Chapter 15

Delirious, delirious.

That’s what everyone keeps telling him. They say he’s delirious, delusional, diametrically detached. But the voices are returning. The story he was told wasn’t true, the one even he was starting to doubt after seven years locked up in the place where they made it official and fed him drugs to soothe him and his rattled sense of reality. It was true. Because it was happening again.

Seven years ago a boy named Gerry Donovan was made aware by his German shepherd Spotty that dogs were intergalactic beings who controlled the universe. They sent agents to every world, in anticipation of an evaluation of the population’s long-term worth, and Earth’s ticket was up. Gerry learned that Spotty was in fact not only his loyal pet but the ruler of these tyrants, who had deemed humanity unworthy. Fortunately, Spotty spared Gerry, as well as an astronaut named Oswald Hamilton, who had happened across the same realization, along with his trusty, footstool-shaped robot companion named Omni 117, after coming across Gerry’s diary, which floated about in space after the dog and the boy’s departure from the doomed planet.

Various adventures resulted, in which the last humans in existence learned the true canine adversary was not cats but flies, whom when captured were banished to the Nullification Zone. Spotty continued his ‘weeding’ of planets, with his humans as his pets, until he grew tired of them and left them behind one day. Eventually, Gerry and Oswald ended up as the hosts of a talk show on the planet Golem, until Spotty came to collect them again. He said the time of reckoning had come.

Somehow, Gerry ended up back on Earth, where he was committed and everyone told him those events were figments of his imagination. He stewed on that, in his stupor, for seven years, and began to believe it. After all, one view of reality was just as likely as another. He had now experienced three, and had decided any one of them could be real. Perhaps everyone was really just in a drug-induced haze, locked away in a padded room, having their dreams taken from them and replaced with a life where they were told what was really going on, despite what they believed. Gerry was the lucky one, knowing how he did the hand that held him down. When he wanted someone to blame, he could point right toward the nurse who visited him three times each day, with the needle and the serum that informed his reality.

In all actuality, he had began to like this state. Even if it wasn’t true, he had decided it might as well be, for all he cared. He accepted it, as someone accepts that a spoon goes inside your mouth if you want to eat. He ate his truth, willingly, for seven years. For seven years truth was something someone gave him.

Then he heard the voices again. This was how it had all started before, the voices, the ones that told him there was another way, another view of reality, one that would shatter everything he had ever known. He knew immediately that there was going to be a fourth world waiting for him, if he could just understand what the voices were saying. He needed help. He couldn’t do it alone. Spotty. He needed Spotty.

But Spotty had been put to sleep. That’s what he had been told, and he had no reason to doubt it, after the grand parade of the cosmos had been played out and the toys put away and he had been safely nestled into this new womb of his. Spotty, the dictator whose pride of his galaxy had moved him to nurture its inhabitants by removing cancerous growths from it, was gone, put to sleep from among those he had condemned. And it all made perfect sense. That was the greatest gift Gerry had received. He understood everything.

And so he waited for the voices to come into focus, so he could embrace his fourth world, where new gods would be waiting, and his final battle would finally be fought. He had found his Source.