S E V E N

It is Year Five, and things have progressed to the point that I am forced to live in a state of almost constant hiding from the users.

        My apartment sits on the third floor of a long abandoned building with no power, no light, no water, no heat. It is a dark and dingy space with nothing in it but a mold-smelling couch, an old mattress on the floor and a smattering of lamps, appliances, and other things that require electricity which are now rendered useless. It would be too much trouble, and more importantly, too risky, to haul these items down three flights of stairs to a Dumpster outside that never gets emptied anymore, so I just leave them to collect dust and remind me of the conveniences that I once had. I chose the apartment because of its largely isolated location in town and for its plain, unnoticeable quality; the sort of structure that blends into the bland grey landscape of similar architecture. However, I have been forced to relocate several times over the years, and almost surely will again.

        It was not always this way, even in the first few years of The Shot. There was a time when I could still go out in the open with relative ease to scavenge the grocery stores for bottled water or food that had not yet expired, and the users would pretty much leave me to my business if I looked and sounded like one of them. But they have gotten smarter, more observant, and more insistent. They have made it too dangerous to be out in the open, so now I go out only when absolutely necessary.

        On the rare occasions that I do go outside, I have to put on an act in order to blend in. One wrong move in front of the users—failure to rave about the glories of The Mothership, coming up short on quoting a piece of Scripture, or betraying even the smallest hint that I am not high on The Shot at all times like they are—could land me with a syringe to the gut and a six hour hallucination that I would rather die than endure. And as someone who has never taken The Shot before, there's the horrifying prospect of becoming hooked from the first use, as has happened with so many others.

        I say that the users have become more insistent because they used to just offer The Shot to those who did not partake of the drug. Now they skip the asking part and plug you with a needle before you can breathe a word of protest.

        With stakes like that, it's easier to just stay indoors.

In the early days, The Shot had just seemed like a trend. Something that might rise up into brief sub-cultural popularity, reach a peak, and then recede out of the spotlight to give way to the next new substance people were raving about. It was the sort of thing you might hear about being passed around at a party, or referenced in the headline of some off-color tabloid. It was something niche-y and hip for celebrities to offhandedly confess to using, usually on late night talk show interviews, always admitting this with a smirk and a glint in their eye, self-impressed by just how very naughty they were being. The online community treated it like a joke, as it was perceived to be in the realm of extreme and damaging narcotics like crack or meth that a “regular” upstanding citizen would never consider using. Word was that The Shot made a person talk about the Bible and outer space concurrently, as if those two things were inseparably connected, which only added to the fodder for making fun of the substance.

        People would tweet John 3:16 or other Scripture references, then add, “I am SO high right now #TheShot.” Memes were made by taking screenshots of charismatic TV preachers, quoting something particularly outlandish that they had said at the top of the image, then at the bottom (always in Impact font, true to meme form) would be: HIGH, I'm “HI” on THE SHOT. There was even an entire sub-reddit devoted to such images, reddit.com/r/ImOnTheShot.

        So much for social media sites now, all of those big colorful companies that they used to say would never die, that were supposed to be a permanent installation to our cultural experience. Try to log on to one of those now and you will find a tangled, glitchy, skeletal mess of pixels and broken pages; the last remnants of ones and zeroes representing what the web once was that have somehow not crumbled into digitized nothingness. Who would have thought that the world's most powerful tool would one day fade out of our culture into complete obscurity and uselessness? If there is one thing you are guaranteed not to encounter these days, it's a face pointed downward, distracted by the black mirror of a mobile screen. In another time and place I would have probably considered that a positive thing for our species. It’s only that what humans are currently interested in is immeasurably worse.

        “Taste, brothers! See, sisters!” users of The Shot would say in the early days, shouting in the streets to anyone walking past. “The world spins on in disbelief and even so, The Mothership approaches! Will you, too, partake of the gift and eagerly await Her arrival?” It became a normal part of life, seeing users around, babbling half-Scriptures and talking about outer space. “Regular” people ignored them at first, although if any other users happened to be passing by they would join in with the shouters in hearty agreement, making a scene until the police came along and broke them up.

        That, or you'd see someone huddled near a window at a coffee shop or in a pub, gazing out with their face pressed against the glass and saying things like “My God, the stars! Do you see them?”—this being in the middle of the day and with full sunlight—“So close, as if we could reach out and grab them! Oh, how I long to meet Her in the skies...”

