So what if they did stop the demolition? he asked her. What then? What next?
Fame, she answered.
Grids laughed, and then realized she was deadly serious. His face flushed with embarrassment. Suddenly he felt small again, insignificant. He made his excuses, said it was good to see her, that he’d check her later, see her around. And then he pulled up his hood and slipped, as casually as he could manage, into the shadows of the towers.
It was the last time he talked to her.
Grids heard about the Cabot party directly from someone on Melody’s crew, a brief in-box flash, date, time, geotag. The first two were a little surprising—it was a weekday, and seven in the evening. Parties didn’t usually kick off until close to midnight at the very earliest. And then there was the geotag itself, slap bang at the bottom of Cabot Circus Shopping Centre, Bristol’s once-great palace of steel, glass, and consumerism.
So Grids was there, just before seven that damp Thursday evening. So were a lot of other people, most of them oblivious, wandering around with their children and shopping bags. If he watched them closely he could see them blinking at air, gazing at the scrolling ads and offers that swooped down and surrounded them. And then occasionally you’d see someone stop in the center of the great pit that formed the Cabot’s heart and blink at the air eight feet above them; someone tuned into that party channel, following that illicit hashtag, seeing something the regular shoppers couldn’t: the geotag sphere, hanging in the middle of the mall like a forgotten disco ball. And then you’d see a flicker of confusion, followed by curious excitement.
Grids started to see faces in the crowd—covered faces—that he recognized. He knew it was them, Melody’s crew, as no one else would have the balls to hide their identities in a space this heavily monitored. Somewhere alarms would be going off, radios chattering, security guards’ spex chiming.
There was no system, though. No rig, no bass bins, no way he could see of making sound. He thought they must be planning something else—maybe Melody had given up and gone back to her Smash/Grab days and was about to instigate a mass looting—and then the music started. At first he thought it was just in his spex—it was, but not just in the internals, in the bone conductors—it was coming out of the external speakers. He ripped them from his face to try to work out what was going on. He could hear it all about him, tiny and tinny, like a thousand headphones turned up to maximum. It was an impressive stunt, the hijacking of everyone’s spex, and enough to turn the heads of the regular shoppers, but it was hardly doing the music justice.
And then the bass dropped. From one direction, then a second, and then seemingly from everywhere. Again Grids jerked his spex off to try to orientate himself, to understand what was going on, where it was coming from, and it took longer to work it out this time. When he did, he laughed.
The music was coming from everywhere. From store fronts and doorways, it poured out of shop sound systems, echoing around the concrete floors and steel balconies, reverberating off the glass roof, testing the building’s acoustics in ways that its architects could never have imagined. It was even coming out of the mall’s own, hidden speaker system, the combined force of dozens of bass bins making the whole building shake and hum, stone and steel singing along with the simple, deep five-note dub bass line—the whole of Cabot Circus turned into a giant, all-encompassing subwoofer.
People, those that knew, those that had come here for this very reason, were dancing. Everyone else was… watching. Dumbfounded. Staring up at the ceiling or hanging over the side of the balconies and walkways, trying to take it all in. Grids heard a few of them chatting, unaware of what was going on, trying to make sense. He heard someone suggest it must just be a publicity stunt, a product launch, some kind of crazed viral, as they grabbed their kids and their shopping and wandered away, uninterested.
And then in among it all was Melody. Onstage, on the mic. Standing at the top of the stairs between two stopped escalators, flanked by AR graffiti and visuals—apparently now not just limited to the hashtag followers, but shown to every pair of spex under the umbrella of the Cabot’s network, replacing the complex’s own adverts and signs. And above her, reaching up through the glass roof, two ghosts of the Barton towers, like pillars of dust-filled light, archaic but proud giants, seeming to revel in history and importance as they gazed down onto this young monument to triviality and greed, tiny drones spiraling around them like birds surfing thermals.
For moments—maybe four or five minutes, the length of one of Melody’s stark rhythms—everything came together in unrepeatable harmony. Grids was transfixed, everyone was; but he knew it couldn’t last. Security guards were trying to make their way through the ever-thickening crowd, being held back momentarily not only by Melody’s crew and her loyal ravers but also occasionally by thick-necked shoppers, bored dads, and ex–football casuals, who had stopped to watch the show and didn’t take kindly to being pushed about by rent-a-cops. For tense seconds it felt like it might all kick off, or that the fat security guards would get to Melody and grab her, she was so obviously the focal point—and either way it was all over, Grids knew. Melody knew. Which was why she did it then, why it happened. So fast.
The music ended.
All eyes turned on Melody.
Her vocals stopped.
She said something about how she would die for her people, her community, her ends.
Some cheers went up.
She raised her right hand above her head. In it was something short and stubby, a tube with a switch on one end. A trigger.
Her other hand unzipped her jacket.
A scream went up.
Under the jacket she wore a waistcoat, and sewn into it were thick cylinders, wires.
Someone near me started to panic, pushing others. Someone fell, cursing.
Melody closed her eyes.
Melody’s thumb pressed down on the switch.
All the lights went off, everything plunged into darkness.
A single sub-bass tone enveloped the building, rattling glass and bone.
People screaming, running, pushing.
Emergency lighting flickered on. Grids tried to look back at the stage, thought he could see her being bundled by security, but it was hard to see anything, the dull lighting barely enough to see where he was being dragged by the panicking, fleeing crowd. He fell at least twice, over and across others, and gave up, letting himself be carried toward the exit.
Outside the air was cold, damp, filled with shouts, chaos, and sirens. It was pitch-black still, like every light in the city center had been flipped off. The streets were filled with the dazed and confused, people piling out of shops to try to work out what had happened. The surging crowd behind him pushed Grids off the pavement and into the road, until he was pressed up against the windows of a driverless bus that had seemingly shunted into parked cars before shutting itself down, its trapped passengers unable to open the doors, hammering on the windows while their terrified faces yelled muffled screams at him through dirty glass.