Hallucinating (6 page)

Some of the final year students at the Avalon Faculty have been persuaded by Kappa to design viruses that will harmlessly but forcefully advertise the new album. One such lady, Vanquara de Musique Nouveau, a mixed up freak who only wears green, makes a Celtic pack that can infiltrate the British Underground via the net. It is a leap forward. Sales projections are eight thousand. With luck, enough revenue will be generated to keep Marcia happy while they find the rest of the cash.

But that is all breadhead stuff. Nulight has a thousand other things to attend to.

The gigs begin. The weather holds. Thousands of merry undergrounders come out and have a great time. Nulight gives away one-track mini-CDs as a taster of the album, which is to be called "Auton de Musique Nouveau" in honour of the virus lady.

The music papers have all picked up on the new development. They say SemiAutonatic's gigs are impure because it is well known that only computers can compose auton, but they applaud Nulight for his audacity, and as a result sales of other Voiceoftibet albums pick up. The news that Mystery Trend have been dropped is suppressed for a week, and then some hacker kid breaks the news over the net, an event that makes Nulight furious, despite that fact that he expected it.

Near the end of the month, with three gigs to go and still no aliens, they release the album. It charts indie at number twenty-one. This is fantastic. First week sales are somewhere between four and five thousand. If they can keep this up then the gamble will have paid off.

Their penultimate gig is at The Other Eisteddfod, just outside Llangollen in Wales. Nulight expects it to be a stormer. It is an apt metaphor.

The stage is quite high and they have arranged their keyboards, computers, av links and internet rig in a semicircle, as usual, since that is a cosmically correct setting. There is a small but enthusiastic crowd, spliff-taffs mostly, but also rasta hangers-on, tipi folk, and ambient heads seething their brains in Lo-Dose and Mighty. Set back somewhat, naked cooks fry psilocybe caps in sunflower oil, offering up their offerings on baps of crusty whiteloaf. There are large amounts of cider available under the monicker Jerry's Strangely Apple Brew.

Iechyd Da!

It is extraordinary how the vibe of the gig affects people's behaviour. Nulight is impressed. Some of the audience are hallucinating, others are coupled in sleeping bags, while others brew tea on primus stoves or eat lettuce sandwiches. Some have had the decency to bring amp-phones, tech that allows them to experience the gig straight off the mixer in head-filling stereo. Nulight imagines their skulls as containers of liquid music, and as the band begins to play he watches them fill up, sees their eyes go misty and faraway.

For half an hour the gig is relaxed, but then they happen upon a trancey blip that Zhaman modifies into a looping riff of close microtones, that, after only forty bars, becomes hypnotic at 144 bpm. It is as if they are all trapped inside the loop, endlessly cycling, round and round, for ever and ever.

Then the audience is wide-eyed, pointing at them, applauding, grinning, laughing, freaking out with pleasure at the trance segment, and Nulight smiles with pride at his accomplishment.

But it was not the music that the audience were reacting to.

Suddenly Nulight is flying upward, something snagged on the back of his shirt, pain in his armpits from the stress. Below him the audience think it is part of the act, and they are
well
impressed.

But he is being abducted. He wriggles, aware that he will shortly die... he supposes. Through the clouds he is pulled, fantastically quick, and he dares not raise his arms and slip out of his shirt because he will fall to his death. Would that be preferable to alien implantation and experimentation? Too scared to think. What to do? Wait.

Then it is all lights and his stomach flips wrongways into his mouth as if he is going over a bridge in a car, and then the lights flicker all around him, strobing, strobing bad, like a storm of fireflies inside a VR helmet. He shakes his head from side to side to remove them from his sensorium, but they will not depart. He hears echoing sound, and spookily enough it is reverberated auton music as if coming from the bottom of a well—though the well's depths seem to be
up
there somewhere. He tries to sense what is approaching, but he is too confused. He wriggles some more. The hook, or whatever it was that caught him, has gone, and in fact he is floating free as if in a reverse draught of attar scented air, so heavy he now wants to sneeze, as if he has passed through a wall of incense. The music is losing its reverberation, coming closer, ever closer, like destiny with a capital D.

