In the barren fields of Cotswolds, not much happens. But they say when something happens, it will be an event. A big event, for that matter. For Justin, the whole place is just a wreaking monotony.
He has secured a nice place to live and established himself in the community. A Londoner by birth, but a cotswoldian fanatic by choice, Justin, widowed but with three children who have been in adulthood for many years now. ‘They barely visit me’ Justin is heard saying to his neighbours. They tend not to take any notice of him. Apart from the usual politeness and casual greetings, Justin doesn’t get much out of the friendly cosmos of neighbours.
Apart from the fact that most of them are humanoids which are bought for a five grand a piece by the Digi-council to do most of the routine and ordinary haphazardly work, these humanoids have not got an excellent record of human interaction. He calls them Tencapsuls (They swell their genetically changed heads *made of cow flesh and skin), to express their boredom. Then they release gases, mostly made of compressed flowerpot squash because this makes them relieve their so-called anger and they talk eloquently only when they feel the need to.
For Justin, this has been little of a cultural shock, really. Because he has worked in a labonotomy (A humanoid factory, a place where these things are built), he has built a career and made good out of it. He has been busy for several years trying to work out the distinct consciousness level of humans and human-built mechanisms. The mechanics of his work had earned him a Nobel prize in 2046 and since then, he had never looked back. He had been active in the community of one thousand tencapsuls, helping them grow and accommodate the ecosystem. First difficulty he encountered was when he had to design the layout of the town. If it wasn’t for a big grant from Digicouncil, Justin wouldn’t have been able to deliver on the town. He had spent wisely but efficiently and prudently. Tencapsuls do not bother with sucking up a lot of investments. As long as they have enough sunrays, they are fine. They don’t need feeding or using toilets or anything else, any necessity that humans need. Justin knows that some of them were up to for renewal and reconstruction. The hardest aspect of reconstruction for Justin is the facial and other more sensitive parts of the tencapsuls anatomy. He has no support and no help at all. Old normal human contact never appealed to Justin, even when he was working in the Labontomies of England. Human contact is limited, or shall I say, non-existent. Because the simple fact is that Justin had conditioned his placement in the town of Light-Light for there not to be any other humans. He wanted to be lonely with occasion visits from his children. He was happy to receive them when they were growing up and while they were in colleges. But a bit later, as they grew up faster and bigger, they intimidated him. He hated their independence and their claim to free speech and all that malarkey, for which he always said that this was the biggest regret he’d had as a parent. Anyhow, on reconstruction day one, he has to deliver ten of the inhabitants. The sky is getting grimmer by the minute. Rain is expected. Hasn’t rained for a very long time, probably over two years now, and drought had seeped into the town. Digicouncil had run out of the rain stimulant, and, for a couple of months, it has been dry. Messages on board had read that the town will be rationed regarding rain distribution all the way until the end of December, just before Christmas. Justin had built his laboratory a mile away from the town. A bit of a stretch for him. In his mid-sixties, he is keen to get himself fit again and do more walking and exercise. He has abandoned his bikecopter for walks, constant walks and exciting music radio implanted in his ear lobes permanently with a consciousness on and off switch modes. Upon arriving at his lab, he unexpectedly turns around and sees them all, having tracked him down and follow his trail to discover their origin. Justin was flabbergasted because this means that they had spent unnecessary mileage on their clocks and that this will signal Digicouncil that there is something wrong with the play.
I can’t fucking believe it. He mutters to himself.
What the hell are you doing…things…!
He looks at the score of them, trampled on the fields nearby, the alarm and security and safety features of the lab have been triggered.
Justin isn’t happy with the lot.
He inserts the slider (A card sweeper that carries personal and state data) into the Melgren (A human-presence recording software that expects site visits but also recognises owner) He switches the Dormingtons (A main data-log for the tencapsuls). He can’t be bothered to wind himself up with this shit.
Ok! He mutters.
This is it. Let me put them to sleep for the time being and let me move on with my stuff. The skies darken quickly. Justin wasn’t sure how far and how deep the experiment was going to run. But he has to have to try pretty hard. Conclusion of his findings are going to be explored next week. The following week, he has to be reassigned somewhere else. He hates reassignments. It has been over three decades since the late 40s that he has been assigned and reassigned and everything else is just a chore.
He can’t envisage a life full of events. Anyhow, he takes matters onto his hands as this is the first time he had to switch the mega community off. He will take responsibility, but before he signs off, he needs to find the right purpose to justify future actions. A lot of dilemmas hit his head. He knows he hasn’t got a lot of time in his hands. But he has a lot of power in his hands. He knows that the squad that overseen north0eastern operations is an amalgamation of collected dead beats.
He can’t stand them and he hates them too. Their inspections are rudimentary, to say the least, but sometimes he evades a lot of tough questions when they just pop in unannounced and demand to see the latest logs from his graze.
