"Polymermen"

Grace pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Live” music, her butt. All at once, the Polymermen flicked buttons on their instruments, revealing them to be self-playing. A hive-mind computer daemon connecting the instruments started up a song written within its alternative intelligence, unseen equations and formulas delivering a tune sounding pitch-perfect to human ears. It was something acoustic, slow, Joe’s guitar even delivering a “doo wop” vocal ad lib at the end of each line through a voicebox hidden in its neck.

No strumming. No playing. No anything. Just nothing. Just music calculated in time to a sin wave, maybe cosine theta, all mathematics and no heart.

And this was supposed to the modern equivalent of fucking Cafe Central? W-Where are the intellectuals? Grace swiveled her head, sure the people would reject this, but the addlepated simpletons ate it up, smiling, feeling happy - they had no right to feel happy! Eyes flashed as everyone except for Grace filmed the performance through Implants, live-streaming it for the Hypernet - this music is fantastic, came a comment from Neo-Neon Tokyo.

Steam spilled out of Grace’s ears. Joe cranked up a dial on his guitar and left it there on a stool behind the microphone, then approached Grace. Purple light and math rock percolated through the air as she stood sullenly, silently.

“You dig, love?” Joe asked.

“No dig.”

“Ah, you gotta dig. This whole city digs.”

Grace just threw up her hands.

“Wait? Did you think we ourselves would be playing?” Joe tilted his head. “Nobody plays no more. We got computers for that.”

Grace jabbed a finger at him. “Then you picked a good name, at least. You’re all polymer. Nothing real. Cheap plastic.”

Joe extended an arm. “Cheap plastic that extends towards the stars, dear. A-Polymer spacecraft, A-Polymer dyson spheres. Why can’t we have A-Polymer music, too? A-Polymer people? Polymermen, if you will.”

“Music’s not about that. Music’s supposed to transform you. Supposed to come from the heart.”

Joe scratched his shaggy head. He genuinely didn’t get it. “But, it did come from the heart. I came up with the keywords I plugged into the instrument. It don’t play otherwise, unless I tell it what to play.”

“Tell your fingers what to play, chav.”

“...what’s that mean?”

“Here, you wanna learn, read this.” She brain-waved him a copy of Eden’s Apple over the Hypernet. He accepted it with a shrug.

“Make sure to download our newest EP,” Joe said, then returned to his stool, looking proudly at his self-playing instrument.

Grace returned to Billy, drinking his third shartini (it’s a clever name, see, ‘cuz it mixes whiskey with milk and cream, and it looks like, you know…).

“Why so glum, chum?” asked Billy.

Grace leaned on the counter. “Don’t know why that stuff bothers me. I guess, growing up on Mars, I was always told you gotta work with your own two hands to make a living. That’s what my dad always said. ‘Course, he got arrested for fraud, so…”

For the next hour, Grace nursed a beer while Billy continued his flirtation with a receptive(?) robo-bartender. With half-lidded, narrowed eyes, Grace watched them, watched the Polymermen, watched the crowd. They were all in-time to something, some invisible beat, a beat that everyone could hear, everyone except Grace.

Alone in a crowd, is all. Fingers running along the bar counter, movement timed to her own heartbeat, looking around at people, knowing none of them will be looking back at you. Grace was certainly used to it, but it still made her head droop sometimes. 

Fortunately, the night got livelier. Around a few tables sat students wearing white letterman jackets with an owl on the back. They were prep boys, attending the boarding school in East Dig, and had started coming over here in droves to seek out intellectuals (intellectual broads, really). The East Dig preppies pissed off the “local” gang, the aptly-named Rooks. Local in apostrophes because it was a worldwide gang, chapters in every city. All you needed to do to join was sign up to their Hypernet forum, subscribe to The Rook podcast (premium members got sooper-dooper hair gel in the mail), and buy a Rook leather jacket.

Well, you see, many Rooks were idle high schoolers or idle high school graduates, with literally nothing to do but cause trouble. When even video games and Five-Sense-Experiences got boring, local fellas would put on the jacket and go ride around their motorcycles and hang out in front of storefronts and talk ‘bout how sweet their pompadours were. When a few heard that the dreaded East Dig prep boys were coming to a bar on Rook turf, word spread around the Hypernet fast. A dozen or so local Rooks showed up, though it took a couple of tries since none of them had ever been to Crash Landing before tonight.

