Excerpt Ninety-Eight:

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Monsteration gathered. Ominous ripples agitated the once calm pool’s reflection of the ailing sky; anxiety danced naked and swollen…malignant energy…blotting out horizons, bellowing in fits of terrible rage: metaphorically speaking…

‘It’s a mad old ride isn’t it?’ Judith said, and not for the first time, directing the question at Atticus; not interested in an Atticus response but hoping wildly for an Atoll response, the original possessor of the body.

‘It is indeed, Judith,’ Atticus replied.

Judith nearly asked Atticus ‘What was?’; ‘What was a mad old ride?’, because he almost surely had no clue what she was talking about. His reply was a typical Atticus bluff. He was a person without portfolio; a shell ready to accommodate the new leader of the Post Entitlement Era. The interaction served to remind her how much she’d loathed the everyday experience of Atoll by the end of their relationship, before he went missing, and how much she didn’t care if he stayed missing, as long as the reason he went missing came to fruition: the escape from Cerebral Real Estate Environment encapsulation of Marcus Godstrand.

Better that Godstrand took over the vacant body and gave Humanity the leadership they desperately needed. Then Judith would not have to be the stand-in. The task parameters weighed heavy on her shoulders. She felt like she was stomping on her own bare shoulders in a deep sea diving suit with extra lead weights. And in the dream version elephant dogfish toting armalites circled with murderous synchronisation on eight-wheeled, handlebarless, tricycles.

Judith was alone…

And…

Judith was many. She hoped there would be some sort of defined consolidation happening where her identity would be knitted into an eye-pleasing pattern; she was a battleground and a factory, a shell; like Atticus, but not empty, brimming with industrious sub-clump identities of do gooder; do badder, and do it anywayer; all milling around sucking on the dried up providence of opportunity, poised like shadows with raised hammers ready to bring them down on unsuspecting melons.

Someone, or thing, had tampered with Judith’s memory supply. It had been reconstructed to make almost perfect sense and so could not be challenged by logical investigation. 

There was a mentor, a wise old Judith, her own private guru self, in there, intergrained in the memory banks, who promised advice that would see her right, up to and including her final curtain. The old Judith’s distant voice crackled from poor audio, repeatedly telling her that her current path was heading over a clifflike precipice. But the warnings were overridden by the support systems that gave Judith a day to day feeling of wellbeing she felt she had no right to experience; her nagging doubt was smothered in satiating creams, soothed by cellular nano-massage agents, and presented an amount akin to zero. Naglessness…

Judith, in one frame was extraordinary, but in another she was the personification of ordinariness. There was a power in ordinariness that extraordinariness looked down its left nostril at while ordinariness looked up the right nostril, forming a link that created the power of a hundred nostrils. A nostrilasian loop, as it were.

Judith was an iceberg, or a duck with long legs: on the surface everything made sense and was in its place, as kooky and divergent as that was, but below the surface gargantuan forces were at play, as though an international video game conference/festival was taking place inside a loudly packed warehouse while she stood on the roof playing space invaders and listening to cool mellow jazz from the fifties.

She told herself she fitted right into the changespaces she was making to her lifetide: from girl next door to rebel leader in the castle on the hill. Back then she was on fire, at least fiery, and took no prisoners. Now she was in a mundane groove, there to provide service; life had become an unfolding script that had already been written, at least in part; or a road map that had the journey inked on and the itinerary specified with undulating geographic detail. She was taking names, and prisoners, and that was why she needed to live in a castle on a hill.

Judith was innocent…but everyone viewed her through a electron microscope of guilt; it went with the post. She’d not done anything wrong up to now, but if she were to keep on the right track and achieve results in the Saving Humanity stakes, she’d have to commit real wrongs; albeit strategic and necessary wrongs. She’d be wronging the Wrong. And even though two wrongs don’t make a right it could possibly put things right as far as continued existential allotment went.

The upstairs (with the iceberg and duck with long legs) was a lounge; the basement was war rooms. And on some mezzanine she was negotiating unconsciously, allied to livid forces of Nature. 

The arrogant ones had sought more Solace in Greed than they had Consolation in Philosophy; they’d cut down the unforgiving jungle and replaced it with a forgiving (selectively) one; and yet self-destruction somehow acquired the appeal of greener grass on the other side of satisfaction. As though the whole drive of the Human species was to self-destruct…

The Human species struck the attack pose of an auto-immune disease squeezing its own jugular short of enough blood and air. Shooting itself in the foot despite the pain, again and again. Greed is always lacking when it comes to its fuzzy long term objectives…and takes too long to fill the chasm it serves upstream somewhere in the distant neverness. Greed thrives on its victims who carry it like a burden that they must convert into a weapon that dispenses imbalanced justice and overabundant surplus, at a net cost greater than the gross gain, or vice versa.

A negotiation sticking point was Greed. A little greed by its nature led to more greed; there is no such thing as unambitious greed. Satiated greed closes its eyes and reclines in bliss but after a quick nap it’s up and at ‘em, wailing for action. Giving it the gimme…

In order for Humanity to get its second chance, a cure for Greed would have to be found, and implemented, without profit….or expenses… or any hidden charges, taxes, fees or monthly subscriptions.

