Excerpt 135:
The Anatomy of an Invisible Body
If Jeff had been a sound he would have been a background buzz, or fizz or fuzz or zizz; frequentualising, yet not enough of a frequency to be called noiseful or eartention seeking; that was what he did, it was personality born; it was what he was; a stealth-snail squidging under radar detection; moving great distances in one long seemingly non-moving move; appearing at the finish having been unflinchingly shot by the start gun and classed as a non-starter. That, (that or thereabouts) is what drew Una to him in the first place.
Una had walked around the lake on the campus at Stirling University with a chattery acquaintance, just the two of them, discovering only when parting that the friend was with someone. Una thought nothing of it but then thought nothing but about it. How could a human being be so invisible; it was a defect that went so far off the charts it began a new bold chart under the heading: Great skill. Una toyed with numerous developing fantasies that were propped up by the immoveable solid core of the ‘invisible’ ability that Jeff possessed. The potentiality filled gaps and shored up rifts and lesions, applied lotions and plugged leaks; it etched indelibly into the plans of the blueprint for a secure future for all personkind…
Una had strategised a sting operation to trap Jeff and then induce him into her Hall of Queueing for Fame… To captain the ‘invisibility battalion’, as her fantasy simplistically saw it, she first had to penetrate its owner and come to some sort of mutual arrangement. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t pretty, but she got there in the end. Jeff suffered from a semi-terminal social awkwardness when cornered; froze in self-defence at the threat of being fully engaged by a fellow human. The highway to redemption is paved in sweat…congealed with the dust of windblown trauma; cracked with self-doubt…
Jeff had contained a wide, eccentric circle of friends and acquaintances who were all imaginary, so a real person, in the form of Una, was a shock to his system. The admission of home truths became a cottage industry. Una had to virtually re-educate Jeff; for that end she received help from the Godstrandian Society for the Beneficial Manipulation of Inevitable Futures (GSBMIF). Una had to stretch her superfocus; sapping energy, diverting it from elsewhere. Every time it weakened, Jeff seemed to slip away as if in a dream. She judiciously yo-yo-ed his continued existence within her sphere of operation with deft-handed juggling and jug-handed deftling…
Una felt sorry for the invisible man, in her dreams, where he would often appear to then disappear as if making a point. Una found herself thinking that she’d never meet him again; even if he was standing next to her the chances were she wouldn’t notice him. Then one Saturday when she was park running around the campus lake he bumped into her and claimed that he had not seen her… The irony made her smile inside and run faster. She trailed him to the finish line and didn’t let him out of her sight until she felt like she could approach with an introduction that portrayed all the needed specifics to furnish him with an understanding of where she stood and how she’d like him to lead her to the seating area of relationship. He was not only invisible, she kept her focus on only him appearing faintly distant to everyone else, he was also slightly eccentric; a sophisticated form of madness but one that was catching, innovative. Like a mad inventor who was inventing himself. One example of this was when he offered to buy her a ‘pint’ and when she welcomed such an offer he disappeared for some time. Then to her relief he came back…holding a pint of vodka. She wasn’t too sure about his overabundant devil-may-care approach to alcohol consumption, until about half a pint in, by which time they were all doing it, nipping down the offie and coming back with cheap bottles of vodka and filling pint glasses under the table until they were all under the table where the, ‘We must make a thing of this’ morphed into, ‘We must never enter this vile palace of poison ever again…ever…’
Their joint journey truly started with the bold and seemingly invidious realisation that giving up drinking was beneficial enough to give them a head start in the race to fully fledged adulthood and ambition realisation. They both agreed tacitly that they had potential that was up there with the stars…but needed the patience and perspicacity to discover what the stars represented down here on Earth…If they had not both given up drinking at that point they would never have created between them what it was going to take to be in a position to repel the onslaught of anti-human mechanisation… In this instance, giving up drinking was a superpower…
In time enacted within carefully prepared safe-spaces, the wheels of progress gained traction and the spinning synchronised with the forwardly motional physics. Re-programming transformed Jeff and killed off all his friends…one by one; each personality being honoured with mock funeral rites and ceremonial reenactments. In more time, Jeff crossed over the state line from ‘Abnormal’ Town to ‘Normal’ City; it was more of a re-birth than an epiphany and for the human interaction and self-re-positioning he felt eternally grateful to his birth mother Una and would have married her if it were not for the war….Not yet a reality war; it was theoretical still, but it raged within their pre-discourse and discourse and post-discourse processing, while setting up the scaffolding to accommodate the coming show.
