It wasn’t like I was planning to stay in Vegas. Hell, I wasn’t even supposed to be on the trip. And now this.

A delay, a joke, a mistake – well, I guess you could say a few mistakes – and we end up changing history. Changing fucking history, man!

Orders came through just like always. Couple of platoons of us, lightly armed, just a routine mission, they said. Pack up for a week away, and be prepared for desert action. Out over the Mojave, like as not, from where we was based. Well, soon as we heard that, I knew I was out of it. I’d never had no desert training, and at this point in my godforsaken career I wasn’t likely to get it. Suited me. Let them get on with it, poor bastards.

– You comin’ with us this time, Gray.

– Me? Noo. I’ll take a rain-check on that.

Usually it got a laugh. Not this time.

– No I mean you comin’ with us, boy.

What was this? Not a question. An order.

– Who me? The desert trip?

– You got it, boy.

– I don’t do desert.

Well now I did. Said they might need the extra fire-power. Said it would shape me up. Said it would shift my lazy fat ass into gear. Fat! Me!

So that’s where it began. Three days of forced marching, me, Hombre in charge, Shadow, New-Age, old Puff, plus a few of the others, always headed north-east. We was to keep a low profile, Hombre said, not draw attention to ourselves. So we stayed clear of the main routes, always just north of Interstate 15. Not that folks ever really notice us much anyway. We’ve been around so long, just kinda mingling, that somehow we’re just part of the scenery. Down on the plain there was an old rancher come out to see us pass, and his dog sniffs the air, suspicious-like. After that, not a soul.

It wasn’t really a place for souls, ‘cept dead ones. Bald-head mountains, crusted-up canyons, and always the friggin’ dust, mile after mile of dust. And the heat, man, the heat! Enough to make your waters vapour. So which joker came up with this plan? A desert campaign in the middle of August.

But then the third night out, just when I thought it couldn’t get no worse, I saw the light. Oh sweet Maker, I saw the light!

Just a glow at first, enough to frame the mountains against the moonless sky. Steadily brightening as we advanced. And then, suddenly, a blazing, humming, seething plateau of light down there below. City of Lights, Entertainment Capital of the World, Las Vegas. Sin City. I’d never been near the place in my life – but somehow it felt like I was coming home. How come? Maybe I’d always seen myself as an entertainer. Or maybe that was Destiny whispering in my ear.

Till then I never really gave a damn about people, couldn’t see the point of them. Oh they were smart, sure enough. Tiny little two-legged critters with their fancy homes and their speedy little vehicles. And a pretty fancy opinion of themselves too. Said they spoke to God, who was – wait for it – created in their image. Can you imagine? God with two legs? Ha – do me a favour! So they walk with God and think that entitles them to screw the planet. Including us.

But this got me looking at them in a whole new light .. know what I mean? Sure I’d heard the stories: Las Vegas – brightest place on earth. But seeing was believing. Now I understood. From that giant red tower fingering the sky at the north end to the two golden dice at the south, the whole Strip was ablaze, burning, consuming. This was what it was all about. Greed, excess, no holding back. Don’t stop till you get enough. Burn, baby, burn. These people sure knew how to party.

We’d pulled around to the south side, moved in closer. That beautiful sign told us we’d arrived.

– OK boys, this is where we hole up for the night.

– Aw, Captain!

– You got a problem with that, Gray?

– No, sir.

I was kind of hoping we’d be able to sneak on in. Check out the hotel rooms through windows, sidle up to a bar, get to play with the neon. But we were on a mission. Hombre was the captain, and orders was orders.

He couldn’t stop me having a little fun though. Like I said, I never had much time for people. But none of us ever forgot them lessons we had way back at the beginning of training in Humanity 101. Absorb. Just lie there like a blanket, letting voices, images, thoughts flow across you, filtering out meaning from noise. You got to be expert, you could get thousands of impressions at a time, they said. Me, I never could Absorb more’n a hundred. And, Project. Send out an impression of yourself, so they’d be fooled into thinking they’d seen a horse, or an anvil, or a flying saucer, or God. Just for a few crazy pranks, we thought, but what a gas!

So now was a time to Absorb. Relax. Wait for it to come.

One more time! Just one more time, honey … Get the fuck out of here, you pervert … Where you goin’, big boy? … Atomic Testing Museum: Family Fun Day … 🎵I’m addicted to you, Don’t you know that you’re toxic🎵 … We raise up people passionate for Christ, operators in the supernatural …

How could you not love them? I lay there, Absorbing, most the night.

