by H. A. Swain
“Dad?” I say. “What are you doing here?”
“I should ask you the same thing,” he grumbles.
“Hello, Orphie!” I look past my dad to see Esther Crawley, Chanson Industries second-in-command, sitting on our couch.
I hop past my dad to plant a sloppy kiss on Esther’s cheek. Although over the past ten years she’s moved up the ranks to become my father’s most trusted confidante, I still think of her as blond-hair, blue-eyed Aunty Esther who used to babysit me when she was just a junior justice broker in the firm.
“Why aren’t you at the Geoff Joffrey show getting some Buzz?” Dad asks me.
“We were tired,” I tell him with a shrug.
He shakes his head and grumbles, “No work ethic,” but Esther winks at me and I snicker, which makes my father’s face turn red. “Get out!” he yells.
Ara turns back toward the door, but I grab her arm and point toward the kitchen. “I’m starving,” I whisper.
Ara clenches her jaw and stares at me hard. Like most people, she’s terrified of my father. Not that I blame her. Especially as he stomps across the living room again, jabbing his finger at poor Esther while shouting, “How long did it last?”
“Not long,” Esther says coolly. “Less than two minutes.”
“Two minutes!” my father shouts. “Might as well have been the entire concert. Ten seconds is all it takes for everyone to tune out. Switch channels. Hit a sports event. Turn on a goddamn book! Two freaking minutes is the lifetime of a song!”
“Less than two,” Esther explains evenly. “And the quality was terrible. Amateur stuff. Dark and fuzzy and the sound was distorted. Nobody will even remember by tomorrow.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Dad says. “This kind of breach makes me look weak! Wounded. Limping to my death. And right when Calliope Bontempi and her little brain activist group filed suit against us! You think that was a coincidence?”
“Calliope may have nothing to do with the hijacking,” Esther reasons.
This stops me in my tracks. Ara squeezes my hand tight. “Tell them,” she whispers but I shake my head. The last thing I want to do is add to my father’s bad mood, so I keep moving toward the kitchen door, which feels miles away with the room tilting and whirling in my Jused-up state.
“Of course she has something to do with it!” Dad bellows. “It’s all a part of her group’s plan to ruin me. They’re vultures. Circling. Waiting for me to die. But, if they take me down, we go back to a decade when genius was a genetic crapshoot and copyright protection was a joke and any schmuck could throw music on the Web and call it art.”
I pretend to shoot myself in the head because I can’t listen to him yammer on about the dark ages of modern humanity (total overstatement) before he single-handedly revolutionized brilliance (in his dreams) and saved the cultural elite from being subsumed into the mediocrity of the lowest common denominator (snore).
Another jolt from the Juse hits me just then and I collide with the corner of the curio cabinet that Mom left behind when she walked out years ago. The bump sends a tremor through her collection of songbird figurines. They skitter and skate across the glass shelves on their tiny breakable legs. The fragility of the birds mocks me and I double over, clutching at the wall, laughing too much, too hard, even though nothing’s really funny.
“Goddamnit, Orpheus!” my father rages. “I told you to get the hell out of here!”
“Sorry!” I call, then drag Ara into the kitchen where we eagerly raid the fridge and cabinets.
Ara pulls out a carton of leftover Mexi-Chinese nacho noodles from the fridge. “This is it? This is all you have?” she says, but she digs in with her fingers anyway.
“Something’s wrong with the sensors that are supposed to reorder the groceries and my father would never do something so gauche and beneath his social standing as reprogram an appliance,” I tell her. As I’m complaining, a box zips down our delivery chute. Overhead, we hear the drone zoom off.
I run over, grab the box and rip into the contents like a coyolf disemboweling a rabbit. Socks and tea and toothpaste. “Oh, weird,” I say, pointing to Nobody from Nowhere scrawled in black marker across a six-pack of disposable umbrellas. I toss everything aside when I spot a bag of Crickers, our favorite crunchy rice and cricket cracker. “Yahoo!” I yell. “Krispy Krab and Bakon!” And stuff a handful in my mouth.
