It's been a few days, but I have been genuinely busy.
Busy packing, that is.
It took a while, but I finally got the memo. It was sitting on my bed in the Ice Palace, wrapped in an official envelope and garlanded with all the official menace the President of the United States could embody in the "to" line.
Of course, it was being used by one of my "guests" to fan himself. "You got mail," he cooed, not realizing it meant the party was over.
What did it say? Four things: me; the Ice Palace; no longer; as soon as yesterday.
I can't say I haven't been expecting this. I knew it was in the cards as soon as Mr. USA got down here with the UN and, looking at what we'd been up to since we took it over, rolled his eyes so far back into his head it's a wonder he couldn't read his own !@#$ mind.
If anything, I'm surprised I didn't get recalled sooner. I figured we had less than a month, anyway, so being one week short isn't too terrible.
(I do owe Carl a fiver, though. He called it. Bastard.)
So it's time to clean up, then. Time to pack it up, put it away, tear it down.
Closing time, as the song goes.
Time to collect the cold weather gear and the guns. Put them in boxes. Account for every bullet fired, every piece of equipment used, abused, and lost.
Time to sweep up the bottles. Clean up the glass. Toss it somewhere to be recycled, knowing it'll be swirling in a trash vortex in the Pacific, this time next week.
Time to send the tranny hookers back to Jo'berg. Give them a last slap on the ass to say thanks. Maybe a few Hamiltons in the bra for the good ones.
Time to take our !@#$ out of the commissary. Toss our food out into the snow. Laugh quietly as the Blue Helmets learn to cook the exciting local cuisine on their own.
Time to figure out what we're going to do with the kids. I think the leftie commie pinko reporter I've collected is going to see about getting them to Neo York as part of the immersion process. I'll see he gets the way as greased as possible, but I won't tell him it was me that did it.
(SPYGOD likes doing things like that. Just don't tell anyone, son. They'll start to think I've gone soft in my old age.)
And then, finally, it'll be time to do the one thing I really !@#$ hate doing. I will personally see to the handing over of all relevant files, sensor logs, and information that The COMPANY collected before, during, and after our taking of the base.
All the evidence we've gathered, all the supernazi corpses we made, all the crazy science we trashed, and all the unofficial souvenirs we were planning on taking until the U-!@#$ing-N showed up to ruin the party. All cataloged, numbered, and handed over for posterity.
Finally-finally, I have to give Mr. USA everything we know about The Chamber, except for the one crucial thing we can't help them with. Namely, getting the damn door open again.
I know he'll demand to know what I do, but I'll tell him I know nothing. And I will say that knowing that he can't force me to tell him the truth because he's never been able to tell when I'm lying.
How do you see the falsehoods in a glass eye?
But I also know he's got a backup plan. Dr. Yesterday's already been contacted, and he and his family are doubtlessly already enroute to Neuschwabenland as we speak.
I'm sure that, given enough time, the world's greatest scientist will doubtlessly crack the case of The Chamber's door, just as he's cracked just about every other thing that America's placed on his desk.
Maybe. Or... maybe not.
You see, I know something that Mr. USA does not. Or, more accurately, I know something that Mr. USA has chosen not to remember. Something about another closing time, a long time ago, when we were bugging out of Europe and taking certain things and people with us.
Not all the people who left were the same people who arrived. Some changes were made to the manifest. Some alterations performed, both out of a sense of national security and human decency.
And some of those alterations, known only to a select few, are the sort of things that tend to engender extreme gratitude, resulting in the occasional large favor.
So yeah, I'm blackmailing a mega-genius into pretending his xeno-retro-engineering skills aren't up to this task. I don't know how long he can keep it up, or how long he'll have to. But so long as he can keep that door shut, I'll consider his debt to me paid in full.
(For now.)
One last stroll around my bachelor pad. One last piss out of the broken window onto the floor below. One last attempt to bean a Blue Helmet with pellets from my magnificent alien love god penis.
On the way out of Vietnam, the radio station said "Goodbye, and see you next war." We'll be back, somehow. We always do.
It's why I smile when Randolph Scott looks at me, as I walk past him and those kids, and asks "what now?" I could tell him, but then I'd have to kill him.
And where would be the fun in that?
Outside the blast doors, Antarctica is a sheet of bright, blinding light. SPYGOD vision changes the whiteout into distinct shapes, all buffeted by flashy motes in the wind. I chew on a tjbang stick, grin like the devil just sucked my !@#$ for a quarter, and leave.
For now.
(SPYGOD is listening to Closing Time (Semisonic) and drinking a flask of Regal Lemon Gin)
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
7/6/11 - GODreads
One bad thing about being back at The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. for a layover, other than coming back to it covered in katooey brains, and then entertaining way too many bollywood boys to make up for it, is looking at the big damn stack of books I still haven't read, yet.
What does SPYGOD read, boys and girls? I'll tell you what I read. Not nearly as much as I should.
One of my many jobs is to look through the galley proofs of anything having to do with national security, strategic talents, and the weird overlapping field between the two, and give the publishers a yay or nay on those particular sections. Sometimes I suggest changes, sometimes I say to kill the whole paragraph, and sometimes I piss on the book, dump it in a plastic bag, and arrange to have it nailed to the editor's desk. From Orbit.
Some might call that censorship, but I call it a necessary evil. We don't put nuclear codes in the newspapers, we don't advertise troop movements to the enemy, and we sure as hell don't want people to know everything about everything that ever happened in our entire history. Knowledge is power, and too much power in the wrong hands is a bad, bad thing.
Are my hands really the "right" ones, then? Right wing, maybe. But if not me, given my firsthand experience with the whole thing, then who?
And if you think I'm a bastard, you should know that Mr. USA used to do this, back before he realized he really did not like to read anything that didn't involve sports, light history, or horse romances.
(Westerns to folks like you and me. Really.)
On average, I vet about fifty books a year, and about ten to fifteen squeak through with major or minor changes. When Mr. USA was doing it, he let about one through, and that's only because the President knew someone who knew someone who owed someone a favor.
That favor then translated to letting a highly expurgated, virtually emasculated version of that person's book be published. In the USA, at least. I have it on good authority that better and fuller foreign language editions are printed under the table in Russia, of all places.
(And before you ask, I have no idea who could have passed that over to Samizdat Press. Really.)
That's not to intimate that SPYGOD is some limp-necked softie who's going to champion the so-called rights of journalists and historians who want to make some cred and moolah off of our highly secretive fraternity, of course. It's just to say that I actually take the time out of my busy schedule to read these things and decide what can stay and what should go.
But that's not the only thing yours truly indulges in, when I actually have the time to do so. I have a soft spot for second-person, present tense, kitchen-sink-genre, circular think pieces that challenge the boundaries of language, gender, and plot. Unfortunately, there was only ever one person who really came close to writing the literature of the 24th century, today, and he died of a heart attack in 1997.
Thankfully, he left a very long body of work to draw from. He wrote something like 100 books, only fifteen or so of which have ever been published. I feel kind of guilty sitting on the remaining 85, but he left strict instructions that no one was to see these until a hundred years after his death.
And SPYGOD does fully and firmly keep at least some promises. (Really.)
Conversely, I've also gotten into something called flash fiction. They're really short stories, maybe 1000 to a hundred words, if that. The fewer the better, oddly enough. Just enough to kick you in the junk but not enough to drag you down.
I also like hint fiction. Can you, in 25 words or less, suggest a greater story hiding behind what you've written?
The man sat on the toy-strewn porch, cleaning his gun. Someday the right ice cream truck would pass by, with the right driver. Someday.
Short, snappy, and often darkly humorous. Just like I like my coffee the morning after.
And if I get really, really bored, I like to read screenplays of the movies I've seen. I'm always interested to see what was supposed to be in the script and what didn't make it to the screen for whatever reason. If you want a real treat, read the first draft of "Apocalypse Now," sometime. It's a wonder they let Coppola keep the name,
But I think my all time favorite "book" is the one that's written all around us, every day of our lives.
I'll sit out on the balcony, drink in hand, and cast my "ears" out into Neo York to listen to people typing away, late at night. If you don't try to listen to one single conversation, they all blend together, making a strange kind of mega-conversation in which all concepts, ideas, sentiments, and intentions blend together like dots in a pointillist painting.
Sometimes Neo York opens its nasty, old windowshades for me, and lets me see what's going on in her secret heart. Sometimes I'm happy to know. Sometimes not so much. But if you want a snapshot of the human condition that so many authors try to capture, but ultimately fail, you can't go wrong with going for the source.
What does SPYGOD read, boys and girls? I'll tell you what I read. Not nearly as much as I should.
One of my many jobs is to look through the galley proofs of anything having to do with national security, strategic talents, and the weird overlapping field between the two, and give the publishers a yay or nay on those particular sections. Sometimes I suggest changes, sometimes I say to kill the whole paragraph, and sometimes I piss on the book, dump it in a plastic bag, and arrange to have it nailed to the editor's desk. From Orbit.
