From a first person view he turns his head looking out at the sunset gold and pastel desert vista and says, it's pretty out there isn't it? And then he looks down at the seat next to him in this old beater car he's driving and the revolver comes into frame. A hand, a weathered pale rock reaches down and pats the pistol. I just have to do this one thing. They can't have my goddamn kid. Then they stopped the website from switching to the next video.
There's a site you can click onto and and watch random Youtube videos that have no views, or almost no views. This is a real thing. There's copycat sites but the original one, or the slickest looking one anyway, was Astronaut.io. And sometimes you would click on a link and you'd see someone's video of a streetcar lit up at night somewhere, or a kid blowing out candles on a cake, or something that would just confuse you. I mean, 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. In the time it's taken you to read this how much does that equal? Do the math.
The landing page for this website says "today, you are an astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments." This is not bullshit until you click to keep from skipping to the next video and land in a pile of it face first.
IMG464195387 started normal as a video of someone driving through the desert close to sundown like from a shaky dash cam listening to Johnny Cash would, like something no one would ever search for or bother to watch, it's just more static, signal interference. Until the guy started to talk and he says some nutty shit like, so this is possibly my last living will and testament and my gift to the world even if nobody ever fucking sees it. The things kids do when they're burnt out studying, like watching Youtube videos that have no views; it's pure voyeurism for no reason, low risk, public and private at the same time. The guy in the video says, I'm taking this video with Google Glass, for the record. The video was two hours long and procrastination got the best of this student who couldn't sleep because of all the Adderall he'd eaten, it happened as soon as he saw the pistol.
Astronaut starts when you press GO, is what it says at the bottom of the landing page.
The man talked, he said that linear time was a hoax that was being played on the public for their betterment because if they knew the truth it would unravel everything about humanity. You can trust me, I have half the alphabet behind my name, you know? I'm sixty two. I work in a cross disciplinary field that you've never heard of and probably never will but then this shit happened. And I know I still have some of that corn fed ass accent at the back end of my speech but that doesn't mean that I didn't do theoretical work down in Santa Fe and put in my time before I got picked up for a big project that you'll also never hear of, alright? Hotel California comes on the radio in the background and the man driving keeps talking for the next hour and forty five minutes. He's saying how I was a theoretician but then I moved over into application and that's where it went off the rails. He says, you know this is my second career actually, I didn't even go back to school until I was about 30, but do you know any other motherfucker could finish their first PHD in six years? Imagine, being a goddamn middle aged prodigy. But he also said things like, did you know that you can buy a whole new identity in Miami for about twenty thousand dollars? Do you know that the cartels have infiltrated the government and you can actually buy yourself a new you if you know the right people? This shit for two hours, and the kid watching it can't even tell if he's just been up too long and this is an elaborate hallucination, if it's an experimental film, or what.
You don't believe me, but this is all really happening to me, the man would cue the viewer every once in a while. I'm reminding you that this is real.
I'm six feet one inches tall, 170 pounds, and I have grey goddamn hair. I started smoking again six months ago from stress. The sun went down in the video. The man had a voice to match that hand, craggy, gnarled; it was the baritone of gravel tumbling in a drum full of smoke, punctured by coughs and drags from cigarettes that he chain smoked the entire time. It's not that I think I'm god but I basically gave birth to the kid and I'm not going to let them carry out some ritual that they think is going to save the world, these Moonie Heaven's Gate wannabe motherfuckers. I don't care IF you're my boss, you don't get to do that.
He said, you ever wonder about those stories about fish falling out of the sky over some field in bumfuck Ohio? And it wouldn't lead anywhere, he's just say, yeah, me too. Weird shit. Elon Musk is full of shit, you're not living in a simulation. That would be too convenient.
At an hour and 45 minutes he pulls off the highway onto a gravel road heading up into the hills past scrub like he's been there before more times than he would care to count. The pistol I have is a Smith & Wesson 629 in .44 magnum, and I only have the six bullets in it but they never take security to this shit because they say that it would desecrate the sanctity of the ritual. Okay, he says, so I've been complicit before, but those times it wasn't MY kid, alright. I grew her from cells, no one is sending my baby flying off on no damn spaceship. In the video he shuts the headlights off on the car and pulls off the side of the gravel road that's gone to two worn tracks heading high up into the middle of nowhere. I'm in New Mexico, he says, but you'll never in your life be able to find out where. He shuts off the car and pulls down the car's visor and there he is, gaunt, wrinkled, severe bone structure, dry cracked lips, grey eyes to go along with the grey hair. A widows peak and thick rimmed Google Glass glasses on his face, he says, and there I am. I'm wearing a black suit because this is a formal occasion but it might also be a funeral. I'm not wearing a tie because I never do. He flips the visor back up and looks over, grabs the revolver.
