by H. A. Swain
“And did the choreography.”
“Ew!” Ara squeals.
“I know, right? I was like, no thanks. What guy wants to think of his mother as a sexy teen pop star?” A tiny quake of revulsion goes through me.
From across the room, Elston and Farouk wave at us like they’re flagging down a flying taxi. We make a beeline for them, whisking tangy drinks from a passing RoboWaiter along the way.
“First night out for Arabella!” I announce when we join our friends. We all lift our cups above our heads and laugh as if it’s freaking hilarious that another friend had her brain zapped and woke up with a Chanson Industry trademarked and patented Acquired Savant Ability thanks to my father. Just a little brain surgery and POOF you wake up a genius. The hilarious part being, Plute parents pay for their kids to have the surgeries, then people like my father make a fortune off their talents, and we call this Art.
My friends and I clink glasses and down our drinks, everyone lifting hands up high and clicking pix with their ExoScreen FingerCams. The images are sent into the data swarm and culled by some complicated algorithm that sorts soundbites, ’razzi drone vids, and FingerCam images into what’s Buzz-worthy for the night.
As soon as the group steps apart, they all check their palm screens, hoping that the moment we just experienced will get plucked from that deluge of data and fed into the Buzz for everyone else to see. Are you famous enough, are your parents, has your patron’s PromoTeam pushed for more coverage this week? Fleeting disappointment passes over my friends’ faces when our real-time moment doesn’t reappear in the Buzz. None of us are worthy enough. Yet.
Farouk turns his attention back to Arabella. “You look gorgeous! Amazing! Isn’t she beautiful?” Elston and I nod and nod and nod. “So, what’d you have?”
She blinks at him for two seconds, like she can’t quite remember. It takes a while for everything to come back online after an ASA so we all wait patiently, trying not to stare. “Music,” she says after the delay.
“Nice,” says Farouk.
“You?” she asks.
“Double in math and spatial reasoning. For architecture,” he says, then adds, “My parents … immigrants, you know, wanted something practical.” He lifts his shoulders almost as if in apology. “Anything happening for you yet?” he asks Ara.
Her vacant eyes settle on me. She is beautiful and empty—just the way Chanson Industry PromoTeams like their talent. It’s a convenient side effect of the surgery. Sparking all that genius seems to short out other parts of the mind, at least long enough for a PromoTeam to fill you up with everything (besides ability) that will keep you rich and make you famous. If everything goes as planned, once Ara’s auditory cortical pathways settle into their new wiring, her brain will be consumed with music. It’ll be all she wants to do. In the meantime, while those circuits are getting settled, her PromoTeam will work their tails off to make her into pre-star material: the look, the walk, the talk, the network, the brand. Because as every one of us Persons Of Normal Intelligence knows, you can be the most amazing savant ever to walk the planet, but if you don’t have a patron’s corporate machine behind you, you might as well be singing to your reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Don’t worry.” I rub Ara’s shoulder. “It takes time, that’s all.”
Just then the crowd parts and Rajesh swaggers up. He’s decked out. Vertical stripes on his jumpsuit, pulsating chartreuse polka dots on his bowtie, hair pomped up almost as high as the girls’. And he’s trailing a cloud of ’razzi dragonfly drones because he’s the current boy wonder of the literary world. His parents got his ASA in early. He was only fourteen when they did it, which can be tricky because as my parents found out the hard way with my sister, Alouette, the brain is so vulnerable at that age. Yet like everything Raj’s family does, they hired the best in the world, which is an option when your father is a rare earth-mining magnate heir and your mother ruled Bollywood for two decades, so money is no question. And it paid off. In the two years since his literary ASA, Raj has gotten one of the largest publishing contracts in history. Now, his patron is about to release the final installment of Raj’s Captain Happenstance trilogy called Revenge of the Shadow Thieves, sure to be another worldwide best seller.
