by Ian Whates
The Shelby-lump shivers. “Was everyone completely hideous?”
“To tell you the truth, I couldn’t see very well ’cause my clear sight app went poof same as the skins. But what I could see did shake me. All the chubbies and the scrawnies, the wrinklies and the shorties. Made me feel guilty, kind of pervy, like I was peeping at something private that I shouldn’t.
“There was this woman, a Blip mod, actually, and her RL body was dumpy with age lines all over her face. She came over to talk about the glitch, and I could barely look at her. And there was also an underage there, scared, never even knew LivIT could glitch like that. But as soon as he heard who the woman was, he got excited about talking to a real, live Blip mod and forgot to be afraid. So you see, that kid really showed me up.”
“He did?”
“Yep. The kid didn’t care that the Blip mod wasn’t beautiful and young, only that she was a Blip mod. Didn’t even occur to him to flinch. He would’ve been the same if she were an eight-tentacled cyborg alien or a giant aardvark.”
“Well, duh. Aardvarks are cute.”
Claie pokes the Shelby-lump, and it squeals and bats at him. “I’m saying outsides don’t matter, kitten, AV or RL. Whatever skin you wear, I will love you, the inside Shelby.”
Shelby emerges from the folds of afghan and curtain, timid and blushing, unable to meet Claie’s eyes. In RL, Shelby is a slight man with pale, thinning hair and close-set eyes, red from crying, in a long face with rough features – except for the nose, which is disproportionately delicate, a pixie-button of a nose.
Claie cups Shelby’s cheek, tips it so his lover must look at him. “You’re beautiful, kitten. How could you think you could be anything but beautiful to me?”
Shelby searches for subterfuge or artifice in Claie’s eyes. She is terrified. A hint of either will devastate her, but she must look anyway.
Claie’s eyes are suns alight with adoration and devotion, their brilliance proclaiming Shelby lovely and loved. Claie’s eyes are the only mirror Shelby needs to feel precious and special, and yes, beautiful, and what she is most afraid of losing. But they burn for her the same as they always have, and her fear melts away. Shelby smiles shyly and lifts her mouth for Claie’s kiss.
The kiss is soft, tender at first. But Claie, as he always does, finds Shelby’s sweetness – the way she offers herself to him – adorable and charming, and very arousing. The kiss deepens, and Claie tugs away afghan and curtain, pressing Shelby deeper into the chaise.
Shelby’s face is flushed, eyes unfocused, but she pushes at Claie’s shoulders. “Hold on. Wait.”
“Don’t want to,” Claie growls. “Want to fuck my kitten into the couch.” He feels Shelby grow harder at his words, her breath quick and a little ragged.
Shelby laughs, throaty, shaky. “Fix my skin, first. I don’t think any of my coupling apps are working either.”
Claie nibbles Shelby’s neck. “You’re beautiful as you are. And it might be fun doing it without the apps. Just you and me, naked.”
Shelby grabs Claie’s face, pulling him away until they’re eye-to-eye. “When you make love to me, I want to be who I am inside on the outside too, the true me, not the one random genetics stuck me with.”
Claie shuts his eyes, conjuring forth images of icy showers and utterly unsexy progress reports and tax tables, and prays that whatever is wrong with Shelby’s skin can be easily and swiftly remedied.
When Claie can trust himself not to devour Shelby whole, he opens his eyes. “Okay, kitten, let me see your display.”
FORTUNATELY, THE FIX is relatively simple. In her panic, Shelby managed to trigger a shutdown sequence in her smartdev. Because of the glitch, instead of the apps resetting when the smartdev came back, the whole thing remained in standby mode, unresponsive.
They reboot her smartdev and as soon as they log Shelby back in, her skin rebakes – raven hair spilling to a slender waist, porcelain skin and cat-slitted lilac eyes restored, along with Shelby’s dulcet voice and silver-gold cheongsam.
