It was probably a coincidence that Fabian, looking like a Bible-thumping evangelist in his spotless white suit, seemed to be channeling an unseen power as he commanded Xander and Tom to close their eyes and hold out their hands. “Can you feel it?” he said solemnly, drumming the palms of their hands with his fingertips. “Pennies from heaven.”
Xander pretended to pluck invisible coins from the air and stuff them in his pocket. “Can we open our eyes now?” he asked.
“Baby, you can do anything the hell you want,” Fabian gushed. “To paraphrase my friend Jay-Z, you’re not a businessman; you’re a business, man!”
Tom smiled, and not just because he enjoyed watching Xander, after barely scraping by on so little for so long, fulfill his artistic aspirations. The morning after the mob meltdown in Las Vegas, the ARK promoters announced the addition of DJX as a featured headliner of the tour, and within twenty-four hours, Xander and Tom were on a plane to a sold-out event in Detroit. Over the following weeks, they had played Seattle, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Miami, and several other towns before landing in Chicago, where they were resting up and doing some recording work before the upcoming ARK festival finale in New York. Fabian had joined them in the Windy City with news that “Stardust” was topping the EDM charts in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Offers were pouring in for media interviews, TV appearances and book deals. Fabian had arranged a press conference and reception at their Lakeshore hotel to promote the launch of an entire line of DJ equipment under the brand MuseX.
“The media mongrels await,” Fabian said. “I hope you guys are ready to get blingy, because the lucre is coming, lots of it.”
As it happened, the rise of DJX was about to become a jackpot for Swarm too. The dark nets that Xander and his pals used to procure their drugs, entire black markets that lurked in the ether and the untraceable crypto-currencies that financed them, had given Tom an idea. What if Swarm created his own peer-to-peer currency, a chain of digital credits that were dispersed and collected off the grid, passed surreptitiously from person to person, hard drive to hard drive, a virtual fortune that could be used to buy real influence and things? He had even minted a name for this new kind of crowd-sourced cash: Nuero$.
“Tommy,” Xander said, reaching for his jacket, “c’mon. Let’s do it.”
“Nah, you go ahead,” Tom said. “DJX is the star. I’m just the dark matter around it that nobody sees.”
Xander grunted. “Yeah, the invisible force that holds everything together.”
“You guys are nuts,” Fabian blurted, grabbing Xander’s arm and steering him toward the elevators.
“Just don’t forget to meet me at the studio,” Xander called as he headed out the door. “Seven o’clock. I texted you the address.”
Tom picked up the Chicago Tribune lying on the coffee table. A headline on the front page asked, “Is Mad Raver’s Disease the new AIDS?” The article explained that the mysterious illness detected in Las Vegas was spreading even faster than the CDC’s most dire projections. Outbreaks of the Rave Plague, as the media dubbed it, were surfacing throughout the country, mobilizing a backlash from groups that regarded the epidemic as a symptom of unchecked social decadence. Laws banning EDM festivals were being introduced in several states, and a senator from Texas was calling for a shutdown of all outdoor music events until the source of the affliction was identified and contained. EDM fans and their allies had pushed back, invoking the First Amendment and free market principles to defend raver’s rights. The FBI, meanwhile, was quietly gathering intelligence on the organizers, promoters, and patrons of the house music scene.
It didn’t help that Ravers’ disease seemed to have no identifiable cause or cure, or that random patches of people who had never even been to an ARK event were showing less severe but similar symptoms of euphoria, dementia, and nymphomania. Conspiracy theories bloomed in the blogosphere. Certain members of the clergy preached that the epidemic was an act of God, a curse on a sinful civilization that signaled the end of days. Others accused the North Koreans and Iranians of biological terrorism or blamed global warming. Parents stopped letting their teenage kids go out at night, and some small towns and cities had enacted weekend curfews. Those most risk-averse had started wearing gauze masks in public, adding to the freakish atmosphere of encroaching emergency. But woven into the clamor and concern, like a loose thread being gently pulled, was the unspoken dread that the malaise creeping across the land was not just a loose thread in the social fabric but the start of a permanent unraveling.
