The Impossible Cheese Ball Of Screaming Squid Stephenson.
To speak its name, it seems almost trivial, a silly, foolish thing. But, beneath the seemingly preposterous exterior, there lurks a horrifying and mind-chilling truth.
Its existence was never chronicled in any major press, and only a few, extremely limited-circulation, small presses, and those mostly personally involved with either Screaming Squid Stephenson or other GNU Age professionals. Yet, according to no fewer than eighteen of the world's most knowledgeable cheese experts, the Cheese Ball was an impossible artifact, uncreateable by any known human cheese-making technology.
Before we examine the reasons this mystifying and world- shaking incident was covered up in the major presses, we must examine the circumstances surrounding its discovery.
Screaming Squid Stephenson is a pseudonym for a GNU Age Professional who wishes to remain anonymous. She is a pirate-radio DJ in the Media Netweb, which is a loose international network of unlicensed radio hacks, who share underground news, experimental art pieces, banned music, alternative talk shows, and radio programming that couldn't possibly be broadcast on licensed radio. They're sent, sometimes encrypted with simple electronics, by shortwave radio, and then assembled and rebroadcast by micropower pirate stations in cities on four continents. The Media Netweb (whose name was taken from the Universal Media Netweb, a fictional network invented by Negativland) is, technically, illegal. However, except for the largest and least amateurish stations, most Netweb members are rarely troubled by the law. A popular format of Netweb show is based on Negativland's "Universal Media Netweb" show Over The Edge, the live radio mix, in which studio sources, phone- in callers, and live media sources are mixed together in a sound- collage. An annual 23-hour long show called World Hack, held on July 23rd of each year, is a simultaneous live mix, via shortwave radio and in-station mixing board, of phone-in callers and studio tape from every participating Netweb station in the world.
In addition to operating an almost professional Netweb station in Salt Lake City, Utah, Screaming Squid Stephenson has a "syndicated*quot; talk show on the Netweb, usually one or two hours a week, aired around 2 AM on Thursday nights. She sometimes interviews guests regarding UFO's, government conspiracies, and alternative religions, but her usual format is a monologue on subjects related to the GNU Age, Anti-Art, and Cheese. The events which placed the Impossible Cheese Ball in her possession took place during the taping of a segment on Cheese Art she was preparing for use in World Hack '92.
Among other things, Screaming Squid Stephenson is prone to occasional fits of epilepsy, during which she frequently receives visions. During the taping of her Cheese Art segment for World Hack '92, Squid suffered a petit-mal seizure, which she describes in the following words:
"Well, first everything started to go kind of blurry, and I knew I was having a seizure. Then there was this light that obscured everything around me. I felt like I was drowning in this light, which was, like... It was somehow a DARK light. Like there was this great darkness radiating and filling the studio, filling the universe, and I was drowning in it. I had this tingly feeling in my fingers and toes that I usually get when I see visions in my seizures. After a minute or two of this smothering dark light, I felt like I was floating over this great barren landscape, full of these deep fissures, like cracks or something. I realized it was a giant piece of Cheshire cheese, or some other crumbly dry cheese with a strong flavour. And I felt this incredible PRESENCE beneath the landscape, like this was some archetypal plane. It was really weird. I don't remember actually SPEAKING with it, but I had the definite sense of communicating with something totally Other. I felt sure it was a projection of my own unconscious, and so I felt totally safe, because I have a good working relationship with my subconscious. I can't put the communication into words... The gestalt was like, it was going to give me a great gift, help me in some way."
When Squid recovered from her seizure, she discovered that the centre of the studio had been filled by a huge speckled sphere, more than two meters across.