Some might call that censorship, but I call it a necessary evil. We don't put nuclear codes in the newspapers, we don't advertise troop movements to the enemy, and we sure as hell don't want people to know everything about everything that ever happened in our entire history. Knowledge is power, and too much power in the wrong hands is a bad, bad thing.
Are my hands really the "right" ones, then? Right wing, maybe. But if not me, given my firsthand experience with the whole thing, then who?
And if you think I'm a bastard, you should know that Mr. USA used to do this, back before he realized he really did not like to read anything that didn't involve sports, light history, or horse romances.
(Westerns to folks like you and me. Really.)
On average, I vet about fifty books a year, and about ten to fifteen squeak through with major or minor changes. When Mr. USA was doing it, he let about one through, and that's only because the President knew someone who knew someone who owed someone a favor.
That favor then translated to letting a highly expurgated, virtually emasculated version of that person's book be published. In the USA, at least. I have it on good authority that better and fuller foreign language editions are printed under the table in Russia, of all places.
(And before you ask, I have no idea who could have passed that over to Samizdat Press. Really.)
That's not to intimate that SPYGOD is some limp-necked softie who's going to champion the so-called rights of journalists and historians who want to make some cred and moolah off of our highly secretive fraternity, of course. It's just to say that I actually take the time out of my busy schedule to read these things and decide what can stay and what should go.
But that's not the only thing yours truly indulges in, when I actually have the time to do so. I have a soft spot for second-person, present tense, kitchen-sink-genre, circular think pieces that challenge the boundaries of language, gender, and plot. Unfortunately, there was only ever one person who really came close to writing the literature of the 24th century, today, and he died of a heart attack in 1997.
Thankfully, he left a very long body of work to draw from. He wrote something like 100 books, only fifteen or so of which have ever been published. I feel kind of guilty sitting on the remaining 85, but he left strict instructions that no one was to see these until a hundred years after his death.
And SPYGOD does fully and firmly keep at least some promises. (Really.)
Conversely, I've also gotten into something called flash fiction. They're really short stories, maybe 1000 to a hundred words, if that. The fewer the better, oddly enough. Just enough to kick you in the junk but not enough to drag you down.
I also like hint fiction. Can you, in 25 words or less, suggest a greater story hiding behind what you've written?
The man sat on the toy-strewn porch, cleaning his gun. Someday the right ice cream truck would pass by, with the right driver. Someday.
Short, snappy, and often darkly humorous. Just like I like my coffee the morning after.
And if I get really, really bored, I like to read screenplays of the movies I've seen. I'm always interested to see what was supposed to be in the script and what didn't make it to the screen for whatever reason. If you want a real treat, read the first draft of "Apocalypse Now," sometime. It's a wonder they let Coppola keep the name,
But I think my all time favorite "book" is the one that's written all around us, every day of our lives.
I'll sit out on the balcony, drink in hand, and cast my "ears" out into Neo York to listen to people typing away, late at night. If you don't try to listen to one single conversation, they all blend together, making a strange kind of mega-conversation in which all concepts, ideas, sentiments, and intentions blend together like dots in a pointillist painting.
Sometimes Neo York opens its nasty, old windowshades for me, and lets me see what's going on in her secret heart. Sometimes I'm happy to know. Sometimes not so much. But if you want a snapshot of the human condition that so many authors try to capture, but ultimately fail, you can't go wrong with going for the source.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
7/5/11 - SPYGODMAIL - Go BANG
IT'S SPYGOD SCOUT MAIL TIME!
Today's mail comes to us from Super Scout Penworth G. Zhang of Santa Rosa, California
Dear SPYGOD:
My dad was in Spygod Scouts, too, and told me that, once, you told him that the secret to having an adventure was to, and I'm quoting him here, "sit on your ass and expect nothing to happen, at which point everything will."
Did you actually say that to my father? Or is he just bull!@#$ing me again?
Example: Last week he told me he invented stormchasing. Boy did I feel dumb when I tried to get him to come into my Meteorology 101 class to talk to my professor about his no-doubt epic experiences! It turns out...
Blah blah blah. Get to the point, son.
Okay, here's the scoop. Half the things SPYGOD says come out of my mouth but might as well come out of my ass, instead. The other half are deadly serious.
I pay my Agents a lot of money to be able to tell the difference with the lightning speed needed to avoid international, and sometimes cosmic disaster. You, fortunately, don't have to worry about that just yet.
You have the luxury of being able to nod and smile while I baffle you all with bull!@#$ thinly disguised as brilliance, insight, or at least a good campfire yarn. And since you're in the Super Scouts, those campfires aren't as hard to soak with good beer, cheap whiskey, and the weird substances you learned how to make during your Chemisty Action Badge.
And when SPYGOD grades your !@#$, I am likely to say all kinds of crazy things.
So yes, it's probably likely I told your dad all kinds of things when he was in Spygod Scouts. If he was in Spygod Scouts to begin with. It sounds like, from your clipped example, he likes to make !@#$ up as part of his perceived parental duties. And he wouldn't be half wrong, there.
But, yes, he is absolutely right, even if he is lying his head off. The trick to having an adventure is to be engaged in other plans at the time, and have one just drop into your arms like a nude, skydiving Katooey with a bomb strapped to his junk and a note informing yours truly "You have one minute to decide: disarm or disappear?"
So I bet you can guess how SPYGOD spent this afternoon.
The story is this: after spending the night drinking my favorite Vietnamese immigrant under his own table, after spending far too long clawing the sides of my chair at SuperCrapJunketParadeThing, I came back home to The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. to sleep it off. My plan was to spend the day with my darling cat, Margarita, take my car out for a spin to get some fresh and proper Thai from Bangkok Eight, and have some proper ladyboys up for a good time. Then I could return to the Ice Palace in good conscience, having committed what I consider a full convalescence after my trying ordeal in West Papua.
(On a related note, I think Metalmaid needs a tune-up. Everything in the penthouse seems fine and she's been performing her duties as programmed, but her responsometers seemed a bit... off. It was like she was trying not to say something when I talked to her. She has been a little jittery around me since the night I humped the television, though.)
When I woke up, maybe at 11 in the am, I was alerted that my good friends in the Neo York sanitation department had left another flaming bag of dog!@#$ and eviction notices on my front doorstoop, again. So I threw on my camouflage PJs, put my Captain Cody helmet on, took the elevator down, and pissed on the offending sack of crap, like normal.
Then I hear a gagged scream. Suddenly there's a stark naked Thai ladyboy falling towards me, wearing a blackbomb around his delicate little package. I do the obvious thing and leap up to catch him, at which point I read the note, and see the fear in his eyes.
And yes, the blackbomb is timing down from the moment it made contact with me. 60. 59. 58...
Blackbombs are nasty. They put them on people and key their activation to getting into contact with others, or a specific person. Half the time the other people have no idea they're carrying them because they've been made to look like something they normally have on them, like jewelry or even clothes. It's only when they run into the trigger person do they reveal themselves for what they are, and they secrete nasty, instant molecular glue that makes pulling them off without severely damaging the carrier a tricky thing indeed.
And the poor guy's got it on his balls.
What can I do? If I run, he's dead, and half the block is gone. If I rip it off he's probably dead or maimed, and I still can't get it away before half of another block is gone.
And if I disarm it we're all okay, but disarming these things are a real !@#$ bitch without some really expensive and big damn equipment. None of which I have on hand at the moment, or even in the B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G., quite frankly.
So I grab the poor SOB and start running for the river. It's the only thing I can think to do. Jump in the river and try and drown the explosion. If I run like mad, jumping over every obstacle in my path, I might just make it.
Just.
!@#$ him and !@#$ me. It's us versus however many people live and work on my block, and that's a lot of people. So I run like mad, counting down in my head all the while, jumping over taxis, over traffic, into traffic, through gaggles of pedestrians...
And have I mentioned I haven't even had time to zip up, yet?
Finally, after far too long, I get to the river. The timer says I'm at 03, 02, 01. We jump the !@#$ in and I pray it's just enough time to get him deep enough to not hurt anyone else but us.
And then a really funny thing happens. The poor guy pees himself, and this somehow shorts out the blackbomb. That is not supposed to happen, but it does.
We stand by the edge of the river. He laughs, gagged. I laugh. No one else is, but !@#$ them.
And when I try to get the gag off his mouth so he can tell me how he came to be skydiving in the nude with a me-triggered bomb around his ladyboy parts, someone unceremoniously blows his head off with what had to have been a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
SPYGOD vision proves useless. I'm stuck babysitting a dead body with a bad-ass bomb wrapped around it until the Neo York PD can send over a bomb squad. And they take their sweet !@#$ time with that, let me tell you.
