by H. G. Bells
I was there to try and show the world that it was okay. We, the media I mean, knew that we needed to calm the fuck down. We saw we were on the edge of the panic, and we didn’t want to be the ones to tip it over the edge into madness, not for the sake of viewership or advertising or whatever bullshit like that. So we went there all quiet like, not even interviewing people; we just watched and recorded, and tried to capture a sense of calm while the place still felt sane. Ordinary people standing in solidarity. Marching peacefully. Holding funny signs.
It was pretty nice at first, a show of support, a gathering together to try and feel some sense of we’re not alone. And then came our one fuckup. Or at least the first, biggest fuckup. We were so set in our ways that we couldn’t ignore a celebrity story; Alec Crips, actor extraordinaire and BBC honorary mascot, died of an OD from taking things to stave off the effects of the insomnia, the very thing the general public was trying to do. Christ for some reason it wasn’t real enough, but if the celebrities weren’t able to save themselves, what hope did the common man have? That was the tipping point for London. In other cities it was a different trigger, but in London, that was when the great big tired turned into Panic with a capital P.
The madness in London was enough to spur the rest of them on. They got huge, pulling people in as riots do, even if many of them had no original intent of joining. These mindless, barely functioning madmen, sleep deprived and feeling the first pangs of desperation, felt the pull of the crowd, and found their adrenaline kick in, felt their pulse race, and found that they felt alive again.
I saw men in suits wield crowbars, smashing anything in their way like they had been born to do it. I saw a gang of older women, all with identical perms, beating the shit out of a car with a selection of canes and golf clubs. Always there was the youth leading the pack. They had the fuck-the-man ingenuity closer to the forefront of them anyway, not having stomped it back to participate fully in polite society yet, and boy did they let their urges fly. They were goddamned creative about their destruction.
Homemade explosives went off all around us on the outskirts of the crowd (thank Christ it was just on the outskirts—not like in a lot of other cities whose rioters hadn’t perfected the goddamn art of making a proper fuse). Molotov cocktails were being thrown like confetti. If London wasn’t so grey and concrete it might have burned down, but nothing greatly flammable was hit, in the city proper anyway. Some of the Molotovs I’d actually call cute. Little single-serving bottles full of cool-burning rubbing alcohol made for a flash-in-the-pan effect rather than an ignition source. Someone in the crowd had a sense of flair I guess, to go with some thread of sanity they were still clinging to.
Glass everywhere. Any window on ground level was smashed as we passed. Then there was that unfortunate building where the crowd got in and went up up up—when they broke that huge plate glass window on the fourth floor and it fell away and down onto the crowd below—just terrible. I got some good shots of that though; that guy with one of his arms sheared clear off—maybe you know it, was one of mine.
It was bloody and angry and terrible, but of course it was temporary; each person only had to participate for a few hours to keep the whole thing going. I stayed with it from beginning to end; we went through the downtown, out into the ‘burbs, the rich houses taking quite a bitter beating (some larger and more serious Molotovs were let loose there—another layer of anger, one at the growing class divide, rearing its head with a satisfying outlet for expression at last).
So the riots were fueled by pulling in people wherever they went, even as others dropped out from exhaustion or injury, there were always more in their paths to join in.
I knew we were fucked when we went back towards downtown; it was a lost cause. I took more speed and tried to keep up, hoping it wouldn’t be too much longer—how many hours of that could I take, goddamnit. It was worth it though . . .
I suppose it’s to my credit that I at least paused after I got the footage. After it was safe in my camera I took it back to the studio to have a look, privately. And when I knew what I had captured, I did pause. I didn’t just turn it over. I sat a good long while, wondering if I should destroy it. Even if I handed it over, I wasn’t sure they’d air it. There were many decisions that had to happen to get those shots on the air in front of the whole world, and I had already made the first one, by keeping my camera rolling as it happened. The second decision, to hand it over to my producers, I thought about, then agonized over, head bowed in the blue light of the monitor in the tiny screening room.
