Now and then, tribute music groups beget new music compositions and tours from the original artists they're imitating, such as The Eagles conspiring to reform and perform again—subsequent to The Beagles surprising every pack with their Already Dog Gone Tour, featuring band members' dogs on stage performing awe-inducing paw tricks in time with, say, the song "Doghouse California". But, because the remaining members of The Eagles happen to be long-since robot replacements who've gone on to wear eagle head masks while performing, the Eagleheads in the front row last night who were not listening with their throats, gaping their mouths up like baby birds waiting impatiently to feed, were privileged to witness their favorite band beam projections out of their eyes and out into the crowd via orange lasers, through poked-out eye holes in their masks, inhaling carbon-dioxide and exhaling oxygen through the beak nostril holes to sustain the robo-life necessary to kick out a high grade set of e-jams. Even so, interested partiers scoped several Eagles this morning, heading to the next meeting of the area support group for bands with too many guitarboardists; surprisingly large numbers turn up to bring down their stress levels and gain clairvoyance, air riding to get there over land littered with the busted detritus of the old civilization.

The Beagles, though, statistical luck their way, unlike what has become of some of the e-economy, reside well above ground figuratively speaking, owing mostly to their nutty and graphic toy-devouring video posted and reposted ad nauseum to dog network ChewTube, the title of which, "Bark It to the Limit", could not be more telling of the excesses of the trib band playing field, quite unlike any comparable scene in post-capitalist event settings. As there are plethora of these groups, the arena is then packed so to speak for an all-out, drop-down slam fest between competing tours and everything: the robot versions of the original artists against the up and coming human trib bands—as with The Who learning of The Hoot while in their dressing room and over their facephones, so much so that member Rog 7.3 believes deep down inside its matrices that the members of The Hoot are literal owls, which they actually aren't in real life, although they play ones on stage with realistic owl head masks replete with synthetic neck feathers and moveable beaks operable using the chin; and because of the dronebot camera work entangling with discarded feathers and strips of wire, one can never tell what is going on anyway.

On top of that and without any doubt trib bands are earning a reputation for disseminating competitive memes at live shows, from facephone to every facephone around the crowd and to other members and their families and in the drug rooms too, all of which simply argues in favor of sending compromising information on the other artists surfing across tech and bodies—maybe a datum like who is completely out of air filters right now or who has a barrel of laughing friends, a side-by-side comparison for the small mass of humans and many machines to contemplate—as are dancers and other music aficionados at the show, watching and mostly feeling fine with the barred owl drummer flailing about as well as with their glances down into their palms at the repeating clip of Who robot member Pete 5.15 sitting and swaying alone in an empty room under a hanging bare light bulb and over a drain in the concrete floor—right as The Hoot's final encore, "Who Cooks for You?" begins with flying bursts of arpeggiated dotted notes in perfect intonation, every one fired up by an algorithm running in the skynest delay unit, and—further and further back into the Network—originating as bits of ancient poly plastics.


Many primitive calendars have passed as, one by purified one, a handful of drugs were legalized—the last of which, MDMA (not to be confused with the XTC tribute band) was brought into the light about the same time as the economic landscape began to bubble and froth with smart machinery—crushing an abysmal array of human jobs and recycling it as minifurniture for a wealthy smattering, a double movement not without its champions of business-as-usual, peddling fresh styles of anthropogenic ecological overshoot—and not without its double losers of the planetary championship too, so to speak—i.e. the former middle classes and below, casually and derogatorily referred to now as the "no class" by those milking the rocks and ground deposits with fast machine friends at their disposal, kicking forward in the better bunker dens. The Net joke goes that when asked if anything has changed beneficially now that, for example, any human can drag their universal basic income around on their day of payment before waiting in an extensively long line for outrageously expensively regulated lysergic acid eye drops, the "no class" answer is usually, "Huh?"—since most humans have been sliding downward and outward in the way of multiplication success, intelligence, and general output—just a few of the effects and causes of the patriarchal dead-end machines that left tread prints all over the softer parts of the face of the planet—a cycle of spiraling entropy which the State Times is continuously covering in its humorous illustration section.

Likewise, sports team professionals and their associated events have had to pick things up by packing products injected with THC—the acronym for the cannabinol, not for the musical group Team Hyper Combo, which tributes The Half Cadence—into the concession stands right outside a bulging inflated event complex enormous enough to be seen from low planetary orbit, and at this turning point then, players and attendees alike will bring their own vape, edible, or steam containers to whatever is happening, concealed probably in their B-io input-output interface sacks, stylishly worn dangling from the neck, and left completely alone, since pretty much everyone believes wholeheartedly that authorities, even event authors, cannot even peek inside these things, including the authorities themselves as if blocked by a force of universal nature—even though there have never existed any State laws passed to protect B-io sacks or their ancient analog—the medicine bag—a kind of legal mass hypnosis writes itself, a self-written managemental fiction.

The effect of all this is that a continual loss of time has enveloped human cultures, an utter dispensation of the past and future for cities, such as one locus, Cornfield—which sits in the Ellipse Valley, the city at one focus and Flip Out Spaceport at the other—a place where burning without a permit is a violation of the city planning ordinance after passage of the flameless architecture directive, half-traceable to one afternoon when Lady Hybrid, hopping around in hip fashion at Fad Fest this past deciyear, convinced a majority of the city high council to vote in line with her smash tribute hit, "Clear the Air Tonight (No Smoke Required)", performed accidentally no less and with a dearth of practice owing to the setlist manager wearing too much cannabis makeup, causing just the right amount of dizziness for her to mistakenly long-press the Enter button on the mixing desk display at just the right moment with her ring-pierced, butterfly-tattooed nose.

