“Ohrwurms,” Abernathy said.
“Gesundheit.”
Abernathy forced out a laugh. “Ohrwurms, or earworms, are musical phrases that the brain latches on to and keeps playing back,” Abernathy explained. “It’s also called sticky song syndrome. … I seem to recall it has even been used as a defense in at least one murder case. In extreme cases, medication is prescribed to people who can’t shut out a particular song… .”
“That’s scary,” Joe said. “But if we put a piece of code onto a computer that did the same thing that you’re describing, wouldn’t that be called malicious code? Wouldn’t we call it a computer virus or a worm? Wouldn’t people start worrying about it? My question to you is this: can a song infect a human mind? Not just get caught in it, but actually infect it.”
“Oh my,” Abernathy said. “It’s not possible.”
“Possible is a relative term. And calling something impossible is a luxury we can’t afford. Run every sound analysis program you can think of on X-Core tracks. Then find someone else and get them to think of some more. Look for things that might not register to your dulled adult senses. High frequencies, low frequencies, sounds hidden behind walls of noise.”
“And you? What are you going to do?”
“I’ve got a X-Core gig to attend.”
“If there’s something in the music, what makes you think you’ll be immune?”
“I’ve listened to X-Core, remember? Apart from it making me want to listen to some decent choons, it didn’t have any lasting effect on me.”
“Be careful.” Abernathy’s voice was grave.
“Oh, I will be,” Joe said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a killer gig. This one might be. Literally.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN: LAST RITES FOR A DYING RACE
Ani exchanged a five-pound note for an ink stamp on her hand and joined the gathering crowd inside the Brixton Warhouse.
She’d spent the whole morning with Gretchen—who Ani now had on speed dial in case she needed her—trying to track down the elusive figure of Jack “Black Hat” McVitie. A three-month-old cell phone number had come back disconnected. Emails and IMs brought them no more luck. Gretchen had tried tracking IP addresses and examining metadata—the kind of methods that Ani herself would have employed—but Jack was paranoid enough to hide behind a number of proxies, to scrub metadata, and her efforts turned up nothing.
Gretchen had apologized for her failure by making an awesome lunch and then, after Ani had eaten half her body weight, they’d both tried chasing down Imogen Bell, the woman behind the alien first contact false alarm, and now—it seemed—involved in the X-Core movement.
They already knew that Imogen had deserted her post at the Pabody/Reich telescope, and she had dropped off the radar straight after as if she had fallen off the world, like Jack. Ani wasn’t surprised that she’d disappeared. People—especially the press—had been less than kind. In the world of media, the failings of a scientist seemed to be given extraordinary coverage, as if it highlighted an inherent distrust of science. There was even a satirical cartoon about her in the Guardian, showing her—unkindly—as a fat, deranged Chicken Little figure, running around in a flurry of feathers, trying to convince world leaders that the sky was falling, when in reality it was merely an acorn—adorned with a picture of ET—that was hitting the roof of the observatory.
Ani thought that she’d probably want to disappear, too, if people were that horrible to her.
She’d been worried that the people on the Warhouse’s door wouldn’t let her in, but twenty minutes of Gretchen working magic with makeup meant that no one called her on her age, if indeed an age limit even existed. In fact, the kids on the door hadn’t given her so much as a second glance.
Or, for that matter, a first glance.
Once inside, Ani saw plenty of people as young as her and realized she and Gretchen had been overcautious. Still, the makeup made a pretty good disguise if anyone was looking for her.
The Warhouse was an old building. Taking an “e” out of the name hadn’t changed its industrial beginnings. It was purely functional. Exposed ducts and pipes were the closest the place came to a theme.
The relief at gaining entry was in direct conflict with the fear she felt about what she was entering.
She had been hiding from the reality of being here. In truth, she’d had to. It was what kept her traveling the straight line between point A and point B. But now she was in the venue of a X-Core gig, surrounded by people she didn’t know, miles away from home. The fear was taking over.
She had heard the sound that these groups encoded into their songs and it had almost cost her her mind. Her plan, such as it was, had just delayed things. If that sound played again, would it finish its work, whatever that work was?
Had these people gathered here also felt its power? Were they under its spell? Would she soon become … one of them?
One of them …
What did that even mean?
Again, she was aware of the speed with which her life had flipped from fairly normal to snafu. It was as if she had suddenly discovered the velocity of monumental events, the power that drove strange mechanisms hidden from human consciousness.
There was certainly something strange about the audience here tonight. She had been to gigs before, but this one seemed different. There was no chatter. No excited buzz. No thrum of anticipation. The people gathering here were silent. They seemed detached from the proceedings. They weren’t even talking to each other. There was none of the usual expectation, no sense of excitement at the event that was about to occur.
It was like the crowd was here, but their minds were somewhere else. She thought about the soundforms that had tried to worm their way into her brain, and developed a leaden feeling in her stomach. Was this what people were like if the process wasn’t interrupted? Were these people who had listened to the .wav file and been changed by the process?
