“But who, and why?” Reba said.
None of us had an answer.
We went back and looked at the hanging bodies, and Steve said, “You know, I think these human shapes haven’t gone rotten because they’ve never had the spark of life. The ones below, I bet they had it, and they didn’t work out, had to be discarded. The others, they can be wound up, but these ... Look up there, see, the more human ones have wires going into their heads.”
I looked, and sure enough, I could see the wires twisting down and into the tops of their skulls.
“Oh, God Almighty,” Reba said. We rushed over to where she stood, and what we saw made us all gasp and go weak.
Hanging in a row were a number of alien and human bodies. We recognized the human shapes. There were several copies of each. There were crude, carved wooden copies, and windup copies, and I suppose there could have been copies in the pile below, and we just hadn’t seen them, or they were too rotted, or too mixed together.
It was all the members of the drive-in.
Replicas of them.
I saw my old friends, Randy and Willard ... Crier ... Many others.
But there was something even more stunning.
Us.
Figures of us.
Rows of us.
Hanging there. Mouths open. Wires running into our heads. Windup versions. Crude wooden versions. Naked little suckers letting it all hang out.
“Ain’t this the shits?” Steve said.
“I think my tits perk higher than that,” Grace said, looking down the row of replicas.
“Damn, Jack,” Steve said. “Are you really that well hung?”
“He is,” Reba said.
“I second that,” Grace said.
“I wish I hadn’t asked,” Steve said.
4
Grace had Steve boost her up to the top of one of the hanging figures of herself. She put her hands on its head, said, “The cable has a little hook, and it fits into a thin loop around the bodies’ necks. The wires, they ... seem to be just pushed into the tops of the skulls.”
Grace yanked at the wires. They came free. “Yep,” she said. “I’m going to unhook this one.”
She did, and swung down, and Steve managed the copy down. We pulled the body away from the hanging rows and out into an open space where there was a little more light.
We all bent over and pushed the inert figure’s hair around, felt where the wires had fastened into its skull. There were these little bumps, and if you looked close, really close, you could see the holes where they had gone in.
“What the fuck could this all be about?” Steve said.
“I have an idea,” Reba said. “And I don’t like it.”
“What?” I said.
“Bend over, Jack. Put your head toward me.”
I did as I was asked. Reba ran her fingers through my hair. She said, “I found these before. I just thought they were birthmarks ... They look like the marks from the wires in the Grace figure head.”
“Now, wait a minute ... Coincidence. They’re just little birthmarks or something. I didn’t even know I had them.”
Reba didn’t answer. She just bent forward, offering me her skull. Reluctantly, I ran my trembling fingers through her hair. There were little bumps.
“The same,” I said.
Grace ducked her head forward. I ran my fingers through her beautiful, blonde hair. Same bumps.
Steve ran his own fingers through his hair, said, “Me too.”
“I don’t think I like what I’m thinking,” I said. “The catfish,” Grace said. “Ed. Remember, there were edible wires inside his flesh. They were so big, we could see them. But with us ... They’re small. They could be ... must be inside us.”
“No,” Steve said. “I’m human. Can you make a machine hungry, make it want sex and Coca-Cola? I don’t think so. Shit, man, I had a life before this crazy place. It sucked, but it was better than this. I got all kinds of memories. I got a divorce, for heaven’s sake. I mean, what robot wants to shit or pee?”
“We all have lives,” Grace said.
“No,” Reba said. “Think about it. The windup versions, the woodcut versions. It’s like whoever made them was learning. Advancing.”
“But, couldn’t they just be models based on us?” Steve said.
“We all have the place for the wires in the tops of our heads,” Reba said.
“It’s too crazy,” Grace said. “You mean, all our memories are ... false.”
Reba nodded. “Could be.”
“We’re just goddamn robots,” Steve said.
“Technically,” I said, “I think we’re androids.”
“But East Texas. Our homes ... You mean, they never were? We never left this world? Or rather, we’ve always been here?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But, I’ll tell you what. I’m pissed. We’ve been fucked ... Jesus. That means Mom and Dad. They never were. Or they were machines. Like everyone else.”
“Like us,” Reba said. “What I’m thinking is they may never have been your parents. It may be all in our head. In our ... Jesus ... in our wires and circuits. We were given past histories, tossed into this world for something’s entertainment. Even the aliens, they’re false. They’re just bodies. Rubber at first. Then devices like us. Something someone was playing with until he figured out how to do it better, and then, he/she/it grew bored.”
“That would explain why the world is coming apart,” Grace said. “Our creator. He just doesn’t give a shit anymore. I always thought, you had a creator, he had to be better than some egotistical Christian god, wanting everyone to love him and worship him while he killed people with diseases and made them suffer ... But, you know, compared to our god, that Christian god is looking pretty good ... If there ever was a religion called Christianity ... My Lord, everything is in question.”
“All of it must have been based on some truth,” I said. “Our creator’s truth.”
We all sat down around the Grace shape on the floor. Just sat there. Quiet. For a long, long time.
