Norne's computer had frozen in the middle of burning a vitally important DVD. He theoretically knew that it had a virus, having formally accepted the terms and conditions, but this was a technicality. There was only one thing for it. Norne angrily rammed his chubby fist into the monitor, precipitating a chain of events that went something like this: thump, crack... 'argh...' slip, bump... 'motherf...' rumble, smash... 'err...' creak, splinter... 'ar...' slam, crash... 'GH!' silence... 'Dinner's ready, dear!'
Norne's computer now occupied a considerably wider area than it had previously, with Norne himself occupying a roughly human-shaped region of the floor. His desk had somehow precariously lodged itself against a bookcase that had contained his vast collection of mostly pornographic anime DVDs, most of which were now distributed liberally over Norne and the surrounding carpet. The broken monitor had fallen out of his bedroom window and was presumably having an embarrassing time trying to fit in with the garden mulch. The burner had slipped from the buckled computer case and was dangling by its cables just ten centimetres directly above Norne's head.
The bedroom door opened cautiously, afraid perhaps of contaminating the outside world. Norne's mother looked at the cataclysm and put on a plastic smile.
'Your dinner's getting cold, dear.'
As she watched, the gently swaying DVD burner spun down and ejected its tray. The new anime DVD rolled out neatly onto Norne's face. It vaguely occurred to Norne that it was quite possibly the only undamaged item left in the room, at which point the burner came loose from its cables.
A week passed.
Bob's arteries throbbed with adrenaline. It was his task, his responsibility. The infidels had taken one step too far in attacking the Beloved... er... Dark Priest? What was he called, anyway? Never mind. They would suffer great vengeance for their cowardly... for their defacement of... their blasphemous... er... act of blaspheme! Norne had been very clear on that point, Bob seemed to recall. They'd communicated in a Shared Vision. Bob hadn't quite understood what IRC meant, but he was pretty sure that text wasn't supposed to just appear on his computer screen. It clearly must have been Divine Magic.
Now he'd arrived. The airfare had cost him a considerable sum, all the more since there was some stupid rule against carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers in hand luggage. At least it wasn't a knife, he'd earnestly tried to point out. You never knew what a dangerous criminal might get up to carrying one of those around. In the end they let him into the country because he was 'promoting transnational trade diversification through mutual competitive market analysis', and besides, the Australian government was well aware that all serious terrorists arrive in leaky fishing boats from Indonesia.
Bob was, of course, a freelance terrorist. It wasn't a job so much as a hobby - his actual job was being an unemployed fat git, and it brought him a considerable amount of job satisfaction. Nevertheless, he felt that terrorism presented a tremendous opportunity to expand his résumé (which had largely been a blank sheet of paper, devoid of details such as 'address', 'phone number' and any sort of historical information), and being freelance meant that he was never far away from the best flash points.
'Excuse me,' he asked a couple of passing academics. 'You wouldn't happen to know where I can find the Church of Bovinity, would you?'
One academic gazed back at him in exactly the manner of a university professor contemplating a friendly question from man with an RPG launcher. The other whispered something in the first's ear, which evidentially produced a flood of realisation.
'Oh yes,' replied Professor Wophlski jovially. 'A couple of our students were talking about it. I believe they're mostly associated with the Faculty of Computing. Nice... erm...'
'Golf bag.'
'Yes, of course,' the Professor beamed. He watched the man disappear through the university's pathological maze of pathways towards the Computing building.
'I fear, Ivan', said the Dean of the Physics Department, 'that there's a kind of inevitability to this, wouldn't you say?' Professor Wophlski nodded thoughtfully.
'Engineering students...' he muttered.
The Church of Bovinity's rules were now far more strict, and even enforced. That is, anyone who chose to toast the Cow God more than the allotted number of times would be forced to continue toasting until their loyalty rendered them incapacitated. A number of people didn't seem to mind this treatment.
In the middle of the third round of the Sacred Ritual - which involved the use of playing cards and as little linguistic dignity as possible - Bob, the Holy Guardian of the Divine... er... Nature of... Things in General, stormed into the room.
'Right!' he yelled righteously, then righteously glanced around the room and righteously did some calculations in his head. 'Is this the Church of Bovinity?' he asked after a short pause, somewhat less righteously.
Andrew glanced up from behind a hand consisting of a suspiciously large number of tens.
'Uh, nnnnoooo.'
Bob deflated, then frowned.
'Oh, the sign on the door was vandalism,' Andrew elaborated. 'Really screwed up. Hope they lock up the buggers that did it.'
'Oh don't you worry about that!' Bob sprang back enthusiastically. Then he turned around as the click of the door signalled another arrival.
'Brilliant! An engineering student!' Thomas Esh announced to the business end of the RPG launcher. 'Wanna be the treasurer? Church of Bovinity? We still have some places to fill.' He pointed excitedly to the reverse side of the club's poster through the glass door.
Andrew winced.
Meanwhile, two parallel trains of thought ran through Bob's mind. There was a certain elegant symmetry to the 'DEATH TO THE INFIDELS!' concept, but another part of Bob had realised that the word 'treasurer' derived from 'treasure'. Besides, who actually was an infidel, these days? Wasn't it all relative anyway, you know, in the end? This, Bob concluded, was another advantage of being freelance.
A week passed.
Norne's channel surfing landed him on a news broadcast.
'...which has provoked outrage from both chiropractors and manufacturers of novelty glassware. To international news. Police in Australia are appealing to the public for any information leading to the capture of a man they claim launched a rocket at a police car inside a West Australian university campus yesterday. Several eye witnesses reported seeing an explosion that lifted the car from the ground and sent it crashing through the second level of a university building. Miraculously, there were no injuries. One witness said she heard a man chanting "udder is great" immediately before the incident.
'At a press conference, the police commissioner denied reports that the man was a member of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, or CFMEU. Instead, he told reporters that police suspected the man to be connected with a secretive and previously unknown cyberterrorist organisation called the Church of Bovinity. He said that police had arrived to investigate the group when the attack took place.
'The commissioner would not be drawn on speculation that the leaders of the organisation had been inspired by sightings of a cow falling from the sky several weeks ago.'