A Song for a New Day

by Sarah Pinsker

  After passing Door Entry 101, she found herself in a room so dim she had no sense of the space’s size. It felt limitless. She’d seen the building from the outside, but the outer dimensions didn’t correspond to anything inside. This was SHL’s world.

  SHL’s world. Her eyes adjusted. The club was as large as any room she’d ever been in, but blander, like it hadn’t yet been mapped over with any personality or style. No, on closer look, it was more than the black box it had at first appeared to be. There were layers, textures. Black paint on black walls, black tape on black paint on black walls, strata of stickers upon stickers upon stickers on black walls, some with embedded links. The illusion of metal struts and lighting scaffolds, far above their heads, and of grime on the scuffed cement floor.

  Staring at the Bloom Bar logo on the wall revealed a text scroll explaining how this was an amalgamation of several venues from Before, not a re-creation of any one in particular. There were also options for a list of bands that had played here in the past, and the full upcoming music calendar. She blinked it all away.

  The first person who crossed her sight line looked like a lion, and for a panicked moment Rosemary wondered if cat avatars had come back into style while she wasn’t paying attention. They had been all the rage among those who could afford them when she was in high school, but after schools and Superwally workplace policies banned them, the fad petered out. On second glance, this was a man’s avatar with a big teased halo of blond hair. She scanned the room to see if that hairstyle was a popular one, but there weren’t any others like him.

  All the seats at the bar down the long side of the room were taken. She studied the people on the stools, trying to pick up what to say. She’d only been in a bar one time before, for her twenty-first birthday, when her school friends had made her meet them for drinks. Real cocktails, which droned to her doorstep in mason jars nestled in protective packaging. The bar itself had been flat and boring, a generic Irish bar with outdated graphics and a glitchy interface made worse by her Basic Hoodie. She’d never cared to repeat the experience; she preferred chatting with friends in a game or somewhere else where they had something to do while they talked. Her friend Donna had said the bar had history, like history was a selling point. The highlight had been the jar of vodka-spiked basil lemonade.

  She watched people at the bar order wine by the glass, bottled beer, cocktails in tumblers. Somebody walked away, and she pushed in to grab his stool. Rested her elbows on the bar, careful not to let her hands touch it. It was virtual, but it still looked sticky. The bar itself held a shimmering menu that appeared when she was right on top of it, advertising a variety of drinks and legal drugs, with two prices beside each, real and virtual. When the bartender finally noticed her, she ordered a birch beer.

  “Real or virtual?”

  She was on the clock, and it took an hour for drones to get to her house, anyway. “Vee.”

  “VCash or Superwally credit?”

  “Superwally!” She hadn’t even thought that was an option. Excellent. The drink could be debited straight from her store credit account. The bartender pulled out a handheld and she passed her account number. He grunted and turned his back to make her drink. He’d have to hold the glass, and scoop the ice, but the birch beer came out of a bottle. She wasn’t really drinking it, she reminded herself. Any germs were virtual ones, too.

  “If you use Superwally there’s no way to tip him. He only takes VCash tips,” whispered the person to Rosemary’s right. She turned. A black woman with a cloud of natural hair raised a phone in her direction and wagged it. “If you’re planning on having a second drink or coming back here again, throw a dollar or two in cash on the counter. He keeps track of who stiffs him.”

  She hadn’t even considered anybody would need to be tipped.

  “Thank you,” Rosemary whispered back, reaching for her wallet. When she looked over at the woman again, she was amazed to see that the avatar’s face was covered with pox scars. Even at Superwally, where avs were supposed to be photorealistic, she’d never seen one with scars. She hadn’t even considered that it was possible, though if you could have a cat head, of course you could have scars if you wanted. Her hand went to her stomach, where her own scars were worst.

  She hadn’t meant to stare, but now the woman was watching her, and she felt obligated to make more conversation. “Are you a big fan of the band?”

  “I don’t care who plays. This place reminds me of a club I used to hang out in. How about you?”

  Rosemary shrugged. “I like their music, but this is my first time seeing them. My first time seeing any band, actually.”

  The av brightened with enthusiasm. “In that case, you should go get closer.”

  “Closer?”

  “Trust me.” She pointed toward the room’s center. A loose circle of people had formed around the stage area. “If this were my first show, I’d be over there.”

  The bartender handed Rosemary her drink in a red plastic cup. She made sure he saw his tip, then went in search of a good place to stand. The projectors—projections of projectors, really—moved in a circle above a clear area ringed with angled speakers. She guessed that meant the band holo appeared in the center. She situated herself behind the largest group, under the assumption they knew what they were doing.

  This was the most people Rosemary had seen in one place since she was a kid, even in hoodspace. More than any of her classes, or any party she’d ever been to, though in truth she preferred smaller gatherings. She wondered if it was an unlimited space, or if there were multiple iterations of this same bar, or if it was coded to allow overlay. She could look, but she didn’t want to know. The thought of someone else standing in the same spot as her, even virtually, made her shudder.

