Post by Captain Fenypoodle on Jul 16, 2006 5:13:22 GMT -5
Please, please give feedback! Hope you enjoy!
You know my name. Everyone knows my name. But I am not who you would think of if I told you it. I am the product of dreams, a machine that looks like a bread-maker and a coincidence that changed the face of humanity.
By 2093, the year in which our story starts, the imaginatively named Babymaker was well established. Natural gestations were down to less than one in a thousand. The Babymaker is simple and fun for every new family to use. Just scan in the coding for the parental DNA then play until your heart is content. Strengthen or weaken traits to make your dream baby. Screen and replace faulty DNA that could put your child at risk of disease or infirmity (or middling talent or intelligence) with DNA from the extensive database. Once happy, snap in the provided “Baby building cartridge” and press “go”. Nine months later you have your new-made baby, perfect in every chosen way: and with every baby a two thousand page bespoke instruction manual telling you everything you need to know; what to feed your baby, how strict to be whilst potty training, what music to play, etc., depending on whether you are trying to grow a statesman, artist, sportsman or comedian.
The Babymaker seemed to solve the few remaining problems of humanity. A generation of brilliant, kind, loving, funny and beautiful babies was born. Women were free of the dangers and pains of child-creation and the inequalities it engendered. Genetic disorders were no more. Psychopathy was preserved only in the fading oldsters. The Impartial Governor ensured that the invention was not used for political aims. So long as you didn’t exceed your baby quota, you were completely free in your choice of baby. But fourhundredthousand youthful dreams said otherwise.
In March that year Johnny Depp, beloved star of stage, screen and computer game-animation, died peacefully in his sleep at the grand old age of 129. My mother tells me that even though his golden days had faded three decades before she felt like a dark fog settled upon the world, like the first few days after Yellowstone. She felt just a little more lost, like something had been stolen, at the ‘final’ departure of the brightest light of the plastic age and in the darkness that followed. She tells me that it is difficult to imagine now the awful cold after Yellowstone and how the joy of films of brighter days had lifted them up in the bunkers and terrible blackness. Pirates of the Caribbean 12, The Spark of Sirius, was the first new film released after the disaster. Half filmed when Yellowstone blew and finished in sets beneath the Hollywood hills, the pirate crew searches for a great jewel of eternal brilliance, Sirius’s third sister fallen to earth, with the power to restore life. The symbolism was blindingly obvious and would have been too clunky for audiences in less desperate times, but as the star of the first film made after the disaster, Johnny, who had returned as Commodore Jack Sparrow, was embraced as totem of hope.
Over the two weeks after his death cinemas showed every one of his films. The pages were full of his interviews and articles. His autobiography sold 21 million copies, one for every three adults. And then on the fifteenth day after his death, while the world was still mourning, the global DNA database was hacked. At a key stroke the DNA of every person ever tested, every world citizen alive since 2052, along with the salvaged DNA of the great and good: Einstein, Cleopatra, Gandhi, Prince Albert and many others, was freely available.
The following year 8% of the million babies born were straight Johnny Depp, a further 13% were Johnny Depp tweaked and 18% were half Johnny Depp. I have a lot of brothers. My name is John Christopher Theodore Depp, MMMMMMMMMMMMDCCLXXV.
Our mothers were distraught when the scale of the crisis became evident. How could so many other people have shared their vision, their daring, their most secret thoughts? The Department of Depp was set up to deal with the consequences. Both the practical consequences - what if a virus mutated to a form that depps were particularly susceptible to? how would they create enough jobs for actors, writers, artists and musicians? and to investigate the metaphysical questions that we would need answering, - who were we to be? there had already been one Johnny Depp, were we to be echoes, bad carbon copies? were we all the same person? did we share one soul?
I grew up blissfully unaware of my commonness. There was a silent consensus, we would know soon enough. I always knew that my DNA, my blueprint, was based on Johnny Depp (to avoid confusion I will only call the film star Johnny Depp by the full name Johnny Depp going forward - if only that convention were followed in life) and we watched his films as a family. But I was only his progeny, I was my parents’ son and was taught I was a unique person with unique potential, special. There was only one other Johnny in the village and he was my best friend, my twin, we were inseparable. Inevitably we spent much of our time playing pirates and Peter Pan, falling out of trees, falling into swamps, running around and hitting things with sticks. He’s never admitted it but I suspect he was tweaked. He’s always been a couple of inches taller than me and had a way with maths. He says it was the vitamin-shakes his parents made him drink. His name is Marshall John Depp Marshall, we called him Marshall. He and everyone else I knew called me Theo.