So the aliens have got him. He relaxes, defeated. Paranoia leaks alongside fear from his mind, and he becomes limp, dejected, a failure, a man without hope, soon to die.

Now the little lights are strobing slow, like a rainbow of speckled sweets, wine gums by the look of them, soft and tangy, and they seem to infuse their essence into him. It is a miniature invasion of the human by the alien. This is no hallucination, this is real. It is happening to him. The sweets. The invasion. The reverse gravity, the up-flight into the warm centre of the mothership; and he is rising high like a spirit of the dead into some anti-heaven of the alien imagination. Buddah save him! Now!

Then he is dizzy, stomach churning, as if he is being sent down a horizontal corridor of light. Then greyness. Gravity plumping him on a floor. A warmth near him. He is in a cell alongside a person.

Chantal!

She is looking at him. "So they got you too."

"Man..." he murmurs, hugging her. "They got me, they got me."

"They got me too."

They hug some more. Nulight wants to be a child, wants protection from somebody. Chantal will do.

He sobs, "Please tell me I'm hallucinating. Please. I don't want this to be real."

"It's real, all right," Chantal replies.

For some minutes they remain silent in the cell. Nulight glances around. It is spacious—no, huge, with a high roof; and everything is made of brushed metal. He imagines himself flailing around as the ship manoeuvres, flung around like a rat in a cage, which is what he is.

"They done anything to you?" Nulight asks.

"Not sure."

Nulight continues, "You must've been out of it. Drugged, most likely. Ain't no other explanation—"

"It is Einstein, isn't it?"

"Einsten? What, number three?"

Chantal's voice becomes urgent. "Time dilation. Whatever. If the aliens can hop from star to star, maybe galaxy to galaxy, then they can bend time, use wormholes, do whatever they like. Who are we to say? We're just animals to them. The zoo theory, ever heard of that? I'm a woman, Nulight, you're a man. Maybe they want us to mate, make babies for their zoo."

Nulight is appalled. Of course he has heard of the zoo theory, but he never imagined in his worst nightmare that he would be one of the animals. With Chantal. It is just too bad to contemplate.

"Stop bugging me," he mutters.

Chantal proffers her hand. "Forget the past. Quits?"

Nulight shrugs, but does not respond. Then he manages, "Maybe."

"I was a pain in the neck to the aliens," Chantal muses. "I was investigating them, not as efficiently as you were, no, but hey... they grabbed you and me because we were the ones that got obsessed by them."

"Uh-huh?"

Chantal nods. "Don't you believe me?"

"Nah."

"It's why we were abducted, Nulight." She touches his right hand, and there is a sensation of mild electricity, like a 9 volt battery on the tongue.

But suddenly Nulight is falling. The fireflies are back, sweet as ever, landing on his tongue like flakes of fruit-coated manna, sensorium overload, synasthesia. Is he falling or rising? He feels cider, tastes gold, hears apples.

Mixer console in front of him. He hears the insistent thunk of a looped pulse, microtonal off-key auton, hissing white noise synthesizer wheezes, treated guitar breaks cut to shreds by a computer. Auton. Llangollen. He is back, and the band is all around him. Below him the audience are going mental; they think the abduction is part of the act. Nulight groans. This all goes back to The Orb trying to induce lightning over some Glasto fest, ELO with their spaceship, the Floyd. Whatever.

"It's true!" he yells. "Don't you understand, it's true! It ain't no hallucination! It ain't funny any more and it ain't no hallucination."

The gig is over. Rapturously he is received by the hangers-on, the groupies, the crazies, the whole tripping lot of them. But Zhaman and Partzephanaiah have snuck off somewhere, leaving nobody to protect him from his adoring fans.

Nulight is surrounded by people and he is getting smothered. The roadies—hired meat—have already forgotten about him. Then a dude in a rocking chair barges his way through the throng, an oldster wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with the legend Jerry's Strangely Apple Brew.

It's Jerry Kranitz, thank Buddah. The psych cider supremo grabs him, as the rocking chair lifts a tad and forges a way through the screaming fans, who move back in response. Nulight is pulled through the throng, his body vibrating as he is crushed into the rocking chair engine, until the fans are left behind and there is the welcome sight of the cider tent up ahead. Into this haven they whizz.

