Excerpt Sixty-Nine

Bugs in the Snug

The battle for Judith’s Personal Cerebral Real Estate had to be no-nonsense, co-operational; compromise all the way, or it stood the chance of resulting in a no go area. It was a life line thrown out for six hands to grasp at once, in equal measure.

The Track Time Finality Buffers (TTFB) were to be applied by the good minds of KB and Sybil: the details concerning any odd flaps and loose ties left teetering or soiling machine-adopted-nature were to be swept under a vast shroud like carpet for hammering flat and over-desiccation into total oblivion.

While the responsibility seemed like a privilege and the power to execute heady and weighty, there was still a feeling felt by both KB and Sybil that their buttons were being pushed and their thoughts pre-narrativised.

As the failed outgoing species slipped under the waves of those happy to see them go, Mother Nature was excited to think of beginning again, despite the fact the new machine people were in the pipeline who would assert that her days were numbered.

The dual-key tool KB and Sybil represented regarding the peopling of Judith’s mindspace had already selected the parties that were on the last hike to check out what the word ‘void’ really meant.

From the Elite to the working man there were six representatory groups with a single spokesperson but the ability to consult their members within sub Stockholm Munchaus simulations that contained the pipeline communication jukebox postcard technique of connecting with those ‘outside’ the environmental framework. Except the reality was the communication was with extrapolative guess work that predicted what the members might say, because there was only room for six minds within the mind. The worlds that existed that carried millions of souls also had millions of (unwitting) generating minds to supply the delusionary perception fantasy dream construction hyper reality fictional narrative eternal life span operation comestibles.

The parties with desperate interest in ‘saving the world’ all planned to enter Judith’s real estate world and try to form some kind of united front to take on the impossibility of resisting extinction at the hands of…long list….short list: their own hand. Judith was to reach the Farm. At the Farm Una would take over and transport the via the Chinese Isle of Man to Washington where there was a protective bubble (except in realty the rest of the world was entirely unaffected by the mechanical malaise that was killing all UKGB personnel and once in Chinese territory the last remaining threat to clearing out UKGB of humans to allow a sovereign machine state to exist and treaty to live side by side with humans thinking that UKGB was the world and nothing but all the world as the world existed.

KB had sight of unreacted files that proffered the conclusion that

UKGB was going to be entirely populated by para-consciousness that contained within it a holiday, or if you prefer, vacation destination for the super wealthy and also a cash generation resource for most of the hyper wealthy.

Back to the UKGB prevailing perspective (that saw the rest of the world going up in flames while UKGB weathered the storm with equanimity.)

The sealed fate of Humanity was insisting on a farewell serenade in the soundshape of a death-rattle: a process KB was tasked with overseeing with Sybil as some kind of decision moderator to make sure KB’s decisions were that bit fairer and less biased than they would otherwise be.

The parties eventually gathered hurriedly at the main Stockholm Munchaus (third copy) and set about fooding (all eating activities that are an unnecessary imitation of activity no longer needed but relished as a treasured past requirement), and dry-hydrating (same but with non-liquid liquid) with luscious futility, as a force of habit. 

The Elite (now called 27b) began by asserting themselves with subtle elitism because they begrudgingly knew they were obliged to share the abomination of equality and that was the best they could do, because sharing hurt to them; a hurt fit to burst with the injustice of giving stuff away involuntarily. And habit from the Inverted-Elite allowed the Elite so much slack that KB had to wave a spanner of influence.

Clothing, fooding, sitting amongst themselves fictionalising, theory-making; ego boosting. Reading up on the rules and regulations they had had to sign up to to be on this final ride that had as much hope as spent residue could offer: they did the same things, just in opposing ways. It was a confederation of lemmings (mythical analogy).

But, yet, the Stockholm Munchaus, despite its metaphoricality, fit so well with the visiting human will and intention and was so at home they might well have been back in their bodies in the snug at the local boozer on a bank holiday weekend in early Summer. Getting leery if it were not for the true task in hand: save the unsaveable, keep the Titanic afloat, tickle you own feet and make yourself laugh…

Meanwhile…

… A little background zoomed into a type of focus: 

Atoll, stuck in a perpetual stuckness, saw himself as a vessel steaming through the ocean leaving a soggy carbon footprint in the waves. His desire, going forward, was to sail through life in a carbon neutral gear. This dreamscape kept him pointing forward, Kirk had gone, he was running out of space for time to bleed into.

