GEO-CHIP log> ISRAEL / DEC, 2031/ 11:11 PM/ THE WEST BANK> Assuming the receiver is initialized and turned on, press MNU, select "SETUP MENU", then select "COORD SYSTEM". For using the Israel Grid, select "USER GRID" and enter the following data: LAT OF ORIGIN 31.73409N / LON OF ORIGIN 035.21206E
“MOOSIKA! MOOSIKA! I want more music, crank it up!” Bridges says with a smile, licking the dopamine-flavored wax strip on the papers between her fingers, Mayan glyphs smart painted on her fingernails as she rolls a phat one to perfection. “The last time I heard this track was in June, at that Solstice party in Australia, out in the desert. Crazy feral motherfuckers, it was just like that movie, you know Mad Mack...”
She lights the joint and breathes in deeply, long wax perfect dreads dyed red and blue and black spilling down past her shoulders as she tilts her head back and laughs. “...Until the oil ran out and the movie became real. All those old sci-fi movies, have you noticed? They’re all coming true. All of them. This is such a fucking crazy time to be alive!”
The veggie-oil and solar powered van swerves around a large shell crater in the road and everyone lurches roughly to the right, scattering firesticks, drums and teepee poles all around the back of the van. Holes up the battered desert road like a string of pearls on the surface of the moon.
“Ben-Zone-Nah,” Oshri cries from the back, taking the joint as she passes it to him. “This road is a deathtrap, sister, turn on the GPS guidance control system before you kill us all with your driving, or head back to Tel Aviv where it’s safe!” He’s decked out in loud superhero ravewear like he’s just come from one of the blue light Day-Clubs, blue spikey hair and glow sticks and neon piping along the contours of his chest and trailing down to his pants.
“Mah? Nowhere is safe anymore, Oshri, don’t believe the NATO hype! And the Americans own the satellites that run the GPS system, you idiot – if we turn it on, they’ll be able to track us like lab rats in their globalized trap!”
Idan’s dressed in the latest full body enviro-suit that automatically adjusts body temperature and sweat and recycles moisture and urine back through micro-filters, making it safe for re-drinking. The suits are regulation Israeli Army wear and highly coveted by desert doofers for long sessions dancing at festivals every full moon. They also look damn funky.
“Chill. Don’t be so hard on Oshri, Idan, this is his first outdoor party – don’t ruin it for him!” Bridges says, breaking into the groovy as the track scratches some pounding 4/4 bass and loops into a hard combatrance anthem, sampled sounds of war remastered into the dance.
Oshi hands him the joint and Idan runs a licked finger along one burning seam where it’s come unraveled. His sharp, angular face breaks out in a smile. He has piercing, black eyes, master of the art of being genuine, being here, now.
“The people have their own Network, Oshi. Freeware, open-source, wireless 802.11b distributed and only 42 lines of code. Welcome to the Tekno Renegades.”
He holds out a pink crystal CHIP and Oshi reaches out for it gingerly, eyes wide open behind his i-Visor wraparound videoscreens. Idan jacks his CHIP into the dataport behind his ear and Oshi follows suit, green eyes glazing over with high bandwidth wireless data ...
GEO-CHIP log> LOAD> M-PARTY data for the Nu Rave Generation! Broadcast on /goa.de/Yellow Sunshine/ EXTRASINN Lemonworld.303 / Chaishop /U.Site / goatrance.de /Cosmic Bug and all good M-Party feeds worldwide! CHOOSE> ZIMRA. ***** Instead of fighting, take it out on the dancefloor! **** Come together this full moon in the West Bank to protest the continued occupation of Palestine and 8th anniversary of the Israel/NATO police-state. Secure GPS coordinates are being dowloaded to your browsers! Bring krew, supplies, good vibes and respect for the environment! Headliners: SHROOM SHABOOM, Ollie Wisdom, Niggun and the sound of the group mind*****
“Would you two chip-heads get it together, we’re almost at the checkpoint,” Bridges yells over the crashing tsunami of beats pumping from the Diamondback decks, cutting the music and pulling into the floodlit concrete perimeter of the Kfar Sava Border Zone in front of dozens of other vehicles jammed into a gridlocked mechano swarm.