Within minutes, Screaming Squid Stephenson heard a knock at the front door of her apartment, and opening the door, she was held at gunpoint by five mysterious men wearing dark green suits and dark glasses, who questioned her about an unidentified light which had appeared above her apartment complex at the time of her seizure, performed a series of physically impossible maneuvers, spelled out the words "Enjoy Coca Cola" in red and white sparkles in the sky, and made an abortive attempt to perform a cover version of "Helter Skelter" by the Beatles in an assortment of ethereal windlike noises before finally evaporating in a shower of confetti and ticker-tape bearing stock reports from August of 1937. These events have been corroborated by no fewer than eight hundred unassociated disinterested witnesses, all residents of Salt Lake City Utah, seven hundred fifty four of whom have since been found dead in a strange series of suicides, from several brutal self- strangulations to a puzzling case who decapitated himself and mailed his head to a dentist in Columbus, Sri Lanka.
Since this incident, Squid's apartment was raided by FCC officials on the prepense of shutting down her illegal micropower broadcasting station. Among the "electronic paraphernalia" confiscated in the raid as illegal radio equipment was a two-meter sphere consisting of seven different kinds of cheese.
Fortunately, Squid was aware that the sphere would probably be stolen by the government, so she had removed a ten-pound slice of the sphere for analysis. When asked by joint representatives of the FCC, CIA, and NASA what had happened to the rest of the cheese sphere, she explained that her third cousin owned a Pizza Hut. Taken by other GNU Age Professionals, it was brought, under tight psychick secrecy, protected by memory escrow, to the worlds most important experts in the subject of cheese. Two food scientists, a biochemist with a Ph.D. in lactic fermentation, three independent cheesemakers, two bacterial geneticists for Kraft and Black Diamond, and Roy Checker (High Thorambic Nela of the Church of Cheddar) analyzed the cheese with the most sophisitated instruments available to cheese science today. The seven types of cheese were, apparently, arranged in a lattice, with the purest concentrations spaced five millimeters apart in an Octet Truss arrangement. Between the core of cheese purity, the gradations of biochemical concentrations were absolutely pure, perfect mixtures of the different types of cheese. Halfway between, say, a Gouda and a Monterey Jack node, the chemical composition of the cheese would be exactly halfway between those two types of cheese. A seven- dimensional surface depicting the cheese makeup of the wedge proved to be, when interpreted as raw data, a complex series of equations which were later identified by a rogue MOOist NASA scientist as some of the operative principles behind the American anti-gravity system used in flying-disc technology (the source of many famous UFO sightings). The only other data present in the nine-pound sample of cheese analyzed for its information content was a brief message, in words, which can't be repeated here, for security reasons.
It's not known what the information contents of the confiscated cheese might have been, but one thing is known with certainty. The cheese experts agreed that there is no known human technology which could produce such a structure in cheese. The perfection and precision of the mixtures of cheese types were amazing: combinations accurate to one part in ten million, in positions accurate to a tenth of a micron, even deep in the heart of the cheese. With this accuracy, the information content of the entire sphere would be almost a hundred megabytes of data, carrying information not generally known to the human population of Earth, produced by a method unattainable, even in the slightest degree, by human technology. The implications are staggering.
The fact remains, however, that this event was not reported in any of the major media, and only a precious few of the small presses. Some of this can doubtless be attributed to the fact that the incident seems ridiculous, and most major presses would be unwilling to report a story that might undermine their credibility. And, to be sure, a huge ball of cheese, however odd, doesn't seem intrinsically newsworthy: it took a great deal of investigation to reveal the complex interior structure of the cheese, and to the average person, it's not at all clear why that structure should be intrinsically surprising. Yet the fact remains that this cheese is just as "impossible" to conventional technology as anti-gravity or teleportation. This fact was revealed to the major presses, and several television and newspaper syndicates were planning on running a small peice on this peculiar story, until key executives were visited by the same mysterious Men in Green who visited Screaming Squid Stephenson, and the story was quietly dropped.
Why it should be that something so bizarre should be the subject of a coverup as massive as any in U.S. government history is a mystery. Gnusticks and MOOists alike have pondered the mystery, and we can only conclude that whatever forces are responsible for incursions of the Other into our realm have a strange sense of humour, or we have to re-evaluate our understanding of the words "incredibly stupid".