Beast Wars Fugue: America's Fight With The Devil

Mr. Beast pits people against one another as gladiators of poverty. He has made a living from torturing the most vulnerable in society, having them do take after take of epic reaction shots as he dangles the promise of wealth just out of their reach before doing advertisements for the rotten children’s food he peddles at Walmart. For a man naming himself after Aleister Crowley, Mr. Beast was quite bold in his spite for the Christian faith. He had replaced the holy trinity with a children’s entertainer. And behind his emotionless eyes are the storms of Armageddon.

Revelation 13

I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

(this is a reference to the lethal car accident Mr. Beast miraculously walked away from, even though his brain was hanging out)

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

(the dragon is a reference to the internet)

I’m witnessing one of the latest Beast stunts. He has two people trapped in a Perspex box above Devils Lake, North Dakota. The contestants had to live together for 21.8 months, though if one person left, the one who remained would get double the money. Therefore the contestants had been at war against each other, looked on by camera drones and Mr. Beast production staff. Just down the lake coast Mr. Beast fans were cheering, holding up signs, doing Mr. Beast impressions to each other. Today Mr. Beast was there, sometimes waving at them from a distance, the smile never moving or wavering with whatever he was doing. He said some words into a microphone about the contestants having a lovely time together. Then he released hundreds of flies into the box. I turn away.

I am unable to bear witness to the satanic ritual taking place overhead, the cruelty of pitting poor against needy, Mr. Beast himself had farmed maggots from corpses to select the right flies for his diabolical scheme. It was a lampoon of the martyrdom of St. Constantine, a blasphemy that brought a plague to the box to honour Ba'al Zabub, the sixth prince of Hell and lord of Ekron, the patron demon of gluttony and envy. I could feel the satanic energy build up around me. I needed to get out.

Later that day I returned, trying to look at him from across the lake with a set of binoculars. Once I managed to pick him out of the crowd, focus the lens, he stopped talking to a producer and looked directly at me. I threw the binoculars away, running back to my Hyundai Sonata. I wasn’t safe. Mr. Beast was onto me. He was too powerful.  

Escape from Washington D.C.

I had nothing in my pockets or on my feet. I was penniless and didn’t know the time. I walked the streets until morning, sleeping on a park bench as the sun rises. I was woken up a few hours later by a cop, asking my name, identification. I muttered, acting mentally ill, shuffling away.

Everywhere I looked there were cops. Undercover ICE agents, police officers armed with assault rifles, armoured ATVs parked by the roadside with a soldier sticking out the top behind a machine gun. Security drones hovered overhead, broadcasting feeds to AI with facial recognition systems overseen by antiterrorist analysts beneath The Pentagon. Somebody shines a laser in my face and everything flashes absolutely green for a moment.

The streets were going to be hard for a bum like me. I walk up an alley, and find a single shoe. It was too big for me, but I took it anyway. I needed money, a phone, transport. At the moment I only had a left shoe. But I was keen to play the game. This wasn't the first time I had operated in an urban area in this capacity. When viewed at with a different angle, the city seemed bountiful, there was everything you could ever want and all you needed to do was take it. I walked past a shoe shop, stealing a single shoe. I was using my entrepreneur survival skills already. Next thing, money.

I stood across the road from a bank, smoking half a cigarette someone had left for me on the floor. Money. If I had money, I had options. Even a single dollar would multiply my current funds infinitely. Sure, you could spend time finding money on the floor, hunting for discarded coins and lost notes, maybe even some other items. You could ask people for spare money they might have, or even threaten them to give you money. But all of this was chickenshit stuff. I didn't want to grind out side quests for a few dollars here and there. I wanted a fat wad of cash. And the quickest way to get a fat wad of cash was by doing tricks. I entered the bar behind me, flicking the cigarette end at the bartender.

"Do you fuck with street magic?"

"Sure!"

"Okay, do you have a hundred-dollar bill?"

