2.
That
was how the old year ended, and the new began: with the image of the
dead astronaut presiding over everything, its myriad associative
meanings reflected in every surface, and every joy an overwrought
fleeing from its grim determinism. In my head, occupying its own
habitually strange environs, the danger was that Gabriel Summers’
corpse would become the symbol of the new century, a sort of capstone
and negation of every dream of the previous one. It had the scope to
be more than a symbol, to evolve into an entire mythology. Elor
Summers had been for us the kind of aspirational icon that the rock
star or film actor had been to our parents: the innovative
entrepreneur with galaxy-spanning dreams; the youthful billionaire
who’d sealed his fortune writing code in a dorm-room; the dynamic
CEO who stirred his creatives to dreams of the future like generals
sent soldiers to the imagined glories of a battlefield. Now he was a
squat, broken figure, forever to be remembered as the man who sent
his son to another world, never to return and never to be
resurrected.
Even
prior the Martian tragedy, however, our dreams had turned to orbit
nightly around the themes of death and technology. Our lives had
become rudderless, uncertain things: with job security a thing of the
past, we were office nomads, working one and two month contracts in a
dizzying succession of companies whose actual business we were no
longer cognisant of; rents escalated so rapidly that urban-dwellers
often carried their entire life-possessions around in ruck-sacks,
using real-time trackers to monitor the ever-fluctuating geography of
affordable rental zones. With all these assaults on our stability,
all this narrowing of our aspirational horizons, one might have
expected violence, revolution, or some degree of discontent to be the
order of the day. In actuality, we were the most passive,
anaesthetized generation imaginable. As though being led drugged
over a precipice, our lives in this time of upheaval were dominated
by algorithms and entertainment. The image of Gabriel Summers seemed
on some level to echo our own – the image of a dead thing encased
in a technological shell. The emergence of some upstart theology was
surely required to rouse us from the peculiar condition of
somnambulism which attended upon the early years of the new century.
Perhaps
it was this yearning which had infused the imminent return of
Tillinghast Nebula which such a weight of expectation. As with many
of his contemporaries, the 80s had not been kind to the star's
reputation and carefully cultivated mystique. The gods of the
post-war youth explosion – those who'd made it through the other
side – washed up on the shorelines of the 80s as middle-aged men,
like a group of huddled revellers whom daylight had finally
discovered, the joys and wayward, fleeting enthusiasms of their long
night laid bare. The ultimate currency of their youth was gone, and
popular music had shifted from the Dionysian mode to something like
the regulated marching anthems of Plato's ideal autocratic regime.
To have been iconic representations of youth in an era of unbridled
youthfulness, their destiny was now to fall to the earth of
middle-years with crushing velocity, and the 80s mowed through the
dreams constellated around them like the Reaper with his scythe,
revealing in high relief the comedy of all our lives, the parodies of
ourselves that we will one day became, the nostalgias we will feel
for an irretrievable zeitgeist.
Healthy,
happily married, and having abandoned the chronic drug-use that
somehow achieved an effect of synaesthesia between his own identity
and the personae of his songs, Tillinghast was now a regular human
being, after all. He flirted with world music and stadium rock,
participated in several of the then popular live telecasts in support
of global benevolence, and spoke wryly of his youthful misadventures
on the chat show circuit. It was the beginning of a gradual retreat
from the public eye which was all but complete by the late 90s.
He
now lived with his family in a penthouse suite in New York's
ill-omened Dakota Building, with public appearances as fleeting and
inconclusive as those of UFOs. Various rumours regarding his mental
condition were circulated by Mission Command, a Nebula fansite
which was also steeped in the popular conspirative which held that
entertainment superstars were divided between the mind-controlled
proxies of secret political cabals (themselves the representatives of
sinister Off World Interests), and a counter-force of insurgents who
utilize the sorcery of mass media for benevolent means. Some said
that Nebula was haunted by the re-emergence of his erstwhile alien
personae, and the suspicion that the real life of an artist is an
insubstantial shadow cast off by the more vivid existence of his
creations. Others claimed that the star had become almost catatonic,
and spent long, bedridden days in contemplation of a series of film
props which he had accumulated over the years, and arranged in a
puzzling tableau. This tableau was said to include the mirror from
his own film Looking Glass (1975), the ruby slippers worn by
Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939), the Monolith from
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the buckskin shirt worn by
Alan Ladd in Shane (1953).