Once enough force had been assembled, the Rooks marched inside Crash Landing in unison. They stepped forward synchronized to the snapping of fingers. Grace was impressed at first, a twelve-man snapping band, until she realized one of them was playing a pre-recorded snapping sound out of an Ear Implant. She went back to pouting into her beer.

The biggest Rook approached the smallest prepper. “You Socials are in Rook territory. You and your little group of weekend warriors better split, otherwise you're cruising for a bruising, dig?”

The Soc looked at him sideways, because it was awful timing for the Rooks. The rest of the East Dig defensive line had shown up and now stood behind the Rooks. The Polymermen, too engrossed in their own music, were oblivious to the growing storm, which slowly spread through the crowd.

And then, in unison-

“Get that Soc!”

“Get that Rook!”

Dozens of fists came flying, knuckles bruised, chairs smashed, brawlers sent into the air. A fight! The commotion spread, smashed glasses, a comical cartoon-style cloud of dust with fists and legs moving in and out. Grace slammed her glass into a Rook's face. Maybe he was coming for her. She punched out the nearest Soc just to be sure. 

“Uh, guys, don’t you think it’s getting a bit unsafe-”

“Shut up, Rango!”

The bartender pressed a panic button. Already, Grace could hear the sound of incoming drones.

“Let’s go!” Billy said, grabbing Grace’s hand over her protests. He was a big fella and dragged her out of the bar wholesale, with Grace flapping in the wind like a flag behind him. He elbowed his way past a Rook and barged onto the street. Blue sirens, both on the road and in the air, appeared in the distance. A Soc went flying through the glass window onto the street, landing at their feet, Grace’s amused reflection in the shards. Another Soc came out, looking at Billy something fierce, but then Grace opened her flannel jacket with a smug expression. The Soc decided to go back inside.

“That the raygun I sold you?” Billy realized.

Grace nodded, smile creeping onto her face, Fourth Space Age Raygun on her hip. “I always bring it with me. Comes in handy on my adventures sometime.”

The night was dark, orange streetlamps dim.

“Adventures?” Billy asked.

Grace shrugged. “I roam around. Saint Francisco, Abidjan-Lagos, Roma. And it’s all disappointing. We live in the wonderful world of tomorrow, yet I can’t find a single thing to be happy about. People are automatons, wind-up dolls. If you think, you are, so if you don’t think…”

The sirens grew louder.

“I once wanted to write a story that would define the coming fourth millennium,” she continued, unperturbed. “But there is no fourth millennium. No one work can define it. Everything is atomized. Everybody has their own truth, own experience, own private womb, tailor-made computers feeding their every whim. Art doesn’t have the power to transform society anymore. If I’m gonna impose a definition on society, it’ll have to be through the barrel of a gun. Tear this whole thing down, see?”

“Uh-huh,” said Billy, picking his nose, mind wandering, more concerned about the incoming sirens and scoring with the robo-bartender later tonight (a rumble during your shift, how awful, let me massage your circuits, toots, hee-hoo…).

The robo-cops arrived at Crash Landing, so Billy and Grace fled down an adjacent alleyway, into darkness. Police drones and former war-bots from long ago charged after them. The drones were essentially flying black cubes, while the war-bots were green humanoids. All of them wore blue police caps.

“Beep boop, die Martian scum,” the lead war-bot called out through his voice-box. Robotic coughing followed. “Apologies, leftover code from the Olympus Mons campaign has left this unit with occasional glitches.”

“The Big War,” a floating rectangle intoned. “The horror, beep boop, the horror.”

Billy swore as they skidded to a halt, the pounding of pistons and engines escalating behind them. A chain-link fence blocked off the rest of the alleyway. Grace noticed a manhole, but all manholes in the district had been locked ever since the Great Toxic-Rat Uprising early in Big Dig Forever.

“Quick, climb!” Billy said. He was halfway up when he noticed Grace wasn’t following. Instead, she used the raygun to vaporize the manhole cover.

“Grace?” he called out.

She looked at him, sadness in the eyes.

“You just don’t get it either.”

So she cut ties with him too.