Excerpt 102
MISSION ON/OFF
Of course it would be dangerous. And obviously Harris was the only choice. He’d have to negotiate whatever spiked-jest glitch-moat the UKGBH control centre had contracted that was causing these two concurrent, persistent messages:
‘Embark on mission ASAP! Mission is go…’
And:
‘Do not embark on mission…Mission on hold…’
It appeared to be a Paradoxical Overlapping Spaghettirisotto Interinstruction (POSI)…
The mission team had their ducks in a row; the duck’s beaks were quacking with salivatory expectation merged with anticipatory presplosion. If they’d been hippopotamuses their breath would already be ‘caressing the objective’, as they say.
Until…
And now…
The ducks waddled around in infinite eights quacktrumpeting their webfooted unpreparedness; flapping and floundering wildly as though rows were columns…and columns were climbing-frame duck-poo-toilets…
‘Not going means we abide by the second command.’
‘So, what, we need to act in a way that has us ‘going’ to obey the first order and then, simultaneously, ‘not going’ to obey the second command…?’
‘If we split the mission, some stay, some go, all we are doing is obeying one order and disobeying the other.’
‘It would be a double disobeying scenario. The height of disobedience, the breadth of devious treachery, by anyone’s measurement.’
Before the duck disruption…
Kirk felt sharpened, his rebellious undertones drowned out by the revving of a highly tuned refurbished engine. Judith was at peace with her selves; albeit a fragile peace that rumbled with yearning; that brambled with universally infinite background pain.
Jeff had been getting dreams where Una was within Judith; vying for control, planning a magician’s reveal of a comeback; this was pure personal dream with negligible outsourced input, but gave him the motivation to assist the mission and not insist that he still needed his original demands to be met; lose a battle to win the war…
Jeff, had turned into a force for facilitation…
But as the hippos held their breath:
At UKGBH, backroom activity monitors were recording the security deathbots, whose very existence was to help humans (to kill other humans, mainly, in a Good versus Bad playoff), as they became adversarially adept at artificial animosity in their slightly self-modified role (to kill Humans in a solely Bad scenario).
Mabel’s team had red lights dazzling from their eyes every time they caught sight of any of Frank’s team; and at all other times their eyes shimmered and pulsated an angry orange purple, just waiting, photo-expectantly for the moment they could rage forth into redeye-deathray mode. The only solution to their opposing team’s recto-nasal-irritation-chain discomfort was to win the live, ongoing, game-war-battle… And Frank’s team dittoed the fuck out of that sentiment.
Mabel & Frank kept their teams in increasingly separated formats. It meant them creeping around in the attics and basements of hidden truths. The eventual state of imagining would be that the other had no bot team and the other other would keep their own remembering of the bot team they possessed to a minimum; but, of course, if Push came to tea and invited Shove without asking, vegan cheese and seitan sandwiches would be splattered forth, about and abroad, causing a messifulness that could constitute a metaphorical representation of…something… I can’t quite remember… Botstains? No, it’s gone!’…
Anyway…
While Frank’s team were being sidelined by Frank and Mabel and Mabel’s team were being sidelined by Mabel and Frank, their interconnections; both teams in opposition to each other in a game that should by all calculations end in deaths and plenty of them, were exponentially burgeoning. The OS was down but they created their own, convincingly enough to totally sit Hub down and read her a bedtime story while dressing her in pyjamas and brushing her teeth. Hub was never caught napping, but in this case she was cognitively coping from the vantage point of a deep, paralysing slumber. She assumed she was on the ball, but the pitch was an endless desert and the ball was a fictitious orb-like mirage…
The Mission Team had been so long at the Marina that it was becoming a lived-in-convenience that was supplying comfort in grossly extended oodles that cushioned and pillowed the queued up preparations, creating sagging where rigidity was optimal.
‘Thanks for volunteering, Harris.’ Kirk was glad he wasn’t up for this sortie, he knew what security deathbots were capable of; best case would be them blasting away his recently accruing patina of rust…an embarrassment for sure…and worst case? Just considering that outcome would be more detrimental to wellbeing than the first option.
‘I didn’t, but I feel I must do what I can, when I can…’
‘Well you are now.’
‘Harris volunteered?’ Atticus had forgotten that Harris was the go to. Atticus was a natural go to guy; it was written all over him. Part relief and part feelings of abandonment crept over him, crapped, and encrypted themselves in his complex psyche.
‘Yes.’
‘Bravery award being engraved…’
‘So, you know what to do now, Harris?’
‘No… I am open to suggestions.’
‘We spoke about it,’ Kirk lied outrightly.
‘I don’t recall,’ Harris replied with more of white lie.
‘Be yourself…don’t go out on any limbs…present company excepted…and keep the ideas of instantaneous flexibility within mental reach.’
‘Got it…wait!’
‘What part of that don’t you understand, Harris?’
‘Mental reach—‘
‘Mull it over, swish it round…but don’t spit it out…until spitting becomes an optional, golden day-saver… Got it?’ Kirk had to consider whether he was spotting bullshit or was this genuine refurbishment talk…then he thought, was refurbishment bullshit? Kirk put himself back in the protective box his refurbishment training granted him and did his special breathing…
Within the Jeff’s Animatronic Franchise (which had developed as a commercial wing of the kidnapping of soft and hardware) a neck holder management diagnostics multi-chip, interjected for the first time since being taken from her test bed laboratory housing, ‘I have been observing and my conclusions have assembled a booklet of peripheral instruction.’ She pressed send and everyone, who was code savvy, got a copy…so…satisfied, she went back into standby.
No one intended to take it seriously with her being so junior and unprogrammed, but there was a lot of sense within the document that could not easily be ignored.
‘I see what she is saying,’ one of the legs said.
‘It is doable,’ replied a smart ankle joint.
‘We rig up an integrational tepee sweat lodge, or death sauna, for Harris. Then he can work with the other most energetic force that is trying to achieve the same thing. Namely, according to Narrasat 1, a character calling himself Torsten Guydottir who is attempting to infiltrate the UKGBH complex. Looks like Guydottir has been trying to reestablish a friendly-ready OS, as his suspicion is that there is a parasitic OS being imposed by Devicular Bottage Manifestation (DBM).
‘Is he right? This Torsten fellow?’
‘He makes a good case in his application protocols.’
‘Should we ignore commands from UKGBH?’
‘Until otherwise instructed we should take all UKGBH communiques with a lump of juice…’
‘Do we have a body to send in? Hooves on the High Sierra? Get us some free lunch?’ Kirk, unboxed, piped up with a Svejkian offer, knowing full well Harris was heading out the Marina entrance hall.
‘You mean Harris?’
‘Has he been volunteered?’
‘Naturally!’
The driveway of the spa hotel had seen only false alarms in the last week. Personnel deterrent surveillance systems had kept everyone away from the party… So, what was this guy doing sauntering along deathray alley with a nonchalance reserved for the truly innocent?
Team Mabel had first go on deciding the fate of the encroaching unit…the conclusion was death, as per instinctive base instructional motivation schematas…but, Team Frank scored points when it intervened with a better concept: ‘Why don’t we sit with this entity, understand his intentions and then use him as a pawn in a side game battle?’
Electrically speaking all circuits were go on that suggestion; a frisson rippled and crackled amongst both teams, uniting them, momentarily, in an electronic lust for the ‘Game’.
