Robin Maxwell, a historian, screenwriter and bestselling novelist, is writing a novella for grahamhancock.com that we will be releasing as a serial publication — chapter by chapter — periodically.
With tongue firmly in cheek, her story peels back the veil of existence and looks behind the scenes of our current tumultuous times and the strange, precious multiverse we inhabit. At the center of it all, Ed and Helen are cosmic coders who discover that Ed’s Earth Simulation has gone completely out of control. But there is worse brewing. Much, much worse…
Below is Chapter 9 of I Am Your Creator Dude.
Enjoy, and stay tuned for more chapters to come. Read:
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter I
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter II
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter III
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter IV
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter V
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VI
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VII
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter VIII
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter IX
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: Chapter X
- “I Am Your Creator, Dude!”: CODA (the last chapter)
“I just read your brilliant ‘I Am Your Creator, Dude!’ Your story is great! Funny, clever, thought-provoking and entertaining.” – Graham Hancock
“Many times I have pondered what’s it all about. Spaceship Earth and The Human Condition. You have touched on my reoccurring conclusion that “Earth” is entertainment for the eternal creator. That infinite eternity is a long time so the creator of creators and creations manifest art projects such as Earth. “The Eternal Must Be Entertained” I suspect Channel Earth is one of a zillion creative projects.” – T Crowe Semler
Discovering that the MultiVerse itself is in the crosshairs of one of Ed’s mad “simulons,” and after a series of neighborly visits to the Creator-Gods living in their apartment complex — The Infini-Tron Arms — Ed and Helen insert themselves into Ed’s Earth Simulation game. Their investigations take them from Don and Melania’s excruciating Mar-a-Lago bedroom to the simmering Yellowstone Caldera about-to-blow, where a run-in with an extremely pissed off Mother Nature — and Helen’s growing impatience — ratchets Ed’s creator confidence down more than a few notches.
But it is during the bickering couple’s visit to the Atlantis Bahamas Resort and Water Park, where the world’s feckless leaders in every arena are gathered, that Ed realizes the “Doomsday Clock” is down to 1 second and counting. If he doesn’t find the “Great Destroyer” quickly, it is curtains for all creation.
Chapter 9
With the din of the International Arms Fair behind them in the Atlantis Resort’s ballroom, Ed steered Helen towards a row of massive open doors that led outside. Above the doorway hung a sign reading “COMPLICIT BEACH”.
Ed nodded, satisfied. “Nice one.”
“Not yours?” Helen asked.
He shook his head. “This place is crawling with creatives.”
“I think they call them ‘influencers’ now.”
They walked out onto the expansive sandy shore, little of which could be seen for the profusion of cabanas and tents in Bahamian white and blue.
The beach, teeming with attendees from every angle of the game, was liberally impaled with 10G receiving towers, their bulky tops masquerading, quite impressively, as palm trees.
“10 G?” Helen commented with irritation.
“That’s right,” Ed proudly replied. “It’s already installed in cities all over the U.S. It’s so advanced it not only gives you brain tumors. Afterwards, it dissolves them.”
A thickness of plastic trash washed in with every wave. They had to shield their eyes from the blinding glare bouncing off the Caribbean blue ocean out in front of them, where War Games were underway. The waters were cluttered with an international flotilla of destroyers, submarines diving and surfacing, and city-sized aircraft carriers with fighters taking off at impossibly steep angles alternating with piss-yourself-close landings. The dog fights in the air above didn’t look like games at all. A Raptor F-22 blew the shit out of an EF Superhornet, its ejected pilot engulfed in flames as he parachuted into the ocean, while a Eurofighter Typhoon and an F-35’s game of head-on chicken ended in, well, fried chicken for them both.
“Where do we start?” Helen asked.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Ed told her, looking pretty worried.
They peered at the shallow cove where the docile Atlantis “Swim With the Dolphins” animals, clicking and chattering, were having harpoons mounted with halters onto their backs, and bombs strapped to their heads by their beloved, blonde, bikinied handlers.
