The five are:
Zach, Mahaska County, Iowa
Zach is stung while drawing a giant penis into a cornfield during a drought. This happens during a video chat he has with another guy. The video, of course, goes viral. Zach is also naked at the time, which makes for interesting viewing.
Samantha, Palmerston North, Wanganui, New Zealand
Sam is stung while on contact with a young woman from Madrid. The two are making an Earth Sandwich - they take a photo of a slice of bread lying on the earth from their opposite sides of the world - which is apparently a big thing in New Zealand.
Julien, 12th Arrondissement, Paris, France
Julien is stung right after he is thrown out of World of Warcraft after having played forever. Julien is not only an arrogant Parisian (as one would expect), he is also more interested in video games than he is in school (of course, he attends the Sorbonne).
Diana, North Bay, Ontario, Canada
Diana, who suffers from Tourette's Syndrom and has a crush on her pastor, is bitten after a not-so-nice scene involving said pastor, his wife and a dog beating neighbor.
Harj, Trincomalee, Sri Lanka
Harj, who works in a call center for Abercrombie & Fitch, is stung while giving an interview about his "celebrity room tone" (silence supposedly recorded in the rooms of famous people).
The five - referring to themselves as the Wonka children, get picked out of their familiar surrounded and spend the next few weeks incarcerated individually in a room without window or any kind of destruction. There, blood is taken frequently, they only communicate with a mechanical voice and are fed jell-o-esque food.
When they all go back to their respective homes, their former houses are uninhabitable, because they have been checked, stripped, taken apart and crowds hang around in front of them, trying to catch a glimpse or - better yet - harvest some of their famous DNA. Also, the prescription drug Solon pops up all over the place. It makes people content with being by themselves and has a 100% addiction rate. Only the five are allergic to it.
They disperse into different directions but are once again picked up and - now together - brought to a remote island, inhabited only by a small tribe. There with them is Serge, someone that has been monitoring Julien after he got stung. Serge urges them to tell stories, something that he passes off as a scientific test. They soon learn, however, that Serge has apparently gone rogue and they have been used in experiments connected with Solon. Specifically, a protein that only they possess and that apparently is what attracted the bees to them in the first place, can be used as a basis for the production of Solon and its antidote.
In the end, the small tribe gets hooked on Solon, the five get the truth out of Serge and they flee into the wilderness, while they start becoming more like a hive the more time they spend together.
Classic Coupland (read: weird).
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment