by Rae Mariz
needed to find to make the song complete.
Mr. Levy tapped on the glass, and I took the headphones off.
“Closing time, Kid,” he said.
“Oh, yeah. OK,” I said, looking at my intouch®. I couldn’t believe it was already almost five o’clock. I backed up the drum track and got my stuff.
“I already had to chase Williams out of here,” Mr. Levy said. I craned my neck, hoping to get a glimpse of Tycho Williams. He was branded, but I swear I wasn’t a gawker. I just had always been really impressed by the music he made.
“What’re you working on?” Mr. Levy asked.
“Just a new track with Mikey.”
Mr. Levy looked back into the Studio. “Where is he?”
I shrugged. Mikey had left after recording. He liked the energy of playing, but lost interest when I started geeklistening on repeat. I could play it back over and over and never get bored, but Mikey says that was because I was hearing stuff that wasn’t there.
Mr. Levy was checking the other soundproof booths. I was the last one left again. “Whatever happened to that one track I heard…the ambient-room composition?”
“It’s not finished,” I mumbled. It was a music project I called Background Checks, and it made me uncomfortable that Mr. Levy had heard parts of it before it was complete.
He waited for me to log out of the Studio, then checked his player records to make sure everyone had logged out.
“Your songs are getting a lot of play at the Listening Library, Kid,” he said, lowering the clanking metal grate over the storefront. “Even though your constant name changes don’t make your uploaded tracks easy to find.”
I shrugged. “We can’t decide on what we want to call ourselves.” Mikey, Ari, and me often added our silly fool-around sorta-songs to the Library, releasing each track under a different band name. It made our songs unsearchable by artist, but coming up with inappropriate band names was half the fun of making music.
“But it speaks to the quality of sound you’re producing that your tracks are getting multiple listens despite no name recognition,” he continued.
“Oh, I haven’t been checking rankings,” I mumbled.
“Murdoch West from the Hit List has been asking me about new talent,” he said. “They’re looking for artists to promote. If you just played your stuff for them, you—”
“I’m going to miss the shuttle. See you tomorrow, Mr. Levy,” I said, making my escape toward the escalator.
I didn’t like the way Mr. Levy was singling me out. I wasn’t interested in getting our songs on the Hit List—I just wanted to play with my friends.
7 LOGGED OUT
My head felt kind of cloudy as I held up my ID and walked through the doors, exiting the Game.
The parking lot was almost completely empty. I’d missed Ari’s text that she was leaving if I needed a ride, and the last Game shuttle to my neighborhood was about to leave.
Mom was going to be pissed if I missed the shuttle. She couldn’t afford to take time off work to pick me up and would probably have to ask Aunt Gillie to get me. Of course, she could just authorize my Game card to allow me to take the metro. But she wouldn’t. She thought it was unsafe.
Mom was one of the millions of overprotective parents who loved the fact that players in the Game got intouches® with GPS tracking.
I took a seat on the shuttle, listening again to Mikey’s wing beats on my headphones. I thought about this morning in the Pit, the bird fight, the body drop, the soundtrack to the Unidentified film. Music box and white noise and bird wings.
I stared out the window and watched sunlight flash off parked cars in even bursts, almost like trumpet blasts. I wondered if I could get Ari to play trumpet, or maybe clarinet bird squawks were what this track needed.
I thought of Ari. Ari’s eyes. Poo-brown eyes, she said. She wanted me to help her choose. Things you think are freedoms really limit your choices, who said that? Lilac eyes. Sea foam eyes. Out the window. Eyes are the windows to the soul. Razor blade to your soul. Choose your suicide. We refuse to choose our suicide.
I took my headphones off, and shook my head.
My intouch® purred in my bag and I dug it out.
aria: what doing? @KID
I wasn’t supposed to text after I logged out of the Game because the wireless charges after closing time were insane. Mom freaked out when she got the bill after the first season. She had overlooked the hidden costs from the local service provider of the “free” intouch® that were mentioned in the fine print agreement when she signed me up for Level 13-17.
I promised Mom I would text only in emergencies after five. But this was Ari—this was important. So I replied.
kidzero: nothing. new track, you should hear @ARI
aria: so i saw that swift totally @ed you today! @KID
I smiled, but then got self-conscious. If Ari noticed Swift @ed my name, then a lot of people could have noticed. I might have a bunch more subscribers following this conversation than usual.
kidzero: don’t have the credit to text right now @ARI
My intouch® purred again.
aria: boo. you’re boring. @KID
I unlocked the front door with the keycard from my shoelace keychain.
Mom wasn’t home yet, which wasn’t unusual. She worked Game hours fielding customer complaints for one of the telecom sponsors, but most nights she waitressed the dinner shift at her sister’s restaurant.
So I was left to forage for myself and our lazy dog, Lump, until she got home. My mom never bought the good kinds of snacks, but I had the Vending Machine in the Game to satisfy all my munching needs.
I fed the dog, and carried my bowl of semisweetened cereal to my room.
It was too quiet in my house. The silence was an itch.
