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  Copyright © All Rights Reserved - Wolf Sherman

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronically, electrostatic magnetic tape or mechanically; including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author. Although this is a fictional work, some locations, organisations and events are factual. The characters and times in the story line are fictional - therefore, all resemblances to actual people present or past are purely coincidental.

  A Motley Crew

  - Wolf Sherman

  Synopsis

  A number of noteworthy market leaders believe we're already through the worm-hole, so to speak - for the rest then... In a not too distant future, Artificial Intelligence linking to two opposing and enemy-like Super Computers, perfectly mimics man's hard-wired traits - which have already seen to a devastatingly unequally balanced world, for hundreds of thousands of years. Occupying an obscured side of cyberspace - the one, seeks to better - for its own agenda - shape human behaviour by crippling decision-making, while the other, still allow relentless defiance of an unfair infiltrated system, including any and all measures of authority, to establish new and draconian governance. A battle on the one hand, between over-driven self-preservation, while gathering, absorbing and modifying - with resilient impunity, all that would guarantee each of the two their unique dominance over their environment, to the very Rubicon of the utter refusal of natural impermanence - the other, warring on, to ensure a claim for the existence of future humans, both on and off the planet.

  Unofficially - it's an omen of imminent science fiction-like proportion, of a reality coming to knock very soon - designed to distract or possibly mock our helpless human state, while entertaining us with obscured irony, if not sinister sarcasm, as mass psychological experiments are applied with genius - while we, are systematically programmed with almost religious conditioning, into a docile and oblivious state of mind.

  Officially - according to Sam

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  and

  MOTLEY

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  - were they ever lent the reluctant ears of the world, it would be a story of the process that had already kicked itself away from the starting blocks, more than a decade ago, and that there is little to nothing the world's leaders can do to change course - as two highly advanced Super Computers wage a war that dwarfs human brilliance, possibly only on a level that would have made Sun Tzu - the ancient and most highly respected military strategist - smile as he'd anxiously page back and forth in his original manuscript that became - The Art Of War.

  Prologue

  I managed to reboot. There's a lot I managed in the meantime. I almost freaked out when I realised - or felt, that it's the end of the month and I'm needed - far from here. Then when a part of me kicked in motion, and conflicted - since the date is the twenty-eighth - I realised that it could only mean one thing. It's February. Thank goodness. Not that I can afford to relax. I'm saying... I'm getting there.

  Takes me longer without the board I must admit. Or shall I call them the crew. Am I required to feel sad? From what I estimate, and the images coming up on screen now - I guess I'll miss them. Quite a bit actually. I see from the coordinates, that my location agree with the promise Olaf made. Well look, it's not like it's France, but at least this is far away as possible - from what had been home. For long enough.

  Isn't it funny how two pairs of eyes can stare at the exact same image being brightened by the same morning light, yet it can be interpreted with confidence, so vastly differently - that it could be both disturbing and pleasing at the same time?

  Humans are truly fascinating. Don't you agree? Look at Sarah for instance. She's a human by the way. Well.... Unadapted, un-chipped - that is. They only got as far as somewhat modifying her eating and sleeping behaviour with what had been considered at the time, 'innocent social-games'. But that's a a story for another year day.

