9. A Fervant Need to be Free

WHACK!

Something heavy and leather caught Larry across the cheek.

“Wake up, Larry,” a voice said.  “Time to wake up.”

Larry opened his eyes and saw that several leather-clad men who looked as if they’d come from the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally surrounded him.  Larry surmised that he’d either fallen back to Earth and landed in what most would call a “biker bar,” or that his time on planet Emteevee just entered a new hour.

Looking around, Larry saw nothing more than cold concrete walls, some green burning fluorescents and smelled the stink of body odor.  There were no windows visible.  His new surroundings were very much unlike the comfort given to him by GoodGoodman and that lot.   Instead, the room looked like a place where someone would be interrogated.  Larry also realized the aliens were also armed with weapons; strange contorted projectile weapons, Larry surmised, that could be wielded by the four-armed alien race easily and quickly, if necessary. 

Curiously, Larry noticed the absence of anything remotely resembling the 1980’s, save, perhaps, the group’s ever so slight resemblancto the trying-to-be-tough looking Joey Lawrence saying “Whoa!” at every turn on the television show “Blossom.”  However, that veneer quickly wore thin as Larry felt the seriousness of the mood in the room.

“I’m awake,” Larry said, and rose to his elbows. “Where am I?”

“Underground, for now.  You know you’re no savior, yes?” one of the men said.

“I’ve been trying to tell you that.  You haven’t been listening.”

“You haven’t been trying to tell me.  You wouldn’t have needed to.  You’ve been trying to tell them,” the man said, pointing a knobby, worn oil-stained finger off in the distance.  “And it won’t work.  It can’t work.”

“What can’t work?”  Larry surmised there stood better than 30 men in the room, all listening to the man speaking to Larry. None responded to his question.  “Well, fine. ”

The man, obviously the leader, motioned Larry to get up and take a chair. The bearded, barrel-chested figure had a booming voice and a presence that would have made Darth Vader blink.  Deep set brown eyes were mounted under a furrowed, ledge-like brow creased at first downward in thought then quickly back upward, as if reveling in some inner delight at having Larry in the same room.  He must have stood almost two meters tall.

“You’ve become the savior of millions and you’ve no idea why.  And they almost had you believing that you were their savior.  Or at least, taking up the mantle so you could help further their causes.  No matter.  The countdown clock has started.  Time is already very short.”

“Short?  Short for what?  What do I have to do with any of this?  I am not from your planet!”

Just for an instant, Larry thought he’d never uttered the phrase, “I am not from your planet!” until he remembered that night at college in bed with voluptuous Rachel Wachstein, the untethering of her overflowing bra — and the discovery of her third nipple.  He remembered saying the phrase very loud, then her screaming and suddenly realizing the amount of alcohol he’d consumed in the hours before Larry smashed her self-esteem forever.

Even still, the phrase played aptly and the man responded with something that made  the memory of Rachel Wachstein irrelevant.

“You are our planet, Larry!” and let loose a voluminous, operatic laugh that filled the room and overflowed to the outside.  The echo hung on the air.  Larry waited a few moments, then decided to be a good journalist, asking how and why.

“Get the scientist.  I want to make sure I have this correct,” the man said to one of the others.

All parties sat in nervous silence as the runner fetched the scientist.  After a few minutes, Larry’s nervousness gave way to his first demand.  “And it would be fair to know your name, since you know mine,” Larry said.

“Fair! Ha!  You humans and your notion of ‘fair.’  Fair is being on the right side of victory, with the winners who write the history!” the man said, laughing along with the others again.  “No matter.  I am Drexel Burnham.”

The runner returned shortly after with a man wearing a white four-armed lab coat, some sophisticated, almost Steampunk spectacles and some sort of clipboard with a video screen.  He stood beside Burnham.

“Tell Larry Milk why we are what we are, Doctor Miskatonic,” Burnham asked, then taking a seat across from Larry.

The doctor spoke slowly and confidently.  “That same soup you humans rose from 200 million years ago.  We rose from it, too.  Or something similar.  That same morass of random oligonucleotides, algae, and photosynthesis brings up every organism from the nurturing deep-sea vents below.  But what took your race so long to achieve – evolving from amoeba form to something fish like to crawling onto land to bipedal forms; Cro-Magnon hunching to standing erect and practicing bad politics, we did in just 13 days,” Dr. Miskatonic said.

Larry knew very little about evolution, though he subscribed to it as a means of explaining life on Earth.  Every rabbi he’d ever spoken with could make the Torah jive with evolution.  Larry was OK with the idea that God had a hand in it one way or the other.  So, he never paid much attention to the anthropology or biological aspects of it.  He believed we all came from that same pool, too.  Larry figured his organism-based great grandparents probably crawled out of a pool near Brooklyn or the Bronx and eventually evolved into sunning themselves in Boca Raton.  And besides, ‘oligonucleotides’ simply sounded silly.

“And he hasn’t even mentioned why millions of years of evolution were somehow crammed into the same amount of time it takes for your planet to process a government worker’s paycheck yet,” Burnham said.

“I’m not sure I care,” Larry said.

“You will,” Burnham growled back.

“If I may … ?” the doctor interrupted.  Burnham nodded.

“The catalyst for much of our evolution is radiation.  And had we been bombarded by the same amounts and frequency of radioactive materials as your planet had, well, frankly, you would be having this conversation on a bare rock and been listening to a roaring ocean cast aquatic anthems across …”

“Save us the poetic waxing, scientist!” Burnham said

“Yes, you’d be talking to no one.  We’d only be a nanoscopic biological fraction of the way along in our evolutionary journey, still clinging to those very sea vents.  In short, we’d be nothing now.  But fate played a different role.  And your planet did this,” Dr. Miskatonic brought up an image of a satellite orbiting the Earth on his clipboard.  “Do you recognize it?”

