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State Jam By P. X. Amphlett

I ditch the bike in long grass by the old railway tracks and start to work my way under the rusting wire. Nearly there. This is insane. This is insane. The ancient concrete under my hands is fractured by green lines of moss, erupting through the cracks, dusted gold by the glancing light. No: stay focused on the spaces between the beats. Gaps in the fences, holes in the programming. That’s where you can still think for yourself, where the structure is weakest. I know I only feel this scared because the music is so loud. What wouldn’t I give to be free of this constant geometric noise, pouring through my head, filling my bones, twisting my emotional responses to force me into entrainment? That was what they asked me at the last state jam: “Would you be prepared to risk your life for the possibility, however remote, that everyone could freely create their own music?” “Everyone?” -Honestly? It seemed like a good trade. So that’s why I’m here, at five-thirty a.m, redshifting from Yare and wired on coffee and adrenaline, making my way to some derelict power station on the outskirts of an unfamiliar city: to deliver a cure for the plague. See, the whisper is, someone has found a way to drown the Imposition for good. I’m too young to remember. What I know of the times before the Imposition is a patchwork of fragments picked up here and there, usually from the older ‘jammers, their recall often jumbled by the perpetual straitjacket of the Imposition’s music on their own thought-processes. Sunlight hits me full in the face as I rise to a crouch in the knee-deep weeds, the power station a looming angular cutout before me, outline softened by the ragged embrace of ivy. I glance back across the tracks and abandoned industrial sheds toward the city. It looks peaceful from here; not pretty, but there’s something about first light in the autumn that can redeem even the ugliest skyline. People used to choose the music they listened to… The demand for music was so great it became a huge industry. Technology, driven by the vast amounts of money in musical media, worked like a demon to give the people what they wanted, or what they thought they wanted. What they got was DNI. I reach for the hundredth time for the memory bead on the necklace I was given. Still

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there. Looks like some kind of seed; a rough sphere of gnarled, dark hardwood with no discernible ports, surprisingly heavy but otherwise outwardly just a bead. “Lose this; I kill you myself”, said the old ‘jammer when he handed it over. For a split second I thought he was joking. “This is the only copy, you understand? No second chances. You deliver it intact, or you die trying.” I nodded mutely. Me and the code: fates of flesh and circuitry entwined. Nothing moving but the grass in the breeze… The damned music gets subtly louder. It’s grating, but I’m used to it; as long as I think in the gaps I won’t create the kind of disturbance in the field that’d provoke a crescendo. Direct Neural Interface, when it arrived, changed everything overnight. Here’s why: it was cheap. Too cheap. Too good to be true. So obvious in retrospect… DNI was cheap because it was part-funded by the government. Pusher tactics. So cheap, so easy, so clean that even the invasive nature of the hardware graft was readily embraced by a culture addicted to novel kicks, a population to whom surgical body-modification had become banal. All it takes is five minutes, and your intertat is done. Nanotech ink, a black soup of bots and bits, tattooed by computer into the skin of the scalp under short-acting local. The characteristic labyrinthine glyph visible on the head of every balding man is more than skin deep. What you see is just the aerial; the nano grows circuitry into and through the skull and merges with your auditory cortex. Powered by your own wet electrics, the intertat collects information from the aether, decodes it and feeds it direct to your mind’s ear. A technological symbiote… or perhaps a parasite. A cloud of midges hangs backlit in the still air, a chaotic network of shining motes. Every few seconds a wave ripples through the whole organism, each individual a glowing, vibrating jewel suspended in an invisible liquid medium and subject to its tides… With the intertat you got audio internet access on the go, and free telephone calls, but it was music that really sold it. Music! Your favourite tunes, direct into your auditory centres: “Loud as you want, and no hearing damage!” went the ads. You could still hear a real-world conversation while your whole head was filled to bursting with the music of your choice. The updates exploded onto the scene almost immediately. The hardware came in the form of an injection; more nanotech, this time a fleet of tiny monitors that attached to your heart and lungs and digestive and endocrine systems… It’s so still… So quiet, outside… Yet the music fills my head without moving the air, riding a higher order of vibration than sound, carried to me in a code to be read and sung by an orchestra of demons: my own neurons enslaved by a remote conductor and forced to play in time. …The new software utilised a synergy of biofeedback and neural network learning. It

