Clarkesworld Magazine

by Wyrm Publishing

“It’s glitching.” Byron leaned forward as he drove. “The environment. The counters are resetting. Like I said, we’re in a liminal place, tonight. The rules are temporarily breaking down. Look.”

  He tapped his wrist, where a watch glimmered faintly.

  “It’s after ten,” Byron said. “It’s been over an hour since I saw you. We’ve lost a chunk of time, and I’m afraid—damn.” He swerved, almost losing control, as he caught sight of something down the road.

  Twisting in her seat, Claire saw the roadside shack, the one she’d just exited, sliding by.

  Byron cursed and pushed down on the gas. They rattled up to the old roadster’s maximum speed, forty, fifty. Swamps, river, and road flowed by. The shack passed again, again, again.

  “All right, that does it.” Byron braked so hard, Claire nearly whacked her head on the dashboard. He fussed with the gearshift and twisted in his seat, wrapping an arm around her headrest.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “Can’t you tell? We’re looping.”

  “But what are you doing?”

  “Desperate problems call for desperate measures.” Byron squinted through the tiny rear windshield. “The way I see it, if you can’t hit fast-forward, hit rewind.”

  The car jerked backward.

  And car and road and Byron all screeched out of being, and Claire found herself sitting at a café table, alone, deep in the tipsy commotion of town.

  She jumped up, knocking over her chair.

  Once again, Byron was nowhere to be seen.

  Claire cursed, turned in a full circle, cursed again. A passing man in a bowler hat picked up her chair, righted it, and touched his hat.

  “Crazy, eh? All these jumps?” He straightened his jacket with a roll of his shoulders, looking up at the sky, as if expecting heaven to crack.

  “But what do we do?” Claire gasped. “How do we stop it?”

  The man in the bowler hat smiled and shrugged. “Nothing to do, I guess. Except play along.”

  Pantomiming, he grabbed a nearby barber pole, swung himself through an open door, and promptly, like a magician’s rabbit, blinked out of existence.

  Partiers ran past, giggling and tripping, stretching their faces in merry alarm, like people caught in a thunderstorm. Firefly-like, they meandered through doorways, laughing as they winked in and out of existence. In a world of rules and repetition, Claire had long since observed, childlike chaos greeted any variation in routine.

  But what do I do? Claire ducked into a drugstore entrance. What can I do, what should I do? She did her best to steady her mind, analyze the situation. The jumps, the cuts, the vanishings and reappearances—they seemed to happen at moments of transition: entries and exits, sudden moves. If she found some way to game the system . . .

  Turning, Claire jumped through the drugstore door. And again, and again, and again, jump after jump. On her fifteenth jump, the trick worked, the environment glitched. Claire tumbled into a banquet hall, crashing into a tray-bearing waiter, scattering scallops and champagne flutes. “Sorry, sorry . . . ” Dashing toward the hall doors, Claire tried again. Another round of jumping propelled her into a rowboat, somewhere out in the stinking bayou. Gators splashed and rolled in the muck, grunting and hissing as they fled from her intrusion. Claire jumped into the water and ducked under, sinking her feet in the creamy ooze. She kicked, launching herself up into the air—

  And found herself, sodden with mud, near the bank of the river, back in town.

  How many times would she have to do this? Searching the bank, Claire saw no promising doors. She threw herself into the river three more times. The third time, she emerged in a backyard swimming pool.

  And so, through portals and windows, through falls and reversals, Claire skipped her way through the liminal evening, traversing a lottery of locations, careening in her soaked dress and dirty hair through car seats, lawn parties, gardens and gazebos, bedrooms where couples lay twined in dim beds. Sometimes she thought she saw Byron, hurrying through a downtown doorway or diving over the rail of a riverboat, moving in his own Lewis Carroll quest through the evening’s hidden rabbit holes. Mostly, she saw hundreds of other adventurers, laughing people who leaped and jostled through doorways, running irreverent races in the night.

