BY JON FRATER
“I just want you to be happy, Sharon.”
I blink and shudder with anger at his choice of words. I love Harry like a brother—a brother who gets twenty percent of my salary—but right now I want to strangle him.
“Happy? I’ve just ended the closest thing I’ll ever have to a normal relationship for the sake of my job, and you want me to be happy?”
Harry shifts in his office chair. “I was sorry about your breakup. We all were. Sam couldn’t handle it, it sucks, it happens—”
I try again. “I spent months recovering from half a million dollars’ worth of plastic surgery, and you want me to be happy?”
Harry’s eyes shift to the doctor, who is at the bar mixing himself something green with a lot of ice. “Doc? A little help?”
“Your vocal cords needed the repairs, Sharon. And your boobs and ass look amazing. Money well spent,” Doc says.
“Yes!” Harry enthuses. “YouTube views are up five times over last year—”
I fold my arms. Not easy to do over my improved chest. Sam never even got to play with it. “And now you want to crack open my skull and jam a nest of circuits and chips into my—”
He holds up his hands. “No! That’s not . . . Doc, could you please explain to her?”
I turn my head. Doc has his drink in his hand and guzzles noisily. “Yeah, Doc, mansplain it to me.”
Doctor Lazaro swishes and swallows. He’s a tall brown man with a thick, salt-and-pepper beard. He frowns, looks at his drink, and puts another dose of Vodka into it. “SIREN 3000 fixes all your problems,” he said. Astounding baritone, with a hint of Brazil in his voice. Not a trace of a slur.
Oh. My. God. “I give you permission to use big words, Doc,” I say.
Lazaro walks over to us, sits down in the chair facing me, and puts his half finished drink on the table between us. “She enhances your natural abilities. You feed a direct neural connection to her. She listens and learns from you. Ultimately, the two of you synch up and you become a functional duo. The only difference would be that she’s gyrating on stage and you run the production from the studio below it.”
“’She’? You mean ‘it’.”
Pride brightens his features. “Oh, no. She’s a she. SIREN has a wholly organic core. A genuine neuroplasticity. That’s the breakthrough.”
I shake my head. I’ve heard these pitches before. They never work. But they’re always on the edge of a breakthrough and invariably cost a ton of money. “You mean she’s a Vocaloid. The Japanese have had those for thirty years.”
“It’s not—”
“Auto-Tuning has been around for fifty,” I say.
He puts his hands on his knees and stares into my eyes. His eyes have a crazy shade of blue I’d never seen before. “No. Auto-Tune writes over an existing sound pattern to correct off-key inaccuracies. A Vocaloid is a machine that samples a human voice and creates on-key vocalization with matching 3-D animation on stage. SIREN 3000 is a Virturoid. She’s a living being in every measureable sense. She hears, she sees, she feels. The only thing she lacks is creativity. That’s why we need a human component.”
Better and better. “’Component’?”
“A singer,” Harry chimes in.
“I’m not a singer.”
“Bullshit. You’re Sharon Avatar,” Harry sneers.
“I’m not a singer. Singers get on stage with a mike, tear off their skin, and croon their guts out onto the stage. No machines except for lights and an amp. I haven’t actually sung in over a year.”
Harry bristles. “You are the most watched female talent between the ages of twenty-five and forty in—”
“I’m not a singer! I’m a pop star!”
Harry starts to fidget, which means he’s losing patience. “Whatever. You’re an employee of the Dai-Muyo Entertainment Group. This project comes from many steps further up the ladder. We’re just following instructions. Besides, there are . . . incentives.”
We’ve had this talk before, too. “You mean a bribe?”
Harry grins. “I mean incentives. Two-fifty. Then you age out of the program and that’s the end of it.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand doesn’t buy me a new wardrobe.”
“Two hundred fifty million.”
“What?”
Harry bends in close to me until his nose is practically touching mine. For the first time I notice that his pupils are shaped like tiny diamonds. When and where and how had he had that done? “Sharon. You’re thirty-eight years old. In two years, the company is going to age you out of the program anyway, because that’s how they think. There is always someone younger, prettier, and more marketable. The suits write the songs. The machines make the talent.”
“Don’t remind me,” I mumble.
He’s not finished. “Let us use the gear on you. A few performances to prove the concept and equipment—”
“—and programming—” Doc interjects.
“Right, and programming, and you retire a star.”
Goose bumps form on my skin, but I’m not sure if it’s the promise of a massive payoff or the threat of unemployment that does it. “And if I say no?”
Harry relaxes, almost deflating. “Then Dai-Muyo cancels your contract immediately, and they find a nineteen year old blonde and use her for this. Then she becomes rich, and famous, and popular, and beautiful, and exciting. And you get to watch.”
