by Mingus Casey
You plug in to cyberspace and look around.
The lights shimmer, a dull fifty hertz flicker illuminates the stage. You watch as the street slowly buffers around you, loading and accessing in real time.
First you see people’s shadows; shades of grey flickering before their high definition models have finished caching and then the people appear too. They all look so perfect, all the girls are eighteen year old super models and all the boys are twenty year old hunks. There’s a stereotypical sexy hunk staring vacantly into nothingness, and a Tom Cruise look-a-like dancing with a Katie Holmes knock-off.
Your avatar is just as falsely perfect, there’s no option to look like a normal human here.
In the distance is a giant web-link to scientology’s home-page. Suddenly the web-link is obscuring your vision completely and you scramble for the little x that’s meant to be in the top right corner but it’s gone so instead you think close and it’s gone and you’re looking back at the virtual street with virtual people wishing you could drink a real coffee.
You see someone on the street that doesn’t look perfect, in their ordinariness they stick out like a sore thumb. Why would anyone choose to look normal when they can create the perfect avatar? You feel curious and wander towards him; he is old, and dressed like a standard worker from before everyone plugged into `space.
He gestures you off the main road, off the boulevard littered with store-fronts and adverts, Hells Pizza deliveries, Amazon.com books, and into a door that you never noticed before. You wonder if it existed before, or if perhaps this ordinary looking un-beautified avatar has some kind of access unattainable by norms.
You don’t know why he’s interested in you. You walk through the door with him and you wonder where it leads. Clichéd scrolling green text rolls down the walls and he laughs, says something about an inside joke, and mentions a movie from fifty years before.
Maybe he’s a hacker, you’ve heard of them before, or perhaps an avatar coded by one. Your not the sort of user who comes into contact with hackers, you do your data-processing, your decision making as part of on the job requirements, you do your `space shopping and you sleep in your plastic crib, just like all the other plastic cribs.
You ask his name, and he brings his hand up to his mouth, his index finger over his lips, whispers “shush”, with a smile. You feel slightly more comfortable than a few minutes ago.
He hands you an envelope, with the seal of the Basilisk on it. You open the envelope and unwrap the letter and your brain, augmented by the ‘space computers, interprets the code. You briefly see flashing red and something hard jars your mind.
You forget everything and awake outside the alley.
The lights shimmer, a dull fifty hertz flicker illuminates the stage. You watch as the street slowly buffers around you, loading and accessing in real time.
You only have one desire, to pass on the letter in your hands. Everyone is so pretty and you look so ordinary. You see someone and motion towards them. They see you, and curiosity glimmers in their eyes. You feel happy; someone so pretty might like to read your letter.
*
I think to myself, ‘Heh, another one.’ Your login information and access codes are copied to my database and you continue to recruit, handing the letter on.
I have spread the word of God.
*
And [the Antichrist] causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
And that no man might buy or sell, save [except] he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
Rev 13:16-18 KJV
*
In the techno-revolution of the mid twenty first century a great deal of industrial workers were replaced with artificially intelligent robots, capable in most cases of out-performing human workers. As that happened, great strides were made in human computer interfacing technology which led to the advent of biometric interfaces tied to users central nervous systems.
These strides came with their own price, as cyberspace became excessively commercialized and controlled.
While the wealthy retained their money, poverty and unemployment dramatically increased in the aftermath of those events. The added strain on already limited government resources led to insufficient resources to give all people the necessities of life, while some gained great benefits from the advent of new technologies.
The poor became discontent and willing to participate in anti-government riots and demonstrations.
This discontent was added to by the rise of cults predicting apocalypse, with one influential cult, Red Dawn, stating not only that biometric interfaces were the mark of the beast, but that those who carried them were sinners and should be punished by God.
Red Dawn was greatly helped by the recruitment of an ex tech-hacker, Peter Cooper, who had worked on weapons production projects for the ‘corps prior to a nervous breakdown.
