You are all just perverts who are secretly horny for the apocalypse. - Slavoj Žižek
It all started with a monkey. It started with a monkey messing with things. He sat there in the dirt with all the time in the world, hammering two rocks together like they were coconut shells, clacking crude and wanton rhythms, screaming excitedly at the noise they made, rocking back and forth in the palette of barren clay with a strange impulsivity, a thing to be feared, as the velveteen drapery of the sky’s setting sun bled through the worship of primordial dreams.
The hairy wiry beast stopped, and looked back over his shoulder, squinting, creases from the corners of his eyes fanning out into extreme deltas, an adverse stratum of uncertainty and unwavering will all held together in one stare. A storm set against the bleeding phallus-head of the sun, a dark imperium of unsettled gods, like the god of all creation stirred awake from a nightmare. The beast sneered, and went back to clacking his rocks. For these fleeting brief millenniums, he was the smartest thing in all the universe, since the beginning of time. The marveled cyclones of stars belching an infinity of inconsequence. The swirling cuneiforms of gaseous nascent phenomenon, huge invisible explosions rocketing all around without a sound. All of it has led to nothing until now.
Here, on this private hollow of outer space, on this rock meandering through these cul-de-sacs of time, is a hairy wretch who throws his turds and laughs at the noise the rocks make. He is our ancestral god, the creator and watchmaker of us all.
In front of him are the loamy hazards of earth strewn out like an unbuckled frontier, wafts of small birds erupt out of the trees like bursts of buckshot, a genius that was unreasonable, a consciousness seen only in wild animals and the wild frontier. He gets to his feet, and staggers into the woods, disappearing behind its fetid angular mass, these heavens of barbarity, this tangled hazard of despair.
Some thousand or so millennium pass. The deliberate wanderings of so many failed evolutions, so many counterfeits of improvement, listless heavens shuttered through the seasons just droning on. Time is usually a wasteland, a pointless expanse with nothing to verify its creation, colors remaining dormant in their confines like shuttered vaults, the rainbows and waterfalls and other cliches for beauty’s sake don’t even yet qualify as nature’s pointless amusements. Nothing could be beautiful until it could be defined as such, until we came along and said it was so.
By these cosmological timescales, the humans came out of nowhere, turning the globe from its verdant sheathing dizzying mass into a kaleidoscope of brutalized order. Freeways growing out from cities like tentacles, groping the outer reaches of the frontier for more, to feed its predatory build up of concrete and smoking gaskets, bubbling pools of industrial waste, people flooding the streets in packed orgies, multiplying out of control like the extreme pace of bacterial binary fusion.
It’s 2024. A discreet unmarked warehouse in the outskirts of San Francisco. It is built entirely of blackened glass and mirrors, and is wedged in the cleavage of two low-lying hills, surrounded by enormous rolling grass lawns are paddocks of tall-grass pastures trimmed in perfect outlines of kidney beans and other amoeba shaped curtilage. A squadron of several Tesla Cybertrucks whiz noiselessly along the road, coming from the entrance of heavily fortified gates, gunmen perched at their posts along the perimeter of iron-javelin banisters jutting unceremoniously at the sun.
The vehicles come to the front of the mirrored warehouse. Several men exit their doors and organize themselves into place. They are of Neanderthal shape and stature, most of them with shaved heads and wrap-around sunglasses and ear pieces with the fusilli bucatini pasta-looking-wire dangling down into their collar. One of them opens the passenger door of the last remaining Cybertruck, and out steps Elon Musk, his roily and lumpy frame erecting out of the car like a creaking and disparaged jack-in-the-box. But he animates quickly, and is escorted to the front doors of the building, the doors opening for him without a sound.
Inside, is a maze of hallways branching off to smaller narrower hallways, always ending at an unmarked door. But there’s something deeply unsettling to the whole order of things. People in long white lab coats enter and exit doors at random and with unnerving frequency, like they’re overacting background extras. They do things like make random squiggles on their clipboards, they show their colleague the details as they flip through packets of empty pages, and they nod and whisper with mock surreptition. Everything is blinding white. White people in white lab coats, the walls and floors heavily lacquered with a white sterilized preservative. And one florescent tube of ceiling light buzzing and crackling against the sordid listless air. But then, finally, we see it’s not entirely an empty show. A monkey is escorted down the hallway, waddling from side to side, holding the hand of this genteel female nurse. He looks around, down the other hallways they pass, up at the specialists in their baggy and overwrought lab coats. He scratches his ass. Then, with a single finger he reaches into the hairy humid cavern of his ass crack and scratches at it furiously, like a menace to his own ass, an aggravation that cannot be quelled.
“Don’t do that, you silly goose,” the nurse teases, slapping his hand away. He looks up at her with an annoyed glare, and grunts something to himself.
She then opens a door, and they walk in together, the monkey now cleaning the gunk from under his fingernail.