In the end, wouldn’t there be other footage of it? Or of something similar enough? Eventually the world was going to see it or something like it. And I knew it wouldn’t be as good as my footage.
Yes, the footage of the mass of jumpers off the top of Tower Bridge was mine. It was the most iconic of the locations where such horror took place. All over the city there were dozens of people jumping to their deaths, spurred on by the crowd around them or even in some cases pushing at their backs. Some of the mass jumps were not entirely voluntary, I’m sure. I had filmed murder, or at least manslaughter. I could have scrapped it.
But the shots of Tower Bridge were too perfect, the golden light of sunrise too beautiful, the way they sailed past the shouting crowd leaning on that blue railing over the Thames too amazing.
I was covering it as best I could. I know it triggered others, but that was the reality of it. It would have happened eventually. People had a right to know. So sue me.
Boomsticks beat petitions any day of the apocalypse; WE TAKE; WE TAKE; WE TAKE
—Sticky notes on the windows of the Phoenix Water
Supply Building, Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Report: Alive in Phoenix, Arizona. Saw massive governmental/military power abuse. City remains in the control of the Reformed Arizona State Protectorate Militia. Suspect they have a nuclear weapon; don’t come unless you know what you’re doing.
Day 4. Plane crash.
Nearly concurrent bombing at the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce.
Plane crash likely accidental, bombing likely intentional to capitalize on the chaos.
Militia took over the city, using both the plane crash and the bombing as lures to attack the city’s first responders. Police killed, fire fighters killed, but paramedics rounded up and taken hostage. Anyone with medical background plucked up out of their jobs, tossed into vans.
Military rolled in on Day 5. Killed bulk of militia in the course of three hours, recovered the hostage paramedics, abducted entire staff of all hospitals and medical clinics. Took city’s medical professionals to work on cure? Rolled out approx. six hours after arrival.
Central city fire was between 7th Ave and the 10; South as far as E. Baseline Road, North and spread just past Washington. Military started the fire? Or remaining militia?
Managed to flee to desert bunker.
Writing to propose an addendum to the Constitution; will be willing to testify in court as to the nature of the “well-regulated militia” that destroyed Phoenix.
Say again: they have a nuclear weapon, use extreme caution if attempting to liberate Phoenix.
I was either a god or public enemy number one. People wanted answers and were willing to beg, bribe, or beat them out of me. Not that I had any answers. We didn’t exactly have a huge budget. Well I mean now, sure, but before . . .
—Notes from Dr. Jayasurena, Sleep Lab, Columbo National Hospital, Sri Lanka
As requested, I’ve sent you a redux of this chapter with some of the terms defined. I knew we had our own language, but I guess I didn’t realize how strange it must look to someone not from the internet.
That’s right, from the internet. It seems so natural for me to say, because it’s how we, denizens of the internet, actually say it. We’re from the internet. There’s no borders there. Sure, we still show our loyalty to our own countries; ‘MURICA has a big part of the online culture, Canada is sorry, of course Australia is upside-do
wn, and don’t even get me started on Madagascar. Those fuckers, always closing their goddamn ports. (In reference to Pandemic II, an online game where you engineer a plague in an attempt to wipe out the entire human race. Madagascar is notoriously hard to infect.)
But there we were, already all together, already sharing in-jokes and this amazing culture that differed depending on what sites you frequented. When it hit, we were already one step ahead.
Denizens of the internet were right at home with all that. Staying awake and trouble sleeping. The boards (message boards, where users can have back and forth conversations, using text, links, images, videos, whatever they want to use to contribute to the topic at hand) were the funnest they’d ever been. Reaction threads went on for ages. Whole memes sprang up and were beat to death within hours, as opposed to the usual days. (Memes: image macros with text superimposed over them.)
