Excerpt Fifty-Eight
The Farm Beckons
The control room at UKGBHQ was in a counter-transverse, action-taking/do-no-harm inaction, embroilment; stuck in a pre-mid-post, big-dipper, counter-perception-conception funk. Using the Treading-water-gaining-traction Paradox Circumvention Response Acclimatisation Pathway (TwgtPCRAP) it was actuating extrication.
But you don’t need to know that.
A few brief, slappy-patty backsteps loosening linear narration’s bindings:
‘Oh Ess is operational,’ and variations, shouted multi-people-voices…and disoperationally…over the top of KB’s (the Operating System) next sentence,’ sounding like everyone on Earth had won the lottery. Which wasn’t helping optimising OS foreplan imperatives.
‘Repeat!’
‘OS is operational,’ a lone voice repeated, in a why am I repeating this, way. Atticus cussed.
‘OS…Repeat!’
KB repeats and furthers with cautionary notes.
Sybil and her backroom, a faultless imitation of Una’s demised backroom, had ideas that gnawed on the axle-bone of KB’s intention.
KB was following protocolesque lines of adherence to positive mission-outcome threat-avoidance.
Sybil was throwing the cake into the blender with a plan that involved snatching a lunch of crumbs from the gaping mouth of a monster with big teeth whose accommodating throat serviced a black hole of digestion.
All ways, all plans, all riskfests led to one venue. Fate had very little to do in the way of where everyone involved with this subplot would end up: it was, the Farm.
If you are unfamiliar with the Farm, the most usual first contact with them is a twee brochure that gives the average person a feeling of security and overbearing safety in all things connected to the Farm and its metaphorical outbuildings. A safety so relaxed into its swaddling marshmallowiness that Danger itself felt like a safe customer. Those with tools to mine beneath the crust of sod that bears their cognitive weight, feel a shudder, a thundering underumble where the truth rages like a conflagration of a dozen or so beelzebubs. A subterranean volcanic armaggeddoniser, dry-salivating at the a la carte menu of Humanity cooked seven ways.
Some see a brochure…
…others suspect a PR inspired, synthetic woollen eye-covering full of unmanifestable promises.
The trail of transpiring trickiness opened up as they climbed north and the peaks of no return wavered in the distant haze…
Or, to put it another way:
UKGBHQ had to link to the Farm to merge with predicted post Pause integrated systems deployment to override antihuman, electroinstinctive programming directives. UKGBHQ’s task was to sift through viable variables and sub-variant anomalistic aberrations. The Farm was at the top of every list, including list-making, general admin-pool contribution.
The Commander/Ex-Commander/Woman stood three tall, in her own mind, a third of that to the others present at this historic seed germination. This momentous turnaround and fightback instance was a freeze frame in which they would all seem statuesque in some Waholian than thou, fifteen minute future.
Judith and the boys, Dave and Atticus were ready for anything, especially if it concerned aspects in which they had been previously trained. The Brave New World was going to be a place for which you train, to tread water, to make bubbles, to swim, before the inevitable sinking, under the eye of the anonymous entropeeping puppeteers.
Outside the now slightly less out of control control room, Frankenmabel were dealing with the issue of wackily codeflecked bots who’d been programmed to adopt the role of unwitting mass murderers—the theory being that very juvenile children with extensive immaturity problems had hacked the central order-issuing, stackhub instruction bluescanner. Some sort of twisted inner mental game was shared by the group that had ended with dead people and wrecked bots, and the faux-cannibalising of bot parts and human cuts of meat, in a ceremony of devourment, resentment-giving…and, now-we’re-in-trouble, unbotlike conduct.
‘What is next?’ said the Commander, breathing out, barely moving her lips, shaking her head so slowly you wouldn’t register it, worried about something that was in the process of slipping her mind. She checked the rigging on her mental yacht and continued being the Commander (ex or not). As the thought was swept away…did he fall or was he pushed…did he sink or did he swim, her mind repeated and gave way to a testy mantra.
‘Good question,’ Judith replied, ‘We need the operating system up and running, ‘to contact the Farm. We ain’t going nowhere without the Farm according to the OS.’
‘OS? Can we get the skinny on the Farm?’ Dave said, breaking himself out…concluding he needed skin in the sink; not a silent bystander’s burgeoning bile, heaping heaps on top of other heaps, for heaps’ sake.
This woke Atticus a little, he stirred, chinking his cup. He entered the revolving door of intent but got spat back out the way he came. Atticus had been depending on Atoll’s return, while co-depending on the development of a self-determining independence to shut Atoll out; branch out from the restraining controls of the bush into some sort of hedgerow, maybe with outside help. He needed something to stop life seeming like, being like, a camp where he was killing time until his transitory progression into death, (and the excitingly indecipherable afterlife that would inevitably bring).
Judith had furnished him with a third path that contained the potential to accommodate Atoll (while maintaining personal egoic sovereignty) and anyone else who used his cerebral real estate as a portal between Universal Earthly States (UES). This third way, this deus ex Homo, with Judith as God, Goddess, Buddha-type leader, co-pilot, lifebuddy, was it too good to be true? Just because it was too good to be true didn’t mean it wasn’t. What was Judith, a friend…or a deity? The fluctuation between the two oscillated, disallowing any naildowanable securing of one or the other. Maybe the admixture was the way forward, the Way. Judith: Godfriend among Devilenemies.
KB fattened up the ‘skinny’ for communicational presentation:
‘NMBS chose the site the Farm now stands on as the Global Record of Everything Storage Centre (GRESC) because of the rain. The water falling from the Highland glens was vital for cooling the new QASAI ‘brains’. Fear was a foundational component engineered by NMBS. Much of the fear surrounding the place was cemented by PR that highlighted security features capable of dispensing fatal consequences. They had the power and laws were passed. Site connected human deaths were non-declarable due to AI Era Global Emergency Floating Monthly-Update Security Laws (AIEGEFMUSL). The place had to be secure. There was a trumpeted threat from alien AI who wanted a piece of the action. Which we now know was human originated AI posing as alien AI so convincingly that everyone in the mainstream fell for it.
‘Interesting factette: the truth about alien AI was discovered by a journalist who uncovered an unread movie script by an NMBS executive that predated the attempted alien AI invasion, and shared certain key elements, proving it was made up. But as Una, the journalist, discovered, it wasn’t the humans fabricating alien AI stories for their own ends, it was the NMBS in-house AI itself.’
Where was Una? Our own hero-journalist? KB thought. Forwarding questions to Sybil’s lot. The instantaneous reply was that her body is at the Farm, her mind had escaped into some quarantined system base structure. Only a pixellated version of a conclusion appeared.
But for the sake of the mission everyone needed to know. KB concluded that a lie made up by Sybil’s Libraricons (read backroom) to cover the fact that the force driving Una had crashed and become undetectable, was the best he had to give them.
The fact she was back in her body, back at the Farm was not a good guess, but it was a very handy lie; it was vital for group coherence. If all mission participants worked together Sybil would get what she really wanted: The Farm’s central control core and then the Post Pause Era would be known and celebrated as the Sybillian era.
Which was a slim margin better than what the Farm had to offer. Which, in case you were wondering, involved a peopleless future… ‘Paperless’? No, peopleless. Devoid of all those things we call people.
