by phuc
Some were real, or looked real. Some had windups at their backs. One of the planes, a little two-seater, had a propeller in the front that was attached with a tightly wound rubber band.
The machines were average sized. One of the cars was a 1966, tan, Chevy Impala. The window was down. Grace stuck her head inside, said, "The keys are in it."
She got inside, turned the key. The car started.
"Now there's something neat," she said. "Low on gas, but I say we try it."
We climbed in, Grace at the wheel. She wheeled around the automotive and aerial debris, and we were off again, tooling along a great tile floor.
5
We found a wide gap in a wall, a mouse hole, and we drove through that. There were trees in there, but they were prop trees, the sort that looked real front on, but at their backs were little stands that held them up.
We passed towns made the same way. Towns we knew. It was Interstate 1-45, or so said the road signs, and the towns were the right towns, but they weren't real. There were even people standing about, at the sides of the road, but they too were false, with little stands at their backs. False cars. False dogs and cats.
Everything a plywood and cardboard lie.
We drove on, and the little towns fell away and gave place to more woods. The woods grew darker and we could see huge sets of glowing eyes out there.
"Man, what could that be?" Steve asked.
"I don't think we want to know," Reba said.
We hadn't gone much farther when suddenly a set of the eyes rushed forward.
A mouse.
A big fucking mouse. Bigger than a horse. It darted for the Impala.
Grace gave the Impala the gas. I glanced back through the rear windshield. The mouse stood on its hind legs and waved its paws in the air in frustration. As it tracked back into the woods, I noted there was a windup key in its ass.
"It isn't even real," I said.
"Neither are we," Reba said, and she began to cry. At one point, we saw beside the road a whole row of tin soldiers. They had rotating keys at their backs. They were dancing together, and it was funky stuff, that's what I'm trying to tell you. "Who winds them?"
Steve said.
"That would be the motherfucker we're looking for," Grace said. We drove in dark silence for a long time, and I know that each of us was thinking of our lives, wondering if any of it was truly our lives, or if we had even lived the drive-in lives, let alone the before the drive-in lives. Just driving along, thinking all this, feeling hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny, remembering sweet moments and sad, thinking, did any of this shit happen or did all our ideas and memories run through chips and wires hidden in our bloodstreams. And is the blood in us blood, or Karo syrup, or is there such a thing as blood, or even humans, and which or what are we, and did this mean someone other than George Lucas made up Star Wars?
Sometime during our drive, the lights were cut off by someone or something. They just snapped off. We turned on the car lights and proceeded. We pointed the car at a silver glow we could see on the horizon, on down that pseudo 1-45.
We drove until we came to an end of the highway and all the props, and still we drove on, across a flat expanse of nothing, almost as bleak as the highway into Amarillo, Texas, if there is an Amarillo, Texas or a highway in that direction, if there is a direction. My God, was there North, East, West or South?
It made the chips and wires and such in the goddamn plasti-flesh skull ache, is what it did.
Not long after me thinking all of this, wondering where this highway ended up, the Impala ran out of gas. We got out and walked toward the glow on the horizon.
We walked and came upon...tools. Giant screwdrivers and pliers, and there were wires and tubes and dials tossed about. We weaved in between them, kept going toward that glow. The goal the glow, baby. The glow the goal. Finally, we arrived at the only place we could arrive. The End Of It All.
There was just the table edge. Nowhere else to go but back, and that wasn't appealing.
The dim light in the distance was not so distant now. It was a huge television, nothing on it but a white glow and an Indian head test pattern. We could hear it hum. And in the TV's projected light, we could see a great room. On the white-sheeted bed was an elderly man and there were metal stands by his bed, and they held bottles of liquid and tubes ran from the bottles into him. They were affixed to his arms and head. Around him were machines with lights and dials on them. To the right of the room was an open window, and moonlight seeped in quietly to rest on the sill like drift-down glitter. To the left of us, setting on the table was a toy, a rubber band windup plane and a checker board with a box of checkers next to it.