No Sleep Suzie and No Sleep Stuart, Insomnia Wolf (instead of Insanity Wolf), all sorts of new ones. And all the old ones got a good ol’ shoop (shoop: shop, short for “photoshop” [Adobe:dealwithit.gif]) to make them look tired. Condescending Wonka (an image macro of Willy Wonka with his chin on his fist, looking quite hoity-toity and condescending, usually used to belittle someone for their unjustified complaints) got a shoop and was all over the front page.
“Tell me again how tired you are” and “Oh you didn’t sleep last night? / Let me accommodate you in all things.” and variations on that were soon overused, and we switched to less on-the-nose stuff. Where Insanity Wolf used to be things like “Plays paintball / Uses knife to conserve ammo” now it was Insomnia Wolf, and told tales like “Played on my Hardcore Deathban server (gaming slang for a multi-player server where you are banned if you die, even once) / Naked (without armor)” which could have actually been an original Insanity Wolf; insomnia or no, those servers are brutal.
As usual, the boards went on the hunt. The witch hunt. The bad guy hunt. Conspiracy theories were everywhere and people were quick to jump on the hate train for whatever the villain-du-jour was. Of course it was Monsanto. Of course it was fracking (fracking is not an internet term, nor is it, in this context, from Battlestar Galactica——fracking is the process of fracturing rock using pressurized liquid, to extract gas. Goddamn I sound like a textbook or some shit. The internet does not approve of your ignorance. iamverysmart.jpg). Of course it was the Republicans, the Democrats, the Jews, the Nazis back from their decades-long hibernation and back to take over the earth. Jesus, my medium of choice is a fucked up place a lot of the time, I know, but hell, it was interesting.
The Twitch streams (Twitch is a service that lets people live-cast their screens, used primarily for spectator gaming) for all the big gamers were insane. People watched Starcraft matches around the clock, which wasn’t anything new, except that the people helming the matches were on for just as long. That shit is exhausting; I have no idea how they kept it up like that.
TF2 (Team Fortress 2, an FPS [First Person Shooter] made by Valve), Rocket League, CSGO (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), basically anything with a loyal online fan base went wild. Games added new hats. New hats! Players love new hats. New game types sprung up, fan-made and player enforced. Most were called variations on GO TO BED. One of the areas of a map was designated the bed, and players had to get their whole team to be on it, in the form of bodies. So the opposing team would try and prevent them from dying on the bed. Someone at Valve had the wherewithal to actually insert an actual bed into the game, big and soft looking, with a comforter adorned with the face of their founder, known as Lord Gaben. It was fun at first but after the days wore on it got too depressing, so they switched back to good old CTF (Capture the Flag)–style games, or just Slayer.
YouTube was full of every kind of thing under the sun, as usual, with a heavy emphasis on talking about sleep and sharing possible solutions. Or just ways of trying to keep your chin up.
Twitter and Instagram were insane. They were already insane to begin with; the short-form videos on Twitter, Instas were usually kept short as well; the brief flashes of commentary was an inexhaustible flow of insight into our situation. I’ve seen some hilarious stuff on there. For a while, posting videos of people sleeping was a thing. We all knew it wasn’t real, but it was oddly comforting. Then the ones of people being woken up started to trend, and those few-second clips had more of value to say about what people were going through than any of the news media were capturing in their round-the-clock updates.
Not that there was much to update . . . And still the hoard sought out explanations, or at least scapegoats. Tumblr and the chans (community of message boards, famously known for 4chan) got into an all-out digital war over some pretty crackpot theories. Enough that it leaked into the other areas of the net, and people started to assemble real explanations, real plans.