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could read your emotional state via the nano monitors, transform it into music, and play it back direct to your auditory centres, all the while monitoring your reactions to what it played, honing its own responses to fit exactly what you liked. Imagine it: your own personal soundtrack, the perfect music for you, for now, whenever you wanted it. People wanted it all the time. People stopped turning it off. It was simply better than anything else… I mean- if you can have tailored clothes, why buy off-the-peg? …The grass in the vacant lot in front of the power station shines, frosted with a million tiny spiderwebs. Autumn turns, new organisms emerge from the soil, and suddenly the whole field is transformed, a single silken membrane vibrating in the breeze… There is a problem, said the government. Their own studies, they explained, simulations run on vastly powerful computers, had shown that certain keys, certain beat structures and chord progressions, were harmful to the human organism, that listening to them reinforced thought-patterns that could lead to paranoia, psychosis, schizophrenia, violence, even physical disease. The Key Mandate was introduced. New legislation to set boundaries on permissible musical forms. Some musical patterns were to be declared illegal… So obviously impossible to enforce was it, given the vast numbers of people who must be monitored constantly, that for a few months the Key Mandate was a standing joke… …right up until the state delivered the real punchline: the Imposition. If it weren’t for the incessant music, my mood would surely fit this place and time better- a place to bask, to absorb the quiet, a place to come to rest, to be, in my own skin. Instead, it feels like I’m radiating tension into the silence, my body a loudspeaker broadcasting the mood of the music; music too harsh, too strident -carelessly unaware of its incongruity with the local environment. Through me, the Imposition leaks out into the world. As long as I am filled with these melodies, they shape my feelings and thoughts, and so my actions… the patterns climb up through me to impose themselves on my surroundings. I am a carrier, a vessel for a message that is not my own. The Government announced that, for the benefit of all citizens, it would now become the arbiter of musical choice: The state-owned feedback and composition algorithms were vastly more powerful than any cranial software, and could predict statistically what patterns would generate the mood most suited to the task at hand. Of course, to ensure the efficient Imposition of the state patterns, the intertat -once the must-have accessory for every rebellious teenager- was now required by law to be grafted at puberty, to ‘ensure a smooth transition through this difficult phase of life’. In this way the state could circumvent the need to monitor every citizen’s compliance with the Key Mandate simply by broadcasting its own music at high amplitude. They realised that all you needed was a way of detecting an unacceptable level of dissonance at the receiver end -a sure sign of internal resistance to the pattern being imposed on the subject- and then prompt the receiver software to increase the volume of the broadcast signal until the subjects’ own patterns were swamped. Ahh, no… not now, not yet! Here it comes. Hold tight. Breathe. Flow.