But he tried away…

Only Good Atoll versions lay ahead. Astern, in his wake, there were bad Atolls, not bad Atolls of his own making but bad Atolls of the making of others. He willingly went along with it all, but then again, was it his ‘creators’ who gave him that willingness to go along with it all? 

He met a secret alleyway of Fate when he came across Judith, she taught Atoll plenty. He detected vaguely that he didn’t quite have control over his own feelings as a direct contrast created by his interactions with Judith. Some inter-exchanging-memo energy chipped away at the concrete of Atoll’s programmed form. She was a force for good and would hammer out goodness from Atoll’s potential and make something noteworthy of him, seaworthy, perhaps.

Except, he was mean’t to be hammering away at her goodness (people pleasingness) and adapting it to the relatively goodless future that was approaching her post haste from a dark and stormy autonomous horizon; to engulf her and set her freedom to one side. But she was turning the horror show into vaudeville.

How?

None of it had gone with a hint, or even a scant nosewhiff, of perfection; it was more like a highly trained, finely honed athlete falling over at the sound of the starting gun.

Before Atoll could say: What?

She had manoeuvred herself into one of the most powerful positions still available to human entities (the Sovereign Face of Humans in the Face of Machines (SFHFM).), when she was supposed, at this point, to be broken and under the control of the Godstrand Mission Program Algonarrative Instigator Engineering Phalanx (GMPAIEP).

He had not come round to regret his dealings with Judith yet. Although persistence in his line of self-persecution would lead there soon.

His brief, the one that came from deep programming that infilmersed his Perceptoconscious Output (PO), was to befriend a suitable candidate for Cerebral Real Estate Mind Conversion Capacitation (CREMCC), and conscript that candidate to the mish.

With a mixture of laziness (not ‘laziness’, but that tab will have to do due to time and effort, etcetera), frustration, an Egoic Personality Interference Blip (EPIB), and just the constraints of being in the field; wearing ill-fitting shit-just-got-real pants under an umbrella of the paranoia of not being fully adapted to the Ongoing Interactive Executive Millieu (OIEM), Atoll chose Judith.

Judith: the bad choice that turned out to be a preternaturally best choice, for Humanity, and a curveball with explosive potential to the Unnatural Whole World of Machinery (UWWM).

When they first entangled it could easily have seemed like Fate (Herself, or as a department) had cast the leads in a sci-fi, horror, suspense, rom-com, disaster movie.

A cheap App, let’s say an Extrapolated Narrative Reversewind Veracitization Inventenabler (ENRV) could have told a very different story, and did. One which Atoll had adopted to deflect blame from collecting and breeding within the mortuary of his self image. But the True Reality (TR) chewed away at his soul, as a baby with baby teeth…with a mouth due a set of incisors. It looked like he’d end up eating his own soul.

Judith had been signed, sealed and delivered to the Godstrand Retrieval Project Mission (GRPM) without pushback… But once in the system the pushing; back and forth and everyotherwhichway began. Judith was evidentially a plant, or, at least acted like one, but she was acting alone and had unwittingly planted herself. Or you could say she was in cahoots with Mother Nature, who having only ever been a metaphor was making a last, desperate, metaphorical lunge at stopping the virus of Humanity (her own infected children of the Devil) from killing her off comprehensively.

Historically speaking…

Judith walked by Atoll as he paused to allow a dizziness that had been climbing ito his brain and festering to dissipate and give way to relative clarity. She’d passed just as he cleared. She was the one, it seemed, and she was not the one, (it naggingly suggested) at the same time. She was an ill-wind and breath of fresh air that scooped him up and spun him round whirlwindishly.

Cutting out vast swathes of in-between data we will never have time to present, let alone digest, now (then) Judith’s Cerebral Real Estate Environment was in great and vital demand. UKGBHQ had been set up to command and control all interested parties in this scenario and they were all negotiating their place in the futile fightback phase of human annihilation.

The Commander was running a sweet shop selling bloodstream-mainlining sugar products, so refined as to be uncivilised.

One pin of Hope remained unbowlled: If the commanding algorithm could be programmed with the unrealistically achievable fact that Humanity was abandoning cruelty and, instead, comprehensively protecting animals, the course of extinction might veer off the road enough to shift life out of the Dark Ages, it never had the velocity to escape, and to take a slivery, yet extant, involvement in the One-True-Future imagined by the Commanding Algorithm…