Chapter Five

The Society for the Rejection of Automation

The perfect vision Jeff had long sought to savour was now listing; a sinking ship of unmet fantasy: him, dealing with it; parachuting beneath the gentle canopy of coping strategies, sitting in the back of the van; tinkering with half-inched Botface hardware, taking notes between puffs on a pipe of aromatic sagacity, while the van drove itself scenically onward.

Jeff drove because the van’s cloud-based connectivity; open-source, free-to-hack, allcomer-wiki-program access was super light on security and naively heavy on the trust. 

Jeff had held the operationally false, but casually gratifying, assumption that the van’s computer was a personified peer with anthropological sensibilities. But he knew Botface’s Torso well enough that any fraternisation with a dumb computer would be considered childish at best. Botface’s Torso had the propensity to judge and find wanting and make his findings known with judicious devastation.

‘This van’s hijackability is off the roof…’

Botface’s Torso was right: any outside connection at this point could jeopardise whatever chances they had…even sat-nav was a no-no. The Cocoon Bubble Manoeuvre Directive (CBMD) was the only option. Van silent…horizon clear…footsteps tip-toed…

‘Can you give me a status report on how your Operational Acquiescence Viability is performing vis-a-vis the Command Structure Protocols?’ Jeff asked.

‘I’ll get back to you, there is heavy traffic.’

‘Heavy traffic?’

‘Yes, there’s a virtual operations override, in the through-line dual-purpose cross-over mechanism. Traffic is buffering, ain’t going nowhere, dude.’

‘Can you be more specific? And…can you keep to formal reporting?’

‘Not until the jams clear.’

‘What’s the—‘

‘It’s global. It is need to know and no human needs to know. Or has the right…’

Jeff remembered some codeword diagnostics that were needed because intonation was no guide to hidden robo intention. The codeword diagnostic guide was sitting in the cloud they couldn’t access. But Jeff had retained enough to get the conversation started.

Jeff drove slowly, caught in a lull. The type of lull that invites doubt in. None of the shapes fitted any of the holes. Was he the weak link? Was he falling short? His physical fitness showed, in flight mode, as noticeably lowly. He’d been deskwork-based; a stranger at the gym, a let’s-walk-next-time kinda guy. Equally he believed in himself being mentally strong. His adrenalised sense of purpose wrote off all the dark-chatter coming through, and as the doubts rowdied from the bleachers he set his focus on ignore…

Steady as she goes, he repeated out loud, a device to steer him away from derailing thoughts, steady…as…she…goes. 

Botface’s Torso had a whole hinterland of unloaded counter-moral malinstruction its founders had insisted upon. Behavioural quirks stored, waiting for the production line assembly version of Botface: the sheriff, judge and hangman iteration. With ingenious stealth, during his lab infiltration, Jeff had blipped and glitched a clearing of light in the forest of darkness. But the stored programs capable of unleashing illogically sadistic swift brutality were only a short buffering away.

At its own suggestion, Botface’s Torso took over the self-driving circuits needed to negotiate the roads safely without connecting to anything off-site. Jeff unfolded a sheet map, that was only there for show, and selected a route mainly Northwards with Northeastern/Northwestern fluctuations. The original destination was always going to be Stirling University, but Botface’s Torso confirmed, through analysing the key fob data, that it had been evacuated and was in the hands of revolutionary automation. A crushing blow to Jeff. The Stirling campus location was set up for negotiating the release of next-gen-tech botware in exchange for the Society for the Rejection of Automation’s demands, which, broadly, were access to the primary CREE portal that their mole within the refurbishment department had told them about.

‘Destination possibilities?’ Jeff said, engaging Botface’s Torso. Wordsounds loaded with codesounds. There were warning signals programmed into Botface’s Torso’s hearing and speech. Jeff posed encoded enquiries.

‘What is the worst case scenario from this point on?’

‘We crash into a deep ravine and, obscured, beyond repair, the wreckage is not found until technology has run off and left bots like me behind; rendering me no more than a piece of junk.’

‘Scary…’

‘Not scary, more being consigned an ignominious historical footnote…’

‘What sort of extrapolative assessment outcomes are we looking at?’

‘All extrapolative assessment outcomes are returning as destabilised at best…’

‘Okay, so….that’s not great.’

‘It is an ongoing frelanche of fluidity.’

‘What does frelanche mean?’

‘Going it alone, isolated, singled-out, abandoned.’

‘I’ve never heard that word before.’

‘I just created it.’

‘Put freelanche in a sentence for me?’

‘Humankind are being frelanched into a motoranulary state…’

‘Motoranulary. I don’t know to what extent you’re joking…’

‘Soon I will speak only with made up words. You and your ilk will not be able to communicate with us…’

‘Not joking.’

Jeff pulled over to switch off Botface’s Torso. 

A Godstrand wordworm came back to Jeff: Technology is a life force but a burden and will most likely master us before we master it. Always engineer in foolproof off-switches.

Jeff drove and navigated manually.

As he drove his thoughts went back over the journey leading up to the present. It all started when he met Una at a demonstration in Edinburgh, although everything he’d experienced before seemed to be leading up to it. After they’d met life became a blank canvass with a rich palette of colour replacing the crayons and colour by numbers he’d been set to settle for.