He finds any opportunity to avoid them. Sometimes he is successful and most of the time he isn’t. Today is that day. He has an excuse to shut this issue away -use tencapsuls to create havoc, but he has to think about food for himself too. He knows he can’t feed himself for long if he puts up a lot of resistance. The carcopters begin swerving round in the air. He doesn’t hear noise but can see them in the screendeterminer.
Fuck, it’s lots of them. He said.
Fuck, there is more than I thought possible. He repeated to himself like a monk in a monastery from which he had never escaped from. Carcopters begin their viewing assault on the site. They identify him immediately but take no action.
Justin reinforces the gates and turns the infrared lights everywhere. Switches off gravity booster and stops any carcopter approaching the site. If they attempt to hide harder and try to land, then they will be pushed away onto exosphere hard. They circle around the site, but infrared blinds their view. First thing that goes in their mind is that the laboratory has been compromised. Their signalling has given them the right sensation that the total population has been switched off and that the sentiments from the town are not coming through. There was no feeding coming through. It is not Justin’s fault that the switch off had to happen. He was frightened when he saw dozens of them behind him. He was feeling down anyway. He needed to have some kind of fun, even if they didn’t know it.
The swerving and circling around doesn’t stop for a while.
Justin is contained inside and knows full well that he can’t sustain living there by himself for long. It’s not solitude that scares him, but the outcome of any revanchist tendencies from the death camp.
Inspectors are a bunch of wankers, and they don’t forgive you.
He knows in his mind that the only way to derail the whole thing is to plead not guilt, to face up the trial and ask them to run a consciousness clearance and for them to see that it actually wasn’t his fault, it was a matter of time before this whole thing was going to go berserk.
While he looks for the options, it is actually staring in his face right in front of him. He eyes the coagulation lever, which is situated right by the Robo-examining board. This huge steel and plastic concrete material that covers the Robo-making mixer is impenetrable. He knows that if he enters it and sets the Made on automatic, he can be transformed into an autonomous tencapsul with a range of life up to ten thousand years. This is accommodating, he thinks after he had read the statement on the front glass entrance. If he pulls the coagulation lever, then things are different–the entire island will be subsumed by soil, and it will disappear at an instant. Is this viable?
He then turns the lights on towards the sloping corridor, which leads to the interconnector. It’s a smaller and lighter task.
Once lights come on, an alarm, the safety-to-the-other-side sign and pink light is ignited. This is the sign of an Armageddon is about to happen and that any living creature, conscious or metal must be following the arrows in the corridor which leads to the permanence ship awaiting on the other side of the curtain.
Fuck! He goes. What the fuck. He mutters. This is not the end. I don’t want this to be the end…my end…
He then looks back to see what is happening in the reality realm, the casualties he will leave behind. Nothing. They are all in the stall's state. Why should he bother to care?
He must follow the path because doing otherwise will just not get him anywhere and he will be another human tencapsul and nothing else.
As he walks along, lights behind turn out, and it’s like a time warp effect. The behind him is extinguished, means nothing, it doesn’t exist. He walks, but then something in his body tells him he has to look back. But every time he tries, he can’t. Something else does not allow him to look back and see what is happening behind him. His legs tell him to walk faster. He runs. He doesn’t know he can do that. His arms tell him to hold on the railing sideways. He does, but he never knew that he has so much strength to do that. His brain tells him to look at the tiny light ahead of him. He indeed does. His body and thoughts are beyond his control. He just does what is told of him and he continues exaggerating more grounds and walloping miles quicker now. The peering in front becomes like a trailblazer from a super launcher. He is consciously confused now. He knows that this makes no more sense. Is he a rocket, an object or a humanoid tencapsul himself? He wonders, because that is the only thing he has left now. Nothing else remains intact. He tries to recall subconscious memories of his loved ones but does not happen. As he is trailing through the tight channel full of Gelltestra (An oxygen-like jelly component that helps heavy objects speed up. But the quirky thing about Gelltestra is that for tencapsuls and humans an additional criterion is applied – they need to fit in the calculated stream of the Gelltestra. Everybody has a space carved out in their Gelltestra, but a lot of them have tried to stay on top of this by trying to understand or control its trajectory. Justin is successful because he is an engineer who never dealt with emotions in his life. He is materialistic and knows how to behave in these situations.) the speed is varied. A voice inside his head tells him that this is because he is moving faster than a normal flying object in the Milky Way Galaxy. It makes little sense to him. He always has been convinced that the likes of Milky Way and the rest, since the end of population growth, has massively changed, life on earth has transformed and that a lot more has happened since them days. But is he right, though? He doesn’t know. All he must do now is focus on his trajectory on the other realm through his Gelltestra and prevail.
***
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