Cyberia

Chapter 9

Slipping Out of History

Much more than arenas for drug activism, Toon Town and other ''house'' events are Cyberia's spiritual conventions. House is more than a dance craze or cultural sensation. House is cyberian religion. But the priests and priestesses who hope to usher in the age of Cyberia have problems of their own.

We're at an early Toon Town – the night Rolling Stone came to write about Earth Girl and the Smart Bar. It's their first party since one fateful night three weeks ago when their giant, outdoor, illegal rave got crashed by the cops and they lost thousands of dollars. Preston is still a little pissed at Heley over that mishap. The English newcomer got too ambitious, and now Preston and Diana's baby, Toon Town, is in serious debt. They may never recover, and all Heley can think about are his damn cultural viruses. This used to be a dance club!

Heley's in no mood for arguments now. It's 11:00 p.m. Earth Girl hasn't shown up with her bar – correction: with Toon Town's bar. She isn't picking up her phone. The laser is malfunctioning. It's still early, but it's already clear that either the owners of this venue or the hired doorpeople are stealing money. A Rolling Stone reporter is on his way to write about the Smart Bar, which is nowhere to be found. R.U. Sirius and Jas Morgan, the editors of Mondo 2000 magazine, arrive with about forty friends whom they'd like added to the guest list. Tonight is supposed to be a party for the new issue, but, on entering the club, R.U. Sirius announces that the real release party will happen in a few weeks at Toon Town's competitor Big Heart City. Tonight is ''just a party'' that Mondo is co-sponsoring. News to Heley. News to Preston. News to Diana.

Bryan Hughes, the virtual reality guide, is setting up a VR demo on a balcony above the dance floor. Along with his gear he's brought a guest list of several hundred names. Cap'n Crunch, notorious reformed hacker and the original phone phreaque, and his assistant are trying to hook up his Video Toaster, but the projector isn't working. The place is buzzing, but Heley is not. Perched on a balcony overlooking the dance floor, he looks away from the confusion, takes off his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. He's angry. Chris – the future nutrient king – mixes Heley a special concoction of pyroglutamate to take the edge off the apparent conflux of crises.

Diana and Preston are running around with wires and paperwork, arguing about the limits of the building's voltage. They perform much more actual physical business than Heley does, but they know, even begrudgingly, that he's engaged in an equally important preparation, so they give him all the space he needs. Heley is the technoshaman. He is the high priest for this cybermass, and he must make an accurate forecast of the spiritual weather before it begins. He is guiding the entire movement through a dangerous storm. But instead of using the stars for navigation, he must read the events of the week, the status of key cultural viruses, the psychological states of his crewmembers, and the tone and texture of his own psychedelic visionquests. Tonight, most of Heley's calculations and intuitions indicate doom. He brought cyber house to San Francisco and was willing to man the helm, but now it's getting out of control.

''I brought the house thing to Mondo, I did their article, and I introduced them to it.'' Their disloyalty, Heley feels, has undermined his efforts to bring real, hard-core, spiritual, consciousness-raising cyber-influenced house to America. "Sometimes I just feel like there's only fifteen of us really doing this. There's Fraser Clark in England, who does Evolution magazine, there's me, there's Nick from Anarchic Adjustment, Jody Radzik, Deee-Lite. I don't mean that we're creating it, but we are painting the signs. We're indicating the direction.'' Heley looks down at the confusion of people, machinery, and wires on the dance floor and sighs. ''God knows what direction this is pointing in.''

It was about three weeks ago that things began to get messy. Heley, Preston, and Diana had arranged a huge ''rave'' – a party where thousands take E and dance to house, usually outside, overnight, and illegall – at an abandoned warehouse and yard. A club competing for the same business on Saturday night found their map point (a small hand-out circulated through the underground community indicating where the party was to be held) and notified the police, who were more than willing to shut it down. Heley recounts the bust with the conviction of a modern-day Joan of Arc.

''They arrived and they only saw people having a good time. People having a party. There's no rational argument they can make against us. They smell it. They smell it and they understand.''

Heley swigs down the rest of his pyroglutamate and soon appears to have gained a new clarity and, along with it, a new reason to fight on. ''This is not a countermovement. It is the shape of the thing that will replace them. But it will be painless for them. It's not a thing to be frightened of. If you're frightened of acceptance, yes, be afraid because this thing is a reintegration. The trouble is that it just dissolves the old lies – all the things you just know are untrue. We're not living that life anymore. You can only live the old lies when the rest of the paraphernalia is in place. Really, house just destroys that. It's not a reactionary thing.''

Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at the history of this thing called ''house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse) began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that – like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant – was called "house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop – influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called ''bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called ''acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''

When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast, high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labelled ''acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music – tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.

''When I heard acid house music would be playing, I figured for sure they meant it was a psychedelic dance club – music to take acid to,'' explains Lyle, an ex-punker from Brixton who has followed the house scene since its beginnings in the suburbs of London. "It began on an island, Ibetha, off the coast of Spain. Everyone goes there on holiday, does Ecstasy, and stays up all night. We got back to England and decided we didn't want to give it up and started raving on the weekends.''

Lyle's explanation is as good as any for how raves got started. These Woodstock-like fests begin on a Friday evening and carry on through Sunday afternoon. Dancing is nonstop. They became most popular in the late 1980s, when thousands of cars could be seen on any weekend heading toward whichever suburb – Stratford, Brighton – was hosting the party. Police began cracking down on them in 1990 or so, but then they went legit by renting out permitted club space. News of raves eventually rebounded to the United States, where the original house clubs began to incorporate the British hallucinogenic style and substances. San Francisco, where psychedelics are still the most popular, was most receptive to the new movement, which is why Heley and other English ravers wound up there.

As Heley suggests, there's more to raves and house than meets the eye. Coming to an understanding of the house phenomenon requires a working knowledge of the new technology, science, and drugs that shape Cyberia, as well as an awareness of the new spiritual dimension (or perhaps archaic spiritual revival) arising out them. Just as the new, quantum sciences and chaos mathematics developed out of the inability of materialist models to effectively map our reality, house is meant as a final reaction to the failings of a work ethic – based, overindustrialized culture.

The ravers see themselves and the creation of their subculture as part of the overall fractal equation for the postmodern experience. One of the principles of chaos math, for example, is phase-locking, which is what allows the various cells of an organism to work harmoniously or causes a group of women living together to synchronize their menstrual cycles. Phase-locking brings the participants – be they atoms, cells, or human beings – into linked cycles that promote the creation of a single, interdependent organism where feedback and iteration can take place immediately and effectively. A phase-locked group begins to take on the look of a fractal equation, where each tiny part reflects the nature and shape of the larger ones.

Members of rave culture phase-locked by changing their circadian rhythms. They self-consciously changed their basic relationship to the planet's movements by sleeping during the day and partying all night. As Heley says in defiance: ''It's in the face of the network that tells you seven to eight-thirty is prime time. You sleep during prime time. You share the same place physically as that society, but you're actually moving into a different dimension by shifting through the hours. It's an opportunity to break out from all the dualistic things.''

