Matty believed, as Chase, Dana, and Babacar saw, that her family was burning, inside their car. She couldn't get close enough to tell, and while no one restrained her, several people shouted at her not to walk into the flames. It was, more than their voices, the heat that stopped her.
And then Brian had his hand on her elbow, and, when she faced him, both of his arms around her neck. Jenny and Ras.
When they were sure no one was hurt, the band started playing again, taking the time between songs to point anyone who might be showing signs of post traumatic shock towards the triage tent backstage (a camping tent someone had pitched just outside the driver's side door of their tour bus).
They asked her questions, and she must have answered them. She felt telepathic, able to sense their aliveness without seeing or hearing them, super-attuned to their existence after, for a world-altering minute, believing they were gone.
"Matty," Chase said, looking guiltily at her family. "Nico wants to talk to you."
Nico felt like he was dying. He was, of course, but more slowly than his body seemed to be telling him this morning.
Virtual reality was like a drug, and coming off of it was worse than the discomfort that had driven him to an artificial means of temporary escape. He was a prisoner of his flesh, but able, with his goggles, to astrally project, to become a ghost before his time. Half a ghost.
Matty's tear-smeared face looked down into the screen. Nico was in a bathrobe, which he made sure was decently fastened around his waist. For a terrified second, he thought he still had the flamingo filter on.
"What do you know about this?" Matty asked him.
"I saw the drone feed," Nico said, rubbing his eyes, "and Marcus's live stream. I've been talking to Chase, and the rest of the DAO. It wasn't Chase that set off the bombs. The trail that has been planted, showing a call between his phone and a device planted in the trucks, unfortunately tells a different story. You should be there when he talks to the police. State and Federal agencies, depending on how this thing gets called in."
He'd just woken up. Had been dealing with the escalation of the conflict between the two factions to a hot war, although one, so far, without casualties.
Matty, he could tell, was a person familiar with how quickly history could happen. How the rug of cultural and psychological continuity could be pulled from out of your feet, burned into chaotic dust.
"Are you leaving?" he asked, thinking about the footage of her, clinging to her husband and kids. He really did believe that whoever detonated the bombs wouldn't have set off the explosion, or let Chase set it off, if there had been people in the blast radius. That meant those who had sent the signal were either in the crowd, or had access to the drone footage.
"No. My family is. I'm going to stay and figure out who did this. Even if it's one of ours."
"It isn't." Nico said.
Once he was off the phone, Nico checked Bithub repositories for comments left by the pseudoghost, sometimes publicly, sometimes buried in the code itself, usual in python or html files, more rarely, and generally less usefully, in cascading sheets of style. He deleted some, edited others, and in files that fell into the categories of what he knew the pseudoghost would be targeting. High rates of infection.
Search algorithms had spawned their own sub-communities and writing styles, others taken over by bots. The danger, of course, was self-imposed information bubbles.
That was, many of the pseudonymous posts suggested, what was going on in Breckenridge: the creation of a psychic information well, something advertisers and memeticists could only dream of: a completely captive audience, that didn't know their connection with the outside had been cut off.
Except for Chase, whose phone was mysteriously charging, who had been targeted for the third (and hopefully final, if fairy-tale logic held) time, making both Chase (probably drugged with the same shrooms that Marcus had obviously taken voluntarily) and the police think, or at least suspect, that he had set off the explosion that had almost killed Matty's family. If they hadn't left the rental car and walked back to the stage, they would have burned to death. Assuming that whoever was watching from the drone, with its mysteriously now-missing footage, would have been willing to take human life.
The trucks, and the way the explosions had been directed downward, signaled professional sabotage, possibly military. The cement truck, in particular, had leaked wet cement onto the road, making the task of clearing it significantly harder. The filled logging truck had added intensity and duration to the spectacle, and justified an additional amount of emergency vehicles whose sirens the band would slide-tune their instruments to match.
People were saying, now, that they weren't technically bombs, just some home-made hand grenades (extra flash and bang) wired up to a Blueberry microcomputer.
His phone was ringing.
"Matty, are you okay
"Yes, why didn't you answer my texts?"
"I was doing some research. Trying to figure out what's going on."
"Chase says you're typing as the pseudoghost. This app he's using. He can see you. He says you might want to tighten up the bathrobe."
Marcus felt like he'd been abstracted, like his brain had been deposited in cyberspace, and every meme he saw of himself was as irrevocably true as his own lived experience.
The worst was when some malicious wag had dug up footage from his snowboarding accident, and side-by-sided it with the now-famous .gif of him making the devil's horns and headbanging right before the truck exploded.
People were already making thousands on "board rock explodes" NFTs, elaborate art-noveau style monochromes, concert-poster size, in exquisitely high resolution, the moment after the dumb look of shock, when some snowboarder's instinct had made him crouch, one arm out, like a low-budget action hero. Not concerned enough about the explosion to stop taking a selfie, according to another meme that burned his eyes with neon truth. There was something about phones at night, Chase's in particular, that was almost occult. Chase was saying something about the phone.
"You're going to give it to the police?" Marcus asked.
"Yes! What else am I going to do?"
Damien had told Marcus, in a direct message, that he should take Chase and go out into the woods, in a random direction, and wait until sunrise. "We've both got solid jackets on. We hit the trails in back of the lodge, go up the mountain. They won't be able to get us there. Also, maybe if we get high enough, far enough away, we'll get out of the bubble."
Chase, growing more concerned, asked him what kind of bubble, exactly.
Marcus had been on mushrooms before. These weren't mushrooms. His stomach felt terrible, like he was dying. He wondered vaguely about throwing up, but the possibility seemed snowily distant.
"Damien said there was some kind of a internet bubble being set up, some false sky, or painted sky, I don't remember." He'd told Marcus that the sky net would spoof every site people in the radius visited convincingly, using text-generating AI, trained on archives of the site's history and editorial voice.
Chase pointed out this was another reason to go to the police. Or an ambulance, if he felt better about it. Nothing would make them look guiltier than fleeing into the woods, maybe leaving everyone back at the lodge in danger.
Maybe his feeling terrible was a normal consequence of almost getting blown up, and it only seemed strange to him because of his epic dose of shrooms. Maybe it was an appropriate reaction.
Then he remembered the memes.