The Bridge | Bots 'R Us

Chapter 13 | Dance Dance Transfusion

WASHINGTON CITY
CLUB BOOMBASTIC
18 DECEMBER 134

Our excited and multicolor groups jostled to the backstage lounge, grabbing their snack bags on the way. We munched away our power snacks, chatting and toasting, buzzed at the idea of performing on the trendiest grooves and fanciest moves. With perfect timing, our reality-stream hostess joined us—the club was streaming out their backstage, too. Dressed in a chameleon jumpsuit flashing in tones of fire and red, Scintillya entered the room with flare and three DronEye™ hornet cameras opening her way.

"Attention, everybody!" she announced, breaking the chatter to get us ready for outfitting. Two buff staff also followed our dreamy hostess, pushing rolling shelves loaded with almost two hundred small metal balls called SpiderWorms. Those were the missing link of virtual gaming: superpowers fitting in the palm of your hand to sync with your VR environment, tune in to music, or other stimuli.

Scintillya touched her slate to call the first name in the first team, and the corresponding ball started glowing on the shelf. One by one, the dancers stood by her side, disrobed, arms open, so she could delicately press the device against the back of their neck, every little movement closely framed by a DronEye.

People could never get tired of the spooky spectacle of a SpiderWorm embracing a person. The ball would take hold on skin contact, soften and stretch to expand like a vine growing in a quick time-lapse. These 'puppeteer wires' were a nanorobotics marvel branching out as dozens of strategic nerve-ending connections. Each line stretched smoothly with intention against back and limbs until it reached its destinations. Once in place, the branches would match our skin color, ready to activate on a tune and take control of our bodies, the time of a dance. We could then don our form-fitting, flying mag-lev unitards in the colors of our teams, with their laser glitter shooters on our shoulders, wrists, and heels!

I wondered what Simone would think about all that. She was not familiar with this crowd but was excited at the idea of seeing our bodies expressing their strength and grace in the air. She had joined the rest of the audience inside the club, where her quality of 'performer chaperon' gave her access to the VIP Lounge, a room shaped like the bridge of a spaceship nudged in the higher reaches of the state-of-the-art theatre. Boombastic was a classic palace designed in the retro-modern New Art Deco style of the early second century. At Simone's feet, below, on the dance floor, a few thousand people bathed in a symphony of lights were already bumping on the thumping like charged-up neutrons.

In our lounge, the stage manager called the first team in the first group. We had seen them quickly marking their steps, giggling all the way. They suddenly disappeared through the lounge's side door to run down the stairs and take their position beyond the stage beneath the dance floor.

As the performance neared, a tower bell's deep and clear chime resounded, growing louder with every stroke. The background beats receded like the ocean tide before a Tsunami, and the lights dimmed. By the tenth stroke of 22:00, on a loud and ominous note catching everyone's attention, the brightest column of light you'd ever seen fell from the roof, like the transporter beam of an alien ship here to abduct festive dancers. This was the signal for the crowd to clear the space around the shining ray. The column of light widened to define a large circle shaped like the iris of a camera lens. Once the revelers had cleared the area, a ring came out of the floor, and the iris blades opened. A thick cloud of white smoke escaped from the ground as if announcing a rocket launch. Lifted by a bright blue disk, dressed in a sharp deconstructed white suit, DJ Célestin emerged from the smoke, glowing in a silver halo.

Greeted by "Oohs and aahs," our DJ introduced the evening's exceptional show:

"Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone around and in-between: Welcome to Boombastic! Welcome to the final series of Dance Dance Transfusion 'In-the-Flesh' performances!" Célestin's HoverDisk backed up slowly until it landed our DJ at the front of the stage. "We've learned a lot about our future in the last two months. Everybody knew something had to give. It was no secret our ecosystem had started to fail. And suddenly, a door opened—a crazy solution that may well work: Bots 'R Us!" The audience let go of a laughing gasp. "And last week we voted! And we said yes! Well, most of us did. So we're gonna do it. We're gonna jump onto that Bridge!"