Just to play it safe, Tom had restricted zeph.r’s signal at ARK events to short, controlled bursts, which still allowed him to isolate and catalog a wide range of effects. He learned that some people were more susceptible to zeph.r than others and that the receptivity of the crowd was enhanced proportionately by incorporating spoken and written language into the audiovisual mix. Tom was on the verge of giving zeph.r a peer-to-peer capability, an open source dimension that would act as a psycho-acoustic echo chamber, amplifying individual brain waves across each other like synapses firing on a magnified grid. Not even the Meta Militia could have envisioned such a thing: a zeph.r super-wave without limits, self-generating ad infinitum, a flash mob with a mind of its own. Tom had also started adding a new zeph.r code into the “Stardust” app, a sleeper signal of sorts that could be enhanced and activated remotely.
As Tom’s ability to tweak the moods and actions of Swarm’s followers and recruit new ones from Xander’s expanding fan base grew, so did his appreciation for the transformative implications of his elaborate pranks. In Chicago, a crowd of twenty thousand inexplicably organized into a two-mile-long conga line and danced to city hall as a protest against the anti-rave crackdown. A week later, Xander made his video debut in an unauthorized Web documentary called Music Messiah: Revolution From the Dance Floor to the Streets. Tom had even bigger plans for New York. It was the last stop on the tour, and he couldn’t resist marking the occasion with a final zeph.r-charged flourish of coordinated flash mob disruptions. Tom had started to translate the ideas welling up inside him into a communiqué of what was happening and what could come next, a manifesto and roadmap for terra incognita.
Prolonged exposure to zeph.r was affecting Tom personally too. Swarm’s talent for mobilizing large numbers of people and zeph.r’s ability to mold human consciousness were starting to seem interconnected and interdependent, like two magnetic poles of the same phenomenon. As he probed zeph.r’s endless pathways and neural vistas with Leap Motion commands, Tom felt his fingers both controlling and being absorbed by the molecules in the air, blurring the distinction between action and thought and alerting him to the possibility that he was on the brink of a major discovery, a quantum shift that would change everything, including himself.
When Tom arrived at the studio, Xander was in the control room, listening as a singer named Maxine dubbed her vocals for a new DJX single in the soundproof recording booth. The track oozed from the speakers, an electro-soul hybrid with clear commercial potential. Xander pulled off his headphones and took a puff from his latest toy, an e-joint that vaporized the THC in marijuana without actually burning it. He saw Tom and held up the smokeless device.
“We’ve come a long way, baby!”
Xander laughed at his own joke, looking like an updated James Dean in his Levis and white T-shirt, hair cropped close on the sides and untethered on top.
“Sorry I’m late.”
Xander pointed the vape at Tom. “You want some?”
“No, thanks. I gave it up for Lent.”
“Ha, Fabian’s little sermon really got to you!” Xander took another drag. “Hey, guess who I ran into at the press conference today?”
“Your tantric yoga instructor?”
“Nope.”
“I give up.”
“The Federal Frigging Bureau of Investigation!”
Tom pressed the mute button on the studio monitor. “Wow, Xan,” he said casually. “Your fan base is really expanding. What did they want?”
“They wanted to know if I had noticed anything …” Xander stifled a giggle, “…unusual.”
“I see your point,” Tom said. “Two Tex-ass greenhorns from Nowhereville sticking to their guns and in no time at all shooting to the pinnacle of the EDM industry, hundreds of thousands of kids losing their minds and going berserk at their ARK shows, the CDC talking about air dusting outdoor raves with anti-bacterial gas …” Tom paused. “Nothing unusual here, Officer.”
“But actually!” Xander stomped his designer boots on the ground.
“Xan, it’s not that funny. What did the FBI want?”