“Friends, Romans, and countrymen!” Raj shouts and inserts himself into the center of our group, arms around shoulders, pulling everyone in for a round of photos taken by the drones. Girls lean in, boobs pressed forward, butts out, heads cocked to the side and huge smiles while the guys lay back, lift their chins and purse their lips, slouch to the side as if nothing is that important. Party pose, they called it at SCEWL where we all perfected it. I slip behind the line to give the others more prominent positions because (much to my father’s chagrin) I’d rather stay behind the scenes. A few seconds later, something else catches the attention of the ’razzi and they move en masse across the gallery, casting shadows as they pass beneath the lights, except for Raj’s stalkers, which stay close by.
“What’s this?” Raj shouts as the others sneak peeks at their palms to make sure they were in proximity of his celebrity to make it in the Buzz. Yes, yes, they are worthy now. “The great Arabella is amongst us. Beautiful eagle heroine. Orabilis, I bow to thee in prayer!” He bows deeply as if waiting for applause.
“Easy there.” Elston gives him a playful bump. “The drones are gone and we’re not your adoring fans.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Raj says, beleaguered by our lack of fawning. “Speaking of adoring fans, anybody seen Quinby yet?” He cranes his neck.
Elston lifts her eyes to the ceiling and blows a puff of air into her tower of rainbow curls, which don’t budge. “I’m sure she’s in the middle of the hive, Queen Bee that she is now.”
“Jealous?” Farouk asks.
Elston gives him a look of death. “Hardly,” she snaps, but we all know better. Elston had an art ASA six months ago and while she’s been mad prolific since she woke up, nothing has popped for her yet. She mostly works from photos, zooming in on details of fireworks in night skies or phosphorescence under the sea, then paints over the images in brightly colored squiggles. But what she really loves is distorting videos of the Plebes. Groups running, brawls for food, a protest gone terribly wrong. She takes the footage from security cameras or HandHelds, zooms in close, slows things down, and forces viewers to confront the faces of the masses. I think her work is brilliant, but it doesn’t resonate with most Plute art collectors like Quinby’s ever-repeating images of woodland decomposition does.
I step to Elston’s side and touch her elbow. The bright yellow and orange stripes of her paint job twist around her upper arm and disappear beneath her steel-blue top. Unlike the other girls wrapped in skin-tight tubes, she favors billowy fabrics that dance around her when she moves. “You’re gorgeous and talented, Elston, and it’ll happen for you, too,” I whisper close.
She sighs, weighty and sad.
Raj steps up. “Cover me,” he says through gritted teeth.
On cue, the whole group huddles close, blocking the circling ’razzi dragonfly drones from view while pressing ExoScreen cams against our thighs so no pix get out.
“Lookie what Papa Raj brought you,” he says and slips a slender silver bottle from his pocket. “My Plebe connection hooked me up with some fine black-market Juse.”
Without hesitation, everyone shoves a glass close to the bottle. Raj tops us all off, then we toast once again. “Down the hatch!” Raj says. In unison we toss back our drinks, smack our lips, and wait for the night to get much more interesting.
ZIMRI
On stage at Nowhere, under one bright light, sweat pours into my eyes as the music pours out of me. My mother, Rainey, and Dorian’s father, Marley, dug this place out of the riverbank before we were born. They made their own music here for years, then abandoned it to the frozards and squimonks when my mother disappeared. I rediscovered it a year ago and have been putting on concerts ever since, but tonight is the first time Dorian’s played wi
th me.
Although the space is small and cramped wall-to-wall with black-masked people, it feels like a cathedral to me. Dorian and I go from one song to the next, pushed forward by the backing tracks I prerecorded and his driving beats. When I sing, the crowd moves with me like beads of water drawn together to form a puddle. I tilt left. They tilt left. I bounce up and down and so do they. I lift my arms. Arms go up. They hang on my words, listening to me sing about working Plebes like us, perpetually treading water so we don’t drown, a feat my father couldn’t manage. The terror and thrill that we could all be caught at an illegal concert feeds the frenzy from first song to the last. And when the final note reverberates over the crowd, Dorian and I both yell, “Thank you!” then bolt offstage while everybody else streams out the door like floodwater spilling over the riverbank into the night, as black as the masks we all wear to protect our identities.