The newly styled “kamikaze suicide dolphins” were sent off down a narrow channel into deep water to seek out their floating targets.
Helen heard the sound of grunting and a series of pig-like squeals. “This should be interesting,” she said, leading the way toward the sounds. In front of them was a cage fight ring with hundreds of chairs surrounding it, but only a smattering of onlookers. And those who were there were barely watching the match, their eyes glued to their phones’ bookmaking apps.
Behind a small ringside table, announcers Rachel Maddow and the big ear-phoned Joe Rogan sat wide-eyed, jaws hanging open at the bizarre spectacle of the barefoot Zuck-Musk “Thrilla in Vanilla” fight. The two emotional infants were greased up and indeed buff from months of intensive training and diets of Bulletproof espresso energy drinks laced with micro-dosed DMT. With Zuck’s hair braided into cornrows, and Elon’s jelled into a giant “X”, they snarled semi-ferociously with their orthodontured teeth, facing each other, knees bent, ready to inflict maximum pain. Of course, each had the spine of a jellyfish and an inferiority complex the size of Texas. They were, as they bobbed and weaved, as dangerous as a couple of bunnies.
“Say something, Rachel,” Joe implored her.
“I have no words,” she said, surprising herself, as she always had words.
Zuck executed a respectable foot-to-the-chin that set Musk’s teeth clattering. The response was instant.
“Ooh!” That was a huge right hand!” Joe shouted at Musk’s punch.
“Oh my goodness, a knee out of nowhere!” Rachel called.
“Big, big energy transfer with that overhand right-to-left hook, and ew!” Joe groaned. “Double knee. Back to basics. That’s a lot of straight punches.”
“Take down!!!” Rachel bellowed, coming out of her seat.
Now Zuck was scissoring Elon’s bug-eyed head between his knees.
“Over-Under at 2.5,” said one of the ringside bettors into his phone. “Couple a pussies.”
“25,000 on Zuck,” another man said, only one eye on the fight. “No, as underdog, you idiot. Everybody knows Musk’s got one of his neural gizmos implanted in his head. Oh yeah, that e-Brain’s gonna kick in any second and…”
Without warning, a chunk of a Starlink Satellite chassis smashed down into the ring with its razor edges, cutting both fighters into two bloody halves.
“Fucking hell!” Joe shouted.
“Now that’s ironic,” Rachel said to herself. Then, adjusting the tiny mic clipped to her black squared-off v-neck, announced to her audience, “We have a draw, folks. One for the history books.”
“Got what he deserved,” Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb declared as he strolled by the bloodied cage with a little box-full of microscopic spherules sticking out of his shirt pocket. Little bits of stuff he’d retrieved off the ocean floor near New Guinea that he desperately hoped were the remnants of an alien craft from deep space. “4,000 satellites in low earth orbit,” he muttered, sneering at Musk, “…a recipe for disaster.”
Just then, the side of a Chinese destroyer erupted into flames and its underwater dolphin assassin – now in five easy pieces – scattered bloodily into the air.
A news media pop-up was, at first, hard to make heads or tails of. From a distance, it looked like a huge scrum of humanity under the open-sided tent ringed with TV monitors. But as Ed and Helen drew closer, they could see the outside of the crowd was composed of suited, white bread executive types jabbering and finger-pointing towards the still-unseen middle.
“Corporate bosses,” Ed observed.
“And their sponsors,” Helen added.
The two of them pushed through the throng of bosses and bosses’ bosses to the center where the famous anchors sat at a circle of network and cable news desks, some beleaguered, some completely insane. Anderson Cooper had gone bald from stress. Wolf Blitzer’s beard had grown so long he looked like Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof.” Morning Joe Scarborough and his wife Mika Brzezinski, were sobbing on each others’ shoulders. Dead center of the circle was a platform upon which another of Poseidon’s thrones revolved. And, there was Rupert Murdoch – malevolent, in his element and now wearing the British Crown of Empire – lording it over everyone.
