Winter Counts(8)
“It was okay. Just hung out with Jimmy. Probably go over to his place tomorrow.”
I knew he wouldn’t tell me about his social life. He’d become more secretive as he entered his teenage years, but I’d figured out how to get him talking. He and Jimmy had become obsessed with UFOs, life on other planets, and why humans hadn’t been contacted by these space aliens yet. They would talk on their cell phones for hours, arguing about theories that explained why there’d been no contact from extraterrestrial beings and whether it was a good idea to send out a message from humans to the stars, directed at alien civilizations. Given the living conditions on the rez, it wasn’t hard to figure out why the boys were so fascinated with worlds far away from here.
“What’s the latest on the Martians?” I asked.
He squinted at me, checking to see if I was making fun of him. “Well, Jimmy still argues for the distance argument, but I been telling him that a Bracewell probe shreds the theory. Remember I told you about that?”
I didn’t remember, but I nodded.
He went on. “It just makes sense, but he won’t give it up. Yeah, the closest intelligent society may be millions of light-years away, but they must have sent a probe out! Why wouldn’t they want to find other worlds? Worlds with intelligent life? Not to mention, their civilizations developed millions of years before ours, so there gotta be like thousands, maybe millions of probes out there, but we haven’t seen one! Why not?” He looked at me expectantly.
“Uh, because they ran out of fuel?”
He rolled his eyes, then took a drink of his soda. “Jeez, no. The probes are obviously running on nuclear fusion. They can’t run out of fuel.”
“Okay, so why haven’t any alien ships found us yet?”
“Probes, not ships! Ships contain living creatures, which can’t survive thousands of years while traveling. Probes are AI, like robots; they can travel for millions of years because they’re machines.”
“All right, so why haven’t any alien probes discovered Earth?”
“Because obviously there are no probes! They would have found us by now. It’s only logical. If there were any alien probes, they would have detected our radio and TV transmissions, duh! So, process of elimination, the only possible answer is the simulation theory.” He looked at me with a triumphant smile.
I was enjoying this. “What’s the simulation theory?”
“It says that our world is just a computer simulation created by advanced beings to study us, and we don’t even know that we’re in it.”
“Like the Matrix movie?”
“Yes, exactly! Except that the rebels in the movie were able to escape from the matrix. We can’t do that. Not yet, anyway.”
“So who controls this matrix? Are we like the people in that movie, just batteries for their civilization? What do they want from us?”
He finished his Shasta and grabbed another one out of the cooler. “Well, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet. I been thinking, if someone could learn how to alter the simulation, then maybe they could reprogram it, go back in time, maybe do something.”
“You mean like change something that already happened?”
“Yeah, I guess.” He looked away from me.
I could tell what he was thinking. Although he’d hidden them, he had pencil drawings of his mom buried in his drawers at home. Pictures of his mother dancing at a powwow, drawings of her holding him as a baby, pictures of her graduating from school. Drawings of what she would have looked like if she’d lived. Some elaborate drawings, some just simple pictographs like those used in our winter-counts calendar. He’d never shown me the pictures, but I’d seen them.
Our pizza arrived, and Nathan started eating like it was his last meal. I took a bite. Cardboard covered with tomato soup and commodity cheese. Disgusting. I’d had real pizza before. I let him go at it while I sipped my Shasta.
After we finished, it was quiet. He started messing around with his phone, and I decided to give it a shot. I knew Nathan had fooled around with pot a few times, but I’d never given him grief for it. Maybe he knew something about the other stuff.
“Hey, you hear anything about heroin around here?”
He looked up from his phone. “No. Why do you ask?”
“Somebody said Rick Crow might be starting to bring it in. You ever talk to him?”
“I know who he is, that’s all.”
“C’mon, don’t bullshit me. I know he sells peji, beers. You see any harder crap going around?”
“I’ve heard some of the kids talk about pills, I guess, but I never heard nothing about heroin,” he said. “Maybe monkey water, I don’t know. I think they do more of that stuff over at Pine Ridge.”
“Okay, but let me know if you hear anything.” I finished the last of my Shasta. “Hey, can you check out a name on your phone for me?”
My cell phone was an old-fashioned flip model, without any fancy features. We both got cheap mobile phones at the Walmart just over the border in Nebraska, but his model had text messages and the internet.
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Martin Angel,” I said, spelling it for him. “Maybe in Colorado.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket while I made my way to the men’s room. I got the key from the counter and went inside. There was an ancient gas-station vending machine mounted on the wall, advertising three different products for the bargain price of only seventy-five cents each. Genuine Horny Goat Weed, which promised to enhance desire and improve performance; the Quickie Marriage License, apparently a phony certificate for those in a hurry to consecrate their sacred pizza-shop union; and scented, neon-colored condoms. The circle of life.