Novelty may loom planet-sized on the horizon but I can assure you that the much ballyhooed and televised post-material mission to land on its surface in the Year 2000 was a hoax. My sources are so credible that black bars have been permanantly grafted over their eyes and their voices distorted by leading military-industrial-complex plastic surgeons. We are without a doubt still firmly anchored in the age of hybridism, splicing music genres, paradigms and buzzwords into marketable yet recognizable packages. Millennia-old ideas alchemied into different combinations, technoshamanic, biopsychic, neuronieric: but you can put the pieces anywhere you like on the board and it's still chess. Cynics call it a set-back, I prefer to think of it as lounging. It's great, the ultimate sex culture. Everywhere you listen is the sound of memes coupling. Click on 'fuck yeah!' though and you won't find surprise on the option-list that excretes downward from the top of the screen. Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations is a Vulcan philosophy and therefore utterly predictable. So this week's episode where two cutting-edge entertainment companies fuse their tactics to provide a marketable yet recognizable experience, well, it's as foreseeable as a hard-on. But I like hard-ons, their beauty and usefulness. Digi-Verite, pioneers of the docu-gaming style, use vat-grown and brainwashed actors outfitted with internal recording devices, send them into riots, sporting events, and war-torn nations, their experiences encoded and downloadable as homeplay videogames.
Trancewerks, designers of the Lateral Immersion Perception System, 'Kiss the L.I.P.S.' Like the ad says, you can purchase recipes for trances, part chemical, part ritual, that send your consciousness on fully 4-D hallucinatory adventures, vacations, night school courses.
"Mick," the email said, "who better to star in our partnership's debut project than the hot, popular, sexy writer of Millennium III, the third in the trilogy?"
I sent my reply, "And who's that then?" because I needed to hear them say it.
Grappling with Amber's naked body, the CEO of Trancewerks, Intercourse with the biological holster for one of the most powerful media weapons in the galaxy, the rush and the stress like blackops pilots flying back-engineered ufos, and things start to go Riechian.
I'm pumping and gurgling like a baby and she's shouting, "World peace! It'll be world peace! 99% of the population will play the Mick-trance and fall in love with being you! Oh God! We'll all be one!" As a secret agenda it's flattering and more than a little overwhelming. Immediately I break down into tears and Amber holds me, whispering softly and wordlessly, stroking my neck. We look like flowers.
I've interviewed previous stars of Digi-Verite titles. They're anti-celebrities, consumers play to experience their lives but as themselves; the players' identities remain intact. More like black holes than stars, negative spaces sucking in the desires of the demographic. They're inversely famous and they all complain that the constant pressure to do interesting things, to be exciting during the recording sessions leads to burnout. Me, I always live my life as if I'm on camera. My behaviour, even alone, is a perpetual ratings grab.
Running on a trance platform, the players won't retain their personalities. They'll become me. They'll have to; no one but me could survive doing the things I do. Hence Amber's messiah/borg vision of a unified world. Again, I'm ain't soph ? of the equation; most citizen's psyches are too former-Yugoslavia, too conflict-rotted to harmonize the global market.
Standing in front of the billboard of myself, like two sections of a Russian doll, 'Launch Date: xx xx xxxx', surveying the city. The recording devise threaded through my nervous system. Can this become the rocketship? Can I succeed where Jesus, Reagan and Tom Cruise failed? A metaphysical feeling comes over me like a soundtrack. Is this what it will take to save the world?
Yesterday the Digi-Trance Alliance held the pre-release party onboard a NASA satellite as its orbit decayed and it fell to earth, incinerated in the atmosphere like the convictions of a protester under a cop's watercannon. The celebration only lasts a few minutes before we jettison the escape pods. ?The kind of symbolism that contorts your face so observers can't tell if you're yawning or snarling.?
I'm drunk and asking a bowling-arrangement of industry brain-donors, "Why in God's name did they pick a writer for their first project?"
"The writer as social technology explicates the individual's process of interpreting experience on a mass scale."
"Writing and magick are the same thing."
"The answer lies in the shared root concept of author and authority."
"Mick is a writer?"
"Writing as a solitary act ensures it's status as mysterious and glamorous. The known unknowable, the unknowable known."
"Whatever you say," I answer them as the room gets hot, and the wisdom zings past their heads like the bullet they're afraid to take for the team.
The day after the launch, Amber slumps behind her desk.
"What went wrong, Mick?"
I'm still coated in blood. It's dripping onto the cloned mammoth-hair carpet.
Using weapons bought from ghetto gun-dealers, stolen from police armories, donated by the army, I spent yesterday killing members of every recognizable social group in existence. Baptists, nazis, pagans, republicans, geeks, blacks, christians, liberals, jocks, muslims, latinos, ad execs, the homeless, the british, reporters, gays, factory workers, rockstars, doctors, poets, the entire bestiary of culture. Each murder was recorded faithfully by the modified electric current streaming through my body, translated by the programmers into easily digested meals of drugs and language, and distributed to everyone on earth, a box office take of Star Wars times Titanic times Lord of the Rings to the power of the observable stars in the night sky.
For one day everyone everywhere was audience and actor in the story of my killing spree. As each cultural category became victim I won the favor of their enemies. As the mystics swallowed bullets like an i.v. drip the scientists gave me awards. As the materialists broke out in full-body, bowie-knife induced stigmata the spiritualists proclaimed me a guru. As white-power tribes were torn apart like grass in the lawnmower the black power movements idolized me and vice versa. As the ugly fell the beautiful cheered me and as the beautiful died the ugly worshipped me.
A wave of simultaneous and absolute hate and love bled over the planet. Now everything is quiet outside Amber's office, the silence of the paradox.
"Amber. I never wanted people to be like me. I only wanted people to like me."
"Fuck, Mick. You could have... We could have saved the world."
"Sex and death, Amber."
"Fuck you, Mick."
"Exactly. Amber, they didn't have to play."
"Mick! Everyone out there is chambered with go-signals to destroy everyone else! We're on the verge of the apocalypse. People can't handle the kind of experience you subjected them to."
She looks at me with terror and batrayal but my fluid-slick face toggles memories of our night together. Her eyes change and I feel my kundalini tickle the base of my spine as if a countdown has started. But then the new energy shining from her slides sideways and down like California into the ocean, leaving only this desparate need, this raw hope that I will answer her, that I will tell her something to make it better. I feel sick.
She says, softly, "This is a nightmare. Everything has gone wrong."
"Whatever you say, Amber. Whatever you say."