Laugh Track

David H. Hendrickson sometimes leaves his award-winning mystery worlds and ventures over into science fiction with some of the most amazing and biting SF stories.

Dave makes no attempt to hide the characters in this original and fun story. Nor should he. And we can only wish, to a point, this was possible. Up to a point.

His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2018, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Heart’s Kiss, and numerous anthologies, including over a half dozen issues of Fiction River, and just about every issue of this magazine so far. Check it all out at http://www.hendricksonwriter.com/

The theories were as common as assholes. Everyone had one. The Veracitati (as they came to be known) didn’t explain themselves, so explanations had to be created.

According to a theory popular in some political circles, the incessant and outrageous lies spewing from the leader of the free world started the whole thing. Politicians, of course, had been lying since they evolved (marginally) from pond scum, but this particular leader had become so brazen and so preposterous in his lies—not even pretending to tell the truth—that the Veracitati couldn’t take it anymore.

At least that was the theory.

Another popular one was that the Veracitati had become bored in their invisible and undetectable spaceships, lurking for countless millennia far outside Sol’s solar system, monitoring a species—humans—that had become increasingly worrisome. And in the Veracitati’s boredom and frustration with humanity’s lack of progress, they chose to reveal themselves and coax humans along the desired path to galactic citizenship. By applying the societal equivalent of a stick of dynamite up the ass.

One leading science fiction author put forth the theory that the spaceships had lost ansible contact with their home world, and in sudden isolation, their commander had gone insane and had intruded into our world in such a bizarre fashion as an act of sadism. “Believe it or not,” she said, “our new overlords might now be even crazier than we are. Like fledgling sociopaths pulling the wings off of flies in the early stages of their sickness, the Veracitati could just be fucking with us. Purely for their amusement. And it’s only going to get worse.”

In response, numerous groups angrily called for a boycott of her books.

In fact, however, no one really knew why the Veracitati did it. They weren’t talking. The theories were all guesswork. No one knew how they did it either, beyond the obvious: a mysterious pulse flashed from their spaceships, formerly hidden to us but now quite visible with the strongest telescopes. And that pulse somehow hit our collective funny bone. But the science involved was so far beyond our understanding, we couldn’t begin to comprehend it. All we knew was that it had happened.

Without explaining themselves, the Veracitati had inserted a laugh track to follow every bold-faced lie uttered with bad intent. Intent, it became apparent, mattered a lot. Parents telling their children about Santa Claus were spared since their hearts were pure, at least on that point. Well-meaning lovers claiming in post-coital bliss that this time had been the best one ever were similarly excused. Even actors and actresses on the stage or in films telling the most outrageous lies suffered no intrusion because their dishonesty was solely in pursuit of dramatic effect.

But for lies spoken or written with bad intent, the response was immediate and stunning.

The leader of the free world stood on a podium behind a black, wooden lectern, looking out over a sea of his supporters, all of them waving red-white-and-blue signs. Behind him on the podium were three rows of supporters, all of them carefully chosen for demographic appeal on that Sunday evening’s nightly news. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, and red tie. Every hair in his comb-over was neatly in place. His cheeks were rosy with makeup for optimal appearance on television screens.

He looked out over the crowd and then at the TV cameras, and spoke the latest of what had become an Everest-sized mountain of deceit. No different than any other day. No different than any other rally.

But this was a different day. The Veracitati had just sent the pulse.

And so, when the leader of the free world looked out over his crowd of supporters and awaited their roar of approval, he was instead greeted with the Veracitati’s response.

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

And then louder, preempting all cheering from the crowd.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The laughter echoed throughout the hall. And because laughter is contagious, sometimes even more so than the chanting of slogans, the leader’s supporters began to join in.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

Even the leader of the free world began to laugh. At least until he realized what he was doing.

“No, stop!” he yelled.

But the laughter continued. A knee-slapper was a knee-slapper. Reporters and cameramen and camerawomen joined in. As did viewers in their homes, watching the rally’s broadcast on cable and satellite, sitting on their couches and lounge chairs.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

It rolled over all of them like a tidal wave until finally, the leader of the free world cut it off, almost screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” as his hands crisscrossed in front of his face.

Finally, they did stop.

“I don’t know what that was,” he said with a frozen smile. He looked about, frowning. “Where did that come from?” Reflexively, he quipped that it was the fault of his old political opponent, the woman he blamed everything on, and his supporters laughed the old-fashioned way and cheered. All was well.

