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Purveyors

Posted on May 18, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

They just really didn’t get it at all.

How could they? The connection between their brains and their hearts had been closed off. They were adults.

Not information-overloaded, time-wasting, attitude-absorbing, world-hating, group-hugging psychos with a taste for the thrills of easy sex, unreal violence and a lack of interest in repercussions.

They wouldn’t know a really bad thing if it bit their faces off and sucked the brain out of an exposed eye-socket. They were not prepared; they just didn’t have a clue. Which was exactly how the average teenager liked it.

It was how the average anti-social, trouble-making teenager loved it actually.

They called themselves Purveyors of Cerebral Mayhem.

Pretentious, too-clever-by-far and bizarrely productive, it was a shape-shifting, ranks-morphing organization that relied on anything but organization to get things done.

In truth, it was a call to arms for the largest terrorist demographic in all the world.

Though it was difficult to pinpoint the source to just one person it was commonly accepted that PCM was founded by a kid who simply himself Jin.

Perhaps it is the nature of global grammar or just that worldwide legends are more easily ascribed to male troublemakers. Nobody really knew if Jin was a boy, nobody cared. From the words posted across the blogosphere from Angola to Zimbabwe, any subscriber to PCM’s world view would have fucked Jin in a heartbeat.

That was where the easy sex came in.

Especially for the rock stars in the group, the cool kids who owned the slickest computers, the nicest cars and the latest clothes and shoes. Or in the case of backward countries, they were the kids who had clothes and shoes.

The manifesto of PCM was never explicitly posted anywhere in the known cyber universe. At one time, for a brief period of maybe sixteen minutes somebody posted a set of rules that would have freeze-dried the spines of any adult online long enough to read them. The list came off and no one was any wiser. The following afternoon, a fourteen-year-old in Johannesburg, South Africa was knifed in the stomach and shoved in the path of a speeding car. She hadn’t stood a chance. Nobody knew whom she had angered to have received such a fate. It would have been impossible for anyone to connect her up to the set of rules that appeared online for sixteen minutes.

That was a way in which the unreal violence manifested itself.

No one even knew if Jin had sent the order of execution, literally and figuratively. Or that it had come from anyone subscribing to the PCM way of life. As far as police in South Africa were concerned, it was another act of senseless violence. The world’s police couldn’t work enough hours in a single lifetime to make a dent in the number of such cases that turned up every single day.

So it was consigned to that great Neverworld of unsolved crimes and promptly forgotten.

The adults were sometimes referred to as ‘perv-wayers.’ They were the ones who funded ‘barely legal’ porn, capitalized on youth to sell everything from anti-ageing cream to sexual performance-enhancers and tried to make it appear that they understood the world in ways kids could not. And yet, they were the ones responsible for placing an entire planet on a knife’s end.

Any day soon, a giant foot was going to step on the planet and cut it in half.

The kids could see it so why couldn’t their parents?

The way the brain trust at PCM saw it, adults were too busy earning a wage, paying bills or cheating on their spouses to see the forest from the trees. They had been blinded by what they had come to believe as their purpose.

There was the ridiculous anecdote one kid posted about how his mother refused his father oral sex because she felt it would give her a double chin. Instead she offered to finish him of by hand. And then she ranted on about betrayal and broken trust when she caught his dad with his pants down (literally) in front of a woman eleven years younger than herself.

The moral of the story, as stated by the anonymous kid, “What’s the difference? We’re all going to die right? And then we’re going to burn or rot away under the ground? Who cares how your face looks when the maggots go to work on it? Give th man his fuckign blowjob! Jeez!”

One time, a group of believers and practitioners took it upon themselves to turn back every single clock in their city. This wasn’t some population 53 town in the sticks. This was a global business hub with millions who lived, worked, fed and bred in its heaving, thrusting, surly confines. Even so, they managed to turn back the time on watches locked away in places their parents were completely confident they knew nothing about. Cinema halls, bank safe deposit boxes, nuclear facilities…it was amazing where kids could go if they wanted to and were well-mannered about it.

It was the day an entire city turned up late.

For school, at work, to drop off babies at day care; to pick up dry cleaning, groceries or the day’s drugs.

Global financial markets were not amused.

Commodities traders lost a lot of money. Senior officials in hedge funds were chewed out by lesser-ranked counterparts from around the world for being late.

A sample conversation went something like this:

“What’s up Yang, you’re calling earlier than usual…”

“Where the fuck you been man!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Alliance went through the roof. I put in the order two hours ago. Why haven’t you processed it yet?”

“Two hou-? The market doesn’t open for another hour-and-a-half. What are you talking about?”

“You been doing coke off a strippers ass again! Market’s been open for four hours.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Hey buddy…”

A neighbour on the train was nudged, a neighbour who looked surly from having slept weird.

“Yeah?”

“What time you got?”

“Seven-thirty…”

“Yeah Yang I think you’re hitting that opium pipe too hard my man. It’s only seven-thirty. Market doesn’t open until nine. Are you sure you’re not having one of your hallucinations?”

“Fuck you Joe! I don’t know what you’re pulling but Mr. Joshi is going to be calling Weismore to confirm what I’ve always suspected. That you’re an asshole!”

And the line went dead. From halfway across the world.

The trick with the clocks cost city money men over a billion, in Euros. And that was over and above the price of lost face. For many it took confirmation from six different global sources to finally get the correct time. Sixteen people killed themselves because forty-two people lost their jobs. Twenty of those people didn’t have a nest egg and while four of them decided that they could make it all back the other sixteen found solace in swan dives off high-rises or by French-kissing a loaded gun.

The incident made front page news and the cover of several weekly magazines. Nobody knew how it had happened. And when the thought finally occurred to someone he just straight out had a heart attack. What if it had been a terrorist attack? What if scientists working for rogue nations had figured out a way to reverse the clocks and watches of an entire city? People were suddenly very aware of how reliant they were on their timepieces to tell them where they needed to be at any particular time of the day.

Instead of providing perspective it simply caused churn.

PCM had a semi-formalized motto which changed just as often as everything else in a teenager’s life. Stickers and graffiti art had popped up in unusual places all around the world. The block-lettered legend simply stated, “It’s not fun if you enjoy it.”

That was how little they cared about the repercussions.

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