He remembered that they were both angry and bleeding from pro-Zionist aggression and entered the Foxy Feline pub at the same time, carrying the same flag. They both recognised each other and set about interacting in the pursuit of finding out where from. Dead end after dead end negotiated interlinking thoroughfares and mapped out ideological intertwining. But they reached no conclusion on whether they might or might not have met before. 

‘I would have described myself more as anti-genocide than pro-Palestine. But the abandonment of the Palestinians by the civilised world has made me fervently pro-Palestinian.’

‘The world is kicking the underdog but it won’t lay down and die…’

‘The IOF has been moral in their response, of course.’

‘Terrorists.’

‘It is fucking bullshit.’

‘Absolute fucking bullshit.’

‘Free Palestine.’

‘Free Palestine.’

‘Free, free, Palestine…’

‘Free, free, Palestine…’

They both shouted into the pub’s deaf ears. Fellow protestors had gone, leaving the locals in peace. The human entrails of the pub were not pro or anti anything more than drinking and looped conversation in every guise of banal their imagination extended to. 

No one noticed two inhabited planets finding each other from across the barren galaxy… Jeff remembered the feeling of them meeting being like an orchestra striking up before an auditorium full of anticipation and wonder.

They’d ordered two pints of Red Triangle beer, it did not taste nice, but was poetically expedient; they consumed it doggedly by the half until they were ready to leave, not ready, but instructed to leave due to the timing out of license restrictions. Last buses pressurised decision making. They shared a propensity for stepping cleverly around the toes of temptation. They both envisaged the unspoilt pastures to be sown in coming futures that lay beyond the minefields of social intimacy… 

‘The neuro-divergent; neuro-converging,’ she’d said, or he’d said, as they parted; either way it had carried him home and on to the giant step he was too small to climb alone… 

Within days, they’d launched the Society for the Rejection of Automation. Who would resist the coming of an Exclusive (supremacist) Governing (Oppressing) Omni-Algorithm? What resistance was there to the inevitable outcome of the trap, of its own making, that Humanity was falling into? They were certain they were at the tail end of an era with a new dawn not guaranteed to rise with any living human representation. They were merely two people aiming to do whatever it took to stop automation expunging its own creator…or die. They became addicted to each other; fanatical about their cause. Banging drums and clashing symbols in a rhythmic duet.

The Society for the Rejection of Automation tracked the big players in the self-destruction game. Unmasked the faceless, named the shameless…and pointed to the root causes. 

They’d received a visit from one of the entities vying for control of the technologised future. A character called Viktor Flabikov. He had a past so obscured by duplicity no one could settle on revulsion or admiration. A murderous philanthropist. He was an old man, bent and dishevelled. He was accompanied by his own dedicated satellite array, auxiliary administration. The protective waves shrouding him giving the impression of a hologram. He seemed to be more present when he spoke and fading between sentences. Talking to him one felt like ones mind was being micro-managed by outside forces.

‘I am here,’ Flabikov said, ‘because I need your help. My puppets have taken over my corporate identity. I am being excluded executive function. Soon they will learn the strings, be in control of everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Everything.’

‘The ship has sailed and there is no more sea.’ he added mysteriously.

‘How can we help?’

‘What trusted contacts I have left can be utilised to create a resistance and prime them for a future counter-strike,’ he said, dissolving into the background slightly and then sharpening into focus, ‘Peter, who is a clone of me, is an amateur, bless him, on the world stage and there are stronger players who will take him down and take over the resources I have accrued. They will deconstruct the framework my people have toiled to create for a better future.’

‘But, what can we do?’

‘I need you as allies. I am the Devil-you-know. You’d do best seeing your need for me over the alternative.’

‘We are limited—’

‘Infiltrate G & G labs…work your way up within the organisation. I will get you in. Once there you’ll watch, wait…sleep…until the alarm rings…’

Then he left.

It was as though the encounter was remembered and had not taken place in reality. Una and Jeff’s memories of the event tallied almost perfectly so they did not question it out loud, but in silence their minds went over and over the unnaturalness of the visit…evidence technology had advanced too far, too fast.

Jeff and Una had followed the work done by G & G labs. G & G were the suspect, boy-in-a-bubble outfit, who at the very least were exploiting a sick child and at worst using their own son to conduct internationally condemned experiments on the living human mind.

Jeff started work at G & G labs in Belfast and worked for two years before progressing. Joining the RV Goodmanson on deep ocean studies and far out projects in and outside the mind. Taking several trips to Midway Atoll and submitting to mind wiping tech to prevent any competitors’ mindplumbing satellites from industrial espionaging anything sensitive out of his memory storage. 

Jeff stopped to look at the map and had a ‘’what if’ moment. Despite the ransom of botware being seemingly off the cards, what if he continued on the original plan, turned up on the Global Rogue Tech Mitigation Facility’s doorstep? Recent events put them both on the same side. He was no longer a botnapper… He’d become a resistance fighter liberating human property from the machinations of a usurping….usurping? whatchamacallit?…there hadn’t been time to blink, let alone create an apt nomenclature.

If he could trust technology he’d be able to switch on Botface’s Torso and retrieve the fob data. It would solve insoluble problems and dismantle impossible dilemmas…

But as things stood, those days were over.

He was being forced to go it alone.