A field guide · Chapter

South by South

For ten days every spring, the whole trench stops working and starts pitching. They call it SXS. Nobody can define it, everybody has a badge, and the queues are longer than the migrations.

SXS · the convergence festival · held in the Lower Wards · badge required, wristband insufficient

It began, like most Atlantean institutions, as a small and reasonable idea. A few grown-tech halls wanted to show the city what they had been culturing in the dark. A few songwriters wanted somewhere warm to play. A few storytellers wanted an audience that wasn't their own family. So they agreed to do it all in the same week, in the same wards, and to share the cost of the lanterns.

That was forty years ago. Today SXS is three festivals wearing one wristband, a migration of two hundred thousand gilled visitors, and the single largest annual test of the city's current-filters. The locals flee to the high reefs. The ascent companies take over the arenas. And somewhere, every year, a band nobody has heard of plays a flooded cellar at the wrong end of the schedule and walks out famous.

The three currents

SXS runs on three overlapping "currents," and the oldest argument in Atlantea is which one ruined it.

The Grown-Tech Current

Founders in matching fin-wraps pitch cultured coral that does your taxes. Every third booth is a "platform." Someone will tell you, unprompted, that this is the year everything changes. — it is not

The Story Current

Premieres of inked sagas and light-plays, screened on bioluminescent walls. A beloved director surfaces for a surprise talk; the line forms six hours early and loops the vent twice.

The Song Current

Ten thousand acts, four hundred stages, one working elevator. The showcases run until the tide turns. This is the part everyone actually came for and the part no schedule survives.

The keynote

There is always a keynote, and it is always "the future." One year it was a visionary from an ascent company explaining that the city should leave the ocean entirely and summer in orbit. The hall roared. The filters failed. The idea was quietly shelved and re-pitched, verbatim, the following spring. This is the rhythm of SXS: every revelation has already revelated, and will revelate again.

"If you are not uncomfortable, you are not early enough." — overheard, every single year, by someone holding a free kelp-cup they waited forty minutes for.

A thin slice of the schedule

Grown-Tech Keynote: Leaving the Water, Again10:00 · Armor Hall

Panel: Is the Vent Over?12:30 · Warm Stage

Premiere: Crown No. 6 (first look)15:00 · The Dome

Showcase: The Gillhorns (surprise set)21:00 · a cellar, somewhere

Unofficial after-partylate · the Great Warm Vent

How to survive it

Get the badge. The wristband is a trap; it admits you to everything except the thing you want. Pick one current. Nobody has ever "done all three" and remained a person. Eat the free vent-fare while it lasts — by day four the brands run out and the lines do not. And when a stranger hands you a badge for a party in a sealed cellar at the wrong end of the trench, go. That is the only rule the locals agree on.

The dry-world parallel. SXS is Atlantea's South by Southwest — the festival that each March floods Austin, Texas with tech, film, and music until the city is three festivals wearing one badge. The grown-tech current is the Interactive track; the Story current is Film; the Song current is Music; the vent after-parties are the ones that aren't on the schedule. The free kelp-cup is a taco. Everything else is reported faithfully.

By the tenth day the visitors are gone, the stages come down, the filters recover, and the trench exhales. The locals come back from the high reefs and pretend they hated it. They did not. They are already arguing about next year's lineup.