Self-Love, Disparagement, Used Dirt Salesmen With Lard On Their Faces

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

This short story is one hell-bent on describing the surreal, fictional or holographic existence of far distant Space Cadet Alien manipulators far beyond the wall of the space-time continuum who send an inferior race that is bred to destroy entire planets--all so the Space Cadet Alien manipulators floating in dead space can nosh on human flesh and drink human blood.  

Well, I'm a vampire, baby
I'll sell you 20 barrels' worth
Good times are comin'

I hear it everywhere I go
"Good times are coming"

I hear it everywhere I go...'

- Neil Young

Do Not Feed The Harbingers

Take a look at Artie's Daleridge's top-drawer personal liberty.  

See him?  We're looking down at a teeny little human standing atop what's left of his front yard.  The earth movers have come, and to us, that's beauty incorporated.  Why big yellow and black caterpillars made of high-stress steel and all dressed up like painted ladies?  Why not?  The federal money and the street.  Full stop.  

Artie's just come home from a backbreaking job at an Amazon warehouse.  He's been standing on his feet all day, and though a black rubbery pad is set out along the box-packing line, after nine hours of that, even Sylvester Stallone, the Italian Stallion, would have trouble limbering up before his next performance.  As all intellectuals already understand, Stallone is Da Man.  

Artie's been working on a novel in his spare time.  Friends who've read chapters one through three think he's a pretty good writer.  Then, when he got home late this afternoon, he saw it, piles of fresh brown dirt clods all over the front yard, the parking, and especially the sidewalk.  

The full plot line of Artie's book is still a little indeterminate.  Why so? Because Artie, after poking around the public library, found information from famous fiction writers like Ann Beattie and other writers and poets, facts that suggest sometimes literary people simply let the characters of the book tell the author where they want to go.  

Sure.  To us here at Traffic Control 57, that's completely out of sync with the real world.  No one should let go of design when plotting next to anything.  The road to success is painted by intricacy and close attention to the sidelong consequences of certain moves a character takes when presented with the plot.  

Dirt.  All over Artie Daleridge's front yard.  All kinds of noise.  Artie's writing career, so far as Saturdays are concerned, is a little like Bing Crosby accompanied by industrial noise.  Artie croons, the machine growls back, and thus the plot: A man pursued by robo-zombies.

Automation Nation--so fun. 

See?  That's witty.  To call the world of the future a patently suburban world that is under the thrall of a huge, computer-assisted political machine that, somehow, is adept at creating zombies via pressure tactics intended to stir various targets into murders, bank robberies, attacks, and random shootings--now, that's wit for you.  

Inspired by a nightmarish dream, Artie Daleridge imagined a man who could kill with his thoughts.  Once awake, once the sun had risen close to its apex before dropping like a stone-drunk tramp in the middle of an August afternoon in the park, Artie imagined a man, cornered and abused, a man who had horrific but suppressed rage.  Whenever the man blinked--a distant disaster. In the novel, that was at first a subject of shame for the little character.  But after that, once the black-and-white of kill or be killed wore away, the enraged nobody began to take pride in long-distance murder.  

Then, in the novel, the man discovers he's alive but trapped inside a hologram.  People have been watching him from far away for quite some time, all scientists, all eager to see what the character named Bob would do next.  

Beyond being trapped inside a hologram, Bob The Character learned that, in the hologram, the mass of men and women, even the children were merely reflections of only five archetypes: large enough icons from a faraway star that used the holographic dramaturge marionettes as emblems with which to describe a strange planet locked in a present--with no one in the menagerie aware of time at all.  

Crystal Flow.  The drug.  It masked the masque perfectly, at least in the fictional account, one that as a sort of meta-modernistic full-caliber weapon of total war, and a creation of what Bob The Character had surreptitiously learned were aliens with huge intentions of destroying entire solar systems, and all for precious metals and magnetic cousins of granite.  Bob The Character called them the Harbingers--forward teams hired by a much more powerful civilization in faraway spot outside nearly all galaxies within range of it, a civilization that actually was in lockstep combat with a mimicry of its harbingers, albeit one with a series of planetary destruction that ranged all across the Milky Way galaxy. 

The surreptitiously-administered drug, Crystal Flow, carries with it a sense of omnipotence and even omnipresence.  In addition to the seductive euphoria, some in the story--at least early on--believe Crystal Flow can do almost anything--"like even shining your shoes!"  

Desertification.  Pollution.  Smog.  Extinct wildlife. Dead vegetation. And, in the end, nothing but salty, tideless seawater and and thousands of miles of cracked earth.  Why so?  

No one in the novel knows. 

Save for Bob The Character.  He knows the Harbingers are the bearers of a retrograde and distorted form of DNA that controls all their thoughts and deeds: destroy, destroy, destroy.  Planet to planet--destruction.  

Bob The Character, who continues to stumble upon what he takes for arcane information, thinks of Mars, a planet that, in his once-real life, had been discovered to have potentially been the foundation of a highly advanced yet entirely psychic civilization.  Telepathically, those Martians who survived, some alleged, had floated through the solar system and found Earth, a pleasantly warm companion and rescue location to start over.  Then came the Harbingers. Destroying anything and anyone, particularly those who had knowledge of the Harbinger's distorted form of DNA.  

