Disco Lives! was written in 48 hours, on July 23-24, as part of the NYCMIDNIGHT FLASH FICTION CONTEST of 2016. The challenge given me and my fellow contestants in Group 42 (highly auspicious) was to compose a science fiction story of 1,000 words or less, set primarily in a dance hall, and featuring (somewhere) a lottery ticket.
©2016 David Saslav
Disco Lives!
Somewhere, somehow, disco lives. And the Charleston, and the jitterbug, and the gavotte and the gigue. And several far odder dances, ones which no member of the human race will ever attempt, ever even see.
As terpsichorean memes flit through each youthful generation in turn, causing the various dance crazes, few notice the origination points of each “next, new step”; those weird and suggestive generational gyrations so mortifying to (non-dancing, “unhip”) parents.
Think Elvis. Think “twerking”.
And those who do notice tend not to remember clearly the first time a Shimmy or The Egyptian or The Lindy Hop was attempted in a public dance hall; also faded from memory are any explicit references to their innovators, the dancers of slightly uncommon appearance who first executed these daring and unusual moves.
These are the visitors.
More specifically, these are the intergalactic visitors from Gamma Lambda IV, a race of shape-shifting deaf-mute nomads who communicate – much like Terran bees do – only through rhythmic bodily waggling.
It is no accident that these communicative acts appear normal to each planet’s host species, as Lambdan utterances take place while inhabiting normal-looking, unassuming bodies, always within the confines of specially-designated communication areas, known to the Lambdans by a term roughly translating to “hyperportals”.
GraffitiLicious, Chicago’s hot new North Side hip-hop lounge, is one such hyperportal.
GraffitiLicious, like dance halls, ballrooms, and the discotecques of yesteryear, serve migrant Lambdans as interplanetary junctions where they can “shimmer in and shimmy on” . Only after their interstellar Transits have safely completed are they capable of passing messages back and forth in their highly distinctive and visual fashion.
For example: “We… We have finally won the lottery, GrrZll,” said Mnndrr – a Lambdan utterance misinterpreted as a standing backflip with two mid-air twists, cheered on wildly (and soon to be replicated) by a group of scantily-clad hip-hop dancers who observed them.
Once every ten thousand Jnnkees, around thrice a Terran decade, a randomized drawing is held from the list of hundreds of billions of Lambdans, displaced at the Great Termination, when Gamma Lambda IV was destroyed by a meteor strike and resulting climatic cataclysm.
Lambda IV’s High Technology Commission, armed with sufficient warning but little else of any defensive value, responded with the only thing it could come up with to preserve their species.
Lambdan scientists had already developed technology that enabled them to observe other species from across great distances; other planets’ inhabitants’ shapes, mating habits, and social rituals. Then, in the kind of mad rush only impending species extinction can produce, they found a way to create a sort of landing pad on connected planets. And, using their sun, the young star Gamma Lambda, as a power source, they were able to solve the final complexities of matter translocation of Lambdans between these “hyperportals”.
Travelling between two points, and settling at the terminus, however, are two very different things.
“Mnndrr, can it be so!? We are finally permitted our choice of permanent residence on an Established Planet? Our days of Perpetual Transit are finally over?” … And thus a new rhumba/hip-hop combo maneuver was born on Earth.
“Indeed, GrrZll, at long last we are permitted to settle!” … This conveyed as a pirouhette followed by several short balletic leaps, inspiring dozens of young Chicagoans to reproduce it.
“MnnDrr, my love! No longer will we be forced to translocate ourselves every three Jnnkees,” noting her skin’s hue alongside that of her partner’s.
Ever darker and darker, over the course of four Earthly hours, Lambdans change color imperceptibly to the human eye, until the Transit Sequence auto-initiates, whisking the whirling migrants away to yet another colonized planet, another native dance hall, another hyperportal.
Years before, Lambdan sociologists had put the finishing touches on a universal framework for assimilating into “advanced” cultures – ones where knowledge of other inhabited planets had already formed and would spark peaceful, welcoming responses.
These, as it turned out, were vanishingly, tragically, few in number.
And so the Lambdans, a species with fairness woven so deeply into molecular code, desperately devised a Lottery system so that the few settlement spaces available on these worlds would be randomly assigned, fairly allotted.
Days before the meteor hit, each Lambdan was given the choice: either accept oblivion as a corporeal being, or secure a lottery ticket and enter continuous interstellar travel mode. A friendly neighboring planet in the galactic neighborhood, Tau Sigma VII, agreed to host the several million Lambdans who won the very first Lambdan Lottery drawing.
Tau Sigma VII also took on the task of hosting the giant database of Lambdan identities, and agreed to conduct the perpetual drawings on a random basis, as new host planets were identified and new immigration quotas negotiated by Sigman emissaries.
In this slow but fair way, mated pairs of Lambdans – once in a blue Terra Sigma VII moon – could be granted respite from their eternal star hop and inhabit a planet for the rest of their natural lives.
Now it would appear that MnnDrr and GrrZll have shimmered out, off to another place, as they have done together so often before.
Only this time, their hop through space will terminate on a world that is their own; now, at last, they can dance the night away, under whatever moonlight there is.
