Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (85 page)

“Dang, it must’ve sucked to be you, Crash,” D.H. jokes.

Gordon jokes back at him, “It kind of makes me wonder if Jimmy had something to do with that CB antenna that ripped through your scrotum.”

“That wasn’t me!” Jimmy squeaks. “I swear!”

Skip sincerely asks: “Do you think my mom fucking me was part of Project MONARCH, too?”

“It’s possible,” Lloyd answers, “except that you show none of the tics of mind control programming. If they got to you, Skip, they went deep…. But I rather suspect your nubile mother was simply horny.”

“I wish she’d been horny for me instead,” Jimmy gripes.

“What I don’t get is why our parents signed us up for this Project MONARCH deal, if they knew we’d be tortured,” says Gordon. “I mean, I know Twinker’s asshole dad was kind of blackmailed into it, but why did our
moms
do it? It’s not like they got rich or anything.”

“Believe me, your fathers were in on it, too. If anything, they’re even more culpable,” Lloyd says. “And to answer your question, the medico-military-occult complex is a source for important business contacts and esoteric knowledge, as well as torture. They also like to keep things going on an intergenerational basis, similar to the legacy admissions policy at Yale–or entrée to Skull and Bones. Ergo, Twinker’s father was likely abused in one of their black-ops programs as a child (while also reaping certain benefits), and therefore he thinks it’s perfectly fine to abuse his own children, and so on.”

“My dad has some pretty fucked-up stories from when he was a kid, that’s for sure,” says Jimmy.

“I know those stories first-hand,” Lloyd says. “I was there.”

“So how come they didn’t go after
you?”
Gordon asks.

“Who’s to say they didn’t?” Lloyd responds. “What you have to understand is that mind control programming is still an imperfect science. The CIA would love to be able to create one of these so-called ‘Manchurian Candidates’ in less than an hour–and they’re closer to that goal than ever–but with some people it just doesn’t take.”

“What makes you so fucking special?” Jimmy asks.

“I’m far from special,” Lloyd says. “However, I would humbly suggest that the level of a person’s spiritual knowledge and attainments is the ultimate deciding factor in a mind control program’s outcome. The higher you can fly on the astral plane, the less likely they are to ensnare you. And those higher spiritual levels are open to everyone.”

“So being able to meditate and do lucid dreaming would help, right?”

“Yes, Gordon, those skills are absolutely essential. You, of all people, should know…” Lloyd says. “Remote viewing, precognition, telekinesis–all of those abilities depend on your astral body being able to shuttle between the Explicate and the Implicate Order. There’s a continuum between our material realm and the astral realm, which lies just beyond the Implicate Order. Within that continuum, astral light phases into a semi-materialized quantum energy field–or the Implicate Order–and then into the Explicate Order’s seemingly solid, three-dimensional forms. Astral light is the foundation of the Implicate Order, the working stuff of the One Mind. Unlike electromagnetic light, it’s completely non-local–similar in concept to Ingo Swann’s Matrix–so the entire universe is holographically folded within it at each and every point.”

“I don’t get it,” says Skip. “Can you put that in plain English?”

“Yeah,” says D.H., “you might as well be speaking in tongues.”

“Let me come at it from another angle then….” Lloyd tries again: “Astral light resides in ideal forms emanating from the One Mind–the universal consciousness we all share with every speck of matter in the universe, which some people call God. You might think of astral light as the blueprint for the universe, a blueprint capable of being changed by directed thought from within the One Mind. It’s really no different than your astral body during lucid dreaming, which serves as a blueprint for
you
–but it’s the unbounded idea of you, with your mind transcendent and at play in the
Bardo.
As opposed the space-and-time-constrained physical you, with a brain that’s just three pounds of electrified pâté inside your skull.”

“Yum!”
says D.H..

“You lost me again,” says Skip, sounding exasperated.

“Maybe I can help,” Gordon says. “Tell me if this is right, Lloyd…. Sometimes, during a lucid dream, I’ll see things that I’m told will happen three or four days in the future. When those things happen in real life, just like I was shown in my dream, I’m always blown away. But maybe that happens because my astral body is non-local, so it can slip off our normal space-time track and go cruising around eternity–or what Lloyd is calling the One Mind’s holographic blueprint–where everything that’s going to happen has already happened. The trick, for me, is remembering it and bringing it back.”

