Bookdns

I once had a dream that a trio of fat-cat bankers — replete in top hats and tails — were lounging on deck chairs on a sunny beach. As the sun came up, they began singing in harmonious, baritone unison: “Give me all your BKDNs! BKDNs, BKDNs!”

I woke up and wondered where that image came from. Why the bankers? Was ‘BKDN’ some kind of stock name I’d internalised during my waking hours? Maybe my subconscious brain knew something I didn’t and that I should immediately invest in this little-known BKDN listing.

I immediately googled it, seconds after waking up. At the time, there were ZERO search results for that specific set of letters in that order.

Obviously it’s pedestrian to pretend that your dreams are so kooky that they’re worthy of comment — everyone has surreal dreams, they’re surreal by nature — but they are always an amalgam of pre-existing thoughts. It tickled me that brain had constructed BKDNs, a pure nonsense but with neither thought nor precedent.

Stranger still, later on that day I was in London and saw these two fancy gentlemen. Why were they dressed like this? What’s with the huge briefcases? Why are the BKDN bankers from my dream now staring at me?

A: he was probably staring at me because I was unashamedly taking a photo of them then following them. I see you, MFers.

Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about BKDNs.
So I wrote this story.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Bookdns

“What’s that?” my wife asked.

Poppy was going absolutely bonkers at her (she’d made the classic mistake of mentioning the cursed word before she herself was ready to take her for the morning W) so I could tell she wasn’t really listening. Even aside from the dog, I don’t blame her for not caring; does anyone ever enjoy anything that follows the phrase ‘I had such a weird dream last night…’?

“Bookdns,” I repeated, having to yell it over the damned chihuahua’s excited yipping and the frantic clicking of her claws on the wood floor.

“No I heard what you said,” she huffed, annoyed at me more than her dog, “but what does it mean?”

“That’s the thing. I have no idea. But it seemed very important?”

“It seemed important.”

“Yeah, for some reason?”

“In the dream.”

“Yeah, in the dream.”

“Fascinating,” she said, in a tone that suggested it really wasn’t. “Barnaby needs more almond milk.”

“Does he? Uh, okay.” My stepson was a teenager. He was old enough to get his own weird milk, but I knew better to ignite this one again. “I’ll pick some up. Isn’t he on oat milk these days?”

“Almond. And sugar free. Sugar doesn’t agree with him, you know that but you always forget.”

*****

“Just that, thanks,” I said, putting my item on the counter. You were legally obliged to say that in Britain, otherwise if you don’t stipulate you want ‘just that’ then the person at the till is liable to start randomly scanning any — and, worst case scenario, every — item in the shop’s inventory.

“You want a bag mate?” said the bored-looking clerk on the other side.

I looked at the solitary carton of soya milk on the counter (I couldn’t be arsed to get almond and instead took the first weird carton I saw.) “I think I’ll manage.”

“Three for ten on vape juice,” said the guy, and it was clear from his expression that he was reciting the words through pure obligation. For all he cared, he could have been reciting a line from the Magna Carta.

“I’m good, thanks.”

“Scratchcard? National Lottery?”

“I think I’m fine for those too, thanks,” I said after pretending to give it a moment of consideration. Clearly my ‘just that, thanks’ was under intensive assault and I’d have to hold fast, no matter what he threw at me. He couldn’t have had much ammunition left, aside from a final inquiry as to whether or not I wanted a bit of paper documenting that I had purchased milk.

“Any bookdns?”

“Nope, I think I’m…”

What?

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

His expression changed for the first time, from an impassive mask of pure boredom to one of slight-yet-cognitive confusion. “I said did you want any… uh,” his stare, having been previously fixed on the mid-distance between the counter and the end of the universe, suddenly shifted to what he had around him. “I said did you want any batteries?”

I noted him gesturing towards a small section of discounted goods. It was filled solely with Kit Kats. “No… I think I’m fine for… er, just that please,” I said, tapping the top of the hemp milk or whatever it was with my index finger, slowly and deliberately.

I did it in such a way that I was pointing directly at him. It was subtle, but I’d like to think it still delivered the message: I caught that.