Of course, sleeping days and partying nights is just as dualistic as working days and sleeping nights, but the point here is that the ''dualistic things'' considered important by mainstream culture are not hard realities, and they are certainly not the "best'' realities. Ravers were able to create a subculture different from the work-a-day society in which they had felt so helpless. They used to be the victims of a top-down hierarchy. As the poor workers to a mean boss or the powerless kids to a domineering father or even the working class to a rigid monarchy, they were just numbers in an old-style linear math equation. Now, phase-locked as part of a living, breathing fractal equation, they feel more directly involved in the creation of reality.

''When you move away from a massive guilt trip in which there is a direct hierarchy, you suddenly find that it doesn't matter a fuck what your boss or the authorities think of you. You're creating yourself moment by moment in an environment that is created by people who are like-minded. It's a liberation, and it's completely in the face of twentieth-century society.''

The ultimate phase-locking occurs in the dance itself, where thousands of these ''like-minded'' young people play out house culture's tribal ceremony. The dance links everyone together in a synchronous moment. They're on the same drugs, in the same circadian rhythm, dancing to the same 120-beat-per-minute soundtrack. They are fully synchronized. It's at these moments that the new reality is spontaneously developed.

''The dance empowers you. It reintegrates you. And then you can start again. It's an ancient, spiritual thing. It's where we have always communicated to each other on the fullest level. Instead of being in this extremely cerebral, narrow-bandwidth-television society, people learn instead to communicate with their bodies. They don't need to say anything. There is just a bond with everyone around them. A love, an openness. If you look at a society as repressed as England, you see how much impact that can have.''

The various forms of social repression in England, along with its own deeply rooted pagan history, made it the most fertile soil in which house could grow. As Heley shares: ''I felt it was slipping out of history. That this was an alternative history.''

House became massive in England. News of raves was always spread precariously by word of mouth or tiny flyers, but somehow everyone who needed to know what was happening and where, found out. Either one knew what was happening or one didn't. It was as simple as that. By the end of the 1980s, house was everywhere in the United Kingdom, but it had never seen the light of day. Tens of thousands of kids were partying every weekend. Mainstream culture was not even aware of their existence. By the time the tabloids caught on and published their headlines proclaiming the arrival of house, the ravers had realized they'd gone off the map altogether.

Off the Map and into the Counterculture

Today, the English house scene still defines the pulse for other house-infected cities. Whether through the brain-drain of emigrees like Heley or the exportation of London-mixed dance tracks, Great Britain still holds the most coherently articulated expression of the house ethic. While there's less technology, fewer gays, and fewer smart chemicals at London clubs, there's a much clearer sense of house's role as a countercultural agent.

Some argue that this is because London's morphogenetic field of counterculture is more developed than America's. London's pagan cultures have endured centuries of repression and distillation. Their phase-locking was probably achieved somewhere in the twelfth century. Symbols and even personalities from ancient pagan times still live in London house.

One such pagan hero is Fraser Clark, a self-proclaimed psychedelic warrior from the 1960s who began Encyclopaedia Psychedelica magazine, which has since mutated into London house culture's `zine Evolution. At his London flat, which he shares with two or three students half his age, the long-haired Welshman rolls some sort of cigarette and explains to me what's happening. From the British perspective, this is a historical battle for religious freedom.

''A kid grows up in a Christian culture and thinks he's probably the only one questioning these ideas. When he comes to house,'' the English are found of using the word alone like that, as if it's a religion, "he suddenly realizes he's got a whole alternative history. He might get into UFOs or whatever there is – drugs, witches, it's all in there.''

And all quite accessible. To participate in this experience of resonance, each participant must feel like part of the source of the event. Where a traditional Christian ritual is dominated by a priest who dictates the ceremony to a crowd of followers, pagan rituals are free-for-alls created by a group of equals. For house events to provide the same kinds of experiences, they had to abandon even traditional rock and roll concert ethos, which pedestals a particular artist and falls into the duality of audience and performer, observer and object. The house scene liberates the dancers into total participation. Fraser, whose new club UFO opens tonight, explains the advantages of a no-star system:

''Nobody is that much better than the next guy that he needs a whole stage and twenty thousand people fillin' up a stadium to see him. Nobody's that much better than the audience. We don't need that and people don't want it anymore. A lot of the music you'll hear tonight is never gonna be on a record. Kids just mix it the week before and play it that one night.''

So the house movement is determined to have no stars. It is ''in the face'' of a recording industry that needs egos and idolatry in order to survive. It depends, instead, on a community in resonance. The fractal equation must be kept in balance. If one star were to rise above the crowd, the spontaneous feedback creating the fractal would be obliterated. The kids don't want to dance even facing their partners, much less a stage. Everyone in the room must become "one.'' This means no performers, no audience, no leaders, no egos. For the fractal rule of self-similarity to hold, this also means that every house club must share in the cooperative spirit of all clubs. Even a club must resist the temptation to become a ''star.'' Every club and every rave must establish itself as part of one community, or what Fraser calls "the posse.''

''It looks sort of like a tribe, but a tribe is somehow geographically separate from the main culture.'' Fraser finishes his cigarette and feeds his dog some leftover Indian food from dinner. "A posse is very definitely an urban thing. It's just a group of people, sharing technology, sharing all the raves and music as an organization. We even call them `posses putting on raves.' I really don't think there's such a thing as personal illumination anymore. Either everybody gets it or nobody gets it. I really think that's the truth.''

UFO, a collective effort of Fraser's posse, opens in an abandoned set of train tunnels at Camden Lock market. This English party is not at all like a San Francisco or even a New York club. It is an indoor version of the old-style massive outdoor raves. The clothing is reminiscent of a Dead show, but maybe slightly less grungy. Batik drawstring pants, jerseys with fractal patches, love beads, dredlocks, yin-yang T-shirts, and colorful ski caps abound. In the first tunnel, kids sit in small clusters on the dirt floor, smoking hash out of Turkish metal pipes, sharing freshly squeezed orange juice, and shouting above the din of the house music. In one corner, sharply contrasting the medieval attire, ancient stone, and general filth, are a set of brain machines for rent. In the second tunnel, dozens of kids dance to the throbbing house beat. Even though we're in a dungeon, there's nothing ''down'' about the dancing. With every one of the 120 beats per minute, the dancers articulate another optimistic pulse. Up up up up. The hands explode upward again and again and again. No one dances sexy or cool. They just pulse with the rhythm, smile, and make eye contact with their friends. No need for partners or even groups. This is a free-for-all.

