It had been their best show yet. They were now tighter than they had ever been, and they were rightly making a name for themselves on the local scene. And for that exact reason, Zeb felt like shit. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could go on like this. The other guys in his band didn’t seem to know or care (despite their supposed musical philosophy), but it was just a matter of time until someone learned his secret.
After they got the van loaded, someone suggested they hit the bar to celebrate. Zeb cringed at the idea of an entire night of pretending not to hate himself, so he faked a headache and started walking home. It was okay; every band needed at least one mysterious member, and he was more than willing to fill that role, for the time being.
The bright neon lights and gigantic advertising holograms of Deep Ellum, usually so jarring as to be considered abusive, tonight had no success breaking through Zeb’s chitinous shell of melancholia. He headed towards his high-rise apartment building oblivious to every distraction the city threw at him.
Which was why he didn’t notice the high-end transpo pod pull up beside him and slow to match his pace.
“Hey!” a voice said, from the world outside Zeb’s zen-like pity-bubble. “Hey man! Come here, I wanna talk to you.”
Zeb jumped at the sound. “Oh, shit!” he said. “What do you want? I’m just tryin’ to get home.”
The person in the transpo pod laughed. “Don’t you recognize my voice?”
“Um, no, sorry,” Zeb said, not entirely sure of himself. Now that he thought about it, there was something familiar about this guy. He finally turned to look the stranger in the face, and his knees almost went weak at his recognition. “Woah, fuck! You’re the lead singer for Elephants Gerald!”
“There he is! How’s it goin’ dude? You probably know me as Captain Skullfucker, but you can call me Max.”
Zeb was faced with a quandary. Right now, in this moment, he wanted nothing more than to go home and zone out to the feeds, maybe watch a couple porno-streams, and go to bed. But he knew that at some point in the very near future, he wouldn’t feel like such a downer, and when that time came, he would be pissed at himself for turning down a chance to talk to Captain Skullfucker himself. So, he sucked it up and walked over to the transpo pod. “Um, hello.”
Captain Skullfucker--Max--opened the pod’s doors. “Get in.”
“Uhh…” Zeb said. Sure, this guy was famous, but Zeb still knew not to just get into any pod off the street.
Max sighed. “Come on, man. I just wanna talk music. I caught your show. You’re a pretty good drummer.”
“Oh, thanks, man. Um, okay, yeah.” Zeb got into the pod.
The second the door closed behind him, the transpo pod took off--not along the street, as it had been, but straight up into the air. Zeb freaked out a little and Max laughed. “Yeah, brother. I got that fancy shit. Even got FAA clearance to zip this puppy across the country, no questions asked. You wanna chill at my place in LA? It’ll only take about half an hour to get there, you won’t even feel it.”
“Uh, sure,” Zeb said, now fully a prisoner to the moment.
“Cool. Let’s ride.” Max pushed some coordinates into a console embedded in the wall of the pod, and they shot off westward. This wasn’t necessarily a surprise to Zeb. He knew Elephants Gerald wasn’t from Dallas, and he had heard about the wild ways rich people traversed the skies, but, as he looked down at the already opening landscape of rural Texas beneath them, he was struck with awe. This was a form of freedom he had never even imagined.
Max pulled a beer from a hidden compartment and handed it to Zeb. “Pretty nice, huh?”
“Yeah, man. This is crazy,” Zeb said.
“Yeah, you never really get used to it. Anyway, you’ve got a pulse metronome, right?”
Zeb, caught off guard, fumbled over his words for a few seconds before simply giving up.
“It’s cool, man. Everybody out in LA has some sort of musical enhancement software in their chip. How else are you supposed to keep up? Oh, shit, I’m sorry, man. I didn’t even ask your name.”
“It’s Zeb.”
“Excuse me, but what the fuck kind of name is that?”
“It’s short for Zebulon.”
“That’s not a great answer.”
Zeb chuckled. Here, at least, was something he felt comfortable discussing. “I know it sounds like this wacky sci-fi name, but it was actually the name of like my nine or ten times great grandfather. He, uh, fought in the first Civil War, for the Confederates.”
“And you’re named after him?” Max said.
“Yeah. My dad didn’t know anything about Zebulon himself, just that he had this fucking wild name. I looked the dude up, only a few years ago, and found that he was a piece of shit. But, what are you gonna do? It’s my name.”
“You could change it. People do it all the time.”
“Yeah, I guess I could. But, um, how did you know I had a metronome program on my chip?”
“It’s pretty common, in my circles. You get good at spotting them, if you know what to look for. What, do you not want anybody to know about it?”
“Not really. You see, my band’s whole thing is that we play old-school rock and roll. That means no enhancements at all. Just, like, our natural funkiness.”
“So what, do your bandmates think you just have a full-body twitch that lines up directly with the tempo of every song?”
Hearing it put this way, Zeb realized just how obvious it was to anybody who bothered to pay attention. “Yeah, I guess. We’ve never really talked about it.”
“It’s dangerous, you know,” Max said. “You really shouldn’t use it.”
“Yeah, I know,” Zeb said. It was true. The pulse metronome worked by over-charging the chip in his brain, sending a slightly more powerful than usual jolt of electricity through his nervous system at whatever bpm he set. This was a miniature version of the often lethal chip bug known as “power-stroking,” where the chip fried the user from the inside. Zeb was tempting fate every time he used his metronome. “I’ve been trying to stop using it, but honestly, I don’t have great tempo without it.”
“Why don’t you just use an auditory met? Play along to the beeps?”
Zeb shook his head. “Can’t do it. Fucks me up. If you’re playing in time, it means you can’t hear the beep. My problem is I’m always listening for the click. If I can’t hear it, it throws me off.”
“I get it. Like a catch-22, or whatever. Sucks, man.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to replace it for you.”
Zeb almost spit his mouthful of beer all over Max’s face. “You what?”
Max laughed. “I’m workin’ on a new project. I think you would be a good fit on drums.”
Zeb couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Elephants Gerald was one of the biggest bands in the world, and here was the lead singer, the one and only Captain Skullfucker, offering him a job. “But what about your drummer…um…Janet Necro….”
“Jane Necrophage? Naw, this isn’t for E.G. Just my own little self-indulgent passion project. Necro wouldn’t be a good fit for this one. Besides, we’ve kinda had a falling out, recently.”
“Oh. Creative differences?” Zeb asked.
“Yeah, something like that. Anyway, you in?”
Zeb’s mouth responded before his brain could even begin to consider the question. “Fuck yeah.”
In no time at all, Zeb was sitting in Captain Skullfucker’s living room, staring at an abstract motion-mural on the enormous projection screen, accepting the bong being passed to him. It was hard to believe that less than an hour earlier, he had been wallowing in self-pity over a thousand miles away. So much had happened in such a short amount of time that that already felt like a long-forgotten dream. Max seemed to be the exact opposite of his onstage persona: laid back, funny, thoroughly un-conceited. He had big plans for this solo album, and Zeb’s drumming was what was going to push it over the top.
“First, though, we gotta replace that juice-clicker of a metronome in your brain. Can’t have my drummer stroking out in the middle of the studio. I’m gonna hook you up with this doctor friend of mine, guy named Doc Hodges. He does all sorts of stuff, from legit medical procedures to purely cosmetic body customization. His office got exclusive rights for this new music program for head chips, supposed to be crazy advanced. I have no idea what it actually does, but he can explain it to you.”
“Cool,” Zeb said. “And thanks, Max. This is huge for me.”
“Don’t worry about it, man. I was backstage while you guys were playing. You got chops.”
“Thank you. Why were you in Dallas?”
Max took a huge bong rip before answering. “Someone sent me a video of you guys playing at, like, a bar mitzvah, or something?”
Zeb laughed. “It was a quinceanera. Our bass player’s girlfriend’s sister. That was the first show that we really came together. Actually, it was the first show where I used the pulse metronome.”
“Yeah, well, my friend who sent it to me knew I was looking to put a new group together, and they thought you were right for it. I came to Dallas to watch you play.”
Chills ran up Zeb’s spine. “Woah. That’s heavy.”
Max laughed and handed the bong back to Zeb. “Tell me about it. That’s pretty much how I got my big break, too. Now that bands can put their shit on the web, and rich pricks like myself can speed to anywhere they want in just a matter of minutes, it really doesn’t matter what city you’re based out of. Anyway, man, I’m fucking tired. Gonna hit the hay. I’ve set up a bedroom for you, or I can book you a hotel room, if you want.”
“It’s cool, I can stay here,” Zeb said.
“Cool. I got you an appointment with Doc Hodges for tomorrow morning.”
