Zombies in the Mountains

Was I being clinically paranoid for thinking that maybe Santa Claus was real? Or Zombies?

I was heading up to a small town in the mountains to take care of a little business before winter set in, cruise’n along I-70 in the newest car or pickup truck that I’d ever owned, a Toyota Tacoma with under 20,000 miles on it.

Once I had the clustered motion of Denver in my rear-view mirror, I settled back into the driver’s seat, slipped an Allman Brothers CD into the CD player and once again became the ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ just like when I was an over-the-road trucker before I retired a couple years back and met Culley Jane the retired professor and a writer too and we got married and live in a house with a fireplace and a big backyard in a suburb of Denver… and, oh, two cats and grandchildren not far away.

I actually met Gregg Allman once when I was a reporter in Detroit in the late 70s. One of his road crew had gone over a balcony and fallen to his death. In the newsroom, we heard about it on the police scanner and the editors sent me to the hotel where the band was staying to check it out. I wound up getting drunk with the famous rock musician. By then, he was divorced from Cher and had a new wife, who was pregnant and didn’t like me. She said I asked too many questions. But me and her husband had a good time, despite the tragic death.

After Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up in Blues’ and Grand Funk’s “We’re an American Band” and ZZ Top and Beethoven, I switched the CD player off and went into a trance -- the booming silence of fir-covered mountains erupting out of the earth, the mechanical purr of a well-tuned engine.

Then I felt alone so I turned the radio on, hoping to get some of the latest news out of Israel. Maybe NPR. I didn’t have satellite radio, so I couldn’t get C-Span. My AM scanner landed on a local talk-radio station. I was in the U.S. House district of MAGA firebrand Lauren Boebert. Following an ad for a septic system company, I recognized the deep, gravelly voice of a conspiracy theorist accusing influential people of unspeakable acts, on purpose and liking it. Like at the scene of a bad wreck, you want to look away or go to another station, but I kept listening.

I suddenly felt exposed.

Paranoid.

Maybe I was being watched, monitored.

Probably somewhere in Northern Virginia there’s already a computer that’s bigger than a house and maybe not much smaller than a small city. And now with the dawn of quantum computing -- entangled particles, speeds faster than the speed of light -- there’s talk of artificial intelligence. I’ve heard it said by people who know more about it than me that such a machine could absorb, digest and store as much data as there are atoms in the universe, which sounds crazy to me, but lots of things sound crazy at first. “Artificial Intelligence” sounds like a contradiction in terms, but appearances can be deceiving. Whatever it is, we seemed to be on our way…

Already, mighty rivers of data can be poured into the Northern Virginia data-machine and it just laps it up like a thirsty kitten, from everybody’s social security number and all their Facebook friends to my exact location on I-70 heading up into the mountains at a precise moment in time, listening to a conspiracy theorist.

Thinking about what was possible, I got even more paranoid and pulled off at the next exit to get coffee and a donut.

Back on the highway I could feel the eyes of overhead satellites crawling around on my neck and on my face like spiders creating their net.

The big data-machine would read my column so it would know I got drunk once with Greg Allman.

My mind raced.

I imagined a psychology researcher at Harvard discovering an unusual, potentially disruptive personality trait common to all people who’ve gotten drunk with Greg Allman and later on in life listened to conspiracy theorists, ZZ Top and Beethoven and owned a Toyota Tacoma with under 20,000 miles on it, not 200,000. The Harvard brain writes an algorithm to reach down into the data-machine to identify all humans on earth who have these five data points. Until science found a cure, he recommends that such people be quarantined.

It was possible.

The tools to do it already existed today.

Maybe Santa Claus was real. Maybe Zombies, too, only disguised to look like something else. In the only Zombie movie I ever saw, people ran from the walking dead to seek safety in a prison with guards and no exits. The idea of it still freaked me out whenever I thought about it, whenever I got paranoid thinking about the future and the road we appeared to be going down according to the news.

But then I reminded myself of what Leibniz would say in a situation such as this, that we weren’t Swiss watches, but the watchmakers, the creators of a Santa Claus or even Zombies if that’s what we decided to do.

That calmed me down enough to enjoy the scenery on my way to my appointment. I decided to stop at the truck stop in Boebert’s hometown of Rifle to stretch my legs, get another coffee and maybe a breakfast burrito.