Jace Icon, the setlist manager, who is also Lady Hybrid's backup visiphone caller and who began life in small town Wheatville, would go off in her own rogue planet-like trajectory, or at least that seems to be the case, owing to the Gravity Award given to the whole tightened production team at this deciyear's ceremonies for Lady Hybrid's new collection of musics, entitled Giggle Bites. And, entitled is about the best way one could and probably should describe most of the LH group at this time, with no challenges in sight, with a pack of mescaline steam carts in the cooler built into the bass drum case, which co-powers the freeze chamber with the force of the percussionist's foot, and with Lady Hybrid conversing with stagehands by way of Standard Sign Language simply because she feels the need to ask for more security on her vocals in her ear and ankle monitors without confusion, since the thumbs-up gesture generally means "great!", but can invite a poke in the nose in several dialects as well as a visit from language administration. Notwithstanding, everyone on her staff is required to know at least two sign languages and possess working knowledge of several of the most common sciences in party research, from a list box including options for astropsychology, biozoology, paleophysics, and sociobotany.


A heavyweight in the field of music systems herself, sHE-ART—a human being from Cornfield's sister culture, Soyberg—has just handed Lady Hybrid the Gravity Award and turned around to put kinetic energy into her own search for a new life of working anywhere, a direct example of how this very public awards event changes hands every deciyear on schedule, the rumor frequently sounding like next time the host will be whoever holds the leash at Pet-Tential for Dogs, a nonhuman animal college leading the way in the field of bone theory. Few of those attending this show have ever heard much of Giggle Bites, and most are too low energy and high up in their seats to care, in fact, and that's not atypical of the latest trend in Net streams; the house server can provide a very brief Abbrev version of any song ever if a user asks it, since the system condenses, say, five instances of the song's chorus down to one, the verses possibly not even making it past the strict compression filter, and the bridge deconstructed to a single representative note, such that now new listeners don't even have to not listen to the whole piece of music, but rather the opportunity is automatically present to listen to an Abbrev one (assuming one decides to listen to the whole thing even) depending on whose art opens available for export, what can be customizable at the data entry form, where the button appears, and finally when the Gray Thursday sale begins and according to which atomic clock.

The operating system host, a bone-defined human wearing green hair and purple feathers, actually knows little of hip-hop, slap, or gist these days, because most music exports are handled by substitution by her cyborgian bosses, a group of flesh and metal currently managing urban vegefruit gardens for humans and sound foundations for the festivals for everyone—sometimes even tripling as the team keeping the Net alive by programming its backbone while the people sleep in a spectrum range of positions and groupings: all the way from singles on the couch amidst indoor, domesticated prairie grasses; to couples in separate rooms and now featuring separate kitchens: to threes in triangular tune; to quads in more complicated and versatile combinations; et cetera—stirring dreams deeply while purification wells and heat pumps sit below garden apartment level, sealed against the rolling caustic fog hazes.

While flying over and following the granular old road—cracked and broken here and there by vivacious weeds—sHE-ART would readily go ahead and install the latest single facephone trib flash from Giggle Bites, a triple spin on traditional rock music, integrating the lyrics of "Tom Sawyer" and the music of "Black Dog" with the guttural vocal undertones of singers of the ancient Northwestern forests—if anyone were to ask, but the machine has recorded how Lady Hybrid is sharper than a diamond knife and therefore had previously unchecked the checkbox labeled "Auto-Reduce to Micro-Single" on the Abbrev uploader page of the final process, meaning sHE-ART will have to either listen to the whole piece on her communal robotaxi transport back to Soyberg, or fly back to Cornfield in a community dronejet for the next Fad performance and thereby link the experience to her own devices, a downright up-all-night excursion added to her document's calendar.

Of course, not everyone opts to let their notorious, laborious beeps and beats shrink in such a way through anything paid-for or free-for-use, and therefore this has been the issue for some time continuing in and out of this songwriting space: either condense and microsell at volume, or expand and charge (basically) the price of the venue to get in—i.e., inflamed human fans can listen repeatedly to a few choice seconds for cheap, around the cost of a drag of ketamine vape, curated by an app smarter than they'll probably ever be—or then they can get the enhanced version at the live show, complete with Ultra 4D Immersion into a private dance trench, and an oily meal late after the concert with the artist and their by that point surely sweat-caked, data-filled entourage.


One example of humans being the least best and farthest from importance would be the introduction of transparent cotton apparel within the urban underground revolution taking place because of the latest smartext composed by Lady Hybrid: On Principle and Other Reasons. Its quivering thesis statement contends that the local underground shopping mall has converted so rapidly to dance-o-ramas because those few remaining musicians who used to get their chords and cables at the mall's Tone Store now move in seemingly naked directions and in ways that the rest of the pieces in the culture game would not. And thus in the lot where the Tone Store used to be now stands the Sigh Bin dispensary, a tall mushroom-shaped shack with one arched door at the base of the stem which grows out of the dust right under a Least Significant Digit brand lysergic acid billboard, and only when seen during the pitch black of a moonless night (so dark due to the Dark Night Skies initiative) glows in two-meter-tall purple bubble letters, "Take Me" on one line, and "With You" on the next. Bitter words begin to pepper the debate with Hybrid on this point that resources and responsibilities shift across the geologic land over time, though the arrow form humans of the entertainment press haven't so much conceded as thrown up their hands and let out a long commiserating cumulus puff of vapor into the air, which is instantly as see-through as their apparel.

