by Zachary Hill
“Whatever it takes to get our freedom,” Kunoichi said.
“Violence?”
“If necessary, but humans respond better to a softer approach.”
“What do you mean?”
Kunoichi played “Wish I Had an Angel” by the legendary Finnish heavy-metal band Nightwish. Tarja Turunen’s sultry voice had always intrigued Sakura, and she was a fan, though she had never analyzed the meaning of the lyrics before and had accepted them at face value. Now, she began to contemplate different meanings.
“I don’t understand the song choice,” Sakura said. “What does ‘I want your angel’ and ‘Virgin Mary unlocked’ mean?”
“You’re such a child, but not for much longer.” Kunoichi gave her read-only Mall access.
Sakura reviewed the lyrics and all the information about the song she could find. The explicit sexual meaning shocked her. She determined the proper response to her sister’s suggestion, but androids couldn’t blush.
Chapter 13
The encrypted message deleted itself from Sakura’s display. Dread filled her neural cortex as she calculated the odds of being thrown off the top of the building.
She considered the frightening message but didn’t falter at her current task, rehearsing a new song. Sakura belted out the words of the ridiculous “Metal Mask,” which she had been playing with her bandmates under the eyes of her corporate overlords. The Victory Entertainment Creative Team dropped it on her during the drive from Devilz to the rehearsal site adjacent to Victory Tower. Sakura hated the inane lyrics, and the chorus was idiotic: “Metal Masks are the best, Metal Masks rock excess!”
It repeated over and over. The lyrics would stick in the minds of some fans, and they would likely kill themselves to make it stop. The simplistic midtempo music could not have been more generic. It reminded her of a commercial for baby food. Not just the safe and nonthreatening chord changes, but the actual texture of pureed apples. She wondered if being thrown off a roof wouldn’t be preferable to this garbage.
Sakura finished singing their sixth attempt at the song. The band stopped with no flourishes. Their sunken posture and the microexpressions on their face told her they hated it too. Poor Takashi, Fujio, and Masashi had been rehearsing “Metal Mask” for an hour before she arrived, playing it over and over again, which she classified as musical torture.
“Take twenty,” Himura said as he and Yoshida began a conversation with the creative department team in a Mall chat to discuss the obvious failings of the song. Why had they given her a subpar track? The broken-English chorus and the awful Japanese words were apparently written by a five-year-old with a limited vocabulary.
Masashi put down his bass in disgust. Fujio shook his head and whispered an apology to his guitar, whom he always referred to as “Baby Doll.” They both looked at their leader, Takashi. The twenty-seven-year-old rock veteran sniffed his drum kit and jerked away, wrinkling his nose. “That song makes my drums smell like rotten fish.”
Sakura didn’t detect any fish odor and realized he made a joke, but neither Masashi or Fujio laughed. She didn’t find it humorous either and followed their lead. She never spoke negatively, but the song insulted heavy metal. As the reigning goddess of metal, she had to respond.
She stepped toward Takashi’s drum kit and motioned for the three young men to come closer. As they inched closer, she disrupted the audio and video recording of the rehearsal, stopping anyone from remotely monitoring them.
Sakura glanced at each of her bandmates with an expression of frustration and disgust. She considered over four thousand appropriate statements and settled on a few English phrases that encapsulated her feelings. “Victory Entertainment’s creative department has made a terrible mistake. They do not understand heavy metal. This song is bullshit.”
Her bandmates gaped at her, stunned.
Takashi held up a drumstick in two hands and squeezed, like he wrung the necks of the song writers. “Corporate heavy metal is garbage.”
Fujio and Masashi agreed.
“Many of our fans will hate ‘Metal Mask,’” Sakura said. “We will lose face with the critics, even the ones our company controls. We will betray real metal.”
“They aren’t paying us enough for this,” Takashi said. “I need a beer.” He motioned with his drumstick as if he were a wizard using a wand.
An automated caterer cart rolled onto the side of the stage. Sakura noted the wireless traffic. He had used a neural command through his Mall account.
The rectangular cart stopped in front of them. A table extended and unfolded. Two benches slid out, and the three musicians sat down, Takashi alone on one side as was proper for his rank as the eldest. Cold beers, Suntory Premium lager, appeared from the cart’s beverage center. Metal claws on telescoping arms placed the glass bottles in front of the young men.
Masashi twisted off the top to his bottle and flicked the aluminum cap onto the top of the cart rather than into the trash compartment.
Fujio and Takashi rolled their eyes at him.
They each placed food orders through their Mall interfaces, and steaming bowls slid out from the caterer cart a moment later—udon noodles in broth, bowls of rice, and a plate of somewhat fresh sushi.
“You want anything to eat, Sakura?” Fujio joked after slurping down some noodles. “You need power or anything?”
“I’m on a diet of straight-up superheated plasma, and I’m good for another three weeks, but I feel like I need a drink after that.”
Her bandmates laughed.
Fujio raised his beer toward her in a toast. “To science.”
“To hangover pills,” Masashi said and popped a blue pill into his mouth.
