dotwav

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Look, I’m sorry to interrupt. My name’s Elliot Carpenter and I’m killing time. I just thought that we might have common ground …”

  Move Along gave Joe the quickest of once-overs and then shook his head. “We have absolutely nothing in common,” he said matter-of-factly, and there was a superior tone swimming through the upper-crust accent.

  “We’re going to the same event.”

  “Yet you understand nothing of what you will be hearing.” Move Along looked away, dismissing Joe.

  “So why not explain it?”

  There was a full ten seconds of silence and Joe was about to leave when Move Along spoke.

  “Do you teach calculus, Mr…. what was it? Carpenter?” he asked, without turning around. His friends didn’t look Joe’s way, either. It had to be the first time in his life that Joe felt snubbed while the person doing the snubbing was actually talking to him.

  “No,” Joe said hesitantly, sensing a trap but unable to see its trigger mechanism. “I have to confess that I have never done that.”

  “But if you did, would you teach it in a lecture theater, to students of mathematics, or in a field, to livestock?” Still Move Along faced away as if Joe were somehow below him.

  Joe could see that this was the trigger for the trap.

  All he had to do was say that he would teach it to students and Move Along would slam down the lid with a simple, “And that’s why I won’t explain anything to you.”

  A mildly clever way of comparing Joe to a beast of the field.

  If he played along.

  But Joe knew that if someone was winning in a game that they, themselves, had set the rules for, then the only way to beat them was to shift to a set of rules that you could win by.

  Or, if the opponent was proud, arrogant, or both, it might be better to force a draw.

  Joe put a micro-smile on his lips, just in case one of the three turned to look at him.

  “Your analogy is entertaining to a point,” he said, “but it breaks down as soon as you actually start to think about it.”

  Joe was reinforcing his words with equal doses of sincerity and pity.

  He saw Move Along’s back stiffen.

  “Because if the livestock in the field suddenly asked me to teach them calculus, then I think the opportunity would be too singular, too remarkable, and too tempting to miss.”

  He turned his back on the trio and started back toward the counter.

  Five steps, he thought.

  It actually took three.

  “Hey! Wait!” The voice was still haughty and arrogant, but it had another quality to it now. The slightest of hints, sure, but that was a start.

  The quality is, Joe thought, curiosity.

  Joe spun on his heel and the trio was looking at him, three sets of eyes in a row. They were giving him their attention now. Like they were seeing him for the first time: a new species of life that they were suddenly interested in.

  He tilted his head a fraction, aware that any larger movement or grand pronouncement could undo the work that he had just done. He needed to be enigmatic. He needed to be a puzzle that the trio felt compelled to solve. So an almost infinitesimal tilt of the head and a steely, neutral stare back gave more layers to that puzzle.

  “Would you like to join us?” Move Along asked, and there was that same thread of uncertainty running through the question.

  Joe waited three seconds, gave a curt nod, and then said, “Sure.”

  Everything was controlled, planned, and carefully executed.

  And it bought him a seat at their table.

  They introduced themselves and the hostility evaporated instantly. It was replaced by an almost predatory curiosity.

  It turned out that Move Along was actually named Curtis Madsen, and he introduced his friends as Thomas Grant and Mickey Warren. Joe didn’t know which one was actually Puppet609, but thought it could be any of them. Joe’s feeling that Curtis was the alpha of this particular group was borne out by the fact that he did almost all of the talking.

  He revealed that they were college friends, second year physics majors at UCL. Then he asked what Joe was studying.

  Which made a fork in the path forward.

  Joe could carry on letting them think he was “livestock,” which might limit the amount of information they were willing to share, or he could surprise them, trump their academic endeavors, and maybe throw them off enough to get more information out of them.

  “Natural Sciences,” he said without missing a beat and amping up on the chemical confidence. It was a rollback to a cover ID recent enough that his subject knowledge could stand up to pretty close scrutiny if required. “Caius College, Cambridge.”

  “Huh,” Curtis said. He tried to cover the fact that he was impressed by immediately changing the subject. “So what brings you to Brixton? You don’t listen to X-Core, obviously.”

  Joe had no idea why that was “obvious,” but Curtis had phrased it as a statement, not a question. He decided to ignore the statement and answer the question before it.

  “To be honest I’m late on a blog entry,” Joe said, going with Abernathy’s suggested “in.” “I write music reviews for the online edition of Varsity—the university newspaper. An unforgiving editor is breathing down my neck, and all that was playing in Cambridge was a Pink Floyd tribute act, and I thought I’d rather cut off my ears than suffer that indignity. A friend told me if I wanted to see the next big thing in music, then to get myself over to the Warhouse tonight.”

  Curtis made a low sound in his throat that might have been a chuckle.

  It might have been a growl, too.

  “The next big thing,” he said in a monotone. His two companions looked at him. Something passed between them, but Joe couldn’t tell what. Some subtle expression maybe? An inside joke? Joe decided the best way to deal with it was to ignore it.

  “So what have I got to look forward to?” Joe asked.

  Curtis closed his eyes.

