There are a few conspiracy narratives that could be considered foundational to our current moment. Some would reach for the JFK assassination, magic bullets carrying certainty of the supremacy of the military-intelligence state over decisions of foreign policy, or with 9/11 where we all took Saudi passports to board our hologram planes into a new world of surveillance and terror theatre. But in our era, haunted by technology and complexity and living everyday in the web of competing fabulists, the tale of Danny Casolaro and the Octopus strikes me as the most instructive . An investigative journalist dead in a West Virginia hotel bathroom, his wrists slit and his notes gone. He had been chasing a grand unified conspiracy, linking together the JFK Assassination, Iran-Contra, BCCI and a great many other shadowy events perpetrated by parapolitical actors. Along the way we escalate to arms trafficking run out of Native American reservations, claims of alien autopsies and doctored copies of the Zapruder film but often forgotten is the seed from which this sordid tale unfurled.
PROMIS.
It began with a trade publication writer, part-time poet, full-time dreamer of Watergate-style scoops. He found himself chasing a lead after listening to the bitter grievances of a software executive with an intelligence background. The executive, a former NSA analyst, claimed the U.S. government had stolen his company’s crown jewel: a powerful surveillance program. PROMIS-the Prosecutor’s Management Information System-technically predated the company's involvement, but INSLAW, under DOJ contract, had transformed it into something far more potent. According to court filings and insider claims, this version of PROMIS may have anticipated many of today’s darkest anxieties: how data is gathered, commodified, and ultimately turned against us. The stolen software was potentially distributed around the world, to US allies and enemies alike, and supposedly contained a backdoor that allowed unfettered access to US intelligence operatives. More fringe imaginings in the years since have taken on a decidedly occult sheen, speaking of the near telepathic capabilities of the software, its status as a sentient AI entity or its origins in reverse-engineered alien technology. Familiar to all of us who now have dark dreams of the computing black boxes that now run our world.
As video games go, DOOM is beyond iconic. I still remember booting it up for the first time on my uncle’s boxy Windows 95 PC. By the time I was getting to it, around the turn of the millennium, DOOM was old news, technically surpassed and culturally receding. And yet, in its low-poly demon-blasting, it carried a strange power. There was its pedigree as a frequently referenced milestone of gaming . But also the frisson of the pantomime “adult” beloved by all teenage boys and thus even more adored by those like me, their preadolescent counterparts. Guns, gore, and guitar riffs galore. And also its legendary capacity to run on even the most basic hardware.
It’s not commonly spoken about, but these two cusp-of-the-millennium protrusions of tech-bound terror, one a diverting entertainment and the other a digital filing cabinet turned panopticon, shared a little known chimeric relationship. This is a selection of some of the echoes of what has been called DOOM: The INSLAW PROMIS edition. I should note that this selection is Eurocentric and concentrated on the Atlantic Archipelago as a result of my own geographic bias. I leave to other brave data-combers to trace its tendrils in their own stomping grounds.
Knee Deep in the Dead
Automated Information Systems Office of the US Marine Corps, Quantico, Virginia, U.S.A. 1996
The practice of warfare made unreal through technology might have had its contemporary origins in the ghosts of Vietnam’s Starlight Scope and achieved its modern apex in remotely operated drones but the 1990s saw the US Army explore the possibilities of directly simulating the battlefield in low-poly textures as preparation for conflict. Video games and the military aligned perfectly. True to the pattern of the INSLAW case, the military-industrial complex preferred to steal and rework a commercial product rather than fund a new one. And so Marine DOOM was born. The game modified the base elements of DOOM to simulate squad based tactics for US marines.
Just as personal computing itself had sprung from DARPA projects, the US military had access to hardware far beyond what civilians could buy. Much of it carried copies of the enhanced PROMIS, invaluable for tracking the logistics of an army down to the laces on a soldier’s boots. What no one anticipated was that, on certain machines, the DOOM builds stripped of their demons would become possessed by another entity: PROMIS itself. A handful of Marine Corps systems officers noticed a distinct version circulating and began to host secretive LAN parties. Few remarked that some of their fiercest in-game encounters seemed to foreshadow, almost exactly, the bloodiest interventions by US forces in the former Yugoslavia.
