“Then why’d they take the Atalan?” joked Lorav.
Patav gave her a punch in the shoulder. Lorav interpreted Patav’s thought as the joking exclamation, ‘Stahp!’ but if she’d had her sister’s ability, she’d know that it meant, “Stop. The captain is going to lose her spit.”
“I’m not doing drugs!” whined Frankie, like someone who should totally take drugs. Her body turned acid green, then flashed coral before making its rounds in the ‘sickly saturation’ region of the color wheel. She also felt a little hotter.
“So, point of no return?” said Quaja rhetorically, scanning their surroundings. “Sucks.”
“Yeah, doesn’t it?” replied Lorav.
#
Demand for a stable intergalactic or even giant interstellar Internet (see History of InterGalactic InterNet in Appendix A) fell sharply with the advent of avatars within an already established network. Naturally accessible by some species, this dimension encompassed all communication beyond vocal folds, sensory transduction, handwritten notes, and whatever it was that Bllghfras do. Through computer terminals and most popularly, brain-interfacing implants, individuals were able to obtain avatars and present a semi-plausible persona to the universe. Earlier generations had created second-rate versions on networks of interconnected webpages, calling it social media. Generations before them had called it lying, but none compared to this noncorporeal dimension commercially called Mindspace.
Lorav’s and Patav’s abilities interacted with Mindspace, but the process was still unclear—possibly utilizing some number of yet discovered sub-, super-, or inter-dimensions. Telepathic species had communicated via Mindspace for millennia. Previously thought to be some of the most powerful species, hivemind species communicated solely on that plane, capable of hyper-organized warfare in typical space-time. However, many saw their physical empires crash and burn as beings piled into Mindspace. Turned out they hadn’t bothered to develop any Mindspace defenses. When the last Boorg fell, his last words were said to be, “Wait, what’s a firewall?”
Frankie connected to Mindspace with a tech add-on to her goggles. Her generation was the last to need these cumbersome add-ons called apps which required security tokens and an ancient credentialing construct known as an email address.
Email was a text message system defined by its particular etiquette, which included greeting, closing, and phrases such as please find attached, but that’s neither here nor there, and the profane please advise. During some of the more organized times in space governance, those naturalized within the solar system were given a handle followed by a random string of letters and numbers and planet designation. Proper form included an @ sign between the unique handle and designation, followed by .spawn to be replaced by the person’s occupation as they aged. Everyone wanted their Tommya4dD9$K67r to be a .doctor, but more often than not they were .livinginthebasement. These were used only for credentials as email machines had suffered a mass-extinction event succeeding a major Please advise event. Additionally, social security numbers were provided, but no one knew what they were.
The invasive festival company had posted further instructions on Mindspace on locating the second act. After much generational translation, the group consensus was that this next portion of the treasure hunt was a scavenger hunt in which one needed to fulfill particular requirements in posted images of oneself taken by oneself. This contest was called a selfiequest.
One needed to take photographs of oneself with each of the following:
Someone half or twice your height
Someone wearing paint for clothes
A generic celebrity, i.e. musician, Mindspace star, A-list athlete, fugitive or talk show host (bonus points if celebrity falls into more than one category)
A time traveler
A silent disco boy band
These images were to be posted as one collaged image and hashtagged #PyreSelfieQuest. Upon first completed collage, the second act would begin to play. Anyone completing the selfies would receive coordinates to locate the third act.
“Well, this will be easy,” said Quaja. She pulled her tendrils underneath her and elongated, rising in height. Standing next to Frankie, she bobbed up and down to get the correct proportion, then stuck one tentacle out to capture them both in a flawless selfie that only the tentacled can do. Before Frankie could understand what was happening, Quaja had pushed her out of the camera frame. She mimed tendrils draping over an invisible person and snapped another photo (“Time traveler—there when we took the photo, now he’s not,” she explained.)
Not desiring to pull Lorav and Patav out of the depths of overstimulation again, Quaja and Frankie ventured back into the main festival area to find a silent disco.
