A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  She took seventy-two seconds to solve the morning’s problem, and another “Timely service!” message rewarded her efficiency. Once Jeremy had gone, she flipped to clearview, straightened her desk, and waited for her first real customer. It didn’t take long. At 8:47, the earpiece chimed again. She forced a smile and answered.

  “Good morning. You’ve reached Vendor Services. My name is Rosemary. How may I help you?” Good job! Your customer can hear your smile! scrolled at the corner of her eye. She waved away the bonus point.

  “We’ve got a massive problem this morning.” The voice came first, then an avatar of a tall young Korean man appeared beside her virtual wooden desk. It was a high-end av, fine enough to show her the tension behind his expression.

  “I’m sure I can find a solution quickly and efficiently. May I have your vendor ID number?” Her words, from her avatar’s mouth. Per company policy, her avatar wore her photographic likeness, but aged up to thirty-three, with neater hair and makeup. She was glad they didn’t care whether she wore makeup in real life, even if they did insist she get dressed in the company uniform every day. They spun that as “look your best to work your best,” but she knew about the tech woven into the fabric, the better to quantify you with, my dear.

  He rattled off his vendor ID, one she didn’t recognize. Rosemary entered it, trying to conceal her excitement at the company name that popped up. “Can you confirm your vendor name?”

  “StageHoloLive or StageHolo. I don’t know if we’re in there as a subsidiary or our own entity.”

  “Your own entity,” Rosemary confirmed.

  She had been at Superwally six years now, but had never gotten a call from StageHoloLive. It had never even dawned on her that they were Superwally vendors. Of course they were. Where else would you buy your StageHolo projector or SHL-enhanced Hoodie? Who’d fulfill orders for physical souvenirs of their shows? And for that matter, whose lines did they use when they streamed one or another of their services—SHL or SportHolo or TVHolo—into every home and Hoodie in the country?

  Almost every home, anyway. Her family didn’t even have the basic StageHolo living room box that played TV and movies, let alone the add-on subscriptions or immersive live experiences. It was mostly a money thing, partly some Luddite parent principle. They would have tossed her old school Hoodie, too, if she hadn’t insisted she still needed it. It couldn’t handle much of anything, but it let her pretend she hadn’t been left totally behind.

  “How can I help you?” As she asked, she repeated the vendor number to herself, so she’d recognize it faster in the future. It was palindromic, an easy number to memorize.

  “We’ve got a big show tonight, and the site is telling anyone who tries to register at the day-of price point that ticket sales are closed. It was fine yesterday.”

  So Superwally ran their registration sites, too. That made sense. Otherwise they’d have created a competitor by now to drive StageHolo out of business.

  “Let me get right on that for you.” Rosemary pictured the code before she looked at it. It was easier when she imagined it as it should be before scoping out the real thing. When she opened her eyes to the visual representation, she spotted the problem. It took only a few keystrokes to fix. She puttered for a moment longer before closing out, so it wouldn’t look as easy as it had been. Don’t make the customer feel stupid, or like they could have solved it themselves.

  “Got it,” she said. “It’ll work fine now. Do you want to test it from your end before I disconnect?”

  “That’d be great. Hang on.” The av went still, then reanimated with visible relief. “Yep. You fixed it.”

  Rosemary glanced at her timer. If she ended the call now she’d get another bonus point for efficient solving, but something nagged at her. “It’s not my place to ask, but I’m guessing this isn’t the first time this has happened?”

  “No, actually. I’ve called twice in the last month. Why do you ask?”

  “I fixed it for this particular show, but I think there’s a bug in how the system is coding dates across your entire site. It’ll probably keep happening.”

  “Interesting. Could you, uh, stop it from happening?”

  “I can, if you’d like.”

  “Of course. That’s why I called.”

  “Well, you called about the specific issue, which I just fixed. We’re supposed to fix the problem at hand, ‘quickly and efficiently.’ Which I did, but the more efficient solution is to make it so you don’t have to call back when it happens again in a week.”

