Maddy and I stared at each other, sweat pouring down our faces, like we were lovers coming back from the brink of disaster.
“I’ll let you two have a little moment here,” Cameron said as he dragged himself toward the stairs.
“Is that what this is?” Maddy whispered. “Are we having a moment?” She seemed surprised by her own voice, as though she’d failed a sarcasm check and landed on sincerity instead.
“Why do you hate me so much?” I said impulsively, even though I couldn’t believe she was motivated by something that simple.
She shook her head impatiently and said, “Saving my hatred for those who deserve it.” Relief washed over me. But if she didn’t hate me, then what did she feel about me?
For my part, I felt like I could drown myself in her. Bradford and Devin kept singing, and unpredictable emotions came over me in waves, like this feeling that Maddy and I were just beginning the first truly meaningful stage of our connection, and I shouldn’t let the past interfere with the present. The past was over and gone; the present was a gift that we shared; the future was a promise you couldn’t possibly keep. Stick to right here and now, looking into her eyes, mesmerized by what you see there.
I mean, you can experience a feeling, and know exactly how irrational it is, but the feeling justifies itself perfectly well regardless, and I was flooded with feelings—not just for Maddy, but for Cameron, and Bradford, and Devin, and everyone all around me. They weren’t the same feelings at the same intensity in every direction, but there was a clear continuum in which I understood us all to be part of a unique tapestry, highly temporary and fluid in nature, and my psychic defenses came fluttering down like billowing fabric slipping off a clothesline in a gentle breeze.
Bradford had established control of the situation via singing, and he maintained control by trading off singing with Devin. As long as one of them was singing, the general aura of blissed-out interconnectedness persisted, in a range that extended as far as their voices could reach. The closer you got to the epicenter of the dance floor, where Bradford and Devin stationed themselves, the warmer and more addictive the sensations.
People who wandered in from the dining room or the balconies quickly tuned in to what was happening. Pillows and cushions migrated from the balconies toward the dance floor; the loft got increasingly tricked out as well, since the acoustics in the room made the loft an excellent vantage point for listening. If you needed to wander out of the perimeter of their voices, like to go to the bathroom, you’d feel it start to wear off and you’d almost get a headache from the sudden dopamine crash, and you’d hurry back to the soothing embrace of the circle as quickly as you could.
The time was just a little past two in the morning.
Bradford assumed a natural leadership role, instigating a rigorous process to get the party back into a zone where the guests could eventually leave here without feeling traumatized by what they’d seen. We had a window of time available to us during which we could reimprint a different emotional version of the night’s events on the guests—generously, you could call this a therapeutic or healing act, or if you wanted a more sinister interpretation, you could call this cauterizing emotional responses before they fully developed into lasting panic or fear. Bradford deputized each of us to work within a subset of the condo’s current population to triage the situation on the ground, restore equilibrium, and maintain peace.
Cameron worked the crowd of partygoers, systematically planting suggestions with his guests that his parties were always like this, which is why he rarely held them—he wanted these occasions to retain a special quality about them. In truth he was also methodically scrubbing any notion that this was an unnatural event from everyone who’d listen. A flow of selfies and photos taken by the guests was probably loose in the wild already, but careful observers of our hashtags would notice a distinct change in the character of the photos coming out of the party shortly after 2 a.m.
Devin gathered the catering staff together, and performed a similar function. They were paid staff, and while they could believe that all the guests gathering in the loft and on the dance floor were sharing a particularly powerful drug trip or whatever, none of them had imbibed any substances, and some were confused by their change of psychological state as a result. Devin soothed their concerns with wispy but sincere talk of how pivotal their contributions were in restoring order after the fracas everyone clearly remembered, and gave them permission to relax and consider themselves off duty, but welcomed them to stay and enjoy the remainder of the event.
The catering staff, bless their souls, somehow managed to get it together enough to start circulating trays of fruit, cheese, and bread to nourish the sleepless masses. Their catering uniforms accumulated various bits and pieces from an assortment of costumes, donated by guests to help these folks feel like part of the unfolding scene instead of outsiders forced to watch and serve the surreal decadence unfolding around them.
Meanwhile, the security team regrouped among themselves to take stock of their injuries, and to discuss a rotation that allowed them to relax while still having Cameron’s back in case any further surprises emerged.
Maddy and I took stock of several bad injuries among Maddy’s crew and Gorvod’s Frenzy. Bradford clearly wanted to keep city authorities away from this location at all costs, while tending to the needs of these people. Phyllis and Max summoned medical assistance from the Church, which maintained an emergency medical clinic on its campus. It was a scary wait for these first responders to arrive. Bradford and Devin could provide a form of psychological anesthesia via their singing, but not proper physical healing, and it was tough for me to unlearn the preconception in my mind that the Church was a weird danger and city authorities were our supposed saviors in the face of trouble like this.
But the Church came through with doctors and nurses who could triage the assorted injuries, and to my shock, I watched a few key acts of miraculous healing that actually made me question my resistance to Lonso’s message about perception influencing reality. And I was keenly aware that this transaction meant that Lonso, and by extension Violet and Olivia, would no doubt be immediately informed of everything that had happened here so far tonight.
Throughout all of these activities, Bradford and Devin continued their steady stream of musically masked power morphemes. They seemed relaxed and pleased with the results, periodically interweaving their voices in counterposition, or trading verses in a call and response; and they never seemed to get exhausted by their efforts. I noticed that delivering power morphemes by singing was for them a languid experience, instead of the sharp, aggressive bursts that often comprised spoken power morpheme sequences.
Usually masking worked by burying power morphemes within a sentence that had its own overt meaning; the overt meaning of the sentence could either complement the underlying intent of the power morphemes, or distract from the underlying intent, whichever worked best for surreptitiously transmitting the power morphemes to a subject.
Singing opened up a new, additional layer of overt meaning you could use—not in the same way lyrics had an overt meaning, to be clear. But good singers could sing without lyrics and still make you cry because of the emotional meaning they conveyed; and that emotional meaning, conveyed via melody and harmony, was an additional overt layer of meaning Bradford and Devin were using to bury the power morphemes that were pacifying the party.
Oh yeah, and Devin, my associate at work who theoretically reported to me, was Bradford’s grandchild. They weren’t using “Jenning” as a last name because they didn’t want presumptions of nepotism following them around; instead, they used the name “Devin James.” And they’d been training with power morphemes much longer than me. I realized I might never stop feeling like a newb around these people.
Oh yeah, and I needed to stop thinking of them as “these people,” which had a dismissive, disrespectful quality, and also inherently excluded myself for no apparent reason. I needed a better way to refer to the collection of individuals, myself included, who wielded power morphemes as tools for personal or greater good.
I needed to come up with a proper character class for these people.
That’s when I started calling us linguist mages.