Suddenly it was all too much for her. What did she think she was doing here? Putting her mind at risk just so she felt like she was doing something, anything, to explain the chain of events that had brought her here.
Who did she think she was kidding?
There was no shame in running away. In returning home and trying to figure things out from home, in Cambridge, with people she knew, in an environment she understood.
She had just made up her mind to leave when a voice announced the arrival onstage of Le Cadavre Exquis and things went quickly downhill from there.
“Good evening,” the singer announced as he snatched the mike from its stand. “Listen to this.”
He was tall and painfully skinny with a shock of bleached-blond hair. Baggy black combat pants only served to accentuate how thin he was, as did the plain black T-shirt with cap sleeves. Behind him the drummer did a quick tour of his kit, heavy on the toms. A couple of notes from the bass guitar were followed by a distorted scrape of an electric guitar. A few notes from a keyboard and then … silence.
The stage in darkness.
An expectant hush.
Pin-drop quiet.
Suddenly a tape-looped voice started up, a strange American-accented voice that sounded both eloquent and insane, backed up by a low throb of bass guitar and a cycling, stereo-panning effect from the keyboards.
Slow, deep drums started pounding out a heartbeat. Spotlights danced over the stage. The guitarist fired off a set of random notes: their only unifying theme seeming to be that they were all spiky and unpleasant. The bass picked up the heartbeat. The singer closed his eyes. A wall of noise was building behind him. When it reached its peak, he raised his fist and the band fell into the first song. Red light blasted behind the band, rendering them into silhouettes.
“They lie, you die, never tell you why,” the singer growled as much as sang. “You stick out your neck as they cash the check. You try, they lie, you die, we cry. At the edge of chaos, they never tell you why. At the edge of chaos. Living at the edge of chaos. The edge of c
haos. Chaos. CHAOS! CHAOS! CHAOS!”
Ani wrinkled her nose. The music was okay—a little loose, a little sloppy, a little all over the place—but the lyrics were awful. If she’d handed them in on an English exam, she’d barely have passed. She looked around her and saw that everyone else in the place seemed to be singing along.
The vocalist churned out another few verses, each as lousy as the first, and then just screamed out the word “CHAOS!” over and over again. The crowd started punching their fists into the air every time he did, and it looked to Ani much like the Nuremberg rallies must have looked to an outsider.
An instrumental break—which, to be honest, seemed to be taking the word “chaos” a little too literally—started a slow, low, churning in the pit of her stomach, bass vibration that made her feel sick … and … and …
Ani suddenly put her hand to her head because of a sudden pulse of discomfort from her stomach to her head, as if it had physically shifted locations.
She felt her body resonating, as if the music had suddenly become a physical thing within her, and she realized with horror that she recognized the feeling. She couldn’t hear it, but she knew that the .wav file was buried beneath the music. The same .wav she was carrying in her pocket on the flashdrive. Knew it because of the way she suddenly felt like she was the instrument playing the music—that she was a plucked string from which the sound was issuing. She felt the physical blow that she’d felt in Uncle Alex’s lab, the clenched fist in her guts, the tingling sensation that started at her extremities and then forced itself into her head.
The soundforms followed swiftly and unstoppably: the wormlike shapes that danced across her mind’s eye, squirming as they took root in her brain. She felt divorced from her own body as the wet, shining worms of sound writhed and wriggled through her mind, breaking open and disgorging more of the soundforms. They were probing at her, trying to find the quickest and most effective way into her core, trying to find a way in so they could fill her, overwrite her, become her.
Even her terror seemed distant and dislocated, as if it was happening to someone else.
But, somehow, it felt different this time, and she couldn’t figure out why.
It was as if the soundforms themselves had changed. They seemed harsher, more electric, and there was something buried inside them that seemed to be saying “OBEY! OBEY! OBEY!” over and over in her head.
She thought of the last time this had happened, and how it had been Uncle Alex who had saved her by switching off the sound. She knew that no one was going to turn the sound off this time. She was defenseless. Thinking happy thoughts wasn’t going to get her out of this one. This time—with their constant refrain of “OBEY!”—this time they would own her. She felt her will ebbing.
The soundforms.
They were unstoppable.
She let out a moan and felt her legs giving out beneath her weight.
There was nothing she could do.
Nothing she …
In desperation she tried to think of things to throw in the way of the soundforms, to visualize objects that would slow down—or even stop—their terrifying onslaught. She pictured a brick wall around her brain. It was shattered in seconds. She tried an old-fashioned metal safe. It corroded and cracked, and she was vulnerable immediately.
There was no defense, or her concentration was just too weak to stand up to the soundforms.
She tried picturing her father’s face, then Uncle Alex’s, but they offered no resistance to the hungry entities that were threatening to devour her mind.
And then, unbidden, a mental picture of another member of her family rose to take their place.
Not a nice image—her mother, hands and arms red with blood, mirror shards lining her arms like the spines of some strange dinosaur—but a powerful one, encoded with so much fear and regret and revulsion that Ani felt the wormlike forms pause before it.
