The Lo Teks
by Philosopher

"The killing floor was eight meters on a side. A giant had threaded steel cable back and forth through a junkyard and drawn it all taut. It creaked when it moved, and it moved constantly, swaying and bucking as the gathering of Lo Teks arranged themselves on the shelf of plywood surrounding it. The wood was silver with age, polished with long use and deeply etched with initials, threats, declarations of passion. This was suspended from a separate set of cables, which lost themselves in the darkness…

"A girl with teeth like a dog's hit the floor on all fours. Her breasts were tattooed with indigo spirals. Then she was across the Floor, laughing, grappling with a boy who was drinking dark liquid from a liter flask…"

—William Gibson
From the short story "Johnny Mnemonic"

It was my first night at Burning Man.

Our camp shaman had served up his infamous fried-peanut-butter-and-mushroom sandwiches, sending us out into the playa with a strange taste in our mouths and the admonition, "Watch out for the bats."

The playa was vast, breezy, dusty, and cool. We tramped for miles and then tramped some more. We climbed onto roaming art-cars, each of which seemed to take us father from our destination (when we had one) or farther out into the Great Beyond, that mysterious void behind the Man.

We danced in a pounding techno club under sprays of green laser light. We rested, lying on the dusty playa beneath a streaking line of strobe-sculptures, flashing like runway lights, seemingly to infinity.

We frequently laughed. We occasionally gasped. We smiled and nodded when words were insufficient.

And eventually we dispersed, victims of entropy.

Now I am walking the playa solo, wandering in Brownian motion, ricocheting from one astonishment to the next. I marvel at how alone one can be while surrounded by 30,000 people. I smile, talk to myself, even tap-dance on the playa, and no one notices or cares. I have become invisible.

After a long traverse through dark wilderness, tracing a diameter from one side of the Esplanade to the other via the yawning empty space around the Man, I see a mirage rise up from a deep vault of my subconscious—or so it seems, anyway, because what I see is too much like a long-held dream to actually exist in reality.

The camp is on the Esplanade. I approach it silently, invisibly surfacing from the ocean of darkness. I can feel the throbbing techno music from 100 yards away. Gradually forms emerge from the night: huge structures of rusted steel, I-beams, towers, chain-link fences, rusted barrels with flames flickering up like blazing hands reaching for heaven. It's all cabled and welded together as if a demon had tried to shape a nightmare carnival out of iron and junk, and failing, had turned his torch on it in frustration.

Moving closer, I see the forms of people. Hundreds of people, dancing on the dusty earth among the girders, under the graffiti-covered catwalks, beneath the looming rusty towers cobbled together from corrugated steel and quivering cables. The dancers wear black leather, black latex, and blood-colored snakeskin pants. They wear chains and bands of studded leather on their wrists, necks and ankles. They are painted, smeared, tattooed, and streaked with dust. The hard muscles of shirtless men glisten with sweat in the firelight. Everything moves to the pulse of the music. Bodies writhe, dreadlocks swing, and black-gloved fists pump up at the astonished sky.

I have somehow stumbled across the lair of the Lo Teks.

Still invisible, I drift to the edge of the camp, where I can feel the pounding bass and smell the dusty sweat. A red spotlight pivots like a machine gun from one of the towers, panning across the dancing mob to illuminate a single human figure, dancing on a rusty catwalk, hovering over the center of the crowd.

Except for black boots, she is nude. Her hair is a spray of pink punk attitude. Her pale skin is smeared with random streaks of color—blue, pink, silver—as if a mob of painted hands had slapped her flesh.

She dances as if it were the end of the world. Her head swings down to her knees then arcs back up to the sky. Her fists clench, and her elbows pull down, as if she were yanking a lever that would tear open the earth and drop us all into fiery hell.

Most of the Lo Teks dance without seeing her, oblivious, jaded, or lost in their own ecstasies. Others—without seeming to realize they have stopped— stare up at her, mesmerized. She rules them without even knowing that they exist. She swings invisible sledgehammers, as if she could smash the world. Her arms fly up as if inviting the cold moon to rip open her breast and tear out her heart. Her fury is exceeded only by her grace.

I am rooted, stunned, lost in a world of imagination made real. This scene has appeared countless times before my mind's eye, as I fell asleep reading Gibson, and my unhinged imagination fused his techno-punk vision with my own flame-kissed erotic dreams. This is my dark, personal vision of the future, where technology and art meet primal decadence.

And here, on a moonlit lake bed in northern Nevada, hundreds of people have conspired to create my imaginary world, just waiting for me to stumble across it.

This is a gift I can never repay, except by my own feelings of wonder, joy, and gratitude. This is my first night at Burning Man, and already I understand.