Tag: sci-fi

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Enoturage:2039 Chapter 14: Billy.

Billy Walsh has always been independent. He made his first movie for twenty thousand dollars- money he made selling lottery tickets and porno mags on the night shift at a liquor store. And when that wasn’t enough, he sponged off his friends, and when that still wasn’t enough, he started stealing out of the till.

Six months later he had four shoeboxes full of cash stashed under his bed, and 20 months after that he had won Sundance for the first time. He wrote, directed, edited, produced, and executive produced. No investors, no film school, no connections: fuck that rich kid shit. He never could relate to the ones who got everything on a silver platter- the ones who got profiled in the glossy magazines with their goddamn pull quotes about “hustling up” four hundred grand. Billy knew right where they hustled it from: rich daddy and his rich friends.

None of that for Billy. He was real indie then, and he was real indie now, here in the Griffith Park Badlands, hunkered down three miles or so outside the big north wall of Ari Gold’s domains. They had a lot of guns, but they knew better than to come in the woods. In their hearts they were all still rich kids, pussies. Even when it had been surrounded by a functioning metropolis, there had been a lot of places in the park to lose a body. Now it didn’t take more then twelve hours for one of Ari’s guys, or anyone who wandered in uninvited, to rejoin the food chain at the lower end.

But the land is beautiful in a lot of ways. Little brooks gurgle in the background, just off the path. Outside there’s a war going on, but it’s green and peaceful in here, and the sunlight cuts through the overhead branches just right, landing on your shoulders in soft diffused rays, and sometimes you even see deer. Things grow here. But this ain’t no Disney flick, Billy’s seen to that.

He sits on his throne of wood, carved into the side of an enormous old growth oak. The tree is still alive, somehow, and Billy is inside it. He has his women, clad all in brown and green like the land, and he has his drugs to keep away the loneliness and the fears that sometimes come in the night.

Billy takes a long drink from a bottle of hooch they make right here in the woods, and runs his hand down the long black hair of the girl on his left, until his fingers find the back of her lithe and chestnut-tan neck. Someone is telling him something about what’s going on outside- something about drones in the air and an army led by a man on a white horse, for real, even though it sounds like something out of a bullshit movie, but Billy isn’t really listening. He knows all about the war already. After all, it’s his.

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Entourage:2039 Chapter 13: Three things happen at once (part three).

When we last left Vincent Chase he was underground. Way underground, in the chamber of horrors presided over by the girl Mary, watching a no-holds-barred sex show given by two spitting images of his youthful self. “Could they come?” Somehow that was the only thought circling through real Vince’s dazed head. It seemed like they were some kind of robots., or cyborgs. Whoever made them had obviously gone into a lot of detail but… would something come out? And if so- what?

Whatever the answer was, he was going to find out soon. The Vince-bots pleasuring of each other was nearing its climax. And so, Vince found as he glanced over, was the girl Mary. Both hands were deep inside her panties now, her head pitched way back, mouth open, watching her own movie on the back of her closed eyelids – waiting for the big explosion.

It came. Literally: It knocked Vince out of his seat. Shook tiles and big clods of dirt from the ceiling, knocked the two Vince-bots to the floor. Something up there had blown up, and it was big. The next few stunned seconds were punctuated with follow-up blasts, further away than the first, but jarring all the same same.

When the fog cleared from Vince’s head, Mary was already on her feet, buttoning her fatigues and frantically throwing items into a duffel bag. “We have to go,” she snapped at him.

“What? Where,” Vince managed to stammer.

“No time for that.” With a strength that scarcely seemed possible in her petite body, she reached out with one arm and hauled Vince’s corpulent bulk upright.

“But… what about… them?” Sure, they were perverts, but they were after all, him.

Mary stopped loading documents from a recessed wall safe into her bag and looked sideways at Vince. “What, the bots? Are you kidding me?”

“I don’t know I just… we can’t just leave them here, can we?”

Mary considered for a few beats. “It’s going to be a long trip. And God knows you’re not going to do me any good. Four- come on. The young Vince-doppelganger she addressed stood at attention, ready to follow his master wherever she might lead. “The rest of you…”

She made a gesture, and the other Vince-bots knelt, without complaint, their faces to the wall. She pulled her pistol from her belt and chambered a round. To the real Vince: “You might want to look away.”