"Okay, we got a few moments," Jerry says. His American accent sounds odd, sure, but it is most welcome.

"You saved my skin, man," Nulight replies.

"Leave my tent out of the back while I hold them off," Jerry replies. "I think I saw Kappa running down to the railway line."

"Right. Nice one."

Jerry leans back in his rocking chair and raises a pint of the golden stuff. "I discovered this is Canterbury," he says, "and I've never been the same since. It's a strange brew—like life."

Nulight shakes Jerry's hand, says, "See ya later," then runs out of the tent. He finds Kappa by the railway, and soon they are away in a taxi down to Llangollen town centre.

Kappa alone has realised the truth about the abduction. He tells his story and she is shocked.

He was not hallucinating.

It was
real.

...ambient music and world domination...

So was it all a gigantic hallucination?

Nulight is uncertain, despite the certainty of his beliefs. It is not a black and white situation.

And then everything happens.

Surfing the internet, he hits Berlin and reaches the computers in which the semi-autonomous music is fermenting. Immediately suspicious of the linkage, he hesitates, for it seems a fluke drop. Maybe Master Sengel is somewhere electronically near, like a guardian devil. But seeing the opportunity to wreck the alien system he moves in to pull the metaphorical plug.

And then his right hand is not his own. It is controlled. He works something, some simple cutting device, and then a skin glove falls off his hand and he understands the significance of Chantal in the mothership.

He looks at the VDU. Instead of dying, the Berlin music simply spreads its wings and
flies.

And over a few days the great plan comes to its fruition, all to the beat of its own new music, auton, that sonic window into the alien psyche, unhuman sounds, unhuman rhythms, the infectious, so catchy abstract germ that nobody can resist, because nobody can develop resistance to what they are fascinated by.

First affected is the German economy, or meta-economy as it has become since parallel computers linked by optical nets recreated it. The software running the stock market is a mathematical model of capitalist thought, and it is easily recast in the alien mode. The autonomous music, existing alive like a protoplasm in the European net,
remixes
the economy. All the data relating to company shares, capital, stock, all the governmental data regarding contracts, fiscal law, relations with the rest of the world, and the entire softsys running the European Community, all these are lost. In its place a warped model appears.

People can go to cashbooths and withdraw ten billion euros, not in cash, but virtually. It seems chaotic, illogical, but there is a pattern. Unfortunately that pattern, being alien, cannot be analysed.

The Berlin stock market crash is nothing, however, compared to the events of the following day. London crashes. No economic business can be done. Computers ruled everything. Now they have gone alien. The pulsating interchange of electronic data has lost its human shape.

Then Wall Street crashes, then Tokyo, and the world is lost.

Economic activity on the global scale becomes impossible to understand. It is happening, but it is alien. How can anybody live a sane life when companies go bust in seconds and beggars become billionaires?

This is how the invasion succeeds. Global electronic economic activity was an ugly music for the aliens. They have substituted their own. They could not help it.

...Cornish gentle...

Only the economically self-sufficient survive. Kappa takes Nulight away to recuperate—they head southwest. Zhaman comes along, also Djo and Sperm. The aliens do not pursue them. The group head for the farm owned by Kappa's parents in Boscastle, Cornwall, and there they set up an agrarian collective.

The Boscastle collective is named MaxNeef, after a visionary.

It seems that the aliens are only bothered with the so-called civilised regions: urban Europe and North America, Japan and the Tiger Economies, Australia, Singapore. They ignore South America, much of India, Oceania. In Britain most of Scotland and Wales is ignored, as is Northumberland and the Westcountry. The Island of Ireland too is ignored. In these places people are left free to live, since they in the past partook so little of the computerised, too-large, mathematical, inhumane capitalist economic system.

In short, everybody previously economically insignificant remains alive.

One evening, Nulight and Kappa are down at Boscastle harbour. The smell of wild garlic from the hill lane wafts down, mixing with the salt of the sea. The village is almost empty, just a hundred or so inhabitants now, and all non-human scale farming has ceased. At the moment it is every collective for themselves. Later, perhaps, some will link up. There is no danger of Government.