“You wanted to turn America . . . into a theme park?”
“The theme defines the park, Marshal. Just as ideas delineate the mind.”
“You were trying to control—”
“Crowds are controlled! I was trying to choreograph a civilization! I thought if I could reprogram America, I would defend against APPARATUS—for it was APPARATUS that was the undoing of Spiro.”
“You’re insane!” the Marshal muttered.
“I am large. I contain multitudes. Give me vivisections and cathedrals! As I’ve tried to explain—I didn’t choose this task—it chose me.”
“All right . . . say we believe you. What did you do? How did you take over America?”
“I made it disappear.”
“Say whot?” said Maggie, her face frozen.
“I made parts of America disappear and then replaced them with my own versions.”
“Yoo meen like—cities—and states?”
“Well, in fact I have done that in a few instances. South Dakota, for example. You probably noticed that time runs slower here.”
“No one can change the speed of time!” the Marshal squawked.
“Historic time, Marshal—the speed of culture. Surely the reptile gardens and chuckwagon suppers are a bit of a clue! In any case what I meant was that I substituted bits of American culture. If I can get you to believe you see one elephant where none exists, I can get you to see an entire herd. Similarly, the best place to hide an elephant is in a herd of elephants.”
“So you didn’t really—”
“Yes, I did! Really.”
“You’re talking about fooling people.”
“Ah. You see what you just did?” Wiggler snapped. “You’re employing a very sophisticated kind of software. It’s called rhetoric. You used a word like fool that has completely negative connotations. You don’t show or prove that what I was doing was bad—you simply label it as bad and think you’ve made your point. For the slow and the dim, that often works. You should become acquainted with the Mulrooney Corollary, which says that because you can’t fool all the people all the time, you need to be very clear on which people you are trying to fool at any given time.”
“So . . . the technology you’re talking about is just . . . words?”
“Just words!” Wiggler exclaimed and the chair had to change shape to contain him. “There’s no just or only about words—those are words! Slippery and strong—and sneaky. You are words, Marshal. Words, ideas, and—dare I say it—a philosophical point of view. Software defines hardware. You need to think of yourself as a technological creation and then maybe you’ll begin to appreciate the ‘reality’ of ideas.”
“So you started worshiping them.”
“I made alliances. I saw that to combat APPARATUS I would need the help of more capable allies than myself. With the Entities, I developed an Entity of my own that I called SET—Sentient Evolving Technology. SET allowed me to develop my own technological family line while controlling that which existed.
“You may recall the so-called Roswell Incident in 1947. Well, that wasn’t a military snafu or the landing of an extraterrestrial craft—it was one of my early satellites crash-landing—first launched at the end of World War One.”
“You had your own satellites—then?”
“Of course. But I quickly moved beyond that. The problem was, the very element that made my more sophisticated creations so formidable was a degree of wildness—an animal unpredictability that I believed APPARATUS couldn’t countermand. It was only a matter of time before the more advanced forms became curious about spiritual matters.”
“You mean they found religion?” Clearfather asked.
“They went searching,” Wiggler replied. “From Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckehart to investigations of the Gnostic Gospels. But they became divided by intense factionalism. Their own democracy of faith allowed such a wide spectrum of beliefs, there was nothing to hold them together. A Marin County of the Mind, cyberspiritually speaking, turned into a Taliban. The Sentient Intelligences that SET developed then created a larger Entity of their own called Daimon—”
“You’re talking about machines or computers that made other smart machines?” the Marshal queried. “Before anybody else had ’em?”
“Not merely machines or computers. Metahuman forms. Who of course had their own aspirations and agendas. You remember me mentioning Savoir Faire? Well, Savoir Faire created Mr. Pickle.”
“Who’s Mr. Pickle?”
“An SI that could see all sides to every question. The smarter it got, the slower it functioned. In the end it was frozen with wonder. Not even Mrs. Darling could help.”
“Who’s Mrs. Darling?”
