It was Judgement Day rewritten by some Bible Belt Chamber of Commerce. TV still worked, and nobody needed the mark of the beast to buy and sell, let alone to give and receive tax-deductible donations. Mainstream churches issued cautious statements which said, in so many words, that the scientists were probably right, but their pews emptied, and the salvation-for-money trade boomed.
Apart from post-Bubble splinter groups of established religions, thousands of brand-new cults appeared—most of them organized on the sound commercial lines pioneered by twentieth-century religious entrepreneurs. But while the opportunists prospered, the real psychotics were festering. It took twenty years for the Children of the Abyss to make themselves known, but then, being born of the Abyss—on or after Bubble Day—was a prerequisite of membership. They started out, in 2054, by poisoning the water supply of a small town in Maine, killing more than three thousand people. Today, they’re active in forty-seven countries, and they’ve claimed almost a hundred thousand lives. Marcus Duprey, their founder and chief self-fulfilling prophet, spews out an incoherent stream of half-digested cabbalistic gibberish and comic-book eschatology, but there are, apparently, thousands of people brain-fucked in just the right way to find his every word resonant with truth.
It was bad enough when they blew up buildings at random, because ‘this is the Age of Mayhem’, but since Duprey and seventeen other Children have been in prison, many of his followers have come to see his release as their ultimate purpose—and with a tangible (if unattainable) goal to focus their efforts, everything has escalated. It makes no difference what I think, but some nights the question spins in my head for hours. I don’t wish they’d set him free. I do wish they’d never caught him.
Mental illness wasn’t confined to the millenarians; for the secular, there was Bubble Fever, an hysterical, disabling, ‘claustrophobic’ reaction to the thought of being ‘trapped’ in a volume eight trillion times that of the Earth. These days, it seems almost laughable—as quaint as some spurious nineteenth-century upper-class affliction—but millions of people succumbed in the first year. It struck in almost every country, and health officials predicted it would cost the world economy more than AIDS. Within five years, though, the number of cases had plummeted.
Wars and revolutions around the globe have been blamed on The Bubble—although I wonder how anyone can claim to be able to untangle its destabilizing effects from those of poverty, debt, climate change, famine and pollution—and the religious fanaticism that would have been present, regardless. I’ve read that in the early days, people spoke seriously of civilization ‘crumbling’, of the coming of a new Dark Age. Such talk soon died away—but even now, I can never quite decide whether I find it miraculous, or inevitable, that the cultural shock waves have been so mild. The Bubble changes everything: it proves the existence of aliens with God-like powers, aliens who have imprisoned us without warning or explanation—and cheated us of our destiny in the universe. The Bubble changes nothing: the aliens are aloof and inconsequential, the stars are irrelevant to human needs; the sun still shines, crops still grow, the life of this planet goes on as ever—and there are worlds within our reach to be explored for millennia.
In the early fifties, it was ‘common knowledge’—for no obvious reason—that the Bubble Makers were about to introduce themselves and justify everything; alien-contact cults flourished, UFO hoaxes reached absurd levels, but as the years wore on in silence, hopes of so much as a curt explanation for our state of quarantine faded away.
I no longer even wonder, why? After thirty-three years of listening to people rant their unlikely hypotheses, nothing could matter to me less. (Granted, the thing killed my wife, indirectly—but then, indirectly, so did I.)
As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we’ve lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.
Bella, as always, delivers on time. I download the records into CypherClerk’s generous intracranial buffers, and I’m on the verge of transferring them to my desktop terminal when, in a moment of caution, or paranoia, I change my mind and decide to keep the data in my skull, for now.
I’m tired, but it’s barely after nine. I don’t want to sleep, but the prospect of ploughing through the Hilgemann’s records strikes me as unbearably tedious.
I invoke Backroom Worker (Axon, $499) and guide it through what I want done with each name: first, check my own natural memory for any associations (after all, the chances are that the next of kin of anyone worth kidnapping will be a public figure to some degree); then contact the Credit Reference System, obtain current financial details, and append them to the record. I think of triggering notification if the assets cross a threshold value, but I can’t be bothered deciding on a figure, and in any case, when the whole thing is done, I can rank everyone by net worth. I instruct the mod to interrupt me only if it comes across a name I know.
I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, ‘Paradise’ by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time and the audio system’s serial number.
Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the recompose button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.
I’ve run ‘Paradise’ about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as ‘giving rise to’ more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.
I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme—but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.