But then it gets kinda hazy. It was getting near dawn, time to snap out of it. So I snapped out, looked around … and my buddies were gone. Hombre, New-Age, old Puff, all of them – just vanished into thin air. My first thought – they was just fooling around with me. They’d be back soon, grinning themselves stupid. They wouldn’t just have left me.

An hour after sunrise, I wasn’t so sure. Not a sign of them. What was I supposed to do? No point trying to follow. For all I knew, they could have turned back to base. And if I just packed and left, what was the charge going to be? Desertion? What I couldn’t figure was why they’d just upped and gone.

Something else too. As the city gradually came back to life, I was beginning to feel vulnerable, naked almost. Not that I couldn’t handle myself. I was a big bastard, bigger than any of them in the platoon. But when you’re used to working in a group, it makes you kinda nervy to be out there on your own.

On my own. Lonely. That triggered off a memory. Back in the Humanity class, there was a lecture on successful Projection, how to make people feel soft and mushy about us. Seems one of our guys broke right into the head of one of their poets and forced him to write:

I wandered lonely as a cloud …

I remember thinking it was shit then. When did you ever see a single cloud in the sky? I’ll tell you when. Never. With us, it’s all or some or nothing. Never one.

Except me. Now.

So I sat there all day long, anchored over the Strip like it was my safety net, feeling more and more uncomfortable. I was right. People were beginning to notice.

Please Jesus let me win, and I promise I’ll stop right now … Ride the Insanity, today half-way between the cloud and the ground … 🎵When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet, You’re in love🎵 …

Day Two was the same, just worse. What was I supposed to do? Go? Stay? I’d give it one more day, see if they came back. Maybe two days. I wasn’t much in the mood for Absorbing. Just made me feel even more stupid, like a freak show or something.

And now from the weather team, there’s a forecast for moderate south-westerly breezes tomorrow. I guess that means we’ll be saying goodbye to that big ole cloud that’s been hanging round for the past 48 hours …

Hanging round? Is that what you think? Well screw you, dude. What your stupid weather team may have failed to notice is that we control the winds, not the other way round. It’s no big deal most the time. We’re pretty laid-back about these things, just catch one in the right direction and go with the flow. But when we need something special, there’s Summoning.

I Summoned that night. Come morning, there wasn’t a breath of a breeze, and if you were looking for me, well I was right there exactly where you left me yesterday — ‘cept, for the hell of it, centered four miles due west, over Spring Valley. Still meant there was plenty of cover for the Strip.

Man, the next coupla months, didn’t we have some fun? Red faces in the weather studios that first morning, that’s for sure, but I surely made it up to them. Three weeks later they were all weather jocks, and the biggest stars in town. For a day or two they forecast and it was catch me if you can, Mr Weatherman. Then some bright spark realizes the potential. They can lay wagers on where I’m gonna show up at daybreak tomorrow. Sure as hell it won’t be anywhere I’m expected. They split the city into 16 districts — the Strip, Spring Valley, Enterprise, Whitney, Rochester .. you get the idea — and they paid out on the bets where they hit me dead center. Before you knew it there was talk-shows springing up everywhere. The jocks interviewing psychics, psychiatrists, geeks, freaks, statisticians, politicians — anyone willing to trade an opinion for a fee. In a couple of weeks, weather forecasting was the biggest game in a high-rolling town. And I was the star. Viva Las Vegas.

I was just getting started. You taste fame, and it’s never enough. You want more. And I knew how I could get more. Project, Gray, Project! Feed their imagination.

Now this wasn’t as easy as I thought. First, I was way out of practice. Second, you needed Advanced Summoning — not just a regular wind but little gusts and breezes to help you shape your masterpiece. And third, I wasn’t a cute piece of cotton candy, like old Puff. I was kinda boring, truth to tell, just flat and gray and flabby. So I started with something real simple — a heart — just a little token of my love and affection. So I Summoned and squeezed and tugged and pulled. And how did it come out? A pancake. I don’t think nobody even noticed. So I tried something else. The famous flying saucer — I was pretty good at that in 101. Yeah, this was better, I could feel the touch coming back. But I got all my angles wrong, and down there on the ground, what could the people see? Another damn pancake.

I didn’t Project every day — it was too much like hard work. And never for more than an hour or two. But I gradually got the hang of it and began to connect. I did a foot and a face, and then a big success — a map of the USA. Just the 48 mainland states of course, but I knew they got it, because they all started waving little Stars and Stripes up at me that day. Most of my best ideas came from Absorbing.

