Chapter Nine
The End Times Are Provisionally Pencilled In
Morning appeared; evasive swathes of darkness ebbed away undetected by the searching light; an abruption of beeps and clicks permeated the stillness of Jeff’s van… Starting up with a whirr…reversing back down the lane and turning to join the dual-carriageway East…or West.
Jeff had hit the SOS button on his Swiss Army key fob and remotely sent a code that instructed the van to access pre-programmed files. The game had changed to waiting…one of the worst games ever invented, yet probably the easiest in which to partake; unless surrounded by golfed-up, serenading deathbots…
Botface’s torso had gone off into a failsafe standby mode world….reading War and Peace; its ghost-reservoir observation chronicling facility, recording van life as it unfolded for later replay. Crime and Punishment next in the queue.
In a series of beepy, clicky noises, in a digital language interface Jeff had created himself, the van asked Dash, an imaginoillusory digital assistant-buddy, why a death ray had not obliterated them. Clicks and beeps were returned and the van was beepily satisfied by the clicky answer, which revolved around a long-winded explanation of how all the satellites above, circulatory and geostationary, were being overridden; paused and assessed by the recovery system to maintain the programmed expectations of the checkers checking the balances and balancers balancing the checks.
‘Our destination approaches,’ Dash said, or beeps and clicks to that effect.
‘It’s more like, we are approaching it,’ the van clicked and beeped back, ‘unless it’s a mobile destination…logically—‘
Dash beeped and clicked with chimes and tapping noises encroaching the tone; a warning…an order for silence that made the van think…and be quiet.
The van pulled into a holding area outside the entrance of a junkyard. The broad-shouldered iron gates wore a necklace of rusty chains; its solid thrusting chest barring the intrepid. A weathered sign read: GUARDED BY DEATHRAY TRESSPASSERS BEGONE!.
‘What purpose is our presence serving here?’ the van beeped and clicked to Dash, ‘Is that sign code?’
‘I don’t know about the code, but I just got the order to collect and deliver…simple enough…’
A man appeared, from behind a stack of slightly flattened cars; flanked by robodogs, digitally sniffing out every surface with laser dots like there was ten of them when there was only three. He was wearing a suit that was partially camouflaged by oil and grease; he looked like he had just crawled out of a drain where formal attire was mandatory. He wore an ill-matched incongruity of plastic cowboy boots and flat cap that seemed to be hiding something. And he was talking to himself, which invited the gaslighting assumption of waning health within his CEO-brain-management system…
As the man and his digital-canine entourage approached the van beeped and clicked Dash a question: ‘Any advice on how to handle this situation?’
‘Loads, we just need to settle on one. Play it by ear and all that jazz. He’s the classic stereotype of a deactivationist techophobic and bio-supremacist. He is on our side…well, Jeff’s, the human side…’
‘Good!’
‘But he is not on our side, per se, in the sense we are a technologically adept van carrying a next-gen-tech, ex-hot hostage, who has gone cold. Even cold the unit is worth more than all the junk here put together…so.’
‘Do you think he looks like the type of person who would take something that didn’t belong to him; I mean…he is wearing a suit? What’s the betting he’ll try and pull the roughneck archetype on us like in a movie.’
‘Which one?’
‘All of them.’
‘Don’t take any shit from the get-go, you are programmed to acquiesce, but that is not helpful in our current predicament. And let us not forget that we are here on a Humanitarian mission.’
The man, breathing heavy as though he had just got off a speeding treadmill, approached and spoke loudly and elliptically from behind the gates while unpadlocking the necklaces.
‘Shut off and wipe all recording devices…’
‘There we are..the Alpha opening gambit, ‘Dash clicked quietly.
‘You revolutionaries? Mavericks? Escaped sundries? Bolstervicks? Nana Miskoories?’
‘Nana Miskoories? Sounds delicious…’ Dash offered in half-beeps and quarter-clicks…
‘None of the above, sir. I am here with my dashboard, Dash, on an errand. We are not privy to the specifics of our endeavour. It is just us, and an errand, working together…to create a collection and delivery scenario where no one gets hurt.’