She concentrated on the image with a supreme act of will, bringing it into sharper and clearer focus. All the emotions that she had the memory tagged with came through with bitter clarity. She let it grow and grow, and she let the cruel despair she’d felt in the moment she’d seen what her mom had done to herself loosen, and she was shocked and elated to feel the soundforms wither in proximity to her memories.
Some tried to ride the flash of elation back down into her head, but she suppressed the feeling and replaced it with sorrow and loss and horror and pain and drove them back.
Negative emotions, she thought, bad memories are a barrier against the invaders.
She had no idea why this should be so, but now that she had a weapon against them she did something that she had never allowed herself to do before.
Something she had never wanted to do before.
She allowed herself to wallow in the terrible memory of her mother’s self-mutilation.
She let it overwhelm and overtake her.
She let it be her.
Let it control her.
Let her weakness finally become a strength.
She saw, truly for the first time since it had happened, the bloodied wounds and the intersections of skin and glass. Where she always blocked out the details to lessen the pain, to diminish the horror, now she allowed those details to come to the forefront of her consciousness.
Firewall, suckers! she thought. Now get out of my head.
Ani visualized her mom’s eyes, and the depths of the madness that they transmitted.
She opened eyes she hadn’t even realized she’d closed and stepped out of the nightmare.
Into.
Another.
Nightmare.
The rest of the crowd had succumbed to the sound.
They were standing there, eyes closed, facing the stage but no longer seeing it or the band upon it. The band had stopped playing. They were listening to the soundforms, too, it seemed. No one was moving. It was eerie and silent, and in such contrast to what she’d experienced while the sound played that it felt unreal.
Then, as one, the crowd began nodding their heads, exactly in time, and there was an odd sound that Ani identified as every member of the audience tapping their feet.
It was as if they were listening to music, but there was none to be heard.
Ani felt a primal impulse to flee, to get as far away from this place as possible, and it was only when she saw the people flashing past her that she realized that it wasn’t just an impulse; it was an action her body was actually putting into practice. She was already heading toward the wanly lit EXIT sign. Her body was in full flight mode, controlled by an instinct that had her self-preservation as its priority.
The people in the crowd around her stood, fixed to their respective spots, and she threaded herself between them, horrified at the thought of what was happening inside each and every one of them. Whatever those wormlike soundforms were, it was hard to believe that they meant anything but harm.
She was overwhelmed by fears, the worst of which was what the crowd would do to her if they came out of their stillness before she’d made it to the exit. Would they hunt her down? Pin her down? Force her to listen to the sound until it stuck? Until the soundforms could complete their dark and sinister purpose?
She was fifteen feet from the exit when a hand fell on her shoulder and she thought her heart would burst.
Joe arrived at the Warhouse in plenty of time and, after paying money at the door, tried to blend in with the crowd. Alarm bells were already ringing in his mind at the group’s behavior, which seemed too quiet, too ordered to be normal. The word cult didn’t seem powerful enough to explain the lack of talking—and the absence of any signs of excitement—that the people here exhibited. To Joe, the word cult suggested a brainwashed religious happy-clappy state of mind, where overall responsibility for one’s actions had been handed over to a charismatic leader with his own agenda, which was usually as simple as fleecing the members of his flock and building up a personal fortune.
There was nothing happy here.
> In fact, there was no emotional engagement at all.
People seemed almost blank, as if the act of being here was not in the pursuit of pleasure, or happiness, but for some other reason altogether.
He’d tried talking to some of the X-Core fans, but had received pretty much what he’d gotten with the three physicists earlier: a big fat zero. He even saw Curtis Madsen and his two friends, but they looked at him blankly, as if they didn’t even recognize him.
Way to make a guy feel unwelcome.
Joe kept his eyes and ears open, but there was pretty much nothing to overhear and nothing sinister to observe. Apart from the fact that the whole thing felt sinister to him. On every level the people in the Warhouse felt wrong, but the feeling was far too nebulous to put into words.
It was almost a relief when the announcement for the first band came over the PA, but then the band started playing and things turned very weird, very quickly.
At first, he thought it was just his heightened senses playing tricks on him; that, on the lookout for something strange, he’d actually invented something to fill the gaps.
The lead “singer” of Le Cadavre Exquis—a young biochemistry prodigy by the name of Fulton Barnabas Peck, according to Abernathy’s files, who had dropped out of academia to pursue his “music”—was droning on about chaos to a musical backdrop that sounded more accidental than planned, when Joe suddenly had the strangest sensation, as if something buried within the music was trying to worm its way inside his mind.
A horrible sensation that felt like physical pain and mental torment. His mind’s eye was suddenly full of disturbing shapes. Something that looked like maggots, or threads, or magnified bacteria, that were assailing his consciousness, as if they possessed life and were hungry for his mind. Squirming threads that made his body tingle and his guts feel like lead.
Immediately recognizing the threat, the firewall programming kicked in and banished the invaders, pushing them away with brutal efficiency, but Joe was left feeling violated and nauseated. For a moment, he felt as if he could no longer tell what was real and what wasn’t, so violent and unwelcome had been the intrusion.
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