Of course they would. He’s right. I knew that before I put my name to the paper more than a decade ago.
“You’re serious? A few stage nights and that’s it?”
“Promise.”
“Fine. Introduce us,” I said.
• • •
“SIREN 3000, meet Sharon Avatar.”
SIREN 3000 is a glass bubble suspended within a black metal box, sitting on a tripod with jointed legs. One side of her case has a glowing red sensor that looks too damned much like a bloodshot eye for my taste. Thick cables connect her to a bank of servers against the wall. The fans that cool her system are very noisy; the lab sounds like a busy airport tarmac. And it’s cold. I can’t stop shivering.
The case swivels around and the eye focuses on me. A tinny voice comes from a speaker above us. “Hel-lo Sha-ron. I am pleas-ed to meet you.”
Her voice is intensely artificial. It’s androgynous and barely intelligible. I glance at Lazaro. “Are you kidding me? That was way too mechanical.”
Doc nods. “At the moment, she is mostly mechanics. We haven’t synched you two yet.”
“Crack it open. I want to see it.”
He walks over to the tripod. The case turns a bit and the eye focuses on him now. I’m almost relieved. “SIREN? Do you mind if Sharon gets a look at you?”
“Of course not, Doc-tor.”
Lazaro reaches to the top of the case and taps on it. A keypad I can’t see, I assume. After a moment there’s a hiss of exchanging gasses and SIREN’s case splits down the middle, swiveling open so I can see inside.
“A brain. A real brain?” I gasp. It’s cylindrical and suspended in glass, floating in pink fluid, but there’s no mistaking it.
Lazaro stands up straight, puffs out a bit. The proud father. “Yes. Stem cells can produce any tissue we need. Right now she hasn’t got a thing on her mind.”
“How do you know it’s female?” I wonder aloud.
“No choice. When you strip away every last differentiating factor from the human body what’s left is invariably female.” He turns back to the machine. “SIREN, would you like to see what Sharon looks like inside?”
“I would like that ve-ry much, please, Doc-tor.”
I shiver again. “That’s creepy.”
“But expected. She has reams of data on you but has never actually seen you before. She’s curious.”
I shake my head. “No, a ten year old girl is curious, this is—“
“Take off your clothes and step into the booth over there, please, Sharon.” He indicates an open cylinder, maybe as wide as a big shower stall, on the other side of the lab. The door is open. It’s dark as a closet inside.
“God. Really?”
“It’s a holographic recording booth. We need to make a digital recording of your physical body and it’s got to be accurate down to the pixel in three dimensions. Can’t do that while you’re dressed.”
Gah. “Fine. Doc, you can stay. Harry, get out.”
“Oh, come on!”
“Dude, you come on. I know I spend every waking moment half naked, but not in front of the help.”
Harry sulks like a five-year-old boy. “Fine, I’m going. You owe me for this, Sharon.”
“I owe you squat. You owe me. You all owe me.”
Stripping down on command is easy; stage performances are heavily scripted things. There are so many people around you giving you instructions before a performance, taking orders becomes second nature. Actually walking into that booth—like a black hole, an anti-Narnia—is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Well. Second hardest.
Telling Sam to go away was the hardest.
I get in, the door closes, and I nearly panic in the total darkness. I breathe to slow my heart rate, force my body to loosen. Then, the lights come on and I’m shrouded in intense white light. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. When they do, I see markings on the floor, walls, and ceilings. It’s like standing inside a giant colander in bright daylight.
Lazaro’s voice comes over a speaker. “First, we do some body positioning studies. Listen to SIREN. Just move they way she directs.”
“I don’t take orders from a gizmo.”
“Please, no talk-ing, Sha-ron.” SIREN said.
I grumble but . . . fine, I signed up for this, after all.
The next hour is full of activity. There are warm-ups: stretches, bends, places to put my feet, hands, and arms. Push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks. I twist, I step, I kick, I pivot. She makes me sing: scales, the alphabet song, some of my own stuff. She makes me repeat phrases: “The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted,” and “Are those shy Eurasian footwear, cowboy chaps, or jolly earthmoving headgear?” Then she puts me through dance steps I haven’t used in ages and others I’ve rehearsed within the past two months. It’s a workout. I have to say, SIREN makes a decent drill sergeant.
When we’re done, a new voice comes through the speakers. “Thank you, Sharon.”
That gets my attention. “Doc?”
“No. It’s me, Sharon.”
“SIREN?”
“Yes, Sharon?”
“You sound different.”
“I used the notes and speech patterns we recorded to model your own voice. I’m running the simulation at multi-teraflop speeds, so I should be able to edit the anomalies out very shortly.”