Bob The Character, probably a little paranoid after being hunted down a few too many times, knew too much about the Harbinger masquerade and self-interested version of saintliness.  That was a sort of high-road masquerade to hide the low-road destruction of planetary vitality.  For the hell of it.  

Look.  We're way up here in a weather reporter's plum job: the determination of the weather from high up in an atmosphere.  That's right.  An entire weather studio floating through space-time like a sort of submarine blimp, whipping up smog and casting it downward, batting at the wind, shattering clouds, and interrupting any transmission available with static attacks.  

Arty Daleridge?  He's hilarious, just standing there and looking at what is left of his obviously carefully-landscaped front yard.  We should do a weather feature on Arty Daleridge.  You know: a Christmas special: "How Used Dirt Salesmanship Makes Life So Much Better For Them". 

Add a little lard, and what do you get as a noble participant in the prefab gentry?  If you're loyal, the lard-asses and dirt slingers'll give you maybe a cut in the earnings. Especially if you've been saved.  In a particular set of churchy churches. 

Here at Traffic Control 57 we are good actors.  Believe me.  On rush hour mornings, over car radios and live streaming broadcasts of all the news about the local weather, we report.  Listeners choose whether or not to go out or stay in. Most simply drive through heavy rainfall--just to get some payment or another for doing some stupid jobs that make no sense in regard to freedom or even personal liberties.  

"Traffic Control 57!  We're watching Highway 97 like a hawk this rush hour morning!  Heavy fog!  Drivers, visibility is almost zero out there--so be careful on your morning drive!"

Ah yes! With the chopper's blender-like blades just whirling away.  Stupid drivers.  They believe we're way high in the air on a zero visibility day!  

Where are we, really?  In the studio.  Surrounded by sound dampening black foam, sitting next to an expensive microphone and blending our voices, with high-tech computer technology that provides the necessary ambience of the sound of helicopter blades! 

Perfection!  Now we're using drones to watch football games for us! 

Back to Arty: In his almost-real world, he's standing next to the now dirt-clod covered parking. The sidewalk?  It's completely blocked.  It's just great watching Arty's three-doors-down neighbor Aurora Schwartz, an eighty-year-old woman confined to a wheelchair try to get down the hill by wheeling her motorized deal up the hill to the nearest Burger King. Her strife.  Powerful.  Very.  Her determination to win despite the oblivious of the digging equipment is a total inspiration to those of us who merely have to climb atop piles of dirt or go around it--onto places like Arty's lawn.  

Life is gorgeous from way high in the air.  

Then  Arty's novel. Bob The Character finds a fellow fugitive, a lovely woman who, as Bob The Character looks on, can flash the best smile a fugitive man can even bear to imagine.  Better she is one of the five actual humans from which the billions of holograms were developed.  She informs Bob The Character he's also not a holograms.  She and Bob  The Character continue fleeing from one page--and directly into the next page as if each page is an entirely new dimensional anomaly.  Then, this is where Bob The Character and his newfound companion, Sylvia The Beauty, must wait.  

Wait? Why wait?  Why not get away and find shelter from the gnawing "world eater" teeth of the Harbingers, the pets of an even more powerful alien species from a planet that has no galactic pull but merely floats in otherwise dead space.  Why do Bob The Character and his amazingly lovely companion, Sylvia The Beauty, a woman who in the novel can run at a fast pace with a fresh miniskirt that seems to appear around her cushy and sleek thighs every single day; why do they stop running?  Where does she get her laundry done?  Why does the story end without either a climax or a denouement?  

Because that's where the novelist, like the Holy Creator of all reality, moves his characters around like fateful puppets, stopped telling.  If anyone asks, just say this to them: 

It's where Arty Daleridge has stopped writing.  Imagine placing an entire science fiction novel, a well-written one, in a steel file cabinet and allowing it to stew until it is returned to the valiant author, Arty Daleridge, and thus led by Arty The God of science fiction to a surprising conclusion.  

Traffic Control 57 here.  Today is a billowy, breezy day, although air quality is a little dangerous, especially for those sensitive to ever-present smog, something we all know we shouldn't complain about because the freeway has a landlord: the just wonderful oil and gas industry.  The oil and gas industry, owned by deep-pocketed sponsors of the state government, sit in distant offices that seem to float way atop the downtown area, and are not only aware of the smog that can even kill asthmatic children and hurt adults with heart trouble, they simply adore the profits.  

Way up in space, the alien race that controls the Harbingers in Arty Daleridge's holographic fear fest, the Harbingers at this point are having a fun luncheon consisting of dead humans.  The mysterious Alien Race Of Bigness, as the story goes, gets off peeling the skin off the already striped-by-whips backs of even captured holograms.  Luscious licking and chewing, a sort of five-star nosh for Space Cadets without a name in the story by Arty Daleridge.   

The Harbingers?  Though manipulated from millions of miles away and ages in the past on the space-time continuum; they get a a exceptionally strong sort of Crystal Flow jolt out of the blood that is fictional and never fed by Alien manipulator-cannibals; not to them.

No, never that.  Don't feed the Harbingers.