''Do you know where I can get some Syrian Rue?'' asks a young house girl named Mimi, pulling me out of my trance and into another. I recognize her from other house events; this makes her part of our posse. Her face is soft and young – almost supernaturally so. It's as if she isn't a regular human being but an extremely human being. Her eyes are large and clear, almost like a Disney character's. ... Then it hits me! She's a toon! She's a soft and squishy new evolved being! The iterations have created a new human. I produce the coveted capsule from my shirt pocket and hand it to her. She pops it in her mouth and washes it down with a choline drink, then hops back out onto the dance floor. It's not as if I could have asked her to dance. One doesn't dance with someone. One just dances. No purpose. No agenda.
A smell like flowers. From where? Lavender water. Who? Earth Girl! She's arrived with her Smart Bar and has already set up. At her side is Galactic Greg, one of her brightly clad bartenders. Earth Girl embraces me as if recognizing me from lifetimes before this one, and pours me a complimentary Cybertonic. It nicely washes down the L-pyroglutamate I had earlier. I offer her one of my two remaining Syrian Rue capsules, but Lila Mellow-Whipkit, in drag this evening, stops her from accepting: ''You've got to be careful with MAO inhibitors.'' Meanwhile, Galactic Greg begins explaining his own and Earth Girl's mission:
''Earth Girl, Galactic Greg, Psychic Sarah, Disco Denise, Audrey Latina, Computer Guy, and his assistant Dynama. We all make up the Foxy Seven, and we are environmental crime fighters. And performers. Our performances are rituals to augment our psychic powers, and then in return we use our psychic powers to help change the world. We are building the infrastructure right now. Everything's all happening so rapidly and really naturally. All these people in the infrastructure are coming together like a big family reunion – all the star-seeded children.''
I'm not sure how seriously to take Galactic Greg, for whom metaphor and reality seem to have merged. I wonder if he realizes that this will be the Foxy Seven's last night at Toon Town. Earth Girl has already made her deal with Big Heart City, and Mark Heley has already signed contracts with Chris for the new and improved Nutrient Cafe.
But right now none of that seems to matter. Toon Town is in absolutely full swing, and not even the apocalypse could break the spell of the technoshamanic trance. I work my way up to the laser controls, where I find Mark and one of his assistants dancing as they furiously pound the consoles. They are one with the technology. Just at the moment that Jno, who is now the DJ, shifts from a hard, agro, techno sound to a broad, airy, feminine, ambient one, the laser transforms from a sharp-edged flurry into a large hollow tunnel cut through the fog in the room. All hands on the dance floor are raised. Another sixteen bars of techno layered with tribal rhythms begins the 120-beat-per-minute drone once again, drawing in anyone who hasn't already reached the dance floor. Screams and whoops. Whistles blowing. Chanting. We're at the peak. Whatever it is that goes on at a house party that everyone talks about later is happening now.
Mark has the uncanny ability to articulate the event as it occurs, but the din requires that he shout, and his Oxbridge elocution gives way to a more urban, East End accent.
''It's a transposition of the fractal/harmonic. Every Toon Town is a psychedelic event. We're the transition team. It's like a Mayan temple, and acts as a relay station. An antenna. It's a harmonic thing – beaming out something. It's a landing beacon for starships. We are trying to attract something down. Through time, toward us.''
Hands continue to reach into the air, and dancers look up at the ceiling ... or past the ceiling. Are they looking for the UFOs? Do they somehow hear what Mark is saying? The music shifts back and forth between a familiar ''garage'' house sound to an amazingly dense assemblage of electronic orchestral thrusts.
''Every new piece of house music is another clue. A new strand of the DNA pattern. A new piece of information. We need to create a synchronization wave for the planet. House is synchronic engineering.''
Mark is referring to a recently revived Mayan idea that the planet, in the year 2012, will have passed through the galactic time wave of history. Time itself will end as the planet moves up to a new plane of reality.
The weird orchestral sound gives way to a more ambient passage. A few dancers leave the floor and head to the Smart Bar. Others browse the clothing boutique and bookshop that Diana has set up.
''Media viruses work at the same level. Smart drugs, life extension, house, acid, and VR most importantly exist in people's imaginations. This is a clue. Mayan mathematics just came into existence and disappeared. We're in the endgame. This is postapocalyptic. We're living under the mushroom cloud. Being busted at precisely 11:30 last week. It was a group sacrifice – just like the Mayans.''
Mark's assistant nudges him to play with the laser a little more. The crowd is getting hyped again, and Jno, accordingly, is playing more ''agro'' beats.
''I consider myself to be more of a technoshaman now than when I was DJing. You don't need to be the one controlling the decks. There's a feedback energy loop going on between the people there – it's just a mind thing. The DJs that we work with are just tuned in to these frequencies. You can influence the fractal pattern at a different vortex, a different corner.''
We look down at the sea of bodies. The pattern their bright clothes makes on the floor looks something like one of the fractals being projected onto the wall. Look closer and the pattern repeats itself in the movements of individual dancers' bodies, then again in the patterns printed on their T-shirts. The boy in the VR television loop discovers the torus in Bryan's demo tour. The whole screen turns to cosmic stars. The dancers respond. The DJ responds. The lasers respond. The pattern iterates, feeds back, absorbs, adjusts, and feeds back again. Heley translates:
''At a house event, the dance floor is really a very complex fractal pattern, consisting of the entirety of all the people there, and their second-to-second interactions, and everyone is influencing everyone else in a really interesting way. A really nonverbal way. You can just be yourself, but you can redefine yourself, moment to moment. That's the essence of the dance.''
Juno takes off his headphones for a moment and stares at the crowd. Rather than look for another record or adjust the control of the mix, he closes his eyes and begins to dance, flailing his arms in the air.
''Juno just tunes in to the frequency that's already there and reiterates it. He is anticipating the energy changes before they happen, not because he's tuned in to the records, but because he's tuned in to a sort of psychic template which exists above the people that are there and unifies them. It's the transpersonal essence of what's going on.''
Mark has described the house version of Bohm's laws of the implicate and explicate order. The dance floor is the explicate order, and the DJ is the link from the dancers to their implicate whole. They only think they are separate goldfish because they experience life in old-fashioned space-time. Through the iterated and reiterated samples of music, they regain access to the experience of total unification. It is religious bliss. All is one. And, of course, this realization occurs simultaneously on many levels of consciousness.
''Everything is important,'' Mark continues. "The Ecstasy, the lights, even the configuration of the planets. The dance is a holistic experience. You're there in your totality, so duality is irrelevant. It's where your body is mind. It's a question of reintegration. You dance yourself back into your body. It's got a lot to do with self-acceptance. There's no level of separation as there is in words, when there's always a linguistic separation between subject and objects. The song is the meaning. It lets you avoid a lot of the semantic loops that tie people in to things like career, and other fictional ghosts that are generated by our society for the purpose of mass control. It's a different frequency that you tune in to when you dance than the one that's generally broadcast by TV shows, the media, politics.''