Dancing Prohibited

Danton Gore stood in front of the “no-dancing” discotheque called “Take Off.” It was 9:45 p.m., and he had already been waiting twenty minutes for his client of the evening, Ms. Gwen Stephens. Take Off was located on city level 54 and was the most popular no-dancing discotheque in Las Vegas. There was a line of about one hundred people waiting to get in. A redhead with perfect cleavage stood in front of Gore, constantly shooting him smiles and glances. Although very tired from his second shift at work, Gore looked sharp tonight in his original, black silk Armani suit. He was looking forward to being with Gwen Stephens, who was not the typical client for him. She was young, attractive, recently divorced and emphasized to him again and again that she did not want a serious relationship at the moment.
Gore had met her three months earlier while ingesting crystals of blue ice at the bar of a female-frequented, male brothel called Surfer’s Paradise in Level XXX. She owned the catering company that supplied the House of Light with all of its food and beverage. On their first night together, she had consumed a lot of blue ice and relayed to Gore the inside scoop on the Men of Light and other key players in the District of Power.
Gore looked away from the pretty girl who had been flirting with him and saw, finally, Stephens emerge from the passenger elevator across the street. Swinging her hips, the pretty black woman walked up to him, flashed him an energetic smile and gave him a hug. He still has no idea who I am.
Gwen Stephens was well known in powerful circles, but not as the owner of a catering company – in those circles she was known by her real name, Sadina Rice. For the last three months, she had been using Gore to pass false intelligence directly to Cloud Base and Free Vegas. She was not even interested in milking Gore for information about the revolution; her only purpose was to plant her false information deep within it.
“Hey, lover boy,” she lightly kissed him on the lips. In reality, she was feeling a bit depressed. She had violated the cardinal rule of a secret agent, allowing herself to have personal feelings for her target. Gore had a master’s degree in sexology and knew what he was doing between the sheets better than any man she had ever been with. Additionally, he was a decent, good-natured man, unlike those that surrounded her all day in her ordinary life within Bush’s inner circle. She had seen him more than twenty times during the previous three months, many more than were necessary to perform her military duty. Recently, she thought of him often during her day.
Rice knew, however, that after Wednesday night and the staged assassination, he would either be dead or imprisoned. She had to break her dependence on him immediately – after one or two more nights of incredible love making.
“Hello, Gwen, I’m so happy to see you,” he said genuinely. Gore also felt something special for this beautiful woman, beyond her relationship to him as simply the client of a male gigolo. He hugged her and kissed her back.
“I have a surprise for you, Dani,” Gwen Stephens, a.k.a. Sadina Rice, called Gore by his pet name as she traced her index finger along his cheekbone.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I have reserved us the Paradise Beach Suite in the love hotel Desire,” she said, her eyes twinkling.
“Great, I love that place.”
“Tomorrow night, from ten o’clock on. I didn’t say when we’d be checking out. Think you can handle that?”
“I can handle it no problem, baby. But how can you afford such an expensive place for so many hours?”
“Now, since the divorce, I can afford it every day if I want to!”
The line continued moving forward. The couple in front of them was having a vehement argument with the doorman. Finally, the girl was allowed in and the man forced to remain outside, testing his luck by loudly swearing at the gargantuan doorman.
“Hello, Boris,” Gore offered his hand, which disappeared inside that of the bouncer.
“Hello, Mr. Gore. M’am,” he nodded at Rice. “Have a nice evening you two.”
Gore walked his date down a hallway, softly lit by green neon light. At the end of it, they entered the actual no-dancing area, which was covered by a dome three city-levels high. Underneath the dome, the floor of the fifty-foot wide, sunken, circular “launch area” was lit from below by pulsating lights that included every color in the spectrum.
Dancing with the feet touching the ground had been prohibited nationwide in the U.S.A. about eighty years earlier. It had all started in the beginning of the 21st century in New York City.
The then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, got it into his head that the citizens of the city that never slept should not be allowed to dance in bars not having a cabaret license. He sent out the dance police and simply refused to issue new licenses anywhere in the city as part of a “silent night” campaign. Years later, the third Bush president took Bloomberg’s idea even further, passing a federal law against dancing in public in any state of the union as an affront to Christian values; heavy fines were imposed and repeat offenders were punished with prison terms of up to five years. The neoconservative Bushes actually used taxpayer money to put advertisements on television professing the consequences of dancing to “devil’s music” and encouraged all U.S. citizens to stay home on Saturday nights so that they would be fresh and alert for church on Sundays. The ad campaign was a complete success.
By the end of the 21st century, however, clever businessmen were making profits through the concept of “no-dancing” discos. Rather than dance on a dance floor, new technology allowed people to float, weightless, over a dance floor – legally defined, “floating” was not “dancing.” The “floaties” hovered and bobbed up and down rhythmically to the music, gyrating hips and asses much more than was possible under the restrictions of gravity. Launch areas had been named after their mayoral inspirer, and were known as “Bloomberg Fields.”