The Age of Zeus

47. MEDIA PASTE

T he world's media gorged on the events in New York for days afterward, chewing over each and every morsel then regurgitating and chewing it over again, until what was left was a paste of facts, opinions and suppositions so thin and watery as to be almost devoid of nutritional content. There remained, however, a few gristly segments which no amount of intellectual mastication could break down to a palatable consistency. How, first and foremost, had the slayers of Hercules been able to kill him? How had they come by weapons capable of harming a demigod? And how could they move at such speed? Then there was the matter of Hermes. Where was he? Was he alive or dead? And, although he had come to Hercules's rescue, could he not have arrived sooner? For that matter, how was it that Zeus, Poseidon and Athena had turned up in Gramercy Park shortly after Hercules was killed? Their presence in New York that night seemed to imply they'd suspected an attempt was going to be made on his life. If so, couldn't they have taken steps to prevent it?

The awkward questions would not go away, and so Zeus agreed to guest on America's top-rated daytime chatshow, with Hera, to set the record straight.

The show's hostess, Paulita Dominguez, started out deferential, as you did with the Olympians, liberally deploying their godly epithets — Zeus the Sign-Giving, Hera the White-Armed, Zeus the Far-Seeing, Hera the Purple-Belted, and so forth. The longer the interview went on, though, the bolder and more pugnacious she became. Neither Zeus nor Hera, side by side on a tasteful beige leather sofa on a set decked out to look like someone's living room, seemed to be giving her acceptable answers. Zeus spoke of unfortunate timing. He said he had had an inkling that Hercules might be a target for these people — these "scuttling cockroaches," as he called them — but had had no idea they would be quite so audacious as to attack him out in the open, with eyewitnesses on hand. No sooner had it become apparent that Hercules was in difficulties then Hermes had raced to the scene, but, fast though he was, he had arrived too late to do anything except punish the perpetrators.

"He could have teleported," Paulita suggested.

"Yes, a good point," Zeus replied, "but you see, he wasn't sure where Hercules was. That is to say, he thought he was somewhere but in fact he was… well, not there, but somewhere else."

He appeared to be floundering. Hera leapt in. "What my husband is trying to say, Miss Dominguez, is that there were too many variables. Hermes didn't believe he could teleport in safely. He thought it better to come in running, so that he could assess the situation as he approached."

In general, Zeus's performance on Paulita was uncharacteristically listless and unconfident. Hera did most of the talking, and kept trying to divert the hostess from confrontational lines of questioning towards a more personal, domestic agenda.

"I'm sure the audience here and your viewers at home want to hear how we're dealing with our shock and grief back on Olympus," she said at one point, and at another said, "I'd prefer to be discussing Hercules's legacy, not his death but his life. Hercules was my stepson but like a son to me. A wayward one, but lively and loveable in spite of it." And on the subject of Hermes: "We hold out hope that he will find his way home safe and sound. My heart aches to think about a stepson — another stepson of mine — lying somewhere, in a remote corner of the earth, injured, perhaps in great pain. Argus is searching high and low for signs of him, and we pray for his return."

"Pray?" said Paulita, intrigued. "Who exactly does an Olympian pray to?"

"Figure of speech," said Hera.

"Are you scared?" This was Paulita's closing question. The floor manager was making winding-up motions, while in the production gallery they were telling her over her earpiece to reel the interview in. There was a sense of disappointment in the air. This edition of the show hadn't turned out to be as riveting as everyone had hoped. Paulita had one last chance to dredge up some TV gold.

"Scared?" said Hera as though unfamiliar with the word, let alone the concept.

"Of these people, these paramilitaries, these terrorists, whatever you care to call them. They've killed most of your monsters. They've killed at least one of you, maybe even two. All I'm saying is, if I were you, I'd be at least a little nervous about stepping foot outside Mount Olympus now."

This roused Zeus from his torpor. "But you are not us, woman," he thundered. "You are mortal, prone to insecurity. You know fear all the time, whether it's fear of your ratings slipping or of people thinking you're fat, or most of all the deep-down fear that you're hideously overpaid for doing a job that a trained monkey could do, and better, what's more. You are a seething mass of anxieties and inadequacies, and I am not. I am king of the Pantheon and I fear nothing and no one!"