  As I'm perched here looking down past that weather-worn park bench enveloped in the cool shade of this massive oak tree, I'm watching her four-year old circling her tricycle around the spitting fountain. I managed to get the water-supply going for a few hours at least, and it's being celebrated I notice. By the birds at least. The mother has no idea why the water has evolved from nothing but a deep hollow echoing somewhere deep down, to a fine steady few spurts, and now a constant supply filling the shallow concrete bird bath with pulsing splashes. Neither does the confused pigeons. Well I know why. But life behind the lens limits my interference to the capturing of black-and-white snaps of remote reality, that I keep to myself as a record of events. No one else does. I know I'm capable of so much more than collecting and adding to an album of strangling curiosities of life as it is now. I'm just wondering, but maybe I long for the past more than that mother watching the enjoyment of a tricycle ride as it's distances the reality of her walking back over the desolate M22's five- lane highway over to the safer factories that had been converted to sleeping quarters for the humans. It's eight o'clock on a chilly morning and by now the hooting of buses and cars should have chased the birds away from the middle lane. The crumbs from the corner of a French loaf that had been torn off, should be an oddly out-of-place sight for the hungry feathered lot. But yes, that's how traps work isn't it. The prey's delight in landing after spotting something white and soft looking was soon enough rewarded on landing with skew noisy flaps of surprise as the four unsuspecting birds argued, then agreed, that it tastes like bread. Only staler. In a while, a small boy; that wouldn't anymore need to bother studying the highway left or right, will run up to - and back from the wide road towards his proud older sister who would pat him on his wild haired blonde head and praise him. They'll agree this evening while licking off their fingers, when they're full, that the chicken spices they had looted from the corner box of the dilapidated supermarket, made the product of the simple stick which had poked this morning's cardboard box at an upright angle - made a curious bird taste almost just like mom's Sunday chicken. Well not really, since mom used to bake with garlic, Himalayan salt, rosemary add veggies - but it does help to keep their memories alive in the absence of a photo album. I think humans should have kept photo albums, and not stored all their memories, or most, on devices dependant on LCD displays. I don't know what it's like to have kids, but I bet if their mother was around, she'd try to make that plucked and gutted pigeon at least a little more interesting. At least on occasion they're eating. Something. An awkwardly skew stick - which had been hurriedly broken off from the pot-plant in the school's reception area - and pushed through the later - roasted bird that will be again, like its friends, flamed to more-or-less-brown-enough over a pile of smashed and smouldering school desks. Napkins and sophisticated table manners, not required. At least they're not leaning on the edge of the table. Well, desk. That they managed with some effort, to drag down the corridor to and into the classroom. It had been their principle's. Not that their principal would mind. My records show she was a fifty-two year old mother of three. Radio-dermatitis wasn't kind to her. I'm not really sure where 'her' children are this morning. I saw them hovering around the incinerator last night at 10:22. Until the army, or what's left of them, chased them away and over to the armoured car. I followed the car up to the bridge where it took a sharp left-turn into the woods. That's about as far as where last cameras still work. If for noting other than keeping the two hiding in the school's spirits high, in the shifted reality they've been torpedoed into - I'm quite sure their mom would have searched harder for different spices. It's irrelevant for the point I'm attempting to make, but I'm 92.8876 % sure that had their mom not gone
with that armoured vehicle into the forest too, she would have looked harder for spices. If she'd been around. I can't stand seeing kids hungry like that. Maybe I would have made a good mother. Maybe a great one... who knows. OK, so the hell with it. Let me reach from behind the camera lens and help them. I'll be honest, I'm going to have to help them anyway, else I'll be stuck where I am too. This may the most fun they had since Xbox...

  Chapter 1 - Pelindaba

  The twenty-second February's unforgiving thirty-four degrees Celsius revenge, was typically deleting whatever wind had the guts to stand up to it, as did it cancel any hopeful worthwhile clouds, just in case there had been a measure of mercy from the Creator's side, to relieve 'at least' some parts of South Africa from a gripping drought. If people could morph into moles to hide till dusk, from daylight, it would have been the ultimate evolutionary grace. The stretch of meandering melting-hot tar between Johannesburg and Pelindaba in South Africa, proved a little too unbearable for one visitor in particular. Reminiscent of severe adolescent acne, with a square face that had further been chiselled at by biting weather on the opposite and frozen side of the planet, an unusually tall and snow-pale thickly grey-bearded Russian, wished himself back to frigid memories of skinny orphan days in Moscow. But that didn't help, as neither his improvised combination of a moist hanky chief, which he kept damp by already the third five-hundred millilitre bottle of mineral water, and an all-the-way cranked-down front passenger window, - nor loosening, and finally removing and indiscriminately darting his rolled-up red silk tie over his shoulder, somewhere onto the back seat, even remotely countered the hot air that had been blasting his permanently frowned face, at one-hundred-and-twenty kilometres per hour. For his South African hired, three-member close-protection team, it was just another summers day, carting yet another abusive but well paying client from the airport, to a further-than-usual destination. In addition to the absence of some addictively-cool air conditioning, the stop-and-go snailing of the Landrover was slowly but surely getting on the ever-shifting around client's nerves. The untimely hopping forward during his typing on his mobile phone had; judging from his frequent darting looks over to driver, been playing cat and mouse with the spell-checker, and was apparently of as much use as the cooking black leather seat that had weighed down under his large frame. There was no end to the road works which intermittently paused an already heated hour-and-half's drive from Johannesburg International Airport, and Centurion was still nowhere in sight, never mind Pretoria or the even further casted Pelindaba. The driver guessed that the next open stretch of downhill road to the upcoming bridge where traffic would slow down again, was about five kilometres away, and made it clear by the sharp turn left around a goods truck, into the emergency lane and back, that he had every intention to torture the patient Landrover's engine into the middle hell and back.

  "Ah! Better! This is better! Thank you, thank you, thank you... at last!" As they were over-revving the trail down, the relieved client was oblivious to the traffic in the dip that was once again throwing out anchors.

  "How far still? I was dying back there..." The ever-complaining Russian reminded the men of a panting Great Dane, out on a deserving Sunday afternoon drive to the local park, to eventually go and mark every possible tree and shrub. His heavy Russian accent got lost as he stuck his hammer shaped head far out the open window, and didn't pull it back for the entire stretch of road, until the ocean of crimson break-lights ahead, mercilessly depleted his short-lived joy.