A cluster of young men are hovering near the turntables with the nervous head-nodding and note-taking of streetcorner bookies. They are the DJs, who are each scheduled to spin records for several hours until the party breaks up at dawn. Tonight's music will be mostly hard-core, techno-acid – style house, but there are many house genres to choose from. There's ''bleep,'' which samples from the sounds of the earliest Pong games to extremely high-tech telephone connection and modem signals. New York house, or "garage'' sound, is more bluesy and the most soulful; it uses many piano samples and depends on mostly black female singers. There's also ''headstrong'' house, for the hardest of headbangers; "techno,'' from Detroit; ''dub,'' coined from Gibson's Neuromancer for Reggae-influenced house; and "new beat,'' from Northern Europe. Less intense versions of house include ''deep'' house, with more space on the top layers and a generally airier sound, and the least throbbing kind, and "ambient'' house, which has no real rhythm at all but simply fills the space with breathy textures of sound. Of course, any or all of these styles may be combined into a single song or mix, along with samples of anything else: Native American ''whoops,'' tribal chanting, evangelists shouting, or even a state trooper calling a mother to inform her "your son is dead.''

The DJs consider themselves the technoshamans of the evening. Their object is to bring the participants into a technoshamanic trance, much in the way ancient shamans brought members of their tribes into similar states of consciousness. A DJ named Marcus speaks for the group:

''There's a sequence. You build people up, you take `em back down. It can be brilliant. Some DJs will get people tweaking into a real animal thing, and others might get into this smooth flow where everyone gets into an equilibrium with each other. But the goal is to hit that magical experience that everyone will talk about afterwards. Between 120 beats a minute and these sounds that the human ear has never heard before, you put them to music and it appeals to some primal level of consciousness.''

If it didn't, house would never had made it across the Atlantic to America, where it could manifest not only on a primal level but a marketing one.

Chapter 10

Making the Golden Rule Trendy

Building on the foundations of shamanism in the English house scene, Americans in San Francisco focus on the techno side. While the English rave has a quality of medievalism, tribal energy, and Old World paganism, the American cyber disco is the most modern mutation of bliss induction, and uses whatever means necessary to bring people into the fractal pattern.

As Jody Radzik explains: ''In a really good house experience, you want to create something like the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. You're trying to create an environment where people can get outside of themselves. There gets to be a certain point in the night where people just cut loose. The party just reaches a kind of critical mass. A synergy of shared consciousness occurs and boom. You'll know it. It'll have a certain sparkle to it.'' Rising above the muted grit and gristle of the British pagans, American technojunkies sparkle and buzz to the same throbbing beat.

Rather than abandoning the television aesthetic and discouraging the urge to be ''hip,'' club promoters use hipness as bait. Jody Radzik, who designs house clothing when he's not promoting the club Osmosis, believes that as house gets on MTV, "a whole new culture will be created. This will be a result of it being trendy. At the bottom line, that's what makes things run: narcissism. Trendiness. I'm always trying to be the trendiest I can be. It's my job. I do design. People get into this because it's a hip new thing. Then maybe they have an opening and get exposed to new ideas. But the fuel that's going to generate the growth of this culture is going to be trendiness and hipness. We're using the cultural marketing thing against itself. They consume the culture, and get transformed. House makes the Golden Rule trendy. That's why I'm trying to create the trendiest sportswear company in the world.''

For Radzik, marketing is the perfect tool for transformation. Rather than discard the system that has dominated until now, the system is used to destroy itself. The machinery of the industrial culture – be it technology, economics, or even the more subtle underlying psychological principles and social mechanisms – is turned against itself for its own good. Just as the earth uses its own systems of feedback and iteration to maintain a viable biosphere, house culture exploits the positive feedback loops of marketing and data sharing to further human consciousness. Radzik explains his take on the Gaia hypothesis and McKenna's prediction about the year 2012:

''This bifurcation we're coming up to, this shift, will be the awakening of the planet's awareness. That's the shared belief of the raver camp in the scene. House is the vehicle for disseminating that culture to the rest of the planet.''

And how does house conduct this dissemination? By imparting a direct experience of the infinite. In the dance is the eternal bliss moment. The social, audio, and visual sampling of innumerable cultures and times compresses the history and future of civilization into a single moment, when anything seems possible. The discontinuous musical and visual sampling trains the dancers to cope with a discontinuous reality. This is a lesson in coping with nonlinear experience – a test run in Cyberia. A tour of Radzik's clothing studio makes this amply clear. His design arsenal is made up of the illustrations from an eclectic set of texts: Decorative Art of India, with pictures of Indian rugs woven into patterns reminiscent of fractals; Molecular Cell Biology, with atomic diagrams and electron microscopy of cells and organic molecules; The Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness, with fractals and mathematical diagrams; and Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity, a collection of hieroglyphics and graffiti-like ancient scribblings. Radzik composes his designs by computer scanning images from books like these and then recombining them. With a keen eye for the similarities of these images, Radzik creates visually what house does musically: the discontinuous sampling of the symbology of bliss over time. The images' similarities give a feeling of comfort and metacontinuity.

Radzik leafs through the pages of his books, scanning images for his next promotional flier. ''The arcane and future groove in the now. It's like this fantastic coincidence. House culture is a meeting point for all these different things. Music, finally, is the universal language of love. The nightclub people are the ones who help manifest it into popular culture. What I do is creative anthropology. I observe what's happening in the house culture, and market it back at those people.''

It's important to realize that this seemingly mercenary attitude is not inconsistent with house philosophy – in fact, it's not considered mercenary at all. Marketing is merely one of the feedback loops that can promote the house philosophy back into itself, and amplify the experience. It does not suck from the system, it adds to it. Everything relates to house in a self-conscious or ''meta'' way. House music is not just music, but samples of music recombined into a kind of meta-music.

House is merely a construction – a framework – like language or any other shell. Once something is ''in the house,'' it has been incorporated into the fractal pattern of metaconsciousness, and is a subject of and contributor to the greater schematic. It has become a part of the self-similar universe – one with the galactic dance. That's why the mechanisms for change in house might be "in your face,'' but they are almost never confrontational. With no dualities, there's nothing to confront. ''House, like punk, is an anarchic, rebellious movement,'' admits Radzik "but it isn't a violent or negative one. If the planet's a living organism, then it doesn't make sense to fuck with each other.''

Nick Phillip, twenty-two, a recent emigre from Britain and now the designer for Anarchic Adjustment clothing, is one of Radzik's best friends and conspirators. He agrees wholeheartedly that participants in house are within a construct that allows for global change.

''The kids now are not going to turn on, tune in, drop out. They're going to drop in. They're going to infiltrate society and change things from within. They're going to use business, music, or whatever they can to change people. What we're doing speaks for itself. People who are involved in the scene are creating this stuff for themselves.''

Finally Going Mental

Nick has arrived at Toon Town tonight with a supply of his most popular jerseys to be sold at the club's small shop, and he senses that the crowd needs an infusion of life. Heley has moved down from the balcony and is making suggestions to Buck, the rookie DJ who will play until 2:00 a.m., when Jno, the technoshaman extraordinaire, takes over. Nick makes his way to the dance floor like a prizefighter taking the ring, and his pugilistic fury is more reminiscent of punk slamdancing than blissful house explosions. It's called ''going mental'' and it looks pretty intense, but his enthusiasm is contagious and others are either encouraged enough to join in or frightened off the dance floor altogether. Apparently, part of the reason for the evening's discontinuity is that the venue's previous event, a birthday party for a yuppie named Norman, had not been let out before Toon Town began. Diana and Preston have urged Buck to play the most brutal house music he can find in the hopes of scaring these people away.