Zeb got to the doctor’s office a little before his appointment, so he was told to wait in the reception area for a nurse to come get him. It was pretty early in the morning, so Zeb assumed he would be the only person there, but there was another guy, a few years younger than Zeb, sitting a couple chairs away. He was wearing a denim vest with no shirt under it and loose-fitting basketball shorts. His head of blond hair was arranged in what Zeb knew used to be called a “mullet.”
“New dick?” the guy said once Zeb sat down.
Zeb was too busy thinking about how he had spent the night in Captain Skullfucker’s guest bedroom to respond.
“New dick?” the guy said again.
“Um, what?”
“Are you here to get a new dick?”
Zeb shook his head. “Oh, uh, no. Just getting some software for my chip.”
“That’s a shame. Doc Hodges is something of a cock wizard. He’s given me two extras, and I can’t complain. My name’s Cheddar Bob.”
“What did you say?” Zeb asked.
“Cheddar Bob,” Cheddar Bob said. “What’s your name?”
“No, I meant--Zeb. My name’s Zeb.”
“Right on.”
“I’m sorry, did you say Doc Hodges has given you two extra dicks?”
“Yeah, man.”
“So, you have…three penises?”
“For sure. I got the little white one I was born with, a black one, because of course, and this real honker that used to belong to some Puerto Rican dude who blew his brains out. Got no idea how the doc got his hands on that one, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Did you beg for them?”
“Well, metaphorically, yeah.”
“Why?”
Cheddar Bob got up and moved to the chair next to Zeb. “Horniness.”
“Oh, so do you fuck a lot? I bet that’s wild with three cocks.”
Cheddar Bob shook his head. “Yeah, man, I imagine it would be, but I wouldn’t know. I’m celibate.”
“Oh,” Zeb said, confused. “Is that from before or after you got the extra penises?”
“Before. You see, I get horny. Like, really fucking horny. And I used to fuck all the time, just to try to handle it. I couldn’t focus enough to keep a job, or anything. I thought I had to fuck the pain away. If I could just fuck enough, eventually I would be rid of this curse. I would be happy. Only it wasn’t working. Not only was I not getting any less horny, I was ruining sex by turning it into some sort of…I don’t know…mechanical process, or whatever. I wasn’t happy. I had to do something.”
“So what did you do?” Zeb was surprisingly intrigued by Cheddar Bob’s story.
“I re-evaluated my shit, and I came to the conclusion that I was going about it all wrong. My horniness wasn’t like a tumor I could excise from my body, but an inescapable aspect of my being, a truth I could never outrun. Or outfuck. So I started getting into all this stoic philosophy, you know, Marcus Aurelius, that kinda shit. I learned that instead of fighting my deviant sexual urges, I should accept them. Let the horniness wash over me, experience it, but do my best not to give in to it, until I came out on the other side. It took a while, but I finally got pretty good at it.”
“Good for you,” Zeb said.
“Thanks. It was crazy. I went from a prisoner of my dick to a master of my dick. The power I now felt, having accepted and conquered my libido, was like nothing I had ever experienced. And that was just with the tiny little pecker I was born with. I figured if I felt this good having defeated one small dick, I would feel like God after I’ve beaten two others.”
“Did it work?”
“Not really, ‘cause I still only have the one set of balls.”
“Oh, right.”
“But it’s still pretty cool. I can do tricks with them, like I can kinda French-braid them together. Well, my white one is so small that it has to be hard for that to work, but I figured it out. Wanna see?”
Cheddar Bob rose from his seat and began pulling on his basketball shorts.
“No, not at all,” Zeb said, coaxing Cheddar Bob back down, “but I do have a few questions, if that’s cool.”
“Shoot.”
“So your white one, the small one, is that in the middle?”
Cheddar Bob nodded. “Yeah, that’s the most logical place for it.”
“And I assume they’re arranged horizontally?”
“Well, obviously. Can’t have three dicks going vertically up to your navel, like the back of a stegosaurus.”
“Obviously. I don’t know what I was thinking. Um, when you said that your tiny dick has to be hard for the French-braid trick to work…”
“Yeah?”
“Does that mean you can control which one gets hard, at any time?”
“Good question, Zeb. Yeah, I can. Not at first. When I first got my extras, it was a crap shoot which one got a boner. It was actually pretty rough at the beginning, because they would all get hard at the same time, and that would leave not enough blood in the rest of my body, so I would get all woozy and weak, and like both of my arms would fall asleep.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“But I saw that as just another mental exercise. I mean, if you think about it, boners are basically telekinesis.”
“Oh, yeah? How?”
“Well, I mean, think about it. You think some sexy shit, and your thoughts change the flow of blood in your body. I mean, blood can’t think, and it just kinda does whatever the heart tells it to, so to be able to determine which parts of your body get more blood is like using your mind to move inanimate objects. It’s not as cool as Magneto chucking a bus at somebody, but it’s pretty much the same thing.”
“I’d never thought of it that way,” Zeb said.
“Oh, yeah. Once I realized this, it wasn’t that hard to learn how to re-direct the blood to whichever dick I wanted. I’m trying to get faster at it. I think that would be a cool trick, to kinda inflate and deflate all three of my dicks in a row really quick, like people doing the wave in a soccer stadium. But that’s tough. The blood itself would have to be pumping quicker, so maybe I’d have to, like, be in fear for my life, or something, for that one to work. I also wanna teach myself how to give different parts of my body boners.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Well, we already know that thinking sexy thoughts drives blood to the dick. And I’ve learned how to choose which dick to drive it to. So I’m thinking there’s gotta be other types of thoughts that can send blood to different extremities. I just need to figure those thoughts out. Like, if I think about, like, giraffes, or something, I could get a boner in my hands, and then I could knock someone out with a single punch.”
Zeb wanted to argue against this line of logic, but he found that he couldn’t. He was about to ask another question when the door leading to the doctor’s lab opened. “Mr. Nite?” the nurse said. “Doc Hodges is ready for you.”
Zeb stood up. “Okay, thanks.”
The nurse noticed Cheddar Bob, and her entire demeanor changed. “Cheddar Bob, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Nothing, I--”
“You know you’re not supposed to hang out here when you don’t have an appointment. Which you never will, if you don’t pay the doctor for that Puerto Rican schlong he got you. Get out.”
Cheddar Bob sighed and headed for the door. The nurse turned back to Zeb. “Sorry about him. He’s the doc’s cousin’s stepson. Good enough kid, but he has absolutely no filter. He didn’t talk to you about Marcus Aurelius, did he?”
“Uh, yeah, a little.”
“Shit. Well, go on back. Doc Hodges is waiting for you in room three.”
Doc Hodges was a forty-five-year-old black dude with corn rows. He was wearing jeans and an absolutely ancient Grateful Dead t-shirt under a white lab coat that extended down to his feet. He smiled at Zeb and told him to sit down in the reclining operating chair. The actual procedure would only take a few minutes, but first he needed Zeb to answer some questions.
“So, Mr. Nite. I talked to our friend Max, and he explained what you needed. A simple program install? No problem at all.”
“Oh, cool,” Zeb said, slightly relieved. “To be honest, I’m never that comfortable having work done on my chip.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I guess because it involves messing with your brain.”
“You ever do drugs?”
“What?”
Doc Hodges put his hands in the air defensively. “Not a judgement, man. I’ve done my fair share of shit myself. But my point is, if you’ve ever done any sort of psychedelic substance like LSD or DMT, or, hell, even a psychotropic medication like Xanax, you’ve already messed with your brain. Only you probably did it on a sofa in your friend’s brother’s basement, or whatever, with no supervision, and no way to know what you’re actually putting in your body.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Zeb asked.
“Not about the sketchy stuff you’ve done in the past, no,” Doc Hodges admitted. “But I have years of education, followed by decades of practical experience. You survived being young and free, so the next hour or so that you’ll be in this office will be a cakewalk. You’re in good hands, Zeb.”
“Thanks. That actually did help.”
“What I’m here for. Now, some basic prep stuff. What kinda chip do you have?”
“It’s, um, a Phantom Industries 4D.”
Doc Hodges whistled. “That’s top-of-the-line.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but how did you get a 4D? Those puppies cost thousands of dollars.”
“My uncle works at the Phantom Industries production facility in Dallas. He...found a box full of 4D chips, a couple years ago. He gave me mine as a Christmas present.”
“Ahh, I see,” Doc Hodges said. “So, stupid question, but I suppose that means that you haven’t registered the serial number?”
Zeb chuckled. “You are correct. But I probably wouldn’t have done that anyway, even if it was totally legit.”
