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Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more. And to new subscribers, thanks for being here! You can check out the links above to get caught up.
Clive has arrived in the Southwest Semi-Autonomous Zone, where he gets an increasingly bad feeling about the tech company that just bought his astroanamorphoscope. (Readers of my essay from last week will detect a bit of autofiction in Clive’s visit to the Grand Canyon.)
EZEKIAL Zebediah (“EZ”) Smith threw a large pistol onto the conference table, causing Clive, seated across from him, to start from his chair, his closest previous contact with firearms having occurred in movie theaters and video games.
EZ fixed him with a stare that seemed to physically force him back into his seat, as if the older man’s eyes wielded some hitherto undiscovered force in the electromagnetic spectrum. He leaned forward, his voice low and gravelly. “You’re not fixin’ to get all litigious on us, are you, son? We’ve got tort reform here in the Zone, don’t ya know? We ran the last lawyer out, what, three years ago now? Missin’ his pound o’ flesh to boot. Nowadays we get all our legal help from the law firm of Smith (no relation) & Wesson, with the occasional services of Mr. Glock.”
EZ was not only the mayor of St. George, but the de facto governor of the Southwest Semi-Autonomous Zone, the chief backer of Croft’s company, Veritas Ventures, and an Apostle of the True, Living, Devout, and Reformed Church of Latter Day Saints, which hadn’t so much reformed the church as returned it to its roots, polygamy being the chief tenet restored to its rightful place in the theology. EZ himself had collected four wives over the years, judging by the pictures displayed on the wall behind him. He was thickset, with a gray chin-strap beard and prone to wearing suspenders and a broad-brimmed hat, which now hung from a peg on the office’s coat hooks.
The deal with Croft was as bad as Clive had feared, and worse. How he’d ever let himself be lured into this most lawless and gun-crazy corner of a lawless and gun-crazy country, he couldn’t quite imagine. Well, actually, he could. It had mostly to do with the fifty thousand quid now sitting in his bank account, earnest money Croft and Smith had wired into his account, converted from their considerable fund of FreedomCoin.
The venture had started out well enough. After disembarking the Anóitoi, a limo had whisked him and Croft to LAX — whisked being the only word to describe the smoothest ride Clive had ever experienced, even over the potholed streets of LA, not to mention the pass Croft had flashed to get them around the airport construction gridlock and directly onto the tarmac — where they boarded a company Lear jet for the short flight to St. George. Veritas Ventures occupied most of a gleaming new building in the small city’s burgeoning tech park. The offices sported a mix of polished cedar and red sandstone paneling, slate flooring, all locally sourced, and extravagant water features and indoor gardens. The staff seemed equally impressive, the coders who would be translating the astroanamorphoscope’s complex algorithms into digital format asking all the right questions, and showing themselves capable of understanding the maths involved.
Clive had hesitated to hand over the device itself, and even more so the thumb drive containing the calculations behind it. Looking back, that was when EZ and Croft had sunk the hook in.
“I can understand your reticence, young fella,” EZ had said, “turning over your life’s work to a bunch o’ strangers. But Alex here says it’s going to take our people a few days to really dig into the thing to see if we can get it to work with the Red Glasses. How about a nice down payment to ease your mind — say, fifty thou?”
That had done the trick, though it hadn’t quite eased Clive’s mind about his new partners — not so much regarding their technical and business acumen as the other types of conspiracy his morphoscope would be sharing the glasses with. Both EZ and Croft had been a little hedgy about all of it — “you know, the usual, Area 51, JFK assassination, moon landing, 9/11 Truthers,” was about all they’d admit to. But EZ kept dropping little hints about his own views — the deep state, the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, UN conspiracies, international bankers, globalists — and he didn’t mean those who thought the Earth was round. And he seemed to believe that the US was no longer a country, but a corporation.
He even seemed skeptical about going into business with a foreigner. “You seem a good enough sort, not the usual English airy-fairy elitist. What do your parents do again, own some sort of store?”
“That’s righ’, Cuddleshanks’ Emporium — gifts for every occasion. We’re a nation of shopkeepers, after all, nothing so posh about tha’.”
Satisfied that he wasn’t a member of the global elite, EZ had given his approval to the project. “Why don’t you take a few days and see the sights? Zion Park is nearby, a whole lot better now that we’ve repatriated it from the federal corporation. You can drive yourself around the whole place, don’t need to get on any danged bus. We could even loan you a company car.”
“Wha’ abou’ the Grand Canyon?”
“Easy day’s drive. But don’t forget your passport. That’s one chunk o’ territory we haven’t been able to wrest out of the feds’ control.”
After checking his phone to see his bank balance clicking up by three orders of magnitude, he’d reluctantly handed over the helmet and the thumb drive, then hopped into a new Maxwell Model F and headed out for a tour of the redrock country.
