RADIO FREEFALL

By Matthew Jarpe
Copyright © 2007 by Matthew Jarpe.



Chapter 1

There’s an old man, looking backward,

At the dreams he used to have,

At the life he thought he’d lead,

At the young man he once was, looking forward...


Sex Lethal, “Take Time”

Stones From the Wall, Metamorphosis Records, 2027



Aqualung sat in the pit, surrounded by computers, engineering boards, keyboards both alphanumeric and musical, little winking lights, dials, buttons, rocker switches, and sliders. He had a bottle of 25-year old single malt scotch nestled between his legs. There was no one else in the room. The only sound was the hum of the air handlers, and somewhere, in a distant hallway, the opening chords to “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple.

As Aqualung settled the vidimask on his face he got his first look at the Undersea Arena, where forty thousand souls had come to hear him play. It took a few seconds to get used to the compressed fish eye view the cameras fed him, but he had designed the interface to be interpretable by the human mind. He toggled sound. He loved the sound of a crowd anticipating a show.

The Undersea Arena was a plastic dome under the Pacific. Light from the westering sun filtered dimly to these depths. Powerful spotlights stabbed through the murky waters, occasionally glinting off a fishy shape. Inside the dome, molded plastic seats marched halfway up the curving walls. The sound system was central, needing only the perfect acoustics of an inverted dome to reach the cheap seats. The bass was fed right through the struts and plastic shell.

Aqualung’s view was limited to the seats themselves, now slowly filling with warm bodies. He kept the zoom down to the minimum, taking the shape and feel and sound of the crowd. The vidimask made it feel like they were taking their seats inside his head. In a way they were. Very soon, he would be inside their heads, and they inside his, the greatest connection between audience and performer that had ever been. It had been twenty years since he first had this idea, twenty years to make it happen. And it almost hadn’t.


This was the Snake Vendor’s first really big gig. They had played for seven hundred in a smoky, run down theater just a week ago, and now they were here, in front of forty thousand in the Undersea. Aqualung had convinced Thrasher Records and Stop Making Sense Productions they could pull it off, but now people were getting nervous.

Just an hour ago, Aqualung emerged from the pit and saw the record company guy yapping around the band, who were lounging on a sectional sofa. They weren’t dressed for the show. Or maybe they were, they hadn’t decided on a look yet. The record company had. They had some outfits designed by some Italian fru-fru all lined up for the band to wear. Right now the band was dressed the way they always were, which was probably how they would end up going out. Fenner was always with the black. Black Doc Martins, black jeans, black T and black leather jacket. Sandra’s thin shoulders held up a paisley sundress as she leaned on Fenner’s shoulder. Lalo wore running shorts and a tank top, his knobby knees and skinny elbows sticking out all over the place. Sticks tried to meld country bumpkin and hipster without much success. Britta filled out a spandex silver top and a red leather mini skirt. Tonight, she was trying out her own contribution to fashion: a home sexually transmitted disease test card hung on a cord around her neck. All negative results, natch.

They looked like five people who wouldn’t have anything to do with one another under ordinary circumstances. And then there was Aqualung, who didn’t look like he belonged anywhere near a band like this. He was in his mid-fifties, overweight, hairy, wearing torn jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. There was a guitar pick stuck in his beard. He looked as though he should be a roadie for the senior has-been/comeback circuit, not fronting for LA’s band of the moment. But he moved like a man thirty years and thirty pounds to the right side of hip, and he always seemed to be having a hell of a time.

The record guy was a little early to be on them about wardrobe, it seemed. Oswald, that was his name, Aqualung remembered. He was pretty much just a chew toy the record company threw to the band. He acted as the bearer of bad news between the talent and the fat cats. For now, he knew his place, but these guys never lasted. Sooner or later he would develop one of two illusions: that he was the boss of the band, or he was one of them. Either way, he would be toast.

“Aq,” he said, “you haven’t given us a playlist yet. We’re on in two hours.”

“We? Are you going up there with us, Oswald?”

“We need that playlist.”

Aqualung had thought about telling him the real story a few times in the last couple of days. He knew they could pull off the actual concert. He knew the Snake Vendors had what it took to play a room this big. It was the Machine he wasn’t sure of, the opening act. He didn’t know what songs he was going to play in what order for a very good reason. He didn’t know how the opening act would go. If it killed, there would have to be a breather. A concert was like a roller coaster ride. There was up and there was down. Too much of either and the ride was over.