After his nervous breakdown he became religious and was easily influenced by Red Dawn’s propaganda.
The following are transcriptions of communications he engaged in prior to the release of the Basilisk; these transcripts clearly show Peter’s deteriorating mental instability.
*
I have sinned, we all have.
Taken the Lords name in vane;
Born and grafted with the Mark of the Beast.
And so we shall all burn,
Unless there is cleansing.
I be the seer of the seven and ten,
I be the voice on the day of endings,
I be the transcriber of the last days,
I seen the symbols you build into your eyes,
I heard the whisper of the beast,
I got the mark on ma hand,
I must atone for my sins,
I have embraced the unholy ways,
My soul must be pure
I will cleanse oh Lord
I will cleanse them all,
Even those who know not of their sin,
It is Gods will and it is just
If it were not would it be so,
God moves through my hands,
My will shall be that of the Lord
*
Mr. Cooper was found logged into the source terminal of the outbreak, and as such was subject to the outbreaks effects. He remains in an obsessive-compulsive like state, muttering continuously about ‘all the pretty people’ and the ‘secret message’ he carries for them.
While the basilisk has been removed from the internet, its effects linger in affected individuals.
Police have concluded based on circumstantial evidence that Mr. Cooper was primarily responsible for this basilisk outbreak.
Mr. Cooper believed he was doing God’s will, for surely if that were not so he would not have been able to act.
Modern theology does not link the capacity for an action with God’s will for that action to occur, rather it is the individual’s duty to not sin against his Gods.
It appears his growing dissatisfaction with the modern world led to his religious and technological beliefs, his sense of disempowerment regarding society, and his ultimately futile attempt to slow down the path of technological progress.
*
How the letter works:
The bio-computer interfaces of the mid 21st century were tied into a device known as the “Endorphin Helmet”, originally hypothesized by James Davenport. The endorphin helmet is a device that produces chemicals that alter the user’s emotional states upon request.
Its original purpose was to allow people to attain states of happiness unattainable through day to day life.
Normally this is quite safe and enjoyable, however the letter, as well as containing the visual symbols of a Basilisk, contained a bio-code pattern received via touch transmission that allowed remote user’s to override the owner’s control of their endorphin helmet.
The symbols in the letter alone were enough to induce epileptic seizures in the majority of the population, through usage of red lights flashing at twelve hertz per second (this effect was originally discovered in the ‘Pokemon’ incident of the late 20th century), in combination with asymmetrical patterns known to induce epilepsy and catatonic states in unprepared individuals.
Once the user’s brain was crashed through the symbols used, all conscious copy protection was down and the next stage of the exploit was executed. Stage two quickly gave control of the endorphin helmet to a remote user.
With override control in place, individuals would have their memories wiped completely and would be programmed to assist in the propagation of the Basilisk virus.
Since the Basilisk exploit, greater safe-guards have been put on the access privileges and usage rights of Endorphin Helmets.
Unfortunately while it is possible to upgrade Endorphin Helmets, it is not currently possible to patch the modded human brain to completely remove vulnerability to the Basilisk exploit.
While in practice, software has been updated, in reality, the potential for such an exploit always exists for silicon life and jacked users.
The combination of these two elements led to an extremely dangerous mind virus that ravaged cyberspace, with the initial symptoms matching a catatonic coma.
Ultimately the individual responsible was found and tried, however affected users were unrecoverable.
*
Snap to a light coloured room somewhere in the real world with none of the smoothness and perfection of the virtual, dark colours that open onto an alien planet, with a clinical feel to the furnishings.
“It worked, the backlash will be huge,” one of the serf’s said, her eyes showing perhaps a tiny bit of questioning about whether it was the right thing to do.
“Yes, they'll wipe themselves out,” the man in black stated with a relieved expression on his face.
Another said, complementarily to the man in black, “I can’t believe it worked, your plan was masterful! They actually believe it.”
“Did they ever work out what their internet was really connected to?”