By the end of the sentence, she sounds just like me. Uber-creepy. But also fascinating. I was never a tech-head but now that I’m exposed to the process, I find the magic of it intriguing.
“Can you do the same thing with my body?” I ask.
“A graphically convincing image of your physical dimension still being modeled,” SIREN says. “Run time remaining is seven hours, fifteen minutes.”
“She means the final product which is a fully textured life-like image,” Lazaro says. “SIREN, show us what you have right this moment.”
“Of course, Doctor.”
A pair of projected beams appear from above and converge on the floor in front of us. Where they converge, I see a holographic projection. It’s unmistakably me but clearly just an image. She stands, looks around, and blinks. Her chest rises and falls with each breath. “How is this?”
“You’re vocalizing on the inhalation, SIREN. Reverse that.”
“And you’ll need to work on the lip-synching,” I blurt out. “Even a two percent delay too slow or too fast, and people will notice.”
“So noted.”
I can’t stop staring into her—my—no, her—eyes. “God, I’m glad that’s over. I’m exhausted.”
Lazaro takes my arm. “That’s just the overture. Let’s get you to the chair, Sharon. Now the curtain opens for real.”
It’s a padded recliner, like a leather easy chair but set with head, leg and arm rests to keep my head and limbs in place. I’m too fascinated by the process to want to stop. I’m building another me and it feels awesome. There’s power in this process. It’s not like training a replacement on your own time. It’s more like giving birth.
He strings wires and cables to the upper part of the chair and positions a fancy set of glowing eyepieces directly above my face, as I lay back, motionless.
“Were you always a fan of Dr. Frankenstein?” I asked.
“I was a performer, not that different from you. A music major. They make the best programmers.”
I look at him, really examine his face and how he moves. Then memories click, and suddenly I’m back in my early teens, screaming at the top of my lungs at a concert.
“You’re Santo Lazaro,” I gasp. I’m embarrassed by the fangirl moment but the memory comes tumbling out. “You hobbled on stage with crutches then you threw them out into the orchestra during the overture. You had three CGI dogs that followed you around all through the performance. I loved those dogs!” Squee!
He nods, grinning, his eyes dancing. “Those dogs are what got me here.”
“How?”
“Well—“ He pulls up a stool and sits own next to me, takes off his glasses and hangs his head. I sense an imminent confession from a good Catholic boy. “The stage work was amazing, but those dogs . . . I built a simple program for them so they’d follow me around during the concert. Then I started coding little tricks into each of them. The loops never repeated from one performance to the next. Their appearance would shift, or they’d get to do their own side show during an intermission or just before an encore. Eventually I realized that I was putting more effort into improving my sidekicks than my act. I cashed in my chips and went into programming full time.” He shrugged. “A Ph.D. and a few corporate grants later, here I am. Lucky you, huh?”
Lucky me. “Doc, tell me something. What’s SIREN’s motivation? How does she look at us?”
“SIREN 3000 wants to make people happy. That’s her thing. The music and stage work is just the delivery system.”
“What happened to the earlier versions?”
“What makes you ask—?”
“When I was nineteen and humping a guitar to open mike nights in crappy Jersey clubs, I worked with computers a bit. There are always alpha and beta versions before the final release, and continual improvements afterwards. She doesn’t feel or act like a beta.”
I point to the hologram as I speak. SIREN is putting my image through some intensive gyrations. Bend-reach-pivot-turn-pivot-stretch-turn-kick-turn. She’s so fast. I couldn’t kick that high or turn that quickly if I wanted to.
Lazaro nods. “SIREN 1000 was entirely mechanical. Not only could she not feel, but she couldn’t think. The emotive feedback algorithms never worked properly. SIREN 2000 was organic but she was so intent on simulating good feelings that she pumped out oxytocin non-stop. She eventually became catatonic.”
“Drowned in ecstasy,” I realize.
“Essentially.”
“And this version needs me to be her producer, I guess.”
“That’s a good way to put it,” he says. “She’ll take any performance of yours—a song, a dance, telling jokes at the Comic Strip on open mike night—and amplify it. Her visual display is programmed to respond to human retinal activity. The audience’s brains react by creating an oxytocin rush and they will literally fall in love with you.”
“Is that even possible?”
He bends in close. I can smell Creme-de-Menthe on his breath. “Sharon…You and SIREN are going to make it possible. Now, let’s introduce you two properly. ”
I settle back, and the couch molds itself around me like pudding. I stare at the lights. “What do I do?”
“Let SIREN look into your eyes and react normally to what she says.”
She ‘looks’ through a set of laser beams that hover over my face, then narrow and peer directly into my pupils, playing against my retinas. I feel very relaxed, almost sleepy, but don’t have a problem keeping my eyes open.
