Flickering Cells

"How can I change the path that I'm on?
This is my destiny
This is my life, my own right or wrong
Bring it on back to me
How can I say what it is that I want?
Wisdom speak to me"

 

Syntax - Destiny

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"Aw, man! Brain-bug right up the nose! How plain silly! What are the chances it'd be shooting out of the drain right when my nose was over it? What's the word I'm looking for?

Argh!!!

'Contrived!' "

 

Sluggy Freelance, 28 Geeks Later parody, 2005/07/21

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Walk with me, dear reader, we'll be taking some twists and turns. First, among zombies:

What? This is too a zombie movie! See, they're looking for the zombies, with flashlights, it's totally plot relevant. I rarely bother with the subgenre, but re-viewing 28 Days Later gave me a chance to compare it (quite favorably) against more recent brain-muncher fare like Army of the Dead, whose pile of cliches indicates how hopelessly played-out zombies had become by '21. The most random of these appear to fit no purpose in the story but to fill script pages, like political posturing on immigration, obligatory scene of action girl visiting vengeance upon an obligatorily stupid and greedy male sexual predator, nerd who must prove his manliness, obvious sneering hateable backstabber, and the daddy who must spend all movie making amends to his daughter for just not being daddy enough for her tastes. But even the more genre-specific, like super-zombies, the Bride of Frankenstein or the utter, cartoonish ease with which our designated heroes dispatch endless swarms, all strain so hard at upping the ante it's no wonder they just went ahead and made a Las Vegas song-and-dance number out of the whole mess.*

 

Of course even two decades earlier 28 Days Later was itself trying to dodge being pigeonholed as a "zombie" flick with all due shambling, given the genre's increasing saturation, so instead played up the societal collapse. The lights no longer come on, the water no longer runs, the double-deckers got double-decked, food doesn't get brought in, the tunnels are clogged, there's no cops to keep the thugs in check. No maids sweep away the rubble, no minimum-wage employees put the shopping carts back in their places. You might say these are also cliches used in common with Mad Max and disaster movies but if so it's because they're natural out-growths of a complex world we take for granted, not merely feel-good applause moments engineered by Hollywood. A collapse is a collapse, whether by zombies, thunderdomes, ETs, superstorms or an invasion of redcaps. Our monkey instincts push us to view everything as a social conflict, victory to be achieved by crushing a rival, a personification of evil, a bogeyman, one which can be screamed at and taunted or threatened with sky-waved fist. But the universe itself is death, scratching at this illusory blip of sapient civilization with a myriad tendrils, constantly.

 

Is the blood drop scene in 28 Days Later contrived? No, the contrivance is that it didn't happen sooner, that they'd get so far in the first place without stumbling face-first into an infected blood-puddle, that they didn't get fried by an electrified puddle of water near a still-functioning backup generator or flattened by debris falling off skyscrapers and that no mosquitos passed the infection around. The true contrivance is the universal storytelling convention that nature must step back so the narrative gets resolved by a heroic plot arc satisfying our primitive mammalian social/competitive instincts. A real collapse will come with more hazards than a marketing tagline can express. The whole point of avoiding civilization-destroying contrivances like mushroom clouds, gray goo, global warming or engineered plagues is that once you let rip with a stinker like that, the wind's gonna blow it whichever way it pleases.** The world is bigger than your stupid monkey ambitions.

 

Which is not to say it's completely unpredictable or inexplicable.

The COVID-19 pandemic had its funny moments, like this illustration of sampling error. Unless you believe the small country of Lesotho, completely surrounded by South Africa, actually had so fewer cases than its one neighbour and largest trade partner, or that Africa as a whole had so few cases. In which case I've got some Venusian real estate to sell you. No, it just had few test kits to discover why exactly grandpa coughed himself to death. And despite the lack of hard, positive scientific proof of untested cases, if you have a working brain you can spot the necessary interconnection (geographic, physical) in that image and take the results with the requisite fistful of salt.

 

Contagion, edge effects, cross-contamination, downstream effects, thermoclines, subduction zones, habitats and niches, study the natural world from most any angle and you run into endless examples of matter impacting other matter in very complex ways based on very simple rules. All it takes is a few gradients - of energy, of density, of pressure, of elevation, of whatever. It can be as simple as on/off states.

