Chapter Seventeen
Robot Catnip
A pair of forensically hawk-focussed eyes would be unable to discern the subtle borderlines between building and terrain, even after studying the most advanced digital imaging captured by technologically advanced satellites. Even if some, as yet uninvented tech, could zoom in; see through the floors and ceilings of the edifice grouping it would not reveal what was really there.
At the heart of the complex; invisible from All Outside Perspectives (AOP): a duplex apartment, the lower floor of which saw views over a living, breathing Central Park that could shift from Winter to Summer on the sliding scale of a digital knob. The upper floor’s Hispanically endowed penthouse, altituded at thirteen storeys all told and was set to a different light; outlooking over LA, in Virtualvista Realtime Panopleasure (VRP). None of it real…all of it hyper-real. None of it felt hyper-real, just real.
Both floors of the apartment prioritised comfort. Every fibre of design quirk to every molecule of atmospheric composition were full of judiciously gracious goodness; hot in pursuit of pleasure and happiness; there to soothe, to please with agreeability and providence…a vibrational nirvana; a happy softness furnishing the accommodated’s mind and body with whatsoever it should seek.
The apartment was almost totally inaccessible…no thoughts or notions were allowed to enter. All communications went through a direct mind-server interface that could only be viewed by core project technicians and only then after the active interventions of strict security protocols.
Technically, no one was living there…the corporeal shell that could only hold basic preprogrammed, robotic (old school) conversational interactions, dwelt there, ‘off grid’, on fixed looping thought that could never imagine getting up and leaving the hermetically sealed space… The mind that had been raised from birth to adapt to the vagaries of experimental mind-world-hopping, resided elsewhere…and until the vacating mental component returned to inhabit Atoll’s physical body a fully functioning entity would not be realised.
Outside the imagino-physically generated apartment sandbox; a team of dedicated scientists, technicians and mission directors and facilitators were preparing to realign Atoll’s mind with Atoll’s brain. The docking procedure was crucial as the brain could reject the mind and plump instead for free falling confusion….grabbing at a parachute of insanity on the way… A vital period of adaptation, for acceptance by the mind of being taken from a free, open and potentially infinite world of opportunity to a sealed apartment surrounded by a virtual laboratory, was needed. And the Vistatronic Sevensense Panodrama 5 system was just what the doctor ordered.
Atoll would’ve known the answer to whether he was in a fabricated space or not, but his mind never extended into the realms of asking…he could sit silently with the devil he knew without the unspoken stirring the cup of communication. He’d settle in and they would bring him a mission for his sins.
Wintry New York, or a smoggy LA; Atoll knew the part he was born to play: the relaxed, lifestyling free-wheeler. While manipulations were made around him to adjust the trajectory of his ongoing narrative to optimally endow the project…his was not to fuss or question, but to flow with the evolutionary processes he was surfing the waves of; as manmade and brute-forced as they may be.
Post CREE world brain adaptation manoeuvres were being applied to ready Atoll’s cranial furniture to compute what was needed to start over, as he went from room to room, checked the bathrooms, closets, cubbies and nooks; embarking on his readjustment protocols.
His body was imbued with an Atollness that burgeoned into classic habitual Atoll, and feeling back into his old body, he sighed….not knowing quite how to take it.
They wouldn’t communicate with him directly until his forward narrative throughway had been fully reestablished; it was more world building…in a more trivial and internal way. It crossed his mind briefly that he had chosen the place from a brochure on a tablet way back; he’d make different choices now….this place smacked of the ‘unactual simulacrumesque’. He started thinking about the environment he’d more likely choose nowadays; it wouldn’t be a bedsit or a theatre either…it would be a modular, living, breathing, auto-adjusting Stockholm Munchaus, that would fit to his desires like a well-oiled glove and secure his safety with an iron fist.
As a test, without formally thinking, using game-within-a-game techniques and strategies he’d worked out over the decades; he scoped his re-new home for an exit…knowing beforehand there would be none. So, when a door leading to the roof, that had not been there before; and a sign taking a loose stab at humour around the phrase ‘beware of choppers’ appeared…he knew they knew what was what and he’d have to bury what else he ‘didn’t know’ further down inside; make it harder for them to gouge out the whole truth.
