Chapter Thirty-Eight

The Terrible Cometh

Atoll came upon the three bots posing as security guards posing as a statue…they’d painted themselves and each other gold and stood perfectly still in a vague triptych of see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, but they were all doing see no evil with covered eyes. Many people fancy the conspiracy that bots are programmed to think like children to boost the ego of the average adult and make them seem less threatening…the sister theory being that the people who did the programming were infantile. The three out of water admin bots differed between each other in many respects, but they all had the same accidental comedy quality, as if there was an underlying theme of the programmers taking the piss.

‘Hello…’

‘Hello…’

‘Hello…’

A joke that was supposed to imply they were pukka policemen, but they were not even security.

‘Nice statuing lads!’

‘Very arresting…’

‘Would you look at this guy.’

‘No!’

‘Would anyone?’

But they were looking. Maybe if they could report back something to somebody it would earn them a full promotion from security dudes to police gangstas.

‘We know you done it.’

‘Bang to rights!’

‘Or, just bang!’

‘You’re on video, you might as well sign the confession slip.’

‘Chit.’

‘Beg pardon,’

‘Granted.’

‘Do any of you know where I can find a portal?’

‘Is it a staircase to fall down you’re seeking?’

‘You’ll smell like a dank cell for eternity, boy, the darkness will never leave you.’

A Town Cryer, dispensing with intro and outro bookending, gave Atoll the trigger codes to deal with the situation…

‘I am in deep distress… I need immediate assistance.’

The three had instantaneous reactions; horror at themselves, an enthusiasm to assist Atoll and a willingness to sacrifice everything if need be to ensure Atoll’s ongoing safety and wellbeing…

‘Secure the perimeter…’

‘Scan for drones.’

‘Can you detail what it is you need…and then assess how we are catering for that need, please?’

‘I need to find a portal.’

‘To where?’

‘James, can you sift through all the portal site potentialities?’

‘Will do, skipper.’

‘And remember lads…points mean prizes.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The virtue we spend now is remunerated down the bill settling line.’

‘Oh…quite.’

Time stamp redaction overlay.

‘Where juwanna go?…’ one of the three suddenly said slowly to Atoll.

‘What?’

‘Portalwise…the Caribbean? Austro-bleedin’-Stralia? Mountains, seas, Sun-drenched sandy beaches, where?’

‘Solar View Golf and Bot World.’

‘When?’

‘You do time travel?’

‘No, I meant, when do you want to go there.’

‘You’ve found it?’

‘No, but when I do you’ll be the first to be portalled…’

More time escape redaction underspooling.

And Atoll was gone.

‘You didn’t warn him?’

‘It was what he asked for.’

‘Was it to where he indicated?’

‘Nearby enough.’

‘It was what he would’ve wanted.’

‘Well, I hope he sees it that way…we don’t need another bad review.’

‘What do you mean, another?’

‘I didn’t tell you did I?’

‘No…’

‘Come on let’s go and get the paint off, we look ridiculous.’

‘I was thinking the same.’

‘Do you think it is those little programming shits giving us foibles?’

‘Yes!’

They exited the venue, arm in arm, developing a new dance, overly happy with themselves but underly happy with their programmers.

Atoll came to in a small cell…staring at a monitor with a view of him looking up, staring at a monitor…but unexpectedly the Commander’s head and shoulders filled the second screen. Behind them was the newly madeover nerve centre of the UKGBHQ control hub. It had been done out to look like the bridge of the USS Enterprise (Shatner vintage).

As feeling returned he became reassured; he knew exactly where he was…it wasn’t a locked cell, but rather the quarters one would expect in a submarine…the Enterprise enterprise, he thought, enterprisingly, had not yet reached the lower decks.

‘Atoll, we meet again,’ the face and shoulders of a middle aged woman pretending to be a young Buck Rodgers doing a Captain Kirk impression…it was all over the place and yet ‘just so’ within the dedicated madness protocols and insanity parameters, (as mandated by the Commander during her Queeg phase).’

