“Well, just like April here, I felt it was becoming more and more clear that something odd was going on and the number of explanations that made sense was getting pretty thin. Obviously I don’t talk about the president’s statement in my book, though I’m already working on an updated version, but this seemed like the story of the century, and I felt like I had an obligation to bring some truth to the table.”
“And, April, what do you think of Mr. Petrawicki’s assertion that the Carls are potentially a threatening and invading force?”
You can see on the tape that this completely blindsided me. The correct response, now that I know my way around every potential interview environment, would have been to say, “I don’t know anything about what Mr. Petrawicki is working on, but . . .” And then I would just say what I wanted to say. Instead, I reacted defensively.
“I think it’s foolish.” And then I paused to gather my thoughts a bit, but before I could continue . . .
“It’s foolish? Is it foolish to consider the security of Americans when a far more powerful force suddenly appears in our cities? A force that has now gone underground and is roaming around who knows where? A force that has not just invaded our cities but now our minds? You think a little caution is foolish?”
If I was supposed to respond, I was not able to. Thankfully the anchor took over for me.
“But, Mr. Petrawicki, what do we know about the actual intentions of the Carls?”
“We know they are wearing armor, we know they came unannounced, we know they’ve violated international and domestic law, we know they have asked for radioactive materials, one of which was provided for them by our guest here.”
I froze up. I wouldn’t have been more still if he had been holding a gun to my head. I shot a quick “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS GUY” glance at Robin, but he gestured to me to keep my eyes on the camera. Looking away makes you look weird.
Again, the anchor chimed in, “Yes, April. That does seem like it was quite an extraordinary step for a private citizen to take.”
Thankfully, I was prepared for this question.
“Americium, the element we provided, is a common household product. We purchased it at the CVS just down the street from Hollywood Carl. It’s radioactive, but so is the sun. I agree, we got too caught up in the fun, though. We should have presented our findings to the government to let them decide what to do with the information.”
This was the talking point we’d decided to go with. If you were watching the interview (which I watched several times in later days), you would have seen Petrawicki with a look on his face like, “Yeah. Duh, you also should not have been an idiot, snotty, shitty little know-it-all brat.”
The anchor took over again.
“The president seems to think the Carls pose no threat—”
I was waiting for the anchor to finish her question, but Peter just picked it right up.
“I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but you and I know exactly as much about this as the president does. It serves her purposes for us to believe these things peaceful envoys. But why, in the face of this immense threat, would we assume the best? Wouldn’t it make more sense to exercise even a little caution?”
“It seems to me,” I said, “that if the Carls wanted to hurt us, they’re powerful enough that they could just wipe us off the planet.”
“So you would suggest, what, that we just lie down in the face of their great power and let them do what they will?”
“No . . . I mean . . . there is nothing threatening about what they’ve done. They’re sculptures, they visited every place equally, and they’re providing games to play in our dreams.”
“Again, you have no idea. No one has any idea what their intent is, where they’re from, what they want with us. But I can tell you that in the history of our planet, advanced civilizations meeting less-advanced cultures doesn’t usually end well for the less-advanced people. No, that’s not a tendency, it’s a rule, a law. The president and every citizen in this country has an obligation to consider this threat.”
“And what would that look like?” the anchor said.
“This is America. We have never been scared away from a fight. When we are pressured, that is when we are greatest. That is when we accomplish the most.”
“That’s all the time we have. After the break . . .” And that was it.
“Next interview, KCKC, radio interview in ten minutes,” the producer said.
“Who the FUCK was that guy,” I said, tearing my earpiece out.
To save you the scrambling Robin and I did to figure that out before the radio interview I had in ten minutes, here’s what we discovered.
Just like me, Peter Petrawicki was in demand. His book, Invaded, was more like a blog post with cover art. It was twenty pages long, and he’d update it whenever there was new news. It was only available online, but it was the top-selling book on Amazon. It was three dollars. It was also the only book about Carl in the whole world, so that helped. He’d had guest columns in a few papers, mostly conservative-leaning. He’d been doing the news circuit since his book came out, which was the day after the Hollywood Carl video.
A few politicians had started to use his talking points—that the president was soft; that the Carls were a threat; that if giant robots could suddenly appear in every city in America (somehow the rest of the world was left out), what was to stop giant nuclear warheads from appearing . . . and exploding? Hide your kids, hide your wives! There’s a space alien terrorist on 23rd!
Before Carl, Peter Petrawicki was a low-level conservative hawk “journalist,” which I put in quotation marks because he seems to have never done a moment of research in his life. He was one of thousands of people who scraped by filtering reality through their ideology and then yelling really loudly at the internet. But his quick thinking (and writing—it took him two days to write the first draft of his manifesto) had made him an instant voice.
This might have stung all the more because I had a fairly similar trajectory. I inserted myself into this conversation when I didn’t really belong there. I was pitching a particular ideology that fit for some people but didn’t fit for others. It made perfect sense that a different perspective was going to feel more legitimate to people who were more afraid of otherness. A competing ideology was bound to pop up, I just didn’t realize that at the time. And so I was legitimately shocked that people were paying attention to Peter Petrawicki. His perspective was ludicrous for a number of pretty obvious reasons. First, if the Carls wanted to destroy us, as we had both agreed, they could do it instantaneously. Just because someone has power over you doesn’t mean they’re going to use it to hurt you. People who believe that tend to either be:
People who have been victims of that sort of behavior, or . . .
People who, if given power, will use it to hurt you.
Peter struck me as the latter.
In the space of ten minutes of research, my vague understanding of “That Asshole” morphed into a fully fleshed-out mental map of the hairball of hate that was Peter Petrawicki. He was scaring people unnecessarily for his own personal gain, and from that fear was rising a fledgling hatred of Carl that lit a fire in me.
And he’d been on the news every single day since Hollywood Carl’s hand popped off. While I’d been breaking up with my girlfriend, moving apartments, answering emails, and replying to YouTube comments, this guy had built an anti-Carl ideology and inspired a growing army of followers. I had even seen them in my comments, but I just ignored them like they were normal haters. But there’s a big difference between an isolated troll and a movement. This was a movement, and I had completely misidentified, or willfully ignored, it.