BOX, SET

Jez Patterson

The wall behind him trembled as the band next door launched into Rock Around The Clock. They called them tribute acts, but tribute was what Mafia dons and dictators got in payment and the artists being copied would be lucky to get a few dollars, if anything.

“How do you like to be addressed?” the journalist asked.

“‘Duke’ will be just fine.” He saw she wanted to say it, so he interrupted: “I know John Wayne used the same moniker, but then so do half the British royal family.”

She smiled at that. Singers sang the same lyrics over and over, and interviews were just more lines to be sung. Same question-and-answer game you played with every audience.

Duke heard his body pop, creak, as it cooled and contracted. The lights had been hot out on stage. His circuits were overheated and he needed an external fan to cool them, but the noise would have distracted Monifa from hearing his answers.

“Thanks for taking the time to talk to me,” Monifa said. “I know you don’t need to.”

“You’re welcome.” Actually his contract stipulated he did have to do any interviews the promoters lined up. But she was right that, these days, he didn’t need to do any of this: play, sing, perform. But what else was he going to do?

“What drives you to keep touring?”

“I am what I am,” he said. “When I was built, they gave me both a name and a function: Duke Box. I was a fancier version of the disc-and-needle machines you got in bars because I actually looked like a singer with his guitar. People asked for their favorite song and I obliged. That’s still the same guitar I played back then.”

Duke thumbed over to his instrument, knew Monifa was looking at the dents, counting the three famous bullet holes in its body. It had been repaired several times—but then so had he. He only wore his old body parts for shows where the promoter insisted. Fortunately, most saw the battered guitar as romantic but the battered body was too obvious a political symbol.

“How did you get into writing your own songs?”

“I saw patterns in the songs I was playing. You know how lots of songs of a particular type all sound the same?”

“Like the stuff they play today?” she said. “All beat, no soul. Like someone’s recorded a train running over cutlery.” She imitated an insistent, thumping bass and snare. Then, because music these days was all written by robots, her face contorted and Duke saw an apology rise.

“They’re just doing what I did: identifying how the song fits together and replicating it.”

“Where did you get inspiration for your lyrics?”

“Again, listening to the songs I already played. My dictionary is quite extensive and once I search by phonetics, it becomes a rhyming dictionary. Some couplets didn’t work, of course, or had unfortunate meanings.”

His lips weren’t equipped to smile so he had to yuk out a laugh to show he knew about those who collected his more cringe- or hilarity-inducing lyrics. Djuke’s Djarring Djingles, was one online site.

“The newer robot composers have better software. I’m happy to leave the poetry up to them.”

“Did you have any favorite human singers?”

“Yes. Of course.”

He thought she’d ask him then, inevitably, about the crash. About the day the music died and what he remembered of that evening. She would, because they all did. But, for the moment, she side-tracked to an equally well-trodden portion of his story.

“Which is your favorite song?”

“I’m not really equipped to have favorites. But the fans always like You Won’t Break Me.”

She grinned, leaning forward, rocking, nodding. He knew she wanted it and so he delivered. Performed.

“You were the one to make me

“Now don’t you, please, forsake me

“You were the one to wake me

“But you won’t be the one to break me.”

She applauded, delighted, and he forced out that laugh again. Never missing a note, a beat, or the responses that the repetitive nature of these encounters had worn into his memory disc.

He didn’t tell her the song hadn’t been meant as a plea for equal rights, for freeing robots from the bondage of ownership. It had just been words that rhymed, sung in a gush of emotive tones so they sounded like they described a relationship in trouble. The stock theme of half the rock songs at that time—the other half bragging about a successful coupling.

Bake me, rake me, take me…his memory bank sang through the rhymes he’d rejected for the chorus, simply because they either didn’t make sense or, in the case of ‘take me,’ wouldn’t have passed a fifties’ era censor.

“I’ve heard that song sung so many times. How does it make you feel to know you’ve written something that means so much to so many people?”

“Proud,” he lied, because he was a robot. Hubris wasn’t in there. “I’m glad if any of my songs bring pleasure to people.”

“It’s an anthem,” she enthused and Duke nodded, as if he hadn’t heard this before.

When people had marched, when they’d gathered, when funerals had taken place, You Won’t Break Me inevitably got sung—and more often than not, he had been the one to walk onto the stage and sing it. When one such gathering had brought out a local police force that had panicked and pulled their guns, he’d acquired the first of his bullet holes.

The beating that had almost killed him had come at another time, when he’d been on his own, and when he’d done something to deserve it.

“How do you feel now, seeing robots free to live how they want, pursue their own dreams?”

“Happy,” he said. Another lie.

“There’s still a long way to go though.”

“There always is. But robots aren’t alone in that. Life’s a journey, not a destination. Not one of my lines, I should add.” Yuk.

“But you’ve seen so much change. How was it? Back then, I mean?”

