“Why do we have to make a fake one? It seems that these guys commit a massacre every week.”
“Forres’, KORPSE ain’t real. We made ‘em up. And we need ‘em to do more killin’ so we can send more guns and dough to the folks on our side, and so we can avoid a war w’ Kargivia for a bit long’r. Now stop askin’ yer dumbass questions an’ help me git this goin.” Mission Creep corralled a bunch of men wearing ski masks and fatigues onto the set. I went up into a booth in a balcony and started working to adjust the lighting and sound. I pressed one button and the set was flooded with a song by Crystal Crowne, a dance anthem that I had given a new meaning. “Take a ride on the high high scepter/The beat is sick, so they have to accept her/Can’t flee the truth, can’t hide the secret/Can’t amputate or…” I turned a dial and the set got dark and gray, like the surface of a small moon. The Dry Men had to have dozens of people that were more qualified than me to get this done, but the Creep was right. I was not in a position to ask more questions.
The job was complicated by the fact that we had no stage crew. It was me, Mission Creep, and the ski mask soldiers. We finally got the sky to look like what we imagined it would look like on the Kargivian steppe in late afternoon. It was tricky because in real life light generally only comes from one source outside—the sun; whereas in a studio it comes from multiple weaker lights. I asked Mission Creep to take the camera off its mount and prop it on one of the artificial rocks. This would make it relatively steady but still give it a low budget, makeshift feel. This didn’t work—it made the image totally lopsided. We opted for a cheaper camera and a tripod.
“Perfect!” I said.
“Try th’ sound!” Mission Creep called. I turned it on, and there was soon a chilly wind of incomprehensible Kargivian threats against traitorous oligarchs and Provisian imperialists. I turned it down and futzed with the speakers until it could presumably be coming from our terrorists, who were standing on the stage.
“Try moving your mouths under the ski masks.” I said. “You don’t have to lip-sync it perfectly, but your lips have to be moving under the mask.” It was fitting that this was happening here. As much as I would never have admitted it when I was young, the Provisian Pitfighting League was the mecca of all things fake. Fake fights, fake trash talk, fake breasts on the ring girls. This was the way it had to be.
“Bring out th’ hostage, boys!” A little man with glasses and bound hands emerged from a side door, and my heart sank as I recognized him as the quack who had given me my Commodore Cactus shots all last month. I hoped that we would not be running in the same circles from now on. Mission Creep checked the blood bag under the collar of his shirt, which had been deliberately dirtied and torn.
“Do we have some fake shit?” I asked. “People usually void their bowls when they’re getting murdered, right?”
“Don’t be stupid, Forres’,” Mission Creep growled. “We’s buildin’ a narr’tive. This here’s gonna be one of our brave Provisian agents in the field. He done needs to die clean an’ noble.”
We screwed up a few takes. In one the blood bag didn’t rupture at all—in another the KORPSE soldier’s knife pushed it up through the hostage’s shirt and then burst it all over in an unrealistic spatter. We went for a new shirt and hastily ripped and lacerated it. Mission Creep knocked some dirt from his boots out onto it.
I held my breath and we rolled. It was golden. One soldier held the trembling hostage by his neck and shoulder. The other faked his Kargivian threats, punctuating them by gesturing with his blade. He slit the pouch, pushed the victim out of the shot, and we cut the film with just the right amount of unprofessional malice.
“OK, folks! Stick a fork in it!” Mission Creep called. The soldiers kept their ski masks on but put their weapons and props in a chest and headed for the door. The hostage’s hands were still bound, but he had gotten back into a comfortable kneeling position. Mission Creep pushed him back down.
“Hey! I thought you said—oof!” Mission Creep pinned him to the stage with his combat boot. He reached into his bomber jacket and produced a tiny pistol.
“OK, Forres’. Do th’ honors.”
I stood stock still. “I thought this was a fake terrorism video, Creep. What the hell is this?”
