“Do you... Can you add more emotion to how you’re singing?” I asked her, once we’d finally nailed down the basic melody and pronunciation. “I know you can speak expressively, I’ve heard you do it. Can you try singing while imagining how the lyrics, like, feel? If you had feelings?”

Naya looked at the sheet music again, now gray and wrinkled from all my erasing. “I can try, but I think you should go to bed soon. It’s pretty late for you, isn’t it? Also, I think your Kittipet is going to damage my dermal covering if I keep you up any longer.”

She raised her leg, which Angie was clinging to with her plastic claws.

“Angie, stop that, she’s expensive,” I snapped.

“You need to sleep!” Angie meowed, retracting her claws. I noticed with relief Naya’s leg was free of claw marks. “And this is preventing you from going to sleep, which is preventing me from doing my job of keeping you on a healthy schedule.”

I rolled my eyes, but as I did that, I suddenly became aware of how tired I was. My eyes and back were aching from hours of work, and my throat was dry. When did I last get a drink of water? “God, fine. Naya, feel free to like... do whatever it is you do at night. I know you need processing time too.” 

“I should be good for another few hours,” she said, examining the lyric sheet. “How about I keep practicing in your soundproofed closet and then show you what I have in the morning?”

“Sounds good!” I gave her a weak thumbs-up and then marched dutifully into the bathroom to shower and get ready for bed.

When I came back out in my pajamas, Naya was quietly sounding out my lyrics to herself. She looked up when she heard me. “Dessie! I was wondering, are there any singers you wanted me to sound like? Or any movies, songs, TV shows that inspired how you want this song to feel?”

“Oh, um...” My primary inspiration was a childhood memory of going to the beach in winter with my parents and having my first existential crisis, but that wouldn’t help Naya much unless she could scan my brain directly and technology hasn’t advanced quite that far, yet. What did I like that was similar? “I guess Glitch Princess, since we’re opening for her? She doesn’t use a Syren, though, she sings her own stuff. Um, I really like Neil Crenshaw’s Syren songs, they perform as ‘Neil and Beth’ like a kind of double-act. Yuichiro, he uses a Japanese Syren he calls Hachiko, he does some really cool stuff with her... And Lorelei, of course. I’m sure you already know this, but all of her music is produced by a team of five musicians called The Five Fingers. My favorite of Lorelei’s producers is Pepperground. If you want to look up his solo work.”

“Of course. But I was hoping to expand my inspiration base beyond what ApolloCorp programmed me with,” Naya said. “Are there any movies you really liked growing up that have influenced you creatively?”

I thought about it. Thought about my song. “The Little Mermaid was the first story that ever made me cry,” I said eventually. “I watched every movie and cartoon version of it when I was like, six. Couldn’t get enough of it. Maybe that’ll help.”

She tilted her head to one side, then the other, then finally nodded. “Good night, Dessie.”

“Good night.”

I shut the door and tried to get some sleep.

The next morning, I opened the closet door to see Naya looking tired for the first time, her fake skin almost sagging under her eyes and around her mouth. “I need to –charge for –abit,” she said, her voice cutting out in places, “but then I'll show you what I got, okay?”

I nodded. Naya positioned herself in the rays of sunlight streaming through the window, solar panels unsheathed to maximize the amount of light. When she was low on battery, I learned, she sounded like when my wireless headphones ran out of juice. “I watched– someLit tle Mermaidmo –vies,” she said jerkily, the words spaced out wrong. “I think I learned a bit about you, Dessie.”

“Oh. Uh, thank you. That’s great,” I said, grabbing some clean-ish sweatpants off the chair next to my bed. “How long will it take you to charge, do you think?”

“Couple of hours.” She rolled her shoulders like an athlete warming up. I wondered if the solar cells were just on her arm, or if her entire surface was covered in solar panels.

Angie was batting her plastic claws against my ankles, her usual reminder for me to eat breakfast on days I didn’t have work to force me into a morning schedule. “Okay. I’ll eat breakfast and try messing with the instrumentals some more until you’re ready.” 

I scrambled some eggs with hot sauce and a lump of processed cheese and made a cup of coffee with the coffeemaker I bought off a kid at my college.

“Have you considered adding a vegetable?” Angie meowed.

I opened my fridge to demonstrate the lack of vegetables in it.

“There should be frozen peas in your freezer,” Angie continued, hopping up first on the counter and then on top of the fridge, as if I needed directions to my own freezer.