Claie wastes no time launching both their coupling apps and begins removing Shelby’s cheongsam. He knows the keys to her body – feather touches to make her writhe, kisses to speed her pulse, and fierce caresses to arch her, gasping and eager, beneath him. He is impatient to unlock her, to glory in the feel, the taste of her, everything that she is, his Shelby.
“Claie, will you do something for me?” Shelby’s whispered request is bashful, yet also daring.
“Anything.”
“Can you have wings? Big feather ones, big enough to hold me with.”
The symbolism is not lost on Claie, and he is touched. He thinks of the swan maiden’s wings, and his body reshapes itself, reforming with feathery angel wings, just as Shelby requested. Although Claie’s wings aren’t white. They’re a shimmering periwinkle like his (currently discarded) zoot suit.
They sweep open and enfold Shelby.
She purrs and rubs her cheek against periwinkle down. Her eyes are luminous, glowing with delight, declaring without words that this is the safest, best place in all the world, here in the softest of embraces.
Claie is enchanted, and emboldened. “Kitten, will you do something for me too?”
“Mmhmm. What?”
“Cat ears. Kitten ears.”
Shelby giggles, and a pair of soft-furred triangles appear on her head, raven-black to match her hair, daintily tipped with pink. She pricks them forward and bats her lilac eyes, coy and inviting.
Claie’s response is instant and urgent. He accepts.
MUCH LATER THEY lie entangled, languid and replete. Claie is relaxed, not quite awake but not yet asleep, when he remembers that there is something he must tell Shelby. It summons him back to wakefulness.
“Shelby, are you asleep?”
“Not yet,” she mumbles against his shoulder, but her eyes stay shut.
“I need to tell you something. It’s important.”
She snuggles closer. “I’m listening.”
“I think you should know that I’ve seen you in RL before today, kitten. My view source app, when we’re at home, I didn’t code it to comply with your skin’s privacy lock. I’m so sorry.”
Shelby opens cat-slitted eyes and yawns, revealing a strawberry tongue. “That’s nice, dear.” She rolls over, drawing Claie’s wings over herself like a blanket, and falls asleep.
Claie laughs quietly, at himself mostly. He tightens his arms around his lover and nestles her snug against his chest. Then he too falls asleep.
PEARL IN
THE SHELL
NEIL WILLIAMSON
Many of Neil Williamson’s award-nominated short stories are collected in The Ephemera (Elastic Press, 2006 / Infinity Plus Books, 2011). Neil is a member of the notorious school of literary pugilism known as the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, and has the internal bruising to prove it. Neil is also a musician, of sorts.
THE VICTAZ CREW bombs straight up the back of the bus but Paolo lingers at the top of the stairs, popping his pearls out, casting an ear around the other passengers, on the scope as always for a source of sounds. Over the road rumble and the motor’s electric whine, the coughs and sniffs and murmured conversations, he zones in on the tapping of toes and tuneless sing-a-long; looking out for clues to what’s cycling through their mixes, what might be hidden away in their shells. You can guess a lot from physical appearance, but a good sourcer uses their ears first and foremost. Paolo’s crew haven’t come across a shell they couldn’t crack given enough time, but it helps to be certain it’ll be worth the effort.
Best bet is usually students – wilfully obscure and ever resourceful – or old hipsters who’ve been around since the days of physical media. Anyone who might conceivably be hiding something a bit different in there. New popular music might have flatlined after ICoSP – the International Copyright Simplification Programme – but more people than the corporations would have you believe still value variety in their music.
Paolo is out of luc
k with this bunch of West End Wendies though. Exactly the sort that happily gobble down whatever the industry tarts up and slops out in the name of entertainment. Fools like that deserve what they get.