At Cape Royal he stood agape, agog, breath sucked out of him, head reeling as if he might fall into that vertiginous space — no cliché being too hackneyed for this feeling of stunned amazement — but not at first. First it was just a pretty picture postcard, looking across the ten miles to the South Rim. But then he looked down, so far down, and there at the bottom was the river that had created it, little more than a creek at this distance. Then the true scale of the place hit him, an abyss not just of space but of time, of order and chaos — not order emerging out of chaos but the other way round, the chaotic erosional forces working over millennia on the precisely ordered layers, as if it were the largest wedding cake ever crafted by the contestants on the Great British Baking Show, then wrecked by no less than the hand of God, raking its way through the ages for bite after bite. A more perfect image of entropy he couldn’t imagine: all that careful order, the colorful layer cake seeming almost a product of design — the metaphor enhanced at this time of year by a thin layer of snow like white frosting atop the other strata — would eventually be reduced to monochromatic sediments at the bottom of the sea (or the next lake down, as long as those lasted).
He knew then that the Creationists were wrong. The working of slow processes over time was just too apparent here — the millennia it would take to deposit and then compress limestone hundreds of feet thick, multiplied by the dozen or so distinct sedimentary formations lying atop the igneous rocks at the lowest depths, plus the millions of years it must have taken that tiny river to carve the whole thing.
Considering how many flat-earthers were also Creationists, he wondered where these thoughts put him with his own community. He’d been so immersed in his maths and building his ’morphoscope, he’d paid little attention to his fellow FETs or the many different ways they came to it, much less the views of the rest of the Conspiracy Community.
Then the next morning, back in the car, the Maxwell gliding almost silently around the sweeping curves of the Arizona Strip highways while he fretted about what awaited him in St. George, constantly checking his phone to assure himself the funds in his bank account were real.
Back at the tech campus, Croft and EZ greeted him warmly. “Good news!” said Croft. “It’s going to work! It shouldn’t take more than a month or two to develop the software module and add it to the next update. And when that’s done, you’ll receive the rest of your advance. Come in, sit down, let’s celebrate!”
Apparently they were to celebrate with Sprite and non-caffeinated root beer, but Croft opened his sport coat to reveal a metal flask, giving him a wink as EZ turned to pour the sodas.
“A toast to our new partnership!”
“Erm, I’d like to ’ave another look at the glasses first.” He’d tried them out once already, of course. They’d seemed to work as advertised, the overlay revealing useful information about Area 51 as he’d viewed that cordoned-off landscape from the Lear jet, even adding little flying saucers doing maneuvers over the place. But the menu had been limited, and now he was curious, anxious even, over what the other modules might be.
“Why?” EZ asked, taken aback, still holding the drink out to him.
“Just want to know soomfin’ about the other modules — conspiracies — my ’morphoscope will be sharin’ your platform wiv.”
A glance between Croft and EZ. “Well sure, Clive,” Croft said.
“Here, try mine,” said EZ, setting the drink down on the conference table and reaching into his breast pocket. “Might as well have everything out in the open.”
Clive put the glasses on as Croft and EZ took seats at the table. It took a moment for the GUI to adjust to the position and shape of his eyes, and then he was able to navigate the menu by glancing through the items. The list of options was more extensive — and horrifying — than Croft’s.
He started up an item called Pedo Profile, which showed a target’s proclivity for pedophilia on a scale of one to ten, in units called Epsteins. When he looked at EZ, the status bar showed bright green with a zero next to it, while Croft’s had a paler lime shade at one Epstein. “I’m glad to see neither of you are pedophiles, but ’ow does it know?”
“Facial recognition to ID the subject,” Croft said. “Then browsing histories, arrest records, sex offender status, occupations attractive to pedos, number of under-age contacts on social media.”
Feeling a bit ill, he took a seat across from his new backers. This was a vast invasion of privacy, but it was hard to argue with fighting pedophilia. He scrolled to the next one.
“Deep State Detector. Wot’s tha’?”
“It scans the subject for government IDs, in addition to facial recognition, of course. Fed employees get the highest alert status, higher still if it’s FBI, CIA, FEMA, ATF, Treasury, etc., and the higher the GS-level, the higher the alert. Military excluded; we support our troops. It’s great at ferreting out deep state moles and agent provocateurs.”
Clive continued scanning down the list, until he came to one that stopped his eye in its tracks. “Jew Alert. Wot the bleedin’ ’ell is this?” He activated it and the text display read, “No Jews detected in immediate area,” while a celebratory display of fireworks and confetti went off in the corners. A task bar at the top of the screen showed “Calculating distance to nearest Jew,” then the display changed to, “Congratulations, you appear to occupy a Jew-free zone.”
“Now, young man, don’t be naive. You’ve heard my views on the New World Order and the international monetary system. Who do you think is behind it all, if not the Jews? Thing is, unlike the other races, it’s hard to recognize them right off.”
“I can’t believe I’m ’earin’ this racist crap!”
“But it’s not racism, I abhor it as much as the next guy. It’s more a cultural thing. Goes back to the Christian ban on money-lending, so Jews naturally moved in to fill the void. And now here we are.”
Clive could only shake his head.
“And it’s not just banking. It’s also the arts and media. The whole War on Christmas, it goes back to the Jews.”
“War on Christmas? There’s no war on Christmas.”