“I don’t even like peas, and these eggs are almost done anyway,” I muttered.

“Why do you have frozen peas if you don’t like them?”

“It’s a good ice pack!” I slid my vegetable-free eggs off my crusty frying pan and onto a clean plate.

“Have you considered adding grocery shopping to your list of tasks for your day off today?”

I glared at Angelica as I shoveled scrambled eggs into my mouth. She was right, my fridge was looking pretty miserable. Even the freezer was a little empty.

But I had a lot of work to do today first.

I finished breakfast and went to work on the instrumentals for the new track, plus figuring out the rest of my half-hour set. I stepped into my closet-studio, put my headphones on, and time disappeared. I ran through the same thirty-second chunk of sound over and over until the song had a shape and I could stretch it and mold it like dough. I mixed in clips from my other unfinished tunes, added a glass-breaking sound effect at the beat drop, pinched and pulled and added and took away until I had something that sounded like, felt like, art. Noisy but not too noisy, tech-y but not too tech-y. A beat you can hum along to. Something that’ll get the crowd going. I got it.

There was a knock on the door. “Dessie? I’m ready to sing for you.”

“And I have a new instrumental track for you.” I hit play on the demo. 

Naya listened to the end once, then hit play again, opened her mouth– she didn’t need to take a breath, but Syrens could simulate breathing for effect– and began to sing.

I understood, then, why Syrens were named after the mythological creatures who lured sailors to their deaths with their songs. Over my gritty instrumental, Naya’s voice sounded angelic, high and round and full. Like that chick from Evanescence or whatever it was called. The distant and emotionless quality she’d had last night had disappeared, and I could hear real pain in her voice. A yearning to connect.

“Incredible,” I said a moment after she’d finished. “Let’s set up the mics so I can record you singing this.”

My closet-studio was the best I could manage, but it was far from a professional-quality audio recording studio. Still, I miked Naya up, put the instrumental track in the headphones, and hit record.

She performed it just as perfectly the second time. Of course she did. Robots have no room for human error.

I was thinking about adding a few effects to her vocals in some places, but her part of the work was done. “Good job. And thank you for your hard work.”

“So you liked it?”

“Of course I did.” A thought occurred to me then. “Did you like it?” 

Naya was silent for a moment. “What if I went with more power on the bridge? I think that could be cool.”

“Oh. Sure. I guess we should do a few takes, then.” So we ran through it again from the bridge, then I cut the two takes together and played it with the instrumental.

It sounded pretty good to me.

“Do you think it’s overpowering the instrumentals now?” Naya asked.

“I think it’s fine,” I said.

“But don’t you want it to be amazing?” Naya blinked her huge artificial eyes at me. “Not just fine?”

The directness of her stare was uncomfortable. “Do you want to do another take?” I asked.

“I can do a hundred more takes,” she said. “Do you want me to do more takes?”

I shrugged. I did want the song to be amazing, and knock the socks off of not just all her fans but Glitch Princess herself, but part of me also felt there were limits to how amazing I could make my very first Syren song. That I’d hit the wall already, and this was as good as this particular track would get.

But maybe Naya was right.

“Well, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, right? So if you’re ready to do a hundred takes… well, maybe let’s just do ten to start with, and can you do each of them a little different?”

“Different how?”

“Hm. Well, let’s do a take of that emotionless style you did yesterday, one that’s more heavy-metal growling, one that’s higher up in your range, one lower, one… can you do something breathy? Let’s try breathy. And um… I dunno, whatever you come up with.”

Naya tilted her head from side to side, then nodded.

And did each take exactly how I asked her to. 

“Now do one that sounds like you’re in the middle of a divorce,” I suggested, and she took the headphones off just to glare at me.

“Can you think of a take you’d want to do?” I asked instead. 

Naya shrugged. “Creativity is not one of my strong suits. ‘More power on the bridge’ is kind of the limit of my imaginative capabilities, if I’m being honest.”

“Well, you’ve given me a lot to work with now,” I said. “I think I’m gonna spend the rest of the day editing this song together.”

“And then?”

“Then I’m going to put together the full set. You can… I dunno, think about how you’ll perform this on stage. I can give you more direction later, I have to figure this out first.”

“Okay…” She fidgeted. “Um, when you’re done with the music stuff, I was wondering…”

“What’s up?”

