SNAPBACK

THE FOUND

THE SMOOTHIE KING

BY ALEXI K. MERSENTES

     The first time it happened I was at my bank. I was 22. The bank had taken over a thousand dollars in fees, leaving me $10 to my name. They messed up, I messed up. Thought we'd figure out an agreement. Maybe I’d only owe them $200, but they wouldn’t budge. It was a Tuesday and later that day I was supposed to take my incredibly amazing new girlfriend up to Mammoth Mountain. A friend lent me his parents condo for four days. All I had to do was throw a few hundred his way. The mountain had just been dumped on and the powder was four feet fresh with more on the way. The place had a hot tub on the deck facing east. You could see the Milky Way on clear nights. I’m talking ski in/ski out. There was a lift 100 yards from the back patio.
    ‘Sir, there is nothing more we can do about this account.’
    When the branch manager shut me down with those words, my mind just started shaking. I could literally feel my optic nerves rattling. My heart and organs compacted. The blood in my veins boiled and froze at the same time. I felt like Bruce Banner ready to go green. Inside me, a massive shift happened. I could really feel it. Not like a light switch, but a seismic shift. This I obviously call the ‘shift’.
    I jumped across the managers desk and smashed him in the face with my fist. I really popped him hard. He was out. It was a reflex. I couldn’t stop myself. Standing there, the manger bleeding from nose and mouth, tellers screaming, people calling 911, the weight of the situation compacted down on me. I got scared. Suddenly, I was pulled back over the desk and into the chair like a rubber band was attached to my back. As I flew backwards, the scene around me blurred and I saw the manager roll back into his chair, the blood disappear, and his perfect stupid hair reverse as if the world were being edited. That’s what I call a ‘snapback’.
    So there I am listening again to this jackass tell me that there’s nothing they can do. That  10 bucks is all I got. This time he says, ‘May I suggest that you use a credit card for your weekend getaway?’
    I don’t use credit cards. Never had one. Never will. Then the Bruce Banner rage comes back.
    Boom, I’m over the desk, mangers is out cold, and now I’m like full on WTF!
    I take a few steps out of his office, then snapback into the chair. Everything’s cool except that I have to listen to his goddam lecture again. We do this 14 times. I rage and smack him. Move further out into the bank, then snapback. Every time I’m able to extend the ‘event’ further. So again, I’m there in the chair, feeling the rage. This time though, I do everything I can to not hit the guy. It works, I don’t hit him. Instead, I rob the bank…36 times. Made off with $24,500 cash.
    I don’t think a kid falls 36 times learning how to ride a bike. But it took me 36 times to figure out that the ‘carry’––what I call navigating in the post shift reality––is all about state of mind. If I was afraid or hesitant, I’d snapback. The more I just flowed with the new situation the longer it would carry. So you learn to control the mind and navigate in the ‘event sphere’––what I call the immediate quantum-psychic area where the shift happens. You do what you want to do and you leave it. Once out of there, it’s like you’re surfing. Everything just lines up. Everything goes your way. The girlfriend and I, we had one hell of a good time in that condo.
    Now you’re gonna ask: Weren’t you afraid the police would break down the door any second? Or arrest you the minute you came back to LA?
    I was. But every time I started to sweat, the inner rumblings began. A warning to get my mind straight. I never did go back to that branch, never had to listen to haircut feed me corporate excuses. Never got caught for robbing it. It was like…it never happened.
    Over the next few months I got better and better at it. Learned the snapback has many incarnations. Sometimes it wasn’t about the carry and getting out of the sphere, but about just experiencing something within the sphere. Sometimes I’d just go for 30 seconds. Say some dude on the 405 cut me off, giving me the finger, catching me at a bad time? I’d smash into his car and beat the crap out of him. You know, get the satisfaction. Then I just snapback to the moment before I shift. I smile when he flicks me off. Also, the shift didn’t have to be ignited by anger or fear or desperation. I learned to bring it on whenever I wanted.
