Popstars of the Apocalypse II. Act 2 Scene 5.

Back at Steve and Crew’s Brick Lane flat.

Steve and Crew are gathered around the lost journal of John Logie Baird which they have just recently found.

Crew: Reading Note in the journal  Never attempt to make this machine.

Steve: Wow, wonder why he was so spooked. Turning pages Look, blueprints.

Crew: What are those wiggly things and those circles?

Steve: Hmm not sure, I think they’re vacuum tubes.

Crew: Look! Whatever that is it’s radioactive! It's got a radiation sign next to it.

Steve: Yeah....stops for a moment then says resolutely Listen Crew, this is crazy, we’ve got no idea about any of this stuff. We don’t even know what we’re looking at here and where on Earth do we get radioactive material and more to the point, do we really want to?

Crew: Hmmm, pretty sure John Hampton would have a university friend who can get hold of some.

Steve: But isn’t this all a bit dangerous buddy? Playing with radiation... ‘never attempt to create this machine’, ghosts....

Crew: Well we hung out with Jim Morrison and he wasn’t too dangerous, just a bit drunk.

Steve: He WAS drunk. We drunk him.

Crew: Hahaaha, nice Hitchhiker’s Guide gag.

Steve: We’d better call John and tell him we’ve got it.

At that moment Crew’s phone rings, the caller ID says John Hampton.

Crew screams and throws the phone in the air with an involuntary spasm, Steve catches the phone.

Steve: John, that’s weird, we were just about to call you. Crew’s freaked out about it. We’ve got the journal but we need some help with it.

Suddenly there’s a knock at the door. Crew screams again.

Steve: Wait a minute John, there’s someone at the door.

Steve: goes over to answer the door while speaking to John on the phone I don’t know who this can be at this hour he opens the door and is surprised to find John Hampton standing in front of him along with another elderly gentleman.

John Hampton: Good morning.

Steve: looks at the phone in his hand and presses the end call button ruefully I might have known. Who’s this, don’t tell me this is another of your university student friends.

John Hampton: No. Dr Philip Kemble here was a friend of my mothers’. But snap on the university, he was a professor at my college.

Steve: Always something new isn’t it with you?

John Hampton: I try to avoid clichés if I can help it.

Dr Philip Kemble: I hear you young gentleman have something of great interest to a tinkering old dodderer like myself. A certain lost notebook of a certain eccentric Scottish scientist.

Steve: Yeah, can you help us build it?

Dr Philip Kemble: That depends on whether you really want me to. The consequences could be grave, if this machine is really what my friend John suspects it might be.

Steve: Not you as well, it's bad enough with the spooky warning in the notebook 'never attempt to build this machine'. I'm starting to think maybe we shouldn't bother after all. I'll take the advice of two old men over the advice of Bill Hick's ghost that visited Crew in a dream.

Crew: It wasn't a dream Steve, it was in colour, so it was more like astral projection.

John Hampton: There's no point turning yellow now my friends, we have to do this. You don't now what's coming and if we don't have some kind of defence against the Dark Pop Circus when it comes to town, the Earth will be taken over by the demonic hierarchy forever.

Crew: Is that so bad? What happens if we just sit this one out?

John Hampton: If you want the whole world to turn into a Beyonce video then by all means, we'll just put our feet up and watch evil roll across the whole world.

Crew: Yeah, that would be pretty bad I guess.

John Hampton: My friend Sarah Clarke found out all about it from an over communicative roadie. They plan to use a special psychotronic pink lazer to implant the demonic host into empty headed pop fans at the Hype Aid festival. This 100,000 strong horde of demonically possessed hipsters, chavs and bimbos will then go out into society and spread the demonic hive mind through the whole of the UK within a matter of days. The only people who can stop them are dead rock stars. Our dead rock stars, and we need to build this machine so we assemble our army against the hell hounds of plastic pop.

Crew: Nervously Oh I see. By the way how do you do that?

John Hampton: Do what?

Crew: Magically appear whenever anyone talks about you?

John Hampton: To be honest I’m not entirely sure. But it’s a neat trick isn’t it?

Crew: Can you please stop being any more spooky for the moment. I don’t think I can handle too much more of this magically teleporting John Hamptons, one minute he’s in the phone the next he’s in your face.

John Hampton: Come on Crew, I’m not spooky on purpose, I guess it just comes naturally. Don’t take it personally, a little weirdness makes a refreshing change from all the tedium of modern life I find.