The metal piercings on her face glint by the light of a NATO POL in full blue-black aerogel padded Anti-Terrorist gear grown in bio-vats from GM spider’s silk, ten times stronger than kevlar as he approaches their van. “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” Bridges quips, winding down her window in a wave of pungent hash.
“Mah Nishi Mah?” the POL warbles over his BOSE embedded speakers, speech translators remixing his thick Texan accent into Hebrew as he sticks his head in to rattle their cage.
“Beseedy. Fine,” Idan replies.
A hovering spherical I-Spy drone protrudes into the cabin and iris-scans them. Idan’s military issue GOODBOX – quantum yottabytes of processing brain in a crystal in his skull – catches the recognition codes at a UV frequency and scrambles them with a wireless burst.
He wipes the smile from his dial and tunes back into the baseline reality grid using Mossad NLP brain control techniques. Wait till you see him dance.
“Nice outfit.” “You Army, dude?” the NATO POL asks him, his face a mask of hardware.
“Ex. I’m a conscientious objector to the war and the occupation. I believe in Ahimsa – non- violent revolution now. Change yourself – all else will follow.”
“Yah, whatever, dude. Like, you wouldn’t have a country without us, you should remember which side your bread’s buttered on if you ask me. But your ID chips scan, so you can pass. If you’re heading to Kfar Sava be advised the NATO curfew begins in under an hour. Have a nice day,” he says in his flat, modulated synth voice.
He moves on up the row of dozens of SUVs and solar powered vans with windmill generators and wireless antennas on top banked up by the checkpoint, a whole generational demographic cluster like a Chill-Cola moment just waiting for the sountrack. Bridges cues the Diamondback decks and loads a dark apocatrance beat.
“Get us the fuck out of here,” Idan spits, one finger up to the CHIP in his dataport as he tunes back into the M-PARTY Network. A flurry of Video Text Messages come into his Inbox, transmitted wirelessly from tekno renegades in other vans also on their way to the party. “MMMM, hey... we’ve got to detour into Sava, there’s a drive-by request on the Network, someone needs a lift.”
“Well, why the fuck do WE have to pick them up, what do we look like, a taxi service?” Bridges argues, rolling another joint and rocking out to the music.
“She’s a Palestinian WATCHER assigned to cover the party. If we don’t pick her up, she’ll be shot if caught after curfew.”
“C’mon, sis, trance has no borders.”
“Fine. But if we get picked up with a Palestinian on board they’ll shoot us all,” she says as they turn off into the outskirts of Kfar Sava and through the bordered up, deserted streets of the new shantytowns.
And there, under the full moon light, lock and zoom – a figure. They brake and Oshri pulls the side door open and stares out at the Palestinian girl, no more than 18, beautiful, dark eyes and raven hair and look of proud defiance staring right on back at him, dressed in a one-piece urban camouflage jumpsuit like a fly’s eye turned inside out, dozens of tiny cams threaded over her body to film and upload images wirelessly to the web.
Who watches the Watchmen? The people do.
“Lysgor Eynaim – close your camera eyes – all of them, or you’re not coming in the van.”
“I’m ON all the time, no off switch, no privacy, no more lies. Can you say the same, Israeli?” A flurry of tiny eyes staring out at him all over her body, shutters clicking shut like eyelids.
“Don’t bust my balls, okay? We got your VTM message. We’re going to the party do you want our help or what?”
“Like you helped in the army, when you killed my people?”
“I don’t believe in violence – I take it out on the dancefloor. We call it Zimra, you’ll see.”