        Despite the public's initial reaction to the substance, within three years of The Shot’s first known appearance in Southern California (which is undocumented and based solely on rumor), large scale surveys by Gallup and a handful of universities found that the majority populations of North America and Europe were openly—and wholeheartedly—using The Shot. Most individuals admitted to taking doses multiple times a day. By then, it could hardly be considered a niche drug anymore with statistics like that.

        Only two years later, nearly everyone on the planet was taking The Shot. There were not any studies or surveys to confirm this. You could see the truth of it as plain as day when you stepped out your front door, when you looked people in the eyes, when you heard the insane things rolling off of everyone's tongues.

        I say nearly everyone on the planet because I am one of the few holdouts—or perhaps the only holdout. There may be a handful of others like me scattered around, but if there are, we have not crossed paths. For the most part, my life consists of staying indoors, and when I'm outdoors, trying to hide the fact that I am not a user by acting and appearing like one of them. If they catch on to me, the results will not be pretty.

        The Drug Enforcement Administration (when it still existed) refused, even after months of extensive testing and clinical research, to classify The Shot as a Schedule I drug—even though it most definitely and undoubtedly ought to be for its hallucinogenic and addictive qualities. The DEA claimed that their researchers—a handful of bozos in white labcoats, no doubt—could not identify all of The Shot's properties, and that they would need more time for further testing. What they did know was that The Shot's chemical makeup is, on paper, incredibly rudimentary—a simple substance of only four or five discernible “ingredients.” However, the elements it contains are unrecognizable and incomparable to any other drug encountered before. Their reports were littered with terms like “unidentified” and “undefined.”

        One phrase in particular was quickly snatched up by the media groups and replayed ad naseum as a soundbite: “While studies thus far are inconclusive, current evidence suggests that The Shot is not harmful for consumption.”

        For many, the matter was settled right then and there. It also threw up an enormous red flag (for me, anyway) that something extremely suspicious was happening behind the scenes. The DEA was hardly known for such negligence and flippancy when it came to classifying a substance. They would not lightly spend millions of tax-payers' dollars and thousands of hours researching something only to come out and say, “We're not sure about this stuff, but it's probably no big deal.” It is possible that there was governmental pressure behind these ambiguous statements (although for what purpose, I cannot imagine), but I think the truthful answer is probably much simpler: the boys at the DEA were already using The Shot themselves.

        This all happened about two years after the emergence of The Shot on the streets, at which time it had already laid claim on millions of regular users and was a much-debated topic of heated discussion. There was a period of time when it was literally all you would hear about on the political talk shows from the left, the right, and the in-between. The big news channels verbally banged down the doors of the White House, hollering for them to give an official position on the substance, but no statement ever came. When it came to The Shot, the Oval Office turned a deaf ear—another red flag.

        The local news stations would feature interviews recorded with citizens around town, asking people their personal opinions on the moral implications of using the drug. Most of them were all for it. TV preachers spat and gleamed with sweat and grew red in the face screaming about the eternal consequences of using The Shot, how the syringes people were shooting themselves up with were keys to the very gates of Hell. The green gook that the heretics were forcing into their bodies was a gift from The Devil himself. There were advocates who gathered on street corners with homemade cardboard signs (featuring tall letters written in bold green, naturally) that read things like “DONT TAKE THE 1ST GOOD THING TO HAPEN TO ME!” or, “THE SHOT IS A GIFT TO MANKIND” and even, “DON'T KNOCK IT TIL YOUVE TRIED IT!☺”

        Meanwhile, The Shot remained “Unclassified” as a substance and the “further testing” by the DEA never happened, probably because their guys were so damn busy getting high on the stuff that they just hoped nobody would ask questions. People did ask questions at first, but those who did were ignored by the parties in charge. Eventually, even the drug’s harshest critics dropped their protests and moved on. And by moved on, I mean they starting using.

        At this point, five and a half years or so since The Shot cropped up from out of nowhere—and I do mean literally out of nowhere—no one is asking questions anymore. No one is interested in studying The Shot, its effects, or its probable health-damaging implications. Everybody is too busy using.

        I remember when people started using it at work, at the newspaper. I had six years of experience under my belt at the time, having started out as a lowly copy editor straight out of college (with a shiny new degree in Journalism in my back pocket that had counted for just about nothing when it came to real world employment). I was paying my dues, working up through the ranks, doing whatever other tired career tropes apply, with my eye on being either a full time columnist or a beat reporter. I had even convinced the Managing Editor to take a look at a few of my one-off pieces, three of which were printed in obscure, deeply-buried sections of the paper. But it was still progress, for which I was pleased. I would take whatever I could get.

