The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (30 page)

Monsoon was lying on the bed, sipping vodka and congratulating himself on the success of his ploy. Hyatt’s attitude toward him had improved dramatically since he had introduced his ace in the hole—or rather, since he had introduced Hyatt to Ace’s hole. That wasn’t to suggest Hyatt was planning on asking Monsoon to be the best man at his wedding anytime soon, but the relationship had at least thawed from frigid to temperate, and they were on conversational if not exactly best-buddy terms. It was a start.

In the bedroom the TV was on. Hyatt was upstairs, goggle-eyed, following Ace around as if her perfume held him in an actual physical embrace like some impenetrable force field of desire. Monsoon was idly flicking through back issues of Playboy and Penthouse, drinking from a bottle of Dead Python ninety-proof rum, and intermittently glancing at the TV. Suddenly he stopped. The magazines fell to the floor. He began staring intently at the TV screen, as if mesmerized, as if he were watching the most fascinating program he had ever seen. His face held an expression of puzzled bewilderment as he mentally struggled to explain to himself what he was seeing.

“
Hey, Hyatt,” he shouted, finally. “You seen this?”

Hyatt’s voice was distant, disinterested, and distracted. “Yeah, yeah.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. I’ve seen it a hundred fucking times. Who hasn’t?”

“
But look.”

“
Look what, dillwad? Leave me alone.”

“
It’s not Harrison Ford. It’s George Clooney.”

“
Yeah, so?”

“
Look. It’s the same movie. Exactly the fucking same. Except it’s not Harrison Ford. It’s George fucking Clooney.”

“
What’s the fucking difference? Quit bugging me. Ace and I are busy.”

Monsoon looked back at the screen. His bottle of Dead Python crashed to the floor and splintered against the stained wood. His jaw dropped open. It was definitely the original movie. It was definitely
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. The same in every detail…except Indiana Jones wasn’t Harrison Ford. Indiana Jones was George Clooney. The slot machine that was permanently installed in the back of Monsoon Parker’s brain hit the jackpot. He heard the sweet symphony of coins rattling into the tray and overflowing onto the carpet.

“
Where did you get this? Is it a DVD?”

“
Oh. No. That’s the R3. Have you been fucking around with it?”

Monsoon felt underneath him. The Japanese egg-looking deal was wedged behind him.

“
If you mean that egg-looking whatchamacallit, I think I sat on it. Hey, kid. Get your snot nose out of her beaver for a second and come down here, will ya?”

Hyatt perched at the top of the stairwell and stuck his head into the room. “You’re starting to piss me off, cuntrocket.”

“
Where did you get this fucking movie?”

“
I made it.”

Monsoon had to swallow hard, to avoid being choked by his own Adam’s apple. “Come again, son?”

“
I made it. Or, that is to say, I made the device that made the movie. The R3.”

“
The what? What the fuck is an R3? Like an MP3, you mean?”

“
No, you fucking gibbon. R3 stands for Remote Role Reversal. Comparing the R3 to an MP3 is like comparing your brain to my ass. It’s like making a comparison between a laptop and an abacus, a rocket and a fucking bicycle.”

“
You mean this?” Monsoon held up the elliptical device.

Hyatt assumed the facial expression that he reserved for especially insufferable cretins. “Yeah. You must have initiated the sequence when you sat on it. Hold it in both hands and squeeze it gently, like a tit.”

Monsoon did as instructed. The egg whined like a mosquito and vibrated. Monsoon would have dropped it, except he was too fascinated to be afraid. The outer shell became transparent. Inside was what appeared to be a lens at one end, and a small, illuminated electric blue button at the other. Halfway down one edge was a tiny microphone grill.

“
So what does it do?”

Hyatt took a deep, exasperated breath. “Basically, it can take any movie, and substitute any one of the actors for someone else. The film stays exactly the same, but the actors change.”

“
You have got to be shitting me. How does it work?”

“
Point the lens at the screen, at the actor that you want to replace. Press the blue button, and hold it down. Then just say the name of the actor that you want to exchange for the one who’s in the original. The device has a database, so it has to be somebody who’s actually been in a movie or on TV before.”

Monsoon aimed the egg at George Clooney and pressed the button. George got zapped by a hair-thin green pulsating light beam. Monsoon bent his head to the microphone. “Sean Connery,” he said.

A bright red light engulfed the screen. It darkened, becoming first purple, then black. A second later, the movie started again, just where it had left off. But now, Indiana Jones was being played by Sean Connery.

Monsoon was compelled to sit down. All the strength had gone from his legs, and he felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He kept looking from the screen to Hyatt and back again, jerking his neck as if there was something wrong with it. Monsoon exhaled, a long, protracted, whistling breath. He forced himself to say, “And this will work with anyone?”

