Dosing Power - Part I
Fragment of Dear Future (what is Dear Future?)
Houbová Zuřivost is a name you won't recognize due to the fact that nobody ever managed to figure out who they were, what they did, or that they were worth finding out about at all. The name, a Czech phrase translating to "Mushroom Fury", was a radical "activist" organization formed by some Czechoslovakian teens not long after General Cocks of the USSA blew most of North America off the face of the Earth. Their radical organizing mission? Dose the ever-living fuck out Earth's greatest living tyrant with obscene quantities of psilocybin.
Psilocybin was the easy part, the members of Mushroom Fury were growing INTERPOL-watchlist quantities of magic mushrooms since they were children. One member even had a dubious "mycological chemistry" degree from a foreign school he refused to disclose the name of. A school he said "made you sign an NDA with an assassination clause before you even applied". A school that "specialized in psilocybin producing fungal species and their pharmacological action on the mind". Probably all bullshit but what was true was his mastery of a chemical-extraction and crystallization process which allowed them to ship product discretely and, more importantly, with a stronger kick.
This hyper-concentrated form of psilocybin which was their flagship product they dubbed God's Word. It was the only psychedelic any member would use themselves and elevated them from your average underground shroom vendor to kaleidoscopic kings of illicit e-commerce. They said that taking God's Word was "like installing a spiritual fiber-optic cable between your mind and the eternal, escorting you beyond awakening to a perfect darkness nestled within the light"— whatever that means.
At the time, most historically dominant regimes were defunct or irrelevant. The United Schutz-Staffel of America had already blown themselves away. Russia had miraculously taken a democratic swing since the timely death of the forever-term President Gleb Sokolov and was now being led by actually-democratically-elected former-opposition leader Svyatoslav Gureev. The exception was China, specifically the CCC (Chinese Command Caucus) led by President Qiong Li, which was still in full swing and now, unhindered by bipolaric MAD diplomacy, ready to hit an autocratic surveillance-state home-run.
Mushroom Fury, really being nothing more than a little band of politically ambitious psychonaughts, initially considered starting small, maybe with an insignificant South American nation whose dictators were always on the brink of collapse anyway. But the specter of Qiong "Super State" Li was just too great to ignore. Plus there was a decent chance that even just one of these dosings would be enough for them to be traced up the supply chain and waxed off the face of the Earth. The way they saw it, jumping to the big leagues was the only choice.
Making this happen all hinged on this guy they knew in The Provinces. A Chinese-American who moved to Guangdong Province in the early 2000's AD for reasons undisclosed and who they only knew as "The Guy".
The Guy was a consistent customer who'd been impressed with God's Word since he first tried it in a TrippSampler™ pack a couple years before he connected with the M.F. boys directly. Odorless, concealable, passed any general drop test. And the name. It wasn't just cool, it was truth. A veritable fast-track to enlightenment as The Guy's shaman put it.
But loving God's Word in itself wasn't what got someone like The Guy to go out on a shaky little "let's dose a dictator!" limb. No, that was the other thing about The Guy: his considered-paranoid-before-certain-fucked-up-events concern with, as he described it, "the straight-up fucked downfall of the free-world". He was banking on China becoming more American by the time he made enough darknet dough to retire, not the other way around. These were ruminations he'd shared more than once with his young Czech suppliers, and what made him come to mind when they got to organizing in the first place.
What M.F. needed the The Guy to do was what The Guy did: connect those who wanted to be connected with those that probably did not. This project was pretty ambitious though, even for The Guy. Finding a man on the inside of the most powerful and paranoid organizations ever to exist? He couldn't just hit up Li's inner-circle group chat and expect them to sprinkle the magic dust for him like it was no big deal. It just wasn't that simple, obviously it wasn't that simple. But The Guy, well, he did have connections everywhere.
Everywhere including a non-zero amount of Chinese corporate elites who enjoyed the proverbial jazz cigarette every once in a while. People who might owe The Guy a favor. People who could find someone to get him in contact with a contact who could connect him with yet another contact. In this particular case, yet another contact being a young-ish executive-maid who The Guy code-named "Cube".
Cube was the daughter of a former business leader in China who had done something to annoy someone high enough in the CCC to inflict material devastation upon those who annoyed them. Cube, having done nothing annoying herself (and also being straight up foxy), was helped out by someone even higher up. They gave her a position within the Caucus cleaning offices and occasionally serving refreshments. Her "occupational excellence" eventually led her to the "great honor" of serving Li himself.
But how to get Cube to do the deed? Bringing her in on the plan was not an option for more reason than one, she had to remain in the dark. But that's where The Guy's intelligence came in.
Unlike many Chinese people of his generation, Li was a coffee drinker. Big time. Actually the only reason The Guy was even able to figure that out was because of just how big time we're talking here. It was practically the only thing you could guarantee about Li, he was going to be drinking coffee well into the evening. And with coffee goes sugar. Might sugar go with God's Word? There was only one question standing in the way: how did Li take his coffee?