Catch the Cloud news: we’re hearing big money laid on the Blue Diamond area tomorrow morning. And there’s a new game sponsored by the Luxor Casino. They want you to predict which of these Cloud shapes we’re going to see this week. Some kind of animal? Something built — like a bridge, or a house? Something spiritual — like an angel or demon? … We beseech you, O Lord, to guide us through this time of darkness and uncertainty, to be a beacon of light and understanding … I couldn’t give a toss about your solar-fucking-panels. We need the air conditioning on now …

So what had happened to my long-lost buddies? You know what? I didn’t give a damn, I was having so much fun. Besides, what kind of buddies were they, to abandon me out in the desert like that? Not like my new buddies. Okay, so what if their crazy beliefs and their sense of self-importance made these little varmints the biggest threat to the planet? So what if most of them were weirdos? At least they gave me a little appreciation. They wouldn’t leave me behind.

Let me tell you about some of my new buddies. First there was the God freaks. Las Vegas already had more than its fair share of them before I showed up. Stands to reason, don’t it? Put God on two legs, make him just like you, then where you gonna find Him? Why, in the city where you made the light shine and burn the brightest, that’s where. Vegas had more damn churches per human capita — and more weddings and more suicides — than any other city in the USA. That’s what I Absorbed.

For the God freaks I was a godsend. Some of them saw that right from the beginning. At first I was just a warning. See, nature’s out of whack, this will be God’s punishment, lest ye repent. But when plain out of whack turned to freaky — what with the Summoning and the Projecting and all — that’s when the Divine Mind was revealed. This was no routine God message but THE … ULTIMATE … WARNING. They trembled with fear and salivated at the prospect.

The end is nigh. The Day of Judgement is at hand. See, we were right all along. Suckers.

That’s when the pilgrims started to arrive. They probably felt they’d improve their chances on the Big Day if they had ringside seats for the event right here, in Vegas, God’s chosen city.

Should I have told them they were making a big mistake, that the truth was I just got left behind? Couldn’t I have Projected it somehow? Well I guess I could have tried, but hey, I was headlining and I wanted to fill the rooms. Truth is, I felt bad for the hotel owners. Sure most of us were having a fine old time, but I was Absorbing that occupancy was down. And they put the blame on me. Wynn and Mandalay Bay had closed their pools and cabanas. Forward bookings were cancelled — not everyone liked the idea of having their vacation interrupted by Judgement Day apparently. And the casinos — them that weren’t running some Cloud scam or other — started moaning that takings were halved.

So I owed them. I wanted to put something back in the economy. That’s why I was happy to see the CRAPS arriving. Not craps, like casino craps. But CRAPS — the Cloud Review and Appreciation Society. Man, if you thought the God guys were freaks, the Crappers were totally out of it. Like stoners, man. They even thought in poetry. Pure schmaltz:

Wondrous cloud up in the sky
Do you see me passing by?
Will you make me wet or dry?

They had a manifesto. It started:

Clouds must be free to wander where they will, free from the tyranny of Man.

But the true meaning of life for these nut-heads was our Projections. You’d never see a Crapper without a camera, just in case that magic moment came along. Which happened about every ten minutes, because they could conjure up a whole forest of trees and gnomes and animals when I wasn’t even trying. Easy money, and that’s why I loved them. Especially when they booked in for a two thousand person conference at the Convention Center in September.

At their conference CRAPS gave me a new name. ‘Asperatus’ — from the Latin for ‘rough’, they said. I think it was meant as a compliment. ‘Like waves in a rough sea, looming above. A new cloud-type’. I truly appreciated that, and was happy to take the credit. After all the practice with Summoning and Projecting, I really did feel like a new cloud. Although I’d always think of myself as ‘Gray’. That fancy Latin stuff was for the birds.

So those were my new buddies. For others I was a meal-ticket, but they came flocking to Vegas to enjoy the show too. Big-time scientists, trying to figure me out. Big-time politicians, trying to grab a little prime-time with me. I was disappointed the President didn’t show up — that would have been something. But he probably caught me on TV anyway, because all the channels were here, from all over the world. Okay, some of the normal tourists were going home. But at least we had all the hotel parking-lots filled with mobile studios. And any publicity is good publicity, right?

Can you swing that camera round. Good. Senator, over here, if you don’t mind … ‘Armageddon Days — Making Your Check List’ with Pastor Thomas A Brownlie — Wednesday at 8.00 pm … 🎵It’s cloud illusions I recall, I really don’t know clouds at all🎵 … I know you’ve got a contract sweetie, but we just can’t afford to keep you. Listen, you wanna try private work? … We plan to fly a WP-3D right into the heart of the Cloud — we need accurate measurements and we just can’t get them from the radar …

What would you call a fear of large metal flying objects? Aerophobia? If that was it, I had it. Call me over-sensitive but I never had the stomach for being flown through. It wasn’t a physical thing — not unless you call breathing in all that plane exhaust-shit physical. I never felt a thing. Except … um … violated. So you can understand why I generally kept my distance from McCarran. If I had a morning date with the weather jocks in Paradise or Clark, I’d roll over to the airport as late as possible, do my duty, and move off again quick.

