(no subject)
I've been lurking nervously for a while, offering a few crits here and there, but am finally posting something!
I wrote this a long while ago, for a writing competition (which I found out today I had in fact lost.) The theme was 'Vision' and the word limit was 3,500 (I wrote 2,254). A few 'mature' themes and several considerations of religion and existence as a whole beneath the cut. Not intended to offend or 'shock', so my apologies if it does so.
Everything in the world, that ever existed, is there because of you. You are the Creator, the Light, the Beginning. See also, God. Every book printed, every film burnt to disc. You break it, you bought it. You think it, you make it. The rest of the sorry race, they’re falling behind at least ten feet. The internet? Yours. Fiji? The result of a boring Sunday afternoon.
We call this Ego Syndrome, and the infection rate is 100%. That means for every hundred people you know, they all think they are better than you. They saw it first, Niagara Falls, the wheel. You’re second place, runner up. We are all a mass un-reality check. Romeo wrote Shakespeare in Love, and Juliet was reincarnate in the form of Marilyn Monroe. Just ask, she’ll tell you so.
I knew a guy who thought he’d invented masturbation, and had finally found a get rich quick plan. He could share his secrets, amaze the world. Factories across the country would open, people would clamour for his wisdom. He believed that until we met at our next pub crawl. Oblivion in booze soothed his disappointment and anguish. His ruin.
We are all the start of everything, your fine self included. Stub your toe, you’ve invented pain. You could extract it, bottle it and sell it in jars by the pound. People will buy it.
Creationism is one of those scams to make money. Who gets the royalties from the world’s best selling book? Who collects the Prestige awards for the Good News? Could easily be you, or me. I am the second coming. Plagiarism, copyright theft. People will sue for anything they think was rightfully theirs.
I call to the stand my first witness, God.
He’ll say, finders, keepers. I got here first.
Imagine you open your exam paper and the first question is ‘Who invented the concept of murder?’ and you just know someone will have made a claim on that. Someone wants their payment in cash because they figured out how to pull the trigger, slap a trademark on it and sell it nationwide.
Cut scene, my life. Twenty nine, male, cynic, addicted to everything that could ever give you cancer. Has anyone ever noticed no one is addicted to a cure? Ever had a drip filled with E150d or a health drink spiked with a secret ingredient of E128? Sadly enough, you probably have. That’s caramel colouring and boric acid that you didn’t ever ask for, but they’ll bill you for it all the same.
It had been a tough day, a long day. I had invented procrastination, in the form of counting the damp patches on the office ceiling. Fifty six and a half, should you count the suspicious smudge in the left hand corner.
When you’re so beyond the brink of tiredness you accidentally brush your teeth with strawberry flavoured lubricant instead of toothpaste, and realise you don’t really mind, enlightenment tends to steer clear of you. Although you do wonder mildly whether the glycerine or nonoxynol-9 will do any lasting damage, it’s not for long. Each day is a new adventure with another hundred additives creeping around your bloodstream.
What I did ponder, was why I owned a tube of strawberry flavoured lubricant.
I went to bed but I didn’t sleep. The sheets hadn’t been changed in nearly a year and the dust mites were having their fun. Folds of cotton sticking together with months of sweat, semen and Tabasco sauce. You lie your face down on the pillow and you sit back up again with half a cinema floor clinging to your face, complete with buttery syrup and chocolate raisins. Maybe, I didn’t quite say out loud, it’s time to clean this place up. There seemed little point, if tomorrow I was going to wake up to the same ceiling, same job.
When I put my hand down in something that I hoped and prayed was congealing chocolate sauce, I reconsidered.
My laundry room was shared with about ten other residents of the tower block, none of whom I’ll even pretend I knew. At this hour I could strut around nude and no one would be there to raise an eyelid anyway. I didn’t, but knowing I could make the whole experience easier somehow. Folding sheets and bundling as many shirts, socks and boxer shorts as I could into one single machine. It cried with the strain, big pearly tears rolling down its white panel face. I gave it a kick; it cried harder.
Everyone used to think I was such a nice guy, and there I was abusing machinery just trying to do its job.
We all have our story; we all have our Tales to Tell. Tales of Love, Tales of Terror. People even get paid for telling stories that aren’t theirs. Harry wants his billions back, Joanne. Frodo wants a pay cheque for his grief and compensation for his missing finger. There are fourteen scripts in Hollywood, so I’m told. We’re all just making a copy of a copy of a really bad photograph that’s out of focus and facing the wrong way.
