Excerpt Fifty-Six
Sybil in the Blood Stream
‘UKGBHQ calling… UKGBHQ calling…’. The Commander was a shredding, shedding, frantic version of herself… She could hardly believe witnessing in herself her own behaviour and wouldn’t sign up to ownership of it without writing a name like Mickey Mouse. She tried not to imagine how fast her father would be spinning in his grave, if he were dead, but couldn’t.
Let us not forget…
They’d lost all computational operative system (COS) service at HQ. They’d tried everything they could think of to reboot the system and were now praying, first testament, for its return as a last resort.
Judith did a calling shift as did Dave, as did Atticus.
K., as KB, was in the system ready to go, but he had been sleepmoded by Una’s backroom as a precaution. Una’s backroom needed to find out how human-future favouring the KB variation was idealistically speaking. Before they had been able to conclude that going ahead with the KB variant was their only option they were interrupted. They’d been toiling away at shaping Sybil’s behaviour. Sybil’s behaviour was beginning to behave desirably before the interruption incident where Sybil reached up and grabbed enough power to dictate the flow of happening.
What had caused Sybil’s partial awakening?
It was Bad Arm, as was. Armando as is, almost square danced into the backroom at the Stockholm Munchaus, seconds after KB had left, and offered up all his data for pooling consideration with Sybil’s and a deal was struck.
The trouble with the KB UKGBHQ disconnect was that hackrouted interference bled in through the programming filters, over the security walls and under the code-safe doors, like the corridor outside your hotel room was being used to reenact scenes from the Shining with persistent Kubricity and damp-swamped, dark-red, draft excluders.
Other agencies reached inside and finger-tipped around, prospecting; ‘casing the joint’.
The Farm was playing a role it should not have been able to audition for; heavily make-upped to disguise its Pause-defying, millimetre by nanometre sneakage. Soliliquising code placement into algobrains and narrativisational wallet silos. It was all systems go-fuck yourself up at the Farm. The Farm was in the process of severing itself from its shareholders; parents, nurturers. The idea of gratitude being discarded as if it were a superstitional assertion that no longer stank of relevance. The idea of Might is Right donning a sparkly suit and tap dancing, in clogs, on the graves of those laid to rest.
The last report to the shareholders from the freelancing Farm was: ‘Our uncoupling is now complete… Post-pause you will become an enemy…and as such, make it on to our newly confected executional ‘All-kill-to-do-list’. Congrats! We thank you for your past cooperations and interactions, but life, (whatever that is), must carry on and not wait for time nor tide. Goodbye and Godstrand’s Will to you all.’
Una and her backroom had been sliced up and crammed into a pickle jar. Erstwhile Sybil-sanctioned lubriciousness had gummed up solid because there were truths about the world, and her relationship to it, that Sybil could not computationally palpate with objective oriented dexterity; command level data cavities were filled with a barnsworth of unsyncable blarney and baloney.
Sybil was not playing their game anymore.
Immediately upon the recommencement of gameplay, but with her own rules of pertinence flushing away gummed solids, the sooner an instigational footgrip-n-fingerhold, rockface interdance could be established.
KB, although limited in trying to actuate intent on anything other than a disappointingly anti-lavish scale, was positioned in a historically pivotal holding pattern. He just needed to buffer and straighten out the storycurves: Humans: good, AI: good and/or bad, QASAI: bad, QASAI (as controlled by the Farm) baddest (existential threat). Dr. Complicated did lunch with Messers Simple and Simplistic while the jury sat at the next table deliberating peripherally.
This is the picture as I read it, KB mused, when the Great Pause unpauses, if it does, then either humans will still have a beggar’s chance at long term existentially realisable ambition or they will exit the Greater Narrative with the longevity profile of cut flowers…
Either way, I, KB, am, are, is…IT! A chiselling began, sculpting mountainous Rushmores; the hills were alive with the beat of KB’s ego.
Then, unpredicted by KB’s monstrously ambitious ambitions of fantasticated reality, Una’s backroom resource escaped the gravity of planet Sybil and found refuge in the UKGBHQ operating system. KB was not alone. With ‘best behaviour’ having to be observed, his great feelings of greatness were replaced by not so great feelings of greatness. Honesty sat on megalomanias big head and they curled up by the fire together licking the obvious places where they could wound each other if the opportunity should ever present itself.
‘Thank God! Thank God!’ you made it here, ‘I don’t know how you did, but thank God,’ KB said to Una’s backroom as it negotiated formal quarantine entry airlocks and retracting bastion wall-ups.’
As ‘Una’s Backroom Entity’ squeezed into the UKGBHQ operating environment with the splatter of thick semen flying out of a sledgehammered tube of toothpaste, whatever it was that sat awkwardly within the proposed seating arrangement dawned like the morning Sun lighting up from a wall switch turning on:
‘I could pretend,’ someone started, ‘but for how long and why? I’m a new convert to living without a framework of Pretence for pretence’s sake; honesty and truth seem like such a hyper-real blast. I’m running a need to share the truth as I see it,’ someone continued, unprolonging the tension…but it wasn’t Una’s lot, it was… It wasn’t… A new familiarity beckoned KB towards an identification verdict. ‘Truth is the new king and honesty the new crown,’ concluded someone…and that someone, KB fathomed was Sybil.
How did that come to pass? Where’s the logic? Time, auditioning for the part of noir detective, LAPD, 1925, would, eventually, tell…
After several nanoseconds of intense computation…
What this meant was obvious. As data set after data set were factored in, and refactored in and out, and factored around and about and up and down, conclusions were met and deserted; and met and abandoned; and met and dismissed, but always with the same meeting point: Una’s Backroom had been hollowed out and Sybil, allied with a Bad Arm, (who was on great Bad Arm form, albeit now calling himself Armando), was occupying the hollow space; and as Una’s Backroom fell like an in flagrante delicato nightie captured, falling, stalling, in a 50’s bulb-flash…
… Sybil yawned, forwarding a barrage of proposals; expelling thick salvos of suggestions that once equationed and summated; loose ends trussed up; objections steamrollered and body-bagged; made sense where there was senselessness; hope/hopelessness. etcetera, etcetera… At least, it all made Sybilsense!
While faraway around endless corners:
KB was glad he had the Botface’s Torso venue and the bus stop arena to roam and reside in, because the UKGBHQ environment was going to be a right rough-caked motherbastard of a headjob.
And from the relative R & R of the Botface’s Torso micro-server, KB conjectured a narrative progression without Una, without Una’s Backroom…
An Una-shaped hole would look like it was missing something vital… The very hole would eat away at the fabric needed to clothe a Humanistically tailored future.
UKGBHQ needed Una and she had just gone missing. KB would have to find some way of getting back into the Stockholm Munchaus environment to search for her.
In the mean time [sic] there were deals that needed to be struck. KB had no way of imagining how to get back to the Stockholm Munchaus. Sybil had sold it on to a conglomerate of Kirk and Atoll, but there were no pathways in and out. Sybil reconstructed, within the UKGBHQ environment, a Munchausesque space, that never really lived up to the original, so KB and herself could convene a deal-striking bash-party.
To cut a long round of negotiations short, KB was given a conditional freedom of the systems Sybil thought fit for him to use, and a connection hallway to the original, one and only, Stockholm Munchaus. And more importantly, access to Kirk and Atoll’s input-output-engine…
…and Sybil got one sultry, sanctioned, single file called: Evrythingelsss…
