Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco

by Jonathan Wright

  On stage, on the mic. Raining beats from hijacked clouds and dark nets, weaving soundscapes and empty spaces from percussion and silence. Explosions of AR graffiti erupting around her, circling her with colour and tone, responding to her subtle shifts of movement. Chuck D, Lauryn Hill, Gil Scott-Heron. Stage presence. Before and after the parties she would look desperate again to me, the flickers of longing and self-doubt across her face coming more frequently, but never when she was on stage, never when she was performing.

  I saw her a few times between the parties too, she seemed to enjoy taking some time out to chat with me. The piece for Interrobang had gone down well, enough likes and retweets to cause ripples for both of us. She’d seen a rise in followers and party traffic, and I had a steady stream of writing work coming in. Nothing major, but it helped with the rent. Interrobang were giving me stuff and occasionally Tamsin would hint at me doing a follow-up piece on Melody. I kept gently brushing her off, afraid to tell her the truth, that maybe there was nothing more to say.

  I heard about the Cabot’s party direct from someone on Melody’s crew, a brief inbox flash – date, time, geotag. The first two were a little surprising: it was a weekday, and seven in the evening, making me wonder exactly how long the geotag easter-egg hunt was going to take. Parties didn’t usually kick off until close to midnight at the earliest. And then there was the first geotag itself, slap bang at the bottom of Cabot Circus Shopping Centre, Bristol’s once great palace of steel, glass and consumerism.

  So I was there, just before seven that damp Thursday evening. So were a lot of other people, most of them oblivious, wandering around with their children and shopping bags. If you watched them closely you could see them blinking at air, gazing at the scrolling ads and offers that swooped down and surrounded them. And then occasionally you’d see someone stop in the centre of that great pit that formed Cabot’s heart and blink the air eight feet above them; someone tuned into that party channel, following that illicit hashtag, seeing something the regular shoppers couldn’t: the geotag sphere, hanging in the middle of the mall like a forgotten disco ball. And then you’d see a flicker of confusion, followed by curious excitement. The tag led nowhere. There was nowhere else to go. This was it.

  Around quarter past seven, the server came online and the avatars started to appear, again invisible to those not tuned into #melody12. Around the same time I started to see faces in the crowd – correction, I started to see covered faces in the crowd – that I recognised. I knew it was them, Melody’s crew, as no one else would have the balls to hide their identities in a space this heavily monitored. Somewhere alarms would be going off, radios chattering, security guards’ spex chiming.

  There was no system though. No rig, no bass bins, no way I could see of making sound. I thought they must be planning something else – maybe Melody had given up and gone back to her Smash/Grab days and was about to instigate a mass looting. And then the music started. At first I thought it was just in my spex – I mean, it was in my spex, but not just in the internals, in the bone conductors – it was coming out of the external speakers. I ripped them from my face to try and work out what was going on. I could hear it all about me, tiny and tinny, like a thousand headphones turned up to maximum. It was an impressive stunt, the hijacking of everyone’s spex, and enough to turn the heads of the regular shoppers, but it was hardly doing the music justice. There was no bass, no mids even – everything felt like it was running through a high-pass filter, just high end, tinny static.

  And then the bass came in. From one direction, then a second, and then seemingly from everywhere. Again I jerked my spex off to try and orientate myself, to understand what was going on, where it was coming from, and it took longer to work it out this time. When I did, well, I think I laughed. I know I grinned at least.

  The music was coming from everywhere. From store fronts and doorways, it poured out of shop sound systems, echoing around the concrete floors and steel balconies, reverberating off the glass roof, testing the building’s acoustics in ways that its architects could never have imagined. It was even coming out of the mall’s own, hidden speaker system, the combined force of dozens of bass bins making the whole building shake and hum, stone and steel singing along with the simple, deep, five-note dub bassline – the whole of Cabot Circus Shopping Centre turned into a giant, all-encompassing subwoofer.

  People, those that knew, those that had come here for this very reason, were dancing. The avatars were dancing. Everyone else was… watching. Dumbfounded. Staring up at the ceiling or hanging over the side of the balconies and walkways, trying to take it all in. I heard a few of them chatting, unaware of what was going on, trying to make sense. I heard someone suggest it must just be a publicity stunt, a product launch, some kind of crazed viral, as they grabbed their kids and their shopping and wandered away, uninterested.

  And then in amongst it all was Melody12. On stage, on the mic. Stood at the top of the stairs between two stopped escalators, flanked by AR graffiti and visuals – apparently now not just limited to the hashtag followers, but every pair of spex under the umbrella of the Cabot’s network, replacing the complex’s own adverts and signs. And above her, reaching up through the glass roof, two ghosts of the Barton Hill towers, like pillars of dust-filled light, archaic but proud giants, seeming to revel in history and importance as they gazed down onto this young monument to triviality and greed, tiny drones spiralling around them like birds surfing thermals.

