by Rob Sears
Quite sure.
Nonetheless, you can feel your heart thumping in your mouth as you open the laptop and scroll down past the warning messages to the meme itself.
→ Swallow your trepidation and click. You’ve got to get a look at the meme behind the mayhem if you’re to have a chance of stopping it. Click here.
→ This might be a terrible mistake. Step away from the laptop and click here.
The laughter eventually dies down.
Kim Jong-un looks at you, suddenly menacing. ‘I said I was joking. Don’t you get it?’
→ Laugh along with Kim Jong-un. He’s right: at times like this you just have to chuckle. Click here.
→ Keep your silence. The fool has brought the world to the brink of Armageddon and needs to get serious. Click here.
You scroll down a little further, and there it is: 300,000 pixels that could purportedly bring the whole edifice of civilisation to its foundations.
The meme doesn’t look like much, if you’re honest. Actually, it makes you mad to think your client thought this would affect you in any way. That petty bureaucrat deserves to be strung up. The idea that this is a killer meme? Fake news, pure and simple.
Your mission forgotten, you pick up a bowl of mussel shells from a table and stand over by the door to the bathrooms, ready to bring it down hard on the head of whoever comes out, lying liars all of them, and members of a satanist child-smuggling ring too, you’re suddenly sure of it.
The certainty feels like meth in your veins. What a narcotic, to know you’ll never have to know doubt or cede ground or think in greys again. And as you descend into madness, so too soon will the rest of the world.
The End
You don’t usually get wined and dined in your job, so you gladly accept a taste of Michelin-starred turbot. It’s tender with a rich basenote of morels.
‘Good?’ the old man asks.
‘Very nice,’ you say.
He holds a fork aloft. ‘It is the opposite of war.’
Whoa. Pretty deep. But there’s a deranged horde outside so you need to get on with your countermeme idea tout de suite.
→ Continue to click here.
You don’t have much confidence in the new chief epidemiologist, but you don’t have anyone else to work with so you’re going to have to make the best of it.
What do you want to do?
→ Ask him where the disease came from. Click here.
→ Ask him if they’ve made any progress on developing a vaccine. Click here.
→ Tell him to seal off the city immediately. Click here.
→ You’ve tried everything. Return to the Oval Office empty-handed. Click here.
Once you’ve explained your plan, your client offers you the use of her Mercedes, which is parked behind the bistro.
‘Good luck,’ she tells you.
‘You’re not coming with me?’
She shakes her head. From the tables behind, you hear a cork popping and a chorus of ‘Cheers’, ‘Schluss’, ‘Salud’ and ‘Prost’. The gathering has turned into a kind of premature wake for their way of life, but you don’t have time to get emotional.
Moments later, you come shooting out of the kitchen door and make a crouched run for the car, expecting meme-addled fingers to clutch you at any second, but the back road is empty and you reach the driver’s seat unharmed.
The engine on the big diplomatic Merc starts straight away. As you manoeuvre it out of the back road onto the main street, a group of them run at the vehicle and you have to mount the kerb as you accelerate away.
You haven’t gone far when you see more of them blocking the avenue ahead, so you whip the car down a side road. You need to go east and fast.
→ Head to the airport. Click here.
→ Head to the motorway. Click here.
You may be hallucinating talking rats, but you still have the presence of mind to know you need to eat. Catching it would be hard enough for a well-fed human, but people can do amazing things in their desperate hours.
You chew down on the warm flesh, feeling some of the strength you need returning almost immediately.
Then, a few hours later, there is what feels like an earthquake and the floor caves in, leaving a crawl space under the bars of your cell. In your emaciated state you may just be able to squeeze through . . .
You emerge from your confinement to find what could be described as a post-apocalyptic hellscape – never what someone in your line of work wants to see.
A group of wretches in filthy rags, chained at the ankles and looking thoroughly disgruntled, pick through the smouldering rubble. The creature who has enslaved them is like none you have seen. Perhaps once a man, his arms are now grotesque pincer-like appendages, his face obscured by a hard pink shell. This crab-human mutant lumbers towards you, clicking its pincers, but before it can get near, deafening gunfire echoes over the rubble and the creature drops to the ground, whimpering.
You spin to see a team of snipers in NATO fatigues.
This is really confusing.
‘Medivac him to the green zone,’ one of them yells as more crab mutants scuttle out from behind ruined buildings and the soldiers open fire.
→ Flee with the soldiers. Click here.
A lot seems to have happened while you were in your cell
‘We need to create a countermeme,’ you suggest, but the room’s attention has shifted to a commotion in the entrance way, where restaurant staff are shoving tables and boxes up against the door to form a barricade.
Following your client to the window, you look out through a gap in the boards and see what has alarmed them all. On the pavement outside are perhaps twenty or thirty once-ordinary people, shuffling around like the undead.
‘Mon dieu, they’re zombies,’ someone says in hushed tones. ‘It’s happened even faster than we thought.’
Menacing as the horde is, each person in it seems barely aware of their surroundings. As you watch, though, one man’s arm brushes another’s, and they fall on each other, snarling, biting and punching. You have to look away before they tear each other limb from limb, maybe literally.