At twelve we joined our brothers in a miniature crime wave. Nothing major; we burnt the odd crumbling shed, stole a neighbouring girl’s bra, a couple of packs of cigarettes and an airgun. It was worse in the cities. The concentration of depps led to a competitive snowballing of petty vandalism. No monument was safe. In London it started with a vapid grin painted on Nelson (at the top of Nelson’s column) and eventually escalated to the Phoenix, fifty-foot symbol of our resurrection, being encased in a plaster cast of the Funky Chicken. After that we mostly grew out of it, got bored and began to look inwards. But it was a taste of what was to come. If there is one trait that we all share it is our anarchic hearts.
At thirteen we joined the local academy. This was my first exposure to our strange shared reality. My year was pretty average, out of 73 there were ten full or tweaked depps and eight half depps, three of which were girls. Can you imagine what it is like to see yourself walking down every corridor, see other people’s work written in your handwriting, mirrors mirrors everywhere? We strove to be individual but all ended up pulling in similar directions. If we had to write a story for class, about anything we wanted, and I decided to write about a kid trapped in the death throes of Manhattan after Yellowstone, so would another depp. The ideas that I rejected would be carried out by someone else and if their’s turned out better I would kick myself. But to chose the obvious and be matched and bested - that was worse. So we would rack our brains for flashes of obscurity beyond the scope of the others. We all took up playing instruments – I learnt the harp. We all started designing our own clothes – I chose Victoriana mixed with 70’s punk – I had a top hat in red plaid encircled with safety-pins, not many of those around. And then at fifteen, to a man, depression hit.
What was the point in doing anything when if I didn’t do it another me would do it anyway? What was the point in living my life when an earlier me had done it once and done it better? I would never be as successful, loved, admired or respected as my originator. Looked at next to his life, mine, though likely to be longer, would be a damp squib. What trail could I blaze? Who could I be that was uniquely me?
I started out by trying to find out where I came from. Who was Johnny Depp? Why did he have such a hold on people’s hearts? I lazed in my room for hours infront of the screen and watched every film Johnny Depp made, read his interviews, articles, books and the books about him. I watched all the extras from the DVDs. I called up photos of his paintings and magazine articles on the lives of his children and his life-long love Vanessa. I listened to his albums over and over again, nearly recognising and then just missing the deeper meaning whenever I felt almost I’d grasped it.
I read all the history books on the plastic age, to get a feel for the world that created him. The age of money, of disease, of inequality and violence. Why did he gain such a following? I read the poets of the time, listened to the music, read the novels – especially his favourites. I asked my mum and all the other depp mums and oldsters than I could find. It was an empty, striving world. Billions of people crowded into dirty ugly cities, each one of them scratching out a living all day every day. The themes of drudgery, compromise and battered dreams re-appeared again and again in the histories. If you were lucky fifty years of working every day in a concrete office. How could they do it? Not easily, depression and apathy became worldwide epidemics. A billion people unable to get out of bed in the morning. They were powerless to control their greedy short-sighted politicians, promoted by self-interested newspapers and maintained by the belief that there was no alternative, that democracy and capitalism were the best options, so much so that they could never see life getting any better except through getting ever richer. Inequality poisoned and paralysed them, driven by the human need for status they had to be a little better off than their neighbours. For these people there was no purity to be found. Run by humans, everything was grey, compromised and polluted. Everything except their dreams.
They lived in movies, in stories and ever more absorbing fantastical games; in dreamscapes where their instincts for good, against evil, could be acted out, and religion - the greatest legends of all. They escaped into worlds where the great universal human concepts had meaning. Where one man could make a difference, where humanism and true love blossomed and great visions could create perfection.
What did Johnny Depp represent to these desperate people? He was, simply, coolly and elegantly, the greatest dream purveyor of them all, because he believed in his product.
He specialised from his early career in characters which had rejected and escaped from the accepted, the norm and all it’s accompanying weight. They refused to do what they were supposed to and yet they prospered and were successful and loved. They represented the great dream of ‘just be yourself, the most yourself that you can and life will come good’. They were the powerless who couldn’t be squashed. The ridiculed who couldn’t be broken. The poor who could never be bought (except when they sold themselves to be horribly killed).
