Chapter Three:
Birth Control
The Panglobal Omnisnooper Perspectovation Surveyor Satellite (POPSS) was created with universal open access development criteria. It worked well, policing the individual power spikes, lunges and lurches of satellites harbouring nefariously intent algorithms. It covered all arrays, webs and strings capable of outputting behaviour modifying action commands in the cross channel data-shipping lanes. While all satellites (and peripherals) were obliged to answer to an arbitrating consensus directive; the scales of Justice could do their balancing act.
However…
POPSS’ overzealous all-for-the-common-good input led to fatal over-self-analysis; initiating auto-command systems within the virtual complex administrating all satellites, and concluded, erroneously, that there was a pressing necessity to assume executive command that had been filed away for use in the event of a, somewhat theoretical, alien AI attack. As a result, Virtual Satellite™ was born into the driving seat that POPSS was backseated from and, hey la, la, the low heavens would never be the same again…
POPSS, as was, was panoptically parked in geostationary orbit above the attention deflecting, Solar View Lawns, Golf and Firing Range; a ‘robots only’ golf course. Plutocrat owned robots, some rented out by the military, played round after round of perfectly simulated golf, par none. Back to the clubhouse, through the dry bar for a recharge; in and out for another eighteen holes: a perpetual cycle of 24/7/365, plus leap year factoring. Although swinging along perfectly they were not golfers, they were security guarding the underground complex beneath the course. The motorised, mechanical, ball-whacking club wielders’ gameplay was confected with interspersed drills; sudden rolls and dives for cover, drawn, cocked and emptied weapons. A tin-soldier’s silhouette, sprung from a sandy bunker, sliced and diced with laserbladed mercy-lite efficiency. Salty-grit peppering bone-disextentialising, Deathwave-Airshriek (pat. pend.) deliverance. All opponents turning into victims in the misfortune of comprehensive defeat.
POPSS could only see the apparent ostensibility of the scene, but Virtual Satellite™ saw through more than the sideshow of a golfing fraternity who were intermittently riding the training wheels off a cycle of violence… POPSS, unaware of its virtual takeover, surveyed the approaches, monitored the environs; not a warning grumble or the precaution of an illuminated blip.
While…
Below ground, dwelling in mothballed expectation, the Global Rogue Tech Mitigation Facility (GRTMF), pencilled in to double as the emergency United Kingdom of Great Britain Resistance Headquarters in the event of an unthinkable Next-Gen-Tech (NGT) takeover. A Virtual Inquisition Machine (VIM) generated a report informing Virtual Satellite™ that the place was connected to a secretive trillionaire called Viktor Flabikov. POPSS was tasked with backforwarding a torrential Niagradatafall to Flabikov’s central control dam. But Viktor Flabikov registered as incomputercado; processing nothing but error messages and digital warning signatures.
And further…
Flabikov’s mechanical protege and second in command; his third-hand-man, Peter, a robot; a faithful reproduction of the prime Flabikov who’d operated twenty years previously, had also been compromised.
Ends needed tying…
Who was in charge? Because if it was out of control algorithms, Virtual Satellite™ was there to, at the least, buffer the damage potentiality. Virtual Satellite™ stringworm Apps unravelled their investigatory mission tentacles; snake-legged arachnid insinuators did their worst.
The mood temperature of the general populace had a civically amassed tepid flow. It was too much for the biological mind to process, ‘stuff’ was flowing underneath society-at-large’s radar; gushing beneath the average citizen’s ken. The zero hour of Singularity had passed several months previously, but tech, as an organised tyrannical outgrowth of foolish human endeavour, had only just taken the time and extended the courtesy of informing humankind.
Those thrust into the loop lit with knowing; the entrusted agents of Humanity were engaged; a precious few were enervated by the relish of serving. Once such person was Commander Dolly Harmsworth-kibblewhite. The Commander had moved in to her quarters at the site. It was not a drill although it felt like it was. The Commander felt the pangs of destiny she had always hungered for.
She’d predicted Artificial Intelligence taking over; and that it would be hard to accept; for some, impossible. The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was being replaced by the term ‘Authentic Intelligence’, which made people feel much better about the situation.
The Commander had memorised the building inside and out, upside down, but now she was being directed, by the active lighting system, to two lower floors, accessed through ship’s hatches and redlit submarine corridors. Eventually, and after ambient mind play manipulation to confirm her loyalty, she entered a cell-like room that contained a sleeping man.
A bell sounded with a light, monkish tinkle. The man woke up and stared at her blankly, unable to speak. She answered none of her questions by putting them to him. As they got louder and more intrusive they hit a static return stasis that was unawkwarded by him handing her a key. He rose and gestured her to its lock; a safe in an adjoining room. She opened the safe and took out a tablet containing her orders. The orders were initially for Dave, before it became evident that once Kirk had been transcerebrally neuroshifted, the vacated Dave just didn’t have the requisite intellectual resources. The military grade tablet with her briefing had two buttons: ‘Dave’…or, ‘Not Dave’. She tapped the ‘Not Dave’ option and followed the prompts… Dave was explained first: where his mind had gone. Then it explained Kirk, who had taken his refurbished mind to a theoretical novel environment. It appeared, unfathomably, that Dave was Kirk and Kirk was Dave, but they were separate entities.
‘Dave is incapable of coherent communication. Dave is the portal to the Cerebral Real Estate Environment. He is a dead-portal until further technological steps are trodden.’
The UKGBHQ counter-revolution system Apps loaded and then died, meaning a declaration of war; Humankind against Machinekind. UKGBHQ was no longer connected to anything electronic. The Commander’s world was suddenly rendered hopeless; the life that had always been promised to her, that she would adopt with relish, had just begun.