  For moments – minutes I guess, maybe four or five, the length of one of Melody’s stark rhythms – everything came together in unrepeatable harmony. I was transfixed, everyone was; even the avatars – who I kind of pitied for not being able to experience this outrage first hand, for not being able to feel the bass – but I knew it couldn’t last. Security guards were trying to make their way through the ever-thickening crowd, being held back momentarily not only by Melody’s crew and her loyal ravers, but also occasionally by thick-necked shoppers, bored dads and ex-football casuals, who had stopped to watch the show and didn’t take kindly to being pushed about by rentacops. For tense seconds it felt like it might all kick off, or that the fat security guards would get to Melody and grab her, she was so obviously the focal point – and either way it was all over, I knew. Melody knew. Which was why she did it then, why it happened. So fast.

  The music ended.

  All eyes turned on Melody.

  Her vocals stopped.

  She said something (I will not repeat her words) about how she would die for her people, her community, her ends.

  Some cheers went up.

  She raised her right hand above her head, in it was something, short and stubby, a tube with a switch on one end. A trigger.

  Her other hand unzipped her jacket.

  A scream went up.

  Under the jacket she wore a waistcoat, sewn into it were thick cylinders, wires.

  Someone near me started to panic, pushing others. Someone fell, cursing.

  Melody closed her eyes.

  Melody’s thumb pressed down on the switch.

  All the lights went off, everything plunged into darkness.

  A single sub-bass tone enveloped the building, rattling glass and bone.

  People screaming, running, pushing.

  Emergency lighting flickered on, I tried to look back at the stage, thought I could see her being bundled by security, but it was hard to see anything, the dull lighting barely enough to see where I was being dragged by the panicking, fleeing crowd. I fell at least twice, over and across others, and I gave up, letting myself be carried towards the exit.

  Outside the air was cold, damp, filled with shouts, chaos and sirens. It was pitch black still, like every light in the city centre had been flipped off. The streets were filled with the dazed and confused, people piling out of shops to try and work out what had happened. The surging crowd behind me pushed me off pavement and into the road, until I was pressed up against the windows of a driverless bus that had seemingly s
hunted into parked cars before shutting itself down, its trapped passengers unable to open the doors, hammering on the windows while their terrified faces yelled muffled screams at me through dirty glass.

  Melody12 had arrived.

  For the first few days after the Cabot’s party, if you can call five minutes of beats a party, the networks were convinced it was a serious attack gone wrong. Melody got called an Islamic extremist – I’d never heard her mention any religion to me – and a terrorist, which even with that ever elusive hindsight still sounds ridiculous. Eventually the truth came out. Her crew, even me, shouted about it enough on the blogs and timelines, and the police cleared it up when they charged her with breaching the peace, aiding cyber-vandalism and wasting police time, after holding her under the terrorism act for a solid week. Were they using her as an scapegoat, as many claimed? It wasn’t like they’d ever be able to get the hackers behind the whole thing – part of Anonymous, or the many hydra heads it had split into by then – so holding Melody up as an example was the best they could do. But to be fair, the authorities weren’t the only ones using her.

  She had authenticity, significance, something her shadowy backers lacked. Even when they were wrecking ecommerce sites and CCTV networks, individual Anon members were far from the frontlines, nothing more than cells in DDoS swarms. As much as they protested against the USA’s remote-controlled drone assassination policies, in many ways what they did was just as removed, just as clinical. Both sides keeping their hands clean as they blinked commands from a distance – no troops on the ground, no rioters in the streets. War and protest by proxy. For the politicians it was plausible deniability, for Anon it was making sure their parents or college didn’t find out. Safety in distance.

  But you need figureheads, icons people can look up to, martyrs. Despite their claims of lacking leaders even Anon realised they needed poster children, and not from within their own ranks. It’s hard to buy the idea that a bunch of white, middle-class teenagers, who would sell out their mates as soon as the Feds knocked on the door, were going to start a global revolution. Melody became one of their symbols, and there were others, picked up by the hacker ’claves: poor, hungry kids around the world with real issues to fight for, communities to support, bricks to throw, nothing to lose. Kids with already dirty hands. It was a good partnership most of the time, kids like Melody got the weight of hacker clans behind them, the hackers got a public figure, and both got plausible deniability about the other – no physical traces, few digital ones. But I could never shake the feeling it was all a bit one-sided, the Anon kiddies sitting in their suburban bedrooms while Melody waited in her pre-trial cell.

  Not that she had done too badly out of the deal, in terms of fame and recognition at least. It seemed, even in the months before the trial, that whenever you blinked on someone’s pixelised head in Bristol they were listening to Melody. Their faces hidden behind their digital masks, but their consumer choices open for all to see. She would have hated that hypocrisy, I know, but would have loved the attention. She was a star, finally. Even if she was dividing the city into those who saw her as an attention-grabbing menace and those who saw her as local hero, it didn’t matter, they all knew who she was. She’d achieved that much, at least.

  I’d done pretty well off the back of it too. I was flooded with press attention after the Cabot incident, the only blogger who had secured an interview with the infamous Melody12. I was an expert on her. I can’t remember how many streams I appeared on in those first few weeks. And the work flowed in too, The Guardian, Dazed & Confused, Sugar Ape. Even a book deal. All of which was how I was able to get into the courtroom on the day of the trial. Front row, best seats in the house.