No such problem with the dinky little planes that flew out from Northtown almost from the day I arrived. Ten, fifteen little heads, tiny noses pressed against the windows, on their hundred dollar twice-around-the-Cloud trip. Thing was, they gave me respect, kept a proper distance. If they ever got too close, I just Summoned up a draft, give them a little bump, and they pulled back. Sometimes to put on a show, I’d flash off a lightning bolt deep inside, nothing dangerous, but impressive enough to make the heads duck back.

But this WP-3D they were talking about, I didn’t like the sound of it. I had nothing to hide of course, any more than the next cloud — if there’d been one — but why did they want to go prodding and prying inside me? Can’t a cloud have a little dignity? Well, that’s when I made my first big mistake.

It wasn’t difficult to spot — an ugly twin-prop plane with a stubby black nose and squat body bristling with instruments, coming straight at me. I was out west, towards Red Rock and hanging low. He entered low too, not more than eight thousand feet. Well, I was going to teach the bastard a lesson he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. I Summoned and hit him with a fierce headwind. He was good. He reduced power and came down a couple hundred feet. So now I hit him with a downdraft and he drops like a stone. Then a tailwind, and I see him struggling to get the nose up. That’ll do it. That’ll show him he was fucking with the wrong cloud. But as I watch, he can’t control the dive. His speed’s too low. And the tailwind pushes him down even faster. He’s down, down and then — oh shit! He’s flown right into the side of the frigging mountain.

That wasn’t meant to happen. Why’d he have to try and mess with me?

Eight leading scientists were killed today when their plane crashed at Red Rock. The team was collecting samples from the Cloud, but the cause of the crash is not yet known … Time to cut the sightseeing tours. We just can’t risk it … The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken … Oh jeez, can’t you bring me some good news? Cancellations by the shitload, trouble in the Mid-East, terrorists threatening to go nuclear, oil prices double, and now this. I tell you, if this Cloud ain’t gone soon, it’s goodnight …

Showbiz is tough. One minute you’re up there with the superstars, next you’re a has-been. My career was nose-diving like the weather plane. No more tourists. Takings down for my live appearances – hell, half the gamblers in town were gone. Sure, the city was still full of God freaks, Crappers, scientists. But there were gaps in the parking-lots as some of the media people left. They cut some of my talk-shows too or pushed them out to late-night slots, to make room for all this new stuff on terrorism. I could see their point. What had I done? Taken down a weather plane. What were these new punks threatening to do? Take down a city, or a country. I needed a new plan.

When the idea came to me, it was brilliant — even if I say so myself. So they wanted me out of Vegas? Okay, I could do that. I stole out of the city that night, heading north-west, destination the old Nevada Test site, sixty miles away. Dawn came, and this wasn’t gonna be easy. I couldn’t have done it three months ago, but look at me now — a trained professional. First Absorb: let me see that nightmare vision, how does it look, what will they feel? Then Summon: winds ready to blast me through the troposphere, into the stratosphere. And finally, Project: a shaggy ash-gray column, spiralling upwards from the ground. And then forty thousand feet up, a ragged deathcap. How about that? I made me a mushroom cloud. Now let Las Vegas have its day in the sun.

I didn’t have to wait too long. Just a few minutes till military jets were scrambled and started circling me from a distance, fast but wary. Not long after, helicopters showed up too. So now, in a stately procession, we made our way back towards the city, me holding my new Projected shape perfectly all day long, and my escort riding shotgun. I was proud of my virtuoso performance.

When I got back to Vegas, what was I expecting? Applause, cheers, laughter? Yes, all of that, I guess. Well I couldn’t have been more wrong. The whole city had gone crazy, man. The highways was snarled up with them fancy fast vehicles all heading for the exits south on the I-15 and the I-215. Except they weren’t fast no more and some of them weren’t too fancy, upside down and some burning at the side of the road, or stuck in the desert after trying a short-cut. McCarran was swarming fit to burst. The military was everywhere, protecting planes, protecting cars, protecting property.

What was wrong with them, these people? Couldn’t they take a joke? And anyway, how come they would pay good money to go and watch crappy simulations in the crappy Atomic Testing Museum off the Strip but went ballistic when someone did it properly? What happened to ‘Entertainment Capital of the World’?

It was my second mistake, I figure. I didn’t understand my audience. I didn’t think I understood anything any more. What the hell was I doing here anyway? I was right about one thing though. The media all came back. The Cloud was riding top of the news again.

