CHAPTER 7
The History of Johnny Guitar
They were both right in different aspects. The Radio Cygnus building was indeed luxurious and made of shiny things, however it was also heavily guarded and annoyingly bureaucratic. It was clear we were going to have to sneak in.
“Here, hold your breath,” Wilx said as he scanned us with a bizarre looking scanning device.
“What are you doing?” I asked, alarmed.
“I'm going to encase us in Illusion Bubbles,” he replied. “The effect can crush your lungs if you're mid-breath when the barrier seals.”
“Illusion Bubbles?” I asked, before holding my breath.
“You will appear to everyone who sees you as whatever I program you to look like. In this case I have all of us looking like suit-wearing Radio Cygnus executives.”
“This whole time you've had a device that can make us look like anyone... and you're just now producing it?” I started. “Do you have any idea how often this would have come in handy? That whole long bit with us looking for the Beard of Broog and impersonating the Kulmoog Commander Flook would have been totally moot. We could have just disguised ourselves as Flook at any time.”
“I lost this device years ago. I only just found it when I was emptying out all my pockets on Hroon, and it hasn't been needed since then.”
“Oh.”
We looked like a regular group of executives. The barrier of the bubble was visible from within, blurring everything beyond it into a wavy mirage. To myself I still looked normal, but when I looked at Rip or Wilx I saw the illusion.
“Alright, let's do this,” said Wilx as we approached the front door. “Don't attract unnecessary attention.”
The lobby of Radio Cygnus was a vast, brightly-lit room, perpetually clean, dazzlingly shiny, mostly empty except for a marble desk lining one of the walls with a receptionist or two hovering about every few hundred meters, while generally every few meters a squadron of heavily armed guards lurked menacingly. The ratio of receptionist to armed guard was disturbingly off-kilter and instantly tuned one into the fact that Radio Cygnus is not a cool place. They were clearly not interested in guiding you or answering your questions, but did look adept at getting you off the property as soon as possible. The intimidating appearance of each of the guards was so similar that it was obvious they were merely clones of the single perfect warrior.
We figured that asking one of the scant receptionists for directions was a bad idea, as only outsiders would need directions. We jumped on the first elevator.
“Do we know where we're going?” I said as I looked at the number-pad. “There are more than two thousand floors!”
“No idea,” replied Wilx.
“Floor 952,” stated Rip. “It's gotta be.”
“How do you know that's the right floor?” I asked.
“Deus Ex Machina?” suggested Wilx.
“It's a number I saw flash before my eyes after I drank the Jupiter atmosphere.”
“I thought you didn't remember anything?” asked Wilx.
“This just came back to me. I remembered the part I was supposed to remember.”
“It's worth a try,” I said. At times I suspected some of Rip's mad prophecies were legitimate and not being given the proper chance to prove themselves as such.
Wilx punched the button for the 952nd floor. We were rocketed upwards at an amazing speed.
“This is even faster than the floating elevator from our old Obotron,” remarked Wilx.
“If you jump just as the elevator is stopping you can experience a moment of weightlessness,” said Rip, as he did just that. He winced and clutched at his abdomen. “I think I just displaced one of my stomachs.”
The elevator doors opened. Immediately we heard the voice of Johnny Guitar.
“Excellent,” said Wilx.
“I've always wanted to meet Johnny Guitar!” said Rip as he bounded into the room like a starstruck child. “They say you aren't anybody until you've met Johnny Guitar!”
“Ssh,” said Wilx.
We wandered around the rooms of floor 952. There appeared to be no one at all.
“Where is he?” asked Rip. “I hear him!”
“We could easily just be hearing a radio. Did you think of that?” asked Wilx.
“He's here, I can sense it.”
“What are all these tapes?” I asked, noticing that every room on this floor was filled to the roof with mini-cassette tapes.
We looked at the tapes. They were all recordings of past Johnny Guitar shows.
“This must be the legendary archives,” said Rip. “Johnny has broadcast more hours than anyone.”
We continued looking for the source of Johnny Guitar's voice amongst the perplexing multitudes of tapes.
“We must have the wrong floor,” said Wilx.
“Let's look for a little longer before we move on,” said Rip.