What the hell happened? Probably the clumsiest yet eerily almost-effective assassination attempt I've had pulled on me in a long time. It would have been airtight if the person who'd programmed the bomb hadn't forgotten to tell it to discard any secondary genetic material, so the poor Katooey's last fear pee wouldn't turn the whole show off.
But watching with a gun just to make sure dead men told no tales? Diabolical. They must have factored in the possibility that I would have done something entirely unexpected.
Needless to say, that put me completely off Thai. So I'm enjoying Indian, instead, and availing myself of some of these lovely Bollywood boys between courses. Metalmaid has been kind enough to fan us while we saunter about, which is kind of unnerving, but under the circumstances, not too unwelcome.
So there you have the secret to adventure. Wear something unpractical, go pee on official Neo York business, and look to the skies, son. Look to the skies.
(SPYGOD is listening to We Have Explosive (FSOL) and having a cold Kingfisher)
Today's mail comes to us from Super Scout Penworth G. Zhang of Santa Rosa, California
Dear SPYGOD:
My dad was in Spygod Scouts, too, and told me that, once, you told him that the secret to having an adventure was to, and I'm quoting him here, "sit on your ass and expect nothing to happen, at which point everything will."
Did you actually say that to my father? Or is he just bull!@#$ing me again?
Example: Last week he told me he invented stormchasing. Boy did I feel dumb when I tried to get him to come into my Meteorology 101 class to talk to my professor about his no-doubt epic experiences! It turns out...
Blah blah blah. Get to the point, son.
Okay, here's the scoop. Half the things SPYGOD says come out of my mouth but might as well come out of my ass, instead. The other half are deadly serious.
I pay my Agents a lot of money to be able to tell the difference with the lightning speed needed to avoid international, and sometimes cosmic disaster. You, fortunately, don't have to worry about that just yet.
You have the luxury of being able to nod and smile while I baffle you all with bull!@#$ thinly disguised as brilliance, insight, or at least a good campfire yarn. And since you're in the Super Scouts, those campfires aren't as hard to soak with good beer, cheap whiskey, and the weird substances you learned how to make during your Chemisty Action Badge.
And when SPYGOD grades your !@#$, I am likely to say all kinds of crazy things.
So yes, it's probably likely I told your dad all kinds of things when he was in Spygod Scouts. If he was in Spygod Scouts to begin with. It sounds like, from your clipped example, he likes to make !@#$ up as part of his perceived parental duties. And he wouldn't be half wrong, there.
But, yes, he is absolutely right, even if he is lying his head off. The trick to having an adventure is to be engaged in other plans at the time, and have one just drop into your arms like a nude, skydiving Katooey with a bomb strapped to his junk and a note informing yours truly "You have one minute to decide: disarm or disappear?"
So I bet you can guess how SPYGOD spent this afternoon.
The story is this: after spending the night drinking my favorite Vietnamese immigrant under his own table, after spending far too long clawing the sides of my chair at SuperCrapJunketParadeThing, I came back home to The B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G. to sleep it off. My plan was to spend the day with my darling cat, Margarita, take my car out for a spin to get some fresh and proper Thai from Bangkok Eight, and have some proper ladyboys up for a good time. Then I could return to the Ice Palace in good conscience, having committed what I consider a full convalescence after my trying ordeal in West Papua.
(On a related note, I think Metalmaid needs a tune-up. Everything in the penthouse seems fine and she's been performing her duties as programmed, but her responsometers seemed a bit... off. It was like she was trying not to say something when I talked to her. She has been a little jittery around me since the night I humped the television, though.)
When I woke up, maybe at 11 in the am, I was alerted that my good friends in the Neo York sanitation department had left another flaming bag of dog!@#$ and eviction notices on my front doorstoop, again. So I threw on my camouflage PJs, put my Captain Cody helmet on, took the elevator down, and pissed on the offending sack of crap, like normal.
Then I hear a gagged scream. Suddenly there's a stark naked Thai ladyboy falling towards me, wearing a blackbomb around his delicate little package. I do the obvious thing and leap up to catch him, at which point I read the note, and see the fear in his eyes.
And yes, the blackbomb is timing down from the moment it made contact with me. 60. 59. 58...
Blackbombs are nasty. They put them on people and key their activation to getting into contact with others, or a specific person. Half the time the other people have no idea they're carrying them because they've been made to look like something they normally have on them, like jewelry or even clothes. It's only when they run into the trigger person do they reveal themselves for what they are, and they secrete nasty, instant molecular glue that makes pulling them off without severely damaging the carrier a tricky thing indeed.
And the poor guy's got it on his balls.
What can I do? If I run, he's dead, and half the block is gone. If I rip it off he's probably dead or maimed, and I still can't get it away before half of another block is gone.
And if I disarm it we're all okay, but disarming these things are a real !@#$ bitch without some really expensive and big damn equipment. None of which I have on hand at the moment, or even in the B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G., quite frankly.
So I grab the poor SOB and start running for the river. It's the only thing I can think to do. Jump in the river and try and drown the explosion. If I run like mad, jumping over every obstacle in my path, I might just make it.
Just.
!@#$ him and !@#$ me. It's us versus however many people live and work on my block, and that's a lot of people. So I run like mad, counting down in my head all the while, jumping over taxis, over traffic, into traffic, through gaggles of pedestrians...
And have I mentioned I haven't even had time to zip up, yet?
Finally, after far too long, I get to the river. The timer says I'm at 03, 02, 01. We jump the !@#$ in and I pray it's just enough time to get him deep enough to not hurt anyone else but us.
And then a really funny thing happens. The poor guy pees himself, and this somehow shorts out the blackbomb. That is not supposed to happen, but it does.
We stand by the edge of the river. He laughs, gagged. I laugh. No one else is, but !@#$ them.
And when I try to get the gag off his mouth so he can tell me how he came to be skydiving in the nude with a me-triggered bomb around his ladyboy parts, someone unceremoniously blows his head off with what had to have been a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
SPYGOD vision proves useless. I'm stuck babysitting a dead body with a bad-ass bomb wrapped around it until the Neo York PD can send over a bomb squad. And they take their sweet !@#$ time with that, let me tell you.
What the hell happened? Probably the clumsiest yet eerily almost-effective assassination attempt I've had pulled on me in a long time. It would have been airtight if the person who'd programmed the bomb hadn't forgotten to tell it to discard any secondary genetic material, so the poor Katooey's last fear pee wouldn't turn the whole show off.
But watching with a gun just to make sure dead men told no tales? Diabolical. They must have factored in the possibility that I would have done something entirely unexpected.
Needless to say, that put me completely off Thai. So I'm enjoying Indian, instead, and availing myself of some of these lovely Bollywood boys between courses. Metalmaid has been kind enough to fan us while we saunter about, which is kind of unnerving, but under the circumstances, not too unwelcome.
So there you have the secret to adventure. Wear something unpractical, go pee on official Neo York business, and look to the skies, son. Look to the skies.
(SPYGOD is listening to We Have Explosive (FSOL) and having a cold Kingfisher)
Monday, July 4, 2011
7/4/11 - Purple Mountains, Waves of Grain
Washington D.C. The Mall. The Annual July 4th Superparade.
The air smells like burnt rubber, cordite, and rotten mushrooms after the ungodly amount of fireworks they've lit off for the show.Vendors sell horrendously overpriced hot dogs, lukewarm popcorn, crap beer, and off-brand sodas in red, white, and blue wrappers.
Not that I'm getting to try any, of course. I've just barely made it by the skin of my teeth after leaving Jakarta, last night. I told the boys to give the Flier all she had and then some, and they did, so she did. And now I'm staring at a horrendous repair bill.
But it can wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow's the time for bills and headaches and hangovers. Tomorrow can deal with the damage done.
Tonight? It's for the pageant the masses have come to expect. Slack jawed kids of all ages are clamoring against the erect-a-fences to get a good look at what their tax dollars have been paying for, all these years.
They've come to gawk at America's proud corps of Strategic talents, smiling and waving as they walk (or are wheelchaired) around the mall. The great men and women who kicked Japanazi ass in the War, and every war thereafter, marching alongside their sidekicks, legacies, and the occasional animal companion.
Right behind them are the Super Soldiers the Heptagon made to try and replicate them. Crazy vehicles that don't really work in battlefield conditions follow close behind, along with captured enemy hardware we've declassified and let loose, and a few other things no one really should be looking at, just yet, but what the !@#$.
In short, a seemingly endless parade of supercrap.
Now, I can't be too critical, as I have my own stake in this dog and pony show. SPYGOD Scouts from all over America are here, tonight, marching in formation in their smart, black leather dress uniforms.
And yes, they do actually look like dresses, but that's just because most of these !@#$ wouldn't know a kilt from a poodle skirt. If anyone ever asks, you say "if it was a skirt, I'd be wearing your wife's panties under it, instead of just your mom's lipstick." Never fails to separate the men from the boys.
(Hint: boys try to punch you. Men laugh and might offer you a beer.)
