VIRUS: THE MOVIE

Quoth umu:

Okay, so the Nigerian police force are waging an endless, futile war against a disorganized mass of deranged, black-magic-using hijackers and murderers.

So we have on the one hand what I am envisioning as the brutally fast-paced and explosive cops' side of the show. Think the gas well explosion in There Will Be Blood, the refugee camp scene in Children of Men, and (in slow moments) the overall tone of Bringing out the Dead. We will follow, I imagine, events around a particularly human character, one possessed of real gravitas. But most everyone else will be grotesque and/or baroque... extreme, unreal. (Their insane names will have sound factual basis.)

On the other hand we have the "criminals," and these will not make any kind of rational sense. We'll follow them, but it will be impossible to put together a particularly coherent narrative of what goes on with them; imagine Satyricon or the interstitial scenes in Mulholland Drive (e.g. the two men in the diner [and the thing behind the diner]). These scenes are heavily nonverbal.

What is, however, essential to convey with them is this: there is a large culture of Nigerians who are chronic users of a strange crystalline drug as well as violent anti-authoritarian guerillas. They are surrounded by paranormal phenomena: strange transformations, manifestations of spirits, apparent teleportation, ability to communicate with animals. (Interpret this loosely as a license to Magic Mountain the shit up a little.) Occult symbolism (again, broadly defined) plays a major role in the aesthetic of these scenes. It is strongly suggested that there are forces at work behind them that remain offstage.

(Imagine the following played out either very slowly or very quickly, depending on whether you see this as a potential movie script or television series.)

What is in fact going on here is this: this Nigeria is part of the "epiphenomenal world" which exists as a function of the data λocated on a futuristic Internet. The sum total of information on this Internet generates a history: the world described by the Internet is this world, its events and history as written in this Internet.

The Internet in question is more or less like our own except for one detail: a cutting-edge neural interface technology has been invented that is giving a select group of users the ability to project their consciousness into the form of text and achieve an intensity of control over the textual data of the Internet that gives them effectively godlike control over the e(piphenomenal)-world.

They achieve this in more or less the way I have been fantasizing about lately: they have a swarm of nanomachines in their bloodstream that has mapped their brain, bonded to their spine, and co-opted their glands. These machines are conceptualized and referred to as "the virus." The virus can be communicated by body fluid—it is frequently sexually transmitted.

Infection with the virus is experienced as traumatic teleportation to a strange astral planescape. The infectee slowly regains control and begins to perceive the virus as a living entity to be interacted with (not unlike Baltar's Six), gaining the ability to traverse time freely (albeit arduously) throughout an infinity of epiphenomenal planes.

Virus infectees form an international conspiracy of apparent drug addicts and violent revolutionaries. They are, to all appearances, homosexuals, junkies, and shamanic types. (I imagine an important scene for this plotline being anal sex leading to an infection.)

Now, the kick is this: the epiphenomenal world is identical with the real world. The virus infectees are engaged in the rewriting of the real history of their world. They are a threat to everything and everyone everywhere because their mission is total freedom and the death of the Black Iron Prison's God.

They too are waging an endless war, but not only with the governments of the temporal world (who resent their ability to fuck with power structures in the present—perhaps the infected have already co-opted some temporal power structures and created a pirate utopia somewhere?) but with oppressors in all time periods and evil forces in fictional realms that are linked to their world.

Since the Internet defines the epiphenomenal world, all the false data on the Internet is also true: all mythologies, fables, and other lies have a reality into which the infected directly feed.

The series / movie (increasingly looking like a series) ought to end with nothing less than the death of Yahweh.

(The sad thing about this is that this is basically the plot of William Burroughs' entire written work... and I'm not convinced it's not also the actual truth.)