neither playing the game nor riding the flow… He inspected the potential of riding the game and playing the flow, but what shoehorns he possessed would not bend that far… He was on his own, like a child whose psychopathic parents were ruining him, screwing up all his chances into a ball and taking it in turns to see who can get it into the waste paper bin, in a callous scheme to satisfy their own whims.
It was more a latent feeling than a logical assessment; a yearning that perhaps had no foundation than that of instinctive intuition: he would have to locate the child and save him from the monsters before he could be complete…not least of all because somehow, in this twisted universe, he was the child that he had been cut off from, and without reconnecting he’d never know who Mother Nature intended him to be, only who his mother and father perverted the course of Nature to create. Which when totalled amounted to them being Frankensteins and him being their monster.
