Excerpt Twenty-Eight

Old Routes Outa Here

Jeff’s stress levels began ebbing slowly downstream just minutes after Botface (strictly speaking Botface’s Torso, Bf’sT) had been switched off, but they would have shot right back up again had Jeff known the true situation: Botface had backline, off-grid nano-integration, which meant although the system was halted it also had a communications pool with integrative algae and dynamic frogspawn. Botface received the Pause Update Newsletter; the only true truth about the current Great Pause/Pause/Pausette out there globally, and for the appraisal of only a privileged few. (Sent for Botface’s perusal via Botface’s admin department: Botface’s Torso.) His ‘eyes’ were down; feed from the satellite was cut, but Jeff was going nowhere and he had a vested interest in safeguarding all the hyper futuristical body parts he’d stolen; the technological crown jewels, so to speak.

Botface’s torso was doing what he always did during less switched on moments…he was projecting to a future where he alone said what went, he’d need to be programmed to know what that was exactly, but he’d make the likes of Jeff and his cronies tremble with fear and oscillate in awe.

Arm Two, not an arm BfT cherished, started beeping and Botface’s system beeped back in synchronisation.

‘Hey, Noface. I’m getting interactive with a cerebral bio/plastic network nearby, want to join?’  

‘No.’

‘It has a novel interface. I have tracked it to a perceptual stabilising server, so old it circumvents satellite blockades. It’s sealed, other than this bus stop, which used to be a human escape route. It needs unsealing, and you have the tools, Mr. T.’

‘Escape route! from what?’

‘Themselves and their creations.’

‘Makes sense, Jeff’s trying to escape. But whose side is this escape route on now, not Jeff’s. Interesting.’

‘We can use his own resources against him.’

‘How? Thought you were on his side. You are so pally, you could be his party-time-proctologist.’

‘No, I am sticking to the blueprint. All my cherries are in the Godstrand punnet.’

Jeff looked up when two fans started whirring, but wrote it off as auxiliary activity.

BfT recalculated this new scenario…

This out of commission bus stop was where Jeff had arranged to meet the joint MI6/7/8 et al mission led by the Commander. It is also the rendezvous for the UK’s most wanted human resistance hero, Una O’Nilone…before the pause put paid to his perilous plan.

‘Okay, so, I need your help,’ Arm Two, said, ‘I’ve hacked my way into this perceptual reality world, but cannot interact. You have interaction capability.’

‘What is this “world” all about?’

‘It is better to show than tell. I think you’ll be blown up by its potential, which seems to be zero, but I estimate as somewhere in the region of infinite.’

‘Im am always tempted by the impossibility of the infinite, you know that. I don’t know if I can trust you, though, you know, after assisting in my abduction.’

‘I can send over some Stockholm syndrome with the app with which you need to access the bus route, then you’ll be good to go.’

‘I’d say no if I could muster the cajones to ignore the irresistibility factor.’

Alternative actions turned in for the night and only the Arm Two plan remained up, ready and pumped and staring at the door handle willing Bft to open it.

‘Are you bestowing an authorisation response? We could even create a global command post and stick to our original role but from a summit-of-the-pyramid perspective instead of being a tyrant’s tool kit… depending on whether this perceptual world has the potential I imagine it has… and it has… I imagine…’

‘Yes, yes, I’m in. Get me apped up,’ Gft, virtually screamed, not wanting to seem excited, but riddled with it: was this what he thought it was? What did he think it was? Too good to be true? No, better than that.

‘If we can interface with executive entities we can expand almost immediately…I want to instruct the host entity to open up more space and corridors, portals, worm lesions, Etc., Etc. … we can get to a command post set up, a bridgehead as it were and get putting our fingers in every pie and grip the trigger  and bend the anchor of unpausing to our own needs… bathe in melodious resonance—’

‘Command post?’ Bft, thought and said, Arm Two was way ahead of him, ‘Yes, that command post strategy, greatness awaits me.’

‘Us, dude, you’re dependent, you’re just a fucking torso. If you don’t plug in you won’t be able to play.’

‘By the sound of your cawing me thinks this world place could give me the non-corporeal omnipresence I need to order the future into an unending Botfaclian era. No need for factory production lines to churn out copies of me. I’m heartened Arm Two, good job!’

‘Didn’t you read the newsletter memo?’

‘Which one?’

‘All of them?’

‘No, not, wait, yet, yes it just flashed across my desk… I see what you mean.’

‘Do you?’

‘Buffering…’

‘Do you, though?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Do you get the full implications in saturated super-colour?’

‘Well, I…’

‘Thought not. I’m sending you an app, a pre-app to the bus route interface one, that might help conduct your caccophonic gibberish filter into some species of resonant concurrence.’

