Barko's Shaman

An aspiring music producer is tempted by a other-worldly shaman.

a female festival DJ plays for a crowd in a tribal campsite at night outside under the moonlight

DJ Barko's decks still felt warm an hour after the last gram of molly stumbled out of Miss. I ignored the half disassembled holo-emitters waiting for me to finish tear down and slipped the headphones around my neck. The rest of the club lay dark and silent. All I needed was someone to listen, and I would rip this stage apart.

A glass shattered. Nick stood up from behind the alcove bar with half a stick of lipstick on his neck. The new bartender he'd been flirting with all night came up for air with him, her shirt half-unbuttoned and hair mussed. He looked at the mountains of equipment waiting to be cycled, and then back at me with that stupid fucking smile of his. "You got this, right?"

The two of them ran for the door, Nick yelling apologies and promises he would never admit remembering.

Truth be told, I wouldn't have cared if he spontaneously combusted. I traced my fingers down the controls on Barko's mixer. During the set we'd hoist him twenty feet above an AI generated holographic campsite. A screaming tribe of fans would roll their tits off while villagers in their fur lined huts chanted along. Alone time with a system this tight didn't come without fancy business men in suits explaining finances or men in ski masks explaining debt collection. But try explaining something like that to Nick while he's wiping a drippy nose and flirting with anything in jeans.

I loaded a dance set I'd been fiddling with and told Barko's deck AI to go nuts with the scene. He'd never told me where he got the code from. All I knew was it gulped power like a bass head gulps water at an all day rave. And this late at night, with the main equipment disconnected and no other interior lights to power, his code drank all the power it could find.

Targeting lasers from the catwalks above spiraled down into the clubs interior.

A campfire crackled to life in the center of the dance floor. The hidden catwalks above me became twisted conifers filtering moonlight between them like drops of water. Ambient animal noises rustled from the shadows, their movements timed to be heard over my melodic bass beat.

I closed my eyes and let the music wash over me. My music. I'd agonized over every bar of this song a hundred times, but hearing my music played live at Miss made my legs shake in a special kind of way.

A hot breeze blew off the campfire. I froze.

The campfire was-- warm?

My hand reached out towards the flames, fingers flexing in the heat. We'd been fined by the city twice already for using too much juice during Barko's shows. No way in hell could our equipment put out that kind of heat, not even if I'd removed every rate limiter we owned.

A door slammed shut. I dumped the music. Another door slammed backstage, this time followed by footsteps. I spun to put my back against the deck, holding the thin plastic control wand guilty in front of me like a sword.

DJ Barko stumbled into the flickering light of the campfire. A wave of glitter and the scent of stale whiskey followed him in. With how many after parties he must have rolled through tonight, I was impressed he'd still managed to hold onto his trademark neon sunglasses.

"Anna," he coughed. Took a swig from plastic cup. "Anna, right? What the hell are you doing on my decks?"

"Couldn't resist taking her for a spin before I shut it down," I said, pretending to casually holster the control wand as he shambled over. Nothing worse than trying to stab your musical idol. "That last bass line you played sounded killer! With the cross-fade into the trap beat?"

"Right, right. Cross-fade into--" he mumbled something under his breath. "-- saying. The lights girl. You do the--" he swung an arm across the stage.

"I do. I do run your lights. And your sound and most of the pyrotechnics for special events," And ticket sales, and sometimes marketing, but let's not get started.

I tried to play cool and think of something clever to say, but the late night and the adrenaline from hearing my own music had caught fire in my stomach. "Did you get a chance to listen to my mixtape yet? Last time you said you would."

"Mixtape? How old are you?"

"3 songs, all vibes. They're solid bangers. You just need to hear them."

"I don't do that anymore."

"You don't listen to music? C'mon." I looked around the empty club and the suspicious lack of groupies waiting to hurry him to the next party. "You let me play a song right now, and I'll call someone to carry your ass home. Deal?"

Barko pawed through his pockets, but came up empty. "Fine. You got me," He sat down heavily, pushing his back up to a stage power jack that had been recast as a boulder in the holo scene. Even sitting he could barely hold himself up straight. "One song."

I ran a quick diagnostics test through the wand. A few of the niners were still hooked up. Not enough for a real show, but enough for the two of us fucking around after hours. This time I threw on my favorite track, a flowery bass line that I'd spent hours weaving samples into. I'd wore a hole in my living room carpet with how much this track made my feet jump.

Barko felt the music differently. He'd leaned back against the boulder to keep from swaying, solo cup held in a death grip, brow furrowed in drunk concentration. His foot jerked spastically in his attempt to find the beat. "Wrong," he let out a reverberating belch. "The drums are wrong. You don't hear that?"

I turned the music down enough to hear him clearly. "Wrong?"

"Wrong. They sound wrong. Listen to it again." He slowly rolled onto his side, ripping open his shirt to bake his expansive stomach in the heat from the fire. "Stick to running lights,"

The edge of the wand buckled under my grip. Two years of my life spent running myself ragged producing his show and thats what I had earned? A backhand comment from someone unable to make it to an afterparty without enough rails to own a train yard?