Then, having insulted his hostess, although Paulita's desperate grin tried to convey that her skin was thick enough to take it, Zeus found a camera, gazed deep into the lens, and said, "Above all, not you. I am not scared of you. I know who you are now, and I will tell you this. ' Mai phunai ton hapanta nika logon.'"

On the next news bulletin on the same channel, an Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Harvard was consulted. He claimed he could identify the quotation. It was Sophocles, Oedipus At Colonus, a line from the antistrophe to one of the later Chorus interludes, and it translated as "Not to be born is, past all prizing, best" — although, the distinguished academic added somewhat archly, Zeus's pronunciation of Ancient Greek left something to be desired.

The significance of the quotation was much debated in newspaper columns and on TV and radio discussion programmes. It was generally agreed that Zeus had simply been threatening his opponents. When I'm finished with you, he'd been implying, you'll wish you'd never been born. No deeper interpretation of it was needed than that, or could be divined.

Meanwhile, the great vox pop that was the internet spoke. From habit, it spoke guardedly. Argus was the ever-present ear at the door, the ever-present eye at the keyhole, and a careless comment, a blog entry or chatroom post that was overtly anti-Pantheonic, might lead to unwelcome consequences. Argus could smash a website to pieces, reducing it to a shambles of corrupted code with one of his unstoppable, sledgehammer viruses. He could crash servers and wipe hard drives. And a persistent offender could expect something much worse — a knock at the front door, a personal visit from an Olympian for a terrifying "polite word."

Still, there were ways to state your true feelings that didn't automatically alert the Hundred-Eyed One, or at the worst would result in the relatively mild rebuke of him blocking out the offending comment with his icon — a peacock in full tailfeather display — accompanied by a pro forma warning: I am watching. For instance, a set of nicknames had been devised for the Olympians that were so banal as to be unobtrusive. Zeus was "Jerry," Hera was "Jane," Ares "Joe," Apollo "Jack," Artemis "Jill," and so on, meaning that those in the know could write about them in a derogatory or defamatory fashion without fear of censure. Argus had not cottoned on to that particular ruse, the J-Series Cipher.

Nor did he seem to be in on any of the Olympian-uncomplimentary acronyms that were doing the rounds, such as WADWAH (Weak As Dionysus With A Hangover, usually used in reference to a bad joke or a movie that failed to meet up to expectations), MHB (My Hercules's Bitch, a favourite among online gamers, as in "I'm going to beat you at this level and make you MHB"), and LLH (Lame Like Hephaestus, something shoddy or inadequate being compared to that Olympian's physical disability).

Other acronyms were less humorous, less widespread, and more specific in their aim. They were the online equivalent of a Freemasons' handshake, a method of sounding out whether an e-correspondent was a fellow traveller on the path of anti-Pantheonism. These included DODO (Dump Olympians, Destroy Olympus) and GMA! (Gods My Ass/Arse!). Slip one of them into the "conversation" and pretty soon you would know whether you were in sympathetic company or not. The Agonides resorted to them frequently, and Argus remained ignorant of their meaning.

On the internet a broad consensus was developing. The Olympians were, for the first time ever, looking vulnerable. Their iron grip was loosening. The perch they sat on, which for so many years had seem so lofty as to be unassailable, now seemed as though it might be within reach, since someone had managed to knock a couple of them off it.

The doubters had, for once, real fuel for their scepticism. The pessimists were converting to the church of optimism. The cynics were laughing. The scoffers were turning serious. Could this be it? The beginning of the end? Was the closing chapter in the saga of Pantheonic rule being written?

"Jerry was LLH on Paulita," ran a typical post. "The J's don't know what's hit them," ran another. "Whoever the guys in the super-suits are, they're MHB-ing the Pantheon," was a common refrain.