You know, he says, David Bowie was a fucking alien. And now he's been reincarnated as a dog. I'm not expecting you to believe that one but you know, it's the goddamn truth. He's an alien and we got him trapped here. There's something out there demanding tribute in return for all this sort of shit. He says, you ever hear of the Bohemian Grove? Yeah, me neither, right?
In the video he opens the door to the car and heads off into an ink black landscape with a star dappled sky above, struggling over rocks and past scrub that tangles his arms, his view pointed up the hill he climbs. By this point the student would have kept watching just to hear the next shit to come out of the guy's mouth. He'd started taking notes at the half hour mark. This couldn't be real was what he was thinking, and then every time that he would think it wasn't real like a reminder the man would say something like, you know I'm a real living breathing person as of this recording right? I'm batshit out of my mind but someone has to see this shit or else my life's work will have been for nothing. Or he'd say something strange like, do you think that they would let a convicted drug felon, a chemist no less, switch tracks and decide that he wanted to be a geneticist?
Lord almighty, I hope you've been taking notes because the show is about to start. At the top of the page the student has scrawled "Linear time is a lie," and underlined it three times. On the screen the man comes over the hill finally and looks down onto a glowing congregation of seven black vehicles, all of them SUVs but one, set in a half circle around an object covered with red tarp standing up like an erect dick fifty feet high and illuminated by generator run pole lights humming in the middle distance, shining sterile white on the tarp covered thing at the center of attention. The car right in front of the lipstick red erection is a limousine and the man says, fuck I'm late. Then he starts to whisper, have you ever heard all those stupid conspiracy theories about the goddamn lizard people? He checks the pistol, opens it and spins the cylinder, says to whoever would ever be watching, let's go crash this fucked up party.
From there he heads down the steep slope slow, creeping, two steps at a time, whispering, I'm sixty two goddamn years old. My bones ache. Then the kid watching was thinking it had really good production values if it was an amateur film someone had uploaded by mistake, but if they had, what was the goddamn point of the whole thing. See, the man says, soon they're going to start the goddamn music. And on cue:
"Hast du etwas Zeit für mich?
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von neunundneunzig Luftballons
Auf ihrem Weg zum Horizont
Denkst du vielleicht grad an mich?
Dann singe ich ein Lied für dich
Von neunundneunzig Luftballons
Und dass sowas von sowas kommt"
That's the German version of Nena's 99 Red Balloons, if you don't know the song because you were probably born after the Berlin Wall fell and we thought nuclear annihilation was a thing of the goddamn past. The music echoes off the rocks and sounds tinny in the video, tinny and so loud it almost drowns out his hoarse whisper when he says, this song is about a guy mistaking balloons for incoming nuclear missiles and almost triggering the goddamn apocalypse. They play it to ward off the apocalypse though. He grunts going over a rock, I hate that it has to be in goddamn German though. You ever hear of Operation Paperclip? You hear all sorts of weird conspiracy theories and rumors in goddamn prison, you know that?
Underlined, halfway down the page, the college student watching had written "Anunaki" under that "Unified theory?"
neunundneunzig Luftballons booms, neunundneunzig Luftballons, blares as he heads down the slope. From behind the tarp covered, he says it's a spaceship, or he implied earlier anyway, come seven men in scarlet robes out of the shadows carrying 14 red balloons each, tied to six foot long strings, hanging over them, grapes filled with blood floating in the night air. The man whispers fuck, fuck, fuck to himself. That's 98 balloons, he says. The doors to all the SUVs open at once and people in robes step out of them, twenty, thirty, he's glancing around the scene and it's hard to tell. The man goes down the hill tripping and stumbling, slipping and sliding. Someone's going to see this shit, the man says. I mean, they're going to see me, or they're going to see this video, either way it don't matter at this point.
Come sliding down to the sandy rock floor of the bowl half on his ass, this is a crater, he says, this is a crater left by some meteor millions of years ago. You'll still never find it on Google Earth. His breathing rings hard in the microphone picked up by his glasses and he stands up, looking down and brushing himself off, straightening his jacket and wiping dirt off of his pants. He's standing just far enough outside the lights to still be in shadows, but no one in the gathering is paying attention to him, and those stadium lights and hoods would have them half blind. When he looks up the door to the limousine is opening twenty yards in front of him.