“How come?”
“Well, I heard that once you register, Phantom Industries has access to all your data. Like, your location, what sites you visit on the web, even shit like when you go to the bathroom, and what brand of mac and cheese you eat.”
“Yeah, that’s all true.”
“Yeah, see, I’m not really cool with that. Also, the only extra program I have on there is my pulse metronome, and that’s a pirated third-party deal, so my warranty’s busted anyway. That’s not a problem, is it?”
Doc Hodges shook his head. “Not at all. I can’t remember the last time I worked on somebody whose warranty wasn’t voided. If you want, while I’m in there I can spoof the chip’s transmitter, so that it thinks it’s legit. I’ll register it under an encrypted serial number that changes randomly every few hours, and I’ll toss a virtual and physical VPN in there too, so Phantom can’t monitor any of your activities. As far as the suits will be concerned, you’ll have an active warranty. You’ll still get all the benefits of registering--free firmware updates, monthly free program giveaways--without any of the dystopian shit that goes along with it.”
“Woah, cool!” Zeb said. “Does that mean that I’ll get to upgrade to Papaya?” Zeb was referring to what he thought was the most recent Phantom Industries operating system. For some reason (probably to appear friendly), the evil mega-corporation named their software after fruit. Rumor was that within the next few years, they were slated to run out of naturally-occurring plants to use as namesakes, so they were hard at work creating their own line of genetically-modified fruit trees for the sole purpose of progressing brand synergy. If they had any plans to donate the resultant fruit to those in need, Zeb hadn’t heard about them.
Doc Hodges laughed. “Papaya? That shit’s almost two years old. You’re leaving today with Durian.”
“I haven’t even heard of that one,” Zeb said. “The operating system or the fruit.”
“Yeah, the OS is brand new. I mean, like it just came out last week. And the fruit I looked up when they announced it. It’s the smelliest fruit in the world. How ‘bout that? Supposedly smells like a rotting corpse or something. I guess they really are running short on names.”
“Yeah.”
“But, yeah. We’ll get you up to date. That itself would be worth the price of admission--merely an expression, since this is pro-bono. But with the OS glow-up, the warranty-spoofing, and the Salieri music program, you’re about to literally become a more powerful human being. And with the previously unheard-of optimization capabilities of the 4D chip, it’ll be even more potent. Not to brag, but when I’m done with you, you’ll have one of the most impressive setups in the country.”
“Really?” Zeb said.
“Really. Top two-hundred, easy. Well, not counting whatever next-level trans-humanist shit trillionaires have, but they don’t count.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah. And you’re gonna use it to play rock and roll music.”
“Yeah. What, do you think that’s a waste?”
“Fuck no, man! Look at my shirt. If you ask me, if everyone put more of their resources and abilities towards making art, instead of this bizarre capitalist horseshit we’ve polluted the world with, most of our problems would just disappear.”
Zeb smiled. “Yeah, I think so, too. Thanks, Doc. This is wild.”
“You’re welcome. Now, lemme tell you about the reason you’re actually here. The Salieri program.”
“Okay.”
“It originated as a language program, designed to bash through the mental blocks that keep you from learning new rules of syntax and stuff.”
“Huh?” Zeb said.
“You ever try to learn a different language?”
“Yeah, I took Mandarin in high school.”
“Were you any good at it?”
“No, not really.”
“Yeah, that’s not a surprise,” Doc Hodges said. “Even ignoring the fact that Mandarin is fucking hard to learn regardless, high school is way too late to start trying to learn a new language. Usually, if you start any time after about ten years old, you’re not gonna be totally fluent. Might get really good at it, but never like a native speaker.”
“Why?” Zeb asked.
“Neuro-plasticity. Your brain forms itself over time, and it becomes kinda…calcified, in a way. The older you get, the more rigid your neural pathways become, meaning that it becomes increasingly unlikely that you can do anything to change them. Learning a language is literally a re-programing of your neural pathways, so after a while, it becomes not doable.”
“Can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“Yeah, pretty much. It’s not an all-or-nothing deal, but your brain will always get in the way. The program I’m gonna install in you basically tricks the brain into thinking it’s more pliable than it is. I’m a doctor, but I’m not a neuroscientist, so I can’t say exactly how it works, other than to say that the weird barriers you hit when, like, figuring out how plurality or past tense work in a language you don’t speak, just kinda fuck off. It works. You’ll have the neuro-plasticity of a toddler, but the intelligence of an adult. It’s super limited, so you don’t suddenly forget how to tie your shoes or anything like that. It can tell which parts of the brain need to be relaxed, and which parts need to be left alone. It makes any problem you might might have seem like no problem at all. Is this making sense?”
Zeb nodded. “Yeah, I get it. It’s like when I can’t figure out a drum beat. But then, when I finally do, it seems so easy, it’s hard to understand why I was having trouble with it to begin with.”
“Exactly. This program facilitates that process. Since music is basically just a mathematical language, it works just as well when developing musical skill. This version, Salieri, also has added attributes, specifically for musicians.”
“Like what?”
“Well, it has a metronome, of course. First thing I’m gonna do is uninstall your pulse met. That shit’s far too dangerous. This one can be set to click or pulse, but it doesn’t power-stroke your chip. It sends a targeted buzz to the chip’s insertion spot, like when someone calls you up to talk, only shorter and set to your choice of beats per minute. Might take a little while to get used to, but at least you know it won’t accidentally cook your nervous system. It also has a chromatic tuner, internal EQ, so you can increase or decrease which frequencies you hear. Let’s see, it also has an instantly accessible encyclopedia of musical terms and theoretical concepts (which kinda kick in automatically, so you don’t actually have to learn them), wireless MIDI capabilities, so you can get tempo and even note information over the air from properly-equipped gear, and the ability to record in real time, and mix, master, and bounce the final product to whatever source you want. You’re basically about to be a walking, talking music production studio, with the added benefit that you’ll be able to gain fluency in any language you want in only a matter of days.”
“Jesus Christ,” Zeb said.
“Yeah, man, I told you. Top two-hundred. Easy.”
“That’s crazy. But it…um….”
“What?” Doc Hodges said.
“Well, it kinda feels like cheating. My band’s philosophy is that we don’t use any enhancements.”
“But you already have the pulse metronome.”
“Yeah, and they don’t know about it. But if I show up to practice with perfect pitch and tempo, they’re gonna know something’s up.”
“Can I say something that might sound harsh? Remember, man, I’m on your team.”
“Um, sure,” Zeb said.
“What you and your bandmates call a ‘philosophy,’ most other people call a ‘gimmick.’”
“Ooh, ouch.”
“Yeah, I warned you it was gonna be harsh. Look, Max sent you to me for a reason. I’m the go-to doc for practically the entire LA music scene, which, besides Korea, might as well be the entire global music industry. And one thing I’ve learned from all those cats is that the only thing that matters, when it comes to music, is how it sounds. Any other consideration besides the end product is just self-indulgence. And that’s fine, nobody says you can’t be self-indulgent, but very few people actually give a shit about how the music they love is made. I know I don’t. This program is just a tool. You can choose to use it or not. But I would recommend you do.”
“You think so?”
“Hell yeah. Everyone else already is. It’s not cheating. You still have to write the songs. That’s one thing that people are still better at than machines. Understanding a rhythm doesn’t mean shit. The artistry is in how you choose to use that rhythm. Going back to language, you and I are both fluent in English, but that doesn’t mean we could write The Grapes of Wrath.”
That was good enough for Zeb to quit his bitching. He leaned back further into the operating chair. “You make a lot of good points, Doc.”
“Thanks. Now, since this install is gonna involve a higher-than-usual amount of license tweaking, I think it’s best if we do it from the chip’s boot menu. That means I gotta put you under. But you won’t feel a thing, and it’ll be over before you know it.”
“Oh, um, okay,” Zeb said.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. Just do your best to relax, and start thinking about all the cool shit you’ll be able to once you wake up.” Doc Hodges pressed a few buttons on his hand-held console, and Zeb fell asleep.
Twenty minutes later, Zeb was in the transpo pod on his way back to Captain Skullfucker’s mansion. He didn’t feel any different, other than a slight irritation at the chip’s insertion point, on the back of his neck, where his brain stem met his spine. And even that was almost negligible, like the suggestion of an itch he sometimes got on the scar on his knuckle. Zeb had heard horror stories about even basic program installs, but now the worry he had felt seemed childish. Of course, the brain chip industry was the largest economic force in the history of the Earth; it stood to reason that all the kinks had been worked out years ago. It’s a lot harder to make money off of a product that kills people practicing basic maintenance. Sure, people power-stroked all the time, but that was usually brought on by the use of an illegal drug that over-stimulated the part of the brain that the chip used as its processor. Zeb’s fear was more a reflection of the company he kept than anything else. He had to admit that he felt fine.