  At last, Claire stumbled out of a bait shop onto the dock, the ramshackle fishing shacks hung with buoys, the long span of planks laid out like a ruler to measure the expanse of her few remaining minutes—and there was the ferry, resting on the churn of its diesel engine, bearing Byron toward the far shore.

  “Claire,” he shouted over the water, and added something she couldn’t hear.

  Was it a freak of the fracturing environment, some cruel new distortion, that made the dock seem to lengthen as Claire ran? Was it a new break in that hopelessly broken world that made the planks passing under her feet seem infinite? By the time she came to the end of the dock, Byron and the ferry were in the middle of the river, and his call carried faintly down the boat’s fading wake.

  “Jump!”

  Was he crazy? The distance was far too wide to swim.

  “Claire, I’m serious, jump!”

  And now, Claire understood: if it had worked before . . . a thousand-in-one chance, perhaps . . .

  Far across the river, Byron was waving. Claire looked into the water. Briefly, she hesitated. And this was the moment she would think back to, a thousand times and a thousand again: this instant when she paused and held back, wondering how badly she wanted to spend eternity in one home, one world, with one man.

  The next instant, she had flung herself headfirst into the water. And perhaps this world made more sense than Claire thought. Perhaps the designers had known what they were doing after all. Because of all the cracks and rabbit holes in the environment, of all the possible locations in which she might emerge—

  She was splashing, floundering, on the far side of the river, and the ferry was a few yards away.

  Claire thrashed at the water, clawing her way forward, as the first of three chimes sounded over the water.

  She’d forgotten to kick off her shoes. Her skirt wrapped her legs. She couldn’t fall short, not after trying so hard, chasing potential romances down the bottomless vortex of an artificial night.

  The second chime made silver shivers pass across the water.

  So close. Claire tore at the waves, glimpsing, between the splashing of her arms, Byron calling from the ferry, leaning over the rail.

  As she gave a last, desperate swipe, the third chime rang in the coming of midnight, the sound reminding Claire, as it always would, of the teasing jingle of a set of keys.

  Around bright tables, under lamps and music, the partygoers had gathered, to mingle and murmur and comment on the food. So much beauty to be savored, so much variety: so many men and women with whom to flirt and quip and dance away the hours of an endlessly eventful evening. And after tonight, there would be more, and still more—men and women to be savored, sipped, dispelled.

  If anyone noticed the woman who moved among them, searching the corners of crowded rooms; if anyone met her at the end of her dock, looking across the starlit water; if anyone heard her calling one name across the waves and throbbing music, they soon moved away. The party was just beginning, lively with romance, and the nights ahead were crowded with the smiles of unknown lovers.

  First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2015.

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  About the Author

  Nick Wolven lives in New York City, where he works at Barnard College. His short stories have been published widely, most recently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, and will soon appear in Analog and F&SF.

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  Space Is the Place: The Science Fiction Pulse of ’80s Electro Music

  Jason Heller | 1755 words

  “I am a computer,” says the voice. It isn’t human. Robotic and coldly electronic, it sounds like something conjured by the eeriest science fiction nightmare. Underneath it hovers a
mechanical hum that might be the ambient noise of a spaceship, or an android brain, or even cyberspace. “I have been programmed to dance,” the voice goes on. Then it adds, with no small amount of ominousness, “I am here to digitize you.” A funky, machine-like beat kicks in, and the voice utters its sole commandment to the listener, one that leaves no room for disobedience: “DANCE.”

  The song is titled “Mirda Rock,” released as a 12-inch single in 1982. It was written, produced, and sung (through the voice-altering device known as the vocoder) by Reggie Griffin under the name Reggie Griffin & Technofunk. Griffin had made a name for himself that year as the synthesizer player on Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message,” the legendary hip-hop classic brimming with apocalyptic imagery. Griffin’s synth bleeps and burbles futuristically—and that futurism is magnified on “Mirda Rock,” a miniature SF odyssey that just happens to be pressed on a record rather than printed on the page.

  Griffin may have threatened to digitize the listener but he was part of a wave of musicians in the early 1980s who were digitizing something far larger: funk. This movement became known as electro, and it flourished from around 1982 to 1985 thanks to the likes of Newcleus, Cybotron, Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Quadrant Six, Project Future, and Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force.

