Excerpt Twenty-Two

Frank & Mabel and Alice

Frank and Mabel were a tight team. They were Frank & Mabel and they were half way across a field when a silent drone, one of those you can hear whispering, cut the soundtrack of breathing and footsteps with its whispered intrusion into their immediate airspace…

‘Silent drone,’ they both crouch-walk-whispered in tandem creating a audio-tricycle effect, which had, somewhere integral within its essence, the suggestion of a society of whisperers and, or, an encapsulating whispersphere—they both churned out personal internalised thought concerning the ‘silent’ claim into the passing moment; was it a case of ‘too big too soon’ or was ‘silent’ a relative term that the pertinent physics would never allow to be absolute? Mabel snapped out of it… Frank thought on alone, entering territory that questioned whether altering the listeners’ hearing, using already available tech, would earn the drone a ‘true’ ‘silent’ ‘badge’… Part of Frank liked to play the part of a small but caring god from time to time, not that often though, not often enough for him, or anyone else, to worry about, except, perhaps, Mabel.

A small object flutter-crashed out of the sky…

Frank picked up the paper rectangle, brushing away muddiness the envelope had acquired during touch down…

‘Careful!’

‘Of what? It’s an envelope.’

Frank recklessly opened the envelope, ruminating on how nerve-wracking it would be to open an envelope at the Oscars, indelible phrases from Joaquim Phoenix’s anti-dairy speech got Frank past a knot of his own demonically blabbering prediction of explosive destruction…

The envelope contained a small slip of paper that Frank read to himself…

‘What does it say?’ asked Mabel.

… and then summarised for her, ‘ It is the address of the Spa Hotel we are heading for,’ he told her.’

‘No, really?’

‘Yes, it’s just an address…’ he said, holding the envelope upside down so that gravity could back up his claim of envelopic emptiness.

‘Let me see.’

She perused the address for what seemed like forever, held it sideways, upside down and smelt it; eyes thinned in forensic focus until all dead ends were reached. ‘Mmmmm.’ She capped her examination with an extraneous re-perusal of the address, ‘Ah hah…’.

They were both suspended in a sickening soup of anti-climax…

The drone seemed to hang around to confirm the message’s delivery and then, unseen, departed in a whispered doppler shift. The manufacturers had not claimed invisibility, which was undisputed, but they’d led on the virtue of silence, which was disputed: what was their game?

Frank & Mabel strode on, dark falling, feet sinking into soft ground. The anti-climax had given them a greater sense of purpose that they both felt, but didn’t communicate due to an elbow of foreboding jabbing their bellies. 

The route took them across more fields and through a light, prickly hedge, over some gates; whenever they paused or stopped, or became uncertain of the direction, a whispering rose from the apparent silence, guiding them onwards.

After climbing over a perimeter fence they rose up to a thin plateau…Then, pausing, they could see the dimly lit hotel: their destination… But as they set off for it a whispering started to their left and loudered with every step they made; they stopped and faced the whispering, then strode out towards it in perfect faith. They came to a lumpy mound that seemed to have no relevance at first, but light appeared that surrounded a door-shaped area, which, on closer inspection turned out to be a door, which clicked and popped open by a door’s width, a very thick security door’s width. The whispering stopped, replaced by a whirring that emanated from deep down. They breached the entrance. The whirring was coming from beyond and below the spiral staircase that descended into a darkness that, with each step, was suddenly illuminated as the step before it was reached… while behind them darkness resumed its business, unperturbed by their passing…

After three levels marked by small landings and doors with ‘KEEP OUT” written on. The ante-penultimate step lit the penultimate step, which lit the last step, which was a precursor to the illumination of a surprisingly large space… roosting within the space was a shocking cohort of closely packed human shaped bodies that sparked into life robotically; Frank saw people pretending to be robots and Mabel saw robots pretending to be people, but the truth (see: fundamental actuality) lay somewhere in-between.

Frank & Mabel looked over the gaggle of partially complete robots as the avidly focussed bots scanned and evaluated them.

‘Don’t court impatience due to the time being taken, there is a war on…’ came a male voice that sounded like a bad recording. Frank and Mabel assumed it was bot humour in action…something vastly inhuman was happening, but a war? With whom?

‘We are in energy saving mode… There is a war on…’

‘Who is “we”?’

‘The world,’ the voice stated with some kind of cheap audio effect from some vaguely remembered video game from history.

‘Okay.’

The lights go out and night illumination takes over revealing blood spills and spattering all over and around the bots. Were they illegal, and super-clumsy slaughterhouse workers? Was this an illicit meat processing plant? That Frank & Mabel smelled fresh death the voice could detect.

