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M U S K
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JOSE GARCIA (AKA CASSIUS CROON) arrived at sunrise in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is, officially at least, how it happened. But what did the concept of "arrival" mean, anyway? -- in a way he had never left Guangzhou. He disembarked the plane paralyzed so to speak, on account of panic attacks and depleted uranium flashbacks. It was sultry and humid (in spite of the fact that it was the end of October), and Croon felt as if he had disrobed and jumped into a sauna. A guide, rushing over at once, explained that the air conditioner wasn't working today. The airport building was eerily deserted, and there were bloody bandages lying around everywhere. Not war this time around, but a recreation -- a Bollywood film crew was in town making a movie based on last year's Ebola 34E outbreak, which killed 200 people and disrupted stockmarkets across Africa. In the middle of the hall, next to the clapped-out luggage carousels, a stuffed leopard stood in wait. Croon's guide, a perky little kid called Razor, hurriedly recounted that this animal sheltered the spirit of the former dictator Mbata, whose body had been plunged into deep freeze in the cryogenics labs at Tel Aviv University after he perished in a hunting accident. One day the body could be revived, so the humble masses thought, and reunited with his spirit, and a new Golden Reign would be come. The Auspicious Master would return! Croon saw the first of his camera equipment emerging on his carousel, and some of his crew moved over to grab it. But the agent was distracted by the sudden manifestation of a mob of antiglobalisation protestors, many of them nonAfrican, hoisting banners and shouting slogans and swarming in from all over the place. They invaded the terminal beating drums, whistles and horns reverberating off the cheap concrete walls. Croon thought for a moment that his cover was blown -- they were environmentalists! But they completely ignored him as they made their beeline for the Bollywood crew. One of their leaders was shouting in a megaphone, in Belgian-French tinted English: <Get out of here you parasites, you conduits of disease! We don't need another media infection! This airport has been placed under media quarantine!>> This was all highly bizarre, so Croon wiggled his right ear enough to trigger the microphone in his Prada sunglasses. He recorded a short snippet of the chief nutter's voice, then manipulating his gold Rolex, input the data into an Internet search engine (Google Dark, almost unlimited access to even the most sensitive databases and TOR networks.) He narrowed the investigation by adding a few keywords, whispered into Rolex's little mike: protest leader... African ambit... media bias... Some three seconds later (you have to expect a time lag when you're in the middle of fucking Africa!), the search results came back, highlighted in gold typeface on Prada's screen -- a list of Belgian citizens who had been captured at bank ATMs, on train station CCTV and from out of the windows of passing cabs, a whole bunch of doctors and students and flower salesman -- and one law student turned renegade, a certain Pavel Poznyak, actually a Ukrainian living in The Netherlands. However, he watched a lot of Belgian TV, according to the experts, and dated a Walloon girl who taught him most of the English that he knew. That explained the Belgian tint to his accent. And bingo! -- Google confirmed that he was known to the police for his "political disenchantments"! This was starting to look like a perfect match! Among other publications and grafitti artworks, Poznyak chaired a website of political tirading and leftist gobsmack, a gathering ground of "swampists and other misinformants, derelicts, conspiracists" (official CIA investigation) -- Croon blinked a few times into Prada to open the link, and a page of vibrant text opened on his lenses. It read something like this:
WE KNOW ALL TOO WELL that there are more than just biological viruses. The Internet is awash with malware which disrupt networks, crash economies and, in the case of the recent Indian dam catastrophe, kill thousands of people. Reviled though they may be, computer viruses are merely expressions of the universal will to Life, irruptions of the chaotic compulsion to creativity into the otherwise sterile grand new ecosphere of the Net. They are here to stay,and evolve -- the next Great Leap in the story of Evolution. But there are more than just computer viruses, but viruses which infect our own thoughts, feed off our fears, and multiply through the exchange of words and pictures and opinions which is the Media. I posit the MEME -- a new order of lifeforce composed not of carbon molecules and DNA but rather consciousness, parasitically consumed and reproduced in the Hive Mind -- entities which live off and through the consciousness of their human hosts. They are not metaphorical but actually metamorphic -- spermazoa which have somehow penetrated the membrane dividing the Real, Imaginary and the Symbolic spheres. In fact, biological viruses, in their innate intelligence, have worked out a way to make the leap, and infect vast audiences of new victims. Perhaps in coming centuries SARS will be remembered as the first virus which was able to transform itself from a real organism into a virtual organism, a media disease, with a vastly larger reach. The greatest mutation of them all -- from one universe to another! SARS set the template -- a contagion which was able to throw off its molecular bindings and mutate into the mental virus of the panic epidemic. I prefer to use the word EPIPANIC to describe this... Some of Jose's crew had entertained the poor judgement to unsheathe their cameras and start filming the melee, which was obviously like waving a red flag at the antiglobalists. A couple of previously unnoticed radical Islamists had surfaced amongst their deluge, and even managed to grab one of his movie cameras and smash it on the floor. Croon was forced to switch off his Prada display and start kung fu fighting, fists and legs ablur, desperate to keep himself alive. <<Your style>> Razor remarked <<is very strange.>> <<Where the hell>> Croon demanded <<are those damned airport security guards?>> <<They're on strike.>> <<That cheetah better spring to life, or we will be doomed.>> Razor pulled out a machete, which he'd been hiding discretely inside the right inner leg of his stained tracksuit pants. <<They don't call me Razor for nothing.>> <<Very well>> Croon said, a smile forming on his lips. <<Let's annihilate these miscreants and get the hell out of here.>>
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