It is a dimly lit operating room. A heavily customized and futuristic 646-ETS Power Procedure Table, fully equipped with swivel and stirrups, awaits under the medical grade lanterns hanging awkwardly like cranes. Doctors prepare themselves busily in the background shadows, sterilizing their hands and forearms, securing masks and hair nets into place. Elon Musk awaits by the empty operating chair, greeting the monkey ceremoniously.
“Yes, um, hello. Thanks for being here and doing this with us. Ha, well, I guess you didn’t really have a choice I suppose, did you?”
The monkey looks at him, bored. He looks towards the edges of the operating room, not wondering much about any of it. “Well, something I used to always tell myself as a kid,” Musk continues, “when I was nervous, was, I’d say, ‘look at yourself Elon, you’re charming, you’re fiercely intelligent, you have pretty approachable looks for the most part, your sense of humor is on par with the best of them, but you’re still a mortal comprised of fleshy apparatuses. You’re just the same as everyone else, clogs of meat sprouting with limbs and genitals. So what makes you so different?’ Have you read any Céline? Ha ha, I bet you have. There’s a great quote from him: ‘so many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don’t know what to do with them … shovelsfull! … but hearts? … very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count … but hearts? … on your fingers!’ I used to think about that a great deal. But then I realized that a heart is just a replaceable muscle. You can have a plastic heart and still get by. It’s all about brains isn’t it? Frankenstein’s monster loved brains more than anyone. So it was when I was five or six years old, I invented the idea of Neuralink. And it is with this simple computer chip implant, we’re going to bring you to the level of super human. Nietzsche’s Übermensch was a pretty flawed character, don’t you think? Ha ha, yeah me too. But the core idea of it is what we’re still after here. You’ll be able to play chess with Carlson and Kasparov, maybe you’ll even be able to solve the world’s problems of resource depletion and biodiversity collapse. You’ll get these inter-dimensional orgasms when you jack off or whatever, that are unlike anything you could ever imagine. Anyways, I’m so excited to take you on this next step of the journey with me. With us! This is a true milestone for humanity.”
The other doctors stand around awkwardly and impatiently, having heard this all before. They were used to having to endure Musk’s exhaustive lectures he routinely performs for himself, and nervous this could be one of the ones that ends up hours long, where the man laughs at his own jokes, and retorts with other jokes like a full-fledged catatonic retard, they started shuffling around finding menial tasks to pretend to perform. Musk notices this, and snaps out of his lecture to the monkey.
“Okay, everyone, lets get in places.” He then turns to the address the monkey. “Would you like to take your seat?” The monkey climbs up onto the Power Procedure Table, and nurses surround him, buckling him into place. Musk flicks on the television set stationed directly in front of the monkey, and cartoons are playing. Musk made this a custom when Neuralink made its first operations on monkeys, playing Tom and Jerry, or Loony Toons, or the early episodes of The Simpsons as a sort of distraction when administering the IV anesthetic, putting the monkey to sleep, to then saw open his skull to thread in the biocompatible polyimide probes. (All of the monkeys—an pigs—that Neuralink has operated on have died while under immense pain, caused from various ruptures of brain hemorrhaging, severe open sores down the esophagus, chronic and oozing staph infections where the implant was performed. According to an article by Vox, “Musk put staff under immense pressure to speed up animal trials in order to begin human trials, telling them that they had to imagine a bomb was strapped to their head as motivation to work harder and faster.” Neuralink’s first human patient test subject was able to play marathon sessions of video games with his mind. “It's crazy,” the man reported of his experience.) So, instead of the usual cartoons, that distracted the monkey only for a moment or two, Musk decided to try something new. He flicked the remote at the television a few times, and some Hentai porn began playing. Musk chuckled. One of the doctors looked over at the television to see what it was. “Oh fuck,” the man said. The monkey’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth wide, screaming with excitement, his fangs gleaming like marbled pillars against the lanterns overhead. Hi arousal became defiant and terrifying, thrusts of his lewd energy jerked violently against the buckled straps of the chair. Musk laughed harder.
“This is what it’s all about isn’t it,” Musk asked rhetorically, turning up the volume as loud as it would go, the deafening cries and squeals of the manga characters in the middle of orgasm crowding the insoluble air. Doctors and nurses throw their hands in the air in defeat, knowing that when Musk gets excited about porn, there was no saving the situation, and they may as well leave. One by one, the operating room is vacated, until all that’s left is Musk and the monkey, watching their cartoon porn. The monkey geckers with further enthusiasm, a dull chatter of unnerving ability, trying desperately to reach for his disjointed member. Musk then unbuckles the primate from his chair, and they just sit there together, watching for hours and hours into the next day. The revered genius with countless inventive enterprises that made him the richest man on the planet, and the monkey—Elon Musk’s god, our creator and watchmaker, our destiny of ill-equipped confidence, our overarching desire. Time circling back on itself, meeting its most accomplished progeny.
Musk turns to the wiry beast. “I love you, son,” he says.
And the monkey smiles a stupid smile. Musk reaches down into his trousers, grunts and makes a face. He pulls out a huge turd, and throws it at the screen.
And they laugh forever.