I'm here, too, but not to lead the band. I'm sitting this one out, this time, waving from the pressbox as the President his high-powered minders smile and wave. It's got a weird Soviet feel about it that I am not comfortable with, but I guess that's what happens when you fight the enemy for too long. You become them through the weird and tragic alchemy of good intentions and bad results.
Case in point, the speaker for all of us super types, year after year. Mr. USA, up there at the podium after the first walk around. Clears his throat, gives that aw-shucks grin, and starts talking up the year we've had.
Call it the Kingmaker's speech. The things we've done. The fights we've shared. The people we've saved.
The ones we've lost.
I manage to not want to vomit until they get to the subject of poor, broken Rockethand. "Fatally shot by persons unknown" is the official story he gives up there, bravely suppressing a tear.
"Shot in the skull before he went crazier than he already was and killed a room full of kids from his fan club" is the truth. But no one's going to cop to that. Not him, not Dr. Yesterday, and not me.
Not since I was the one who pulled the trigger.
This is the part I really hate about this junket. The lists of those gone and dead and missing in action. I can easily account for the fates, reasons, and true whereabouts (respectively) of more than half of that list. The others are mysteries on one of the many plates I have spinning in the air at any given moment.
But the way Mr. USA says it, he always makes it sound like some kind of accusation. And at some point he always looks over at the parade (the press box, this time) and looks right at me with those big, sad, blue eyes of his.
His way of saying "!@#$ you, SPYGOD," I think, some years. On others I realize it's just his way of saying he's sorry. But this year, when he talks about the late, broken Rodney Carmichael, I'm not sure what he wants to say.
I know what I want to say. I want to pull out a gun and fire it at that !@#$ podium until it's nothing except splinters and flinders, leap onto it, and tell every braindead asshole here in their strategic talent shirt the facts.
The fact that the Supers call me The Reaper, both behind my back and to my face, because they know the moment the crazy chemicals and freak accidents that turned them super take them past the edge of sanity, reason, and reasonable behavior, I'm the one who gets to deal with it.
The fact that, when I have to deal with it, chances are good it's going to be a !@#$ permanent solution.
The fact that I have a very long list of sad days, stretching back to the War, when I had to look an ally, friend, or lover in the eyes (sometimes) and pull the trigger before things got too far out of hand.
But I can't. It would destroy things. It would make the situation we're in even worse than it already is.
So I keep my big damn mouth shut, applaud at the correct moments, and smile when bidden.
And I remind myself that this, here, at this moment, is not America. This is a circus. This is bread.
We are hungry lions in search of condemned Christians.
America can be found in a lot of places, here in the Square Mile. When I'm done with this sick parade of empty, and my Scouts are hand-shook and winked at enough, I'm going to go to the best one I know, especially now that the Brickskeller is gone.
Saloth Thom came here from Vietnam in 1975. His home in Hanoi was ruined, most of his family dead or missing. He had no one and nothing left, but somehow got the wherewithal to get a plane ticket out of Bangkok and an American visa.
(I think he stole the ID and ticket off a dead man near the airport, but I'm not judging. What would you do, son?)
He came to D.C. knowing no English and with very little money left. He got a job working in a restaurant and proved his worth. In five years he was the manager.
Ten years he was the owner.
Got remarried in the meantime. Had kids. Sent those kids to college so they wouldn't have to bottom out in his restaurant unless they wanted to. (Some did.)
Now he makes the best bowl of Pho in the world, and is !@#$ proud of that fact. When Vietnamese folks come to D.C. to sightsee, they go to his place to eat. And they say it's better than anything they ever had at home.
Maybe they're right. Maybe they're just saying that. Maybe it's all the free, good cognac Saloth showers his guests with if they stay late into the night and chat.
(If they knew his secret ingredient they might not be so happy. But SPYGOD tells no tales.)
That's America to me. The ability to walk out of a bad scene and make something new for yourself, here. And being able to do it without having to worry about the darkness coming to find you.
Not without a fight, anyway.
I'll fight for that any day of the week. I'll even sit on my hands and not shoot at Mr. USA when he makes me want to vomit my eye out of my skull.
But I swear, after this one, I am going to drink Saloth out of cognac.
(SPYGOD is listening to Divine Wind (Blue Oyster Cult) and pounding the Salignac like there's no tomorrow)
The air smells like burnt rubber, cordite, and rotten mushrooms after the ungodly amount of fireworks they've lit off for the show.Vendors sell horrendously overpriced hot dogs, lukewarm popcorn, crap beer, and off-brand sodas in red, white, and blue wrappers.
Not that I'm getting to try any, of course. I've just barely made it by the skin of my teeth after leaving Jakarta, last night. I told the boys to give the Flier all she had and then some, and they did, so she did. And now I'm staring at a horrendous repair bill.
But it can wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow's the time for bills and headaches and hangovers. Tomorrow can deal with the damage done.
Tonight? It's for the pageant the masses have come to expect. Slack jawed kids of all ages are clamoring against the erect-a-fences to get a good look at what their tax dollars have been paying for, all these years.
They've come to gawk at America's proud corps of Strategic talents, smiling and waving as they walk (or are wheelchaired) around the mall. The great men and women who kicked Japanazi ass in the War, and every war thereafter, marching alongside their sidekicks, legacies, and the occasional animal companion.
Right behind them are the Super Soldiers the Heptagon made to try and replicate them. Crazy vehicles that don't really work in battlefield conditions follow close behind, along with captured enemy hardware we've declassified and let loose, and a few other things no one really should be looking at, just yet, but what the !@#$.
In short, a seemingly endless parade of supercrap.
Now, I can't be too critical, as I have my own stake in this dog and pony show. SPYGOD Scouts from all over America are here, tonight, marching in formation in their smart, black leather dress uniforms.
And yes, they do actually look like dresses, but that's just because most of these !@#$ wouldn't know a kilt from a poodle skirt. If anyone ever asks, you say "if it was a skirt, I'd be wearing your wife's panties under it, instead of just your mom's lipstick." Never fails to separate the men from the boys.
(Hint: boys try to punch you. Men laugh and might offer you a beer.)
I'm here, too, but not to lead the band. I'm sitting this one out, this time, waving from the pressbox as the President his high-powered minders smile and wave. It's got a weird Soviet feel about it that I am not comfortable with, but I guess that's what happens when you fight the enemy for too long. You become them through the weird and tragic alchemy of good intentions and bad results.
Case in point, the speaker for all of us super types, year after year. Mr. USA, up there at the podium after the first walk around. Clears his throat, gives that aw-shucks grin, and starts talking up the year we've had.
Call it the Kingmaker's speech. The things we've done. The fights we've shared. The people we've saved.
The ones we've lost.
I manage to not want to vomit until they get to the subject of poor, broken Rockethand. "Fatally shot by persons unknown" is the official story he gives up there, bravely suppressing a tear.
"Shot in the skull before he went crazier than he already was and killed a room full of kids from his fan club" is the truth. But no one's going to cop to that. Not him, not Dr. Yesterday, and not me.
Not since I was the one who pulled the trigger.
This is the part I really hate about this junket. The lists of those gone and dead and missing in action. I can easily account for the fates, reasons, and true whereabouts (respectively) of more than half of that list. The others are mysteries on one of the many plates I have spinning in the air at any given moment.
But the way Mr. USA says it, he always makes it sound like some kind of accusation. And at some point he always looks over at the parade (the press box, this time) and looks right at me with those big, sad, blue eyes of his.
His way of saying "!@#$ you, SPYGOD," I think, some years. On others I realize it's just his way of saying he's sorry. But this year, when he talks about the late, broken Rodney Carmichael, I'm not sure what he wants to say.
I know what I want to say. I want to pull out a gun and fire it at that !@#$ podium until it's nothing except splinters and flinders, leap onto it, and tell every braindead asshole here in their strategic talent shirt the facts.
The fact that the Supers call me The Reaper, both behind my back and to my face, because they know the moment the crazy chemicals and freak accidents that turned them super take them past the edge of sanity, reason, and reasonable behavior, I'm the one who gets to deal with it.
The fact that, when I have to deal with it, chances are good it's going to be a !@#$ permanent solution.
The fact that I have a very long list of sad days, stretching back to the War, when I had to look an ally, friend, or lover in the eyes (sometimes) and pull the trigger before things got too far out of hand.
But I can't. It would destroy things. It would make the situation we're in even worse than it already is.
So I keep my big damn mouth shut, applaud at the correct moments, and smile when bidden.
And I remind myself that this, here, at this moment, is not America. This is a circus. This is bread.
We are hungry lions in search of condemned Christians.
America can be found in a lot of places, here in the Square Mile. When I'm done with this sick parade of empty, and my Scouts are hand-shook and winked at enough, I'm going to go to the best one I know, especially now that the Brickskeller is gone.
Saloth Thom came here from Vietnam in 1975. His home in Hanoi was ruined, most of his family dead or missing. He had no one and nothing left, but somehow got the wherewithal to get a plane ticket out of Bangkok and an American visa.
