Who is Cassandra?

Of all the questions that have been asked in recent weeks, this one seems the most pertinent, and the most mysterious. At first people would laugh when they heard the question: "That's easy!" they would begin, but soon fall silent at the realisation that the question was unanswerable.

As soon as it was first heard, the question spread from person to person like a virus. People asked their friends and family, neighbours and co-workers, but nobody knew for sure.

Within hours of the first asking, theories began to emerge on secret internet message boards, stories exchanged by clandestine meetings of conspiracy theorists in the underlit corners of shady pubs. Cassandra was a top agent for the CIA, based in North Africa and the Middle East; she was responsible for the current crop of uprisings in Libya, Syria, Iran, Egypt. Cassandra was the high priestess of some bizarre cult worshipped by the British royal family. One theory held that Cassandra was merely a talented software programmer who has installed subliminal messagers in all her work, and that the entire phenomena was part of a wager against a co-worker.

Such chatter was not limited to the usual suspects of internet crazies and paranoid teens. Walking home in the dark one night, a young woman with enough ketamine in her body to down a stallion placed her hands on my face and insisted that there was no single Cassandra, that the name was merely an alias used by the many leaders of an international underground resistance, sworn to protecting the human race from the eternal evils that lurk in the world's invincible shadows.

As the days went by, the absence of the question "Who is Cassandra?" from the mainstream media's reportage become more and more noticeable. Why was it not being asked by those in the highest authority? The people had a right to know. This was even more fuel to the flames of the conspiracy theorists, who insisted that the failure of the BBC, CNN, Sky, FOX, Al Jazeera, et al. to report on the question was proof, if more were needed, that the question was part of an international cover-up of the most extreme sort by the powers that be. JFK; Roswell; Watergate; now Cassandra.

I tried not to let myself obsess over the question. I tried to focus on my work, my studies. I soon found "Who is Cassandra?" scribbled in a hurried hand that I recognised as my own upon my notes. I caught myself surreptitiously writing it on restaurant menus. My housemates heard me asking it in my sleep; they stopped sleeping in order to avoid the nightmares which plagued them with the unanswerable question on an endless loop.

Who is Cassandra? Perhaps we'll never know. Perhaps, whether by luck or by judgment, one of the theories is true. Perhaps Cassandra really is an emmissary from a future society, sent to warn us of the dangers ahead. Perhaps she is a creature from another planet or another dimension, trapped on Earth without the resources to return home. Perhaps there never was a Cassandra. Perhaps.

I must confess that my favourite theory is a little more mundane than those. My favourite theory states that Cassandra was simply a girl from the American Midwest who, tired of the wieldy, Hellenic, mythic associations of her given name, eschewed it in favour of another moniker. Over time, even her closest friends, who had known her longest, began to call her by the new title, and forgot her old one. And so it was they who first really asked the question "Who is Cassandra?" after all.

But it's just a theory.