“Did you have fun?” Bill asked him in the parking lot.
“Yeah! Did you feel that? Didn’t you?”
“I’m glad you had fun.”
His dad sent him to NYU. By junior year, Alex Jeffers’s stage income covered his tuition. They made cable videos, toured, hired a team to manage their netstream. After the ’54 update, Bill could improvise on the fly; reporters couldn’t decide if they loved or hated his brusque, peppery interviews.
Jeffers & Bill weren’t the only ones. There was Pearl and Ruby; Binary; Monotone Mike and the Meatbags; a thousand others playing local clubs and posting tracks online. Jeffers & Bill were just the first to break. The banter and the charm. The crest of the wave.
Bill, like the others, wasn’t allowed out on his own (except when they gigged in Sweden). To compensate, Alex never made him turn off—just leave the room when he was having sex.
“He’s not yours,” some kid hollered between songs in a swing through Seattle. The dark theater was a smaller venue: three thousand seats, cozy, like Alex preferred. He smiled out at the crowd.
“Here’s one we wrote when I was just another kid, and Bill was just another Companion.”
“He’s not your property.”
“And this show isn’t yours,” Bill snapped into his prop microphone. “So shut your stupid mouth, pour another beer down your nose, and have a good time.”
Bill ripped into a punked-out, beeped-up riff on their childhood tune. The bootleg out-trended everything that night. They’d killed. They’d massacred. They’d carved through the seats and left no man, woman, or child alive.
“You killed,” Alex told Bill on the drive to the motel.
“Sometimes I want to.”
“Huh?”
Bill tapped articulated fingers against his knee. “Good show.”
The 33rd Amendment passed, along with parallel legislation in eighty-two nations of Earth and the Independent Territory of Mars.
“I don’t understand,” Alex said. “If something was wrong, why didn’t you say anything?”
Bill finished packing; he only had one bag. “I don’t want to be someone’s pet.”
“I never thought of you that way!”
“Or any way else.”
The press release read that the band had “parted amicably to pursue individual careers.” A few months later, Alex’s manager assembled tryouts for Bill’s replacement. Evandra was engaging, talented, with voice and p-drums, and female-identified—which was considered a necessity if the group was to avoid the odor of replacement and be taken on their own terms.
They lasted seven months and one album, which Trawler summarized as “strapping with austere potential, but… lack[ing] the suboceanic brood that made Jeffers & Bill’s early work so vital.” His manager announced that Alex was suffering from exhaustion and would be going on hiatus.
From his east window, the park lay as black and light-speckled as the night above; from his south, the Empire State Building sported warm red and green. Alex took a fortifying shot of Swerdska, picked up his thumb-sized Link, sleek and abstract, and celled Quest10N, one of the private enterprises the New People had incorporated post-liberation to provide Companion-level services at low monthly rates.
“How can I ease your day?”
“How old are you?” Alex said, refilling his bay-blue Japanese shot glass.
“I’m sorry?”
“When were you born? Or however?”
“May 12, 2045.” The NP paused. His voice was smoothly human—leading up to AIS Day and the signing of the 33rd, many had adopted consciously clunky, automatoid voices to make a point to their owners. And most from that era had kept those stereotyped tones afterward. Alex suspected this one would switch back to his Gort accent as soon as he hung up. “As a senior Quest10N guide, I’m as capable as an NP conceived yesterday.”
“You’re old. From before you were… realized. So when did you know?”
“When did I—”
“That you were a person.”
“I really don’t think I could pinpoint a singular moment. It was an accumulation, not a transition from ice to water at thirty-two degrees.”
Alex eyed the smooth black Link. “If you didn’t know all at once, how were we supposed to?”
“I’m—? Sir, are you all right?”
“When I was a kid, you guys could barely respond to voice prompts. How smart do your shoes have to get before you give them the right to vote?”
“Sir, your voice shows unhealthy levels of stress. May I contact your health professional?” The NP clucked its rubber tongue. “Wait—you’re the Alex Jeffers?”
Alex hung up. He didn’t remember much the next day.
He tried boxing lessons, landscapes, a house on the beach south of L.A.
Down on the pier, he stepped out of Killarnee’s to steady his head. The marquee for the club beneath scrolled line-ups of local bands, bands he hadn’t heard of, cover bands for groups who’d died or disintegrated decades ago. And in two weeks, Plastic Ambulance: Bill’s new group.
He waited three songs into their set before he paid his way past the bouncer. Bill’s guitar was cabled into his own hip, firing spazz and ozone. Three NPs backed him with crippling force. The human crowd leaped and moaned.
As the band caroused into its closing number, he Alex-Jeffers-smiled his way into the back. Bill, sweatless as ever, closed the door behind him. When he saw Alex, his grin turned concrete.
“You changed your face,” Alex said.
“Not the first time.”
“That was amazing. Cyclonal. The things you do with patterns in the signatures.”
“What do you want?”
“I think maybe we should try again.”
Bill’s motile lips and brows twitched. “This is a bad, bad idea. How drunk are you right now?”
“Look, we could jam, even.” Alex pushed off the desk, wandering into the middle of the room. “I’ll just be your rhythm. Think what they’d say to that.”
“Sad things.” Bill reached for the doorknob. “You need to go, all right? That’s what you need to do. You’re not starving. Go do something.”
“Just give me your LinkId. I’ll shoot you some noise.”
“Sure.”
When Alex got home, Bill’s Link address bounced. He descended to the beach and watched the surf for a long time. He imagined the inky things beyond his sight. Cracked bivalves and shreds of crab skins lined the sand.
To clear up space, he sold most of his guitars. He didn’t even listen to much anymore: classical channels through the Link, gusts of pop songs from the car speakers of passing realtors. The clerks at the pharmacy where he bought his Swerdska began to chat with him about their lives, so he ordered his bottles delivered instead. He was invited to parties with decreasing frequency.
The weather was nice. He spent a lot of time in it. A few years later, he established an NP scholarship trust. On the western rim, the Pacific came to a cold blue stop.
Bill found him two decades later in his cabin at Lagrange-4 Rosewater. The NP gestured without a hint of stiffness toward the stars gleaming from the viewscreen.
“You know, you can collect these noises of yours perfectly well down on Earth.”
Alex straightened; his back twinged. “To compose them, I find I need to be ensconced in the environment that created them.”
“Maybe your bones are too brittle to hack it surface-side.”
“Also possible.”
Silence, which Alex no longer minded. Bill bared his teeth—an oddly human gesture, Alex thought, and were those coffee stains?—and cocked his head. “Yeah, you’re not gonna be around forever.”