'The Codex : Crown of the Head'

INSECTOID! Four Eyes Studios presents:

'THE CODEX : Crown of the Head'

November 2040 AD – Ripley, Ipswich, QLD…

‘This is fuckin’ bullshit!’ Ray bellowed and then took a determined puff from his cigarette, deep and hungry.

‘Let’s just give ourselves over to the Machines already and be done with it,’

Ray continued his rant, as he exhaled smoke, to Harlan while the two middle-aged men sat on the faded grey speckled concrete barrier across the courtyard from The Hive.  A golden spiral logo, a yellow image of a huge storm, advertised the Company’s dominance and dotted the steel-blue building within a verdant, green zone for miles.

 

The Hive, a sixty-six-story high, blue-steel framed and dark reflective exterior glass building that loomed across CyClone Courtyard, was a shadowy center point hub structure to the expanding CyClone company, a major tech corporation set in the re-purposed yet pleasantly quiet suburb of Ripley in Ipswich. Like its namesake, several other buildings spiraled outwards from the middle eye, The Hive, also known as ‘CyClone: Building One.’

 

From a bird’s eye view, the entire complex would appear as a monstrous storm cell stretching throughout most of the suburb.  Re-zoned for Industrial use after the civil unrest and suburban fires of 2035, Ripley was the ideal location for such a secretive company.

 

Harlan, knowing full well that Ray was needing to get it off his chest, just monotone affirmed to his black-haired colleague, ‘Right.’ or if he was feeling charitable: Yeah right, I know. I hear you, Ray.’

‘Well, what do you think we should do, Harlan? They’re going too far this time,’ Ray put it back on to Harlan suddenly. Harlan, who had slightly zoned out while smoking his own Eden’s Apple brand cigarette, felt like a child swimming relaxing at the beach, in the zone, when suddenly shark teeth clamped on his bony ankle.

 

‘Ray, you know since our managers and team leaders went into the most recent leaders training seminar last week and had the Cyclone Chip installed in their temples, they’ve all already been increased up to 96-98 % efficiency in work inter-personal and communication skills. The Company’s traced data doesn’t lie man.’

 

‘Yeah, but at what human cost, Harlan?’

‘Fuck man, why is it only now that you want to go to war with Cyclone? You knew when you took the job that there would be sacrifices for efficiency. As with any business, Ray, Profit…*cough* Profit is God,’ Harlan was starting to tire of Ray’s pointless grandstanding he was doing here, almost within earshot of The Enemy. He outworked his growing frustration with Ray by clearing his throat. Harlan felt some mucus sitting heavy near his vocal cords.

The blonde-haired man looked around quickly then spat on the red flowers in the garden next to the concrete barrier. It was a reasonable wad of phlegm; the yellow-green mucus clung like a cliffhanger to the crimson flower that bent to the spit’s mass.

 

‘I don’t know Harlan. I’ve been waking up at 3 AM each night thinking about where we are allowing ourselves, I mean humanity, by Cyclone’s efficiency. They set the standard now for Artificial Intelligence. I think it is great Australia pulled its thumb out of its ass and got into the tech game on a serious level, but fuck we are even more soulless than Silicon Valley or any of the former USA ever was.’

The two men’s yellow smart phones beeped and cried at them like golden and hungry newborn chicks, telling them simultaneously for the worker bees to return to The Hive. They put their cigarettes out with their boots and Harlan picked him up, conscientiously putting his ciggy butt in the minibin within the concrete rail. Ray left his cigarette butt there, mashed into the pale grey concrete. CCTV’s watched the men walk back across the CyClone Courtyard, and back into and up The Hive to the 64th floor.

 

.

 

January 2041 AD – Ripley, Ipswich, QLD…

It had been six weeks since their conversation during smoko out in the Courtyard, and Harlan had resisted ‘Progress’ for as long as he could.  CyClone had designated that the trial stage of their CyClone Chip, a neural bud that connected users’ brains to the CyClone Cloud, was over, the new and improved managers and team leaders were proof in the pudding, and therefore all current lower employees were required to have the CCC 1.1 installed by the end of the day.

Ray, despite all his protesting, was out of the two men, the weakest link, or from the Company’s perspective, the ‘Strongest Link’, what they called early volunteer adopters of CCC 1.1.

He relented quickly after some verbal protesting and didn’t shut up about it even while the head CyClone nurse technician, Judy Temple, shaved a Friar Tuck, a top circle bald spot, removing Ray’s hair, sterilized with clinical alcohol and then Judy used what looked like a long metal syringe, to click in the spherical CCC 1.1, into the top of Ray’s shaven skull.  It activated with a quick, audible ‘pop’ and then chittering like tiny insects, or so it sounds to the conscious subject having the device installed into the top of their head.

