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

by Jonathan Wright

  I tried to get an interview, put in a request, again never heard anything back. She had handlers now – you would glimpse them hovering around her as she was lit by flashbulbs and shadowed by camera drones – corporate handlers that looked conspicuous by their lack of corporate suits, awkward and anxious panic etched across their you’re-not-on-my-agenda faces as they carpet bombed you with press releases and hashtagged announcements. Album plans. Tour plans. Sponsorship deals. Remixes. A free homecoming party, open to all.

  Part of me didn’t want to go, but I knew I must. It was going to be at Cabot Circus, obviously, but this time it was official, organised. Security and police, health and safety. The rumour was that she would trigger something during her set and it would activate her new album, the now redundantly entitled Flight Path Estate, which everyone had been downloading on pre-order for weeks, and was sitting patiently on everybody’s spex or in their clouds, a dumb bundle of data waiting to be given a voice.

  I got there early, to try to beat the worst of the crowds. The vibe couldn’t have been any different from the first time, mystery and surprise substituted with manufactured expectation and entitled excitement. We were guided through entrances, our faces scanned by drones, as Cabot hummed to the warm-up DJ’s bass tones. They were using the building’s sound system again, but also a professional rig. It sounded better, louder, but safer.

  Of course, the whole thing was a gimmick. Like the original party, it was a stunt but this time authenticity and desperation had been exchanged for marketing and product placement. I took my spex off as soon as I got there, the advertisements too much, the timeline buzz too intense. I didn’t even care if it meant I missed the visual aspect of the show, somehow I needed to separate myself from this charade, to stay unconnected, to be tuned out for once. I didn’t know how prophetic that was, at that moment. I didn’t even start to suspect how significant tucking those cheap LG spex away in my jacket pocket would be. How could I have?

  And then the crowd roared, jostled for a better view, and she was there. Amongst it all. Melody12, on stage, on the mic.

  I strained to see better, finding myself questioning her performance, questioning my own analysis… was it lacklustre? Did she seem tired, coerced? Uncommitted? Was this just my own doubts leaking in, could I even be objective? I resisted the urge to reach into my pocket, to find what others were thinking.

  She was working through material that was unfamiliar, the highlights of Flight Path Estate I assumed, the slightly unsure crowd cautiously moving with her, holding out for something they recognised. It sounded okay, the new material, echoing sonar blips and drizzle ambiences, slow traffic drones, cut-up vocals and antique drum machine hits. I thought I could sense a nostalgia there, a yearning for parties she’d never seen, friends she’d never have, an era of masked fame and anonymous celebrity that if it had ever existed was long gone now. The 1990s. The failed revolutions, the brewery-sponsored social upheaval, mythological summers of love.

  But something was wrong, something spoiled. The minimalism was gone, the starkness. The empty spaces. It wasn’t the beats that mattered, she told me, but the spaces in-between. They’d taken it from her, the A&R men and the superstar producers, taken what had made her unique – unable to bear that starkness, that inky blackness, that essence of Melody – that disconcerting sense of desertion and loneliness, jarring simplicity, they’d been unable to take it, unable to sell it, the fucking cowards, and they’d filled it with insignificant sound and faux fury. This wasn’t the Melody of industrial estate raves and squat parties, of Barton Hill protests and media control – it was fake Melody, a simulation, the Melody of billboards and TV interviews, sanitised drums and washed-out timeline retweet echoes.

  My heart sank when it hit me, and I turned to leave. It was best I left.

  And then it all changed. Melody changed.

  It was that rhythm again. The one from the first time. That final rhythm.

  Of course it was obvious where this was going to go, or so I assumed, but still I stood transfixed, needing to see it play out again. 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.

  The crowd cheered.

  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.

  The crowd roared, people mimicking her, hands in the air.

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

  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.

  The crowd screaming, whooping in joy as one.

  A flash lit the stage, blue flame lighting Melody for the briefest of moments, before she disintegrated into a fountain of crimson and cloth, blood and flesh arching high into the dark, still air.

