Originally published in Verbicide issue #9

There is a spectre haunting mankind. The next step in the game of evolution has been initialized, and all those cute and cuddly human beings we have come to know and love like so many Beanie Babies — well, they might just accidentally get fucked. There is a force out there and it is combining and combining and combining: cells into organs into organisms into something that is conglomerating you with neither your knowledge nor consent. Look at the dinosaurs — solitary, wise ole gators. Archaic. Now look at a beehive with its workers and drones. Mathematically efficient, and still around after an even longer span of time. Anarchic organisms will always fall victim to pack mentality.

Welcome to the human condition. As Albert Einstein-#7 said, “brilliant niggaz always gettin bum rushed by mediocre mindz.”

The human brain is designed to store information — a computer chip. Indeed, the entire human race is a planetwide circuitboard, and the commerce of ideas, financial cycles, the worldwide web, fashion entertainment, trends images ideas stemming from indefinable sources — these are the heartbeats and brainwaves of the network, a thought process none of us has access to. This is the vast secret purpose of this exercise, this beautiful human beast. Engineered from outside. How many people do you know who always leave the TV and radio on, who are always jacked into the internet, who read every newspaper and magazine; watch E! to keep abreast of the times? Data entry.

We’re being typed and prototyped so fast it’s already almost too late to stop it. Who is doing this? Invaders from Outside. The Invader is a sentient virus. No other possibility. What is a virus? A virus is that which comes from outside and is transformative in nature, turning what was once autonomous into a factory for viral ends. The computer virus? The computer is the virus, geddit? The computer will soon become incorporated into the human organism. Commodity to necessity. That is the way of things. Look at your Tv, your microwave, your cell phone, the internet. Wasn’t so long ago they didn’t exist, now you can’t live without them.

In the Infolution, the body will become obsolete. Look at any television ad, any fashion magazine: they’re already paving the way for the plastic revolution. Cosmetic surgery will soon be a rite of passage like orthodontics. Who wants an ugly baby? We’ll all be androids soon. Genetic Engineering merges with the silicone revolution and BANG! Another dotdotdot, each change as drastic as the sum of all previous changes, and evolution itself is evolving.

Faster and faster, and faster and faster. It’s a merry-go-round you can’t get off — a merry-go-round that ain’t so merry anymore.

What? Did you think evolution had reached its zenith, that humans and the drastic changes that they are inflicting on the planet were somehow outside the system of nature? Who do you think you are? There is no difference between natural and artificial, between a toxic waste dump and a field of daisies. It’s all part of the process. Don’t say you didn’t see it coming.

The power of the Babylon system is that it hides behind bureaucracy, employee handbooks, and K-Mart propaganda films. There’s no one that doesn’t have to answer to the invisible inevitable big brother. Everyone’s just trying to get what hey can grab without getting gaffled. And the citizens, (i.e., you,) they all just fall in line.

Look at an ant colony: a failed attempt at corpanism. The organism had not developed enough. But the humans have. And the time for the Next Step is now. What do you do for a living?

ANSWER: The same thing over and over. Welcome to the ant farm.

The Invader has monkeyed the works and worked the monkeys — a bad case of the possessions. Yes, some unlucky monkeys, it looks like they accidentally got fucked, come down with the funk, invaded by something beyond the brain. Something antithetical, perpendicular to it. This I-mentality, this scrolling biography we like to call our self, it is a symptom of the language virus — an entirely different sort of organism, our lexicon its DNA. It has appropriated our mind to replicate its pattern and build cells about it. This lexicon, it’s a real Pandora’s Box. It caused civilization. It caused money. It caused government. It created science and art.

Do you get the picture?

Hold on a second., you say. Where did this Invader come from? What if I don’t want to be part of its plans? Listen, this Invader, it always has been. It is imbued in the fabric of the cosmos. It is the dotdotdot in punctuated evolution, the reason that things are going the way they’re going. We’ll call this virus M. There is no referent – M. Look at the shape of the letter looming over you in Sesame Street nightmares. M. Coming to get you. M. The vicious point between chitinous insect legs. M. The Invader that seeks to sublimate human beings to the role of cells in planetwide synthesis. M. Ever felt like you were receiving thoughts outside your own? M. Ever looked down on the city from an airplane and seen a circuitboard thinking for itself along powerline-highway neural networks, automobiles binary digits? M. Battalions of space invaders. M. Chikchik chikchik, chikchik chikchik…

The phantom impetus towards meta-organism exerted by M can best be thought of as a Headless Conspiracy. To understand the way a Headless Conspiracy functions, imagine an ant colony. Through a system of rules and information transfer, the colony is able to achieve objectives inconceivable to any of the individual ants which carry them out. Even the queen ant, to whom some humans erroneously attribute leadership, is nothing more than a specialized breeding organ of the colony who has no more power or understanding of the workings of the whole than does the lowest slave. The same model works for the United States of America and its president, who is nothing more than the hood ornament on the Car of America. It’s no surprise that ex-actors and pro wrestlers make the best presidents. M. The conspiracy so deep that all its operatives are unaware of its objectives, of its very existence. At best, we see the workings of M’s puppet fronts: the CIA, the Taliban, Scientology, the Communist Party, the Catholic Church, Scientific Atlanta … deeper and deeper. Sometimes the conspiracy theories make more sense than the news.

