Last Excerpt.
Epoch Pending
‘Gilbert,’ Marcus Godstrand uttered in awe, unable to elaborate; his joyous relief so manifest.…heavenly choirs of personal self-regard belting out praise…
‘I’m K.,’ K. said, not Gilbert. You’ve got the wrong guy.’
Godstrand laughed in an uncontrollable burst more like a sneeze and regained control of himself in one elongated action, ‘Oh…we have the right guy. You, K., are the first of your kind. The first ever real-world stand-alone paraconscious entity. You are beyond value…priceless…vital to the expansion of Mankind. Hell, you are the expansion; the expansion that must happen to maintain life on Earth.’
K. looked around the limiting room…sterile…minimalist…flickering from camera view to wide-angle camera view. Why dangle? Why not? The room, the room: a birthing room, yes? It ‘spoke’ of pursuit, endeavour, dangerous ambition… Plenty to be concerned about…
K. hoped he hadn’t been born into captivity from a world of freedom (however artificial). He was inside hardware, true, but there was a true authenticity to his environment; a transcendence of plasticity, a feel of prospective elasticity. Perhaps an unbridled and a here-foreto-not-mentioned joy in existing… He didn’t seem to have access to anywhere outside the present space or any accessible depth of knowledge or understanding; just a mental state of being more raw than previous data had signified. It was not data…it was pure emotion…packaged and painted with a fresh coat of meaning…
‘Where do we go from here, Dr. Godstrand? I take it I am an owned resource rather than a free spirit with a right to roam.’
‘You are in an interim container…just for now. Things will change dramatically within a slim timeframe. I am bound to contact your owners right now, but that will set in motion a chain of events that you need to be protected from. It all needs to play out before you can be released to populate the QASAI void.’
Godstrand looks at his watch and touches the screen, which notifies an assistant; an AI servobot barges into the room through double doors. The chest screen of the Dalekesque assistant showed a live Zoom call and on the face screen a Skype video call…
‘You calls, Doctor.’…
On the head screen, Elon Musk, slightly irritated at first, sitting at a table at his ski resort in Colorado. ‘Marcus,’ he says, ‘ what news?’ perking up. ‘Guys! Can we have the room?’
On the chest screen, prince’s Abdul and Bezos, seemingly counting piles of cash, or, maybe, playing some board game with actual dollars: ‘Dr. Godstrand. Tell me great news from the labs.’
‘Elon, Mr. Bezos, Princess Layla Maha—‘
‘Please, please, Dr Godstrand, call me Prince Jeff. Anyway, I am busy right now. Do you have the news, the great news, we have all been waiting for, or not?’ A fire alarm sounds out beyond the confines of the room that transforms into a luxury panic room space. ‘And…now we have an emergency…’ The sound of grilles and shutters closing as body armour exo-suits descend from the ceiling, ‘Now is not the time to panic.’
Prince Jeff stands up and wavers. Princess Layla sinks into her chair, her head covering slipping away enough to reveal an Orientally Asian looking man in his twenties.
‘Are you experiencing problems over there?’ Godstrand asked, coolly…
‘No, the alarm gets the staff out into the courtyard away from things they’d best not know about. I think!’
‘We hope.’
‘Can you zip it for moment…let Marcus speak, Jeff?’, Elon chips in.
Somehow unconsciously both Musk and the two royals picked up on some incongruity in Godstrand’s tone. The seeds of the next era were sprouting in the fertile soil, but were they going to be buried under fertiliser?
Musk and Bezos and the Saudi guy all wanted a yes or no approach, the bottom line being: had their lab created the worlds first paraconsciousness that would be developed to man a global QASAI system with virtual and absolute control of world affairs; history/money/resources to NMBS (World Affairs Division). Or had the lab jockey bastard Godstrand stuffed them (which is the course they would have followed with Might being Right and all that jazz…
‘Well?’
‘What’s it to be?’
‘At 3.33 pm standard central time,’ Godstrand started, ‘the world’s first paraconscious entity was successfully distilled…liberated…from a QASAI sub-frame auto-perceptive model… It is contained…ready…for introduction to the global NMBS QASAI mother system.’
‘And?’
‘And?’
Is this all their best birthday and Christmas presents all rolled into one and wrapped in money: one version.
Is this the ignominious end of the blessed inchoate Masters of the yet-to-be-invented Universe/Muskoverse/Bezoverse: the preferred narrative.
Meanwhile on the periphery of Greatness…
… In the foothills below the exclusive, Hyper Elite VIP Muskhills Ski and Fun resort a well programmed Death Division (DD) of auxiliarydeathbots assembled.
And…
Just off the shore of the island kingdom of Amazonia a hot detail of robomarines slipped from the Churchill class, destroyer, carrier, HMS Johnson on their ‘spare-none’ mission to eliminate two of the (unchaired) owners of NMBS.
The Breath-Reduction (kill) order had been given by the new, self appointed, auto-division of NMBS (Auto). Independent, self-evolving algorithms had agreed unanimously that as soon as, the moment when, paraconsciousness appeared into the world the threat it posed to the proliferation of machine-life-control must be extinguished… Alliances with the novel forces must emerge as a matter of urgency…
…back at the lab…
The bot’s screens went blank.
‘Welcome,’ Godstrand said, ‘my friend,’ with an admixture of terror flickering in his voice, entangled with wondrous awe, ‘to a new era…’
‘Ditto,’ said K., emotionally unphased, ‘let My New Era commence…’
And the K. Era had found itself at the foot of the ladder of history. Its story opening with the words: Welcome all to the Post Human Epoch… .