*****

“We turn now to the latest developments from the growing crisis in East Teldonia,” the woman told us over the news in a sombre tone. “Mass civilian casualties are being reported in the wake of a failed coup by rebel separatists, leading to what Amnesty International is calling…”

“Do you think she’s attractive?”

“No,” I said. Nailed that. Maybe a little too quick off the mark, there…

“Yes you do,” she stated.

“I literally said ‘no’.”

“You do. Admit it.”

“I won’t, because I don’t.”

“Go on,” she said, smiling flirtatiously while bumping my thigh with hers. “You have to admit she’s a bit cute.”

“Jesus, Camilla. She’s literally talking about a proto-genocide going on right now,” I said, extending an open palm toward the screen at the censored images of civilians hanging from overpass bridges. On fire. “Hang on, do you think she’s attractive?” I said.

Excellent deflection, there. Classic.

“She has got lovely hair,” she said, flicking her own.

Danger.

“I agree she does have… hair.”

Camilla’s smile dropped and she somehow managed to instantaneously teleport half a foot down the sofa away from me. “So you do fancy her! My god, I knew it!”

It was my fault for not seeing that coming. Despite my best attempts, I’d stepped on yet another fully-visible beartrap. My third this week.

“Honey, I didn’t mean…”

“I bet you’d prefer it if I were a brunette too.”

“I just meant that…”

“Sshhh!” she cut across me, waving a hand in front of my face to indicate that she was now very interested in the growing crisis in East Teldonia.

“… in a moment we’ll be tuning into the situation live on the ground with our field reporter Marcus Buckfield, but first we turn to David Diggins for comment here in the studio. David, as a spokesperson for the Secretary of Defence, do you feel our government is doing enough to aid the civilians in…”

Camilla and I sat in frosty silence. I figured she was stewing in indignant rage too much to actually listen to David Diggins drone on, and I was similarly staring blindly at the TV while the words washed around me.

“… but if I could just — David, if I could… no, I’ve let you have your say. Do you feel that the government is providing East Teldonia with enough bookdns?”

I was way up in my own head, but that made me blink. I looked at Camilla. She wasn’t paying any attention at all. I turned mine back to the TV, and David Diggins was as puzzled as I was.

“Do we send them enough… buck dunns? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar.”

“bookdns,” repeated the newscaster, who was objectively attractive. “bookdns… I’m sorry, bllstc. Ballistic? Missiles.”

David Diggins face had screwed up at this point. “Sending them ballistic missiles? What on earth are you… when has that ever been policy?”

“I apologise, we appear to be having some kind of technical difficulty here in the studio,” hot newscaster stuttered, turning to the camera. She looked very flustered. “Apologies to David, here. While we resolve things in the studio, let’s turn to our field reporter on the ground in East Teldonia. Joining us live now is CNC’s Marcus bookdns.”

*****

“You got the wrong milk for Barnaby. Again.”

Camilla delivered this latest accusation while slamming the fridge door. She went to open it again and slam it for a second time, but I caught the door.

“Yeah, I did. I’m sorry,” I sighed. I then placed my hand over hers on the rim of the fridge door, and looked up at her scowling face in gentle deference (sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.) “I’ll be honest with you honey, I struggle. I really struggle. There’s too many varieties to keep track of. There’s almond milk, rice milk, oat milk, cashew milk… pea milk, of all things. There’s even coconut milk, if you can believe that!” I said, then reflected on the last one. “Actually I suppose coconut milk is a thing. That one always existed, really.”

“You don’t need to remember all of them!” Camilla snarled, tugging her hand away from mine and rubbing her temples in abject irritation. “You just need to remember that Barnaby has to have sugar-free almond milk! Why can’t you remember that?”

I looked down. Not in submission, just to see the carton in the fridge door. I squinted at the writing on the side, then gave myself a little chuckle before addressing Camilla again.

“I see where you’re coming from honey, and you’re absolutely right. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t remember that.”

“Good. So do better in futu…”

“Except for one: I genuinely don’t give a shit? Now that I think of it, why don’t they figure out a way to milk shit? They’ve figured out how to milk everything else, so why not milk actual shit. Barnaby can drink sugar-free milked shit for all I care.”