“This is where they’re insidious, see? They didn’t set out to ban Christmas, least ways not at first. They just set about changing the way we celebrate Christmas. For instance, did you know that all those ‘Christmas classics’ they play at the malls were written by Jews? Beginning back in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century, they were secularizin’ Christmas with their “Silver Bells” and their “Let It Snow.” And now here we are, you can’t wish someone a Merry Christmas or put lights on your house without someone gettin’ triggered.”
Clive, still shaking his head: “So ’ow’s this work, facial recognition again?”
“That’s right,” said Croft. “Once it has a positive ID, it looks up synagogue affiliations, favorite pastimes, reading lists, likely professions, doctor and lawyer being at the top. And, erm, if all of that fails, it uses certain facial features typical of Jews…”
Clive turned on EZ. “You just said it wasn’t a racial thing!”
“Well, now, we have to identify them somehow, don’t we?”
“Look, it might not be apparent to you, but I’m part Jewish. Me great-grandmother was a Jew.”
“See, I told you it wasn’t a racial thing. You don’t look Jewish at all, and the database didn’t show any Jewish cultural markers, no excessive love of musical theatre, no purchases of Gefelte fish or Manischewitz.”
“We’re not Nazis,” Croft explained helpfully. “We don’t have a one-drop rule.”
“My god, imagine what this could do if it fell into the wrong ’ands, in ’ungary say, with everyfing that’s been goin’ on there…”
“We do quite a brisk business in Hungary, actually,” Croft said, a bit sheepish. “But look, you don’t really have anything to worry about. Everything is modular, so our customers can pick and choose which conspiracies they want. We exist to support our clients’ needs and values.”
“That’s right, son,” EZ put in. “We’re all about freedom of choice and expression.”
“It’ll be up to the customers whether they want to have your Flat Earth module next to the Jew Alert or Holocaust Truth modules.”
Clive had to resist slapping his own forehead. “Holocaust Truth…I don’t even want to ask.”
“But I don’t suppose there’s much overlap among those communities, is there?” Croft asked.
Clive wasn’t so sure. He seemed to remember something about Hitler hiding out beyond the Ice Wall, his life unnaturally extended. “No, I don’t want my ’morphoscope ’avin’ owt to do with those other conspiracies, or modules, as you call ’em. Fact, I don’t want nuffink to do wiv your company at all.”
“Son, you’ve already taken our money,” EZ said, a warning growl in his voice.
“But we ’aven’t signed a contract or even…”
And that’s when EZ pulled the gun and started talking about tort reform.
Clive stood his ground. “I’ll ’ave me bank wire the money back to you. Then you just erase all me data from your drives, ’and over me thoomb drive and me ’morphoscope, and we’ll be even Steven.”
“Now look here, son, we’re too far down this road for any turnin’ back. The genie’s out of the bottle, the horse has left the barn, the toothpaste’s out of the tube — them eggs’ve been cracked, is what I’m sayin’. I’m a man of my word and I mean to uphold my end of the bargain. Alex, make sure the rest of Mr. Cuddleshanks’s advance is wired to his account. You’re eligible for those royalties, too, but don’t hold your breath, accounting being what it is. Still haven’t figured a way to do without the bean-counters…”
“But…”
“Don’t look like such a sad-sack. If you’re like most inventors, you’ll bounce back with a new gizmo in no time.”
Ten years of his life, vanishing before his eyes, all for a couple hundred thousand quid. He might as well have stayed at the kebab house, maybe worked his way up to assistant manager. And now he couldn’t even take credit for his invention, not without looking like he supported the most virulent racism. “You’ll keep my name out of it…”
“Of course. In fact, if you want so little to do with us, you can make your own way home. Ephraim!”
From out of nowhere a large man in a dark suit appeared.
“Ephraim, see Mr. Cuddleshanks to the border, and make sure all his personal effects, including his astro-whatsits-scope, are returned to him. Wouldn’t want anyone accusin’ us of theft.”
The man nodded and gestured to the door. A couple of hours later, Clive found himself deposited at the border checkpoint, not much more than a line in the sand on either side of the highway, with a couple of guard houses and a bank of floodlights spanning the concrete ribbons. The desert here was more intimidating than the landscape he’d just left, with none of the charm provided by the richly colored rocks contrasting with the green of junipers, cedars, and cottonwoods — more a monochrome of grays and tans and drab, olive-green bushes stretching to the horizon. He was in the middle of Nevada, judging by the welcoming sign, with Las Vegas fifty miles away, and no apparent way to get there.
Oh well, he’d hitched plenty of times on his way to and from the uni. He tucked the box containing the morphoscope under one arm and stuck out his thumb.
Five minutes later, a VW bus was pulling over, Clive wondering if the mild sun hadn’t somehow addled his brain as the passenger window slid down to reveal a vision of a goddess, blond ringlets flowing down to drape over tan shoulders and toned arms, a tank top showing off a pleasing figure, made more pleasing as she leaned toward him, flashing a grin: “Need a lift, John?”
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.
What do you think Clive will do now? Can he wrest his invention from the clutches of the backers he now wants to get away from?
Next up: Chapter 18, “On the Origin of Canyons,” in which Slim and Shorty (mainly Slim) try to set Reverend Paul straight.
Penny???