by Nick Mamatas
Surely you remember those three nervous weeks before the web was recovered. Sure, some things still worked. Corporate intranets. Some landlines in overbuilt (or underpopulated) areas, though often just occasionally and only thanks to thousands of employees mobilized as temporary telephone operators—“May I have the number you are trying to reach please?” was no longer the wind-up of a half-remembered and obsolete joke of an even older sepia-toned time; it was the catchphrase of the year.
ATMs and the banking system were generally all right, though one wouldn’t know from the long resigned lines that twisted around blocks and blocks. The line, that was the new online, the new World Wide Web of flesh and resentment that tried to form in place of fiber optics and plasma screens. The virtual marketplace crumbled, but a new infrastructure began to take its place. It didn’t so much “spring up” as it congealed, slowly, around the legacy technologies of the daily newspaper, sold again on street corners in thrice-daily editions, in extended banking hours when checks could once again be drawn by hand and traded for scrip, in the new “slug mobs” of desperate jobseekers who stalked the streets with banners reading BANDWIDTH OR BUST and blocked the street traffic to regain that sense of mastery once provided by a virtual world only a mouseclick away.
Davan ate a handful of sleeping pills. Alysse saved his life by leaning him against the walls in the corner of their apartment and slamming her fists into his stomach until he vomited up the pills in a soup of old food and new blood. She broke four of his ribs and nearly ruptured a kidney. She visited him in the hospital when she could—she was only allowed to every third day as patients now lined the halls two deep—and left him by the end of the week. She hitchhiked back to Ohio to live with her parents, who had a large garden and three German Shepherds. “Call it Plan Z+2” she wrote to Davan in a crooked, girlish script. The postcard took three weeks to arrive.
Wallace, that old police officer from Trenton, hardly noticed what was wrong till the next morning. The rabbit ears on his old TV still worked, and he found a UHF channel broadcasting emergency information direct from the FCC. He reported for work and stayed on duty for nine days straight, catching what he called his “da Vinci” naps—fifteen minutes, eight times a day. The young Turks at the precinct took his lead. He remembered life as it had been; he changed typewriter ribbon, dug out the old walkie-talkies with portable handcranks, and in a junk shop in Camden found enough vacuum tubes to get the old dispatch radio sets running. He liked to ride shotgun—let the snotnose drive—and he liked holding his shotgun in his hands with the windows rolled down so everyone could see that they’d better behave on the streets like it was 1959. And in Trenton, thanks in no small part to Wallace, they did.
Liz herself wasn’t quite sure what Plan Z was, even as she pulled the trigger on the endeavor. She’d thought of it, she told friends over drinks in the first of four candlelit nights in the liquor store whose security gates she they had jimmied open and then closed behind again for privacy, as a giant reset button. “Like in a video game. Something that would erase what had come before.” She took a long pull on the jug of wine and smiled a purple smile. “I was right too, eh?” Liz’s friends, mostly just yellow eyes in the dark, tittered and drank their mid-shelf vodkas and improvised appletinis. Liz knew she’d be fine. She was Australian, they were mostly American.
It only took three or four hours for most of them to drink themselves into various stupors—some were silent, others snored like engines. Then she picked herself up out of the small puddle of urine she had produced and on wobbly but thick legs let herself out and locked the rest of her movement cell in the store indefinitely. There were enough nuts and chips to keep them alive, and when they were found and freed it was only en route to an arrest. Nobody else in the world knew that it was Liz that had called down Plan Z, and nobody was going to believe a quintet of drunks with radioactive orange Cheetos Flamin’ Hot with Limon Crunchy Snacks powder caking their lips. Louis Orange, doing street duty like all the other police officers, found them and—worried that they were a cult who might be attracted to the word on his badge—maced them all before arresting them.
Gus Petrakis was rehired by Gotham Apple Tours, as the company had quickly developed a new business model and needed their buses on the streets twenty-four hours a day. Gus spent the hours between midnight and eight a.m. driving National Guardsmen and bags of money across the five boroughs of New York City and occasionally onto Long Island and into New Jersey. When they thought nobody was watching, Petrakis and the male guardsmen would climb to the roof desk of the bus and urinate off the sides. The lone female in the troop, who had met Julia months before, often pantomimed raising her weapon and firing through the ceiling of the bus.
