CSI: American Carnage (Monday, January 6, 2020)
IN THE CYBER – Little Timmy, pup reporter, and the Professor’s small strike force stand at the entrance to a central backchannel running through The Cyber. Small booms can be heard coming from a distant field, tweets detonating beyond the hillside to the north, or what could be the north if there were cardinal directions within the indeterminate pipes and tubes marking much of The Cyber’s landscape. The Professor says, My guess is that this hatchway can lead us topside, probably somewhere along the east coast and certainly west of the Urals and north of the Black Sea. Boris, genial triple agent, says, We must keep eye out for server taken to suburb of Kiev. Mohammed says, That’s just nonsense. Nobody runs around with servers any more! They move through the cloud, like the great crawling eye from the old documentary. We have to keep an eye out for strange creatures. Sarah, Timmy’s friend from the resistance pot luck says, We already have enough strange creatures to deal with, out of control, two-bit gunmen gathered around the autocrat. He pulls them in because they will answer his erratic demands. The booms from the north are now louder. Timmy says, Let’s go. The tweets are closing in. Pretty soon they’ll lock on our location and we’ll be scattered like so many false and misleading statements broadcast at press gaggles Mohammed watches a squall of robotic love dolls slam into the hillside. They rise from the muck demanding justice. The Professor pulls the latch. The door to the backchannel slides open. The strike force steps through. The space inside the tube is dim and quiet. Hey, says Timmy, why are there no communiqués? It’s empty in here. No babble of languages. No shady deals down by the river there. No complex negotiations slithering at our feet. What gives? Sarah says, This is ominous, but not unexpected. The autocrat now stands fully exposed. All of his dealings, all of his communications, all of his crimes, heresies, depravities, and ignorance; all of his cunning tricks, his contorted psychological strangeness, his infantile remarks and reactions, all of it is now out in the wide open. He must be under serious threat, if not actually entrapped. Because, look over there. She points at a pile of gloves of all kinds. Boris says, The gloves are off! Sarah says, Indeed. We have been in The Cyber so long we have forgotten that it reflects the physical world. The Cyber is largely metaphorical. But the autocrat uses it as a synechdoche, it stands in for a larger sickness. The Professor says, Let’s get our bearings. We want to aim for the power of the Oval. Sarah says, We are on a metonymic journey into the bowels of power. Mohammed says, I don’t know that I want to go there. The Professor cocks his ear at a distant whooshing in the tubes. – Monday, January 6, 2020