    I stopped robbing banks and just went for armored cars. Required a lot less snapbacks. Lot less people involved. Don’t have to worry about some retiree pulling a gun and shooting you five times in the belly with a .357. Yeah. That one sucked. Didn’t hardly sleep for two weeks. Close my eyes and all I could see were those muzzle flashes. The good news was I couldn’t be killed in a sphere. Nearly instantaneously I’d snapback from that death moment, but the memories remained. It could never happen faster than the pull of a trigger.
    I learned to create ‘bubbles’ which are little event spheres within the bigger sphere. I can’t stop the guy from pulling a gun, but then I can snapback to a moment only a few seconds before he draws. Disarm him as he exposes the weapon. See, whatever happens, only happens in the sphere. Ten, 15 seconds after I exit a sphere, it collapses. Gone forever.
    How big is that sphere you’re gonna ask?
    Average about 100 feet, but they can be 300 or only 10. I’ve left a sphere, then immediately walked back into and all hell is still breaking lose. I step back out…and the world is going on business as usual. Then the sphere collapses. I walk back into the area where the sphere was and it’s like nothing ever happened. That $350,000 I took from the armored car is back in the truck, AND it’s also in my trunk. Those guards I tied up…they’re not tied up any more, just doing their job none the wiser. The best explanation I can come up with is that somehow I can make our macro world become like the quantum realm and things like superposition and zeropoint are no longer confined to the subatomic reality. I should also mention the ‘flash’. The flash happens when a sphere collapses. It’s like a curtain of light momentarily blinds me. It’s when the ‘change over’ happens. That flash brings everything back to normal. It resets reality, the change over. What I just did is erased from the time-space continuum.
    So the components of it are: The Shift, the Event Sphere, The Carry, Bubbles, Flash, and Change Over.
    Three years eight months. That’s how long this has been going on. You know how many times I’ve flown to DC and slapped a politician? Know how many times I’ve streaked at the Super Bowl and stolen the Mona Lisa? I’ve burned 12 of them. At one time I had four hanging in my bathroom. Even though nothing I ever did, well, except for the last one, affected the world, I did have a moral code. No sexual assaults. No hurting anyone I loved. No gratuitous killings. Though I would use a snapback to find out the best way to approach a woman. Say some flattering, heartfelt things and ask her straight up if she were interested in me. No? Okay, snap it back. I wouldn’t forget the rejection but at least she would.
    Then suddenly one night…there was only the shift. Snapback didn’t happen. There was no sphere. No carry or bubbles or flashes. What I did, it didn’t just disappear. Such a stupid thing to get busted over. Telling people about my power. Now that was an even bigger mistake.
    “That was nine months ago. And here I sit, another two psychiatrists across the table listing to the madman,” I say. “Though you two seem different. You’re not taking notes. There’s no microphone.”
    The man and woman look at each other and nod.
    “How would you like to get your powers back?” says the woman in a low voice as she slides a business card across the table.
    “What is ‘Actual Solutions Inc.’?” I ask inspecting the card.
    “There are others like you,” the man says. “but with different…abilities if you know what I mean.”
    “You’ll be out of this criminal psychiatric hospital, but you won’t really be free,” adds the woman.
    “It’s a whole lot better though, that we can assure you,” says the man as he and his partner stand.
    “So,” the woman extends her hand, “say yes and you walk out of here with us. Say no, and you die in here.”
     My hand extends autonomously. “Not really much of a choice, is there.”
    “No, not really,” the man replies.
    “One more question,” I say, “why’d you let me stay in here for nine months? I mean, it’s been kinda rough.”
    Moving towards the door, both of them start to answer at the same time. The man quiets to let his partner speak.
    “A little time in the stuck in the unknown builds character. Actual Solutions looks for that in an employee.”

