Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

“Anywhere you want!” came the unhelpful reply. Slightly more helpful: “There’s a map”—a link lit on her screen—“showing where the current recruiters are. No sense duplicating their effort, but anyplace else is fair game. You let Logistics know, and they’ll book your travel. Pick wherever your favorite band is from and start there. Or start with whatever’s local to you.”

It wasn’t the best time to mention she didn’t know any local bands. She pulled off her Hoodie, facing a momentary disorientation when she saw her room as it was instead of her scarf-draped Veneer. They had invited new employees to explore the campus if they needed a break; that sounded like as good an idea as any.

She had been surprised from the beginning at the campus’s enormity.

“We need it, legally, to hit the legal ratio to the number of people here,” Jeannie had explained. “But also, given how many people live and work here, the campus is considered a job perk.”

The campus held not only the hangar and the studio wing, the offices and dorms and performer village, but also four hundred acres of pinewoods and paths. She chose the two-mile loop path marked with red circles. Two miles in brisk March air was a reasonable head-clearing distance.

The trails were wide and well-groomed, with footing that sprang back beneath her feet. A few yards past the first marker, she encountered an exercise station with metal bars fixed at two heights. A few minutes later, she came to a wooden beam anchored a few inches above the ground. She hopped onto it and walked its length, just for fun. The third structure, a little farther into the woods, was a byzantine jumble of lumber and metal.

“I’ve been walking past here for a year now and I can’t figure this one out, either.”

Rosemary turned to see a man standing in the path. He wore expensive-looking workout clothes, a lopsided smile, and hair that fell across his eyes in a way that looked both messy and deliberate. Latino, maybe, or Middle Eastern? She was much better at reading ethnicity in avatars. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. Not from her hiring group, but maybe she’d seen him in the control room or an office they’d toured through.

“Maybe this one isn’t for exercising,” she guessed. “Maybe it’s art. I think I saw this on a museum site once.”

He accepted the challenge. “Maybe a chin-up bar and a seesaw were spliced in a genetic experiment gone horribly awry.”

“Maybe it’s a torture device.”

“Aren’t all exercise machines?”

“I wouldn’t know. This is my first—well, third if you count the others today. They seem friendly enough.”

“Don’t let them fool you.”

She smiled. “I’ll stay vigilant. Is it safe to continue toward the next one?”

“They’re all safe compared to this one. Do you mind if I join you?”

She was supposed to be clearing her head, but it felt rude to say she didn’t want company.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m Aran. I should introduce myself to people before I go inviting myself along on their walks. I never run into anyone out here, so I’m forgetting my manners. I mean, I come out here to get away from the folks in there, but it’s nice to meet someone who had the same idea. That’s what you’re doing, too, yeah?”

Rosemary didn’t know what to answer other than the last question, so she nodded. She also didn’t have any clue about the etiquette of walking with a stranger in the woods. Did you talk? Walk in companionable silence? How close did you stand, and who got to set the pace? She started moving again, to let him fill in the blanks on distance, at least.

“You didn’t say your name.” He matched her stride, an arm’s length away.

“Rosemary.”

“Pretty name.”

“Thanks. Um, my parents came up with it.” She was flustered by the sudden suspicion he was flirting with her. She had no idea how to tell someone in person she was uninterested. In hoodspace you just threw a flag. “Um, I ought to tell you I’m not really into guys.”

He cocked his head at her. “That’s okay. I’m not often into girls, and anyway, if I was looking for somebody, this would be the worst place to look. I told you I never run into anyone out here.”

She walked faster, embarrassed to have said anything at all.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I appreciate a person who’s clear on her intentions. Let’s go back to the part where we were just chatting. I don’t recognize you, so I assume you’re either new talent or new hire?”

“New hire.”

“Let me guess: I don’t think you’re wardrobe or makeup. You don’t have that look. You’re a sound tech or something behind the scenes. Uploads, downloads, interfaces.”

Rosemary tried to relax again, pretend she was chatting in hoodspace, instead of walking through an actual real-life forest with a total stranger who made surprisingly good guesses. “That’s what I should be doing, only for some reason they gave me the artist recruiter job instead, and now I’m terrified they’ll figure out I’m clueless.”

She realized she hadn’t asked him about his own job; that thought stopped her dead in her tracks. He was probably in office or logistics or people management, and now he’d know she was faking it. “So, um, how about you? What do you do here other than walk in the woods?”

He stopped to wait. “I make music.”

“Like, you write? Or you play?”

He looked at her as if she’d missed a connection. It took her a minute. “Oh. You mean you play music for SHL? You’re Talent?” She didn’t know how she managed to put a capital T on a word as she spoke it, but that was how it sounded.

He looked more and more familiar, and she knew so few musicians by sight. “Wait. You’re the singer for Patent Medicine!”

She knew it was true even before he answered. “I love ‘The Crash.’ I saw you play at the Bloom Bar. It sounded even better live. That thing where you drew out the ending was cool.”

“Thanks!” He smiled. “That’s the goal, I guess. If we make you think you’re going to get something different on SHL than the recording, you’re more likely to come to the show, yeah?”

“I’d go to another in a second.” It was an honest answer, though she worried she sounded a little too earnest now.

“I look forward to seeing you there.”

He was joking, obviously, but it led her to another question. “Is it weird playing in a box? Not being able to see your audience?”

“It took some getting used to. It closes down the conversation between performer and audience, which is a weird sensation. Like leaving a message for someone that they’re going to read in real time. Not seeing each other while we play is the harder part. We have monitors, but learning how to cue each other in that situation is tricky, and we have to practice a lot more to get to a point where we can play something that sounds fresh or improvised.”

“So it’s not improvisation when you do something like that ending?”

“It can be, but we have to time it carefully. Like, if you say you want two minutes to talk to the audience you have to say where you want it, and you get exactly two minutes, with countdown. Or you say you’re going to take x number of bars to solo at exactly this point. There’s no room to let somebody keep going if they’re on a roll, but I think that’s more a problem for jazz than my kind of music. There, now that you’re on the payroll, you get to hear all the trade secrets. I hope it doesn’t ruin the experience.”

She considered. “No. Not any more than learning you play in those tiny booths.”

They came to another piece of exercise equipment, two sets of raised footsteps on hinges, with handholds beside them. “This one is more self-explanatory.” Aran hopped onto one and began swinging his feet.