The Shazaam Gun
There are certain items that are so alarming that they get suppressed by the Conspiracy. Sometimes the very name of the thing being suppressed gets hidden, in order to hide it from people. And then you have things like the Shazaam Gun, the broad details of which are included in every Man in Black’s new hire orientation packet. The Conspiracy wants its agents to be proactive in hunting down new versions of this profoundly dangerous headache.
The name for the Shazaam Gun comes from what the Masses fondly think is a sort of shared hallucination / urban legend: supposedly there’s a movie out there called, well, ‘Shazaam.’ People independently remember this movie, the actor who starred in it, the basic plot, they remember renting it… but there’s no actual record of the film’s existence. Those who decline to believe that their memories are fake have instead come up with a variety of explanations for the situation, ranging from a conspiracy to bury an apparently truly awful film to flat-out involuntary dimensional hopping.
For the record: the Illuminati can suppress a movie this thoroughly. And they do deal with involuntary dimensional hopping on a mildly regular basis. Unfortunately, that’s not what they’re dealing with, here. What they were dealing with was a fairly sophisticated, demoni… ah, ‘memetically reinforced (inimical, high entropic) Applied Theology physical artifact’ that creates a field that makes it much easier for people to get possessed by dem… err, ‘unauthorized non-corporeal (inimical, high entropic) self-autonomous Applied Theology intelligences.’ The item is also capable of knocking out for a full day anybody who gets ‘shot’ by it, but that’s a completely different effect and is only there so that humans will keep using the Shazaam Gun.
Fortunately for Planet Earth, full-bore assaults from let’s-not-call-it-Hell are rare. There’s a sort of metaphysical field that makes it hard for certain entities to manifest here and harder for them to stay. However, when an interloper of this sort is eventually booted back “home” the person it was possessing is left with a certain amount of “lost time.” As nature and human memory both abhor a supernatural vacuum, a brain suffering from this will try to fill the void with something.
Unfortunately for Planet Earth, the denizens of let’s-not-call-it-Hell know this, so they’ve wired Shazaam Guns to implant a specific set of memories into anybody that gets knocked out by a blast from the weapon and later possessed. This tells later… OK, fine: “demons” …that the person in question is vulnerable to future possessions. All of which means that, if you’ve got one of these particular false memories, then probably you’ve been possessed in the past and you’re more likely to be possessed in the future.
Yes, realizing this would freak the average sufferer out. That’s why the Illuminati suppress the true story, while still letting the outward condition remain a minor mystery. It’s probably the best way to keep the poor wretches under observation while still allowing them the comforting illusion of a mundane life…
I haven’t seen a “Shazaam” movie, so I guess that I am good. I have, however, seen the totally different and unrelated Kazaam.
What if we just remember the trailers thinking “Good lord why is he trying to be an actor?”