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The music swells to fill my head. I must be causing detectable dissonance just by remembering this stuff, even at such high resolution. We chose the old power station partly because there are so few signal boosters in the area. Still loud enough to hurt, though. It’s like the mental equivalent of trying to swim against a powerful current, resisting such high-amplitude patterns. Got to keep my head straight: South entrance, second floor, door with a blue handle. Focus on the now. Focus on the gaps. Think smooth, think fast. There are two simple ways to raise the energy of a waveform. Most obvious is to increase the amplitude. This translates to an increase in volume in your ears, in your head. The preferred approach of the state; always has been. You don’t like what we’re saying? We’ll shout it louder, over and over and over again, until you acquiesce… …The other way is to increase the frequency. This translates into an increase in tempo or pitch… an increase in detail. This is what we do: the ‘jammers. We flood the gaps with high-frequency harmonics, and ride them. There are always gaps. Between any two beats, between any two wave peaks, there are gaping holes in the music, if only you can drive your nervous system high enough… I take the last ampuole out of my sock. Metallic black hourglass, an inch long. I put the narrow centre in my mouth, close my lips around it gently and bend the ends away from me. Crack. It tastes of rose petals. …And all at once I’m shifting up into the indigo shine; the flood of music I was drowning in moments before now beneath me, my mind small enough to ride on the surface tension. I take a lot of Yare. All the ‘jammers do. Three things always go together: Yare, state jamming, and free running. You ‘jam, you better not just think fast, you better be able to run, because sooner rather than later the cops’ll tune in on the dissonance knot and come to shut you down. Yare isn’t like caffeine or speed: they’re crude metabolic accelerants. Yare blueshifts your higher mental functions without touching your metabolism. Anything else would alert the monitors. Nobody knows how it works, or where it comes from: the molecular structure disintegrates catastrophically on exposure to light; in seconds all you’re left with is a colourless, jumbled organic soup. The stuff is impossible to trace, in or outside the body: I mean… how can you look for something if you don’t know what it is you’re looking for? One thing we do know: it works, beautifully. Wave glazing, they call it. An extra layer of cognitive processing, like a virtual neocortex, a harmonic halo. Picture your mind in its baseline state as an ocean. Yare gives every wave a thin iridescent sheen, and then the whole sea darkens and expands around you until the sheen itself is deep enough to swim in. You think in the overtones. With Yare, everything else slows down… including the music. Blueshift enough, and the seconds yawn open; you drop into the spaces as the bass falls right through the floor, sublimates into rhythm. High notes melt and soften, sawtooth waves blunt and expand.

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Right now I’m shifted about as far as I’ve ever been. I probably have the temporal resolution of a hoverfly; a blackbird singing in the distance sounds like whalesong. A state jam is a gathering of dissidents, a temporary knot of glorious, fluid dissonance in the otherwise uniform harmonic pattern of the Imposed field. Two things make ‘jamming possible: pirate software, and Yare. The software allows your intertat to tune in and listen to the signal signatures of others in the immediate vicinity, but at octaves far above the operational frequencies of the musical field, or the frequencies of ordinary brainwaves. Yare allows us to think, and so play, fast enough to match those frequencies. So, you get a bunch of the right people together and all shift into the blue, and suddenly you’re plunged into a sea of noise, each ‘jammer broadcasting their own psychophysical state encoded as unique patterns, keys and rhythms, freed for a few precious minutes from the constraints of the Imposition. It’s disorienting at first: the whole soundworld melts, and with it, your sense of context. Most people’s first instinct is to retreat into fear. That can freeze a ‘jam- if one or two people freak out, the loud, chaotic state they broadcast feeds back around the group and drives everyone into a tightening spiral of raw animal panic. Not pretty… The dissonance knots created by such accidents are so bright that the cops home in and swing down in minutes to find a bunch of mewling kittens in place of people, too terrified to even think, let alone run away. I look at my watch. Twenty to six. Twenty minutes to zero hour. Hundreds of thousands of ‘jammers, if the whispers are true, all ready and waiting to blueshift at once and tune into a new signal. The ‘jam to end all ‘jams… The ‘jam to begin all ‘jams. But only if I deliver the code. Deliver the code. No more wasting time. I rise to a stoop and break into a run, painfully conscious of how exposed I am, each moment of vulnerability stretched out and divided into sub-moments, each submoment itself iridescent with fine-sliced time. I head to the right, and as I pass into the shadow of the power station I’m so blue it feels like diffusing across a membrane: the sunlight darkens gradually as I hurtle across the penumbra, and then I am enfolded in a pool of thirsty turquoise space, drinking heat from my body. The main entrance doors are welded shut, but there’s a first-floor window with a couple of panes missing, and the walls of the building are a cascade of ivy and creepers. I angle my run toward the wall and leap upward, clawing at the ivy until I can grab the window sill and then scramble up. The wooden frame, grey and rotten, red paint crazed and peeling, gives way in my hands- I almost fall, scrabbling frantically, then gain purchase on the corner of the wall inside and pull myself through… So, the ‘Jammers are careful. You learn to build up your tolerance for discord slowly: what was once noise becomes assimilated and understood as signal of some kind; what was once experienced as painful becomes merely… complicated. Entering a ‘jam with this hard-won tolerance, the ‘jammers begin to entrain to each others’ patterns. Discord strobes through the group like waves, then all at once the magic happens: the whole thing collapses into harmony. A single, unified organism. One mind. It feels like state of grace; for a while, it’s impossible to play a note wrong,

