The following short story is from Monty Webber’s new collection of Short Stories of the same title, ‘Glitching Out’. To buy a copy email Monty at [email protected].
Being a filmmaker, I occasionally get to meet other filmmakers. In 2004, at the Kona Short Film Festival on the Big Island of Hawaii, I met a documentary film producer from Los Angeles, California. When he discovered I was an Australian, he intrigued me by gesturing for me to come closer and whispered: “Have I got a story for you!”. As I had my camera and sound gear with me, I asked him if it was okay if I recorded the story. He didn’t want to appear on camera but let me record audio. There was only one proviso: If I ever went public with the story, I must not to use his name. Here is a transcript of what he told me. It was spoken with a classic Northern Californian drawl.
“About 15 years ago, in the late ’80s, I was working on a documentary about the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After a disappointing interview with an old CIA agent named Jeff Almond, he apologized and said he couldn’t answer more of my questions. I must have appeared somewhat disappointed, and I think he felt sorry for me. He told me to ask him about anything else apart from the death of JFK. So, off the cuff, I asked him: “Who’s the most extraordinary person you’ve ever met?” He ran through a list of famous people, including Josef Starlin, Pol Pot, Al Capone, Henry Kissinger, Golda Meir, and Elvis Presley. He rubbed his chin, and his eyes lit up and he blurted: “Wait a minute. I’ll tell you who the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met was. Someone no one has ever heard of. This will blow your socks off.”
To my surprise, Agent Almond described an Australian surfer he met in 1967, in Huntington Beach, called Mike Williams. Jeff told me Williams was very muscular with disheveled blonde hair and wore no shoes. Jeff said that he and his partner Sam had been involved in Project MKUltra, the secret drugging of people with LSD. He said they were in a bar in Huntington when he observed Williams guessing what people were thinking for free drinks. Jeff observed Williams entertaining the crowd, while his partner Sam was spiking someone’s drink. To his surprise, Jeff saw that Williams was guessing everything right. People could be thinking about anything: a number, a friend’s name, an animal, or even a different country, and Williams was correct every time.
Jeff saw Williams steal someone else’s drink on his way to the men’s room. But it was a drink that had just been spiked with a massive dose of LSD by his partner Sam. Jeff and Sam watched Williams to see how he responded to the drug. They had both drugged a lot of people by that stage of their careers and were familiar with how things usually went – badly. They’d seen a hippy woman try to drown herself in the ocean, a Vietnam veteran run in front of a moving truck, and a businessman jump out of the window of a tall building.
But Williams was different; the large dose of LSD lit him up like a Christmas tree. Jeff noticed that Williams was a chameleon; he effortlessly mimicked whoever he was around. Surrounded by jocks, he took his shirt off and puffed out his chest and struck a variety of bodybuilding poses. He shuffled slowly through a group of surfers with his arms behind his back like he was soul-arching on a surfboard. Outside, on the busy street, while standing next to a Cherokee Indian, Williams chanted and did a rain dance. He and the Cherokee looked at the sky like they expected a downpour. He also bumped into a biker who picked a fight with him, but Williams stared him down, and the biker backed off, seeing how twisted he was.
Williams climbed up the ladder on the back of a passing Greyhound bus and sat on the baggage racks. It was the non-stop Huntington to Las Vegas special. Jeff and Sam rushed to their car and followed the bus. It was late in the afternoon, and as the sun set, Williams stood on the top of the bus like he was riding his surfboard. Jeff and Sam tailed the bus the whole way there, it took six hours. They were surprised that the police never pulled it over.
Upon their arrival in Vegas, they followed Williams through the front doors of Caesar’s Palace. Inside the casino, Williams won everything he bet on. In no time, the floor staff were onto him, took him aside, and questioned him. By the time Jeff and Sam broke into the conversation, the mob boss owner of the casino was threatening Williams and asking him how he was cheating. When Jeff and Sam flashed their CIA identification, Williams informed the casino owner: “You can’t touch me; I work for the CIA”.