        It had seemed like I was gaining traction until one day the Editor-in-Chief came into the office, a towering, short-tempered Jewish man with a large gut named Barry Weitzmann. He was high as a kite and had a big sunny smile on his face—a rare sight if ever there was one. He began shouting across the newsroom that he had something wonderful to tell us. He made sure the entire staff was gathered—thirty-seven people in all, including journalists, editors, graphic designers, the whole lot—before he went on a nonsensical rant about a ship and salvation and how much he wanted us all to taste and to see this thing called “The Shot.”

        I and much of the other staff looked around at each other bewildered, wondering if there was going to be a big punchline at the end of this speech (even though Barry was hardly one for joking). But no punchline ever came. Some of the staff even appeared to be quite engaged in what he was saying.

        Weitzmann finished his address, still cheery as could be, with the recommendation that we try The Shot for ourselves, that he could personally guarantee we would not regret it. In fact, he said, to not try it would be robbing ourselves of a wonderful experience. With that, he told everyone to have a great day and proceeded to step into his glass-walled office and kick back in his reclining desk chair. He put his feet up on his desk, folded his hands behind his head, and stared out the window with a big grin for the rest of the day.

        The next morning, Weitzmann did not come back into work, nor did our Managing Editor. They did not return for the rest of the week, and our assistant editors had to make all of the final decisions for what went to print, a task for which they were hardly prepared.

        The following week, our Sports staff stopped showing up, along with a few of the photo editors. The week after that, we were down to two-thirds of a full staff, and the material we were putting out was slapped together and surely riddled with copy errors and unverified information.

        A month passed since any of us had seen Weitzmann or the Managing Editor, and we were down to putting out one paper a week instead of the usual five. If our reading public had noticed, we hadn't heard about it. There were about nineteen of us still coming in to the office on a daily basis, but half of that number spent the day staring out the window and muttering about stars or whispering pieces of Bible verses. The “work” they turned in was nothing but spaceship doodles and gibberish. The newsroom itself was messy and neglected.

        Seven weeks after Weitzmann's speech in the newsroom, I stopped receiving paychecks that were set up to automatically deposit into my checking account. It was not a surprise, as even I had stopped going in. Doing any work was pointless because there was no one to submit it to, no one pushing the content through to be laid out for print or the website. We had not put a paper on the stands in almost three weeks.

        I could have gone out and looked for another job at that point, but it seemed useless and like I would only have the same experience anywhere else. People had stopped showing up for work everywhere, and the effects of The Shot could already be seen rolling through many parts of the culture.

        If only things had stopped there.

The Shot—which can refer both to the substance itself and the syringes in which it is placed—is a velvety green goop with a thick consistency somewhere between that of toothpaste and maple syrup. Its appearance is not so different from the stuff they used to make called “tire slime,” a runny glue-like liquid with a lumpy texture sold in a plastic tube that could be squeezed into a bike tire to prevent punctures and fill small holes.

Users will fill a special syringe with The Shot—the needles feature an extra wide opening to accommodate the passage of the thick gunk—and shoot it not into their arms, but into their stomachs. Somewhere along the line, by way of extensive personal experimentation by the users, the stomach has been discovered to be the most effective place to inject The Shot. It produces the most vibrant high, apparently, more so than the arm or thigh or heel. Whether this has anything to do with the digestive system, I don't know.

        It's disgusting to watch them shoot up, ramming the needle into their soft pink bellies as if they were diabetics only minutes away from death, pumping their bodies full of life-saving insulin. Most don't even flinch when the needle goes in. The prick of pain is but a small price to pay for the bounty about to swirl through their veins. Once The Shot is pulsing through their system, users' eyes glaze over and they no longer seem to see what is in front of them. Their pupils grow wide and fade to a deeper shade of black like camera lenses, empty and dead. It is as if they are seeing everything and nothing at once; still themselves, and yet completely gone.