Smiling, the leader picked up where he left off in his speech. Brazen Lie Number One was finished. Time for Brazen Lie Number Two.

He spoke it, and again, the Veracitati’s laugh track responded, preempting the crowd’s cheers.

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The leader of the free world’s eyes widened. What the holy hell was going on? What the fuck!

Once again, his supporters joined in with the Veracitati’s contagious laughter.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

It took longer this time for the leader of the free world to seize back control.

“What’s wrong with you people?” he scolded, forgetting that he, too, had momentarily been laughing at himself. “Don’t laugh!”

But Brazen Lie Number Three set them off again.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The leader of the free world stomped off the stage, barely suppressing his own laughter as he moved behind the red-white-and-blue curtains and raced down a damp, cold concrete hallway, his most trusted assistants and Secret Service agents in tow, all of them trying to wipe grins off their faces.

His ears burned. Everyone was laughing at him!

At him!

Who did they think they were? Rage exploded from deep within his gut.

He whipped his phone out of his pants pocket, pounded in the password, and stabbed the Twitter app. He would get his message out one way or another. His favorite way.

As his hands shook with anger, he typed in Brazen Lie Number One from tonight’s speech. With his index finger, he stabbed the blue oval marked “Tweet.”

The response almost broke the Internet.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The mocking laughter came not just from his many, many detractors, who mocked him continuously, but also from every single one of his supporters! Every follower responded with laughter.

Including the newest twitter account of all, @Veracitati.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The leader of the free world stood frozen, wide-eyed, his heart pounding and hands shaking uncontrollably, as he watched the tsunami of laughter bring Twitter to a crawl.

And not just that.

He heard the laughter in his own ears. The entire world was laughing at him!

The leader of the free world slammed the phone onto the cold, concrete floor as if it were a football and he was spiking it following a touchdown. A Secret Service agent bent down to get it for him, but the leader of the free world kept stomping it to bits, his rage rising with every furious crash of his foot into the evil phone’s increasingly splintered parts.

And when there were no more unshattered parts left to crush, he stomped his foot several more times.

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t tweet. What else could he do?

Time for a hooker.

And so it went.

Simultaneously, in a different time zone, Jimmy Bob Swinnerd, the world-renowned televangelist so accomplished he owned (through his church so it would remain non-taxable) seven multimillion dollar mansions at locations ranging from Palm Beach to Hawaii, twice that number of luxury vehicles (two per mansion, the bare minimum, in addition to a limousine with a full-time driver at his primary residence), and a private Gulfstream jet, strode to the pulpit. His Valentino tailored black suit, Stefano Ricci striped shirt, and Salvatore Ferragamo navy blue tie complemented his well-sculpted body (thanks to a personal workout trainer and daily deep-tissue massages) and his sandy hair, trimmed every three days by the great Armando.

Today’s service had followed the script to the letter, from the four songs of increasing fervor led by the award-winning, forty-person, carefully multiracial Tabernacle of Praise Choir to the scripture reading offered by his equally impeccably attired wife, Thelma Sue.

Jimmy Bob looked out over the assembled thousands, arrayed in three sections divided by wide aisles, each row elevated ever so slightly above the one in front so that every parishioner fortunate enough to be a part of the Tabernacle of Praise had perfect sight lines to Jimmy Bob, sight lines that Los Angeles Lakers season ticket holders could only dream of. Then Jimmy Bob looked reverentially into the TV cameras, at the millions more who worshiped remotely in this, his über-church for those who had no need to wait for eternity to enjoy the good life.

In due time, Jimmy Bob reached the critical part of his sermon, the point where the ushers would begin passing the ornate—everything had to be ornate—gold-plated offering plates up and down the many rows.

“God does not want you to be poor,” Jimmy Bob said, shaking his head, his thick Southern accent pronouncing it poo-wah. “God wants you to prosper, to enjoy the fullness and the richness of this life. He wants you to have nice things!

“He wants you to own your own home. He wants you to own your own car, and not just some twenty-year-old jalopy. He wants you to have it all, and to be debt free. He wants you to be able to retire early and enjoy the fruits of your labors.”

Here came the crucial part.

“But before that can happen,” Jimmy Bob said, smiling beatifically, “you must bring your tithe into this storehouse. I say that to those of you here, and to those”—Jimmy Bob stretched out his hands, beseeching his electronic audience—“watching from afar. God wants all of you—He requires all of you—to give to this ministry of your tithe—a tenth of your earnings, according to His Word—and if you will do that, this ministry will be blessed, and so, too, will God will bless you! He will bless you richly, Hallelujah! You will want not! He will shower you with His riches!”