  But during that brief time, electro made a strong impact. Electro acts gathered up the Afrofuturism of certain ’70s music—most notably acts like Parliament-Funkadelic and Earth, Wind & Fire—and mixed it with the emerging instrumental technology explored by the likes of Kraftwerk and Gary Numan. And they wrapped it all in outrageous, glittering costumes that drew from science fiction’s camp tradition along with funk’s flair for the flamboyant. The result not only influenced countless waves of musicians with its imaginative, innovative sounds, it paralleled the early-to-mid-’80s explosion in SF cinema, SF-themed video games, and the cyberpunk movement in literature—as well as honoring Griffin’s vision of the future as something both fearsome and danceable.

  Electro may have felt radical in the early ’80s, but it didn’t show up out of nowhere. Bandleader and icon Sun Ra began incorporating electric keyboards and what would later become known as Afrofuturism into his work as early as the 1950s, when his cosmic vision of jazz first gazes toward the stars—and when he began dressing in glittery robes that bridged ancient Egypt and the world of tomorrow. His science fiction film from 1974, Space Is the Place, would turn out to be vastly influential to electro.

  The advancement of the synthesizer in the ’70s, when the instruments started to become smaller, cheaper, and more accessible, led to its increasing use in all kinds of popular music, funk included. The late Bernie Worrell of the Parliament-Funkadelic collective was one of many funk keyboardists in the ’70s who coaxed space-age noises out of synthesizers—only in Worrell’s case, he was abetting P-Funk leader George Clinton, a man who shared many cosmic viewpoints and sartorial choices with Sun Ra. “If we can’t be free on Earth, then we’ll find liberation elsewhere in the galaxy,” is how writer JS Rafaeli summed up Clinton’s ethos, and that’s borne out in his songs: They’re infused with a powerful Afrofuturist vision of protest, hope, intergalactic mythology, and cartoon-sized fun.

  Throughout the ’70s, other artists besides P-Funk helped lay the groundwork for electro. In 1977—the year Star Wars helped popularize science fiction to a level that had never been seen before—funk veterans War released the song “Galaxy,” complete with laser-beam sound effects and a mandate to escape Earth “on a rocket ship, no time to wait / I just want to gravitate.” That same year, Earth, Wind & Fire recorded “Jupiter,” which speculated about an alien visitation—likely influenced by another SF blockbuster from 1977, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And Herbie Hancock’s pioneering ’70s output with the Headhunters—especially the 1973 song “Chameleon”—helped push funk into weird, exciting new dimensions.

  A similar space-funk vibe ran through subsequent songs like Slave’s voice-modulated “Stellar Fungk” and Marvin Gaye’s sprawling “A Funky Space Reincarnation,” both from 1978. (The latter even mentioned Star Wars by name.) In that same year, the German/Caribbean group Boney M. issued “Nightflight to Venus,” a song about interplanetary travel that opens with a robotically-voiced countdown to liftoff. Curtis Knight—an R&B veteran who once counted a young Jimi Hendrix as one of his sidemen—clocked in with a record titled “UFO” which was an oddity on its release in 1979: “Looked inside, now I know / A UFO is a high-flying disco,” Knight sings, telling an entire epic story about his ride on a flying saucer. Really, though, “UFO” was just a couple years ahead of its time, as it presaged the clipped, sculpted electronic sound, computer-blip effects, and hip-hop slant of electro. And of course, Clinton and crew unleashed numerous SF-themed songs that decade, most notably 1975’s “Mothership Connection (Star Child).”