Now, if the opening act stunk, the show would have to open big. They had two or three potential singles and a couple of kick ass covers from the teens to throw out. They had no bigger opening than “Mojo Motorbike.” If the opener stunk so badly that the forty thousand were calling for blood, their hit single might not even save them. But Aqualung didn’t want to tell Oswald any of this because the fat cats would pull the plug on the opener.

“Relax, Oswald, I’ll give you a list.”

Fenner got up off the couch. “I thought we weren’t going to do a list, man.”

“Oswald wants a list, he’ll get a list. Now,” he said to Oswald, “don’t expect us to stick with this a hundred percent. You see, we like to feel out the mood of the crowd and play what comes to us naturally. It’s an organic process...” He had given this lecture dozens of times, and Oswald’s eyes glazed over quickly. He snagged Oswald’s think pad and jotted down a list of songs off the top of his head, and took the liberty of scanning a few files while he held the thing. Forty thousand was conservative, by the look of it. The record company had done a good job of promoting this gig. They stood to make a lot of money, as long as they didn’t pay people to come as part of the promotion. Aqualung had enough experience to know what a bad idea that was.

“How are we coming on my console, Oswald?”

“Look, Aqualung, I know you think the opening act is going to be something special, but our top priority right now is the concert.”

“All that is required, Oswald, is that it be delivered, and unpacked, and plugged in. Now, concentrate before you answer this question, Oswald. Is it here?”

“It’s on the next train, I promise...” He held up his hand. “Only, KYGI had more gear to load up than we thought, and we have to let them go ahead.”

“You’re an eater of broken meats, Oswald.”

“What?”

“One whom I will beat into clamorous whining. Little Shakespeare for you. That’s your culture for the day. I want to tell you about my top priority. The only reason I’m doing this underwater concert is so I can test out my equipment. This is going to be something that has never been heard in the history of music, and we are all going to be a part of it tonight. You are going to be there, and you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren, if they let people like you reproduce, that you were there at its birth. Tonight, we are not only going to launch the 2032 Pacific Rim Tour of the Snake Vendors, but we are going to launch ourselves into history. And the forty thousand in this arena are going to go home tonight, stunned and amazed, and they’re going to buy lots of records. And the critics are not going to believe their ears, and we will make the cover of Spin magazine. And you, Oswald, will be rewarded by your superiors as befits a lackey in your fortunate position with a new electric Lexus and a Malibu beach house. Are you with me, Oswald? Are we all agreed that some radio station can wait for the next train so that my masterpiece can arrive here safely and on time?”

Oswald had just enough imagination to be moved by this speech. “I’ll make a call.”


It was time to check in with his band, the Snake Vendors, whom he had dispersed throughout the crowd. They were relative unknowns, they could circulate anonymously among the forty thousand. This would be the last time they could do that. He hoped. His interface identified his five bandmates by blinking squares with numbers in them. They were wearing headsets and were supposed to be spreading out through the crowd. Fenner and Sandra were still together, though, and Sticks was down by the stage talking to the roadies.

“Sticks, buddy, I think you’ll enjoy the show a little more if you move about halfway up the dome,” Aqualung said into his mike.

“You mean you can see where we are in this crowd?”

“You’re transmitting, buddy. I need to know where you’re standing so I can adjust my output based on what you’re telling me.”

“All right, I’m moving.”

Aqualung switched channels. “Hey, Fenner, I was wondering if you could help me out.”

“Sure, what is it?”

“I’ve got a blind spot. It’s at around eleven o’clock, at the top of the dome.”

“What do you mean, eleven o’clock? It’s only nine.”

Aqualung had forgotten about the recent demise of the analogue dial and the useful terminology that had come with it. “I’m sorry, that’s an old guy term. It’s about fifteen degrees left of center stage. See where the Nationalists are camped out?” A small group up near the top of the dome were holding up banners that said things like “Borders = Choices” and “One world, many peoples.” Weirdos.

“Oh, I see. Do you want us to move up there?”

“Just you. I need Sandra where she is. Don’t worry, you’ll see her after the opener.”

