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State Jam

By P. X. Amphlett

I ditch the bike in long grass by the old railway tracks and start to work my wayunder the rusting wire. Nearly there .This is insane . This is insane.The ancient concrete under my hands is fractured by green lines of moss, erupting

through the cracks, dusted gold by the glancing light.No: stay focused on the spaces between the beats. Gaps in the fences, holes in the

programming. Thats where you can still think for yourself, where the structure isweakest.I know I only feel this scared because the music is so loud. What wouldnt I give to

be free of this constant geometric noise, pouring through my head, filling my bones,twisting my emotional responses to force me into entrainment?

That was what they asked me at the last state jam:Would you be prepared to risk your life for the possibility, however remote, thateveryone could freely create their own music?Everyone?-Honestly? It seemed like a good trade.

So thats why Im here, at five-thirty a.m, redshifting from Yare and wired on coffeeand adrenaline, making my way to some derelict power station on the outskirts of anunfamiliar city: to deliver a cure for the plague.See, the whisper is, someone has found a way to drown the Imposition for good.

Im too young to remember. What I know of the times before the Imposition is a patchwork of fragments picked up here and there, usually from the older jammers,their recall often jumbled by the perpetual straitjacket of the Impositions music ontheir own thought-processes.

Sunlight hits me full in the face as I rise to a crouch in the knee-deep weeds, the

power station a looming angular cutout before me, outline softened by the raggedembrace of ivy.I glance back across the tracks and abandoned industrial sheds toward the city. It

looks peaceful from here; not pretty, but theres something about first light in theautumn that can redeem even the ugliest skyline.

People used to choose the music they listened to The demand for music was sogreat it became a huge industry. Technology, driven by the vast amounts of money inmusical media, worked like a demon to give the people what they wanted, or whatthey thought they wanted.What they got was DNI.

I reach for the hundredth time for the memory bead on the necklace I was given. Still

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there. Looks like some kind of seed; a rough sphere of gnarled, dark hardwood withno discernible ports, surprisingly heavy but otherwise outwardly just a bead.

Lose this; I kill you myself, said the old jammer when he handed it over. For a splitsecond I thought he was joking.

This is the only copy , you understand? No second chances. You deliver it intact, or you die trying.I nodded mutely. Me and the code: fates of flesh and circuitry entwined.

Nothing moving but the grass in the breeze The damned music gets subtly louder.Its grating, but Im used to it; as long as I think in the gaps I wont create the kind of disturbance in the field thatd provoke a crescendo.

Direct Neural Interface, when it arrived, changed everything overnight. Heres why:it was cheap. Too cheap . Too good to be true . So obvious in retrospectDNI was cheap because it was part-funded by the government. Pusher tactics. So

cheap, so easy, so clean that even the invasive nature of the hardware graft wasreadily embraced by a culture addicted to novel kicks, a population to whom surgical

body-modification had become banal.All it takes is five minutes, and your intertat is done. Nanotech ink, a black soup of

bots and bits, tattooed by computer into the skin of the scalp under short-acting local.The characteristic labyrinthine glyph visible on the head of every balding man is

more than skin deep. What you see is just the aerial; the nano grows circuitry into andthrough the skull and merges with your auditory cortex. Powered by your own wetelectrics, the intertat collects information from the aether, decodes it and feeds itdirect to your minds ear.A technological symbiote or perhaps a parasite.

A cloud of midges hangs backlit in the still air, a chaotic network of shining motes.Every few seconds a wave ripples through the whole organism, each individual aglowing, vibrating jewel suspended in an invisible liquid medium and subject to itstides

With the intertat you got audio internet access on the go, and free telephone calls, butit was music that really sold it. Music!Your favourite tunes, direct into your auditory centres:

Loud as you want, and no hearing damage! went the ads. You could still hear a

real-world conversation while your whole head was filled to bursting with the musicof your choice.The updates exploded onto the scene almost immediately.