Camilla looked at me aghast. “How dare you speak of my son that w…”

“Ah, fuck off,” I said, taking the carton of milk out of the door. I laughed even harder now, seeing that there was another line in a smaller font beneath the one I’d already spotted:

bookdns milk
bookdns-free

*****

“Morning,” I said to the elderly man walking the other way.

It was always a gamble, that. Saying hello in the countryside. For a nation in which etiquette was practically codified, nobody could quite agree on this: do you say hello to strangers while walking? Certainly in rural areas it was more common, but by no means a given. How cheery were you supposed to give it? How offensive were you supposed to take it if the greeting is not returned? Has anyone ever studied how far into the countryside one must go until the rules apply, or indeed, break down?

“bookdns,” the man replied, cheerfully enough, but his happy expression turned into a mask of anger. He punched himself repeatedly in the temple in pure frustration, and with some serious force, as he walked past me.

It had been about five months since the word had entered our lexicon. No, not entered… invaded. And by ‘our’ lexicon, I mean every language on the planet.

I don’t know for certain if my dream was the genesis of it all. Probably, given how things ended up. But putting aside whether or not I was patient zero, I still couldn’t answer where the word had come from before me. Did it exist somewhere else before entering my subconscious brain? Had it existed in the fabric, just… waiting? No other word in any other language had this power, so it would be peculiar that none of the 100 billion human brains that had come before me had conjured it before.

And make no mistake, it was unique. As far as we could tell, nobody had put the string of characters ‘bookdns’ together in that order before (according to all history of the Internet). If you tried to search for it, you got literally zero results — a rare feat these days — and instead a polite suggestion that you might be an illiterate moron looking to buy ‘book ends’.

And that is exactly what I did. I had a tab open specifically just to periodically refresh and monitor the search results. I didn’t have to wait long; it took only about a week after my milk carton fiasco before the first scattered mentions appeared on forums — Reddit posts with titles like ‘Can anyone explain what bookdns means?’ and ‘Why do my parents keep texting me about ‘bookdns’? Is this a far-right thing?’

Of the early crop of posts, the one with the most upvotes was a video of a girl writing in a notebook. She was holding the camera in her left hand, pointing the camera directly at the notebook in the centre of the frame as she used a rainbow-coloured gel pen to write. After a few repeated bookdns, the uploader speaks — asking in earnest if she’s having a stroke, or some kind of medical issue that a commenter could explain. No matter how hard she tried to write a different word, she wrote ‘bookdns’ in increasingly shaky handwriting.

Anthropologists were among the first to weigh in, suggesting that this wasn’t a new phenomenon (contrary to my earlier suggestion that words have never had this power). In modern times we usually think of memes as Spongebob images, forgetting that language itself is memetic. Individual words can mutate in perceived meaning and entirely grip huge swathes of a population, tip into overuse, and then settle into part of common lexicon. For proof, listen to any two teenagers talk and count the frequency of the word ‘literally’.

It was a decent start, but fell far short of explaining why non-English speakers started involuntarily adding ‘bookdns’ into their sentences too.

Virologists entered the chat briefly to suppose it was being spread on contact. Some kind of bizarre prion disease, perhaps? They lost all stake in the argument when the word ‘bookdns’ was painted on a mountain plane big enough to be spotted by satellite, which was remarkable given that the isolated Nepali tribe responsible would have been wholly unfamiliar with such Latin characters outside of their native Devanagari script, let alone the word itself.

Broadcasted text was not exempt either. The ticker tape showing stock prices at the bottom of news channels began showing BKDN against every number (apropos of nothing, the numbers alongside them unchanged). At this point all gloves were off — after all, nothing was more sacred than the economy, and this was clearly beyond the level of some highly-elaborate, international prank.

The militaries of the world pointed fingers at each other with accusations of mind-virus technology. Every field of science left them to their baseless conjecture and sabre-rattling, joining together across the aisles in scrabbling for a theory. They would even have settled for a half-decent hypothesis.

Even philosophers found use for their degrees, at long last. Sort of.