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a beat out of time. State Jam: the name is both a nod to the instrumental “jam sessions” from the times when musical instruments were still legal, and a reference to the fact that we’re temporarily jamming the state’s signal: drowning out the Imposition with our own fragile harmonic field. A vial of Yare lasts about fifteen minutes, by normal reckoning. That equates to about four hours’ thinking time, in deep blue. The euphoria of a good ‘jam sometimes outweighs good sense, and then, well… when the Yare wears off, you redshift nearly as fast as you blued, and that’s when the Imposed music rushes back up to surround you. Fresh from the ‘jam, feeling free and fluid and alive, you’re all still broadcasting your own key. A dissonance knot twists into being as the ‘jam interferes with the State signal: an unmistakable beacon. The monitors squeal, the cops zero in. Then, you run. …I fall to the floor behind the window, a tiled corridor littered with pigeon shit and dry leaves. A long, long moment’s pause in the stillness… -Nothing. Nothing but the music, still kept distant and deep by the blueshift. I crawl until I’m well away from the window, carefully avoiding shards of broken glass, then make my way quietly along the corridor in search of a way up to the second floor. Yellow light comes in slantwise through the green-wreathed windows, the whole space immersed in a submarine gloom. I turn a corner and there is the staircase, a frozen spiral avalanche of dusty yellowing papers, two feet deep in places. It looks as though someone emptied every filing cabinet in the place into this one stairwell as some kind of farewell gesture. Climbing it is like ascending a slope of soft slate, layers of sheets as likely to slide underfoot as bear my weight. The second-floor corridor is a replica of the first, but somewhat more overgrown. Floor covered in dust, in places the ivy pouring in through the broken windows and down the walls, forming snaking pools of green that spread slowly across the floor. I picture the whole building gradually succumbing to this slow caress, imagine redshifting way below baseline so the days pass like seconds and the ivy is a furious, writhing explosion that reaches up out of the earth to wrap and digest the old structure, hard lines blurring, signal degrading into static, seeping away to merge with the microwave background. Do buildings dream as they unwind? Like fading songs in a forest, echoes becoming confused as they are coiled around the surroundings… architecture bleeding memories as it decays. If only you could tune in on the right frequency… Snap out of it. There… along the hallway… blue handle… the door half off its hinges, frame filled with shadow. As I approach the doorway, the music in my ears starts to fade for the first time I can remember. It’s not the Yare -I’m rapidly shifting back to baseline- and anyway, this isn’t a frequency shift: it’s actually getting quieter in my head; at any other time this would be more than welcome, but given the circumstances I find it more than a little disconcerting. Crossing the threshold, the hairs rise on the back of my neck as the music dwindles to a barely audible murmur; distant echoing voices, a vague recollection of commands once heard and obeyed, now receding into obscurity. Inside the room the light is even dimmer, and I have to stop once I’m just beyond the