My name, the man says, is Nick Tesla —no relation before you have the gall to ask yourself— and you're about to witness an unprecedented event in the history of mankind, my John Wayne moment. As he says this a burly robed figure steps out of the back door of the limo pulling a small figure out after it, a girl wearing a red hoodie with the hood up, pulling behind her a red balloon on a string. Before I do this I just want to tell you something, Nick says to his audience of one watching astronaut, The Devil was just a stupid fuckin' alien, and I had to learn the hard way that all power demands sacrifice. Creators forgive me for what I'm about to perpetrate.
neunundneunzig Luftballons, he walks past the perimeter into the glow of the light and the glasses refocus and recalibrate to the new conditions, everything goes blurry for a second and then clears, then there's digital artifacts at the bottom left of the screen. In the light, for the first time the student noticed that the man walked with a limp. He looks down at the gun in his right hand and shakes out his arms, taking deep breaths. The fat man in the robe leads the child with the red balloon towards the red tarp, and the tarp is pulled down from behind, revealed to the camera from the bottom up, standing there in a crater in the desert is something that looks like a German V2 rocket but at least twice the size and fuck me lips, fast car red. A hatch is open with stairs leading up to what looks less like an opening into the rocket — the student wondered, that has to be a rocket — and more a chamber you'd lock something into. I hate this song, Nick says. I really hate this song. The seven men all release their fourteen balloons at once when the fat man and the little girl are close to the steps up to the rocket.
The man raises his right arm, points the pistol at one of the men who held the balloons and fires. There's a puff of blood or dirt when that sprays the night air from the man's chest and then he falls down. No movement, no drama, just real life voyeurism of the worst kind. Any college student who has been on the internet since highschool with a morbid streak can tell you a person getting shot in real life on video looks the complete opposite of a person getting shot in a movie. Holy shit I just watched someone get shot on Youtube the college student said out loud.
Motherfuckers you turn off that goddamn music or I'm going to kill every single one of you, Nick bellows, and sounds like Tom Waits screaming in a deeper voice. That's my daughter and you're not feeding her to no goddamn space overlords, I don't care, I grew her up from cells, she's a thinking, feeling, real human being. She's more real than any of you goddamn captains of industry, you politicians, you mad scientists that think you control the world, Nick yells.
The fat man in his robe bends over and whispers something to the girl with the red balloon and she nods, then turns to look at Nick and asks why are you doing this? You know we have to do this, this is what you signed up for.
No, I signed up so that I could make her, and so that I could pull the curtain back on you people, and because you sold me a pack of goddamn lies when you snagged me up from the Santa Fe institute and put me on some secret Rosicrucian mailing list and locked me in a lab with a very vague set of instructions on what to do with all the fancy tech you had given me.
Nick, we are only trying to do what is right for the country; the fat man has a shrill voice, nasal, but his delivery is solemn and he means what he says. If he was ordering a beer it would come out a whine, but here he carries some sort of authority. You grew her to feed them.
Nick raises his arm and shoots another man standing closer to him in the head, blowing the back of the hood out of his robe and sending him slumping to the ground next to the open door of an SUV. And you've brought a weapon of destruction onto holy ground, Nick this is unacceptable.
You people order drone strikes on weddings and poison water supplies for profit, Nick yells, and you're worried about me and my pistol fucking up your cult meeting?
We have to give in order to receive Nick, the man yells. We have to give in order to receive!
Vivienne, don't you worry, papa is here to make sure that the lizard apocalypse cult doesn't feed you to gigantic, horny space aliens, Nick yells at the girl. She doesn't move. Vivienne just hold onto that balloon and we'll get out of here and vanish.
You can't run from us Nick, the fat man says, we're the goddamn government.
Then how the fuck did you end up hiring me? I'm a criminal. You have never known shit about me. As far as you're concerned I have zero history, none, it's all lies. You stand on top of your goddamn mountain and you can see the valley, right? You can see the valley below you but you're all so old, your eyes are so bad that you have no idea what's going on down there. You know there's a village, but you don't know the name of the village priest, or the hangman, and right now I'm both; Nick's voice, angry and tired, scratchy and hoarse, breaks a time or two when he says this. And he yells, do you think you see everything just because you know things other people don't? Your privilege won't help you here, that's my daughter. Now you walk up those stairs and get in that pod and feed yourself to those goddamn aliens or I'm going to blow your brains out, but she's not your tribute. She was never going to be your tribute. She's my goddamn daughter.
Nick, you know that's not how it works, the fat man yells, and Nick cocks the hammer back on the pistol and levels it at the man and shouts, well this time we're trying something new then. The fat man turns to another cloaked figure and asks, can it be Lola? Lola is at least a female. The camera shakes in a nod and Nick says yeah, send her up then.
You really shouldn't have Nick, the fat man says, and Lola, this other cloaked figure that might have breasts under there, shakes her head and walks up the steps into the chamber, then pulls it closed. As soon as the chamber closes there is an audible series of loud clacking sounds, a seal setting itself with a hiss, and then gas starts to come out of vents at the bottom of the rocket. Nick shoots the fat man in the chest as soon as this series of staged events has started.