(I think he stole the ID and ticket off a dead man near the airport, but I'm not judging. What would you do, son?)
He came to D.C. knowing no English and with very little money left. He got a job working in a restaurant and proved his worth. In five years he was the manager.
Ten years he was the owner.
Got remarried in the meantime. Had kids. Sent those kids to college so they wouldn't have to bottom out in his restaurant unless they wanted to. (Some did.)
Now he makes the best bowl of Pho in the world, and is !@#$ proud of that fact. When Vietnamese folks come to D.C. to sightsee, they go to his place to eat. And they say it's better than anything they ever had at home.
Maybe they're right. Maybe they're just saying that. Maybe it's all the free, good cognac Saloth showers his guests with if they stay late into the night and chat.
(If they knew his secret ingredient they might not be so happy. But SPYGOD tells no tales.)
That's America to me. The ability to walk out of a bad scene and make something new for yourself, here. And being able to do it without having to worry about the darkness coming to find you.
Not without a fight, anyway.
I'll fight for that any day of the week. I'll even sit on my hands and not shoot at Mr. USA when he makes me want to vomit my eye out of my skull.
But I swear, after this one, I am going to drink Saloth out of cognac.
(SPYGOD is listening to Divine Wind (Blue Oyster Cult) and pounding the Salignac like there's no tomorrow)
Sunday, July 3, 2011
7/3/11 - Beautiful Friend, The End
Halfway across the Pacific, heading for D.C. for the usual July 4th Strategic Talents junket, it hit me that Jimmy walked on, 40 years ago, today.
I always forget that date, somehow. It's like the birthday of your third cousin ten times removed or something like that. It sits there at the edge of your mind like an echo of an echo, flitting from brain cell to brain cell and never quite coming into full view until you get a nasty phone call from your mom asking why you didn't send a card, again.
July 3rd, 1971. He'd have been 67 if he'd just stuck around.
But then he never really could, could he? Never in one place for too damn long. Always sitting down in the chair just long enough to get comfy, maybe have a beer, and then you turn your back to light up and he's gone.
Just like that.
When Jim Morrison was four, the secret ways of the invisible world reached out and showed him that he was a marked man.
The sign came in the form of a a horrible wreck by the side of the road in an Indian reservation, out in the deserts. "Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death," he wrote later, and it kept coming back up in his work. A bright signpost on the highway of his life, showing the way to the end of the road.
His family doesn't remember the accident the same way, of course. Maybe a few Indians. Maybe one car. Nowhere near the mythic power he ascribed to it.
But that's because they weren't seeing the same thing. They just saw an accident. He saw the tragic death of his previous self from the next Earth over, superimposed over the smaller tragedy they drove by.
For a few fleeting seconds, Jim Morrison met Johnny Morphine, rock and roll messiah of the Colonies, who'd died defending its native peoples against demon-spawned redcoats with laser guns. He'd fought them hard and well for years, with blasters and songs, but sooner or later was going to come the day when his devil's luck would run out.
That was the day, right then and there. Smashed down to earth in a blue bus, bleeding to death. More laser-bored hole than not, he was still shooting and laughing at the enemy as they continued to come for him, eager to collect the million-pound bounty on his head and neck.
Then, across the worlds, Johnny saw Jimmy. Their eyes met, and he knew it was a good time to walk on. So he did.
And then there was Jim.
The first time I laid eyes on him was in 1966. This was before the cover story they cooked up for him was in full speed. No Ed Sullivan show, no rock albums, not just yet.
Just rock at the Whisky a Go Go and places like that. Just him and his handlers three, aping the rock scene to give his crazy goings-on some relative weight. All night parties? Kooky goings-on with the police and civil authorities? People seeing things that weren't quite there, or shouldn't be?
It's only Rock N Roll, kids. Long live Rock N. Roll.
I saw the real him, later, when we were hip-deep in the chittering, wet spawn of something that didn't belong in this world. I saw him use that sword he carried just out of reach and sight, bright and shining and silver. He sent thing after thing squirming back into the hole ripped open by some idiot sorcerer SQUASH had hired for the occasion, smiling and laughing all the while, maybe composing poetry on the spot. Maybe not.
When it was done, and we'd sealed the hole, he looked at me, winked, and said "And here I thought I was going to opening doors, tonight." Then he unzipped, pissed around the sorcerer, and walked away laughing.
People looked at him and saw a beautiful, angry poet. They heard a voice like a sweet, thundering angel. They watched him move and groove and never realized they were watching time and space break down around him like psychedelic taffy.
But then that's what he was, when you took those trappings away. An anomaly in the normal movements of the world. Sign that the universe was into repeating itself, over and over again.
Because some things need to be said repeatedly, until we understand.
Johnny Morphine. James Mortson. Jimmy Morningstar. Jerry O'Morning. He'd been all those people, time and again, living parallel lives in parallel worlds. A force for "good" in some, "evil" in others, but always someone greater than those around him. A leader, a priest, a monster in human shape, a doer of things and sayer of ideas.
An eternal champion, but never for long.
Jim fought the good fight for a handful of years, but something about this world never quite sat right with him. Maybe he fell in with the wrong crowd, given that we were all about managing his image and trying to keep him on a leash instead of letting him flare up like he wanted to. Maybe he kept wondering if he'd picked the right side, given how we were doing things back then, and was looking for some kind of an honorable exit.
Maybe he fell too much in love with the lifestyle we helped create for him, given his Dionysian levels of pure excess. Maybe he thought the drugs were good for him, and helped, somehow.
But even man-gods have their limits, after all. Even me, even him. So it wasn't too long before he was a shattered wreck of the young, vital angel I'd seen in action in California, that night, and on and off again thereafter.
Then came the day the ultimate door opened for him, in that bathtub in Paris. He must have looked across the veil of the worlds, and seen his own eyes reflected in someone else's.
And then, smiling, he knew it was time to walk on again while no one was looking.
A lot of people have wasted a lot of time trying to prove that Jim Morrison didn't die, back then. They say he had no autopsy, which was true. But there was no autopsy because the French didn't suspect foul play, and, more importantly, we didn't want anyone else to open him up and see how he ticked.
But when we did, we found nothing out of the ordinary. No strange organs. No cranial abnormalities. No physical evidence of mutations or the like.
Just the empty husk of a life force too powerful for just one shell to contain, lying there dead on a table with a weird smile on its face.
In The End, Morrison sang: The killer awoke before dawn / he put his boots on / He took a face from the ancient gallery / And he walked on down the hall
In the 90's, his father put a tombstone on the grave that read ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ. "According to his own daemon," or "spirit," if you prefer. Prime evidence that his dad knew something was up all along.
I'm having a spliff the size of a man's fist and drinking a cold Bintang just for you, Jimmy. I don't know where you are, or who you are. But I hope wherever you are, tonight, you're giving the bastards hell.
And I hope this time around you stay longer than you did here.
(SPYGOD is listening to The End (The Doors) and having a cold Bintang)
I always forget that date, somehow. It's like the birthday of your third cousin ten times removed or something like that. It sits there at the edge of your mind like an echo of an echo, flitting from brain cell to brain cell and never quite coming into full view until you get a nasty phone call from your mom asking why you didn't send a card, again.
July 3rd, 1971. He'd have been 67 if he'd just stuck around.
But then he never really could, could he? Never in one place for too damn long. Always sitting down in the chair just long enough to get comfy, maybe have a beer, and then you turn your back to light up and he's gone.
Just like that.
When Jim Morrison was four, the secret ways of the invisible world reached out and showed him that he was a marked man.
The sign came in the form of a a horrible wreck by the side of the road in an Indian reservation, out in the deserts. "Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death," he wrote later, and it kept coming back up in his work. A bright signpost on the highway of his life, showing the way to the end of the road.
His family doesn't remember the accident the same way, of course. Maybe a few Indians. Maybe one car. Nowhere near the mythic power he ascribed to it.
But that's because they weren't seeing the same thing. They just saw an accident. He saw the tragic death of his previous self from the next Earth over, superimposed over the smaller tragedy they drove by.
For a few fleeting seconds, Jim Morrison met Johnny Morphine, rock and roll messiah of the Colonies, who'd died defending its native peoples against demon-spawned redcoats with laser guns. He'd fought them hard and well for years, with blasters and songs, but sooner or later was going to come the day when his devil's luck would run out.
That was the day, right then and there. Smashed down to earth in a blue bus, bleeding to death. More laser-bored hole than not, he was still shooting and laughing at the enemy as they continued to come for him, eager to collect the million-pound bounty on his head and neck.
Then, across the worlds, Johnny saw Jimmy. Their eyes met, and he knew it was a good time to walk on. So he did.
And then there was Jim.
The first time I laid eyes on him was in 1966. This was before the cover story they cooked up for him was in full speed. No Ed Sullivan show, no rock albums, not just yet.