“A telepathic defragging system that Uncle Waldo designed. Named for the mother in Peter Pan, who’d go into the children’s dreams and ‘tidy up’ their minds.”
“Uncle . . . Waldo?” Clearfather gulped.
“I’m getting ahead of myself,” Wiggler said, accepting a drink from his chair. “I solved the Enigmas of Spiro—and, if you like, defeated him in psychic combat—only to find myself confronted with the same great conundrum he had faced. But you see, I had the benefit of his experience, and so I instigated new Protocols that began shaping and managing the cultural systems and determining the speed and direction of technological innovation far more directly than he had ever tried. I inserted Alternates in key positions—mindjacked bodies. Sometimes I just Inspired people. But getting the dose right is fraught with risk. You can trigger latent neuroses—and, in very unfortunate cases, permanent psychosis. Alternates, on the other hand, because they’re command-guided, lack initiative and the ability to improvise, so they require tremendous amounts of time to manage. Even a minor official like a secretary of state becomes an administrative nightmare.”
“We’re talking people here—like presidents and bigwigs?”
“I gave up on presidents after Kennedy. The biggest debacle other than OJ! A whole conspiracy industry developed just to cover up a brainout!”
“You mean . . .”
“He’d been playing up badly and I could see he was headed for a major psychotic episode. He was supposed to go quietly in his sleep—then the remote guidance system failed outright—and I developed the counterstrategy of the assassination.”
“You . . . were behind the Kennedy assassination?”
“You didn’t think Oswald acted alone, did you? Quite frankly the whole thing was a cock-up. I decided then that I would go back to my main focus of business leaders and celebrities. It’s been—”
“Which celebrities?”
“As far back as Al Jolson I saw that popular entertainment would become more important than politics and social issues. That meant that the most influential people in America would be entertainers and sports stars.”
“So hoo did yoo doo?”
“Bing Crosby was my first great experiment—and failure.”
“Hoo?”
“Bing Crosby!” the Marshal blurted. “He was arguably the first modern superstar. He wasn’t a failure!”
“He developed corruptions and was co-opted by the forces that Daimon set in motion, which were then appropriated by APPARATUS. But I learned a great deal. I concluded what many others sensed—that the key to healing America lay in a synthesis of white rationalism and the seething Soul of the displaced African nation. The battleground for that at the time was almost exclusively audio—and so I became a student of the blues, jazz, and ultimately rock and roll. One of my most hopeful champions, Johnny Ace, shorted out on Christmas Eve in 1954, supposedly playing Russian roulette backstage in Houston. By then the Daimon family were advanced on their strategy to try to steal black music, producing insipid white cover versions. Johnny Ace was a black balladeer with an appealing white sound. He would’ve changed history if he hadn’t gone nova.”
“So . . . you’re claiming people like Bing Crosby and Johnny Ace . . . were your creations?”
“Of course not
every major star was mine . . . but the significant trends and currents in pop culture can be seen in terms of a battle between myself and the SIs that remained loyal and those of Daimon and the forces that melded into APPARATUS.”
“God, please tell me you didn’t do Elvis!” the Marshal moaned.
“Oh, no,” Wiggler said with a wave. “Elvis was unaffiliated—as I might add were Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, James Brown, and Sly Stone. But Elvis became a key battleground. Colonel Parker was the Daimon operative dispatched to ‘manage’ the King—and I’m afraid he did too good a job. I didn’t have anything to do with Fats Domino or Chuck Berry, either, but I had some influence with Jerry Lee Lewis. And I was heavily involved with Little Richard.”
“Little Richard?”
“It’s not easy, I can tell you! You take homeostasis, simultaneous perception, and parallel programming entirely for granted. But when you then crank up the ego, add animal magnetism, a libidinous aura charge, sexual ambiguity, and mania—well!”
“Whot about the Beatles—I at least heard a-them?” Maggie said.
