Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

Shakespeare, Beethoven, Jesus, Hitler. Who are they?

Five thousand and the casings of nuclear warheads corrode releasing plutonium 239 into the environment fifteen thousand and the last buildings fall before a new advancing ice age.

Henry Ford. Mahatma Gandhi. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince. Who?

Thirty-five thousand and lead deposited from car emissions finally dissipates one-hundred thousand and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air returns to pre-industrial levels but you know what?

Let it rip, Keith.

Trillions of years from now? Trillions and trillions of years from now?

Yeah?

Broadcasts of The Twilight Zone will still be flying outward through space The Beverly Hillbillies Baywatch Survivor American Idol The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

…

…

At least the ringworm and head lice will miss us, huh?

Domesticated cattle and rats too without us they're just prey for other organisms and then you know what? You know what happens after that?

It starts all over again?

The chances of that are basically nil no this is it from there on out it's all just this long slow hum toward the death of the sun.

Holy shit.

Pretty much so.

Well, um, thanks for your holocaust thoughts, Keith. I guess you've just proved the score will always remain nature one, humans zero. I appreciate the existential slap upside the head, man. I needed that. I mean, I almost started thinking I mattered there for a second…

And, uh, let's see here. You're off the air with Jolly Roger. What has chance brought you here to share with us this warm and startling evening?

They sent down the robotic cockroaches first, man.

Excuse me?

The robotic cockroaches. Back in the Eighties. To Wall Street, mainly, but also Beijing, Moscow, London. Check out the archives, man. The evidence is overwhelming.

And why do you suppose They did such a thing?

Shock troops. They looked just like other insects, you know… till you picked ‘em up, till you examined ’em real close.

Which is when you saw…

The cameras, man. Just behind those dark polymer eye shells. The cameras. You think I don't know how that sounds?

I have no opinion about that.

You think I don't know you wanna treat me like one of those kids born with flippers instead of arms? Well, don't, man, cuz it's fucking patronizing. Every word I'm telling you? It's true. Believe it or don't. Frankly, I don't give a fuck.

Fear not, compadre. Jolly Roger isn't here to pass judgment concerning such highly dubious notions as truth and fiction. He's here to listen and hand on the word. May I ask your name?

I'm the guy They never told you about, the one who does the jobs that don't exist, if you know what I mean.

N.S.A.?

Think of this as my report from the front. My last dispatch, you could call it.

Where are you phoning from?

Bedroom on the second floor of a safe house in East L. A. You know what I'm doing this very second? I'm holding an Uzi here in my right hand, a cell phone in my left. And let me tell you something. They're on the stairs, man. They're coming up.

Who is?

I'm here to bear witness, you could say, tell you how the world ends.

We're listening.

…

…

Okay, well, they sent in the robotic cockroaches first, and the fuckers set about their business — you know: collecting data, sniffing air, chewing whatever detritus they chanced upon.

Because…

Nano hard-drives for heads, man, vacuum cleaners for stomachs. They were recording. Gathering information like other insects gather pheromones and food, you know? Downloading the digital identity that makes this planet itself.

What sort of information?

You name it. How government functions, how the hive-mind of the media performs, the economic machinery, the geography of the corporate imagination. Then they started going for the tissue samples.

The tissue samples?

They infiltrated the hospitals. The morgues. Took epidermal clippings from sleeping patients. Burrowed deep through the tympanic membrane, cochlea, vestibular nerve, directly into the brain. Get it? They were harvesting, man.

Jesus.

Which is where the first one was exposed. Back in ‘89. Columbia Medical Center. This autopsist? During a routine postmortem? She finds the thing nesting among the semisolid neural jell. Bristly legs, feelers, flat slippery body housed in a leathery yellow-brown casing. Hissed at her when she uncovered it. Like a goddamn cat. She removed the fucker with tweezers and crushed its armored head. And you know what happened?

I couldn't begin to guess.

This little blue spark flared up. Zzzzzzzz. Thing shorted out, man. So she slipped the carcass under a microscope. And behind what was left of those dark polymer eye shells?

Yeah?

Behind what was left of those dark polymer eye shells she discovered the cameras. She called the police. The police called the FBI. The FBI called the CIA.

And the CIA called you.

I was just supposed to observe. Feeling was that too much had already gone down to do much more. Everyone knew it, man, though everyone pretended otherwise. Before long, hundreds started turning up. I scanned CNN for signs of final embarkation, old movies on the Turner station for scenes added while our cultural backs were turned toward something seemingly more interesting.

And you say the evidence was overwhelming?

Not at all. Not at first. I didn't see a thing. No poltergeist. No rough beast. The earth didn't stop spinning. Creepy deal was everything simply continued on as everything always does. But then in 1994 I was up in Seattle doing some business at our West Coast headquarters. It'd been a long day and I was lying in bed in my hotel room, channel surfing. That's when I saw him flip onto the screen.

Him?

Police said he killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend by stabbing them repeatedly, kneeing her spine, yanking back her head by the blond hair, and slitting her throat. Blood was everywhere. You remember how it was so black in the photos it looked as though someone had puddled crude oil down the walkway?

We all do.

And then he was standing in the police station. Proud fucker. Determined, defiant. Like this was some fairly inconsequential project he'd been working on, like our universe was somehow smaller than his. And I looked into his eyes as his eyes looked into the media, and you know what they said?

They said: You're living on my planet now.

EXACTLY. I discovered myself making reservations for the first flight to L.A. You more or less know the rest. The legal wrangling, the accusations, the counter accusations, the posturing. I sat in front of other TVs in other hotel rooms in other cities and studied his eyes, the way they'd drift up and left in the courtroom like his mind was just too busy with important matters to be troubled by all this shit. Which is to say it wasn't difficult, only we had to be sure. So we went through the footage, zeroed in on that horse-jawed face, that high forehead, that Doberman's neck.

And you found…

We magnified those eyes, man, magnified them more, till our screens were overrun with them, till there was no more space left for anything else. And you can guess what we spotted.

Those polymer shells.

The robotic cameras pivoting frenetically beneath the surface, and I… uh… I don't have much time left, okay? They're here. I'm guessing the door'll hold them a minute, maybe two. The Uzi a couple seconds more. There's this gray BMW in the alley out back. I can see it from my window.