“I am sorry, I - - I... In Palestine, we call it Zumur. The music.” Her eyes flash with a haunted intensity, then look away. “My name is Umma,” she stammers, holding a hand out as Idan pulls her into the dark guts of the van.
“I’m Idan. That’s Bridges and Oshri. Now let’s get this party started right.”
Oshri slams the roller door shut and the van accelerates into the night, Bridges on the Diamondback decks scratching in dark tribal soundscapes that wrap around them between the silence of their words.
GEO-CHIP log> The WALL. Covering the entire length of the West Bank at a distance of almost 215 miles and costing U$ 1 billion, it’s also the most viewed space in the 21C. Thirty foot high slabs of concrete embedded with hi-tech monitoring sensors wrapped in a classic Cold War barbed-wire fence either side, a Steve McQueen movie moment just waiting to happen. Party hard! Brought to you by TEKNO RENEGADE, the global network of party-activists. Join the Network today!
“You have heard our MP’s? Locked into home arrest, using stolen technology, pirated warez, we code the song of our lives and host them on the Network. We draw the world to our pain because under the skin we are all one, in the dance. And tonight, you shall join us, yes?”
Her webcams zoom in on Oshri for a closeup, his face reflected in them like facets on a disco ball. Through the windscreen under the full moon light, dozens of vans jockey on the small dirt road at the edge of the West Bank, people streaming in, locked into the group mind, the collective M-Party Network directing them like homing pigeons.
“Right on, sister! Bring on the beatz, we’re almost there...” Bridges cries as the van crests a small dirt hill and parks there in a sea of hundreds of vans, the solar powered panels on their roofs glinting in the moonlight. Behind them, the electric barbed-wire fence is down for a good 100 meters, the Tek crew jamming the government alarms and rerouting the surveillance signals with the satellite dishes on top of their flotilla of vans, their collective processing power pooled together into a mobile supercomputing brain.
Big boobed German women in sequined bikinis and combat pants are flanked by a cell of buff British Muscle Marys with their tops off and LCD emoticon tattoo icons pulsing across their skin. The WALL has become their podium, a thick global party crew of all shapes and hues dancing together with a sea of young Israelis, lit up with piezioelectrical strips powering their partywear. Everyone’s smiling. The night is still, all of them silent dancing under the stars, the music piped across their wireless frequency...
“So, like, THIS is your big thing? The Network? I do not understand... all these people are here to PARTY against WAR? Why is there no sound?” Oshri asks, slamming open the van door and staring wide eyed out at the crowd, a little shy, such a big step, a new way of seeing.
“You do not know? This is your first time, yes?” Umma leans in and shows him a real time video feed on her sleeve screen of hundreds of Palestinians dancing behind the WALL. “Musik is our ‘weapon’, Oshri. We dance for peace, on both sides of the WALL.”
“Here, jack this and you’ll tune into it,” Idan says, offering them all a selection of pink crystal chips. “It’s a different type of trance, too. We call it Neo-tek...” Oshri smiles, plugging in, feeling the beatz call him out out onto the dancefloor. The vibe is infectious, beats sculpted to interface directly with the brain, a sonic altered state of mind so good it has to be illegal.
“That’s my cue,” Bridges says, following her brother, jacking her chip and beaming. “Surfs up, waters fine, get down and dance, motherfuckers, see you out there!”
And she’s gone, too, shaking her juju under the silence of the stars, leaving Idan and Umma alone. They look at each other nervously, each waiting for the other to talk first.
“The WALL runs through empty fields outside Kalkelie, just 100 meters from where my house used to be. Do you know what that was like when I was growing up? Over half my life staring at a concrete horizon where my world ended. Is it any wonder we were willing to kill ourselves to be free?”
“I – I’m sorry, Umma. Sorry, that both our people had to die. The old ways were for the old world and all that is passing, now,” Idan says, threading through the crowd with her, camera eyes recording all she sees, drinking in the party around her. Mutated performance artists in light exo-skeletons tower above them like warped archetypes of the global unconscious.