I had to admire his movies. How could the man have such foresight…"I don't want to be 85 years old and have my grandkids go, 'Ewwww. Grandpa did some dumb smeep.' I'd rather have them say, 'Wow, man, you're nuts!'". So many grandkids.
Marshall and I sat around, shot pool and talked through the night.
“Either that man was a saint or he had the world’s best publicist.”
“Probably neither.”
“merde.”
“merde!”
He lived by the values that drove his movie choices. Escaping from safe lunchbox eponymy, being a little wild, risking making off beat movies out of loyalty to people he admired. And then in contrast to the seedy affairs of the other glitterati, falling head over heals in love at first sight and telling the whole world how happy his family made him ever after. He lived the dream of following his own path, every day forward to wherever it led him and it led him to fulfilment and happiness.
So where did that leave me? I struggled in the dark of my room for days, weeks, months. A year after I started when my research was finally done I understood the action of the mothers. He was gone, exhausted, and I was alone, bereft. A seed of despair born of love, loss and jealousy grew inside me, gasping at the suffocating weight of his legacy. How could I be free, of it, of him?
I started by throwing his toys out of my pram. Everything he’d embraced I rejected. Everything he rejected I embraced. I ached to obliterate him in me and every other depp on the planet. To make them disappear, one by one, poof! How can they be real? Only one of us can be real, the others are golems, doppelgangers. But no, they are as real as I am. I am manifold.
To spite him I embarked on becoming a tax accountant historian, but three days of reading drove my head deep into my hands. Nothing could be more pointless. I couldn’t embrace what he rejected any more than I could make hot feel cold and cold hot. I was him. Him but missing something, some spark, some assurance. Must have been something he found along the way. If he could only tell me what it was, but I could read the poetry that he lived by but with me - it missed the mark. Nobody can tell you that kind of thing, what is worth living for, you have to find it for yourself. I realised that when he was my age he must have been more confused, more lost, more uncertain, with no idea who he was going to be, and he achieved all that. smeeper. He had no safety net, no guaranteed support in whatever he chose.
Full of despair and lost, I moved to the city. Education could wait, life could wait, I just wanted to wander, see what happened. Marshall came with me. His tweak seemed to have spared him the depths of my depression, no monsters from the deep, just a quiet thoughtful melancholy. I was grateful to have him with me. He felt enough to understand but not to be crippled by the gut wrenching - what? Emptiness? Just sickness, darkness. We stayed in one of the grand hostels, guests as always of the state, and we drank. All night, every day from the moment we crawled out of our sleeping sacks to the moment we somehow fell back in them, in the deep dark depp dens of the city (as they became known). 30 of us, 50 of us, sometimes laughing, mostly not speaking. And we fought, fought with ourselves, our inner turmoil played out in graphic novel clarity. Sometimes I felt a part of something precious, unique, this overabundance of testosterone driven angst and potential: one giant ant person in pain. Mainly I felt my fragile teenage identity was besieged. We stopped trying to remember each other’s unique histories, it was impossible to remember who was who, we merged.
The Governor did its best of course. It wasn’t like we didn’t know what should make us happy. The secrets of human happiness, not anything that surprising as it turned out; family, friends, exercise, giving a smeep about others, identity, creativity, personal freedom, purpose and cooking your own food, were well tested. But our beef was just too big. Identity and purpose, that was the problem. They published depp specific guidance, of course, but did we read it? Did we smeep.
I got a tattoo of three five pointed stars under my left eye. Non-depps started talking to me, secure that they’d know me next time we met. My mood lightened, progress was possible, until walking down the street rather earlier than I’d been accustomed to I was hailed as Jack. He’d got his stars three weeks before. I got mine filled in sea green. I began to dream of murder and woke up in fear. What I dreamed I knew another depp would make real.
I went to the local Conduit with my fears. A warm young lady, my idea of what a priest should have been like.
“I am a depp.”
“Yes sweetheart, I can see that.”
“And as a depp I have an insight into what other depps are going to do. Insight isn’t a strong enough word. Foresight would be better. Or even hindsight, I can know what’s happened without seeing it.”
“Ok.”
“When I was at school the ideas that I had for stories would be carried out by other depps.”