Many house regulars have retreated to a ''brain machine lounge,'' where they smoke and chat like members of a bridge club. The room has been set aside for David, a distributor of the "light and sound'' devices, to demonstrate the new technology to house kids and maybe make a few sales. The machines consist of a set of goggles and headphones.

''No, it's not virtual reality,'' David says, probably for the hundredth time, to a newcomer to the room. "It's for relaxation and it can get you high.'' The goggles flash lights and the headphones beep sounds at exact frequencies, coaxing the brain into particular wave patterns. Ultimately, the brain machines can put the user into the brain state of an advanced meditator.

While the kids play with the machines, David is more interested in explaining to an attractive young woman who is waiting for a brain machine, an article he hopes to write for Magickal Blend magazine about the physics of David Bohm.

''It's all about discontinuity. Things that look separate in our reality, the explicate order, are all linked together in what Bohm says is the implicate order.''

David grabs a pencil and draws a picture on the back of his hand to make his point. ''If two positrons shoot out of an atom at the same time, and you shove one, the other will move, too.''

''How does it know to move? ESP?'' asks the girl.

''No. It happens at the same exact time.''

A couple of other kids perk up to hear the explanation. ''That's because on the implicate order, the positrons are still linked together.''

David is interrupted by a fourteen-year-old boy who seems to have a better handle on the idea. ''Bohm used the analogy of a goldfish and two TVs. If you put two cameras on a single goldfish, and connected them to two TVs, you might think these were pictures of two different fish. But when one fish moves, the other will move at exactly the same time. It's not because they're connected. It's because they're the same fish!''

''Right,'' David chimes in, eager to get credit for his knowledge before the girl disappears under the goggles. "The real goldfish in the bowl is the implicate order. The monitors – the way we see and experience it – is the explicate order.''

The young boy rolls his eyes. Clearly, David doesn't understand the implications of all this. ''Kind of, only, man. The implicate order is timeless truth. It's the way things are. The explicate order is the way they manifest for us in time and three dimensions.''

David gives in to the child's brilliance. ''Do you take smart drugs, or what?''

In another private room, actually a kind of DJ lounge, Jody Radzik, a DJ named Pete, and a more flamboyant crowd who call themselves ''personal friends of the DJs'' smoke pot and talk about similar issues. This is all very heady for a house club. The center of attention is a state-of-the-art transvestite calling "her''self Gregory, who is trying to understand the merits of trendiness in house culture.

Radzik takes a stab at a simple response: ''House makes the Golden Rule trendy. It makes spirituality trendy.''

''But is trendiness good?'' Gregory asks, her eyes shifting in that tweaking-on-psychedelics-paranoid way.

''The culture is just pushing a pseudopod into a new direction and that's a trend.'' Radzik says, using the biological metaphor to reassure her. "The ideas have a life of their own. They have an existence outside the human beings. The human beings receive the ideas, and that manifests them.''

''That's the implicate order being downloading into the explicate order!'' The girl from the brain machine room has a near religious experience in relating the two conversations. "We were talking about the same thing in there!'' She beams. ''Two conversations. Distinct on the explicate order, linked on the implicate order. I get it now!''

Pete, the DJ, seems a little uncomfortable when the conversation gets too far into science. Sounding as brainy as he can, he tries to ground everything back to music. ''The ecstasy comes through the music. The different polyrhythmic elements and the bass. It's technoshamanism.

Gregory kisses Pete's hands as if she's recognized the messiah. ''You're our spiritual leader, aren't you!''

''Well, spiritual leader entails a lot of responsibility and I don't think I want to take that on.''

''Nobody does,'' Radzik says, once again, trying to bring it all together. It's the unspoken rule here that if everyone's point of view can be integrated into the same picture, it will all be okay. "Nobody wants to be a spiritual leader. 'Cause everyone's got the access to the E-xperience. Everyone can create their own situation in the social context. House lets all those different experiences get on and synergize.''

Gregory's eyes widen. She slowly rises, her arms outstretched, her head falling back. ''With E, at 120 cycles a second through our heart, we're dancing. We must dance!''

Radzik's been overpowered. ''Well, the E's not responsible, but ...''

Gregory might be on the verge of a bad trip. She whips her head to face Radzik directly. ''It'll literally bust our spines, won't it?''

Radzik tries to regain control of the previously quiet gathering. ''That's a lie! Propaganda.''

But Gregory doesn't seem to mind her suspicions about permanent neurological damage. She clenches her fists together as if to hold back an orgasm. ''The peak threshold is bliss, is E, is now. We've condensed it down. It's powerpacked. It's now. We all, man and woman, we come together and dance. All our technology. We've heard of the side effects. E diminishes a vital chemical in our bodies every time we take it. The chemical is the essence of life. This is a gift which cannot be replaced. We're taking this fluid and spending it. The E is undermining our very existence. I feel a little bit of my life force being spent each time. It's bliss. You're dancing it. E gathers all your life's bliss at one time. If the world were supposed to end, we'd come together, take E, and dance!''

Gregory's allusion to a recent study linking MDMA to spinal fluid reduction in mammals, coupled with her oversimplified E-xuberance for the dance, gets everyone a little uncomfortable. Is this the transformed being we've been working to create? Luckily, the moment is interrupted by a young visual artist and video wizard who just happens to be distributing an MAO inhibitor called Syrian Rue. Radzik introduces me as, ''Don't worry, he's cool,'' which garners me four of the capsules. I put them in my pocket and thank the boy, but he's already busy rigging a projector to show a film loop on a wall near the dance floor. It's a ten-second cycle of two boys fighting over a microscope. I ask Radzik about the pills I've been given.

''It's called Syrian Rue. Mark Heley will be able to tell you a lot more about it. It has to be taken with other psychedelics. It has a synergistic effect. It's made from a bark.'' Not enough information to merit sampling. I leave it in my pocket and work my way back out into the club. I search for the periphery so that I may observe but not participate ... fully. Leaning against a noncommittal wall near the edge of the club is Bob, an oriental computer programmer from Oakland whom I met last week at Mr. Floppy's, where he operated the camera for some television interviews and got bitten by the house bug. He continues a conversation we had been having there, as if there were no break in continuity:

''Thought is a distraction of the moment. Whenever we're in a space we're processing information. In our reality, we're bombarded with information. So in Reichian terms, we put this armor on. You know the song, `I Wanna Be Sedated'? I think a lot of people are anesthetized by their surroundings. It takes some really piercing hard information to break that. Like piercing your cheeks. If you get Zen, you've got to let go, and let it all come in. But if you let it all in, you go crazy. But if you let it come in without processing it, without calling it good or bad ... people who label things bad have got a lot of heaviness. Go Zen about it. There is no black or white, then you can let everything in.''