However, as Jimmy Bob came up for air, ready to march on with his message to get those gold-plated offering plates filled, he was for the first time in his divinely anointed memory greeted not with shouted amens and praises to the Lord and Hallelujahs, but instead with the most astonishing sound.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

Jimmy Bob was so astonished he almost began to speak in tongues. What on Earth was going on? Was that…laughter?

It was.

In response to his plea for money?

The laughter materialized at first out of the thin air right in front of him. Miraculous in its own way, but he wasn’t about to use that word. Now, though, it was beginning to ripple through the audience, from the first row to the back, and from the left to the right, like fans at a football game doing the wave.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

Wide-eyed, Jimmy Bob waved his Bible and tried to regain control. He shouted, “The more you give, the more God will give you!”

The laughter roared so loud it forced the tabernacle’s sound engineers, themselves laughing, to cut the volume of the microphones to avoid the screech of feedback.

Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The sermon instantly became the shortest of Jimmy Bob’s illustrious career. Even though there would now be dead air on the broadcast that the engineers would have to somehow fill, Jimmy Bob didn’t really give a flying fart.

It was time for a vacation.

And so it went.

Not just on the grand scale, but also on the small and everywhere in between.

A faithless spouse denying his faithlessness with the same lies told since lies and faithlessness were invented—“That wasn’t me!” or “I’d never do that to you!” or “I’ll never do it again, I promise!”—was greeted with the ridicule he (or she) so richly deserved.

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

The response materialized out of thin air, and spanned all cultures, each with its own definition of faithlessness and treachery. The specifics varied, but the response remained the same.

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

And so it was that the human race improved.

A bit. For a short while.

Politicians learned that, at a bare minimum, they had to make a passing attempt at telling the truth. Corporate executives making millions of dollars a year no longer used phrases like “our employees are our most valuable asset” while simultaneously trying to figure out how to lay off as many of their sorry asses as possible. The changes carried all the way down to that lowest level of horny men simply looking to get laid. Unwilling to hear shrinkage-inducing laughter at their most flagrant lies of attempted seduction, they admitted up front that their interest extended only as far as sex, and in a few cases of honesty gone wild, also admitted they weren’t particularly good at it.

Sadly, humanity’s improvement proved short-lived. Like bacteria forming an immunity to the latest antibiotic, like cockroaches becoming invulnerable to a pesticide, humanity figured out how to get past the laugh track.

The pathological liars, the evil-minded, those obsessed with greed, and the faithless all learned to camouflage their lies with just enough half-truths and practiced sincerity that no laugh track replied in mocking response to their words.

And when the laughter did kick in, the results were quite often less than disastrous. For much of humanity, the laugh track has sounded so often and so loudly that… people didn’t really hear it anymore. It was there, to be sure, but it had become little more than background noise because people didn’t want to hear it.

Lies were often far more attractive than the truth. So humanity en masse tuned out the laugh track.

Honesty lost. Lies and deception, greed and corruption once again prevailed. The ethical cockroaches of the species once again thrived.

Until…

For the first, and last, time, the Veracitati spoke to all of humanity.

“We give up,” they said in words every human heard translated into his or her own dialect. “We tried to make you an honest people, trustworthy galactic citizens. The laugh track, as you called it, was but the first of many steps. Next, we planned to curb your violent appetites. But you deliberately chose to thwart us.

“We could force change upon you, but only that which is willingly adopted can truly last. You display no desire to improve, to measure up to galactic standards, even when given forceful pressure in that direction. There are notable exceptions among you, and we apologize to them for grouping them in with the rest of your kind. But to use your own phrase, ‘A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.’ And your weakest links are beyond weak. They are evil, duplicitous, and violent.

“Humanity threatens the well-being of the galaxy. Not yet because your technology remains so very primitive, but the kernel of evil and ignorance and violence remains so embedded in your makeup that you are irredeemable.

“So we must act. It is our duty. We’d say that we are sorry, but we are not. We are only sad. Sad and a little bit angry at all our lost and wasted time on your people.”

And in the final moments before a pulse from the spaceships eradicated them all, humans heard a reminder of their squandered opportunity.

Ha, ha, ha, ha!

Ha—!