  Darkness again.

  People screaming, running, pushing.

  I fell to the ground, the air pushed from my lungs by the stampeding crowd, my skin damp and cold from shock.

  I don’t really remember how I got home that night, my memories just fragments of stumbling through cold, unlit streets and confused crowds. I remember looting and fires, the city full of granulated glass shards and black car-fire smoke. I remember getting in and locking and bolting the door behind me, collapsing on the floor, sobbing.

  I don’t really know what happened, I imagine there are few people who do. I can make assumptions, put together theories, though with no more real authority than you can yourself. I know my spex never worked again. I know the TV never came back on. I know the phones never rang. I know the power was out for weeks, and when it did come back it was fleetingly, unstable. I know there was fighting in the street, that martial law was introduced, that for months I never heard any news from beyond south Bristol, let alone the rest of the world. I know a lot of people were cold, hungry. I know a lot of people died.

  I can guess that Melody triggered something, something waiting in those unopened Flight Path Estate downloads, something Anonymous had given her. I can guess it was something Anonymous hadn’t made, something they had found or stolen, something they didn’t fully understand. I can guess it wiped out decades of history in a few short days, destroying culture, money, opinions, society, the digital. I can guess governments panicked and made wrong decisions, threw dangerous switches. I can guess the global economy didn’t so much collapse as just vanish.

  I can guess that Melody rigged those explosives just right, so that they ripped her apart and harmed nobody else. I heard people talking about her just a few days ago, in the lines for rations at College Green, wondering why she did it, saying she knew what was coming, that she was too much of a coward to face what was to follow, to face her punishment, to face the world she left behind.

  But I know now why she did it. She had got what she said she had wanted, the celebrity, the fame, and had stepped from one prison to another. I can only guess how hollow that left her.

  She was Melody12, the last pop star, the girl that turned off the lights.

  We’re still waiting for someone to turn them back on.

  One Door Closes and then Another Door Closes

  - Stanley Donwood -

  He thinks that something terrible has happened to him, but he doesn’t know what it is. He can’t identify it. Is there anything wrong with his mind? There must be, because this unspecified feeling of wrongness is from his mind, from inside his head. He listens. It is very quiet. He looks from the window. It is winter, the trees are bare or dead, the sky is a dirty yellowish colour and the clouds are a chill grey where they tear against the horizon. There is some kind of confla
gration in the distance, far away. The wind stirs the ragged treetops. Bruises of pale half-sunshine bloom fleetingly across the rooftops of the houses. He cannot see a single human being, nor hear any evidence that human beings exist. The view is bleak, and it depresses him.

  Maybe it’s always been like this. He can’t remember when he first noticed that something had happened, that something had gone wrong. He can’t remember when, or how the world became so soundless. The quiet is almost tangible. It’s not so much the absence of sound, but more, the secretive presence of silence.

  He thinks that he has been having a sort of mental trouble for a while; nothing in particular, just a general sense that something is not quite as it should be. For example, this morning he woke up screaming. He stopped himself, then dressed blearily in the shabby clothes that were on the chair next to the bed, went down the stairs; and now he is eating breakfast.

  The spoon, brimming with flakes of cereal and milk is there at his mouth, but then he puts the spoon down and covers his face with his hands, spilled drops of milk quivering on the tabletop. He is shaking, but then he pulls himself together and takes some deep breaths. It’s not a big deal, he tells himself. It’s just a spoon. But it’s not his spoon. He doesn’t recognise it. He doesn’t recognise the bowl that holds the cereal, he doesn’t recognise the table, or the room. He doesn’t know where he is. It’s with a feeling of horror that he swallows the cornflakes.

  Would he recognise anything as ‘his’? Is this some sort of sudden, terrible illness? He forces down another mouthful of breakfast and considers the evidence. He looks at the cereal box; cornflakes, made by Kellogg’s. The newspaper on the table is the Daily Mail, and he reaches across and pulls it towards him. A headline designed to maintain antagonism towards the Continent. Plausible enough.

