Dear Pod
People:
You're sincere. We get it. You can stop now. You've already won
a gold star on the blackboard from the teacher.
I won't try to make a distinction between the junk science you
worship and actual science. You're too far gone for that.
You're in a box. You've been in that box for a long time. It's
created by the "authorities in charge," and their super-coiffed
high-priced press hookers. The order to go on lockdown was just
another piece beamed into that box, and you stood at attention.
Yes sir.
Even some of you
anti-vaxxers are in the box.
What did you think you were saying about viruses with your
stance on vaccines? Let me translate.
You were saying,
"We can deal with
viruses, we don't need your toxic vaccines to gain
immunity."
But now, all of a
sudden, with this fake ghost virus, you fold up like puppets.
You ask your masters to pull on the strings so you can put on
your masks. All along, you've had a piece of mind control stuck
in your domes you didn't know about. I mean, really.
To all you pod people: you needed a new religion at this late
date?
I'm sure some of you were actively against the Iraq war under
Bush 2. You bucked the
artificial consensus. But now, you salute and enlist.
Can you back up just
a step and take a peek at yourselves and glimpse how ridiculous
you look, in lock-step, masks on, gloves on, trudging 27 feet
apart down the middle of some deserted Main Street?
I'll even bet there are long-time JFK assassination researchers
in masks. For decades, they've combed through one false trail
after another, traveled through halls of mirrors, finally
arriving at the door of the CIA… but now, after three sentences
from that petty bureaucrat Fauci, they're in the cult. Bingo,
bango, bongo.
"Going pod" is quite a phenomenon.
Yesterday, the person
was living a regular life. Then, all of a sudden, with no
apparent thought involved, the robot-ness grips him.
"Yes," his wife
says. "He seems to be the same person, but he isn't. I don't
care what anyone says. For God's sake, I've been sleeping in
the same bed with the man for twenty years. I should know.
This is someone else."
Her oh so reasonable
therapist - played by Leonard Nimoy in the 1978 version of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers - tells her:
"I understand.
Look, people are under stress these days. Social changes are
dislocating our sense of Place. Your perception about your
husband is actually a symptom of a wider unrest. I'm not
asking you to change your process. Just be with this odd new
sensation you have. I guarantee it'll fade. You'll see him
as he was again."
"No. I won't. My husband is somebody else. He's
a…replacement."
An old grizzled
cigar-smoking tobacco-spitting two-gun rancher isn‘t out on the
range anymore herding cattle and swigging whiskey.
He's sitting in a
barn, mask and gloves on, next to a placid cow. He's waving a
wand at her.
"Hmm, Bessie's
temperature seems to be elevated a tenth of a degree. Maybe
she has the COVID. I better call the public health people.
They should come out and disinfect the whole ranch. We'll
shut down for a month and stay indoors and play with the
Lego Harry Potter set…"
A wan thirty-year-old
with a degree in biology from Harvard shows up in a New York
7-Eleven wearing five translucent plastic shower curtains.
He clomps down aisles
and tosses items into a briefcase containing chlorinated wood
chips and dried dog turds. He's concluded that his whippet,
Phillip, was infected, then recovered, and is therefore immune.
The whippet
antibodies may be protective.
"Today, on
deserted Jones Beach, a lone lifeguard ventured out into
rough waters to save an unresponsive swimmer. Unfortunately,
the lifeguard, wearing a hazmat suit, sank below the waves.
A roving team of Long Island public health police rescued
and revived him.
The swimmer
turned out to be a blow-up doll equipped with a homemade
‘virus sensor.' It was being operated remotely from a
beachfront cottage by a PhD biologist, who was carrying out
locally funded research for a group of worried New Yorkers.
They were trying
to determine whether it was safe to sneak out of the city
and take up residence in their summer homes on the Island
shores…"
Hail to the pod.
You belong to the system. You take your energy from it. You give
everything you have to it.
Let's follow the wan fellow back home from the 7-Eleven. He
trips and stumbles into his apartment, picks up a bottle on a
table and sprays his shower curtains with triple-strength
Roundup. He lies down on the carpet and rolls around. Then he
sits up, strips away the curtains, and looks into the living
room.