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door to let my eyes adjust. From the way sound is reflected it feels like a large space, but the small, high windows are so choked with vegetation that the far end of the room is cloaked in darkness. I peer into the gloom and immediately catch my breath: two eyes suddenly appear, hanging in the air right in front of me. I take an involuntary step back as the shadows fold into form and emerge into the halflight of the hall. She’s a hole cut in the world. I mean, I never saw skin so black. Taller than me, impossibly curved, and the way she moves… languid inevitability, like ink in water. “Halo.” Her voice is burnt orange. I can’t look away. Beauty like this could be used as a weapon. Her head leans to one side: “You were expecting someone else?” “Um, no, I, er, I mean…” She smiles. I can feel my rational mind collapsing. “What’s your tag, child?” Gently, amused. I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. “Vector.” Her delighted laugh, deep and clear, hits the resonant frequency of the room; the echoes glow. “Perfect.” She holds out her left hand. A silver ring on the thumb in the shape of a snake, with the head pointing towards her. “K’un.” Smiling again. “They say I’m a good listener.” I offer my own hand. Hers is like cool, smooth leather. I look her straight in the eye and immediately feel like I’m drowning. “I -I can barely hear the music…” “I’m acting as a sink. The signal’s earthed through me: it always takes the path of least resistance. To the remote monitors, this place registers no dissonance whatsoever- it’s empty.” I have no idea what kind of hardware she must be incubating to pull something like that -you can’t just drain signal out of the aether altogether, no matter how powerful the receiver, no matter what kind of aerial you use; it just doesn’t work like that. …Does it? Just deliver the package, moron. I take off the necklace with the memory bead, hold it out. “Are you -are you the designer? The one who wrote this?” White smile. “No. I’m only one half of the brain. I don’t really do linear language… More… shapes and patterns. Feelings. I’m… the mother of this baby.” She takes the necklace gently as she speaks, cradling the memory bead. In the green light, even her palms look black. “Like all children, this little demon was born from a meeting: A whole army of codefreaks did the programming, each working independently to avoid the authorities, each coming up with original fragments of pattern. I’m the hub. They come to me with the code; I accept or reject it according to how well the patterns mould to my internal landscape.”

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I have a brief, vivid flash of rivulets of molten silver running along folds in black velvet. I have to shake my head to dislodge it. “It’s like being surrounded by suitors, all vying for their chance to share in fathering this… origynasm.” Her laughter licks the walls like candlelight. “This program was evolved, not built.” “But that’s… How do you know it’ll work?” “I know. For intuition to function as a tool, it must be trusted.” “What I mean is; have you, er, evolved anything else this way? Anything functional?” “It’s the same approach we used to develop Yare.” “You?” “Yare isn’t a drug. It’s a demon: a systems upgrade for the human central nervous system. Hardware and software combined in a single package; a viral carrier, suspended within a cellular nutrient solution, that builds and binds to each synapse a tiny shaped crystal, a miniature transceiver. Neural impulses are no longer limited by the speed of chemical waves; instead the whole brain becomes a field of nodes vibrating at quartz frequencies. Your own miniature internal radio network- the harmonic overtones of thought.” In a flash, I see thought stacked within thought, each thought a ripple in a fractal waveform, the detail going on forever as I fall endlessly toward the wave yet never reach it, and I reel, recoiling from my own depths with a kind of internal vertigo. “Holy… Who are you?” Her eyes flash. “I’m the soil after the first rain. And this…” she says, removing the memory bead from its necklace and holding it between finger and thumb in front of me “…this is a seed that will regenerate an entire ecosystem.” I watch incredulous as, in one quick movement, she puts the bead into her mouth and swallows it. “What the-?” Again, that inscrutable smile. “Don’t fret, little one; it’s uploading as we speak: the final update. Until now, state jamming has been a temporary, local phenomenon, interactions with other ‘jammers constrained to a tiny radius: one’s immediate environment can be transformed for a short while, only to be crushed and smoothed over by the Imposition once the Yare wears off… “This last update will allow you to go global. The music you hear through the intertat is transmitted and received as radio signals, remember: your responsiveness isn’t limited to the speed of sound waves in air, or by the distance sound waves will travel, so really there’s no reason why you can’t play with people far beyond earshot. “The software will link all the intertats together to form an aether loom -a huge parallel-processing network that, if it has enough nodes, will easily outperform and overpower any of the state’s hardware. “I only hope there are enough nodes… enough ‘jammers blueshifted and ready to tune in when the update’s finally online.” I picture the unbridled chaos of so many free signals all vibrating simultaneously. “But isn’t that a recipe for disaster? I mean, it’s hard enough dealing with the dissonance of a handful of people without cracking up… the idea of thousands of ‘jammers all suddenly linked… won’t we all just go nuts?” “The first astronauts suffered from what was known as ‘space sickness’- a strange generalised disorientation that turned out to be a reaction to being uprooted from the