Just rock at the Whisky a Go Go and places like that. Just him and his handlers three, aping the rock scene to give his crazy goings-on some relative weight. All night parties? Kooky goings-on with the police and civil authorities? People seeing things that weren't quite there, or shouldn't be?
It's only Rock N Roll, kids. Long live Rock N. Roll.
I saw the real him, later, when we were hip-deep in the chittering, wet spawn of something that didn't belong in this world. I saw him use that sword he carried just out of reach and sight, bright and shining and silver. He sent thing after thing squirming back into the hole ripped open by some idiot sorcerer SQUASH had hired for the occasion, smiling and laughing all the while, maybe composing poetry on the spot. Maybe not.
When it was done, and we'd sealed the hole, he looked at me, winked, and said "And here I thought I was going to opening doors, tonight." Then he unzipped, pissed around the sorcerer, and walked away laughing.
People looked at him and saw a beautiful, angry poet. They heard a voice like a sweet, thundering angel. They watched him move and groove and never realized they were watching time and space break down around him like psychedelic taffy.
But then that's what he was, when you took those trappings away. An anomaly in the normal movements of the world. Sign that the universe was into repeating itself, over and over again.
Because some things need to be said repeatedly, until we understand.
Johnny Morphine. James Mortson. Jimmy Morningstar. Jerry O'Morning. He'd been all those people, time and again, living parallel lives in parallel worlds. A force for "good" in some, "evil" in others, but always someone greater than those around him. A leader, a priest, a monster in human shape, a doer of things and sayer of ideas.
An eternal champion, but never for long.
Jim fought the good fight for a handful of years, but something about this world never quite sat right with him. Maybe he fell in with the wrong crowd, given that we were all about managing his image and trying to keep him on a leash instead of letting him flare up like he wanted to. Maybe he kept wondering if he'd picked the right side, given how we were doing things back then, and was looking for some kind of an honorable exit.
Maybe he fell too much in love with the lifestyle we helped create for him, given his Dionysian levels of pure excess. Maybe he thought the drugs were good for him, and helped, somehow.
But even man-gods have their limits, after all. Even me, even him. So it wasn't too long before he was a shattered wreck of the young, vital angel I'd seen in action in California, that night, and on and off again thereafter.
Then came the day the ultimate door opened for him, in that bathtub in Paris. He must have looked across the veil of the worlds, and seen his own eyes reflected in someone else's.
And then, smiling, he knew it was time to walk on again while no one was looking.
A lot of people have wasted a lot of time trying to prove that Jim Morrison didn't die, back then. They say he had no autopsy, which was true. But there was no autopsy because the French didn't suspect foul play, and, more importantly, we didn't want anyone else to open him up and see how he ticked.
But when we did, we found nothing out of the ordinary. No strange organs. No cranial abnormalities. No physical evidence of mutations or the like.
Just the empty husk of a life force too powerful for just one shell to contain, lying there dead on a table with a weird smile on its face.
In The End, Morrison sang: The killer awoke before dawn / he put his boots on / He took a face from the ancient gallery / And he walked on down the hall
In the 90's, his father put a tombstone on the grave that read ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ. "According to his own daemon," or "spirit," if you prefer. Prime evidence that his dad knew something was up all along.
I'm having a spliff the size of a man's fist and drinking a cold Bintang just for you, Jimmy. I don't know where you are, or who you are. But I hope wherever you are, tonight, you're giving the bastards hell.
And I hope this time around you stay longer than you did here.
(SPYGOD is listening to The End (The Doors) and having a cold Bintang)
7/2/11 - He Is Risen
... and that, in the words of one of my English superfriends during the War, was a bloody damn bewildering episode.
(He used that to describe the time we were chasing ABWEHR spies who were chasing us while someone else was chasing both groups, and someone entirely different was trying to keep us all from meeting at all. I can't explain how it ended without a big damn floor chart, visual aids, and several stiff drinks, so don't ask.)
I should be dead, right now. I know that. !@#$, for a while there I thought I was dead.
The bitch had me where she wanted me. I had no idea she didn't need to touch you to take your memories, anymore. She must have gotten stronger as she got older (and uglier). And she was stripping entire years from me like skin off a whipping boy's ass, cackling all the while.
I think I heard the upper atmosphere part, like angels singing. That meant The COMPANY got my message and was working on carrying out my last order. And the flash thereafter, and the pressure change, well, that had to be the rod hitting.
Old twist on a new idea, those rods. You don't need nukes, anymore. You just need a big, metal rod in orbit, launched from a spring mechanism that looks like some abstract, rube goldberg-designed mousetrap. The rod flies down through the atmosphere, hits the ground, and BOOM -- massive devastation, no radiation.
Launch a whole gaggle of them and you're looking at big time bad news. Launch just one, and you've got a hole where a small city used to be. And that's what I was going for, just then.
I floated in and out, after that I won't take you on a tour of my own, private fantasy island behind the eyelids, both out of a sense of national security and some vestige of shame. But I was in a happy place, there, with guns, Thai hookers, and sexy sycophants aplenty.
No big bad science terrorist !@#$ groups. No high brass bull!@#$ coming down the pipes in my direction. Just me and the B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G., mysteriously uplifted to a crystal beach in Polynesia, me on that beach drinking rocket fuel drinks with umbrellas like they were going out of style, and Metalmaid shooting door-to-door religious salesmen in the junk with a big damn gun and a laugh track.
If it was heaven, I could live with it.
Then I wake up here, in Cikini Hospital, in Jakarta. I come to in a private room with a bucket of lukewarm Bintang by the bed and a "do not disturb" sign on the door. The people that work here can only tell me two Indian fellows checked me in three days ago. And they showered the night help with much-needed, off-the-books money, on the condition that my stay here be equally off-the-books.
That and they deliver a message, in Hindi: "Thank you, goat-!@#$er."
I think I know what that means. I'll have to send Dosha a little token of my esteem next time we don't meet, again.
The day I woke up I think I went a little crazy. Chandra Eye or not, I wasn't sure if this was real or just another dream. So while, in retrospect, organizing a randy little shin-dig on this wing might have been an extreme reaction, at the time it made perfect !@#$ sense.
The Jakarta police might not see it that way, of course, but I managed to get the charges dropped on most of the other revelers. I told told them an as-yet unknown super-science terrorist had used some kind of weird mind-control ray on them.
(I just neglected to tell them that the terrorist was yours truly.)
I think they mostly bought it. Part of the deal was me getting my obviously well-enough-to-travel ass out of the country as soon as travel can be arranged. The American ambassador's been very helpful in that regard, but I think it's because someone's breathing down his neck.
Not hard to imagine who, either. This is going to be an interesting two or six years, now.
Nice night, here in Jakarta. Smelly and noisy outside my window, a thousand cars and bajaj flying every which way down a road with no rules. It's worse than driving between cities in India, sometimes. But the locals make it work, somehow.
It's only when pasty, white guys like me get behind the wheel that someone gets hurt.
(SPYGOD is listening to Bintang di Surga (Peterpan) and sucking on a warm Bintang)
(He used that to describe the time we were chasing ABWEHR spies who were chasing us while someone else was chasing both groups, and someone entirely different was trying to keep us all from meeting at all. I can't explain how it ended without a big damn floor chart, visual aids, and several stiff drinks, so don't ask.)
I should be dead, right now. I know that. !@#$, for a while there I thought I was dead.
The bitch had me where she wanted me. I had no idea she didn't need to touch you to take your memories, anymore. She must have gotten stronger as she got older (and uglier). And she was stripping entire years from me like skin off a whipping boy's ass, cackling all the while.
I think I heard the upper atmosphere part, like angels singing. That meant The COMPANY got my message and was working on carrying out my last order. And the flash thereafter, and the pressure change, well, that had to be the rod hitting.
Old twist on a new idea, those rods. You don't need nukes, anymore. You just need a big, metal rod in orbit, launched from a spring mechanism that looks like some abstract, rube goldberg-designed mousetrap. The rod flies down through the atmosphere, hits the ground, and BOOM -- massive devastation, no radiation.
Launch a whole gaggle of them and you're looking at big time bad news. Launch just one, and you've got a hole where a small city used to be. And that's what I was going for, just then.
I floated in and out, after that I won't take you on a tour of my own, private fantasy island behind the eyelids, both out of a sense of national security and some vestige of shame. But I was in a happy place, there, with guns, Thai hookers, and sexy sycophants aplenty.
No big bad science terrorist !@#$ groups. No high brass bull!@#$ coming down the pipes in my direction. Just me and the B.U.I.L.D.I.N.G., mysteriously uplifted to a crystal beach in Polynesia, me on that beach drinking rocket fuel drinks with umbrellas like they were going out of style, and Metalmaid shooting door-to-door religious salesmen in the junk with a big damn gun and a laugh track.
If it was heaven, I could live with it.