His wife, wearing a
leopard-skin bikini, is transfixed before an altar topped with a
doll-figure of Tony Fauci. She's silently weeping. Is it the
impending divorce? Is it straight-out worship?
Tune in next week,
when Fauci tries to hold a poker party with 16 of his closest
friends on a yacht beyond the three-mile limit, and a special
ops team boards the vessel and carts him off to the presidential
suite at Walter Reed Hospital, where mind control specialists
try to reinstall his basic program.
Can they find three
active brain cells to rub together? And where is Phillip the
whippet? He's gone missing in a junkyard in Union City. He's
hanging with rebel dogs.
Phillip finally
removes his mask and we see, for the first time, that… he's the
animated rabbit from Episode One, who made a fortune selling
Chinese ventilators…
"Say, Bob, we
can't write this stuff for the show. They'll never let it
get past the networks censors."
"Bill, lost your marbles? Don't you remember? There is no
show. The season was cancelled by the lockdown. We're doing
this for a little independent video platform."
"Right. Forgot. I've been drinking heavily. Let's work a
different twist with Fauci. Transform him into a guy who's a
victim of the lockdown. You know, a Trading Places deal.
He's now living in one room in the back of a store that's
closed for business. He's broke. He's already spent his
government check. He's trying to borrow money for food. He's
lost his glasses and sold one of his shoes."
"Yeah. Then he comes back, episode by episode, a rags to
riches story line. He makes a desperate and successful
contact with the governor of Illinois and shows him how to
dig his state out of a budget deficit of three hundred
billon - with federal coronavirus dollars."
By this time, both
writers are so drunk they can't maintain their fragile hold on
plot. They just sit in their chairs and stare out the window.
A voice speaks from Bob's pocket.
"Bob, this is
your cell. You left your house this morning. We've traced
your movements to a colleague's house. Lockdown code
violation. You could be a spreader. Do not exit the
premises.
A team will
arrive shortly to take a swab for rapid qPCR. You will
shelter in place until the results are reported. Wash your
hands. Don't touch your face. Make a pot of coffee. Your
blood alcohol level is point twelve."
Bob dozes off. He
dreams he's sitting in a large office high above a city.
Looking down through
the window, he can see lines of people wearing masks. They move
slowly along a boulevard toward a papier mache sun at the
horizon. Next to him, on a small table, is a simple black box.
Embedded in top of
the box is a bulbous red button.
Tony Fauci
is standing before him.
"You know what
happens if you press the button?" Tony says. "The beaming
shuts off."
"The what?" Bob says.
"From the satellites," Tony says. "The message."
"What message?"
"'The virus, the virus, the virus.' That's what we're
beaming. As you can see, it's very effective."
"You're selling a virus?"
"No, you idiot. We're selling a story about a virus. That's
all it is. That's all it ever was. You're either inside or
outside the story. Go ahead. Press the button."
"What happens if I do?"
"That's the question, isn't it? At this point, people are
talking story to themselves. We provided the stimulus. I
don't think we need the beaming anymore. Go ahead."
Bob presses the
button.
He wakes up. Three men are standing over him. One is pointing a
fever wand.
"Ninety-nine
point two," he says. "Look, sir, this is a first offense.
We're going to leave you here. No test, no foul. Don't leave
the house for eight days. Understand?"
Bob nods.
He looks over at
Bill, who's fast asleep in
his chair.
"Eight days. I
stay in this house."
"That's right, sir. And don't press the red button."
Bob jerks upright in
his chair.
"How do you know
about that?" he says.
The man frowns.
"It's a phrase
going around. Just something people say. It means don't
panic."
"What else are they saying?"
"We hear all kinds of things. Love your mask. Green stripe."
"What does that mean?"
"There's a rumor you'll be seeing stripes on your cell phone
pretty soon. Red stripe means stay at home. You won't be
able to get into office buildings. Green stripe means you're
immune. You can go anywhere, within limits, of course."
"How do I get a green stripe?"
"Who knows? It's just a rumor.
The CDC has codes. We
haven't seen them yet."
"I just had a dream about Tony Fauci."
"Yeah. We hear that all the time. Lots of people are
dreaming about Fauci. He could probably run for president,
if he wanted to."
"He told me to press the red button and I did."
