The Probing: Leviathan, The Mind Pirates, Hybrids, The Village

by Frank Peretti

  “Hi there.” The clone smiled. “My name is Skylar. I’m so glad you could make it. So how was your flight? Terrific, I hope.”

  I traded looks with Andi. Can anybody say Stepford Wives?

  Cowboy didn’t notice. “Hi, I’m Tank. Ours was great. But Miss Brenda’s and Daniel’s, here, theirs wasn’t so good.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “So, Skylar,” Ashlee said. “We’re running a bit late. Would you mind escorting our guests to the control room?”

  “Why, I’d love to, Ashlee. If you’ll join me and walk this way, please.” She turned and we started toward what looked like a giant airplane hangar.

  The professor sped up and joined her. “Excuse me, miss?”

  She turned her perma-smile on him. “Yes?”

  “What exactly is our purpose here?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. You’re here because our executive producer, Norman Anderson, invited you. Didn’t you receive his e-vite?”

  “Yes, we did, but he failed to mention why.”

  “Oh. Because we’re taping his new reality show, Live or Die: The Ultimate Reality.”

  “I appreciate that, but the question still remains—why?”

  “Because you’re his invited guests.”

  He took a measured breath and tried again. “I understand the name of the show and I understand we are his invited guests, but you have yet to address the question of why?”

  She looked at him blankly. Then apparently guessing he was hard of hearing, she raised her voice. “Because we’re taping his new reality show, Live or Die: The Ultimate Reality!”

  The professor opened his mouth, then closed it. It was obvious he didn’t know how to communicate with her species.

  When we got to the main entrance, Skylar turned to us. “Now we’ll have to be very quiet.” She looked to the professor. “As Mr. Anderson’s invited guests you are being allowed inside the control room. That’s quite an honor, but it will require that you turn off your cell phones and remain completely silent. Is that understood?”

  Everyone nodded except for the professor.

  She repeated louder for his benefit, “Is that understood?”

  “Yes.” Andi stepped in before he could respond. “We understand.”

  Skylar flashed one last smile and opened the door. We stepped inside and were struck by a wave of coldness. The edges of the room were dark, but you could see it was huge—a couple hundred feet wide and forty, fifty feet tall. In the center was a big oval sandpit. It was surrounded by a fake stone wall and fake stone bleachers—eight, maybe ten rows high.

  “Welcome to the Colosseum,” Skylar proudly announced. “It’s like the Roman Colosseum —you know, the one they have in Rome, Italy? Only it’s not as big. It’s a lot smaller because it’s not as big. It’s a miniature version.”

  “Of the one in Rome, Italy?” the professor asked. We all caught his sarcasm. Well, most of us.

  “That’s right!” Skylar beamed. “Exactly.”

  We kept walking.

  As we approached the side wall I could see half a dozen TV cameras mounted around it. Another one hung from a cable over the pit, and two more were manned by live operators inside the pit. Each and every camera was focused on two people: a young man and a young woman. They pretended to fight, but in slow motion.

  “Are those the stars?” Cowboy whispered.

  Skylar shook her head. “They’re what we in the business call ‘stand-ins.’ They’re to help the director find the best camera angles for when the real fight begins this evening.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question,” the professor said. “Why have we been selected to—”

  “Oh, there’s Brittani.” Our guide waved to another perfectly proportioned assistant waiting at the top of the bleachers. She stood next to a large black room with mirrored windows on the front. Skylar started up the steps and we followed.

  Andi leaned over and whispered to me. “Don’t these girls ever eat?”

  “If they do,” I said, “it all goes to their boobs.”

  We arrived and the new girl flashed her mandatory grin. “Hi there. My name is Brittani. I’m so glad you could make it. So how was your flight? I hope it was terrific.”

  Now, for over an hour, we’d been standing (as in not sitting) inside the back of that big black room watching and listening to some overweight Jabba-the-Hutt director firing off instructions to his camera crew. Other than us, the only person standing was some lean, older guy with a buzz cut. By the way he paced, chewed gum, and sipped his grande Starbucks, you could tell he was in charge. I’m guessing he was the mysterious Norman Anderson.

  “Hold right there,” the director said into his headset.

  On the monitors, the two stand-in actors froze. Since we’d been there, they’d gone from slow-motion punching to slow-motion swordplay, to slow-motion battle maces, to slow-motion lances. If it had been real, it would have been way too gross for Daniel. But everything was fake . . . including the fake blood smeared over the guy’s face when he was fake stabbed in the eye before it was fake gouged out.

  For the past few minutes, the girl was supposedly getting the worst of it. Her hand had been fake cut off by a cleaver—same fake blood, only now it spurted from a pump in her sleeve. And a few seconds ago, her ear had been fake sliced off.

  “Beautiful,” the director said. “Okay, Sean, take the butt of your sword and slam it into Jillian’s face.”

  The actor nodded and, in slow motion, spun around and pretended to hit the girl’s face.

  “Jillian, drop to the ground. You’re dazed.”

  She lowered to her knees and rolled over.

  “Fantastic. Cameras Two and Three, don’t forget to go for cleavage. With all that rolling around I want plenty.”