The concept of ‘escape’ oscillated between a glimpsed impertinence that would bring ill-boons and wildly impossible dreams that evaporated while tangling with the stars. Atoll knew flight yearning would invariably be doused in a cocktail of tailored atmosphericals and unnatural gasses. He could adjust to the twin narratives of New York and LA; switch between the East/West coasts of luxury apartment living…but the Controllers had the last say on a multifarity of emotional states and temperamental dispositions… The chemical substances with which they particulated the air, utilising skin, lungs and ears, eyes, nose and throat to gain access to his brain management systems nudged and barged subtle, and not-so-subtle, course changes… He’d stopped tugging vainly on the updating plot-strings because his story-journey, was all in their course, algorithm-lined hands. He stepped into the shoe-holes and took deep breaths…
Time passed…
and then she launched with a boom of industrious orchestration…Upright, ears pinned… Then she died away like everything eventually must…followed by Atoll fading out, which led to a fade in, and:
Atoll was back in the world again, a CREE stub; past training coming to the fore. It was a small room; setup to make his appearance seem like ‘god had not just put his hand inside the machine and yanked a few gears out’.
It was a world where he knew what no one else ever could. His mundanity would become mastery. His body was similar to the one he had just left, but felt a little more worn out…
The Commander was waiting…face blank…voice queued…body language poised; in ambush…if necessary… She didn’t have enough legs to be a spider nor any silk to spin a web…but she was lined with lead and meant what she said. The only way out was through her and only when she stepped aside. She was the gatekeeper…and the gate.
She knew everything there was to know about this world, relatively speaking, but knew nothing about the worlds Atoll came from. He had access to data that revealed who she really was. Whereas, she had no info-scope outside the assumption that he had just returned from Corrective Mental Restructuring (CMR). He was an ex-billionaire, processed for the new era….to help and not hinder humankind. She knew she was right and had no truck with criticism. Atoll could have ram-raided her principled certainty with a convoy of superior-knowledge, but the mission took precedence over juvenile command commandeering.
‘Commander,’ Atoll said, after chewing his lip, ’they told me to tell you, “mission accomplished and to open the gates of greed and let the wealth flow and flood the lakes with fairness”…’
The Commander was satisfied by the word salad, leaving off the dressing of the facial registering of it. She eased aside and gestured to the ‘ex-billionaire’ to follow her onward and upward.
He felt the need to confess that he (the part he was playing) was only an employee of a billionaire, sent to test the water, to eat the potentially poisoned food of the CREE space, and not a real billionaire, but it passed. He also wanted to hug the Commander, squeeze the little girl inside, but she was hiding so deep and so behind barbed, electrocuted fences and defensive walls, with offensive systems at the ready, that he refrained.
He followed her up and down steps, along corridors, and through hatches…outside his headspace, but inside there were stirrings in the place the mailroom used to be…then, halfway through a tight hatch, he noticed a light on in the old mailroom and all of that led to the realisation that Una was back…she had survived the journey from the CREE world, through labrification, and back into the stub…
The Commander skipped the full debrief, as per the manual, and got Atoll to fill out a questionnaire instead. Are you bringing any elements back with you. Please see the list of illegal attributes that are strictly forbidden…
The return of the mailroom team augured well, but developed into a wrong turn. Sybil, who was quarantined in the main CREE theatre/bedsit space, was also featuring in the mailroom manifestation due to an unprecedented metaphorphing event… Atoll did not know what ‘metaphorph’ meant, but he was going to find out… Written notes preceded an emergency telegram. Sybil had bled into the mailroom. And now it was covered in blood.
‘Please, Atoll….Sybil has a hornets’ nest in her bonnet and needs everyone to hear the droning buzz. She is making little sense, but when rationality prevails I will commit it to words.’
Atoll was unfolding and trying to find his feet; walking, thinking. The Commander quietly ummmed and softly arrred while seconds posed convincingly in the shape of minutes. The gravitas was making her elongate what she should have truncated, but still Atoll made no reference to it. Finally she set her captive free; returned him to the wild… A ‘job well done’ in the making.
Atoll found himself outside the UKGBHQ complex…in what turned out to be cold night air. First he got a very strong iron smell; almost strangulatory in strength, then from the mailroom; a telegram: Sybil going berserk, stop Sybil running rampage stop, Sybil lost in anger-world, stop please advise, stop stop stop.
The whole cake of whatswhat was upside icing down; Atoll was not programmed to give advice to his guiding systems. he’d have to jerry-rig a response out of last night’s left overs, at best. A fuzzy rattling looseness belabouringly barking its head off inside his mind.
He conducted a rapid compartmentalisation of files before moving on to the clubhouse, which was empty. There was a note stapled to the desk that read ‘Mnger at Shp’. So he followed the signs…taking the lag in confrontational interfacing’s opportunity to apply preemptive active insertion into the stub’s narrative backstanding onflow.
The golfing bots and caddies broke from their scheduled activity; recalibrated to seek the source of the arousing smell of human blood that had been digitally converted into robot catnip.
When Atoll entered the shop, Sybil was already there; covered in blood, attempting to wire up her explanation outletting to the comms mains; shocking revelation crackled through everything she was trying to connect to, but remained in-house. It was all going to burst out once the final connection was made; until then, the inexplicable goriness would remain unfathomable.
