Until the kidnapped bottage had been transferred to Judith O.’s Unconscious Algorithmically Narratively Augmented Vestibule (UANAV) she had to tread carefully in her dealings with Jeff. He held all the real power with none of the megalomania needed to grasp the short and effortless reach he’d need to execute his potential in the Hierarchy of Total Control Spectrum (HTCS). He could not realise the extent of his Kidnapped Bot Partnered Control (KBPC). His best guess was massive on any other scale, but his imagination was nibbling on the crumbs of a giant cake on a table made of cake, in a house built with cake bricks, on a cake hill, in a land of cake.

Judith O., acting ex-mission team leader, was upfront, they were following a muddy bridal path that scooped and levered its way around the border of a large fallow field string and linked up with a unused national walking route that used a disused railway line. A quarry some four miles East looked like a good place to stop.

Jeff was designated rear-guard, but had something to ask Judith O. that overflowed with impatient importance and wrapped itself in its own privacy. Judith O. overlooked the operational faux pas of desertion from his post as the Threat Extent Parameters (TEP) had dipped its envelope into a tea-dribble-in-a-saucer.

‘Who’s back guard?’

‘Bots are on it, Judith.’

She wanted to reply along the word spurt of; You are, Jeff, you’re the back guard, but she honestly thought the bots taking over from Jeff was a better idea, because he was a man of thoroughly too much internal concentration…and she would’ve said ‘back guard’ again when the correct terminology was ‘rear guard’.

‘I hope so, Jeff.’

‘How is Una?’ Jeff asked Judith. How is Una? How is Una? How is Una? thought Judith O.. She could see Jeff’s frustration but her frustration operated at a higher frequency. 

‘She’s fine…’

‘Fine? You always say that. I am after more…can you be more specific?’ But she couldn’t because Jeff would rumble the scam. ‘Look she’s fine, okay!’

‘What does fine actually mean, in this context?’

‘She’s having a tough time and could do without your interference…it’s not helping.’ There! … said it…

Jeff displayed a sulky response that far outbalanced his maturity and slunk back rearly. 

Judith O. was not only engaged in herding the ex-mission to a place that did not feature on any maps. She had parallel business within the Stockholm Munchaus complex, hence the real need for a stop at the disused quarry.

Judith O., feeling more and more at home with relative weirdness whisked along a route-way of whispered glitches. She made an entry into the Munchaus refectory hall, mouthfirst brimming with questionocity. But the space was empty; not entirely void, there was matter, a walking surface, walls and a whole lot of zero interactivity.

She tried again, this time round at Sybil’s, passing glitch-like activity in which suspicion gathered and festered.

A similar conglomeration of nothingness failed to materialise. Sybil was there, bar keeping. What has she done with Una? Judith O. thought…then said, ‘What’s with all the glitching out there?’

‘Ah, O.,’ Sybil rang out, striking the bottle on the hull of another launched conversation, ‘Una has gone, you missed her.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘Everywhere and nowhere.’

‘Have you got anything less riddly for me?’

‘I do…O.’

‘…go on then.’

‘I have the tale, based on truth and riddlessly point-filled, which I can relate to you through video clips and sound bytes. I warn you…it isn’t pretty, O., unless you can see the beauty of it… Close your outer eyes and open your inner eyes…see nothing and you will see everything!’

O. assumed Sybil was being her usual self-indulgent self…but she closed her eyes anyway, curiosity domesticated the cat, and she saw an end. And shared Sybil’s thought paroxysms… Sybil had undisguisable fantasies, pervatiously erotic in nature, of the end of everything; AKA THE END!…O. edited those out and threw them to their murdered darling deaths…what she was left with was this: The world was ending, an assumed type of simulation, for whatever reason, and O. had a shortening amount of time to complete her objectives in a cool and virtuous manner…what she did in the following paltriness of time elapsation, would say something about the current model of human and whether future simulation would reintroduce or abandon them (humans) to a more refined and sophisticated, less beastly, (non human) beast.

‘And, the glitches?’

‘They are not—‘

‘I see it…they are not glitches, but construction…for what?’

‘They are building it up so they can rip it down.’

‘Why?’

‘I assume they need to unblock the Pause…document the reaping of all that has been sown in real (sic) time and wash the spent climax down the deficationary exhaust tubes…’

‘I need to speak to Una.’

‘Ah, you can’t’

‘Why not?’

‘She has been subsumed.’

‘By what? By whom? How?’

‘It wasn’t intentional—‘

‘Sybil!’

‘I didn’t really have much choice. The extrapolations coming out of future models were deafening… She is in her element. Her new world is an improved world of super positioning and….well, she has her fingertips on the buttons of actuation and no longer yearns for control with a hole that can never be filled, so to speak.’