They posited that we should put aside the disconcerting fact that whole populations were beginning to repeat the word over and over again whenever they tried to speak sensically. The more concerning focus should be on why pre-written text was now appearing as bookdns; was this a matter of human perception, or was the ink literally rearranging itself on all the world’s pages somehow?

Physicists leapt in. They went for a quantum explanation, because of course they did. They can’t help themselves.

To be fair, they actually figured it out. Not just what was happening, but how to reverse the linguistic entropy sweeping across the planet. Professors Laument and Drington held an urgent press conference to explain their findings and, more importantly, unveil the silver bullet they had discovered.

“Hello,” Professor Drington stated, clearly a little uncomfortable. “This is a global announcement.” He was looking straight into the camera as soon as it had been turned on. The chyron overlaid on the broadcast around the world suggested that his name was prof.bookdns.

“Since this calamity has unfolded,” he went on, “our team — in conjunction with bookdns around the world — has gotten to the bookdns of this linguistic scourge deconstructing language as we know it. Moreover… we know how to reverse it.”

The gathered associated press and selected public officials in the Cambridge hall fell short of applauding, but the inward gasp and fevered excitement still hung thick in the air. Professor Drington gave a very slight yet deferential bow, both to the audience and to his colleague to whom he handed over the press conference.

Professor Laurent accepted the mantel, and with a click of the remote held aloft in his left hand, the gigantic monitor at the centre of the stage came to life. It displayed only one thing — the simplest, distilled form of the equation behind bookdns. It was presented in a form perfectly understandable to anyone with a basic grasp of maths, yet the inherent beauty and symmetry would have seemed practically divine to those with even college-level mathematical knowledge.

Not only was it the most elegant formula ever conceived, it also held the inherent answer to save mankind (or, at least, the very foundation of all language.)

It arguably eclipsed the sheer potency and brilliance of E=mc².

Laurent prepared to give the audience a whole minute to take it in before he spoke. Inwardly, he was basking in the reveal… except he was anticipating less of a deafening silence? He looked towards Professor Drington. Then they both looked at the crowd, and beyond the stage lights was a sea of darkened people, all with their arms raised.

“Erm…” Laurent began, but was momentarily lost for words. He looked at Drington, who shrugged. Laurent turned back to the sea of raised hands, pointing at one of them at random. “You have a question?”

“Your formula,” replied the journalist he had picked. She re-aimed her previously raised hand to point directly at the screen behind Laurent. “It just spells out bookdns?”

Laurent’s brow furrowed. He and Drington looked back at the screen together, and saw what every single delegate in the audience was seeing.

“I see.”

Professor Laurent — a man with two PHDs, thousands of teaching hours and over a hundred publications under his belt — uttered what was to be his final, unique word. He said it mainly to himself, having buried his face in his hands, but forgot about the lavalier microphone clipped to his collar. As a result, it was broadcast to both the auditorium before him and the entire world:

“Ah, fookdns.”

*****

Within another week, the whole of academia was finished. Drington and Laurent were left only being able to speak and write the word itself, with all their written notes leading up to the solution similarly decaying into uniform nonsense. Scientists around the world — those whose languages hadn’t yet broken down — raced to share their work, quickly trying to reformulate what the Cambridge team had figured out. It was like trying to pass fistfuls of sand.

The sudden inability to conduct science represented a permanent handbrake being pulled on the future of our species. It was nothing short of existentially catastrophic. Oddly, this did not have quite as much of an emotional impact on people as the loss of all literature, from Shakespeare to religious texts and everything in between (though few mourned the loss of EL James).

But several orders of magnitude above all this, in terms of immediate impact, was our computer network. Every single line of code on every single computer in the world quickly began changing to bookdns, as if the universe was conducting a mass ‘find and replace’.

It was the fabled Millenium Bug on crack.

Phone networks, ATMs and anything else with a firmware folded instantly. Healthcare broke down, both in the emergency sense — MRI machines, ventilators, infusion pumps and other such devices stopped working — and in the systemic sense that all patient records were rendered utterly meaningless. Airports were crippled immediately, as were train networks, nuclear reactors and any car manufactured after the mid-1980s. Satellites were suddenly useless bits of metal orbiting the Earth.