“Can we change my look sometime soon?”

“Oh!” I had completely forgotten about my plans to do that. Poor Naya had been stuck in the same skimpy default-Syren clothes since she arrived. She didn’t need to change clothes every day since she didn’t sweat or anything, but it must feel uncomfortable all the same. “Yeah, absolutely! What were you thinking of doing?”

Naya opened the closet door to reveal the late afternoon light spilling through my windows. How long had we been working? “I don’t know, just something… different. Don’t wanna be a default Syren for too long, you know?”

“I’ll see what I can do about clothes,” I said, thinking of the piece I had already squirreled away. “Anything in particular you want regarding hair and makeup?” I could buy Syren-specific hair pieces and face paint online, but it would take a few days to get them in. The fastest makeover option would be to just hack off some of Naya’s plastic purple locks, like I was a four-year-old and she was one of my dolls. Maybe we could do some kind of Y2K-inspired look? Short bangs, bob that flipped up at the ends? Like a Eurobeat girl...

“Just something different,” she said again. 

She stepped out of the closet-studio and positioned herself in the window once more, unsnapping the dermal coverings on her arms to recharge. “Will there be a lot of people at this gig?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Glitch Princess is pretty big in this area.” Seeing the cityscape seemed to bring me back out of the world of music and into the world of more material needs. When was the last time I had a drink of water? Or went to the bathroom? Judging by my robot cat’s expression of disapproval, not recently enough.

“Please try to buy groceries before the store closes, meow,” Angie told me from where she was lying on my unmade bed. Say what you will about Kittipets, at least they didn’t leave cat hair all over the place.

“And when will the store close, Angelica?” I asked her. 

She sat up straight and recited, “The QuickMart 0.3 miles away closes at 11 pm, but the FreshFoods 0.5 miles in the opposite direction closes at 7:30 and they have a wider selection of fruits and vegetables. I have prepared a suggested shopping list for you based on your last five grocery store receipts and your dietary needs.”

“Ugh, fiiiiiiiine.” I got paid next week, but she was not wrong about the miserable contents of my fridge today. I needed to get something for dinner at the very least.

I turned to Naya. “You wanna go grocery shopping with me? It helps to do it with someone else to keep me on track.” Non-sentient Syrens didn’t normally accompany their producers to the grocery store, but she could probably pass as a Cupid to the casual observer. “And it might be fun for you too. You could borrow my hoodie if you want to cover up. Although it’ll probably be too big for you...”

“I think I’d rather... stay in,” Naya said, still looking as uncomfortable as her artificial facial muscles allowed. “I can practice singing while moving around. Maybe learn some dances.”

“I guess that makes sense.” I felt a strange pang of disappointment at the rejection. Which was silly. Like I actually thought I was going to be friends with the singing robot I bought online. “The performances at the annual ApolloCorp Expo are really good, but I think the less-huge Robo-Ball has more interesting and experimental stuff usually so if you can find any video of the recent ones I’d recommend watching them.”

“Got it.” She nodded once, then looked out into the middle distance like she was zoning out. I guess that meant she was watching the videos in her head somehow.

Angelica smacked my ankles again and I gave in, grabbing my reusable shopping bags and heading out to the FreshFoods. I took the stairs down and put a recent album from one of the big Japanese Syren producers on shuffle. He did a lot of interesting stuff with sound effects like clicking, bottles opening and ambient cafe sounds. Maybe I could incorporate more of that into the song I was working on with Naya.

As much as I hated to admit it, the Kittipet was probably the best present my mother had ever given me, besides piano lessons when I was a kid. But part of me kept comparing the two robots hanging out in my house. Angelica wasn’t fully sentient. Though she had a bit of a personality and some ability to reason independently, everything she “thought” about revolved around two things: convincingly imitating a pet cat, and supporting me as a kind of feline executive function coach. 

Naya was supposed to be similar, but she turned out to be capable of a lot more independence than I’d bargained for when I ordered a Syren online. I thought about our first meeting again. Why did she call me a “cutie”? Did she mean it? Did her programming instruct her to flirt with her owner? What was up with that? 

“Aaaa,” I whisper-screamed into my reusable shopping bag, earning me a weird look from a passerby.

I wished I’d had someone to talk to about it, but she seemed to imply she was one of a kind. An experimental model, as she’d said. I doubted anyone in the Syren SuperBoards knew anything about what I was going through with Naya now.