Night Sessions, The by Ken MacLeod

human could do, and use equipment designed for human operators, without worrying about radiation exposure or needing life-support. Another hundred or so still filled odd niches—bodyguards, bouncers and the like—where creeping people out was a feature.
    And the last hundred or so had migrated, a few at a time, by some cryptic consensus, to Waimangu. To human beings Waimangu meant natural wonder, creation science park, tourist attraction; to the robots it was a refuge: their own uncanny valley.

 
     
    Dave Warsaw was the man, the king of the silent scene. He stood in the pulpit of the Liquid Cosh dance club and looked over a couple of hundred bopping heads. The crowd was good tonight. Most of them were doing designer but enough of the old guard were here for the sweet smoke to be thick and the bar at the back to be busy. He raised his arms, poised to begin the night's session. The club's interior walls were plain: wood panelling to two metres, then whitewashed plaster all the way up through to the vaulted curves of the roof. The two long sides each had a gallery, whose pillars had provided convenient spacing for tables and booths. The only decoration was an abstract, tentative pattern in stained glass in some parts of the tall pointed windows. Dave's default in such clubs was the paintbox of Catholic baroque. But tonight he felt a qualm. A Catholic priest had been murdered today. It wasn't reluctance to offend that made Dave hesitate. Nobody here would be offended. It just didn't seem right, for reasons he didn't have time to explore, because people were looking up at him, heads turning, looks becoming questioning.
    He concentrated on the imagined menu and sent options flying across his sight. He made his selection, grinned to tell the crowd and to clear his eyes, and brought his arms down with a virtual drumbeat crash. Then he swung his arms around and began to throw the scene. Patterned tiles covered the floor and walls, the roof opened raw and ragged to a brassy sky, and the rotor thump of a military helicopter just overhead segued into the opening beat of the first chords. At first the recognition was slow, just a few here and there catching the tune, then body language and cheat codes made the crowd converge on the same virtuality, or a compatible one at least, and they were all moving to the same beat.
    Yay! Dave threw a magnesium-flare explosion into the virtual sky and was gratified to see that most of the dancers caught it. They were with him here, in a ruined mosque from the Faith Wars, dancing to “Haji Horizontal,” a heavy hit from that time, an oldie but goodie, and Dave had three minutes and a half to find or think of something else. He blinked on “Related,” did a date-range exclude to skip the last-generation stuff and in the nick zapped ina cracking contemporary from the Utah Scooters, a band he'd heard once and been impressed with. He hadn't heard this particular file so he was taking a risk but it paid off. The crowd surged into the swing and so it went, file after file, and bit by bit Dave darkened the sky and brought out stars and more flares and some tracer fire here and there.
    He was well zoned in, running on auto, and he had time to watch the crowd and to notice stuff, give the nod to people he recognised from other gigs or a high-five to his friends. The mix tonight was a little over-sweetened with the draggy and transy, spiced with dark-siders and heavy mods, vampires and werewolves and the like, with a vanilla overlay of curious and admirers and noobs. After a bit he noticed one such—could have been a noob, could have been a curious—out on the dance floor, who time after time was just not getting it. Dave prided himself on being able to carry a crowd, and everyone on the silent scene prided themselves on being able to converge on the virt, to take a hint, catch a drift. Watching this fool bopping and twirling out of time shouldn't have irritated him so much, but it did. It was like a