  The assistant next to him asked, “What about wardrobe malfunction?”

  The director chuckled. “Let’s hope.”

  The others laughed as if on cue.

  “Okay, Sean, grab the axe off the back wall there, and come after her. Camera One and Two, go tight but give him room.”

  The images on the monitors shifted as the actor scooped up the axe and came toward the girl.

  “Slower . . .”

  He slowed.

  “Raise it over your head.”

  He did.

  “Everyone check your marks. This is the kill shot.” He turned to Anderson, who paced behind him and nodded. He turned back to the monitors. “Alright. Gore lights, please.”

  The lights in the arena turned deep red.

  “Strobe.”

  They began flashing.

  “Camera Two, go for the money shot. Extreme close-up. I doubt he’ll stop at one blow, so stay in there, nice and tight for spurting blood. We’ll have the cameras watertight by tonight.” He laughed. “Make that ‘blood-tight.’”

  Smiles all around.

  “Alright, people, let’s wrap this puppy and go on break.”

  Both actors nodded. Sean slowly brought down the axe until it hovered an inch from the girl’s face.

  “Good. And repeat.”

  He raised the axe and brought it down again.

  “Good.”

  “What if it flips?” the assistant asked. “What if the girl wins?”

  “Then we’ll adjust. This is just practice.” He spoke back into the headset. “Okay, Sean, keep hacking. Don’t stop until I call.”

  The stand-in nodded and pretended to hit Jillian again, then again, and—

  Suddenly all the monitors flickered. For a second another show came on. Not a TV show, but a scene from the Superman movie. The same one that had come on in the limo.

  The director shouted, “What the—”

  The monitors all flickered to a Rocky movie. The same part we’d seen in the limo. Then the Leonardo DiCaprio spinning top.

  We all traded looks.

  Anderson slammed his Starbucks cup down on a console near us. “Engineering!”


  “On it.” Some shaved-headed guy moved into action.

  Next, we saw the show with the flying telephone booth. Then the scene from The Hunger Games.

  The director swore—worse than me on a bad day.

  The scene switched to the ant cartoon. Then the newer Rocky movie.

  It was exactly like our limo ride. Except for one added bonus: The grande Starbucks beside us? No one touched it. No one was near it. But, suddenly, for no reason at all, it exploded.

  CHAPTER

  4

  And we’re here because . . .” One thing about the professor—he’s as persistent as he is obnoxious. At least this time we were with someone whose teeth didn’t look Photoshopped and who actually had answers.

  Norman Anderson was eating dinner with us and the rest of his crew in the studio cafeteria—if you call a “cafeteria” someplace where they serve prime rib, salmon, and plenty of veggie things for the veg-heads.

  Anderson barely glanced up from his steak to answer the professor. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  The lean fifty-something sized up the professor, then went back to eating. “You’re here because I’m a man who can’t say no to his daughter.”

  We traded looks. Clueless as ever.

  He glanced back up and saw our expressions. “What? Helsa didn’t tell you?”

  The name stopped us cold.

  “Helsa . . .” Cowboy said.

  “Yeah. She and my daughter are, like, best friends.” He spotted a waitress who didn’t quite measure up to Team Barbie and signaled her to refill his water. Perrier, of course.

  He turned back to Cowboy, who still had his mouth open. “You’re the football player, right?”

  “Was,” Cowboy corrected. “But how do you—”

  “And Helsa, she’s your niece or something?”

  Before Cowboy could correct him—little details like they were totally unrelated and Helsa was just a friend sent from a parallel world to sometimes help us—the professor cut him off. “Yes, she’s his niece.”

  “Professor,” Cowboy protested, “that ain’t exactly the—”

  “Close enough.” The professor turned back to Anderson. “It’s a rather long and boring story.”

  The man didn’t notice or care. He went back to his steak. “So for months she’s been telling my kid that you and your pals here have been dying to come onto a real Hollywood set. You know, see how things are done.”

  We traded more looks.

  He took a sip of his water, stifled a burp, and set the glass down. “And since you were already in the area—vacation, is it?—I figured, why not? I mean, if it makes my daughter happy.”

  “Are they here?” Andi asked, glancing around. “Helsa? Your daughter?”

  “Right,” he scoffed. “Like I’d let them see a show like this. I sent them with the wife to Maui for the week.” He turned back to Cowboy. “Cute kid, your niece. Strange, but cute.”

  It was about then I noticed the water in Anderson’s glass rippling. Like someone bumped the table. But when I looked at the other glasses they were perfectly still.

  It was the professor’s turn to scoff. “You refuse to expose your own child to the violence of your show and yet you are perfectly willing to present it to the entire nation?”

  Anderson gave him a look. It was obvious they weren’t going to be friends. “Do you know anything about network ratings?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “If you did, you’d know that everything’s in the toilet. Nothing’s making money these days.”

  “So you’re producing this type of barbaric ilk simply to make a—”

  “This is the real world, Professor. Not some Ivy League hothouse. People here have to work to eat.”

  “Even if it means prostituting themselves?” The professor kept pushing buttons, one of his specialties.

  “If someone’s got the money and is willing to foot the bill, yeah, I’m willing to help them spend it.”