The small blue sphere dropped down into a liquid state and spread down like a Jewish skull cap, a Tech Kippa also called by some within the Company, ‘CyClone’s Yarmulke’.

Tiny blue neural threads then began their programmed instinct to thread microscopic bio-connective tissue and grey nano wiring right through the neo cortex and even basal reptilian brain of the homo sapiens subject absurdly called: Ray Bravery.

All Ray’s protesting bullshit had got across to Harlan, and even after his work buddy, Ray, had done a heel-faced turn and cowardly flipped, joined the shambling Living Dead, also known as ‘low echelon employees of CyClone’, Harlan Eterniton stood his ground and refused the Chip.

 

He had put in his two weeks’ notice of resignation to CyClone, and, bound by several NDAs, quietly retired to his unit at Wooloowin in Brisbane. The catalyst was Harlan observing Raymond after his friend had allowed the Chip to be installed. At first, there didn’t seem any change at all, but over a couple days, a metal-like coldness had spread across Ray’s personality. The rebellious fire of Old Ray had been replaced with a cool-headed but boring new personality within New Ray.

 

Like all times that two people choose alternate sides in one of the several forks in Life’s Road, Ray going down the heavy foot-printed Left, Harlan choosing the lesser travelled Right, the Men’s contact with each other naturally dwindled to nought.

 

.

 

January 2043, Wooloowin, Brisbane QLD…

The ancient morning Sun kissed the low-hanging clouds, bathing them in beautiful pink and rose tints as the birds chittered and sang of the new day. A fog formed quickly as the early light hit the air’s moisture and spread across the suburb of Wooloowin like the love of God’s Spirit in olden times.

To Harlan, who awoke gradually to the dulcet tones of the song and dance of nature outside his closed windows, this was one of, if not, The Best, part of his day. Since retiring from CyClone Tech, Harlan had got a job cleaning the shit out of zombified, compliant students’ toilets at the local High School in Wooloowin, so in his mind, Harlan had moved up, on to greener pastures.

A job was a job, and the new type of robots hadn’t been able to replace literal shit-kickers like toilet cleaners…yet. The majority Non- Player Characters of the World still ate food, digested it and shit out of their anuses, just like Harlan. The System hadn’t worked that one out yet to upgrade for higher profit margins and Progress.

The sense of positive potential still existed in Harlan’s un-upgraded ape mind and Mr Eterniton had learned with age that all things pass but some take longer to crumble into the dust.  Like established religion, CyClone seemed here to stay for the duration, a New Society had formed, colder, more efficient.

The Skull Cap, or Cap for short, a nickname for even the fresh CCC v1.8 that possibly was insensitive to traditional observers of Judaism, was as successful, if more, than sliced bread.  World peace had been achieved, always at a cost, with a fresh kind of humanity.

A Combine of machine and human, an Übermensch as Friedrich Nietzsche called the future species of Man that would prevail in the coming centuries. It was not affected by individual endeavor via the strength of the Will, like the German philosopher had imagined it, but through the Will of Few, Elites geniuses that sought to pave the distant path with order where the chaos of modernity had resided previously.

A New World Order prevailed and Harlan lingered within this fresh disease. No risk of ever tasting of the forbidden fruit again, souls were contained within the Cap, all was well for the System and the bringers of the New Dawn.

 

Harlan got out of bed, moved his empty wine glass off the dining table that had a trace of crimson at bottom of the wineglass inside. He brewed up a cup of black coffee and after happily pissing in his toilet, washed his hands, sincerely glared and then smiled sarcastically at his reflection, baring caffeine stained yellow-white teeth like a chimpanzee.

‘Ooo, Ooo’, Harlan imitated, in a high-pitched but quiet manner, Humanity’s closest living cousin and scratched the crown of his head while he hobbled like a squat cowboy.

‘You silly fuckin’ wanker’, he admonished himself right afterwards, laughed out loud into an empty room, as no-one else was there to do it for him. The cold echo hit the other rooms but not his Soul.

It remained sunburst orange and warm.

Chuckling about this to himself, Harlan then walked into his Living Room and slid the record of Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of The Moon’ out from its protective sleeve. Careful like sincere faith, Harlan laid the vinyl down to rest on the record player, turned the On/Off- Volume knob right, and sat at his wooden dining table two poached eggs on toast for breakfast, listening to the masterpiece.

It was playing gradually to its middle point.

… ‘The Sun is the same, in a relative way...’

Around and around the dark, beautiful shiny record went, the precise fire-truck red and deep ebony needle moving inwards slow like deep time, towards the inevitable conclusion.

Harlan sipped his dark coffee and smiled at the Joke that no one had to voice.

END