Planet Fever (36 page)

“And Moroni….”

“Yes. He was one of the partners in the project. He took off with a bunch of samples. Nobody told me why, but I think he went rogue to do his own version of the experiment outside the lab, in society.”

Or that’s their “cover story,”
thought Eddie.

Mona continued, “They
upped the experiment with you though, and programmed your brain to inhabit a bunch of realities and bombarded you with different signals, so you wouldn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. That way, you would never be able to ‘expose’ them, because you would just seem like a lunatic. They made me sign ultra top-secret non-disclosure contracts and hired me on as your ‘handler,’ so that way they could roll you back out into the streets and watch to see if you ever made contact with Moroni, the only other guy that could bring them down. Eddie, before this, I never thought in a million years that anything like this was real. I just wanted to be an actress and help people. Honest.”

Ed began to speak, but nothing came out because a bunch of phlegm clogged his throat. He cleared it and said, “So, we’re not an actual couple?”

Ed noticed she had to hold back a sincere tear, or was a
very
good actress making him think she was holding back a tear.

She set the pencil down and squeezed his thigh. “Oh, Eddie. I do really care about you. And I think I have developed a fondness for you. But you would never be able to fully trust me. Our entire relationship is founded upon fraud and pretense. Most of it in fact
is
fraudulent. Even from your side, because of your condition.”

Wow. Reality shattered, yet again. How many more of these episodes could he endure? He had one final gasp. “Wait a second, you took all this from Chapter 80 of
Planet Fever.
I wrote that, and you are now just messing with me.”

“Eddie,
you
wrote that chapter many times, in different incarnations and revisions as your mind tried to make sense of the programming. I’m willing to bet it tried to make Colonel West a not-so-bad guy at times, because that’s what they were trying to program into you, even though you intuited otherwise. Am I right?”

Alarm bells went off.
Aha, so she did know West. That wasn’t something they had programmed in as a false memory.
His mind was beginning to get that ol’ messed-up feeling again.

“Another thing, Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“They know about the plan.”

“What?”

Eddie heard the toilet flush. Out of the bathroom emerged the same guy Eddie had ditched from the bus, and had more recently passed at the rest stop in Utah, the guy in the three-piece. Ed then stood up way too fast and fell backward onto the couch. He felt dizzy. His mind was spinning. He reached into his pocket and found a loose pill, which he promptly swallowed. He closed his eyes.

“So, we’re not an actual couple?” he asked again, smiling. Then he wondered if his entire plan to save the universe was shot.

“NO, MR.
Bikaver. We are not a couple in the fashion you are inquiring about,”
the Interrogator says. “
And your plan is shot. Nice try, thinking you could hand yourself in and then your pal, Ezekiel Buckminster, would come dashing in for a rescue. Fits your hackneyed style. You’ve been feeding us the entire narrative this whole time. That is the purpose of this interrogation. Even though you wrote down the plan with EZ in pencil and erased it, you narrated the fact that you were making a plan with him to me. We just deduced what the plan was based on that. He wouldn’t be able to make it here anyway, even if he were able to locate this place.”

Well, here I am again. In the first person. In the present.

“
So, are you ready?”
the voice asks.

“For what?”

“
The part of your plan that we will follow. To hand over the rights to this ‘Book of Life’ of yours, given to you by Atoz Al Ways. You can yield it and inhabit a comfortable life in a scripted resort of your choosing. We will even write a decent role for you such as president or head of a bank or something. Perhaps mysterious yet popular reclusive author? Or you can remain in that chair, looping through various incarnations of your pathetic life over and over and over in what essentially amounts to endless psychological torture. The recurring cycle of being, each time being aware you’ve been through this before, but cannot do it differently: trapped in a circuit of routine like a series of déjà
vu within déjà
vu. What do you say, Edward Bikaver?”

I’m exhausted. I’m beat. I’m completely powerless to stave off this insanity. But I want to know something. Two things, in fact.

“I want a couple things first. One: since you’re going to erase my mind anyway, what is this special place?”

The Interrogator takes his time with this one. Then he answers, “
Very well, Mr. Bikaver. You are on the dark side of the moon. Contrary to popular opinion, this moon is in fact an orbital satellite space station which projects synthetic simulations of realities upon the populace of your planet, to keep you pretty much hypnotized while we utilize your planet’s vast wealth of resources. We have been doing this for millennia. Next.
”

“Okay. Do you know what happened to Froward Moroni?”

Dead silence. I hear a sliding door open and footsteps approach. From the darkness appears the figure of none other than Froward Moroni.

Moroni bows. “Hello, Mr. Bikaver. I trust you’ve enjoyed your stay, in this, my fair recliner today?”

What the hell is going on here?

A third eye manifests atop Moroni’s forehead and he takes a more serious posture. “That is a third question, but I will grant you the answer. I am Tritosofthalmian, and an RA hunter in the employ of Phos Atomos Paradosi. I have been monitoring this planet for some time, and took note of large amounts of creative activity from you and the others—a group of Reality Authors for Atoz Al Ways. I finagled the rest of them out, but you were the last holdout, Mr. Bikaver, and Atoz put a lot of stock in you. The fool. When we learned he gave you your
Book of Life
I nearly went to the ceiling of reality with delight. If I could get you to give up the rights to your entire existence, past, present and future, gaining all the rights to all your other works would be moot. We would have it, de facto. Because we would have you.” Moroni snapped his fingers.