The hardware came in the form of an injection; more nanotech, this time a fleet of tiny monitors that attached to your heart and lungs and digestive and endocrinesystems

Its so still So quiet, outside Yet the music fills my head without moving the air,riding a higher order of vibration than sound, carried to me in a code to be read andsung by an orchestra of demons: my own neurons enslaved by a remote conductor andforced to play in time.

The new software utilised a synergy of biofeedback and neural network learning. It

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could read your emotional state via the nano monitors, transform it into music, and play it back direct to your auditory centres, all the while monitoring your reactions towhat it played, honing its own responses to fit exactly what you liked.Imagine it: your own personal soundtrack, the perfect music for you, for now,

whenever you wanted it.

People wanted it all the time . People stopped turning it off. It was simply better thananything else I mean- if you can have tailored clothes, why buy off-the-peg?

The grass in the vacant lot in front of the power station shines, frosted with amillion tiny spiderwebs. Autumn turns, new organisms emerge from the soil, andsuddenly the whole field is transformed, a single silken membrane vibrating in the

breeze

There is a problem , said the government. Their own studies, they explained,simulations run on vastly powerful computers, had shown that certain keys, certain

beat structures and chord progressions, were harmful to the human organism, thatlistening to them reinforced thought-patterns that could lead to paranoia, psychosis,schizophrenia, violence, even physical disease.The Key Mandate was introduced. New legislation to set boundaries on permissible

musical forms. Some musical patterns were to be declared illegal So obviously impossible to enforce was it, given the vast numbers of people who

must be monitored constantly, that for a few months the Key Mandate was a standing jokeright up until the state delivered the real punchline: the Imposition. If it werent for the incessant music, my mood would surely fit this place and time

better- a place to bask, to absorb the quiet, a place to come to rest, to be , in my ownskin. Instead, it feels like Im radiating tension into the silence, my body aloudspeaker broadcasting the mood of the music; music too harsh, too strident-carelessly unaware of its incongruity with the local environment.Through me, the Imposition leaks out into the world. As long as I am filled with

these melodies, they shape my feelings and thoughts, and so my actions the patternsclimb up through me to impose themselves on my surroundings.I am a carrier, a vessel for a message that is not my own.

The Government announced that, for the benefit of all citizens, it would now becomethe arbiter of musical choice: The state-owned feedback and composition algorithms

were vastly more powerful than any cranial software, and could predict statisticallywhat patterns would generate the mood most suited to the task at hand.Of course, to ensure the efficient Imposition of the state patterns, the intertat -once

the must-have accessory for every rebellious teenager- was now required by law to begrafted at puberty, to ensure a smooth transition through this difficult phase of life.In this way the state could circumvent the need to monitor every citizens compliance

with the Key Mandate simply by broadcasting its own music at high amplitude. Theyrealised that all you needed was a way of detecting an unacceptable level of dissonance at the receiver end -a sure sign of internal resistance to the pattern beingimposed on the subject- and then prompt the receiver software to increase the volumeof the broadcast signal until the subjects own patterns were swamped.

Ahh, no not now, not yet! Here it comes. Hold tight. Breathe . Flow.

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The music swells to fill my head. I must be causing detectable dissonance just byremembering this stuff, even at such high resolution.We chose the old power station partly because there are so few signal boosters in the

area. Still loud enough to hurt, though. Its like the mental equivalent of trying toswim against a powerful current, resisting such high-amplitude patterns.

Got to keep my head straight: South entrance, second floor, door with a blue handle. Focus on the now. Focus on the gaps. Think smooth, think fast.