“
Sure.”

“
Any movie? Any actor?”

“
As long as they’re in the database, yeah.”

“
So, theoretically, I could watch
Deep Throat
, say, with Jessica Alba, for example?”

“
No problem.”

Suddenly, Monsoon could not hear. He could not hear because of the roaring in his ears. It was the sound in his mind. The sound of his private Lear Jet, landing on his private island, filled with whisky and hookers.

“
So, er, how many of these things did you make?”

“
One.”

“
Let me rephrase that. So how many are you
going
to make?”

“
It depends on the program.”

“
The TV program?”

“
No, you moron. The computer program. If it wants to reproduce itself or not. If it wants to replicate or transform. It decides. All I can do is suggest. It’s a meme.”

“
Meme. Who’s she?”

“
Not
she
, idiot,
it
. A meme. A unit of information. A cultural sequence. A piece of intellectual property, valid in all languages, that gains meaning and significance as it grows, until it becomes an entity in itself. An idea that proliferates, a self-replicating essence that functions as a universal codex, intelligible to every human being on the planet, a mirror that reflects itself
ad infinitum
, that cross-pollinates until it generates a whole new school of thought, discrete and isolate and entire unto itself. Get it?”

“
Er. Not really.”

“
It exists only in the intellect. In our collective intellect. There it flourishes and evolves like a neuron synapse garden, sending out tendrils and shoots that themselves metamorphosize into the next generation of ideas. Understand?”

“
Er. No.”

“
Fuck me. Listen, dipshit. The R3 is everywhere and nowhere. It doesn’t exist and yet it is universal. It is in the ether. In space. In time. It floats and swirls in the void. That egg that you have is just a piece of fucking plastic. It’s like a magnet or a conduit. It attracts R3 and channels it.”

“
Er. Right. I see.”

“
You don’t fucking see, you retard. R3
evolves
. It e-fucking-volves! It’s an independent algorithm. How it works today is not how it works tomorrow. Get the picture?”

“
Son, not only do I not get the picture, I don’t even get the fucking camera. What the hell are you talking about?”

“
I am talking about controlling the ghosts, putting the genie back in the bottle, turning back the tide and making the sun set in the East. Catching a falling star and putting it in your fucking pocket.”

“
Very poetic. But how does that work in English?”

“
Okay…let me put this in terms that even an evolutionary blind alley such as yourself might understand. Imagine a baseball park.”

“
Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. I know a shitload about baseball.”

“
Why does that not surprise me? Okay, then. Get this. One throws to two. Two throws to three. Three throws to four, and four throws to home base. All the while, the catcher is trying to intercept, except he can’t because he doesn’t have a glove. R3 is like the ball. It’s out there—a scrambled coded signal, bouncing from one satellite to another, forever and for all eternity, or until the Big Bang becomes the Big Crunch and we all contract and disappear up our own assholes. And all the time, the catcher is trying to catch the ball, but he can’t.”

“
So what are you saying?”

“
What I’m saying, Einstein, is that I have the fucking glove. I know how to catch the ball.”

“
I still don’t get it.”

“
You need branes.”

“
You’re telling me.”

“
No, not brains, shitferbrains,
branes
. B-R-A-N-E-S. It’s string theory. Branes are objects propagate in space-time according to the theories of quantum mechanics. That’s how it works. It’s the anti-zero. It exists because it doesn’t exist. It’s the opposite of entropy, the impulse toward chaos. It’s the impulse toward organization. The unified theory. It’s the Chameleon Fallacy.

“
The which fallacy now? I’m getting my fallacies a little tangled up here.”

“
The Chameleon Fallacy. It’s about perception, man. Fucking
perception
. It’s
the
theory of perception. The act of observation that alters the behavior not only of the object observed but also of the observer. It’s a kind of mass hypnosis by common agreement. The chameleon never changes color—it gets us to believe it has changed color, to see it as it wants us to see it. We see what it wants us to see, because we all
agree
that’s what we see. It gets us all to agree that we see what we see. It’s like money. It only has value if we all agree it has value, otherwise it’s just pieces of paper. The Chameleon Fallacy is the perfect equation, divine in its purity. It’s the emperor’s new suit of clothes, expressed as an equation, but its very perfection is its fatal flaw.

“
Like a diamond, you mean?”

“
Something like that. Like the most perfect diamond, a sub-molecular examination will reveal a flaw. Its flaw
is
its perfection. It mathematically disproves its own existence. Furthermore, it denies all evidence of its ever having existed.”

“
So what happens then?”

“
It ceases to exist. It disappears.”

“
So what you’re saying is that these gizmos stop working. That they just vanish?”

“
More or less.”

“
So how long does that take?”

“
About a week. But by then, it’ll be someone else’s problem.”

Chapter 11