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bioelectrical context of the Earth’s magnetic field. “We need a root note to set the key: the update reads the fundamental frequency of the Schumann Resonance -the Earth’s electromagnetic field pulse- and transforms it into a bass drone against which all other notes can tune themselves. If you ever feel lost, you only have reach down and touch it: fall into tune with the deepest note you can find. Entrain with the planet itself.” She closes her eyes. “Ah… almost… there…” I can’t imagine what kind of grafts she has installed -she must be a walking net server. I check my watch. Two minutes to six. She lets out a small sigh, opens her eyes again and holds out her left hand in a fist, palm down. The silver serpent shines against the jet black skin. “You’ll be needing this.” I put out my hand to receive a metallic black hourglass. “What about you?” “I don’t need Yare… Quickly, now.” Fumbling, I crack the ampuole and take a deep breath as the shift takes hold again… “Now, listen!” I close my eyes and wait. The Imposition’s music, already distant, drops below the threshold of my hearing. Nothing…. Then, a murmur, flickering lightly at the fringes of my perception, like a gentle breeze ruffling my hair… The murmur grows, swells, dilates into a sudden roar, cacophonous, blazing with interference and distortion. It’s sickening, and I feel bile rise in my throat, my body beginning to protest at the hypercomplex waveforms running through my system. Each note is a taut silver wire, a thread of data in a web so tangled it hurts my mind to contemplate. I feel like I’m being pulled apart, torn to my component frequencies by some vast informational storm… And then, rising beneath it all, a slow pulse, a tone. The root note. A dark velvet wave, tidal, irresistibly powerful, pulling all other frequencies into resonance. Suddenly, huge sections of the web of silver notes begin to shiver and thrash: what were harmonic centres moments before start to uncoil into screaming dissonance and fade. I realise in a flash what they must be: the patterns of the Imposition, suddenly thrown out of tune with a deeper, more compelling key, now becoming dissonance knots themselves, and being subsumed and assimilated by the new field. I concentrate on the lowest note, the deepest context, tune in… and… surrender. Instantly all noise disappears. I’m a ribbon of molten silver, flowing through the valleys of a writhing black landscape, a million other ribbons all interweaving around me in patterns never heard before… except, perhaps, in dreams. And the landscape itself, the velvet drone: I’ve never heard a note so rich… like the ringing of a great bronze bell, deep, deep underwater… And as I swim in the flickering shoal of quicksilver, the drone itself begins to blossom and unfold, new harmonics peeling from the abyss as it opens endlessly, each overtone a droplet flung from a humming flywheel the size of a world, a bright mote thrown onward and around as the centre opens, and opens… and opens… The stars screech as they are dragged across the night sky, but the axis is empty. We are a corona worn by the void. … Silver rain falls forever toward the night…

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… A white tree, hammered through the sky… Happy Birthday, everyone. Glowing cracks spread into creases, into valleys, made of valleys, the whole divided without limit, every division yielding a new lacuna, within which lies the whole, intact. There is so… much… space here… And the root note sings on unceasingly, the mother of all frequencies, bubbling up from the depths like joy, like the sound of laughter, deep and clear… “Halo, my children…” …I know that voice… “…Welcome Home.” *

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