Planet Fever (17 page)

The words
Marcel “the Champ”
boomeranged into my head. Flashbacks spun like a cyclone until I had a clear memory of him kicking my ass in chess during the days in Moroni’s art camp. I was glad he was still doing his thing, and grateful that my memory was defogging.

EZ Buck ushered me to the base of one of the ski mountains and into the
Tesla Express
gondola. We rode up in comfort, the cables humming their pleasant pitch. Buck reached into his pocket and pulled out a small tin, tapped a pinch of fine ruddy powder onto the web of his thumb/forefinger, pressed in his right nostril and snorted the contents off. His eyes bugged out and he chortled a slight cough or sneeze and let out a “Whooow…. Damn….” He held out the tin. “Snuff?”

“Sure.” I snorted up a hefty pinch and was immediately impacted with a punch in the nose by a fist composed of fine antique-store dust. My eyes watered up; I didn’t know whether to sneeze, cough, gag, breathe or wretch. My head floated like hot-air balloon. I grabbed hold of the railing and collected myself.

Buck was doubled-over in laughter as I regained my composure and the gondola reached the peak of the mountain.

WE STEPPED
out of the gondola and into a breathtaking real-life 360-degree mural of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The deep and dense blue sky let you know you were a few miles closer to outer space. The air—that is, the air that did reach the lungs—had an untainted, crisp immediacy to it.

Lightheaded from both the snuff and the lessened oxygen density, my heart pumped double-time to get whatever oxygen available through to the body.

“Wow….” That’s all I mustered up.

Blue, green, brown and white: a vast expanse of sky and earth fanned out before me and I understood the reason why some adventurous people spent their lives in attempts to get to the tops of giant mountains. For them, and I suppose Nimrod—the luminary chieftain behind the Tower of Babel—it was to get a first-hand glimpse into “the great beyond.” Indeed, that was one reason why I once had wanted to become an astronaut. For the view.

We were at only a fraction of the height of Mount Everest and I was agog.

“Majestic, eh? That’s what it’s all about,” EZ Buck said.

“Yeah….”

“Let’s go see the boss.” EZ nodded for me to follow him and we walked toward an Alpine ski-lodge.

We walked through the main entrance of
The Please Yourself for the Sake of Others Film Institute
and EZ gave me the lowdown on the place. It was once the marquee ski-lodge, restaurant and hotel of the resort. Large, sturdy and comfortable, it could house one hundred and twenty people and feed up to three hundred. Fillono had converted many of the lodging quarters into classrooms, film and sound editing suites, writing and production rooms and small film-studio spaces, as well as quarters for visiting artists and luminaries. He’d made a miniature 1940s Hollywood studio lot within a ski-lodge on the top of a mountain.

Brilliant.

The place was teeming with activity. Students with vintage wind-up cameras swarmed about like flies, filming us from all possible angles as EZ and I strolled upstairs through a hallway to a door simply marked
Director
.

EZ knocked and the cameras purred.

“Come-a-in,” Fillono’s muffled voice invited. I’d forgotten that he tended to lyrically add an “a” between words with his accent.

Fillono, draped in a tangle of film, examined a strip of 16mm film in the window light as we entered.

“Hey boss. We got a special guest here. Calls his self Bikaver.”

Fillono set the filmstrip on the flatbed-editing machine, removed the film from around his person and tossed it into a bin.

“Bikaver….” he approached me and adjusted his spectacles. He got right up into my face and examined it. “Eddee! My friend! I-a-remember now!” Fillono bear-hugged me and kissed each cheek. “You are here—I am happy!”

He stepped back to look me up and down. “You look-a-tired. No? Tell me, please—is life wearing you out?”

“Nice to see you too, Fred. Life is … why I am here.”

“Hey, you tell me over-a-cappuccino.” He turned to EZ. “You too, my friend. I still owe you from our last-a-match.”

EZ grinned. “You got to quit betting me.”

“Signore Buck is very good ping pong player…. He must-a-give me chance to get my honor back.”

“I’m tellin’ you, Boss, you ain’t gonna beat me. It’s a curse, like Lancelot of the Lake; I can’t be beaten,” EZ said.

“I have a plan. I will get you very drunk, then invite you to-a-play, and I will then beat you.”

“Uh-huh. Then wall me into a cellar like some devious Edgar Allen Poe shit. Let’s go grub.”

WHILE FILLONO
put away his film stuff, he gave a quick rundown of the resort in general. Since the place had been a ski-resort, chairlifts were the key transportation around the mountains (the entire resort encapsulated three mountains total). More chairlifts were built at ground level, to get from one end of town to the other, with intermediary boarding and un-boarding points in between.