Ara sprinkles a whole pack into her carton of leftovers, then slurps a Cricker-covered nacho noodle so hard it smacks her forehead, leaving a smudge of ChinCheez like a yellow-orange bindi jewel between her brows. I start to guffaw, but something lodges beneath my epiglottis and I choke. Ara rushes over and slaps me hard on the back.
“Breathe, man, breathe!” She laughs while smacking me, as if she’s enjoying the whole thing a bit too much.
A projectile of Cricker sludge flies out of my mouth. Immediately, five tiny SpiderBots skitter over the countertop to take care of the mess as I giggle uncontrollably. “When is this stuff going to wear off?” I whine. “Damn Juse.”
“I know, right?” Ara slumps beside me in hysterics. I lean torward her, ready for another kiss, but she pops upright, dancing foot to foot. “Oh my god, I think I’m going to pee myself.”
“Bathroom’s that-a-way,” I say and point. Ara makes a run for it. I sigh as I watch her go. Will our timing ever be right?
When she’s gone, Esther comes in the kitchen. “You two are wound up tonight,” she says with a smirk, then places her gold-rimmed cup in the BevvyBot, pushes a button, and waits for it to refill.
I pull myself together and hunch close to her. “Hey listen, I didn’t want to tell my dad but I had a very strange encounter with Calliope Bontempi tonight.”
Esther chokes on her frothing, smoking cocktail. Liquid dribbles down her chin, which she dabs at with her sleeve. “Calliope Bontempi! What did she want?”
“As best as I can tell, she wants to bankrupt Chanson Industries, dismantle the music industry, get rid of all ASAs, and give music back to the people.”
“Oh, is that all?” Esther says with a chuckle, which puts me more at ease.
I hop up to sit on the counter next to her and ask, “Does this kind of thing happen in other industries or do people come after Dad more often because he’s such a jerk?”
Esther chuckles then says quietly, “His personality doesn’t help matters, but the music industry has its own unique set of problems.”
“I doubt that,” I say.
“It’s true,” she says. “It all comes down to profit margins in the end.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Esther leans back against the counter and crosses her arms. “Think of it this way: When your friend Quinby sells a piece of art, someone pays a big premium to have the original. The artwork itself becomes a collector’s item and a status symbol for the owner. Even after the original sells, lots of digital copies will also sell, over and over and over to make more money, but it’s the actual artifact that is rarefied and valuable. So art patrons make money off the original work and the digital reproductions and downloads, plus the shows and tie-in deals for movies and products that use the image—posters, coffee mugs, t-shirts, umbrellas.” She points to the delivery items imprinted with copyrighted artwork scattered on the floor. “But with music, there is no original, big-ticket item. One song is not inherently more valuable than the next. It’s always two minutes and thirty seconds of sound that gets played over and over, which has to butter our bread. That’s why your dad came up with pay-for-play and put everything on the Stream. Before that, music had lost most of its economic value. People were used to music being nearly free and at their fingertips anytime they wanted it. Even though we have more control over the profits, music is still easier to steal than other kinds of art. People do it all the time.”
I look away, flushed with guilt over the receiver in my Cicada.
Esther bites the side of her mouth. “Song pirates are like little mosquitoes buz
zing around Chanson Industries’s head. A few don’t matter, but too many will drain us.”
“Calliope’s not a song pirate, though,” I say.
“True,” says Esther. “She’s another kind of parasite looking for a payoff.”
I shake my head. “She wants more than blood,” I tell her, then quickly hush when Dad stomps into the kitchen for a refill on his drink, too.
Ara comes in the opposite door and Dad bellows, “Didn’t you just have an ASA?” which makes Ara jump. She nods, looking terrified. “Which one?” he demands as the BevvyBot mixes him up another bourbon and lime.
“Music, of course,” she says.
“Am I your patron?” he asks as if there is any other option in the western hemisphere.
She nods again.
“Good.” He takes his drink and narrows his eyes at her, no doubt calculating profits. “Then our PromoTeam’s doing an excellent job. She looks great, don’t you think so, Esther?”
“Jeez, Dad!” I complain. “She’s my friend. Not your commodity.”
“Now she’s both,” he says with a dismissive little shrug.
I can’t hide my disdain.
“Don’t give me any crap, Orpheus.” Dad slams his glass down on the counter. “ASAs cost a lot of money and my job is to make sure they pay off for people like Arabella here.”
