John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Don’t be doing this shit in public!” he wheezed.

“Just playin’, son, don’t get all—”

“Hey, I’m in charge of the stage biz, we agreed that, Bettina! Don’t be doin’ that shit to me here!” he protested, pulling free.

“We backstage now. Gimme a kiss.” She crushed him to her, and he gave in. She broke it off herself, looking him in the eye, almost nose to nose. “You know de protocols?”

“I know the UNIX protocols. I know the systems call code to log on as a superuser. I know how to evoke the debug function. If they haven’t changed the debug function.”

“Dey probable haven’t, ’cause dey using a rented system. High security, but rented. If dey have changed it, fuck ’em, we log off and dey won’t be able to trace it to an aug chip. I think de back gate is still open on dis system—”

“Where’d you get it from?”

“De anarchist underground. Plateau subsystem bulletin board.”

“Some of those Wolves’ll give you fake codes just to get their rivals in trouble.”

“Dese ain’t Plateau Wolves, these are Plateau Rads. About de only people I met on the Plateau I trust. Dey got a guy used to be a hacker for SAISC till he found out what dey were into. He knows de system’s back gates.”

“The anarchist underground cooperates with the resistance? You’d think they’d say fuck off. The NR wants to re-establish the old European republics. That’s not very anarchist.”

“Anarchists hate de Fascists worse den de Social Democrats, worse eben den de Republicists. Dey scared, like ever’body else out in de cold, boy. One of my braid’s comin’ loose, can you—Ow! Don’t be doing it so tight! De NR’s got anarchists in it, along with everything else. Just get rid of de Fascists and den fight over de bones, I guess is—”

The rest was drowned out in a tidal-wave magnification of the careening noise from the stage as the door opened and the club’s manager looked through. He was a weakchinned rocker with sections of his depilated scalp shaped into three-dimensional figures like those on ESP testing cards: wavy lines, star shapes, squares, circles—like little flesh antennae on his head, made of transplanted skin and collagen. “Scalping up” hadn’t hit the States yet, and Bettina found the fashion disconcerting. Whenever the guy came in, she stared at his head, which pleased him enormously.

“Are you ready, then?” the scalp-up asked.

“Yeah,” Jerome said, standing up, so the guy would think he was coming right that second. So he’d leave, thinking Jerome was going to follow. He left, and Jerome turned to his shaving kit, took out his shaver, took off the rotary heads and found the plastic-wrapped aug chip. Bettina got hers from a tube she carried in her vagina. At her size, she had to wrestle with herself to get it out.

Jerome took the chip from the plastic; wet it, opened the flap of skin on his head, and inserted the chip, activating it with his thumbnail mouse. In a way, it was like doing a hit of speed, only it was isolated in you; one part of you hummed with restrained power, and the rest paced itself normally.

He ran through the password code, ran a quick program to check that the chip had gone through Customs without being magnetically scrambled, and then, nodding to himself, headed for the stage, Bettina coming along behind him, moving like a sailing ship in high seas. “I’m not that much into the concert part today,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m, like, totally out of practice, and I was forgetting about performing anyway when you guys thought this shit up…”

“Oh, yo’ love it, yo’ little ham.”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I was never in a band much. I used to do little concerts with digital and maybe one player, and the recording was all electronic, except for a couple of musicians I used in the studio and never saw after that. A band is such a hassle, it’s like babysitting, I’m not really into it. But you can’t get up enough crowd energy just using purely electronic backup, you got to have some other people, live…”

He was already picking his way over the gear on the stage, looking to see that everything was in place.

Bones was there, waiting, at the synthesizer. They called him Bones, but he couldn’t stand Bone Music normally, calling it “neurological masturbation for bored middle-class white kids,” and he could barely play the keyboards. It didn’t matter much that he couldn’t play well, though Bones didn’t understand that. He was as nervous as a kid auditioning, running through the simple keyboard lines over and over, behind the polarized screen that was the stage’s curtain. Club roadies moved equipment to either side of him.

Andrea, the guitarist, was dialing her tuner, and the wire dancer, a faggy Spanish guy named Aspaorto, was taping his wireless transers to the electrodes on Jerome’s thighs and arms and calves and hips—Jerome-X used some of the minimono techniques—and the mikes were whining with feedback as the soundman turned them up. It was a live, noisy, electrically charged space, and that would help mask the aug signals, Jerome thought.

He sighed, and shook himself. His hands were damp. He wasn’t in the mood for the music part. He wanted to break into the system, do the work, get it over with. Only, the way it was set up, it wouldn’t be over with, in a sense, for a long time. A long, long time. Because they were infecting the system for now. Not destroying it. Bones had gone all stress case over this approach. We oughta wipe it out while we got the chance, not fuck around, he’d said. It’s taking a dumb chance.

Steinfeld wanted it done this way, though. Slow infection.

Steinfeld could plan, long-term, Bettina said. That’s why he was going to kick ass, she said, when the time came.

Jerome took a headset mike off its stand and slipped it on over his head. Heard his own breathing come back to him on the monitors.

Get into the mood, he told himself. These people paid their money, and there ain’t much of that around London nowadays.

He was still invisible to the audience behind the black plastic screen, but he shouted over the mike to see if he could prod them in advance a little. “Maybe we shouldn’t bother playing, nobody fucking cares anymore what anybody does!”

“Sod off, ya barstads!” someone shrieked in gleeful reply, and the audience set to whooping and howling. He could see them in foggy silhouette through the translucent screen, a gallery of faceless busts from here, joggling up and down. Some of them, he could see by their outlines, had scalped up: tombstones of cemeteries atop their heads was a favorite. Others were still in flare hairstyle variations, in multi-Mohawks, in retro spikes.

“Yeah, well fuck off, or we will play!” Jerome threatened.

“Uhgitta chezick!” someone in the audience yelled in technicki. Meaning, I’m getting chillsick, and the rest of the audience laughed, because it was a joke, a sort of pun. Bone Music gave you the chills when you heard it, very literally sent shivers through your bones, but between bands the club played music without the shiver frequency to give you a rest, otherwise the audience got sick, “chillsick,” and to say you were chillsick while you were waiting for a band meant, essentially, Don’t bring ’em on, I’m sick of this shit already, especially when it comes to these blokes. Which was in fact not really an insult, just affectionate mockery, taking the piss out.

Jerome laughed, liking it. He was getting some attitude on now. He had to slip into a kind of split subpersonality, a schizy character that was all authoritative punkiness, in order to pull off a concert. It didn’t come to him naturally, not like some—not like, say, Rickenharp. Jerome had to work on getting the right attitude in a public place. It was a lot easier to do video graffiti at home alone with your minitrans and camera. He was a little embarrassed on a stage playing underground pop star. His boyhood idol had been Moby—and he found himself pretending to be Moby in his own mind. It was okay to be a pop star if you were Moby.