"What happened?"
"I woke up."
"Well there you go."
"Go where?"
"Stay in the house."
The men left.
Bob called his agent.
"Listen, Harry,"
he said, "I have an idea for a series, when all this dies
down. A Saturday morning cartoon. A little twerp who lives
in a land of zombies runs for president. He's the only
candidate. The zombies just have to press a red button and
he wins."
"And how much have you been drinking, Bob?" Harry said.
"Little bit."
"Call me when you're sober."
"Don't know if it'll ever happen."
"Lot of that going around."
While Bill slept on,
Bob spent the rest of the afternoon drinking and wandering
aimlessly around the house. At some point, his sense of time
fell apart, and he was only conscious of flashes:
He was sitting in a warm bath, wearing an old Army helmet and
smoking a cigar. He was General George Patton. Contemplating the
problem of defeating a force of pod people.
He was still wearing the helmet, and he was standing naked in
the middle of the street at night, and neighbors were coming out
of their houses. They were laughing at him.
He was STILL naked at night, standing on the lawn of the local
sheriff's house. Dennis the sheriff, in his bathrobe, holding a
pistol, was saying,
"You mean I'm the
boss of this county, Bob? I can do anything I want to?"
"Right, Dennis. It's an old law. Something I remember from a
history class at Princeton. You can end the lockdown. Hell,
you can shoot down the drones."
"I could make a stand. I could be historic. And it took a
naked television writer to wise me up…"
Dawn. Neighbors,
close to a hundred of them, tightly packed, are standing on
Bill's lawn. Bill is sleeping in a folding chair.
STILL naked, a drink
in his hand, Bob is giving a little speech.
"…That's what I'm
trying to tell you. They sold us a friggin' story about a
virus. That's all it is. Dennis is ready to unpress the red
button. Set us free. We have to back him up. We can't leave
him with egg on his face…"
Bob is sitting in a
café. It's open for business. The tables are full. Waitresses
are rushing around, serving breakfast. Music is playing.
In uniform, Dennis
the sheriff walks through the door. Applause.
"You're all
deputized!" he says. "You've got nothing to lose but your
masks!"
Cheers erupt. Feet
stamp the floor.
Bob looks at himself. Now he's dressed in a suit and tie. He
wonders how that happened.
He's back at Bill's house watching TV. Bill is nowhere to be
seen. On the screen, two local news anchors are smiling and
scratching their faces. One sneezes.
The other says,
"Who cares?"
Bob hears an
explosion outside. He runs into the street. There, lying in
pieces, is a bird-sized drone. A grinning neighbor is holding a
shotgun.
"All you have to
do is cough and they show up," he says.
"So it's a not a bad idea to cough," Bob says.
"Yeah, if you're armed."
Bob looks around. The
sun is shining.
"It's a new day,"
he says.
He hears a voice in
his head.
"…used to work
for Google… just hacked into five satellites… changed the
message… GO BACK TO WORK. OPEN THE ECONOMY. TAKE YOUR
FREEDOM."
Bob shouts,
"We don't need
any messages! Shut the whole thing down! We're already
free!"
Quiet.
Quiet in his head, quiet on the street.
The sun is shining. It's a new day.
A few miles away, at a local Stasi health food market, a
checkout clerk suddenly yanks off his bandana-hairnet, his
medical mask, his gloves, spits on his hands, rubs them
together, and shouts:
I'M OPEN HERE.
PAPER OR PLASTIC? STEP RIGHT UP. I'LL TAKE CASH WITH GERMS
ON IT. LET'S MOVE. NO FEAR. SCREW FAUCI. SNAP OUT OF IT,
PEOPLE.
Pause.
Then customers make a mad rush for his lane.
People outside the store break their line and come striding
inside, grabbing carts.
Running through the parking lot, a creature dressed in black
with clinking nose-and-ear rings pulls a can out of her pocket
and expertly sprays the store window - OPEN FOR BUSINESS FUCK
THE LOCKDOWN.
In the woods at the edge of the lot, a wan 30-year old wearing
five translucent shower curtains leans against a tree and
vomits. Weeping uncontrollably, he feels a spell and a curse
leaving his body. At last.
The sun is shining. It's a new day...