On the plus side, the people of Indonesia were treated to the astounding view of the International Space Station blazing through the night sky on atmospheric re-entry since it couldn’t perform orbit-correcting boosts. The five astronauts on board probably felt differently.

The Internet kinda rerouted itself for a bit but was only able to self-heal for a few days before the entire thing fell.

Mass societal panic engulfed the world, but counterintuitively, war did not.

Every military on the planet, which at this point was fixing to let loose ICBMs on any and all perceived enemies, found their operations totally halted; even if the coding to launch missiles and get them to their target wasn’t defunct, the chain of command had collapsed. No subordinate was prepared to be the first to launch thermonuclear weapons on the basis of a General yelling ‘bookdns!’ over analogue channels.

Hmm, zero industry either, I thought to myself as I stepped towards Camilla’s front door after my walk in the countryside. On the plus side, maybe that’s climate change sorted.

*****

“Hey,” I said, lobbing the binder into the living room then taking off my rain mac and hanging it up. “I need you to sign that.”

Camilla was sitting at the foot of the sofa, on the floor, her mascara streaming down her cheeks. Barnaby was sitting between her splayed legs, also sobbing. He was bigger than she was, and looked ridiculous. He’d been sobbing ever since League of Legends stopped working, so honestly, fuck Barnaby.

“bookdns?” Camilla said as I entered the room proper, one hand holding the binder up with her other hand outstretched to me. I intuited that she was either asking one of two things: what is this binder, or please keep talking to me.

The latter was a request I’d gotten used to. From former world leaders to indigenous rainforest tribes, every person on the planet could only speak or write one single, meaningless word. I was forced to accept that my retained ability to speak full English (and a tiny bit of Spanish) must have sounded like a fucking angel singing in three-part harmony.

“Divorce papers,” I said, in case she was asking about the former. I produced a biro from my pocket, clicked it, then handed it to her. “Sign on page 14. I get the house.”

She burst into a fresh bout of sobbing, but leafed through the papers anyway while I left them to it and sat in the adjoining conservatory. I didn’t know what the point of me doing that was; every word of the settlement contract was the same, and as I heard her move the pen across paper, I could picture exactly what her signature looked like too. It felt cathartic though.

We’d set up a projector screen here in the conservatory, years ago. The idea was that we’d put our phones away for the evening and have movie nights. Never happened, of course, because ‘putting your phone away’ for even an hour is beyond human ability. Putting it away for the evening is as futile as asking a heroin addict to lay off the ol’ brown for a while.

I was thinking of this as I browsed through the blu-ray collection. I figured I’d select something with a maximal run time. My finger walking across the cases stopped at the perfect candidate: I recognised it because of the cover art, not the title, which had been mostly changed. There were a few minor adjunctives around the world that remained, but they were vanishingly small and being converted by the day. I was genuinely surprised to see a few of them right here:

The bookdns of the bookdns: the bookdns of the bookdns

I slid the disc into the blu-ray player. Would this even work? I had very little hope as I waited for the projector to show me something. To my utter delight, it did so; I was giddy with excitement on learning that the set-up was antiquated enough not to have been impacted by the firmware apocalypse.

According to the title menu, my options for the disc were ‘bookdns’ ‘bookdns’ ‘bookdns’ or ‘bookdns’. I selected the first one, since that was always going to be ‘play movie’. The onscreen text told me it was a bookdns production, naturally. But then came the theme music — something that they could never dismantle or take away from me, and it filled my heart with unadulterated joy.

Poppy jumped onto my lap, which I normally wouldn’t have tolerated, but on this occasion I let her get comfortable. We were going to be here a while.

The spoken words of the intro voiceover began.

“The world is changed: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air… Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. It began with the forging of the Great Rings…”

“Hah!” I exclaimed, which made Poppy start, but I calmed her down with a head rub and looked straight at her little face. “Can you believe it? They missed one!”

I didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but I gave it another minute or so before calling out to Camilla in the other room. “Hey, sweetie!” I was pointing at the projector screen as if there was any possible way she could see it. “I bet I could make a religion out of this!”