Conway's Game of Life is one nice way to get yourself into that mindset, and you need not delve any convoluted mathematics to see individual squares or larger structures as rudimentary biomes, organisms, molecules, whatever magnification you want to imagine. Bilateral symmetry is quite easy to achieve and there's even predation of sorts, when an overpopulated, exploded structure swarms out and demolishes anything nearby, or when a glider impacts a stable structure just right to send a new glider off in another direction. It makes a nice rejoinder to the cretinous religious insistence that self-replicating life is too complex to have arisen by itself. Bullshit. Look at repeating, dispersing patterns arising from far less complexity than that provided by carbon compounds. And each individual cell's next state is driven by its surroundings, much as in life.

 

Of course, that's too much information for the average voter, which can only rattle a single isolated binary in its hollow skull at a time. The American presidunce spat out one of his innumerable random bits of idiocy on the occasion of last month's cold snap in the Eastern U.S., claiming as usual that it disproves global warming, and the degenerate inbreds going truck-nuts over his every dribbled inanity picked it up as gospel. Unsurprising as "if it's currently cold in my back-yard there's no global warming" is routinely dredged up as a redneck sound bite as often as "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" The real explanation was of course simple enough. Europe and the U.S. were two cold fronts isolated in a swirling totality of overheating. Cold air was actually channeled southward by warm, humid air over the oceans. If that explanation sounds familiar, it's because the disruption of the polar vortex by global warming has been explained to the rabble every couple of years for an entire generation when it keeps causing such local cold snaps, over and over again. Looks like a glider impacted something.***

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is a particularly funny phrase for how often it must be repeated because everyone keeps forgetting it. Some things cannot repeat. The Black Forest is gone. The Nemean Lions of southern Europe were exterminated at the dawn of recorded history. And the coral reefs I visited with my parents on vacation a quarter century ago are now dead, and will only get deader along with all the life that depended on them. But the pattern repeats. Our species is death. We are the ravenous, brainless, ever-swelling shambling horde.

 

Our own behavior is just more squares on the grid, lighting up predictably in response to adjacent stimuli. Easy enough to explode if you know where to click. There's a grim comedy to the recent rumours that ICE agents (y'know, the thugs shooting civilians in the back in the middle of the street?) here in the U.S. have not been getting their promised $50,000 signing bonus from their all-star team. Specifically, the comedy always lay in the amount itself, precisely ten times the $5000 promised by the exquisitely Trumpian dictator Berzelius Windrip to every American should they elect him in the 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here. Which (important plot point) of course nobody ever receives. It is only mentioned again to illustrate how disjointed from reality they'd remained even as various characters began being herded into concentration camps while still dreaming of their promised loot. Even the few which did initially make out like bandits rapidly turned the same treatment on each other. A work of fiction? Now adjust that pie in the sky tenfold for inflation. Your recruiters are laughing right in your faces because you're too moronic to see it.

 

"Barlow realized that some things had not changed, that Jack Ketch was never asked to dinner no matter how many shillings you paid him to do your dirty work, that murder will out, that crime pays only temporarily" - The Marching Morons, C.M. Kornbluth

Funny thing about conservatism: you can't conserve when the squares around you start flickering. We'll be piling shopping carts as barricades soon enough. Won't keep the boiling flood waters out, though.

 

Here's one last parting shot though: remember that climactic moment in 28 Days when the hero bursts in, rampaging in the jealous rage of any murderous ape rushing to the defense of his mate, the moment when the hero is indistinguishable from the monsters. There's a lot of talk here in the states about the mid-term elections and the possibility of overturning the incipient dictatorship. Of course, there very well may be no further elections. The murderous thugs willing to gun you down at a protest will not shy away from doing the same in front of a voting booth if you look too un-American for their tastes. But if the self-appointed rebel alliance should win, it will still not have ever questioned the myriad ways in which its own obsessions drove politics into the current cesspit. It will retrench in its gender Lysenkoism and identity politics insanity, proselytize its irrational postmodernist anti-realist dogma all the more forcefully. Thus the cycle will only roll over again two years from now and you'll be looking back at these months as the last chance, the single remaining heartbeat of opportunity when you should have taken the shot - at your own heroic selves.

 

You think you can sell the right ad campaign, but how different are you from the morons? 

 

 

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* The zombie tiger though, that was legit coolsauce. Not that it actually does much.

** Compare with a writer who got it quite right, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and the ease of death in a world of Ice-9.

*** Even if your attention were so feeblemindedly restricted to your back-yard square, you could've compared temperatures on the same day in your back-yard over the past few decades, or average yearly temperatures locally, or the number of below and above average temps in a single year, and almost certainly received the same confirmation that the warming trend continues. In fact you can do that for free through the National Weather Service's records.