I put on the music project I’d been mixing whenever Ari and Mikey punked out on band practice. Background Checks. I recorded and looped “amplified room hum,” pulling apart ambient noise to find danceable rhythms and simple melodies.
I liked to play it when I was feeling this way, weirdly empty and uncomfortable. The quiet wasn’t so lonely if you listened to how much sound was hidden in silence. The fan rattle of overheating appliances, fridge motors, and like all the tiny vibrating tones of light bulbs and neon buzzes that we barely notice but surround us every day.
I got to the part that Mr. Levy had heard, where I’d amplified the faint chirps of my intouch® recharging and layered it with a fly trying to escape out a closed window. I thought about what he’d said about the Hit List cool hunter who would probably promote it. Ari would pounce on this chance, but I didn’t make this music to be an access ticket into the VIP Lounge. I don’t really know why I made this music, but it wasn’t to get me branded.
I opened my notebook®. My intouch® default settings uploaded saved images automatically to the Network, and I found myself staring at the pic of the security cameras posing for each other. What kind of people went through the trouble of doing something like that? Who were they?
I clicked to view the dummy suicide video a few times. Listened to the baritone voice say what the Unidentified wasn’t, giving no clue to what they were.
I closed my notebook® again and let the Background Checks music bleed into the sounds of my own room. The heater turning on and off, trying to keep the homeostasis of warmth in the house, and the traffic from the street outside. After a while I heard the TV switched on in the other room and the volume turned up.
It was the sound of my mom coming home.
“Kiddie!” Mom called out, and I turned off my music and went to see her.
Mom was collapsed on the sofa, watching the news. She was always so exhausted; working all the time, stressing about making debt payments, and feeling guilty about not being here when I got home. I kissed the top of her head.
“Did you feed Lump?” she asked me automatically.
“Yeah.”
I always fed Lump when I got home, but she always asked.
I could make a big deal out of it, tell her that I didn’t need her to remind me, but if she stopped one day, I would probably miss our ritual.
“I brought home some dinner,” she said, gesturing to a bag of restaurant leftovers on the table. I scavenged through the containers, happy to have some real-looking food.
“How was it tonight?” I said, helping myself to Aunt Gillie’s famous macaroni and cheese.
“Slow,” she said with the same tone she would’ve used if she had said “busy.” She hated it when it was slow because the tips were so bad it didn’t even make it worth her time being there, but she hated when it was busy just as much. The tips would be decent, but she was already so tired from working the phones all day, it took the last of her energy to have to race around all night.
“Why do you keep doing shifts there? Can’t Aunt Gillie find someone else to cover?” I said with my mouth full of food.
“You almost missed the shuttle today,” she said, sitting up and looking at me.
I flinched. Of course, she would be checking my GPS coordinates at closing time.
“Yeah, but I didn’t.”
She had that look, I could tell she was playing an imaginary horror film of everything that could have gone wrong if I’d been stranded outside of the Game without a ride. “Where was Ari?”
“She already left. I just lost track of time.”
“You need to take more responsibility for your actions,” she went on. “Your mistakes don’t affect just you.” I’d heard this all before.
“You worry too much.”
“Guess why,” she said simply. She turned back to the TV that was so old that you could tell you were watching a screen.
There were more reports of so-called minor mobs. I wondered who had so-called them that. It made them sound like no big deal, but maybe that was the point.
The government had just proposed legislation to raise the legal age to twenty-one. It threatened to extend the prohibitions against underage gathering in public places on to Bonus Level campuses too, and there had been protest parties. They showed clips of law enforcement using tear gas to break up “potentially illegal gatherings” and kids just continuing to dance in their gas masks.
I watched the images on the screen. It looked like it would’ve been a totally harmless party if the cops weren’t using brute force to try and stop it.
“I don’t want you getting caught up in what’s going on out there, Kiddie,” Mom said, watching a girl get dragged across the dance floor by the authorities. “As soon as the Game is done, I want you on that shuttle, and I want you home.”
8 TAG, YOU’RE IT
I fumbled with my ID card at the Level 13-17 entrance. The doors wheezed open and the late-morning sun blazed through the skylight. I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass.
Operating on autopilot, I turned on my intouch® and felt it seizure in my hands with all my missed messages. I hid in the shadow of one of the “trees” at the edge of the Pit to read the texts without the sun glare on the display.
I just got messages from the sponsors, and a few updates from Ari, but no shout-outs to respond to. I put my intouch® away and was about to jump down from the edge of the planter but stopped to stare at a peek of pink blooming in the black soil where the “trees” buried their roots.
Someone on the other side of the planter said the words “Illegal Arts Workshop.” I perked up and tuned in on their conversation. Notice of Illegal Arts Workshops were spread entirely through word-of-mouth. They were totally unauthorized, and always a guaranteed good time.
But it wasn’t just the content of the conversation that caught my attention, I couldn’t stop listening to the sound of the speaker’s voice. I knew it from somewhere. I turned to see who was talking, and recognized the guy from the Park the other day sitting on the opposite edge of the planter.