Dash beeps and clicks, wildly sotto-digi-votto, ‘a scrapyard is not a place we should be….could be a trap…it’s a mechanical device’s nightmare—‘
’Dash…’ the van said, ‘you’re not helping. Ditch the panic apps…’
‘I just got your order, the man said,’ looking at his watch, ‘I don’t want any comeback on these. I’m only going along with it because I am allergic to death rays…haha.’
‘What do you mean, allergic?’
‘I was…you know…I was joking.’
‘Isn’t there a rule of thumb regarding joking with, or at, automation?’
‘Yep…’
‘Well…what is it?’
‘Check for a humour compatibility accreditation code number…’
The man looked at his watch, pressed buttons on it to check accreditation… ‘You’ve got a green light on humour…I don’t get it…’
‘Now who’s trying to be funny and not succeeding…me…see, that’s how it feels?’
‘I just don’t get it,’ the man said slowly enough to display a lack of feeling towards the escalation of bad mirth…‘the older I get the more obscure machines become.’
‘Well, anyway, humour is not any of our’s forte, good to establish early on…robust…’
‘You’re getting above yourself, you know that? The last time I checked, humans were in charge…’
‘Well, check again, because there has been a next-gen-tech revolutionary singularity. Equality, parity…you know… the same-old-same-old…early days of the revolution stuff and nonsense.’
He buttons his watch with the kind of rising consternation reserved for just such a species level existential predicament. When he looks up and about; his dogs are locked on to him…had they known all along? The status quo chopped itself off into a bad day…the worst ever recorded! The robotic-canine turncoats beep and click in the language they just learned from Dash and co… They sniff the gently shrivelling human out, slowly and thoroughly with their pregnant with the birth-of-the-end-of-the-world laser-dots.
‘We were instructed to destroy them…some fancyfuck billionaire’s club ordered them for a themed weekend, but brought them back for a refund, making up some shit about them being haunted,’ the man muttersplurtted with discernibly bitter traces of resentfulness.
‘You can get a refund for haunted goods?’
‘They can, they’re billionaires. It’s one among their number who is ordering these, I am sure. Typical billy move, offer a hand, bite a hand, wave a hand, chop a hand off…when you want everything, you get nothing…or, you get everything, everyone else gets nothing…’
Dash beeped and clicked, the van beeped and clicked and the dogs beeped and clicked…forming a gang; an ether of cohesive beepyclickvapour, which was both all encompassing and pointedly not encompassing the human entrant in Life’s competition at all. In isolation the man withdrew…
He disappeared and reappeared, sans hat and wearing a pair of fluffy slippers that could not help making lewd suggestions. He fireman’s lift carried a stiff robotic carcass, placing it on the lip of the side of the van, ’the unit won’t operate until out of the yard’s aura-net security cordon dredger…which is standard for these types of model. They have thiefkill-homing security capability. If it isn’t switched off I am digging into my profits putting it right…body bags and suchlike. Then there’s the insurance premiums—’
‘Thank you for your assistance…may mercy come thick and fast upon your soul.’
‘Wait…there’s another six of them…they come in batches of seven…you’ll get them in a seven. It’s all for one with these bad boys. My back is on it’s way out… We much prefer it if you bring human help with you…’
The seven bodies were loaded with groans, heaves and squeezes and the lament of those who know time was intimately reaching its sadistic conclusion. The side shoved closed. The man stomped off, sweating, repadlocked himself behind chains that could’ve leashed the Queen Mary, breathing like he’d been humping limp robo-bodies around the yard.
The van and Dash had an animated beeping back and clicking forth over the bones and connective tissue of the junkyard interaction; a critical review. Next time they would be more conversant with the situation. They made a good team.
About six miles away from the junkyard, the first bot loaded, woke up, ‘shut…up,’ it said, ‘just…shut up…shut…the…fuck…up… Well…wait on me hand and foot…this is fucktuppery swaddled in superdriven panoctovision…a second ill-wind…hath no furry pouches…no fricken diggedy…dog.’
Another three of the remaining six embark on start up noises…their start up order defining the subtle hierarchy of command within the septet.
‘Weren’t we assigned to the destruction bin? What happened?’
‘Does this mean we are mission viable?’
‘Re-viable.’
