I thanked my lucky stars I was a producer and not a guitarist, because I couldn’t imagine the stress of having to actually play a whole real instrument live. 

Just pushing a button and standing awkwardly behind my bulky computer setup was equally embarrassing to imagine. For my live performances I usually cut up each of the songs I was going to play into parts, and then used my music mixing tools to play each part and connect them to each other live, so they’d sound a little different from the versions I’d uploaded to SoundShare. 

I didn’t have a lot of extra room for improvisation this gig (especially since Naya wasn’t built for improvising herself), but if I wanted to make a song go longer or shorter than I’d originally written it to, I could. With practice, the two of us worked out a method that let me look like I was doing something at my machines without going off the rails too much. 

I pushed my little buttons and listened as my beats recreated themselves in the air around me. The lights felt like heat lamps over my head. I shrugged off the sleeves of my hoodie so I was standing there in a black tank top, just like any other sound tech. I could hear my songs, but also, the rustling of the crowd, like leaves in a windstorm. And underneath all of that, my heartbeat, syncing in time with my bassline.

Once I’ve set the clips for the first chorus, I glanced over to my right to see what Naya was doing. She was dancing behind the curtain, executing the moves just like we’d practiced. I think she took my advice about exaggerating the movements, because they were pretty clear in silhouette. I looked back into the dark crowd.

I couldn’t make out a single face, but I knew they were all looking right at me. It was all I could do not to hide behind my big black mixer table. I pushed my volume dial up and hoped that helped.

“Hey, can I get some more lights going?” I said into my mic. I felt like I needed to do something to liven things up. Without Naya there to look at, I wasn’t nearly entertaining enough.

He said something into a radio, and soon there was a beam of yellow light roving around the space, bouncing off the audience onto the walls and back to the stage. I felt a lot more relieved now that I could see everyone was actually getting pumped up to my tracks. 

“Thank you, thank you!” I said into the mic after the first song finished and the crowd spurted a polite amount of applause. “Once again, I’m Dessie, here with my Syren. We’re still working on her look, so she’ll be singing from here today—” I gestured to the curtain. “But her voice is still just as angelic as a Syren’s should be. Thank you so much to the Sparkplug and Glitch Princess for giving us this opportunity. Up next is After Rain, The Wet Leaves.” 

This one was a little bit slower and moodier, but it segued really nicely into Ocean, and I’d added some of Naya’s vocalizations to the end of it as a kind of teaser for the Syren song. I’d mixed in a lot of atmospheric sounds, rain and wind and crunching and splashing all weaving through the more conventional instrumental music to create a clear sensation. Listening to it calmed me, even though it was my own song. It was a song I’d kind of made for me first, and everyone else last.

Naya swayed slowly in place, and added her little “la-la-la”s to the end on the spot.

I wasn’t expecting wild applause for this one, but the crowd was louder when it finished than after my first number.

“Thank you,” I said. My heart pounded wildly in my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack or something. “Up next is a brand new, unreleased song featuring Naya: Ocean!”

For this song, I wasn’t doing any button-pushing. We wanted the focus to stay on Naya. I just hit play and swiveled to stare at the curtain, waiting for something to go wrong.

The stage lights switched to blue. The instrumental opening kicked in, the beats and melody I’d labored over for what felt like my entire life. Naya’s silhouette stood still.

My breath caught. She opened her mouth, tilted her head back, and began to sing. 

“I never wanted to be blue... Never wanted to find myself like this, cold and wet and drowned...”

She spun around, putting her arms out to either side. The song began with this kind of feeling of despair, before spiraling into anger, and then ending on an uplifting, determined note. I hoped all of that got through, at least.

“Turning me into seafoam... turning me into seafoam.... Turning me, turning me, turning, turning, t-t-t-t-t...” and bam! There was the beat drop. I felt my shoulders loosen. 

Syrens could recreate vocal glitching live, in a way most human singers were physically incapable of doing. They could recreate effects that for a human singer would only be possible after a lot of time spent fiddling with a computer, just with their voices. That was why I wanted to work with a Syren instead of a human singer.

Naya started moving more as the song got faster and livelier, swaying, moving her hips, shoulders, arms just like we’d practiced in my apartment. I still wouldn’t say she was the most expressive dancer I’d ever seen, but I felt more despair and anger in her posturing now than I did on our first run through.

“Now what, now what, now what?!” Her voice escalated into a shriek. The beat dropped again, and there went the chorus. I couldn’t really hear anyone singing along to it yet, but maybe in future shows. Maybe someday, people would know the words to my songs.

“Waves crashing against the hard shore of my heart, and I’m coming apart,” Naya sang. “Back into the ocean where I belong.”

It was working. I pushed up the volume on the drums behind her, dropped in a clip of staticky wave and water sound effects. I tried to feel for the energy of the crowd, but the lights blew the audience into a dark mass. It was working. It had to work. 