A NEW WORLD IN OUR HEARTS? AN ANARCHIST RESPONSE TO “PLAN Z”
by Free Africa Bong – NINTH ESTATE BROADSHEETS
The last month has seen an unparalleled revision of the state of human affairs. Ever since Z-Day, when the Internet “went down”, many millions of people have been getting down with mutual aid and a world without the technological crutches of electriccash, online “relationships” (which are nothing of the sort), and individualism. When the proverbial shit hit the fan, we were all given the same choice: adapt or die. For righteous anarchists, this was easy. We’d already adapted, creating our own penumbra of infoshops, skill shares, collective homes, and real human interactions based on human needs, the middle classes and privileged sets were left scrambling. Of course, now that most sites are back online and everything is returning to BUSINESS as usual, we have a chance to do something big.
Yeah, the so-called “movement” was really a bunch of middle-class assholes, but those middle-class assholes did what we spent the last seventy-five years talking about: they dealt a body blow to capitalism. And what do you know? From the power vacuum emerged all sorts of cool new nonhierarchical social formations to deal with the new ‘Net-free environment. So yeah, thanks middle-class assholes! We owe you a solid. Maybe slightly longer ropes when it’s time to make use of the lampposts.
And hey, wasn’t it great NOT to be a slave to the sell phone and the Crackberry for a few weeks? To get MAIL in the mail instead of credit card come-ons and coupons for things you’d never use even if KKKorporate AmeriKKKa paid you? To walk by a bank and laugh at all the people who THOUGHT they had money when all the really ever owned were promises in convenient-to-carry electron form?
But now the ‘Net is coming back! Hell, the big sites were back online after the first five days, and when people rushed back to continue their “virtual” (you know, as opposed to “actual”) lives, the bourgie dumbshits just crashed them again with their sheeple stampede to their old wretched lives. We were able to distribute more NINTH ESTATE than ever before. And people said the Mimeograph Machine was dead!
So here’s what we want you to do: If you didn’t take an axe to your computer on Z-Day out of pure frustration, do it today out of PURE JOY!
Keep it on the streets! You don’t HAVE to go back to your job even though your “workstation” is waiting for you, nor do you have to stay home and somehow “connected” via your “playstation.” Don’t abandon your new comrades, comrade. Keep the hustle and flow flowin’!
Make copies of this and other issues of NINTH ESTATE you’ve been collecting over the past three weeks! We have a circulation of nearly 100 now, and any set of eyes we can get our hands on helps! We need to get busy on the sheets!
Send us money: the NINTH ESTATE collective isn’t getting any VC funding or government grants! Draw us up a check. If you see an NE comrade, bring him a tasty vegan sandwich (we <3 fennel) or a new pair of pants. We need one another, now more than ever!
BRIAN Bernstein, also known as “Free Africa Bong,” the former owner of Williamsburgist.com, and the founder and only member of the Ninth Estate Collective, was found beaten to death outside the Common Ground coffeehouse of Athens, Georgia, with several copies of the above broadsheet crumpled into balls and shoved down hi
s throat. Police investigators determined that the material was pushed into his mouth while he was still alive.
21
IT took seven hours for Raymond to get out to his mother’s house on Long Island on the evening of Z-Day. The cab he was in, and for which he had paid an even thousand dollars, actually ran out of gas in the traffic on the Northern State Parkway. The cabbie had to pour the emergency reserve in the trunk into the tank, and then learned his lesson. He turned off the ignition, and then turned it on again only when cars began to slowly crawl down the highway. After idling for a five minutes, he’d turn it off.
“No A/C, sorry,” he told Raymond.
Raymond opened one eye and muttered, “That’s all right. Nothing to be done. Hell, for most people on the planet, getting from Manhattan to Suffolk County in ninety minutes would be considered magic. Maybe we deserve this big kick in the ass.”
