In the Federation, there was a peculiar city that existed for only eight days each year. During those eight days, its visitors reveled through the night, turning it into the noisiest place in the world. Then it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, and silence returned overnight. The revelers left nothing behind. It was as though nothing had ever happened there, and only the endless windblown sand remained, quietly awaiting the next year's festivities.
This one-of-a-kind city was called Black Rock City.
Black Rock City stood in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. It had been created for Burning Man, an unconventional festival.
Burning Man lasted eight days. Every year, tens of thousands of people arrived in Black Rock City wearing outlandish costumes and riding vehicles of every bizarre shape imaginable. Through artistic creation, they built a unique city and spent those eight days in near-mad revelry.
Burning Man was a relatively new festival, founded only thirty or forty years ago. Its stated ideals were community, inclusion, creativity, fashion, and opposition to consumerism.
That sounded appealing, but at heart, Burning Man was something like a continuation of the Federation's Hip-Hop Spirit.
It was hard to say whether Hip-Hop Spirit was good or bad. It bore the stamp of an era and represented a cultural trend among its young people, but it often left a poor impression on later generations.
Indulgence, excess, and living for the moment were the hallmarks of Hip-Hop Spirit. They were also the hallmarks of Black Rock City and Burning Man.
Even so, a place like Black Rock City was an extraordinarily unusual cultural phenomenon anywhere in the world.
Apart from the three major religions, it was hard to imagine anything else with enough appeal to draw tens of thousands of visitors from far and wide into an