Free Hallucinating by Stephen Palmer

paid off.
    Their penultimate gig is at The Other Eisteddfod, just outside Llangollen in Wales. Nulight expects it to be a stormer. It is an apt metaphor.
    The stage is quite high and they have arranged their keyboards, computers, av links and internet rig in a semicircle, as usual, since that is a cosmically correct setting. There is a small but enthusiastic crowd, spliff-taffs mostly, but also rasta hangers-on, tipi folk, and ambient heads seething their brains in Lo-Dose and Mighty. Set back somewhat, naked cooks fry psilocybe caps in sunflower oil, offering up their offerings on baps of crusty whiteloaf. There are large amounts of cider available under the monicker Jerry's Strangely Apple Brew.
    Iechyd Da!
    It is extraordinary how the vibe of the gig affects people's behaviour. Nulight is impressed. Some of the audience are hallucinating, others are coupled in sleeping bags, while others brew tea on primus stoves or eat lettuce sandwiches. Some have had the decency to bring amp-phones, tech that allows them to experience the gig straight off the mixer in head-filling stereo. Nulight imagines their skulls as containers of liquid music, and as the band begins to play he watches them fill up, sees their eyes go misty and faraway.
    For half an hour the gig is relaxed, but then they happen upon a trancey blip that Zhaman modifies into a looping riff of close microtones, that, after only forty bars, becomes hypnotic at 144 bpm. It is as if they are all trapped inside the loop, endlessly cycling, round and round, for ever and ever.
    Then the audience is wide-eyed, pointing at them, applauding, grinning, laughing, freaking out with pleasure at the trance segment, and Nulight smiles with pride at his accomplishment.
    But it was not the music that the audience were reacting to.
    Suddenly Nulight is flying upward, something snagged on the back of his shirt, pain in his armpits from the stress. Below him the audience think it is part of the act, and they are well impressed.
    But he is being abducted. He wriggles, aware that he will shortly die... he supposes. Through the clouds he is pulled, fantastically quick, and he dares not raise his arms and slip out of his shirt because he will fall to his death. Would that be preferable to alien implantation and experimentation? Too scared to think. What to do? Wait.
    Then it is all lights and his stomach flips wrongways into his mouth as if he is going over a bridge in a car, and then the lights flicker all around him, strobing, strobing bad, like a storm of fireflies inside a VR helmet. He shakes his head from side to side to remove them from his sensorium, but they will not depart. He hears echoing sound, and spookily enough it is reverberated auton music as if coming from the bottom of a well—though the well's depths seem to be up there somewhere. He tries to sense what is approaching, but he is too confused. He wriggles some more. The hook, or whatever it was that caught him, has gone, and in fact he is floating free as if in a reverse draught of attar scented air, so heavy he now wants to sneeze, as if he has passed through a wall of incense. The music is losing its reverberation, coming closer, ever closer, like destiny with a capital D.
    So the aliens have got him. He relaxes, defeated. Paranoia leaks alongside fear from his mind, and he becomes limp, dejected, a failure, a man without hope, soon to die.
    Now the little lights are strobing slow, like a rainbow of speckled sweets, wine gums by the look of them, soft and tangy, and they seem to infuse their essence into him. It is a miniature invasion of the human by the alien. This is no hallucination, this is real. It is happening to him. The sweets. The invasion. The reverse gravity, the up-flight into the warm centre of the mothership; and he is rising high like a spirit of the dead into some anti-heaven of the alien imagination. Buddah save him! Now!
    Then he is dizzy, stomach churning, as if he is being sent down a horizontal