I give him one of my capsules of Syrian Rue and move on.

Engineering the Synchronization Beam

Our evening at Toon Town is getting into full swing. Most of Norman's birthday partiers are gone, and several hundred more hard-core house people have crowded onto the dance floor. Buck, the novice DJ, is spinning well, and steering the energy toward deeper, techno-acid house. Nick, the rave pugilist, is on a small stage pumping his fists into the air, and the laser is finally functioning.

Meanwhile, on a balcony, Bryan Hughes, the cyberspace guide, leads a young man through his first virtual reality experience. Cap'n'Crunch uses one of his cameras to capture an image of the boy in his VR goggles. Another of Crunch's video leads comes straight from the virtual reality machine. He uses his Video Toaster to combine the two images and then projects a composite video picture onto a giant screen above the dance floor. The resulting image is one of the boy actually appearing to move through the virtual reality space he is unfolding in the computer. Superimposed on that picture are further video images of people on the dance floor watching the giant projection. Gregory notices me staring at the self-referential computer-video infinity. ''Works kind of like a fractal, doesn't it?'' I have to agree.

But Bruce Eisner, MDMA expert, who stares at the same video depiction of virtual reality, shakes his head. He is amused but unconvinced. ''Maybe one day the mystical vision will be realized in some kind of neurological link-up or a virtual reality. Technology does have a great promise. It could become seamless, so that what we think of today as magic will eventually be done by technology, and eventually we won't even see the technology. A neo-Garden of Eden made possible by technology. But the main rub is human nature. That's where I have a problem with the virtual reality people. I was at the Whole Life Expo, and Timothy [Leary] was there with John Barlow and Ken Goffman [R.U. Sirius] and they were doing a panel on virtual reality and I sat there for an hour and a half and listened to them talk about virtual reality the way they talked about LSD in the sixties – it was this thing that was intrinsically liberating. You hook yourself up to this thing and automatically you're better – you got it. And so I asked him a question. I said, `It seems to me that technology can be used for good or for bad. In the sixties, Leary told us he was looking for the cure for human nature. How is a new media intrinsically good?'

''Leary looked at me and said, `Bruce, I'm going to talk to you as I would to a ten-year-old child.' And then he went on to explain how when we have virtual reality, no one will have to fly anymore. No one will have to go to Japan to make a deal. You can do it in Hawaii on the beach. Fine. But why is that intrinsically liberating?''

Eisner seems almost sad. He's not in tune with the same harmonic as these kids but can, deep down, remember the sixties and his own acid experiences. He refuses to be lulled into that false optimism again. He stares out, losing himself in thought.

Meanwhile, the pulse on the dance floor deepens. I can feel the bass passing through my body like the subsonic frequencies of an as-yet-uninvented kidney therapy. The frenzy of the crowd iterates back to the DJ, and in turn to Mark at the laser. The walls are covered with projected images of fractals, tribes dancing, the fight over the microscope, a cartoon smiley shoots at evil, attacking letters. Another monitor displays the virtual reality bombardments of attacker pilots in the Gulf War, intercut with tribal dancing and the wild computer holographics of a tape called ''Video Drug.'' The strobe flashes like a brain machine.

''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.''

This new frequency, finally, is the frequency of the apocalypse. Terence McKenna's 2012, the Mayan calendar, and the great, last rave of all time are all part of one giant concrescence. Over the loudspeakers, samples of Terence McKenna's meandering voice now mix with the rest of the soundtrack. He's on a house record, his own words helping the dancers to tunnel toward the overmind, as the overmind lovingly drills backward through time toward them.

''If we imagine ourselves in four-dimensional space-time,'' Heley explains, "in that very dubious construct of Einsteinian space-time – we're sort of swimming towards the object from which the frequency emanates. It's like these are fragments of DNA information that are squeezed into a certain specific time frame. It's a constant exploration and discovery of how those resonate with our own DNA information in that particular moment of time. Basically it's that fact – and the rich sampling of all the moments placed within that context – that gives you this amazingly flexible framework for reintegrating yourself into your body and also communicating as a group. You're moving to a certain time-space and you're in a group state of consciousness. You're at one with it and you become the moment.''

I realize that Mark's perception and retelling is LSD-enhanced; he's just beginning to feel the full effect of a hit he took about an hour ago. Still, he's concerned that it's not strong enough to take him to any kind of ''edge.'' I offer him my two remaining Syrian Rue capsules. He pops them down immediately, explaining that they enhance the effect of other psychedelics and are related to ayahuasca, one of the main ingredients (along with DMT) used by shamans to make the most potent brews. I surmise that it puts a new twist on things the way one might turbocharge a car with NO2, add salt to spaghetti water to raise its boiling point, or throw a starship into warp drive. In an ominous synchronicity, down on the dance floor Diana helps a disoriented girl to a chair at the side of the room.

Mark goes on, the new chemical accelerating his speech toward the climax of his cosmic drama: ''The human body has not been fully danced. We don't dance our full dance yet. Time is accelerating towards this point in the year 2012 when the story of the human race will have been unfolded. We're reaching a bifurcation point. There's so much instability in our current paradigm that it's just shaking apart. A lot of people I know feel we're reaching an endgame. There's that feeling in the air. I feel myself being dragged through different time zones and it's intense. When you surrender to it, it becomes even stronger. Exponentially so. It's amazing.''

But what about the people who haven't been exposed to house? All those people Diana so desperately hopes to bring into the scene before it's all over? If they aren't dancing when the spaceships or the galactic beam comes, won't they be left out? How are people to guide themselves toward Cyberia? As Mark tries to reassure me, I become conscious that my questioning may be starting to affect his trip.

''Well, bliss is the most rigorous master you could imagine,'' he says. Then suddenly his face registers a new thought. "If your antenna is finely tuned, you'll find it [Cyberia]. In a way, everyone is tuned in. One point in humanity rises, all of humanity rises.'' He adds, as if he's never thought this before: ''But I imagine that there are some towns in the Midwest where a house record has never even been played.''

These kinds of conceptual uncertainties grow into physically realized landmines for the shamanic warrior. Mark senses his own doubts, as the Syrian Rue drives his trip down a frictionless psychic tunnel. Instinctively, he hands the laser controls to an assistant. He stares at me intently. ''There's only so much energy. My only tack is to just keep my head down and push ahead. Diana may bring in more people someday. But until then, I've got to do what I can with what I've got. We'll struggle and struggle until we give up. Then it will break through.''

He works his way to the dance floor. The bodies are writhing, peaking. It is in the middle of this swirl that Mark reaches the highest part of his trip. He realizes that the fractal pattern that surrounds him is of his own making. The synesthesic congruities between movement, sound, and light bring a feeling of certainty and wholeness. His body and mind are united, as he literally steps under the looking glass that he created. Both God and Adam at once, his very existence literally dissolves the fiction of creator and created, beginning and end. He has constructed his own womb and stepped inside. In his self-conception is the essence of timelessness. The beginning is the end.

