Monkey Business

--- DATELINE: LONDON
--- 5/02/04 / 1250
Experts report a new discovery in the field of Unnecessary Computation (UC). By generating Very Large Numbers (VLNs) of Random Number Generators (RNGs), the so-called VLNRNG technique, scientists have constructed a program which is capable of writing everything else ever written. After much deliberation at the 5th International Congress of Unnecessary Computation at University College Tashkent, the program has been named, for reasons of simplicity, INFNUMMONK. The Government has ordered the formation of a new academic body to propagate understanding of the program and to oversee its development. This body, incorporated at Gresham College, has been named the Free University Congress of the King's International Numeracy Group (Propagation and Oversight) for Investigating Numerical Theory, its Lessons and Effects on Society and Space, or, for reasons of simplicity, FUCKING(PO)INTLESS.

DAY 1: There's a bonobo on Tottenham Court Road. Animal Rights activists broke into the Primate Labs at University College and freed the Archbishops. Then they moved on to the Monkey Maths lab and let out the chimpanzees, the bonobos and the old gorilla, Jeremy, who had been helping the scientists with their enquiries. Not naturally a gregarious individual, he had been gradually coaxed out of his social hermitage by a combination of bananas and the sweet kindnesses of a young research assistant called Claire. Released, he padded off in the direction of the female changing rooms.
    The activists - the London Student Division of Born Free Willy, Sentimentalist Wing of the Vegetarian Society- were not so lucky. Attired head-to-toe in great furry ape suits, they were easy pickings for the security guards and their high-velocity repeating dart guns - 200ccs of anaesthetic being a gorilla-sized dose more than effective in bringing down a ninety-five pound PhD student, since the introduction of the Government's Intelligence Tax living on cabbage and reconfigured Pret-A-Manger styrofoam coffee cups.
    Back to that bonobo. Standing almost six feet tall, he was looking as a Traffic Warden, and the Traffic Warden, frozen mid-ticket, the look of glee draining from his pale and grinning face, was looking back, his mind running through countless scenarios absorbed from nature documentaries on the Nature Channel and Survival Specials on the Survival Channel in a desperate search for applicable strategies. He couldn't recall any for this particular situation, but with admirable presence of mind, surmising that noone bar noone likes Traffic Wardens, he doffed his cap and tried to cover the badge on his lapel with it.
    Unimpressed, the bonobo - whose given name, by the way, was Dave, bestowed upon him by no less an august personage than the Director of the INFNUMMONK program himself when he arrived from the breeding centre in Kent (Dave, not the Director) - strode off in the direction of Soho.

DAY 2 (18H00): A social grouping of chimps and bonobos emerges from Argyll Street and occupies Oxford Circus. A detachment enters Topshop. Teenage girls and stylists in cowboy hats and rollerboots scatter among the jewellery shelves, cascades of glittering plastic bracelets and elasticated kitten heels tumbling down the escalators. Topshop Radio starts cutting up Christina with jungle noises. The crowd goes apeshit.
    A bonobo with a banana wrapped in a bright pink ethnic shawl demands the contents of the cash register:
    "Hit the floor, Jack; it's evolution, right back atcha!"
    "Hands off, you damn dirty, stinking..."
    "Watch it!" yells Dave - for it is he - and discharges the banana all over the till-monkey's pastel diamond-print lambswool golfing sweater.
    "You... bastard..." croaks the besplattered salesperson, "... it's... Prada..."
    Dave flings the till though the floor-to-ceiling window and leaps out, through the crotch of the 60ft prepubescent emblazoned on the front of the store.
    "Fashion victims!"

DAY 3 (TUESDAY): Dave, not yet hanged, like the poor shipwrecked survivor of his race in Hartlepool, for being a Spaniard, is bathing in the fountains in front of Centrepoint.
Soap suds, looted from the launderettes of Chinatown, bubble and churn in the eddies, lift off from the pool and float through Cambridge Circus, coagulating on the windscreens of Northbound buses.
    Questions are asked in Parliament:
    "What time is it?"
    "Who used up all the toilet roll?"
    "I think I'm gay!"
    August Personage, Chairman and Director-for-Life of the INFNUMMONK program Steering Committee, makes personal and convincing representations to the Lord Chamberlain in an effort to prevent the Army being called out:
    "These apes, milord - setting aside for one moment, in due deference to National Security protocols, that these apes share 99.9% of the DNA with human beings - these apes are valuable assets comparable, I must say, with the vastest supercomputers yet assembled; vital to the National Interest as their very ploughshares were to our yeomen forebears."
    Dave bathes. Commuters on the Northern Line, passing beneath him, strap-hang, swaying.

DAY 4: Simultaneous demonstrations are called in Parliament Square, the Outer Circle of Regent's Park, site of the Zoological Gardens, and outside Custom House, site of ExCeL, currently hosting the hastily convened 6th International (Extraordinary) Congress of Unnecessary Computation, by three entirely different umbrella groups with entirely different means, aims and ideologies.
    All leave is cancelled by the Metropolitan, City and British Transport Police. Emergency services, London Transport, St John's Ambulance and the RSPCA are put on standby. Policemen outnumber protesters at two out of the three events. The third appears on the evening television news, with later bulletins showing footage of burning cars and bleeding men with battered, illegible placards being dragged into Police vans.

THE FOLLOWING DAY, the newspapers will downplay the numbers at all three events. Calm will be restored. Your government knows what to do: it has seen this kind of thing before. Our Zoological Gardens, our abattoirs and our animal testing facilities are more scientific, more educated, and more humane than theirs.

SOME TIME LATER... Dave is in the basement of Milroy's on Greek Street, drinking Havana Cask Glenfiddich Reserve and sucking on a Cohiba. He is also on the telephone:
    "But, but, do you see what I'm getting at here? It's not that we don't like doing the math - it's just that we need to cut loose some times... London, y'know... yeah, give us the 40K, the car, the Notting Hill townhouse and we'll talk about it. But one day, one day I tell you, you're going to wake up and there's going to be a fucking monkey in Downing Street and you won't even fucking notice."

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