Chapter Eight
Wondermental Timeout
Una and code formed a solid lifelong relationship from the very first moment they met; there was something about the truth hidden within a deliberately constructed white lie, as she saw it, that buzzed her souldeep with dynamic vitality. Una’s unconscious processing stayed up late; toiling over words and word adjacent instances. A great oak heavily abundant with acorns could create a storm of scorn and appear to her inner mind abundantly as corn. The trade off with her genius with words was that she was numerically deficient; number dumb. Relatively simple mathematical calculations only ever built a make shift cabana on shifting sands.
In every day life it never came to anything; it was merely a word train hitting the buffers ad infinitum. But all those dead ends added up to a vast plain of opportunity; all those brain-hours vainly working on non-existent conundrums added up to a skilfully adept orientation to the world of code. Even before the SRA was formed and things got doubly serious, her interest in the G & G CREE project was endowed with an understanding shared by few experts in the field. She had average memory for anything other than what she perceived as code; on the code front her memory was photographic.
She was being insinuated into her new world; Atoll’s mind world, within the collective minds of the Hosts…a consistent code integration was constantly being unconsciously exchanged…only her and Jeff had a good enough understanding of Fictional Narrative Programming (FNP).
There was that…and, also:
Behavioural mundanity and robotic repetition were the keys to upward fluidity. This new environment was limited in depth but infinite in the way that depth could be explored and adopted. As it was, she found herself, at first, in an enclosed area, you could call a room, in which there were sort of people doing sort of stuff…in a sort of processing space… She looked it over and decided it would become a mailroom.
Over the years she’d formed an idea of what her space within a mind within minds would look like; in many variations. Not that she really thought it would ever come to pass. Work, mixed with time, came up with a final arrangement; the real fantasy version: spartan, workpersonlike, practical, efficient. She used dream-reality shift-patterning, transmorphing techniques and personified the amorphous entities carrying out the admin tasks.. She created a personhood for them that had an ongoing biographical outcome of logical simplicity…
Data came in, in a leaky way…data was processed with a faux expedience. It wasn’t yet being called for…and that was what she wanted to cut off at the shaft…her job was to take over the incoming requirements of the information processing hub. Only the ease by which her intent unfolded gave her cause for trepidation. There were enemies out there and if they had not made themselves known, they were hiding; drawing out her paranoia; controlling her narrative…attempting to.
Her continual proactive stance and her obsessive over-coding was maintaining executive managerial control.
Una created a form for application to the memory banks for access to the hidden vaults protected by Agnosticised Blind-Coded Disparabolation (AB-CD). She wanted to access Atoll’s memory from the years he was being worked on by G & G laboratories; the years when the idea of an autonomous takeover was science fiction; restricted to circles of inwardly burdened fantasy-fanatics (burdfans).
Her task was to understand Atoll better than he understood himself; to access Atoll’s own memories which were only supplied to him on a need to know basis…and try somehow to divert; convert his programming from the elitist direction it was set to to a more inclusive one. Una felt invasive; parasitical even…she was there as Atoll’s future programmer, overwriting the pre-programmed and the current-programming algoristics.
It was a best-of-three rock, paper, scissors that decided; she was the hijacker and Jeff was the hostage-taker. They were both law-abiders by ancestry and upbringing; necessity became the mother of intervention once the cat of technology was out of the bag of human self-destruction. They had tried to dismiss the idea they were a Tech Era Bonnie and Clyde. But however much they riddled the persistence of the idea with holes, it just kept coming at them like they were Butch and Sundance…
Una discovered, in information Atoll possessed, but had no access to, something that confirmed what she suspected; that all sugar had been spiked during the refining process, and dummy cloned at a cellular level to make it undetectable. All consumers of refined sugar underwent Chemically Adaptive Territory Facilitation Loading and Plausibilisation Sovereignty (CATFLaPS) when activated by Teaser Enervator Remote Recall Ovular Reactionalisation Sublimation (TERRORS) that were hidden in processed fats. When the TERRORS came the CATFLaPS swung into action. Their diet made the fat and sugar consuming populace mind-control ready. Their minds freely accessible to the Personhood Inhibiting Mind-Paralaxation Process (PIM-PP).
Atoll was always intended to be the only Beholder at this point. But the acceleration of plutomilitary access to G & G data and their legal right to copy and interfere; all areas accessed, meant the SRA had to move fast to get Una ingested into the system; and, at just the right time not to disturb the unnatural order of things. The only advent making this possible was the intervention of the Singularising Next-Gen-Tech (renamed: Nowtek.) To do this they had sold out to a monster that ate Humans for breakfast…
She kept seeing herself as a bronze statue in a city park. Sometimes, Jeff was part of the same casting; other times he was merely mentioned in passing; bracketed on her explanatory plaque. She was becoming someone else…tried to grip on to an old piece of herself without ripping the fabric of her identity. She recalled Godstrand’s lectures at the Future of Next-Gen-Tech Festival in Edinburgh; the year it incorporated a comedy & the arts festival entirely populated by robot comedians and artists…as she held open a door; he passed through on his plotted course to a boon laden life of history making…he’d said: ‘Most people in the West live their lives as rabbits; weighing down their ears in the vain hope of becoming hares.’ And of course she took it personally…she’d had to take a wondermental time-out in the washrooms… This reminiscence was so real it sucked in all her conscious currency; she had to remind herself it was due to the effects of her positioning, and it would be easy for her to succumb to living in her memory and remaining there stuck…so she deliberately and precisely exited the fabricated washrooms, not into the convention centre but to the warren of corridors that, with intention, led to the office suite containing the mailroom. On the way back, Una reminded herself why she was there…it was her ineffable suction to principles of fairness for all. What her father had, inadequately, called a Jesus complex…
She had no visuals on the CREE space, but there were written reports on Atoll’s progress, which Una read to keep up to date…scanning them with a yearning to detect the arrival in the CREE world of another entity; who would be Jeff… he had top level code-conversancy…if he was there, she knew, he would let her know… They’d lived together in an exclusive world of code in a time before paraworlds were more than mere concepts…
Reports from upstairs painted a world being paved with progress.
Atoll had built a hallway that led out into a temporary yard made partly from what you’d expect to see in a high street, and was sitting on the over-crafted doorsteps he’d been working on, waiting for Kirk. He didn’t have to wait, but he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Kirk, who had the weight of something heavy behind him; unpredictable, heavy and potentially nemesisian. Kirk, as a world actor, was still falling into Atoll’s defining category of mission contingency and no plan could be forged, regarding his adoption or disposal, until he had finished falling. It was a matter that Atoll needed to sleep on…
Kirk, for his part, never slept. Sleeping had not been programmed into him. Kirk hung upside down in a cupboard feigning sleep to fill the long gaps taken up by Atoll’s persistent staccato of non-awakeness. This was never explained…it just felt like it didn’t need explaining…except when it did, it became inexplicable. Which pointed towards code, but offered no further clues.
‘Today we push back walls, open up vistas and roll out the red carpet…’ Atoll said, when he heard Kirk clumping down the stairs. He’d pre-audiolised the words but added the ‘red carpet’ bit for no apparent reason other than seeking to make grand, which was jumped on by Kirk.
‘Red carpet?’
‘I just threw that in. In reality we need to be sparing with the red,’ Atoll added, regretting the ‘red carpet’ slip.
‘Too right…there’s a time for blood and it is not now… Listen, I had an idea, maybe we should create a drinking establishment, or three, a place, or places, of repute, none of it ill, maybe a bit. I was visited by an angel…that sounded different in my head…and we both agreed, we don’t want any of the, “It’s a Wonderful Life” crap of abstinent pomposity and moral riches…you can be leery and recalcitrant without corporate capitalistic control screwing with your every move. And…my thought was that then we could maybe socialise with each other and breed that familiarity we so obviously require for unfettled forwardness…’
‘It’s “unfettered”…and don’t they say that “familiarity breeds contempt?”’
‘They do… But does it though? If you think about it?’
‘In the main—’
’In every case, though, but? We are in exceptional times are we not? Against the grape and the grain, one thing can mean another and other things mean other things, but not necessarily in the configuration one would expect…’
Atoll wished there was something he could take to dampen the rising contempt he was feeling for Kirk…
‘We need a golf club-cum-firing range,’ Kirk said.
The concept of a booze and smoke emporium was floated and soon became unsinkable…splitting icebergs to a frosty crumble and negotiating the niptickling bows and sterns of a Festival of Buoyancy Regatta…
‘Don’t tell anyone but we could make it a Speakeasy kind of place.’
Kirk had Davish ideas about boozers that he wasn’t sure he really wanted but felt he would be stuck with in an R & R scenario, that could be summed up in one word: brothelesquetweakerbatingerosenseful.
While, a way off, Atoll had hologramic mirages of mid-pacific bars, military diners, route 66 and nineteen-fifties airbrushed wives…mixed with no idea at all, that he endeavoured to keep out of Kirk’s judgement zone.
They both edged their way along the soft and hard shoulders of discussion…planting fruit, stretching boundaries they’d just made; deciding to stop when they both had eyes on a social establishment that was not too blurry that their vision faltered. They came up with an, agreed upon, secret tunnelling, just between them…then whatever happened; however taken over the technology became, there would always be a refuge for them and their trustworthy inner circle…
The immediate environment outside the front door had been conjured up from a newly hatched window and was extensive from the upstair perspective, but needed work to suggest reality up to the level the world demanded; bit by bit the scene unfolded revealing a barren land with construction sites. Atoll had been shown AI’d photographs of the early construction days of Las Vegas and other cities…
Atoll remembered he was meant to be the boss…
Atoll mumbled indecipherable fragments of internal thoughts to himself regarding the possibility of creating some kind of prison, or hospital, he could quarantine Kirk in to get a better view of how things were supposed to be and not how they had turned out. He didn’t know yet what a threat Kirk could be, but he should not even be there, no one had given warning specifics, he came under a general threat heading… And the fear of the new world becoming a network of wetwipebrothellinos and alcodenhousedives due to the input of an unplanned visitor seemed counterproductive…tempting…but counterproductive. Then the sleep came and Una opened up a vein of influence…he began hearing stuff he didn’t want to hear; stuff that, nevertheless, answered many questions…
Una had begun hearing recordings from subdued memory cues and assumed, in a momentary lapse of reality, that her ears must be growing. She spent some self-gathering moments back in the washrooms at the convention centre, in wonderment, maybe even moongazing.
When she got back to the mailroom she reacquainted herself with developments; it looked as though the CREE’s working narrative had taken a sharp turn and disappeared over a precipice…
Who Atoll really was and what he was programmed to actually do began to unfold. Only, it was less like unfolding, more like unwinding a bloody bandage.