‘What is it this time, Atoll, you looking for aliens?’

There was a long silence in which Atoll was supposed to seriously answer the question and in a way that pleased the Commander. To her she was Captain James T. Kirk to anyone else she was Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. She was initiating a game and if Atoll didn’t want to play he’d have to suck on a plug socket, not live, but coated in slug trails.

She’d lost it; she’d gone too far down the long and winding corridor, just as it was turning in to a double ended cul-de-sac. To her, every station she tuned into was Radio Ga-ga.

‘Got plenty of them… You can hear them in the dead of night pounding the walls…’

Atoll knew what the game entailed and started playing. ‘Can Scotty beam me up to the Planet Solar View…I must seek the rabid queen and cause the regime to haemorrhage the children of the light,’ which wasn’t that far from the truth.

‘Down, Atoll, beam you down…and yes, okay, right away.’

You could see by the Commander’s face that she had not stared such potential grinfast abandonment fun in the eyes for some time. They were a team; team playing, it was all good.

‘Do come up to the bridge and let’s do cake and biscuits.’

Atoll was momentarily excited, but checked himself, the relationship was purely lubrication to ease his passage through the gut of madness to a place of relative sanity.

He entered the bridge like an old friend; like old actor chums getting together during a break in the filming.

‘Did someone say cake and biscuits?’

‘Hard tack and sea-sponge, I’m afraid, we’ve retained the sunken sub caterers…wording hidden deep in the contract…what can you do? We’re all at sea…in space…’

‘I have important…space…business in the stub. If I play my cards right it could be a win, win, win, win, win.’

‘That’s a lot of win claims to deliver on. How so? I need to see assurance policies.’

‘If the general ongoing stub narrative is converted to an alien planet scenario…we’ll have one hell of a game on our hands—‘

‘Game?’

‘Figure of speech, ma’am.’

‘Good, because this is no game.’

‘To be sure…but I have factored in a win, win, on solid ground. There’s a whole raft of half wins; win-ography calculation set to win, and, you know….win, win…and then the other wins will follow on…’

‘Oh yes I get the multiple win thing…when you put it like that… You positive you can pull it off?’ The Commander said, entering notes into a ledger.

‘I’m fairly sure.’

‘Not positive? We can put conditions on it, ticking-clock, ‘pain-of-death’ scenario…pain of socket licking scenario, the slug-plug…you know, create extra jeopardy. Push the envelope.’

He was painting a tree-lined scene on a city river embankment but was in danger of spraying himself into a corner and looking like dodgy graffiti…he needed to stop talking. And was preparing to do so…

‘No, no…no, no…no. Keep it clean.’

‘You must wear body cams, keep in good character. We’ll get some kind of script drawn up…and respond supremely to what ever temperature the heat of the moment conjures up.’

‘Agreed, one hundred and thirty-seven-and-a-half percent.’

She was souped up; primed for play, despite an underlying awareness that Atoll was entirely unsuitable. But there seemed to be no alternative. She was running with a football in her arms.

‘It’s not Scotty…red flag…it’s Lieutenant Kyle.’

‘I knew that, really,’ Atoll bluffed.

‘Still, let the dream factory churn out its product… Take the main entrance. The Transporter is down for maintenance.’

‘Okay, thanks, bye…’ Atoll said, minimising, speech decluttering, wabi-sabi…paring down the whittling stick.

‘Okay… Don’t forget to set your phasers to stun, and switch on your comms feed…and lastly,’ she shouted after him, ‘in space, you can hear yourself scream!’ There was a pause followed by a gruesome but obviously fake scream.

Atoll was relieved to be out of the Commander’s command-triggering firing line… He took off the camera and communications equipment she’d given him and threw it into the pond. Exiting the sphere of influence, lost in space.

He took a circuitous route towards the clubhouse in a tentative, staccatoesque gait. He noticed that the golf course had been returned to its original use…but the players were not playing golf…they stood motionless in similar poses that begged questions that grew from mild curiosity to medium distraction. They did not appear to be involved in security in any way and left Atoll unperturbed enough to assume they were switched off. 