  “When the global economic crisis hit, people were surprised,” he said, a slow drawl that seemed entirely unconnected to Joe’s question. “Even though economists had been sounding alarm bells for years about the unsustainability of financial structures built on foundations of credit and bad debt.

  “The war on terror was nothing more than a war on the Middle East and a power play for oil, an excuse to settle ideological and religious differences. It ended up creating the very radicals it was supposed to destroy.

  “People cling to material goods, utterly oblivious to the fact that it is those very things that are dragging them down.

  “Religion. War. Violence. Intolerance. Untrammeled greed. Climate change denial. Fear. Distrust.

  “Tonight … tonight you get to see the alternative.”

  Curtis opened his eyes and looked at Joe earnestly. His friends started nodding their heads in eager agreement, as if he had come up with something more than a group of poorly thought-out and barely connected statements. It had sounded like headline extracts from a second-rate manifesto with important linking passages omitted.

  Joe wondered how the intellectual elite that X-Core self-selected could settle for such gnomic garbage. It was the kind of stuff that trolls posted on just about every message board on the net.

  It wasn’t that Joe didn’t sympathize with the problems Curtis had outlined—mostly he did—it was just that it was more like a collage of teen angst protest subjects than an actual belief system.

  A set of bullet points rather than actual, cogent thoughts.

  If X-Core was a cult that demanded its fans belonged to an intelligent elite, then Joe was bitterly disappointed at the caliber of those followers. He wondered if Lennie Palgrave was subscribing to such a threadbare ideology.

  And Harry Brewster.

  Something didn’t scan.

  Joe couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but something felt off about this whole “alternative to the world’s problems” shtick passed off as gospel truth.<
br />
  The more he thought about it, the less comprehensible X-Core became to him. The examples of X-Core music he’d heard were hardly inspiring. Muddled musical ideas, ineptly played, terribly produced, and lyrically naïve—it was hardly a bold step forward. In lieu of songs, Joe had been expecting something sensational behind the music; something that explained its cultish status among bright, influential kids. An ideology. A purpose.

  The core of X-Core though, if these three fans were anything to go by, was empty—and that seemed incredible to Joe. Maybe these three were not representative of the movement as a whole, but he feared that they were.

  He decided that there was nothing to be gained by tiptoeing around, and he altered his strategy. To be honest, Curtis irritated him. The kid was quite obviously privileged, but all the good breaks and private tutors in the world had not resulted in the creation of a likeable person.

  Or an interesting one.

  Just a shallow and arrogant one.

  “There’s nothing that chills the blood of a music writer more than hearing something described as alternative,” Joe said, making sure to meet Curtis’s eye and feigning boredom. Boredom, Joe had found, was unlike most of the other emotions he could have used to slam home his message. Boredom was subtle because, if it was real, it was absolutely honest and inarguable. It was critical without the need for confrontation. As a result, it was much harder to dismiss.

  Curtis blinked, surprised, and then spent a couple of silent seconds formulating a reply.

  “That’s because most times you hear something described as an alternative, it’s usually just a lesser evil, rather than a true alternative. Like Diet Coke as an alternative to Coke: the choice is loaded. Labor or Conservative? Whoever you vote for …”

  “… the government gets in,” Joe finished, pretending to stifle a yawn. “So is X-Core political?”

  Curtis shook his head.

  “Anti-political?”

  Curtis shook his head again.

  “Apolitical?” Joe tried.

  Once more with the head shake.

  Joe felt frustrated, like he was getting nowhere. Slowly. Either Curtis was toying with him or he really wasn’t as smart as he wanted Joe to think he was.

  Again, Joe felt disappointed by the level of Curtis’s thinking—or at least his ability to discuss his thinking—but covered it up with a liberal dash of encourage, changed tack, and asked, “What makes X-Core different from any other musical genre?”

  The trio exchanged an odd look among them, and it was almost as if Curtis was asking the others’ permission to reveal more. Joe manufactured more encourage, sipped his drink, and waited.

  And waited.

  The trio had stopped talking.

  Joe was about to say something else when, suddenly, Abernathy was speaking inside his head.

  “I’ve just checked out our three friends,” he said, as if it was perfectly normal to be communicating in this manner. “And they are pretty typical X-Core targets. All but Mickey Warren come from wealthy families. Curtis’s father is a top London barrister, Tommy Grant is the son of Ellie Grant, a fashion photographer who regularly features in Vogue. They all attended elite schools—Mickey on a scholarship, he’s a truly gifted physics student—and they’re all engaged in research on theoretical particles. Or they were.

  “Their research had even earned a rare undergraduate visit to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN when … well, something happened. It seems that about a month ago they dropped out of school. Diligent, conscientious, and gifted students, they suddenly stopped attending college. Their advisor is baffled. I’ve got someone speaking to her at the moment. If I find out anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  Joe had been studying his companions while Abernathy was talking, and it was as if they had suddenly just been switched off. They sat there, unmoving.

  And Joe suddenly realized something else.

  Not only were they not moving, but for the duration of Abernathy’s message they had been unblinking, too.

