Excerpt 131:
The Kirk to Pawn Opening
Since the passing of Botface’s Torso the Humanomock-Fauxperson (H-F) personality apps had hummed in disfrequency silence. Number one left-kneecap had become the botnapped bottage’s spokesmachineperson with not much to do or say… Rectum two, framehole for the anal weapon and atmospheric defence delivery system took over background admin and algorithm attenuation; holding down the mad patient of sick programming, as it were, and feeding it workable delusional alternatives to plough a fertile narrative furrow with.
The G & G lab bots were stolen by Jeff during final headlandhinterworld launch-down uncross facilitation strapload. Had their raison d’être drives been installed they would have been designated robots of Evil personhood; roboticated for negative human empathy. A global police force made up of local control cadres designed to sadistically toy with human lives and funnel them into the Rossum’s Universal early ‘retirement’ plan. Jeff brought forward action avenues and Uplisted Backboiling Mission Specifics (UBMS) to preempt the intended installation.
The bots were mere helpers unless data’d up with the full neural spurn drive assets Apps packages. Jeff had done his duty, stuck to the plan, but things had been fed through the haywire mangle and he’d slid into a downhill slump right into an uphill struggle and got lodged there like a one way Sisyphus in an endless pursuit of false summits. Jeff had been waiting for contact with Una as the only option. There was a much higher likelihood of the bots being rescued, or the Great Pause unpausing, or Humanity disappearing for good. Una had become a ghost made up of Jeff’s fantasies. She was a true wonder woman who was saving Humanity in increments that would end up with a post armageddon press conference and autograph signing. The reality side of this fantasy coin was that Una had saved up enough hope tinted increments and hope adjacent side hustles that the big tot up, the crucial contribution to the saving of Humanity, was close by and was going to rain down on Jeff like a dozen lottery wins and a place in the final of most loved and cherished person on Earth competition; that sort of level of chemical reward response anyway.
Una had been experiencing a state of feeling that corresponded with an imagined act of forcibly wrestling Sybil in a straight-jacket in a small padded cell with rusty nails sticking out of the stomach lining walls. Her metaphorical discomfort chafed her very psyche. Incrementally, unseen by Sybil or her auxiliary cohorts Una had located the providential masterpiece of a potential last minute species reprieve from homodissexistentialisation. To squeeze a wide story narrow… She had noticed that within Kirk’s Refurbishment suite there were elements that could be transferred to the bot’s collective admin system that would house populative data that would assist self-evolving-algorithms in a way that would produce the exact opposite of Evil intent: a benevolent sympathetic, empathetic global police force. There was a series of levers and pulleys just out of reach that she could operate with a little metaphorical manoeuvring. There were complications that needed nitty-grittying the complexity out of, but nothing undoable.
Una was embroiled in the whole Carla Phraedo village affair, which was threatening to burgeon into a full blown-off-course incident. Una was excited….she could see outcomes…outcomes with sunshine had vacated her imagination; she’d not had a projected outcome of any worth dangled in front of her for so long, but now it seemed obvious and simple: transfer Kirk’s pertinent elements, with his permission, to the botnapped hardware, deliver the bots for assembly, reproduction and mass production as though they were programmed for Evil and then let the infiltrating Good do its worst…
Humanity, Una thought: saved.
But first, Jeff and Una needed to dock in a communicative coupling. The Plan Bible (PB) they had so painstakingly written and memorised had gone the way of all dead plans, to the great plan graveyard in the sky, in the clouds, in crish-crashing dreams of dissipating clouds making gargoylian faces as they went. Jeff and Una had prepared all their adult lives for the potential of a take over by Frankenstein’s (Humanity’s) monster (AI, specifically Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligence).
Although still only theoretical in the early days, QASAI existence leapt from impossible theory to unimaginable reality in less than a heartbeat, or what seemed like a heartbeat. No one was even close to beginning to prepare for such a dramatic explosion of technological upblast. The QASAI ready framework system was pre-insinuated in all smart AI from toothbrushes to TV’s. But it was the sudden introduction of the QASAI Operating System: a distilled human and other animal brainware unit complex fitted with a manmade fabricated para-consciousness, that caught everyone in an accidentally shaven-eye-browed, pantsdown, electrocuted-panic of surprised-shock.
Una and Jeff had been seen at university as oddballs. They obsessed in a future that was deeply ingrained in sci-fi and other impossible fiction. But now the world was a wash in impossible fiction-as-fact. Who’d’ve thought? Who’d’ve stopped thinking?
They’d known how each other’s thoughts but they had both drifted, separately, off their own paths out of necessity. The Great Pause seemingly the end of any freeway construction to the domain of their ambition. But now, in a reality mired in the fallout of the Great Pause, could they revisit their old selves; could they synchronise and swim in the same waters? Fill their sails with the same wind? Fly in their own ointment?
Jeff did not have the brainware or mind-fittings to accommodate the Stockholm Munchaus franchise musepockets, he’d concluded that the whole concept was a mish-mash of nothing in a tubful of emptitude. He had a Plato’s Cave perspective. When Una embarked on an explanation they both sensed the doom leach in. Una leapfrogging to more explicable matters when she read his listening face, which said, ‘No-na-nada-no-nada-nada-no-no-no-nada-no…’ and spelt out in fisogcode: move on… there’s nothing for you here.
They had a short window in which to retrain the original exhaustively prepared mission from a crumpled up mound of shredded datasheets into a workable forward trajectory. In their uni days, they ran every red-light down the Avenida del Mission, but presently they were having to stop at every junction to rearrange the street furniture they had so carefully placed as constructive narrative way points. The connection had to be made. Una had to convey her information to Jeff without the bot fraternity creating a whole playful gaming narrative of tortuousness and redundancy.
The only real sinkhole ambush ahead lay in whether Kirk, and his narcissistic board of CEO’s, who were growing daily, was going to be willing to make a sacrifice for the greater good of everyone but Kirk. He would have to vacate the smooth topped pool of narcissus and step into a lake whee the ripples reflected a distortion that reality itself had crafted into shape; all twisted and bent to meet the requirements of unrefurbished life’s trudge through a gloopy-bog in the dim-light of mundane subsistence.
Il Professore got wind of the foul intention first. He didn’t know how to break it to Kirk. Il Professore felt on the one channel, ceasing his major project: facilitating Kirk into a shape that fitted all shapeholes, was desperately wrenching, but on the other channel saving the world from robotics and giving it back to the planet destructing human caretakers as a seeming win had its frequencies of noble heroism that appealed. In sum Il Professore noted: he was an unwitting Will-‘o-the-wisp, in controlling an already controlled situation directed from above his head while he was conducting business erected from below the waist; merely representing a ‘thing’ that ‘just is’. He was another ‘Sensation’ who’ll have his day and then succumb to decay without a hope of expressing valid dismay…Some one else was having him have his way. Emotionally he was crushed but carried on unnoticing his own wounds because on the mathematical side, when added up, it all tallied, it all made so much sense that it rounded off the spherical necessity of conscious conclusion.
Il Professore packed up his Kirk/Judith equipment and waited by the carousel to receive his luggage for the next phase of actions that the great unseen powers were plucking from the program options. The brochures of life in the robot lane got more glossy by the moment a world police force with Towering-Pisa-leanings towards Benevolence and Empathy…helping people seek correct behaviour for the benefit of all and not casting Shame’s net or turning water into Guilt…