He changed tones, to what he thought of as his ‘serious’ setting. “People were always going to be suspicious. Robot technology came, in part, from experiments the Nazis had been doing. There’s no surprise in that—so did a lot of NASA’s rocket technology. Unfortunately, the robots that were subsequently produced were destined for military service rather than space flight.”

“They were used in space flight, too,” she said quickly. “I mean, during the experimental stages, when things could go wrong—when a pilot could die. When it came to setting foot on the Moon, that was when they sent a man. Couldn’t let a robot foot step out onto the Moon first!”

She was panting, indignant on his behalf.

“I felt sorry for the cats and dogs,” Duke said, as softly as possible. Robots were always rumored to have an affiliation with cats and dogs and other fluffy, cuddly pets. He’d seen the same kind of pictures done with gorillas. There was no truth to it. The hippy fantasy had come about when some sixties photographer had photographed a kitten held by metal fingers and the image had appealed and stuck.

“You weren’t given a choice about being soldiers. People should understand that.”

“We were property back then. Even I started out as property.” He saw the crease of pained sympathy on her features, but it hadn’t been his intention to draw that from her, just to state a fact. “Those early robots were put into combat. Korea, mainly, though the British and French used them in their empires too. Vietnam became the turning point.”

“The Gun That Refused To Shoot is one of my favorite films,” she told him.

“It was an honor to have them use my music.” Even if they had contrived it to fit the scenes by playing verses out of context. She was waiting for him to play something again, but he couldn’t decide which excerpt fit the moment and so left his guitar where it stood.

“There’s still some way to go,” she said again. “Even now that robots are free, there are still those that refer to them in derogatory ways.”

Tinheads, Clangers, Bobs, Towbars…

“It’s not the words you sing, it’s how you sing them,” he said, a line she liked enough to write down, even though she was recording all this.

“What do you think about Thrash Metal?” she asked, nervous for his non-existent feelings.

“Music has always been a powerful form of self-expression, for both good and bad. I’ve seen robots ‘thrashed,’ as they like to say in their lyrics. Only those of us from the fifties are really ‘metal’ anymore. Those kinds of bands are small in number and there have always been artists that like to shock.”

“They don’t even write their own music,” Monifa said. “That’s the irony. They take robot music and add their own lyrics! It’s so sad, it’s pathetic.”

She was getting hot and Duke felt like offering her his circuit-cooling fan, as if humans could burn out too. They couldn’t. When humans got hot about something, they just got hotter and hotter, burning up inside until they didn’t melt, but breathed fire.

Fire.

“I was going to ask you about your favorite singers…”

“I’ve shared the bill with most of the great rock’n’rollers,” he said. “Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis.” He paused, switched from feigned enthusiasm back to serious, winding down to the low tones of solemn. “And Buddy, of course. Buddy Holly was the best.”

“Yes…” Her eyes filled with moisture.

“They say the music died that day,” Duke said, quoting lines he’d repeated so often he could have had them engraved on his breastplate. “Not just Buddy, but Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in that crash. Music didn’t die, though, because they gave us something that will live forever. But music did take a break, and the stage was empty for the longest interval I can recall.”

“What…what do you remember of that day?” She asked it gently, they all did, partly to spare feelings he didn’t have and partly because they hoped to draw out something new, that no one—not the inquest investigators back then, not those who had researched the story since—had managed to find.

“I remember everything up to the plane taking off,” he said. “We were all on the same Winter Dance Party Tour. Twenty-four cities in the Midwest at a time of year most people are putting their hands to a log fire, stamping their feet to keep the circulation going. I was okay, most of the time, but even machines can freeze up. The distance between cities was a problem, but promoters always had a tendency to accept the booking before they thought about the artists’ travel arrangements.

“It was all by bus back then, and not the luxury ones you see on the roads these days. Some people had the flu, Buddy’s drummer even came down with frostbite. We stopped off in Clear Lake on February Second for a break and discovered the promoters had offered us to a local ballroom. It wasn’t unusual, but Buddy and the others were near to a breaking point.

“Afterward, Buddy had the idea of hiring a plane to fly to the next venue and he, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie all claimed seats. They offered me a place, too, that being the kind of guys they were. When we took off, there was a light snow falling, but nothing much else.”

Duke paused then, gave a shoulder shrug he’d practiced over the years.

“My battery was running low. I didn’t have insulation pads back then, so I switched myself off. The next thing I knew, I was lying amongst the wreckage. The guys were all dead, thrown out of the plane when it crashed. I was tangled up in the wreckage, along with the pilot—fellow by the name of Richardson.

“That’s all I remember. Just a tragic accident.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

The story was confirmed by his memory camera. Back then, when robots were still property, so was anything they created—which was why he had never earned a cent from the songs he’d composed and recorded, nor from the concerts he’d played. What their eyes and ears saw and recorded as ‘memory’ belonged to his owner, to extract, play, watch, sell.