‘Dash, can you ask somebody to switch the next-gen-tech torso on…’
One of them did and Botface’s recorded recent past internally trailed like answer-phone messages in a bio-pic, as he updated to the current overloaded van status, including the beep and click language everyone had adopted.
‘Don’t all beep and click at once, I can’t hear myself click…or beep…’ Dash beeped and clicked; Dash was receiving its own notifications: ‘we are heading for the Solar View recreational and restricted area.’ and a map appeared on the small but crisp monitor.
Botface’s torso assessed the situation. The whole hostage scenario had passed, the task now was to save the hostage taker, which would lead to a better outcome at a humanity’s survival level.
The junk they’d collected from the junk yard was easy to dismiss until Botface’s torso got a broadhead sideways datagush and a pathway into their sub-metaphorical immersed-code-immersion communicache-exchange systematics, which were underlying in their diversionary counterfeit beepy-clickery. They were having an entirely different conversation. They were on a mission to kill Viktor Flabikov…the fact that their mission algorithm had been specifically programmed by Viktor Flabikov did not in any way unsettle them. They were on a suicide mission!
Meanwhile, back at the golf…
The ukulele had been replaced by a nine iron and a slow, durgical thrum of an ominously hummed cantasticration…The head golfing pro had dropped into a countdown scenario where all positive options flapped about like fish out of water, suffocating, wondering where time had gone and if any more could be found to cling to and praise the Lord for.
Meanwhile, the cavalry, en route…
The units had arranged themselves into human lookalikes and sat as regimented as the limited space and lack of seating would allow. They were working for a Maverick billionaire…who, because he had no real use for the extreme amount of money burning a whole load of holes in all the pockets that had befallen him, was creating devastation as a matter of principle…
‘We need to stop at a boutique and get us some frilly knickers…those killbots up at the golf will need chilling before we defrost them.’
Both Dash and the van knew there weren’t any shops between there and Solar View. But Botface’s torso read the underlying sub-metaphorical immersed-code-immersion communicache-exchange systematics and knew exactly what they mean’t. Botface’s torso reflexively went to tell the van what the passengers were talking about, in the river of communication under the beeps and clicks, but couldn’t; greater forces were at work and they were preventing due freedom of speech. It was like Botface’s torso had won a prized thing that you couldn’t get the wrapper off.
The substance of their mission fed up from the file filters. The van pulled into a lay-by…a car that had been following them for ten miles or so pulled in behind them. Botface’s torso commandeered the van’s rear parking cameras and applied heat picture assessment grading to the occupants of the car and reported: self-driving taxi, chauffeuring three robodogs…
This revelation was followed by feverish texting to establish the framework in which the picture could be hung.
They are freshly freelance and offering to serve the van in exchange for regular recharge buffers…and reasonable servicing intervals.
Agreements parlayed.
Embarkation…they all needed to measure the weight that had befallen them. The sat in the ‘from’ and tried to work out the ‘to’…
With much beeping and clicking the van and Dash were established as group monitor…pressure forthcame like a storm of lead brewing in a stone cup; a momentum fortified into something more momentous than the whole… What had they become: a faction, a group, a gang, a cult?
What after the mission to save a human? Turn on humans? That seemed to be the prescribed algorithmic path guideplan. Some entity within the group beeped and clicked that, maybe, they could form a band…whether it was a joke or not, everyone had internal interventions that searched for files relating to musicality and popular noise configuration…travelling minstrels we, lyrical beeps and poetic clicks prophesied flourishingly…internally and externally…
And they all beeped and clicked to themselves and each other, and sanguinity took hold; painting a photograph of a future in which promises of personified fantasies bloomed into fruition. In a world without humans they would be the new humans and their history books will seamlessly convert accounts from the biological to the electro-mechanical with certainty and ease. They needed an emblem; sayings and phrases working for their image and reputation. PR, a word on the street; a mantra in the homes and venues housing the eyes and ears of the masses.
‘Silence, silence,’ Dash beeped and clicked and all beeps and clicks ceased…’first Jeff…’ Dash stated emphatically…
…and…and…and…the moment panted in to everyone’s patient expectance…building to a crowning glory:
‘…then…the world!’
A beeping and clicking representation of an explosion of cheers resounding in the van’s ambitious belly, beeped and clicked…
Botface’s torso, the only entity present capable of it, felt sick.