‘The ventilation system is in energy-saving mode…there is a war on.’

There was a long gap in which Frank & Mabel stood still, unwilling to unwittingly elicit a destructive response from whatever potential pandemonium they had wandered into with such good faith.

And in the stuck cogs of the gears of the moment…

Frank’s unconscious tentatively pitched him a screenplay scenario where two innocent government agents wander, innocently, into a lunatic asylum for potty robots. Great idea for a movie, he thought, and then as the thought settled saw it for what it was: a ruse. A wrong-footing over the bridge across the river of obfuscation. But, and, or, so, why the ‘innocence’ all of a sudden? Frank had never considered himself ‘innocent’ as far as he could remember. Wait, it was a screenplay, for a movie, it wasn’t real… He wanted & Mabel to know about this uncomfortably protruding ‘innocence’ barb, but now was not the time. Maybe, even, never ever was the time…

Mabel farted and then coughed in a, post modern captive equine had bolted to a frying pan/fire freedom, manner. Was this the last time she’d see herself alive again? Or, was this the start of a new era; a new beginning, a fresh start. Maybe even one without Frank &. The fresh start idea felt intoxicatingly pervasive. She’d loved to have stumbled into that winding corridor of freshly laid sanguinity. But nothing about this smelt very fresh.

After many minutes of whirring with some beeping thrown in, the units adopted the standard standing sleep position… except one… who stepped forward to greet the incoming, outgoing agents… He was unplugging some wires from his throat, part of the tech that kept him one download and half an upload away from being detected as not being one of them but the robotic unit community. This was a hubot (hew bot), an undercover human spying on bot activities.

‘Hi, I’m Deluge, Agent Deluge. Call me Jim. It is so good to see you and not have to… I have been working here among the bots; trying to assess the universal global, local, vibe…On a mission to unveil the machine’s machinations, as some might have it. A pernicious “electro-will” has infected, perverted, usurped… our machines… As you can see, it’s been a bloodbath, a visceral feast of beelzebub-vomitted nightmarefullness. But you’re safe, you’re safe, because Mallory has it under control. Mallory has come to our rescue.’

‘Nice to meet you, Jim… This is agent—‘

‘Mallory knows all about you both. She is our commander, stroke saviour. She’s operating from way up in the power echelon summits; we’d be sunk without her. Come! You are the chosen ones…. Mallory chose you both. You are both super-lucky, Mallory endowed you both with super-luck.’

‘What is actually going on here, Jim, it’s a bit dark.’

‘Energy saving, my friend.’

‘I mean, it’s—‘

‘I’ll turn the vital central comms off; we don’t need them, we have Mallory. Mallory has a team at her disposal.’

‘Vital comms?’

‘Follow me,’ Jim said, starting off robotically and slowly gaining in motorised fluidity.

‘Tell us more about Mallory’s team, Jim. These are humans?’

‘Yes, primed and sitting in a car up the road, well within Mallory’s protection resource perimeter.’

‘A car?’

‘A false car, an old electro-Beetle conversion jobby’

‘Jobby?’

Frank & Mabel followed Jim to a door, marked: ‘INSTILLATION (Human Only)’ The door opposite read: ‘INSTALLATION ( Non-Human)’ They turned to face the ‘instillation’ door, which unlocked itself, after scanning Jim’s nasal hair, and revealed a small, stark room with a simple table and four basic chairs. 

‘This is the last place the other agents saw, Jim said, sadly, ‘It had to be done… The bots were programmed to control and dispose of ex-government agents such as yourselves. I could not blow my cover. Their previous programmers had one focussed path and Mallory, thank the Lord, has another. She would have stopped it if she’d been able to, sooner. It was a bloodbath…but…there is a war on.’

‘This war, Jim, this war you’re talking about? … We are unaware of the specific war of which you seem to speaking.’

‘No one is…’

‘With whom are we fighting, Jim?’

‘We haven’t seen any death tech, only a whispering messenger.’

Jim stopped on a thruppence, reminding Frank & Mabel of how robots used to be before they became convincing, and said, ’The Billionaire Schemer Elite have created a war within the human mind. A copyrighted, trademarked, WarScape, which isn’t totally separate from the traditional, physical world, or so it was planned, but there’s leak-over… splash-up … secretion saturation …shit storm blow-in! They invented the Cerebral Real Estate space to create more wealth, but when that wasn’t enough, they just kept inventing and creating… inventing, creating… this one is fatal, compadres, to the death… to the buffers of extinction. That’s why certain movements have allied to at least leave a bit of humanity in machines that can survive the purging of physical life on this planet… Except the “surviving” humanity is assisting the extinguishers to accelerate the end, a coup de grace with the first salvo.’