There are two simple ways to raise the energy of a waveform. Most obvious is toincrease the amplitude. This translates to an increase in volume in your ears, in your head. The preferred approach of the state; always has been.You dont like what were saying? Well shout it louder, over and over and over again, until you acquiesceThe other way is to increase the frequency. This translates into an increase in

tempo or pitch an increase in detail . This is what we do: the jammers. We floodthe gaps with high-frequency harmonics, and ride them. There are always gaps.Between any two beats, between any two wave peaks, there are gaping holes in themusic, if only you can drive your nervous system high enough

I take the last ampuole out of my sock. Metallic black hourglass, an inch long. I putthe narrow centre in my mouth, close my lips around it gently and bend the ends awayfrom me.Crack .It tastes of rose petals.

And all at once Im shifting up into the indigo shine; the flood of music I wasdrowning in moments before now beneath me, my mind small enough to ride on thesurface tension.

I take a lot of Yare. All the jammers do.Three things always go together: Yare, state jamming, and free running. You jam,

you better not just think fast, you better be able to run , because sooner rather thanlater the copsll tune in on the dissonance knot and come to shut you down.Yare isnt like caffeine or speed: theyre crude metabolic accelerants. Yare blueshifts

your higher mental functions without touching your metabolism. Anything else wouldalert the monitors.Nobody knows how it works, or where it comes from: the molecular structure

disintegrates catastrophically on exposure to light; in seconds all youre left with is a

colourless, jumbled organic soup. The stuff is impossible to trace, in or outside the body: I mean how can you look for something if you dont know what it is yourelooking for?One thing we do know: it works, beautifully. Wave glazing , they call it. An extra

layer of cognitive processing, like a virtual neocortex, a harmonic halo.Picture your mind in its baseline state as an ocean. Yare gives every wave a thin

iridescent sheen, and then the whole sea darkens and expands around you until thesheen itself is deep enough to swim in. You think in the overtones.With Yare, everything else slows down including the music. Blueshift enough, and

the seconds yawn open; you drop into the spaces as the bass falls right through thefloor, sublimates into rhythm. High notes melt and soften, sawtooth waves blunt and

expand.

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Right now Im shifted about as far as Ive ever been. I probably have the temporalresolution of a hoverfly; a blackbird singing in the distance sounds like whalesong.

A state jam is a gathering of dissidents, a temporary knot of glorious, fluiddissonance in the otherwise uniform harmonic pattern of the Imposed field.

Two things make jamming possible: pirate software, and Yare.The software allows your intertat to tune in and listen to the signal signatures of

others in the immediate vicinity, but at octaves far above the operational frequenciesof the musical field, or the frequencies of ordinary brainwaves.Yare allows us to think, and so play, fast enough to match those frequencies.So, you get a bunch of the right people together and all shift into the blue, and

suddenly youre plunged into a sea of noise, each jammer broadcasting their own psychophysical state encoded as unique patterns, keys and rhythms, freed for a few precious minutes from the constraints of the Imposition.

Its disorienting at first: the whole soundworld melts, and with it, your sense of context. Most peoples first instinct is to retreat into fear. That can freeze a jam- if one or two people freak out, the loud, chaotic state they broadcast feeds back aroundthe group and drives everyone into a tightening spiral of raw animal panic. Not

pretty The dissonance knots created by such accidents are so bright that the copshome in and swing down in minutes to find a bunch of mewling kittens in place of

people, too terrified to even think , let alone run away.

I look at my watch. Twenty to six. Twenty minutes to zero hour. Hundreds of thousands of jammers, if the whispers are true, all ready and waiting to blueshift atonce and tune into a new signal. The jam to end all jams The jam to begin alljams. But only if I deliver the code.Deliver the code .

