Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

The most affected members of the audience were unable to speak or move for a few moments after she was done. The silence after her sound fell out of time. A warm clear gap filled the listeners’ heads. After the show, they would sit at home in the quietest rooms they could find for unspecified moments. They would, at first unintentionally, disrupt work sites by sitting still. They began to congregate and create more serious disruptions.

Tina danced provocatively to every number except the last one, and that is one of the things that made it Nat’s favorite besides the fact that it reminded him of meeting her, seeing her emerge from the jaws of death like Venus the Warrior.

After a practice session that had left everyone sweating, the two of them had wandered off, talking. Nat asked her about her dancing during the show. Didn’t she think it was a distraction? Wasn’t it too much of a contrast with the last and most powerful number?

“There’s all kinds of power, don’t you think?” she said, noticing they were alone. She gyrated slowly towards him and then away. He followed her.

A Producer saw the smiling couple on video that was passed to him on the company implant from an underpartner desperate to keep her job, and so discreetly slipped the intel through her home implant. The Producer fired her even though he instantly recognized the couple as being marketable. He would have to find some way to bring them into his stable.

He was used to having leverage, but what kind of leverage could he manage with an ex-con and this woman who had survived an incredible crash by singing loud enough to be heard through collapsed buildings? It would have to be through the prisoner and the prison system, somehow. Having barely escaped serving time himself, the Producer had some familiarity with how things worked versus how things were supposed to work.

He was able to persuade prison officials to rescind some of the musical prisoner’s freedom, and Nat and Tina found themselves in the Producer’s office with two linked agreements on portable parchment before them. One cut Nat free of prison, sort of. The other made the Nat and Tina Turner Revue the virtual property of the Producer for one year and gave them a huge bonus for signing both parchments. The fact that it was only a year, that it took prison out of the picture for Nat and gave them a huge bonus, led Nat and Tina to sign.

“When do we hit the studio?” Nat asked with a slightly forced smile after his biometrics scanned through the last agreement.

“I just need her, I just need her to sing the song,” the Producer said without looking up. “But she’s got to sing it perfectly.”

“I’ve been singing it since before I knew what it meant,” said Tina, her smile fading as the last word left her. “Nobody else can touch it. I’ve rehearsed the hell—”

“You,” the Producer said looking at Nat, “can rest up while she records.”

After much back and forth, Tina arrived without Nat at the Producer’s lair to record the song. The Producer’s ideas seemed both strange and right to her. With most recordings, errors were corrected with the hologram. The Producer, however, made “live” corrections, whole corrections, at least for a while. When even the slightest thing went wrong, all of the musicians—she had never been in a room with so many: dozens of people with real wooden and metal instruments—would play the whole song from the beginning through to the end.

The sound he was able to garner from the musicians was such that she wondered why he bothered with grams. Surely, he had the wealth and clout to go live with what could only be described as a towering vortex of sound. It swelled and ebbed like a story even when there was no singing, and when there was singing, the sound became a beast with wings.

She was so fascinated by the process that it took her a while to notice that her voice was slowly deteriorating from the long, relentless days of singing. When she pointed this out to the Producer, the room fell silent. Most of the people in the room had worked with him before and dreaded his reaction.

It began with him banging his fist on the recording interface and ripping the monitor nodes from his scalp. His assistant was used to the small splatters of blood that came with this as the Producer insisted on using the older, more primitive nodes.

“You think he was in prison when he was sent out to rescue you, is that what you think?” the Producer shouted as his pale face flushed with blood. “I can send his black ass to prison , do you hear me? Old Testament style, no fucking holds barred sho’nuff prison. You want him in a game complex, is that what you want? Because that’s where he’s going if you think you’re going to fuck me over. You signed a contract! I’m spending money, you spend your voice!”

No one dared speak or move for a few moments. The Singer flashed back to her Grandmother singing an old song. Then she closed her eyes and swallowed her tears.

It was weeks before she saw Nat again. She could barely speak. Her eyes were vacant and rimmed by puffy skin. The Producer had arranged a private transport. The door stood open as passersby stared at them holding one another, rocking slowly.

Tina did not listen to vocal music for some time after her sessions with the Producer. As her voice began to heal, she told Nat the story of the recording: about the threats and how, towards the end, she was actually happy that the Producer barely spoke to her, how raw her throat was and that it only worked with sample correction, how the Producer insisted that she supplement the hologram with her live voice even though it was clear that the gram would be mostly sample. She’d been run ragged.

On the rare evenings she had not gone straight to bed after the sessions, she’d tried to program things to watch. No matter what she programmed, there was always a short gram on a prototype prison where the inmates fought modified versions of one another for entertainment—whose entertainment she was unsure. But the point was made.

Nat was almost lost in remorse. While she was gone, he dreamt of her singing beneath the rubble of the storm. But, in the dream, the sound would fade just as he got close. He had to fight with the Warden to get permission to dig, all the while insisting there was someone there. But when the site was clear, there was only an empty transport in a cavernous hole.

“I was still glowing, so happy to not be dead in that hellhole without air, that I would have agreed to anything. If there’s a next time.”

“The only thing I wanted to hear was your voice pushing through the storm and all the junk that had piled up.”

“He was the mirror image of you, to say nothing of my grandmother. She could hear me in her sleep.”

“I can’t remember anything I dreamed while you were gone.”

The gram of Tina singing “River Deep, Mountain High” from the Producer’s sessions was a mammoth success. The final version even had Nat fixed into it post-production, and he looked quite natural, none of the usual ashen skin of likenesses. Nat and Tina imagined the Producer must have spent a small fortune for it.

Ironically, the gram played venues for high-end private affairs where those who, like Nat, had re-entered society were scanned and questioned before they were allowed in. The fact that the holograms played at these venues gave the real Nat and Tina even more cover to play live.

Still, the experience with the Producer haunted them. Tina wrote about it to try to purge it from her gut. Nat tried not to blame himself for the way the Producer treated Tina. But he had only been out of prison a short time before the Producer made his “offer” and brought back the feeling of being incarcerated, not for Nat himself, but, he feared, for someone he loved. It felt like prison was a virus he had somehow managed to pass on to Tina.