Dorian and I work quickly to dismantle any evidence of what went on here tonight. We haul the pallets out back. Take apart the lights. Carefully fold up the canvas curtain and put it, along with the ancient equipment, in an alcove my mother so cleverly constructed to hide all of her ramshackle instruments, mixing boards, turntables, laptops, and headphones back in the day. When we’re done, the only things left of this evening are the audio and video recordings that I hold in my hands.
“What will you do with those?” Dorian asks. He slumps against the wall like he just worked a double at the warehouse, his dark skin sheened with sweat beneath bleached blond dreds. But in his shiny silver pants he’s every ounce the rock star.
“I’ll release the audio tomorrow,” I tell him, and stick the little digital recorder in my pocket. “If that’s okay with you.”
“Far be it from me to stop a pirate,” he says with a laugh.
I grin. After my mother left, I took one of her old transmitters to Tati who helped me get it up and running with a few spare parts scavenged from the electronics dump. Tati showed me how to hook up an antenna so I could start my own pirate radio broadcasts. For the first year, I used it only to search for my mother. “Rainey, this is your daughter Zim, come in Rainey. Please come in.” Then I’d sing sad songs that she loved—Sarah Vaughn, Mavis Staples, Mary J. Blige, Trinity, Libellule—like a siren trying to lure a sailor back to the rocky shore.
One day Marley pulled me aside. He squatted down with his hands on his knees so we were eye to eye. “I heard you on the air,” he told me, which made my cheeks burn red. I hadn’t thought about other people scanning the waves with the black-market receivers they bought from Tati and hid inside their PODs. “You have to stop. You don’t have a license and you’re broadcasting music you don’t own the rights to.”
“I’m just trying to find her,” I told him.
“Honey.” He put his hand on my shoulder, which made me feel small. “If your mother wanted to be found…”
I squirmed away. I didn’t need him to finish that sentence but right then and there I knew that the music I’d make had to be for someone other than my mother.
“I just hope we pulled in enough,” I say to Dorian. I never ask for money when I put on a show, but people leave it anyway and since I don’t really need it, I give it to someone who does. “Levon’s son, Luka, is coming home from the MediPlex tomorrow but Levon says the prosthetic leg is terrible. The kid can barely walk.”
“Did they ever catch the person who ran him over?” Dorian asks.
I scoff. “Of course not. Just some Plute plowing down the road out by the river where Levon’s son was riding his bike. At least the guy had the decency to drop the kid at the MediPlex, but then he took off like he’d dumped a half-dead dog.”
Dorian shakes his head, disgusted by the same old story of Plute versus Plebe. “Do we take the money to Levon then?”
“It’s already gone,” I tell him and he frowns. “Hey,” I say. “The less you know about it…”
“I get it,” he says. “If we never touch the money, no one can say we profited, right?”
I nod. “But don’t fool yourself. Even if we don’t have cash in hand, what we’re doing isn’t exactly legal.”
He shrugs as if he doesn’t care, then points to the video cam in my hand. “What about that?”
I toss it up and down, catching the little orb in my palm where it fits so well. “It didn’t work. I checked the laptop but there’s nothing on it. I’ll ask Tati to look at it the next time I see her.”
I look over the empty room. What felt like a sacred space when we were on stage has returned to a small, cramped dugout with a low ceiling and musty dank air. “Want to get out of here?” I ask.
“Let’s go,” says Dorian.
* * *
Outside by the river, it’s a good fifteen degrees cooler, which is nice after the stuffy air of Nowhere. And it smells good, too. Like moss on damp rocks. The moon has come up bright, making the path along the river glow soft yellow. I miss Brie then. She usually waits for me beneath the big willow tree after a show so we can walk home together, but she got demoted back to nights at the warehouse after missing three days of work with the flu last week. Now, I can’t even ping her because they block our HandHeld signals while we’re on the clock. That’s the hardest part of being on opposite shifts. I’ve barely talked to my best friend all week!
Dorian picks up his bike, hidden in the reeds. “Want a ride?”