  “Great. Do that, please.”

  Rosemary grinned for real this time. The repair took fifty-eight seconds; she didn’t wait for the optimal time. “Can I help with anything else for StageHoloLive?”

  “No, but listen. You were so quick, and I appreciate that you took the initiative to fix the problem behind the problem. Can I send you a code to attend tonight’s show for free?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t accept gifts from vendors. It’s against company policy.” That saved her from mentioning how the only Hoodies in her household were this work-dedicated one, which she was prohibited from using for entertainment, and the Basic the school system had subsidized when she was thirteen and school had gone virtual, which was still good enough to listen to music and hang out with her friends, but too archaic to handle SHL technology.

  “Gotcha. Oh, well. I don’t want to get you in trouble, but can I get your employee ID number? Or a direct line to contact you? You’re my new hero. I’d like to be able to contact you again, and maybe send a compliment to your supervisor.”

  She didn’t see any harm in that; she already had a few vendors who contacted her directly. She passed her ID number.

  “Thanks, Rosemary. Have a wonderful day.”

  “You, too. Thank you for being a loyal customer.”

  The call disconnected. Rosemary glanced at her reward center. She had lost her bonus point for problem-solving efficiency—the call had gone two minutes over optimum—but got another one for refusing a gift. She was 157 points away from a merit raise. Maybe she’d use it to buy an SHL-compatible Hoodie, even if it pissed off her parents.

  The remaining shift-hours passed in a series of mostly easy fixes and a couple of trickier ones. Rosemary appreciated the tricky ones, even if the system didn’t adjust to give credit for dealing with more complex problems. She imagined there were other people in her position who found ways to shunt off those issues, to go for time points rather than completion points; she occasionally got calls that had been bumped from other vendor services staff. She’d never met or talked with any of them, so she could only guess some note in the system marked her.

  If her parents were correct, sooner or later it would cost her a raise. The company would keep her where she was, solving everyone’s problems, but not solving them quickly or efficiently or whatever the other inspirational posters of the month demanded. At lunch she ate her yogurt with speed and efficiency. She solved issues as quickly as possible, but some couldn’t be solved any faster.

  Just before she took her Hoodie off for the evening, one more message chimed. Annoyance surged through her. She was obligated to take it, even two minutes before quitting time, but she didn’t get overtime without prior approval and she’d get dinged if she ignored it.

  She tapped the message envelope and found an optional overtime assignment. StageHoloLive had put through a formal request for her to observe that evening’s show to make sure there were no technical glitches from the Superwally end. Observe the show itself, but with access to the code if she was needed. She read it twice to make sure they were serious.

  “I’d be happy to, but my hood isn’t SHL-enabled. I’ll see if I can borrow one in time, but it’s unlikely,” she wrote back. “I apologize for not being able to fulfill this assignment.”

  The system passed her message along to whomever had sent it. She
changed out of her work uniform; they weren’t supposed to track her after she clocked out, but she didn’t trust them not to.

  Walking from her bedroom/workspace into the kitchen was a walk back into reality. Enclosed in her Hoodie all day she sometimes came to believe there were no real people, just voices and messages and lines of code and avatars spread out across the world. Faces that needed help from her in order to feed themselves data and packages and money. Then she stepped into the warm kitchen and was reminded humans existed, real flesh-and-blood people, and they didn’t all need something from her.

  “What can I do?” she asked, stretching one arm against the doorframe, then the other.

  Her mother was chopping carrots for soup, her crutches leaning against the counter beside her. She hadn’t bothered with her prosthetic today. “If you take over on the vegetables, I’ll do the chicken.”

  Rosemary took the proffered knife, popping a carrot piece into her mouth, then spitting it out again. The handsome carrots Superwally droned in never tasted as sweet as the stumpy and gnarled red-cored Chantenay they grew in their garden, but those had all been harvested months ago. Her mother gave her a look, and she ate the bland piece rather than waste it.