More and more, the New Labours of Hercules were coming to be regarded as a cheap ploy by Zeus, a bid for public kudos, an attempt to save some face by winning hearts and minds. It was almost taken as read, now, that Poseidon must have been behind the Staten Island Ferry near-disaster, and some were speculating whether the 25-foot alligator in the New York sewers hadn't just been planted there for Hercules to find. That 'gator was a kind of monster, after all, and the Olympians knew a thing or two about monsters, did they not? It stood to reason.

As for Hercules himself, a certain grudging pity was in evidence. "Jessie," as he was dubbed in J-Series Cipher, was judged to have been a patsy in the whole affair. Zeus had dangled him out there in front of the noses of the monster killers, setting him up as their first Olympian target. They'd taken the bait, and all along Hercules had been oblivious, innocently obeying Zeus's orders, until out of the blue the attack had come. "Jim," a.k.a. Hermes, was never meant to have arrived in time to save him. Zeus had, in other words, sacrificed Hercules in the hope of killing or capturing one or more of the enemy in exchange. Herc the Jerk was a perennial embarrassment for the Olympians. His death was no real loss to "Jerry." Get rid of him, get rid of some of the opposition at the same time — two birds with one stone, win-win, all that. Only, the scheme had backfired, and "Jim" was now MIA. One of the Pantheon's major assets, gone. Little wonder "Jerry" had been in such a grump on the chatshow. He'd made a bold play, and the other team had spanked him.

So ran the sentiment within humankind's electronic collective consciousness, and whether the internet shaped or only reflected the mood out there in the real world, its users were certainly becoming more strident in their views, more daring, more willing to stick their necks out and say what they thought. There was a fever building. The Titans, though no one apart from them knew yet that that was their name, had started the infection, and now it was incubating nicely, replicating, spreading. At last it seemed possible that Pantheonic rule was finite. The future wasn't going to be just year after year of the same old arrogant tyranny, the same old squirming submission.

A tantalising prospect. No more Olympians. If everyone could just get together, following the example of those unknown champions in their strange high-tech armour. If ordinary people would just rise up. If national armies would just unite and march on Olympus. If, if, if…

And as the fever grew, the temperature online rising and the internet buzzing and thrumming with a febrile radical zeal, hardly anyone noticed a brief, anonymous email that was lodged in the Comments and Suggestions section of the British government's official website. Hardly anyone noticed because such emails were routinely discounted and discarded. The UK's leadership had little interest in learning what the common man had to say about the way it ran the country, and even less interest in putting any of the common man's ideas or proposals into practice. The civil servant whose daily chore it was to delete each of these missives didn't even glance twice at this particular one, despite it having as its subject heading the words "I KNOW WHERE OLIMPAN KILLERS R HIDING." All sorts of crazy people wrote in to parliament, and emailers were often the worst. They were the new green-ink brigade. "Disgusted" of wherever-it-was had access to a computer now and no qualms about bombarding those in power with whatever nonsense happened to percolate up in his or her pea-sized brain that day. The poor grammar, the capitals, the misspelling of Olympian, and the textspeak "R" all confirmed that this particular email was the work of yet another uneducated, semiliterate nutcase. The civil servant opened it, ignored the content, pressed Reply, pasted in the stock answer template — "The Prime Minister thanks you for your concern and will address the valid issue you raise as soon as time permits" — then Send, Delete, done. Next!

Someone did sit up and pay attention, however.

Argus.

The email snagged at the fringes of his awareness. His enormous, globe-spanning ether-self felt a tweak, a faint, distant niggling as some lexical filter or other that he had set up years ago probed the content of the communique and was made curious. With intangible tentacles the software plucked the email from oblivion, much like a librarian retrieving a tome from the basement or a truffle pig snuffling out a fungal delicacy in the depths of the forest, and brought it winging to the forefront of Argus's mind, for his closer attention. Thousands of operations like this occurred every hour of every day. Argus's life was a perpetual assessment of data, an unending sorting of the relevant from the irrelevant, the pertinent from the impertinent, the tolerable from the intolerable. He would sift everything down further and further until only the finest-graded stuff remained — the credible threats to Pantheonic control, the most insulting or seditious opinions given voice to, the matters that demanded immediate action. He would then inform Zeus, leaving it to the king of the Olympians to determine the appropriate response.

The email in question read: