[UA] Re: Enigma

[Stuart Anderson]

Peter Hindman wrote:

>    I'm not sure what this has to do with the subject any more, but...
>
>    A classic take on the 'viral message' is the short story 'Nothing But
> Gingerbread Left' by Henry Kuttner, where a certain string of nonsense is
> turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
>    On a similar note, I once had an idea for a story in which a key
> fragment of the King in Yellow gets incorporated into an email virus.
> Never wrote it, though.

    I'm stuck on the fourth wheel. A viral message with an intentionally
incomplete genetic code. So what part of the message is it *not* rewriting,
and what does that tell us? An attempt to discover something by inference? An
attempt to urge a mutation of the virus? Was the fourth wheel corrupted
somehow and unusable? would its theft be required for decoding the virus?
    I can see the characters being toured through some bizarre literary
'Andromeda Strain' complex, passing a room with a million monkeys at
typewriters. Deaf, illiterate agents would be airlifted to viral hot zones to
try and quarantine every electronic device, piece of paper, semaphore flag
and refrigerator magnet in hopes of isolating communication. The Cone of
Silence would be employed.
    Ten years in the past, Bill Bourroughs is outside the complex, sitting on
a gorilla box full of ammo, firing into the horde of virally-infected zombies
large, low-velocity wadcutters--probably .44 specials--cast around randomized
cut-up messages on microfilm, straight into the medulla oblongata. "It's a
100% effective cure," he growls in that flat Missouri twang, "no living
patients still suffer."
    Ten years in the future, the survivors have mutated and communicate
purely chemically, like bees. We have immanentized the eschalon, just in time
to devote our heightened group consciousness to our new insect overlords. All
but a few beta drones who huddle in basements, stealthily randomizing their
communications using dice and preventing traces by masking their
neurochemistry with foreign substances. It's so alien, and yet so familiar .
. .
    Maybe that's more of an OTE scenario.
--Stu


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