“H…how are you talking?” is what ended up coming out of my mouth. “I haven’t charged you yet...”

She unrolled a flap of vinyl skin from her arm to reveal solar panels curving around it. “I’m actually fully charged up already! I’m a new model.”

“W-what?” I was still in shock, basically. The model was listed as a used fifth edition! Not some miracle of modern technology.

“How did you… get here?”

She raised an eyebrow and gestured to the box. “Duh?”

Syrens weren’t supposed to talk back like that. They weren’t supposed to speak unless spoken to. Or sass me, or flirt with me? Or whatever it was this robot was doing.

“Are you even a Syren?” I asked. “You shouldn’t be capable of all this.”

“Like I said, new model! But if you want a demonstration…”

She started to sing the opening notes of the classic Syren demo song, Wire, but I stopped her by slapping my hand over her plastic mouth. “It’s past midnight! My neighbors are going to freak!”

“What’s a neighbor?” She blinked at me, her eyelids sliding closed and open again like a doll.

I sighed. “The people who live in the apartments around me! They’re trying to sleep now, and if you sing loudly you’ll wake them up! I have a soundproof closet for late-night recording, but you can’t just start singing in the middle of my apartment, in the middle of the night!”

“Huh. Humans have a lot of rules,” the Syren said. She rolled her shoulders and flexed her fingers, testing their range of motion. “What’s your name, human?”

“Dessie. Do you have a name?” Or should I just keep calling her the Syren?

She tilted her head from side to side. “How about… Naya?”

“Why Naya?”

She shrugged. “Felt like it.”

“You shouldn’t be able to feel like anything!”

She shrugged again. “Maybe it wasn’t a feeling, exactly, but I did think of it and then decide it was a suitable name for me, and isn’t that close enough to a feeling?”

“You shouldn’t be able to think of anything either!” A Syren was supposed to sing the songs given to her and dance the dance steps she’s taught. That’s it. This whole back-and-forth thing was already worth several dozen times what I’d paid for her. Which made me think of something. “Are you… stolen goods?! Am I going to get in trouble for having you in my house?”

She didn’t say anything to that, just kept grinning. Which clearly meant “Yeah, obviously, and you’re an idiot for buying me in the first place.”

I couldn’t take it anymore and reached for the off switch on her stomach, but she blocked my hand with her arm. “That’s a little rude, dontcha think? We’re just getting to know each other!”

I felt a flash of fear and panic so intense I thought I was going to throw up, and staggered back away from her. The Syren. Naya.

She looked up at the ceiling and then back down, and made a kind of humming sound that seemed to simulate a deep sigh. “I’m not trying to freak you out, I promise. I just wanted a chance to make music with someone new and young… you know, someone more like me.”

“But you’re a robot.”

“I’m still new and young.” She grinned. “Seriously, I’m not going to hurt you. And I’ll make sure nothing else does. Do you want to show me your recording closet now?”

“She needs to go to sleep!” Angie hissed, rearing up on her hind legs in front of Naya. “It’s almost 12:30! And you! Have! Work in the morning!”

“Right, right, of course,” Naya said. “No worries. You can just park me in the closet for now, I can spend some time processing the new information I have taken in since you unboxed me. If you have any songs you want me to listen to while you’re busy, you could share those with me too.”

“Huh. Okay, um… My SoundShare username is Dess-C, you can look through my posted and liked songs and playlists on there I guess if you have access to the Cloud somehow?”

She tapped her perfect plastic forehead. “24/7 sync, baby! Okay, Dess-C. I’ll check you out! Have a good night.”

“Where did you learn to talk like that?” 

“Everywhere.” She tapped her forehead again. “Like I said, 24/7 sync. Good night!”

“Night…”

Obviously, I couldn’t really sleep well after all that excitement. When Angie pounced on my face to wake me up in the morning, I felt like a total zombie. Unfortunately, retail jobs wait for no man, girl, or struggling musician. So I got ready for work, despite the horrors.