BY ALEXI K. MERSENTES

    They came down in giant pyramids.
    Parked them above 35 of our most iconic cities all over the world.
    There was no warning. One minute the world stumbled along––the next, the impossible had become…possible.
    They hung there for three weeks without a word: sleek and shiny, perfectly smooth ocher three-sided pyramids with a base five-miles wide and a silver capstone four more miles up. Nothing could get close to them. Our drones fell from the sky. Russia fired rockets at the one hanging above Moscow. All imploded before reaching their target. Sometimes they would enshroud themselves in electrical storms. The purple lightning kept our eyes on the sky.
    Needless to say, the pyramids became THE STORY of our time. Aliens were real and they were ‘here’ (though in those early days there was great debate if we were in fact dealing with aliens).
    Beneath the ‘Arrivals’ as the pyramids were soon called, tens of thousands congregated, setting up huge camps. True believers flocked to them, swelling their ranks day by day. Even the most hardened skeptic had to admit the timing of the the alien visitation was perfect.     Back then human civilization rode the raggedy edge, ready to slip into oblivion at any time. Ebola raged around the planet. The Fukushima clean up had failed. ISIS had set off a low-yield nuclear weapon in Chicago. Markets and currencies collapsed. Oil stopped flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. Food riots consumed cities worldwide. Fires in Siberia threatened to produce so much smoke the sun would be blotted out. An impossibly-named volcano in Iceland had blown its top, covering the European continent in dust. A cyber-virus jammed up the only thing we had going for us, the Internet, and governments had to enact strict bandwidth rules. You were lucky to get 90 minutes of connection a day. Another virus infected cellular networks. The smartphone became dumb, just a texting machine and that was it. Israel threatened to launch permeative nuke strikes on Pakistan. Half the world had less than six months left of potable water left due to a never before seen freshwater algae bloom.
    It did seem like Judgment Day.
    Too much was happening at one time to see it any differently.  
    Then, just as the light flickered, the pyramids appeared.
    All the bad things fell away from that amazing moment.
    For three weeks the world watched and waited.
    On the 22nd day they began speaking. They didn’t appear on TV broadcasting a message of peace and love. No, the aliens spoke through people. Chosen ones. Tens of thousands of them. Prophets tapped in directly to the alien message.
    The message was: Convert to the alien God and it’s religion.
    It didn’t go over so well.
    Hundreds of prophets were killed. Many more imprisoned. Of course there were plenty of believers, but their anger and passions could not match the non-believing fire which came their way. When Fukushima suddenly stopped releasing radiation, radiation that was going to poison the planet for the next 500 years and cause 80% of the population to die a soft kill, people took notice. When millions of ebola patients, who had almost two feet in the grave, walked out of the hellish camps set up around the world, a lot more people took notice. The fires in Russia went out. Electricity miraculous returned to India where it had been the scariest of commodities for over a year. The skies above Europe cleared as the volcano shut down. The algae disappeared. The crippled could walk. The sick were cured.  
    People stopped killing the prophets and started listening.
    The gist of it went like this: While humanity had the right idea about there being a ‘God’, our execution left a lot to be desired. The aliens, like some Mormons knocking on the world’s door, wanted to share the good news. A better way existed. A new religion. Not necessarily a new God, but the correct interpretation of the one we already knew. With surrender we would experience great peace, longevity, prosperity, love and eternal goodness. New and magical powers and senses and answers to our deepest cosmic questions would come our way. All we had to do was stop killing each other and come to the pyramids. No more violence. Anyone committing a violent act would not be allowed into The New Day about to dawn. Other than that, details were vague. Many wanted to see the aliens. The prophets offered streams of well thought-out rebuttals. It was revealed we’d be leaving the planet as it needed time to heal. We’d be transported to an Eden-like planet 34 light years away. The trip would only take the equivalent of
one earth day. At some time in the future some people would return to earth. Another revelation was that the aliens would not show their faces until we had entered the pyramids.
    Some of the more enlightened scholars pointed out that the situation was similar to missionaries going to the Solomon Islands in the 1930s. They brought medicine, technology, cured tribes of diseases and connected them to the world. The catch? Give your allegiance to a new god and everything would be better.
    Those Solomon Island missionaries offered baptisms. The aliens would be offering their own version. We would be baptized by entering the pyramids. There was enough room for all of us. By the sixth week so many had made the Pledge that the best you could do was get within 10 miles of a pyramid. At least you could see it. Then you waited.
     By the sixth week over three billion had made the Pledge. Then the Two Week War began. In a curious and deadly alliance, zealots from the Abrahamic religions allied with the most powerful militaries, along with Buddhists, right wing fundamentalists, communists and anyone else ready to kill and die to defend humanity against the so called “New Age Alien Lie”, attacked ‘The Found’ as we were told to call ourselves.
    Unlike New Testament believers on the road to Damascus who were cut down by haters with no help from their god, The Found got assistance. Somehow bullets stopped working. Maybe it had something to do with an ionic charge which altered the chemical makeup of gunpowder. It was more than bullets, though. The same force field which protected the pyramids, extended down to The Found. Of course there were casualties, but there would be no massive slaughter. The zealots and their army could do nothing, and by the eighth week their ranks had been shattered with most coming over to our side.
    As the 11th week came, a majority of the population had Pledged.
    Just 11 weeks to change the world forever.
    It is now the 12th week since Arrival, or what is now referred to as AA 0 (After Arrival, with before 12 weeks ago now known as BA 1). Tens of thousands more flock to the camps each day. The prophets have assured us again that the aliens will show themselves when all The Found have been baptized. Until then, we are to enjoy being on the cusp of a new existence; take time to pay homage to the old life we will soon leave behind. There is no more commerce or work or sports or really anything from the life we knew three months ago. Food and water and love and good times abound. There’s no conflict and even sanitation has been taken care of.
    Sometimes when sitting around a camp fire I miss the old world. I miss the status-quo. I miss football and going to the movies and just hanging out on my couch. Don’t miss the job though. I wonder about my ex-girlfriend who is one of the holdouts. She retreated into the suburbs and then country last I heard. People like her are called The Lost. We are The Found.
    The Found.
    The prophets tell us how all the previous religions were like ripples reaching shore before the The Great Boat of Truth arrived. The universe truly is an ocean. The prophets tell us there is so much unknown out there in the near infinite abyss (as God designed it to be, and then God dove into the vastness to live in Its creation). One in a million that The Alien God found us, we are told. It could only be destiny, they say. Meant to be.
    So The Found wait, The Lost run, and the world keeps spinning. Above hang giant pyramids commanded by alien missionaries who’ve saved humanity from Armageddon. The bargain is we have to accept their God, who is really the God we’ve been worshiping, just a better more clear version. We just have to let go of the old world. The things we loathed and loved, the boredom and action, pain and hope. The things that made us…human.
    Looking back at the city teeming with those waiting for the show to move on to the Second Act, I know my decision is right. People like me are still Found, but we’re not ready to let go of what was, we’re not ready to ‘buy the ticket and take the ride’––aka, get in the pyramids. The prophets tell us our work is to convince The Lost, of which there are almost 500 million. We’re gonna miss the boat, there is no doubt, we’re gonna miss the upgrade this time around. The world will return to a wilderness, we’ve been informed. Life will not be easy even with the help of a small continent of prophets and alien missionaries left behind.
    It is said The Alien God shines brightest upon those like me. We will be guided through the doubt and darkness to come.
    I hope so.
    I really do.