Jeff and Sam took Williams, with his pockets full of money, to a nearby hotel, where he drank everything in the mini-bar and then crashed out on the floor and slept for 10 hours. When he woke, he told the agents that he wanted to return to the West Coast to complete his “Californian surf tour of duty”. They took him back to CIA headquarters in Los Angeles. It was there that Jeff took Williams to meet Agent Simon Crow. Agent Crow was the head of the Stargate Project: the Remote Viewing Research Team. Jeff did not tell Agent Crow anything about Williams but suggested he might make a good Stargate Project member. Agent Crow sat down opposite Williams and opened a book with no title on the cover. Crow silently read from the book. After a short while, he asked Williams what topic he thought he had been reading about. Williams quoted back to Agent Crow, word for word, the exact text that he had just read. It was a complicated scene from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Simon Crow did his best not to seem surprised. Williams acted like he had always been a CIA agent.
Agent Crow gave Williams a map of the Soviet Union, a jar of coloured pencils and a piece of paper and asked him to draw Red Square in Moscow. After drawing a colour accurate picture of Red Square, Agent Crow directed Williams to the Kremlin, where he made his way into the office of Yuri Bezmenov. “This guy wants to defect,” Williams told Agent Crow. “Right now, he’s thinking about how many members of his family died in the Holodomor in the Ukraine, and he wants to bring his wife and children to the United States”. Agent Crow asked Jeff to get Pete Holbrook, who worked with Soviet defectors. When Jeff returned with Holbrook, Agent Crow asked Williams to describe what was on Yuri Bezmenov’s desk in Moscow. Williams told them exactly what they wanted to hear. “The Soviets are planning to invade Czechoslovakia.” Out of all the CIA agents there, only Holbrook knew about this planned invasion. He whispered to the others that they might have just stumbled upon the best remote viewer they would ever meet. The information Williams passed on to the agents over the next few months changed the course of world history.
The only obstacle in the way of Australian surfer Mike Williams becoming the best-ever CIA asset, appeared when, in his mind’s eye, he saw Yuri Bezmenov’s beautiful Russian secretary, Natashia Sambruski. Having informed the agents about Bezmenov, who went on to become the most helpful Soviet official to defect to the US, Williams spent the rest of the morning squirming in his chair like a young teenager with an erection, while perving on Natashia Sambruski.
Williams’ inability to concentrate on his ‘remote viewing missions’ due to the distraction of women, was an almost insignificant problem compared to what happened when he spotted surf breaks in his mind’s eye. This mostly occurred while he was scouring the coastal Naval Bases. During these sessions, for hours on end, Williams ‘mind surfed’ the islands and atolls of Micronesia, and eventually the whole Pacific Ocean. To the frustration of the CIA agents, every time they tried to rouse him from his reverie, he responded in the same way: “Fuck off! I’m on my Pacific Ocean surf tour of duty.”
It was by accident that the team discovered that Williams could not only move anywhere in space but also in time. It happened when he saw in his mind’s eye a newspaper headline about a corrupt waterfront union boss, Jimmy Hoffa and informed them: “I can tell you who killed Hoffa and where his body’s buried.” The agents were confused and told him that Jimmy Hoffa was not dead. Williams closed his eyes and read the date on the newspaper and saw that it was August 1975, eight years into the future.
Over the next few days, Williams exposed the perpetrators of many unsolved crimes. The CIA used these revelations to publicise the agency and for political leverage. But they also let some yet to be committed crimes go ahead without stopping them. When Williams asked them if they wanted him to work out who had assassinated John F. Kennedy, their response was unanimous: “No, don’t worry about that, Mike, we already know.”
The CIA took care of Williams, while they milked what they could from him. But over time, Williams’ ability to remote view slowly disappeared. After he had helped them for almost two years, he told them it had stopped working altogether. At a secret “Thanks Mike!” function, with a group of his CIA friends, Williams met the legendary British spy Roald Pinkerton. During their meeting, Pinkerton was so impressed by Williams’ chameleon-like behavior that he became convinced he would make the perfect double-agent. It took a while for the others to let go of their best asset ever, but since his ability to remote view had evaporated, Pinkerton eventually convinced the powers that be to let Mike defect to the Soviet Union.
Pinkerton hoped that once the Soviets trusted Mike, he could get close enough to kill Leonid Brezhnev. The plan was that the US could then create a highly profitable proxy war between Afghanistan and the Soviets. After Mike’s planned assassination of Brezhnev, they hoped to get their other double agent, Mikhail Mikinoff, elected General Secretary of the Communist Party. Pinkerton and Agent Crow trained Mike up and flew with him to China. Mike crossed the border into the Soviet Union on foot on December 9, 1970. Shivering from the icy conditions, he told the border patrol he was a CIA agent and wanted to defect.