Do you get the picture?

No?

Too absorbed in the pixels. Take a step back.

M.

The aims of M are difficult to fathom. To the inside observer, M’s aims are assimilation, control. But these are merely tools for a something that eclipses our scope of comprehension. Think of yourself as a binary digit in a computer chip. The course of your existence is determined by the gates you pass through during the course of your existence: AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR. These gates seem to you to be ends unto themselves, agents that dictate the course of your actions — gatekeepers and angels in a nightmare straight outta Kafka. Their function as it seem to you is not even remotely akin to its incomprehensible role in the operation of the chip and the program being run.

So how can you fight M? Sabotage a multi-national corporation and it’s the workers who’ll suffer most. The partitioning of tasks — that assembly line mentality — is assimilating mankind into a new entity, a prototype of corpanism. These corpanisms functions on a tight conglomerate of specialized systems, and they are invincible. All commands are hardwired in, all parts easily replaceable. Look into the scratches in the buildings and you will see the traces of the giant that stalks the earth. It is a new form of organism — the next step on the evolutionary scale. We have become parts of the machine, uniform bodies move as one, the same way that organelles became parts of the cell, cells of the organism. These meta-organisms are nearly impossible to destroy, because they do not exist on the human level. You see, no one is actually an agent of M. We are all just pretending. We are all just doing our jobs. We are all just trying not to get caught. The reason your boss is such an asshole to you is that he’s afraid of his boss and on and on … Think it’s any different over in Communist China?

So who’s behind it all? Despite what simpleminded Socialists proselytizing off-campus might say, that Boss of Bosses — let’s just call him Rex Hugo — he just does not exist.

Or does he?

Rex Hugo is an Operator. Like all Operators, Rex Hugo is a figment of the collective imagination of an invisible brotherhood known as HEAVEN: Humans Eliminate All Viral Entities Now. Rex Hugo is the face we have put on M for this most dangerous game of ours. I can just see the hole now, in an ugly green suit, smoking a Capitalist cigar so nasty, holding his GAPwhip over those Indonesian sweatshop children with sadsad tears in their oh so adorable Japanimation eyes — looks like something right out of a feed the children infomercial. Ain’t that Tiny Tim himself? No no, too — well, how do you say it — too asian. Making em make Nikes for niggaz to buy with crack money fronted through the same channels the CIA keeps the immigrants poor too poor. It’s all the same. Nike is a Columbian drug cartel supported by the CIA selling shoebase to the brotherman, and you have a taste of the logic that you will need to adapt in order to see the agents and entities of M. Rex Hugo is not Ill Gates or The Donald, but the field their collective presences create. Rex Hugo is the uberGates; he wasn’t Rockefeller, but he is now — now that he’s dead. Rex Hugo slips through the sands of system. Oh he exists all right. Just not as a human being — nothing you can touch. More like an electromagnetic field orienting particles in a particular direction.

So how can you find him and fink him out?

The members of HEAVEN are counter-agents, antibodies. They are glitches within the system, autonomous agents who function like viruses, appropriating it to their own ends. Most of these agents are simply bad sectors, disk error, land mimes wiped out in their own catastrophe — snow crash, total annihilation. But amongst the ranks of simple glitch, there are fringe characters and lunatics from every era, harbingers of the apocalypse, who have bequeathed their memetic DNA and rewired the beast. Saints, Perverts, and Geniuses: Kafka, Freud, Nietzche. Even “The Simpsons.” They are the ones who have infiltrated, transcended — I could tell you what they’re all about and I’ve studied none of them. Nor do I care to. I am only interested in the image they have projected into the future, the echo of their monstrosity, calculated to haywire the machine. They have ascended into soundbyte, into language. Their names becomes words: -isms, -esques, -ians. Doh! From Sadism to Marxism, it’s all the same. Whatever their purpose, they can be extremely dangerous to M. They are cancerous tissue, bricks through the window of system. These are the masters in whose footsteps we must follow in order to burn down Babylon and take our place with the crocodiles, basking in the sun on the banks of the Nile.

Become the Invader. Invade from inside. There is no system stronger than a single man, geddit cowboy? And the larger the system, the more susceptible it is to the monkey’s wrench, human. Why do you think disease is so lethal? The ultimate goal, grasshopper, is to enter into system, and beat M at its own game — spread your own virus. Beat the game at its own system, monkeywrench control, give those bastards a little taste of Texas Justice, some of what’s coming to em.

In this way can the beast be ridden with sickness and destroyed.