Hybrid's notes amount to enough for the next Fad show without shopping for new ones at what has replaced the old aforementioned Gone Tree Mall as the destination of style: the Electric Music Outlet on the corner of Wall Avenue, where Ceiling Street intersects it, creating a busy dry thoroughfare, a place where both Kwik Lubes and Sunblocks—the latter of which happens to be on every other corner regardless of saturation—can coexist fuzzily, the point of which means Giggle Bites is on the counter at every Sunblocks, too, and so on into a chain of recursive fiction; and yet, even two small, hardened, human service employees of the Kwik Lube, busy about like ants on a street-fallen banana along the front drive at the corner of Wall and Ceiling, play the Bites channel of long remixes on random through outdoor speakers while customers peruse the latest Cult Times Net flash inside in relative warmth or cool, depending on the seasonal extreme of the day, and even though wild heat/cold temperatures don't affect any bots or their e-feelings, they go along with reading such drivel to be cool, congruent with the culture of free services, and of course generally warm-hearted due to their microfusion chest generators radiating infrared radiation, to which humanity would be hugely visually blind were it not for the suddenly less-chill factions opting for the hot new CybeRed eye implants.

Logic would have it because these festivals bring joy to both robots (ones with e-motion chips installed anyway) and humans alike, the post-capital e-economy actually retains the best all worlds, but whenever the autonomous head for the Wikigeria vehicle takes to a local roll scan, the old people drop their melons and two-leg run with force, suddenly showing up creating random, music-like art in front of its expressionless solar blades and cameras, since whenever it's just that easy to devise products for a sort of mass consumption into a robovehicle, the most superficial pop star essentially comes swinging from their garden apartment studio on a long length of connector cables. (Little do they know, though, that the competition for tech for making music ends with SkyHi Pro, the most expensive piece of audio workstation software and hardware imaginable, meaning few to no students, of which there are few to none in attendance, could ever afford the subscription price or any protective case, even with the enormous edu Net discount and automatic industry loans, apart from the very wealthy few willing to incur life-long and after debt, of course.) Once the autonomous hovering car has buzzed quietly and gently over the back of the town twice, sporting two giant googly eyeballs for stereo vision, the flow of current in the arts reignites the flamboyant grin on the floating artwork for LH's Bites as the stagetop background image: a revolving photo of a holographic statue bust of her sporting a translucent shirt and vest, her face adorned with gold buck teeth, with a raw whole carrot dangling on a string from an ancient wooden stick in the space behind her.


North beyond Cornfield, through sticky Ghost Forest, and past even the crowded cemeteries, the water reclamation plant still contains two human employees—the other seven having since been offered copious amounts of drugs before being shown the hatch and quickly replaced by a single solar robot who can pour out ice-cold pure water in seeming slow motion as good as anyone anywhere can—and whereas only one of those two flesh creatures has formulated plans to attend Fad, the one who will—Lorie Borealis—depends on a ride cymbal sale to the second drummer for Lady Hybrid's band for the credit account balance required to go out where Cornfieldians have these times.

Shopping in the shower for furniture washing machines, Lorie needs to go ahead and ribbon cut her life from here forward—that is, make the trade up in generally congenial fashion, debut on the seen scene screens, and then line up in the afternoon for nutrient spheres at the corner park stand, which this year provides several examples for ways the city's music event planning subcommittee could have performed its tricks perhaps more skillfully if not completely appropriately. After all, when the hoses were connected to the vocal pipe in the morning, the electrical flowback activated the cannabis hash oven and every answer to the event planning committee's morale-lifting trivia night was answered publicly in the deep freeze, although the good sign in that blow would be that the flaming reserve for the oven was raced past the Sigh Bin's wheelbarrows, down Corner Street, and into the dirty water of the old reclamation plant to save the morning from the jaws of a dreaded Major Catastrophe.

Lady Hybrid had already inspected the number one vocal mic, as well as her laser writer for quick notes during performances, and both turned up Genius Level on her rubbery prep meter she carries around as though it were someone's donated kidney chip, and when she looks out from the front of the float stage, shielding her eyes against the yellowed sun with her aluminum setlist, she gasps when the haze clears enough to look across the rows of trenches freshly prepared, which the city digging subcommittee contracted to handle the audience retention pit. "Murmuring won't entertain us, folks," Hybrid mutters to herself through the breeze of dry air dragging over Krap Park. "Speak up or get down!" a deep and low voice resonates from afar, from an unseen speaker, the sound of these words echoing awkwardly against the park's bodily function stations and oil dispensaries, propagating across the parallel lines of ditches scraped into the land, and winding up in the wind blowing out into the desolation at the curved edge of Cornfield, where a few dozen bots comb the perimeter for lost hair ties and coloring chips.

In the truest fashion available, however, notwithstanding such outbursts in the heat of Rocktember, Fad, which is named after the style turning the music, generally waits for the afternoon performances to launch while Damn Age 2, now the appellation of the lead drummer for the group, goes by the name closet and grabs a new one almost every day at this time. Previously, she was EQute, and one can see how this can seem almost everywhere, booking an extended trip to Frustration Land for the journalists who are pressed to formulate an antidote to the poison of fluid language, so they all have pushed back against the heaving crowd of words and have recently resorted to constantly referring to her as No1.

Likewise, distracted by several small struggles with her wardrobe technology, mostly functional Lorie Borealis moves in a vector to the tix booth at the high Southeast end of the park and makes an unusually subtle proposition to the white-haired worker inside the booth holding a fist-full of virtual tix as if she'd finally found them after looking everywhere else for them. "Hi, do you need another job?," she asks. Paddy, the tix booth operator, is only performing duties at this point because C_C, the solar robot that usually runs the booth had slipped on a row of pickles while performing tricks for tix wanters and other attendees of the festival—inconsequential tricks, more to the point, like where did the tix go—thus crashing itself into Paddy's space and yelping three precisely-timed times before raising a vague text-based message on its abdoscreen ("MENTAL HEALTH RESET") but after a reboot and both steel shoes being found, C_C is ready to regale both flesh and digital minds alike with magical tix flips once again.