“That’s interesting…”
“I once went to school to find someother depp wearing a t-shirt nearly the same as one I had designed myself.”
“Ok. And what is it that you fear that a depp is going to do?”
“He is going to try and eliminate all the other depps.”
“The Governor has looked at the depps likely life-pattern. It isn’t really in your nature to undertake a crime spree darling. Crimes of passion yes, but not a sustained crusade.”
“But unusual times…unusual measures. It is a truly strange pressure that we live with.”
“I will let the Governor know.”
“Thank you.”
“Any idea when these crimes might start?”
“Someone else usually gets there before me. I’d say they’d already started.”
“We haven’t found any bodies.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Goodnight. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.”
“You too. Goodnight.”
They found the first body three weeks later, well decomposed. Shot in the back of the head. Murder had become pretty much unheard of. Life was easy, few parents chose children with a propensity for violence and serious crime had become almost impossible to get away with once the detectives had been perfected. Unless you were a depp. DNA and other molecular evidence were next to useless. Fingerprints? Retinal scans? Visual recordings were even worse. Even human alibis were unreliable, we could usually trick each others mothers. The next body was found four days after. Another after three days. Another two days, another body.
The mood in the depp dens was black, black, black. Who was the viper in our midst? Stupid instinct said to huddle together. Logic said to find the nearest non-depp and bearhug them. But they were horrified by the murders and crossed the street to avoid us (in zigzag patterns). We knew nothing but that it was a depp. We hovered, we milled, like sheep without a dog. They didn’t trust us, we didn’t trust each other, didn’t trust ourselves. And if it wasn’t bad enough, we knew that if there was only one depp doing this, it was the first time in our lifetimes just one depp had ever done anything.
Marshall came up with the solution. “I can always tell if another depp is lying”.
“Me too.”
“We’ll just have to ask them all if they’ve killed anyone.”
The plan was simple but not without it’s drawbacks. Fortunately, the Governor came up with pretty much the same answer. On our third day of scouring the bars they sent the enforcers in. I was grateful. By then I could barely open my eyes and my nose would never again be compared to a finely chiselled anything. Every single depp rounded up and shipped off to the compounds. Quite an exercise. The Governor’s approach was more scientific than Marshall’s. They couldn’t let any one of us do the questioning as we could each have been the murderer, so they got a machine to do it instead. They must have been planning it for years; where else did they get a facility that size? It took months to get through us all. Interminable months of sitting in a white cell alone, comfortable, all entertainment channels on hand, but man... I learnt to meditate.
Then they tagged us, injected us with a virus that swiped some of our unused cabbage DNA and replaced it with a unique luminous marker. Identical no more they set us free (all but two). The murders exorcised our darkest demons - we were never going back there again. The solitary confinement forced a measure of peace. I was eighteen, pleasingly rugged looking and the bevy of sweet natured, independent, graceful girls obligingly created by the mothers in the few years after our mass conception was just coming to fruition. The next few years were fun. We swapped girlfriends. We couldn’t help it. The dream of free love became a reality as the girls couldn’t tell whether they were sidling up to their guy or some guy they’d never met. Ok they could tell with me, but after a while it didn’t matter. Cigarettes that did no more damage than the nicotine that addicted you to them. Cell level rebuilding of your liver whenever it got too damaged. Nothing I had to do until I was twentyone. Like many others, I joined a band. Hundreds of us on stages in bars throughout the city all knowing what the others were going to do next whether we played with the guy’s we practised with or not. The whole city was alive with music. We found our freedom.
I am Johnny Depp. In my last life I was a global superstar, the most beloved actor of a generation. I have been reborn many times. What will I do with this, my new life? I will do all the things I didn’t get to do last time. Travel incognito. Jump out of planes. Spend years learning obscure crafts. Paint. Make fifty-foot structures out of glass that shatter the light in a million directions. Hand-carve tables. Write (probably bad) poetry. And some of the things that I did last time. I will find my girl, somewhere, and start a little family of my own.
Six years ago I joined The Society. No need to call it The Depp Society, everyone knows what it means. Every year we celebrate Johnny Depp’s birthday by re-enacting a scene from one of the movies that he made at the age we are now. This year I am fortythree. Fortythousand Captain Jack Sparrows all charging into the sea screaming - a feeling I will never forget. But I think it would have been even better to be on the other side, watching.