“Agin with th’ questions. This here’s two things. One, this sumnabitch sp’osed to be dead inna leftist Kargivian compound. He cain’t be walkin’ hisself around town. And two, the Dry Men only forgive a single penitent each year. An’ that’s you, not him.” The little man’s eyes had gone wide. A single wet patch spread on his pants. I levelled the gun at his head.
I wish I could say that I pretended that he was Lauren, or the Dry Men puppet masters, or some anonymous demon that had put me in this situation. I wish I could say that I even hesitated. But I didn’t. My mind was blank, abdicated to the shores of some foreign land. I fired.
I handed the gun back to Mission Creep, and we made our way to the exit. “He’ll never turn me into that cactus again.” I thought.
Part 3: Provisian Dawn
What would you say about a man who introduces poisons into the water he drinks and the air he breathes?
― Robert Shea, The Illuminatus! Trilogy
“Wildly, he fought the feeling seeping through his system, but soon dropped helplessly to his knees, unable to fight it, knowing that the tree had won.”
--Terry Brooks, The Sword of Shannara p. 127
“THE MAKING OF MISSION CREEP”
Over the next few days, I seemed to pick up the knack for quieting the questions that always seemed to bubble up from the cauldron of my mind. Questions had been nagging me all my life, and especially lately. It went beyond the sort of normal curiosity anyone would have had about the Dry Men. I was plagued by deep-seated questions about myself.
I didn’t ask myself what it meant that I wouldn’t kill a hooker who ruined my life, but I would kill a stranger who was stuck in the same awful position I was in. I didn’t ask myself where all this was headed, or how I really fit into it. Years back, a few Kargivian swimmers cheated in the Transnational Games by castrating themselves and swimming in the women’s division. They were caught and disqualified, but as automutilation goes, they had the right idea. Sometimes you have to cut out a part of yourself if you’re going to survive. So I bit down on something, amputated the part of me that asks questions, cauterized the wound, and screwed a prosthesis in its place. That prosthesis was called determination; the force of will to try to be a good soldier, or at least as good of a soldier as someone like me could hope to be.
The Order of Dry Men was no social club for idle rich who wanted to dicker around with pretensions of power and fancies of esoteric knowledge. The shit was real; there was no way out, and if you wanted to rise in the Order you had to embrace an element of mindbending risk. It was like running up a crumbling pyramid with some priceless treasure at the pinnacle. You might reach the treasure, but you would probably break your neck trying. There was no choice for me now; there was no turning back. It didn’t matter whether I was finally learning about true terror instead of befriending it, or if the Dry Men ought to be considered my benefactors or my enemies. If I could get to the bottom of a story, I could get to the top of their stupid system, and then I’d have enough power to do whatever the fuck I wanted, even leave the Dry Men for good.
This was my thinking as Mission Creep drove us towards POGO headquarters in the jingomobile. Grim as these thoughts were, they cheered me considerably. The Creep flashed his clearance to a series of guards at gates, who directed us towards the Experimental Division building. “POGO.” I said. “I guess we’re going on a mission to defeat some alien menace.”
The Creep’s eyes were always hidden under his sunglasses, along with what passed for eyebrows on his synthetic skin. Still, I could tell he was looking at me like I had the IQ of a brain-damaged fungus. “Forres’, if there was real aliens, d’ya think we’da growed Eye-Jaw-Kull in a lab for th’ ol’ plan?”
&nbs
p; “I was never clear on what the old plan was. It was before my time.”
“Th’ ol’ plan was to grow us some Eye-Jaw-Kulls and stage a alien ‘vasion. A body could do an’thing with a crisis like that. Kill off en’mies. Spread panic an’ fear. In a month th’ peasants would beg to pay us more taxes so we could police ‘em more.”
“You’re saying there’s no aliens at all, that it’s all fake. I’d always heard things, when I was writing. Encounters, abductions, mutilations.”