“That’s exactly right,” Lloyd beams, “although there are countless possibilities beyond just knowing the future.”

“Yeah, but at least
that
I can understand,” Skip says, triumphant and relieved. “That’s pretty cool. Just think if you could play the stock market that way.”

“I know for a fact that some men do,” Lloyd says. “We ponder over the inequities of wealth distribution in this world… well, there’s one of the reasons for it.”

“But I thought you had to be on a high spiritual level to do this astral travel stuff. Like Gandhi or something,” D.H. quibbles.

“The acquisition of wealth isn’t intrinsically evil. It depends on your motives for acquiring it and what you actually do with it. Having said that, there’s also the Left-Hand Path of spiritual attainment–the path that Aleister Crowley and others of his ilk have chosen to follow. It’s the ‘Dark Side of the Force,’ so to speak.”

“Like what they taught us in Project MONARCH,” says Gordon, as a terrible understanding dawns in him.

Lloyd gives him a sad smile. “It’s hard to reconcile the term ‘psychic killer’ with the image of an airy-fairy, sandal-wearing bodhisattva, isn’t it?”

“Oh fuck….”

“You’ve been bad, Gordon,” Jimmy razzes him. “
Real
bad.”

“
¡Silencio!
” Lloyd shouts. He turns in his seat and swats Jimmy across the top of his unruly brown hair. Surprised but unhurt, Jimmy slouches lower in the backseat, muttering to himself.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Lloyd tries to reassure Gordon. “Nothing that you weren’t unknowingly programmed to do, that is…. You, my friend, are the weapon, and it’s not the weapon that does the killing–it’s the hard heart that pulls the trigger.”

“Now you’re
really
freaking me the fuck out,” says Gordon. He’s pretty sure he’s hyperventilating.

“What the hell did he do?” Skip whispers. D.H. just shrugs his shoulders while Jimmy grumbles: “I can’t tell you.”

“The CIA has been searching for ways to create a psychic killer since at least the early fifties, when Andrija Puharich came on the scene. Think of how convenient a psychic killer would have been when they were trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. That whole Bay of Pigs fiasco could have been avoided.”

“Operation ZAPATA!” D.H. says with a Zorro-like flourish, recalling the CIA’s codename for the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

“A nod to the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company,” Lloyd relates, “owned by our illustrious Vice President, George H.W. Bush. It was Bush who thoughtfully supplied an offshore oil platform for use as a staging area during that botched operation, some forty miles north of Cuba. And it was an operations chief at the CIA’s JM/WAVE Miami station, David Sanchez Morales, who’d trained Operation ZAPATA’s Cuban exiles to run the sabotage raids on Castro–only to watch them get slaughtered after President Kennedy curtailed their air support at the last-minute. I’m talking about
the same
David Morales who was later implicated in the assassinations of both Kennedys, and who conveniently died just a few weeks before he was scheduled to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Cubans knew him as
El Gordo
–The Fat One–and he’d been properly feared as the CIA’s top assassin in Latin America. For all we know, he may have had that same role in the good old U.S. of A as well.”

“You’re just full of fun facts, aren’t you?” Gordon says, feeling sullen now that the fear Lloyd had put into him is subsiding.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to get sidetracked…” Lloyd says, “although I find it quite fascinating that a few FBI memos are floating around that make note of George Bush being in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot. Mind control programming was in its gangly adolescence back then. The CIA could manage a patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald, but it would be several more years before they were confident enough to deploy an amnesiac mind-controlled shooter like Sirhan Sirhan–and the creation of full-blown psychic killers takes us right up to the present day.”

“You keep telling me that I’m one, but I don’t even know what a psychic killer does, really,” Gordon complains. “I wish someone would clue me in.”

“A psychic killer can pinpoint any human target, anywhere in the world, through remote viewing, and then psychically manipulate that target’s mental, emotional, and/or physical health, through remote influencing.”

“So I can supposedly kill people by remote influencing.”