But he didn’t feel more musical. Was there some method to turning the Salieri program on that Doc Hodges hadn’t told him? Zeb tried willing the program into existence, but nothing happened. He knew that some programs had physical switches, like closing one nostril with your finger and exhaling for two seconds, but no combination of gestures did the trick. Eventually, he decided he would hold off and ask Max about it when he got back to the house. Maybe he had a user’s manual or something.
Resigned to figuring it out later, he pulled a beer out of the wall panel and turned on some tunes. Just before the bottle hit his lips, the Salieri program turned on and blew his mind.
The song that had come on was a run-of-the-mill K-pop number, but Zeb found that it was much more complex than he would have thought. Instead of the standard I-V-vi-IV chord progression of a typically optimistic pop song, it was actually more of a voice-leading exercise, with each chord change acting more like its own miniature cadence, playing with modulations and secondary dominants in this thrilling way that totally engaged your mind if you paid attention to it, but could be completely ignored if you didn’t. It was like having poetry cascade over you, without any expectation of appreciation. But it wasn’t perfect. Some of the suspensions didn’t resolve properly, and even the leading tone occasionally failed to be followed by the root, not to mention the parallel fifths that repeated a few times during the bridge. Zeb did a quick computation in his mind and figured out a more harmonically pleasant solution.
Which was funny, because just a couple hours ago, he had had no idea what the fuck any of those words meant. He was just a drummer--a completely self-taught drummer at that. Yesterday, he couldn’t have explained the definition of a paradiddle, let alone what the V/V chord was in the key of C.
The most bizarre part was that the Salieri program itself didn’t tell him any of this. There was no floating text explaining the music theory. Zeb just knew it. Doc Hodges’s comparison to language was completely accurate. Zeb was now simply fluent in a language in which earlier today he was barely conversant. He suddenly felt like one of those dudes who get super into Japanese culture and go around calling everyone they meet “san,” but who would be no different than any other stupid American, if they got air-dropped into the heart of Shinjuku. Now that he spoke the language of music, his career (if you could even call it that) seemed pathetic.
He wondered how he was going to break the news to his bandmates. Because, no matter what anyone else thought, right then he knew that there would be no going back from this. Why would he willingly choose to have less of an appreciation for his life’s passion? Doc Hodges was right: by limiting the tools they used, Zeb and his friends had only been hurting themselves. To get rid of the Salieri program now would be no less tragic than when an Alzheimer’s patient forgets their child’s name.
The instant his pod hit the ground outside of Max’s mansion, Zeb was running across the lawn, towards the rehearsal studio situated out behind the pool. He had this burning need to play the drums immediately, like a zealot rushing to get his words on paper before the fickle presence of God departed his newly-enlightened soul. Max seemed to have predicted this, as he had left the studio door wide open for him, and had even turned on his gear to record whatever rhythmic diatribe Zeb felt like spewing.
Zeb walked straight to the drum kit (set up exactly like his, back home in Dallas) and started playing. The Salieri program automatically picked up on the tempo and time signature of Zeb’s noodling, and his chip’s insertion point began buzzing in time with the beat.
It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. For the first time in his entire life, his mind and body were in perfect sync with one another. The drumset was not an instrument as much as an external appendage over which he had complete control. He spoke through the drums the way a painter speaks through the canvas, with the grace of a dancer, and the predatory awareness of a tiger lurking in the bush. His whole being was alive with music, not just the rhythm of the beat, but also with the harmony of the instrument itself. He had never before cared that the three toms he used were tuned to actual notes; they were just different noises to throw into his loud, abrasive jumble. But they were actually tuned harmonically to one another, in this case in an F major triad. Zeb began to not simply hit the drums, but play them, and he soon figured out that pushing one stick into a drum head would tighten it, thereby resulting in a higher note when he struck it with the other stick. The Salieri program intuited what he was doing, and a little chromatic tuner popped up into the corner of Zeb’s field of vision, allowing him to know exactly how much pressure to apply to the heads. Now he could insert melodies into his drumming, little stories with satisfactory beginnings, middles, and ends. Zeb went on in this orgiastic fashion for over an hour before he finally got up from his throne, immensely satisfied.
Max had recorded the entire thing. He was waiting for Zeb on the leather couch at the back of the studio, a huge smile on his face. Zeb collapsed on the couch next to him and sighed.
“So, how do you like the program?” Max asked.
“That was the single most musically fulfilling moment of my life.”
Max laughed. “The most musically fulfilling moment of your life so far.”
“Yeah. This is fucking insane, man. I wanna go play some more, but I’m exhausted.”
“We’ll jam in a bit,” Max promised. “First, just tell me what it was like.”
“Don’t you know? I figured you would have already had Salieri installed.”
Max shook his head. “Naw, unfortunately, I fucked up my pre-frontal cortex pretty bad when I was a little younger than you. I tried installing Salieri, but it wouldn’t take.”
“Oh, shit, man. That sucks. What happened?”
“Pretty much what you would expect. I power-stroked. Damn near killed myself.”
“Were you on weed?” This was the street name for an illegal drug that over-loaded the pre-frontal cortex, amplifying the effects of the user’s brain chip to psychedelic proportions. This surge of energy sometimes caused the chip to short out, sending a jolt of electricity through the nervous system, like a far more dangerous version of Zeb’s pulse metronome. Marijuana hadn’t been illegal for nearly a century, but since then, the jargon associated with it had migrated to other, more deadly substances. Max was lucky to be alive.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve always wondered what that was like. I’ve never done it.”
“Well, it fucked me up something fierce. I can only have basic chip programs now, and the chip itself has to be in power-saver mode while I sleep, so that it doesn’t treat my dreams like drug flashbacks and try to purge my system of a substance I haven’t ingested in years. But, honestly, besides that, it’s fucking awesome. Not even kidding. I know I coulda died, and I definitely would die if I ever did it again, but I remember those trips like it was yesterday, and I gotta say, it was worth it. Sometimes I feel like my life has become nothing more than manufacturing reasons not to take one more trip, even if it killed me.”
Zeb laughed. “Not exactly a youth ambassador, are you, Max?”
“Bro, my stage name is Captain Skullfucker.”
“Good point.”
“But anyway, back to you. Explain the program to me.”
“Well, the program itself is kinda minimal. Like, it shows you images when you need them, like tuners and a little light for the tempo, and stuff, but that’s nothing new, I guess. What’s crazy is that all this shit that I used to find really difficult, or even shit that would never have occurred to me, is now, like, obvious.”
“Obvious,” Max repeated.
“Yeah, like it doesn’t make sense that I never knew how to play like that before. Do you play the drums at all?”
“A little. Enough to keep up with AC/DC or whatever.”
Zeb nodded. “Then you know about the little hurdles you have to clear, before you can even play a beat. For me, getting both my arms and both my legs to do independent actions was nearly impossible, at first. It just didn’t feel natural. I couldn’t comprehend doing four things at once, even at the same tempo. But that’s just it: you’re not doing four things at once. You’re doing one thing, that happens to be broken down into four tiny parts. An eight-piece drumset is not eight instruments. It’s one instrument.”
“Right, that was hard for me, too,” Max said.
“Right. But once you understand that, it’s not hard to get over that first hurdle. Learn to see the kit as a singular entity, and you can play in probably eighty percent of all bands.”
“Probably closer to ninety.”
“Exactly. From there, all progressing means is encountering those hurdles and changing your thinking, so that you can simply step right over them. For me, the next one was dance beats. You mentioned AC/DC, which is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. AC/DC rules, but the basic musicality is not very complex. The drums play a pretty standard beat for every song. The dude hits the hi-hat either on the downbeat with quarter notes, or on the down and upbeats with eighth notes. The kick drum often just plays on the downbeat, or he might throw in the occasional eighth note on there, too. Either way, not a whole lot of subdivision there. And the the snare hits on two and four. Perfectly normal, perfectly acceptable. But try dancing to an AC/DC song in some way that’s not just stomping your feet like a drunk guy at one hundred bpm. They rock, but I don’t think you can call them ‘funky.’ For that, the first step is to mix up the hi-hat, usually hitting on the upbeat instead of the downbeat.”
“Uh-huh.”
“This creates all sorts of problems if you’re used to the AC/DC style of drumming. None of them are huge issues, but they’re still hurdles you have to get over. For me, that just meant adding that beat to my list of things I could play, but for better drummers than me that means keeping a count going through each measure and knowing when to hit the hi-hat.”