But timelessness is only temporary. How long can this last? In that very wondering is the initial descent. The perfection of the fractal pattern has begun to decay. Reentry into time is imminent. Has he become the UFO?

Damage can occur on the way back. Downloading the cogent information requires every shamanic skill he can muster. The Syrian Rue has caused a kind of time phasing. Mark searches for a way to bring himself back into crystalline alignment, even if at a different frequency from before. He doesn't care how he comes back, as long as he can find the way home. His body is gone, dispersed throughout the room.

He tries to recreate his body by finding his point of view. A point of reference can serve as the seed. But his field of vision is compressing and expanding ... expanding as far out as the sun and even the galactic core. He is riding through the precarious Mayan Tzolkin calendar. He closes his eyes and fixes on the galactic core – on that time a year or so ago, tripping in a field, in the sun. He was like a dolphin under water, swimming under the surface yet still warmed by the sun. It was beautiful. And as he lay there, a new Gaia program came down from the sun to the earth, and needed his head to do it. The light used him to download the precious information. His own body. Strange ganglia sprouted from the back of his head straight into the soil beneath him. Beautiful.

But no. That's not what's going on here. Everything is phase shifted. It's out of control. No panic or all is lost. He could spin out and be gone forever. Mark must get down carefully. He doesn't care what he brings back anymore, as long as he gets back. He realizes that somehow he's gotten himself onto a flight of steps. Real steps, somewhere in the club. Perfect image. It's where he is. Stuck on the stairway. It's life or death now. Bliss is merciless. The rigorous master. The music continues to pound and eventually draws him back into the vortex. Everything spins. This is dangerously disorienting. He's completely losing polarity. He's on the steps, but which way is he facing? Is he going up or down? The back and the front are the same!

But wait! This isn't so bad. There's complete knowledge of what's on both sides! He can see in front and behind at the same time! There's no duality – but, alas, no orientation, either. There's no up the stairs or down. No before the trip or after. No higher than the peak or lower. Suddenly everything is static. Paralyzed. Stillness.

It is in this brief fulcrum of stability that the transmission occurs. Like an electrical earthquake, an alien thing passes up through Heley's muscles, bringing his whole being up into a faster, shamanic shape-shifting frequency. This is the state of being, Heley realizes, in which master shamans turn into pumas or eagles or visit the dead.

Suddenly, then, it's all clear. The duality is not within life as judgments or ideas. Life itself is one side of it. It's life itself that is rooted in dimension. That's one side of the whole thing. The explicate order. That's the place where will is necessary. ( I'll just keep my head down and press on.'')

The will. Mark summons his will, knowing that this navigation through the iron gate of the moment back down into dimensional space-time requires it. He must summon his will. He senses movement.

He passes through the I Ching sequence as if it were a cloud formation – the effortless binary expression of the universe. Ahh, he realizes, the creation of time and history were necessary. Without them, we'd never have created will. We need the will in order to move toward something. But what? Toward 2012. Toward the overmind. The galactic event. But now he must continue his descent.

He passes over a shamanic conference. Eight old men sitting in a spotlight. He is offered an apprenticeship by these dead warriors, but refuses. He's made the right choice, he thinks, and begins to travel faster. He's gained either power or stupidity.

He just needs to remember that everything is fractal; he just needs to find the fractal pattern on any level and the rest will fall into place. But stretch out too far and the pattern breaks. The illusion of personal reality is gone, and so goes the person with it.

Diana, Preston, and Nick come to the rescue, finding Heley stuck on the stairs, trembling. He can't even speak to them, but just their focus is helping. As they stare at Heley and call to him, he becomes anchored in the present. Then all the Heleys on each of the fractal levels are able to redefine into shape. He finally finds himself back on the stairs, leaning against the wall. Preston looks at him and asks simply, ''Are you going up or down?''

''If I only knew,'' Mark says, grinning.

''Mark had a really, really bad trip,'' Nick Phillip announces at his design studio the next day. "He took some Syrian Rue and LSD. He got a weird side effect and he was cog-wheeling. It took us two hours to get him into the car. He wouldn't let us touch him!'' Nick dials Heley's number angrily. Mark picks up the phone after about ten rings.

''You should fucking reevaluate what you're doing!'' Nick scolds him.

''It was brilliant, Nick. Just brilliant!''

''So brilliant!? You shouldn't do those bloody MAO inhibitors! You could die, you know!''

Mark hides his extreme weariness by speaking in clipped sentences.

''I experienced some polarities, that's all''

Nick covers the mouthpiece and talks to the room and to the air: ''That's sooo Mark Heley!''

''There were just not enough people to absorb the beam,'' Mark explains logically, "and I had to do it alone.''

The responsibilities of the technoshaman never end. Like the shamans of ancient cultures, they must translate the wave forms of other dimensions into the explicate reality for the purposes of forecasting the future and charting a safe path through it. And as Heley's adventure indicates, it's networking the potential of this beam that defines success in spiritual Cyberia.

Chapter 11

Neopagan Technology

There is a growing spiritual subculture dedicated to channelling the beam, and it is characterized by pagan ethics, reliance on technology, and interconnectivity through vast networks. The neopagan revival incorporates ancient and modern skills in free-for-all sampling of whatever works, making no distinction between occult magic and high technology. In the words of one neopagan, ''The magic of today is the technology of tomorrow. It's all magic. It's all technology.''

Again, it's easiest to get a fix on the neopagan revival back in England, where the stones still resonate from the murders of over 50 million pagans throughout the Dark Ages. Fraser Clark, pater of the Zippy movement (''zen-inspired pagan professionals''), sees the current surge of pagan spirit in the cyberian subculture as the most recent battle in an ancient religious struggle. Youth culture is the only answer.

As Fraser prepares to head to work (it's about one in afternoon) he invites me to read what he's just typed onto his computer screen:

Ever since they managed to blackball the Hippy to death, the correct mode of Youth (as hope and conscience of the culture) has been systematically schizophrened from its historical roots. And we're talking about roots that go back through the punks, hippies, rebels, beats, bohemians, socialists, romantics, alchemists, the shakers and the quakers, witches, heretics and, right back in the roots, pagans. Yet the human spirit still revitalized itself! We pagani (Latin for nonmilitary personnel, by the way) have been cooperating and breeding unstoppably, together with our personal gods and succubi like personal computers! Until now, just when the Roman Christian Monotheistic Mind State reaches out to grasp the whole planet by the short hairs, the Alternative Culture births itself.