“But not for Calliope Bontempi?” I snap and immediately regret it. There’s no reason to bait my father except the Juse hasn’t quite worn off, so everything that pops into my mind falls out of my mouth.
He scowls at me. “That girl will be sorry she ever crawled out from whatever Plebe rock she’s been living under.” He points at Esther. “Hire private detectives. Turn over every stone. Do whatever you have to because I’m going to destroy that little con artist and whoever broke into my LiveStream.”
“I’m already on it,” Esther says.
“Good.” My father turns back to me. “And you. What are we waiting for? All your classmates, including Ms. Lovecraft here, have gotten their ASAs and started their careers. So chop chop. I don’t want a lazy moocher for a son much longer. It’s time we schedule yours.”
I shake my head, tired of the same old argument. “Tell that to Mom,” I say, expecting him to blow a gasket.
Instead he cuts his eyes to Esther then says, “Don’t you worry. We’ll take care of your mother.”
I cross my arms and stare at him. “With you, Dad, there’s always a reason for me to worry.”
VERSE TWO
ZIMRI
Every day in the warehouse is a Picker Symphony. Ticka. Ticka. Ticka. Ticka. Boom ba boom ba boom. With my HandHeld strapped to my palm and an earbud in place, laying down the backing tracks of bings and bonks like the hi-hat and the bass, hitting me between my shoulder blades and down deep below my belly button. It might not be a secret concert on a hidden stage, but when I find the music in this job, I can dance ten miles of aisles under one giant warehouse roof without losing my mind.
I slide across the concrete floor, then stomp stomp stomp. Clap my hands above my head when the first item pops up on my HandHeld screen.
Girls panties, three pack, size 6x
Aisle 14Q
Unit 24
Bin AA
The earbud chirps numbers in my ear. “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…” I improvise a line over the melody. “Countdown,” I sing. “Counting down now here we go!” And I’m off, basket in hand, running through the wide center aisle of sector Q. When I hit Row 14 a BING signals for me to turn—odd numbers on the right, evens on the left. I dash down for Unit 24 (25 units per row, so second to the last). Another BING, different tone, C natural? Right on time. Ten seconds to go. I find column A of Unit 25 (columns are in alphabetical order so I move far left) and reach up among the grid of bins (AA top left, AZ bottom right). And there they are. Girls panties, three pack, size 6X.
I scan them with my HandHeld. Wait for the PING! A high F#. The sound of happiness. Forever the note of success. “I got you, babe,” I croon as I toss the panty pack in my basket along with the other items I’ve already gathered for some nameless, faceless Plute. Da blomp goes my HandHeld and I know the order is complete. I have a few seconds before the basket’s due to hit the conveyor belt so, since nobody’s around and I’m out of the sight line of the security cams, I press against the shelving unit and slip out the permanent market I keep in my pocket. I take one more quick peek over each shoulder to ensure that I’m alone, then I scrawl Nobody from Nowhere across the panty package, the tissue box, and the bag of six disposable umbrellas. With marker stowed, I skip to the end of the aisle and attach the basket to the conveyor and watch it travel up and up, where it will be carried overhead to the packing line and boxed up by human hands (Dorian’s perhaps? Will he see my secret message? Or will it go unnoticed as usual?). Then finally, within an hour of the order being placed, it will be plucked from the rooftop by a drone and flown off to a delivery chute somewhere in the City.
Levon passes by. He presses his hand over his heart and mouths, Thank you. I nod then I high-five Merle—one of the few human forklift drivers left. He knew my dad. It’s a small miracle we haven’t been replaced by A.N.T.s yet, but we all know it’s only a matter of time before automated nanotechnology takes over and all ten thousand of us navigating these aisles will become obsolete. The others grumble about the inevitability of that day but I know it will set me free, which is probably why I’m the only one here dancing.
And so … Ticka. Ticka. Ticka. Ticka. Boom ba boom ba boom. Countdown, here we go! Another order up.