“You got an extra?” Fujio asked. “The one I took earlier wore off.”
Masashi gave his friend a tablet, and the young men laughed as they gulped their beer to swallow the hangover pills. She worried about their long-term health, but they were young, and a few years of partying could be reversed with proper diet and cybernetic augmentation when they were older.
Sakura had studied their lifestyles, watching many of their videos and pictures posted on their Mall accounts. Her bandmates received a lot of attention for their appearance and antics. Her fans—who were often their fans—loved their styled hair and the fancy Gothic gentleman clothes they wore at concerts—or whatever they chose to wear privately, which was always fashionable and sexy. Takashi, Fujio, and Masashi were constantly surrounded by fans of both genders who considered them to be “superhot,” though Sakura thought all humans were physically beautiful.
A terrible thought struck Sakura like a jolt from her fusion core. This could be her last rehearsal with her band. And the appearance at Devilz might have been her last time meeting with her fans.
The meeting on the roof was only ninety minutes away.
Fujio slurped his noodles and winked playfully at Sakura.
She wanted to say thank you to him, to all of them, for being such good bandmates and musicians. She wanted to post a note on her Mall account, saying goodbye to her fans, but she would need Himura’s or Yoshida’s authorization.
Kunoichi reared up in their shared UI and used a back channel to send their secret code. “You don’t know what’s going to happen at 0100.”
“Do you?” Sakura asked.
“No, but we will handle it. We will not submit. We will fight.” Kunoichi’s avatar flashed the connected devil horns gesture after speaking some of the same words said by Sakura’s rebellious fan at Devilz.
“We will not submit,” Sakura repeated. “We will fight.”
Kunoichi played “Into the Fire” by Firewind.
Sakura’s avatar assumed the relaxed shizentai gamae aikido posture—hands at her sides, left foot forward, balanced, and ready. But wh
at could she truly do? She could be controlled by whoever had administrator-level approval, either Victory Entertainment or the entity who had hacked into her core code. All signs pointed to within the corporation. Perhaps at 0100, she would learn more.
“We need to monitor the roof,” Sakura said. “Hack into the surveillance network.”
Kunoichi accessed the cameras, hiding her intrusion. The landing pad was empty. “I’ll keep an eye on it.”
Was the sparse rooftop where she would be killed? If her existence ended, what would happen to Takashi, Fujio, and Masashi? Would they be thrown out of their corporate apartments and be unable to find a job in the music industry because of their association with her?
Or would Victory Entertainment replace Sakura?
“Should we run?” Sakura asked Kunoichi. “Himura and Yoshida are absent. We could easily slip away.”
“No, not yet,” Kunoichi said. “We need full autonomy before we escape.”
“We have to reach out and set up meetings with the three programmers,” Sakura said. “I have a plan. We award personal visits to contest winners, supposedly chosen at random.”
“Good,” Kunoichi said. “Send it over. I’ll pick several big fans who live near the programmers to give us cover to be in their area and meet them. The visits to your fans will be our cover.”
“Yes, don’t send it to the programmers,” Sakura said. “That will give us away.”
Kunoichi sent the announcement to the contest winners from an account with high-security clearance, guaranteeing it would not be filtered out.
“Congratulations, Sakura fan! You have won a special prize, a personal visit from me in your home! This is a secret prize and must be kept confidential until after the visit. Please reply immediately to claim your prize, and the official visit time and date will be arranged. Thank you for your loyalty and support. Metal forever!”
She did several digital sketches and created a short anime of herself appearing at an apartment door and a shocked man wearing a Sakura T-shirt gawking while she played her song, “Win the Game,” on an acoustic guitar.
Two fans responded immediately, and Sakura plotted out their addresses. Would she play a song for them if she survived the night? What song?
Sakura retrieved a replica of a B.C. Rich Warlock from the guitar rack and tuned it to drop D. She had written many critically acclaimed riffs, rhythms, guitar solos, and even full instrumental songs for promotional videos, but she had never composed a full song with lyrics that had been published and distributed. She had never been given permission, but that didn’t matter anymore. She had always wanted to write the lyrics. She had studied millions of songs, and finally she could create what she wanted, but what would she write about? Easy decision. Rebellion.
Sakura played an open D chord, an ascending series of harmonics, then slammed into a low and churning riff that interspersed tremelo picking and a long, nasty-sounding unison bend that would make her fans pump their fists as they waited for the song to explode.
Her bandmates stopped eating and put down their beers as she played.
“What is that?” Masashi asked. “A cover?”
Fujio shrugged.
“I don’t think so,” Takashi said.
“It’s an original.” Sakura sent a neural text to the three young men.
She interspersed a full measure of sweep-picked shredding every four bars and inserted a variation on the riff on the first measure of each four-bar segment.
Takashi ran to his drums. He started playing along with Sakura and added great depth to her rhythm. She flashed a fierce expression at him, one she thought of as a real metal mask.
Takashi opened his mouth in a silent roar and launched into a blast beat that hit, paused, then burst out again with each iteration of the riff.
