Generation A (9 page)

JULIEN

Until I discovered World of Warcraft last year, I spent my days mostly in my room, reading a series of translated Japanese illustrated novels called The Voyage of the Battleship
Yamato
. I watched animated versions on DVD—it had been renamed
Star Blazers
in foreign markets, and all the sex and subtle fascism in the Japanese version deleted by non-Japanese distributors. Apparently there are new uncensored boot legs out there. Somebody
please
post them! I
must
see them! I want them to live on forever as disembodied electrons floating through the world’s airwaves and hard drives—and there, they will join the newscast footage of me being carried out of a Winnebago in a thick blue plastic bag and into an idling biohazard truck.

Back to The Voyage of the Battleship
Yamato
 . . .

The animated version’s “
fromage
factor” was high. It was made in 1973—an animation industry low-water mark—but it seems more authentic than today’s tacky computer-generated spectacles. You can tell that the people who made it loved what they were doing, even if they were doing it with a minimum of taste and style.

The story is of a small multinational crew journeying through space in a hollowed-out asteroid in search of the planet Iscandar in the year 2199. An alien race known as the Gamilonians are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet’s surface uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground, but the radioactivity is slowly infiltrating the underground cities too.

Are you still reading? I know, but bear with me.

Earth’s space fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the Gamilonians’, and all seems lost until a mysterious space probe is retrieved on Mars. Blueprints for a faster-than-light engine are discovered, and Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud sends a message saying that she has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D (a.k.a. Cosmo DNA), that can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.

Hang on just a bit longer . . .

The inhabitants of Earth secretly convert the ruin of a WWII Japanese battleship, the
Yamato
, into a massive spaceship. Using Queen Starsha’s blueprints, they equip their new ship with a warp drive and a new, incredibly power ful weapon called a wave motion gun that fires from the bow. A tiny but intrepid crew of 114 leaves in the
Yamato
to travel to the Large Magellanic Cloud to retrieve the radiation-cleansing device. Along the way, they discover the plight of their blue-skinned adversaries: Gamilon, sister planet to Iscandar, is dying, and its leader, Lord Desslar, is trying to irradiate Earth so that his people can move there, at the expense of the barbarian humans.

And so on.

I guess that’s what all sci-fi is about in the end: societies competing for survival. Variations on George Lucas and his pasteurized mythologies. When I was still pretending to go to the Sorbonne, I took a class called Heroes and the Monomyth. The moment I started attending, I simply stopped caring about grades or anything else. I decided that knowledge comes from real life and from travel and interacting with others. So I decided to spend all of my awake time playing World of Warcraft. How amazing to see all that mythology acting itself out in real time, fuelled by genuine human sentience! Real life can be mythologically sci-fi, too. For example, my father spends five days a week at
CERN
, on the French side of Geneva, and is technically only a hundred metres away from its Large Hadron Collider. Soon he’ll be moving to offices closer to the Low Energy Antiproton Ring. If that’s not sci-fi, what is?

So anyway, on the flight to Sweden—specifically to the town of Solna, outside Stockholm, home of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control—I spoke at length about the
Yamato
and World of Warcraft to the three militarytards minding me. None of them showed any interest in either the
Yamato
or World of Warcraft—so that shows you the colourless pit we call society. I would have preferred travelling in the company of the hectoring protein specialists, but they vanished once I was loaded into the transport vehicle.

I actually fell asleep en route to Stockholm. I’d been up for thirty hours by then and couldn’t keep my eyes open as the three tards haggled over the remaining egg salad sandwich somewhere over Denmark. When I awoke, I was in my room. Watch out, IKEA: viral laboratories know your gig—stylish, neutral and beautifully constructed.

You’ve probably heard about the neutral rooms, so I won’t go on about mine. My contact voice was that of leather-skinned French pop singer/survivor Johnny Hallyday, whose tonsils had been marinating in Scotch and nicotine for half a century. It seemed kind of funny, but then, enough about me—let’s quickly learn more about Johnny Hallyday.

JULIEN PICARD PRESENTS
:

A Shameless and Cheesy

Wikipedia Dump on the

Life of Leathery French Pop Star

Johnny Hallyday

Johnny Hallyday was born Jean-Philippe Smet in Cité Malesherbes, Paris, France, to a French mother, Huguette, and a Belgian father, Léon Smet. His parents separated not long after his birth, and he was raised by his paternal aunt, Hélène Mar. His pseudonym was borrowed from his cousin’s friend Lee Halliday; it turned into Hallyday when it was misprinted on a record label. He was married on April 12, 1965, to Sylvie Vartan, a French singer. They have a son, David Hallyday, who is also a singer, born David Michael Benjamin Smet on August 14, 1966.

In those earlier years, Johnny was seen as a less than caring father. His career had taken control of his life; his focus was on his next song rather than on his family. Although Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan were France’s Golden Couple of their generation, they divorced on November 4, 1980, two days after the election of Ronald Reagan. Hallyday married a model named Babeth Etienne on December 1, 1981, in Los Angeles; the marriage lasted two months and two days.

Hallyday’s love affair with French actress Nathalie Baye began in 1982, after they met on a television program. Nathalie gave birth to their daughter, Laura, at the end of 1983. They separated in 1986.

