Free Hallucinating by Stephen Palmer Page B

saved my skin, man," Nulight replies.
    "Leave my tent out of the back while I hold them off," Jerry replies. "I think I saw Kappa running down to the railway line."
    "Right. Nice one."
    Jerry leans back in his rocking chair and raises a pint of the golden stuff. "I discovered this is Canterbury," he says, "and I've never been the same since. It's a strange brew—like life."
    Nulight shakes Jerry's hand, says, "See ya later," then runs out of the tent. He finds Kappa by the railway, and soon they are away in a taxi down to Llangollen town centre.
    Kappa alone has realised the truth about the abduction. He tells his story and she is shocked.
    He was not hallucinating.
    It was real.
    ...ambient music and world domination...
    So was it all a gigantic hallucination?
    Nulight is uncertain, despite the certainty of his beliefs. It is not a black and white situation.
    And then everything happens.
    Surfing the internet, he hits Berlin and reaches the computers in which the semi-autonomous music is fermenting. Immediately suspicious of the linkage, he hesitates, for it seems a fluke drop. Maybe Master Sengel is somewhere electronically near, like a guardian devil. But seeing the opportunity to wreck the alien system he moves in to pull the metaphorical plug.
    And then his right hand is not his own. It is controlled. He works something, some simple cutting device, and then a skin glove falls off his hand and he understands the significance of Chantal in the mothership.
    He looks at the VDU. Instead of dying, the Berlin music simply spreads its wings and flies.
    And over a few days the great plan comes to its fruition, all to the beat of its own new music, auton, that sonic window into the alien psyche, unhuman sounds, unhuman rhythms, the infectious, so catchy abstract germ that nobody can resist, because nobody can develop resistance to what they are fascinated by.
    First affected is the German economy, or meta-economy as it has become since parallel computers linked by optical nets recreated it. The software running the stock market is a mathematical model of capitalist thought, and it is easily recast in the alien mode. The autonomous music, existing alive like a protoplasm in the European net, remixes the economy. All the data relating to company shares, capital, stock, all the governmental data regarding contracts, fiscal law, relations with the rest of the world, and the entire softsys running the European Community, all these are lost. In its place a warped model appears.
    People can go to cashbooths and withdraw ten billion euros, not in cash, but virtually. It seems chaotic, illogical, but there is a pattern. Unfortunately that pattern, being alien, cannot be analysed.
    The Berlin stock market crash is nothing, however, compared to the events of the following day. London crashes. No economic business can be done. Computers ruled everything. Now they have gone alien. The pulsating interchange of electronic data has lost its human shape.
    Then Wall Street crashes, then Tokyo, and the world is lost.
    Economic activity on the global scale becomes impossible to understand. It is happening, but it is alien. How can anybody live a sane life when companies go bust in seconds and beggars become billionaires?
    This is how the invasion succeeds. Global electronic economic activity was an ugly music for the aliens. They have substituted their own. They could not help it.
    ...Cornish gentle...
    Only the economically self-sufficient survive. Kappa takes Nulight away to recuperate—they head southwest. Zhaman comes along, also Djo and Sperm. The aliens do not pursue them. The group head for the farm owned by Kappa's parents in Boscastle, Cornwall, and there they set up an agrarian collective.
    The Boscastle collective is named MaxNeef, after a visionary.
    It seems that the aliens are only bothered with the so-called civilised regions: urban Europe and North America, Japan and the Tiger Economies, Australia, Singapore. They ignore South