“It looks like a satellite,” Larry said. “So what?”

“So, Larry Milk, this is Global Direct Entertainment’s Satellite 7,” the doctor said, reading off a series of serial numbers and other codes Larry did not recognize. “One morning, one what your planet calls a ‘Saturday,’ the satellite turned itself around.  It stopped facing Earth and pointed itself at our planet – and started broadcasting.  However, while the ‘broadcasting’ is important – and I’ll get to that in a moment — what it broadcast is why we are standing before you today.”

“A-Team reruns?” Larry said, his hands out apologetically.

“Radiation!” the doctor yelled.  “Huge quantities of what you call microwave radiation of a kind this planet was never supposed to know!  It all started when you turned your satellite away from your planet and toward ours.”

Larry then remembered the day MusicPlanet.com fired him.  The day his article never made it through because … a satellite broke.  Could it have been this one?  It must have been this one.

“Our news reports said that the satellite malfunctioned.  It cost me one of the best jobs I ever had.  Anyway, what’s wrong with the fast evolution?  You don’t seem any worse for wear?” Larry started remembering anecdotes from Star Trek episodes he thought might help him relate. “Shorter life span?  The blue skin?  The four arms?  Some sort of, umm, necrotic cellular degeneration?”  Larry smugly smiled at his recall ability.

“I’ve got an idea, smart guy, go ahead and try and spell necrotic,” the doctor said, challenging Larry.

“N-E-C … umm …” Larry couldn’t do it, so he stopped.

“I thought as much.”

“We’re fine, Larry.  The problem isn’t with what we might become,’ Burnham said, “the problem is with what we are.”

“You see,” the Dr. Miskatonic continued, “while radiation advanced our growth at a rate that still amazes our own scientific corps, it was what the radiation contained that caused all the trouble.”

“What?”

“The information, of course, Larry.  Don’t be so naïve,” Burnham said.

“A seemingly limitless amount of data that combined with our – what do you Earthlings call it – D-N-A … to form who we are.  Billions and billions of gigaflops of data, quite literally, fused in to our DNA.  All mostly useless, save what we were able to salvage to educate, create and explore ourselves.

“That particular satellite was married to a particular set of programming.  And it fused, among other things, almost everything about what you call the 1980’s into our cellular blueprint.  There were other things, certainly.  Knowledge we’ve been able to tap to educate and feed ourselves.  Knowledge that’s formed our subconscious means of survival.  However, what our species retained – with a crazed fervor – was this twisted knowledge of your 1980’s subculture.

“Wherein lie another problem,” the doctor said, pausing.

“And yet, still not the most challenging of the bunch,” Burnham said.

The doctor nodded in agreement.  “No.  Not by far.  But back to the first set of problems.  The information that arrived here arrived was warped due to the distance and time the transmission traveled.  Some of the information came garbled.  Fractured.  In parts.  In fact, we have a legion of scientists trying to piece much of it together.”

“Like what?  Maybe I can help,’ Larry said.

One of men in the room leaned into the doctor and mumbled something.  “Ah yes,” Dr. Miskatonic said. “Very good example.  For instance, Larry, how long was Max Headroom the ruler of your planet.”

Larry laughed.  “He never ruled the planet!  The product he worked for had a pretty big share of it.  Max Headroom was just a gag.  An advertisement.  A pitch.  Nothing, really.  We’d call it a ‘fad.’”

The doctor pulled something out of his pocket like a cel phone and spoke to it.  “Tell them to stop the Max Headroom experiment and focus on the Alfonso Ribiero Cyclonic Atomic Generation facility,’ and then hung up.

“That’s one example.  And you, as a reporter, can understand what happens when information is changed, reshaped or distorted.  Things … happen,” the doctor said.

“They … happened, Larry.  Those lunatics that brought you here happened,” Burnham said, pointed again, and loosed a large sigh. “But we were once them.  Fervent, blind lunatics.  Brainwashed soldiers to their cause.”

“But,” Larry offered, “you were … born that way.  It’s part of you, right?”

“It didn’t HAVE to be Larry!  We should have been free thinkers to begin with.  We should all have the ability to do and say what we please without being overwhelmed by someone else’s conditions or vision of what life should look, smell, taste, feel or sound like!  But in 13 days time, what gave us our evolutionary foothold also annihilated our free will — all 2 billion of us who inhabit this planet!”

“This is his fault.  Tell him Drexel!  You’re holding back!” one voice cried.

Burnham raised a hand.  “We’re getting to that.”

“My article,” Larry said nodding.  “You think I wrote that article so …”

“No,” Dr. Miskatonic cut Larry off.  “We know your article is what caused the fervor and we have scientific proof of it.  It’s what charged them, and us for a time.  We know this because along with television, radio and internet programming that was sent along just one or two times, the satellite transmission repeated your article thousands of timesfor the first three days.  The repetition of transmission was also coupled with this fact – the highest level bursts of radiation came during those moments of transmission.  This is what has inculcated itself into most of our DNA, Larry Milk — your so-called 42 commandments of Eighties Music.”

“And millions of us haven taken the message very seriously,” Burnham stood and extended his arms. “Congratulations, Larry.  You’ve created a society of crazed zealot soldiers on a mission.  You are their savior …”

“And as of four hours ago,” Dr. Miskatonic said with a wry chirp, “you’ve become part of a countdown to destroy this world.”