Finally Grace said, “I say we find this creator, and kill the sonofabitch.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Wouldn’t that be a bad idea?” Steve said. “He is, after all, our Frankenstein ... And how do I know that? Is there really a character called Frankenstein? Or is that just part of the whole brain implant, probably a chip in my head of some kind. Man, everything we know or have learned may be a big old fart-smelling lie.”
“We’re each different,” Grace said. “Where he fucked up, is he gave us free will. We can do what we want. And that means killing him. Hell, wanting to do that. Have some kind of revenge. That makes us human, don’t it?”
“If there ever were humans,” I said.
It took a long time for us to make our way around the funnel, to the other side. We ended up sleeping a lot, and eating all our fruit. But finally we made our way to where the planes and buses and such were.
Some were real, or looked real. Some had windups at their backs. One of the planes, a little two-seater, had a propeller in the front that was attached with a tightly wound rubber band.
The machines were average sized. One of the cars was a 1966 tan Chevy Impala. The window was down. Grace stuck her head inside, said, “The keys are in it.”
She got inside, turned the key. The car started.
“Now there’s something neat,” she said. “Low on gas, but I say we try it.”
We climbed in, Grace at the wheel. She wheeled around the automotive and aerial debris, and we were off again, tooling along a great tile floor.
5
We found a wide gap in a wall, a mousehole, and we drove through that. There were trees in there, but they were prop trees, the sort that looked real front on, but at their backs were little stands that held them up.
We passed towns made the same way. Towns we knew. It was Interstate I-45, or so said the road signs, and the towns were the right towns, but they weren’
t real. There were even people standing about, at the sides of the road, but they too were false, with little stands at their backs. False cars. False dogs and cats.
Everything a plywood and cardboard lie.
We drove on, and the little towns fell away and gave place to more woods. The woods grew darker and we could see huge sets of glowing eyes out there.
“Man, what could that be?” Steve asked.
“I don’t think we want to know,” Reba said.
We hadn’t gone much farther when suddenly a set of the eyes rushed forward.
A mouse.
A big fucking mouse. Bigger than a horse. It darted for the Impala.
Grace gave the Impala the gas. I glanced back through the rear windshield. The mouse stood on its hind legs and waved its paws in the air in frustration. As it tracked back into the woods, I noted there was a windup key in its ass.
“It isn’t even real,” I said.
“Neither are we,” Reba said, and she began to cry.
At one point, we saw beside the road a whole row of tin soldiers. They had rotating keys at their backs. They were dancing together, and it was funky stuff, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.
“Who winds them?” Steve said.
“That would be the motherfucker we’re looking for,” Grace said.
We drove in dark silence for a long time, and I know that each of us was thinking of our lives, wondering if any of it was truly our lives, or if we had even lived the drive-in lives, let alone the before-the-drive-in lives. Just driving along, thinking all this, feeling hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny, remembering sweet moments and sad, thinking, did any of this shit happen or did all our ideas and memories run through chips and wires hidden in our bloodstreams. And is the blood in us blood, or Karo syrup, or is there such a thing as blood, or even humans, and which or what are we, and did this mean someone other than George Lucas made up Star Wars?
Sometime during our drive, the lights were cut off by someone or something. They just snapped off. We turned on the car lights and proceeded. We pointed the car at a silver glow we could see on the horizon, on down that pseudo I-45.
We drove until we came to an end of the highway and all the props, and still we drove on, across a flat expanse of nothing, almost as bleak as the highway into Amarillo, Texas, if there is an Amarillo, Texas or a highway in that direction, if there is a direction. My God, was there north, east, west, or south?
It made the chips and wires and such in the goddamn plasti-flesh skull ache, is what it did.
Not long after me thinking all of this, wondering where this highway ended up, the Impala ran out of gas. We got out and walked toward the glow on the horizon.
We walked and came upon ... tools. Giant screwdrivers and pliers, and there were wires and tubes and dials tossed about. We weaved in between them, kept going toward that glow.
The goal the glow, baby. The glow the goal.
Finally, we arrived at the only place we could arrive.
The End of It All.
There was just the table edge. Nowhere else to go but back, and that wasn’t appealing. The dim light in the distance was not so distant now. It was a huge television, nothing on it but a white glow and an Indian head test pattern. We could hear it hum. And in the TV’s projected light, we could see a great room. On the white-sheeted bed was an elderly man, and there were metal stands by his bed, and they held bottles of liquid, and tubes ran from the bottles into him. They were affixed to his arms and head. Around him were machines with lights and dials on them. To the right of the room was an open window, and moonlight seeped in quietly to rest on the sill like drift-down glitter. To the left of us, sitting on the table was a toy, a rubber band windup plane and a checkerboard with a box of checkers next to it.
There were shelves in the room, and they were covered, or perhaps the word is littered, with all manner of old toys and books.