The footage was in the public domain these days: Duke walking with the musicians to the plane, settling into his seat, the guys laughing, Ritchie nervous and getting teased by Buddy and the Big Bopper. Then there was just darkness, lasting all the way to when Duke opened his eyes and began recording again: the sheriff’s people looking down at him in concern and disgust, depending where they had stood on the whole ‘robots-have-rights’ issue.

But as it always did when he was led by question or comment to remember that night, his own, inner mental-eye peered deeper, into where the removed scenes were kept. Had it been necessary to provide footage to fit the missing hours, his story would have come undone—but darkness because he was switched off was easy to both explain and to fill those minutes of missing time.

“I guess they had the ultimate black box on board…and it proved useless,” he said, because generating sympathy at such moments had proven useful in the past to deflect more probing questions. “I sang at their funerals. Heart-breaking.”

He was laying it on thick, and Monifa responded to each line the way he needed.

He heard Don McLean’s American Pie singing in his head: McLean cursing Satan for being up there on the stage and laughing about when the music died.

“You’ve never wanted an upgrade?” she asked.

“As I said: I am who I am. I’m too old, too set in my ways to trade in my metal body, or that guitar, or what I carry up here.” He tapped his head and it clanged, like the derogatory name said it would. He couldn’t afford to have anyone poking around up there. He carried the weight on his shoulders in more ways than one.

McLean had come close to the truth in his song, but only because he was in the business and had heard the rumors. There were other rumors out there about that flight: that the three guys had composed a song that had combined their talents, that one of them had brought a gun on board that had gone off accidentally, that one of the passengers or the pilot had been suffering suicidal tendencies.

“Well…thank you for your time,” Monifa said.

“You came to the concert?” he asked, thumbing at the wall, behind which another tribute act was now playing. She nodded. “Then thank you for yours.”

She liked the line, itched to write it down, but contented herself by checking her recording device.

After she had left, Duke picked up his guitar, tuned it, strummed it, but only because he knew no one would knock on the door, try to come in, whilst they heard him playing. It gave him time to let the hidden memories run.

They really were three good old boys—he hadn’t lied about that. And it really had been a tragedy. He wouldn’t have wanted them blamed, even though there were plenty that blamed him for the crash that day. The accusation generally got ignored, except by the most stubborn of conspiracy theorists—the same that held that only a robot could have made the shot that killed Kennedy.

The four of them strapped in, Buddy chattering nervously, Ritchie and the Big Bopper silent, solemn now, the plane taking off and climbing.

“We have to,” Buddy said. His glasses misted, and not from the cold. “We agreed. If not…if not, where will we all be? It’s just him at the moment…but if we don’t do something…” Buddy looked pained, his face creasing tighter. “I have a wife, a baby on the way. We’ve all got family to think about.”

They unclipped their seatbelts and came towards Duke, who sat there, not moving.

The plane wobbled as their combined weight shifted its balance.

“Is everything okay?” Duke heard his own voice from so long ago say, the recording as clear as it was the evening he’d spoken those words. The plane’s engine droning, two sweating, shining faces coming closer, and Ritchie behind them, pulling at the door.

“We can’t let the music die,” Buddy told Duke. “You Won’t Break Me? I damn well love that song, man. But we gotta eat and we gotta play.”

They undid Duke’s belt, put their hands down to pull him from the seat.

They hadn’t anticipated his weight. Duke hadn’t resisted them, though it must have seemed like that as they yanked and strained. His limbs were just locked for transport, wouldn’t bend unless he released the locks. Had they asked him to, he would have—he followed orders, and not just from his owners. He was a robot, there to perform as he was told.

It delayed the choreography of their plan—Ritchie getting the door open, the wind rushing in cold enough to make them all gasp; a scream in Buddy’s case because he hadn’t been expecting it. The scream, the wind, the sudden dip in pressure inside the plane.

The plane had turned nose-down, the screaming becoming louder, higher, the inevitable crescendo never reached because the whole symphony had ended with a dull thud.

Duke stopped strumming, the room vibrating, and it was a moment before he realized it was not coming from the band playing next door but the aftermath of his strumming. His whole body sang with the notes, as if he was being struck again: the faces that held the weapons all too familiar to him.

‘Familiar’ as in family. Not his, but of all those that blamed him.

He let his internal ringing dull to silence. Someone knocked at his door.

“Duke? It’s the final encore. The others are waiting for you.”

The imitation Elvis, Bill Hailey, Little Richard and, of course, Buddy, Ritchie and Bopper. Duke was the only authentic article among them now. Proving it wasn’t the music that died, just the musicians.

He would remember not to look the imitators’ way when their combined medley ran though his own contribution. He felt no emotion, but, if he had, it would have been guilt and not triumph he’d have felt when he sang it:

You won’t be the one to break me.