You know my name. Everyone knows my name. But I am not who you would think of if I told you it. I am the product of dreams, a machine that looks like a bread-maker and a coincidence that changed the face of humanity.
By 2093, the year in which our story starts, the imaginatively named Babymaker was well established. Natural gestations were down to less than one in a thousand. The Babymaker is simple and fun for every new family to use. Just scan in the coding for the parental DNA then play until your heart is content. Strengthen or weaken traits to make your dream baby. Screen and replace faulty DNA that could put your child at risk of disease or infirmity (or middling talent or intelligence) with DNA from the extensive database. Once happy, snap in the provided “Baby building cartridge” and press “go”. Nine months later you have your new-made baby, perfect in every chosen way: and with every baby a two thousand page bespoke instruction manual telling you everything you need to know; what to feed your baby, how strict to be whilst potty training, what music to play, etc., depending on whether you are trying to grow a statesman, artist, sportsman or comedian.
The Babymaker seemed to solve the few remaining problems of humanity. A generation of brilliant, kind, loving, funny and beautiful babies was born. Women were free of the dangers and pains of child-creation and the inequalities it engendered. Genetic disorders were no more. Psychopathy was preserved only in the fading oldsters. The Impartial Governor ensured that the invention was not used for political aims. So long as you didn’t exceed your baby quota, you were completely free in your choice of baby. But fourhundredthousand youthful dreams said otherwise.
In March that year Johnny Depp, beloved star of stage, screen and computer game-animation, died peacefully in his sleep at the grand old age of 129. My mother tells me that even though his golden days had faded three decades before she felt like a dark fog settled upon the world, like the first few days after Yellowstone. She felt just a little more lost, like something had been stolen, at the ‘final’ departure of the brightest light of the plastic age and in the darkness that followed. She tells me that it is difficult to imagine now the awful cold after Yellowstone and how the joy of films of brighter days had lifted them up in the bunkers and terrible blackness. Pirates of the Caribbean 12, The Spark of Sirius, was the first new film released after the disaster. Half filmed when Yellowstone blew and finished in sets beneath the Hollywood hills, the pirate crew searches for a great jewel of eternal brilliance, Sirius’s third sister fallen to earth, with the power to restore life. The symbolism was blindingly obvious and would have been too clunky for audiences in less desperate times, but as the star of the first film made after the disaster, Johnny, who had returned as Commodore Jack Sparrow, was embraced as totem of hope.
Over the two weeks after his death cinemas showed every one of his films. The pages were full of his interviews and articles. His autobiography sold 21 million copies, one for every three adults. And then on the fifteenth day after his death, while the world was still mourning, the global DNA database was hacked. At a key stroke the DNA of every person ever tested, every world citizen alive since 2052, along with the salvaged DNA of the great and good: Einstein, Cleopatra, Gandhi, Prince Albert and many others, was freely available.
The following year 8% of the million babies born were straight Johnny Depp, a further 13% were Johnny Depp tweaked and 18% were half Johnny Depp. I have a lot of brothers. My name is John Christopher Theodore Depp, MMMMMMMMMMMMDCCLXXV.
Our mothers were distraught when the scale of the crisis became evident. How could so many other people have shared their vision, their daring, their most secret thoughts? The Department of Depp was set up to deal with the consequences. Both the practical consequences - what if a virus mutated to a form that depps were particularly susceptible to? how would they create enough jobs for actors, writers, artists and musicians? and to investigate the metaphysical questions that we would need answering, - who were we to be? there had already been one Johnny Depp, were we to be echoes, bad carbon copies? were we all the same person? did we share one soul?
I grew up blissfully unaware of my commonness. There was a silent consensus, we would know soon enough. I always knew that my DNA, my blueprint, was based on Johnny Depp (to avoid confusion I will only call the film star Johnny Depp by the full name Johnny Depp going forward - if only that convention were followed in life) and we watched his films as a family. But I was only his progeny, I was my parents’ son and was taught I was a unique person with unique potential, special. There was only one other Johnny in the village and he was my best friend, my twin, we were inseparable. Inevitably we spent much of our time playing pirates and Peter Pan, falling out of trees, falling into swamps, running around and hitting things with sticks. He’s never admitted it but I suspect he was tweaked. He’s always been a couple of inches taller than me and had a way with maths. He says it was the vitamin-shakes his parents made him drink. His name is Marshall John Depp Marshall, we called him Marshall. He and everyone else I knew called me Theo.
