From her side of the glass, Silpa could see Gabe and Jak out in the lab, his grin lit by the glow of his screen like some old lech intent on a peepshow. Gabe was beside him, arms crossed disapprovingly, though she continued to watch. The fact that he’d rotated the screen gave Silpa a sickish feeling. No doubt he’d come across more video posted from one of the conflict zones. Most of them had been shot with phones then put online to show soldiers like Guy being beheaded, or blown to bits, or burning in their wrecked Hummers…. The first time he’d found
the site that collected them, he’d excitedly pulled Silpa over to his computer, showing her a video of an American medic applying hand pressure to a soldier’s abdomen to keep his intestines from spilling out. He gave a low whistle. “Oh man,
look at that soft tissue damage.” Suddenly a second medic’s head appeared in the scene, the medic bending in to give mouth-to-mouth to the downed soldier.
“There!” Jak excitedly yelled, pointing at the medic. “Is that him? Is that Guy?” It looked like him but it was hard to tell, the faces of both men hidden by the breath-giving kiss. Then the video jerked, Silpa realizing at the same instant that the video had been taken through the lens of the sniper’s rifle-cam, the jerk—a
recoil—coinciding with a bullet ripping through the heads of both the medic and solider he was helping…. “Let me play it again!” Jak said, as though it were no more real than W.2.
“Are you using the sink?” Silpa asked, standing there with a rack of test tubes. Mohammed looked at her as though she had called him a name before shaking his head. What was up with that? she wondered, turning on the faucet as he walked away. For the last few days he’d been acting weird.
The video had been made by teenagers in Paraguay: a homemade version of Jackass: The Reunion Movie that showed old men doing the same stupid goofs they used to when they were twenty: driving golf carts into head-on collisions, shooting bottle rockets out of their asses—stupid stuff like that. Some of the original Jackass episodes were pretty funny, Gabe had to admit. And she liked their politics—the stunts they pulled to freak out businessmen or bankers or uptight clerks—like the time one of them took a dump in a toilet on the sales floor at Walmart.
But this DIY edition was pathetic: the teenagers had laid the Jackass theme song over their own stupid stunts—taking turns riding a bicycle into a cactus patch—only it was all so pointless there: the boys dirt poor, their hair shaggy and dirty. Their beltless pants had been cut off raggedly at the knees and hung on emaciated frames. Not because the waif-life, refugee look was in as it was in the U.S., but because that part of the world kept getting hotter and hotter ever since the monsoons shut down. Their title—The Land of No Evil—faded away as they flagged down a beat-to-hell pickup truck. Soon they had one end of a rope tied to its bumper, the other end tied to a wooden door lying on the ground. Three of them got on the door as though it were a surfboard. As the Jackass music played, the truck roared off, throwing one immediately; the other two were dragged at high speed across a scrub field, the plume of dirt kicked up by the truck obscuring them as they bounced violently. When it ended, they were so dirt-encrusted and scratched that they looked as though they’d been mauled by jaguars.
“Havin’ fun with no money,” Jak said. “These are the guys that we’re supposed to be afraid of?” he added, referring to RedHat campaigns to scare Americans into invading countries that controlled rare earth elements—Brazil was next, they said—the Lungs of the World. Kill the Lungs and the World Dies, warmongering senators argued, switching from protecting the rights of coal and oil companies, once the planet was past saving, to grabbing what was left. Lots of people thought the U.S. would have invaded already if only because pharmaceutical companies were hot to get the remaining biodiversity. Gabe wasn’t sure what to think about an invasion that sometimes seemed like the right action for wrong motives and at other times a very wrong action for wrong motives; and yet again as an immoral action for immoral reasons but one that would have the morally right consequences. Or at least some of the consequences would be good. Why did everything always have to be so muddy?
In the background she could see the horizon—a flat brown line like the EKG of a dead patient.
“Don’t you ever do any real work around here?” she asked Jak.
“I am working,” he said defensively. “Olympia wanted me to see what else I could find on that woman who first speculated that Phthiraptera saliva gave immunity.” To impress Gabe, he pulled the article out of a heap of papers. “So old I had to have the librarian over at the LoID fax me a hardcopy.” Precambrian feather louse indicates age of avian – dinosaur split. Not only had it never been digitized, but it was buried in a footnote in an article that claimed that dinosaurs were only misidentified birds.
“Olympia already knew that.”
“Yeah, the article gave the coordinates where the entomologist thought she found ancestral bird lice. This is what came up.”
He hit return and the globe on-screen turned as it enlarged Paraguay to show an aerial view of abandoned farmland—so brown she almost asked, “Where’s the forest?”—stupid question. “But the librarian did put me onto a clip that someone posted at the turn of the century.” He brought it up and antique video showed a woman weeping in the rain, kneeling in a clear-cut forest. A nude forest Indian stood behind her, back to the camera, as he shouted at the sky, “Ywy Mará Ey!” Thunder rumbled while a text scrawl said, SAVE WHAT’S LEFT! DONATE NOW! “Her research might have been a dud but this clip was one of the first to go viral—even before Star Wars Kid. They say that the money it raised is what saved the Mbaracayú Biodiversity Corridor from looking like this.” He clicked on the map and the banjo music started again.
“Good dog,” Gabe said, patting his head, then turning back to her own bench. She logged in, then began to eat her yogurt as her email opened. The first was spam that had gotten through the filter. LIVE.NATION: Offering concert tickets worldwide!!!!! Video of some twee-boy TJ—so called XactlySo—using a Z-Game controller—product placement 24/7—to play a technopoem the way some hip-hoppers still played turntables; multicolored filaments morphed to become a dandelion’s white seed globe, then an Earth globe, becoming in turn a map of the Internet, then a live map of everyone on Earth and their VISA
transactions, a crowd of manikin-beautiful posers bobbing in rhythm to industrial trance. One Night Only!!!! Cover: $345 live / $100 virtual.
The ad pissed her off. Just as fashion designers began to co-opt the rags worn by refugees, just as Hummer changed the name of the army trucks they sold from The Destroyer to the H2O-Vehicle, LIVE.NATION had taken on the look of Guerilla Concerts—but none of its politics. They even booked Shasta, the sellout fuck—“Hey man, even rebels gotta eat,” he’d tweeted.
No Exit.
But the very next email had SPAM SPAM SPAM in its subject line—robotically-dumb spam filters sure to quarantine it unless a human, like her, white-listed its sender, as she had done. It was from Sir Spam-a-Lot who took spam for penis enlarging pills, low rate loans, bank transfers from Bottom Billion royalty, or whatever, rearranged their words, then sent them out again as poetry. Today’s poem was itself an ad for a NO.IT.AN.EVIL concert, and she instantly knew how she’d gotten the first. He had hacked the LIVE.NATION ad, rewrote the name backwards, then resent it to his own list. Same night. Same local. An anti-concert concert. Then the email deleted itself. “I’m so there,” she said out loud.