Sellafield Nuclear Site, Seascale, Cumbria, U.K. 2002
Some time after 9/11, a copy of DOOM: INSLAW PROMIS Edition was let loose inside the Sellafield nuclear facility. It circulates quietly among technicians. Soon after, several staff begin to notice something odd: in-game destruction of a certain number of explosive green barrels, when carried out in rapid succession, seems to correlate with anomalous sensor readings on the physical site. Reportedly it produced a multitude false positives on coolant breach alarms and radiation leakage reports.
Through residual back channels maintained by British stay-behind networks operating in the Republic of Ireland, a warning reaches the Oireachtas. The language is vague. There is mention only of “unresolved operational irregularities” at Sellafield. Shortly thereafter, the Irish government distributes iodine tablets to every household in the country. Officially, it is described as a precautionary measure against possible terrorist attacks in the wake of 9/11. Unofficially, few believe the threat ever originated outside the facility walls.
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), French-Swiss border, 2012
I can’t help but wonder whether the apocalyptic buzz around the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs boson wasn’t just a misunderstanding of physics, but a long-delayed cultural milestone. This was Europe’s first real taste of something to salve the Area 51 envy. The EU had finally made it as a techno power bloc, its laboratories having become sufficiently advanced to reach into the esoteric imaginary and visions of paranoid and apocalyptic possibilities. The question of whether the LHC would cause the end of the world might have been a feverish fantasy but I can’t help but view it also as a tiny European victory over the imaginal forces of American techno-supremacy. Somewhere a Gaullist wept no doubt.
But the scientists weren't the only ones at CERN interacting with mysterious forces. A Belgian art collective, known as concréte1304, was in residence at CERN not long before the LHC fired up. Of course at a time of such frenzied activity at CERN the artists had become an afterthought there. While they had applied for the purchase of computers preloaded with certain software tied to their residency agreement, when they arrived they found nothing and the harried administrators eventually chucked an old terminal their way. In the end, as is the wont of art collectives, they made a virtue of the lack and began to compose a piece of sculpture with the terminal at its center supposedly meant to say something about the paltry funding for the arts and sciences in the EU.
It wasn’t long before they came to know that the terminal, an old gift to the CERN offices from some colleagues at a military-adjacent research cluster in MIT, contained a program of great artistic interest. The copy of DOOM (IPE) was by no means the centerpiece of their artistic designs, but attracted special attention from one of their Walloonian contingent. He became obsessed with the game, insisting that it differed significantly from the available retail version of the game he had played in the mid 1990s. The others took little interest in his blasting demons and even less when he began to insist that variances in the available shotgun ammo in each level, differing in key places from the base game, had profound correlations with the running of particular high particle experiments at the CERN facility. The residency would be discontinued before the final project would come to fruition, supposedly owing to some budgetary issues in the municipal government of Geneva. The notes in the interim project reports laying the blame for intermittent power outages at the LHC on the crashing of a copy of DOOM on an old computer terminal possibly didn’t help.
The Shores of Hell
Public Health England, Waterloo Road, London, UK, 2016
Simulations are wonderful things. More than just serving as entertaining distractions in the form of video games, or as a poor man’s theology for DMT-one-shotted tech freaks via the simulation hypothesis, they offer something far more practical to politicians. Simulated emergencies create the pantomime of preparedness, but with none of the risk: if they reveal the impotence of the political class, the outcome can be stage-managed into the desired narrative or, if things go badly enough, buried entirely.
It is the latter that would be the fate of Exercise Cygnus, a UK Government pandemic preparedness simulation carried out in 2016 which aimed to simulate the impact of an influenza epidemic on the UK and the potential pitfalls in UK Government responses. The exercise laid bare the failings of the UK’s health system and would prefigure the scramble for ventilators and concerns about ICU capacity that would rear their ugly heads only years later during the Covid pandemic. The results were so damning that they were quietly buried, never receiving any follow up or formal publication until they would be leaked months into the UK’s flailing COVID response.
However the tentacles of the exercise stretched more directly into the pandemic a few years later. While the exercise was an old school paper based simulation, manilla folders slid onto politicians' and officials’ desks with thin A4 sheets saying “an ICU in Hackney has been overrun and patients are spilling into the corridors…” computers remained necessary to administer the Exercise. Records were kept of “decision matrices” , emails were sent to participants and related expenses ended up in an Excel sheet somewhere. Within this web of computers tracking related records were a number of curious, air-gapped terminals whose procurement process was opaque enough to feel like a rehearsal for the COVID’s own “VIP lane” scandals.