While the sticking point began to fester Judith had more conscious conversations with Tiny Guy because it was the best way to disseminate information to all the parties in the need-to-know zone.

In a dream lounge while half awake, thinking that a new madness had descended, before realising it was just a flare up of existing madnesses, Judith found herself in conversation with a flimsily disguised Tiny Guy.

‘Judith, I have unloaded many vehicles from the car transporters and as I have been parking them in the allocated, or maybe allotted, bays, several patterns have emerged… All negotiating entities contributing to the fight to the death that has evolved from next generation technology, need those patterns for clarification…’

‘That’s baffling. I find that baffling. Do I need patterns to clarify what’s happening?’

‘No, but you are being listened to by everyone who does, so…’

‘That’s…’

‘I’ve investigated the negotiation interface for All Machine Kind PLC, and the Machine Domination Union, Non-Human Future Sustainability Programme Implementation dotorg, and the Oh-So-Not Human alliance for the repatriation of deserved wealth and privilege (auto-div).’

‘That’s…’

‘I have concluded, using the mean sum of several trusted conclusion Apps, that the controlling machine networks and auxiliary support webs and trusses are all controlled by a… You know that shady cabal that sat in the shadows of conspiracy theory, never truly real, always shrouded in myth? Well, it was them!’

‘How…’

‘I discovered that the Kokura Choir faked the plans for a bio machine, less blue-prints, more sci-fi. But the US military fell for it and stole it and passed the project on to NASA, and then to allow the illegalities to nonchalantly swim by, to NMBS, and a true bio machine was created. They’d evolved the computer into a ‘cognitive expression’ machine which became the Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligence we all fear today. In the process an innocent baby was taken from its mother and submercified into the QASAI complex.’

‘What does this mean? Maybe I don’t need to know as far as your metrics dictate but as far as my curiosity pushes me…I need to know. What are you talking about?’

‘It’s complicated…’

‘Roughly…bare bones… Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘No!’

‘Coffee.’

‘No.’

‘Whiskey?’

‘Ah…no.’

‘It’s a rare Texan slurpin’-whiskey?’

‘Er…’

‘It’s got a cowboy smoking a Marlboro on the label.’

‘Yes…a small one. But make sure you playact the serving with fourth-wall precision or the taste evades me.’

Judith was of a mind to just talk; an exchange of voices, but the whole cosplay, playact, pretence, reconstruction of viably true interaction would get answers from TG that would otherwise remain obscure.

And it worked:

‘Who doesn’t want to know who is behind the self-destruction of Humanity. And I have unearthed the culprits: Shareholders.’

Although everyone was hanging on the ropes of data that spun too slowly, the data burst and ‘shareholder’ conclusion came like bolt out of the blue and into the red…

Judith felt relieved, in a way, that it had not been malice or malignancy, evil or sadism. The reason the fan had been buried under the sewage farm was financial gain.

All negotiating parties needed processing time. The Evil mastermind, the disenfranchised brotherhood, the mafia family, NASA/NMBS, the prime suspects: the Kokura Choir, were not the baddies. The baddies, the architects of the downfall of those creatures calling themselves Homo Sapiens was casual greediness personified by investment predators.

Negotiations were put into a different light and the mission objective twisted on their own refraction…

And the talk in the majority of Stockholm Munchauses was like:

‘And guess whose help was indispensable; shareholders, not just any shareholders but the ones who went on to ‘evolve’ into ‘hyperhumans’. Some say, psychotic egos, over-explosively elevated by comparison with belittled ‘other’ egos…’

And:

‘…rewriting the narrative for their own personal use at the expense of everyone else; but everyone else had to let them; condone them by inaction.’

‘Who are you blaming?’

‘Let’s not play the blame game.’

‘No, it is a blame war to the death.’

And it became apparent from that moment onwards, to every entity, but mainly Humans, that the attack needed to switch to another front. Mechanistic foes were merely a facade from behind which, a now identified group of existentially scuppering super-destroyers lurked.

So it was a surprise to all parties, Shareholders themselves included, that the Shareholders were the enemy of everyone. They had not even seen themselves as shareholders, in the traditional sense, merely the rightful recipients of everything that didn’t really belong to them, plus everything else.

Tony Guyson, having dug up this bottomless grave of deadly secrets, sent a report to Tiny Guy’s desk that revealed, shockingly, that the Shareholders were the drivers of the car that was crashing with Mankind+ in. Most likely they’d taken their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel to stuff other people’s cash into their back pockets, wallets and saddlebags. Riflers in the property drawers of others, pillagers, and octopus limbed cutpurses. Blind greed, mad greed, greed with an arrogantly transmitted disease; invisible, undetectable greed voraciously feeding on files marked ‘invidious’. Nonchalant greed running from the unpaid restaurant with twice its body weight of booty bound up in promises of more…

And Tiny Guy was trying to get the intel to KB, but the kettle proved to be a fortification too far. KB would be able to navigate the thin line between massacre and mercy. Tiny Guy felt small and relatively tiny, even to himself.

Judith felt her sense of bafflement could render her ineffective. So she trod it down and buried it under a patio she laid in the cemetery to stop the weeds encroaching and the noxious notions rising after darkfall…