“Did he walk here from the lobby?” Helen asked.
“Nope. I kind of gave him the ability to be in more than one place at a time.”
“Yeah, really great,” she said, trying to hide her smirk.
“I saw that,” Ed said.
”Check this out,” she said, jabbing him in the ribs.
They turned to see Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan — the even-featured Aussie’s face now morphing back-and-forth from his own to Kieran Culkin’s — elbowing his way through the crowd crying, “Hail, Rupe!” But when he got to the throne, he hauled the old man off it, and, snatching the crown from his daddy’s head, placed it on his own. The successor sat down and grinned charmingly at the media hacks as his sibs and half-sibs James, Elisabeth, Prudence, Grace and Chloe — all suited up in SWAT gear — smashed into the crowd and dragged their father kicking and shrieking, “I will be involved every day in the contest of ideas!!” out of the tent and away, until all that could be heard from afar was, “every daaaaay!!”
As Ed and Helen pushed further through the unfolding grotesquery, they approached a close-walled tent whose lit-up sign over the door read:
An endless line of poor souls waiting to gain admission snaked around the beach between tents, their variety and abject resignation startling but unsurprising.
“Another of your favorite words?” Helen asked, referring to the shot-up sign.
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Ed answered curtly.
“Did you expect such variety in your victims?”
“Don’t call them victims! They’re…unfortunate Simulons.” He wanted desperately to sidestep the line, but there was no getting around rubbing shoulders with the soon-to-be-fucked.
There were decidedly more black and brown people in line, but the other races were well-represented, too: a middle-class soccer mom reduced to bag lady status with all her earthly possessions piled in a grocery cart; a spiffily dressed college grad with hopelessly hollow eyes; a skeletal opioid-addicted couple leaning on each other for support; a Hispanic immigrant mother with her toddler chained to her body so not to be separated. There were lots of elderly, poor and severely handicapped. The unhoused, uninsurable, incurable and disrespected. Bloodied, battered, burned, but always forgotten casualties of natural disasters more than three days past the news cycle. Smug-faced AI recruiters snatched only the recently unemployable Silicon Valleyites from the line.
Ed and Helen watched as the one waiting first at the door was sucked forcibly in by what had to be a giant vacuum and disappeared inside the tent. For a brief moment, the moans from within – those in the midst of the reaming process – could be heard, and resignation in the eyes of the next in line turned panicky.
“Nice work, Ed,” Helen said, then, taking pity, found them a way out of the crush.
The “SCHMUCKS CLUBHOUSE” sign, which bore the 3-D likeness of Rudy Giuliani, welcomed his compatriots in with outstretched arms, hands grasping fistfuls of dollars. On either side of the tent door, Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser stood, cracking wise to the long line – though not nearly as long as the butt-fucked – of mostly stupid white men with a skinny white corporate woman here and there. Two of the broads with their heads together tittering conspiratorially had matching Fox News tee-shirts, their fronts reading “Anchor Maria Bartoromo” and “CEO Suzanne Scott,” but their backs were identical – “No Fact-Checking Allowed.” They were so high on life and their obscene wealth they didn’t care at all what the idiot libtards called them.
“Bill,” Jerry called out cheerfully to a short-haired, bespectacled billionaire businessman in a blue crewneck and button-down shirt who was looking worried as he tried to peek inside the tent flap.
“Is Melinda in there?” he asked.
“Now he’s a comedian,” Reiser commented to Jerry, and together they cackled like a couple of hyenas.
The Washington crowd, represented by Josh Hawley, Lyndsey Graham, Stephen Miller and Joe Manchin, were there. Mike Pence was blissfully unaware that a house fly in the black robes of a Supreme, sporting the head of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was swooping around the V.P’s silver hairdo, looking for a place to land.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a Bozo the Clown suit that so befitted him, was all grins and giggles, having gotten away with all his corruption.
He paid no attention to his wife, Ginni, in her “Orange Is The New Black” jumpsuit. She hadn’t been so lucky with her grifts and had been doing hard time in a Federal Penitentiary outside of D.C.