He was flirting with a girl who looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t think of where I’d seen her before.
She had short black hair and a small pink circle drawn high on her cheekbone. I was still trying to figure out how I knew her, when she looked over at me. The way she was staring reminded me of the birds in the Pit, defiant and unblinking.
The Urban Climber guy with the honeybee voice turned to look at me then too. He smiled, and I should’ve looked away, pretended to mess around with my intouch® or something, but instead I sort of smiled back. I felt caught. That’s the best word I had to explain it—captured. Captivated.
“Is there something we can help you with?” he said pleasantly, even though I’d just got caught lurking.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I grabbed my bag to leave, when I decided to just ask him. “You were in the Park the other day,” I said. “You were telling everyone whether they were in or out.”
“Yes,” he answered, even though I didn’t get a chance to ask my question.
“What were…How did you decide who to choose?”
The girl still hadn’t said a word, but she was staring at me hard. I couldn’t read her expression, and it was making me uncomfortable.
He shrugged and said, “It was completely random. How do you choose?”
Something javajacked in my memory when he spoke the word “choose.” “What do you mean?”
“That’s what they want to know: what’s in and who’s out. They monitor all our interactions, looking for a way to untangle our complicated social systems to know what string to pull. When they’re watching for reasons, a random choice is the most subversive.”
I thought about that for a while. I understood all the words he used, but it still felt like he was speaking another language.
I glanced quickly at the girl he was with, then said, “You told me I was in.”
“Yeah, well. What do I know, right?”
He turned back to the girl with eyes like a bird, and I felt…disappointed.
“Kid!” I heard Ari calling my name. “Kid!”
I looked out from my corner, back into the brightness of the Pit. The sun reflected off the white tabletops, and through the glare I saw Ari. She was surrounded by a colorful flock of Craftsters. Ari waved me over and I got up to go to her.
“See you later, Kid,” the guy said softly as I hurried past them. I sat by Ari in the bright sun, trying to shake off the weird feeling. He made me feel like he could see my secrets, and I didn’t even know his name.
“What was going on over there?” Ari asked, craning her neck to look at the shadowy corner.
“Nothing. I don’t know,” I said honestly, but Ari frowned like I was keeping something from her.
She turned back to the Craftsters and continued to add her voice and laughter to the chatter. I just kind of sat there, watching them flip through pages of glossy feminist magazines, their poet-rockstar hairstyles teased up like the feather displays of jungle birds.
My intouch® chirped. I had gotten a new PLAY message:
PLAY: what is the acceleration of a body in free fall? submit before noon for time bonus.
I stared at the question. I knew “body” meant “any object” in physics-talk, but the question was eerie considering what went down here yesterday. The creepy feeling that someone knew my secrets just got stronger. It couldn’t be a coincidence—the administrators and sponsors must know something about that stunt, right?
I heard one of the Craftsters shriek, “Yeah! We should totally go!” followed by the goose-squawks of everyone’s chairs getting pushed back at the same time.
Ari was on her feet and noticed that I was still sitting there. She looked at me, then back to the rest of the crew flocking toward the passage, chitter-chatter and perfume plumes following after them.
Rocket glanced back at Ari, “You coming?”
Ari said she was coming, but sat down beside me, grinning at me, all breathless and brilliant.
Anyway, there we were alone at last and she was like, “Hey. So, did you hear?”
“What?”
“Come on, don’t tell me yo
u didn’t hear.”
“Ari. Just say it.”
Ari had been known to hype the news of what she ate for breakfast.
“Guess whose page Aerwear cool hunters have visited eight times now?”
Her uncorked-champagne thumbs popped up, pointing to her chest with all the subtlety of a neon sign.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been tracking views,” she said, putting her finger to her lips. “There’s a script code you can just copy and paste to watch who’s watching—but don’t spread it around, because admin will block it if they find out.” Then she squealed, “I’m totally going to get branded!”
“That’s great!” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could fake.
She frowned. “You’re just saying that.”
“What?”
“You don’t really want me to get branded.”
It kind of sucked that Ari knew me so well.
“I know this is something you really, really want. And you deserve it. You’ve been working so hard. I will be deliriously happy for you when you get it.”
Ari jumped up, flung her arms around my head, and squeezed.
I didn’t really see the point of branding. What was so great about being linked to a logo? Or maybe I just cultivated this attitude because it was never going to happen to me, and it was just easier to laugh with Mikey about it than obsessing over attracting cool hunter attention like Ari did.
People who got branded enjoyed a fair amount of fame and notoriety on campus. And if Ari got her status upgraded to the It List, everyone was going to know her name. She would get access to the VIP Lounge, the gathering place for Generation Triple-A. It was the exclusive lounge where rumors were made—the rumors of the place itself were legendary. All the free stuff they get. How they get to mingle with the cool hunters and brand representatives, who listen to them because their opinions matter and can make a difference. Getting branded fast-tracked you into a career of media, marketing, and shaping public opinion, which was what Ari always wanted.