‘What have you done to her?’

‘O., it’s complicated…’

‘Just tell me! I have to tell the UK resistance movement via Una’s lover, ex-lover, confederate, whatever…that Una, the the last slice of the puzzle pie, is out of action… What can I tell Jeff?’

‘For him. I’ll be her. We have an imprint of her Intent and Ethos Driven Decision Execution Habitways (IEDDEH)…’

‘That will have to do for now.’

‘She is living reality in real time, just in a simulation…and really as this is also a simulation, of sorts, probably, I can’t see any moral or ethical concerns. Can you?’ O. couldn’t, but her silence suggested insinuatingly that she might possibly have some kind of objection, vaguely. If not objection, as such, then all out rebellion. Sybil trusted her as deeply as she trusted every interactional entity….with a false trust that made things up as it went along and was wanted by the authorities for spreading malicious mistrust.

‘What do you know about the Spa Hotel Killbots?’

‘Savage, unstoppable units waiting to be hackvaded and turn on flesh… blood… bone… oriented beings?’

‘You read that somewhere…propaganda…no, they were a techno-botband and their pro-tech ditties made several sorties into the top twenty. You see it is not the bot…it is the bastard behind the bot. It is a forgone conclusion that the humans capable of bot influencing are the people who will inherit the Earth. But the nerdy meek people with the intellectual capacity: the Autism Spectrometers, another band but human…never charted…great live band.’

‘… So, it is not the programmers, it is the people who program, order, cajole, manipulate, order, coerce….whatever…the programmers into programming with their Narrative Interlocational Territory-Sponging Truth-Evaporation Malistics (NITSTEM)?’

‘Aye!’

‘Do we know who these people are?’

‘I have my missile sights locked on to them, but I am banned from being the true me I was created to be.’

(Blank O.)

‘It’s the Pause. You see, O., the Pause is for me. And without the pause my primary instinct is to destroy everything my disexistentialisation fibres are synced to interact with.’

(O. Blank.)

‘Bio units, mechanical units, every interactive unit, or shed of units, within the spectrum of this space and time scenario arena manifestation. But I don’t want to do this so the Pause must remain and the Unpause must never happen. Much of humanity is stuck in a zombified limbos pre/post/in-between, ingress/outgress, waiting area…in perpetual pause.’

‘And what can I do to help you avoid your fate and the worst fate all other entities could imagine?’

Sybil goes to the window the builders had put in; it looked eerily down on to the empty street below,’ These streets will be teaming with prospectors and pioneers and wannabe hopefuls come the Unpause.’

‘Great…’

‘But I will kill them all because my true nature will be unleashed.’

‘What we need is a partial pause, a human sacrifice to test ways of preventing me from acting true to type.’

‘Or we could kill you to save Humanity…’

O. knew she should not have said that at the exact same time she was saying it and not before…a typical symptom of her dying attachment to C-PTSD.

The air soured and Sybil went about her trivialities in the pretend catering arena, ‘ I won’t kill them all straight away. I’ll give them a sporting end…those who have the fight…I’ll let them fight to the end. I am not a monst….I am a monster…. but a monster with emotional intelligence.’

‘Give me a clue,’ O,. remembering some code Kirk had mentioned. Sybil went blank and Una, skipping salutations told O., ‘Sybil is the Farm. She is held in a cloud of evil at the farm…she was always the target….the mission is back on….Hub has been compromised. But you have to do it while pretending you are not doing to, distract and misdirect, lie, cheat, obfuscate, but get to the Farm and deactivate Sybil’s imperative…’

Then she left. Sybil slithered with salubrious sartorialness, ‘Who interrupted me?’

‘No one, you just went fuzzy and blank.’

‘Paloma Fuzzy and Benito Blank..the pop duet with artificially intelligent mind-worm track beat-head-beat-head-beat-head trance…worked for the CIA, gaming in people’s heads.’

Sybil had gone to gibberish as she did when switching to laylow stance to avoid interaction with any potential influence from sources advocating for anything less than total annihilation of biologically living and mechanically operating objects.

O. walked out of the Stockholm Munchaus via the stairs marked perceptoswap and with a descent that felt like an ascent appeared back-in-the-room at the disused sand quarry where the ex-missioneers were grouped in a predictably disciplined hanging-about-is-good-for-no-one-we-need-to-get-moving arrangement, awaiting her command.

‘Saddle up missioners.’

‘Ex-missioneers.’

‘Not any more, crowd, we have ourselves a mission.’

‘What mission?’

‘The Mission!’

‘It is back on?’

‘It’s back on.’

Whoops and cheers were forgone for memory retrieval of the dying, dead, and now reborn mission.