        Apart from the vacant look in their eyes and the curious, spirit-fueled rants that begin flowing from their mouths, a user high on The Shot is almost indistinguishable from a regular person. And yet, their personalities seem to disappear, floating away for a while to a place behind the scenes of consciousness to be replaced by something unsettling and artificial. Beneath that, something sinister. As for the physical effects, The Shot produces no slurring of speech, no hindrance to motor function, no uncontrollable giggling, sudden depression, or incoherence. In fact, a user's awareness seems heightened in a way, as if they suddenly see deeper and farther and clearer into the universe than the rest of us. One of the perks, they say, is that “everything you see becomes something else.” That's always what they say; all of them, that exact same phrase—word for word and without fail.

        Everything you see becomes something else.

I have not experienced the effects of The Shot myself, but I think I’ve got the gist of it. Users describe the sensation as a hallucination of sorts. It does not sound like a “trip” similar to that of LSD or hallucinogenic mushrooms, where Warron Zevon might visit you for a conversation about An American Werewolf in London or Raphael reaches down from a Ninja Turtles poster on the wall and offers to light your cigarette. Users of The Shot are aware of their surroundings and can identify the objects around them—though incorrectly, at times.

        For example: cups. Any sort of cup—whether a pint glass, a child’s sipping cup, a coffee mug, or a disposable paper cone from a water dispenser—is described by users of The Shot as a chalice. The chalice, in fact, “of our Lord Jesus Christ, born of The Blessed Mother.” If it is something you can drink out of, in a user’s eyes, it’s the cup of Christ. The Holy Grail. I’ve seen users take this part to such an extreme that they will refuse to drink from a cup while high out of reverence, opting instead for a water bottle or slurping out of a bowl, deeming themselves unworthy to even touch their lips to an object so sacred. If fifteen or twenty different cups are all lined up in a row, each of the cups is still the chalice; each one still holy. The concept that this could not logically be possible evades their compromised minds.

        These side-effects were intriguing in the early days, even humorous at times. That was back when people were using The Shot only once a day or so, the highs lasting for four to six hours. But things have progressed substantially since then.

Dear God, how they’ve progressed.

        I do not understand how something can exist so prominently—so loudly—on the earth and be in daily use by so many human beings—millions of human beings—and yet we know almost nothing about it. And the fact that no one seems to be even slightly concerned about that anymore? It is nothing short of madness. And just how the hell is there so much of it?

That’s another thing: the flow and availability of The Shot never wavers. Wherever its source lies, the supply refuses to dry up.

*

Back in Year One, The Shot rocketed to the forefront of the public’s attention when a prominent actor named Glenn Charnock (an A-lister and multiple-time Academy Award nominee) recorded a webcam video of himself while high, then uploaded it to YouTube.

        The video consisted of Charnock ranting—or preaching, more like—at his laptop camera for more than an hour and a half. At a total run-time of 118 minutes, he had created a home movie that rivaled the length of his feature films. In the middle of his wild recording was a 28-minute section where he became completely silent, staring blankly into the lens. Somewhere between 00:72:00 and 00:73:00, it’s as if he reawakens, or comes back to the present from some other place. He shakes his head, blinks several times, then resumes his speech at full speed.

He uploaded the video, tweeted it out to his plethora of followers, and within two hours YouTube crashed because of all the people trying to watch it at once. News networks cut together compilations of the most eyebrow-raising sections and replayed the clips endlessly. Social media lit up with their own mass-commentary, suggesting the actor’s possible loss of sanity, speculating on what this “shot” was to which he kept referring, seeming to relish in watching his career take a very public dive before their eyes. Numerous comparisons were made to Charlie Sheen’s meltdown in 2011. People did not seem to be concerned or freaked out by Charnock’s bizarre behavior (as I was), they treated it like a joke, much the same as they did The Shot itself only a few months later.

For several weeks, Glenn was the laughingstock of the country, and much of the world. Those with more sympathy pointed out that he did not seem the sort to humiliate himself like this, and that he was usually a very private person, not a figure obsessed with constantly placing himself in the spotlight. Prior to his meltdown video, he had been considered by his celebrity peers to be a reserved, cordial, hospitable man of utmost professionalism. That sort of thing was rare in show business.

        The following is an excerpt from the video transcription, compiled and published by Titan Media Group.

        “People, how have we even existed this long without The Shot? What we’ve been doing… people, my friends, brothers and sisters, that’s not living. The Shot is living. It’s beyond living, it’s beyond seeing, a gift to mankind, and we are the generation blessed enough to have it gifted to us from on high! I mean, do you understand how incredible this is, people? We are the flock and have indeed been tended to by some gracious shepherd, fed and nurtured and now given a great reward.