Aqualung hated telling them what to do. He tried not to feel old around them, and he succeeded most of the time. But his worst moments came when he had to ask them not to get ripped just yet, or to eat something before a show. Or when they looked to him with that look, that “What do we do now?” thing. He hated that. He also hated watching them kill themselves, but he wouldn’t have to worry about that until after the show.

With his spies in place, Aqualung toggled the face recognition software. The arena came alive with color. The software picked faces out of the crowd, digitized them, and analyzed them for emotion. It reported through the vidimask with color. Red, of course, stood for anger. Blue was happiness, white was boredom, black, despair. Orange meant someone was stoned, purple stood for fear, and green was excitement. Complex emotions were beyond the capabilities of the software, but it made some guesses and blended the appropriate colors. Right now, most of the arena was pale green and orange. The roadies and arena staff were white. There was a blob of red near one of the exits, probably a fight, and Aqualung was surprised to find a ring of blue-green around it. People getting off on violence. Ugly.

The comedian was plowing through his act. It was Sam Kinison, screaming away, tossing around swear words that no one even thought of as swear words anymore. A beer can flew out of the crowd at him and passed through.

“What’s the matter with you? You little moron?” Kinison screamed. “I’m a fucking hologram. Aaaaaah! I’ve been dead for forty years! You can throw all the fucking beer cans you want at me. I don’t give a shit. Aaaaah!”

“Well, Aqualung, it looks as though you’re ready to start,” said a quiet, faintly southern sounding voice in his headset.

“Colonel, I didn’t know you’d be joining me tonight.”

“Well, the other executives and I are a little concerned about your device, here, and we all thought it would be best if I looked over your shoulder, so to speak.”

“Did you, now?”

“Well, you know how this machine of yours profoundly affected listeners in the studio.”

“That’s pretty much the point, colonel.”

“Well, we at Thrasher records are concerned about the safety of the concert goers entrusted into our care this evening.”

“You know, its guys like you who put the artificial in artificial intelligence.”

“Is that an insult, Aqualung? A disparaging remark about my lack of physical manifestation? I’m shocked.”

“You’re afraid of lawsuits, colonel. If my machine happens to cause a riot or a mass mental breakdown....”

“Of course that is a concern, Aqualung. That’s why the board decided to authorize me to intervene.”

“Colonel, would you say that you understand humans?”

“No, I wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, I would say that your kind are a constant source of amazement to me. Particularly you artists.”

“So you really wouldn’t say you understand our art either.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” the colonel said.

“Have you ever heard that it’s dangerous to mess around with things you don’t understand?”

“Yes, I have heard that, but...”

“So you would agree that intervening in this demonstration would be dangerous.”

“Ah, well, since you put it that way...”

“I promise to pull the plug at the first sign of trouble, colonel.”

“Yes, well, proceed when ready, Aqualung. And break a leg.”

“The Machine’s been on for the last five minutes, actually. It’s just a bass carrier wave, supposed to induce a sense of anticipation. I think its working. The crowd has stopped heckling the comic.” Aqualung toggled a button on his main control board. “Kill the comic. I’m ready to start.”


Like so many things, the Machine was the child of a man and a woman, but it was the man who carried it to term and gave it birth, and the woman had run off , who knows where, a long time ago. It started with an argument in an electronics shop over a phase modulator, twenty years before.

The phase modulator was a special order item, and had taken three weeks to come in. It was the last part needed to rebuild a fried synthesizer, and that synthesizer was needed for a huge gig. When the man entered the shop to pick up the part, there was a young woman trying to bribe the electronics store guy into selling the item to her. The woman’s name was Cathy Woodbridge, and an older man might have just told her to go to hell, but that wasn’t what happened. She needed the part to complete a research project so a paper could be revised and resubmitted by a certain deadline.

“Well, I need this thing to rebuild a synthesizer by Friday. It might mean an opening gig for Quetzalcoatl. It’s a very big deal.”

“I’m sorry if I sound patronizing,” Catherine said, “but your rock concert just pales in comparison to my research.”

“It can’t be that important. This is Quetzalcoatl we’re talking about.”

“Oh, sorry. Quetzalcoatl.” Her voice was saturated with sarcasm.

“So how long do you need it for? Maybe we can share it.”

“It will take a couple of days to build it into the board, but the experiment will only take a couple of hours.”

