Throngs of half-naked young people sporting mouse ears, Burger King crowns, DayGlo body paint, and oversized sunglasses waved at the limo as it approached the ARK festival. Xander and Tom waved back, marveling at the fantasyland of streaming banners, faux medieval towers, carnival rides, and waterslides ringed by a trio of giant stages that loomed like Mayan temples over the postpubescent playground. Platoons of festival workers were attending to the first wave of what would grow into a bronze carpet of fifty thousand bodies. Even with the sun sinking in the west, it was still scorching hot, and in the middle of the carnival several hundred revelers in surfer shorts and bikinis were doing a rain dance around a giant dripping mushroom made of hydraulic misting tubes brought in to blunt the heat.
“Jesus,” Tom said. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’ve been ready forever,” Xander answered.
In a couple of hours, Xander and Tom would join the sultans of spin as they whipped the faithful into fits of aerobic abandon. But for now all they could do was gape in awe at the sheer scale of the spectacle gearing up around them. ARK was the latest and biggest in the new breed of mega-EDM events. For years, the electronic dance movement had been building on the outlaw foundations of Detroit techno and Chicago house, amplifying and consolidating the countless permutations of trip-hop, dubstep, techno, and trance, elevating the DJ from a booth at the back of the room to the front stages of sold-out arenas and stadiums. With Tom’s surreptitious help, Xander had caught the mega-rave wave just as it was cresting into a multibillion-dollar enterprise and EDM festivals were metastasizing into massive multidimensional attractions.
The opening acts were warming up the crowd as the limo pulled up to the backstage entrance, where staffers politely asked to see their passes before waving them into a compound of deluxe Bedouin-style tents. Balloons swayed lazily overhead, and a propeller plane used smoke to etch an invitation to a casino after-party, the puffy white letters slowly smudging to nonsense in its wake.
Tom and Xander were escorted to the VIP enclosure behind the main stage, where the other DJs and their entourages sipped cold tequila cocktails and acknowledged new arrivals with a glance and courtly nod. An elaborate buffet and open bar awaited, as did a bottle of vintage Dom Perignon with regrets from Fabian, whose note begged forgiveness for having to shepherd another client at the Sacred Music Festival in Fez, Morocco. When Xander popped the cork, several heads turned and Tom felt curious eyes on them. Then a fawning actress and her manager/boyfriend approached their table and asked if they could please have a pucker of bubbly. Xander made a graceful bow as he filled their glasses and the invisible membrane was breached effortlessly, seamlessly, as if they had always been on the inside track, as if their ascendance to the royalty of EDM had been preordained and blessed from the very beginning. Where Tom and Xander came from and how they had arrived at the technorati apex made no difference, not with the thrumming vibrations of half a million watts of audio equipment massaging them through the evening air and thousands of fans eagerly waiting for DJX, as Xander was now officially known, to assume his place on the illuminated platform and rattle the heavens with his sand-shuddering beats.
Xander’s animated gestures and lopsided grin said it all—this was where he belonged, these were his kin, this gleaming chain of social silver was his element. Tom knew that someday, probably very soon, he would remember this moment as the precious pinnacle of something that was about to be overwhelmed by events even more irresistible than music or money or fame. Xander was absolutely right about their fates being tied, but Tom now saw that rising to the upper echelons of the EDM elite was just the beginning of a much steeper trajectory.
Even though he was young and fresh on the scene, or most likely because of it, DJX had been awarded a plum slot to spin, just when the sky behind the stage became an orange-violet aurora laced with iridescent chem-trails. A female show runner materialized and whispered into Xander’s ear, signaling that it was nearly time for him to go on. Tom and Xander followed her onto a tarp-covered riser behind the stage, which overlooked a vast ocean of people already applauding and calling for their groove-wielding hero. Tom and Xander were shaking their heads and laughing even before the crowd let out a guttural roar of anticipation. “Let’s make them remember this,” Tom said, heading to his perch a hundred yards opposite the main DJ stage at the elevated A/V console that controlled a curved wall of fifty-foot-tall LED screens.