“I’m starting to feel like a festival mom,” said Quaja as she used her tentacles to create a path among the beings for her and Frankie. She stole a bottle of water from a kid and handed it to Frankie.
“Yeah, the girls are tough to deal with,” said Frankie as the water turned her partly blue as it traveled through her body. “Do you have any snacks?”
A tendril with a bag of corn chips pressed onto Frankie’s chest.
With grace and efficiency, they arrived at the entrance to the silent disco, which was anything but silent, as they looked in from the outside. A flagpole with a disco ball attached to the top was planted in the center, towering above two DJ tables and their enthusiastic and silent DJs. Dancers climbed and hung from the pole with various limbs above them. All wore headphones (or their species equivalent) connected to Mindspace where they had tuned in to their favorite DJ. The DJ with the most dancers would win the disco battle. There was a lot of off-key singing, overcompensating speech volume, and general festival noisiness that intended to provide a dose of FOMO or Fear of Missing Out to non-participants. Really, non-participants felt an unhealthy embarrassment for those dancing to music not everyone could hear, and so steered clear and didn’t make eye contact—like when one has no intention of buying an asteroid or gaining financial freedom through the resell of asteroids and asteroid accessories.
They’d created a bit of commotion as they arrived. Kieron dance moves were legendary, often turning the dance floor into a bit of a rave—just prior to turning it into an orgy. A Roswell Gray bopped over to them, offering headphones and small, gray psychedelic lumps to consume. Frankie waved him away, but the Gray did not understand. She had to yell, “No, thank you, kind sir!” to bypass his headphones before he grasped her meaning. He turned about face, and snapped a winking selfie with Frankie before leaving.
He wasn’t the only one either.
Several dancers boogied their way over and snapped selfies with Frankie.
“Why are they doing this?” she asked Quaja over the silent disco’s din.
“Maybe you’re Mindspace-famous because of that filter,” suggested Quaja, who absentmindedly shook some dancers out of her tentacles.
“Yeah… Or, maybe they think I have programmed paint on, instead of clothes.”
The boy bands were not easy to spot in typical space-time, more fondly known by Mindspacers as IRL (see In Real Life in appendix A). However, once Frankie connected to Mindspace via her glasses, she could see they were everywhere. Groups of friends, frenemies, or strangers could take on the avatars of individuals in several popular musical groups. They then lip- and dance-synched to computer-generated choreography. No matter how not-greatly they performed, they looked flawless in Mindspace.
Quaja and Frankie took a screenshot of themselves and a group dancing roly-poly style as orange and green beings. And while they were at it, the two took turns taking on the avatar of legendary Tom (see History of Social Network Constructs in Appendix H) for another to fulfill the celebrity quota. Exiting the not-so-silent disco, the two looked around for anyone who might fulfill the paint as clothes requirement—preferably Tarke, if they could find her.
*#WINNER, WINNER, CHICKEN DINNER!* shouted Hashtag from the knockoff jumbotron as a roving golden orange f
loodlight searched the crowd dramatically like one of the sa(u/r)-n antagonists in The Lord of the Rings, despite the geotag that gave precise locations down to how many layers of clothing you were wearing.
The winner was wearing exactly none.
Now on the jumbo screen, Tarke stood in her signature This is my attack pose, but not really stance, and gave a sexy snarl which reverberated through the sound system and broke the fluid-moving organs of 88.3% of the festival-goers.
SIX
With the decisive mechanical screech of metal on metal, and a collective surprised yell against a collective surprised gasp, the entire stage which contained the Pitmosh collapsed, and the Pitmosh fell into an actual pit that sounded much farther than the height the stage actually stood over the audience.
*Don’t worry, folks! The Pitmosh is fine with about the same amount of injuries they would have incurred being in the Pitmosh for the allotted time it took to fall into the pit.*
Indeed, Frankie could see the party was still on, even in the pit. Beings were breaching the stage surface in some sort of berserk crowd surf, causing the bodies to crest like a wave.