A new set of footsteps enter. That same guy in the three-piece suit strolls in, carrying my backpack. He hands it to Moroni and strolls out.

Moroni unzips the backpack and reaches in. He picks up the tiny pencil and examines it. “As a souvenir.” He hands me the pencil, then reaches back into the bag. “Now for the moment to end all strife, behold, Edward Bikaver’s
Book of Life!”
He brandishes it and holds it high up in the air. After a moment of exaggerated flourish, he lowers the book and examines it. “Quite dusty. Anyway, you must state that you, Edward Bikaver, give me, Froward Moroni, representing the New (and Improved) Interstellar Syndicate, all rights to this book unconditionally.”

He leans in and his third eye leers at me, awaiting me to make my statement. A bead of sweat drips down the side of his forehead.

So this is it.

“I, Edward Bikaver, give you, Froward Moroni all the rights to that book in your hand unconditionally.”

He smiles wide. “Wise move.”

He begins to wipe the dust off the cover, relishing every moment. “We shall begin implementing your new virtual existence shortly, as soon as you fill out more….” He scrutinizes the book cover he has just wiped all the dust and dirt off of. “What is this?!”

The cover of the book says “My Little Book of Life Cycles
1
.”

It’s a reference book for pre-school children that follows life cycles, stages of frogs, butterflies, sunflowers, sharks, chickens, and bees through photos and simple explanations:

How do sunflowers begin?

When do tadpoles become frogs?

It has nothing to do
specifically
with my own existence.

I do not, nor have ever had any publishing rights to that book. I just found this copy in the desert and gave it to Moroni. I never stated
which
book it was.

“I am inside the moon. I am inside the moon. I am inside the moon,” I say into the watch strapped around my wrist.

Moroni is quite perturbed. “I know you are. I brought you here.” He attempts to collect himself by fixing his bow tie. “Where is
your
‘Book of Life’?”

At this point, I begin to finish the book,
Planet Fever
, aloud, and jot it down with the pencil:

“I’m now tri-located. I’m in the moon, at the space where the Interrogator
is
Moroni. He’s asking for the book, believing that will wrap up ownership of my life, as well as ownership of the past, present and future of the Universe. He doesn’t know that I have taken a timed-released time capsule and that I’m experiencing this in present tense even though it will have been past tense by the time all is said and done.” I turn to Moroni. “Hah, I gave you a partially false narrative. You want to know why this pencil is worn down? Because Mona and I have been planning this all along, with EZ joining in. I just never included
that
part about Mona in my story, except that she was ‘doodling’ in my notebook. And she played her role well.”

Moroni’s third eye blinks in confusion.

“For the record: I’m finishing the book, and have given all the rights to it—past, present and future to the original author—who goes by the names of Peter Stier, Jr. and Atoz Al Ways. Good luck finding him, because he exists outside our known space-time-word continuum. Within that book in your hand, as well as this watch, Mr. Moroni, is a high-powered tracking beacon notifying my friend EZ Buckminster the location of this operation base. He has jacked your uplink and is currently sending up EMP pulses he has been working on from the sub-station you had at Fillono’s utopia. This entire time I was being ’interrogated’ by you was just a ruse for time so Buck could do his work. The artificial reality projection and hypnotic control you’ve been casting from here onto the earth’s populace will momentarily be over. How does that float your boat?”

Moroni’s third eye twitches. He takes in a deep breath and attempts to smile. “You could rescue the entire human race from being obliterated by twenty-five asteroids smashing into the planet, and most of them will shush you because you are interrupting their TV show.”

“I’m not doing this for the accolades.”

“Bikaver, you are bluffing. If you comprehend this, then you understand that the EMP will crash the entire system. The de-cloaking will pull all holographic realities, as well as accompanying mind-control parameters, off-line. You will see six billion people go utterly crazy, not knowing what to do because their entire existence has been controlled from the beginning. Imagine six billion zoo animals being set free, or six billion people coming off of heroin, nicotine and booze simultaneously and seeing thousands of three-eyed beings walking around among them and seeing the moon as a strange spaceship looming above? You are going to witness bedlam on a spectacular scale. Or, they won’t do anything. They won’t care, because you humans never cared. Either way, you lose Bikaver. We control reality.”

“Nah, you just control illusions and pass them off as reality.”

Moroni is visibly sweating. “Mr. Bikaver—if this station is compromised, its habitat stabilization system will desist operations. We will be able to survive, but you—sans gravity, oxygen, and such—will cease to exist.”

“I had a nice run.” I close my eyes.

I hear Moroni mutter some cuss words and his footsteps exit.

With the final lead in the worn-down pencil, I write down the words
Thanks for the memories.

That’s the way the story goes.

1
My Little Book of Life Cycles,
Camilla de la Bedoyere
(QED Publishing)

“HAPPINESS: OH,
poor Eddie. How can he be happy when he’s given fake versions of what others think he should call ‘happy?’ He thinks he is happy, but he is wrong, because he is dead and enslaved. But will he ever be happy? Free? Alive? We’ll see, won’t we—and that shall be the story….”