“What are all these mechanical tracks running along the floors, walls and roof?” I asked. There were strange things going on that were obvious and yet still eluded us.
“I'm not sure,” said Wilx.
“Over there!” I shouted. “Something moved along the tracks!”
“Where?” asked Rip.
“There! It happened again!”
We all began to catch glimpses of small robots zipping along the tracks.
“They look like tiny train-carts,” I said. “And they're all filled with tapes.”
“The archivists are robotic,” said Rip. “They must exist in a constant state of mixing and categorizing.”
Suddenly an intricate robotic arm passed through the room.
“Look at that hand-thing!” said Rip. “It grabbed one of the tapes. Let's follow it!”
We ran as fast as we could. We finally reached an uninhabited sound-booth. A door opened and the robotic arm went inside. We quickly followed before the door closed.
An old-fashioned cassette player was positioned in the middle of the booth. The robotic arm took out the current tape and placed in the new one.
“This must be like a 24-hour Best-Of mix that plays in the archives as an interesting attraction,” said Rip.
“No, I don't think so,” said Wilx. “This is the live radio feed.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rip, even though it was painfully obvious.
“Isn't it painfully obvious,” I said. “There is no Johnny Guitar, except on tape.”
“No, that can't be true!” argued Rip. “Johnny Guitar is one of my heroes!”
“This is indeed very shocking news,” stated Wilx solemnly.
If space/time-travelers didn't have such difficulty in knowing which current events are actually current, then many radio-listeners would have figured out years ago that Johnny Guitar's news updates are always ludicrously random and out-of-date.
“So you figured out our secret,” said the funny little scary man who suddenly materialized beside us. The jolt of his appearance was enough to shock Rip's displaced stomach back into proper positioning.
“Who are you?” asked Wilx.
“I am Chancellor Groomfleg. I own this Radio station.”
“What's going on here?” demanded Rip. “What have you done with Johnny Guitar?”
“Johnny Guitar died several centuries ago. Sit down, I'll explain everything.”
The Chancellor went into great detail about the history of Johnny Guitar.
It went like this:
Groomfleg's ancient ancestors built for themselves a small-time radio station. They hadn't expected to make much with it. Johnny Guitar was hired simply because he was willing to work early in the morning at half the price. The Groomfleg's were unaware they had hired the greatest Radio DJ who would ever grace the microphone. Johnny's amusing freestyle wit paired with perfect articulation projected so powerfully and charismatically that he made you believe you'd be missing out on the greatest moments in life when you weren't listening to the show. Ov
ernight he became the most popular program anywhere in space. Advertisement prices during Johnny's show went for millions per second. It was obvious he should be the only show on the station. Out of greediness to have Johnny on air as much as possible, he was bribed with exorbitant amounts of money to broadcast all day and all night; despite the irreversible havoc wreaked on his health and mental state by such a perpetually rigorous schedule. He often suffered extreme mental breakdowns caused by a denial of bathroom breaks and a total lack of sleep, going into maniacal, improvisatory rants for hours at a time while popping speed capsules like one-cent candies and banging objects against the wall in what he thought was musical rhythm but was actually a deafening cacophonous racket. He was frequently the subject of so many neighborhood noise complaints that eventually there were only two choices: end the Johnny Guitar show, or demolish every house within earshot of the station. Someone then suggested a third option, remove Johnny's ability to make noise by removing all items from the sound-booth. Without dishes or guitars or any other object to hurl, Johnny's percussive participation was limited to the much less noisy banging of his fists against the wall, which was only audible within a few surrounding floors of the building. Some listeners considered these drug-infused episodes to be his most organically inspired moments of broadcasting, a fascinating anarchic view into the twisted depths of a genius mind, while others said the show had grown intolerable, just another sad case of a great talent having been usurped and burned out too quickly by greed-dominated corporations. Soon enough, Johnny Guitar died of an overdose. Radio Cygnus was intensely fearful of the bankrupting backlash his death would cause, for at this point the entirety of their business was based on Johnny. They could never hope to replace him. A cover-up was essential. His spent corpse was quietly and briskly taken from the sound-booth and cremated in the basement furnace. Only a small handful of top executives were aware of his death. They quickly set in motion a plan to make sure Johnny Guitar never really stopped broadcasting. For a while bits of old tapes of Johnny's show were spliced together to create the illusion of a new show, however it was apparent this would not fool everyone forever. A top-secret organization of brilliant scientists and inventors were then employed to invent a translator-machine that not only replicated the voice of Johnny Guitar, but captured his essence and originality as well. After countless hours of analyzing the tapes of Johnny's voice, they finally perfected a machine in which any person could say anything into a microphone and it would be altered into sounding like a brand-new Johnny Guitar broadcast. With this machine you could literally monotonously read from a dull book about tax audits and it would be translated into an exciting new album review by Johnny. Most of the tapes in the archive were not even original Johnny broadcasts, but rather these fake recordings. Johnny Guitar, whom everyone assumes is immortal, has been heard broadcasting on Radio Cygnus for about 426 years, despite the fact that he died at the tender age of 32.