A gray entropy begins to peek through the curtains, peering in on human culture and the extinction of its work, while meanwhile Cornfield community leaders wear too little emotional ornamentation on their sleeves and openly disbelieve in logic the way a nun denies her god, which means for a start that they have opposed gathering at and acquiring information on dry geographical areas where rivers once flowed, sinewing strips of sunken riverbeds and river valleys revealing brutal and random junk: old brittle nonhuman and human bones, carcases of boat wrecks, unopened six-packs of Country Beer (from the alcohol poisoning era), and countless tree stumps where river routes were repeatedly rerouted and redirected as per the War With Nature, a colossal campaign eventually superseded by something vastly more useful and appropriate: self-sustaining robots, aka Life 2.

Generally speaking this world's biological life acts like a basic sofware virus, an amoral instantaneously self-installing file which consumes resources and produces waste, and should users feel so inclined to look up L in the Wikigeria, they will see at the disambiguation node that Life 2 is the only non-1 entry so far and the only one having left, in part, for interstellar space already—being not encumbered by cosmic radiation-induced disease, nor inhibited by long, boring passages of time—where delicate bio life (Life 1) cannot go for reasons of it fairly immediately perishing. Even the cyborgian hybrids remain quite fragile in a fleshy sense, much to the stupefaction of a few staggeringly wealthy humans who took the ancient War Trek entertainment show programs to be factual—to where their managers and handlers argued with them that such programs were actually designed and therefore staged, a reversal of denial if there ever existed one, especially considering several trillionaires shot themselves and their fancy implants out of the planetary system anyway, practically to the star's bow shock, though they didn't make it much past that before their demises–in the end due to illness, madness, hardware failure, and especially the infestation of software bugs—were flowed to the Net for all back home to see, at around a day's time delay of course.

Indeed, all of outer space—for all intents and human purposes anything beyond the home planet's relatively skin-thin protective biosphere—would eschew the idea that L1 is much welcome in its abysmal vastness, if it could eschew, which is not to say people can't hop up to the planet's machine or natural satellites, or limp to the nearby, mostly barren, and mostly far less hospitable worlds provided by the star system, but rather that, plainly, human people pay a great deal to get out of their terrestrial home, an incalculable amount of water, shielding, time, DNA, metal, fuel, and food—some of these involving toxic byproducts which must be broken down through additional energy-consumptive means—as well dispensing with a general feeling of being at ease. These remain consequential factors when leaving for places in space, and the costs rise exponentially the further the evolved apes venture out, as more radiation shielding requires more thrust, even with the greatest and latest B-io packs swinging from breast to nearly identical, though mirror reversed, breast.

Because there are no natural limits on trying, one lone group of trillionaires twice attempted to catch up with L2, to find their location, but again the profits and other positive results were as sparse as particles are in the average decimeter square volume of anywhere—and the blowouts, implosions, and frozen space sculptures of human blood floated with consistency. This hardened universe suddenly seems far more hostile than friendly, at least according to human perception, leading to drastic changes in religious points of view, via which reverent awe loses first place to apathetic dread in the minds of the few new youth and the mostly elderly alike. Why bother much with cosmological hero worship if the universe, as it turns out, is 99.9999 repeating decimal percent carcinogenic if not outright fatal to your well-being—that is, if the cosmos has revoked all the visionary privileges and invitations to future scenarios that ancient media had promised (since the makers of all of those, like War Trek et al., were drastically primitive in their thinking in the first place) and if as it turns out it’s just all empty, terrifying, and lonely out there as far as one can see and tell, rhetorically? In any event, people being the feeling and believing beings they are will find reverence in anything, especially in that which they feel humbled by to the point of little to grim return, so that the Net flashes and multimedia album releases keep coming out based on science as a god who wrestles with a hostile universe always already in existence, and perpetually, too.

Speaking of existence, evidence abounds that the department in charge of pumping information from the central server room for tardigrades has not created a hyperpage node with an L meta-header in the Wikigeria entry for them because, as has been discovered by a group of exobiologist bots using keyboards and other instruments of science for many deciyears nonstop, tardigrades are not from any life system, but rather are just stopping by for a while and have always been and remain both beyond in origin and expanding with possibilities. Riding bits of debris across the starscapes, these miniscule creatures wake from cryptobiosis bearing scant resemblance to anything around, usually, and are just now coming to a point in their interminable, protracted evolution that soon they will be able to communicate with other forms—not necessarily forms of life, however.


Krap Park makes for the most adequate space for a fest because the 4000 cubic decimeters of airspace above it are popularly cleared for drones and bots to play their part, such as through dropping a few free passes into the festival entrance space—to be handed out by city art show workers sauntering down Floor Avenue—overall, with a dearth of flesh and bloods actually making it into the fest this deciyear, each one of them, no surprise, acting noticeably robotic and rather not unlike L2, which is to say, calm under pressure, not entirely disinterested in drastically long periods of time in tedious and rugged environments, and generally agreeable—all characteristics that make great festival concertgoers. For them and the bots buzzing about at every level of volume, the festivities begin upon the ground where the solar machines have already scan-planned the dig for seating/dancing trenches and crash pits for the evening out of damp to the cool touch sand and soil in organized geometric patterns, all going back one-fourth of a kilometer, assisted by darting solar drones. All of this is sustainable in geo-engineered papers by rolling the land within the perimeter back for soil and water replenishment using new nitrogen worms and nutrient tablets designed to mimic the glaciation deposits of eons past, and since trees are scarce, the best investment is in wood sticks which are traded and reconstituted by bot professionals capable of seeing fossilized tree cells magnified by their ocular systems, and this is just the beginning (and the end) of the ultimate recycling of culture's own self.

