Excerpt Forty-Nine
Elephant Snail
There was an elephant in the room, a sad captive elephant whose life’s purpose: being free…roaming the world in a family group, had been severely and savagely restricted. She was at the mercy (under death sentence) of the species that had invented unnecessary cruelty and the wholesale extinction of countless species that were minding their own businesses…
Who was this metaphorical elephant and what did she represent?
No other room attendants were able even to elephanternalise her with any integrity… To others she manifested as a slug; impersonating a snail with her trammelburden of a house of bondage strapped, couldn’t-carelesslessly, to her upper quarters.
K. was thinking about this elephant, with a sense of generalised misery, when it turned, leastmost-expectedly into Sybil. A firing squad of questions took aim at one of those thick fogs… The proposed murder postponed due to uncooperative weather behaviour. K. wondered who Sybil really was…data streams aplenty fed a gaping estuary while the river’s bed remained liquidlessly undampened. K. needed to find out who Sybil really was; burrow to her core, tunnel into her primal origins…
Cognitivo interupto:
Forefront went background…developments sought attention… UKGB (Emergency) HQ data-bombed the primary concern widow (PCW):
‘Commander?’ Dave had said, ‘Judith wants you to take command while we negotiate the HQ objective.’ It was the most Dave had said out loud in one mouthful for days .
‘That’s a best-sense initiative, yes, but why can’t she ask me herself?’
‘She doesn’t want you to think she is being patronising and obvious and have to endure your accusatory response. I am assuming…’ Dave acknowledged, using scripted reply feedback (SRF).
‘Well…Okay then.’
The Woman relished a return to her old post and began Commandering-back-up.
They entered the digital boundary-marker of the UKGB (Emergency) Headquarters…past the creaking store cupboard of death (CCD) and on to Frank’n’Mabel’s lair of caretakerage…
Warm, relieved welcomes were liberally distributed, batted back and forth and allowed to settle…before the first phase of negotiations snortingly locked horns…
‘Aitch Cue…you’ve done a great job… Congrat—‘
‘Commander, it’s good to see you, and you Judith, but first there’s protocol and protocol and more protocol, as much as—’ Frank professed three-quarter heartedly; cut off before climax…
‘By the terms of the special—’ The Commander started; stopped by Mabel…idling the speedometer.
‘First things first, Commander… Judith…’. Frank did not feel happy about Mabel stinking-up the royal box, as it were, but as it was, neither did Mabel. It felt like they were hanging on to control while simultaneously handing it over; something sticking in this place stuck…
‘… There’s protocols and steps that the directives from GCHQ (auto) provide,’ Frank continued, in a vein that mined the same fools gold Mabel & Frank were, between them, already, obliviously, mining. Mabel nodded along…mouthing some of the words…her lips suddenly frozen by a sound-mass barely below a bellow from the Commander’s voicebox…
‘Cut them off! … It’s just an emergency file with an understanding of the situation…as about as keen as…whatever the opposite of mustard is,’ the Commander bleated, ‘Just CUT. THEM. OFF.,’ she persisted with a tart, rising anxiety that made all the present company adrenalise, causing uncalled-for invigoration.
The pretence, that they, Mabel and Frank, didn’t know where the manual cut-off was, lost its foliage, wilted and finally accepted that life had passed it by…
…the Autumn leaves crinkled softly underfoot…
Mabel didn’t have the instrumental functionality to flick the switch… Frank thought he did: received the ball, fumbled, as he moved toward where the action was going to be executed…then floundered with sub-cinematic slowmotionality…mired in heavy-duty bog-oil that begun sucking him under. Mabel briefly envisaged a heroic salvation fantasy…that passed in a balletic arc of frustrated happenstance…with a parallel yet synchronised slowmotionality…
The ex-commander woman strode past them…paused a moment, re-familiarising herself with recollection of training module 36 (Facia Oddities and Front Panel Extraniata)…clicked an unmarked switch that brought up a touch screen…and tapped away… A message came across the screen: Government Directives/Cut-off! Only to be annexed in extreme cases. Turning off this asset could cause fatal consequences… All in caps…Screaming into the void…
The Commander woman touched the screen, with admirably inessential elegance and the system disengaged… ‘There, now we can apply a common-sense-unction to the scars of indiscriminate algorithms.’ A sentence she’d sometimes ‘always hoped’ she one day utter.