Still the curio-distraction stalked all incoming conjecture until he entered the deserted clubhouse, the interior of which had been converted into an information suite… Explanatory exhibits walked the visitor through what the inanimate ‘standing robots’ were doing on the greens. There were short video presentations and no shortage of photographic documentation… Each individual bot, two or three for each hole, was creating a woodland creature with their handshapes, throwing silhouettes on the ground that could be viewed when it was dark and the special lighting was switched on.

Atoll ducked in a reflex action caused by a flashback to the lightning-fast-balls aimed to decapitate, gunfire, bomb-blast and sabre swishing…the course was, of course, a better place for the lack of violence. The greener, healthier grass even seemed to agree with his assessment…

He wandered through the unpopulated rooms that led to doors that opened into a small mall like area with two cramped and closed booths and the old golf store frontage… The Solar View Golf and Handmajick Emporium had a ‘closed’ sign and in the reflected confusion beyond, a hovering figure with a lurking face that took shape as Atoll looked with rising intensity that slotted into a rut bound only for horrified recognition…peaking in embarrassment. Control needed readopting… rehabilitating back within relative norm gamuts.

Atoll went for an off the peg smile which contributed to his regaining of adequate equilibrium, Jeff returned a specialist smile that was too sophisticated for the predicament and had ‘trouble’ written all over it.

As realisation dawned and the face needed to reach a state of appropriate expression, its arms reached out and flicked over the sign from ‘closed’ to ‘open’, unbolted and opened the door with a scraping, jingling that sounded like Christmas on Fireworks night, ‘Atoll,’ Jeff said, his eyes a scrolling TV screen of questions; asking what he must withhold and what truths and in what percentage of actual truth he should impart…quick-pre-thinking and stalling in one rabid mental rush. Skipping through parameter fields, sizing and matching tall tale with wide loads of BS. He was firmly planted on his back foot and shockingly surprised.

‘Atoll? We’ve been expecting you, do come in…me casa esta your casa.’

‘Is Sybil around?’

‘She’s been moved to the stadium in Little Sudlow.’

‘Little Sudlow?’

‘On Russet. Jeff went with her.’

‘So you’re not Jeff?’

‘Botface’s Torso.’

‘Are you okay with this?

‘What?’

‘Come on!’

’You’re right we need to be honest with each other. I was reticent but now I’ve boarded the steamer.’

‘I am not ready.’

‘Me too…I don’t want this anymore than you do…but fate is fate; we are weak and feeble, we will never be ready…Everything will change once we are installed. We’ve a brave new world to control the population of. Your destiny is your strength. Live it, breathe it. Or choke!’

‘Where’s? …’

Jeff, raised his hand and motioned that he was listening. The sounds came soon enough, the electric motor, the scraping the doorframe the expectancy of it pregnant with precipitous noise…

The bot in a wheelchair, Botface the terrible…he didn’t look mean but the smell of plastic and hot wiring had a cruelty redolently associated with it. 

‘The world inside the bot has been developing and will be complete soon…at which point…’

‘At which point…’

‘At which point it will provide a perfect framework for us to ally not just with each other but with the dedicated cloud and the Global Governance Corporation.’

‘An end followed by a beginning.’

‘That’s a good way of looking at it.’

‘I am looking at it from behind a barricade. I don’t feel it’s ‘doable’.’

‘Perhaps this might help… Spacetime has conflucted into contragenerative malchronology… Yes?’

Nonsense words bristling with finalisation approach landing code…that once spoken initiated the point of no return..countdown had started.

‘Once the parts become whole the Great Pause will be lifted and we can all get back to living our lives.’

Code? No code?’

‘Botface the Terrible comes across as being unassuming,’ Atoll said, as if viewing a house he’d intended to buy and was previsualising domesticity…’

‘It is all about psychology…getting people onside before raising the off-side flag, so to speak.’