You’re breaking barriers that aren’t even there.
To you, fellow inventor, I am just another face here to tell you a story that isn’t mine. To try and reap the benefits that I may gain, dare you enjoy it. The story I could tell you, was probably already told within the last two millennia. I’d be grave robbing someone else’s well thought out ideas. The hours they spent constructing, honing their words, I’ll pick up the credit for.
It was standing in that laundry room, I began to concoct my idea. Watching the clothes rumble by in a mass of foam and water, I began to wonder. Everyone is dead set on creating the next big thing. The new iPod, the grand scale Space Hotel. Everyone wants to cash in on that big time. Do you know how rich the inventor of Pot Noodle is? Neither do I, but there’s probably a reason he hasn’t released anything else. He doesn’t need to anymore.
Everyone wants to be the next big news, by making something different, more original. You can’t be original anymore, we’re here too late. No matter what you think, you can’t be the first one in there to make something.
You can be the first one to destroy something newly made.
As soon as it hit me, I rushed back to my flat, soggy clothing and sheets in hand. I left them to dry on the washing line that ran across my pitiful excuse for a living room - water dripped onto every piece of furniture I’d ever owned. I didn’t mind letting a couple of wooden chairs and a moth eaten sofa suffer a bit of water damage. I had to get to work, and it was three o clock on a Saturday morning.
My job is for one of those big corporations where you’re not even sure what they do. Animal testing, embryo experimentation, as long as they paid me I wasn’t kicking up a fuss. I had an office full of damp and a computer that worked when you stuck spoons in the modem at a certain angle, and that was enough for what I wanted to do.
My office was located in the underground section of the building, the part that wasn’t quite so shiny and made of glass. If I closed my eyes and concentrated I could almost hear the Tube trains running by my left hand wall every few minutes. They lumped the people they needed but didn’t especially want down here, and it suited me just fine.
Slumming it away in an apartment caked with so much grease I could scrape it all off and sell it to McDonalds and make a reasonable profit, you would have thought I lacked skill in just about every area available to me. What I lack is the Materialism gene that posses so many of us, persuades us to own things which eventually turn around and wind up owning you. You are your possessions, says each advert that flashes up on your television screen. You are nothing without the newest design of blender, sofa cover, pyjama set.
You can market anything, and people will want it. You can market anything, and someone else will tell you they had that idea first.
Booted up and logged on, I began my very own act of creation.
There are two things the Western world can no longer function without. See addiction. See electricity and The Internet. The World Wide Web that so many of us love and know, it is the Achilles heel of generations to come. All I had to do was find a switch, and flick it. Internet on, internet off. Worldwide chaos off, worldwide chaos on.
It really was that easy.
The Internet is powered by interconnected computer networks transmitting data in packets, using standard Internet Protocol. It is quite simply, a network of networks, compiled of home computers, businesses, any server hosts you wish to think of. At the base of it all, was my big magic off switch.
See, the internet now is run by the Big Daddy of all computers. No one knows quite when they made the switch around, but it’s there. Mr Super Computer, the boss, the one with all the power cables, the one distributing those packets of information technology goodness.
You drop bombs over a city, you’ll cause maybe a few casualties if you don’t look where you’re aiming. You aim your cannon fodder at the central nervous system, the brain, the living centre; the entire place will simply crumble. For this nervous system, see Shopping Centre. See Church. See big Daddy Super computer, and you begin to see what I’m getting at.
You don’t kill an ant; you kill the whole nest with one fell swoop.
What do I do for my company? Codes, programs, anything even remotely useful, which it very rarely is. HTML For Dummies only gets you so far, and then you have to use your initiative. Bold tag, destroy tag. CSS style sheet of impending doom. Trojan horses. It all falls under the same category of Computer Stuff. Eloquent as ever, I began my task appointed to me by boredom and washing.
You’d wonder why I didn’t just go for the Electricity, which appears to be the big cheese in all of this. You switch off electricity, things don’t work, and it’s incredibly annoying for just about everybody. You destroy the core of the internet with a super-virus so powerful that it spreads in the blink of an eye, that’s more data than you can ever imagine, vanished. Sure, they’d get it back up and running eventually, but everything that was in there would be gone. Cue uproar, cue court cases, cue people suing everyone within a five mile radius.