Then I wake up here, in Cikini Hospital, in Jakarta. I come to in a private room with a bucket of lukewarm Bintang by the bed and a "do not disturb" sign on the door. The people that work here can only tell me two Indian fellows checked me in three days ago. And they showered the night help with much-needed, off-the-books money, on the condition that my stay here be equally off-the-books.
That and they deliver a message, in Hindi: "Thank you, goat-!@#$er."
I think I know what that means. I'll have to send Dosha a little token of my esteem next time we don't meet, again.
The day I woke up I think I went a little crazy. Chandra Eye or not, I wasn't sure if this was real or just another dream. So while, in retrospect, organizing a randy little shin-dig on this wing might have been an extreme reaction, at the time it made perfect !@#$ sense.
The Jakarta police might not see it that way, of course, but I managed to get the charges dropped on most of the other revelers. I told told them an as-yet unknown super-science terrorist had used some kind of weird mind-control ray on them.
(I just neglected to tell them that the terrorist was yours truly.)
I think they mostly bought it. Part of the deal was me getting my obviously well-enough-to-travel ass out of the country as soon as travel can be arranged. The American ambassador's been very helpful in that regard, but I think it's because someone's breathing down his neck.
Not hard to imagine who, either. This is going to be an interesting two or six years, now.
Nice night, here in Jakarta. Smelly and noisy outside my window, a thousand cars and bajaj flying every which way down a road with no rules. It's worse than driving between cities in India, sometimes. But the locals make it work, somehow.
It's only when pasty, white guys like me get behind the wheel that someone gets hurt.
(SPYGOD is listening to Bintang di Surga (Peterpan) and sucking on a warm Bintang)
Friday, July 1, 2011
6/29 - 7/1/11 - No Rest for the Wicked
(OBSERVATION LOG - OVAL OFFICE)
(DATE: 6/30/11 - TIME: 19:24- 19:45)
(PERSONS PRESENT: POTUS, VPOTUS, SOD, MR. USA)
MR. USA: Sir, reporting as ordered.
POTUS: Thank you for coming, (NAME REDACTED). You know, you really don't have to salute me.
MR. USA: I think it's only right, sir. You are my commander in chief.
VPOTUS: How come you never salute, me, (NAME REDACTED)?
MR. USA: You'll have to take that up with the voters in a few elections, sir.
(LAUGHTER)
POTUS: Well, let's get right down to it. You want a beer, (NAME REDACTED)? We can call this a beer meeting.
MR. USA: No thank you, sir. Just some ice water, please.
VPOTUS: I'd have thought you'd have had enough !@#$ ice to last a lifetime, down there.
POTUS: You can't cuss in front of Mr. USA, Joe. It's unpatriotic.
MR. USA: I've heard worse, sir. Ask the Secretary. I remember when he was just a private in Korea.
SOD: Heh. Well, I think the less we remember about that the better, (NAME REDACTED). We've all got some war stories best left in the war.
POTUS: Well, if we're talking about what I think we're talking about, I am having that beer.
VPOTUS: Make that a double for me.
SOD: Give it to us straight, (NAME REDACTED). SPYGOD. He is alive?
MR. USA: Yes he is. I don't pretend to know how he made it out of West Papua alive after everything that happened, but I can confirm that he is alive and recuperating in Jakarta. And he has lost none of his... eccentricities.
POTUS: Yeah, I've been fielding some interesting phone calls from the Indonesian Ambassador. Did he actually have a whole wing of the hospital dancing a conga in the nude?
MR. USA: I do believe he did, sir.
VPOTUS: Holy !@#$. Was that his, what is it, SPYGOD vision?
SOD: Actually, sir, I think he just talked them into it. We believe he has the power to unconsciously lower people's inhibitions just by being in their presence.
POTUS: So the head of our most powerful intelligence agency is a human intoxicant?
MR. USA: It would explain a lot of things at The COMPANY, sir.
VPOTUS: Well, here, (NAME REDACTED)/ Back the train up a bit. You got these transmissions, here. This unauthorized trip into Indonesia to root out, who was it, GORGON?
SOD: That's correct, sir. He had reason to believe their main base was in West Papua and sent in some operatives to ascertain the situation on the ground. They sent back some very strange reports and then fell off the radar, so he and some Agents went in. After that, well... the transmissions are pretty clear as to what happened, and who caused it.
POTUS: Aging Japanese super war criminals?
MR. USA: They're nothing to laugh at, sir. We lost a lot of good people to Japan's strategic talents during the War, and they turn up every once in a while, elsewhere. If anything, it's a miracle we got so many of them to go along with the Occupation.
SOD: It's also a miracle he survived at all. That last person he was up against, the black hole lady?
MR. USA: Black Star, sir. I've tangled with her, too, before. Not a pleasant experience.
SOD: Well, she had him so bad that he was actually calling for a strike on the area, just to be sure she didn't get away.
VPOTUS: Did you?
MR. USA: Well, that wasn't my decision to make, sir. I tried to point out that there were doubtlessly civilians nearby, but the Agents were quite adamant on carrying out his last wishes. They activated a plowshare in geosynchronous orbit and sent down a rod. I'm sure you felt the blast here. It obliterated about twenty miles of the landscape.
POTUS: Oh. Oh !@#$.
VPOTUS: So... any blowback from Indonesia?
SOD: I don't think they know it was the Agency, sir. And so far as it stays that way, I think we're okay.
MR. USA: I think we should tell them what we did and why, sir. It's the right thing to do. Besides, if they did have GORGON operating on their soil for so long, I don't think they can really complain too loudly if we had to act to stop something truly catastrophic from happening.
POTUS: What would be the truly catastrophic thing, (NAME REDACTED)?
MR. USA: Having SPYGOD's body fall into the wrong hands. That's part of why I'm here today, sir.
VPOTUS: Well, go on with the rest of the story, (NAME REDACTED). How did he get from the crater to Jakarta?
MR. USA: That's the bit we're still trying to figure out, sir. There was no trace of him, Dark Star, or any of the GORGON agents at the blast center. If you don't find a body, don't expect them to be dead, but I'm hard pressed to imagine anyone surviving that kind of blast.
POTUS: But SPYGOD did, correct?
MR. USA: Correct. Apparently he was dropped off at a small hospital in Jakarta by two Indian men, one of whom was badly scarred and wore an eyepatch. The other may have been a strategic talent named Daksha. I believe he teleports.
VPOTUS: Aha.
POTUS: And then?
MR. USA: And then he was asleep for twenty four hours, awake but unresponsive for a day and a night, and then started up a party. I think he's managed to find all the liquor stashes in the city and drain them.
SOD: Standard operating procedure for our SPYGOD, sir.
POTUS: Well, at least we don't have to worry about succession at The COMPANY. But what's on your mind, (NAME REDACTED)?
MR. USA: Well, sir, I've known (NAME REDACTED) since World War II. I've fought alongside him, worked with him, came up through Camp Rogers with him. And I have to say that, while he is an extremely capable defender of America's interests, and a very useful strategic talent, he's also become a major embarrassment. I'm sure you know what it's like to be SPYGODed, by now, sir.
POTUS: Oh, do I ever.
MR. USA: I'm not saying he shouldn't be in charge of The COMPANY any longer, sir. But I do think it might be a good thing if he wasn't put in charge of anything really internationally sensitive until he gets his act straight. This decision on his part to upset the apple cart as badly as he did... it's having serious repercussions around the world.
VPOTUS: It was also the right thing to do, quite frankly. And I know we had a lot of good intelligence coming out of how we had things before. But you gotta admit, it's a good thing to have evil people on the run for a change. I hear HONEYCOMB's pulling back a lot--
MR. USA: Yes, sir. And now that they're pulling back and killing their double agents, how do we find out where they are, or what they're going to do next? This is the kind of information we're missing out on, now. And the stunt with The Chamber in the Ice Palace, that just kind of seals the deal, sir.
POTUS: Well, I don't feel comfortable telling a god where to get off when he wants to protect his own country, (NAME REDACTED). And I can't agree with all his methods, but he hasn't gone so far off the ranch that we can't rope him back in if we need to. But I tell you what. As soon as he's back on his feet, I will order him to remove himself from the Ice Palace, and leave it up to the UN mission you're heading up to deal with. Can that work, you think?
MR. USA: I don't think it sends a strong enough message, sir. But if you think that's best, I'll sign off on it.
VPOTUS: I think we should just blow that whole place up and salt the remains. Nothing good's coming out of playing around with that Chamber thing.
MR. USA: And that's another thing, sir. I'd like to have Doctor Yesterday and his family look into helping us with unlocking The Chamber. If anyone can do it, it's them.
POTUS: I think I can arrange that. Anything else.
SOD: I think that's all we really need, sir. But if you don't mind my asking, I thought this would be a lot tougher a sell?