At twelve we joined our brothers in a miniature crime wave. Nothing major; we burnt the odd crumbling shed, stole a neighbouring girl’s bra, a couple of packs of cigarettes and an airgun. It was worse in the cities. The concentration of depps led to a competitive snowballing of petty vandalism. No monument was safe. In London it started with a vapid grin painted on Nelson (at the top of Nelson’s column) and eventually escalated to the Phoenix, fifty-foot symbol of our resurrection, being encased in a plaster cast of the Funky Chicken. After that we mostly grew out of it, got bored and began to look inwards. But it was a taste of what was to come. If there is one trait that we all share it is our anarchic hearts.
At thirteen we joined the local academy. This was my first exposure to our strange shared reality. My year was pretty average, out of 73 there were ten full or tweaked depps and eight half depps, three of which were girls. Can you imagine what it is like to see yourself walking down every corridor, see other people’s work written in your handwriting, mirrors mirrors everywhere? We strove to be individual but all ended up pulling in similar directions. If we had to write a story for class, about anything we wanted, and I decided to write about a kid trapped in the death throes of Manhattan after Yellowstone, so would another depp. The ideas that I rejected would be carried out by someone else and if their’s turned out better I would kick myself. But to chose the obvious and be matched and bested - that was worse. So we would rack our brains for flashes of obscurity beyond the scope of the others. We all took up playing instruments – I learnt the harp. We all started designing our own clothes – I chose Victoriana mixed with 70’s punk – I had a top hat in red plaid encircled with safety-pins, not many of those around. And then at fifteen, to a man, depression hit.
What was the point in doing anything when if I didn’t do it another me would do it anyway? What was the point in living my life when an earlier me had done it once and done it better? I would never be as successful, loved, admired or respected as my originator. Looked at next to his life, mine, though likely to be longer, would be a damp squib. What trail could I blaze? Who could I be that was uniquely me?
I started out by trying to find out where I came from. Who was Johnny Depp? Why did he have such a hold on people’s hearts? I lazed in my room for hours infront of the screen and watched every film Johnny Depp made, read his interviews, articles, books and the books about him. I watched all the extras from the DVDs. I called up photos of his paintings and magazine articles on the lives of his children and his life-long love Vanessa. I listened to his albums over and over again, nearly recognising and then just missing the deeper meaning whenever I felt almost I’d grasped it.
I read all the history books on the plastic age, to get a feel for the world that created him. The age of money, of disease, of inequality and violence. Why did he gain such a following? I read the poets of the time, listened to the music, read the novels – especially his favourites. I asked my mum and all the other depp mums and oldsters than I could find. It was an empty, striving world. Billions of people crowded into dirty ugly cities, each one of them scratching out a living all day every day. The themes of drudgery, compromise and battered dreams re-appeared again and again in the histories. If you were lucky fifty years of working every day in a concrete office. How could they do it? Not easily, depression and apathy became worldwide epidemics. A billion people unable to get out of bed in the morning. They were powerless to control their greedy short-sighted politicians, promoted by self-interested newspapers and maintained by the belief that there was no alternative, that democracy and capitalism were the best options, so much so that they could never see life getting any better except through getting ever richer. Inequality poisoned and paralysed them, driven by the human need for status they had to be a little better off than their neighbours. For these people there was no purity to be found. Run by humans, everything was grey, compromised and polluted. Everything except their dreams.
They lived in movies, in stories and ever more absorbing fantastical games; in dreamscapes where their instincts for good, against evil, could be acted out, and religion - the greatest legends of all. They escaped into worlds where the great universal human concepts had meaning. Where one man could make a difference, where humanism and true love blossomed and great visions could create perfection.
What did Johnny Depp represent to these desperate people? He was, simply, coolly and elegantly, the greatest dream purveyor of them all, because he believed in his product.
He specialised from his early career in characters which had rejected and escaped from the accepted, the norm and all it’s accompanying weight. They refused to do what they were supposed to and yet they prospered and were successful and loved. They represented the great dream of ‘just be yourself, the most yourself that you can and life will come good’. They were the powerless who couldn’t be squashed. The ridiculed who couldn’t be broken. The poor who could never be bought (except when they sold themselves to be horribly killed).