  I glanced back at Anderson’s water. It was rippling harder.

  Always the peacemaker, Andi cooled things down by asking, “When you say, ‘foot the bill,’ are you referring to the network? To your sponsors?”

  “For starters.”

  “Starters?”

  “There are other players. No one talks much about them; they prefer to avoid the spotlight. But we all know they’re there and that they’ve got major bucks. Truth is, every year they’re investing a bit more.”

  “Into programs as uplifting as yours,” the professor said.

  “The show was not created in a vacuum.”

  “Meaning?”

  “They came to me. Not with every detail, of course. They trust my creative genius. But the initial concept was theirs.”

  “And you took their money for services rendered.”

  “I wasn’t thrilled about it, but look at the country. You’d have to be an idiot not to see this is where programs are going. This is what people want for entertainment, so this is what they’ll get.” Anderson returned to cutting his steak, none too gently.

  After a moment I asked, “These other people, with the money, they got a name?”

  “Like I said, they like to be anonymous.”

  “But you know who they are.”

  “I’ve seen a contract or two.”

  “And?”

  He looked up at me, then to the others. Obviously figuring it didn’t matter, he returned to his steak. “They call themselves The Gate.”

  If we’d been surprised about Helsa, we were downright stunned about this.

  Anderson didn’t notice and kept eating. After a moment, he quoted, “‘For better or worse, the influence of the church, which used to be all-powerful, has been usurped by film. Films and television tell us the way we conduct our lives, what is right and wrong.’”

  “They said that?” Cowboy asked. “The Gate?”

  Anderson shook his head. “George Lucas. But they quote it. They’re big fans of using the media to ‘educate’ and ‘enlighten.’”

  “By reveling in sex and violence,” the professor said.

  Anderson had had enough. He laid down his knife and fork and shoved away his plate. Leaning toward the professor, he said, “It’s called entertainment. We give the people what they want. No one takes it seriously.”

  “Actually—” Andi cleared her throat as she pulled out her tablet and snapped it on. “There are over three hundred studies directly linking TV violence to social violence. More studies than link smoking to lung cancer.”

  Anderson turned to her, unsure how to respond.

  “She’s kinda smart,” Cowboy said.

  Searching for a link, she continued, “In fact, a 1992 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded”—she kept looking—“ah, here it is: ‘Long-term childhood exposure to television is a causal factor behind approximately one half of the homicides committed in the United States, or approximately 10,000 homicides annually.’”

  Anderson frowned.

  Cowboy grinned. “Told ya.”

  She kept reading. “‘If television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.’”

  I glanced to Anderson’s glass. The ripples had grown so strong the water was sloshing back and forth.

  “Right.” He grabbed his napkin, wiped his mouth, and started to rise. “Well, like I said, it’s a living.”

  “Pretending to kill people?” the professor said.

  “Pretending? Pretending? No, my friends, what you see tonight will not be pretend. It will be the real thing. Live or Die: The Ultimate Reality.”

  “You mean you’re gonna kill someone right there on TV?” Cowboy asked.

  “We’ll have disclaimers. Viewer discretion, late-night viewing, the usual.”

  “But—”

  “The actors have sig
ned waivers. Everyone knows what they’re getting into.”

  “And you seriously believe people will tune in to watch?” Andi asked.

  “Just like they did in the Roman Colosseum,” he said. “Just like we do at freeway accidents. Sure, we wring our hands when we pass by, say we hope no one got hurt . . . but we slow our cars, hoping against hope that we’ll see something awful.”

  No one had a comeback.

  He turned to leave.

  But I had one last question. “And your live audience? You think they’re just gonna sit around and watch someone get snuffed?”

  He turned back to me. “I wouldn’t worry about that, miss. They’re going to have a little help.”

  “Help?”

  He didn’t bother to answer. “So you don’t miss any of the action, you’ll have front-row seats. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a few hundred fires to put out before the show—which you just might find entertaining . . . in spite of yourself.”

  He turned and walked away just as his water glass toppled over on the table, then crashed to the floor.

  CHAPTER

  5

  What I saw next was pretty violent. So if you want to skip over this part and go to the next, no hard feelings. I’ll fill you in later. ’Specially if you’re like under seventeen or something. I’m serious. Fact is, if I wasn’t part of all this, I would have skipped the whole show. But like someone somewhere said, “If you’re gonna fight evil, sometimes you gotta look it in the eye.”

  That was the very argument we had about going back inside and seeing the show. I’d seen enough violence in my life. I don’t need no more.

  The others might have agreed with me . . . if it wasn’t for the professor. As strange as it sounds, he was the one who kept insisting we go.

  “Why’s it so important to you?” I demanded.

  “What it is to me is entirely irrelevant. But it’s abundantly clear The Gate is behind much of this. Equally clear is the fact that we have been sent here, at no little expense, to deal with it.”

  “And don’t forget Helsa,” Cowboy added. “She’s in on this, too.”

  “Yes.” The professor cleared his throat. The girl was never one of his favorite topics. “The point is, great pains have been taken to arrange this encounter. It would be both illogical and irresponsible for us to simply walk away from it.”