“Well, tell you what, you can have it until tomorrow night. I’ll even help you put the thing together. If you can do your experiment tomorrow, I can rip it back out again and get my synthesizer fixed by the gig on Friday.”

“This is a very complicated piece of equipment,” she looked him up and down, a couple of times. “I don’t know if I want you monkeying around with it.”

“Listen to him, lady,” the electronics store guy said. “He’s got golden hands.”

“Look, I’m not obligated to help you at all. It’s my part. I’m doing you a favor.”

The experiment was a success, and the paper was published: Woodbridge, et al., 2006. “The effect of phase modulated sound pulses on mood and cognitive function in human subjects”. Nature 484, 326-330. That was a career making publication. It helped her land a sweet job somewhere on the east coast, and she was gone within a year. She left behind a really ugly couch and the seeds of an idea.

The first incarnations of the Machine could only produce one mood in human subjects with any reliability, and that was annoyance. Later, it could make people cranky, bored, violent. The complete spectrum of human moods took more and more computing power and a more rigorously defined sonic space, until it had become impossible to improve the device further with limited resources.

The music industry had nearly unlimited resources. But sooner or later, you had to make some money.


“So the Snake Vendors are here,” Kinison said, wrapping up. “I don’t know who these bastards are, they just programmed me to warm you little monkeys up. So are ya warmed up you little monkey bastards? Are ya? I don’t give a shit. Aaaaaah!”

The comic abruptly disappeared and the house lights dropped. The carrier wave that had been thudding through the infrastructure of the arena grew slowly louder, joined by higher notes from the directional speakers. A beat, or rather a series of beat patterns, started to develop at foci throughout the crowd. As sound waves met and either complemented each other or canceled each other out, the sensation of music was created. But it was a different kind of music, that was as much a part of the crowd itself as the machine that created it. As the machine created different sound patterns in different zones of the acoustically defined environment, the presence of moving, sound absorbing bodies affected the patterns. As the music altered moods, the moods fed back into the machine through the face recognition software and changed the music.

A light show would accentuate the effects, of course, as would incense, and especially drugs. But tonight was about pure sound.

Within ten minutes, Aqualung could tell it was working. The colors on his vidimask display became more coherent. There was a bright green blob right in front of center stage. Surrounding it was a blue-green aura. The rest of the crowd was blue and orange. Bands of red, black and purple swept through the crowd, but never stayed in one place very long. This was important. If red or purple set in, a riot would develop. If black, then people wouldn’t have a good time and would tell their friends the concert sucked. But if the colors didn’t change at all they just faded to white. So the negative emotions were there to provide contrast. The computer at the heart of the Machine knew these as its cardinal laws.

As soon as the colors set in, Aqualung checked on his spies.

“Hey, there Lalo. Can you guess where you are?” Lalo’s square was at the edge of the green blob.

“It’s a mad house, here, man. This is the mosh pit, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. You’re just on the edge of it. What’s it like?”

“Woooh! This is great, man. Oh!” There was confused babble for a few moments. “They’re throwing each other around. They just picked me up and threw me.”

“We used to call that crowd surfing. You mean you’ve never done that before?”

“No. What should I do now?”

“Enjoy yourself.” He switched channels.

“What do you think so far, Britta?”

“Wow.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“Grotto.”

“You’re fucking A. Like it?”

“Wow.”

“What are people doing?”

“Touching. Kissing.”

“No shit. You?” He zoomed in on Britta’s square. She was locked in a passionate embrace with three or four other people, both sexes. He had no idea the grotto would be like this. As he panned around he found the zone where the grotto met the mosh pit. The change was gradual. Hugging gave way to dancing, which gave way to slam dancing. He panned back across to the other side of the grotto. There hugging gave way to swaying.

Sandra was in the center of the mosh pit, the roughest place. By design. She looked fragile, but Aqualung suspected she could handle a lot of shit. He called her up.

“Ugh, this is crazy. Aqualung, I’m getting crushed. I’m jumping up and down, but I’m not jumping.”

“What do you mean?”

“The crowd is pushing at me from all sides and lifting me. Ugh. It’s crazy.”

That was a neat effect. It would be a good physics problem for a cool teacher to throw at his class. How tightly would the crowd have to be packed in, and how many of them would have to be jumping up and down to lift people in the center against their will?

“That doesn’t sound safe, Aqualung,” the colonel said.