A few minutes later, Mary was dashing down a tunnel, Vince-bot #4 by her side, real Vince wheezing fifty feet behind her, doing his best to catch up. Mary, rounding the bend first, came into a dimly lit chamber that stretched a hundred feet overhead, and longer than a football field in either direction. There were cars here, all makes and models, and tanks, and military transport trucks. Vince caught up to her just as she pulled off the cover.

The car was a ’69. Pontiac GTO convertible, Fire Engine red, perfect mint, with the Ram Air V you couldn’t get from the dealer.

Vince finally caught up to her. The top was already down as she threw her bag in the backseat. Vince doubled over, gasping for breath. Mary smiled a little as she held the passenger door open for him; a real smile this time, not the cynical flash of teeth she had showed him back in the apartment. Now she raised an eyebrow.

“Roadtrip?”

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Entourage:2039 Chapter 12: Three things happen at once (part two).

Ari Gold is not at peace. Never has been, and apparently never will be- not if bullshit like this keeps happening. You can’t get good help: That’s the one thing that’s never changed since the old days.

And they still get out of his way when he walks down the hall- that hasn’t changed either. You would too, if you saw the Ari Gold of 2039 coming at you. The big pistol on his belt, the bulging arm muscles, obvious even under his suit. And then there’s those legs- cosmetic surgery has come a long way in thirty years. It’s hard to even call it cosmetic anymore, when the recipient’s leg looks more like a horse’s, and he can (and has) knocked people stone cold unconscious with one kick to the head.

It’s obvious to Ari what happened. They came up through the tunnels, under the wall. The places his men are supposed to be charting, and mining, if they weren’t so scared, and lazy, and worthless. They’re still scrubbing the blood off the walls and taking the bodies away when Ari gets there. He feels nothing for these men, nothing at all. They were weak, and lazy, and careless. All the evidence he needs to make this judgment is right there in front of him, stiffening by the minute.

In a few minutes Ari finds the storeroom he was looking for, the place where they came in. A quick inspection, and he knows exactly who he’s dealing with. The calling card is handed to him a second later by an underling who literally turns and flees in terror before Ari can say a word to him. The black card, blacker now with dried blood, only confirms what Mr. Gold already knows.

He reads the label anyway: “The Murphy Group.” A little smile curls on the end of his lip. They realize, of course, that this means war.

Meanwhile: Turtle’s slow breathing is the only movement in his cell. There is no light, no sound, no nothing. Right now there is not even Turtle. He throws his entire self into the meditative void with an almost Trappist zeal.

Ari Gold is meditating too. His practice area is a little different: For starters, there’s the gigantic gold-plated Buddha that almost envelops Mr. Gold as he sits cross-legged in front of it on the giant, Opium-den-red pillow. There are Buddhas everywhere, and maybe a few of the more well-known Hindu deities for good measure. As he sits, Ari’s mind is not what a Zen teacher would consider “clear” by any stretch. When he closes his eyes, his anger does not dissipate. No, quite the opposite. With his concern temporarily withdrawn from the waking world, Mr. Gold’s rages are free to careen though the black gulf of his semi-consciousness , like pulsars transmitting through deep space.

But maybe that is a kind of meditation. Beggars can’t be choosers. And maybe, just maybe, on some astral plane, the minds of Ari and Turtle meet. They’ve had thirty years after all, to get to know each other, to get inside each other’s thoughts. Thirty years since that fateful day when Turtle barged into the offices of the Miller/Gold agency and demanded Ari helped him go into business. He’d said “no,” of course, given the kid some big, half-made-up lecture about what it had been like for him starting out, and then sent him on his way with no help whatsoever- just as a matter of principle. That had been the beginning. And now, the beginning of the end.

Ari, lost in memory, is maybe the only thing in his entire fiefdom not moving right now: In the cyborg workshops under the Silver Lake reservoir, in the hangars and barracks of what was once the Paramount lot, from the tops of skyscrapers and half a mile under the Hollywood Hills, Mr Gold’s people are preparing to make war.