At the base and at the top of two of the mountains there were lodges, restaurants and little recreation areas and cafes. The third mountain was leased by the military as a training facility.

In the winter the place
did
operate as a ski-resort, albeit a quasi-private resort that cost quite a penny to stay at, so it attracted pretty much only those of the super-class who liked their skiing sans hoi-poloi. This substantial income, along with Military leases, sales from artworks, donations and a self-contained agrarian-based “barter” economy made it possible for Fillono to maintain the operational costs of the place.

Almost everything had solar panels on it. Bicycles—both stationary and regular—had dynamos rigged onto them to charge small battery cells, which would be used to power small devices like Walkmans, lamps, or space heaters. Most people had to charge their own batteries, so they would ride either a regular or stationary bicycle every day to at least “keep the lights going.” Those more athletically inclined, or people that simply loved riding bikes, would offer themselves as “chargers.” They’d barter their “charging” services to people who didn’t want, like, or were physically unable to do so on a regular basis.

Roller-skates, roller-blades, skateboards, scooters, and the occasional unicycle were used and an intricate alpine-slide network crisscrossed down the three mountains like a mini road system. Paragliders and hot-air balloons were also in vogue.

Every square inch of the property was canvassed by cameras operating 24/7, the signals funneling into a centralized broadcasting center, where an array of feeds could be accessed on any given TV set at any time within the resort town of Whynot. Each and every citizen, guest and patron had their very own “channel” so anyone could watch what anyone else was doing at any time.

Fillono grabbed a giant cable TV remote and snapped on the TV set. “That’s-a-what the watch is for,” he said, pointing to my wrist.

On the screen, a catalogue of numbers next to names of people appeared, much like the front-door buzzer at a big apartment building, but in the form of a cable TV guide.

“Ahh, Eddie—what channel are you?”

“Check the timepiece,” EZ nodded at me, tapping his wrist.

I examined the calculator-like watch. A tiny button below the LED display read
Watch This!

I pressed it. The LED lit up. “EB–11097,” I read the values aloud.

“That’s in the ‘Guest’ part of the guide, boss,” EZ informed Fillono.

Fillono scrolled through pages of names and numbers until he got to my initials, followed by 11097. “Aha!” He pressed enter on the remote.

My watch beeped a few times. On Fillono’s TV screen, some white noise cut in followed by lines of static, and then—there I was—watching myself watching myself on the tube. The picture was black and white, and the frame was cut into four squares, each square showing a different camera angle. It looked exactly like the surveillance-camera monitor from a gas station I had worked at during college.

The watch was a tracker device, always to be worn within resort limits. The only places no cameras existed were bathroom stalls and showers.

“We want-a-to test 99.99% transparent society. If everyone they have
access
to what anyone else is doing at any time, nobody will do anything that-a-would be considered bad, or criminal, or-a-wrong. If people they want to ‘conspire’ and do something in the bathroom, everyone will know they were doing
something
together there, so they are less likely to do anything that would be….”

“Nefarious,” EZ finished Fillono’s sentence. “Anyone can scope everyone else—so everyone’s more chill. And nobody is outside this system. The mayor, the police, right down to the town drunk, all got their own channels. We are all equal, and nothing is done in secret.”

I wondered if this were the great equalizer—everyone is equal because everyone had access to everyone else’s whereabouts and activities. It was like
1984
, but
everyone
was “Big Brother” so nobody could hold an advantage over anyone else. Simple and elegant
transparency
on a rudimentary level.

“Have you done any tests? Maybe actually conspire to do something and see what happens?” I asked.

“Of course!” Fillono blurted. “We did a fake meeting where-a-we talked about taking over the town slowly by drugging the people with-a-the water and food supply, making them more and more like dumb zombie people, and then-a-using them for slave labor so we could a make lots of money.”

“And?”

“And….” EZ shook his head “…nobody gave a damn. Some people that watched thought it was a put-on, which it was, while a few tried warning everybody else, but nobody believed them, even when they saw the replayed footage.”

“People are-a-more sophisticated, Eddie, and yet they are-a-naive. They didn’t-a-think it was-a-real because they couldn’t believe nice
people similar to themselves-
a
-
could, or-a-would do a dastardly thing like that. So we-a-poisoned the water supply and now use everyone as slave labor!” Fillono winked into one of the cameras and smiled.

EZ shook his head and chuckled.

I stared at my own stunned amazement on the TV screen.