I climb on behind him and balance with my hands on his hips. He’s gotten tall and solid, like a sturdy tree. And there’s something about the way he holds his shoulders, back and down with his chin up, that hits me in the belly like a pebble in a puddle, sending ripples to the edges of my skin. I shake off that feeling because it’s stupid. We’ve known each other since we were born.
As we ride along the river path, I listen to the squee and squonk of his bike chain, then make those the backbeat to a rhythm I tap on Dorian’s hipbones. He keeps the pedals going, perfectly in time to the click of delivery drones taking off every other second from the mammoth Corp X warehouse roof. Squee and squonk and squee and squonk and zoom and zoom. Squee and squonk and squee and squonk and zoom and zoom. Dor adds his bike bell at the end, ting ting. I shoosh my feet in the gravel—shup shup—and he finds a bright screech on his brakes. I match the note, A#, sing a riff of nonsense as we ride along until he hits the brakes hard and I slam into his back.
“What the…!” I peel myself away from his sweaty shirt.
“Look at that!” He straddles the bike and points to the sky where a giant bird lifts off from the top of a tree. It glides out over the willows standing along the bank like tired women hanging their heads after a long day at work.
I slide off the back of the bike and hurry to the edge of the path. “Come on!” Dorian drops his bike and we scamper down a slope to see where the bird has landed. Halfway down, Dorian loses his footing and ends up on his rear, hollering, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” as he grasps for tree roots to slow himself down. I catch him by the back of the shirt. His arms windmill as he teeters on the edge of the bank.
“Whew, thanks, I almost took the plunge!” He stiffens. “Oh, god, sorry … I…”
“There!” I point, not interested in his apology for my family history. In the center of the river, the heron tiptoes through the water, silently hunting for its supper. “I haven’t seen one of those in years,” I whisper and plop down on a soft tuft of grass to take off my shoes. I slide my feet into the river. The cool water swirls around my legs and carries away the aches and pains of a full day running in the warehouse plus all that stomping on stage. Curious little frozards nibble on the ends of my wriggling toes, like tiny kisses from my father sending his love up from the depths. Hi, Papa, I say inside my head, but I don’t cry anymore when I’m here. It’s been five years since he took the plunge.
“Nonda told me that when she was a kid, there were creatures out here that we don’t have anymore,” I say to Dorian. “Things like foxes and beavers. Or separate species, like there were coyotes and wolves or
squirrels and chipmunks. Those were all different things before Corp X came along and everything got squished together.”
“I think your Nonda makes things up.” Dorian squats beside me. In the dusky light, with a stick in his hands, he looks more like the kid I remember from when we were little and everybody played together in the Youth Activity & Recreation Domain, not the person he’s become, tall and lanky, all arms and legs, his face rearranging itself into an adult version of himself. When he turned fifteen, he got a job on the warehouse box-packing line because he tested high for spatial reasoning skills.
I sing a song about an old man river and kick arcs of water in the air. I’m still jacked up from the show and can’t quite settle my brain or stop the adrenaline pumping through my body. I feel like grabbing the heron and twirling around, singing at the top of my lungs, dancing across the riverbank, climbing trees, swinging on the moon. “I wish I could perform every night!” I say.
“Every night?” says Dorian. “Sounds exhausting.”
“Not to me.” I stare out at the swirling water below, always moving forward, and I imagine a life on the road like the old-time musicians on tour—going from town to town, a different venue every night. “Making music makes me happier than anything else in life,” I say, my dreams clouding up my voice. “You can’t touch it or live inside of it. Music can’t protect you from the wind or rain. It’s not like we can eat it or drink it. But if I suddenly had no music in my life, I think that I might die.”
“You’d die?” Dorian teases.
“Shut up,” I say and bump his shoulder with mine.
“Yeah, well, you better be careful, Zimri Robinson,” Dorian warns. “If you get caught, you know what happens.” He presses his fingers into my temples. “Bzzzt!” he says. “They’ll zap your brain!”
I knock his hand away. “Nonda says I was born in the wrong era. Just like my mom.”
“Or maybe we were born on the wrong side of the river.” Dorian tosses his stick. It makes a gentle splash that scares the heron into flight.