But first, dinner. Ari halted his practice mid-breath and stood to the meditation cabana. If he’s going to unleash hell, why not a little taste of heaven first? He walks to the table, where a lavish meal is waiting: The finest veal still gettable anywhere west of the Great Divide, and an eight year old Bordeaux brought up from the deep cellar for the occasion. His face bathed in red-tinted candlelight, Mr. Gold eats.

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Entourage:2039, Chapter Eight: The Arms of the Prophet Joshua

It’s a hundred and thirty miles, give or take, from here to where the city of Los Angeles used to be.

The city is still there, sort of. Something of a skyline remains, blackened and battered but still standing. You could see if from here if the smoke ever cleared. Which it doesn’t. By day, an almost biblical plume half a mile high blocks all vision, and at night the lights of aircraft slicing through the dark red haze, and the occasional missile, give the impression of a nebula viewed from several light-years away.

Here in the desert it’s quieter. You get kind of a country vibe, even. Broken down muscle cars of 1960s vintage litter the ditches, and the restless ghost of Gram Parsons still haunts the little roadside motels, looking for good music and a cheap fix. Very little moves on the road at high noon except the lizards and the snakes.

The Mormon pilgrims of the 19th century named the cactus-like trees that dot the desert for their prophet: The trees, like Joshua, seemed to be extending their thorny arms heavenward in prayer. And now something else is moving along what was once the four-lane blacktop of the Twentynine Palms highway. A family of four, heads hidden under dark robes, backs bowed under the weight of a lifetime’s possessions. The mother holds an infant to be her breast, trying to shield him from the sun, and the father pulls a two-wheeled handcart lashed, oxen-like, to his shoulders.

Now there’s a noise behind them, the puttering of an ancient and underpowered gasoline engine. In an instant the trap is set: The father and the older son hide themselves in the scrub beside the road, while the mother and infant wait, centered on the cracked double yellow lines. The sidecar-ed motorcycle putters over the horizon, spots the woman and child, and stops. In less then a minute it’s over: the father slits the throat of the driver, while the son dispatches the passenger. The faith of these pilgrims lacks a prohibition against killing, or anything else. The family loads their gear onto the bike and putters away towards the horizon.

Four days of hard travel later, their water is almost gone. There hasn’t been a spring or a supply cache for two hundred miles. The family’s belief in their patriarch has always been unquestioned, but now they glance at him sideways as he uselessly wipes the sweat from his brow and studies the hand-drawn map one more time.

And then, as the sun sinks over the desert, they see it. Something metal reflects back at them. Approaching, they find a natural staircase wedged between two huge boulders. The air cools as they descend into a box canyon. No one would find this place in a thousand years, if they didn’t know where to look. But now a blonde-haired child, dressed in white, appears to them. Her smile shows a level of dental care that presumably no longer existed in this world- certainly there is no reasonable explanation for its existence here. And yet, she is not a hallucination. She speaks:

“You seek the Oracle?”

The man is too full of joy and exhaustion to speak, but he manages a nod. The child beckons for them to follow, and they move deeper into the canyon. Ten minutes later, they emerge from a series of switchbacks into an amphitheater. Ancient sandstone walls rise two hundred feet above, closing together as they do. Only a tiny sliver of sky is admitted into the Oracle’s chamber. There is a pool of cool fresh water here, more drinkable water than the family has seen in ten years. More blonde children frolic around it, each more perfect than the last. They splash each other without a care in the world, as if it were the pool at any middle-American motor inn. The armed guards don’t phase them a bit.

About those guards: They carry compact but deadly submachine guns, and their body armor is completed by their helmets, adorned with full faceshields, liberated from riot police of one of the region’s former cities. The ancient logo has been scrubbed away, and replaced by three crudely stenciled letters: “JDC.” Some who remember the ancient books, and the man for whom the desert trees are named, say it stands for “Joshua’s Dominion under Christ.” But the fact is, no one knows but the Oracle. And on this subject he is emphatically not talking.

But on other matters, to those of sufficient faith, the Oracle does speak. For there he sits, on his pedestal, face hidden under his black robe, his tall gaunt frame hunched over on his simple throne of wood. The father is afraid, but with the eyes of his wife and children on him, he walks eight trembling steps forward onto the wide mat of palm leaves, holding in his arms their humble offering.

He kneels.