An ageing mandarin, who’s remained seated at the bar, beckons you over. You think he’s mistaken you for a server, but when you approach he speaks reflectively.
‘This,’ he waves a hand, ‘was mud, trenches, corpses, chlorine gas, ashes. Not so long ago really. Man’s malign nature turned everything to dust. And then we built . . .’ he waves a hand again, ‘this. We made . . .’ he holds up his fork with a bit of turbot on the end, ‘this. We’ve been lucky it’s lasted as long as it has. Here, try some, please.’
→ Try the turbot. Click here.
→ There’s no time, you need to make that countermeme and fast! click here.
You call on all your powers of rhetoric to make your case, knowing that Putin is listening intently. After you are done with what you consider the perfect peroration to persuade him, a nod passes between Putin and the FSB man and the FSB man tells you, ‘Very well, come with me and we will assist you.’
You’ve heard people say Putin is inscrutable, but you’ve just figured out what motivates him and played him like a fiddle – you’re operating at his level after all.
→ Click here.
It’s all getting a bit too much for you. You can have a chat with HR later but for now, as the Really Freakishly Large Drill speeds nearer, all you can do is turn and run. There’s a smashing sound and the floor shakes, and you turn your head without slowing your sprint to see that the machine has swerved at the last, spraying up enough sand to destroy the huge windows. Disoriented, you find yourself careening against the side wall of the hangar, where a bank of high-tech knobs and buttons start flashing. A computerised voice booms, ‘Bonkers mode activated.’
‘Turn that off!’ say the Elons, but when you press the flashing button again nothing happens.
‘What’s bonkers mode now?’ you ask.
Uncanny Elon shakes its head. ‘Nothi
ng good.’
Sinkholes are appearing all over the desert; from one a plume of red-hot lava shoots up. A new entry appears on the Deep Underground blog, titled ‘ThE tIMe iS NOw’.
You clutch your head. ‘Why would you create a bonkers mode?’
‘It’s an Easter egg,’ Uncanny Elon says. ‘Customers love them.’
This rings a bell. You remember Dan, the car-obsessed guy from your Accounts Receivable department, showing you a YouTube video of the Tesla Model X ‘dancing’ to the music of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra.
‘Wait, I thought you said you couldn’t change its programming? That it had completely walled itself off?’
‘It has,’ Elon Musk says, suddenly animated. ‘It’s rewriting its software all the time. Except the Easter eggs are hardcoded into its firmware, which means it can’t change them . . . which means . . . just maybe . . .’ He does some mid-air swiping and tapping and the computerised voice says, ‘Dance mode activated’.
Out in the desert, the Really Freakishly Large Drill bursts out of the ground and starts shaking and twirling and getting about as close as a steel worm can to dancing, though it looks more like Mechazilla’s vibrator to you than a robot Fred Astaire.
‘You brilliant idiot!’ says Elon Musk. ‘We’ve done it!’
Relief floods your body and brain. You’ve been able to exploit an opening in the drill’s firmware to activate an Easter egg, and now it’s stuck in an infinite loop of nightclub moves.
That was a close one. You’re already thinking ahead to the look on Perfect Susan’s face when she finds out you’re on the exec team. The Elons offer you a drag on a hefty celebratory spliff. You politely decline – you’ve had five missed calls from your boss during the drama and you want to let him know of your success.
→ Continue to click here.
Nearly forty-eight hours later, during your third session, you feel you are beginning to get somewhere. The USSR was no more by the time Svetlana was born, but her mother had experienced life under both systems, and Svetlana had come to share her belief that ideologies of all stripes were just crude masks for certain basic human drives. Consequently she felt entitled to follow her own basic drives, and to run away with all the money from her Orthodox church’s collection box.
As she relates this story, you become aware of a slightly alarming news story on the RT screen behind her. A mindless throng is battling riot police outside the Kremlin itself.
As Svetlana tells you how she hid on a pig farm after she ran away, and spent the happiest week of her life feeding acorns to the pigs to reward them for not being humans, the lift doors open and a tidal wave of belligerent, braindead Homo sapiens washes through the campus, smashing computers, flipping server racks and ripping the stuffing from beanbag chairs.
‘It’s just as I imagined,’ says Svetlana dreamily as someone staves in your skull with a fire extinguisher.
There wasn’t time for psychoanalysis after all. If only you’d gone click here and tried reading her wholesome internet stories instead.
The End
You tell the chief epidemiologist that Drumstick needs to be dissected and his organs sent for testing immediately.
‘What, cut him open?! I can’t – we can’t—’ He starts struggling for breath again and you wonder for a second if the virus has got to him. ‘I can’t do this, I can’t! I’m not really an epidemiologist; until yesterday I was a libel attorney!’ he blurts.
A libel attorney? That explains a lot.
‘The sight of blood makes me faint. I can’t even get in contact with the doctors any more. I think they all ran away or died.’
‘What happened to the real chief epidemiologist? The one before you, I mean?’
‘She was telling President Trump things he didn’t want to hear. A president needs someone he can trust,’ he says, puffing up pridefully.