On those terminals was a program described as an “advanced visualization software” for PPE supply management. The few specialist technicians who worked with the terminals didn’t seem to question why something that could be straightforwardly accomplished with an Excel sheet would require them to navigate through low-poly 3D environments, metal walls apparently flecked with blood, picking up little blue potion bottles to register the scramble for simulated medical supplies.
Fewer still noticed that the locations of those pickups would, four years later, map with eerie precision onto the supply routes where PPE consignments vanished from aircraft holds in the summer of 2020.
Offices of Europol, The Hague, The Netherlands, 2019
As part of the wider investigation into encrypted networks used for criminal communications that culminated in the ENCROchat bust, a small number of Dutch employees of Europol would write several reports on an odd copy of DOOM that seemed to come preloaded on some of these burner devices. Given the stripped back and feature limited nature of most of these phones, necessary for selling criminals on its security, this seemed an unusual inclusion. The phones and their service was a limited part of the overall market and so didn’t merit much attention.
The few agents assigned to the case would notice that all seemed more or less as expected barring the fact that players reaching the Halls of the Damned section would instead find what appeared to be a pixelated rendition of a quiet and ordinary housing block. The player would find themselves forced to use only a rocket launcher and the only spawned enemies were the humanoid zombiemen.
By the time anyone might have realized that the housing project very closely resembled one in Stockholm which was subject to a grenade attack by gang members who possessed these devices, the team had moved on to more lucrative intelligence projects
Põhjaranna tee 24, Muuga Harbor, Tallinn, Estonia, 2027
When the European Union’s Electronic Freight Transport Information (eFTI) system came online, the culmination of the dryly named Regulation (EU) 2020/1056, it was hailed as a victory for transparency and cross-border efficiency. The Greens could trumpet the saving of innumerable trees from the scourges of paper transport documents where the growing far-right of the European parliament would crow about how the integrated systems for cross-border documentation would prove an obstacle to illegal migration. The grins of achievement concealed grimaces of desperation from committees looking to salvage something from a near decade long IT project that had most significantly accomplished the swindling of billions of euros of European money into the hands of a procession of IT consultant swindlers.
With an army of consultants looking to leech the maximum money for the most PowerPoints and least technical work opens up plenty of possibilities for cost-saving and profit maximizing. And why make custom software to the everchanging specifications of a none-too-technically enlightened set of eurocrats when you could buy a proprietary solution on the secondary market? When the enhanced profit margin hypnotizes you one tends not to look the gift horse too carefully in the mouth. That’s the case even when its great big equine incisors bear an unusual resemblance to a certain FPS milestone.
Few paid attention to the fact that key components of the Estonian integration node were underwritten by legacy modules drawn from DOOM [PROMIS], a decision obscured beneath procurement euphemisms like “adaptive behavioral interface middleware.”
The system worked flawlessly, or so it seemed. But buried in the dataflow, something malignant had nested.
Estonian customs agents found themselves passing the time on overnight shifts with a fun little distraction on their handheld inspection terminals. Beyond their utility for reading QR codes and authenticating waybills it seemed the contractor who designed them had packed in a little extra. When the ferries weren’t running and the train yards were silent the agents found themselves traversing Phobos Each time a player avatar died to the Cyberdemon inside the embedded simulation interface a suspicious cargo package was quietly waved through the European transport network. No flag, no scan, no inspection. Down the line an attaché would pick up on the fact that the the composite identifiers specifying the placement of these Cyberdemons within the levels, mapping out location and positioning, could be cross-referenced to the license plates of several consignments that would wind up missing and subsequently discovered burnt out in various locations. Their drivers were never found but it is suspected that their cargo reached its destination.
Inferno
New Hibernia Monitoring Station, Sea of Tranquility, Luna, 2081
It was hardly the way Ireland imagined reaching the stars. The “Plough and Stars” initiative sought to lend some grandiosity and the weight of ambitious history to the concession of what amounted to a few test tubes on the moon granted in Indian territory as pay-back for a highly advantageous tax treaty signed a handful of years earlier. Ireland had been coasting somewhat since reunification a few decades earlier had made it the poster boy for successful integration in a Europe that was fracturing more and more by the day. More importantly than being the country’s first exopolitical outpost these were cross-community test tubes: evidence at last that Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians could all cooperate in harmony to spin dirt around very fast in space under the watchful eye of the administrators of the Greater Indian Lunar Concession for Small Nations.