“When th’ most out-there, paranoid people still b’lieve jest what we want ‘em to, it means we’re doing a good job. Shit, anybody can kidnap folks. Anybody can slice up a few heeps. As for encounters, ya think the fellas that stock up them zoos with freaks cain’t be bought to make some weird looking ‘aliens’? Shit—I knowed a surgeon lost his medical license. Dry Men paid him to make some kids look like visitors from the big beyond. We stuck ‘em in a ship, crashed ‘em on a farm, and told the press it was a crop dustin’ zeppelin went haywire. You want someone to believe what you want, you tell ‘em a lie about a lie.”
Mission Creep pulled into a parking space, and we got out. “I’ma tellin’ you all this ‘cause it ain’t above your paygrade no more, and it might help you with what we have to do here. POGO ain’t jest space anymore.”
The Experimental Division was housed in a white enigma of a building, which sat at an odd angle, as if the Gods had just carelessly dropped it on the parking lot, like a faceless pair of dice. It had no windows, or at least it appeared so from the outside. When we got into its palatial lobby, we found that the white walls were mostly made of one-way glass that let in light but let no one look inside. A mobile of the solar system hung from the ceiling, complete with planets, moons, and planetoids. Walking up the spiraling staircase, we got closer and closer to the planet replicas, and saw that each one contained a different area of scientific inquiry. One planet seemed to have neural pathways when you looked into it; another had a helix of DNA at its translucent core, like the planet was really just a big nucleus. Each one must have been glass blown with great artistry and at great expense.
All this, and there were peasant families so poor that their animals ate better than they did.
Upstairs, we were greeted by a doctor in an all-white suit under his lab coat. “Dr. Tower,” he said, introducing himself with a firm handshake. “We’re excited to have you here. Let me show you the Projection and Consciousness Lab.” He hit a little box next to a heavy-duty door with a key, and it opened. There were so many locks and codes and keys that I wondered if high-level Dry Men had skeleton keys that could open anything. Then I realized that this was another of my damned questions in the making, and I threw it away.
Inside, there was more whiteness. Religious people like my aunt and Reverend Burstin had always taught me that bright white was associated with Godliness, but this place was making me disagree. It was as if the attention to design and smoothness and purity was all there to mask something, like everything was gloss. Many white cards sat on a series of white tables, and a big white conical object with a door sat in one corner. “Our objective for today is to train you to be an egonaut. egonauts are able to astrally project themselves into the ego of a target.” He gestured towards a cup and pill, and I drank and swallowed. “The pill temporarily de-ossifies your pineal gland. We’ve been working on it for quite a while, and we’ve finally managed to chemically engineer one that is fast and efficient. Should work in about twenty minutes.”
Plenty of questions about this, but I ignored them like itches on a phantom limb. The part of me that asked questions was gone, cut off and thrown into the incinerator. It had to be, if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life cosplaying Commodore Cactus. I let Doc Tower keep talking. “When you’re in the EgoCone, it will allow you to travel to an astral representation of a person’s ego, their sense of self-esteem and self-importance. The science behind it is very complicated, but the technology is based on using out-of-body experience and virtual reality to impact a highly localized point in the collective unconscious. In short, a skilled egonaut can alter the actions of an individual by locating and repositioning a ‘talisman,’ a charged psychological symbol.”
He led us over to the tables. “There are five hundred cards on these tables, each one with a different symbol.” He flipped one over, showing us what looked like a lightning bolt over waves on the reverse side of the card. “Mr. Cromwell will enter the EgoCone,and project himself into Mr. Creep’s ego, and influence him to choose a preselected card that we will flash on the briefing screen in the cockpit.”
I sighed heavily. The urge to excoriate this pompous geek, to tear to shreds his high-flown academic lingo and shit on him like a recalcitrant tweep was overwhelming. I reminded myself of my new strategy—I was playing possum, a tactic that went back to my rough and tumble Bloodhawk days at the orphanage. I had to act defeated if I was going to win.
Dr. Tower led me over to the EgoCone, which looked like a cap for the world’s biggest dunce, with a door built into the side in case some of the stupidity was ever inclined to leave. A suit uncomfortably reminiscent to the one I had worn at times as Commodore Cactus was hanging next to it. I took the hint, stripped, and put it on.