“And all these robots,” concluded Groomfleg, “are perpetually sifting through the tapes, always perfecting the translation machine.”
We sat in stunned silence before Wilx remembered our original intent for being here.
“That's an interesting story,” he said to Groomfleg. “Now I apologize for doing this,” he added as he shot him in the chest. Groomfleg collapsed to the floor, not dead, only stunned.
“You two tie him up in case he wakes up early,” Wilx said to us. “I've got a broadcast to make.”
“Are you going to tell everyone that Johnny is dead?” asked Rip.
“Nah, let's let them continue enjoying their show. We came here to find some life for Jupiter.”
“When you talk through the microphone, won't it come out in different words, because of the translation?” asked Rip.
“There must be a setting so that you can continue to sound like Johnny Guitar without having the actual words being altered,” I suggested.
“Yep, here it is,” said Wilx as he switched around a few of the programmings on the translation machine. He clicked off the current tape and spoke into the microphone. We all marveled as Wilx talked with the voice and enthusiasm of Johnny Guitar.
“Ok everyone, I apologize for interrupting the crescendo of that fourteen hour song, but we have an emergency broadcast. It seems there is a very nice gas giant planet named Jupiter that is suffering from continual disappearances due to being completely uninhabited. That's right folks, the Life-to-Planet Totality Quotient is real and in full effect. I have decided to make it a mission of mine to save this planet from its terrible state of limbo, so I'm urging some life forms to begin colonizing this planet. Jupiter is primarily hydrogen and helium, and it is likely the best-suited life forms would be ammonia-based. If any of you faithful listeners out there are made of ammonia and are in need of a home, please swing by Jupiter and have a look. I'm going to broadcast the location coordinates now.”
Wilx programmed in the coordinates and set the whole thing to loop for several hours before returning to the regular Johnny Guitar broadcast.
“That should do it,” he said satisfyingly. “Now let's get out of this mad place.”
“What about him?” I asked, pointing to the lump on the floor that was Chancellor Groomfleg.
“Leave him. He'll wake up in a few hours with no memory of us or of having spilled the secret about Johnny.”
We got in the elevator.
“Everyone jump!” said Rip just as the elevator was about to stop at the Lobby floor. We all jumped and experienced a pleasant moment of weightlessness. Nobody had their stomach displaced at all. It was just the sort of tranquil experience we were due for, especially since the Layer of Transcendental Levitation on Lincra had been destroyed. I made a note to spend more time in the Zero Gravity room once we got back on the ship.
As soon as we stepped off the elevator a series of whooping alarms sounded.
“INTRUDER! INTRUDER!” shouted yet another disembodied voice.
None of us were aware our Illusion Bubbles had long since worn off. Now we were just a bizarre group of aliens standing unwanted in a corporate environment protecting itself from bankruptcy with murderous inclinations. It was at this moment, as we successfully ran out the front door and onto our ship, that I realized most of the armed guards we tended to find ourselves running away from would have a much easier time of catching us if they weren't burdened down with the excessive weight of armor. As it were, none of the warrior-clone guards could move much faster than the average Romero zombie. They also couldn't shoot due to terrible aim and eyesight, having not been cloned from the perfect warrior but rather from some regular dweeb with poor vision.
“I hope this works,” said Wilx as we fled from the Radio Cygnus Planet.