Moseying up to join the others, he passes a woman rattling her fingernails on her armrest with all the natural rhythm of a fibrillating pulse. He jostles her shoulder and is rewarded with a slow-focusing glower that chills right down when she checks him. The inked suit, the shirt with the stiletto-tip collar, the chessboard hair and the pearlescent array of shell-tech devices pierced around his face like a beachcomber’s Christmas tree baubles. He grins. She snatches back into her shell and stays there. She’s not the only one to notice the crew now. There are glances; distrustful, wary. Good. The crew expects that reaction, covets it. It’s a proud tradition, rude kids sharing their music with the wider community whether the community likes it or not. Only difference nowadays is they don’t know about it until a little present pops up in their mix with the tag: Mashbombed by Victaz.
Paolo topples into a seat, eases the pearls back into his ears. Nods approvingly. Swanny’s got some beats rolling, ready in case Paolo turns up something of interest. Some mashers go about it full on, nailing a jumble of scraps and slices to a plank of Canto-dub and ending up with the musical equivalent of a horse chewing through a mains cable, but Swanny’s subtler than that. His beats are aggressive but he’s got a real feel for the dynamics of a good groove that spotlights each of those little snippets of song at the same time as binding them together. That’s the secret of good mashing.
When Paolo lenses up a file list of recent finds in the crew’s shell-share, Swanny lifts his head and grins.
“What’s this?” He says it without moving his lips. Only the others can hear it, in the share. Older people look like bad ventriloquists when they do this, but it comes naturally to the crew. Cell phones were on their way out before they were born. They’re the shell generation. Dinks laughs at Paolo when he says things like that. Usually follows it up with some tosh about making the most of every resource in a scarcity economy. Bollocks.
Swanny’s used to Paolo’s little finds but his eyes widen when he runs the first of the files. “Aw, come on, ya perv, that’s no real.”
“Classic 1970s porno. Lifted it off the lollipop man outside St Agnes’s at lunchtime.”
Swanny shakes his head. “Dirty old bastard.”
“Who’s a dirty old bastard?” Dinks drops her prized antique headphones around her neck, paying attention now. Girl’s got a sixth sense for fanny. Even monster fanny like this. “Woah! What was it with the seventies man? They never heard of personal grooming?”
They share a round of lulz. Their toons roll around the share, giggling and clutching their sides.
“Sure, but check the music,” Paolo says.
They both do. They both nod. “Ya perv,” they both say.
This time their lulzing avatars hit Paolo’s over the head with cartoon dildos.
“Aye, aye.” Dinks is their cracker and, next to fanny and retro tech-chic, the one thing she’s got an infallible instinct for is a poorly protected shell. A second or two later, a group of girls appears. Five of them, sixteen or seventeen, school blazers and full make-up, modest shell-tech jewellery: barnacle ear-studs and chickering winkle chain bangles. Absorbed in their shell-share, they don’t even notice the crew and once Dinks gives Paolo the nod he makes quick work of skimming their files.
Strictly speaking at this time on a Wednesday morning, he and Dinks should be at college. There are exams coming up after all, but Paolo will ace them. Hell, he could write the questions.
Explain the effect that the International Copyright Simplification Programme had on the commercial music industry in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
What that really boils down to is: what’s the magic number? At the last count, the magic number was seventeen hundred and seventy eight. That’s the exact number of individual and distinct songs recognised by the International Rights Authority. ICoSP came about because DRM didn’t work and because the delivery platforms had moved to the automatic micropayment model and because corporate pop music had long been reduced to papping out variation after variation of the same old shit, eventually dispensing with the involvement of writers and performers entirely. So, now there are only so many unique “combinations of melody, presentation and lyrical sense”. Everything else is designated a copy.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise: ignoring the mostly ignored and easily ripped off fringe artists, the history of commercial music was always more about flogging a formula than it ever was about invention and art. ICoSP was merely the acknowledgement of that fact. It only got really silly with the Universal Pact amendment, proposed by the multinationals who, naturally, were terrified. Once the uber-algorithms had worked out which songs were classed as being essentially the same, the amendment determined that the rights would be awarded to the earliest variant still under copyright at the time the statute was adopted as law by the signatory territories.