“Lord.” Wiggler sighed. “If you only knew half the story! Ringo Starr alone would take all night. As ‘conspiracies’ go, it’s up there with the murder of Hank Williams, the death of Sam Cooke, and the Bob Dylan Affair.”
“Bob Dylan?” Clearfather choked.
“How about the Rolling Stones?”
“You don’t think Keith Richards could have gone on that long on his own, do you? And I have to take much of the blame for Brian Wilson although I didn’t design him. The Inspiration turned his mind to mush.”
“Wait,” said the Marshal. “You mean to tell us . . . that when you claim to have all these powers and advanced technology and could’ve been stopping things like the Holocaust, Hiroshima, or Iraq—you were moving pop stars around like pieces in a game?”
“Open your mind, Marshal. The Bing Crosby problem was intimately connected with Hiroshima—you just have to know how to read the signs. In 1966 the song ‘Winchester Cathedral’ won a Grammy Award—Mao Tse-tung launched the Cultural Revolution in China. Coincidence? Don’t kid yourself. In 1968 one of the most powerful Daimon operatives, Don Kirshner, introduced the Archies, a cartoon singing group that he could control completely—a lesson he’d learned after the Monkees had started acting up. That same year Sly and the Family Stone made their debut. The Detroit Tigers won the World Series—Joe Namath and the New York Jets won the AFL championship on their way to an upset of the Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl, and Richard Nixon was elected. You don’t think these events aren’t directly connected to the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy? Don’t you see the pattern?”
“Did you do Denny McLain?” Clearfather blurted.
“Hm. Yes, I did. But APPARATUS got to him.”
“Go back a bit. What about Buddy Holly’s plane crash?”
“The Big Bopper blew up. You know the Pheasant Plucker ditty? Well, the Bopper was equipped with a much earlier version called Chantilly Lace—an audio hypnotic weapons system that disrupts neural firing. Holly and Ritchie Valens were just unlucky.”
“Are you responsible for Janis Joplin?” Clearfather asked, thinking back to Dustdevil.
“Janis, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison were bitter defeats for me. I was so exhausted after their burnouts, I wasn’t able to defend and advance the funk movement as I should’ve—which allowed the devastation of disco—which necessitated the breakout of punk—which prompted a backlash to bland, setting the stage for the hip-hop explosion, which started off with tremendous promise and then became degraded and contaminated. In between I tried everything . . . Prince . . . Kurt Cobain . . . Eminem . . . I was floundering.”
“Sounds to me like you’ve made a hash of everything,” the Marshal blurted.
“A hash!” Wiggler growled. “That’s just the sort of ungrateful little-minded bullshit I’ve put up with my whole life!”
“Don’t sling that rhetoric,” the lawman insisted. “Haven’t all your creations come unglued or blown up on the launch pad and your allies turned into enemies?”
“Listen, Marshal, if I’ve had setbacks and defeats it’s because of the power of the opposition. I at least haven’t quit. You don’t realize what a powerful, insidious force APPARATUS is. The popular culture I’d hoped would integrate, unify, and educate America began devouring other cultures around the world. The enemy was getting stronger and had copied my strategy and gone me one better at every turn. So I countered with the formulation of the Vitessa Corporation. I took Wynn Fencer on as my protégé and then went public with some of my previously secret technology—while infiltrating the likes of Microsoft, Disney, McDonald’s, General Electric, and the major pharmaceuticals. Fencer’s business acumen made him a hit with stockholders, so I established him as CEO. We grew powerful—and then the Holy War gave us unprecedented freedom to consolidate.
“I was married to Felatia then—the model and film star. One day I found Fencer boning her and I knew I’d been betrayed. What’s worse, he’d sold out key positions within the empire to Daimon-designed Alternates. A vicious conflict erupted among the three of us—and in my rage and grief I lost control of Vitessa. Felatia accused me of molesting her adopted tribe of mutant African children—and ended up by trying to kill them all before committing suicide. Fencer tried to do the same when he’d found out how stupid he’d been. He’d become isolated at the top of the pyramid, a petty figurehead at the mercy of intelligences he could barely comprehend. I rescued him and replaced him with an Alternate—but he’s virtually impotent in the midst of what is now an APPARATUS organism. He’s just had a brainout and probably will not recover. The true traitor I rescued is in the Canyon here, serving a life science for treachery and destroying my family.”