  “Hey, Ma, do you know anyone nearby with a StageHoloLive hood? Near enough for me to get it in the next hour?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got a chance to go to a free concert. I thought it might be interesting.”

  “That’s not ‘going to a concert.’ Trust me, it’s a slippery slope. The hood is cheap, and maybe the show itself isn’t too pricy, but then they make you pay for more and more inside the experience, and it’s too easy just to say yes and transfer money. It’s a system designed to make you spend and spend—”

  She heard the frown in her mother’s voice without seeing her face. “I know, I know. But they’re covering me. I’m curious about the full experience. Just once. I’d get paid overtime, too.”

  The overtime made a little difference. “I didn’t realize it was for work. Maybe Tina Simmons? She practically lives inside that corporate playground.”

  Rosemary didn’t bother to check; her mother hadn’t noticed she’d been avoiding Tina for years. She wracked her brain for others among their closest neighbors, but nobody came to mind whom she’d be comfortable asking. The more she considered it, nearby was only the first problem. Her mother was right that Tina spent all her time in hoodspace, like everyone else but Rosemary; asking to borrow something most people put on when they woke and took off when they went to bed was the second problem. It wasn’t going to happen.

  She cut the remaining carrots, moved on to celery and onions. She was setting the table for dinner when the proximity alarm on the front door beeped. Her mother washed her hands, wiped them on her jeans, and pulled her phone from her pocket to check the security camera feed. “Package drone. Are you expecting anything?”

  Rosemary shook her head. “I’ll go see what it is.”

  She unlocked the door. The package was small and light. It was addressed to her employee ID number, not her personal ID. Inside nestled a brand-new, top-of-the-line, honest-to-goodness name-brand Hoodie™, along with all accessories. She turned it over in her hands, amazed at how little the new model weighed. No wonder people never took them off.

  The packing slip had a sentence in the notes section saying, “Thank you for supporting our concert this evening.” She ran back to her room and pulled her work hood back up to check if the assignment was still available to her. It was.

  “I will be able to assist,” she said, happy that the interface wouldn’t convey her excitement.

  3

  LUCE

  The Peach

  The morning sun pried my eyelids open far too early. Hewitt slept in the passenger seat, wrapped in the pink bathrobe, T-shirt over his face. JD dozed against the steering wheel. April had taken the far back row, behind me. She was already awake. “Good, you’re up. I needed to show this to somebody.”

  She passed me her tablet. I rubbed sleep from my eyes with my still-smoky sleeve, wincing at the odor. Focused on the tablet. Looked up. “Every hotel?”

  “Every hotel.”

  “The whole city?”

  “The whole state.”

  I closed my eyes again. “And no bombs were found?”

  “No. Not yet. The bomb squads haven’t gotten to half yet.”

  “And they’re planning on getting to all? They haven’t caught someone or found something to make them think it was a hoax?”

  “Are you going to read the article or not?”

  “No.” I handed her back her tablet. “It stresses me out. It’s some terrible hoax. I need sleep. We all need sleep, and then we need to get ready for the show tonight.”

  * * *

  —

  April and JD and I spent part of our per diem on breakfast at a diner near the hotel while Hewitt dozed in the van. The diner was packed with groggy people, some of whom I recognized from the parking lot. I dumped sugar in the weak, acidic coffee until it approximated something drinkable.

  We had a noon radio spot scheduled, but we still weren’t allowed back in the hotel room, and I still stank like the podcaster’s ashtray. I scrubbed myself as clean as possible with paper towels in the diner bathroom, and tried to scrape the caked shampoo out of my hair, but it didn’t fix my clothing.

  “It’s radio, Luce,” JD said when I returned to the table. “Nobody can see that you smell.”

  He ducked the yellow sweetener packet I chucked at him.

