Tuesday, May 4, 2010

WINDSOR EXECUTIVE SOLUTIONS



As the media erupts in celebration of the terrorist next door meme, telephotos the latest love trusts of the photogenic Wales boys, and hides M.I.A.'s revolutionary new video, the fine fellows at Futurismic have just posted a new story I was fortunate enough to co-author with Bruce Sterling. Bruce and I hatched the idea while hanging out in Mexico City last for the Mundos Paralelos symposium at the Festival de Mexico: I was admiring the combat ready bodyguard's son in the gossipy pages of Hola! magazine, Bruce was pondering Terry Schiavo and her Italian analog as the world's first posthumans; add street corner machine guns and large quantities of Tequila, and the result is Blackwater Prince Harry. An excerpt:

JANE’S ADDICTIONS

From our analysts to friends and followers of Jane’s Information Nexus

Happy Birthday Your Undead Highness

by (name withheld)

21 April 2026

Popular celebrations break the general darkness for the 100th birthday of the world’s first posthuman monarch. Queen Elizabeth II is not alive, nor is she dead. Suspended under glass in icy limbo, she awaits the inevitable. Heretics who question the Queen’s ‘divine right to persist’ swing from the surveillance lamps over the burning cars.

Five long years since our Queen fell and could not rise. Elizabeth has joined the ranks of prominent women deemed too important to die. Britain has never come to proper terms with life-extension.

Our elite zombies have become the obverse of our working-class suicide cults. The flesh of young women explodes among us daily while centenarians dream on ice.

The last functional segment of Government is the propaganda wing of the Royal Household — now run mostly by Americans.

Meanwhile, hooligans raid immigrant neighborhoods after the pubs close, armed with assault rifles smuggled from Texas. Bobbies are genteel by day, death squads by night. Young upper class paramilitaries gather at posh wine-bars on ‘Sloane Ranger’ hunts for anarchists, crusties, and ‘ugly people.’

The only viable tactical path is ‘direct action’ — to exorcise the royal ghost from her Westminster crypt. Yes, that means ‘assassination’ — in some strictly technical sense.

We forecast a techno-regicide. At Janes, it is our unpleasant business to assess the military odds of success.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Emir of Dubai make unlikely allies. But since someone’s hand must pull the royal plug, why not some helpful, understanding pagan? They can pay, and they can pardon.

The radical wing of Plaid Cymru killed the Prince of Wales when Charles was eighty. The Welsh separatists also bombed the Imperial College, where the Queen was once stored. But after the terrible vengeance of ‘Windsor Executive Solutions’ — which made Cardiff a crater and called that ‘peace’ — Plaid Cymru is urban legend.

Our NATO alliance with the United States offers us airstrikes on demand. Brussels offers us mussels and Tintin cartoons. The United Nations is beyond any use to anyone. And Prince William, after his doomed attempt to live like a human being, suffered a complete mental breakdown.

So Windsor Executive Solutions are — we must conclude — the final solution.

The Black Prince will strike, because his people demand it. His global guerrilla army is the only entity capable of mounting a coup. ‘Blackwater Prince Harry’ must annihilate his frozen grandmother and resuscitate the failed state.

Jane’s paying subscribers will recall that Harry — the mercenary veteran of endless global microwars — redefined his efforts within Britain as ‘domestic security consultancy.’ His commandos savaged entire city blocks through video surveillance and airborne robot assaults.

Harry’s press spokesman is ‘Lord Falstaff’: an exiled American — fat, boozy, bizarrely charismatic, carousing across the ruins of the Middle East. Falstaff’s drawling provocations crackle over pirate feeds at every cornershop. Each time the Prince’s acolytes shoot an elected official, Falstaff immortalizes it.

The cowed Establishment emits a deafening silence.

‘Public opinion,’ the artifact of a vanished public order, has ceased to exist. There are no reporters, and there are no chattering classes. Falstaff hunts and kills the lonely bloggers hunched over their laptops.

Blinded by the light of fiber optics, we descended into darkness. By the time we realized the depth of the abyss, we were too low and weak to escape.

Harry’s drunken bandits are modern cult heroes, worship-figures. The pogroms of the Blackwater Prince go unquestioned by anyone. In today’s Internetherworld, ‘fact,’ reality,’ and the ‘official story,’ have vanished in a cabinet of monstrosities. Beset on all sides by collapse, bereft of the mass consent once engineered by mass media, we breathe legends, rumors, folk-tales, pop-songs, and terror.

We at Janes therefore conclude that Windsor Executive Solutions, inevitably mutating from multinational corporation, to Praetorian Guard, to a hungry mob, must devour the frozen flesh of Queen Elizabeth.


Check it out.

1 comment:

Dave Hardy said...

Read the full story at Futurismic. Good, mind-blowing stuff. I daresay David Cameron is wishing for a Black Knight about now.