“In theory, yes,” Lloyd says. “In practice, it’s not quite that simple. Let’s say, for example, you were assigned to kill the Ayatollah Khomeini–or his CIA-sponsored rival, Saddam Hussein–in a bid to end the current Iran-Iraq War. First off, it’s one of your alters that has been programmed as a psychic killer, not your core personality–the
you
that I’m talking to–so they’d have to bring you in or give you a trigger command to reboot you, so to speak…. Then they’d likely put you in an isolation tank so you could enter a deep state of meditation. Remote viewing is much the same as astral travel during a lucid dream–it’s easily interrupted–so they’d want to keep you tucked away.”

“Would they give him drugs?” D.H. asks. “Like John Lilly with his LSD?”

“It depends on the individual, but there
are
certain drugs that enhance psychic abilities, as we’ve already established. So yes, Gordon could be tripping his brains out while he’s in there looking for Saddam Hussein.”

“Or Khomeini,” Jimmy says, rooting for Iraq.

“Or Khomeini…. Once Gordon has locked onto his target, he’ll have no choice but to carry out the assassination plan. He might have been commanded to remotely rupture the aorta of Khomeini’s heart, for instance. But here’s the rub: Whatever damage Gordon inflicts, the same damage will also afflict him. It’s sort of spiritual payback–
Instant Karma
, in the words of John Lennon–and there’s no getting around it. Which would be fine if the CIA considered psychic killers dispensable, but people with those abilities are extremely hard to find and even harder to mind-control, so the actual psychic killers are quite rare. There’s fewer than a dozen, that I know of, in the entire world.”

“Way to go, Gordon,” D.H. congratulates him. “That’s like getting a perfect 1600 on your SATs.”

“What they’ve come up with instead,” Lloyd continues, “is a roundabout way of killing the target without also killing the psychic killer. They find a physical weakness in the target’s body that the psychic killer’s body can withstand. In Gordon’s case, since he already has asthma, he knows and can project all of the symptoms leading up to a life-threatening asthma attack. So what his handlers do is stock up on asthma medication and then they put Gordon into an isolation tank with the post-hypnotic command to give the Ayatollah an absolutely lung-crushing case of bronchial spasms. After Gordon executes that command and is fished out of the tank, he’ll be barely breathing–but his team will instantly provide him with the right medicine and put him on life support, if necessary. Meanwhile, over in Iran, the old Ayatollah might not be so lucky.”

“
Vewy twicky
…” says D.H., pulling on an invisible mustache and sounding like Charlie Chan–or their absent friend, Hideous Nakamatsu.

“I’m not sure if this technique has ever been successfully deployed against human beings,” Lloyd says, “but I
do
know for a fact that it’s been used with resounding success against extraterrestrials.”

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me!” Gordon says. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but he’s appalled–and
embarrassed
. “I’ve been giving aliens asthma attacks?”

“There’s a reason why Area 51 is nicknamed ‘Dreamland,’” Lloyd hints, “and it’s more subtle than you might at first think. It has to do with the recovered alien technology they’re studying there. They get that alien technology these days by using psychic killers to murder or incapacitate the alien pilots of UFOs.”

“I’d never do that,” Gordon protests. “That’s just fucked up and wrong.”

“No way! What are you saying, Crash? That’s so
cool!”
Jimmy laughs.

“Screw those Nude Dudes on the Moon!” Skip hoots.

“Wheeze, you fuckin’ bug-eyed muthafucka! Wheeze!”
D.H. pantomimes Gordon’s less-than-heroic-looking psychic efforts on behalf of the CIA.

“We tend to have the home court advantage when it comes to alien encounters,” Lloyd says. “That’s why UFOs rarely ever fully materialize and leave behind physical evidence. Their occupants have mastered a non-local technology that interfaces with consciousness and enables them to travel up and down the astral-material continuum that I was telling you about earlier. Which explains why UFOs are sometimes caught on radar traveling at outrageous speeds and then–
bing!
–they come to a full stop and head off at a 90-degree angle. The G-forces at work during that sort of stunt would destroy any
physical
aircraft and its passengers, but it’s entirely possible for a UFO in astral, or semi-materialized form. They’re more like a holographic projection in that state–or like figures in a lucid dream–and that’s where they like to stay while they’re visiting Earth. It’s safer for them there. Or at least it was until the psychic warriors like Gordon came along.”

Doing a breathy Scarlett O’Hara, Skip sighs,
“My hero!”