Crew: A little. But I’m just about at saturation levels. We’ve drunk a drunk Jim Morrison, burgled a Scottish museum to talk to a weird possessed wooden puppet and been held captive by another even weirder possessed puppet with a flaming wall of fire in an attic above Bar Italia. I need something reassuringly banal. Who wants tea and biscuits?

Suddenly there is a muffled noise from within Crew's bag.

Stookie Bill: Who are you calling 'weird' you rascal? Let me out of here so I can box your ears.

Dr Philip Kemble: What on Earth was that?

Steve: whistles Oh I forgot about him. This is going to be fun. Take a seat Dr Kemble, this is probably going to come as quite a surprise.

Dr Kemble sits down after shrewdly examining a green bong which was on the chair and placing it on the table. 

Crew: opens the bag and takes out a wooden puppet This is Stookie Bill, or James, or both, it's all a little confusing.

Dr Kemble: Yes I know about this puppet, Baird used it with his early television experiments, I have seen pictures of it. How did you make the voice come from the bag? That's a pretty good piece of ventriloquism.

Stookie Bill: suddenly starts speaking Ventriloquism my eye! I'm alive, it's those two who are the dummies.

Dr Kemble suddenly looks wide-eyed and promptly faints.

Crew: Oh no, I've told you're not allowed to kill old people. He was our friend.... well, at least we were getting there I think.

John Hampton: The good doctor isn't dead, just a little bit surprised. Why did you have to bring him along?

Steve: He said he could help us put the machine together.

John Hamton: checking Dr Kemble's pulse The good Doctor is ok, we'll have to wait for him to come round. Put that thing back in the bag.

Steve: With pleasure.

Stookie Bill: protesting I am not a 'thing' and I will not go back into that blasted ba... his protestations are cut short as Steve grabs Stookie Bill and stuffs him back into Crew's bag.

Act 2 Scene 6

Dr Kemble: sitting in a chair, awake and accepting a cup of tea from Crew Good Lord, when my friend John here told me that he had access to John Logie Baird’s actual schematics for a machine to contact the underworld, I was intrigued and curious as to what insight into Baird’s renowned eccentricity this might shed light on, I hardly thought I would be venturing into the underworld myself and sharing a room with its indicating the bag rather peculiar inhabitants.

Stookie Bill: From within the bag Who are you calling peculiar? Take me out of this bag at once I am not a pair of old tennis shoes. I am an anomaly. The first TV star! One of a kind!

Crew: correcting him TWO of a kind.

John Hampton: Take him out of there Crew, let’s see what kind of anomaly we’re dealing with here.

Stookie Bill: removed from the bag Dealing with? Dealing with? I am not a petty crook or ruffian, I’ll have no more of this tone of disrespect. In my day we spoke civilly and respectfully to our elders.

Crew: But you’re a puppet. Since when did anyone treat puppets with respect?

Steve: No, he’s right Crew, there’s no need to hurt his feelings.

Crew: But he’s such a grumpy churlish thing Steve. And he offered me cakes when he didn’t have any. I still haven’t quite got over that.

Dr Kemble: addressing Stookie Bill So you’re an inhabitant of the underworld?

Stookie Bill: I don’t know about that professor. I’m mostly an inhabitant of Soho, which may well amount to much the same thing.

Dr Kemble: So you knew John Logie Baird?

Stookie Bill: Of course I did. But let’s talk about me some more. I know everything that old lunatic knew. His knowledge sort of infused into me like psychic osmosis.

Crew: Psychic Osmosis. Good band name there Steve.   

Steve: Duly noted.

Dr Kemble: I must say I can’t make much sense of this blueprint, can you explain the principles of this machine Stookie Bill?

Stookie Bill: Well yes, I’ll try to make it simple professor.

Steve: turns and winks at Dr Kemble He’s always like this, don’t take it personally.

Stookie Bill: You see here, the metal plates contain an isotope: radioactive Americium 241 and the usual alpha decay will be almost infinitesimally perturbed by the existence of astral energy. Ghosts to you laymen. The difference between the expected rate of alpha reception and the measured rate is then converted into an electrical charge and sent through these vacuum tubes, then the arc discharge is measured and the plasma flow is reversed at the same rate, and in this way it creates a high voltage feedback loop which is then discharged onto a small black glass screen which allows the astral energy to  be visualised in 2 dimensions.

Dr Kemble: How strange.

Steve: That goes without saying.

Dr Kemble: It appears from what our disembodied friend here says that Logie Baird invented the smoke alarm. This machine appears to work in almost exactly the same way, instead of detecting minute particles of smoke it is detecting minute variations in some kind of field. In fact this machine appears to be a cross between a smoke-alarm and an electrical television set. It’ll be easy enough to construct, just seems surprising that no one else thought of it.