“Whatever,” said the cabbie. “I still gotta find a place to sleep on the island after I drop you off, if all this shit keeps up.”
“It’ll keep up.”
“Yeah, I know,” the cabbie said. “It’s worth it for a G. Hope wherever you’re going is worth it to you.”
“My mother’s house. She’s probably freaking out, trying to call, kicking the TV if it doesn’t work. She’s a delicate person. I know she’s worried sick and probably also somehow blaming me for not picking up the phone, as if I could.” Raymond sighed and that sigh turned into a yawn, and he didn’t bother covering his mouth because the cabbie was only making eye contact via the rear-view mirror. “So I have to drag my butt—and yours, and sorry about that—out
to the North Shore so she can yell at me for the world falling apart. But at least she’ll know I’m alive, so she’ll be happy.” Raymond turned his gaze to the strip of woods beyond the highway. “It’s also not smart to be in the city right now, I think.”
The cabbie said nothing and the two waited for hours. It was 2 a.m. by the time Raymond entered his mother’s home, where he had been just a few days before. He switched on the lights in the kitchen and looked in the fridge. The sounds of static fuzzled down the steps to the upper floor, where Raymond’s mother kept her bedroom. Raymond ate some meatballs in sauce from a pot, with his fingers, then sucked his fingers clean and closed the door. He stretched out on the couch and fell asleep immediately, his right hand tucked into his pants.
RAYMOND woke to the smell of burning bacon. He shot up and off the couch, and ran from the living room to the kitchen to grab the pan off the burner. “Mama!” he called out. He dumped the bacon and the black grease into the sink, and peered out the window into the yard over the sink. Then he grabbed a few paper towels and wiped the basin of the sink clean, so his mother wouldn’t know he had poured grease down the drain instead of collecting it separately in the old coffee can used for that purpose.
“Mom!” he tried again. And he walked upstairs. He looked into her bedroom. The bed was made and the TV still on, playing static as the cable was out. He checked his old bedroom, a shrine to his high school years laminated in dust and kitsch. The L. L. Cool J poster was especially disconcerting, the yellowing science fiction paperbacks a bit less so, but he had no time to rifle through them or pack a bag for his eventual trip back home. He checked the upstairs bathroom, which was empty, and the tub itself, which was dry, so mother hadn’t been taking a shower
recently. He ran down the steps and checked the mud room, and then went down into the basement. It was piled with boxes and cracked furniture, and cool as it had been a few days prior. The path he had kicked through to get to that pile of blankets and find the mutant Hymenoepimescis sp. nest was still in place, except for one patch of floor on which a small wicker basket full of old socks had rolled.
Raymond went back upstairs and into the small yard with its hip-high chain-link fence. His mother wasn’t in the back by her tomato plants or in the front getting the mail. He reached for his cell phone and checked for messages but he received a No Service notice. He went back inside and picked up the receiver of the wall phone in his mother’s kitchen, and there was a dial tone, but the few calls he tried to make—to his own voicemail number, to Liz, to Mama’s friend Irma who lived around the corner—all failed. Raymond walked out the house and headed toward Irma’s, but walked back after half a block and sat down on the couch where he had slept. The living room TV wasn’t receiving a cable or broadcast signal either, but there were DVDs, and he put on Like Water for Chocolate, which his mother had cued up. Raymond drifted off to sleep again and we had him. Now all we needed to do was find Julia and reinsert her in the Simulacrum as well.
22
THERE were three worlds now. The world as you
knew it, the emergent world of tyranny and cooperation that had emerged in the wake of Z-Day, and the Simulacrum. Julia had more places to hide. The security apparatus on which we often exploited was in disrepair and human behavior had become somewhat less predictable after Z-Day. Yes, there were explosions of rage and frustration and indeed there were instant communities formed in the crucible of disaster, but who found themselves pulled toward what was essentially arbitrary. Like the weather, the anthroposphere has an infinite number of variables and predictive analysis is thus inexact in the best of times. To create and make indispensable a communication network that size and scope of the World Wide Web over the course of half a generation, and then to dispense with that network, albeit temporarily and partially, was an unparalleled event in modernity. Hymenoepimescis sp. and its role in the evolution of your species seemed nearly superfluous.