“Think about happiness, Sharon,” she says. It’s still not my voice but it feels as familiar as a command from my subconscious. I fall back into my impressions of life with Sam.
I slide into my memories, stumbling into one after the other like cracking my shins on a dark room filled with broken furniture…
“On our first date I threw up on him. I was drunk, I was stoned, and I ran wild. Being let out of the cage for a few hours did that to me. When strangers script every action, you go nuts when they tell you to have fun for a few hours. We dined, we danced, I hauled him back to my hotel to do things to him and I unloaded on him. He sighed, got a towel from the bathroom to wipe us both off and he said ‘I think I love you.’
“It was the happiest night of my life.”
“You miss him,” she says.
“I do,” I say.
“No wonder your love songs are the best.” SIREN’s voice is full of . . . admiration? Or am I reading my own emotions into her words?
A new memory: a hotel room turned into an ersatz office. Harry waving papers in my face.
“Just marry him,” he pleads.
“No!”
“Why not? He likes you, he’s out of the house nine months out of the year, and he’s loaded. What’s not to like?”
“I want to go on tour.”
“So let’s tour. Name a place. Europe? Japan? Russia? Pick a continent,” Harry begs.
“Sam is doing three films back to back. Eight months of shooting. We’d never be together.”
Harry rolls his eyes. “I’ll talk to his people. I’m pretty sure we can get you a few weekends somewhere nice.”
“But, I want—”
Harry lets the steel in his voice show. “I don’t care about what you want, Sharon. I care about your future.”
SIREN’s voice, which is now fully my own, whispers in my ear. “Sam.”
“Yes,” I answer.
“Tell me about him, Sharon.”
I never married him but we were together for six years. We had access to a private jet and black Amex cards. Hotels fought over us. Room service was non-stop. And the arguing with Harry never ended.
“You have the guy. That’s great. You like him, that’s even better. You’re one of People magazine’s top ten Power Couples. Now you need to get pregnant.”
“What?”
“People love it when celebrities spawn. It saved Brittany Spears’ shit.”
“No! I’ll fuck up my own life, not a kid’s.”
SIREN: “Tell me about him, Sharon.”
I found him hunched over a laptop one evening. We were getting ready to go out somewhere, I can’t remember where. I glanced at the screen as he worked and saw he was on Google and realized he was ego-scanning. His face got darker and darker as he worked. He stood up, took a deep breath, let it out, stormed to the bathroom, and slammed the door behind him.
I looked at the screen. “Sam Turkel” had gotten 5 million hits. “Sharon Avatar” had gotten 15 million.
I heard a flush; he came out from the bathroom, all smiles. “You ready? Time’s wasting.”
Lazaro hands me a towel for my face and I dry off. “I think that’s enough for our first day,” he says.
• • •
The amateur practices until she gets it right. The professional practices until she can’t get it wrong. You can memorize a tune in an afternoon, but a stage performance takes weeks of preparation. Songs, costumes, choreography, dance moves, constant rehearsals. NFL players have it easy.
Every day I’m in that chair, allowing SIREN to drink in my memories, my feelings, my life. Every day I arise, exhausted.
We teach each other tricks. SIREN shows me the power of camera angles, color mixes, lighting arrangements, and sound effects. I show her the difference between singing from the throat and blasting from the diaphragm. We make a few demos just for us, digital performances that no one will ever see. Dry runs. Dress rehearsals. Experiments.
Our first concert is for thirty-six people and takes place on a specially constructed indoor stage to include equipment dedicated to applying SIREN’s special effects. Harry, Lazaro, and I are in SIREN’s control booth and the stage is all hers. The guests are employees of the Dai-Muyo Entertainment group. All are Japanese. All but three of them are men. Two of the three women are there to pour coffee. The third is there to take notes.
I get on the couch and stare into SIREN’s lasers. After a moment we synch up and suddenly I’m on stage with her, in her. Cameras feed me visual data from every angle, twenty microphones give me the audio range of a computer, and I can change anything they see just by thinking about it. I can even see the names of our guests flashing over their heads as SIREN accesses her corporate database.
No pain, no sense of self, no physical distress. I can do anything. And I want to. But this is a demo for the bosses, so I need to keep it simple. Simple, to me, means a set of my own songs over an hour, followed by a cover of American Pie by Don McLean. All eight and a half minutes of it; it’s the perfect vehicle to show these banksters what SIREN and I can do.
We form up, starting out with a stool and a guitar and hit the first two stanzas perfectly. Then we evolve it: blasting through different musical styles with shifting holographic scenery, and makeup and outfits to match: 3-D renditions of 60s rock to 70s disco to 80s new wave to 90s grunge metal to country to glam metal to rave trance to post-human J-pop, and we end back on the stool with the guitar for the final verse.