Stookie Bill: Not really, most scientists don’t believe in ghosts so they don’t go about looking for them.

Dr Kemble: Yes, I suppose you’re right. How interesting. I wonder if science actually started looking for such things how much it might suddenly discover.

John Hampton: I believe Nikola Tesla was of a similar opinion.

Dr Kemble: What is all this about John, why are we doing this? Entering the underworld like mediaeval alchemists traficking with spirits?

John Hampton: Because we've got to stop them.

Dr Kemble: Who's 'them' John?

John Hampton: It’s like this, but I warn you, this is going to get metaphysical: There are many human beings on this planet who are, what is termed, possessed by demonic spirits. Most of them don’t even know it, the worst and most evil and dangerous people, the murderers and child abusers, they know it. The rest, have no idea. They just stumble through life, being mean for no reason, sometimes they suddenly erupt into violence or abuse at the least provocation. Sometime the demons leads them into self-destructive habits, alcoholism, drug abuse and sex addictions. It does this because the demon itself enjoys these sensations so it stimulates the mind of the human it is infecting to indulge in them as often as possible. Now this is a fact of life and life goes on more or less. However when a critical Mass of human demon possessed zombies is reached, when over half of the Earth is demon possessed, the system collapses under the weight of its own evil.

Because whatever they try always ends in disaster and widening entropy because there’s just too much evil in the system and evil begets only more evil. Only natural goodness can create and generate structure and continuing life. Most of the politicians and rulers of the world governments and corporations are demonically enchanted. This is how they reach their level of success, the demons all work together to insure that ‘their’ agents are in control.

The Zombies are everywhere they always have been and once their numbers get out of control we have war in order to reduce the number, sadly the good people also perish in the same numbers as the zombies so it’s a phyric victory for humanity as a whole and a losing game as ever year the Zombies are more and the good people are fewer and fewer.

They feed off the rest of us, and they generally look for someone with light and imprison him within a psychic framework: most commonly a Job, and since they are the bosses they have a variety of ways of subtly torturing their employees which they never will suspect and it is this torture which becomes anxiety and stress which feeds the demons and also, can help trigger the transformation of the employee themselves into a demon possessed agent. 

So their agents then slowly attempt to destabilise, persecute, harass, annoy, and otherwise attempt to weaken this person drawing his energy and they use this to create negative events and power wars and terror attacks because they themselves have no power to manifest events. And this is how the world works and how no matter how much things change, conditions for life on Earth don’t actually seem to get better. They may appear to with new technology and medicines, but all of this just creates more entropy.

Every cynical negative act performed by these people locks itself into a permanent patchwork of error like a structure made of broken blocks. The tower grows and appears to be strong but looking at it there is an awareness that it is warped and maintains it position and stability only through an interconnected living membrane of terror and fear. It is the souls of the tower’s builders who maintain the tower’s structure. One block out of place, one person within the structure can bring the whole thing crashing down to Earth.

We have to stop them reaching critical mass, which this time, won’t just result in war, but in the end of the world and the human race itself.

Suddenly there is an odour of whisky in the air and soft singing... this is the end....beautiful friend...

Crew: Hey it’s Jim!

Steve: Just in time, I thought I was going to drown in that lecture.

Jim Morrison: Materialising in whisky form I always tried to tell them.... but they never cared about my poems: a place where ghosts reside to whisper into the ears of travellers and interest them in their fate.

Steve: raising his eyebrows Wow, that’s actually pretty good.

Jim Morrison: Of course baby.....but Bobby couldn’t make ‘em scan with the music so I had could only write basic lyrics for the songs. I mean ‘come on baby light my fire’ it ain't exactly Wordsworth.

Steve: Another mystery solved.

Jim Morrison: Well you got it, Jim is here and all the doors are opened. Addressing Dr Kemble So professor, can you build that crazy magic ghost TV machine?

Dr Kemble: slightly at a loss at addressing a Jim Morrison made of whisky The principle is surprisingly simple, so yes, whether it actually works or not is another question.

Jim Morrison: Oh, it’ll work baby. When you switch it on better man the switchboard because there’s a lot of my friends want to break on through to you guys. We’ve got a lot of work to do, we’re gonna take this planet back from the plastic pop and mark the return of the mighty lizard men of rock n’roll. They always said rock n’roll was the devil’s tune, but that ain’t true. The things I’ve seen in the name of pop music make me even the mightiest rockers of the far-side blush with shame and weep with pity for the future of the human race.