Fraser has dedicated his life to the spread of pagan consciousness, specifically through the youth culture, which he sees as our last hope for planetary survival. "The system cannot be allowed to go on for another ten years or it really will destroy us all, it's as simple as that,'' Fraser tells me as we walk with his hairless dog from his house in Hampstead to Camden Lock Market. His tone is always conspiratorial, reverberating a personal paranoia left over from the sixties, and an inherited paranoia passed down through pagan history. "If we had this conversation in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we'd be burned at the stake for it. We'd never even be able to imagine things being as good as they are now ... or as bad as they are now.'' Fraser brings a broad perspective to the archaic revival, helping would-be pagans to see their role in the historical struggle against the forces of monotheistic tyranny.

"The actual witch-hunts came in like waves of hysteria just like drug stories in the press do now. You know, every so often along comes a story about witches in their midst so let's burn a few. So it came in waves. Another thing that came in waves is the plague. The black death.'' I can tell that Fraser wants me to draw the parallel myself. Deep down, this man is a teacher. His theory (which has been espoused elsewhere in pagan literature) is that the sudden rises in black death can always be traced to a surge in witch killing and cat killing. The church would reward people who killed cats because they were associated with witches. The rat population would be free to increase, and more plague would spread. As he puts it, "Hysteria caused the plague.'' Meanwhile, our current and potential plague – IDS, pollution, nuclear war – are seen to be caused by similar repression of the pagan spirit, which he seeks to revitalize in the youth culture of England, in any way possible.

To this end, Fraser has become a spokesman and advocate for the modern, urban neopagans. Like both their own ancestors and the most current mathematicians and physicists, they have abandoned organized rules of logic in favor of reality hacking – riding the waves, watching for trends, keeping an open mind, and staying connected to the flow. It's not important whether the natural system is a forest, an interdimensional plane, a subway, or a computer network. For the neopagan, exploration itself is a kind of understanding, and the process of exploring is the meaning of life.

Interdimensional Scrolling

One urban neopagan, Green Fire, is a witch who works for Earth Girl at the Smart Drugs Lounge under Big Heart City and as a psychic for a 900-number phone service called Ultraviolet Visions. The house scene is like a self-similar hypertext adventure. Each new person is like a new screen, with its own menus and links to other screens. But they're all somehow united in purpose and direction. As though each member of the global neopagan network goes on his own visionquests, they are all on a journey toward that great chaos attractor at the end of time.

Today, Earth Girl and other members of her Foxy Seven are busy remodeling the new basement home of the Smart Bar. Toys and trinkets are everywhere. In one corner sits a six-foot geodesic dome lined with pink fur and foam, dubbed the Space Pussy. The soft being inside, who believes he's a direct descendant of the magical ''Shee'' beings, is Green Fire, an impish and androgynous twenty-something-year-old whose Peter Pan gestures belie the gravity with which he approaches his mission: to save the planet by bringing back the Shee, the ancient fairie race that originally inhabited Ireland before the planet was overrun with the "Naziish alien energy'' that has been directing human activity for the past few millenia.

Green Fire believes we are fast approaching a kind of spiritual dawn. ''There is more light now than ever before. Even Joe Blow now is starting to experience a little bit of magic through technology.'' Green Fire is a seamless blend between the magic of the ancients and the technology of the future. "High technology and high magic are the same thing. They both use tools from inner resources and outer resources. Magic from the ancient past and technology from the future are really both one. That is how we are creating the present; we're speeding up things, we are quickening our energies; time and space are not as rigid as they used to be; the belief system isn't there. Those who did control it have left the plane; they have been forced out because it no longer is their time. Those of us who know how to work through time and space are using our abilities to bend time and space into a reality that will benefit people the most.''

So, like house music and its ability to ''condense'' time through juxtaposition of historical "bytes,'' Green Fire's witchery gives him an active role in the creation of the moment. The ancients call forward in time to the present, giving Green Fire the techniques of sorcery, while the light from the future calls back in time through computer technology.

Earth Girl joins us in the Space Pussy to make sure Green Fire is presenting himself in the best possible light. Diana, from Toon Town, follows her in. Diana has come to the Smart Lounge as an emissary of peace. The subtext never reaches the surface, but Diana's presence is threefold: first, to understand exactly why Earth Girl left Toon Town for Big Heart City; second, to gather as many facts as possible about Heley's competition; and third, and most apparently, to make sure everyone stays friends. No matter how stiff the competition and how hot the tempers, everyone is in this thing together. There's only one galactic beam.

Giving the gift of vulnerability as a peace offering, Diana mentions Heley's ''bad'' trip last night at Toon Town.

"He doesn't have the tools to be traveling that far out,'' Earth Girl responds in a genuinely caring tone.

No one says anything for a while. The Space Pussy, too, is silent, itself an emblem of Earth Girl's betrayal of Toon Town and her ex-boyfriend, Heley. Diana shifts uncomfortably: Why would he leave her for me? Earth Girl, knowing she's being stared at, fingers the lace on her flowing satin dress – a striking contrast to Diana's tomboyish overalls and baseball cap.

Diana lights a cigarette and laughs. They all pretend the moment of silence was spent contemplating Mark's weird Syrian Rue adventure. ''He doesn't feel bad today. He even thinks he may have touched the ability to shape-shift.

"We humans are all shape-shifters,'' Green Fire comments, getting the conversation back on track. "We just need to learn to access our DNA codes. It's very computer-oriented. We are computers; our minds are computers; our little cells are computers. We are bio-organic computers. We are crystals. We are made out of crystals. I even put powdered crystals into the smart drinks.''

Green Fire's words seem a little hollow given the emotional reality of Diana and Earth Girl's conflict, so the two girls leave. But despite its inability to tackle everyday, real-world strife, Green Fire's cyber pagan cosmology beautifully demonstrates the particular eclecticism of the new spirituality. It is not an everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink grab bag of religious generalizations, but a synthesis of old and new ideas whose organization is based on a postquantum notion of time. The juxtaposition of magic and computers, shape-shifting and DNA, crystals and pharmaceuticals, is itself indicative of a time compression preceding the great leap into hyperspace, or timelessness.

But until that leap, the realities of romance and business still shape the experiences of cyberians. Diana and Earth Girl must still cope with the fact that they're in the same business and have shared the same boyfriend. Green Fire must cope with the fact that his goddess, Earth Girl, will eventually realize the futility of her comicbook-style leadership, dissolve the Foxy Seven, and go into business for herself.

But in the Space Pussy, for the time being, all is quite well. In the safety of his cocooned emotional playground, Green Fire is free to take daring leaps into interdimensional zones that a parent, professional, or reality-based adult would not. Instead of using Heley's psychedelics and house music, or a hacker's home computer and modem, he practices his magic using techniques from the Celtic shamanic traditions. (Unless, of course, he just happens upon a fairie ring of mushrooms in the forest.)

He'll begin with a purification ritual and an herbal bath, then some breathing techniques and chanting for an hour or so, which brings him into a kind of psychedelic clarity.

"Everything mundane leaves so I know I'm in the trance. I'll cast the circle and invoke the elements. Sometimes I'll have to do a dance to help tap in to some of the Celtic energies. Then I will begin the journey down. Now, that's just like – that's something close to mushrooms, LSD, or DMT.''

