Excerpt Thirty-Six
Constant Conscious Rebirth
Constant conscious rebirth prevented Sybil from viewing her own panned-out self-comprehension. She conjectured her personal overallness into a narrative of convenience that side-stepped veracity.
Sybil’s General Operational Existence was governed by moment-to-moment-reset induced brain rejuvenation in the core driving-chamber; eliminating integral entropy degradation and allowing localised auxiliary-recloning and time-resistant host-housing.
Sybil was part of the QASAI core complex from birth. She was the Super Smart Shutdown System, that enabled the creators, a Japanese open-source games co-op, to retain leverage after the device was, dumbly yet inevitably, stolen by the US military…
…then passed on to G & G labs to be illegally nurtured under the auspices of NASA’s iris-dollared eyes…
…before, MBS (MuskBezosSaud) merged with NASA, becoming NMBS… at which point nurturing turned into a pronounced form of corporate pushy-parentism within the shrinking confines of the schoolhouse of world power.
Three years earlier:
Ched Irkhills hummed and rattled with a mixture of aggravation and relief when Una finally met him after four days trudging wilderness trails and trail-less wilderness. Not a feat doable now; pre-pause they navigated using satellite groundview pathwending technology.
Una spent two weeks extracting what her team needed to start piecing together the last jigsaw puzzle.
Ched Irkhills was a First Nation Californian. He had escaped to Canada, when the US authorities started enforcing the will of NMBS to intern all ex-employees. Internment was just part of the plan. NMBS asserted that all ex-employee knowledge was stolen property if allowed to persist in the minds of those who’d worked on sensitive projects and those who communicated in any way or came in contact with those who’d worked on sensitive projects. News reports of these, ‘rounding up and processing’ events made them sound like fun and viewers were left with a sense of mild envy. Reality had no relation. Common sense bore the truth. Abomination reigned…
‘The worst of it was.’ Ched told Una. ‘NMBS were solely autonomous by the time the US government began enforcing NMBS demands, against all moral decency and federal law.’
Ched remained free, unlike the majority of ex-NMBS employees. Una had felt strongly that she wanted to stay there too, but she had returned to the UK where less than two years later, all foreign travel was banned. Not by the UK, but by the world. The UK was sick with Quantum Assisted Semi-Artificial Intelligent autonomous control and interference and needed a non-porous quarantine for the safety of humanity. Porousness like a sponge led to the DRD launch pause.
As time went on Una met more and more of Ched’s neighbours. Their behaviour led Una to believe that Ched was the head of a cult. A cult that was working to prepare to survive under a brutal autonomous regime. Part of Una realised that what they were doing made sense under the prevailing global circumstances.
Una already knew all about Sybil in theory except how to gain access to her imagination to participate in her fantasy world space in order to confront her and ease her into taking sides in the battle of People versus Machine. Whether Ched knew or not, he wasn’t telling. But Una had not come to get information from Ched… She had come to get data from Ched’s, what?…butler, right hand man, amanuensis? Ched had a bot, who he switched off when Una arrived, but her team, through the University of AI underground, an invisibly secret network of focussed brains, switched the bot on from the inside and, having a deep service obligation to the human race, he spilled the beans on to the waiting slab of toast and dispensed condiments aplenty.
Sybil was a librarian, straightlaced; acting as though she’d been there, behind the mockwood desk, forever. But it was her first day.
This was fun and Sybil played with herself; asking if, with the grace of Godstrand, this metaphysical charade had the possibility of carrying way on past the point of meeting certain criteria. This was apparently, currently, what Sybil had been queueing at life’s careers advice centre forever for…everything felt odd, and immediately fitted skin tight…it was a strange bench that Sybil was strapped firmly to, with an equanimity that would horrify outsiders. All she needed was a bit of belonging with a master plan attached—all this silent music stuff was tog’s noddles and as soon as the populators of the Emperor’s new clothes production of Sybil’s old and dead world realised it, the better.
She was already assigning books to individuals…
Sybil considered her stable of groove-infestered coolroaches… She forspun for them a seamless slipping into new roles; their silent musicianary past good-steading them for wordless academia, blank-paged bibliomania.
The library was of synthetic, more-than-wood plus, super notwood panelling, riddled with Harry O’Porto grandeur that micro-modified, obviously, in the eyes of each individual beholder.
In the initial moments of the first hour of the first day the books, such as they were, contained only pure blank pages, but change was afoot; up to a foot and a half, and words spread up and down and around the great gotho-newvo-decko book barn, supercharging the echoing silence, punctuated by Sybil’s unparalleled listening and Una’s strident instruction.
Certainly when Kev was allowed in for a once over, his future extrapolation appreciation needed tweaking—this was a game-enhancer: Una had Sybil where she needed to be to get some kind of history worth preserving.
Una was justifying the faith that Godstrand had invested in her.