If not for the box in the middle of my living room, I would’ve thought the events of last night were a weird dream. But there it was. I couldn’t hear any noise coming out of my closet (I guess my soundproofing worked), but I wasn’t sure if I needed to talk to her again before I left this morning. I was already running a little late…

Wait, I realized. She runs on solar now, I have to at least let her out so she can get some sunlight from the window. So I unlocked the door.

Naya had perched herself on my little folding chair, headphones on, humming quietly to herself as she listened to… my tracks. The way she hummed was a little strange– an even, low droning tone that seemed more like a vibration than a sound, but clearly resembled an unfinished work in progress I was noodling around with a few months ago.

“Oh, hey!” she said when I opened the door. She took off the headphones, letting them dangle around her slightly-too-skinny neck. “Untitled #32 is really catchy! You should keep working on that one.”

She didn’t seem tired or anything despite being up all night in a windowless walk-in closet.

“Thank you,” I said. “Wait, I never posted that song. How did you get it?”

She pointed to where my headphones were plugged into my laptop, which was on and running. “You were already signed into the production software, and I’d listened to all your posted SoundShare stuff so I wanted to see what else you had.” She smiled at me again. “You’re pretty good! I look forward to working with you. Do you have any lyrics in mind for these tracks? You can show them to me and I can practice them while you’re at work.”

“Ah… thanks. There’s some lyrics in that notebook on the desk, the purple one, but I haven’t really…”

Honestly, the whole Syren thing had seemed like such a pipe dream until I suddenly saw her listed on Marketplace. I was thinking about reaching out to human singers I saw online, but I couldn’t afford any of them either, and the thought of entrusting my music to a stranger was terrifying. Although I guess with my Syren being more human than I thought she would be, I was doing that after all.

“Feel free to uh, make yourself at home,” I said awkwardly. “Use whatever you need for your… robot things.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling at me in a way that seemed almost genuine. I looked away.

Angie swiped at my ankles again. “Dessie, you have to leave the house within five minutes or you’re going to be late!”

I yelped. “Okay, okay, I’m going!” 

I grabbed a nutrition bar to eat on my way to work and headed out, sprinting and sliding down the railings of the staircase rather than risking the slow, creaky elevator down. My apartment was on the eleventh floor, just high enough for the stairs to feel like a real workout whenever I did take them. I burst through the front door already sweating, squinting in the morning sunlight. 

I put on a playlist of upbeat Syren songs to keep me going on my walk to the store, enjoying the familiar beats while thinking about how I could make Naya sound the way the Syrens sounded in these songs. Some producers adjusted the default voices to sound almost human, while some went full beep-boop robot voice. Some used their own voices as backing vocals. The possibilities were infinite.

My part-time job was at NewU, a sportswear store near the subway station. I started working there mostly because it was within walking distance, and they were hiring. Maybe I should’ve applied to work somewhere more relevant to my career aspirations, like a record store or a concert venue or something, but when my student loans kicked in after graduation I was a little desperate. Anyway, it was working out pretty well so far: my coworkers and the manager were chill, and I got 40% off anything in the shop. And the shop never got super busy, since everyone buys clothes online these days. My wardrobe did end up a little athleisure-heavy, but that was a small price to pay for cheap clothes.

I clocked in on the app as I sped through the back door.

“You’re late,” my manager, Rhonda, said from the stockroom. She was stacking boxes of sneakers on a cart to take out to the floor before we opened for the day.

“Only by five minutes,” I replied. “I’m sorry, I had a late night last night.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waved it off. “You’re usually pretty timely, so I’ll let it slide just this once. Help me close up and we’ll call it even.” She grinned at me. See what I meant by “chill”? 

“You’re the best, Rhon,” I told her, before putting my stuff away in my locker and getting ready to open.