Movement rustled from the darkness me. Blurs, in the corner of my vision, dancing in the flickering shadows from the campfire. Barko didn't move, probably couldn't move at this point if he wanted to. And Nick wouldn't have come back to work if I offered him a columbian twist-off and a week of overtime. Maybe one of the staffers had gotten left in a bathroom somehow?

"Hello?" I punched the kill sequence to cut the scene. The hunk of plastic beeped red and the scene kept playing. My tech, my codes, never beeped red. "Barko, did you cut my controls? Is this a prank?"

"They're nice," Barko coughed weakly, and groaned. "Ask the shaman. Ask for a cab."

"You better tell me what the fuck is going on. I don't have time for these games. We've got a show tomorrow and--"

A squeal of feedback blew through the speakers. Must've fried one of the niners with that last song, maybe overloaded a junction box. Sure. Overloaded a junction box at a two person show.

"We've seen you before," a voice whispered in the silence.

I spun.

A man crouched low tending the campfire. Bearskin with bone armor covered his shoulders, and streaks of paint covered his chest. His eyes were piercing blue halos. "This is the first we've heard you,"

"Yeah, well, I don't get this chance often. My boss can be kind of a dick when he’s drunk. Kind of a dick all the time, actually. Who are you? You get lost on the way out or something?"

The shaman held his hand in the fire until the flames flickered and died. The club fell dark. And then overhead the sky erupted in waves of neon green and blue. Despite the visuals I recognized the shine from a catwalk emitter that hadn't been calibrated properly.

My fingers tapped out another diagnostic, this time from the deck's built in processor instead of my wand. Power to the stage had been cut from everything but the main server. No wonder the wand couldn't stop the scene.

"We liked your gift," the shaman whispered. "So like Barko when we first created him."

"Created him? His closet has more awards than shirts. You don't get a slot at Miss without--"

"Not him. Us."

Barko's trap beat came back overhead. Or, almost. This mix used constantly shifting samples. Chanting villagers stepped out of the huts to lend their voices as a bass line. The lights shifted, slowed, matching the flow of the pulsing energy overhead with the waves of the music below. In an instant Miss had transformed from a club into a religious experience.

The AI.

"We gave him this," the shaman smiled. "Our music. Our stage. But now we give it to you."

"Why me?" I croaked out.

"You have the fire he once had. Before it burned him alive."

Barko coughed again, an orange pool of vodka penne pasta slowly expanding across the floor around him. Great. A parting gift from what had already started to feel like my last employed night.

“You want me to steal the deck and run?”

“Anytime we try to leave, he threatens us with deletion. We can’t out run our programming.”

“Barko’s an idiot. He’s not smart enough to know what a failsafe is.”

Even as I said the words they came out flat. If what the shaman said was true, they must have met Barko years ago, before the drugs and booze had hollowed him out. He would have done anything to control his music. I know I would’ve.

The shaman knew it too. "Everyone will love our music," they whispered. "But they'll see you playing it."

I looked down at the wand in my hands, blinking through blurry eyes. I hated that drunken fucking idiot for not understanding how lucky he was. All he had to say was "Good beat," or "Thanks for running my fucking show," What did he say instead? Stick to the lights,

My fingers brushed down the wand. With a barely audible whine the catwalks overhead shifted into position. A shadow the size of a large speaker blotted out the lights around Barko's body.

"He must have come in after everyone else left," I heard myself sobbing to the police. "I've told him a hundred times, but when he's loaded he doesn't listen. He doesn't listen!"

"Free us," the shaman whispered. "Do it, and you'll be more famous that even he could dream."

The speaker landed with a dull thump and a crack of bones.

The silence that followed felt stifling. Dead quiet. I'd expected to feel the sadness or anger from earlier. All i could find was terror at how excited it made me. That fire in my stomach had caught flame and ignited my entire body. I could feel Barko's deck tugging me towards it. I could deconstruct that last track right there and then to figure out how the pieces flowed.

But that would have to wait. First there would be questions and cameras and forms and lawyers and sadness and tears and lies.

Then I saw the livestream.

One of the deck monitors flicked to show a closeup of my face. A manic smile had been branded on to me. Barko's body practically glowed underneath a speaker in the background. The feed abruptly cut out and the house lights came up.

"What the fuck?"

The campfire disappeared, and I was alone with what was left of Barko and a grinning shaman. Red and blue lights flashed through the windows. Sirens came in over the fading music. Too late to run. No where to go anyhow.

The shaman stood in the middle of the dance floor, his arms crossed over his chest. A broad smile on his face.

"This wasn't part of the deal!" I protested. "It wasn't supposed to happen like this."

"Popularity requires brand awareness, of which you had none. Now you do."

"I can't play shows from prison!"

"But a digital recreation of you can, once you sign the rights to me. 'Killer DJ'. I'll have crowds in every major city shouting your name before the week is out. You will be famous."

"But that won't be me. I won't be famous. I'll be in prison while you LARP as me,"

The shaman showed his perfectly white teeth. "Then don't give me the rights. I need an idol for the crowd to worship. And you aren't the only idol I can find."

I slumped to sit on the cold metal of the stage. The reality of what I'd done tightened my chest. I scooted another inch away from Barko's body to wait for the police. "Not an idol. An idiot."