“Aha,” the Marshal smiled grimly. “It seems the great theme-park designer is now locked out of his own creation! Isn’t that one of life’s most cunning and persistent metaphors! So how does our friend and your supposed son fit into this last-ditch plan?”
“I did a great deal of soul searching.” Wiggler sighed. “And I don’t use that term lightly. I went back into the Vortex. I discovered the reason why my creations and machinations had—as you put it—malfunctioned. The technology that underlay them had become aligned with APPARATUS—which is to say at a very deep level I personally had been corrupted. Like Spiro before me, I was building a hidden defect into everything I did. To my horror I saw that I was the most powerful agent of all in the growth and development of APPARATUS. Imagine, having fought so long and so devotedly—only to find that I’d been strengthening my enemy, perversely helping to create it.”
“Jesus Christ!” snarled the Marshal. “Can you hear yourself?”
“I needed a new kind of technology. Something APPARATUS couldn’t commandeer. I no longer had the power to support my dwindling network. APPARATUS is using almost all the psychic energy available. You’ve probably noticed I have down moments—when network continuity is interrupted. The power requirements are phenomenal!”
“So what’s this new technology you pulled out of your butt?” the Marshal gibed.
“Palingenesis, the art of reincarnation—either through metempsychosis, which is the transfer of one soul into another body, or the far more complex metensomatosis, the seeding of many souls in one body.”
The Marshal snorted at this assertion but then paused when he looked at Clearfather.
“So I am Hosanna Freed,” the younger looking of the two bald men said.
“Yes, you were Hosanna Freed, orphan, mental patient, fledgling porn star, cult leader, and martyr,” Wiggler replied. “Your body has been regenerated from Freed’s amputated penis—but your mind and your soul comprise all that I could find and salvage that APPARATUS has not affected—all that I could harness from history—and that crucial element that is yours alone. I’ve also passed much of my own direct power into you. The final Transubstantiation is yet to be performed and then you—or w
e—will be Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And heaven help us all.”
“What will happen to you?”
“I will have uploaded into you, my Son. Hopefully, I will have purified myself.”
“Wayt a minnit! Yer sayin’—hee’s a peenis? I thot hee bit off his peenis!”
“There have been teething problems. Resurrection dysfunction. So much power in one package has caused various crashes and discontinuities at different levels. But we’ll get that all sorted out.”
“A few readjustments and everything’s okay,” the Marshal said.
“That self-righteous tone is creeping in again, Old Sweat.”
“But why me?” Clearfather asked. “Why did you choose me?”
“Revival of the Fittest,” answered Wiggler. “You are a Man of Sorrows and a Man of Storms. Your endurance in the face of suffering—your courage in the midst of loneliness—your ability to draw others to you—to have them risk their lives to help you—these are great powers of the spirit. Like Blind Lemon, there is something in you that cannot be diminished, abstracted, or corrupted. In your previous incarnation you were raised in pain and debasement and yet you did not give in to madness or murder. You always sought out love. You looked for wholeness though there was little hope of finding it. Christ let himself be crucified believing that his Father would save him. The Buddha sought to cleanse himself of the world—to rise above the struggle of Life. You have gone on fighting and striving whether there was anyone to help you or not. You will go on when others will fail and you will never withdraw from Life. You will return to help others. Just as you have returned to help me. Because, you see, you chose me. Something drew you to Dustdevil, Texas, and the struggles of Lloyd Meadhorn Sitturd. My concentration was directed elsewhere when you were murdered—but your death planted a seed in my life.”
Zanesville: A Novel Page 39