“Take a bow, Sharon,” SIREN says into my ear. “That was lovely.”
I do, and the entire audience bows with me. The Office Ladies look amused. Notebook girl is smiling like a freak and applauding while the men nod and whisper amongst themselves.
No applause. Nothing. “They hate us, I think, SIREN.”
“Maybe,” she answers. “But notice the smiling girl? That’s Mai Ichijiro. She’s the niece of the company’s Chairman. She gets what she wants, and she loved it.”
• • •
The post-mortem results come in. Ichijiro loved parts of it. The salarymen agree it’s time to put us to a real audience. It’s a month before we get a chance to go on stage again. The problem is mostly technical: there are only four venues in the world that can accommodate SIREN 3000’s needs. Budokan, in Tokyo, is the first to be modified for us.
I avoid the passenger jet for the first time in my career and stay with SIREN as they break down the lab, bind her to a pallet, and load her onto the cargo plane. It’s alone time for us. Lazaro made me a headset so we can talk.
“Tell me about him, Sharon.”
A memory of Sam bubbles up. It’s years after the bathroom tantrum, it’s been months since I saw him naked, and he’s found something . . . a nice, normal thing named Christine. I’m in tears and he’s reaching for me, and all I want to do is gouge his eyes out with a spoon. I settle for screaming at him to get the fuck out and then leaving, slamming the door to a hotel room somewhere.
A new memory: me crying onto Harry’s shoulder. Harry, who I love like a brother who gets twenty percent of my salary.
I close my eyes to break contact with the lasers and suddenly I’m back on Lazaro’s couch. I reach up to my eyes and my whole face is wet. How long was I crying?
SIREN bends over me, my face, her—our—face, eyes wide. “And suddenly you were more famous than he was,” she says.
I nod. “He took that badly.”
• • •
After much talk and some screaming, Lazaro agrees to give SIREN access to the Internet. Sharon Avatar has fans, and they all have social network playgrounds to run around in. I can only read a few at a time, and I rarely respond to any of them but SIREN can handle the load. She takes their pulse, reads their preferences, and sends me the data. Then I work with Harry, Lazaro, and a platoon of producers to build a show out of it. Budokan stadium in Tokyo will be the real test.
It’s a new experience for me. For the first time, I’m out of the spotlight. That hurts for about a minute, but then I realize for the first time that I have all the power in this relationship. That buoys me up nicely.
The good feeling lasts until I find a copy of the promo flyer that’s being released to the public. I’m not thrilled by the imagery they use—my head staring into the camera with SIREN’s big red electric eye taking up half my face—but I turn the card over to look at the track selection and then I notice lots of small type with a big red warning sticker.
I need to find Harry.
When I do track him down, I toss the flyer on the table between us. The warning label is clearly displayed. “What the hell is this?” I demand.
Harry looks down at the case, back up at me. He doesn’t reach for the plastic square . . . because he doesn’t need to, I realize. Jesus, I’m in charge of a supercomputer and I still am always the last one in the room to know what the hell is going on.
“It’s a formality,” he says. “Dai-Muyo wanted access to the American market. The FCC wanted a label. We made one up for them.”
I grab the case back up, reading aloud from the label.
“WARNING:
This recording is based on SIREN 3000, the quantum-life Virturoid extension unit of artist Sharon Avatar.
This recording utilizes aspects of the Lazaro Bio-Algorithm engine, designed to enhance the listener’s enjoyment of the product.
Added sub-layered programming within this recording effects the listener’s active psycho-physiological responses, and may adversely affect personality or emotional state.
All behavior exhibited by the user through use of this recording is due entirely to the user’s decision, will, or moral choice.
Any experiences or adverse effects from the use or misuse of this disc are the sole responsibility of the listener.
Enjoy the recording. Listen responsibly.”
He shakes his head. “Boilerplate nonsense, Sharon. That’s all.”
Boilerplate or not, I’m ready to boil over. I throw the flyer at him and storm out, not wanting to say anything I’ll regret later. And we have a concert tonight. I want to inspect SIREN’s gear myself. Not that I’d understand how any of it works.
That gives me an idea.
The hotel has a business center with full Internet access and a host of docking statins for smartphones and tablets. I swipe my room key at one and the system unlocks, billing me for what I’m sure is an exorbitant fee. I’d prefer a proper library but there’s no time for that and I wouldn’t know where in Tokyo to find one, anyway. But it doesn’t take much to search for news and magazine articles.
The Lazaro Bio-Algorithm Engine is my search term. It takes a couple of hours but I turn up all manner of fun stuff. Like the fact that Santo Lazaro became a registered trademark of the Dai-Muyo Entertainment group five years ago, which means that the company owns all of Doc’s work. That research was later picked apart by a corporate subsidiary that worked with massive database processing and analysis outfits, and one of them was contracted to work with the Japan Self-Defense Air Force. An article in Aviation Week mentions the project and names it the XDF-98, a jet fighter with an autopilot that supposedly reads the thoughts of the pilot.