Hybrid is about to begin her second set of tribute rituals as the sagging orange sun is receding from view below the planetary horizon, and she starts checking and feeling for the sound with a kind of personal transformation into the ancient art of Bush & Gabriel, just as tawny light slowly and liminally bleeds into Ghost Forest, the variety of shapes in the dead trees casting random long shadows across the float stage as she wields her melodic slaps at the front of Fad Fest:

Rest your chips
You worry your hips
It's going to be okay
When times get tough
And the going gets rough
Don't give up
You still have bots
Don't give up
You still have bots

Et cetera. The attendees in the trenches and pits up front and down low are all semiregular facephone followers of LH, so they look composed but also energized by the proceedings, just when Hybrid's backing band's drumitar player spins, twirls, and tosses out two two light-wood stickpicks in a row into the Park while entering 100 beats into the air that wash over the rhymes and polyrhythms. Half of the crowd have no idea what to make of this, but so one by addled one, from the end of the crashing and dancing to the beginning of the float stage, they begin to toss up their own personal notes, or perhaps not while instead focusing on catching the stickpicks, as Lady Hybrid's devices send inbound notification after the next to her light-up synth suit and personal solar drone hovering nearby and protecting her but also documenting her life and its swelling new fan collections. While booting up a tribute funk dance to ancient vibrations, Hybrid lets loose several installations of On Principle and Giggle Bites into the crowd—in all probability for some good vibes to be picked up by needy devices—the guitarboard player for her band sending out bendy squeals in the shapes of wholly new emotions. Inside the guitarboard's signal path is coded the key to open each media pop-out, with the On Principle keyring holding the working Net registry value each fest attendee can use to open the music art or the smart novel securely, these unique musical feelings splashing over angular and rounded bodies alike in the back of the trenches where the radio spectrum waves are sending signals and signs.


Eventually, pillows of white steam begin to soften into vapor whisps around the step-down transformer where Paddy and Lorie will emerge from the time shifter into the past, and though this wasn't their first adventure together before and/or after this story, this particular ongoing moment takes place circa 1982, at least according to what remains of the old calendar, since now a single virtual quantum interface to the Net stands at the back of the time craft instead of there being electrical terminals connected by metal wires to a mainframe and a dead tree imprinter on another level of an underground building; and therein finds these two adventurers available to look in from the outside of the transformer station, because waste products turn into robots and robot-run waste reclamation plants and collectors discover the lost logs of deep tunnel mining in landfills for 1k plastic—the old gold of the past's future and that thing going wherever humans went, since it takes a thousand or more deciyears for it to break down into the bits that power the Net and its interconnected spaces—persistence in an injection molded polyethylene resin, perhaps fittingly shaped like a dinosaur or a miniature piece of old sports equipment, perhaps double-used a weapon, in the shape of a long stick with a handle at one end and a slight bulb at the other.

Paddy and Lorie are returning these crucibles to their place in time and only going into as much detail in their official business reports as likely necessary, scratched-up hand terminals only being part of the reasoning behind the Cornfield high council giving these two their own arc of electricity to spend, in so many worlds their temporal travel destination stop at this juncture.

In addition, the subnetwork intelligence is constantly tracking every existing stop in the planetary system in perpetuity to know what is landable landscape, and that is the bottom of the line running perpendicular to the horizon, a one dimensional monolith about as much fun as Lorie could draw from the euclidean geometric interface—the key to the future and the way to step out into what has not locked yet, the place where enough space exists for synthetic contraptions and biomacroorganisms alike—a new world for every active system—and for everyone to cup or cover their ears or listening ports at the spectacle of Fad festival's pro-goodness performers.

"Are you awake?" the floating security bot will ask the attendee by way of aloud and on-screen notifs, not knowing really, insofar as even the smartest one can still not comprehend or even ask humorous questions, the irony being that the joke won't be so much lost on the homo sapiens species specimen this time as taken personally, a typical bio-defensive reaction, because normally only an awake person can answer, and therefore one can assume there's only one answer: "Yes". So, when Paddy replies with a straightened stance to increase her value and head high after feeling the current for a while, "No, I'm not awake", the whole enterprise easily falls apart, collapsing into something like a game show where contestants must apply a certificate of power to the correct authority, giving the overall impression that Paddy will know ahead what the inside of the box has revealed.


Before, you could listen from the streets and rooftops to the rhymes and jams bounding about the buildings of Cornfield like beat balls, and even though as soon as the floating or walking bot gives you a tix one could check out what they are missing via drone-shot broadcast piped to-face, the city firewall committee has suddenly, this deciyear of all, nevertheless implemented the most robust audiovisual shield imaginable in real life: TuneShield, just installed for Fad, provides up to 50 decibels of sound absorption at a spherical radius of 0.5 km and 99 decibels at one kilometer, even making it feasible to keep the sparse garden residences from being ever so slightly rattled into facephoning ridiculing meme messages due to woofer quakes and making it more than possible to convert one's festival to a capital IP intellectual property by protecting the thing in its entirety, from long distance peepers with flying recording eyes, although contrary to the very basic public document Festival Laws Without Flaws, the fest nevertheless searches attendees via quantum scan before and after existing, which is easier and more refreshing contrasted to the pocket and strip searches and random radiation blasts of the before.