A thudding cadence announced the beginning of the set, and Xander stepped onto the turntable deck under a halo of bluish light.
“Hello, everybody! Are you ready to touch the sky?”
He raised his arms in greeting to the cheering throng, at once blessing and bowing to the sea of smiling faces. Then he donned his headphones and started turning dials and pushing buttons, adding layers of percussion until he had a samba-like foundation riding the insidious bass line. Thick waves of synthesizer slowly wobbled and then sped up to a rollicking strut that got the crowd kicking and bouncing. In the video control booth, Tom was echoing the aural textures with whirling shapes that dissolved and merged into each other like spin art. It occurred to him that neither he nor Xander played an actual instrument, yet here they were manipulating sounds and images in concert before a vast and appreciative audience, a foot-pounding pageant performed by an emphatic cast of thousands.
Xander looked at Tom from across the crowd and raised two fingers, meaning that there would be only two more songs before the world premiere of “Stardust.” Tom reached into his pocket and retrieved the flash drive that he hoped would demonstrate the potential of the Meta Militia’s contraband code on a live audience. In addition to recalibrating the zeph.r signal and synching it with microwave-enabled audio and visual suggestions, Tom had taken the extra precaution of separating his and Xander’s earphone channels from the main feed to shield them from zeph.r’s mind-warping effects.
Xander launched into a patch of fast-paced electro with a counter-pattern of peeling saxophone—or was it guitar? In response to the song, Tom brought the circular shapes on the LED screens into sharper focus, making them synch with the beats like single-cell creatures pulsing to the rhythms. Out in the audience, glow sticks drifted over the thicket of hands and arms like mitochondria.
Xander looked over and held up a single finger.
Tom pulled out the key drive and uploaded zeph.r, checking to make sure that his visual loop was queued up and ready to go. Xander was building tension with scratchy guitar riffs over tumbling synthetic drums and a corroded lower register. He took the tempo down to a lumbering crawl, and Tom followed suit, initiating the fractal egg animation and aiming a battery of industrial-strength lasers upward to intersect like the interior arches of a celestial cathedral. Xander raised his hand, and the symphonic overture of “Stardust” rose along with the lights, a single searing note that coalesced with the lasers overhead to create a portal to the Milky Way.
Tom turned a dial to stream zeph.r into the mix and scanned the crowd just as the light and music swooped back to Earth in a cascade of pulverizing thumps and the dancers reeled with mouths open, heads bobbing, bodies bending like rubber under the sonic pummeling. Xander was nodding and staring into a faraway place, pacing himself. Through the lens of the Orion software, zeph.r was a neon red rectangle with pulsing control nodes, blinking in time with the music, guiding him as he adjusted the blend and raised the amplification another notch.
The crowd was heaving in tandem to Xander’s motions like minnows swimming in some unseen current, their heads bowing in perfect agreement. Almost too perfect. Just to be sure, Tom boosted zeph.r another notch, and that’s when he saw it: an enormous murmuration shuddering through the audience, like the ripples emanating from a stone dropped into a pond, except that this pond was a mass of several thousand people suddenly lurching in unison, an impossible concurrence of limbs perfectly synchronized to the beat as the song’s lyrics shuffled and blinked on the giant screens:
Move.
Be
the
beat.
Now be
Stardust
Again.
Tom looked over at Xander, who seemed perplexed by what he was seeing in the crowd. Their eyes met, and Tom shrugged, pretending not to know what was happening, pretending not to be thrilled by what he was seeing. Tom gazed out at ARK city—twenty thousand eyes glued to the screens, feet stamping, arms pumping, all of them responding to the same internal metronome, not separate anymore, not from the images inside or outside, not from the world around them or each other. The throng simultaneously heaved and screamed in approval, the conscious attention of a single beast consuming its audiovisual feast.
Be
Stars.
Move
with
Each other.
