Сара Пинскер - A Song for a New Day

They stepped in and closed the door behind them. This time, Rosemary resisted the urge to look for a Veneer and accepted it at face value. The room was small but cozy, lit by a desk lamp. It was hotter than outside, probably from the electronics: the flat surfaces were all covered with what looked like science experiments. Boxes with dials and wires connected to other boxes, amplifiers, a small keyboard. Fans whirred amid the other machine noise.

A woman sat in a desk chair in a tank top and shorts, legs crossed, head bent over a circuit board. She swiveled her chair to greet them.

“Rosemary, Katja. Katja, Rosemary.” Joni put the bowl of stew on the desk beside the electronics.

Katja waved a greeting, then raised an eyebrow at Joni.

“Rosemary, I wanted to introduce you to Katja to show you there’s amazing music being made here that doesn’t translate well to your formats of choice. K, do you mind being used as an example?”

Katja shrugged. “I never mind a chance to play. Bass is in the closet.”

Joni rummaged in a large wardrobe and pulled out an electric bass, which she plugged into one of the amps before sitting on the bed. “Key?”

“I’m feeling D minor.” Katja pulled up her Hoodie—Joni had said not all her friends were noncomm—and fiddled with wires and boxes for a minute. A computerized beat emerged from another amp. Rosemary sat on the far edge of the bed from Joni, the only other clear space.

Joni started to play a simple bass riff, nothing like the sound she had ripped from her cello, though she still carried the same intensity of purpose that Rosemary had found so entrancing. Then the other instrument started, one she didn’t recognize, something bowed mated with something brassy. Rosemary turned, remembering she was supposed to be listening to Katja this time, not Joni. She expected to see Katja playing an instrument, but her hands were empty. The sound itself came from a small amplifier on the desk.

The pitch changed, and Rosemary looked closer, determined to figure out what she’d missed. Katja massaged her own wrist and… was that it? Yes. She ran her hand up and down her other arm, drawing notes, changing the pitch and velocity. Somehow it all worked with Joni’s bass. She slapped her own shoulders, her forearms, her thighs. Her entire body made music. Everywhere she touched produced sound. Rosemary looked for something like Kurt Zell’s keyboard tattoo.

Katja held out her right arm, and Rosemary realized it was an invitation. She was repulsed for a moment at the idea of touching a stranger so intimately, but Joni whispered, “Go on, it’s okay,” without missing a note, and Rosemary pushed her fear aside and reached out.

She used one finger to stroke Katja’s forearm. Katja shuddered, and the amp emitted a ripple of notes, barely audible, all in key. “Harder, please. That tickled.”

Three fingers, pressed down. A chord, insistent, dying the second she lifted her hand away. Katja smiled and pushed her chair backward again, to indicate she no longer needed Rosemary’s touch. She played for a couple more minutes, then nodded to Joni, who ran through her riff two more times, then stopped. The beat kept going, but both women looked at Rosemary expectantly.

“Wow,” she said. “How do you do that?”

“Trigger implants under my skin. Processor translates them all into key and then out to the amp.” Katja leaned over and hit a button to cut off the beat.

“Like that Kurtz guy?”

“Not ‘like that Kurtz guy.’ That ass stole my idea.”

Joni slapped the bass strings, making a rude noise. “But if he hadn’t stolen your idea, you’d never have gotten a better one.”

“This is way cooler than his little keyboard,” Rosemary said, hoping to repair whatever insult she’d made mentioning him.

“True.” Katja ran her hand across her forearm again, though it no longer made a sound. “And he wouldn’t have gotten kicked out of the house, and you wouldn’t have moved in, so I guess it’s a win for everyone.”

“Now show her the vid,” Joni said.

Katja pulled up her Hoodie, and Rosemary took the hint to do the same. Katja pushed a video her way.

“Are you watching it?” Joni asked.

“Give her a sec.”

The clip lasted a minute. It had been filmed at the 2020, on a third party’s Hoodie, since she was seeing Katja from a few feet away. Rosemary watched hood-Katja throw herself into the crowd, allowing them to play her the way Rosemary had. They were respectful, but not as shy as she had been. It felt intimate, as it had in real life, but also voyeuristic to watch other people do the touching on a recording. She shut it off.

“That’s amazing, and I get why you’re showing it to me. The video doesn’t capture it. But SHL…”

“SHL would program it so avatars could touch an avatar of me, and it would lose all meaning.”

Rosemary closed her eyes and pictured the code, then tried to picture Katja in the Bloom Bar. She imagined reaching out, avatar to avatar, and how the illusion would crumble. They were right: not everything was meant to be an SHL experience. She already knew that, had already been through the motions of choosing bands specifically for hoodspace, but none of those decisions had been based on a performance like this. You had to be in the room to experience this tactile connection. She understood: sometimes the performance was the music, and vice versa, and the two couldn’t be separated.

They walked back to the 2020 in silence. Rosemary had too much to say, so she didn’t speak.

When they reached the door, she mustered, “I had a wonderful day. Thanks for showing me around.”

Joni smiled. “There’s more I can show you if you want to do it again sometime.”

“That would be lovely.”

The evening’s first band was a teenaged-looking sextet of assorted gender presentations playing hip-hop on toy instruments: a plastic drum kit, a plastic ukulele, a tiny xylophone, etc. They turned their joke instruments into a catchy sound, and the ukulele player was a talented rapper. They all wore Superwally warehouse uniforms—ironically, Rosemary thought, since if the techwear in the uniforms was still activated they’d be fired—and the first song gave a hilarious takedown of Superwally customer service. What if one of them was Jeremy from Quality Control? Rosemary laughed out loud at the thought. She didn’t think SHL would condone mockery of Superwally, but she made a mental note to find out their name and mention it as one to watch. Now that she had an idea how SHL worked, she thought it would be easy enough to add other bands as she found them.

After a couple of songs, she spotted Joni chatting with someone she didn’t recognize, a stocky black guy with a shaved head, and made her way over.

“Rosemary, this is Mark Grail. He’s been coming here since Luce started bringing in music. He took most of the pictures on Luce’s walls. Mark, this is Rosemary. She’s visiting from out of town. I was just saying I hadn’t seen Mark in a while,” Joni said.

“And I said I got a little burned out on the scene. There’s only so many times I can watch the same bands in the same room.”

“What did you do instead?” asked Rosemary.

“Hung out in a jazz joint for a while. Found a good monthly house concert.”

“And why did you come back?”

“Because he missed me,” Joni teased.

Mark waved her off. “My buddy Dex is in the next band. It’s their first time here.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” said Rosemary. “How do you know who’s playing on any given night? I’ve been trying and trying to figure it out.”

“There’s a calendar on the fridge upstairs.”