  I hated shopping at Superwally, resented the way they underpriced local businesses to close them, then automated the checkouts and fired cashiers, but it seemed the best option given the circumstances, so I ran across the parking lot to buy clean jeans and a tank top, hoping Hewitt would do the same when he woke. I couldn’t say that, though. The one other time I had tried to suggest he change clothes for a show, he had shown up wearing a wrestling thong.

  Why did he have a wrestling thong with him? We made guesses among ourselves, but refused to ask him directly; better to look unimpressed, so as not to encourage him. He couldn’t surprise us with anything from his bag today, but if I asked him to buy something to replace the bathrobe he’d probably arrive in a union suit and bunny slippers.

  When we got back to the van, I was relieved to see he’d found jeans somewhere, which he wore with the band-logo shirt he had liberated the night before. We didn’t have his guitars, anyway, so he could have sat the radio promo out, but I appreciated the effort.

  The radio show was business as usual. Guitar, bass, an overturned plastic garbage can for a drum, all within a space the size of a port-a-potty. There was an old Disappear Fear song with a line about negotiating the angles of guitar necks in radio studios, which always came to my mind as we tried not to put each other’s eyes out.

  “Is ‘Blood and Diamonds’ autobiographical?” the DJ asked after we played it.

  “No.” Served him right for asking a yes/no question, anyhow. Everybody knew you asked open-ended questions if you wanted open-ended answers. If he had asked “What inspired that song?” I might’ve given him something. As it was, April and JD exchanged a smirking glance, and I realized I’d shut down another personal question, like they’d said the night before. It wasn’t that I set out to tell nothing; I didn’t see how it mattered.

  The DJ realized his own mistake—shrugged at me in apology—and moved on. We answered questions about that night’s show, the tour in general, the album, the hit song, and even managed to turn the hotel scare into a more lighthearted anecdote. We gave away some tickets to a few lucky listeners. Watched in amazement, not for the first time, as actual callers lit up actual phone lines to get the tickets. The DJ passed me his tablet to show that people were responding on social media as well.

  I still hadn’t gotten used to being in demand. After se
ven months of slogging, we had played seventeen sold-out or near-sold-out shows in the last twenty-two nights. It had all happened so fast. One video in the right place at the right time, a feature on SuperStream, and all of a sudden we had been bumped from opening act to feature. “Blood and Diamonds” wasn’t even my best song. It was easy to believe in the mundane details of promotion and driving and lousy food and scuzzy club bathrooms and time onstage, but the idea that people were listening was still beyond my comprehension.

  * * *

  —

  They let us back into the hotel at two in the afternoon, just before I transitioned from panic to high panic. April had already started searching online for a local store where we’d be able to buy or rent Hewitt a new guitar, and I was trying not to think about having to go back out to Superwally to find makeup and something appropriate to wear onstage. Nobody from the hotel mentioned the pink room, which made me think either the bomb squad never got to our rooms or they had orders to ignore anything other than what they were looking for. Made sense. Nobody wanted to walk through hotel rooms that weren’t expecting visitors.

  “Maybe we should take everything with us in case it happens again.” April flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes. She had a habit of taking her clothes out of her bag and putting them in the dresser and closet, even when we were only in town for a night. Said it made her feel less vagrant.

  “That can’t happen twice in a row. Can it?” I pawed through my own chaotic bag of stage clothes, looking for what I wanted to wear. There weren’t many options. I’d spent Monday, our usual laundromat day, doing the promo for tonight’s show, and the band had spent it redecorating. The plan had been to make up for it today, but we hadn’t anticipated getting locked out of the hotel.

  April started snoring gently, and a nap struck me as appealing. I set an alarm on my phone and closed my eyes. Woke what seemed like two seconds later to my phone’s chime. April was drying her hair. I never figured out how she managed to wake herself without alarms, no matter how little sleep we’d gotten. I followed her lead with a blissful, uninterrupted shower.