From that night onward, the lights started to go out. Vegas wasn’t the brightest place on earth no more.

Gradually things went back to normal. No, not normal, just not crazy. The tourists had gone, almost all of them. My buddies had stayed mostly, the CRAPS folks and the God people. They were still getting off on the whole trip. But only a few others rattled around the city. The military, the addicts, the owners and residents, the media, the looters, some of the good-time girls, the people who just didn’t make it out and probably never would. And me. Just hanging there, feeling sorry for myself. There was no place else to go.

The mood had turned nasty. Some of them wanted to run me out of town.

Yes sir, we have a plan. We believe it’s possible to disperse the cloud. It’s been above Vegas for several months now, but not a drop of rain. Well, we believe that by seeding the cloud – injecting massive amounts of silver iodide into it – we can induce rain, and that will cause break-up. There’s no hundred per cent guarantee, but we’re going to give it our best shot. We’re preparing everything at Northtown right now …

So they wanted to seed old Gray, did they? And what did they expect the old boy to do? Just lie on his back, open himself up and say ‘Take me, big boy’? These people made me sick. Here they were on my show, I’d made the little bastards famous, and they gave air-time to people who just wanted to kill me off? What kind of thanks was that? But what was I going to do about it?

The answer came out of the blue the next morning. And I mean out of the blue. All this time there’d been just me sitting over Vegas, and all around clear blue sky. But this morning there was another cloud … well, not so much a cloud as a contrail. And what did that mean? For sure, a message from base. So they hadn’t forgotten about me!

Contrails were our little secret. What was great was that people hadn’t caught on. They thought they were just vapor trails from jets. Well they were right in a way: that’s how they started out. But if you notice, sometimes these trails don’t just fade away in a few minutes, like you’d expect. They stay for several hours stretched right across the sky. That’s because our guys are using them for communications. Like this morning.

I wasn’t expecting literature. Messages had to be short because water vapor’s not a great conductor. And besides, we were always careful about possible intercepts. But this took some figuring out. Craps – well that must be the Appreciation Society. But how were they going to stop the seeding?

I didn’t need to worry. The Crappers had already got the message, loud and clear.

See that trail up there, man. That’s a chemtrail. They’ve already started seeding. We gotta stop them … 🎵Hey, You, Get Off My Cloud🎵 … Let’s do it on the runway at Northtown at noon … Free from the tyranny of man …

To show my appreciation, I Projected, the first time in days. A picture in a cloud this time. A small plane surrounded by a little circle of people holding hands. Wasn’t the best I’ve ever done, but my buddies were tuned in and turned on by now. Just like they planned, a thousand of them stormed the perimeter fence at the old Northtown Airport and sat themselves down on the three runways. Wasn’t no seeding plane gonna take off. Course the military saw it different and it wasn’t too long before they were in there too, beating the crap out of the Crappers. But you have to hand it to those airheads. One of them had land, a ranch or something, just outside the city, and before the end of the afternoon, he’d served a temporary restraining order on the City Council, banning them from any action that might spoil his enjoyment of his property. Like making it rain. I never did get seeded.

But I did me some heavy thinking. Those three little words from my long-lost buddies at base. What were they telling me? That they knew about this all along? That they was just sitting back there, having a good laugh at the adventures of Gray in Wonderful-Las-Vegas-Land? Was it all some kind of fancy plan?

A few days later I knew for sure. Another contrail, another three-word message.

The New Year was starting and the God freaks planned a big event, Not big like in the old days, but big enough to fill the old Sam Boyd football stadium, out east in Whitney. They billed it as an event for Christians of all denominations, led by husband and wife team Pastor John Etheridge and Pastor Enid Etheridge. The theme? When God Comes For Us.

I hovered up above the stadium on a chilly Las Vegas winter day. Temperature just above freezing but still a good turn-out, under the circumstances. You could just feel the heat and the passion building between these people as they started with God Bless America.

The handsome couple, Pastor John and Pastor Enid, stepped forward to the podium, hand in hand, dressed against the weather in thick woolen scarves and hats. Pastor John welcomed the congregation:

Brothers and sisters in Christ, we meet in an uncertain time …

That wasn’t true. It was certain. I took aim carefully and released the bolt. Pastor John was a smoking heap on the ground.

They say lightning never strikes twice. That’s not true either.

Pastor Enid was a smoking heap on the ground.

Was that really necessary? My message just said:

As my God-freak buddies scrambled screaming for the exits, I shed my first raindrops in over four months. I can’t explain why.

Changing history! The first shots in our campaign.