‘And that’s you?’
‘I’ll go to my grave knowing I’ve always told him the truth, except when he’s made it clear he’d rather hear something else.’
→ Looks like this is up to you. Go ahead and dissect Drumstick yourself. Click here.
Svetlana, inverted, concentrates on countermeme ideas while you look online for feel-good news stories that might help her rediscover her faith in humanity.
‘Here’s one: this launderette is giving away free clothes to homeless people so they can attend job interviews. Doing anything for you?’
She shakes her head.
‘A dog ran back into a burning house to save this family’s kittens. No?’
‘Did it burn to death? No? Not funny then.’
‘The kids at this school made their janitor cry by singing a surprise song on his retirement day. Sweet, no? We could watch the video?’
‘I don’t want to barf.’
→ Keep trying. Click here.
You rush over to the door.
‘Stop there or I’ll blow us sky high!’ Prof. Wu says, brandishing some kind of detonator device.
You’re set on calling her bluff, but the moment you grab the door handle and try to wrench it open, yeow! A sharp pain radiates from your right thumb, and you see a little bee that must have been sitting on the door handle drop to the ground, writhing and waving its appendages.
You try to open your mouth to swear at the pain . . . but something is wrong. Your chest feels like the entire atmosphere is pressing in on it. An unfamiliar wheezing sound begins issuing from your windpipe. You gesture frantically to the lab director and find yourself sitting backwards on the floor, and the last thing you remember is her face, oddly full of concern given she was just threatening your life, and she’s asking if you’re allergic to bee stings and you’re thinking, ‘I didn’t know I was’.
‘Ack, epipen’s out of date,’ you hear her mutter, from somewhere behind you now, as the fringes of your vision darken.
→ Continue to click here.
You sit patiently on your hands, across from the suitcase, resisting the temptation to look inside. With such strength of will, you probably could withstand the meme’s siren call to madness, but you aren’t going to find out, as here’s your client back from the bathroom, smelling of lavender handwash.
What do you want to suggest?
→ Stop the meme spreading. Click here.
→ Create a countermeme. Click here.
You arrive in the skies over New York City right on time.
‘Come in, hero, do you have eyes on the missile?’ hisses the radio.
Ahead, a black shape streaks down out of the dark blue above.
‘This is going to be a million-to-one shot, hero. Every citizen of North Korea is in the cockpit with you.’
The difficulty level of what you’re trying to do suddenly seems unthinkable, but you flip the safety on your control stick, close your eyes and fire. Then you open your eyes again.
To your astonishment, a puff of smoke hangs in the air where the missiles have obliterated one another.
‘You did it, hero!’ screams the elated voice on your radio.
Colossally unlikely as it seems, you’ve just pulled off the most amazing trick shot in aviation history and saved the world from thermonuclear war.
Just for the record, this has used up absolutely all your reserves of luck so don’t expect anything like it to happen again.
Your mobile phone rings. It’s your boss, but his voice keeps drifting out.
‘Hang on, you’re breaking up. I’m travelling at Mach 2.3, I’ll call you back,’ you tell him.
You’d better find somewhere nearby to land.
→ Continue to click here.
It’s three a.m. and you’re both flagging. Pizza boxes and coffee cups litter the floor.
Svetlana continues to rack her brains for meme ideas to calm a troubled world, while you keep reading life-affirming news items aloud to her. All the while RT is showing more of the insane crowds spreading across Germany.
‘There’s a shopping mall that lets stray dogs sleep
inside on cold nights,’ you tell Svetlana, who grunts for the hundredth time. ‘And here’s a story of a piglet that was rescued from a well and adopted as a fire department mascot.’
‘WAIT!’ Svetlana flips down from her perch. ‘I think I felt something.’
‘About the mascot pig?’
‘Yes! Read more like that.’
‘About pigs?’
‘Exactly!’
You run a new search. ‘Here’s one about a pig farmer who won the lottery. It says you’ll never believe what he built for his pigs. And here’s another one about a pig rescue . . .’
‘Keep going, it’s working! I’m getting a warm feeling in my toes!’
Who knows why certain things strike a chord? But after twenty minutes of feverish activity, Svetlana has completed her countermeme.
‘Done,’ she says. ‘Excuse me, I might actually be sick.’
You take a look at her handiwork on her screen. At first the countermeme doesn’t look like anything special. Pig-based. Funny caption. But as you look, a warm feeling rushes through you. It feels like wetting yourself but being fine about it, and you experience an upswell of good feeling for Svetlana and for all the wonderful people currently smashing up Europe. What are violently opposed political beliefs when the human flock is bigger than all of you?
In short, it works! Within an hour, Svetlana has rounded up all her teammates from their beds, and they’ve shared the meme on approximately five thousand social media accounts. It’s amazing how rapidly it spreads from there. The Pope, Cardi B, Greta Thunberg and Unilever have all reposted it before sunrise. Others begin to post variations on the meme, which you’re worried will dilute its effectiveness, but Svetlana steadies you: ‘It will be what it’s meant to be.’