Xander arched his back and rotated on his heels, the same action that had momentarily mesmerized the police in Austin. He pounded the air with his fists, absorbing the approval of countless roaring mouths, basking in their feral screech. He turned his palms in a gesture of benediction to his tribe, and leaned forward over the controls, constructing a swirling melody around an amplified Middle Eastern tattoo. Xander had returned the crowd to solid ground, and now Tom took them deeper, immersing the dancers in a sulfurous haze of smoke and blood red light. The giant words flickered and flashed, a kaleidoscopic scrabble of letters and shapes coalescing into a call for action.
Move
Live
Love
Each other
Live
Love
Now
A thousand yards away, on the other side of the ARK festival grounds, Eric Wightman heard a thunderous racket from the main stage and cursed his friends. He had come to ARK at the last minute, convinced by his chums that seeing DJX would be the highlight of the summer. They had all agreed to arrive early for his set, but that was before his pals, most of them drunk or rolling on ecstasy by now, had insisted on waiting in line for the fucking Ferris wheel, like little kids distracted by the candy-colored ring of pretty lights. Don’t worry—we’ve got plenty of time, they’d assured him. And then the wheel had lurched to a halt because someone had thrown up and had to be carried away to the medical tent, and now Eric was trapped in limbo, literally up in the air. Even from this distance at the top of the mechanical loop, he could tell that whatever was happening on the main stage was epic. The light show on the screen and the cluster of lasers rising over the crowd like a castle of white light were hypnotic, incredible. And the new song—so stirring and soulful, was triggering memories, things he hadn’t thought about in years. The feeling he got from the music erased his anger but not his frustration. He wanted to be there with those people. He wanted to dance with them, all of them. “Shit!” was all Eric could say. “Shit, shit, shit!”
Tom felt the energy in the audience morphing again, moving inward from the edges. Then he peered into the teeming crowd and saw something inexplicable—people going at it like animals in heat, not just making out but having actual intercourse. Already stripped down to swimsuits and flip-flops, it didn’t take long for the boys and girls to get naked and nasty with their neighbors, total strangers instantly available and irresistible. Meanwhile, in the middle of the humping horde, dozens of delirious dancers were passing out, their limp silhouettes carried on a cushion of hands to the edge of the crowd, where they were gently lowered to the ground. ARK security, alarmed by the licentious groping and growing pile of bodies, pushed into the heart of the crush to disperse the mob, but instead of making them docile, zeph.r accentuated their natural aggression. Anyone who resisted became the object of their wrath, until the lovers and the fighters were all trading blows in the expanding brawl.
This wasn’t the plan, people going crazy, getting hurt. Tom disengaged the zeph.r signal, but it was too late. As the tangle of humanity churned into a violent mash-up, Tom’s elation evaporated and Xander gave him the signal to pull the plug. The show was over. Tom cut off the sound, uncoupled his hard drive, and erased all traces of zeph.r before joining Xander in a mad scramble to get away from the chaos and back to the enclosed VIP area. They fought their way through the stampede, miraculously managing to locate their driver.
“Get us the hell out of here!” Xander ordered. As the limo pulled away from the exit, a caravan of Nevada State police cruisers barreled through the gates, followed by ambulances and fire trucks, all with lights flashing and sirens screeching.
“What the fuck happened back there?” Xander wanted to know. “Everybody went berserk.”
Tom was busy making whiskey drinks at the other end of the limo. “It was fun at first, and then it got kinda weird.”
“Ya think!?”
Twenty minutes later, Xander and Tom were back in their high-roller suite with wraparound views of the Las Vegas Strip. The ARK after-party and the nightlife lords and ladies of Las Vegas awaited them, but right now it was just the two of them, still trying to digest the magnitude and meaning of what had just transpired.
“Did you freaking see that!” Xander was pacing and typing into his phone. “I mean, the crowd went absolutely apeshit!”
“Yeah, I saw it,” Tom replied. “Totally insane.”
