As To What Really Happened, Questions Remain

In conversation, most nod and sigh, accepting there’s a good possibility the new phones include backdoor spying capabilities easily accessible to hackers, governments, and telecoms, and at the idea that the replacements are cheap knockoffs manufactured in faraway mafia sweatshops, a thoughtless shrug expresses, “What can you do?”

            As to what really happened, questions remain.

            Enraged consumers continue to boycott McDonald’s, and the idea that the telecoms were involved from the beginning is not out of the ordinary. “All of them are dirty up to their elbows,” is a refrain I overhear in one form or another.

            “It has to do with China,” many camps agree.

            They’d called in bonds, forced the Spanish government to pay off the humongous debt by buying millions of phones, and the government, in cahoots with the telecoms, had manufactured the app and puppeteered a crisis of demand.

            “Follow the money,” I hear phrased like a growl.

            There are theories that the new phones are updated with a special chip that has the capability to collect neural-data.

            “This is a pilot program. To phase out old tech, replace it with something that reads our minds.”

            Some say the plot is to bury the truth.

            “What a fucking whopper of a promotional campaign.”

            From the get-go a nightmare, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and the government and major telecoms have teamed up and improvised a large-scale production of damage control theater, lie on top of lie, deceit piled on deceit, an amorphous concoction of propaganda devised on the fly, coalescing with story beats scripted by the skin of its teeth.

            It’s no longer a small minority anymore who believe a cabal of elites assemble like chess pieces a network of covert agents, embedded in the public-eye, who spoon-feed through media and politics a well-thought-out design of coordinated events, planning and organizing short- and long-term social engineering benchmarks.

            The newest hair-raising story going around describes how the malware in the app, before it ruined and wiped out your phone, downloaded all your files to a gargantuan server farm out in Extremadura run by military intelligence, where it’s being data-mined to develop individual personality profiles to better predict behavioral patterns and buying habits.

            An optimistic slant speculates the QR code catastrophe was beneficial because the phones previously in circulation, as everyone had feared all along, did cause cancer.

            “It was the safest way to replace the devices without creating hysteria.”

            Even the more paranoid spheres roll their eyes at the leaps in logic and mental gymnastics needed to wind up with that conclusion.

            “Everyone knows,” they balk, “the new phones give you cancer.”

            Because the pharmacy companies, obviously, are wrapped up in the sinister confederacy, too.

            I smile, frown, brood, laugh sharply, drink another drink, eat Chinese food, gobble it down, guzzle coffee, smoke a million cigarettes, the twists and turns leaving my head spinning, and underneath it all is a vague feeling like two weather pressures colliding together, one a cold chill, the other a warmth of amusement.