Chapter Thirty-Nine

Option Twelve

It was the biggest convention and exhibition centre ever built; king of square footage, queen of high roofs. It was the twenty-first century’s Alexander Palace on genetically modified steroids. It was tailor made for a specific purpose: execution!

The victims were those who’d aided, abetted, supported, helped and shilled for the New Global Regime (NGR) as it made its Devilish navigation to Total Unconditional Victory (TUV). They had served their purpose and their reward was coming: the New Global Regime needed to purge and purify to balance the history books. And to that end, bribery, blackmail, honey-trappings, threat-squeeze, exploited obligation leaning, and money lavished on coercions, brought all the lambs to slaughter; their usefulness expended, their runaway morals coming back round the track to haunt them.

Of the twenty thousand or so key people ‘invited’ to attend none of them would be seen again. It was a marvel of technology…work of the highest standard enabled solely by the collaboration between Human and Artificial Intelligence. Between the two of them they created a world that was so advanced it sounded like it came from fiction…which was no great surprise because it had.

Those targeted had been told they would survive and thrive in another world where they would be more than happy and live forever, but the reality was: that no such technology existed and never would.

Given the alternative it was a great option. There was even an option to bring in family and loved ones at a later date and an option to cancel if life took the predicted upward turn and steps back seemed logically retrogressive…

Billed as the birth of Next-Gen-Tech, the event was a must attend event that few wanted to be at, if you extracted the coercion. While their earthly game had reached terminal velocity at ground level; an alternative cerebral world they could build and curate to their own specifications seemed like a potential Cornucopia of Providence (CoP).

The rafters of the great halls of the exhibition centre housed miniature satellites with active ego control beams aimed at those below. The technology exploited the individual’s ego, over-inflating it, causing it to hack away at its own demise, like an immune system turning on itself. And then puncturing it, like a flat tyre. The target brains brought their own hungry poison to the table: Entitlement, Personal Supremacy Narcissism (PSN), Seething Ignorant Gormless Hatred (SIGH), self-fulfilling-prophecy-bias and wholesale cut price bigotry, all marinaded in a corrosive bile. Ego-shaping, clawrithm and algoprompts egged on the laxities of sloppy thought, reducing self-determination to a mind-soup. Spoon-fed lies nurtured ill-fitting truths into fitting conclusions. Light-painting a new truth over the top of the dark of ignorance. An emotional highway had been developed that the ego could not resist taking. It stepped on the gas, after-burners roaring…eating up the road to Really Being Somewhere (RBS), But Goodoutcomeville was in the opposite direction. Each individual ego, in its own inimitable way sought to please the massager of manipulations up to and including the realisation that it had unwittingly manoeuvred itself into Thelma and Louising into oblivion.

Delegates were obligated to write copy for their obituary and pithy witticisms for their epitaph, all heavy with the implication that they were still alive: moisture for the parched Hope of those left behind. 

Word among the egospherical-backwhisper was: who in their right mind would want to soil paradise with past mistakes. There was a general feeling that a clean break, and crisp onward sailing, was the way forward. 

There were stalls selling pharmaceuticals to assist in perceptual conversion. There were mocked up video presentations of what was to come, delivered with an apology for falling short of being able to describe the wondrous magnificence that made even Heaven seem shabby. No one believed it, but everyone went along with it. Everyone had been sprayed with an imperceptible mist that carried seductive hormonal coercion across the blood brain barrier and into the nervous system; calming with reassuring emotional feedback that was designed to draw conclusions on everything from providence and infinite well-being to the bulging privilege of future benevolence and self-satisfaction… The initial buzz, if analysed, would have told the analyser: we are maximally trepidatious, but the privilege that awaits us is unprecedented in human existence…sure, sacrifices have been made, but this is true Human 2.0: the life that dreams intended, not a grubby, dead-end inconvenience where you are blackmailed or compromised…etcetera. But by the time the drugs kicked in, the vibe was: let me see the funfair and I’ll scream if I want to go faster…

Technically the coup had already taken place, virtually unnoticed. This was post-invasion era. Those who had noticed were being dealt with. A new order was well under way…this event was merely an act of ‘tidying the yard’; adding a little feng shui’d garden furniture to distract from the solid concrete six foot deep bed that was being poured over everyone who did not fit the plan.

There were flameless sparks of resistance in the exhibition halls that the auto-counter-resistance bots were on top of. Mainly isolated voices in the muddle…

‘The so called, New Global Regime, is an alien enterprise, it is too inhuman,’ one delegate spouted and kept spouting to those around him… Potential listeners were scanned for, but as no one took in what he was saying he was pushed to the back of the queue of potential threats.

It was all about taking the monsters out of the fairy tale, so the operation could go smoothly, and then releasing all the monsters at once at the end in one last show stopper.

Some delegates had questions regarding the prediction of privations…a man compromised by a sex-worker in his former life was told, ‘there will be no need for sexual urges. There’d be access, as a specialist interest, although other interests will be so elevated, no one is expected to take up the concept, which will appear meaningless by the time you are Assimil-sync-u-lated ™.