When the internet vigilantes got it in their heads that somehow there was a vaccine, or a cure or some shit, god help us. I mean, the internet, our collective wisdom, our collective stupidity, had had real life ramifications before. I’d helped flood a children’s oncology ward with pizza once. I participated in the world’s largest Secret Santa every year. Fuckin’ 4chan solved a goddamn murder once. For real. We did good, but the things that float to the top are the times we screw up. Ruining someone’s life, you know, like the fuckin’ Fedoral Bureau of Investigation (fedoras = neckbeards = NINJAs [No Income No Job or Assets, a primarily Millennial demographic on the rise before the apocalypse]) on Reddit mis-IDing the Boston Bomber, that sort of shit.
So of course there was a cure, or a vaccine, or some goddamn expecto patronum that we could use to fix it all. After just a few days into it, people were desperate. Rumors spread fast when they’re something everyone wants to hear.
We organized raids. Loosely organized, you understand. We had times and places, but it was anarchy. It was a bunch of kids. The oldest among us were the man-children too stupid to stay away from it, or too desperate to join in the madness that they would finally leave the solitude of their battle stations (gaming setup——the hardware and software involved in a life of “professional” gaming).
As if they, the people in charge of public health I mean, didn’t anticipate it. They knew the danger they were in. They had no cure. No treatment even. And it’s not like they weren’t also on the internet, on the very boards that were orchestrating the attacks. So they were ready for us.
I say us, but really, I wasn’t a part of all of that. I mean sure, I was there, but I was trying to document it. For the hoard. Video of what happened was actually working at counterpurpose to their intent; show the internet what happened when “we” took on the CDC, and it did more to deter further action than anything else could have.
Keep in mind that this was early on in the crisis, when the riots were in full swing and everyone was on three or four nights without sleep, before the curfew. We were all severely impaired by this point, basically stumbling drunk, unless we had some uppers to kick our noodles into gear.
My footage began with the first people rushing up to the locked front doors and lighting their homemade bomb. They hustled away and hid behind a newspaper box—as if that would protect them from their clearly overzealous amount of explosive material in the bomb. Those stupid Guy Fawkes masks they wore (a symbol of internet vigilantism) hid their expressions from my camera, but their shaking hands and erratic movements told all we need to know. That kind of fear anger is a whole-body response. Arms spaghetti.
The newspaper box was way too close to where they lit the bomb. Fucking amateurs; what did they think would happen? They fell before they even heard the blast, but it allowed the others to pour out of safer hiding places and towards the now open doors. Those charging forwards didn’t notice the carnage that had begun before they were even faced with the defenses of their target.
There were a few hundred laying siege to the CDC building. Large enough that they felt like they could do it, large enough that their insanity spurred one another on; even w
hen the gunfire started they stayed the course. The internet brought guns too; guns with real bullets, not the rubber bullets the CDC force was using. There was tear gas, but, the internet being the internet, they’d come prepared even for that. For what moron vigilante doesn’t have a gas mask in their riot kit?
Another bomb went off, taking out a section of wall to add another entrance into the building so they could flank the defenders, who unknowingly outnumbered them three to one, and had proper weapons and training. I would call it a massacre, but those people defending the CDC never left the confines of the walls. They never advanced, only prevented further infiltration from the crowd of idiots getting pocked with rubber bullets and trying to keep their masks airtight against the gas.
Right as that other hole was blown in the wall, a fresh busload of some much more organized forces came to join the melee, armed just as I’d expect a collection of gun-happy crazies to be. Automatic rifles sounded out, grenades were thrown into the building, and then the defense really kicked it into gear.
No more rubber bullets. No more tear gas.
I caught footage of someone inside unable to continue firing on what were clearly US citizens, and half of them just kids. That man inside held my camera’s focus for longer than a lot of the shots of the action on the front steps—his lips moved constantly with some hurried speech, a litany against fear or a prayer for safety perhaps.
When I took my lens back to the front steps, there was a kid with his guts out all over the ground, screaming. I wondered if it had been him who’d thrown the bomb that’d undone him. A bullet caught him square in the head, and from the way the splatter of brains shot from his head, there’s no doubt it came from inside the CDC. A mercy killing? An execution?