What
this particular juxtaposition of objects meant to the ageing star, we
were not given to know. Perhaps in contemplating them, his mind
journeyed through some archetypal landscape of deep-rooted personal
significance – a notional Death Valley where Brandon deWilde's
plaintive boy-cries still echoed after the receding image of the
gunslinger; where Dorothy, Toto (here morphed by the errant logic of
dreams into a Martian rover), the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man still
follow the Yellow Brick Road, past solitary cowpokes who strum their
lullabies to dying fires and lost loves, onward to an Emerald City
which has been replaced by the austere form of the Monolith, around
which sanguine chimps play games of checkers and watch the sand sift
to the bottom of hourglasses, as though waiting to witness some
transformation denied to their species, something incalculable that
resides far beyond wit, courage or heart.
It
was also possible, of course, that Tillinghast was merely leading the
life of a more or less typical husband and father, away from the
prying eyes of the media, and a public who couldn't help but
mythologise him, and couldn't concede that it had been only a
performance, and a trick of the times.
3.
Other
winds of paranoia were blowing through the ether that January. On
the 6th, a spoiler dropped on Noosfeed for the season 2
finale of Angel Investor. It was a catastrophe – people
were so demoralized that they instantly shared it, figuring to spread
the misery or something. After a couple of days, the spoiler was
everywhere, not just on Noosfeed, but spilling out into the real
world like a contagious and vindictive Tourette's . Various hitherto
quote unquote normal people, seemingly unhinged by the effects of the
reveal, were shouting it in the streets. Some bitter case hired a
aeroplane to tow around a banner with the spoiler summarised until
the authorities interceded. One friend of mine saw it tattooed on
the shoulder of an elegant young Japanese neo-punk – another
written in the sand on a beach, washed away by the tide an instant
later.
So
far I'd been inexplicably lucky. I hadn't got caught yet, but it
meant I had to stay off Noosfeed, and walk around the streets in a
hyper-alert paranoiac state. Whenever I went out, I listened to
Tillinghast Nebula music on my head-phones, and tried to maintain a
state of awareness whereby I wouldn't drift automatically into
reading any text, or even lose my concentration sufficiently that
some troll, aware of my head-phones, might somehow physically act out
the spoil in a way that was instantly comprehensible to me. I may
have been losing my mind a little, but it was interesting.
Having
to avoid Noosfeed put me in a pickle, though, going beyond standard
withdrawal symptoms. I'm a freelance entertainment/conspirative
journalist. I contribute content to various 'Feed nodes and
click-holes. I wanted to do some digging into the source of the
spoiler itself. Most people think that major spoiler drops come from
rival streamers, but that's just the beginning of it. Chinese
hackers and Russian psi's have been probing the secrets of Western
long-form narrative television for years, dropping spoilers through
proxies as a form of destabilizing psychological warfare. Without
Noosfeed, I was going to have to carry out my investigation in the
Deeper Web.
It's
a testament the success of the Deeper Web that not a great many
people are aware of its existence. The problem with the Deep Web was
that you just couldn't hide anything on it from the real specialists.
No matter how many layers of encryption buried under, or how
sophisticated the overlay network, government agencies had classified
super-computing tech that opened it up as easy as clicking on a
regular 'Feed node. As soon as any information is stored digitally,
no matter how far from the beaten path, it is instantly available to
intelligence agencies, many of whom have already gone further off the
grid than you could imagine. So to move forward, the architects of
the Deeper Web turned full-circle: they resolved that the only way to
exchange information freely and safely was to restore an oral
culture. The Deeper Web was a group of individuals – they called
them USB Bards – who had elected to become the repositories and
brokers of vast stores of contraband information. The USB Bards had
undertaken an in-depth study of long lost mnemonic techniques going
back to ancient Greece. Each Bard had their own virtual city which
operated as a visual data base. Their powers of visualization were
so intense that many of them were said to spend idle, opiated hours
wandering the streets of their own notional principalities, and in
the Deepest Web of all, the Bards shared notes amongst themselves on
mysterious encounters they'd had therein.