All the schmucks were trying to avoid looking at the 16th-century wooden stocks through which Marjorie Taylor Green’s head and hands were protruding, the flow of verbal diarrhea only terminated by an indignant AOC stuffing a rag in her mouth.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome!” cried late-night host John Oliver, who’d just emerged from inside, “The gruel is wonderful today.” At the back of the line, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert shoved the schmeckies forward, giving Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft extra kicks in the ass for good measure.
“Watch it!” Helen cried, pushing Ed so hard he fell to his hands and knees in the sand. She crouched beside him as a pack of research scientists with the Pfizer logo emblazoned on their white lab coats ran past. Each of them clutched their hastily rescued laptops under one arm, a sample storage box covered over in cute and colorful stickers of what lay inside – deadly viruses, bacteria and fungi…and their cures, chased by what could only be the corporation’s executive leadership team and a posse of money-grubbing shareholders.
Pfizer’s CEO had just tackled the slowest of his scientists who had fallen to the ground, wrapping his body protectively around a small cryogenic tank.
“Give it here!” The top exec snarled.
“Profit whore!” the researcher shouted back and began beaning the CEO with the tank as the rest of the greed-mongering shareholders trampled over the scuffling pair.
Ed grabbed Helen’s elbow and pulled her to standing.
“You need to fix Big Pharma, Ed,” she told him. “Seriously. It’s disgusting. Ed…” Helen said with a quizzical lilt in her voice,”…is there any such thing as a contact high from smoking DMT?
“Not that I coded.”
“Then what’s that?” She jutted her chin towards some people being chased by a 10-foot-round COVID virus — its hundreds of “spike proteins” looking more like actual spikes than cute little flowers — as James Taylor’s jazzy “I’m a steam roller baby…I’m gonna roll right over you” blared over the beach’s loudspeaker.
“This way,” he said, ignoring her – he hated it when she was right – and pushed her towards a festive covered area courtesy of “Altacocker Village for the Geriatric.” They were holding a wheelchair square dance, a quadrille now in progress with partners Joe Biden and Bill and Hilary Clinton looking nifty in their cowboy outfits but frustrated with their wheels getting stuck in the sand. Mitch McConnell, wearing a Stetson — himself in a wheelchair — called out the dance moves to the piped-in strains of a bluegrass band. He finally stood up for, “Promenade, now circle left and Doe-si…” The final syllable never made it out as his latest TIA overtook and paralyzed him. Everyone kept on rolling as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened till Willie Nelson jumped in out of nowhere and goosed Mitch with a long glass genitalia-shaped bong. “Doe!!” Mitch shouted, shocked out of his stupor, and resumed his square-dancing rap.
The real action was taking place around the giant red MAGA hat tent with a dazzling parade of sequin-gowned drag queens and Midwestern librarians strutting around it, occasionally stopping at the open front door to bend over and moon the dedicated throng inside. Each time the flap opened, Ed and Helen caught glimpses of the faithful.
“Look away, look away!” Helen cried. “We’ll turn into pillars of salt.”
“Stop with the histrionics,” he snapped back at her. The 21st century wouldn’t have been half as entertaining without them.”
“We’re running out of time, Ed,” Helen told him.
“We’re getting there!” he said, starting to get annoyed. “I know what I’m doing.” He saw her gazing around at the shitshow on the beach with a look that couldn’t help but wither his confidence. He just kept plowing forward towards the shoreline where an array of news cameras and their operators were vying for the best action of the naval war games. The most serious nerdists of them all – young men seated at their bleeding-edge computers, recognizable by their lumberjack jeans and plaid shirts as developers – were themselves seeking ideas for the best “Moment of the Apocalypse” video games.
Then, abruptly, all hell began breaking loose in Hell.
A North Korean destroyer launched a Patriot-sized missile at one of the two U.S. aircraft carriers, which blew the gargantuan thing in half in a split second, its two parts turning vertical and sliding under the waves like James Cameron’s Titanic.
