Chapter Six
Building on a Dream
The theoretical concept known as the Cerebral Real Estate Environment was first presented in 2003 in a small conference room at the WEF in Davos, to a select few.
They sold it on the theoretical time foldouts predicted in test models. ‘The more wealth amassed, the faster time flashes by,’ they said. ‘It is easy circumventing tax laws, but the laws of time; impossible without cerebral real estate. If you want to jet ski, paraglide, motocross, and sail with proficiency, that’s a life of time tied up right there; you haven’t even parachuted, bungee jumped or even read the manual of the flying car that is sitting in the garage waiting to be taken out for a spin. What is life, we ask ourselves: the mere glimpse of a snowflake landing on the tip of the summit of potential life experience? You can’t say you don’t want to expect more from life, can you? Financial wealth leads to a perceived poverty of time…stuck in the counting house instead of doing what really counts. The prospect of billionaires being able to buy everything life itself lacks in one package was here; the billionaire’s curse, they said, was being lifted… The limitless experiential gift of the Cerebral Real Estate Environment…’ Blah blah blah… That was how it was sold.
Albeit a long way from becoming reality it elicited a crashing waterfall of funding; it bought the founders (Marcus Godstrand and Mary Goodmanson) a research vessel, the RV Goodmanson, and set up an underground laboratory on the Midway Atoll nature reserve, with the personal seal of approval and support from Obama, and the ambitious assemblage of a prospective quantum computing farm deep below the Antarctic wastelands.
Decades later the first pioneer was reported to have entered the CREE sphere. Atoll Goodmanson trained since shortly after birth, now in his thirties, entered semi-voluntarily; semi-chemically induced. It was going ahead with phase one, though, only because next-gen-tech jumped up ten levels unpredictably like it had time travelled and brought back its future self to belittle the state of human endeavour.
Jeff was under suspicion and he’d been cut out of all the loops he’d circulated in. He guessed that the next-gen-tech powered by quantum technology had created its own master algorithm with self-evolving properties. It looked to him like G & G labs had sold out humanity in exchange for a breakthrough in the CREE project.
On the day of the major breakthrough there was a total global tech controlled blackout. An irresistible Singularity took hold. So the alliance of Billionaires known as Transcranial Elongated Allotment of Time (TEA-Time) were buzzing like aroused hornets that their investment was tied up in tech that was shutting down. Tech-wrecked on a time-droughted island.
The Society for the Rejection of Automation were ready when the moment came…the labs had installed Atoll into the CREE portal as planned, and the whole G & G operation went auto…there was a small synching window when SRA operatives orchestrated a secondary CREE entrance. The secondary entrance meant that the mind being conveyed had no executive physical property and only consciously existed with in the mind of the primary beholder; a place reserved for loved ones and close adherents the primary beholder was unable to leave behind.
Three people now populated the CREE space set up by G & G labs: Atoll from G & G labs, Kirk from the military intervention funded by a rival group of billionaires, and Una the SRA activist who gained access through Jeff’s deployment at the labs and a necessary collusion with the tech they were trying to stop.
The first step of Una’s immersion in the CREE world was to consciously persist within a mindpocket situated within Atoll’s thought process complex that was developed as an advisory guide; collating pertinent memories to construct practical solutions to ongoing problem opportunities… Una developed slowly into her new being…her diminutiveness easing into the vast arena of space… It was like her first day at work: minimised, she had to serve time before insinuating herself into the workings of the mindpocket. The mindpocket itself was like a mail room where memories got sucked and pumped in and reassembled with other data and then prepared for relaying to Atoll the next time he entered the dreamlike space’s briefing room during half sleep. There was always some helpful nugget of data.
And after bringing him up to date; in the next waking window, Atoll had a breakthrough…
First, a window opened allowing in a lusty airflow of Spring-like substance; beyond the pane, a flat green/brown shifted to a faithful, heavy blue via a teal vitality that lacked the honesty of congruous sky colouring. Game on! A sky line of roofed facades, Paris, London, New York, Jerusalem; (hardly reality but heading in a hyper real direction), riddled and ransacked with meaning in general; not yet able to stand up to close scrutiny… The world was toddler-walking….close scrutiny would be a faster and more profound gait… One small step…
Despite the audiolessness, imagined birds called, a blackbird maybe, a pigeon…warbles and coos and hoots and shrieks… A call-spotter’s paradise.
Atoll had a pen affixed to a self-scrubbing pad, all mechanical, none of it electrical, that was attached to a cord around his neck. He wrote words for Kirk, and Kirk encroached on all sensitivity and wrote whatever he needed to communicate. It was falteringly old school, but it worked as well as needs demanded for the foreseeable ongoing invention of new futures.
A hallway was next on the ‘natural way of things’ directory and Atoll concentrated, out to work, on a hallway wide enough to seem perfectly hallworthy, but narrow enough to make negotiation by more than one person at a time awkward; that way realism lies. The contrariness of physics, he’d learned; had it drummed into him, was the work of a practical joker. The laws of physics were present to facilitate; but only in subtly aggravating ways that provide constant comedy on some celestial light entertainment channel. But you can’t bite the hand that screws with you because it is good friends with Life itself…
Kirk had taken shape as a hippy-like character; disguising his true intention by clumsily taking the opposite form choice whenever it presented itself. In his mind, although as yet unproven, he was a fulsome specimen of machismo…not a killer…unless the need arose. A rock in a hard place, not a sponge in a wet bucket. In reality; this plastic reality, he was becoming a soppy peacemonger; a perfect cover in some ways, but revealing nonetheless, to anyone who might want to pull the dust sheet from his statuesque frame to prove he was talking a load of old antonyms.
And Atoll, was quietly working on a form that would shock himself, upon the reinvention of the mirror, which was way down on the list of schemes and projects. His look-making was internally powered and unfortunately his developmental trauma had something to say about how ugly he could be.
They tunnelled into a wall between them; burrowing with corridorial expansivity. Atoll, deep in novel toil and Kirk standing around throwing stances and building up expectations. A respectable corridor appeared from their labours, promising more… Atoll had the idea of a word string to accompany their act, maybe to consecrate it in some deep spiritual manner, ‘exponentially excavatory exuberance,’ he thought, and Kirk could not help thinking the exact same word string too…
Stairs? wrote Kirk.
Stair time, Atoll back-wrote in agreement, with a hodful of relish, carried by a building momentum.
After the initiation of the first step, had been harder than anticipated; the first step, by its very nature, had to set the tone and scale of everything that followed… Atoll downed tools and wandered back to his bed for a rejuvenatory nap. It felt both scheduled and ad hoc. The concept of a butterfly flapping its wings, occupied his time from work to rest; the papery winged insect causing storms somewhere across the globe. His first steps were butterflies.
Kirk, abandoned by Atoll’s sleep move, and having no concept of what sleep meant, tried copying Atoll, who had developed a convincing snore pattern by then, but failed to carry it through….so, finding himself at a loose and fragmented end, he began creating wall objects… Pictures of death and destruction that pleased him, despite knowing they would undergo passive demilitarisation at the hands of authoritarian warriorlessness. Guns for flowers and tanks for bicycles, bullets for handshakes… But the butterfly wings of bellicosity flapped all the same and the future consequences gathered leerily on the futile horizon.