Internet businesses, as I tapped away at the keyboard with my tongue clenched between my two front teeth in concentration, would be ruined. News archives, gone and forgotten. Bank transactions, Neopet accounts. Every user of every age would be distraught. Online shopping centres, bankrupt. It would be monumental.
Cue cut scene to a montage, of foraging through computer files, day and night.
Downloading the most virulent viruses already created to take them apart and piece them together in new, exciting ways. Imagine a Lego set, combined with Meccano. Polystyrene coffee cups piling on the desk, slowly growing mould. Whole civilisations of bacteria set up a livelihood in those cups. While they invented their own computer systems, I continued to destroy ours.
It can take any amount of time to write a virus. Days, months, however long you wish to spend. My own took longer that I would ever wish to divulge. The planning, the creation, of this bug which looked so benign until you unleashed it. The planning, the security I had to dodge, to breach. Labyrinth Online, they should have called it. Block the security cameras, distract the guards. Flirt with them, if need be, although I’d never admit to that.
Unscrambling password encryptions took me weeks, longer the further I got inside. Undetected for now, but definitely not forever. Think mouse, think alley of cats, and you’d see my position. The further I went in, the harder it was to leave, and the harder it was to continue. I pinned myself to our Big Daddy Super Computer, like a parasite, and didn’t let go.
All those hours, weeks, months, possibly years (I’ll never tell) cumulated into the final day. The day when I realised I was in. Apply injection to the vein and in goes the medicine. Medicine, cyanide, who can really tell the difference?
The single command I typed, was Execute. Appropriate in more ways that it would ever know. I tapped the enter key, and sat back.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Please keep arms and legs inside the carriage at all times. The first step to the end of civilisation was on its way.
In the beginning, there was God, and he created the Earth.
In the beginning, there was nothing, and the Big Bang happened.
The era of creation is long over. Welcome to the era of total destruction. Whatever you think you made, whatever you owned, whatever you see with that imagination of yours, it is now worthless, obsolete, and dust in my hands.
My vision, my creation, is chaos theory.
I wrote this a long while ago, for a writing competition (which I found out today I had in fact lost.) The theme was 'Vision' and the word limit was 3,500 (I wrote 2,254). A few 'mature' themes and several considerations of religion and existence as a whole beneath the cut. Not intended to offend or 'shock', so my apologies if it does so.
Everything in the world, that ever existed, is there because of you. You are the Creator, the Light, the Beginning. See also, God. Every book printed, every film burnt to disc. You break it, you bought it. You think it, you make it. The rest of the sorry race, they’re falling behind at least ten feet. The internet? Yours. Fiji? The result of a boring Sunday afternoon.
We call this Ego Syndrome, and the infection rate is 100%. That means for every hundred people you know, they all think they are better than you. They saw it first, Niagara Falls, the wheel. You’re second place, runner up. We are all a mass un-reality check. Romeo wrote Shakespeare in Love, and Juliet was reincarnate in the form of Marilyn Monroe. Just ask, she’ll tell you so.
I knew a guy who thought he’d invented masturbation, and had finally found a get rich quick plan. He could share his secrets, amaze the world. Factories across the country would open, people would clamour for his wisdom. He believed that until we met at our next pub crawl. Oblivion in booze soothed his disappointment and anguish. His ruin.
We are all the start of everything, your fine self included. Stub your toe, you’ve invented pain. You could extract it, bottle it and sell it in jars by the pound. People will buy it.
Creationism is one of those scams to make money. Who gets the royalties from the world’s best selling book? Who collects the Prestige awards for the Good News? Could easily be you, or me. I am the second coming. Plagiarism, copyright theft. People will sue for anything they think was rightfully theirs.
I call to the stand my first witness, God.
He’ll say, finders, keepers. I got here first.
Imagine you open your exam paper and the first question is ‘Who invented the concept of murder?’ and you just know someone will have made a claim on that. Someone wants their payment in cash because they figured out how to pull the trigger, slap a trademark on it and sell it nationwide.