“I thought you said these were war games,” Helen observed. “There was nothing remotely game-y about that.” Even before she’d finished her sentence, no trace of the carrier remained above the water.
At the exact same moment, Ed’s and Helen’s ears popped loudly, and the sulfurous smell of a newly lit match made them turn to each other with a what-the-fuck face. The sky turned a bilious green and the air became weird — very, very still…and very, very quiet. Then, with the roar of a freight train, great crashing and whooshing in the sky above, a monster tornado blew in all the trash from Florida, and out from the funnel cloud of debris, the premier Doomedia Queen — writer Jessica Wildfire — was inelegantly expelled with a couple of small appliance boxes. She looked around at the crowd and shook her head disgustedly. “Not a single fucking mask,” she muttered to herself. She stood up and retrieved the two boxes — portable air filters — that she tucked under each arm, and as the garbage twister messily departed, she rushed across the beach to a tent set apart from the others as though it had been shunned. It was the “I-Told-You-So-ers” Pavilion. There, on low stools, were Jessica’s compadres, mired in truth and consequences, pariahs of the fact-based “conspiracies” that nobody wanted to hear about until they were suddenly – and too late – proven right. Al Gore forlornly sat shiva with Bill McKibben, James Hansen, Noam Chomsky, Rachel Carson, Michio Kaku, Carl Sagan and Umair Haque. It was a sad place. “What are you doing?!” she shouted at them as she ran inside. She heaved N-95 masks at all of them and pantomimed putting them on, which the great thinkers — but less-than-great practicalists — obediently put on their faces. “Over your noses, not under!” she cried, frantically looking around the perimeter of the tent for outlets to plug in her air filters.
Ed and Helen were forced to detour around the news cameras and game devs on their approach to the shoreline, where by now Helen understood they were headed, and discovered a full film crew, though no actors were in evidence, and whose director Adam McKay was arguing with a clutch of young studio suits.
“Stop whining,” one guy who looked just north of twelve insisted. A ‘Don’t Look Up’ sequel makes perfect sense. A billion+ box office and God knows how many more Oscar nominations.”
McKay clutched his forehead with his fingers.
“It’s a satire, explained a leggy blonde in a tight pencil-skirted suit, teetering in the sand on her 4-inch stilettos.
“You want me to satirize my own satire.” The director sighed deeply and walked back to his crew, shaking his head, defeated. “You ready, Mitsuko?” he said to his special effects coordinator, who stood before a broad console of controls. “Bring ‘em out.”
From the water sloshing onto the shore in gentle waves came a robotic monster – a hairy “eyelash mite” twelve feet high, its fanged maw hideous as it snapped open and closed with a gnashing sound effect that echoed across the beach.
Then, another one emerged from the sea, sluicing streams of micro-plastic-rich water off its back and six legs.
Fascinated as any film buff would be (and McKay was one of his favorite directors), Ed controlled himself and began waving down an amphibious D-Day-looking transport that was ferrying military personnel from the vessels off the coast to the beach.
“We’re going out there?” Helen said to him. “Out into the middle of…”
Suddenly, a giant white tic-tac-shaped UFO materialized out of the air above the Russian warship Potemkin II and beamed a thick red death ray onto its deck.
“…that?” Helen finished.
Before Ed could answer, the sound of “No! No!! Nooo!!!” could be heard coming up the beach as the Godfather of Futuristic Physics, Nick Bostrom, was now crying, “The Singularity, the Singularity has begun!!!”
“Don’t look so surprised!” Helen yelled at him as he sprinted past them, then to Ed added, “What did he expect?”
The amphibious transport was nearing shore, and Ed began dragging Helen into the junk-polluted waves to meet it. At that exact moment, the air began to sizzle in a megatomic heat-dome, and people started screaming as the beach sand melted into a sheet of solid glass. The doors to the Atlantis Ballroom flew open, and out clomped the platoon of Boston Dynamics robot soldiers, their singularity-driven algorithms prompting them to shoot anything in sight, especially their handlers. On Adam McKay’s movie set, the beach was crawling with 12-foot-tall eyelash mites, themselves out of human control in the Singularity, heading straight for the studio execs, their burning shoes stuck in the molten glass and unable to run. Then the robot insects one-by-one, bit the heads off the bodies of the shrieking suits.