So now whoever holds the rights for “I Will Always Love You” also gets the cash from a thousand other compositions whose words cover the same general subject matter and have a roughly similar arrangement (and the operative words in that sentence are general and roughly). It came as a shock to the writers of the huge Euro-pop hit, “Build You A Wall”, that the bulk of their millions in royalties were suddenly diverted to the geniuses who came up with “Bob The Builder”. It came as an even bigger shock to discover that the Sex Pistols owned the rights to much of the history of rock and roll. And with the duration limited to fifty years, irrespective of whether the creator was still alive or not, legal battles over the next inheritor of that particular golden chalice had been rumbling on for the best part of a decade.
There you go. Ignoring the looming monster next door represented by the Chinese industry who refused to touch ICoSP with the proverbial barge pole, that’s the history of modern music. Sixty marks, please. If he has enough time at the end of the exam, Paolo might be tempted to add a caustic postscript to the effect that it completely sucks that music students actually spend the bulk of their education learning how not to get fined, sued or imprisoned. Hardly anyone writes new music. Some still try – potentially, if you managed to write a genuinely original song you’d have the rights brokers battering down your door – but if you attempt to release a composition that matches 51% or more of the 93 points of reference in an existing copyrighted song, the rights for your new effort are automatically awarded to the existing copyright holder and you have to pay them for the privilege of playing the song you thought you just wrote. You’d still get a performance royalty but, as the man said: Fuck that.
There is an exception, however. The preview clause. You’re legally allowed to play up to two point seven seconds of any song before your app automatically identifies the rights holder and coughs up. And that’s where mash comes in. Danceable patchworks stitched together by crews like Victaz – as in Frankenstein, yeah? – from slivers you don’t have to pay for. It’s a loophole they’ve been arguing about for years, even though mashes themselves are now also copyrightable. The whole thing is frowned upon of course, but the mash charts are one of the few growth areas in the industry.
The greyest area of the whole thing is that the only completely honest way of creating mash is from what you can preview on the net. There was a time when you could find almost anything online, but after ICoSP the former rights owners of tens of thousands of tracks removed them from sale rather than make someone else a little richer every time they were played.
That’s why, if you’re serious about the art of mashing, about conjuring some sort of originality from a rehash of existing work, you have to go that extra mile to make your source material different from everyone else’s. Which means bending the rules a little to see what the world is hiding from you.
The girls are a surprise. One of them has a decent stash of obscure 50s soul, and another ap
pears to have a fascination for the roaring twenties. Both are untapped areas for the crew so, invisibly, Paolo transfers a selection of files from their share to the crew’s. Swanny drops them a mash bomb as a thank you. From the way he’s smirking Paolo suspects that 1970s pornography will feature prominently.
In the Victaz’s share, Dinks’s avatar stomps a big boot and executes a shrill two fingered whistle. “Our stop, boyos.”
Paolo’s proud of the plan they’re about to put into action. The problem with random public skimming is that the hit rate is low for the effort required, so they’ve been looking around for a higher yield potential scenario than the buses and the malls.
Then someone in the music business had conveniently died.
The crematorium is tucked away up on a hill on the city’s eastern fringe, just green enough and distant enough from the traffic and general noise to give the illusion of peace. Trudging up the access road, all three find the silence unnerving, so Swanny pumps one of his latest mashes nice and loud and they kick into a swagger as they reach the rows of cars parked along the manicured verge.
Paolo pops open Heather Gilchrist’s obituary for some last minute revision. The crew are posing as fans come to pay their respects so, should anyone ask, they have to know at least the names of the old band members, her grown up children, and a few of the songs that had made her famous.
The obit is more a sob story than a celebration. It spends too much time sentimentalising about how the rights crash ruined Heather’s life; making the person secondary to the legal fight, the subsequent poverty and the final retreat into reclusiveness when the cancer was diagnosed. The bit that caught Paolo’s interest though is tucked away at the bottom. A sentence of speculation about how it’s believed that she kept writing, kept trying to make new music, just never released it to the public.