“You don’t do that?” Max asked.
“Well, I didn’t used to. I can totally do that now, but before today, I had developed a sort of mental trick that let me play dance beats.”
“What do you mean?” Max was clearly enjoying himself, even if he didn’t always appear to be listening.
“Well, in my mind, I started viewing the upbeats on the hi-hat as downbeats. I don’t know why that was easier, but it was. Now, if I wanted to hit the snare on two and and four, it felt like I was hitting it on the ‘and’ of one and the ‘and’ of three. But that also meant that I could align my snare hits with my hi-hat hits sometimes and get funkier with it. And if you listen to what I did with the bass drum, you’d notice that I would usually start a measure off with two eighth notes, then I would be on the upbeat for the rest of the measure. But to me, I was playing those like a pickup and a downbeat, so that I could then basically play an AC/DC rhythm, only transposed half a beat ahead. Then, if I needed to go back to normal, I would play two more eighth notes with the kick, only this time it really was a pickup and a downbeat.”
“So you used your bass foot to switch between time-zones?”
“That’s a perfect way to put it. My bass drum was the door to danceland. And after I got good at that, it just clicked. I merely changed where ‘one’ was, and it all made sense.”
“So what about now?” Max asked.
“Now, it’s like I went through that process with every rhythmical issue I could ever imagine. Now, it’s not like I can put ‘one’ wherever I want. It’s like everywhere already is ‘one,’ and every possible subdivision works as its own jumping off point for any beat I want to play. All the hurdles have simply ceased to exist, and I can do whatever the fuck I want.”
“Sounds good,” Max said. “Let’s go play.”
Max had already written a couple songs for his solo debut, and Zeb learned them in a matter of minutes, then recorded the drum parts perfectly on the first take.
“Wanna give it another go?” Max asked after the tracks were in the can. “See if there’s a different beat you wanna try out?”
Zeb shook his head. “I mean, we could, but I’m pretty sure that was the best beat possible.”
Max smiled. “My thoughts exactly. Just wanted to see if you would change your mind.”
“It’s weird. Normally, I wouldn’t be so confident, but this isn’t an opinion. It just is, and I know it, like saying two plus two equals four.”
“Well, you’re not wrong. Let’s head back into the main house for a bit. I still need to finish figuring out my guitar parts for the other songs, so we’ve pretty much done all we can today. I got somebody I want you to meet.”
They traversed the lawn and went back into Max’s gigantic living room. There, standing behind the bar making himself a drink, was a guy, about twenty years older than Max, nodding his head in time with music Zeb couldn’t hear. When he noticed Max and Zeb, he blinked both of his eyes, apparently stopping whatever playback was going on between his ears. “Max, baby, this kid is fucking amazing!”
“You bet your ass he is, Trav!” Max shouted across the room. He turned to Zeb and said, “Zeb, meet Travis, my manager.”
“Hello,” Zeb said.
Travis emerged from behind the bar and motioned for everyone to sit down in front of Max’s projection screen. Max pressed a button on a console hidden in his sofa, and an enormous Jackie Chan began silently fighting gangsters using a bicycle and, later, a ladder.
“I was just listening to what you did, right when you got back here. I’ve never heard anything like it,” Travis said.
“Oh, um, thank you. But I think most of that is the Salieri program.”
“No, don’t you gimme that bullshit, Zebby! Put that thing in my head, I still couldn’t play like that!”
“I don’t know…”
“Zeb’s not used to praise, Trav,” Max said. “Let’s let him ease into it by telling him he sucks.”
“Oh, sure thing, Max. Zeb, your playing is atrocious. I couldn’t tell if that was someone hitting the drums, or if you recorded my grandma having diarrhea.”
Zeb and Max both burst out laughing. “Jesus Christ, Trav!” Max exclaimed. “Not exactly what I meant, but that’ll work, I guess. Zeb, do you feel appropriately brought down to size?”
“Yeah, that did it,” Zeb said, still chuckling.
“Great,” Travis said, “I guess that means now’s a good time to tell you why you’re really here.”
Zeb did a double take. He looked from Max, to Travis, and back to Max, and saw that they were both now very serious. “Wait, what? What is he talking about, Max? I thought we were gonna record an album together. I mean, we already started.”
“We are, Zeb. And trust me, if what we laid down just now is any indication, it’s gonna kick fucking ass. But…that’s not the only reason I brought you out to LA.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Well, I don’t really know how to tell you--”
“Jane Necrophage is missing,” Travis said.
“What?” Zeb said.
Max nodded. “Yeah. Walked into our label’s headquarters about a month ago, and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Oh, shit. Did you, like, call the police?”
“We did,” Travis said. “Didn’t do any good. Knew it wouldn’t but we had to try, anyway.”
“Why didn’t it do any good?”
“Felix Osiris, the head of Tutela Records, is the LAPD Chief’s brother. A whole lotta shady shit goes down behind those walls (not to mention the buck-wild house parties the label throws), and the cops couldn’t possibly give a shit. The Osiris family has this city by the balls, one brother monopolizing our culture, the other policing the laws in whatever way he sees fit. I think they called Jane in for a meeting, and killed her.”
Zeb gasped. Max shook his head and got up from the sofa. “No, Trav, I told you, we have no way to know that!”
“Well, what do you think happened? She’s missing, Maxy.”
“Yeah, but--”
“Excuse me,” Zeb interjected, “but why would your record label want to kill Jane Necrophage?”
Max shrugged. “I don’t know. They wouldn’t. It makes no sense.”
“Oh, come on, Max,” Travis said, now rising from his seat himself. “You know that’s not true. She was testing incredibly poorly. People don’t like that there’s a chick in your band that won’t fuck any of you. It kills the image that you’re all depraved, sex-crazed lunatics. Her bad attitude is breaking the illusion for our biggest demographic: sixteen-year-old boys.”
“Fuck’s sake, Trav. It’s the twenty-second century. You don’t get to call shit like that a ‘bad attitude’ anymore. I’ve never even tried to get with Jane, and neither have any of the other guys. We’re friends. It’s not Jane’s fault if some lizard-brained teenager can’t comprehend that.”
“Hey, you don’t gotta convince me! I’m just parroting what the suits at Tutela told me.”
“But would they kill her for that?” Zeb asked.
Max sighed and sat back down. “Uh, yeah, probably. Remember that rapper, Lil’ Ouija?”
“Yeah, didn’t he die in a gang shootout?”
“Yeah, that’s what they told people, but actually, a bunch of LAPD cops ran into his home and murdered him in his sleep, on some Fred Hampton shit.”
“Oh my God. Really?”
“Beamed the live feed of them doing it directly to the brain chips of every artist they have under contract. Clarence--that was his real name, good guy--had spoken out against the human rights atrocities committed by some dictator over in Europe. What he didn’t know was that Felix Osiris holds a bank account in a shifty bank run by that dictator’s oligarch friends. Lil’ Ouija was stirring up controversy and costing the Osiris brothers money, so they didn’t think twice.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s horrible. But, sorry if this sounds, like, crass, or whatever, but what does this have to do with me?”
Travis sat back down. “What did you think of Doc Hodges?” he asked.
“What? He was cool enough. Why?”
“He told you he had to put you under to install the Salieri program, didn’t he?”
“Yeah….”
“Didn’t you find that strange?”
Zeb started freaking out. His heart was racing, and a little caption at the corner of his field of vision told him that his pulse was going strong at one-hundred and sixty-three beats per minute. “I mean, I wasn’t totally down with it, but he told me he had to, to fudge my serial number and get me updated with Durian, like, off the books.”
“Yeah, and that’s all true,” Travis said. “But also, he had to knock you out so you wouldn’t notice the other program he loaded onto your chip.”
“Other program? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Everyone who signs a contract with Tutela Records gets implanted with a tracking beacon,” Max said. “I have one, Clarence had one, and Jane has one. But the data isn’t shared with anyone except the Osiris brothers themselves, or whoever they decide to sell it to.”
“But Doc Hodges said he was gonna give me that VPN thing. Said it would keep people from tracking me. Didn’t he do that for you, too?”
“Yeah, but that only works for Phantom Industries, or other data-mining firms. This tracking beacon is a physical piece of hardware, implanted in our arms.” Max held out his right forearm and showed Zeb where to run his fingers, to feel the tracking beacon. Zeb pressed on the spot, and felt a slight bump, beneath Max’s skin.
“Fucking weird,” Zeb said.