“They wanted to know if I had been approached by terrorists or subversives, or if any of the other DJs are working for the Iranians, or if I thought the Taliban or Isis are into trip-hop or techno house … Ridiculous shit like that. A total waste of taxpayer money, if you ask me.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Maxine was waving to them from the recording booth. Xander clicked on the intercom. “What’s up, Maxie?”
“Hi, Tom.” She blew him a kiss. “Did you guys like the last take?”
“Beautiful, baby.” Xander slowly clapped his hands together. “We loved it, didn’t we, Tom?”
“Yeah, really nice.”
“I think we’ve got what we need, baby,” Xander told her. Maxine did a little celebration dance and started packing up her stuff.
Tom turned the monitor off again. “So what did you say to them?”
“Dude, chill,” Xander scolded. “It was just one guy, Agent Lance Chen.” Xander produced Chen’s card and handed it to Tom. “It was a clueless fishing expedition. Obviously. Don’t get all spooky on me.” Maxine was on her way to the control room. “I hear you, though. Things are getting a little weird out there. Humpty Dumpty in da house.”
“All fall down,” Tom said.
“That’s where we’re headed.”
“What?”
“I meant we’re going to the Varvatos party—downtown. That’s where it’s at tonight.”
Maxine entered the control room and looped her arms around Xander’s neck. “You guys, you sexy sonic sorcerers, your fabulous beats make me feel like …” Maxine made a sound that started as a squeal and ended in a suggestive purr.
“Gosh,” Xander said. “Our beats are that arousing?”
“Even better,” Maxine said, running her finger along Xander’s jaw. “C’mon, Tom. Come with us. You know you want to.”
“I do, and I would,” Tom said sincerely. “But I’ve got a date.”
“It’s a cyber date,” Xander whispered sotto voce in Maxine’s ear. “Very off the grid.”
“Oh, safe sex,” Maxine said, her hand inching down Xander’s shirt. “Without touching. How fucking romantic.”
“You’d be surprised,” Tom said.
Xander stood up and gave Tom a friendly fist bump. “C’mon, Maxi. Let’s give Tommy some privacy.”
When they were gone, Tom connected to their secure mobile network and fired up his laptop. Lucy was already logged in, waiting for him with a glass of wine in her hand and a feathered mask on her face. She knew he was traveling, but he never told her what city he was in or why he was there.
“Are you going to a costume party?” Tom asked.
“Yeah,” Lucy said with a slight slur. “It’s always Halloween when I’m with you. In fact, it’s a fucking ball, a masquerade ball.”
Tom sighed. A few weeks after they started Skyping, Tom installed a program that distorted his features just enough to conceal his identity. The semblance of normalcy had mollified her—at least for a while.
“Baby, I’ll do anything you want,” he said.
Lucy took off her mask and glared into the camera. “Yeah? In that case, why don’t you go fuck yourself? I’m tired of jerking off a ghost.” Lucy raised a glass of red wine toward the camera and took a slurp. “I figured if I got my own mask, then I could get a girlfriend to fill in for me once in a while, just to keep things interesting. Not that you’d notice.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I’ll tell you what’s not fair,” she said. “Having a relationship with a guy I’ve never met or touched, a guy who must be ashamed of himself or me or both. A guy who says he’s hiding his face to protect me but won’t tell me from what, a guy who says he loves me but treats me like a fucking cyber hooker. I could make a thousand dollars a night doing this shit.”
“Lucy, c’mon.”
“You don’t you think I can get it?”
“Oh, you’re hot enough,” Tom said, taking the bait. “Going all the way, having cybersex, that was your idea, remember?”
“You call this sex? You call this going all the way! Fuck you, Swarm, or whoever the hell you are. I’m sorry, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take it. It has to stop.”
Lucy’s demeanor transitioned from angry to sad, and Tom realized that she was on the verge of breaking it off with him. “Wait, wait, listen to me,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I told you already that what I’m doing is against the law. You mean too much to me. I can’t have you mixed up in this.”