“You’re lucky,” Dr. Tower said. “Officers in the galactonaut training program have to suffer everything from G-force simulators to painful catheterizations. You’ll just have to wear the cooling suit and a metal cap to boost your astral capacity.”
“I don’t feel all that lucky,” I said, finally straining a bit under the weight of my tongue. Dr. Tower guffawed with a disgusting affability and ushered me inside.
2
The interior of the EgoCone was tight and uncomfortable, like sitting in the kitchen of a bourgeois dwarf that needs to get it remodeled if he’s ever going to be able to sell his home and move to Plenty Burrows. I was hemmed in on every side by a wrap-around control panel. It was uncomfortably hot, presumably from all the high-tech machines that were revving up to launch me on this mad and unnatural journey. The projecting cap was so cold by contrast against the top of my head that I felt like I was stuck in a fever-dream; there was a flicker of panic that they would forget to turn on the suit’s cooling system and I would barbeque in this damned dunce cap and be buried in an unmarked grave by the Dry Men’s next crop of penitents.
A tiny screen flashed a countdown—four minutes and change until they could be sure that their pill had kicked in. It displayed the symbol I was supposed to dead-drop in the Creep’s ego—it looked like two letter ‘M’s that were pressed side to side. I drummed my fingers restlessly on the panel. The countdown seemed to elapse at a glacial pace.
It hit zero, and there was a horrible stretching of everything. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. A lifetime of hard drug use has made me an expert at breaking addictions and surviving withdrawal; life itself can take on a greasy, thorny texture that is as unbearable as it is indescribable. You want to take a coarse sponge and scrub existence off itself. It is the flip of the coin, the anti-drug where instead of escape and expanded consciousness, you are stuck in a hideous constriction, like that eight-headed cobra leech at the zoo is choking the life out of you. Once I was withdrawing from Think Ink when I was on assignment, and I kept waking up suddenly in the night after I thought I was past my need for it. I would have a pain that didn’t correspond to any part of my body, like an electrified needle jabbing nerves that only existed in the fourth dimension. And that was nothing like this. It was like something powerful was pulling my brain backward, and I could see it receding from the back of my eyeballs.
Then there was a release that sent me flying in the other direction, like when you let go of a slingshot’s basket. My body and the cone and the cockpit and everything was gone, and I was conscious of nothing but my disembodied presence hurtling through some nonexistent realm that should not be accessible to anything remotely human. I was only aware of the zoom of motion and a painful heliographic bli
ndness, like being thrown from days of darkness into bright sunlight and then getting decked in the face.
I stopped suddenly just as I was becoming self-aware enough to worry about what my mind would hit at this speed. I was in a featureless white expanse that could have passed for the Consciousness and Projection building if it weren’t endless and totally empty. Empty, that is, save for Dread. He was grinning and regarding me behind huge reflective lenses, deftly juggling one of his platinum skull ornaments along the fingers of a hand that should have been hobbled by his brass knuckles.
“King of the Nine Hells and Gods damn!” I roared. “That was fucking horrible. And I can only assume that you’re here because I’m in real trouble. What, did they give me brain death in that stupid, fucking…”
“Be happy and calm, mon, you be mis’taken.” He stopped playing with the shiny skull and fastened it in one of his dreadlocks. I’ve seen Dread dozens of times, but my mind always struggles to process his appearance. Seven feet tall, purple skin, and built like he could humiliate Lord Leon the Lionhearted in a wrestling match. “I didn’t come-a to you dis time. You done come an’ visit de Dread mon.”
“What?” I demanded. It didn’t add up that there was a meaningful distinction to be made between a figment of my drug-addled imagination visiting me and me visiting him.
“Some names do carry de truth in dis world. I be Dread, de God of Dread.” There’s a horrible sinking in your gut when you’ve gone through your life as a confirmed atheist and then suddenly realize that your imaginary friend really is a God, and that you had everything backwards. Especially when you’ve been using the Gods’ name in vain in that very conversation.
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