I had to admire his movies. How could the man have such foresight…"I don't want to be 85 years old and have my grandkids go, 'Ewwww. Grandpa did some dumb smeep.' I'd rather have them say, 'Wow, man, you're nuts!'". So many grandkids.
Marshall and I sat around, shot pool and talked through the night.
“Either that man was a saint or he had the world’s best publicist.”
“Probably neither.”
“merde.”
“merde!”
He lived by the values that drove his movie choices. Escaping from safe lunchbox eponymy, being a little wild, risking making off beat movies out of loyalty to people he admired. And then in contrast to the seedy affairs of the other glitterati, falling head over heals in love at first sight and telling the whole world how happy his family made him ever after. He lived the dream of following his own path, every day forward to wherever it led him and it led him to fulfilment and happiness.
So where did that leave me? I struggled in the dark of my room for days, weeks, months. A year after I started when my research was finally done I understood the action of the mothers. He was gone, exhausted, and I was alone, bereft. A seed of despair born of love, loss and jealousy grew inside me, gasping at the suffocating weight of his legacy. How could I be free, of it, of him?
I started by throwing his toys out of my pram. Everything he’d embraced I rejected. Everything he rejected I embraced. I ached to obliterate him in me and every other depp on the planet. To make them disappear, one by one, poof! How can they be real? Only one of us can be real, the others are golems, doppelgangers. But no, they are as real as I am. I am manifold.
To spite him I embarked on becoming a tax accountant historian, but three days of reading drove my head deep into my hands. Nothing could be more pointless. I couldn’t embrace what he rejected any more than I could make hot feel cold and cold hot. I was him. Him but missing something, some spark, some assurance. Must have been something he found along the way. If he could only tell me what it was, but I could read the poetry that he lived by but with me - it missed the mark. Nobody can tell you that kind of thing, what is worth living for, you have to find it for yourself. I realised that when he was my age he must have been more confused, more lost, more uncertain, with no idea who he was going to be, and he achieved all that. smeeper. He had no safety net, no guaranteed support in whatever he chose.
Full of despair and lost, I moved to the city. Education could wait, life could wait, I just wanted to wander, see what happened. Marshall came with me. His tweak seemed to have spared him the depths of my depression, no monsters from the deep, just a quiet thoughtful melancholy. I was grateful to have him with me. He felt enough to understand but not to be crippled by the gut wrenching - what? Emptiness? Just sickness, darkness. We stayed in one of the grand hostels, guests as always of the state, and we drank. All night, every day from the moment we crawled out of our sleeping sacks to the moment we somehow fell back in them, in the deep dark depp dens of the city (as they became known). 30 of us, 50 of us, sometimes laughing, mostly not speaking. And we fought, fought with ourselves, our inner turmoil played out in graphic novel clarity. Sometimes I felt a part of something precious, unique, this overabundance of testosterone driven angst and potential: one giant ant person in pain. Mainly I felt my fragile teenage identity was besieged. We stopped trying to remember each other’s unique histories, it was impossible to remember who was who, we merged.
The Governor did its best of course. It wasn’t like we didn’t know what should make us happy. The secrets of human happiness, not anything that surprising as it turned out; family, friends, exercise, giving a smeep about others, identity, creativity, personal freedom, purpose and cooking your own food, were well tested. But our beef was just too big. Identity and purpose, that was the problem. They published depp specific guidance, of course, but did we read it? Did we smeep.
I got a tattoo of three five pointed stars under my left eye. Non-depps started talking to me, secure that they’d know me next time we met. My mood lightened, progress was possible, until walking down the street rather earlier than I’d been accustomed to I was hailed as Jack. He’d got his stars three weeks before. I got mine filled in sea green. I began to dream of murder and woke up in fear. What I dreamed I knew another depp would make real.
I went to the local Conduit with my fears. A warm young lady, my idea of what a priest should have been like.
“I am a depp.”
“Yes sweetheart, I can see that.”
“And as a depp I have an insight into what other depps are going to do. Insight isn’t a strong enough word. Foresight would be better. Or even hindsight, I can know what’s happened without seeing it.”
“Ok.”
“When I was at school the ideas that I had for stories would be carried out by other depps.”
“That’s interesting…”
“I once went to school to find someother depp wearing a t-shirt nearly the same as one I had designed myself.”
“Ok. And what is it that you fear that a depp is going to do?”
“He is going to try and eliminate all the other depps.”