        “The Shot is the richest gift ever awarded to mankind, sweeter than honey, more pure than gold. A gift from The Mother Herself. God, a higher power, a supreme being, whatever you want to call it. Mother Nature, creation or the cosmos or fate or whatever name you want to give it. Maybe it bubbled up out of the earth or poured forth from a rock like when our Father Moses got upset at the people of Israel and smote the stone with his staff, causing water to run freely. Or maybe, maybe a femur bone was thrown into the air by an ancient race of ape-men, suspended and spinning until it evolved into a space vessel, The Mothership, then our sweet Mother concocted this elemental bliss for us from aboard Her starship! And The Shot has just been stewing and brewing for thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of years until She had the recipe just right, until it was perfected and ready. Ready for us.”

        Without transition or any break in his speech, he would change subjects. This happened numerous times throughout the video.

        “Those lights, man… I mean, just look at those lights! The stars out your window, have you seen them? I mean, they’re right there, have you really taken a look and seen them? Just like Our Mother said in Her holy word, 'And the heavens were opened, and behold...’

        “Oh yes, just look at them…”

        A long pause. At this point he gazed off-screen for a while.

        “It’s like… it’s like going on a magic carpet ride and being presented with the best ideas that have ever crossed your mind! It expands the channels of the brain, people, do you know what I’m saying? It unfolds the deeper layers of our grey matter that have been crammed closed and dormant for so long. I mean, this has got to be the best thing to ever happen to our collective consciousness! It is A GIFT to the world. No, no, that’s not big enough. The whole universe will be blessed by what The Shot can give us, much like the blessing that spilled over to every nation from the offspring of Abraham's loins. What a great fortune has befallen us! We, a wicked and slanderous generation, have been shown grace upon grace, deep to deep, as if a teardrop has been plucked from the very eyes of YHWH in heaven and planted at our feet.”

        At this point, he moved his face even closer to the web camera and held unblinking eye contact with the lens, as if pleading with each and every viewer personally.

        “Will you, too, partake of this most blessed cup? To reject it—oh friends—to reject it is to reject great wellsprings of riches of the mind and soul and body and heart. To cast it away is to deny new landscapes of understanding, new frontiers of wisdom. To turn your back on The Shot is 'to have eyes and not see, to have ears and not hear.'

        “And do you not….

        Another long pause. He made a strained face, as if in extreme pain, gritting his teeth and balling his hands into tight fists next to his temples. When he released this pose, there were tears on his cheeks and he resumed eye contact with a look of deep concern.

        “Friends, do you not want to be prepared for The Ship? Our blessed mother hen comes for us, and that right soon. She will scoop us up to safety in Her warm and loving wings and carry us off of this scarred and broken terra to deliver us to the kingdom of lights! And only by The Shot will you truly see this. Only through The Shot will you truly hear this. The Mothership's arrival is imminent.”

        And so on. It is worth noting that Charnock had previously never been known to speak of faith or religion whatsoever, other than stating once in an interview that he considered himself an atheist. And yet, while on The Shot he was suddenly quite versed in biblical concepts and was quoting Scripture, or at least some convoluted version of it.

        It eventually became the most-shared, most-watched video ever, clocking in at just over four and a half billion views within two months of being uploaded (beating out the formerly most-watched  video—a ridiculous but admittedly catchy pop hit by a South Korean rapper—by almost double). A representative from YouTube confirmed that the play count was authentic—not fabricated by bots, as has been known to happen—and that their analytics showed that the link had been visited by more than three billion unique IP addresses, meaning that, not accounting for those who had watched the video more than once, roughly one half of the world's population had witnessed the actor's drug-addled rant.

        Renowned anthropologists conducted extensive studies on the video’s cultural impact. A bestselling book deconstructing the video and Charnock's behavior was penned by a highly-respected professor of psychology from Stanford University. The religious community chimed in as prominent ministers of Lutheran, Methodist, and Baptist churches, as well several rabbis and Catholic priests all gave their hearty disapproval of the actor's many spiritually-charged statements, citing them as theologically errant and even heretical. One pastor of a mega-church in Houston, Texas, went so far as to write a pamphlet for his congregation titled “THE DEVIL IS ALIVE AND WELL ON YOUTUBE: 77 Fallacies with 'The Charnock Video,' and the Real Meaning of the Scriptures Misquoted Therein.” This pamphlet was made available as a free PDF on the church's website, and gained some significant traction within the Christian blogosphere.