There were shelves in the room, and they were covered, or perhaps the word is littered, with all manner of old toys and books.
"By now," Steve said, "I've seen everything but a pig doing the hula while wearing a tutu and a top hat with a cork in his ass, but, I got to admit, my little old brain, or computer chip, whatever, is doing the dipsy-doodle on this here shit." "I'll second that," Reba said.
"Thirds," Grace said. "Oh, hell, count me in too," I said.
"I don't know if you have noticed," Grace said, "but what we're on, isn't quite as wide as it was. And now that I can see better about the room, I spy a chair, a couch, and guess what, we're on a table." "I'll be goddamned," Steve said.
"I see a lot of test tubes," Reba said. I can see them over there, near the bed.. .Goddamn, look at that."
We looked where she was pointing. The TV set. The set crackled like Rice Krispies and lines appeared and met in the middle, and out of the lines came an image, and the image moved across the room toward us.
It was a young, thin, pimply man with unruly hair and glasses thick as goggles. He wore blue jeans and a white shirt with a pencil and pen pack sticking out of the pocket. The pants were a little too short, and you could see his white socks with little blue clocks on them. He wore brown loafers.
As he moved across the dark expanse of the room on a beam of light, he said, "Hi. My name is Billy."
The beam from the TV brought him down on the edge of the table, and there he stood, looking as solid as us.
"A lot of people call me Little Billy, or used to. I am your creator."
6
Then we're going to kill your ass dead," Steve said.
"Actually, you can't," Billy said. "Or, you won't have to. I'm not me... Really."
"That figures," Grace said. "Nothing is real here."
"Oh, yeah. Some of it's real. This room is real. The things in the room are real. To me, anyway. The little toy plane on the edge of the table is a real toy plane. I'm not really coming out of the TV set though. I just thought that seemed cool. I'm coming out of him."
Billy turned and pointed to the old man on the bed.
"And who is he?" I asked.
"Me. The older me. The creator of the creator, me creating me. The younger me."
"I think we ought to just walk back and get eaten by the windup rat," Steve said.
"He's a partial," Billy said. "The rat, I mean."
"Do what?" Grace asked.
"He's a partial. Part flesh, part machine. But, not really."
"Glad that's straightened out in a confused manner," Steve said.
"We want to kill you," I said, "but, you know what, since you're just a beam of light, I'm gonna guess that isn't going to happen."
"No. It won't. Told you that. Besides, what you want, is not to kill me—"
"Oh," Grace said, "I assure you, that's what we want."
"What you want," Little Billy said, "is to know the truth. Everyone wants to know the truth. And the truth is this. The world is bigger than you, and you are on my bedroom table, in my lab. And I'm eighty years old. This is how I remember myself. As a kid. But, I'm eighty, and my time is nigh."
"That's why everything is breaking down," Grace said, "you're not maintaining it anymore, because you can't."
"That's right."
"So, you built
prototypes," Grace said. "Until you got something more lifelike, discarded the old ones in a waste heap, then gave us, the keepers, false memories and turned us loose in a horrible world. Gave us memories so we thought we had a past and could long for going home?"
"Sort of," Billy said, taking off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt.
"You're a fucking monster," Grace said.
"No. I was just playing. I'm not even really very smart, so I didn't exactly do that."
"What did you do?" Grace said.
"Philip K. Dick asked once, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and the answer is, they do dream."
"Okay, now I really want to get eaten by the windup rat," Steve said.
"On the bed the man is not a man but an android. He is a creature and creation of this world, which is a creation by human beings. Maybe. I don't even know that answer.
Humans. Androids making androids. Androids making humans. God making humans, a single cell of thought floating in ether, imagining it all? Whatever."
"So we are the android's androids," Reba said.
"No," said Little Billy. "You are the android's dream. The android, Little Billy, is a beautiful creation like his mother and his father and his now dead sister. He could procreate. He was as human as a human. And like a human, he dies."