Or, maybe they were trying to get out.
The constant stream of Mindspace photos, memes, and stories on the floating projection cube minimized to the bottom of the screen to a size that was perfectly distracting without being discernible—at least to those of a certain age. The Hunz’ta Hashtag popped up on the larger portion of the screen.
*You found the second act!* He waved his thin woody limbs in the air like in fact, he did care, before the screen was overtaken with hashtags in typeset not dissimilar to Comic Sans.
“I’d think he’d be more of a Papyrus fan,” said Quaja before all the hashtags were zambonied off the screen.
*We’ve got a twist!*
“Oh, twists are always good,” commented Quaja. “The midpoint is always a great place to add a twist—like a false victory or a false defeat.”
Frankie wasn’t sure if she’d like either of those, but she was willing to stick out the muddy middle to perhaps reach the end of this familiarly structured story so that they could go back on their spaceship and do space-y things. Her few weeks of planetary ownership had cemented her desire for a location-independent career. This property had caused more trouble than—well, whatever trouble she’d have gotten in for not having a business license in the first place.
*The third act is LOCKED UP! You’ll need to find the band AND the key, in order to launch the final act. And to make this even more exciting, we’re going to give away one million aCoins, which is an intermediary music festival-specific currency that can be evolved into music festival-specific currency Coin either by the passage of time or by being boosted by real money—er, I mean, your local currency. Please note, aCoins and Coins cannot be traded in for cash. #PyreFestival #hothothot #PyrePyrePyre...* Hashtag floss-danced out of the camera frame.
A vomitous stream of ancient animated emojis took its place. Relatively untranslatable, it was impossible to know what another phone service would interpret the emojis as, rendering them almost useless as communication, especially between Apple-person and non-Apple-person as they’d been since classified in the Mindspace.
Hashtag’s incorporeal voice played over the sound system.
*Presenting your favorite throwback futuristic band!*
Throwback futuristic was a recursive genre. The seed-music was what people of the past thought the music of the future would sound like. Many years later, that music was played, but ironically. Time travel theories added more complexity to the genre. What if a time traveler had visited just now, heard this music, and brought it to the people of the past, presenting it as music of the future—which then made it the music of the past—which then made it the music of the future. Of course, none of it much mattered now that repetition was no longer a key factor in the music industry. Previously the industry spent years training the music-buying population on a Pavlovian sequence of musical chords, but with gene manipulation, chemical dependency could be easily achieved without sacrificing the quality of the song.
Tarke had fulfilled all the selfiequest requirements in a single selfie. She had an advantage, being someone wearing paint for clothes. Cat from Cat the Bounty Hunter had his arm around Tarke’s shoulder, and from Tarke’s ecstatic face, the guy was the actual real-deal. They’d done some sort of Hobbit trick in the photography which made her look half the height of Cat—or maybe she really was. To top it off, they posed in front of a boy band made entirely out of dancing Time Lords. #PyreSelfieQuest
The selfie had been taken in Mindspace, so Tarke could physically be anywhere. Frankie had forgotten how easy it was to lose her crew—all of her crew—when they weren’t confined to the ship.
Eventually they found Tarke enjoying the sounds of Something and the Somethings, which Tarke adamantly declared were not a tribute band, but an actual band from the era, dug up and reanimated. Gail was in a nearby group of old-school hippies, not to be confused with later-generation hipsters. These were old biddies that spent their retirement in hover chairs as roadies, hitting on the drummers. Frankie motioned her over.
Before leaving, Gail tapped the shoulder of a concert attendee who appeared to be Gail’s age, but with significantly fewer enhancements. She gave her a kiss on the cheek and the woman lifted her walker in a goodbye wave. The walker had a clear frame and contained Galaxy Glitter™ which swirled with mesmerizing cosmic indifference. Each foot of the walker had a yellow-green tennis ball attached.
“That’s Rose,” explained Gail to no one who asked. “Her family thinks she’s on a bingo tourney.”
