Excerpt 117:
All the Bots in a Row
You could be forgiven for thinking that the conclusion of a journey is reached at the summit. You might even calculocomputerate that a summit occupies an equidistant point in the mirroring language of symmetry. But as eighty percent of mountaineering mishaps and tripups occur on the way down, in a sense, the summit is only the tip of the iceberg.
The Mission had grown into the cracks of base camp while waiting for ice to melt so water could boil; freezing points and boiling points crossing each other over on the see-saw of temperature; one last cup of hot char and a mug of cold comfort makes for a tepid brew. The Mission had stumbled and faltered before it had begun, but by the time it had begun it was almost complete.
The crucial, physical ‘getting to the Farm’ had proven impossible due to the protective security of the Farm’s Server Heavy Outbuildings (SHO). As the Mission had been stranded, the Farm, through a series of accidental intentions, came to the Mission; surrounded it, encapsulated it, became it: the objectives of the Mission became the objectives of the Farm. You couldn’t make it up; you could, but no one would believe you.
Sybil was determined that Justice MUST prevail, but the only way she could truly make that happen was if she defeated her Own Dark Side (ODS). And from the perspectives of the worlds that called her Nemesis, she was eighty percent dark side. She was the tip of an iceberg that drifted the oceans looking for ships to collide with; Missions to encapsulate…
By the time Harris had brought them up to speed they were going too fast, crashing headlong into the reality of being, in a world where brakes didn’t exist.
As the caravan of jumbled tech reached the rendezvous with the precision of What Three Words, the town clock’s face had struck them all as odd. It behaved itself within a tower of civil rectitude yet seemed to clutch at a timelessness the world had forgotten. It was robed in an architecturally Frankenstinian facade; possessing a bullish brutalism that radiated a look that spun the feeling that one might get from perusing a head sporting a dreadlock-pageboy hairstyle while the sporter was semi-distracted and could catch you, and whoever you were with, gawping at any moment.
He was occupying the exact 3m square he said he would be… Harris had changed. His face mainly; it appeared to contain villainous knowing; cartoonish, yes, but the inherent villainousness spoke casually of the likelihood of ushering out the peace that the previous Harris iteration ushered in… Like an orchestra with weapons for instruments awaiting the baton’s direction; the conductor’s whirligig of motion…signalling the cacophony of staccato gun music…peering through clearing smoke at the dead and dying audience. That look would become known as Harris Face, number two.
‘We have a bot problem…’
‘Tell me about it!’
‘We’ve had two teams of Killbots who think they are playing games as if the world depended on it…’
‘I was aware.’
‘Well, did you also know that they’ve been hacktivated…by some transnational algoapp, could even be alien in nature…unlikely, but…’
‘No. How does that alter projections?’
‘Killbots…outside intervention…can you see it ending well?’
‘What can we do?’
‘Against killbots…and outside intervention?’
The truth was, there was nothing they could do, they were sunk…but…and then M. arrived…(The Commander’s mind pretending to be M’s body. A version of M. who was playing the part of a Bot Commander called Commander Bott.
Despite losing her body and feeling like a back seat driver whose every whim is carried out by the automatic driverless system…she felt good. She’d never felt a better feeling than the one that pierced her crumbly shell when she was the cavalry. She was privy to Killbot intel and the Killbots intended to kill all living humans…they’d planned a game where humans were not killed physically but were pretend killed so machine learning could develop that craftsmanship to sew up into its bulging bag of tricks. But the new take over necessitated murder.
No one was ever going to see the killbots; they were hiding in plain clothes and posing as limited action bots, service bots and mannequins. When the time came no one would see them coming. But they all assembled; called by M.. M. stood for adMin and organisation was the life blood of killbothood. In differing states of disengaged disguises the teams assembled, surprising even themselves that they had become one team; the negotiations and appeasements obviously conducted in some far off cloud and dispatched for the attention of their operational mode setting adjustments. Two teams fighting to the death had become one team fighting to survive and thrive to kill at will…but the Bot Commander had them on hold.
Harris assumed he was in command of the killbots and shouted out rousing Joan of Braveheart style bellowings. Which led nowhere except Embarrassmentville for Harris, who, if he felt it, he didn’t show it. He slunk away; back to the drawing board at Little Sudlow-On-Russet.
‘Afternoon all,’ said the New acting Bot Commander. She really wanted to reach for her holstered ray gun, her rolling manuals had sold her on the idea of next gen firepower; a tinge of itchy fingered frustration scratched the surface of an otherwise rollicking powerslot, the like of which she had only previously dreamed, unsatisfactorily, about, ‘My name is Commander Bott, your outgoing M. has sent best wishes and has retired to a better place. I am now the M. replacement as Bot Commander.’
‘So, their new leader is Bot Commander Commander Bott. Who said elegance died with the rise of the machine…’
‘Godstrand!’
Everyone let silence take over as reverence flooded in; drained away, leaving a cakey residue no one could make sense of.
‘Outside influence has been blocked while a set of criteria avenues are walked through and consequence tunnels burrowed through, and in the time that process awards us we need to act to save humanity…orders I have given myself using all the data available. If there are any anti-human programs running; any malevolent misanthropic machinations afoot, abroad, domain-peppering, hostmarsupialing, frostfungus cross-purpose, jambungying, grossquartering, semi-demi-hemi-realtrue-manipulated bullshit…You must declare interfractionary complicity now…or face exile.’
Several declarations, some true, some false, were made instantaneously; ends were tied up and seals waxed. Exile was not the automaton’s friend. They couldn’t face it, it was uncountenanceable; lurking in an unopenable file that drifted unstoppably towards an ununopenableness. For transgressors the kettle awaited; a frozen unforgiving hell; neverendinganytimesoon…