"Can't you like jump him off?" Steve asked. "You know, battery cables or something?"
"He is an android," Little Billy said, "but he is too human to be fixed like a machine. He ages. He dies. That's the short and the long and the abbreviated middle. He created your world and all of you to give him life inside his head, since life no longer exists outside of it. On the bed, inside his head, he knows the truth now, that he is an android. He didn't even know, until now. All the secrets of the universe, his own and others, are revealed.
And he sends me to you, in his younger form, to talk to you. He's sorry you've been through what you've been. But not really. He had fun believing it all. Believing for a time he was a great creator of aliens and androids and of a marvelous dark world. In his head, images nestled in a little speck of chip smaller than a virus, he enjoyed the idea that he carved you first, and wound you up, then wired you up, and made you all, put you in the drive-in world, created problems and let you go. You see. But he did that all in his head.
He never put a knife to wood or a wire to chip, flesh to machine. He/me loves movies. A man of unseen wires and parts loves the dreams of the machine, the camera, the devices, the effects. And you, are in fact, the dreams of a machine."
Little Billy glitched, cut out, came back.
"I haven't long. Old age...or what we think of as old age, has caught up with us. Me/Him.
And when I go, the world as I know it goes, and the world I have created goes. And our knowledge of who we are and why we are, goes with us. And by the way, Grace, three points for not wearing a top."
"Now let me get a handle on this shit," Steve said. "We ain't really androids neither. We ain't nothing but a dream?"
"You are what you are," Little Billy said, and there was a glitch and his image jumped away, jumped back, then faded.
And was gone.
We stood stunned, and when I looked back at the way we had come, there was only the table, and I could see the end of it, and beyond it, the dimly lit wall of the room. Finally, I said, "I'm as real as I want to be, friends. And I say we do what we've always done.
Charge on. Live what life we have for as long as we have it."
This was considered, Grace stuck out her hand, palm down. I put mine on top of hers.
Steve and Reba joined in. We said, "Hooyah!"
"Now," I said, "might I suggest transportation? The toy plane? It's a four-seater."
"What the hell?" Steve said. "Why not?"
We made our way over there. The plane was pointed toward the back wall. Steve and I had Reba and Grace climb up on the checker box and step inside the plane. Grace took the little wheel in her hands.
"Do you think it works?" she said.
"Don't know," I said, peeling off my tied-up clutch of spears, tossing them on the ground.
"We're gonna turn it so it faces the window. Then we're gonna wind it up, climb in and let it go." "How?" Grace said.
"I have an idea. A spark inside my little brain that is neither flesh nor computer chip, but the makings of an old man's dream. His brain is my brain. And that brain tells me we are going to turn the plane around, me and Steve."
We struggled to do it, but managed, then shoved it up close to the checker box again, pointed it in the direction of the window.
Steve and I went around front, got hold of the propeller and began to wind it, grabbing each new propeller blade as it came to us, winding it tight.
"When we have it wound tight," I yelled up at Grace, "take your bundle of spears from your back, and stick the whole bundle between the blades, and you and Reba hold the propeller in place till we get inside."
We kept winding, and soon it was as tight as we could wind. "Now," I said.
Grace stuck the bundle of five spears between the blades, and with Reba helping her hold them, we let go. One of the spears snapped, the propeller moved a bit, then held.
Steve and I scrambled on top of the checker box, slipped into the back seat of the plane.
"When I say," I said, "jerk up the spears and toss them away." Grace nodded. "Now," I said.
She and Reba jerked them back and tossed them loose of the plane, and the little toy rattled and roared and wheeled across the table, came to the edge of it, and launched. It dipped at first, then rose up and glided, wobbled a bit, then headed straight on toward the open window.
"How long do we last?" Steve said.