        Online community boards for fans of the video emerged, and meet-up groups were formed. People would get together and watch the video in its entirety in a communal setting, usually while getting high (although not on The Shot, at least not at first), then analyze it together afterwards.

I heard about even stranger things, such as groups that would organize public showings of the video at local art house cinemas, but they would only watch the twenty-eight minute silent section. They would crank up the volume so that the white noise was blaring, and they would try to blink as infrequently as possible for the duration of the presentation, soaking up every possible clue or meaning, getting lost in Glenn’s blank eyes as if he was communicating something secret to them without words.

It goes without saying that the “Illuminati” subculture on YouTube had a hay-day breaking down and analyzing the video frame by frame. As far as bizarre events went, it was their Holy Grail.

The whole thing became more than just a famous person’s public meltdown, more than just a laughable news story about another drug-addled member of ultra-privileged society losing their shit. Those who did not criticize Charnock treated his words like those of a prophet, something transcendent and ominous, too important to be ignored. There were people who had entire sections of the monologue memorized and I would hear it recited between friends in coffee shops, at barstools, on the bus. Quotations from the video started showing up around the city, spray-painted boldly on the sides of buildings or train cars. “THE SHOT IS LIVING. IT’S BEYOND LIVING. A GIFT TO MANKIND,” or “WILL YOU TOO PARTAKE OF THIS MOST BLESSED CUP?” and even “THE MOTHERSHIP’S ARRIVAL IS IMMINENT”. Seeing these quotes blazoned across walls in public areas—always in bright, neon green paint with letters that bled—was unnerving. I believe that people meant them to be celebratory, like proclamations of some wonderful paradigm shift in our culture, but to me they seemed foreboding and out of place. It reminded me of graffiti in a graphic novel I read once; violent black letters slashed onto storefronts that said things like, “THE END IS NIGH,” and, “WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN?” I felt like, maybe, the Doomsday Clock was ticking a little bit closer to midnight.

Regardless of peoples’ opinions for or against Glenn Charnock, the question on everyone’s lips was: “Just what is this ‘Shot’ he keeps referring to?” He used the term more than 160 times in the course of the video, always with the functioning word “The” in front of it. It wasn’t just a shot, but “The Shot.”

Nearly every news network in the country reported as having tried to reach Charnock for comment and explanation once the clips were in heavy rotation on TV and online. The trouble was that he was found dead by his agent two days after posting the video, in the very same room that he had recorded the rant. The coroner’s report estimated that he had taken his own life shortly after putting the video online, as the time of death correlated approximately with the time that the video went live.

It was a suicide by hanging, and he left a four-word letter:

Gone to The Mothership

In the days since, The Shot has very rarely been associated with suicide. From what I have gleaned, most users do not hold to the belief that taking one’s own life will deliver them automatically to The Mothership—the vessel they believe to be waiting in some nearby galaxy that will eventually arrive to welcome them aboard and carry them home to “paradise.” Charnock’s fatal decision is considered among most users to have been a poor one. He simply allowed himself to become too excited and impatient for his reward, they say. He was immature in his belief and got carried away. It is widely accepted in the ideology of The Shot that users must wait patiently for The Mothership. This is something I learned from talking to enough of them in the early days when they were still safe to be around. They say that the ship will arrive when the timing is right—when She deems it right, in Her infinite wisdom—and that regular use of The Shot will further educate users on the principles of interstellar travel, thus preparing them to board the ship.

        There is no ship, of course.

There cannot be, logically. The concept is impossible and absurd. The idea that there is some sort of motherly spacecraft coming to redeem mankind is nothing more than another wacky religious sham conjured—probably in some laboratory—to stir up the hearts and betray the hopes of degenerates seeking comfort in life, an answer to “What It All Means.” The Mothership is an imaginary savior, nothing more than a new blend of religious fanaticism in a long line of weird belief systems.

        Oh yes, and those news networks that wanted to ask Charnock what The Shot was all about? They did not have to wait long for an answer. Only weeks after the video was posted, preloaded syringes of The Shot could be found for sale in nearly every back alley (heck, every street corner, for that matter) from Los Angeles to Long Beach, if you knew the right person to ask. The substance had caused a man to kill himself and talk about some seriously crazy shit, so naturally, instead of staying the hell away from it at all costs, the more “experimental” public wanted to see for themselves just what The Shot was capable of.