Uninterested in BFF Rose as much as the recursive logic of a revived band of throwback, futuristic, and/or present-day music, Frankie asked directly for the clue.
“I earned that clue. I’m not telling you!” shouted Tarke above the crowd, while also enjoying being a part of the crowd.
Frankie didn’t argue. Instead, she turned around and captured a selfie with Tarke’s painted body.
When Frankie’s collage blasted over the marquee, Tarke gasped. “Are you letting me run around like that?”
She immediately wetted her thumb and smeared two possibly tangential stripes from her right shoulder. Really, there were many more areas of concern. The paint had begun to crack in several places, and the paint had swirled gray anywhere sweat collected—elbows, armpits, other pits and dimples. Also, at some point all the paint on her ass had been stripped off.
“The Machines miss him. He’ll be nothing but a Ghost if you don’t find him before high tide,” recited Lorav and Patav as they approached.
“You did the selfies, too?” asked Gail, excitedly.
“No, dummy, they read MY mind, like cheaters,” said Tarke.
“Maybe they read my mind,” tried Gail.
“That wouldn’t’ve worked,” Tarke pan-faced.
“Are you saying I don’t have a mind to read?!” shouted Gail in a huff. She whipped her head around, and her flower wreath went lopsided in anger.
“No… just that you didn’t know what the clue was,” said Tarke. Her sly smile went slyer, happy Gail had fallen for the provocation. “But now you got me thinking…”
“Wow, that’s kind of ominous,” commented Quaja.
“I know! She’s super mean,” pouted Gail.
“No, the clue,” corrected Tarke.
“Tarke, stop correcting Gail,” Frankie commanded as she tried to focus on the issue at hand.
“Tell her not to be wrong!” screamed Tarke in a possible overreaction.
Quaja shoved a bottle of water and a pack of peanut butter crackers at every crew member before stating, “After we get rid of the festival, everyone is taking a nap.”
No one argued. They were busy consuming the vital things they had forgotten to consume.
When the hunger-anger began to dissipate, Quaja tried again. “Is the clue saying that the band will die at high tide? That seems important.”
>
“I can’t imagine anyone dying in this high tide… it’s so very, not dramatic. Placid, you might say,” said Frankie.
“But somewhere along the shore,” said Lorav.
“That’s like 60% of the planet,” said Patav.
“Well, I guess we better start looking.”
From her limited time on its surface and a cover-to-cover study of an outdated planetary travel guide, Frankie had gathered Hephaestus was a relatively smooth planet. Lacking mountains and valleys, the planet was a round, sandy ball that didn’t quite have enough water to cover its exterior. Khufu provided important, but relatively placid tides. Low, spring tide occasionally revealed additional geological features. Could one be some sort of alcove big enough to fit a musical band?
A shadow crossed over the water, as a minute cruiser flew through the upper layers of the atmosphere. Frankie wouldn’t have noticed, except all ships had been confiscated through an overexuberant Don’t Drug and Drive campaign, which should probably just be called Don’t Drive. Several more ships followed, and if it hadn’t been for their complete lack of uniform formation and appearance, Frankie might’ve considered the planet to be under a second minor invasion.
“Latecomers?” asked Lorav, peering into the sky.
“Do you think they’re going to send more porta-potties?” asked Gail, eyeing one that had been turned over for no damn good reason in the water. The group gave it a wide berth.
“I don’t think that’ll help at this point,” started Quaja, wiping tentacle with tentacle in a futile task to feel clean, but really creating a habit that would never end—but just go on and on, my friends.
Hashtag—the being, not the hashtag—announced over the planetary loudspeaker that more had joined the treasure hunt. In celebration, loot boxes had been deployed. Inserting 1400 aCoins (purchasable with real money—er, local currency) into an aperture of the box would unlock the box and reveal the mini-treasure inside. It could be a clue regarding the final act’s key, licensed Independent[sic] Festival Company gear, or some insignificant number of aCoins. It was a surprise mechanic.
Atalan Adventure Pack: Books 4-6 Page 4