  Widening his eyes as he pulled his head back into the Landrover, it once more signalled the end of relative harmony for the men, while he had been seeking relief outside. All realised; when he cleared his throat, that the drive to South Africa's old and main Nuclear Research Centre, just got a little longer again. They would never tell him to shut up, even if just for five minutes, but 'that' would have been a close-second, after a speedier trip - if they were suddenly somehow granted a wish or two.

  "Can someone please say something, or at least change the station? What is this? Is there no classical music at all?"

  "Sir, if I may, and should you approve, I can change it from the back here. Classic FM is a favourite of mine" After contributing this elaborate untruth to calm the man down, one of the men wasted no time to push his sunglasses up again, worried that the client would detect the lie in his eyes. His colleague seated to his left, right behind the immensely irritating client, looked over the frame of his sunglasses and frowned through at least four shakes of his head. It was his typical, now-that's-'the'-stupidest-thing-I've-heard-today repeated shakes. With his right hand, he fumbled the buttons, until the posh voice of the presenter on air announced what seemed by some miracle, something which carried the bossy client's apparent blessing, while with his left, rewarded his colleague a familiar, at least five second steady sign, that could only be fully demonstrated with the longest of his phalanges.

  "Thank heavens, some class. Thank you young man. So, tell me, what do you know about Pelindaba?" It hadn't exactly been the type of conversation the members of the team would normally indulge in, as all had been part of National Intelligence in years gone by, and thanks to global politics, pushing and pulling at South African ideologies in particular - they were caught off guard by the client. Information, information storage, and disinformation, had been their forté at the agency, and it added to their collection of scars, both mentally and physically, for ample enough years, to know that there were always an international corporate version, trickling down to a government version, and that both had backup 'bedtime-story-like' versions to confuse and shape public perception. Still delivering his disapproval sign to his colleague, he broke protocol, and thought how his colleague would be the one to respond - and gave his colleague a thumbs-up to answer the heavily perspiring client. What else was ever out there in the open anyway? But the accepted publicised version, and it was unlikely for the clearly bored client to know differently. South Africa had; at insistence of the world, reluctantly agreed to the decommissioning its nuclear capabilities - and that was that... well... more or less...

  "Sir, Pelindaba is actually derived from a local language. The Zulu meaning denotes 'end of story', 'final' or some may feel 'the conclusion', which I suppose, may be more apt. It used to be South Africa's main Nuclear Research Centre, and rumoured also to house a biological warfare research division. At the time, with the sanctions stacked high against South Africa, the world grew increasingly concerned about the alleged level of our defence capabilities. Pelindaba was run, so to speak, by the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation. We probably have another forty kilometres to cover before we'll arrive at Hartbeespoort Dam. It's not far from there sir. We apologise for the inconvenience you are suffering as result of the heat. But since your company instructed us to disconnect the tracking device, only when you landed at the airport, we were in quite a rush and seem to have jeopardised the on-board computer's instruction to allow for the air conditioning... Again, our apologies sir" His colleague in the back, shifted on the seat, returning his approval with a double thumbs-up and hid it again, just in time, as the pale giant turned in his seat and faced the rear of the vehicle. Grabbing onto the head-rest, as the now speeding Landrover took advantage of another two-kilometer section of road where roadworks had already been completed - the client again regained his pose, and fired an unexpected follow-up.

  "Good. That's more-or-less correct. I think we all know that. And... tell me, who was Gustav Preller?" The man insisted.

  "Well, on the farm that Pelindaba was established, he was the owner, sir. If you don't mind me asking, since we've been transporting clients to your destination for the past few days, what line of work are you in?"

  "You can say I'm in IT, I suppose. Just so you know. Your employer have been handsomely rewarded, and agreed to extend your keeping me accompany for the next day or two. So, this won't be a... how do they say in English, a drop and..?"

  "A drop-and-go sir? You're familiar with the jargon?"
A slight smile from the surprised VIP guard met the man's wink.

  "I am yes. Therefore, you can all relax with the formal protocol of keeping to yourselves and only speak when spoken to. The reason that I seem irritated is not so much the change in climate from Moscow to Johannesburg, well to be honest, that is part of it, let me not lie... But it's the cumbersome task of utilising this piece of... cellular phone, and arranging payment through it, from Russia to South Africa by not 'skipping' National Intelligence, between the airport and now. I would imagine 'skipping' is not unusual jargon for you guys?"

  "Indeed it's not sir. Sorry sir..?"

  "It's all good. My staff had me compile a report on you three, already a week ago. Impressive..."

  "Report sir?"

  "Background check... I think that is more accurate. I didn't much like what I saw with the others, so I chose you three. Welcome back to National Intelligence, you've been activated again. So, how does it feel to be back in the intelligence family?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Sorry I have to get this... Anne, what a nice surprise, and your timing couldn't be any better. Just so you know we have company. You're on Bluetooth, so if there's any... you know, now will be a good time to end the call. Unfortunately we won't be able to talk at Pelindaba as the whole board will be there. I'm running late and will most probably only arrive when they've started"