* * *
At 10:25 a.m. we get our first tenner. Before Brie got demoted, we’d always grab a bevvie from the bot or head outside to the river for ten minutes of fresh air. Without her here, though, I don’t bother. Instead, I hit the bathroom and drink straight from the faucet. The water bites with chemicals, but it’s wet, as Nonda says, so it’ll do. I sing as I slurp.
Veronica, Rhiannon, and Jolene come shuffling through the door, chattering and nattering away like squabbling squimonks. They’ve been this way since we were small. Veronica, forever the nicest of the three, is the only one to say hello.
I shoot water through the little gap in my front teeth. Jolene harrumphs at my misbehavior then clump clump clumps across the floor to ratchet down a paper towel and rip it from the dispenser. I like that sound, ratchet ratchet bzzzzt. Scratchy paper against tiny metal teeth. Jolene takes no notice of me repeating it. She’s like a little bulldog, all head and chest with spindly legs. No wonder her times are so bad. She isn’t built to be a picker. You have to be nimble and lithe—a rubber band ready to spring. I get my own paper towels. Two of them. Ratchet ratchet bzzzzt. Ratchet ratchet bzzzzt. Then I rub them together to get the shup-shup-shup of an old soft shoe beneath a melody I improvise.
“Can it, Zimri,” Jolene chufs, tired of my noise.
Spoilsport! Always has been. I crumple up the towels and toss them in the trash.
“What’s that song?” Veronica asks me.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Just something I was singing.”
“Probably made it up like all her weird stuff.” Jolene pushes past me to a toilet stall.
I see Nobody from Nowhere written in block letters on the outside of the door, but it’s not my handwriting and that makes me grin.
“Can you believe what happened during Geoff Joffrey’s LiveStream last night?” Rhiannon asks as she tucks a spiral of hair beneath her cap.
“That was insane,” Jolene calls.
“What?” I ask. “Did he fall on his face?”
“Where were you? You didn’t watch it?” Veronica asks.
“I had better things to do,” I tell her with a smirk.
“Oh, girl, you missed it!” Rhiannon says. Then she and Veronica hem me in on either side, both nearly quaking with excitement. “Just as he was launching into his new song—”
“‘Your Eyes,’” Veronica says, looking dreamy, then they break into a
pitchy rendition of the chorus, “Your eyes shoot right through me like a laser beam! A laser beam!” and I clap my hands over my ears. It’s bad enough that that song is in the Stream all day. I have to hear it here?
“Some crazy person in a black mask broke into the feed!” Rhiannon squeals.
“What?” The floor falls out from under me and I back up against the sink.
“Some girl was on a stage screaming like a lunatic,” says Jolene as she busts out of the stall.
I straighten up, offended. “What do you mean, screaming?”
“She was singing,” Veronica says, “but the sound was all messed up so you couldn’t make out the song.”
“None of it?” I ask.
“Nope,” they say.
“How long did it last?” My legs are weak and shaky with excitement.
Rhiannon shrugs. “Not long. Like a minute or so.”
I swallow hard as sweat pools under my arms. “Who was it? Does anyone know?” I can barely speak above a whisper.
“Brain activists probably,” Rhiannon says.
“Or just some random nutjob,” says Veronica.
“Whoever it was, they almost ruined the LiveStream,” Jolene says. “Everybody was like, Wha…? And then all of the sudden, poof! The screaming girl was gone and there was Geoff again.” She sighs. “He’s so cute!”
“We missed almost all of the song,” Veronica complains.
“Yeah, but…” I look from face to face. “Was she any good?”
“Was who any good?” says Rhiannon.
“The girl who broke in?” I bite my lip.
“Who knows? The whole thing was dark and fuzzy and distorted, which is lucky for her because if she ever gets caught…” Veronica shakes her head.
“Bzzzzt!” Jolene says and pretends to zap her own brain. “She’ll wind up a drooling idiot in a MediPlex.” Then she laughs maniacally.
I turn away, shaky from the news. My mind reels through the possibilities of how my video feed made it onto the LiveStream at the Strip and whether anyone could have traced the signal. I have no idea how the whole thing works. I have to talk to Tati and I should warn Dorian. I hurry out of the bathroom. If I run, I’ll make it to the break room by the packing line and grab him before the tenner’s done, but as soon as I’m on the floor, Jude shouts my name like I’ve been hiding from him.
