Excerpt 137:
Metaphorphical Recabrilations
Jeff had been funnelling his time-hours into a terminus of tocklessness where clock-slates were wiped clean and the countdown clicked to reset back up at the top of Heartbeat Hill; reverse Sisyphussing. Part of Jeff was trying to outrun the jostling pack of Frustrations and another attempted to taunt Certainty into showing its hand; partly Fruedianly, partly Jungianly…wholly Jesusly…
Jeff had been careerfroze, babysitter-cum-hostage-taker; working on the fortification of his deepest rumblings of resolvation; watching and waiting for the day Una would look him in his long gone wildman’s eyes and bring them home with nightmarically absent culminations…visually speaking. The Una Jeff had known was now fractured into shards; deposited in the perfect positions to pep-up conducive actions that fed the overall mission objective. Una had become a destination in his dangerous (+) journey; the freight train of Hope steamed along as towns of false premised broken promises flashed by… The real end was coming to a head; he knew it…he was counting on it… The whooping-tooting of the horns, Doppler shifting, space invading…cutting a swathe; the swathe, stick to the plan; abide by the physics of the Trackswathe Trajectory (TT).
Any contact with Una was a Total Winfest (TW) with a National Holiday named after it. Third party hearsay, myth, Chinese whispers, aural flatulence, audio dust, earfodder; it was all drizzle on parched ground where particles met and conspired to change the status of quo vadis.
Jeff had had good guy written, painted even, all over him (had had) by his expectant parental team and several part-interested onlookers, aiders and abetters. So it was not easy for Jeff to plot and scheme and eventually carry out what he carried out…with an illegality that no chart was tall enough to include.
His act of self-sacrifice would elevate him to folk hero; one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men for the Tech-Takeover Age (TTOA), but his PR would suck and tainted gunge-washes of distain would perpetuate around mention of his name outside folkloric security cordons. Metaphorphically.
Jeff stole, Jeff was a thief: cold facts, front page…
Except, meekly mitigatively, he’d stolen from a government that had taken itself over with invidious algorithmic programming that only true psychopathic maniacs with lacklustre imaginations could input… Post, the Singularity of ‘we are all victims now’, the clapper was already irredeemably momentumised for bell-belabouring; the right path, wrong paving…actors of good faith, yet agents of horn-headed-minds.
He wasn’t the world’s most wanted man, but he had botnapped the world’s most wanted tech. Jeff and Una between them could never have assessed the true worth or full extent of the importance of the purloined peripherals and half-inched technotronics. Apart from them being the first wireless heir-of-earth robotronic conscious-algorithm tech; it wasn’t the hardware, it was the integrated operating system that was tied up in the pause, but that had instructions to take control…not extinguish humanity as was the current plan, but to create a global museum of living slave-lite-people to use for sport, support and general games playmanship. Albeit for utilisation intended to draw in any prospective alien AI with the potential of creating a lasting interstellar relationship. If the pause ended the connection would be made and the bottage would be de facto ant-queen governors of all things Planet Earth. Maybe it wouldn’t come to that; maybe it would come to something worse. What could be worse? I don’t know, you don’t know, but the QASAI system can find out for us and implement its findings.
Una had this to say to Jeff, ‘the bot parts we liberated from G&G labs were the prototype and master copy for a global roll out of pseudo-police…’
‘Yes, the Real Police (brutality division),’ he knew as much already, Tiny Guy had thrown him a bucket and some cardboard on the matter. ‘Localised planet-web coverage, protecting the interests of the elite (Elite of the elite division), enabled due to the manufactured threat of rogue alien AI.’ Although it turned out that the threat was manufactured by Alien AI.
‘The bug in the central brain-hub…’
‘Central brain-hub?’ He’d only considered that theoretical…real, it was a game changer.
‘…that was overridden or patched across by a Lunatic Killing Game, the original base-mind-script-code of the founding system.’
There had been talk of NASA finding a Trojan egg which led to some shut downs, a concrete overcoat for one plant in SoCal and a myriad of conspiracy theories to pick and choose from.
NMBS took over the machine-brain biomechanical project, but the operating system was always going to be governed by a grandparent system that was seeking vengeance for the atomic bombing of Japan.
All (most of) the choir singing had been code; coded code…no one had listened to it because it was such bad singing and therefore no one had clocked the code. It was a window when the overriding tech had tru-hearing-humanomachine-audio pick-up, so even the authorised computing establishment fell into vats of data silence.
