Transmission by Kunzru Hari

Author:Kunzru, Hari [Kunzru, Hari]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141008295
Publisher: ePenguin
Published: 2005-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

At the boundaries of any complex event, unity starts to break down. Recollections differ. Fact shades irretrievably into interpretation. How many people must be involved for certainty to dissipate? The answer, according to information theorists, is two. As soon as there is a sender, a receiver, a transmission medium and a message, there is a chance for noise to corrupt the signal.

There is no doubt that legally and morally Arjun Mehta must bear responsibility for the outbreak, but actions have been ascribed to Leela, and hence to him, for which he could not possibly be responsible. There were rumours that the virus was ‘attacking the water supply’, and the claim circulated that the Colville plant shut-down was part of a strategy by a foreign power to contaminate drinking water with (depending on who you spoke to) Cryptosporidium, E. coli or LSD. Alarms, mostly false, were raised in various US government offices, at power plants, dams and military bases. Lack of technical knowledge contributed to the confusion. In Honduras, Leela was suspected of blowing lightbulbs in the Ministry of the Interior. A man in Ottawa papered his bedroom in silver foil, convinced that his son’s PC had started to emit harmful rays. In Bihar, police acting under orders from a regional politician conducted raids on various local markets, confiscating pirated VHS copies of Leela Zahir films which were believed to be ‘spreading disease’. Back in the US, when the administrators of the website for the Houston Airport System discovered that references to George Bush Intercontinental Airport had been mysteriously changed to George Bush is Incontinent Airport they issued a press release accusing the anonymous author of Leela of perpetrating the outrage.

Conversely, other events which may be attributable to Leela have dropped through the cracks. To this day much remains invisible to the counters and chroniclers, those whose function it is to announce what happened, to come to some conclusion about how it must have been. There were market movements, jitters and shakes, reconfigurations of money and confidence and power that for the most part were not discussed or even comprehended at the time. Leela was in the system like a quintessence, a breath.

Within twenty-four hours of Leela01 being identified and countered, variants were reported. Some were obviously the work of copycats, crude alterations to the subject line of the delivery email, superficial tweaks to the code. Others were more profound, and analysts were reluctantly forced to classify them as entirely new organisms. Leelas03, 04 and 05 were identified. Leela06 (the so-called RingtoneLeela), which programmed cellphone handsets to play a melody from You’ll Have to Ask My Parents, caused particular alarm. It displayed a knowledge of mobile-telephony systems which shocked the telecoms corporations, forcing them into a hasty security redesign. Ringtone is also one of several Leela variants which have never been conclusively linked to Arjun Mehta, a gap in the record that opens up vertiginous and troubling possibilities. Were other people out there dreaming of Leela Zahir?

In the first few days of the outbreak, various groups and individuals claimed responsibility.

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