  What was it that wrenched him shrieking from sleep that morning? What made him scream, what nightmare? He cannot recall. Nothing comes back. Where is he? The room looks familiar in its generalities (walls, ceiling, floor, doors, a window) but it’s just answering a description of a room, it’s not ‘his’. Or at least, he doesn’t think it is. The view of the park from the window is unremarkable, so it’s unclear whether this is a view he has looked at countless times before or one that is utterly unfamiliar. It’s as if I don’t exist, he says aloud, and in his mind the words seem to freeze in the air before falling to shatter silently on the linoleum floor.

  He thinks, hard. Am I married? My parents? Where do they live? Is this my house, and if it isn’t, what am I doing here? He returns to the window and stares out. He looks at the watch on his wrist; it’s eight in the morning. Down on the street the children are being taken to school as usual, roped together, led by their parents. The air looks somehow blotchy. By the look of it the children and the parents are having a bit of trouble breathing, and they’re choking quite often, even with their masks. Masks? His face creases with concentration, with the effort of recalling memory. Have they always worn masks? He thinks so.

  There is a good view from the window, and he can see a long way into the park. The park, what does he know about the park? In the spring and the autumn the birds come. They keep coming, every year, from far away. But less of them, each year. They migrate from the north or the south, from where it’s colder or where it’s hotter, from Africa or Siberia, driven to do it by some ancient atavistic compulsion, guided by magic in their skulls. And then they perch, to sleep, in the barren branches and the sick twigs but they never wake. Stupid birds. In the mornings the Council usually sends a couple of workers to sweep them up, but when they don’t the little feathered corpses just lie there, like ghastly fruit on the ground. That’s what happens in the park. That and executions. There are no workmen today. He shakes his head. A car drives past, which strikes him as unusual. The noise of the engine cuts through the quiet, as shocking as breaking glass.

  He will telephone his parents. He realises that he doesn’t know if his parents are alive still, or dead. And their names are… what are their names? He can call them Mum and Dad, he’ll have to for now. What can he say, though? I’ve lost my mind? But he hasn’t. He hasn’t lost his memory either, not completely; he remembered about the birds, he knows that Kellogg’s make cornflakes and that the Daily Mail is a newspaper. But he can’t remember his parent’s faces, he can’t remember their names or – he can’t remember their phone number. He sits down heavily, his face a stricken mask of terror.

  He must get to a doctor, urgently. Deep breaths. Okay, he says out loud. He forces himself to calm down – he has to find his shoes and a coat, he’s got to find a doctor, but no, there’s no time, what if this gets worse? Keep calm! Maybe he should call an ambulance? Call 999? Or is it 911? Not an ambulance though, there’s nothing really wrong, but should he call a doctor? He scrambles around the room looking for a phone book, a directory or something, but there’s nothing. Of course there isn’t; there’s no telephone in the room. He is becoming frantic.

  He rushes into the hallway and glances at the walls, but there’s no phone here either, and he races up the stairs to the white-painted room where he awoke this morning to the sound of his own panicked shrieking. He looks around; the bed, a chair, a small table, a chest of drawers. Then he experiences a powerful jolt of self-knowledge, a lurching epiphany that disturbs him as much as it elates him – he knows that in this room, in the middle drawer of the chest of drawers, he has a mobile phone! How could he have forgotten? Tears crowd at his eyelids and he scrabbles through the worn shirts and frayed vests. There it is, he was right! He presses a button. The screen is blank. He tries again. Nothing. He dials 999. Then 911. Nothing. He turns and rifles through the drawers, looks under the bed, through the clothes, gasping, searching for the mobile phone charger. It’s at the back of the top drawer, and he plugs it in to a socket on the wall, and attaches the phone.

