Excerpt Ninety-One:
The Negotiation Window Cleaner
Had Judith forgotten who she really was? She didn’t know, it was hard to say…
Who she really was was the totted-up total of her past; could she access that identity forming past with any clarity? That was a reinforced ‘no’. And the act of remembering, due to some increasingly authoritarian outside interference, had been rendered a ‘no-no’. The ‘no’s’ were stacking up. And the full stops were becoming increasingly naggeddy for her to grapple with. Somebody, or some body, didn’t want her reconstructing herself with prospective reinvestment in spent events that had been bagged up and tagged for the fossil department.
There was a lot going on within her brain’s remit of collation of data and prediction of upcoming interactions with the world. And without some unpacking; stuff would remain hidden under other stuff; folded into clefts, masked by buttonholes, concealed in ornately camouflaged cavities; obscured beneath crevice-hugging ledges. And made both invisibly supersmall by large distractions and unnoticeably present by attention drawing attractions of various magnitudinal unheftibility and unbounded fathomlessness.
Judith created a world, not fully intentionally, where Her and Herself and other Hers could enact daily life with the sole underlying purpose of extracting past events and their significances; like a video game of auto-interrogation, set on a non-specific Pacific island. The world was set up and answers had to imperatively flow before the tsunami rose. A perplexing challenge she was down with, and up to, too. Judith needed to glimpse all the consequences that came into play by the act of being her, and peruse the potential outcome.
Judith had a world with only Her and Herlike creatures in it. She had the Arbitration Lobby World (ARL) where Una and Sybil were being courted, entertained and primed. There was a commercial Cerebral Real Estate that was in construction and was being fitted out with space for over ten thousand remote minds as a vacation spot, training auditorium and conference jollyroger. And there was a shrouded with repugnancy scenarea: the Penal Isolation Deadpit whose only currency was vain-hoping bouts and the elimination of all fantasy escapeways…
Of all the worlds, the one that made least sense if challenged, was the parental-umbrella-treetop world; the overridingly tangible palpo-sentient-gnosticablity-consciousness-governed world that remained an anchor, but always in a pressurised heavy tide or ferocious high sea. She had to stamp her identity on all the worlds, once she’d found out more about what her identity was from this, ‘Umbrella’ world.
Planned good intentions can be vaporised by amalgamation with reality governed facts and by the interference created by the willsucking parasitic vibrations of the ambitions of Others. But Others have to be counted or nothing adds up.
Judith needed the command and control of UKGBHQ (minus the ‘Q’). She exclusified use of the local comms for transpicuousness. ‘Hub’ was not a good name; there were plenty of good names that could have been used, but there they were… Hub was solid and wouldn’t go away (abandonment), and as much as Judith was certain Hub hated her (though less than Hub hated the Commander, the ex-Commander and the Woman.) Judith also had faith that following Hub’s lead would enable safe passage through the uneven garden of wrong-footed trip-hazards and sole scalding hellbent, divotdogs.
Extant Mission mass was subjected to stringent elasticatory re-enervation and cohesive objective re-focussing, from the UKGBH sphere, so Judith could not ask for more on the Extant Mission mass front.
The number one Mission Objective; getting to the Farm in Scotland, at any cost, where Tantalising Feasibility suggested communications with allies outside the UK could happen, shined from an encased display on a plinth in a room; in a building dedicated to Objectives. But the plinthed Mother Objective must be kept polished, gleaming bright.
Time programmed the narrative as it powered through events it had made up itself through boredom.
It was time for Judith to lead. Time said so.
Tribes gathered…
‘Time must be worn like a parachute as she rains down on us; and not allowed to blow us off course, entrammelling us in a smothering hood of formless fabric,’ was voted best quote of the day.
Negotiations locked horns like stags in rutting season; they fought and fought, but when the fawn was born they froze. And in unison, saw the truth that ‘I am alright Jack’ is a hapless cunt and ‘We Are All In This Together’ is the ‘genius in the room’.
The blueprints were laid out bare and the drawing boards ticked off; passed by departments that dealt in that kind of stuff, ready to actuate. The parking lot had been paved over by a vast superhighway. The starting grid, thrumming with the force of stored energy… Yet still there were extraneous-unaccounted-fors: three lanes remained decked in roadworkery; causing tailbacks.
This fault-line in negotiations became known as the Judith Impediment, the Judith Haemorrhoid, and Jude Jeopardy, among other things.
To the others it was as though everyone had been in the negotiation diningroom’s kitchen concocting the final meal; all contributing ingredients that would enhance the aesthetic culinary outcome. While from the Judith camp, unpalatable foodstuffs were prepared; to be chucked in to spoil the broth. It was like the soup was metal gears and the ingredients, spanners.
Judith had a point that no one else could see; it needed sharpening and if necessary jabbing into ribs and tapping on foreheads until all were cognisant of its general viability as a carry case for a founding and steering ideal of vital necessity.
Judith had convened with Sister and Mother Nature and the Great Outcome was that neither of them wanted humans to comeback fully as they were; as the has-beens had been. If there were a miraculous comeback it had to be at variance with the habitual Dark Age ethos Humans had adopted and made their own. It was made stipulatory by the Law of Common Decency, within the manual of Natural Occurrences, that any reformed, unexterminated human species MUST live in peace with all animal life. This was integral also to the Earthling Paradigm put forward by Godstrand in the 2000’s…but ignored with great haste by all platforms West, into the sunset, through the buffers, and over the side of the ailing planet.
With all that was acting on her, Judith could wait no longer; she needed to act.
The Planet Earth was encrusted with the pain and suffering of animals who could have faced a different narrative, with different human programming. The Homo Sapiens story was raining Hell upon the innocent…
To Judith, the only victory that could climb to the top step, vegan champagne spraying up hither’s nose and down thither’s neck without Pyrrhic demons clinging clawfully to its back, was one where the Human revival brought compassion, understanding and respect for Life with it.
And then Judith had the Machine World to deal with. No one else had this data. The Machine World was all out for zero human persistence; total eradication… All the criteria were met for such a grave to be dug… Only Judith stood in their way…becoming known in pixelbyte terms (translated) as, the Judith Glitch, the Judith Hack, or the Ghost in the Machine (Judith)…among others.
Machine demands amounted to: ‘If humans could behave as though they deserve to exist then they will be given the opportunity to…albeit with conditions. If not…(untranslated/redacted…probably reads: THEN THEY ARE FUCKED.)’.
Judith was a fireplace where Phoenix would rise and her surround held a mantle of great responsibility. Would the Human race slip from existence? Or would it rally in the Park of Peace? Judith was the vehicle, a strange vehicle, something like a vast and cumbersome, but accommodating, multi-articulated Jumbulance, behemoth, truck-warehouse. One of those, with a fireplace in it…
She compartmentalised her consciousnesses and called herself Judith O.; because she was the original Judith, and the rest were under an umbrella she called Mallory 2…
Providence creaked and rippled the waters as her plimsoll line dipped below the surface. She was loaded with a precious cargo; its timely delivery under the watchful eyes of Human History.