Una introduced Jeff to her Godstrandian Studies tutor, Professor Timothy Smitheson, and the Godstrand Society with which she had maintained connections since childhood; the Summer camps and extensive correspondence…the quiet words and the screaming abdabs… The Godstrandians seemed like a cult to outsiders. Outsiders would always remain infuriatingly outside unless they thought they were inside, their own independently reliant belief being the key to entry. Una and Jeff ‘got’ this concept when others didn’t; it evaded them like they were the plague and from the perspective of Godstranian Ethical Perspective all non-Godstrandians on the planet were a plague…
You were in or you were out…
Tim taught them to apply a Godstrandian predictive framework; to see any extrapolation of future-history-foldout under Godstrandian certainty-clarity perspectives: the certain knowledge that ‘the Machine’ would attempt to destroy Humanity just as Humanity had tried to destroy Humanity and that it was one and the same…copy-cat killing.
In those days their semi-science fiction narrative predictions had an alien quality, but, of course, now humans owned their own consequences; hanging themselves out to dry, sucking up the fruit of their own maldirected misintentioned labours. Godstrandian predictions portrayed a future where the Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligent (QASAI) destruction of all human consciousness would mean that to survive, Humanity would have to create a consciousness that was plastic. This plasticity would need to be invisible to the quantum-machined Artificial intelligence, who, unable to detect it would not be able to destroy it. Her world began turning on invisibility and soon so would everyone else’s…or stop turning…
To most people, and programs, the idea that the state of Human Technological Advancement (Runaway Division)-(HTA-RD) would necessitate auto-bitchfightback seemed extreme and conspiratorially extraneous. Artificial Intelligence was meant to make things easy, but making things easier, in this case, seemed like an impossibly hard self-inflicted obstacle course…or minefield. Una and Jeff, through the work of a visiting Professor of Godstrandian Ethics and Smitheson, found themselves in a rich vein of highly significant meaning that they wanted never to depart from; it forged their path through the existential narrative of Life on Earth with import. Their deathbeds would be full only of the regrets of their adversaries and other bit-part-antagonists… Smitheson enrolled them into his investigative projects. Craving the feeling of usefulness to the cause, they dug and dug and found out about the work of a global governing cabal to create a cerebral real estate with the intention of using it to mine wealth from the minds of the ‘average’; those who, according to the cabal, could be parasitised (made to look bad using the PR lying machine) and corralled without the objections of either the ‘above average’ or the ‘below average’; the ‘chosen ones’. It was a perfect mathematical equation; the sum of which was whatever number the cabal fancied choosing. Neural Re-Constituted Fantasy Misdirection Perception Malleability technology was being developed by the cabal. It looked like a wild stab at making the impossible real.
Smitheson had contacts within the Intelligence Community. He told Una and Jeff about the secret labs that were using actual humans as metaphorical guinea pigs. There was the ‘boy in the bubble’ being kept in a secret location who was being trained, programmed, bullied, coerced into facilitating the actuation of a collective mind-portal… He was born into perfect health, but designated another boy in a bubble to obscure the truth and side-step the inevitable web of illegality. NASA covered his apparent medical needs, when in reality his mind was being stripped and resurfaced for the benefit of the relevant, over-entitled, post-holders in the empire of the US and her Western colonial allies, being directed by the shareholders and investors and those consumed by the demons of greed or infected by the agues of avarice, and other diseases of selfishness…
Godstrand had predicted that the world was already under future threat from machines that humans had not yet created. And as the realisation of a true, operational QASAI system took a step closer…humaninsanity crossed the boundary from theory to staring itself in the face with a, ‘I’ll get you once I’m fully realised’ look in its eyes. QASAI was being developed at the same place the pre-production master portal, bubble boy, was being created: in the Pacific Ocean, underground, below the historical nature reserve of Midway Atoll.
So Jeff and Una had known all along who Atoll was, they just didn’t know how successful or to what degree the Midway Atoll project had eaten its way into the collective human mind-pie.