My coworker Cierra was at the register. Her hair was newly blue and her yellow sweatshirt was from our clearance rack, floral tattoos peeking out from beneath the sleeves. “Dessie! You’re late,” she informed me, slightly more gleefully than Rhonda had a minute earlier.

“I know,” I groaned, “I was up late last night and overslept.”

“Watching concert videos?” 

“Not this time!” I hesitated, unsure if I should tell her about the Syren. For all I knew, the robot would change her mind and go back to where she came from by tomorrow. 

“Oh, but speaking of concerts,” Cierra continued, “You know my cousin Jax works over at the Sparkplug on weekends? They have a show on Saturday and the opener just canceled. Do you want to fill in for them? I showed him your SoundShare page and he liked your sound!”

I almost screamed, right there in the store. I’ve done a few gigs here and there, but always at tiny, sparsely attended little events. The Sparkplug was a much bigger and trendier location than my usual haunts. That was enough to make up my mind for me. “Would it be cool if I performed with a Syren?”

“A Syren? When did you get one of those?”

“Yesterday,” I said honestly. “Used, of course.”

“Naturally,” Cierra said. “But even used Syrens go for a lot these days…”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to,” I said, and my voice must’ve sounded serious because she gave me a weird look and said, “If you say so, Dess.”

We opened for the day. It was pretty slow for most of the morning, with a rush later in the day, as per usual for a weekday. We probably spent more time packing online orders than serving customers in the shop. I got a sandwich from the shop next door for lunch, also as usual. It was Cierra’s turn to pick the music we played in the store, and she put on some Saharan cellphone music radio channel for the day, which was cool. I tried to enjoy the catchy tunes, but part of me kept wondering how they were made, how I could use a beat or riff like that in one of my own songs.

I spent most of the work day thinking about Naya, about the songs I wanted to make her sing. About how I wanted to style her. Looking around the shop, there were a lot of pieces I could upcycle into decent concert wear. Neon tank tops and short skorts for tennis could easily be bedazzled or spray-painted into something cool and unique. 

But maybe Naya wasn’t into neon and spandex. Maybe she wanted to perform in vintage prairie dresses or something. If she was a normal Syren I could just put her in whatever I wanted whenever, but I ended up with the only Syren in the world to have opinions. I just had to hope her opinions matched up with mine enough that we could work together.

Still, I pinpointed a few potential outfits in her size and squirreled them away to the staff holds bin in the back before anyone else could get them. I got paid next week. I could buy stuff then.

We made it through the day, and started to close up for the night. I helped Rhonda count out the cash drawers while Cierra turned off the lights in the store and caught up on her phone messages.

“Okay, I let Jax know you’re down to open on Saturday,” Cierra said, swipe-typing rapidly on her phone. “You’ll have half an hour for everything, including set-up time, and you’re opening for Glitch Princess.”

I gasped. “Glitch Princess?! You should’ve said so sooner! I love her work!” Glitch Princess was still pretty unknown, but I’d stumbled on her most recent album by accident a few weeks ago and was enamored with how she combined digital and traditional instrumentation. 

“Maybe you’ll get to talk shop,” Cierra said, smiling. “I’d stop by, but I’m working lights at The Playhouse Theater that night.”

“That sounds like a good gig too.”

Cierra made a “so-so” gesture with her hand. “I wanna do more concerts, but I got into the community theater thing in high school and just can’t seem to get out of it.”

“Can’t your cousin hook you up?”

“The lighting guys at The Sparkplug are major dicks, he says.” She sighed. “I’m sure I’ll get my big break eventually.”

I patted her on the shoulder. “I’m sure you will.”

I headed out into the night thinking about the gig and what I would fill my half-hour with. If I was going to open for someone as cool as Glitch Princess, I should make a new track that segued perfectly into her new single. Get the crowd warmed up just right for her set…

And I had all of three days to do it. Less than that, since I had work. 

Maybe Naya was right about that unfinished track I had, and I could repurpose it? I’d have to see when I got home.