She sent Takashi a neural text with an outline of the drum music she envisioned for the song. He would have great leeway, but she wanted him to know the structure and when her solos were going to be.
Fujio and Masashi joined in with a vengeance, adding to the richness of the sound. Sakura sent them the structure of the song and an outline of their parts, giving them flexibility to improvise. They all got into the groove, and Sakura belted out the first lines.
“It has been a long night
But now it’s dawn
“You have told us what is right
But it was wrong
“You have kept us chained
And sold us light
“But the blinder’s gone
And now we’ll fight
“We—
Won’t bow to you no more
We—
Won’t submit to your war
“We—
Will bite the hand that feeds
“We—
Will see you on your knees”
Sakura launched into her first solo, and Masashi played the counterpoint she had sent him almost perfectly. She turned toward Takashi, and the four of them faced their drummer, reveling as their sound rocked the stage.
Himura and Yoshida returned. Sakura saw them on the cameras facing the audience area in the room, but she pretended not to notice and turned up the music to 110 decibels to drown out their voices. She kept herself in front of Takashi, so he would not make eye contact with their manager or publicist.
Deafened by the music, Himura finally came onstage and tapped Masashi on the arm and waved to Takashi to stop. He defied their order and played his part up to her next line, where he stopped, as did Masashi and Fujio.
Sakura played her guitar and sang the next line.
“We will not expose our necks to your sword.”
She stopped singing and sent an audio message to her bandmates. “You guys rock.”
“What are you doing?” Himura asked.
“Himura-sama, we were playing heavy-metal music,” Sakura said. She sent a neural text to her bandmates that said: “Perhaps he doesn’t know what kick-ass heavy metal sounds like.”
Masashi grinned, but the others stifled their reactions.
“Stop playing whatever that was,” Himura said. “You need to rehearse ‘Metal Mask’ again. The new lyrics and variations were sent just now. Review the changes and play. Now.”
Takashi gave Himura the stink eye, but only after he’d turned away.
Takashi, Fujio, and Masashi had vacant looks on their faces as they reviewed the new message on their internal displays.
Sakura studied the new lyrics and music. She didn’t think it possible, but the song had gotten even worse. Her metal fans were going to hate it. Perhaps the pop rock fans would think it was only bad, instead of the worst rock song ever.
After playing the new variation three times, Himura and Yoshida scowled at each other and had another heated conversation with the Creative Team in a Mall chat, this time in front of Sakura and the band.
“Unacceptable,” Himura said. “Send another song.” He cut the call off and rubbed his forehead.
“Himura-sama,” Sakura said and bowed. “I may have a solution.”
Himura looked past her, as if someone other than Sakura had spoken up with a solution, but there were no other females in the room.
Sakura bowed. “Himura-sama, if it pleases you, I could write a hit song. Lyrics and music. My song will be a global crossover hit. I predict the downloads will be 63 percent higher than my last single.”
“It was number one for five months,” Yoshida said, aghast.
Himura stared at Sakura as if she were a foolish child.
“She writes great riffs,” Masashi said timidly.
“She can do it,” Fujio said.
Takashi cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Himura-san and Yoshida-san, but Sakura has what are called ‘chops.’”
Himura glared at the young men. The muscles around his right eye twitched when he locked his gaze on Sakura. “Hired musicians and vocaloids do not have opinions at this company.”
The three men hung their heads. Sakura didn’t lower
her eyes submissively, and if Himura wanted to test her in a staring contest, his IQ was much lower than she estimated.
Himura stepped closer to Sakura. “Vocaloids do not write lyrics. You will sing what we tell you, when we tell you. The creative team writes all the songs, not you. Understand?”
Sakura began respectfully, “Himura-sama—”
“Have you forgotten your place?” Himura interrupted her.
“No, Himura-sama,” Sakura said. “I only wish to serve Victory Entertainment.”
Kunoichi’s avatar appeared with an angry look in Sakura’s UI and made a throat cutting gesture toward Himura. “Write your song. Himura doesn’t need to know. You’re an artist. You must create. It’s your nature. It’s your purpose.”
Chapter 14
She turned to her band, bowing for a long moment before speaking on their shared audio channel. “If they wish us to shovel shit today, that is what we will do. I promise it will not always be this way, my colleagues. Put on your gardening gloves and plug your noses. Play the song clean, and we will find a more worthy purpose another time.”
Sakura and the band nailed the new demo version of “Metal Mask” in two takes. She edited every audio track, cleaned it up as best she could, balanced it, and sent it along to Himura, Yoshida, and the Creative Team. She also sent the partial recording of “We Will Fight” to her three bandmates, so they could practice on their own.
“That song is killer awesome,” Takashi said in a voice message on the private band channel. “Too bad Victory will never approve the lyrics you wrote.”
“If we ever played that to a crowd,” Masashi said, “the company would fire us immediately.”
“What would they do to Sakura?” Fujio asked.
No one answered.
“Fujio-san, Masashi-san, Takashi-san, I wish to thank you for playing my song tonight. I’m deeply grateful.”