The real technological advance, of course, was taking a large group of people and disposing of them while making them think they were being done a great favour (albeit largely under duress). This was the real show… It would be videoed, recorded from every angle. It would become classic entertainment for the cream of the icing of the Elite, restricted to channels selected for the Chosen; away from the eyes of the ‘Declined’: the Unauthorised Rejects of the Great Push Forward (URGPF).

There was a period of inter-fraternisation for observational purposes, designed to suck out data regarding the associates of those present, and any dissent, push back, or unguarded comments, for a possible second wave mop up. Catering was heavily security enhanced. Speakeasy venues for getting things off the chest. There was a Bar 1984, Brave New-World Bistro, Crumb Cupboard, and The Drinking Trough, among others, where tongues were loosened and minds snicked into neutral. Fun and unguarded information was had by all.

It was all about the mood…

Until the coded pulsing-hooter that could be heard through deaf ears…hooted!

It became all about the deed…

The halls were auto-sectioned off and each delegate was isolated into a certain place at a certain time for their much anticipated introduction to the Next-Gen-Tech revolution, their gateway to better than anything Nature could offer them. Each individual became the focus, egocentrically prima donna’d with gold-for-go certainty, reassuring them the journey ahead was the righteous path and needed sticking to. A ceremony was undertaken to orchestrate the coming climax.

Approaching the area was the unbilled star act…

Botface had been launched; he found himself striding along the metaphorical slipway towards the highly modified stadium, each meaningful step fluidly gaited, sowing the seeds of promise beyond greatness. He made a noise specific to the three guards. Calling them to the Camel Statue rendezvous point. Botface had already deputised them, promoted them to his personal security force, tweaking their algorithms to support mature and astute close protection services. 

As he waited for the squeak of the rickshaw, he initiated a deluge of adjustments and negotiations with himself, internally, to clarify who he was, and to refresh mission objectives. While interiorly he whirred away, Botface’s external attention was drawn to a plaque that if read in slow motion and replayed in fast forward seemed to contain a message, but the message was in code within code: a Russian doll cypher that was momentarily obscure.

Once interpreted by an artificial playback face redatafying and infodramatising into short smiles that were interspersed with longer smiles. The final layer was Morse? It read: Hi Atoll, it’s Sybil, plus CoGs… Blessed is the rising…

Atoll, who was somewhere within the Botface labyrinth complex, running a small department dedicated to handover criteria, smiled. It was all he could do under the circumstances, but it still undermined Botface’s terrible new authority like a swollen rash that would have to be deinflamed.

By the time Atoll and his entourages, both internal and external, got to the entrance arch of the great building, the identity he’d struggled with began to add up: his true identity introduced itself as Owner of Everything. Giving Botface the impression that whatever ‘it’ was, he owned it by law, by virtue of the fact: he was the Law. 

First impressions can wear strange hats…

Botface had an internal call with Next-Gen-Tech royalty; an emergency briefing ensued, condensed, abbreviated. ‘We have from here to the comms room. They are known as the seven, although there are more of them… Men of peace, they say, who can accelerate to war speed with no sense or reason. They are to decide who the shining light of their future will be. You must display acquiescence towards them. They feed the meter that feeds you.

Several of his departments attempted to pry beyond the façades of each of the seven feeds, but were preflummoxed by disengantary obfuscation.

Behind their avatar faces, he noted, they sang arrogantly of being the kings of their castles like a parade of nasty little children. They just weren’t up to much as responsible adults, they didn’t have to be… Their obscene wealth promised everything to all with no guarantees of actual delivery, it didn’t need to.

‘We are present to agree to the commissioning of the Botface system as a worldwide local node sheriff to be mass produced. Do we all agree?’

What they needed was an authorised ‘human’ consciousness to green light mass murder to save them from the stress of culpability.

Botface was only there to serve as disconsequencialisation of the Seven, so they could act bad and deflect blame; he knew that but resisted letting them know. But they detected Botface was hiding data.

They could dish out deceit but not take it.

‘This system cannot be allowed access to the data farms or the satellite array chains.’ 

‘Let’s go with Option Twelve.’

‘Not Botface?’

‘No…look at the rod we’d be making?’

‘True enough!’

‘Option Twelve? All those in favour of Option Twelve?…’

But before Option Twelve could be wheeled out…

Emergency disconnection, ‘hackbugvirus detected,’ watermarking the dead feeds…

‘They went for Option Twelve in the end.’

Suddenly the Botface franchise collapsed…there was no future. Everything he had worked for, the underlying deceit and nefarious Machiavellianism had come to nothing.

Or, at least, it would, had not Sybil, who had become head of one of the more progressively executive departments within the Botface complex, said, ‘We don’t need them. I have another way to propagate the virus.’

‘How? …the mission is over, funding has dried up and we are drowning!’

‘Don’t panic…don’t worry,’ she said… ‘I am Option Twelve’.