“Oh, they’re just having some fun. Only a soccer game can really get people excited enough to crush one another. I did think of one potential danger, though, if you want to help me out.”

“What is it?”

“Suppose you get these kids jumping up and down at some frequency, and that frequency just happens to coincide with some resonance in the structure of the dome, and we get the whole place shaking like the Tacoma narrows bridge. Wouldn’t that be a bummer?”

“You’d like me to calculate that frequency based on the structural details of the arena.”

“Bingo,” Aqualung said. That ought to keep the bastard off my back for a couple of minutes. To his chagrin, however, the colonel came back with the answer in less than a minute. Damned computers. Fortunately, there was no way he could get these kids jumping fast enough to shatter the dome. The music was more powerful than a drug, it looked like, but there wasn’t enough amphetamine in the world to get them to jump that fast.

He zoomed back in on Sandra. She was no longer fighting to keep her space. She had given in to the music. She wasn’t answering her headset. She’d become like a wild animal.

He continued checking up on his other spies. “How you doing, Sticks?”

“Cool, man. This is like, cool. Where am I, Aq? What is this place?”

“You’re in the glades, man.”

“The glades. It even sounds cool. Glades.”

“I’m glad you like it.” He zoomed back out to take in the crowd. There was some trouble. An edge of black had set in at the upper margin. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Fenner was in there.

“Fenner, what’s going on?”

“Fuck, man.”

“How do you feel?”

“Feel like I’m comin’ off a three day crank vacation.”

“I’m going to try to shake things up. You hang in there, buddy.”

Aqualung toggled some switches, activated some subroutines.

“What seems to be the problem?” the Colonel asked.

“You remember what I told you about this two weeks ago, colonel?”

“You said to expect the unexpected.”

“Well, that’s what we got.”

“Anything dangerous?”

“No, just a little bit of a bummer developing up there in the cheap seats. I’m trying to inject some happy juice.”

“It doesn’t seem to be working.”

Aqualung ignored the AI and worked on the problem for a few minutes. “I think I’ve just made up a new rule for the machine.”

“What would that be?” the colonel asked.

“Black sticks. It has its own inertia. Once black sets in, those people just won’t cheer up. It makes it harder that it’s at the periphery. The up beat is centered in the mosh pit, then it tapers towards the edges. I’m going to try something radical.”

“Perhaps you should just pull the plug, like you said.”

“Black would still stick. Without music those people would never cheer up.”

“So what are you going to try?”

“I’m going to invert the pattern. Turn the whole outside rim into the mosh pit. I’ve got to give Sandra a break, anyway. Otherwise she won’t have enough energy for the show.” Aqualung had already activated the subroutine, but it was supposed to happen gradually. A sudden shift from one emotion to another would probably be OK, it happened in concerts all the time, but he didn’t want to take any chances with the colonel looking on.

He watched for the changes he was expecting. Black giving way to green at the rim, and green to blue at the center. He had convinced himself that it was happening so he missed it at first. It was the colonel who pointed it out.

“Purple seems to be predominating.”

“What? Oh, shit.” There were purple spots spreading from what used to be the grotto. They began to grow and connect and became shot with red.

“It looks like a riot.”

“It is a riot.” Aqualung zoomed in and panned around the crowd. The forty thousand were freaking. So far he didn’t see anyone getting hurt, but people were running, screaming. That was rule two for this test run: Fear spreads.

“You’re shutting it down, aren’t you?”

“I’ve got one more trick, then I stop.” So far, the experiment had gone on for twenty minutes.

“Aqualung, don’t make me step in.”

“You won’t have to, I promise. The music is over.” A single spot stabbed up from center stage against the underside of the clear dome, some of the light reflecting back to the audience and some diffusing out into the deeps. Aqualung toggled his mike, and his rough, careworn voice filled the arena from every direction.

“Welcome, fellow travelers, to our new undersea dimension. We’ve all taken an ocean voyage tonight, a journey on the turbulent seas of emotion. Tonight, you have melded with the Machine, and the Machine has looked into your souls. You have experienced in these last few minutes the entire human condition, from elation to despair. Some of you feel dashed against the uncaring rocks of life. The Machine has unmade you, and given you the chance to remake yourself. Take a few deep breaths, then join us for another kind of journey. We are the Snake Vendors.”

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

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