Down below, gamblers and gawkers streamed through gleaming mazes of carefully calculated temptation, most of them hoping in vain that they’d get a chance to do something that was supposed to stay in Vegas. During the ride from the airport to the hotel and during a short exploratory sprint on the jammed sidewalks, Tom was astonished by the sheer range of humanity pouring through the streets, an endless parade of pedestrians who had converged on this shameless Shangri-la to forget their woes and escape the inertia of the familiar, the comfortably safe and sound, where the chances of winning big were even lower than a streak on roulette.
But Tom and Xander had managed to beat the odds, both of them still in a state of suspended disbelief, trying to digest the magnitude of what had just happened. What difference did it make that Tom had engineered Xander’s stardom from the shadows? None of it would have happened without their unique combination of ability, guts, and ambition. After all, Xander’s talent and charisma were real, the ARK extravaganza was real, the lavish suite they were staying in was real. Zeph.r was real. The power of its signal had outstripped Tom’s expectations, but he had also witnessed its limitations. He now understood why the Meta Militia had passed it on to him; the software was a ticking time bomb. In its present form, zeph.r was too unpredictable, too blatant, too random. But what if it could be tamed, focused, and controlled?
Xander poured some stiff drinks from the bar and motioned for Tom to follow him out to the terrace, which overlooked the famous fountains of the Bellagio. Tom’s eyes followed the river of light flowing like lava past their hotel and down the Strip to the edge of town. Just a few minutes ago, they’d been running for their lives, and now they were on top of the world. Tom felt a shiver of vertigo, a tremor of understanding that by breaching the boundaries of what was possible, they were now teetering on the threshold of the unthinkable.
Arms resting on the railing, Xander gripped his glass with both hands and leaned in toward Tom. “It was ‘Stardust,’ man,” he said. “That’s when everybody went nuts, dancing like maniacs, tearing off their clothes. It was a goddamn free-for-all out there. It was like, like …”
“Like The Rite of Spring?”
“Yeah, exactly!” Xander blurted. “You know what I think?”
Tom waited for Xander to tell him.
“I think we’ve got a monster hit on our hands.” He held up his glass. “We did this together, Tommy. We’re a team. I want you to come on tour with me as chief of technology and visuals. Full partners in crime. I keep the publishing rights but everything else we split down the middle, fifty-fifty.”
Tom glanced at Xander to make sure he wasn’t kidding. “Gee, Xan, thanks. I mean, when and if that happens …”
“It already did.” Xander grinned like a dealer pulling an ace from his sleeve. “ARK asked me to join the tour as one of the headliners. Ten cities in thirty days. All expenses paid. Fabian just texted me. He’s working on the money part, but it’s middle six figures minimum. Are you with me?”
Tom wasn’t particularly fond of traveling, and he didn’t need the money, but the chance to keep testing zeph.r in public was enticing. He had assumed that its signal could only affect people within a few hundred yards of the speakers, but there also seemed to be a halo effect of some kind passing from person to person across a much larger area. Doing more ARK festivals would give him ample time to fine-tune the software and probe its uncharted dimensions.
From their perch on the twenty-ninth floor, Tom watched the Bellagio’s swaying strands of pressurized water flex and twine like a double helix of DNA preparing for cellular mitosis, the chemical chain that had programmed the destiny of every human cell since the dawn of the species, including the occasional mutation, a random glitch that reshuffled the genetic deck and opened the door to variation and, under the right conditions, biomorphic evolution. In fact, it occurred to Tom that the entire Vegas strip was an annotated history of human civilization, from the Bellagio’s spurting gene pool to the Egyptian pyramid at Luxor, on through Caesar’s imperial Rome, the canals of Venice, and even the Eiffel Tower and its saucy American sister, the Statue of Liberty, with her beguiling gaze and promise of unfettered democracy in the home of the brave and the land of ATMs that spat out crisply minted hundred-dollar bills.
“Hell yeah,” Tom said, gripping Xander’s shoulder. “I’m all in!” Then he opened his wallet and tossed a wad of twenties into the air, the buddies howling as they watched the money corkscrewing like confetti into the fountain’s fanning tendrils.