“But how can we forget? My home was destroyed – the bulldozers came one day and demolished it. My father and brothers, they resisted...the soldiers beat and killed them. We moved to the refugee camps, but then they razed them in their search for terrorists. Of my whole family, only I am left.”
She’s watching him as the moonlights plays across his face, her cameras taking in their words and relaying them out over the Network.
“This is a new world now and we are a different people, a global people. We have to work together, play together and party together to bring on the global consciousness – all tribes united as one in the dance.”
“You talk talk talk, same old same old, but how can we dance together with that WALL between us?”
“Walls fall,” Idan replies, holding her hand and dragging her onto the dancefloor.
They flit through the writhing mass of bodies and let the Neo-Tek wash over them, brain receptor sites drinking it in until the music is in them and it IS them and it carries them away, breakdancing old world paradigms, butterflying across the party canvas and lost in the MIX/ water spiders across a pond, making no waves as they go.
Around them, the crowd lets off a flurry of text messages coded from their MRI brain patterns, networking into a group mind coming together out on the dancefloor, lost in the trance:
<THIS IS NOT A MIND TRIP> < THIS IS A BODY TRIP > <STROBING LIGHTS BURSTING> <THE CURRENT OF ENERGY> <BIGGER THAN LIFE> <A CRESTING WAVE> <NRG BUILDING EXPANDING> <WHITE LIGHT> <THE BEAT THE BEAT> <PEAKING AND CLIMAXING> <IT’S...ALL... > <ZIMRA > <ZIMRA > <ZIMRA...>
“Fuck me gently with a chainsaw,” Bridges cries later as she drags her sweaty body, exhausted, from the pulsing bio-mass of dancers, falling out of HIVE mind as Oshri stumbles to the ground beside her. “That was intense...!”
“I feel like a baked potato on the sun,” Oshri moans, unable to stop smiling.
“The music makes you listen, you feel, you take it in, you take acid and hear the BEAT,” says an old Goa looking tripper to their left, long black hair and deep, crazy eyes, a psychedelic ponchoed cowboy, laying prone on a brilliant red and black Navaho Indian rug, smoking bongs with a crew of Israelis under the wall.
“Niggun, is that you, you old party dog? I just knew we’d bump into you, man! Hey, aren’t you DJing tonight? What time are you playing?” Bridges crouches down to talk to him and Niggun grabs her, staring at her hands.
“Play? I don’t think I can even scratch the dex. Like, I’m on 23 levels, y’know. Emeshed in a augumented neurochemical consciousness, surfing, filtering the MIX around me. Did I just say that out loud? Who...”
“Niggun, it’s me, Bridges. You remember – Voov festival two summers ago, I hooked you up with that RAM you needed. This is my kid brother – Oshri. Oshri – Niggun. Wicked DJ, shaman-space case, knows his way round the sack, too.”
“Bridges...? is that you? Can you see the energy under the fingers, the way the light pulses the life force, like Kirlian auras? No? Well maybe you’re not just there yet, no matter.” His crusty face breaks into a grin, revealing a missing front tooth and a blue tongue from the curaco shooters he’s been skulling.
“They can’t fight it, you know, it’s in the Kabbala... The four–letter name of the Creator translates as "Bringing into Being", just like the four beat which brings us into collective harmony. The One, you see, is always counting for us ,1,2,3,4,... Laying the bass to the song that is life.” His hard, blistered hands pack the alien head bong and pass it to Bridges, who accepts it gratefully.
“GOD is a DJ? Man, that’s old skool, I could’ve told you that. I danced to that in kindergarden,’ she says, lighting the bong and sucking it down eagerly. “Are you gonna play that, oh, I love that trak, man, could you...” she says, exhaling smoke into the starry night.