"Let me just check the cash register." Says the old timey barkeep. He has a little red waistcoat on. I look around. There's nobody else here except three men sitting nearby. They're cops, of course. I wave at them and one starts fingering the trigger of his gun, its actually slightly sensual, but I look away and back at the hundred-dollar bill.

"Okay, watch closely." I say, taking it off him. I hold the bill aloft, pull it tight twice and show the pigs sitting nearby. I then fold it up.

"May I have a beer?" The barkeep obliges, passing me a badly poured pint of Czech lager. I look around the room theatrically, tilt my head back, and place the folded triangle of the hundred-dollar bill on my tongue, before slowly retracting it into my mouth. I then down the beer in a single gulp. The barkeep starts to cheer, but I wave at him. I haven't finished yet. I open my mouth and pull out a folded triangle of paper. Except it is totally blank. 

"The beer must have washed the ink away!" Shouts one of the cops. They all lean forward, turn between each other and whisper.

"Can you do it again?" They ask. 

"Of course. But please, I must first use the bathroom."

Whilst in the bathroom I vomit the beer and the hundred-dollar bill back up, plucking it out of the brown liquid and squeezing it slightly. I carefully fold the bill, place it in my pocket, then from my other pocket pull out a blank piece of paper the same dimensions as a bill. I fold it up, place it in the roof of my mouth and go back to the bar.

After twenty minutes I've made a thousand dollars. This was one of the best tricks you could pull, the art of illusion. By using some rudimentary street magic, I had cleared out most of the till and everybody's wallets, big bills only. With my pockets stuffed with cash, I follow signs, end up at a bus station. These are long distance buses, the people here are sleeping, on their phones, waiting. I join them. I do not sleep.

I do not sleep. I look. I look at everything that surrounds me and think it is beautiful and perfect and the moment I am in seems to shine. I feel my own place amongst this paradise and understand that I matter and are also perfect and beautiful and for a moment everything seems as if it is in a painting in a gilded frame on the wall of a gallery.

The bus comes. I get on, sit by a window, I keep looking out from the window. I feel a person sit next to me but never know what they look like as I never turn away from the window as we all travel South on the 95, past Quantico and the Potomac River, through Richmond and Petersburg, toward North Carolina.

I get off at Roanoke Rapids, check myself in at a Holiday Inn. I lie on my bed, the air conditioning providing white noise against the traffic. I can’t get to sleep. I go out and the night is warm, big fat insects fly around a security light. I walk through an empty car lot, past a gas station, fast food places that are closed. There didn’t seem to be anything here. The road had taken over the town, swallowing it up into empty stretches of asphalt, traffic lights hung from wires that bounced in the wind, sequencing red, yellow, green, yellow. I was eager to spend money, but there was nowhere to spend it. I’m back at the motel room, writing my notes on stationery I had stole from the White House. I fall asleep whilst watching QVC, waking up hours later with the volume somehow turned to the maximum. Somebody bangs on the wall between our rooms. I go outside and look through the window and there is nobody there.

Baby Boomers; Late Bloomers Or Irrelevant Rumours?

I watch hour after hour of television pilots from the various networks, the blu-ray discs lay scattered around the glass coffee table of my penthouse apartment. I'm watching an extremely light detective show in which an elderly woman investigates teen crime at a local high school. I watch as she opens a door and is hit in the face with a cloud of smoke.
"Smells like my grandsons car!" she says. I scream at the television and throw a blu-ray as hard as I can at the screen. I throw it so hard it goes faster than the speed of light and momentarily, yet infinitely, exists at every point in space at the same time before recombining inches away from the camera lens on the set four weeks ago, flies another few feet before hitting the old woman in the nose. I then grab handfuls of the discs and throw them out of the window, letting it rain bullshit onto the streets.

There once was a time when teenagers were hip and every strand of marketing was directed at them. To get the 16-24 audience in a prime time slot was the dream of every television exec this side of Death Valley. Yet times were changing. Young people didn't watch television, downloaded all their favourite films and were slowly dwindling in a post-recession economic meltdown. Rather than hanging out at the hippest clubs you'd be more likely to find teens hanging out under bridges offering to sell themselves for a cup of coffee. And the people on the other end of this illicit barterdom? The elderly. They had more money than they knew what to do with and half of them didn't even remember that they had it. Kept alive with futuristic machines that turned back the clock, the vampire myth was becoming more of a reality each day, sometimes literally as children would have their blood swapped with that of centenarians in order to keep them alive.