“The Governor has looked at the depps likely life-pattern. It isn’t really in your nature to undertake a crime spree darling. Crimes of passion yes, but not a sustained crusade.”
“But unusual times…unusual measures. It is a truly strange pressure that we live with.”
“I will let the Governor know.”
“Thank you.”
“Any idea when these crimes might start?”
“Someone else usually gets there before me. I’d say they’d already started.”
“We haven’t found any bodies.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Goodnight. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.”
“You too. Goodnight.”
They found the first body three weeks later, well decomposed. Shot in the back of the head. Murder had become pretty much unheard of. Life was easy, few parents chose children with a propensity for violence and serious crime had become almost impossible to get away with once the detectives had been perfected. Unless you were a depp. DNA and other molecular evidence were next to useless. Fingerprints? Retinal scans? Visual recordings were even worse. Even human alibis were unreliable, we could usually trick each others mothers. The next body was found four days after. Another after three days. Another two days, another body.
The mood in the depp dens was black, black, black. Who was the viper in our midst? Stupid instinct said to huddle together. Logic said to find the nearest non-depp and bearhug them. But they were horrified by the murders and crossed the street to avoid us (in zigzag patterns). We knew nothing but that it was a depp. We hovered, we milled, like sheep without a dog. They didn’t trust us, we didn’t trust each other, didn’t trust ourselves. And if it wasn’t bad enough, we knew that if there was only one depp doing this, it was the first time in our lifetimes just one depp had ever done anything.
Marshall came up with the solution. “I can always tell if another depp is lying”.
“Me too.”
“We’ll just have to ask them all if they’ve killed anyone.”
The plan was simple but not without it’s drawbacks. Fortunately, the Governor came up with pretty much the same answer. On our third day of scouring the bars they sent the enforcers in. I was grateful. By then I could barely open my eyes and my nose would never again be compared to a finely chiselled anything. Every single depp rounded up and shipped off to the compounds. Quite an exercise. The Governor’s approach was more scientific than Marshall’s. They couldn’t let any one of us do the questioning as we could each have been the murderer, so they got a machine to do it instead. They must have been planning it for years; where else did they get a facility that size? It took months to get through us all. Interminable months of sitting in a white cell alone, comfortable, all entertainment channels on hand, but man... I learnt to meditate.
Then they tagged us, injected us with a virus that swiped some of our unused cabbage DNA and replaced it with a unique luminous marker. Identical no more they set us free (all but two). The murders exorcised our darkest demons - we were never going back there again. The solitary confinement forced a measure of peace. I was eighteen, pleasingly rugged looking and the bevy of sweet natured, independent, graceful girls obligingly created by the mothers in the few years after our mass conception was just coming to fruition. The next few years were fun. We swapped girlfriends. We couldn’t help it. The dream of free love became a reality as the girls couldn’t tell whether they were sidling up to their guy or some guy they’d never met. Ok they could tell with me, but after a while it didn’t matter. Cigarettes that did no more damage than the nicotine that addicted you to them. Cell level rebuilding of your liver whenever it got too damaged. Nothing I had to do until I was twentyone. Like many others, I joined a band. Hundreds of us on stages in bars throughout the city all knowing what the others were going to do next whether we played with the guy’s we practised with or not. The whole city was alive with music. We found our freedom.
I am Johnny Depp. In my last life I was a global superstar, the most beloved actor of a generation. I have been reborn many times. What will I do with this, my new life? I will do all the things I didn’t get to do last time. Travel incognito. Jump out of planes. Spend years learning obscure crafts. Paint. Make fifty-foot structures out of glass that shatter the light in a million directions. Hand-carve tables. Write (probably bad) poetry. And some of the things that I did last time. I will find my girl, somewhere, and start a little family of my own.
Six years ago I joined The Society. No need to call it The Depp Society, everyone knows what it means. Every year we celebrate Johnny Depp’s birthday by re-enacting a scene from one of the movies that he made at the age we are now. This year I am fortythree. Fortythousand Captain Jack Sparrows all charging into the sea screaming - a feeling I will never forget. But I think it would have been even better to be on the other side, watching.
That was the most original thing I have read in ages. What a terrifying concept. I almost stopped after the first few paragraphs because the whole scenario was upsetting me too much but I'm really glad I kept going. Fantastic writing, Smilerrj. And I absolutely loved your last line, very Johnny-esque ;D 