“God is in the music, my friends. Here, have a cherry...” Niggun says, taking a punnet of fresh cherries from the cooler and popping one in Bridges mouth, metal tongue pierce against fruit, technology against nature – all the little details, the shining moments collecting around them as feedback kicks in on the Network, a deep pulse rumbling up from the space within like the shadows of a sound. Nothing moves but everything feels like it does.
“What the funk is that?” Oshri screams.
“Relax. It’s just the background free oscillations of the Earth remixed and sampled into my set,” says Niggun. “It’s on I-tune mode, pattern matching tracks against my brain state. What, you thought I was relaxing? I’m a professional, goddammit!”
NATO POLS log> LAT OF ORIGIN 31.73506N / LON OF ORIGIN 035.21300E. SCALE FACTOR: 1.0. UNITS TO METERS CONV: 1.0. / THE WALL/ OUTSIDE KFAR SAVA. DEFENSE SATELLITE FEEDS REPORT UNAUTHORIZED “TEKNO” GATHERING ON BOTH SIDES OF THE WALL IN BREACH OF CURFEW RESTRICTIONS. SENDING NATO POLS UNIT TO RESPOND>>>
Umma, always watching, sees them first.
Through the crosshairs of a camera lens: John Wayne on the horizon, the cavalry riding to the rescue in a phalanx of RCCV urban response mini-tanks, ready to kill some Injuns over land deals. Pull back: Take in the Networked vans arrayed in a defensive semi-circle around a rainbow collection of trance dancers funking up a storm, chasing the beat and locked onto the new Vibe as Niggun phases in on the dex.
Pan along: The tanks close in, the dancers tattooing sonic mantras in the dirt with their feet, holding their ground. Zoom in: As the music peaks and twists, refuses to let go, 150, 170, 200 BPM, it courses through the dancers riding it like voodoo loa. Umma drinks it in, sampling the vibe and beaming the footage out for the whole world to see. As she turns in a perfect arc towards Idan her camera eyes glint in the moonlight, attracting attention.
A RCCV fires through a gap between vans and the ground beneath her explodes, dancers tumbling to the ground like marionettes in a shower of flesh and blood, a huge gash cut into the WALL itself, Palestinian dancers peering through. Tear gas cannisters rain down in time to the dark Neo-Tek soundscape as NATO POL troops in combat exo-armor pour forth from the RCCVs.
Dancers are scrabbling over the rubble of the WALL, mixing together on both sides as the music draws them together as one, oblivious to the POLS. Idan rushes to Umma as the dancers unite around them, locking in the harmonic vibration as the hum reaches a higher octave and Gaia wakes.
“The Earth is ALIVE and we are part of it in interelating feedback loops,” Niggun blogs over the sound system. “You are hearing the warm, cosy sound of the planet going about its business. Instead of fighting – take it out on the dancefloor!” The sound kicks out into hyperdrive, the dancers transmuted to notes against the wall of vibration, their DNA switched ‘on’ in a cosmic circuit board.
The NATO POLS are wrapped tight in their GM insect armor, protected from sonic assaults by padding and technology, protected from everything but the media as Umma’s footage of their assault reaches global data banks and feedback loops to their superiors, inviting international criticism and a hasty order to retreat. Global Eyes for a global mind.
“Umma, don’t move, I- I’ll...”
Dying, cradled in Idan’s arms, Umma looks up at the hole in the wall and the stars above and the Israelis and Palestinians and global people dancing as one. “You were right, Idan. Walls fall,” she says, smiling and sending off her last transmission to the Network:
GEO-CHIP log> ISRAEL / DEC, 2031/THE WEST BANK> MEDIA WATCHER upload> UMMA AZZUR> @ the WALL> Trance has no country. No border, no flag, no division. We are the Children of the Sun, a Gaia Nation where only the music is eternal.
Global Eyes: Zimra was originally published in the Psycence Fiction ebook collection available here: https://rakrazam.com/psyence-fiction/