  The room buzzed with voices, a baseline noise. Snippets of conversation drifted her way. Discussions of bands they’d seen, bands they wanted to see, bands they wished they had seen. The weather where they were. She concentrated on their clothes, on what people put on their avatars in this place. She’d used her work avatar, with her work avatar’s uniform, a polo shirt and slacks. She hadn’t been sure if she was allowed to change into more casual clothes, given that she was here on assignment. Her real body wore her uniform as well, of course. A majority of the crowd wore T-shirts for Patent Medicine, or else for other SHL bands. One man had dressed all in feathers, another person in tight leather pants and a skin that she was fairly sure she recognized as a celebrity from her parents’ generation. She filed the information away for the future, if she ever got to do this again. Even if they didn’t ask her for the fancy Hoodie back, she couldn’t afford a subscription, so it was a moot point.

  The dim overhead lights got even dimmer. The crowd cheered. Who were they cheering? It wasn’t like the band could hear them. Rosemary hesitated, then joined in. It felt good to add her voice to a group. She’d never done that before. It left a pleasant vibration inside her; she’d done it in real-space as well. She imagined what it must have been like in the old days, when entire stadiums cheered together.

  The rig overhead whirred to life. Rosemary glanced up, and was rewarded with a blinding flash. She looked back to where ghost gear now rested in what had been the empty space. A drum kit at the center, a couple of large amplifiers, three microphone stands. A rack full of ghost guitars. Somebody near the stage reached a hand out and chopped through a guitar neck. He disappeared a second later; there were penalties for disturbing the illusion.

  The lights flickered, and a moment later musicians stood holding the instruments. The effect was eerie. The original empty stage must have been a recording, because there wasn’t even a second’s pause before they hit a chord. Out of nothing, music: three voices and two guitars. They held the note for ten seconds, then drums rolled over it.

  Rosemary had been to a wave pool once when she was five, at a run-down amusement park, in the Before. She had waded out into
the water holding her father’s hand. The pool was crowded and flat, full of people lounging in tubes in the lull between wave sets. She spotted something on the bottom, a nickel or a quarter, shining just beyond her reach, and released her father’s hand to grab it. That was when the first wave hit, knocking her back toward the shallows. She surfaced lost and sputtering and terrified, but strangely exhilarated.

  The music hit Rosemary like a wave, knocking her breath from her. Louder than anything she had ever heard, filling every corner of her. One chord, and she was full. Don’t stop, Rosemary thought. Don’t ever stop.

  The song shifted, and she recognized it now. It was one of the songs she had checked out this evening before the show, but altered. The intro in the recorded version had been tamed, tempered. She had thought it was okay, nothing special. She hadn’t realized music could reach inside you.

  She pushed closer. Camera flashes went off throughout the room. The bag checker outside had said pictures were possible for the first two minutes, but she couldn’t tear her attention away from the band long enough even to blink a screenshot. What would it have captured anyway? Ghostly faces, a tinny recording. Nothing like the magnet in her gut drawing her toward the stage.

  The holo quality changed, the second-minute change the girl had mentioned, a momentary shimmer. Rosemary pressed her avatar up against the people in front of her, the closest she had been to strangers in her adult life. The Hoodie gave a warning jolt, but the other people didn’t notice, or if they noticed, they didn’t care. A gap opened between two men in front and she pushed through, hoping there wasn’t etiquette against it. The space expanded before her, a highlighted path leading her to a better spot.

  She found herself in the front row and right of center, gazing up at the bassist, a tall, lean, shaven-headed woman with skin so brown the hologram pushed it into purple. She wore jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt, showing off amazing biceps, and she was barefoot. She had a bruise under her left big toenail, which made her more real. Rosemary fought the urge to touch her; God, she fell in love easily, not that it ever led anywhere.

  Rosemary had always liked music, even if she didn’t know much about it. She’d listen if somebody told her to listen to something, bought songs and posters of artists she enjoyed, but she had never gone out seeking anything. She didn’t know what was cool and what wasn’t. She’d played this song, “The Crash,” after the Hoodie arrived this evening, and had thought it was decent. Nothing like how it sounded now. Nothing had ever satisfied her the way writing code did, but now she was the code, and she was being overwritten.

  “The Crash” ended. Rosemary felt its absence as a physical loss. She placed her drink by her feet to clap, and a second later it disappeared. The lead singer stepped back to the mic. He shielded his eyes and peered out as if he saw them. The people in front of him hollered for attention he couldn’t give them.

  “Good to see you all. Good to be here at the Bloom Bar.” His lips shimmered as he said the words “Bloom Bar,” as if they had been inserted separately. A lock of hair fell in his eyes and he brushed it aside. “We’re going to go ahead and play some songs for you, yeah?”

  The bassist opened her eyes for the first time. Something caught her attention, something in whatever place she was actually in. She glanced down, shook her head, then looked straight at Rosemary and winked. It was the sexiest wink Rosemary had ever seen. She knew it hadn’t been meant for her, but it might as well have been. She took a step forward before reminding herself she was an avatar looking at an avatar of someone standing in a warehouse somewhere—where?—a hundred or a thousand or three thousand miles away. Someone who had just winked at someone else.

