Next up on my list of must-have elements for Serotonin Overload: MUSIC!
Music may not be an indispensable building block for cyberpunk fiction, but I wanted it to figure into this story in some integral way. Not shoehorned in for the sake of saying “see? that’s where the punk part is!” Because that’s not where the punk part is, I covered that in the previous post: the punk part is rejecting the system everyone else blindly adheres to.
Music is pretty important to me IRL. Live music is vibrant; it’s an experience. Stories need vibrancy to come alive. They need the sensory element, and what’s more sensory than live music?
As for the music that found its way into Serotonin Overload, I came up with a fictional music genre called algopunk (algorithmic punk) in which human musicians compete with their own equipment…
An algopunk trio gyrated madly on the tiny stage opposite the bar, discordantly screeching over increasingly complex, procedurally generated loops. The bandmembers glittered with skinplant tech and jewelry. Lights blinked and strobed from their torn denim. When they flung up their hands, lasers shot from their fingertips to sweep the smoky air. Garish, multi-hued aug-light spelled out the name of the band, TECHNOSTATE, above their heads.
Serotonin Overload, chapter 8.
I’m setting a scene here. Goods are about to change hands in the back room of a smoky bar. Our hero walks through the bar, smelling the stale beer and sweat, blinking in the strobes, the music pounding insistently into her eardrums. All well and good, but if that’s all there is to it we could have done this clandestine exchange anywhere.
Thing is, algorithmically generated loops … and live musicians trying to keep up …
She didn’t care for algopunk. Presumably the clash between the live musicians and the looping algorithm represented the futility of striving against the modern technological world. The musicians’ attempts to defeat the constantly adapting algorithm were a symbolic defiance.
I probably don’t have to mention at this point the real world nonsense going on with so-called “art” made with so-called “AI.” And there are elements in Serotonin Overload that touch on this, mostly in tangential fashion. Algopunk is one of them.
We’re scratching at the underlying theme here, and this is one of the earliest parts of the book to do so explicitly.
It’s also a scene in which our hero sees one of her fellow ‘punks clearly for the first time (perhaps). Like many great protagonists, Sera is a bit of a fish out of water. She doesn’t come from the City. She was raised by futuristic quasi-religious fanatics who reject all modernity and scratch a living from the dirt. They taught her that technology, all tech, is evil. The modern world is evil. Everybody in the City is evil. She rejected these ideas and ran away, then met some people she thought proved there could be Good in the big bad city…
His betrayal could not have been more devastating. Shady and occasionally underhanded as he might be, she’d believed him a good man, the first decent person she’d met. In him, she’d found validation for her rejection of Brother Carpenter’s dogma. Proof that good people could still live in the City. That one could exist amid the rot without themselves becoming rotten.
That he was a criminal made no difference. It was no moral victory to abide by the laws of a corrupted state. Criminality became a badge of virtue in such surroundings. Furthermore, the nature of his crimes aligned with the values of her own heart.
Unfortunately, it seems her fellow ‘punk is not what she thought. I won’t tell you what our hero has learned in this scene (spoilers!) but the revelation is devastating to her. It shakes her whole worldview, to be honest, and rattles her confidence in ways that really screw her up and drive a good section of the plot.
What’s that got to do with the music? Well…
Maybe Brother Carpenter had been right all along. There could be no morally sound participation in a system that engendered such predicaments. Like Technostate’s dissonant efforts to defeat the algorithm on the stage below, to struggle within the confines of the system was futile.
John A. Underwood 