Raging monkeys. That's what the news tells us, but we all know better. There are icebergs the size of Texas melting just north of us, the Middle-east has bombs, Japan is buried in a cloud of radio-action, and Yahoo is malfunctioning. Eat your heart out, Cronkite - it ain't monkeys...
A boy of eight, with bottle-cap glasses and a cowlick, sits patiently on the floor with notepad in hand. He listens carefully to the reports coming in and makes chicken-scratch notes to himself about inflection and word-usage.
What began as simple curiosity spawned into a full-fledged conspiracy theory. The boy noticed how news casters spoke in a timbre and phrasing uncommon to everyday dialogue and he wished to understand. Upon further examination, he realized that half of what they said was lies and one could decipher between truth and lie just by listening closely to the delivery.
So he listens.
"Chaddeus," his mother whispers, poking her head out from the kitchen. "It's a little too loud, dear. Could you turn it down, please? Your father's trying to read the paper."
She's sweet and her husband is a wise man, but they don't always understand their son. Chaddeus is much nerdier than either of them ever were in their school days, and they'll always be a bit soar that he never makes the JV baseball team. But that is, in all fairness, due partially to the fact that he never makes it to high school.
Chaddeus becomes so skilled in discerning truth and lie by speech patterns, that he begins to dissect the lessons taught at school. He finds that the majority of basic math is in fact not so basic, if accurate at all. He debunks half of the English language, not on principle, but based solely on how unconvincingly Ms. Wilcomb teaches it. But the problem comes when he starts calling the bluff of his history teacher. Little does he know, Mr. Richmaldt is actually a retired CIA operative with old friends in the Pentagon. When Chaddeus begins questioning Mr. Richmaldt on who Glen Miller really was and what really happened to Amelia Earhart, the Pentagon starts asking questions of their own. And when the boy figures out the Yahoo fluke isn't a fluke at all, they start bugging his house.
"Reports confirm that the Yahoo issue is attributed to a virus from raging monkeys. The monkeys recently escaped from an undisclosed mid-west testing facility, and their infection has spread now even to the interwebs. God help us."
Chaddeus doesn't buy it. Too deliberate a phrasing, breathing too steady for the subject at hand. The reporter either doesn't realize what he's saying, or he knows it's all bullshit. But what's the real story. Chaddeus starts listening to more stations and more reporters. One reoccurring theme he finds - sources are never revealed.
"Reports confirm," but what reports? Whose reports? Chaddeus starts poking around other media outlets. Newspapers, public speakers, political activists, musicians. Everyone's talking about it, so there's plenty of voices to listen to. And what does he find, but that the further up the food-chain he goes, the guiltier the voices sound. It goes all the way to the top, he decides. Beyond the President and even past the UN.
The answer comes from an awareness video released shortly after the whole issue begins. An Irish man with whiskers and purple-tinted glasses sits beside his MacBook Pro and delivers a heart-wrenching message of hope and change in spite of technological adversity. His band's music low in the background only accents the already over-emotional sentiments, guaranteeing every viewer will be in tears by the end of the three-minute blurb. It also guarantees the band will sell another ten million CDs in the next week and a half. But Chaddeus watches the video, and listens carefully, and is not subdued or swayed in the least. He sees the lie for what it is and, what's more, sees the man for what he is...
Bono is to blame.
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