With this in mind the future world of media has took a turn for the old. Rather than the ultra-violent non-linear post-modern slanged-up shows we're used to seeing grace our tv screens, networks are now focusing on a more slower paced form of entertainment. The shows are often populated by protagonists that are over sixty, the villains are young people, the plots amble along apparently aimlessly and climax in a snappy line delivered with a smile rather than an adrenaline roaring cliffhanger. And it's not only television that's acting old. Radio waves are now being filled with old time music, cinemas project movies twice as big for those with bad eyesight and social networks are now jammed with the elderly spewing racist nonsense every second. This problem won't go away overnight. In fact it will never go away. The population is getting increasingly old and will begin to outnumber the young. I took to the streets to find out what the public thought about it.

"It's a good thing I think, I mean, everyone gets old. Why not make more stuff for them?"
"My grandma watched Breaking Bad."
"Don't they already show repeats all the time?"
"I think it's a good idea."

So there you are. Four people said those things so therefore all public opinion must conform. Yet I couldn't help but feel as if the elderly were a growing problem. Before the decade is over, 1 in 4 people will be over the age of 80. That means one of these people will have to look after the geezer, another will have to tell them what to do and the other person will die of starvation. Is this a just world, or should we just lead the elderly to underground crypts and hope that they evolve some kind of subterranean civilization beneath our feet? Like most things, the correct answer is perhaps somewhere in the middle.

A History Of Hollywood

The city streets were shape shifting, caught in a transmorphing temporal wormhole of culture generated through the Hollywoodland media cluster. The combination of population density, money, technology, crime, topology and cinema had made Los Angeles transcend from reality into a metaphor, exemplifying humanity's utter present, using the city as canvas. It's architecture a continuous set for the people acting out potentials, the asphalt and concrete and glass and metal sprawling outwards, increasing in citymass hour by hour. There are times in the year when stood at precise points across the city that its entirety reflects back at you and you are caught in the composite eye of Los Angeles and it burns you with a million reflections from windows in high rise buildings, the shafts of light are caught against your retinas then stabbed into your brain, the concentrated beam melting through your neurons like satan's lasers.

The city of Los Angeles. Home to Hollywoodland, built in 1902 by the Warner Brothers. The Hollywood sign now rests on the side of mountain, an old ad gimmick, white letters arranged amongst rocks and scrub land. It is a kitsch icon, a set of modernist erected fonts each as tall as a building that further went on to dub it's surroundings as Hollywood in 1947. Hollywood is home to several film studios, including the empty sets of the olden days you may have seen in pictures at your local cinema. All of the Hollywood executives ride around in expensive cars and they wear nice suits, they have the final say in the taste in style as they're the ones that decide which film is going to be made! The producers often have big piles of money stacked up on their desk, ready to give to the best director. The director then takes the money away and begins to hire writers, camera crew and actors to be in his picture. These stars and starlets of Hollywood are as follows: Johnny Depp, Simon Agby, Brad Pitt, Joanna Lumley, Sarah Jessica Parker, Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, Johnny Knoxville, Angela Carter, Channing Tatum, Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, John Travolta, Courtney Cox, Nicholas Cage and Michael Cera. The film executives often spend a few hours a day looking through glossy black and white photos of potential actors for their films, muttering to themselves whilst smoking cigars. Meanwhile back on the sets of Universal Studios the film will begin to be made whilst the marketing gurus begin to advertise the picture, using social media, alternative reality games, merchandise, trailers, the web, billboards, newspaper articles, events and a word of mouth campaign. The film will be broken down into its basic components before being reconstructed by CGI. All of the best films nowadays are 3D and shown on cinemas around the globe, with 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound and comfortable chairs. Some cinemas even offer popcorn to munch throughout the movie viewing experience as you whisper to your friends;
“This movie rocks!”
“I don't know what to say, I love it.”
“The ending...it's a killer!”
“That was one seriously funny movie.”
Viewers are then persuaded to go home and think about the film as they lie in bed, unable to get to sleep. They can't stop thinking about it! For the next few days it will be all they will be able to talk about, often stopping people in public, physically restraining them by the shoulders, and telling them about the film. They would speak immensely quickly and sometimes get their words jumbled up, often being pushed to the ground by other people due to the enthusiasm they display in talking about the movie. There bodies would begin to convulse and blood begin to leak from the ears, nose and throat, muffling their voices in the sticky iron redness. The eyeballs would melt out of their sockets and the face would begin to turn inside out, the roof of the mouth being pushed out of the lips as the entire skull cracks. The organs begin to dissolve the skin and tissue surrounding them, displaying a bed of human entrails sitting in the body cavity that thump and twitch along to the rapidly beating heart and everything begins to bleed and rip itself open and scream. The director walks in front of the camera and yells 'Cut! That's a wrap.'
The actor sits up in his prosthetic latex suit.“How did I do?”
“You were great!” says the camera man. The crew begins to clap and the actor looks around, smiling.