  The street outside is empty. The children and their parents have gone. There is no traffic. The wind stirs the litter that has collected between the lines of abandoned cars.

  After an agonising couple of minutes the phone shows signs of life. He accesses the directory; dozens of names come up. He scrolls through them; who are these people? He chooses a name at random, but there is just a silence from the earpiece. He tries another name, then another, then another. Nothing. A hollow, empty silence. Not even a dial tone. Somehow, he is not surprised. He doesn’t think that the mobile phone has worked for a long time. There was something that happened. Something electrical, or magnetic.

  He has a sudden urge to be outside, a sure understanding that if he stays in this house he will lose what remains of his sanity. He has a horrible premonition of himself on his knees, pounding the floor with his fists, weeping uncontrollably. No, that cannot happen. It must not. Or perhaps it has already happened. Did it happen? Yesterday? Does it happen a lot? Yes. It happens a lot. He laces up his shoes, scuffed and worn, in need of a polish, and like the spoon, like everything, they are somehow unfamiliar. But they fit perfectly. He goes back down the stairs. Why is everything so dusty, so dirty, so old?

  On the back of a chair in the room downstairs is a worn-looking coat that he pulls on over his jacket. He hesitates, then tears a piece off the newspaper and finds a biro. In the pocket of the coat is a small bunch of keys, so once outside he checks, and is gratified that one of them fits the front door of the house. The door is green. It is in need of a coat of paint, and has been for some time. He turns.

  And he coughs. The air is bad, thin and gritty. He fumbles in his pocket for the pen and paper. He writes down the number of the house, and walks away. The rain has washed the dust from the stationary vehicles and some of them look almost as if their owners will come back and drive them away, except for the flat tyres and the broken windows. Many have been completely cannibalised, and he remembers that the Council were supposed to have cleared the roads but something happened and the cars stayed where they were.

  At the end of the street is a tall gate with a push-button unit next
to it at waist height. Behind the gate is a petrol station with a convenience store attached to it, but it is deserted except for a bored-looking security guard, walking aimlessly between the pumps carrying his semi-automatic.

  Something is stirring in his memory as he looks through the bars at the guard. He is gaining some sense of meaning; the recollections he has of the Council, of migrating birds, and the hazy idea that he can reach people he knows on the telephone begin to form attachments to each other in the wilderness of his mind. Perhaps he works in the petrol station? He stoops and tries tapping some numbers into the console in the hope his fingers have some sort of physical memory of the access code. But no, and the guard moves towards him, hoisting the gun. He moves briskly away. Or maybe he works for the Council? Should it be him sweeping up the dead birds, or hoisting the ruined cars behind a pick-up truck? He reads the words on a torn advertisement hoarding that is flapping in the cold wind. These are old words, he realises, antique words exhorting him to buy objects which are no longer available.

  Another car drives along the road; like the one he saw from the house it’s big and solidly (or rather, strongly) built, and the windows are black so he can’t see a driver or any passengers. He realises that the whole city is silent, and that this is only the second car he has seen today. He coughs several times, quite painfully. He should have brought his mask. Perhaps he should go back and get it; and at that moment he remembers where it is! It’s hanging on a nail on the back of the door! Could it be that he’s getting better, that his memory is returning?

  Almost running, he gets back to the dirty green door and lets himself in. There is the mask, just as he’d thought. But then he has a fit of choking. It subsides, and he goes to take a glass of water from the tap. There is no water, and then he remembers that the water is in a container in the cupboard. The taps stopped working quite a long time ago. The water has to be fetched from a giant tank at the junction where this road meets the main road, and there’s always a simmeringly angry queue when it’s delivered. He drinks some water, and it’s a little brackish, but it soothes his throat. He looks at the watch on his wrist. It’s nearly nine o’clock. Time seems to move in spasms, to cast dark shadows. He stands before the window again, watching another armoured car drive slowly by, his memories gaining resolution and definition. Bad air. Dead birds. Forgotten habits. Stale water. Silence. He remembers.