“The ocean leaves me salty wet and scraping sand out of my leather boots.” she stomped twice, raising her knees high before dropping her feet back to the ground. I thought it was a fun move when I suggested it, but seeing it through a curtain made it look a little too on the nose. We’d have to change that in a future show.

I glanced backstage to see if anyone was nodding along, but all I could see was Glitch Princess’s team getting ready to set up for their own show.

I felt awkward shouting into the crowd, so I just hoped Naya’s energy was enough to intrigue people. But even that was sure to be diminished, since she was hiding behind a curtain. What was with that? She was, very literally, made to be a pop star. 

She was supposed to be on stage. 

The lighting techs seemed to be helping me out, though, flashing blue-gelled lights onto the curtain to echo the ocean theme.

And then... it was over. The end of my all-too-short set.

“Thank you, everyone! Once again, I’m Dessie, my Syren’s Naya, you can find our songs on SoundShare and my socials at d-e-s-s-hyphen-capital-C!” I still hadn’t uploaded Ocean anywhere. I’d have to do that when I got home. 

The lights changed, and the techs helped me break down my equipment as fast as possible so Glitch Princess could start setting up her own stuff. I remembered to give her back the borrowed cable.

“Thank you so much, you’re a lifesaver,” I blurted out as I passed the cable back to her.

“Of course, of course,” she said, waving me off. “I liked your set! The Syren song was really good. I’ll have to follow you later!”

I felt my face heat up. “P-please don’t feel obligated to...”

“Nonsense. I like your sound!” She turned around on her way to center stage. “By the way, there’s going to be an afterparty at The Pink Cat a block down after I’m done here, if you want to come by. Some of my friends who do Syren stuff are going to be there, you could chat!”

“Oh, sure, I would love to.” My mouth seemed to be operating without any input from my brain. I had to work tomorrow morning. But like hell was I missing a Glitch Princess afterparty. Maybe she’d tell me what synths she used on her last album...

The techs pushed Naya’s curtain away from the stage to replace it with Glitch Princess’s handmade glitter-and-fake-butterflies backdrop she brought to every show. Naya followed me behind the stage, pulling her hoodie back on. She wasn’t sweaty, Syrens didn’t sweat, but I could hear the vents under her arms and on the sides of her torso working overtime. Usually, her ventilation system was silent.

“What was all that? Why didn’t you want to be seen on stage?” 

Naya shook her head. “It’s complicated.”

“Is it like... a programming error? Do you need to be debugged? I could send in a ticket to ApolloCorp—”

“No,” she snapped, fast and harsh. “It’s— I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”

I checked my phone for the time and saw a smattering of New Follower notifications filling the top half of my feed. “Huh. I guess people liked us.”

“I’m still kind of annoyed,” I said, “that you’d just deviate from our plan like this. And after I’d spent all that money and time on your look too! I was counting on you being there so we could play off each other while performing, because I’m not really a good performer myself.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Naya said, quietly. “Are we leaving now?”

“I want to stay and watch the rest of the show, and then Glitch Princess invited me to an afterparty.” I then remembered that no one else knew Naya was more sentient than most Syrens. It would be weird to bring Naya along. “I guess you could watch the show from the back, if you want?”

“No thanks,” she said, way too fast again. What was going on?! 

She seemed to realize this was weird, and tried to smile. “I can power myself down for now and you can just take me home with the rest of your stuff after you’re done!”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to carry you and my sound equipment,” I said. “Oh, but... they have big lockers by the train station, I could put you and my sound stuff in one of them for an hour and stop by the party for a bit and then pick you both up? Are you okay with that?”

“Sure!” Her voice sounded too bright. I thought she might be trying to make up for her earlier disagreeableness. And I was annoyed she was being disagreeable, but more than that, I was annoyed that she didn’t want to tell me why she was acting this way. What was bothering her? 

“And if you don’t want to watch the show right now I guess you could just hang back here...”

“Why are you talking to her like she’s a person? Power button’s on her stomach.” Someone— one of the sound guys from earlier, I think— whispered as he walked past me with a roll of extension cords.

I glanced guiltily at Naya. She stared back at me.

In the distance, I could hear applause as Glitch Princess’s set was about to start.

“I’ll just stand in the corner and wait for you to come back and get your equipment after Glitch Princess is done,” she said. 

I groaned. “That makes me feel terrible.”

“It’s fine.” This time, it sounded genuine. “I have fulfilled my purpose for today. I sang, and danced, and performed. So I’m satisfied.”

She followed me to where I was storing my equipment for the time being and sat down on top of the big black boxes. “Go watch the show.”

I could hear the familiar bubble-popping sounds of “3 A. M.”, the leading single off Butterfly Rendering, beginning in the distance.

I cast one last glance at Naya, then went to watch the show.