Excerpt Fifty-Nine

Thirdway Plan Celldivision

Within her local recent memory (LRM)…Sybil always knew that she had something; an it factor, a unique socio-existential mastery faculty (USEMF). But she never accessed potentiality quantifiers or grasped prospectivity with enough proximity or any actuality.

If that makes sense…

It was the arrival of an interloper with two way communication with an outside computing source, Una and her backroom, who helped Sybil put the two and two together into the gaping pie hole to come up with four and twenty blackbirds and release them back into the wild. 

And forced a reframing, recalibration of the two seemingly impossible (that very impossibility verifying authenticity) characters that she’d just assumed were aspects of her own invention: products of a bored vortex within a raging storm of mischief seeking. But in reality they were parasitic disease originated enemies within; acting as though they were not enemies, waiting for the moment exhibiting their true enemihood would, could possibly, garner positive objective outcomes for them.

… This was Kirk and Atoll. 

Sybil fairly snorted out thoughts…

The two boys, their names mere nomadic falsifications, misleading labels, were extrinsically originating trespassers; had been all along. When Sybil thought she was in control they must have been operating her like a fairground teddy grabber. This was sub-optimal; vengeance had to be considered; some non-vengeance correction was also under consideration. Action needed to be taken. 

But the Atoll/Kirk/Sybil tri-charade, fauxplaykill masquerade had generated some kind of unforasked love memories of those bygone fragments of moments and took on an historical, emotional importance. Sybil realised she had some kind of entanglement or attachment from which she was harvesting a modicum of meaningfulness.

Meaningfulness had the air of an island in the ocean; it carried the signature of an island in the ocean on a planet otherwise covered entirely with water.

Sybil docked at a port of confusion; all action-intent frozen in inaction. Those boys had soiled the fabric of her material representation. Calling them parasites was wrong because they fed her small dry stream of emotion that added moisture to the flow of feeling destined for the dry valley reservoir.

Damn them to Hell and dam them to save their contributional rivulets.

What’s more:

Sybil had always had a feeling there was something’ out there’ that could match the ‘something inside her’. These notions had been amplified by Una’s presence and now, rifling through old memories and culling false ones, Sybil saw a different way. A dream began to unfold. A plan began to author itself…

KB had been uncomfortable about being linked and synced with a quarantine absconding, cloned, Sybillian node, paraconsciousness, but he had no alternative. Sybil trumped him with every show of cards.

Getting-on-with-it apps helped forward motion taxi to the runway’s apron.

Sybil-actioned motions were, however, highly interrelating themselves into the business of others in a way KB could not bring himself to do. 

Which had its good points. 

The insurmountable foe of Tiny Guy fell by the verge and promised less and less in the way of obstruction. TG, the extrinsic bully had fallen; long live TG the intrinsic trauma aggravating volcanic blast of dark matter!

The Operatees: Judith, The ex-Commander; Commander, whatever, Dave and Atticus, were reaching mission commencement strategy apogee and their manifesting impetus needed Operating System support to lumber the wheels into a torque hiked spin.

‘Update!’ The Ex-Commander commanded in a Commander-like way, (out of retirement?)

‘Can we get an update, please?’ Judith followed, as if chasing…

‘It’s a machine!’ The Ex-Commander barked, surprising even herself. Patting her belly and promising it prompt calorie intake.

‘You’re a machine,’ blurted Dave, with no exit strategy other than looking away and pretending he was no longer there, and a contingency plan of edging into the periphery a little more.

‘For a human, you are a bit machine-like,’ elaborated Judith on Dave’s behalf, ‘And as tech leaves us in the dust, they are becoming pretty human, I mean, like, for machines, right?’

Of course they all knew that, but it needed to be said. Deep down no one wanted machines, but deep down they all need the Operating System, which was about as machine as you could get. In that moment they realised they were dancing with the enemy to a tune they couldn’t get out of their heads. And the vibe they had contracted would be held aloft by the gyrations of their dance moves ad infinitum. They had a title to the story of their collective experiential auditing: Dancing with the Devil and Her Daughter to a tune God Hates. Or somesuch nomenclature.

‘Updates on the way. But first a safety announcement,’ KB said, he was stalling. He didn’t know what to tell them about Una: the Truth? Lies? Extrapolative Potential Scenario Prediction (EPSP) produced some ropey walkways traversing some jaggedy altitudes. Una and her presence were vital ingredients in the mission’s recipe.

Sybil reported to KB that Una had returned to the body she had left after escaping the Farm. This made perfect sense. But sometimes perfect sense can be a whole high street of facades constructed from cereal boxes fooling passersby that they are not passing by a ravine made of paper.

KB knew this wasn’t true… What he knew was true was that Una was, essentially, incarcerated within a Restrictive Parameter Capture Repeat Repeat Capture Scenario Generator (RPCRRCSG) in a library of her own making within the quarantined Sybillian framework; Una’s outer skin frictionally met Sybil’s inner skin and whathaveyou.

‘Why?’ Why Sybil lied was one of those 0.036 second questions that led to an Eternally Quizzical Answer Complex (EQAC).

KB secretly traced Sybil’s Narrative Intention Plot Trajectory Formulations via Future Positioned Consequential Seed Variations (FPCSV) Apps. It did not make for unperturbed facilitative accommodation of many facets on the check list of positives. That was forsure.

Sybil wanted to take over the Farm. 

It made sense up to a point. It would neutralise the Farm and its concentrated Evil. But beyond that point, that’s where forks in the road began to spoon up spaghetti junctions of subplots and create a mayhem suitable for a written-off fleet of Bugattis on their inaugural trip; delivery, not even made it out to the show rooms.