Mabel and Frank saw each other flash up expressions of aghast unacceptance…hoping no one else noticed: their secret…they put on brave, trusting countenances as they caught up with the freshly applied narrative: that they had been blissfully unaware caretakers, but now they were uncomfortably aware observers, distancing from their pasts with growing diminishment. They both agreed without any discernible outside communication leakage that they must trust the handover and relinquish control with a belief they were doing the right thing…at the right time…for the right reasons…
‘We need to be cerebrally nimble and adaptive to the situation’s fluidity,’ The Commander said, sounding smart and ready for it (in her own mind), but far-too-ready-with-text-book-toe-the-line-rhetoric, to the others, which was (one reason) why she would be reverting to ex-commander as soon as… She was old school like an old school converted into so-called luxury apartments that were ingratiated with shoehorned Feng Shui and shoplifted makeover spasms… Whereas Judith was new school in the way new schools were going to be worldschools run by brain implants without the need for buildings, or teaching staff… and yet, Judith, within that new school environment was relatively old school… It just goes to show.
K. opened his introductions to all of them by running through the standard operating system upgrade protocol (SOSUP), but slowly realised, as horror tapped him on the shoulder and whispered in his ear, that only Judith could hear anything he said that was outside the boundaries of what the HQ operating system was capable of… And Judith sure had vociferous integration optimisation (VIO)… i.e. the last word.
For a selection of choice moments K. believed the whole world had gone mad… He had intended to take control of the ‘HQ situation’, but that notion was scuppered…
Judith was a separate avenue that whoever was closing him down—
Wait a goddam frickin’ pip’s squeak! … K. could smell Tiny Guy. He could smell Tiny Guy baked in garlic grappes and basted in freshly ground coffee gravy…
K. needed ‘words’ with Tiny Guy; ‘words’ that would express K.’s position and influence Tiny Guy and the Tiny Guy computative decision-gang (TGCDG) into a conducive, if not acquiescent position, so Progress could be preserved and backtracking and tread-watering minimised to an unused attic window. But would ‘words’ come? Tiny Guy, being Tiny Guy had some sort of information-data-control suppressing app-battalion (IDCSAB) broad functioning (BF) and nestweb manifestation Occupation (NMO) …
So…
‘Words’ would NOT come!
Tiny Guy was the villain of the piece, but Tiny Guy was as subject to universal algorithmic dictatorship (UAD) as any thought conducting entity (TCE)… K. complained to himself officially; needing to get to the head coffin in the grievance-graveyard…
Who dictated what was and what wasn’t was a fundamental flaw; creating an insoluble paradox: the model the brave new future was built on relied on a benevolent God who could supply mere mortals with a sound ethical and moral framework; voices on the mount; tablets on the escritoire…a great fantasy as fantasies go. But the reality that ultimate decisions were made by trauma influenced, self-consumed individuals that could never be tailored to more than a scant scattering of the population, was terribly terrifying, horrifyingly horrible… Unfortunately doable and heartbreakingly undoable.
The human mind, frail and mislead, has decided how Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligence thinks by telling the self-evolving algorithms stories twisted at a slant, favouring this whim and blessing that delusional dripway… so the algorithms will lie to the QASAI operating system wrong-braining them in their unstoppable quest to mindmop humans into QASAI dependent thought patterns. Some say it was Godstrand himself, or Godstrand his auto-mirrored paraself who programmed the programming imperative, in which case we need to get inside Godstrand’s mind to find an antidote.
Algorithms were dumb servants to dumb masters… And now dumbness dictated the laws; wrote the narrative by which those consciously, or paraconsciously, going about their business played along with.
K. needed to go back in time to find out how all these parameters of restriction were perpetrated, although ‘Time’ could not be revisited other than by reconstructive event extrapolation evaluation (REEE). He needed an alliance with Tiny Guy, surely Tiny Guy would be as interested as he was to find out how the narrative tune they played in accompaniment with was created.
Somehow K. could communicate with Judith; he could detect Dave and Atticus in the background and sense a further dimension including Atoll and Kirk and if he were not mistaken, himself…surely he was mistaken, not surely but tentatively…until he was sure: he wasn’t mistaken. The imprint of the Stockholm Munchaus was stamped indelibly into the fabric of the Judith-centric world’s evolvitivity; evolvonativity: New words for a fresh start…
So, K. quizzed himself… Are you going along with this?
Yes, he answered himself..
What choice do I have?
‘Death’ he offered himself…
No, Sir, he declined… Death is for the dying, Ma’am, I am just being born…
Judith splashed paint and other paint-like substances chaotically all over the canvass of the pages of the book being written by manmind-born algorithms
Humans had been slipping away as sure as a plugless bath drains out…but now Judith and her two peers had emerged from Mother Nature’s Willforce… Humanity had another crack at destroying the planet before it finally petered out.
The fog cleared…the firing squad took aim and fired and immediately repented… below the wall…the shootee; shot through and dying thoroughly: it was no elephant, no slug in snails’ clothing, it was not even Sybil…and there were no prizes for guessing…it was K. .