Cut scene, my life. Twenty nine, male, cynic, addicted to everything that could ever give you cancer. Has anyone ever noticed no one is addicted to a cure? Ever had a drip filled with E150d or a health drink spiked with a secret ingredient of E128? Sadly enough, you probably have. That’s caramel colouring and boric acid that you didn’t ever ask for, but they’ll bill you for it all the same.
It had been a tough day, a long day. I had invented procrastination, in the form of counting the damp patches on the office ceiling. Fifty six and a half, should you count the suspicious smudge in the left hand corner.
When you’re so beyond the brink of tiredness you accidentally brush your teeth with strawberry flavoured lubricant instead of toothpaste, and realise you don’t really mind, enlightenment tends to steer clear of you. Although you do wonder mildly whether the glycerine or nonoxynol-9 will do any lasting damage, it’s not for long. Each day is a new adventure with another hundred additives creeping around your bloodstream.
What I did ponder, was why I owned a tube of strawberry flavoured lubricant.
I went to bed but I didn’t sleep. The sheets hadn’t been changed in nearly a year and the dust mites were having their fun. Folds of cotton sticking together with months of sweat, semen and Tabasco sauce. You lie your face down on the pillow and you sit back up again with half a cinema floor clinging to your face, complete with buttery syrup and chocolate raisins. Maybe, I didn’t quite say out loud, it’s time to clean this place up. There seemed little point, if tomorrow I was going to wake up to the same ceiling, same job.
When I put my hand down in something that I hoped and prayed was congealing chocolate sauce, I reconsidered.
My laundry room was shared with about ten other residents of the tower block, none of whom I’ll even pretend I knew. At this hour I could strut around nude and no one would be there to raise an eyelid anyway. I didn’t, but knowing I could make the whole experience easier somehow. Folding sheets and bundling as many shirts, socks and boxer shorts as I could into one single machine. It cried with the strain, big pearly tears rolling down its white panel face. I gave it a kick; it cried harder.
Everyone used to think I was such a nice guy, and there I was abusing machinery just trying to do its job.
We all have our story; we all have our Tales to Tell. Tales of Love, Tales of Terror. People even get paid for telling stories that aren’t theirs. Harry wants his billions back, Joanne. Frodo wants a pay cheque for his grief and compensation for his missing finger. There are fourteen scripts in Hollywood, so I’m told. We’re all just making a copy of a copy of a really bad photograph that’s out of focus and facing the wrong way.
You’re breaking barriers that aren’t even there.
To you, fellow inventor, I am just another face here to tell you a story that isn’t mine. To try and reap the benefits that I may gain, dare you enjoy it. The story I could tell you, was probably already told within the last two millennia. I’d be grave robbing someone else’s well thought out ideas. The hours they spent constructing, honing their words, I’ll pick up the credit for.
It was standing in that laundry room, I began to concoct my idea. Watching the clothes rumble by in a mass of foam and water, I began to wonder. Everyone is dead set on creating the next big thing. The new iPod, the grand scale Space Hotel. Everyone wants to cash in on that big time. Do you know how rich the inventor of Pot Noodle is? Neither do I, but there’s probably a reason he hasn’t released anything else. He doesn’t need to anymore.
Everyone wants to be the next big news, by making something different, more original. You can’t be original anymore, we’re here too late. No matter what you think, you can’t be the first one in there to make something.
You can be the first one to destroy something newly made.
As soon as it hit me, I rushed back to my flat, soggy clothing and sheets in hand. I left them to dry on the washing line that ran across my pitiful excuse for a living room - water dripped onto every piece of furniture I’d ever owned. I didn’t mind letting a couple of wooden chairs and a moth eaten sofa suffer a bit of water damage. I had to get to work, and it was three o clock on a Saturday morning.
My job is for one of those big corporations where you’re not even sure what they do. Animal testing, embryo experimentation, as long as they paid me I wasn’t kicking up a fuss. I had an office full of damp and a computer that worked when you stuck spoons in the modem at a certain angle, and that was enough for what I wanted to do.
My office was located in the underground section of the building, the part that wasn’t quite so shiny and made of glass. If I closed my eyes and concentrated I could almost hear the Tube trains running by my left hand wall every few minutes. They lumped the people they needed but didn’t especially want down here, and it suited me just fine.