  Their eyes had a far-away look, not quite glazed over, but definitely as if they were looking elsewhere, somewhere in the distance, somewhere farther away than the walls.

  The word cult just kept rolling around in Joe’s head. Was this how people behaved when they were under the influence of an ideology or a belief system? Was this brainwashing in action?

  He’d had enough of thousand-yard-staring X-Core fans.

  Joe slammed his coffee cup on the bare table, deliberately avoiding a nearby coaster, and there was a sound loud enough that it attracted the attention of the server, who looked over disapprovingly.

  The three X-Core fans appeared not to hear it.

  It baffled Joe.

  If one of them had just faded out, then it wouldn’t have been so weird. People phase out. They get lost in a thought, and screen out the world around them. They’re in the room, but they’re not.

  It happened all the time.

  Make it three people, though, and it started looking sinister.

  Very good acting, or a sudden epidemic.

  It was time to test which.

  Joe reached over and drove his knuckles into the meat of Curtis’s right bicep, rotating at the wrist and drilling into the upper arm. Curtis blinked at an incredibly rapid rate, his body went into spasm, and then he slumped, as if asleep.

  Joe might have thought he was asleep, if he hadn’t suddenly begun speaking.

  “A storm is coming,” Curtis said in a low monotone, eyes closed, body loose and relaxed. “And the world is running out of places to shelter from it. What are you going to do, Elliot Carpenter? Are you going to run around with the rest of the cattle, sensing death flashing toward you, but too scared, too bound by tradition and manners to do anything about it? Or are you going to hide? Cower and quake as the sky falls in above you?”

  Joe felt a frisson of fear that painted his arms with a cold coat of goose bumps.

  It wasn’t what Curtis was saying, although that was part of it. Joe wasn’t big on apocalyptic ravings, but the certainty with which they had been delivered would have given him pause, regardless of the context.

  It was the way Curtis had said it that disturbed Joe most.

  Almost as if he was reciting it with little or no knowledge of what he was actually saying.

  As if they were ideas that had been hammered into his brain so deep that they came out as a kind of reflex.

  Brainwashed?

  Or something worse?

  Curtis and his friends remained there, slumped and unresponsive. Like marionettes with their strings cut.

  Then he noticed something.

  At first Joe thought he was imagining it, and he had to double check to be certain.

  Curtis’s foot was moving.

  It was gently tapping.

  Tapping out a rhythm.

  He checked the other two and their feet were tapping, too.

  To the same rhythm, Joe was sure.

  Then, completely in synch, they started nodding. Nodding their heads to what looked like an insistent, driving rhythm. The only problem was—there was no music playing.

  Joe thought about the military film and the soldier who would’ve blown his own brains out in response to a sound. Was X-Core music a mind-control technology? Did Curtis and his friends hear it in their heads even when there was no music playing?

  Were they listening to it now?

  That last thought jarred him. How could they be listening without MP3 players or smartphones?

  He stood up and hurried toward the door, pulling out his phone as cover and holding it to his face.

  “Abernathy?” he said. “You listening?”

  “Of course,” Abernathy only took a few seconds to answer.

  Joe was already on the street, moving back toward the Warhouse.

  “I suddenly thought you might have something better to do than monitor me.”

  “Don’t be crazy. What have you got?”

  “Just a tho
ught. You know we had that science fiction chat earlier, about mind control, about sounds making people do things …?”

  “What of it?”

  “I was just wondering, how carefully have we analyzed X-Core songs?”

  “All the lyrics have been carefully examined by literary scholars and cryptographers looking for patterns, recurring images, motifs, words that might have extra meanings …”

  “Have you analyzed the music itself?”

  There was a pause, then Abernathy said, “I wasn’t seriously suggesting that we had an MKULTRA situation here. So, no, we haven’t analyzed the music. We’ve been concentrating on the people, rather than the music.”

  “A music-based threat. That video you showed me, and you haven’t thought to analyze the music?”

  “We’ve listened to it …” Abernathy said defensively. “A couple of musicologists wrote a report on its crude, brutalist soundscapes …”

  “That’s not the same thing. I just sat down with three of our X-Core fans and they fell into … I don’t know, some kind of trance. Anyway, they were oblivious to the world around them. And they were listening to something. Without music playing. Without headphones.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Joe …”

  “I mean that we might be looking at this whole thing the wrong way. What if the X-Core subculture isn’t following the usual cult model—charismatic leader forms cult through force of personality and will—what if it’s because there is something actually in the music?”

  “But that was just me speaking hypothetically …”

  Abernathy was silent, and Joe knew that he was ordering tests on X-Core tracks in his most unhappy voice.

  Ten seconds later he was back.

  “So how were Curtis and friends listening to X-Core without, you know, listening to X-Core?”

  “You don’t mind me thinking aloud?”

  “I’d welcome it at this point.”

  “Earlier, I got fitted with a firewall for my chipset and its software,”’ Joe said. “And I guess that’s got me thinking about the way the human brain reacts to information. We’re talking about music, so I started thinking about the way that we can get hung up on a song, find it hard to get it out of our heads …”