No more wasting time.I rise to a stoop and break into a run, painfully conscious of how exposed I am, each

moment of vulnerability stretched out and divided into sub-moments, each sub-moment itself iridescent with fine-sliced time.I head to the right, and as I pass into the shadow of the power station Im so blue it

feels like diffusing across a membrane: the sunlight darkens gradually as I hurtleacross the penumbra, and then I am enfolded in a pool of thirsty turquoise space,drinking heat from my body.The main entrance doors are welded shut, but theres a first-floor window with a

couple of panes missing, and the walls of the building are a cascade of ivy and

creepers. I angle my run toward the wall and leap upward, clawing at the ivy until Ican grab the window sill and then scramble up. The wooden frame, grey and rotten,red paint crazed and peeling, gives way in my hands- I almost fall, scrabblingfrantically, then gain purchase on the corner of the wall inside and pull myself through

So, the Jammers are careful. You learn to build up your tolerance for discord slowly:what was once noise becomes assimilated and understood as signal of some kind;what was once experienced as painful becomes merely complicated.Entering a jam with this hard-won tolerance, the jammers begin to entrain to each

others patterns. Discord strobes through the group like waves, then all at once the

magic happens: the whole thing collapses into harmony. A single, unified organism.One mind. It feels like state of grace; for a while, its impossible to play a note wrong,

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a beat out of time.State Jam : the name is both a nod to the instrumental jam sessions from the times

when musical instruments were still legal, and a reference to the fact that weretemporarily jamming the states signal: drowning out the Imposition with our ownfragile harmonic field.

A vial of Yare lasts about fifteen minutes, by normal reckoning. That equates toabout four hours thinking time, in deep blue. The euphoria of a good jam sometimesoutweighs good sense, and then, well when the Yare wears off, you redshift nearlyas fast as you blued, and thats when the Imposed music rushes back up to surroundyou. Fresh from the jam, feeling free and fluid and alive, youre all still broadcasting

your own key .A dissonance knot twists into being as the jam interferes with the State signal: an

unmistakable beacon. The monitors squeal, the cops zero in. Then, you run .

I fall to the floor behind the window, a tiled corridor littered with pigeon shit anddry leaves. A long, long moments pause in the stillness-Nothing. Nothing but the music, still kept distant and deep by the blueshift.I crawl until Im well away from the window, carefully avoiding shards of broken

glass, then make my way quietly along the corridor in search of a way up to thesecond floor.Yellow light comes in slantwise through the green-wreathed windows, the whole

space immersed in a submarine gloom.I turn a corner and there is the staircase, a frozen spiral avalanche of dusty yellowing

papers, two feet deep in places. It looks as though someone emptied every filingcabinet in the place into this one stairwell as some kind of farewell gesture.Climbing it is like ascending a slope of soft slate, layers of sheets as likely to slide

underfoot as bear my weight.The second-floor corridor is a replica of the first, but somewhat more overgrown.

Floor covered in dust, in places the ivy pouring in through the broken windows anddown the walls, forming snaking pools of green that spread slowly across the floor.I picture the whole building gradually succumbing to this slow caress, imagine

redshifting way below baseline so the days pass like seconds and the ivy is a furious,writhing explosion that reaches up out of the earth to wrap and digest the oldstructure, hard lines blurring, signal degrading into static, seeping away to merge withthe microwave background.Do buildings dream as they unwind? Like fading songs in a forest, echoes becoming

confused as they are coiled around the surroundings architecture bleeding

memories as it decays. If only you could tune in on the right frequency Snap out of it.There along the hallway blue handle the door half off its hinges, frame filled

with shadow.As I approach the doorway, the music in my ears starts to fade for the first time I can

remember. Its not the Yare -Im rapidly shifting back to baseline- and anyway, thisisnt a frequency shift: its actually getting quieter in my head; at any other time thiswould be more than welcome, but given the circumstances I find it more than a littledisconcerting.Crossing the threshold, the hairs rise on the back of my neck as the music dwindles to

a barely audible murmur; distant echoing voices, a vague recollection of commands

once heard and obeyed, now receding into obscurity.Inside the room the light is even dimmer, and I have to stop once Im just beyond the

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door to let my eyes adjust.From the way sound is reflected it feels like a large space, but the small, high

windows are so choked with vegetation that the far end of the room is cloaked indarkness.I peer into the gloom and immediately catch my breath: two eyes suddenly appear,

hanging in the air right in front of me. I take an involuntary step back as the shadowsfold into form and emerge into the halflight of the hall.Shes a hole cut in the world.