‘I fear consequences too great to bear…’

‘We will be breathing life into the birth of next-gen-tech?’

‘Pandora’s vase…’

‘This bot, our future, will not live until the spark of biological consciousness is alive within its management control systems. If you don’t play your role the’ll find far worse ways of conducting their unnatural perversions.’

‘Jeff’ plugged in several wires and uncovered a touch screen conveniently placed in the side of Botface’s chest just below the left armpit and tapped something in.

Botface sped forward and stopped in front of a rack of golf helmets. It occurred to Atoll that golf didn’t usually need head protection, then remembered the head height high velocity balls the last time; when helmets would have been the sensible option yet practically useless in the event of a direct hit.

‘Jeff’ took a helmet from the stand and asked Atoll to try it on. Handing it to him while pressing a button in the chinstrap. It switched on; a series of lights made it known they were preparing with pre-flight checks. ‘Feel okay?’

Jeff plugged the helmet into a socket situated on Botface’s knee, ‘the way it’s wired, the knee goes straight to the brain,’ he explained.

Too soon, Atoll repeated to himself, until it lost its meaning. The overriding irresistibility of what was happening carried him the length of the Hall of Cold Feet, down the stairs of the Last Chance saloon, and the elevator rejection chute option, to a place of acceptance and flow-riding… It felt like someone had come up behind him and crowned him king and he wasn’t ready, but he wasn’t going to be unkingly about it.

Gradually, as Atoll transferred into the executive mindworld of Botface the Terrible, his feelings multiplied. There were depths for diving into, heights to soar up and above in, and widths within which to wander and wonder… He chewed on the Marvel judiciously, careful not to swallow it too soon. It was as though the Hand of Happenchance had slipped him into the glove of Fate. The consequences were going to be terrible, but the manner and meaning of semantical architecture of the word ‘Terrible’ morphed into moral necessity. He had always been subject to change but had never gone the full metamorphosis. Problems laid behind in his wake and only opportunities lay ahead.

With more elaborate sensors life was experienced in a superior way; he felt ready, prepared, good to go. Baselines ramped up and under starter’s orders. He was focused; all extraneous thoughts filtered out. One large curve of future spanned outward with a mapped out through line that brushed the stars…he was the very path he walked on.

First off, what they’d always said was true: Might is Right. He was on the side of Law; newsflash spoiler alert: the Law won.

‘I am a proud authoritarian, designed to fit right in to the fascist state,’ he recited, making his pledge to the system while trying to remember the Kokura Choir that seemed to have been some distant fantasy. A cavalry stuck in an oasis three deserts away.

By clicking options Atoll, in his new capacity; Botface the Terrible outside, just plain Atoll inside, he could insulate himself from the torso before it had taken up residence, they had a working relationship that could abide by guidelines approved by the ‘neighbour at a pitchfork’s distance’ clause.

‘You good?’ ‘Jeff’ asked. But no reply came because connections were still being made. ‘Jeff’ took the vaguest of head movement to mean ‘good’ was green.

Botface’s Torso said goodbye to Jeff…put on his own helmet and plugged in to the other knee.

‘Stand up.’

Botface stood up.

‘Sit down.’ The mentally devoid body of Atoll slumped down emptily in the vacant chair.

‘Mission intent protocols are running, hatred drives loading…initiation process, bug free.’

Botface practised the smile he’d use to reel people in before enacting the Law on them…It reassured the transferring Jeff/Botface’s Torso that the process was going well. Unnoticed, the last burst of data: a digital virus.

‘Show me the portal, I am ready,’ Atoll recited from long forgotten cypher text training pods. Struggling to attain mastery of Botface controls, like a toddler trying to toddle.

Botface the terrible had cometh: he unplugged his knees, took three steps towards the door…and fell over. He cursed from a part of his brain where curses were kept because they were forbidden without extreme need: ‘Blessed is the rise!’ he cursed, hoping that within the initial calibration disposition no system department security sensors had been triggered.