POTUS: Well, gentlemen, it's like this. I've got an election to win in a little over a year. I've got an economy in the tubes and a lot of problems I inherited from the last Administration to deal with. The last thing I need is to have some crazy stunt by SPYGOD go so bad that it takes me down along with him. So if yanking him out of the Ice Palace gets the point across that he needs to stay cooler than he's being, I'm okay with that. But let's not forget who is he, and what he's done, and what he can do, either, shall we?
MR. USA: I think I can agree to that, sir. Good day.
SOD: Good day, sirs.
(DOOR CLOSING)
VPOTUS: God what a !@#$. Are you really going to give in like that?
POTUS: I am. (NAME REDACTED) isn't wrong about this. But I've got my own reasons for not wanting SPYGOD down in Antarctica any longer, Joe. And you know better than to ask.
VPOTUS: I guess not. Good thing I asked for two beers, then.
POTUS: Cheers.
VPOTUS: Cheers.
(Mr. USA is thinking of The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie) and drinking ice water)
(DATE: 6/30/11 - TIME: 19:24- 19:45)
(PERSONS PRESENT: POTUS, VPOTUS, SOD, MR. USA)
MR. USA: Sir, reporting as ordered.
POTUS: Thank you for coming, (NAME REDACTED). You know, you really don't have to salute me.
MR. USA: I think it's only right, sir. You are my commander in chief.
VPOTUS: How come you never salute, me, (NAME REDACTED)?
MR. USA: You'll have to take that up with the voters in a few elections, sir.
(LAUGHTER)
POTUS: Well, let's get right down to it. You want a beer, (NAME REDACTED)? We can call this a beer meeting.
MR. USA: No thank you, sir. Just some ice water, please.
VPOTUS: I'd have thought you'd have had enough !@#$ ice to last a lifetime, down there.
POTUS: You can't cuss in front of Mr. USA, Joe. It's unpatriotic.
MR. USA: I've heard worse, sir. Ask the Secretary. I remember when he was just a private in Korea.
SOD: Heh. Well, I think the less we remember about that the better, (NAME REDACTED). We've all got some war stories best left in the war.
POTUS: Well, if we're talking about what I think we're talking about, I am having that beer.
VPOTUS: Make that a double for me.
SOD: Give it to us straight, (NAME REDACTED). SPYGOD. He is alive?
MR. USA: Yes he is. I don't pretend to know how he made it out of West Papua alive after everything that happened, but I can confirm that he is alive and recuperating in Jakarta. And he has lost none of his... eccentricities.
POTUS: Yeah, I've been fielding some interesting phone calls from the Indonesian Ambassador. Did he actually have a whole wing of the hospital dancing a conga in the nude?
MR. USA: I do believe he did, sir.
VPOTUS: Holy !@#$. Was that his, what is it, SPYGOD vision?
SOD: Actually, sir, I think he just talked them into it. We believe he has the power to unconsciously lower people's inhibitions just by being in their presence.
POTUS: So the head of our most powerful intelligence agency is a human intoxicant?
MR. USA: It would explain a lot of things at The COMPANY, sir.
VPOTUS: Well, here, (NAME REDACTED)/ Back the train up a bit. You got these transmissions, here. This unauthorized trip into Indonesia to root out, who was it, GORGON?
SOD: That's correct, sir. He had reason to believe their main base was in West Papua and sent in some operatives to ascertain the situation on the ground. They sent back some very strange reports and then fell off the radar, so he and some Agents went in. After that, well... the transmissions are pretty clear as to what happened, and who caused it.
POTUS: Aging Japanese super war criminals?
MR. USA: They're nothing to laugh at, sir. We lost a lot of good people to Japan's strategic talents during the War, and they turn up every once in a while, elsewhere. If anything, it's a miracle we got so many of them to go along with the Occupation.
SOD: It's also a miracle he survived at all. That last person he was up against, the black hole lady?
MR. USA: Black Star, sir. I've tangled with her, too, before. Not a pleasant experience.
SOD: Well, she had him so bad that he was actually calling for a strike on the area, just to be sure she didn't get away.
VPOTUS: Did you?
MR. USA: Well, that wasn't my decision to make, sir. I tried to point out that there were doubtlessly civilians nearby, but the Agents were quite adamant on carrying out his last wishes. They activated a plowshare in geosynchronous orbit and sent down a rod. I'm sure you felt the blast here. It obliterated about twenty miles of the landscape.
POTUS: Oh. Oh !@#$.
VPOTUS: So... any blowback from Indonesia?
SOD: I don't think they know it was the Agency, sir. And so far as it stays that way, I think we're okay.
MR. USA: I think we should tell them what we did and why, sir. It's the right thing to do. Besides, if they did have GORGON operating on their soil for so long, I don't think they can really complain too loudly if we had to act to stop something truly catastrophic from happening.
POTUS: What would be the truly catastrophic thing, (NAME REDACTED)?
MR. USA: Having SPYGOD's body fall into the wrong hands. That's part of why I'm here today, sir.
VPOTUS: Well, go on with the rest of the story, (NAME REDACTED). How did he get from the crater to Jakarta?
MR. USA: That's the bit we're still trying to figure out, sir. There was no trace of him, Dark Star, or any of the GORGON agents at the blast center. If you don't find a body, don't expect them to be dead, but I'm hard pressed to imagine anyone surviving that kind of blast.
POTUS: But SPYGOD did, correct?
MR. USA: Correct. Apparently he was dropped off at a small hospital in Jakarta by two Indian men, one of whom was badly scarred and wore an eyepatch. The other may have been a strategic talent named Daksha. I believe he teleports.
VPOTUS: Aha.
POTUS: And then?
MR. USA: And then he was asleep for twenty four hours, awake but unresponsive for a day and a night, and then started up a party. I think he's managed to find all the liquor stashes in the city and drain them.
SOD: Standard operating procedure for our SPYGOD, sir.
POTUS: Well, at least we don't have to worry about succession at The COMPANY. But what's on your mind, (NAME REDACTED)?
MR. USA: Well, sir, I've known (NAME REDACTED) since World War II. I've fought alongside him, worked with him, came up through Camp Rogers with him. And I have to say that, while he is an extremely capable defender of America's interests, and a very useful strategic talent, he's also become a major embarrassment. I'm sure you know what it's like to be SPYGODed, by now, sir.
POTUS: Oh, do I ever.
MR. USA: I'm not saying he shouldn't be in charge of The COMPANY any longer, sir. But I do think it might be a good thing if he wasn't put in charge of anything really internationally sensitive until he gets his act straight. This decision on his part to upset the apple cart as badly as he did... it's having serious repercussions around the world.
VPOTUS: It was also the right thing to do, quite frankly. And I know we had a lot of good intelligence coming out of how we had things before. But you gotta admit, it's a good thing to have evil people on the run for a change. I hear HONEYCOMB's pulling back a lot--
MR. USA: Yes, sir. And now that they're pulling back and killing their double agents, how do we find out where they are, or what they're going to do next? This is the kind of information we're missing out on, now. And the stunt with The Chamber in the Ice Palace, that just kind of seals the deal, sir.
POTUS: Well, I don't feel comfortable telling a god where to get off when he wants to protect his own country, (NAME REDACTED). And I can't agree with all his methods, but he hasn't gone so far off the ranch that we can't rope him back in if we need to. But I tell you what. As soon as he's back on his feet, I will order him to remove himself from the Ice Palace, and leave it up to the UN mission you're heading up to deal with. Can that work, you think?
MR. USA: I don't think it sends a strong enough message, sir. But if you think that's best, I'll sign off on it.
VPOTUS: I think we should just blow that whole place up and salt the remains. Nothing good's coming out of playing around with that Chamber thing.
MR. USA: And that's another thing, sir. I'd like to have Doctor Yesterday and his family look into helping us with unlocking The Chamber. If anyone can do it, it's them.
POTUS: I think I can arrange that. Anything else.
SOD: I think that's all we really need, sir. But if you don't mind my asking, I thought this would be a lot tougher a sell?
POTUS: Well, gentlemen, it's like this. I've got an election to win in a little over a year. I've got an economy in the tubes and a lot of problems I inherited from the last Administration to deal with. The last thing I need is to have some crazy stunt by SPYGOD go so bad that it takes me down along with him. So if yanking him out of the Ice Palace gets the point across that he needs to stay cooler than he's being, I'm okay with that. But let's not forget who is he, and what he's done, and what he can do, either, shall we?
MR. USA: I think I can agree to that, sir. Good day.
SOD: Good day, sirs.
(DOOR CLOSING)
VPOTUS: God what a !@#$. Are you really going to give in like that?
POTUS: I am. (NAME REDACTED) isn't wrong about this. But I've got my own reasons for not wanting SPYGOD down in Antarctica any longer, Joe. And you know better than to ask.
VPOTUS: I guess not. Good thing I asked for two beers, then.
POTUS: Cheers.
VPOTUS: Cheers.
(Mr. USA is thinking of The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie) and drinking ice water)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)