He married Adeline Blondiau in 1990, and they divorced in 1992. In 1996, he married Laetitia Boudou. In 2004, the couple adopted a Vietnamese baby girl they named Jade.

In 2011, Hallyday’s left foot was severed at the tendon by a Komodo dragon in a petting zoo in Dallas, Texas. In 2012, he admitted to his extraterrestrial origins and was delivered to a waiting alien spacecraft in a shuttle piloted by English-billionaire-turned-rogue-supervillain Richard Branson.

To be honest, I chose Johnny Hallyday’s voice because my mother went to one of his concerts when I was small, and took me with her when the babysitter didn’t show up. It was the only time I’ve ever seen her display simian behaviour in public, along with thirty thousand housewives all dressed like cleaning ladies waiting for the Number 18 bus to Porte de la Chapelle. I mean . . . I was kind of embarrassed, but to see my mother express emotion—that was something rare.

The fact that Johnny’s still around seems unreal to me—as if he’s accidentally dropped into our world from a parallel time stream. And while I’m actually quite a good singer, the few times I tried singing a Hallyday classic in the Neutral Chamber, Johnny’s own voice shut me up: too much branded media information.

Fine.

Like the others, I endured the daily ritual of being asked contorted questions, followed by bloodletting.

If you were to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it facing the Pacific Ocean or the city of San Francisco?

Can you imagine a situation where pain might feel good?

Do meek drivers drive you crazy?

Do you like or dislike religious people?

Do you enjoy talking to attractive strangers more than unattractive strangers?

If you had to destroy one beautiful thing, what would it be?

Is recklessness sexy?

There were thousands of these queries, and they could get repetitive and baffling very quickly . . .

Do ringing telephones frighten you?

Do you shoplift in your head?

If you had Tourette’s, what would be the forbidden words you would shout out in public?

Some days I’d come away from the interrogation sessions angry, and some days I’d feel as if I’d just watched a really good movie.

Wait . . .

In the previous paragraph I used the word “days,” but we had no idea whether it was day or night. We had no time markers. I learned afterwards that I actually run on a twenty-five-hour cycle, not twenty-four. (It’s more common than you think). Zack had no cycle at all, and Diana had the most perfect twenty-four-hour cycle anyone in the research crews had ever encountered.

The cretinous scientists who stole a month of my life at least had the good manners to debrief me at the end of my quarantine. Zack and the others never received this courtesy. Their governments pretty much shipped them home in orange crates, with a bag of potato chips, one juice box and no useful information. So, yes, once again I met with the protein scientists Serge and Céline, who flew to Sweden to debrief me.

We were to meet in the canteen. I arrived early and raided the chafing trays like a Viking, thrilled to see real food again, even if it was canteen food.

I was halfway through my third portion of lasagna when they arrived.

“Ah, look, Céline—it’s young Sean Penn once more,” Serge announced.

“Serge, please don’t start with that,” I said.

Céline asked what my month had been like. I told her it had been boring—and yet at the same time not. “It was like being in a dentist’s chair. You’re not doing anything, but at the same time you
are
doing something. I wish I’d had a carton-load of Solon with me.”

The two of them made eyes at each other and went to fetch coffee. They reminded me of people who show up for dinner who’ve been having a raging fight until the moment they knock on your door.

Céline sat down with a steaming cup and said, “Julien, you must have questions. Please ask, and if we can answer them, we will.”

That sounded reasonable. I spoke between bites of food. “Why was my room so boring? Why wasn’t I allowed any books or TV or movies? And by the way, the bookcase they used wasn’t generic—it was
IKEA
, from their Billy bookcase series, and not only that, in my mind I was mentally taking it apart and putting it back together with an invisible Allen key. So much for brand neutrality!”

“Who put a recognizable brand in the room? Idiots,” Serge said to Céline, and then he turned to me. “I’m going to tell you something, and it’s going to be weird, so brace yourself.”

“Okay.”

“There are molecules that the human body produces when one enters various states of mind.”

“Like adrenaline.”

“Adrenaline is a very coarse molecule—a peasant’s molecule.” Serge found himself amusing. “The molecules we’re talking about are almost-invisible proteins that are nearly impossible to recognize and to isolate. It’s why we were always taking so much blood from you. The questions we asked you were designed to put you in specific frames of mind, and from these we tried to decode your body’s response in terms of molecule production. Books and movies, or any form of culture, would create molecules that would obscure our findings.”

I thought this over. “What does this have to do with bees and me being stung?”

“Our thinking is that the bee sensed something in you that it didn’t sense in other people, either the absence or presence of one of these molecules.”

Céline added, “We don’t think it was a virus or germ that made the bees vanish. We think it was one of these newly discovered molecules called ‘eons’ that made the bees go crazy.”

“Eons?”

“Tiny proteins we didn’t know about until recently.”

“Wait—so
I’m
the antidote to vanishing bees?”

“You flatter yourself,” Serge said. “People your age love thinking they’re special.”

“Jesus, Serge, why is it you have so much trouble with younger people?”

“Serge is just jealous,” Céline replied. “He thinks young people aren’t people yet. I take the broader view: nature gives young people . . .” she paused, “
fluid
personalities because society would otherwise never get soldiers to fight its wars. Young people are still capable of being tricked by idiotic ideas.”