It's over, Nick yells, I'm taking my daughter and leaving. Everything from here on out runs automatically, he says, to the astronaut watching the film. All I had to do was get someone in there that wasn't Vivienne. He snorts, and spits, and says, you know it's sort of weird doing this and narrating it all at the same time, and now we have seven minutes before that thing takes off so there's no rush. He walks to Vivienne, she's frozen standing holding that balloon close to the dead fat man, and when he gets to her he sweeps the crowd and says, I'd tell y'all not to do anything stupid but violence isn't allowed on hallowed ground and you're all dumb enough to believe that matters. Anyway, don't anyone go being stupid just because I suddenly broke all your rules, right? Some of the figures nod their heads under their cloaks.
Vivienne, he says and bends down, grabs her by the shoulder, and turns her around. Papa, she whispers, but her mouth is a vertical slit that looks too Georgia O'Keefe for it to be less than deep gut turning disturbing, along with the six red eyes and the white feathers where hair should be. When he turns her around its also obvious that her arms aren't in the arms of the red hoodie she's wearing, it's draped across her shoulders and her arms are something like a cross between wings and conventional human appendages, but with little girlish hands at the ends. If you were to say anything about it, you would say that her arms unfold when she hugs him then, still gripping the balloon, and the hug comes with the rustling of feathers and a coo. Papa, she says, they told me that I had to go meet god.
Yeah, Nick says, well they were full of shit, and she says that they said that the warrior is not afraid of space, and that bravery invokes magic. Nick says that they're right on both those counts, but they were twisted Nazis about to feed you to some Eldrich horror controls parts of reality that was going to violently mate with your mouth and then you were going to have something in you would eat your guts for Gerber's while it grew and you were awake in a fluid suspension in a vacuum, freezing cold, and this goes on for the next ten years because you're only eight.
Papa, she says, that's not what they told me.
All the government will ever do baby girl, is lie to you, Nick says, now let's go home. And she asks him where home is and he says shut up. He takes her free hand in his left hand and turns her away, one last glance at the rocket and Lola now hoodless and screaming inside the casket, and leads Vivienne away to one of the SUVs. He shoots the man standing by the driver side door and says, I'm taking this car out, if you don't mind. They get in and he drives around the rocket and down a paved road out the other side of the crater. The thing about secret societies and bullshit like that, he says to the lone astronaut watching, is that they do some stupid shit like this because it's secret. Vivienne asks him who he's talking to and Nick says he's talking to whoever is watching, because he recorded the whole thing. He looks down and she covers herself and groans, no, I don't want anyone to see me.
Baby girl just because you're part Rock Dove doesn't mean you aren't pretty.
My mouth, my mouth looks like a vagina, Vivienne says and Nick asks her how the hell she even figured that bit of information out. Vivienne groans again and slumps in her seat. Behind them a hiss and the rising sound of something taking flight. And Vivienne asks, Lola went up in the spaceship didn't she? Is she a warrior, is she not afraid of space? Nick laughs until he coughs and says, no, she wasn't a warrior, and she was fucking terrified of space. Concern rising in Vivienne's voice she asks — her voice sings like birdsong synthesized and coming out of a precocious eight year old — will Lola be okay?
Lola will be fine, Nick says. Ok Google, stop recording.
Then the video stopped. The college student astronaut had pages of notes written. The next video that came up was Gorillas behind glass in some foreign zoo looking very bored. Underlined at the bottom of the last page of notes he'd written, "the warrior is not afraid of space," and "bravery invokes magic." At three in the morning nothing else was getting done. He would start Googling about this video after tests were over, and as he fell into bed he was annoyed he'd watched that whole thing, but adrenally exhausted and his skin was tingly because the video had seemed super real.
The college astronaut didn't dream, and woke up with his second alarm to two text messages on his phone and a cluster of missed calls that he'd slept through. All the missed calls came from two numbers. The text messages, one a piece, were from the two opposing numbers. One was a DC area code, but he didn't know that, and one was a 707 area code, that's Northern California, but he didn't know that either. The DC text message read, "we are very interested in meeting with you to talk about upcoming recruitment possibilities as per our previous contacts." The Student astronaut went to Brown university, and he didn't know that it was an NSA and CIA recruitment factory bigger than you'd ever think it was. They'd started courting him a few years ago, but now that text in the morning from a phone number that had been calling him over and over again in the middle of the night read like a threat on his radar. The second text from the 707 area code read:
"You watched my whole video before they got it yanked by the skin of your ass. You have a hotrod university connection of some kind because if that video hadn't loaded or you'd paused it, it would have disappeared. By now they're bothering you, am I right? Well, any dreams you had, give them up. All power demands sacrifice. Call me though, I can tell you how to get out of this bind you've put yourself in. You can come meet Vivienne." He was even long winded and didn't shut up in text messages. "But you have to do everything that I say, you have to follow my instructions exactly. This is where you pick a side, right? You can go work for those people in the video, or you can be the warrior who isn't afraid of space. Either way, hear from ya soon kid, it's a no brainer. Give Uncle Nick a call."
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