Max nodded. “Yeah. It’s proprietary tech. Nothing about it leaves the building. Somewhere in Tutela Headquarters, there’s a giant database of all our location information.”
“What, like in their computer system, or something?”
“Yeah, we think so,” Travis said. “But no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the data is hidden behind a fortress of encryption. Even the best hackers in the world couldn’t get through it remotely. What it would take is someone finding the right access terminal and hard-jacking into it, to crack through. The human brain has this bizarre way of amplifying the effects of certain programs. Really, chip tech is out of this world, but we still can’t make a computer as powerful as a regular brain.”
“Of course,” Max said, “you can’t just walk into Tutela HQ. You have to be let in.”
“Like, say, you were the hot new drummer about to tear it up on Captain Skullfucker’s solo debut, there for a tour of the facilities,” Zeb said.
“Bingo.”
“And let me guess: this other program the good doctor installed in my chip is the crypto-cracker you need to get to Jane Necrophage’s location data.”
“You told me he was smart, Maxy,” Travis said.
Zeb looked up at the projection screen just in time to see Jackie Chan knock someone unconscious with a refrigerator door.
Tutela Headquarters was a monolithic building in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. The label had purchased all the property for blocks on either side and thus created a kind of city-state in between Spring Street and Grand Avenue, walled off and protected on all fronts, like Okinawa castle. Zeb couldn’t help but be intimidated as he and Max rode through the front gate and down the winding drive leading to the security checkpoint.
“Jesus Christ, isn’t this a little much for a record label?”
Max exhaled sharply. “Yeah, you’d think so, but Tutela makes fucking ludicrous amounts of money, enough that they’ve kinda transcended what makes sense to you or me. At some point, what you’re selling doesn’t really matter, and it’s perfectly acceptable to kill people to hold on to what you’ve got.” He waved at an smg-toting security guard, who smiled and motioned them on through.
“They seem to trust you,” Zeb said.
“They’re not afraid of me,” Max replied. “There’s a difference.”
They parked Max’s transpo pod in an underground garage and were greeted by a concierge almost immediately. She touched one of her temples and blinked several times in rapid succession.
“What is she doing?” Zeb whispered, as he and Max got out of the pod.
“She’s checking us in,” Max said, at full volume. “Probably scanned the bio-monitor in my tracking beacon, too, to see if I’m high, didn’t you, Himari?”
The woman smiled professionally, but her eyes told Zeb that she harbored a strong disdain for Captain Skullfucker. “Why would I do that, Mr. Jemmison?”
“No idea, but you do it every time.”
Ignoring this, Himari turned to Zeb, and her smile metamorphosed into something more genuine. “And you must be Zebulon.”
“Hello, um, you can just call me Zeb.”
“Why would you shorten such a marvelous name?”
Zeb smiled sheepishly. “You know, no one’s ever said that to me before. Thanks. I guess you can call me Zebulon, if you want. It was Himari, right?”
Himari winked, and Zeb nearly fainted. Thankfully, she turned on her heels and began leading them inside the building before she saw the color hit his face.
Max slowed his gait and pulled on Zeb’s shoulder to hold him back a bit. “Be careful,” he hissed. “She’s buttering you up.”
“Fine with me,” Zeb said.
“No, it’s not. I need you to focus. After you do what you’ve come here to do, you can flirt with all the cute Japanese girls you want. Hell, I’ll even get you Himari’s chip coordinates, and pay for you two to hit the town. But later. Stop thinking with your dick.”
Zeb shook his arms like he was warming up to pitch in the World Series. “You’re right. Sorry. Eyes on the prize.”
“Are you coming?” Himari called over her shoulder without stopping. “The tour starts in just a few minutes.”
Thinking back to his conversation with Cheddar Bob, Zeb did his best to just accept the feelings he was having for Himari, and not let them dictate his mental state. He clearly needed more practice, but eventually he was able to remember that he was on a recon mission in search of a missing fellow drummer.
Himari escorted them inside and through the open doors of an elevator. She pressed the button for the fifteenth floor, and they were moving up in an instant. She turned to Zeb and answered his question before he could ask it. “The first fourteen floors are where the boring office-building stuff is. Unless you want to go meet the accountants and lawyers, the tour will begin when things get interesting.”
“Oh, okay. Cool.”
They rode in silence for the remainder of the ascent. When the doors opened on the fifteenth floor, Himari pointed to a large reception desk at the other end of a vast lobby. “Just head in that direction, and your tour guide will be with you shortly.”
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Zeb asked.
Himari smirked. “I’ve seen it all already.”
“Yeah, of course, but--”
“When you’re done, meet me back down in the garage. And don’t worry about mean old Max here. On your way out, I’ll give you my chip coordinates myself. And dinner is on me.”
The elevator doors closed, and Himari was gone.
“Hell yeah,” Zeb said.
“Hell no,” Max said. “That means she could hear what I told you. She knows we’re up to something. Fuck, I’m such an idiot.”
“But if that’s the case, why did she let us know that? Why not just let us keep on thinking we’re sneaky? Maybe it was a warning?”
“I don’t know. She hates me, so I doubt that. Stay frosty.”
A door opened at the far end of the lobby, and a chubby guy with male-patterned baldness waddled over to Zeb and Max. He raised his hand in greeting, and said, “Hello, Mr. Jemmison, Mr. Nite. My name is Terry. I’ll be showing you around the building.”
“Hello, Terry,” Max said. “How are you today?”
“Not bad, Mr. Jemmison.”
“Please, man. Call me Max.” Max extended his arm and shook Terry’s hand. Terry seemed almost touched by the gesture.
“Hi, Terry,” Zeb said, waiting his turn in the hand-shaking procession. “You can just call me Zeb. Or Zebulon, if you want.”
Max laughed. “So what, you’re okay with your name now?”
“Just trying it out,” Zebulon replied.
“Well, I’ll be happy to participate in that experiment, Zebulon,” Terry said. “Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll begin.”
Terry was not a very attentive tour guide. He had his script he was supposed to recite, and he stuck to it fervently, without improvisation, often not even checking to see if Max and Zeb were still behind him. For the first few floors, Zeb simply followed along, gazing through glass walls and open doors to see if any room they passed housed a computer server. Travis had told them that the database containing the tracking beacon data was rumored to be on the very top floor of the building. There were a hundred and seventeen floors, and after over an hour, they were only on floor thirty-two. They were either going to have to speed things up, or cause some sort of diversion, allowing Zeb to sneak up to the top floor alone.
“Hey, Terry?” Max said, on floor forty-five, half an hour later, “I don’t wanna harsh this groove you got going, or anything, but I’ve seen all this stuff before, and I don’t think Zeb is super interested. Can’t we jazz it up a little bit, show him (and me) something a little more…VIP?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Max,” Terry said. “I’m really only supposed to take you on the public tour.”
“Yeah, I know, man. And I don’t wanna get you in trouble, or anything. But, like, I don’t do this often, but I’m the lead singer of Elephants Gerald, dude. And I’m trying to make a good impression on this kid here.” Max reached out and grabbed Zeb around the neck, scruffing his hair like a handsy uncle. “You might not have heard about Zebulon yet, but he’s gonna be hot shit. Whatever he does is gonna make more money than this place has ever seen. I don’t wanna lose him to another project. Or another label.”
Terry gulped. Such artist relations were clearly above his pay-grade. “Well, I’m not sure…”
Max elbowed Zeb in the ribs, driving home his plan.
Zeb frowned. “This shit is fucking boring, Max. If this is what it’s gonna be like working with Tutela, I’ll just go back to Dallas. I heard Phantom Industries is looking to branch out into music production.” He turned around and started walking back to the elevator.
“Yeah, I don’t blame ya!” Max yelled after him. “Sorry, bud. Good luck with all your future endeavors!” He turned back to Terry. “I’m sure Mr. Osiris won’t blame you for that. I mean, talent. What are you gonna do, right? Anyway, I’ll just see myself out, Terry.”
“No, wait!” Terry exclaimed. “Um, Zebulon! Zeb! Mr. Nite! Hold up. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you weren’t enjoying yourself. You’re right, this, uh, shit is…fucking boring. Lame-ass dogshit, I agree. But if you stay, I think I can show you some cooler stuff.”
Zeb stopped in his tracks. “Like what?” he said, without turning around.
“Well, um, we can go to the vinyl workshop on floor seventy-seven, where select albums are still pressed into physical records, for collectors, if you want?”
Zeb continued his march to the elevator. “That’s whack. No one gives a shit about that, Terry, but nice try.”
“Okay!” Terry shouted, his voice now pregnant with anxiety. “How about floor ninety-one. The aviary.”