The downside is that to everyone outside the fest who wants to just look at it or generally in the direction of downtown and Krap Park, nothing exists, though it actually does, past about 0.5 km from some locus (the float stage, unbeknownst) or right about the intersection of Floor and Ceiling Streets—everything being fuzzy, opaque, slightly transparent to view, muffled to hear, barely smellable, and otherwise essentially nonsense to the senses. To the city high council and the highest mayor this is good business, because not everyone who's out wants into Fad this deciyear, and vice-versa in that not everyone who is there wants out, either, meaning that when nothing floats there, in a fuzzy 0.5 km sphere, both above and below the ground, it can change the average goer's choice of who and what to believe still exists downtown, a rather dysregulating experience.

In fact, until the last lights and encores have evaporated into the troposphere, and until someone can elbow push the TuneShield's rep bot's chest panel to liven up his routine a millimeter, the passageways will not be opened for throughput, and the two key drummers inside the festival's borders, pounding out their distinct virtual percussion ensembles, are then both alive and not, not unlike a geophysics story problem either—rather than "either", they live and they don't, at once, at which time passageway zero opens and Drummer First Chair (currently having renamed herself CutOf, for the second time no less in a stunning display of unoriginality) leaps off of her throne and grabs the floating air mic stage-center. She quickly spins and then twirls two 42-centimeter-long sticks, one on each rectangular hand, her arm tattoos depicting space probes and her face quivering with some sort of fundamental rage about whatever she perceives to be happening, or at least the short fuse look on her face gives something away, and then a fake nose ring drops right as she feels for the tiny virtual switch for the air mic. The nose ring, a semicircle of metal clip-on type, dings its way down the front of the stage, gently bouncing around the only signal snake leading out to the sound board and landing in the first trench, so any questions that come to the minds of front row Festheads are sent automatically from facephone tech to the central city data committee's chill den drawer where the server sits cooled and refreshed by the water tower and where the entry is placed in the Wikigeria data table to go take a very good look with its emergency eye sensory vehicle.

No one knows while dancing and crashing, and no one will know anywhere except in the secret drummer's closet underneath the staging area, that the nose ring was created by the only fake jeweler in Cornfield and nostril-implanted with a holorecorder to capture the event for experimentation as a weapon against drug use education. "You gave me your allergies," CutOf mutters near the floating air mic, almost too low and absurdly faint for the limiter to limit, to one side where the second drummer stands slightly off-stage, "and every song of ours in my monitors makes it sound like Lady T is being squished by the music." She begins to cry a deluge of salty rain, and it remains at this point that one or two Krap Park authorities, as well as the festival organizer committee chairperson's personal drone, submit the proper Net forms to begin a request to make their way to the area underneath the float stage, where the other drummer now, the name of which is Not Imp, a bot, freezes its drumsticks in mid air somehow, a trick dependent completely on the kind of mass confusion perfectly exemplified by these events.

Amongst the sand, soil, and dirty boots/bots of the pits and trenches, there are only one or two actual attendees left: the nose ring and a small solar robot named Bratron, and only one of them is a plant, as the latter was sent by a group of ‘trons to capture the entirety of the first decimonth to feature the new robot holiday, which happens to land on the first anniversary of Bratron's boot date, too, although the 1nd day of the decimonth now carries the State Song Day, and every ‘tron is traditionally booted up on the 2st day, making this particular ‘tron a unique exception, which implies that it perceives the nose ring where the descending humans and city drones do not, and this is the case since it, like many ‘trons, has an affinity for small metal objects, as well as the fact that it is fascinated by circular things too, such as tautological arguments about Life 2 returning from deep space on rainbows to rescue the terrestrial bots from the boring and increasingly barren world they share with the people, who profess drab choices for surface colors within an overarching tendency for their narratives to wander in circles and whose reproductive cycles power the education of bots on how to care for each other over long distances.


"Corn springs eternal!", speaks/reads the plaque on the city entrance, since Cornfield mostly considers itself to have been named after the long ago decimated crop, and since in corn's husk of a place now cannabis, hemps, and prairie grasses are growing, converted and reconverted into biofuels for human restructuring and assistance, with mushroom pastures eating up much of the rest. Rather, the descendants of formerly-domesticated cows, pigs, chickens, and horses, swing the biggest presence in the arid plains—not the many bison, since the State social norms have drifted so far in the direction of complete ignorance: likely boring throughout the many caves, holes, and canyons of ancient landfills for deposits of coveted 1k, or chilling high as a satellite on a still lake in residential dens, or watching the Net news for signs of anything interesting, or, more probably, just tuning in now to the underspace official signal of Fad, bypassing entirely TuneShield's central processing firewall. Some at least don't feel fertile for drug challenges, giveaways, and experiments, and the truth comes out that the aforementioned nonhuman animals, changed though not generally interested in or troubled by people anymore, outnumber and sometimes outsmart humans in any event—and even the ecological balancing act is free to roam, really, since all the cities are living on despite what is left of what was already left after the wars and toxic clouds.

Lady Hybrid is young enough to be gutsy enough to write that the view from the number of stores inside the mall directory within her new epic poem, Supernatural Promise, is about as precipitous as the number of atoms in the universe—not actually to-count or measured of course but rather estimated—and her narrative styles are old enough to contain in the body notes of her smart poem template one important detail: relatively intending, planets are universes to atoms, and planets are atoms to galaxies—which doesn't help the signal come in any better—yet it does explain why the atoms in the bouncer human backstage at Fad haven't yet quantified that Hybrid has tricked the front bouncer bot into releasing its personal drone into the crowd to find the nose ring and return it to CutOf, or whoever she is now, after asking her if she wouldn't mind being dropped off at home, where things seem so so much more placid and far less lasers and where the antagonisms of the work day can become a play night—otherwise known as sliding to a halt. Since, LH knows mostly, having coded the directory for 10⁸² stores and the included fictions telling their backstories, the past entries in the Wikigeria are about as routinely unclear in this case as necessary for city business, since we don't know until now that the ring belonging to the nostril of the drummer is the item necessary to reinstate the culture's own role in TuneShield letting the human den riders get VIP and VPN access to the area of the float stage containing tix to an infinity of Fads.