Slumming it away in an apartment caked with so much grease I could scrape it all off and sell it to McDonalds and make a reasonable profit, you would have thought I lacked skill in just about every area available to me. What I lack is the Materialism gene that posses so many of us, persuades us to own things which eventually turn around and wind up owning you. You are your possessions, says each advert that flashes up on your television screen. You are nothing without the newest design of blender, sofa cover, pyjama set.
You can market anything, and people will want it. You can market anything, and someone else will tell you they had that idea first.
Booted up and logged on, I began my very own act of creation.
There are two things the Western world can no longer function without. See addiction. See electricity and The Internet. The World Wide Web that so many of us love and know, it is the Achilles heel of generations to come. All I had to do was find a switch, and flick it. Internet on, internet off. Worldwide chaos off, worldwide chaos on.
It really was that easy.
The Internet is powered by interconnected computer networks transmitting data in packets, using standard Internet Protocol. It is quite simply, a network of networks, compiled of home computers, businesses, any server hosts you wish to think of. At the base of it all, was my big magic off switch.
See, the internet now is run by the Big Daddy of all computers. No one knows quite when they made the switch around, but it’s there. Mr Super Computer, the boss, the one with all the power cables, the one distributing those packets of information technology goodness.
You drop bombs over a city, you’ll cause maybe a few casualties if you don’t look where you’re aiming. You aim your cannon fodder at the central nervous system, the brain, the living centre; the entire place will simply crumble. For this nervous system, see Shopping Centre. See Church. See big Daddy Super computer, and you begin to see what I’m getting at.
You don’t kill an ant; you kill the whole nest with one fell swoop.
What do I do for my company? Codes, programs, anything even remotely useful, which it very rarely is. HTML For Dummies only gets you so far, and then you have to use your initiative. Bold tag, destroy tag. CSS style sheet of impending doom. Trojan horses. It all falls under the same category of Computer Stuff. Eloquent as ever, I began my task appointed to me by boredom and washing.
You’d wonder why I didn’t just go for the Electricity, which appears to be the big cheese in all of this. You switch off electricity, things don’t work, and it’s incredibly annoying for just about everybody. You destroy the core of the internet with a super-virus so powerful that it spreads in the blink of an eye, that’s more data than you can ever imagine, vanished. Sure, they’d get it back up and running eventually, but everything that was in there would be gone. Cue uproar, cue court cases, cue people suing everyone within a five mile radius.
Internet businesses, as I tapped away at the keyboard with my tongue clenched between my two front teeth in concentration, would be ruined. News archives, gone and forgotten. Bank transactions, Neopet accounts. Every user of every age would be distraught. Online shopping centres, bankrupt. It would be monumental.
Cue cut scene to a montage, of foraging through computer files, day and night.
Downloading the most virulent viruses already created to take them apart and piece them together in new, exciting ways. Imagine a Lego set, combined with Meccano. Polystyrene coffee cups piling on the desk, slowly growing mould. Whole civilisations of bacteria set up a livelihood in those cups. While they invented their own computer systems, I continued to destroy ours.
It can take any amount of time to write a virus. Days, months, however long you wish to spend. My own took longer that I would ever wish to divulge. The planning, the creation, of this bug which looked so benign until you unleashed it. The planning, the security I had to dodge, to breach. Labyrinth Online, they should have called it. Block the security cameras, distract the guards. Flirt with them, if need be, although I’d never admit to that.
Unscrambling password encryptions took me weeks, longer the further I got inside. Undetected for now, but definitely not forever. Think mouse, think alley of cats, and you’d see my position. The further I went in, the harder it was to leave, and the harder it was to continue. I pinned myself to our Big Daddy Super Computer, like a parasite, and didn’t let go.
All those hours, weeks, months, possibly years (I’ll never tell) cumulated into the final day. The day when I realised I was in. Apply injection to the vein and in goes the medicine. Medicine, cyanide, who can really tell the difference?
The single command I typed, was Execute. Appropriate in more ways that it would ever know. I tapped the enter key, and sat back.
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. Please keep arms and legs inside the carriage at all times. The first step to the end of civilisation was on its way.
In the beginning, there was God, and he created the Earth.
In the beginning, there was nothing, and the Big Bang happened.
The era of creation is long over. Welcome to the era of total destruction. Whatever you think you made, whatever you owned, whatever you see with that imagination of yours, it is now worthless, obsolete, and dust in my hands.
My vision, my creation, is chaos theory.