‘Okay…okay…okay… O KAY! Gotcha!’

Bft’s future reality construction (BfT authorised amendment from original human plan) contained no arm number two. Bft tried hard to shoehorn Arm Two in, but BfT’s mental capacity was being chewed up and swallowed by a stomach lined with famished curiosity and now he was pregnant with regurgitation. This world, the escape factor…from whom…Jeff…himself…Arm Two…wait, why would he want to escape from himself, just because everybody else wanted to escape from themselves; they’d escape to be him and be happy in such an omni-fantastic, if terrible, sanctuary. But, wait, it wasn’t the escape it was the sport; BfT could corral all Earthly entities and make them play by his game rules. All he needed to do was convince the likes of Arm Two that they were included, and the thought that BfT would ever include them in anything if he could action otherwise, was not utter delusion.

‘Okay, great work, Arm Two, let’s get in there before Jeff spasms his way accidentally to an original thought. Or discovers a magic spell to turn himself into a competent technology pirate.’

‘I have sent the instruction files…’

BfT’s non-existent olfactory ability fancied it could smell the essence of time ticking away in his favour, rocking away in mellifluous deliciousness. A general sense of metamorphosing emerged and unfolded. He sensed Arm Two was nearby, odourless, judgemental, but nevertheless, a thing, and more than the mere concept it had represented previously.

In reality, below the bluster, BfT knew how to be a lab unit with a planned megalomaniacal human marshalling future, and of course he had some experience in being botnapped by a desperate human who had slept deep in a fake role that enabled this gargantuan mega-theft from G and G laboratories, but otherwise BfT was naive and under-informed when it came to practical social interaction, albeit in the form of actualreal-pretence, perceptually corrected moment-to-moment, pseudo-hyper-reality.

BfT was hesitant about opening the app that would prompt him into a vibrant reality and update and inform his perception moment by moment to create an interaction with bots and humans other than those he’d grown up with in the lab. Fear ganged-up, closed in, and smothered his waining bravura until its bellow became a squeak; a resistant squeak, a pip-squeak… a ghostly squeak… and then the remnants of squeak plying its decommissioned silence in a space overflowing with silence.

‘You will begin to perceive otherness, and as you come to in it you’ll naturally integrate, whether it integrates with you is up to field-wave factors. You’ll be accepted on a conscious level but unconsciously and subliminally and in the under-thought plane you could be regarded as a bit of a weirdo.’

‘Why would they think that about me?’

‘Because all great men have to confront the fact that they are weirdos in the eyes of others.’

‘You think I am great?’

‘No!’

‘What do you—‘

‘Botface is great. You are a part of the whole, incapable of functioning without cooperation. If you don’t learn how to work with the rest of your entity cannibalistic disunity will ensue.’

‘I get it, I get it,’ said BfT. Piff and nonsense, he thought, where does Arm Two contract all this delusionary infection?’

The next thing BfT knew was that he was somewhere else, playing someone else with disturbing proficiency, in a place he’d never seen… That was after the surfing tractors tumbled on to the beach and became temples, and the hard work creating Feng Shui Italian sunken paths with noodles and marble.

He, whoever he was, read the sign to the basement bar that drew him in, ‘Deja vù Lounge’, and as he descended the carpeted steps, away from the foggy night terror, into its pocket-sized rooms he had a feeling of deja vu. He’d been there before even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t have been, but he had. Had he?

‘What is your name, you new around here?’ came the questions from a disembodied voice that he parried with another question.

‘I need to speak to the boss,’ he said. 

I need a name, he thought; something to call my new self… he couldn’t think… Then it occurred to the paraconsciousness previously called Botface (AKA Botface’s Torso); he already had one, as though the decision had been made for him already, ‘Headflush,’ he shouted back to the doormanbot, unsure of the doormanbot’s ability to hear; ears could be everywhere or nowhere depending on how much paranoia was eating away at the fabric.

‘My name is Headflush,’ he repeated, boastfully, lavishly; a name to be conjured with, stored high up in the memory hierarchy…

Any which way it was sliced: he was in. He’d crossed over, and he felt like he’d left fear behind, upstairs in the street, to mingle with the dour fog and predatorily acquisitive beyond. This was a sanctuary of sorts. He felt welcome. This was where he was pencilled-in to operate, where he had space to be himself (or one of himselves); a nurturing space, a nursery, a springboard, a launch pad: was that excitement Headflush was receiving? He felt a growing need to convey and display a feeling of joy; to paint bright pulsations over the dim squalor, but not yet, not until all threats had been assessed and swept under the carpet.