  She didn’t look too bad when they brought her out, just tired. The hoop earrings gone, confiscated. Older slightly, but not much. Still so young.

  Nobody was shocked by the guilty verdict, but when the judge handed down the sentence on the second day there was surprise. The public gallery erupted, the air in the courtroom thick with shouting and gavel-hits. Two years. Two years in a Military Academy – the final legacy of the last-ever Labour government – learning “the service ethos, discipline and responsibility, and most importantly learning first hand from veterans that terrorism is no joking matter,” as the judge put it.

  I’ll never forget the look on Melody’s face. There were no cameras in the courtroom that day, and to be honest I think most people weren’t even looking at her when that sentence was read out, but I was, my gazelogger confirming I’d been glancing at her 34 times a minute.

  A look of shock, but so quick.

  Then relief.

  Then a smile.

  Then a look to someone in the gallery, a family or crew member, another smile, as if to say “it’ll be all right.”

  Then relief again.

  It’s easy now to pick those brief seconds apart, to understand what was going through her mind. The relief makes sense. If she’d walked out of there a free woman then that might have been it. Game over, back to level one, please return to obscurity. But now, courtesy of an over-zealous, attention-surfing judge, she had been handed fame on a plate, her status as teenage pop martyr guaranteed.

  And then the lights went out.

  It was daytime so it wasn’t like the courtroom was plunged into darkness, but it still got everybody’s attention, a ripple of subdued panic running through the building, amplified when everybody realised they’d lost connection too. That always made people jumpy.

  The judge dismissed the court, security trying to get us out as calmly as possible. There was a crowd on the steps – a real one – and I don’t know who was more angry, the pro-Melody protesters trying to get through the police cordon or the journos and bloggers realising they was no net outside either, no way of tweeting, posting or streaming.

  Car horns filled the air, police trying to guide traffic by hand as the lights outside Bristol Crown Court had shut down. Over to my right I could see another crowd gathered around something, jostling while more cops tried to break them up. I managed to push through the outer layers to see what they were gawping at. Shattered glass crunched under my feet like autumnal leaves.

  A car, a small Nissan, sat by the kerb, its roof smashed open like a crushed egg, as if something had hit it hard from above. At first I thought it was a jumper, a protester taking Melody’s example to its logical conclusion, but there was no blood, no gore, the only entrails were fused from silicon, glass, plastic and twisted, painted metal.

  It was a drone, one of those insectile police ones, fallen from the sky like a swatted wasp.

  I tried to see her, made applications to go and visit. Obviously she had to approve them. I never heard anything back.

  To be honest, I was relived. Part of me didn’t want to make that multi-train trek out to the middle of remote, damp Wales where they’d put her – as far away from Bristol as they reasonably could – just to sit and look at her in there. As far as I know she didn’t let any journalists visit her, which did surprise me, as someone, somewhere was making it their business to make sure she didn’t drop out of the trending stats for too long. I guess in part it was Anonymous or whoever had been backing her, remnants of her old crew and, towards the end at least, the media label that signed her when she got out.

  Between them they had done an impressive job. It wasn’t like the news had stood still since she’d been inside; the net was getting to be even messier than usual. There was talk of all-out war between Anon and a ’clave of Chinese hackers, both sides allegedly fighting proxy battles for corporate interests, the CIA, Google or space aliens – take your pick. New viruses and DDoS strategies, bot armies a billion zombie units strong. Half of Chicago drowned in sewage when something disrupted the water systems, reports of rolling blackouts across Beijing and Rio. The White House threatening to throw the kill switch. But still they, somebody, managed to keep Melody trending.

  It was easier in Bristol I guess, she would always have her followe
rs here. I remember, it must have been six months at least after she’d been sentenced, watching a flock of micro-drones sweeping across the surface of one of the Barton Hill towers, spiralling and twisting like a cloud of starlings, spraying paint in their path, guided by some unseen graffiti artist, each pass of the artificial cliff face completing another section of the mural, until her face was there, 15 storeys high, looking out across all of south Bristol as if daring the city to forget about her.

  Of course the main problem she faced when she eventually got out, 18 months into that two-year sentence, was that she’d won. Five months earlier Bristol City Council had announced “an indefinite hiatus pending further feasibility reviews” for the Barton Hill demolition plans, citing financial concerns, but it was hard to imagine Melody hadn’t been a factor in the decision, which was met with cheers and celebration, raves and righteousness from her followers. I just wondered what she’d do next.

  I found myself trying to avoid the news on the day of her release, but it was a losing battle. Drone footage snippets on the timelines and punctuating the rolling news, her leaving the school, cars winding down damp welsh A-roads, awaiting crowds in Bristol. Her emerging on a seventh-storey balcony at Barton Hill, waving to fans, that mural surrounding her, looking tired but more militant in her baggy, oversized government-issue khaki stormsuit. The hoop earrings back. An endless collage of imagery, speculation.