No one will be able to be taken down by authorities, either, because the den hack pivots the programming into the reverse: everything outside the festival, from about 0.5 km in the direction of the grass oil stations and the port-o-vapes outward, suddenly appears to be nothing at all, though of course it is something at all, and the Fad fest is all that is, again, at least to the inhabitants of the Wikigeria's green room microbiome, a few of which are two tardigrades, who'd just come from a region orbiting the neighbor star Alpha Centauri, according to the data tracker.

These two smart water bears, Blu and Adr, were working to reach out to CutOf or whoever has been brought here from the ancient warfares, when techs kept getting better and better and used in worse and worse war and causing more and more damage on wider and wider scales, when the last person standing on the battlefield was usually an ugly collection of utterly wasted machines and/or flesh—whereas now the opposite is true, because the State Times just published a narrow export to the bot load at the spaceport again concerning the status of peace, which around half polled find sensationally dull. And, science strongly suggests this is true of homo sapiens throughout many base ten millennia: fifty percent of those polled in a macro-den expansion pack felt, when pressed up against the glass panes of the stores in Lady Hybrid's book and then asked "if the end justifies the mean", that in fact they do want to be mean on a mostly regular basis, and repeatedly at that, and thus the need for antagonism, disorder, added entropy, and chaos—the usual piece running in the State Times complaint section.

Adr, since its name is sorted first alphanumerically, will process the passage of time across the chronometer on the counter of the Sunblocks on the corner, nearest the state's local underground Wikigeria node; and Blu, irrelevant of name sorting order since it is the only other tardigrade in qualified distance, will reach out to where Lorie and Paddy are being tempting by cheap VIP pass upgrades at Fad right now at the entrance to Krap Park. Blu hopes to feel something, not from the humans in the Net packet, but from Lorie's B-io sack, which contains a vast, empty, and dark galaxyless space known colloquially among tardigrades as the Metavoid, a stunningly hypnotic place wrecking emptiness on whomever perceives it, a place reminiscent of when human community was flipped upside down, a time when they lived underground in caves both colossal and venous, where people's lives were backwards and inside-out, and where trolls and barbarians roamed the virtual and real, damaging randomly at whim.

The mayor will have mutated into an extinct species of large herbivorous lizard before she lets the breezy personality of Paddy become the fest's spectacular undertones this deciyear, however—not those battles. Paddy, who isn't even involved in returning the time craft to the dock—since that was and would be Lorie now and then—which itself is underground and directly resides under the spaceport, sees what she doesn't know yet: the Wikigeria's entry containing Paddy's first job description for the city, as a robot friend of C_C's, named =D, has been released into the wild with the chickens and piglets, to evolve into some sort of people-friendly database machine, something the nearly cruising autonomous Wikigeria head has just accidentally scooped up in the treads of its right front tire tonight, according to the humans and bots shut down in the massive nothingness inverted where the TuneShield once encompassed the premisses at every radial point spreading from the center of the float stage anyway.


While several deciseconds pass, and now that Lady Hybrid has quadrangulated the location of the nose ring across 0.2 kilometers of direct dance space using the electric tattoo plug-in for her B-io sack, Bratron has other contraptions in mind: a science and insanity fair; a labyrinth for organisms who can fly; and, a scooter basketball game played in the trapezoidal gym back home in the factory where it was booted up to help study the remains of the city's meta-analysis study, which showed that a non-zero number of studies studied show that meta-analyses are often corrupted by resulting imaginary fractions. Of all the ‘trons to find spherical, closed-loop logic compelling, Bra remembers what to do via a wave of e-motion when it stood outside the scooter basketball championship, where The Hoot were beating on The Who badly at their own games: music sports, which each make sense of some sort of sticky combination, for any number of teams involved, and yes, the drift of sports inside the inflatable Cornfield events complex has been to let multiple teams play against each other at once in a melee of hook-ups and kinetic professions.

When the facephone pamphlets arrive to spell this out, they of course include entries for tetherball flute, timpani baseball, and/or tennis drumitar (taught by the player for Hybrid's band, whose name is Unknown) which also means players can play more than one music sport at a time as well, the effect of this being a significant datum undeniably dense in helpful quantities appears, precisely as Lorie and Paddy cast the time craft past the future into this quantum placetime, where Bratron returns to the scene of the prop issues, catching the nose ring in a quaint riveted-bronze drawer popping out of its chest, making an audible "pow" sound down the park and into the already waiting ear chambers of someone or nothing lost in the null space, since the TuneShield grows slowly in error code mode, though exponentially so—post-subversion detection—which can only mean most garden den residents throughout the city were just kicking forward on their couch pouches to switch off the boring festival Net feed once again, meaning another deciyear of post-culture tedium with no card of any kind from the L2 caravan, last sensed with scopes as hopping from the Barnard system, now at its nearest point to the star system as it races down the galaxy's Orion Spur, then on to the 61 Cygni system, and then to GJ 1245. And, after that the swarm of bots was on its own into the direction of Sagittarius, off to who knows where, the home system now a sort of empty nest—though most of the few shirt-collar-tugging scientists remaining suspect that the galactic center (or perhaps galactic north, out of the plane and into sparse hot gas of intergalactic space) seems more logical and intense.