Fun Day Out At La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea tar pits have been excavated for the last one hundred years, the black bones of animals are dredged from the deep using a series of chains attached to a crane. Tar divers doggy paddle in the molten blackness, helping ease out the skulls of giant wolves onto the shore for visitors to see. The pits reside in Hancock Park, halfway down the Miracle Mile, next door to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The odour of the tar pits hangs in the air like an ancient death, the ever grave churns beneath the boiling sun. I finish my coke and hurl the can onto the heavy oil before walking towards the Page Museum. It's quite busy, families run backwards and forwards between the exhibits, the children point excitedly at the hundreds of bones scattered around. Teenagers chill out radically around an enormous woolly mammoth, repeating internet catchphrases to each other or swapping e-mail addresses. Retired people are ushered around and they look thoughtfully at the great condor, magnificent in it's quiet existence. Museum attendants are constantly smiling, eyelids as far back as they will go, hundreds of teeth shown, well moisturised hands ready to touch people on the shoulder as they are pointed in the right direction. I see my contact, Vernon Chavéz, gazing at the ribcage of a camel.
“Vernon?” I say. He turns around, face sweating and chemically thin. We shake hands and begin walking through the museum, passing an animatronic sabre tooth cat that jerkily nudges a sort of bear.

We enter the restroom. Vernon checks beneath the stalls and once sure nobody else is there he puts his briefcase on the side of the sink.
“You got the money?” he asks. I put my own briefcase on the side. “Let me check.” I pop open the lid and show him sixty thousand dollars in unmarked bills.
“Now you show me.” I say. He checks the door before opening the clasps on his case. Inside the aubergine coloured interior are three jars of wasps.
“Impressive. Most impressive.” I say. He takes my briefcase and I stand in the bathroom, watching the wasps waiting in each jar. I take out a pair of ear defenders from my pocket and put them on.

I pass an enormous puppet built by the Jim Henson's creature workshop, Smilodon Fatalis, It is accompanied by a smaller puppet, Nibbles. An old man plays a harmonica. A girl lets go of a balloon. A young couple kiss each other. Faces flash by. I crouch down onto the cold floor and open up the suitcase, taking out each jar carefully. Some movement catches my eye, I look up to see a security guard wearing a khaki shirt running towards me, although I am unable to hear his shouts. People are beginning to move away. I take one of the large jars and open the lid, pouring the wasps out. They begin to fly away before hitting the floor. I do the same with the other two jars and then begin to make my way through the crowd of people around me. The wasps meanwhile begin to search for food genetically installed into insect brains. For those wasps each ear is like a flower for a bee, a fruitful canal for them was a valuable source of protein. They flew from ear to ear, their thumb-sized bodies clinging onto the earlobe as they carefully fed on the people around them. Panic gripped the entire museum, people clutching at their heads as they ran full pelt through the corridors, others were caught in the swarm of wasps and crouched close to the ground, faces contorted into strange grimaces. In the confusion I made my way towards the Research and Collections area.