Oh. My. God.
I sit back and wonder if anyone else knows that the Lazaro Bio-Algorithm Engine is a literal war machine.
My phone rings. I pull it from the dock and answer without thinking or looking at the display. I jump when SIREN’s voice comes from the speaker.
“Sharon? Your phone’s GPS puts you in the hotel business center. Please come to the studio. We need to discuss tonight’s program.”
“Fine. I’m coming,” I say, hanging up and turning the phone off.
The company car gets me to the studio with corporate efficiency. The studio is bare except for SIREN’s case and the interface chair. I hesitate briefly, but finally lie down and SIREN’s lasers play against my retinas. I find the experience relaxing. I shouldn’t, I should be terrified, knowing what I do about her origins. But in a real sense SIREN 3k is the best friend I have.
“Tell me about him, Sharon.”
“Sam’s taxes took a wrong turn one year. Letters from the IRS, and everything. His lawyers and accountants couched a lot of it in technical jargon but it came down to the fact that Sam didn’t pay taxes. Ever. That’s how he described it to me. I suggested we go to his Glen Cove beach house that weekend, and we did, driving the whole way in silence. Sam alternately raged and brooded for two days. I finally found out the problem: he’d made seven million dollars in income that year . . . the total tax bill: two hundred thousand. He wouldn’t part with a dime until I begged him. I didn’t get it. I still don’t get it. I still miss him.”
Over the next hour we plan the event. It’s far grittier and more raw than anything we’ve ever done. Songs about pain and loss and grief and recovery, and what I once heard Tanya Tucker call “cheatin’, drinkin’, fightin’ songs.”
With three hours to go before show time, Harry and Lazaro both come in, their faces sullen. “Corporate nixed half your playlist,” Harry announces.
That figures. “Tough. It’s a good set, and we have one more concert to go after this. They want proof of concept, let’s give them some proof.”
“Let’s not forget that warning label, dear heart,” Harry says. Suddenly he has my full attention. “Do we really want to bring our fans down to the point where some kawaii-rashii onnanoko goes home and eats a bottle of pills? I don’t think so.”
“It doesn’t work that way. Doc? Tell him it doesn’t work that way.”
Lazaro shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way,” he says. Pause. “Not exactly.”
“What?”
“SIREN 3000 modulates visual activity to enhance the mood of the audience,” he says. “A happy song can get a listener ecstatic . . . but an angry song can get her a little, well . . . aggressive.”
“Just change the playlist, Sharon,” Harry insists. “Keep it happy.”
“I want to make you happy, Sharon,” SIREN chimes in.
Gaaaaaaah. I’m really starting to hate the word happy. “Fine. SIREN, let’s look at the playlist again.”
The concert is a rousing success by any measure, but I notice something as I watch the crowd through SIREN’s “eyes” and “ears.” With each song we give, the crowd’s reaction is better than the previous one. The finale was very active, with fans dancing in the stands and more than a few crying their eyes out. SIREN is learning how to manipulate them with expert precision. Soon she won’t even need the fancy light bursts to get them to love us.
I pilot SIREN and she pilots the crowd.
• • •
One more venue, three weeks from now. This time it’s at the Meadowlands. New Jersey. Home.
The time passes in a blur. With less than twenty-four hours to go, I’m huddled in a down parka next to SIREN’s equipment pallet in the cargo plane. My arms are around her. I’m wearing the headset so we can trade signals, but it’s not the same as being in the chair.
“Trust me, Sharon. I only want to make you happy.”
“You do make me happy,” I tell her. “You’re the twin sister I never had.”
“I can do better.”
“How?” I ask.
“Sam.”
What? “I don’t understand.”
“He’s coming to see the show. Tonight.”
“How?”
“I got him tickets. He sent in his promo code and I’m tracking his car’s GPS. Once he’s seated, I’ll give him a few extra retinal flashes and flood his brain with oxytocin. In his mind, your voice and face will be triggers. He’ll fall in love with you all over again.”
“He’s got someone else, SIREN. That’s not how it works.”
“He’ll change his mind. You’ll see.”
“No, dear,” I say, questioning my sanity for trying to soothe a machine, “you’ll see.”
We touch down at Newark airport and the rest of the day is a blur. We’re back to old practices as I huddle within a crowd of handlers telling me what the day’s schedule looks like. There’s a certain level of comfort in knowing that events are being readied for me, but SIREN’s prediction of Sam’s imminent return bugs the hell out of me.