“I’m already mixed up in this. At first, I was intrigued. You were so different and mysterious and, yes, sexy. The novelty of it all was kind of exciting, but not anymore. Not like this. And I finally realized that nothing is ever going to change, least of all you.”
“Oh, baby, my lovely Lucy in the Sky.” Tom grabbed the side of the screen and leaned in. “I’ve already changed. I’m changing so fast, in so many ways. I wish I could show you. I know it’s hard to deal with, but I need you more than ever. You can’t leave me all alone, not yet, not now.”
Lucy watched the live feed of a man with no face professing his love to her. “How the hell do I know you’re not already in jail?” she asked. “I’m sorry, but you are no Prince Hamlet, nor even an attendant lord. I thought you were the fool, but now I understand—the fool, you see, is me.”
Tom had one last card to play. He braced himself for the consequences of what he was about to say. “All right, you win. Listen to me.”
“I’m done, my dear. I’ve had it with your pretty speeches …”
“You know that secret project I’ve told you about, the reason we can’t meet, the thing that speeds up evolution?”
“Please spare me more Darwinist bullshit. I’m not your fucking chimpanzee.”
“No,” Tom said. “It’s real. If I show you what it is, if I let you try it, if I prove to you it’s not bullshit, will you give me a break?”
Lucy stared at the screen and drained her glass. “I’ll tell you when I get back from the bathroom,” she said.
Tom pulled a key drive out of his computer bag and uploaded the most recent version of zeph.r, and sent Lucy a copy that would self-erase after one use.
When Lucy returned, Tom asked her to lock the door of her room, download the app, and put on her headphones. “This better be good,” she said.
“Just keep the headphones on, no matter what happens,” he instructed. “It’ll sound like static at first, or a high-pitched whine, but just keep listening.”
Tom booted the zeph.r code and used the control panel to create a link to the app on Lucy’s computer. Then he donned a pair of headphones himself. During the tour, he had done some research on microwave mind-control experiments. It turned out that the Russians had published data on the frequencies that they knew affected people’s moods and thoughts, but what they didn’t have was the ability to embed language and thought into the signal itself, and vice versa. By distilling the code through the Omnisphere software and modulating it with pro tools, Tom could actually play the human brain like an instrument, an instrument with an infinite scale of tones and modulations mimicking music and speech, an instrument capable of fusing with other instruments, other minds, until it was like a chamber orchestra tuning up or, in this case, an intimate binary fugue, a duet between a guy and his girl.
Lucy’s expression was impassive at first, and then her eyelids began to flutter. As Tom worked the controls, both guiding and following, he began to sense what she was hearing, feel what she was thinking. He approached the porous surface of her awareness, the trembling anticipation of surrender, two signals coming together, transmitting and receiving, sharing energy like strings vibrating in perfect pitch, communicating without talking, embracing without touching.
As Lucy listened, the room around her dissolved, replaced by a weightless void dotted with shimmering dots that expanded into pulsing concentric circles, yawning elastic portals pulling her closer, drawing her in. “I don’t … I can’t,” she stammered. “My God. Oh my God.”
Tears streamed down Lucy’s cheeks as she experienced herself as a child bouncing on her father’s lap, the thrill of her first ride on a carousel, centrifugal bosons of self-stretching the colors, spindles and hubs, across memories and fantasies, round and round, into the nested Chinese boxes of birth and death and genetic roulette and the sublime chorus of her own being and everything echoing around it and through it, an atonal aria that twined and chimed with the life force that had bought her to this moment. And there was something else, something far beyond sound or physical sensation, coming closer, until she felt herself in the presence of another essence, and she understood who he was and what he was doing, why he couldn’t reveal himself, why he wouldn’t say good-bye and why he had to go, and in a way that could never be painted or photographed or rendered into an actual image or shape, she finally saw his face.