With three worlds to hide in, Julia was difficult to find. She knew of the Simulacrum now, and how to find her way back into it. In the chaotic world of Z-Day, she could be just one more flailing quartet of limbs hurtling down a human-choked street. And in the world of blogs and e-commerce, Julia might still be there, one of those few with lists of IP addresses and the power of access. There she might stand out, but on the Internet anonymity is still a possibility, especially when one only passively consumes. We had a thought—Julia may be somewhere out there, in an interstitial space between worlds—spying on us, plotting her revenge.
What would Julia do? Would she make friends, which she is very good at, and charm her way onto a steamer headed toward the Panama Canal, and there seek out the Hymenoepimescis sp.? Perhaps she would even infect herself a second time, to bring still more larvae back into the U.S. with ease. Was there a doctor among Sans Nom that could extract them? An entomologist who dabbled in etymology on the side? Julia’s behavior would not necessarily be further altered, as the wasp in the wild wouldn’t have been irradiated and mutated as were those she encountered in that Long Island basement. Julia would always know of us though, and would be fuming with rage and anger, as humans nearly always do when they encounter another form of intelligence.
Or was Julia active on the Internet, such as it existed during those weeks? When the root servers and registrars went back online, would the world be greeted to a YouTube video explaining it all, or a Facebook application designed to turn a genocide against us into a fun game to be played amongst friends?
Perhaps Julia was in the Simulacrum again, playing the role we assigned for her as best she could, given the eruptions of Z-Day. Her flight from the United Nations was the last we’d seen of her, though on the edges of our own World Wide Webs we felt vibrations, a presence.
“THIS is not a poem,” Julia said into the microphone in the Der Rathskeller. It was dark and smoky. So much anxiety over the past few months—antismoking laws were lifted in many municipalities. The room was a warm one, almost too warm. A couple of men, both wearing thick plastic eyeglasses, had just walked in. Indeed, we followed them. Their lenses steamed up instantly, and they sat half-blinded.
“This is the truth,” Julia said. “This is the story of the motherfucking world.” She raised her left hand and the droning of the theremin on the podium at her waist increased in volume then, with a twist of Julia’s right hand
, altered pitch from a low thrum to a wild whine.
“Vladimir Lenin,” she declared, enunciating every syllable with an angry precision, “played the theremin!” She looked older now, her hair was streaked with silver and matted into ropy dreadlocks. She was gaunt from the stresses of hiding, of irregular diet and of a different couch each night, her face faceted where bone met the backside of flesh. Her sundress hung off her like a drapery. “The audacious dictator, an enthusiastic student of electronic music.” The theremin squealed, then Julia lowered both her hands, nearly touching the silvery box, and the few men and women at this performance felt the decline into low sonic rumbling in their thickest bones.
“Why!” Julia said. She pulled her hands away from the antennae on either side of the instrument. Now conversational she said, “Whether you are a Leninist, and even on a college campus these days there likely aren’t all that many, or not, it’s a pretty bizarre little factoid, isn’t it? Was he the leader of a great working-class movement or a ruthless dictator? Either way, whatever your opinions, he took time out of his day and during a civil war that threatened not only the new socialist society but Russian civilization itself. The war was not only against the future but the past as well.” Another gesture, another warbling wail.
“The theremin is a unique instrument. Look ma, no hands!” Julia whipped her hands behind her back and the sound vanished except for the atonal buzz of the power supply, and the rhubarbhubbub of the patrons. Then she slowly brought her hands back around, her fingers swaying at her waist and then resting just over the machine. The sound came to life again, animated like the yawn of waking. “There is another difference as well. With a theremin you play the rests as well as the notes.” She angled her hands slightly, twitched her fingers, then turned her wrists—the symbol of the movement—and the tones warbled and burbled in response.