“By now,” Steve said, “I’ve seen everything but a pig doing the hula while wearing a tutu and a top hat with a cork in his ass, but, I got to admit, my little old brain, or computer chip, whatever, is doing the dipsy-doodle on this here shit.”
“I’ll second that,” Reba said.
“Thirds,” Grace said.
“Oh, hell, count me in too,” I said.
“I don’t know if you have noticed,” Grace said, “but what we’re on, isn’t quite as wide as it was. And now that I can see better about the room, I spy a chair, a couch, and guess what, we’re on a table.”
“I’ll be goddamned,” Steve said.
“I see a lot of test tubes,” Reba said. I can see them over there, near the bed ... Goddamn, look at that.”
We looked where she was pointing. The TV set. The set crackled like Rice Krispies, and lines appeared and met in the middle, and out of the lines came an image, and the image moved across the room toward us.
It was a young, thin, pimply man with unruly hair and glasses thick as goggles. He wore blue jeans and a white shirt with a pencil and pen pack sticking out of the pocket. The pants were a little too short, and you could see his white socks with little blue clocks on them. He wore brown loafers.
As he moved across the dark expanse of the room on a beam of light, he said, “Hi. My name is Billy.”
The beam from the TV brought him down on the edge of the table, and there he stood, looking as solid as us.
“A lot of people call me Little Billy, or used to. I am your creator.”
6
“Then we’re going to kill your ass dead,” Steve said.
“Actually, you can’t,” Billy said. “Or, you won’t have to. I’m not me ... Really.”
“That figures,” Grace said. “Nothing is real here.”
“Oh, yeah. Some of it’s real. This room is real. The things in the room are real. To me, anyway. The little toy plane on the edge of the table is a real toy plane. I’m not really coming out of the TV set though. I just thought that seemed cool. I’m coming out of him.”
Billy turned and pointed to the old man on the bed.
“And who is he?” I asked.
“Me. The older me. The creator of the creator, me creating me. The younger me.”
“I think we ought to just walk back and get eaten by the windup rat,” Steve said.
“He’s a partial,” Billy said. “The rat, I mean.”
“Do what?” Grace asked.
“He’s a partial. Part flesh, part machine. But, not really.”
“Glad that’s straightened out in a confused manner,” Steve said.
“We want to kill you,” I said, “but, you know what, since you’re just a beam of light, I’m gonna guess that isn’t going to happen.”
“No. It won’t. Told you that. Besides, what you want is not to kill me—”
“Oh,” Grace said, “I assure you, that’s what we want.”
“What you want,” Little Billy said, “is to know the truth. Every one wants to know the truth. And the truth is this. The world is bigger than you, and you are on my bedroom table, in my lab. And I’m eighty years old. This is how I remember myself. As a kid. But, I’m eighty, and my time is nigh.”
“That’s why everything is breaking down,” Grace said, “you’re not maintaining it anymore, because you can’t.”
“That’s right.”
“So, you built prototypes,” Grace said. “Until you got something more lifelike, discarded the old ones in a waste heap, then gave us, the keepers, false memories and turned us loose in a horrible world. Gave us memories so we thought we had a past and could long for going home?”
“Sort of,” Billy said, taking off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt.
“You’re a fucking monster,” Grace said.
“No. I was just playing. I’m not even really very smart, so I didn’t exactly do that.”
“What did you do?” Grace said.
“Philip K. Dick asked once, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and the answer is, they do dream.”
“Okay, now I really want to get eaten by the windup rat,” Steve said.
“On the bed the man is not a man but an android. He is a creature and creation of this world, which is a creation by human beings. Maybe. I don’t even know that answer. Humans. Androids making androids. Androids making humans. God making humans, a single cell of thought floating in ether, imagining it all? Whatever.”
“So we are the android’s androids,” Reba said.
“No,” said Little Billy. “You are the android’s dream. The android, Little Billy, is a beautiful creation like his mother and his father and his now-dead sister. He could procreate. He was as human as a human. And like a human, he dies.”
“Can’t you like jump him off?” Steve asked. “You know, battery cables or something?”
“He is an android,” Little Billy said, “but he is too human to be fixed like a machine. He ages. He dies. That’s the short and the long and the abbreviated middle. He created your world and all of you to give him life inside his head, since life no longer exists outside of it. On the bed, inside his head, he knows the truth now, that he is an android. He didn’t even know, until now. All the secrets of the universe, his own and others’, are revealed. And he sends me to you, in his younger form, to talk to you. He’s sorry you’ve been through what you’ve been. But not really. He had fun believing it all. Believing for a time he was a great creator of aliens and androids and of a marvelous dark world. In his head, images nestled in a little speck of chip smaller than a virus, he enjoyed the idea that he carved you first, and wound you up, then wired you up, and made you all, put you in the drive-in world, created problems, and let you go. You see. But he did that all in his head. He never put a knife to wood or a wire to chip, flesh to machine. He/me loves movies. A man of unseen wires and parts loves the dreams of the machine, the camera, the devices, the effects. And you, are in fact, the dreams of a machine.”