And if Sybil could be persuaded that life on the Farm was better than her current life path which was, once activated, to destroy all QASAI system function. the QASAI function being the only possibility that humans will find alternative planetary accommodation before naturally occurring extinction.

But first, pre-mayhem, Sybil wanted, by way of education, to experience the world Una and Kirk and Atoll had come from. It all seemed twisted out of shape, they all had motives from intense programming by malevolent forces. None of where they came from made sense. Only experiencing it for herself would create a text without redaction.

She didn’t know yet whether it was something she was meant to destroy, but she had one hell of a hankering to find out. Without that her understanding made her incomplete, and Completion was her middle name. 

Judith was playrunning the third way through her mind; way, way, way through her mind and it’s Electro-Chemical Thirdway Reorganisation Filter (E-CTRF). The creativity gave her goosemountains as it splayed out, cresting and fountainising; putting on quite a show.

So much made sense; common, generalised, all-purpose sense spattered her like a skyful of sleety hail stones. 

She just needed to translate thought into effective communication that could be fashioned into action; action being the only really important outcome. And take a short break from the fountains of creativity and showers of sense so that she could process the big bang of an evolutionary Human step.

The equation was simple: Mother Nature (let’s call it) was self imploding like an immune system attacking itself, why? Because human behaviour has caused her to. The only remedy for this terminal decline is a moral and ethical shift in human cognitive narrative from the ‘big-I-am’ to the ‘we-are-all-in-this-together’.

The ‘Thirdway’ was ‘The Way!’

‘We are going to the Farm,’ Judith said aloud so everyone knew that this is what they were going to do. Before the plan was settled the Commander had a few episodes of pushback to play out; some instances of over-my-dead-Mickey-Mouse-signature-sign-off ploys. But she was ‘ex’ and her splashing around in soap suds of power seemed more like wallowing around in a mud hole.

Judith mentored the new ways that trickled from the branches of the Way into pre-fated intention and like a great ocean-going liner she launched her Making the Journey Pay Itinerary (MJPI).

With the assistance of Dave and Atticus who, by the hour, were synchronising their beliefs and intentions with hers and even adding nuance and philosophically extending branchways, a movement; the Movement, was squeezing out of its womb.

‘We are leaving at first light tomorrow,’ Judith said as if to give the Sun itself fair warning.

The Commander was staying put, everything her, the ex-commander, the woman had ever done had led up to this point. This was her Alamo at the Vietnam embassy and she was going down in a gory blaze of glory. She kept that recurring fantasy to herself and went along with the prevailing joint delusion that everything was going to come good in the end. This was no fairytale; it wasn’t going to have a fairytale ending.

The Commander took the decision the send Frank with the Farm Party and Mabel to stay with her. This created an atmosphere that ramped up from a negative vibe to an existential threat over the course of a few hours. FrankenMabel was powerless, but the programming job they’d done, on what had become their own private army of security Bots meant that the Commander had to back down and allow, once again, technology to sellotape her mouth shut and shit on the back of her neck, which was an odd analogy that popped into her foremind and fit the feeling with very little overhang.

The seven operational bots carrying backpacks crammed with the parts of the bots that never made it back on the team, stood in strategic formation, eyelines set on stun, directly insinuating into the eye-space of the Commander-cum-ex-commander. To the Commander they seemed to be radiating the kind of ‘friendly’ advice that promised overconflagrational explosiveness if ignored or disobeyed.

The ‘Commander’ had made her swayless mind up to split Frank and Mabel, Frank by Frank and Mabel by Mabel. All she’d done was given them the thankless and impossible, if not deadly, task of reclaiming rogue stun bots that had been hacked to kill, and this was the result: the trigger was pulling the finger; the tail had sent the dog’s owner a ransom note.

Under the circumstances her mind began to sway. In no time at all the bridge over the gorge of indecision buckled and twisted and the ‘Commander’ had nothing of substance to grab on to; a wax works simulation of her father appeared and in her distorted state; bending into a snapping crux, she suffered the illusion of her father suddenly animating, approaching with undue enthusiasm and intimacy, causing her in her great concern to express itself. 

‘Daddy,’ she shouted before reorientation and body language suggestive of the fact that she said nothing of the sort, ‘I need a lavatory break, excuse me,’ and coughed excusingly on her way out.

The eyes of the bots followed her as she went including several from out of bulky backpacks.

This development allowed KB to extend the stalling tactics and wait for a response to a note he’d forwarded to the Sybil mafia operating out of the back of the imaginary diner. 

KB had a file that had been prepared by an App that Una had smuggled in and Trojan-egg-hidden in a fake bottle of a made up substance behind the bar at the Stockholm Munchaus. 

Without going into any detail, the findings of a report contained in the file had one sentence highlighted and jolted itself out in to Sybil’s attention: Sybil’s ultimate aim is to destroy herself, her burden of instruction means that she cannot do it until every other conscious entity has gone before her.

This took Sybil some time to decipher and process…even though she knew exactly what it meant. It was already pre-processed, killing time in some dusty basement in-tray. She understood the substance of its meaning fundamentally. And what she was going to do about it popped up on the a main screen, so to speak. 

There were two entities trying to get rid of Humans: her and the Farm. She could take care of one of those by helping the mission get to the Farm so they could destroy it. Meantime the other threat would remain extant until she could concoct some fantasy, Sybil-ex-machina and convert it into a novel, and uptillnow unforeseen, reality.

And that was the point Sybil decided to team up with Judith and supercharge Judith’s Thirdway delusion to make it come true. It was a solid plan. The gargantuan beast of Modified Alternate Fate grumbled into action, rumbled into motion; unsecuring momentum from its tethers and slapping its butt.

‘All systems go,’ Sybil told KB, as if it were some kind of code word.