I mean, I never saw skin so black.Taller than me, impossibly curved, and the way she moves languid inevitability,like ink in water.Halo.Her voice is burnt orange.I cant look away. Beauty like this could be used as a weapon.Her head leans to one side:You were expecting someone else?Um, no, I, er, I meanShe smiles. I can feel my rational mind collapsing.Whats your tag, child? Gently, amused.I take a deep breath, let it out slowly.Vector.Her delighted laugh, deep and clear, hits the resonant frequency of the room; theechoes glow.Perfect.She holds out her left hand. A silver ring on the thumb in the shape of a snake, withthe head pointing towards her.Kun. Smiling again. They say Im a good listener.I offer my own hand. Hers is like cool, smooth leather.I look her straight in the eye and immediately feel like Im drowning.I -I can barely hear the musicIm acting as a sink. The signals earthed through me: it always takes the path of least resistance. To the remote monitors, this place registers no dissonancewhatsoever- its empty.I have no idea what kind of hardware she must be incubating to pull something like

that -you cant just drain signal out of the aether altogether, no matter how powerfulthe receiver, no matter what kind of aerial you use; it just doesnt work like that.Does it?

Just deliver the package, moron.I take off the necklace with the memory bead, hold it out.Are you -are you the designer? The one who wrote this?White smile.No. Im only one half of the brain. I dont really do linear language Moreshapes and patterns. Feelings. Im the mother of this baby. She takes the necklacegently as she speaks, cradling the memory bead. In the green light, even her palmslook black.Like all children, this little demon was born from a meeting: A whole army of code-freaks did the programming, each working independently to avoid the authorities,each coming up with original fragments of pattern. Im the hub. They come to me

with the code; I accept or reject it according to how well the patterns mould to myinternal landscape.

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I have a brief, vivid flash of rivulets of molten silver running along folds in black velvet. I have to shake my head to dislodge it.Its like being surrounded by suitors, all vying for their chance to share in fatheringthis origynasm .Her laughter licks the walls like candlelight.

This program was evolved , not built.But thats How do you know itll work ?I know. For intuition to function as a tool, it must be trusted .What I mean is; have you, er, evolved anything else this way? Anything functional?Its the same approach we used to develop Yare.You?Yare isnt a drug. Its a demon: a systems upgrade for the human central nervoussystem. Hardware and software combined in a single package; a viral carrier,suspended within a cellular nutrient solution, that builds and binds to each synapse atiny shaped crystal, a miniature transceiver. Neural impulses are no longer limited bythe speed of chemical waves; instead the whole brain becomes a field of nodesvibrating at quartz frequencies. Your own miniature internal radio network- theharmonic overtones of thought.In a flash, I see thought stacked within thought, each thought a ripple in a fractal

waveform, the detail going on forever as I fall endlessly toward the wave yet never reach it, and I reel, recoiling from my own depths with a kind of internal vertigo. Holy Who are you?Her eyes flash.Im the soil after the first rain. And this she says, removing the memory beadfrom its necklace and holding it between finger and thumb in front of me this is aseed that will regenerate an entire ecosystem.I watch incredulous as, in one quick movement, she puts the bead into her mouth and

swallows it.What the-?Again, that inscrutable smile.Dont fret, little one; its uploading as we speak: the final update. Until now, state

jamming has been a temporary, local phenomenon, interactions with other jammersconstrained to a tiny radius: ones immediate environment can be transformed for ashort while, only to be crushed and smoothed over by the Imposition once the Yarewears offThis last update will allow you to go global . The music you hear through the intertatis transmitted and received as radio signals, remember: your responsiveness isnt