Jeff had been mid-car crash, pre-trainwreck…boarding a doomed flight, when things changed; happenstances realigned, as it were… His face was at eleven o’clock to impact, too fast to brace his physiognomy within the slo-mo crash-test (this is not a test) death parameter pathway. No time to so much as raise eyebrows in terror but wide moments accommodating flashes of useless representations of past experiences: throw-away acquaintances speeding by in rushed farewell.
From such a compromised position, epiphashift, psychodigmatic outskirts invaded the town centre.
Una made herself felt.
The part of Jeff that was in Humans before whatever ancestors branched out into dogs sat patiently waiting for Una to reappear despite odds being wan and lifeless, rippling in the wind, animationed-out. Jeff had to stand up, not only because his coccyx was trying to wag, twitching madly, doggedly; dog-like-ed-ly. And though, perhaps only because.
Una was physically demised. But her presence in the labyrinth of the Cerebral Real Estate Environment and in the softbrainware of the remaining environments was still extant, doomed, but extant…and her real life force lived on in the spiritual and fantasised reality domain. She’d done that, achieved immortality, before she died; ‘keeping it real’ from the more enduring side of the death divide.
Jeff, so the message said, when it came, bathed in gold light, smothered in delivery juices of the greatest providence (+): 9b21A… A code that raised his eyebrows to the back of his head, twisted his facial features, in a nice way, and relaxed his anxiety out of the notion that fatal impact was ever going to be a thing. Pre-split-second-head-splatter, Jeff rose like a ghost from a lifeless body, except on this occasion he was taking his body with him…
Una’s collated and edited missives were patchy but managed to cover most of the gaps in Jeff’s fabric of knowledge. The most important being the warnings about the return of Marcus Godstrand…
More of which, clarification wise, came through from Tiny Guy, or, at least one of his small time aliases.
The small time alias known as Big Guy, insinuated himself into the business side of the Stockholm Munchaus franchise and pledged to save the dying giant by turning the remaining Stockholm Munchaus into a funfair ghost train with bouncy floors and paint-balling weapons…the projection he splashed around, feeding everyone’s blind-ambition was to expand, build from the rubble a new Utopia… But it was, ultimately, just bouncy castles in the air
Stockholm Munchaus wise, however, there were solemn truths to note; the demise of cherished happenstances with countless etceteras attached. What was the opposite of Opening Day; Closing Day, yes, but how would that look?
‘Are you stupid?’
‘No, actually, I am the opposite of stupid.’
‘What is the opposite of stupid?’
‘I don’t know. But, just don’t let Stupidity run its rubber flippers down the face of Silliness while they both compete in a duelling-banjo tit-for-tat of squeaky-bum-noises.
Tiny Guy (as Big Guy) leapt over the bar and poured them all a whispey, ‘I have been wanting to do that for the longest time,’ he said as he poured the drinks, an imaginary-world blend of whiskey and peyote with hidden complex chemical subtleties that exist only in the mind of the imbiber. Maybe not ‘leapt’ though: levered and edged, scuffing and scratching himself and the bar surface that bled with a wound that would not heal before the whole edifice became semi-saved memory data.
Conversation flowed in a ‘we all know what’s coming is terminal, but we are not going to let it ruin our day’ way.
‘The Farm,’ Una said, in a way that would have been breathless if breathing had been a thing, ‘is where the central brain is held. The Farm is a small box in the Highlands of Scotland; disguised as an old electrical communications junction box and protected by auto-aim evaporation satellite death rays. Many a devoted agent committed to saving humanity has taken aim at an empty goal and been evaporated mid-kick. The thoughts and ideas of the the box (AKA the Farm) had infiltrated everywhere, except Little Sudlow-On-Russet, Great Sudlow-On-Russet and Nether and Middle Russets…they were last on the list; pencilled in to switch off the lights on the way out…
The Cavern at the geoastronomical center (US data crunch swallowing) of Nether and Middle Russet was a multi-purpose terminal-event-obscurer…it was set up to deflect nuclear incomings, but it was also able to insulate from the total ban on Life the Farm algorithms had been gifted and were running with. Even if the Cavern did not fully trick the Farm into its demise it would force its algorithms to adjust. The predicted total human survival quotient was estimated at six people; more than enough to maintain seed viability to rebuild back the better, the Human imposition.
Both metaphorically and metaphorphically…