How destructive could a war in our minds be, thought Frank & Mabel, until the thoughts branched out like an explosion in slow motion ripping everything they held dear to pieces… And ‘splash-over’ just added blasts to the explosion. The stuck initiation of the DRD global system was a potential verification of Jim’s seemingly implausible narrative. The world since the ‘unlaunch’ was behaving like everyone in charge had ‘left the building’. Still ‘the End of Humanity’ did not compute, how could it?

‘What about the People of Musk, and the Bezos Clans, the one-way-ticketers and such, the portion of humanity who are off-planet, Jim? Surely they carry the flame—’

‘They are not off planet,’ Jim said sternly, uncompromisingly, inappropriately. ‘They’re convinced they are, but they are, in actuality, inside a simulation within the Cerebral Real Estate space.’

Frank & Mabel faced each other with a seriousness they’d never achieved before and one of them said, but didn’t say, ‘This guy! This Moment in Time. Can you feel the deja vu? Is that the distant yodelling of the sub-controlled, non-liminal training we might or might not have had during long blackouts in our careers?’ The other one said, but didn’t say: ’Yes!’ 

‘Wow, so those tales of new beginnings, Jim, on the Planet Musk, on BezoDom and the Planet of Iron Kings are fictions?’

‘Fictitious fictions, nought but rich man’s loose-poop drizzled on a celebration-cake that we all had to suffer eating a slice of to prove we can see the Emperor’s new clothes.’

‘So,’ Mabel posited, tripping on the grass verges of genius, willed on by Frank, soundlessly cheering from the cheap seats,‘the war is not “us” against “them”, but “us” against “us” and “us” against “them” and “us” against “them” and “us”, and “us” against “ourselves”?’

Frank noted, that although what she was saying seemed to make no sense, the sentiment was flapping in the wind, and that the next time she embarked on this explanation he’d join in with hand-sign speech marks. 

‘As war goes, it’s a riot,’ Jim countered, unable to deliver a definitive reply that would’ve needed to have been fed by a greater understanding of what he’d just audibly witnessed Mabel saying. He hoped that that was the end of Mabel’s enquiry. It was all getting so old for Jim. PTSD was waiting in the wings for the final curtain and fireworks so show stopping as to burn down the whole theatre. And Jim was not looking for exits.

They all needed a processing recess. And one was had…

But, then…

…Later, while drinking herbal tea, 

‘There’s blood on my mug,’ noted Frank. With Mabel’s tacit backing they registered a cool disgust. Both seeking a demeanour from different episodes of the same old cop show. The victim could have been a close friend and/or associate who’d gone missing in action a few weeks ago.

‘There’s blood most everywhere, be thankful none of it is your own,’ explained Jim. ‘They massacred with bloodlust, but cleaned with increasing distain.’ 

Frank & Mabel were a seething quiz compendium. Jim was a vast orchard of answers fructifying in the warm late summer sun of questions.

‘Any questions or other business?’

‘Tons.’

‘Thought so. Well, they’ll have to be asked of Mallory if she’s answering. I’ll show you the control room; it is still under construction. I suppose it will always be. ‘Jim paused for a moment of reflection. ‘This briefing is concluded,’ he said finally.

‘What briefing?’

‘Time is dying,’ said Jim, as though he were Time…

Frank & Mabel didn’t get it: the overall position they found themselves in… They thought they had it grasped, but the branches they tried to pull on to climb the tree of understanding just snapped. The human brain had to do its thing unaided. They both had instilled, refurbished and plastic inner abilities, but those were off limits; non-human additions, parts of themselves that could not be trusted to orchestrate counter-revolutionary operations for the entire resistance forces of the outgone UK HM Gov. & military & secret service complex. 

‘You’ll get it soon enough,’ Jim told them, ‘ seeing in their scans a lack of grasping and that they had technological immersion training, an unconscious preparation for theoretical counter-tech resistance. ‘You’ve had the CRE base installed. Our system here will prep you for the needed attributes. I’ll drop you off at the control centre. And then I’ll be gone. You might get some dead robot activity but it really will be a last gasp, they are running down and out.’

But agent James ‘Callmejim’ Deluge, was dead wrong; all the add-ons and modifications in the new tech world would be of no use, Frank & Mabel were fighting for what existed before the tech revolution turned its lumbering mill-wheel of creative destruction. Frank & Mabel must help whoever else there is still fighting out there to reverse the giant wheel of misfortune…if…if it is not too late….

‘Mallory calling! Mallory calling!’

‘Should we reply?’

‘Should we reply?’

‘No!’

‘No…’