“Aviary?” Max said, unable to stifle his curiosity.
“Yes. Through selective breeding, Tutela Records has created a species of tropical bird able to perfectly mimic the human singing voice. They sound just like real people. Some say it’s the future of music.”
Zeb actually wanted to see that, but it still wasn’t close enough to the top of the building. “Buncha fuckin’ birds? Naw, I can catch that at the zoo.” He had reached the elevator. He pressed the call button and leaned against the wall to wait.
“Floor one hundred and sixteen!” Terry screamed. “Deepfake holograms. Nanobot swarm suits. We can recreate any person, living, dead, or imagined, in the physical world. Send them out on tour when the artist is too…preoccupied with other things. You can meet the four founders of the company (well holograms of them, at least). You’d never know they weren’t standing there in front of you. That’s the best I can do, and I don’t think Phantom Industries has that.”
Zeb did his best to appear nonplussed, but in his head he was celebrating. One floor beneath his goal probably was as close as this guy was going to get him. The elevator door opened, and Zeb made a big show of considering his options. Finally, he let the doors close behind him as he sauntered back to Terry and Max. “Okay, let’s check these holograms out.”
They lucked out big-time. The top two floors had actually been combined into one giant loft. The lab containing the computer server was located in a glass room at the top of a metal staircase, overlooking the bottom section, which appeared to have been turned into a living space. There was a big-screen television, a few couches, and several partitioned-off bedrooms. From the computer lab, one could see into theses separate areas, as there was no ceiling between the levels, but from the floor, it just looked like a very high-roofed house.
Behind the living room was a kitchen, and at the kitchen table, there were four dudes, somewhere in their mid twenties, drinking from red plastic cups, playing some sort of card game, the rules of which were not immediately obvious.
“Five of diamonds!” One of the dudes yelled. He was short, with brown hair and a beard. “Drink, bitch!”
The guy sitting to his right, a larger black dude, slammed his hand on the table. “You motherfucker!” He chugged the remainder of his cup and began refilling it with the contents of an unlabeled liquor bottle.
The other two, a skinny guy and a guy with long, reddish-blond hair (also bearded), laughed. It took the four friends a few moments to realize that they had visitors.
“Oh, shit! There’s someone here,” the skinny one said. The others looked over at Max, Zeb, and Terry, and waved. They seemed friendly.
“Max, Zebulon,” James said with a dramatic flourish of his arm, “meet the founders of Tutela Records.”
The four dudes got up and walked to the tour group. “Well, not really,” the short one said. “We’re hologrammatic recreations of the four founders.”
“Yeah, you always say that, but I feel like the same guy I’ve always been,” the long-haired one retorted.
“Say, I’ve heard of you guys!” Max said. “I didn’t know they had you livin’ up here!”
“Yeah, for like the last…what? Two years?” The skinny guy said. “They don’t really let us out much, I think they’re worried we might get too spicy.”
“What does that even mean?” the black guy asked.
“You know about it.”
“No, I don’t. Anyway.” He turned back to Zeb. “Due to some non-disclosure bullshit, we’re not allowed to tell you our full names, but you can call me MJ.”
“Hello, MJ,” Zeb said.
“What’s goin’ on? Dude with the brown hair is EL, long-haired dude is KB, and this spicy motherfucker is AK.”
“Hi, it’s uh, nice to meet you. I’m Zeb, and this is Max.”
“Hey, how’s it going?” EL said.
“Howdy,” AK and KB both said simultaneously.
EL motioned for everyone to once again sit down at the kitchen table. “You guys want anything to drink? We’ve got some beers, this absolutely heinous whiskey in a plastic bottle, and, uh, tap water.”
“Pour up some whiskey,” Max said, sitting down.
“Cool.”
Once everybody had a drink in their hand, KB, with a sly look on his face, said,
“Thundercats.”
The other founders groaned, and all four of them downed their cups in an instant. MJ, who had already been made to do this, just a minute or so earlier, shook his head, as if willing himself not to pass out.
“What was that?” Zeb asked.
EL, sticking his tongue out in disgust, said, “It’s a game we play. Every night, each person gets one ‘Thundercat.’ When you say it, everybody else has to say ‘ho,’ and chug their drink. We’re idiots.”
Max laughed. “That’s fucking hilarious! HO!” He downed his drink like a pro.
“Hey, I like this guy,” AK said. “Terry, is he signed here?”
“Yes, sir. Max is Captain Skullfucker, lead singer of Elephants Gerald.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s a good name for a band,” EL said.
“Thanks,” Max belched.
Zeb chugged his drink himself and nearly vomited. They weren’t kidding when they said the whiskey was heinous. “So, what’s the deal with you guys?”
“These gentlemen (or the four men they are currently emulating--there’s some debate about that) started Tutela Records, in a kitchen very much like this one, in the early twenty-first century,” Terry said.
“It wasn’t like this kitchen,” AK said. “It was this kitchen. Well, at least this is an exact copy of it.”
Terry nodded. “Zebulon here is from Dallas, too.”
“Oh, shit, you’re from Dallas?” MJ said.
“Yeah.”
“What part?” KB asked.
“I live in a high-rise in Deep Ellum.”
“Hell yeah,” EL said, “we used to play shows there.”
“Cool.”
“We’re from Richardson. Heard of it? Not sure if it’s still its own separate thing.”
“Uh, no. Sorry,”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. It was a suburb, just a little north. Of course, even back when we were alive, if someone from out of town asked us where we were from, we’d just tell them Dallas.”
Like most giga-cities, Dallas had long since adopted the personality of a hungry amoeba, reaching out its slimy boundaries to suck up the neighboring towns, until the entire Metroplex was united under a single name. Even to this day, living close to what had originally been downtown granted you a snobbish superiority, like seventeenth-century Londoners turning up their noses at the riff-raff on the other side of the Thames.
Max reached for the whiskey bottle and poured himself another drink. “So, you guys are dead?”
“Well, kinda,” MJ said.
“Shit, not me. I feel pretty alive,” KB said.
AK laughed. “Well, yeah, we’re all alive, but, like, the originals of us have been dead for a while.”
“See, I don’t believe that either. We’ve all got our memories, don’t we? We all remember our trip to Colorado, where that cop--”
“But was that us, though?” MJ said. “Yeah, I remember that too. But those aren’t necessarily our memories.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Well, when we went to Colorado, I don’t recall my body being made out of a bunch of tiny hovering robots projecting holograms over each other.”
“No, but you just said, ‘my body,’ like it was us.”
As they continued on in this vein, EL sighed and turned to Max and Zeb. “We’ve been having this argument ever since we woke up in this place.”
“Which do you think it is?” Zeb asked.
“I go back and forth. I mean, I know what we are, like, physically, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. If I have to make a choice about if we’re the same dudes from before or not, I usually side with KB. But really, I think it doesn’t matter. I do feel like the original EL, but does that mean the original EL is still alive? Or is that guy dead, and I’ve taken his place? Whatever. I’m here. That’s really all that’s important.”
“Why did the label, uh, resurrect you guys?” Max asked.
“Yeah, Terry, why did they?” AK said.
Terry cringed. He had obviously been hoping to avoid answering that question. “Well, you see, gentlemen, the technology used to bring you back to life is still in its infancy. Before sending out a nano-swarm hologram of, say, Max here, the label had to be sure the process worked.”
“He’s saying we were the test runs,” KB said.
“Well, I wouldn’t put it so bluntly, but….”
“How did they get your memories back?” Zeb asked.
Terry attempted to answer first with a diplomatically-phrased explanation, but AK cut him off and said, “They dug up our graves and zapped our brains like Frankenstein.” He convulsed his body in a rather graphic pantomime of electrocution.
“Jesus,” Max said.
“Well, it’s not exactly that,” Terry said.
“So what is it?”
Terry had no reply.
EL said, “It’s basically that. I don’t think even Terry understands the actual science involved. They had to awaken our neurons enough to capture our memories, but since that’s really fucking hard to do to dead gray matter, lots of the gaps had to be filled in with AI-assisted guesswork, like upscaling from shitty quality video to high-definition, back in the day.”
“Or the frog DNA from Jurassic Park,” MJ said.
“Yeah, exactly. That’s another weird aspect to all of this. How do we know that, when they filled in those gaps in our neurons, they didn’t just make a bunch of shit up? Like, I’m pretty sure I was born in Florida and moved to Texas when I was three, but what if, when they scanned EL’s brain, they couldn’t find anything about the first three years of his life, so they just plugged in someone else’s baby years in West Palm Beach?”
“Woah,” Zeb said.
“Right?”