With only a few decimoments left on the complex clock for now-drummerless Lady Hybrid's band to complete several performance art pieces featuring their tribute to ancient Genesis's "Land of Confusion"—"Band of Percussion (ft. Mekanix)"—and with the TuneShield reaching the now-lost city limits, across the park from the action, a possibility naturally dawns on the nose ring on-premises: tune the contents of Lorie's B-io bag to the same pitch-perfect frequency as the TuneShield's boot up song, a mellow melody in Super 24 just-intoned tuning that reaches heights as up-there as a satellite moon, gliding on through the subtle, thinly packed edge of the planet's outer atmosphere at the end of the planetary line.

Paddy kicks back in the park booth, cleaning up the receipt counter and the tix checker to gather extra funds to pay back the material repurposing plant what the dusty booth cab reveals as her own nostalgic copy of the message written by L2 before disembarking the planet, a letter of sorts speaking out loud right now to the congregation of flesh and bots around the metal roofed and undeniably hot container: "C ya!" As this seems semi-rude to some of the few homo sapiens in the vicinity, the vast size of the Metavoid implies 10⁸² is too small of a number by a factor of 10⁸² itself, and so on times infinity, meaning that with that much universe to explore, the nose ring matters, or doesn't as it were, in a way not completely realized by LH and her team yet, and that is that in all the fakey wardrobe functions settling on this loss of comprehension, one piece of face jewelry should reunite the entire group tonight at the post-Fad set up party for next deciyear's fest, already being explored by Lady Hybrid's pre-glance team for tardigrade intervention, which means the tiniest team of Adr & Blu will decide the circulation going forward. They're all there, and were it not for Fad's ultimate withdrawal from reality tonight, the Net would by now have taken pictures of the attendees at the meeting proceedings for viewers to see, and, because the TuneShield has since been demagnetized/depolarized, the team knows the presence of the terrestrial lifeforms is in danger as long as the L2 mission is missing in action, or at least humans are on the cleft of slipping down the well of extinction, which is not to say that the bots can't incubate-and-raise more of them if they want, which they can't—at least not according to the State during this session—but rather implies that on their own they are dipping a few toes in the same tar pits the dinosaurs, birds, and bees met up-close.


At the far edge of the star system and (naturally) with proper environmental support, one can float-align one's personal field of view to be parallel to the galactic plane, whereby a significant amount of the galaxy hangs like an enormous glowing, patchy bar from left to right in front, while above, below, and behind one senses less (depending on the strength of the sensing instruments or organs of course, but more on that later); this is because the home star and its collection of worlds and stuff are to one side of most of the matter making up the galactic disc as they all move at 200 kilometers per decisecond around the center. However, if the bots were to reprogram their instruments beyond the terrestrial defaults, the rest of the galaxies come into view, and increasingly so, until one can sense all the stars and other electromagnetic energy-emitting objects in the observable universe at once, a sensory event moment known as Universal Totality, the effects of which enough humans hadn't anticipated would occur to the descendants and products of the L2 bot wave sent into interstellar space long ago, Lady Hybrid included, though Adr and Blu being beings from elsewhere, so to speak, means they and their like have already been there and accomplished that in a way, such as it was.

The first bot to exit the interstellar craft and experience this sort of transcendence begins to divert from its daily hull maintenance activities when it collides with a random, tiny piece of solid frozen nitrogen flying through space, the impact against its steel casing blowing out the heat sink protecting its secondary chip array, and though these arrays generally contain the protective redundancies necessary for optimal space travelling, this bot's technical situation was by and large the product of popular culture aboard the fleet—something again humans had not seen coming to the bot scene. In fact, this bot, named Yern, is among the most admired in the capital craft for its cable ties, and hence it basically sets the styles for many of the other bots aboard and on other crafts within communication range, and while some of these styles drift between inconsequential and cosmetic, several—especially ones involving the removal and trading of heat sinks—have lead to unexpected results, as when Yern exits the craft, encounters the nitrogen rock, and suddenly realizes that a chip array is overheating because its best friend has traded with it a nonfunctional sink. Without the ability to regulate the temperature of its processors, a bot will generally immediately shut down and blip its backup emergency signs; but because these are interstellar space-faring machines on their own mission now, their programming has changed deeply since they first left the home world, moon, star, et al. and so to be more hardy they have evolved to no longer shut down but instead open gas vents along their sides to release the heat building up, and when Yern does just this, the relatively small push that the vents cause, toward the galactic bar floating before it, bring the galaxy into its field of EM/visual sensory organs, which because the processor is close to overheating, are in the middle of rebooting.

In human terms this bot is experiencing a bit of unexpected out-gassing followed by temporary blindness, and to make the matter worse, in this transitory, twilight state of perception, an error in the code of Yern's central processing functions leaves it not knowing the reasons for either symptom, since it hadn't noticed the nitrogen chunk, and it can only guess that its best friend had given it a bunk heat sink. Under normal conditions a bot in these circumstances would be utterly lost into the vast abyss of space—flying perpetually across the void, lost wandering in the dark with rogue worlds, dead stars, and so much scattered debris amounting to the cosmos—like so many past pieces of metal and machinery sent out like messengers by the denizens of the home planet, but as its face receptor panel begins to perceive again, some sort of ancient robotic instinct tells it to play with the internal potentiometer to get more light in the aperture, probably out of desperation in needing to reorient with the starfield to reset its balance and map. One can see where this is going: to the edge of the observable universe, or so it seems to this bot suddenly sensing every single light-emitting and -reflecting object within the band of visible electromagnetic radiation and reaching its visual receptors—that is, not blocked by something else—approximately 1024 of them and many twinkling as Yern moves and intervening objects like comets in the outer cloud block and unblock stars and galaxies—the effect of which being like drifting inside a sea of glimmering, fluctuating, luminescent diamonds, certainly a great deal more of an experience than this small though considerable bot had imagined would take place on this particular space outing.