After successfully pretending to be a willing communist, Williams only informed the Soviets of what Pinkerton and Agent Crow had told him to share. Based on his information, the Soviets had a couple of little wins, particularly in Cuba and Argentina. Over time, Williams slowly infiltrated the top levels of power and became great friends with famous British defector Kim Philby, who was living in Moscow and vouched for him unreservedly. “He is as much a willing communist as I am.” While living with Philby, Mike observed and mimicked his every mannerism. This only made the narcissistic Philby like him even more.
Then Williams saw Brezhnev’s beautiful daughter, Azmaninov, and fell madly in love with her. On the day Mike was meant to kill Brezhnev, with a small squirt of cyanide spray, he was arrested and jailed. This was on direct orders from Brezhnev, who was notoriously overprotective of his daughter.
While incarcerated in Moscow, Williams lost remote viewing capability unexpectedly returned. He spent all his time searching his mind’s eye for something of value to trade for his freedom. In his imagination, Mike found his way into the future and saw plans how to build UFOs. He told his captors. Initially, they thought he was making everything up. They finally took him seriously when they got their top astrophysicist, Professor Maxim Brine, to talk to Williams and look at his intricate drawings.
After a few months of studying Williams’s plans, with unlimited government funding and the help of Professor Brine, the Soviets built their first UFO. Constructed precisely to Mike’s specifications they could travel at thousands of miles an hour and, as he said, “Turn on a dime and disappear completely.” This was the beginning of the worldwide UFO phenomenon.
The Soviets would never have given Williams up, but he eventually learned how to escape. During one especially distant journey into the future, Mike discovered that Artificial Intelligence had worked out how to break living organisms out of the time/space continuum. After he indulged himself for three years in the futurist lifestyle of an intergalactic surfer/sex addict, surfing mountain-sized waves in wave pools and making love to robot women, Williams disappeared from his prison cell.
Many years later, Williams found his way back into his pre-ordained time and place in history and sought out Agent Jeff Almond in Los Angeles. He told Jeff he’d been stuck in the hallucination of a highly evolved Artificial Intelligence, looping through endless tubes and multiple orgasms. “I was glitching out for almost a thousand years, Bro.”
The last time Jeff saw Williams was on VHS recordings of the well-documented 1997 Phoenix Lights UFO sighting. Mike confiscated all three original tapes. From three separate angles, the videographers had captured footage of a man standing on top of the triangular alien spacecraft, with both hands behind his back, soul-arching, as the gigantic spacecraft sped off into the distance. One of the camera operators could be overheard on the audio. “There’s someone on top of the UFO; he looks like he’s… surfing!”
I’ve finally decided to tell this story because, for the first time in my life, last night, I saw Mike Williams. I was having dinner with some friends at the Yamba Bowling Club, and there was a free tribute show for the ’80s British new wave band Ultravox. The band was surprisingly good, and we couldn’t believe how well the old singer mimicked the original lead vocalist, Midge Ure. He wore a grey trench coat and had a trademark Ure pencil-thin mustache, and pointy sideburns. As he sang their hit, Vienna, he held both hands behind his back and soul-arched. After the gig, when we were leaving the venue, I saw the name of the tribute band on a poster stuck to the front door of the venue. “MKUltravox – North coast surf tour of duty.”
Adam Courtenay: A review of Glitching Out
Geez I love Monty Webber’s new collection of short stories – ‘Glitching Out’. I’m in love with the crazy, incredible worlds he creates. Of the many short stories he’s written, these are my favourites. They’re crazy but somehow have truths written into their DNA. That’s special writing. I liked them so much I wondered if it was just me – so I gave my very discerning literary type wife the first short story – and she rushed into my study and said she absolutely loved it. If he can get my wife on board (trust me, not easy), then he must be doing something right. I don’t know where he gets the ideas for these tales, but a weirder, wackier or more outlandish bunch of stories I have not read for years. I laughed my face off at some of the scenes he put together. Loved all the apocalyptic visions he conjured, and the way he uses the near future to give the story an immediacy. It’s ‘Twilight Zone’ meets ‘Lost in Space’ with a dash of Kurt Vonnegut. Unreal.