  “Mirda Rock” came out in 1982, just as three science fiction films hit the silver screen and helped spark the electro movement: Blade Runner, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Tron. Like Stars Wars and Close Encounters before them, these three films solidified SF’s hold on the pop-culture consciousness. But they also ignited the imaginations of what would become electro’s first wave. Leading the pack was Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, whose “Planet Rock” became electro’s blueprint and rallying cry in 1982. Bambaataa—whose accomplishments have been overshadowed by recent sexual abuse allegations—was a pioneer of hip-hop as a DJ in the late ’70s, but “Planet Rock” pushed him to the forefront of the emerging electro scene. Befitting its title, the song drew from a global palette of electronic-music influences—England’s Gary Numan, Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Germany’s Kraftwerk, whose 1977 milestone “Trans Europe Express” was echoed in “Planet Rock”—while fusing those icy, futuristic sounds with the deep pulse of funk. And like Clinton and Sun Ra before him, Bambaataa dressed in lavish costumes that tapped into Afrofuturism’s time-warping scope.

  The popular obsession with androids, aliens, and computers helped “Planet Rock” find a ready audience, but Bambaataa himself took inspiration from older sources: the SF of his childhood, namely Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Star Trek, and Lost in Space. He wasn’t the only one. In 1983, a group called Jonzun Crew released an album called Lost in Space. Not only did it pay homage to the beloved, robot-starring SF show of the ’60s, it upped the ante for electro. Awash in vocoder-filtered vocals, jerky funk, and sleek synthesizers, the album’s songs steeped themselves in SF tropes, from “Space Cowboy” to “Ground Control” to “Space Is the Place”—the last of the three proudly referencing Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist SF film from a decade earlier.

  Jonzun Crew wasn’t alone when it came to that reference. In 1983, the project Warp 9 issued the single “Light Years Away.” Along with its overt space-travel theme—and SF-fusion lyrics like “Funk rays in the alleyways / Like laser beams they rock my dreams”—the song features the refrain, “Space Is the Place.” In the early ’80s, electro took on a political bent, even when not openly political; the movement’s Afrofuturist message was inclusive, pointing toward a better place for humanity beyond the stars, or even here on Earth, if Homo sapiens were able to harness technology as coolly as electro artists did drum machines, synthesizers, and vocoders.

  Still, there’s no mistaking the confrontational nature of electro. As Kodwo Eshun said in his book More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, “Instead of using synthesizer tones to emulate string quartets, electro deploys them inorganically, unmusically. The synthesizer becomes a sound weapon.” Even the vocoder, initially devised to encrypt messages for military purposes, had a tone that was both scary and thrilling—reminiscent of Colossus, the malevolent, monotone, vocoder-voiced supercomputer of the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project (and even Darth Vader, despite the fact that vocoders were not applied to James Earl Jones’ delivery in the Star Wars films). The vocoder even hinted at posthumanity, creating a hybridized, cyborg-like voice that was as empoweri
ng as it was formidable.

  Scores of other electro artists released music during the genre’s heyday of 1982 through 1984. The band names and titles alone sound like something pulled straight from the ascendant trend of cyberpunk literature, which hit critical mass in 1984 with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer : “Cosmic Cars” by Cybotron, “Body Mechanic” by Quadrant Six, “We’re Rocking the Planet” by Hashim, “Ray-Gun-Omics” by Project Future, “Arcade Lover” by Project Future, and the group Newcleus, who delivered one of electo’s greatest anthems with a song titled, not coincidentally, “Space Is the Place,” in which a female singer assures, “I’ll be your cosmic tour guide on this trip through the galaxy.” Even some of the artists who had laid the groundwork for electro in the ’70s got in on the act: In 1982, George Clinton released the electro-leaning album Computer Games, and in 1983, Herbie Hancock’s single “Rockit”—aided by its captivating, robot-heavy music video—beamed electro into the homes of millions, going gold in the process. “Rockit” marked the commercial peak of electro, and also the end of its first wave.

  Although the music has experienced numerous revivals since then, the sheer inventiveness, imagination, and ingenuity of ’80s electro has rendered it timeless—and popularized Afrofuturism for an entire generation. As Rafaeli wrote, “The action heroes of the old sci-fi films may have been entirely white, but the stars of what became known as Afrofuturism weren’t just interested in passively watching these stories on the screen; they created their own mythology, embodying dazzling psychedelic, utopian personas and creating some of the coolest, weirdest music of the 20th century in the process.” The pioneers of electro hacked funk’s DNA, rewiring popular music for a brave, new future.

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