  Rosemary refocused on the singer. Something shimmered above his head, and when she examined the link she found a menu of optional enhancements and accessibility options. Subtitles, translation subtitles, vibration boost, visual description tags. Nothing she needed, but cool to know it was there.

  The next song began with a bass pulse. The bassist closed her eyes again, and Rosemary stepped back, trying to regain her composure. She examined the stage. From here she could read the song titles on the set list at the bassist’s feet, though she didn’t recognize any of them after “The Crash.” Ghost sweat rolled off the drummer’s face, and he wiped it with a ghost forearm.

  What would it be like to have a subscription and relive these shows anytime she wanted? To capture this band and have them to herself? Go to more shows? Not for the first time, she wished she could do this every night. If SportHolo and TVHolo were this real, too, that explained why her friends always looked at her with such pity when she said her family didn’t go in for any of it. She’d been missing out on so much.

  “Encores are awkward in this situation,” the lead singer said after the twelfth song. “So we’re all going to pretend that was our last song, and we left the stage, and you stomped and cheered until we came out to play one more. We’ll play one more and then we’re going to go for real. Thanks for listening.”

  Don’t go, Rosemary wanted to say. Keep playing. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know the songs. The music had stirred something inside her.

  The real last song ended with a long cymbal splash and four cha-chunks of the guitars, which also wasn’t the ending on any music she’d ever heard before. It had to be rehearsed, but it felt a little wild at the same time, a loose possibility that things might not work out as planned. The band members grinned at each other on the third cha-chunk, and the bassist raised one lovely eyebrow as she watched the drummer. The last note hung in the air, the singer gave a final salute, and then the band blinked from existence. They were there and then gone, like magic, leaving a three-dimensional StageHoloLive logo floating in the place where they had stood.

  It was followed by a voice saying, “Patent Medicine merchandise is for sale here, as well as at Superwally and StageHoloLive. Purchase now to wear instantly inside, or have the real thing droned to you by the time you get home.”

  A recording filled the room, flat in comparison with what had been there a moment before. The lights came on. The room was much smaller than it had seemed in the dark, or maybe that was an illusion, too. The ceiling lower, the walls closer, the floor scuffed and littered with plastic cups, which winked away a moment later.

  Most of the audience had already headed for the exit or blinked out from where they stood, but a few people still lingered by the bar, or stood blank and absent, probably buying Patent Medicine merchandise. A couple of T-shirts changed before her eyes. Rosemary understood the appeal. If there were a way to capture that first moment, when the band had played the chord that had crashed into her, she’d buy it. A T-shirt wouldn’t do that. Maybe, maybe a live recording. If not, she’d have to find a way to see them again.

  She could have pulled off the Hoodie and disappeared from the room, but she wanted the full experience. Her ears rang as she walked out. There was a muffled quality to everything, like she had cotton wrapped around her. She stayed in the silent hood even after she had turned off the visual; she didn’t want to lose the feeling she had walked out with.

  In her dream world, a job offer from StageHoloLive would be waiting when Rosemary checked her messages again, along with a drone delivery of a concert souvenir—a T-shirt, maybe, or a poster to add to her bedroom collection—and a free SHL subscription. Or any of the above. She wasn’t greedy.

  It wasn’t until a message chimed in her work Hoodie that she remembered she’d ostensibly been there on business.

  “Thank you for your help,” the message read.

  She hadn’t done anything, though she would have. She had to word this carefully, so her own bosses didn’t think she had charged fraudulent overtime, or used their time to pursue something else. In the end she decided on, “I was happy to do it. It was useful for my professional development to experience how the StageHoloLive system works firsthand. Please let me know if I can be of
any assistance in the future.”

  She took off her work rig and replaced it with her fraying Basic. Lay back on her bed, turned on audio of “The Crash” again, closed her eyes. It wasn’t as good as the live version.

  5

  LUCE

  The Last Power Chord

  A baseball stadium, or what was left. Smoking wreckage gaped where the stands behind home plate had been.

  “Were there people there?” I asked, as if they knew more. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Six p.m. “It couldn’t have been full yet.”

  “West coast,” Silva said. “Seventh inning, first matinee of the season. The stands were packed.”

  “Oh, God,” April repeated.

  A number scrolled past, an estimated casualty count, but my brain made no sense of it.

  “Do they know what happened?” Hewitt asked.

  “Bomb.” I pointed at the screen.

  “That’s not all,” said Silva. “There’ve been bomb threats tonight at three other baseball stadiums, two airports, an arena concert, a convention, and a whole bunch of malls. All over the country. The president made a statement a few minutes ago, asking people to stay home tonight if possible and cancel public gatherings.”

  “Isn’t this when they usually tell people to go about their business, and not to let terrorists terrorize?” My voice pitched itself an octave higher than usual. The picture on the screen moved closer. Rubble, smoke, a tiny shoe. I looked away.

  “That’s what they say when they think the threat is gone.” JD shook his head. “They say that after.”

  I couldn’t wrap my head around it. “But this place wasn’t threatened? We’re still playing?”

  Silva shrugged. “Nobody from the office has said anything yet.”