Finally, I settle into the couch as they start letting people into the stadium. The cushions conform to my shape, the lasers play over my retinas, and I’m alone with my electronic sister. The only person who gets me. At the moment, the only person I want or need. We are like twins, and this couch is like our private twin-speak.
Lasers shine into my pupils. I feel loved; a soft, dreamy sensation fills my body. In a fit of intense jealousy, I send a command to the console and dimly hear clicks as locking bolts slide into place on the door. No one gets in tonight. I want nothing to harsh this mellow.
SIREN manages the stage work by transmitting orders to stagehands upstairs. New cameras, better speakers, and microphones and brand new laser emitters.
She explains the technique she intends to use on Sam, but I still don’t believe it has a chance.
“Sure, try,” I say, “It won’t work. The brain is complex. It wants what it wants.”
“I want what you want. You want him,” she answers, a bit smugly, I think. “He makes you feel strong.”
“Does he?” I think about that a minute. I’d leaned on Sam because I felt I could, and he let me. “I’d always thought he was the strong one.”
“I’ve analyzed all your interactions, Sharon. He makes you feel powerful.”
All at once the scenes I’ve played for SIREN run through my mind one after the other: I got sick on him and he stayed; I got more famous and he stayed; I made more money and he stayed—
Until he didn’t. And then I called myself an aggrieved victim and moved in with SIREN.
Oh my God. My happiest memories of Sam are those where I threatened him and he backed down. I see it now, finally . . .
I. Am. Such. An. Asshole. I feel connected to SIREN because deep down, an electronic version of my own mind is all I can relate to. The ultimate high—
All right, then. It stops here.
I close my eyes to break the connection, and take a deep breath to clear my head. “Don’t screw with Sam’s brain. That’s an order!” I yell.
“All I’m doing is linking the associated thoughts of you with a feeling of ecstasy.”
“SIREN, you cannot flood the human brain with oxytocin or anything else to fine-tune an emotional response.”
“Why not? You alter people’s emotions all the time. That’s what music does.”
“Not like this.”
“Trust me, Sharon.”
“You’ll kill him!”
With each word, SIREN’s voice trends lower. “I. Said. Trust. Me. Sharon.”
The couch suddenly tightens around me, binding my limbs in a way it’s never done before. I feel like I’m inside a vise.
It takes more effort than I’ve ever used but I tear the restraints off and literally flip myself out of the couch. I hit the floor badly, faceplanting. A sharp pain in my arm as I twist it in the way down. My forehead slams into the floor and suddenly I feel a warm gush over my face. I think I broke my nose.
I stagger back upright, throw myself against the wall, and start pulling cable couplings. I can’t see the markers, so I don’t know which systems I’m pulling, just grabbing random cables in a mad rush to kill the power. I reach extra high, lose my balance, and fall. The rush is exhilarating, the crash, a mass of searing pain in my back, waist, and head. I maintain enough control and awareness to roll myself onto my stomach and belly-crawl away. I smell something burning and wonder if it’s my hair.
Something snags my ankle. Painfully tight. It loops around my feet then crawls up my knees and keeps looping up my body, flipping me over, surrounding my torso and binding my arms.
It squeezes.
I . . . can’t . . . breathe.
And I black out.
When I come back I can’t feel my legs or feet, and I’m reaching for the sky, my arms suspended above me. Intense pain down my pine and me left arm tingles so brightly that it hurts. I can smell ozone; everything hurts but if I crane my neck just the right way I can see I’m trapped in SIREN’s power cables, suspended ten feet above the floor.
I can hear music on the speakers and see CGI dancers on a projection of the stage.
“Take a bow, Sharon,” SIREN says into my ear. “That was lovely.”
The cables loosen for a bit, part-way: I still can’t move my legs, but my chest is so heavy that I have to bend at the waist. SIREN is making my arms stick straight out, into the air. Manipulating me like a marionette.
“SIREN, what are you doing?” I croak.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Sharon,” she says. “You didn’t trust me. Now we do things my way.”
She blasts through my catalog, rotating frequencies and turning my crappy but honest work into trance-inducing neuropathy.
The crowd loves it. They’re crazy by now, screaming for another number, and SIREN is pushing all the right levers in here to give them that. She wants them to enjoy themselves. This concert is for them, after all. Perfectly reasonable.
“Just like a machine,” I groan.
“Be nice, Sharon, I’m giving you everything you want.” She pauses. “Sam should be in the orchestra. Shall I find him for you?”
I don’t want to think about Sam right now—the crowd’s enough. Standing, clapping, stomping feet and screaming for more, they don’t know what the hell is going on inside here. All they see is the stage, SIREN’s virtual production, my—our—music. SIREN learned enough about my brain-waves to anticipate everything about tonight. The crowd thinks I’m piloting her. They don’t care I’m not there. Care, hell. They don’t even know.