“Sometimes I think they got none of our memories right,” AK said. “But sometimes I think they got them all right, and they only woke us up to rub it in our faces.”
“What do you mean?” Max said.
“Well, people were always trying to buy us out, when we were alive, and we always turned them down. It wasn’t until the last one of us died, in 2106, that the Osiris family was able to take over. I think they brought us back to flex on us.”
“Seriously?”
The other three founders all nodded in agreement.
“That’s pretty fucked up,” Zeb said.
“You’re telling us,” KB said. “Every time they release a new album, they send it through that huge computer up there in that glass room. Felix Osiris likes to stare down at us and gloat as he presses the button.”
“Man, fuck that guy,” MJ said.
“For real,” EL agreed.
“Hey, sorry, off topic question,” Max said, “but I notice you guys are drinking. But if you’re just holograms being played over a bunch of nanobots, how is that possible? And do you…”
“Piss and shit?” AK asked.
“Yeah.”
“Speaking of,” Zeb said, standing up. He liked the four founders, and he felt like he could talk to them all day, but he and Max were here for a reason, and now seemed like a good time to get on with it. “Is there a bathroom around here?”
MJ stood up and explained how to get to the restroom. It was through a little door just outside the facsimile living space, on the opposite side of the loft from the metal staircase.
“Naw,” AK was explaining to Max. “The bots come together to make internal organs for us, but they eat whatever we put down there, for, like, fuel, or whatever. We can get drunk, but that’s like, programming, or something. They have total control over our bodies.”
“So why is there a bathroom in here?” Max asked.
“Building codes,” Terry said.
“Ahh, got it.”
Zeb exited the living space in the direction of the bathroom, then looped around behind the kitchen wall towards the stairs. He climbed them slowly, not wanting to make any noise. When he got to the top, he saw that there was no door to enter the lab. Of course, the label would not give these four guys access to their central computer. They were assets to be monitored, which was why they were imprisoned here. Zeb turned and began descending the stairs. As he did so, he made accidental eye contact with AK, sitting at the kitchen table. No one else seemed to notice. AK made a subtle movement with his head. Zeb followed his gaze, and saw a door at the foot of the stairs. He hadn’t noticed it before because it was the exact same color as the wall, and the knob was flush to the surface, like the handle to a transpo pod, only flipped ninety degrees counter-clockwise. Zeb gave AK a look as to say, “please don’t tell anyone what I’m doing.” AK simply shrugged and went back to his conversation about his digestive tract.
Thankfully the door came open silently when he tried it. Zeb stepped through it and into a maintenance corridor. At one end, there was an exit that would take them back into the main hallway. At the other was an elevator that obviously led to the computer lab. He walked over, hoping to simply press the call button, but it wasn’t there. In its place, there was a keyhole, and above that there was a little pad to scan your thumb print.
“What are you doing?” Terry’s voice came echoing down the concrete tunnel. “How did you even get in here? The bathroom is in the other direction.”
“Oh, uh, I got confused.”
Terry took a couple steps back and pressed a finger to his temple. “I don’t believe you. I’m calling security.”
“No, you’re fucking not, Terry,” Max said from behind. Terry tried to run, but Max grabbed him around the neck and held a kitchen knife up to his throat.
“Mr. Jemmison? What’s going on?” Terry said in a garbled, terrified voice.
“Where does that elevator lead?”
“What?”
“You heard me. Where does it go?”
“Uh, the lab. The computer lab. But you can’t open it without a key.”
“That’s fine, because I’m sure you have one of those keys, don’t you, Terry?”
“No, of course I don’t.”
“He’s lying,” KB said, through the open door back to the living area. “He goes in there all the time.”
“Thanks,” Max said.
“Yeah, no problem,” KB said. He turned and went back in the house.
“How did you get that door unlocked?” Terry asked. “No one’s even supposed to know about it.”
“Terry, do me a favor and stop asking so many questions, okay, pal? Just hand over your keys to my friend here, and come with us up to the computer lab.”
“No,” Terry said.
“That’s fine,” Max said, applying slightly more pressure with the knife. “Zeb, come get his keys outta his pocket.”
“Uh, what?” Zeb said.
“Come on, man! Clock’s ticking.”
“Fuck. Okay.” Zeb approached Terry cautiously. He didn’t know if Terry was the kind of guy to react violently to a scenario such as this. Thankfully, the poor guy started crying, letting Zeb know that it was probably safe to rifle through his pants. He grabbed Terry’s keys and found the one that fit in the elevator’s keyhole. Max walked Terry up to the thumb pad. Terry reluctantly but inevitably scanned his finger, and the elevator door opened.
The ride up was incredibly awkward. Zeb kept wanting to apologize to Terry, who seemed like an alright dude, but he figured that would throw off the whole vibe Max was going for.
“What is this?” Terry whispered, more to himself than to Max or Zeb.
“Don’t worry, Terry, it’ll all be over soon,” Max said.
The elevator doors opened and they finally entered the computer lab. There were aisles of servers lining the center of the room. Zeb had no idea what any of them did, but Max seemed to know exactly what to do. He pushed Terry directly to a large, flat-black cabinet situated on the far side of the room. He made Terry open the cabinet and do another security check, and then a large desk console emerged from the ceiling, complete with a leather chair for the operator.
“Just sit down and place one of those contact things against your chip’s insertion point,” Max said. “The rest’ll happen automatically.”
“Seriously, what the heck are you guys doing?” Terry cried.
“Don’t worry about it,” Max said. “You’re doin’ great, Terry.”
The console had completed its descent, and Zeb got in the leather chair. He grabbed a tiny magnetic square out of a specially-designed compartment, and brought it around to the back of his neck, where his brain chip had been implanted. “This is for Jane Necrophage,” he said, and let the square attach to his skin.
“Wait, what?” Terry said.
But it was too late for Zeb to answer. He was overwhelmed by a murderous screech between his ears, and his entire body came alive with excruciating pain. He thought he was dying. At the bottom of his field of vision, the words SALIERI PROGRAM UPLOAD COMMENCING started flashing in neon green, and a progress bar began to fill up. He hurt too much to be confused.
The lights in the building turned off and an alarm began sounding. When the progress bar was about at halfway, some weaker backup lights turned on, and Zeb could just barely see into the founders’ kitchen below him. The four friends seemed worried, but there was nothing they could do. When Zeb’s progress bar was nearly complete, a voice came on a loudspeaker and announced that the building was under red alert.
The door to the computer lab burst open, and many things happened at once. The words SALIERI PROGRAM UPLOAD COMPLETE flashed momentarily in front of his eyes, the four founders, in the fake house below, evaporated into glowing clouds, and a security team ran in and zapped Max with a cattle prod. Terry took this opportunity to run away, and Zeb collapsed to the floor, fully expecting to get prodded himself. However, he soon felt someone pulling on his arms, and he was able to get back on his feet.
They walked him out of the computer lab and took the elevator back down to the corridor. Zeb could barely see, but, when he glanced around, looking for Max, he saw a security guard carrying a body over his shoulder. He couldn’t tell if Max was still alive.
The door to the corridor opened, and Himari came charging through. She stopped and held her hands up. The security team, clearly aware of her authority, slowed their pace slightly, but attempted to go around her.
“Hold on,” Himari said. “You can take Max, but the boss sent me to fetch Mr. Nite personally, and bring him to his summer office, on the other side of the plaza. I’ll take him off your hands.”
“Um, Miss Goto, we didn’t receive any orders saying that,” the head security officer said.
“Well, actually, you just did. If you want, I can call Mr. Osiris, and we can see what you have to say about why you ignored his directions in the middle of a red alert you were too stupid to prevent from happening, but I can’t imagine a scenario in which that conversation goes well for you.” Himari put a hand to her temple.
“No, wait, I’m sorry, ma’am. Of course.” He pushed the catatonic Zeb in her direction.
Himari grabbed Zeb by the elbow and started walking him back to the elevator to the computer lab. “Change of plans, babe,” Himari whispered. “We’re gonna have to leave from the roof. You good to walk?”
“Huh?” Zeb said. He still wasn’t fully aware of what was happening.
“Come on, we don’t have much time.” She opened the elevator and they got back on, only this time, she peeled back some hidden panel and placed her palm against a scanner. A computerized voice informed them that roof access had been granted, and they started going up.
The door opened on the roof, where a transpo pod was waiting for them. They jumped inside and shot straight into the air, then down and away from Tutela Headquarters with remarkable speed. Finally able to form somewhat coherent thoughts, Zeb said, “What the fuck is going on, Himari?”
She leaned back and exhaled. “Zeb, you just started a revolution.”
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