There are thousands of boxes, each containing a fossil pulled from the tar pit. I make my way quickly past the bones of rodents, dogs, giant birds and lizards, the preserved shells of the invertebrates and into the flora section. It takes me a few minutes but I have quickly filled my pockets with the preserved seeds of almost fifty species of prehistoric plants. I would need to send them to Korea to be processed properly. I make my way back into the museum, it's corridors empty now save for the constant flight of wasps.

Hollywood Cambrian

He removed his teeth with the calmness of regularity and turned back to the interviewer. "The reptillians live amongst us hiding in suits made of lubricated skin. I am a freedom fighter and have decided to go public, blow this whole conspiracy wide open." he said, sliding the wig off his head. The radio presenter watched in horror as a crocodile man emerged from the Ted Danson suit.

The Kingdom, The Power And The Glory

Scientists have recently discovered that through the act of meditation one can learn to direct ions from where the hemispheres of the brain meet in order to move small pieces of iron through telemagnetism. It is thought that although this wouldn't have much application in building large commercial and industrial buildings it would come in handy for fiddling about with little ibbly bits inside the smallest machines. Scientists are also questioning as to what effect machines have on pushing negatively charged ions into our cortex holes.

In Touch With Nature

Jennifer Fairholme recently tried to get back in touch with nature by trying to survive without technology. Naked and mute she stumbled through the forest, cutting her feet on broken branches as she searched for food. At night she lay curled up by a tree, hoping that no animal would attack her. This lasted for a few days until she started to raid the bins in the suburbs where she used to live, occasionally scared away by a security light. People still see her from time to time, rushing away from car headlights and the local rambling club. She's doing a lot better now.

Millenium Parade

We walk through the aisles of motorized automated corpses lying on steel tables. “These are famous celebrities” explains Ray Arthur, head of the plant. “This one here is Lady Gaga." I look down at the naked cyborg body for Gaga and can't help but be amazed at it's lifelesslikedness. But yet, I knew it would be walking around and talking after Lady Gaga suffered from a fatal accident or began dying of a terminal illness for instance. The cyborg replacements waited for the brains to simply be inserted in the skull dome before being activated. This method was thought of as more glamarous than undergoing multiple surgeries to enhance the body with implants like metal bones, hydraulic legs or telescopic eyeballs. In fact people would commit suicide in order to live as a cyborg. I asked Ray what he thought of this. “Often a person can't wait to take some of these bodies for a test drive.” said Ray, smiling. I ask him whether he is a cyborg or not. “Well, that's the point isn't it. The point of the movie Blade Runner. That's why every cyborg is programmed to answer that question straight away. So, no.” I wonder. Have I seen Blade Runner? I begin to watch it on the holographic projection inside my computerized face sheath and carry on with the interview.

Black Corridor

2034 – Man living on the moon
2076 - Personalized Teleportation
2024 - Cyborg exoskeleton
2030 - Robotic Endoskeleton
2017 - Augmented Reality inducing contact lenses
2017 - Glasses-less 3D
2028 - Computer Intelligence
2019 -Self driving cars
2020 - Robotic Humanoid Soldiers
2041 - Memory uploading onto computers
2066 - Man landing on the sun
2100 - Faster than light travel
2100 - Time Travel
2022 - Mind reading
2028 - Cure for hunger
2030 - Communication with animals
2050 - Understanding of time
2039 - Genetic modification
2019 - Cure for sleep
2100 - Cure for death
2038 - Holographic objects that work (e.g speakers, power tools)
2053 - Ability to pass through solid matter
2026 - Cure for cancer
2018 - Ability to see beyond visible spectrum of light
2017 - Ability to hear beyond audible range of sound
2032 - Ability to perceive time slower/faster
2060 - Poverty solved
2031 - Atlantic Bridge
2017 – Hydrogen powered cars