The meeting that clinched it was a freewheeling time devoid of frontal lobe activity, which was the norm among the cold blue men gathered. If you’ve ever seen archival footage of the 20th century actor and 21st century all-purpose freak Gary Busey you will have some idea of the uncontrolled impulses and erraticity of the board members who in the interest of coherency and good sense are not quoted here. Let it be noted there was much flopping around, as though they had been unexpectedly soiled in excrement. Some manage to diaper their screams, but the speaker, knowing only more spoilage, more excrement can clear a path back to order, wants to give it one last shot.
*
Gentlemen, it is 8:18 am. Front and rear anxieties infoliate into this dyspeptic hollowness {he rubs stomach in woeful pantomime}, into a viscous internal mist that fills the lungs and stomach, so I’ll give you the real story and quickly. We have no time to waste with the usual token partisanship, though I know we represent a broad, if somewhat narrow range of interests: There’s a basic sameness among our products; we all share a ruthless commitment to acquisition; our very images, in relation to our earnings, are enough to make quite the photo montage on some glue-sniffing anarchist’s viral video. Is it too early to offer anyone a drink?
Already we have taken action to crack down on a few pederasts, the most prominent and public moralists in our databases. The anticipated media fire-storm should provide a brief reprieve, at least during the more prurient Breakfast Bunches and Cockle-Warming Morning Guys of the Morning-style programs that are still the crass and mechanized mainstays of the networks. Tie-ins for tomorrow’s cycle might include concerns about Harlot the Witch, Weather Groups, Hypothermal Chimneys, Bilderberg-brand Fear Machines, whatever the conspiracy nuts are fond of now plus all the usual straw-men. It is imperative that we fragment and misdirect the current unwanted publicity.
The aim is to have these basement-dwelling, virginal, would-be-whistle-blowers squawking about every conceivable ludicrosity [sic] up to and including WordPress Seers; The Time Traveller John Titor, and if he’s not available get the Impostor Time Traveller John Tibor, anything with over 10,000 page-views a day is fair-game; FEMA Prison Camps; I want shots fired in courtrooms from Alabama to Arizona, preferably over the Income Tax; get someone to crawl to Congress for something on bloody hands and knees; SERIOUS unrest in Mexico or somewhere like Mexico if unrest can’t be spread there quite quickly enough; Aggression Diseases; Wonky Vaccines; Various Agendae [sic] brought to light; and a healthy smattering of wild-eyed YouTube channelers, I know at least one who has gotten a few things right. We’ll promote a few of these characters to our Prime Time Broadcasts in an effort to distract from the uglier psychotronic truths recently brought to light.
We need to become inward-looking people, us that is, the men in this room. We have lost our sense of the more, shall we say, poorly-informed among us. If they are to imbibe our teacup of horseshit, if we are to destroy their convex[1] understandings now we will be full of financial holes, but ultimately redeemable. If we are to fail we will be charged with unspeakable crimes avec much gasping and writhing and purported prudence from the far-flung enclaves of susceptibility.
Ahem, the Publicity Plan must impregnate with laser-like precision, so that it saturates parts of the brain still middle-aged and whimpering about Psychological Pollution, Civil Mind Space, Truth Badges in flashed palms; worm-into this spot, whatever it might be named, I am not a neurological-expert after all—it’s this neural region both the poison of our message and a more specific, liquid-form of poison must infiltrate. It’s possible this poison can literally extract resistance and cause it to be excreted through a gland of some name I wouldn’t hazard to guess at. Our boys in the “Rogue Soda” detachment have something promising ready to market. And though immediate in effect, we’re not convinced we can get it on shelves expediently without raising unwanted suspicion among retailers and general observers.
Gentlemen, your time is more valuable than ever in these trying times. Were this not an emergency I would not fixate on the internal for so long, but I feel some introduction is necessary. The people have gotten old and tough. But not so tough that they’d want to get physical and risk losing their medications. Still, they are increasingly resistant to simple messaging, and gaps have been torn in the veneer. Questions are being asked, and not just by the usual cranks.
We’ve always prepared for this very scenario with a plan named Rogue Traveller. In the past the invocation of this plan was much whispered about and generally anticipated in tones of hushed awe. Almost like being in a house of mirrors, the first distortions unnerved us, but not enough to cause panic, but now that we are having difficulty finding the exit it’s clear that the plan was not implemented quickly enough, rendering the very plan itself ineffective given the disturbing number of leaks.
Did you know that, and this is just one of the zany issues popping up in today’s cycle, just one I picked at random, like we inclined the post 1980-born youth to say, as in “Random!” “Random sweatshirt, etc”. Even I found that aesthetically displeasing….I digress…An example of what we’re facing here, just one example in a salt-river of skin-shriveling examples… {Reading Aloud}
Hypnotic Messaging Rampant in Television Commercials, Study Finds
Plenty of questions, still no answers. Horrifying suggestions: “Rape Your Child” paired with commercial alternatives, “Or bring the family to Taco Bell. One or the other.”
Gentlemen, this was the headline of my local newspaper. I live in a small bedroom community. Three people work at that newspaper. These are not, like, exposé people. This is wire copy in a newspaper servicing a municipality of 12,000 people. Our principal demographic—the unquestioning rubes of the various heartlands—now compromised. The trouble could soon reach Executive Levels.
So, after the pederasts et al are used up, we’ve planned an action in everyone’s most-feared hostile-nuclear-regime du jour. Our Agents are embedding now to begin a lunatic bombing campaign against their very reactionary leadership. Supraliminal messages have already reinforced that we are the ones behind it in all appropriate Button-privy circles and factions. We are daring them to nuke us, and by God, if they don’t, the very CEO’s name could be appearing in the paper by next week.
Of course we have underground shelter space for you and members of your organizations. Not as much space as we’d like, but about 25 kilometres under airport land in heretofore undisclosed locations that I will now tell you are around the Denver area.
And the facilities are brand gleaming new, almost like a mall. From birth to death huh boys? The whole set-up is going to go pop, pop like a fabulous yellow roman candle[2], and long after it does, nuclear winter will turn to spring again, and men like us will be needed more than ever, to build the new structure from the ground up.
[1] The Speaker may have meant concave.
[2] “…pop[ing] like a fabulous yellow roman candle,” was an overly used quote from the 1957 Jack Kerouac novel On the Road, which The Speaker had not read at the time, since his recently discovered Denver Diaries reveal a series of epiphanic responses to his reading of it in Bunker 61-A7 which came, like, way too late, on early May mornings of a year now long past. Since this is a popular quote we assume the Speaker had read it on the back of his copy while packing it in his 700 cubic inches of allotted crate-space.
© Mike Sauve
Mike Sauve has written non-fiction for The National Post, The Toronto International Film Festival Group, Exclaim Magazine and other publications. His online fiction has appeared everywhere from Feathertale, Frost Writing, and Rivets to university journals of moderate renown. Stories have also appeared in print in M-Brane, A Generation Defining Itself, Palimpsest 2010, and elsewhere.
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