Just as Ed and Helen threw themselves into the transport, a giant flock of seagulls fell dead out of the sky. All the people and all the tents went up in flames, and the entire Atlantis Bahamas Resort was engulfed in a firestorm so epic and so hot that the buildings simply melted, its lagoons rising up as great clouds of steam. Above this firey furnace, a hundred-foot-tall mirage of a seriously pissed-off Mother Nature appeared, shimmering overhead, her long white gown burned up to her blackened knees.
“I’M BACK!” she boomed, “you stupid little shits!”
Image by Luke Hancock
Please visit Robin’s website:
www.RobinMaxwell-GodsOfAtlantos.com
Ramblings of a boomer, devotion to cynicism, addiction to telling us all how bad and stupid we are, in lieu of good writing, just bad for everyone to know a person can waste their life like this.
Indeed a boomer, and cynical for a very good reason. If we, as a species, weren’t so “bad or stupid” as we are, we wouldn’t be in the unholy mess we’re in now, dangling at the precipice of apocalypse. Your opinion of my writing is your own, but I can assure you that being able to write my best, and be published without censorship on Graham Hancock’s brilliant website, is what keeps this old broad happy and productive.
Thank you again. I cant wait to see what the next chapter takes Ed, Helen, and Mother Nature.
Hi Stardreams. Thank you for your kind words. You’ll be happy to know I got a good start on Chapter X today. I put all the “Major Creators,” Ed and Helen on the deck of the last aircraft carrier left after the “war games” off the coast of the Atlantis Bahama’s Resort, having a palaver about what trouble they’re all in. It’s another humongous chapter with a lot of moving parts, like IX was, and so much fun to write. Warm regards, Robin
Following the Creator of the Universe and his wife as they set out to save the world from certain destruction is a fun romp with serious undertones and commentary on the planet we now increasingly find ourselves on. Gulliver on his travels, nor Jules Verne on his, ever encountered such a bizarre reality. With terrific cartoon images, Maxwell’s plea for international sanity is timely and entertaining.
Thank you, Wilhelmina. Very grateful that you grok my reason for writing “Dude!” FYI, Ed and Helen are not married yet. If they manage to save the MultiVerse, it will be a small, intimate wedding.
I have laughed out loud and often several times in every chapter of “Dude!” and this one is no different. Who knew how a future iteration of wireless data networks will answer our wildest conspiracy theories with a perfect solution? My only issue is that I’m sad we have to wait so long for 10G to materialize to have our tumors dissolved. Loved it!
I am so impressed with your wit, creativity, and sensibleness, all wrapped up in what I can only describe as scathing satire of the best caliber. I look forward to the next chapter!
Thank you Greg, my devoted reader and editor. Your praise means so much to me.
Loved the influencer commentary as well as the Zuck-Musk fight HAHA! And the Avi Loeb cameo. Once again, the AI generated images bring the story to a new level and I love it.
All in all, I continue to love the chaotic smorgasbord of scenes, characters, and plot events in DUDE. It’s like a perfect charcuteterie board with enough variety to never get bored. I’m always eager to see who shows up next! Bravo, Robin- always 🙂
Love that you love it, Mac. People like you (a writer) can probably understand that I have boundless fun writing this stuff. Soon, the denoument!
Provocative, insightful, scary as hell and very very funny. Maxwell lets her vivid imagination soar in this crazy conglomeration of…everything! I love it – can’t wait to see what comes next.
Happy holidays & I look forward to reading chapter X
You don’t have long to wait, Missy. All the writing and editing is done for Chapter X and the CODA. Just finishing up the images. Hopefully in the next week will the Hancocks publish (not just Graham, but his two brilliant kids who are my editors, Leila and Luke).