limited to the speed of sound waves in air, or by the distance sound waves will travel,so really theres no reason why you cant play with people far beyond earshot.The software will link all the intertats together to form an aether loom -a huge

parallel-processing network that, if it has enough nodes, will easily outperform andoverpower any of the states hardware.I only hope there are enough nodes enough jammers blueshifted and ready to

tune in when the updates finally online.I picture the unbridled chaos of so many free signals all vibrating simultaneously.But isnt that a recipe for disaster? I mean, its hard enough dealing with the

dissonance of a handful of people without cracking up the idea of thousands of jammers all suddenly linked wont we all just go nuts?

The first astronauts suffered from what was known as space sickness- a strangegeneralised disorientation that turned out to be a reaction to being uprooted from the

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bioelectrical context of the Earths magnetic field.We need a root note to set the key: the update reads the fundamental frequency of the Schumann Resonance -the Earths electromagnetic field pulse- and transforms itinto a bass drone against which all other notes can tune themselves. If you ever feellost, you only have reach down and touch it: fall into tune with the deepest note you

can find. Entrain with the planet itself.She closes her eyes. Ah almost there

I cant imagine what kind of grafts she has installed -she must be a walking net server.I check my watch. Two minutes to six.She lets out a small sigh, opens her eyes again and holds out her left hand in a fist,

palm down. The silver serpent shines against the jet black skin.Youll be needing this.I put out my hand to receive a metallic black hourglass.What about you?I dont need Yare Quickly , now.Fumbling, I crack the ampuole and take a deep breath as the shift takes hold againNow, listen !I close my eyes and wait.The Impositions music, already distant, drops below the threshold of my hearing.

Nothing.Then, a murmur, flickering lightly at the fringes of my perception, like a gentle

breeze ruffling my hairThe murmur grows, swells, dilates into a sudden roar, cacophonous, blazing with

interference and distortion. Its sickening, and I feel bile rise in my throat, my body beginning to protest at the hypercomplex waveforms running through my system.

Each note is a taut silver wire, a thread of data in a web so tangled it hurts my mindto contemplate. I feel like Im being pulled apart, torn to my component frequencies

by some vast informational stormAnd then, rising beneath it all, a slow pulse, a tone. The root note. A dark velvet

wave, tidal, irresistibly powerful, pulling all other frequencies into resonance.Suddenly, huge sections of the web of silver notes begin to shiver and thrash: whatwere harmonic centres moments before start to uncoil into screaming dissonance andfade.I realise in a flash what they must be: the patterns of the Imposition, suddenly thrown

out of tune with a deeper, more compelling key, now becoming dissonance knotsthemselves, and being subsumed and assimilated by the new field.I concentrate on the lowest note, the deepest context, tune in and surrender .

Instantly all noise disappears. Im a ribbon of molten silver, flowing through thevalleys of a writhing black landscape, a million other ribbons all interweaving aroundme in patterns never heard before except, perhaps, in dreams. And the landscapeitself, the velvet drone: Ive never heard a note so rich like the ringing of a great

bronze bell, deep, deep underwaterAnd as I swim in the flickering shoal of quicksilver, the drone itself begins to

blossom and unfold, new harmonics peeling from the abyss as it opens endlessly, eachovertone a droplet flung from a humming flywheel the size of a world, a bright motethrown onward and around as the centre opens, and opens and opens The starsscreech as they are dragged across the night sky, but the axis is empty. We are acorona worn by the void.

Silver rain falls forever toward the night

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A white tree, hammered through the sky

Happy Birthday, everyone .

Glowing cracks spread into creases, into valleys, made of valleys, the whole dividedwithout limit, every division yielding a new lacuna, within which lies the whole,intact.

There is so much space here

And the root note sings on unceasingly, the mother of all frequencies, bubbling upfrom the depths like joy, like the sound of laughter, deep and clear

Halo, my children

I know that voice

Welcome Home.

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