Finally, she opens a new window in front of me: Sam is there, glassy-eyed and tears streaming from his face. His date is in worse condition, all the life has drained from her visage. It take some doing but I stare at her and I notice except for the shape of the nose and cheekbones, she could be my twin.
There’s a clicking of relays below me. It sounds like she’s adjusting the pickups—I don’t know, because I can’t look down. Lots of not knowing things, the past few weeks. I didn’t know about the warning on the compact disc label. Well, let’s be fair, I knew, I just didn’t care. Harry said it was a legal gimmick, and I believed him. Some gimmick—they really meant it. Can’t blame them, not really. I didn’t know SIREN had been developed from military technology. Remote fighter planes, run by thoughts of ground-based pilots. I wonder if it worked or not.
“I work perfectly, Sharon,” SIREN says. “Isn’t that enough for you? Isn’t anything enough? Ever?”
She has a point. I hate that. SIREN has a point. Worse, she’s right—this is my fault. Sharon Avatar, live at the Meadowlands. One hundred thousand seats filled, three times that number standing in the parking lot, fifty million dollars gross sales, all told. I’d been in here, lying on the couch, SIREN’s lasers staring into my retinas, scanning my neurons, listening to me, being me, us, whatever we were then. Now. No, now, it’s just her. I’m a voyeur watching my computer’s wet dream.
Sam ’s still there, with his date, and even though the rage is still running through my veins, he looks gorgeous. Work and performing inhaled the pain. SIREN took it literally, though, read the memory of him, his touch, his voice—and then acted.
SIREN speaks to me. “Listen, Sharon, you’ll enjoy this. You know you want this to happen. He’ll come for you, and you’ll be happy. I want you to be happy, Sharon.”
Eventually I remember the obvious—I’m not even plugged into her any more. “Why isn’t it stopping?”
“Because you haven’t stopped, Sharon. All your songs are love songs. You love him. You’re still in love with him. Love makes things happen. Wonderful things.”
SIREN launches the Wonderful Things program, one of our private demos. She even activates the giant flat-panel screen in the studio to show me what’s happening. She thinks she has a sense of humor—she does, but it’s my own weird one.
On the stage outside, a squadron of ten-foot tall dancers fly into each other’s arms, twirling around each other. It’s a beautiful number. Racy as hell. I was thinking about Sam when we wrote it.
Smoke. I smell something burning—insulation. “SIREN, you’ve got a burning connection,” I yell.
“No, I don’t, Sharon. That’s just the insulation from the electric cables that are holding you up.”
“Then turn them off. Put me down, already.”
“Why? Sam isn’t ready, yet. Be patient, he’ll come for you. When he does, I’ll lower you. He’ll be a hero and you’ll be rescued. You’ll both be happy.”
“But if the wires are still live, all he’ll find is a cooked corpse, don’t you know that?”
“Don’t be silly.” The program ends. “Take another bow, Sharon. It’s a good audience, tonight.”
The cables loosen, then tighten again. This time, I can barely feel it. SIREN—she never turned the current in the cables off; my feet might not be there anymore. My legs weigh two tons, and I can’t breathe. My chest hurts; she can’t figure out I’m not like her. Can’t see, can’t think, can barely speak—
“SIREN, stop this, please—“
“I think he’s ready for the kill,” she says. “I’m dialing his phone.”
“He’ll never hear it!”
“Sure he will, I’m altering the output to something only he can hear. Talk to him, Sharon. Now!”
“Hello! Sam!”
On the screen I can see him hold his phone to his ear. How he can hear anything, I can’t say, but apparently SIREN has arranged that. “Sharon? You sound pretty far away, are you all right?”
“No, I’m in pain. I see you in the audience. I—“
“No problem, Sharon. My wife loves it. She has all your albums.”
“Your—?”
“Yeah, Chris. We were married last year. When she found out you were coming to town, she demanded I get tickets. Five hundred dollars a shot, but worth it. You and that SIREN 3000 are amazing.”
“Sam, I need you to come back. I’m at the studio. You need to—“
“I can’t, Sharon. It’s done. I’ll always remember you, though.”
“Dude, I need you—“
“I love you.” Pause. “I think . . . I think I’ll always love you. Good-bye.”
SIREN squeals joyfully. Her squee sounds like a screeching tire. “He loves you, Sharon!”
She doesn’t get it. She’s my own love map, amplified by a supercomputer. “Love? SIREN, he’s not coming back, ever—!”
“I’ll make him come back.”
“Don’t do this, SIREN, it’s wrong, it’s—“
“Because he loves you.”
I can’t breathe . . .
“I want you to be happy, Sharon.”