Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

She was grateful to have a wall at her back, and oriented herself to be the nearest of her group to the door, even if her view was now blocked. Way too many people. How did they all stand being in the same room? The heat of them, the air they displaced, somebody’s cologne, somebody else’s sweat, unless it was her own. Even in the packed Bloom Bar show, she hadn’t felt so crowded, though of course that hadn’t been real. Concentrate on the tech, she told herself. Find something to take your mind off it.

Jeannie whispered, “That bay over there is sound mixing.” She pointed to a man in headphones behind a large screen filled with dancing meters, green cresting to yellow tips then falling back again.

An identical bay, with a young woman at the controls. “The one next to him is another mixing bay, for in-ear monitors, making sure the musicians hear what they need to hear. And that whole section is cameras.” She pointed to the vast monitor bank covering two walls. “Some for the actual camera feed, some for what the audience sees, some for knitting it all together. The holo camera rig is automated, but we keep people at the controls in case anything needs a human touch. They’re watching carefully during this particular set because there’s a chance some camera may not follow the updated path for the new set list. Anytime you make last-minute changes you increase the likelihood things will go wrong. Remember that, kids.”

Some monitors showed Magritte, some showed her brother, but the vast majority showed the two together. On a raised platform at the room’s center, overhead projectors conjured a life-sized, living, breathing holo of the two performers without backdrop, knit seamlessly into one image.

Rosemary’s jaw dropped. “How do they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Put them in one room together when they’re not!”

Her eyes understood how. Each performer had their own camera array, with their own fake stage set behind them matching the others. The two were combined in studio. “How?” wasn’t the question she wanted answered, though it was the first that had come out of her mouth. Not “Why?” either, since why was obvious: to make each performer look three-dimensional, they needed to be shot from all angles, with nobody else blocking them.

The question was a different “How?”—it was, How do those performers act as if they’re interacting with each other when they’re isolated? Patent Medicine must have been in booths like these as well. Those songs that had so moved her, the performance that had reached out and spoken to her; it had all been an elaborate ruse.

The musicians in the booths started a new song. The guitar had an effect on it that made it tremble. Magritte sang a line in some other language, something intense, with a dark turn at the end. The guitar echoed her, in her own voice, trembling, snarling. She looked at her brother, locked eyes with him. Cut him with another line, which his guitar tossed back at her. Their faces drew closer to each other. Inches apart.

Rosemary tore her eyes away from the holographic combined image to look at the individual monitors again. They were still in the same positions they had been in in the three-dimensional version, but now she internalized the isolation again.

“Can they see each other?” she asked, hoping it was a less naive question.

“Sometimes. They can’t see much beyond the lights, but they have marks to show where they expect each other to be, and they do have visual monitors in their floors. We can correct if they’re off by a few inches.”

It was amazing. If either missed their mark, they’d look ridiculous. One singing to the other’s nose, or playing guitar at nobody. Instead, this was a performance built in two halves, a relationship carried out by two people with complete faith that the other was where they were supposed to be.

The song ended, but the guitar continued into another song. The image flickered, jumped, then crumpled the two performers’ images like paper. The holo in the room’s center spun them into prismatic arcs, flattened Picasso figures given flesh: jaws elongated, limbs twisted, impossibly long shards of arm and body and guitar wound together.

“Fuck!” somebody shouted. “Nobody said they’d segue from ‘Carajo’ to ‘Contagious.’ Those were supposed to be hard stops.”

“Cameras are three seconds behind cues.”

“Jump forward.”

“We’ll miss a few seconds. There’ll be a gap.”

“Better than the paper dolls we have now.” The paper dolls were creepy, distorted versions of the people in the booths. Rosemary slipped around her group to get a look at a console running code.

“On my mark, jump to the thirty-second cue for ‘Contagious.’ Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

The real-time monitors stayed on the performers. The holo took a stomach-churning leap to match up, then they were restored to three-dimensionality. It was a strange relief, an escape from an uncanny valley.

Magritte and her brother never lost a beat. If any control room stress had reached their earpieces, they showed no sign. The woman was a mesmerizing performer. It wasn’t a matter of losing herself in the songs; she was part of the music, but she controlled it, used it. Something about the way she addressed the cameras said, “I am putting on this show for you.” Not warmth, not connection. Power. Even in a setting this clinical, that much came through. Even in a playful song like the next one, or a quiet song like the one after that.

“And we’re offline,” announced someone in the room as the last song came to an end.

The holo faded out of existence, but the artists on monitor in the booths did not.

“What was that?” asked Magritte, looking straight into a camera as if she was about to reach through it. “That shouldn’t have happened. Who missed the cue?”

Her brother lifted his guitar strap over his head, placed the guitar on a stand. Sweat shone on his face, dripping down his neck and into his collar. “Mags. It was our fault. My fault. We told them to cut a song, not to stitch the empty space.”

She turned her glare on him. “If anybody complains, you can refund them yourself.”

“Yes, yes.” He waved a hand at her. “Now, can we please leave these sauna boxes and argue off camera?”

“Yes. Or the eavesdropping ghouls behind the cameras and mics could turn them off, since we’re not talking to them anymore at this point.”

Somebody shut the cameras off.

Jeannie turned to her tour group. “That’s it, start to finish. Y’all will go off and learn the specifics of your jobs through online training modules. Then some of you’ll recruit and you’ll send people here, and then some will dress them and paint them and make them pretty, and the rest will mix them and film them and send them out to their fans. You’ve got the best gigs in the world. Have fun, learn your jobs well, and as you’ve seen tonight, don’t ever let it be your fault something went wrong.”

She said the last bit with a grin, but Rosemary couldn’t tell if she was serious or not.

Whatever April had hit three of my roommates over the next week, and whatever it was, it was bad. Started with chills and fever, same as April. I kept to myself, afraid to catch it, afraid I was the vector, afraid to infect the fourth, Jaspreet, the teacher-filmmaker.

She laughed when I told her as much. “I teach third grade, Luce. I have the immune system of a… what has a good immune system? Anyway, half my kids are out, too, and some had it before you went to New York. You’re not Patient Zero. If anyone brought it into the house, it was me.”

I allowed myself to be somewhat reassured, until the next day, when she fell down the stairs. I heard the crash from my room.