"As long as the old man," I said. "As long as life gives us. As much as life gives us. Hell, nothing's promised to human or android or dark little dream, so goddamnit, we'll live what's there." The plane sailed smoothly out of the window and into the moonlight and into a cool fall breeze that swept under the plane and lifted it higher. White moths burst in front of us and beat wings to the sky and became white flakes in the darkness. Above us, stars — real stars as my false memories remembered them —shone above us, bright and sharp. And there was the moon. A great silver plate lying on the black fabric of night. The air smelled of fresh mowed lawns, and there were warm lights in house windows and a long dark yard where grass grew, and I knew instantly, that this was the world I had come from; this was my East Texas as created for me by my android sire who lived here in his East Texas created for him by... Whoever.
I took in a deep breath of cool night air and felt good and strong and strangely alive.
I thought: There's no reason to write anymore, so I will not. I tore open my pack, took out my journal of composition books and pages, tossed them high to the sky.
The fluttering pages evaporated in the air like cotton candy birds licked wet, then the front of the plane faded, and I laughed, and I saw Grace and Reba fade, and Steve looked at me, and smiled, and faded, and so did —
EPILOGUE
The end ain't the end, and the mystery ain't the mystery, and the grooves of the pseudo-mind are dark and, well...groovy.
FADE IN, DEAR HEARTS
We were back.
"What the fuck was that?" Grace said.
"I thought the old man died," I said, "taking us with him."
"He must have had a moment," Reba said. "A mild stroke."
"Don't matter," Grace said. "Tree!"
The plane, which really had no guidance system other than windup, aim, and point, went straight for a large oak. I threw my hands over my face and the plane hit the tree and knocked me loose of the seat.
I woke up lying on the fresh cut lawn.
I sat up slowly. Nothing seemed broken. I eased my pack off my back, tossed it aside, made it to my feet, staggered toward the wreckage. I saw Grace crawling out of the cockpit. There was a thin line of blood across her forehead.
"Shit! Shit! Shit!" It was Reba, calling from t
he other side of the plane.
When I got there, Reba was on her knees, bending over Steve.
"He's dead," she said. "His neck."
Steve's neck was twisted in such a way it reminded me of a neck-wrung chicken. His teeth littered the moonlit grass around his head.
Grace came around the plane slowly, her forehead bleeding more now, running over her pretty features like a flood. She looked at Steve, then eased toward him.
"Goddamnit," she said. "Goddamnit."
She dropped down on her ass, cradled his head in her lap. It rolled over as easy as a sock puppet's head. Blood ran out of her mouth and onto her bare legs. Her naked breasts heaved in the light.
I looked away, back at the house. The lawn was littered with my journal papers.
"And the fun just keeps on coming," I said.
"Yeah," Reba said, reaching down to touch Grace's shoulder. "Look."
She wasn't excited, just stating a fact. The distance was squeezing in. The yard was constricting, the houses were fading. It was like an invisible fire had surrounded us and was burning toward us, taking everything in its path. Where there had been something to see, lawn and trees and houses, now there was darkness.
Above us, the moon and the stars winked out.
We, me and Reba and Grace, the body of Steve, our plane, were at the center of a long, narrow, valley. The walls that rose on either side of it were dark and bumpy, pulsing and sparking. Wires ran along the bumpy walls like veins. The sparking gave off spotty, strobe-like light, so it was hard to see how far the valley, or to be more accurate, the trench, ran.
"Now what?" Reba said.
"His brain," I said. "The old man's brain. Made of flesh and wires and micros smaller than virus sized chips, made of this and that and things we don't know. His brain's business, my friends, we're inside it."
"That makes less sense than being part of an android's dream," Reba said.
"He can't create the world out there anymore," I said. "Can't project his thoughts the way he could before. He's dying. It's all pulling into the source. We're inside his head. We're impulses in the grooves of his mind. He's probably in a coma. We were never part of any kind of dream. We were invented. And we are real. What happened to Steve is real. How I feel about it is real. He has sparked us to life. He is God, and we are his creations."