Not
only had the Bards mastered the ancient art of memory retention, but
they also evolved entirely new techniques that made them equally
adept at forgetting. Using the visual iconography of long outmoded
desktop computers, the Bards could move memories into a Recycle Bin,
and even permanently delete them, making them impervious to all forms
of enhanced interrogation. It is widely believed that the peculiarly
ascetic and neutral character of the USB Bard was a by-product of the
fact that they edited their personal memories, removing traumatic
emotional complexes in the manner of the system adumbrated in
Hubbard's Dianetics, making themselves spectral and robotic in
the process.
USB
Bards exercise a series of different functions for clients, while
ultimately following their own inscrutable agenda at all times. They
carried insurance data dumps for whistle-blowers and sold credit
details to carders; they saved a thousand things screamed by
psychotics and whispered by dreamers in their sleep that otherwise
would be lost forever; they sometimes acted as pornographers,
recounting ten minute vignettes of amateur porn in an elevated poetic
meter of their own creation, in performances which were prized as
eerily erotic by connoisseurs; they stored film scripts, manuscripts
of novels, philosophical treatises, lewd limericks and haiku
which were deemed to have dangerous or subversive content; they saved
things that people thought while they were shaving or emptying their
bowels, fusing them into a single mosaic of transient impressions
which was like a vast Joycean novel; they had created an index of
plausibility for conspiratives, and shared information with low-level
journalists like myself, again serving their own elusive long-term
ends.
I
had arranged a meet with my USB Bard, who called himself Malcolm,
through the usual Whisperer, and an encryption code that utilized
billboards, news-paper headlines, and the tilt of a high-street store
mannequin's pelvis. I took a bus out into the mountains, and as soon
I disembark, the otherness of the natural world hits me all at once.
I feel like I've been in the city and staring at a screen too long,
maybe, too long in the porous, schizophrenic, hectoring ambience of
the street and the 'Feed. The hedgerows and the fields, the crows
wheeling above and the cows with cautious, sluggish eyes, all seem to
recognise me as an unwelcome intrusion. After trudging along for
about ten minutes, I see the USB Bard standing by a rusty meadow
gate, his form almost lost in a dense ticket of brambles. He wears a
Burberry macintosh, navy pinstripe suit and bowler hat. He has an
umbrella to complete the look. His skin is translucently pale,
gleaming in the setting evening sun. When he speaks, it is the sound
of a half-forgotten decade, an early morning before you were born.
“The
most plausible conspiratives suggest the Angel Investor
spoiler is Russian in origin....but the purpose of the release is not
disruptive, but more in the line of a fact-finding exercise.”
“To
find out facts about what, exactly?”
“I
don't have any reliable conspirative to answer that. But bear
certain things in mind: the character of the show's titular angel
investor, Tyrone Crest, is believed to be modelled on Elor Summer.
Conspiratives of moderate plausibility suggest that the failure of
the Martian mission was due to sabotage.”
“Sabotage
by whom? US government?”
“Unlikely
to be US acting autonomously, more probably at the behest of a
transnational, such as the GFAB.”
The
Global Fiscal Advisory Board is an international think tank which
meets under considerable secrecy and security every four years. It's
stated purpose is to provide policy suggestions to ensure proper
co-ordination in the economic strategies of the various transnational
conglomerates: the IMF, World Bank, European Union, Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership and so on. The GFAB was believed to
be involved in the trading of insider information with a certain Off
World Cartel, speculators on an interplanetary exchange index whose
stocks and currencies are levels of sentient misery in different
quadrants of the galaxy.
“Several
moderately plausible conspiratives suggest that the plot of Angel
Investor is a clearing-house for a mixture of genuine inside
intelligence and carefully seeded disinformation. Hence, it seems
likely that the Russians have dropped the spoiler in response to the
possible sabotage of the Summers Mars mission, as a means to probe
the attitude of the GFAB towards private-sector space exploration.”
“What
the fuck is going on here?”
“I
don't have any reliable conspirative to answer that. But consider
this: a highly plausible conspirative suggests that Noostream have
re-written the season finale episode, so that the spoiler is no
longer strictly accurate. A question remains, however: if the
spoiler was originally correct, but no longer, is it still a
spoiler?”
The
Bard looked at me with a peculiar intensity, as though matters of
great import hinged on the solution to this abstruse problem.
“Some
more information which may prove relevant. The name of Tillinghast
Nebula's forthcoming album is Dog Star Lazarus Lounge Lizard.
A highly plausible conspirative suggests that Nebula is dying, and
intends the album – or some document associated with the album
– to be his last will and testament.”
Continued
shortly.
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