Green Fire's fairie realm is also very close to the computer experience. His description of this space, his iconic presence, the way he moves through the space, as well as the hypertext quality of his experiences make it sound like a cyber space fantasy game.

"They'll take me inside. Sometimes I feel like I'm falling or flying. Sometimes I just whoosh, and I'm there. Depends on what kind of passage it is. Then I'm there, and it's a real place. Usually once I get there my body is still in this dimension. I've gone through my cells, my DNA, and I've opened a doorway and I've gone to that other dimension. So I will need to have an archetype there. It's a dreamlike state, but it's also very physical. This is the strange part. I can feel stuff there through that body. I can smell, I can taste, I can touch, and I can hear. My guides will be there, my totems – and they usually guide me to certain cities I need to go to.''

Just as I was guided through virtual reality by gentle Bryan Hughes, Green Fire is guided by his fairies through Celtic Cyberia. This is a virtual world! Each doorway is another screen. Each totem allows him to ''load'' more "worlds.'' Through an archetypal virtual suit, he can see and feel his hyperdimensional reality. And, like Mark Heley in the shamanic fractal, or me in the Intel virtual reality demo program, he must prove he is a worthy interdimensional traveler. As McKenna would say, thoughts are ''beheld.'' As Heley would say, "bliss is a rigorous master.''

"Whatever I think becomes real. Just to even get there I have to be very clear. My emotions and my thoughts steer me. Really, instead of me moving, the place moves. I think something, and then I'm kind of like, there. So if I start feeling dark and weird, I find myself in the dark places of that land. And there are dark places.''

Things get eerie. Green Fire describes how realities ''scroll'' by as on a computer screen, and it's as if he's describing the thickest places in the "ice'' in William Gibson's Neuromancer, where a hacker/cowboy can lose his soul. Green Fire moves through the fairie matrix like a hacker through the network, from system to system, always leaving a back door open. But Green Fire is making his systems breaches without the protection of David Troup's Bodyguard program. Instead, he must depend on his mental discipline. He's in the ultimate designer reality, where his thoughts become what's real, whether he likes it or not.

"It's a discipline to keep your emotions in check – to keep certain archetypical images in my mind. I have to keep them because they're doorways, and if I don't have those doorways positioned correctly, they could lead me to a place that I wouldn't want to be. It's like a puzzle or a maze and I could get lost. Magic is a dangerous thing. There's a new age belief that you can never get hurt; that's not true. You can get hurt very bad. Not everybody should do magic. Even those of us who are made to do it, we fuck up quite a bit. I fuck up quite a bit.''

While a computer hacker who ventures into the wrong system might find the Secret Service knocking at his door, a witch who ventures into the wrong dimension risks psychological or spiritual damage. But just as the most aggressive cyberian hackers make sacramental use of psychedelics to augment their computer skills, adventurous witches make use of the computer net to keep informed of pagan technologies. The communications and computer networks are a self-similar extension of the pagan need for a map to hyperspace.

Green Fire's journeys through the multidimensional ''net'' are also reflected in the way he conducts business through the communications net on earth. Most of his income is generated through a national psychic phone service, Ultraviolet Visions, which offers psychic readings, astrology, tarot card analysis and other psychic services through a 900 number. The office in which the psychics operate is decorated in what Earth Girl likes to call "New Delphic Revival'' – twenty-two stations around a big glass table with pillars, each station corresponding to one of the twenty-two cards of the tarot's major arcana. Of course, the billing is handled by computer through the phone company.

Chapter 12

Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss

The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network. Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people. Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways: as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.

Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge, founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up through computer technology to the creation of a global, informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey, soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.

All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess known as ''the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous nature.

The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800 phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in turn takes information from the web and makes it available to local members. As one initiate explains: ''The main memory can be accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all its members compose a single, informational being.

The information passed about consists of ''majickal techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In some ways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they pass around is much less important than the way in which it is passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as a way of retaking control of language, which has been used and abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.

However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely peep up out of the underground into the light of day and consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPY members. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less important than their presence as a cultural virus or informational entity.

All on the Same Side

Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers for the next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target ''likely'' clubgoers – kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies, college cliques – Diana is dedicated to spreading the house phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional, caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy, especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city to promote Toon Town full-time.

When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men clad in leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who exchange it for a leaflet of their own, ''The Wheel of Torture,'' a poem by Coyote 107:

EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTURE

ON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OV ALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTO SHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTAL APPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOT WAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.) THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUE SELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATE YOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE. TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZ WHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATES ARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE. CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL. GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOU CHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE & PURIFY.

The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways. First, the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important, the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- or even countercultural infrastructure. In a ''meta'' way, the new lines of communication create the global, informational being, in this case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike Green Fire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic party clothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.

"Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus a lot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.

"We're trying to achieve total control over information.'' Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence, ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit, computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick – majick as actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative technology that is used by the individual who's realized that he or she has his or her own will which they have the freedom to exercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''

To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection of the will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to program them into unconscious submission, and replace them with information that opens them to their own magical and technological abilities.

While Kurt is more ''in your face'' and confrontational about his majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl, Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.

"Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner, thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.

Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.

The Protocol of Empathy

Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group prepares to go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club, it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new member of the group – a runaway teenager who was found at a concert last weekend – wonders why everyone is so preoccupied with spreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.

"That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have to wake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''

Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially infectious subliminal ideas.

"It's the programming that's dangerous. The television networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer. Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''

So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting television programming with information of their own: magick.

"Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've understood that throughout history have stayed away from the church, and used the occult as a type of underground communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''

The revelation of the subcultural latticework vanishes as Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.

"I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certain amount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket, and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and it affected me.''

"Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an even tone.

"Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''

She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the human being is really that of the computer with will. But in another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and radically traditional value system than their parents could have had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming the streets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for clothes, or mix potions.

When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol than human interaction:

"When computers talk, there's a basic handshake that happens between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.

"Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people, and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopation is together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the higher level of communication that you're experiencing. Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms that are agreed by the two users.''

The highest level of protocol between two users is, of course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPY members are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ''ovum,'' the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of majick.

"Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the house insists in block type:

We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim astrangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds, subconscious manifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this fear and our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are not. Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is ours strength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov our conditioned behavioural responses. Identifying and dissimilating the thought structures that blind us ov our beauty and imprison us from our power. We thrash these weeds beyond recognition, beyond meaning, beyond existence to the consistency of nothingness. Returning them to their origin, thee abyss. Thee fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration. in coum-union, we impregnate thee abyss; thee omninada; thee all nothingness, with thee seed ov creation. Cultivating, through will and self-love, thee infinite beauty and love that is Creation.

The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzik considers the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The "fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration", because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility for their obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressing them turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse.

Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic. They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.

Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it, he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:

"I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''

Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. ''Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.

"Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys, whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous. She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''

The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror and disdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: ''Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow and she loves every minute of it!''

As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: ''Fucking art critics!''