The agreement had been framed in terms of “honoring the relationship between nations which have known the pain of British colonialism” but most understood the tax sheltering quid-pro-quo which had birthed it. What most people were less aware of is the other utility for which this monitoring station served for India’s intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing. They had recently discovered a highly advanced iteration of a particular piece of surveillance software, packaged in an unassuming architectural relic full of demon-blasting, and thought it best to test not only extra-territorially but extra-terrestrially.
The spinning centrifuges soon reached from one small node to many, all over the growing military and scientific infrastructure on humanity's first off-world colony. The tentacles of the octopus stretched out freely in the artificial gravity. The grimacing marine with the bloodied face now clutched lunar weapons platforms in his hands.
The Room With All the Levers, Earth Coincidence Control Office Sub-base Alpha 2, A Point Outside of Time and beyond known Space
As John C. Lily described the Earth Coincidence Control Office it was not a place or agency where technicians sat with concrete, mechanical pulleys and dials adjusting the affairs of man into madness or enlightenment. It was more an amorphous intelligence, reaching out into the cosmos to string together odd synchronicities in the name of something like enlightenment. Coming to Lily at the apex of his experimentation with potent quantities of hallucinogens alongside his pioneering work with sensory deprivation tanks, the notion of the ECCO was of a vast, unfathomable and distributed cosmic computer offering winking acknowledgements of human affairs and possibly plotting our destruction
Well apparently anomalous, metaphysical intelligence-clouds can run DOOM just fine.
It was sometime in the doldrums of the Great Recession, in a rundown flat in Ennis, where the change first became apparent. The country was itself changing, moving from the cocaine days of the Celtic Tiger to the cheaper ersatz stimulants like mephedrone, the loss leader of the headshops that thrived beside the boarded up shopfronts.
But our protagonist was a more discerning type of consumer. Where others chased racing hearts he was partial to another rising tide of changing tastes in intoxication: ketamine. A local vet acted as the supplier of the horse tranquilizer, growing in illicit popularity as people moved away from chasing sensation in a speculative bubble to trying to numb themselves. But our unnamed protagonist was chasing something more. His father, in his youth one of the locally derided “boghoppers” more enamored of Black Sabbath than Big Tom, had by chance introduced him to the 1980 film Altered States at an entirely too young age. Mesmerized by its otherworldly depiction of consciousness exploration our protagonist followed its traces to ripples of John C. Lily on dial-up internet. And so ketamine came for him as a serious minded experiment and not an anesthetic to chronic unemployment. He probed the outer realms of consciousness where he would often wear the face of Deputy Timmy Dooley, cut from an election poster and with the eyes slashed out, as a totemic ward against encounters with sinister astral entities.
Eventually he confirmed his first contacts with ECCO via a numerological codex communicated to him in a K-hole. He used it to record the magpies he saw on his daily walks for fresh air in the local garden center and revealed, in the patterns of their appearances, certain sequences of binary logic which resolved into a schematic. This is how he constructed a device which maintained permanent and two-way contact with the representatives of ECCO outside of the boundaries of any drug induced state.
Gathering together the materials in his apartment, black mold and damp sweating from the walls, he managed to combine a longneck barbeque lighter, a Casio calculator and antennas made of bookies biros into a tool of transmission. At this point his rightmost premolar is in fact a sophisticated listening device which the machine elves have installed in his sleep. It is via this tooth-way radio he receives his final instruction. His amalgamation can be loaded with a particular ROM of DOOM which one of the magpies brings him on a dirty thumbdrive.
The numbers that flash up on the Casio’s solar panel alternate between the ammo remaining in the BFG and the years that remain before the world blinks out. The faces of the enemies resemble family friends and cabinet ministers. The magpies are getting their beaks in the doorway now. They don’t need a keycard to get him. They tell him ECCO is an NSA cut out.
-- D.T. O’Conaill is an Irish writer of horror fiction as well as non-fiction at the borders of techno-paranoia, spirituality and high strangeness. His fiction has been published by JayHenge Publishing and in Underland Arcana. He writes the Stained Glass Alien Craft substack with less regularity than he probably should and tweets with even greater irregularity at @GlassAlienCraft.