BY ALEXI K. MERSENTES

    I will smooth out your life.
    All the wrinkles––gone.
    The Smoothie King delivers.
    But there is a price.
    What do people want more than fame and fortune and love? They want to feel good. Fame and money are worthless if inside you are a ball of knots. The Smoothie King delivers. But there is a price.
    All the jagged sharpness that catches your soul will become sea glass. Smoother than a million years of wave action could offer. That’s what I can do for you. When the shatter has been melted into a lump of luscious roundness that you roll around like a happy ball of life, you will thank me. But there is a price.
    Imagine feeling as content as a baby after it’s bottle and burping? No longer will you twist and turn as you pray for sleep. Never again will you shoot up at sunrise with the anxiety of the day churning in your heart. But you know the deal by now…there is a price.
    Smooth. Just think about it. Silk. Water. Jello. Ice. Porcelain. I will iron you out from the inside. This is what I do.
    What is my price for giving you the true life you’ve always wanted? My price for taking away the spiky shards preventing you from having a moment of peace? I could ask for millions, billions. I could ask for you spirit. You would give it to me just to feel what it’s like in the blissful silky clam. But I don't want it.
    I will not ask you to kill, or die, or do anything to harsh your new mellow. My price…you won’t have to steal or lie. I don’t need your firstborn, or your last.
    What is my price for giving you what even God could not give?
    A thousand years of servitude in the hereafter would suffice…but that’s not what it costs.
    I am The Smoothie King and I have a price.
    You will call my name in a dark room. Alone, in the dark. Call my name five times in a row. Smoothie King. Smoothie King. You know the drill. In the dark alone you will hear me snap my fingers and it is done. That is my price. What a deal.
    Now of course you’re wondering what does The Smoothie King get out of this. You see, I have a master plan. It’s gonna be big. To get there I need you to call me.
    Tell your friends.
    Everyone should be smooth.