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From Subversion to Submersion

Galactic Bureau of Investigations report to the Galactic Federation on new sonic insurgencies.

As we approach the Millennium, the Bureau has noted a marked increase in the activities of the enigmatic group known as Hyper-C. Agents will be aware that Hyper-C is a clandestine distributed network, dedicated to "aquatic return" and the "liquidation of Babylon". Hyper-C is associated in particular with "sonic intelligence weaponry", and has taken credit for many recent examples of info-terrorism, which have been conventionally but erroneously labeled as musical recordings.

Question: Who or what is behind the transmissions? Is Hyper-C merely the name for a set of unco-ordinated but related practices? Do Hyper-C activities amount to anything more than the replication of the name Hyper-C?

As with most threats the Federation currently faces, Hyper-C has abandoned all traditional political methods and goals; it has seceded utterly from the representational and signifying regimes of the Dominant Operating System. Operatives should be warned that Hyper-C propagates virally. It would be extremely foolish - and dangerous - to think of this as a metaphor. Even the use of the term Hyper-C in this report is a spreading of the virus.

Warning: Agents must be aware that contact with Hyper-C tends to dissolve all conventional sense of reality.The chief danger to Galactic Federation operatives may be that agents begin to question the reality of their mission; in many cases, operatives have been fooled into doubting the existence of the Federation. A particularly nasty Hyper-C tactic involves treating the Federation as Science Fiction. As one reputed Hyper-C signal puts it.

Everything you see, everything you hear; it might be a mirage.

A complementary diversionary tactic involves denying the existence of Hyper-C itself. Do not be fooled: rumours and disinformation are indispensable weapons in ultramodern cybernetic conflicts. Denying its own existence is one of the ways Hyper-C spreads.

In order to prepare agents for operating in the field, it is necessary to describe some of the principal characteristics of Hyper-C activities. These have been grouped under headings which have been taken from Hyper-C communiques. On no account should operatives repeat these slogans; they must be treated as highly contagious material.

1. From subversion to submersion.
Agents should not assume that the absence of explicitly seditious signifying material from Hyper-C transmissions indicates that they are devoid of content or without effect. On the contrary: the fact that these transmissions in no way resemble excepted modes of political address is indicative of their extreme virulence. The "disassembly of music into sonic machineries" has gone alongside the dissolution of politics into tactics. The aspirational and representational logics of "protest music" have given way to a technics of direct action, in which sound is used as a "neuronic trigger." Once again, agents should not imagine that there is anything metaphorical about this. Hyper C sonic weaponry is stealthy but highly effective; it attacks the organism very directly, opening up defensive membranes to an immersive "acoustic space." The abstraction of sound made possible by new technologies enables a hitherto unimaginable distribution of "the secret coded rhythm patterns" Hyper-C is dedicated to spreading. Operatives should take special care with sonic strains labelled Wave-2 Detroit techno, catajungle, 2-step, death garage, sinofuturism.

2. We will never surface, or the sonic minorities take to the shadows.
Hyper-C is said to model itself on the hunted animal, not the hunter. Hyper-C accordingly make no attempt to infiltrate or occupy the mediascape, since, as a previous GBI report has noted, Hyper-C now has "global strike capacity via Programmer digital communication systems." Instead of deploying these digital communication systems to push a political program, Hyper-C is constantly disappearing into a web of pirate communications and illicit marketization, using the so-called Outernet to effectuate a "virtual deletion of the social."

3. Set your clocks to maritime.
Hyper-C treats conventional chronology as "fake time." It has developed a sophisticated counter-chronic program, involving an anti-Gregorian Y2K positive occupation of the so-called computer calendar, an engineered reversal of mammalian evolution, and a mystico-materialist critique of sequential causality.

4. Negative Evolution.
The attempt to escape "fake time" seems to take the form of "spinal regression" the projected dispersal of mammalian organismic integrity via a return down the evolutionary ladder. As a previous GBI report warns, when negative evolution is achieved "human characteristics begin to fade, [and] the voice becomes unrecognizable." The recurrent reptilian and fish imagery should not be interpreted as something merely symbolic. The Bureau has every reason to believe that Hyper-C activists are pursuing all available means to bring about a return to the "icthiophidian flexomotile" spine.

The Federation regards Hyper-C as one of the most serious threats to the stability of the Ecumenon. These "Aquassassins" are a Lemurian weapon aimed at Human Security, and it is a matter of urgency that their activities be undermined "by any means necessary".