Boi-oi-oi-oing!

Oct. 23, 007
Black Rockalypse

I slept soundly in my new home, despite the partying going on in the cul-de-sac outside my door. I dreamt of seeing comets up close, of evading asteroid clusters, of lingering at the curvature of the Earth to look down and marvel upon all of creation. Heaven, Hell, purgatory, paradise … angels, demons … heroes and villians and monsters and insects too odd and complex to suggest a humorless creator (or creators) … it is all here on this planet. And we don’t even look to see it, most of the time.

We think we’re so small and insignificant we can shit all over everything and nobody will notice.

The Earth doesn’t care if we live or die. Only we do. And now, it seems, someone else does.

They’re here to help us. They don’t say why at all, really. Or what it is we’re doing, beyond a few vague goals. We have to guess most things.

We don’t know if they’re alien, superhuman, otherworldly, one dimension ahead of us in the same exact place and time, or what. They just do stuff here and there that proves they’re more powerful than us. The visitations, the light shows, the invitations, the transportations, and the kickass trailer park all set up and ready to go. Each trailer personalized and pimped out, right down to our favorite foods stocked in the fridge and cabinets.

And the Black Rock Saloon is here too, all picked up from Gerlach and plopped down into a central point of our new neighborhood. The Black Rock is our main structure (for now), and includes the (also re-stocked) kitchen and walk-in and food closets, TV room, computer room (now reading/game/nursery/meeting room) and the BAR — re-stocked with a fresh-from-Exodus amount of beer and liquor. No Coors or Bud Lite here — only Pabst and Mexican beers and microbrews. They know us.

This is only our head-start supply, we’ve been told. After this we have to find out how to get everything ourselves. That’s part of the game. No running water — and all that that implies. They’ve given us a leg up with a good supply of 5-gallon jugs … and after it’s gone, we’ll have to figure out how to get some H2o from the ground, first thing.

I’ve taken to calling them the “Not-Us.” Out of respect. I’m not sure what else to call them. As far as I can tell, they’re not here on-playa at the moment. Or if they’re around, they keep themselves hidden. Not in clouds and whatnot, not like before. We can tell.

In winter, the playa is submerged in a thin layer of water … but they told us the main function of the … Not-Dome? … is to regulate the temperature so it’s less extreme, and to keep us away from the wet.

We’ll see.

—–

So what are we supposed to build, exactly? Something about a self-sustaining community in the desert — one that will serve as an example to the rest of the planet when it soon becomes imperative they have access to instruction. A take-it-or-leave-it kind of we’re-doing-it-anyway sort of thing.

A little push, like the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m guessing.

Beyond that? Yeah. Maddeningly vague. So why did we all say yes? … Because if you were us, and you saw what we saw they can do, you would too.

—–

“What if you’re evil?,” I asked Barton, the day he first visited me as a Not-Us at The Wall when I drove out alone to say goodbye to the playa. “How can you prove to us you’re not evil?”

“Because,” he said, and temporarily cleared the dust and made another double rainbow like the one during the event, and pointed at it.

(this is the one during the event. by loupiote)

“Ha ha, where’s the unicorn,” I said. “That doesn’t prove anything except how you can do magic.”

He smiled, and the dust re-swirled around us, lifting his matted brown shoulder-length locks into a hair tornado.

“How about the fact that we’d just kill you all if we wanted something you had?,” he asked. “Like vampires?”

“But vampires toy with their prey,” I said. “Animals in nature even toy with their prey.”

“Yes,” he said, “but in nature, prey always knows it’s prey. You say you’ve been working on your intuition, Summer — look me in the eyes and tell me if you think you’re prey.”

I looked in his eyes. Me in welding goggles; him seemingly surrounded by a clear protective bubble in the sandstorm.

Brown eyes with fiery golden centers. Long-ass lashes and a smooth olive-hued brow. A look on his face as questioning and sincere as a Mission Street Jesus poster … All that stuff about feeling an otherworldly peace? Yep. Him getting into my thoughts and showing me some potential futures without him saying a word? Yep. Overwhelming sense of calm, with the sound of my heart pounding in my ears? Yep. Excitement instead of dread? Yep. The feeling I’d be missing out on the opportunity of anyone’s lifetime if I said no? Yep.

It was a Gandalf moment.

“I don’t think I’m prey,” I said.

That’s when he disappeared. That’s when I decided to come.

Yes, it’s still possible that our brain chemicals are being manipulated, and this is either a spider-to-the-fly type situation or an all-out hallucination. And believe me, in this crowd, we were all born with the skeptic bone protruding noticeably from our bodies. But I really think they’re straight-up. So does most everybody else. And for those who don’t … well, they don’t want to miss out, either.

—–

Forgot to say my car is here as well. Only vehicles without digital parts got transported to the Black Rock with their owners, with the caveat that eventually they will probably be converted to run on electricity or biodiesel or trash and coffee grounds or whatever we — not the Not-Us — decide. We all agree we’ve got to figure out some half-standardized method to make all the cars sustainable, and the electric boys and the Mechabolic folks and the biodiesel crew are already arguing about the best way to do so.

Here’s the cool part.

We found one edge of the property line this afternoon by driving around until we hit it — and when we encountered the invisible barrier, the car slowed down like it had collided with quicksand. The atmosphere seemed to ripple around us, and we gently got pushed boi-oi-oi-oing backwards, wheels locked, like a slow-motion slingshot. Wheee! Then we drove alongside it and, while my dog Bruno barked in agitation in the back seat (he never barks), Arwen and 13 and I took turns sticking our hands in the border, which feels like really soft rubber. The scenery stretches a little when it’s touched, but other than that, you can’t tell it’s there.

Little Matt came up cruising beside us with some Gate folks in his car, and this get-to-know-the-Not-Dome session quickly turned into a boi-oi-oi-oing contest — each of us taking turns going faster and faster at the thing, holding on and white-knuckling the counter-boing — till I almost rolled and he almost flipped. Whoops. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Guess we’re going to have to delineate the perimeter, then. Soon. Especially for nighttime, since if there’s one thing our kind likes to do, it’s to high-tail it across the playa in fucked-up cars. Would hate to have a Death By Stupid this early in the game.

Others spent all day tootling off in this manner as well, just sort of touring trailers and meeting new people and reuniting with friends to say “holy shit” together and cruising around in the cars we do have access to, even though fuel will run out soon if we can’t figure out what to do as far as getting supplies shipped out here. But Barton told me we’d just spend this week settling in, wait for more instruction, and trust that we’ll get what we need. Stress is the leading cause of everything bad, and chaos provides. We were picked in part because we know how to roll with the changes.

I’m guessing.

—–