Canberra, Australia. The ANU Clubs and Societies Centre.
The centre’s architect had been an Australian Technocommunist. Its design consisted of twelve-floors of studios wrapped around an open atrium. Robotic conveyance systems left intentionally transparent showed the communal resources—computers, sound equipment, art supplies, exercise machines, etc.—being transported between studios in accordance with reservations. During the semester months, the atrium filled with a cacophony of student noise similar to a large flock of birds roosting in the canopy of a tree.
The design philosophy coincided with an emerging emphasis on the fraternalistic aspect of college, one of the marked shifts in the universities of 2050. Globally, higher education had ceased its focus on jobs training and research due to the eclipsing of humanity in these areas by supercomputing. Instead, there’d been a return of classical notions of learning as a means for cultivating a physically-, societally-, and intellectually-rounded citizen.
In one studio, a small crowd of three dozen had converged for a mini musical concert, the same number tuning in via the centre's interconnected monitoring system. Presently, most of the band were resting. Panting with the exhausted elation after a vigorous bout of aural intercourse, they were bobbing their heads and toes to the slurred rhythms of a double-bassist plucking madly on his lonesome.
At a mic, a middle-aged zoomer woman recited a stanza from a trembling sheet of paper.
“Our dreams will not be pacified by the cries of twins shrieking in the cradle
With demands to suckle on our ‘selfishness’, our wasp-waists, our promotions, our Sundays in bed,
To support impotent car-salesmen on sabbatical from home.
Our dreams will not be pacified.”
Standing before this poetess was an ordinary teenager, staring her down like a bull at a matador through the slats of the rising gate. His gaze was unflinching, his muscles taut, his brow beading with sweat.
Tour IV – Andante Moderato
“The hook,” Henry ordered.
“Our dreams will not be pacified," the poetess repeated.
“Yell it!” he roared. “Feel it!”
“Our dreams will not be pacified!”
He motioned with a hand marking tempo for the bassist to speed up. “Again! RISE!”
“Our DREAMS will not be pacified!”
“SAY IT TO THE FUCKING SKY!”
The poetess, discarding her suburban middle-aged inhibitions, flung her head back and shrieked. “OUR DREAMS WILL NOT BE PACIFIED!”
Henry, having the old lady continue repeating the line, encouraged the bassist to venture towards an ever faster pace, to attack the strings harder and harder until their pained grunts had matched the poetess’s shout. The two voices began to meld. Like a pair of duelling rams, their syllable-notes circled each other, sized each other up, accepted, raised onto their hind legs, hovered, tilted, clashed their heads, and fell back dizzily to repeat another round of the dance.
Sustaining this climactic struggle, he closed his eyes and let the tension be expelled from his body by the invading rhythm. “Gorgeous," he declared. "Keep it up until the pianist relieves you.”
Tossing a suggestive wink to the rest of the band, who rearmed themselves, Henry shimmed over to an unoccupied piano, beside which Little Liu was swinging his toddler hips. He, the pianist, reclaimed his seat, and the band crashed back in.
Henry'd orchestrated a jam-sesh for the fourth phase of the tour and his campaign of love.
The poetess and most of the spectators had been acquired during the Tour III phase when he and the patrician beauty had powwowed at a departmental lunch. Afterwards, when they were being presented this technocommie student centre, Henry'd recognised an opportunity to impress the beauty with a musical party trick. First, he had the chancellor demonstrate the building’s conveyance system by calling in an entire grand piano. Henry then, taking a quick spin on the instrument, set to song a mediocre poem a student had molested his eardrums with at lunch. For this, he employed skills in translating natural word-sounds to music from prior climbs. At age 11, during a computational paleozoomusicology phase, he’d produced a suite of experimental albums from the digital reproductions of calls from extinct animals. Post-Maximalism also had a standardised technique of music-to-prose translation, which he’d employed in Infinite Leaves to harmonise his favourite Slavic symphonies with a rowdy 189-page ballroom scene featuring android-clones of prominent figures from the Russian civil war.
After the first song, following the subsequent entreaty of other poets, he improvised a few more. A music major (and member of Flaming Sun) chancing by with their band caused this party trick to escalate into a small concert for Henry's improvised compositions.
Thus, a memorable event had been created for the patrician beauty. Henry'd redeemed his fallen image by displaying his musical virtuosity and ability to operate in a team environment, and, on the other end, he'd gotten to know the beauty better.
Henry, his fingers hopping through a solo, surveyed the audience. His gaze glided over the amused literature academics and other poets scribbling down their shlock. Far in the back, the patrician beauty was hidden, a diamond sparkling amidst a heap of coal.
Half her face had been occupied by massive sunglasses acquired during the Tour II phase of his seduction, limiting his ability to read her reaction.
Her mouth was flat.
He nodded to himself. She wasn't familiar with 2030s city folk either...
He'd been riffing on iconic melodies from that avant-garde genre, the 11th that he’d hinted at and that'd evoked no discernable excitement from the beauty over the 24 minutes of this performance.
Conclusion: she was not a musical patrician.
Henry shouted the numbers of a couple stanzas at the poetess for the closing passages. He then signalled to a saxophonist to sign them off while offering a couple motifs in the last measures of his solo that would complement the upcoming lyrics.
At the song's conclusion, the other poets swarmed him waving their works to be rendered next. He apologised, lying that he’d exhausted his musical stamina for now but would consider holding a second session at tomorrow’s writing workshops that he had zero intention of attending. He could have gone much longer, but he sensed that this concert play had passed its maximum impact in regards to wooing the patrician beauty. If she wasn’t musically inclined, the session dragging on could get kind of awkward; at worst, if she was tone-deaf, it would be like break-dancing in front of a quadriplegic – not sexy or fun for either involved. Romance, as with any mode of discourse, required an equal, mutual back and forth, each participant sharing their turns*. (*Disclaimer: he had not yet confirmed whether this mutual turn-sharing theory of romance was accurate.)
Henry exchanged contact info with the band in case their talents proved useful at a later stage of the love campaign. He then picked up Little Liu and rejoined the tour-group, chatting with the writers hopped up on the vibes of his concert.
The chancellor, leading them out of the studio, resumed his interrupted and ignored tour narration. “I couldn’t have planned a better demonstration. That's the spirit we're after. Students of diverse calling, brought together…”
The minimalist professor limped up to Henry and gave him a manly knock on the shoulder. “Why have you been scrimping on this soul, boy?”
“Thanks, Ray.”
“Spare some of it for the page. A tenth of that honest expression would weigh more than all your Po-Max fakery combined. Truly great, Henry boy. Truly great! Bravo!”
Henry wanted to monologue explaining that his Infinite Leaves contained infinitely more soul if only one had read the supplementary material necessary to understand it. But he suppressed that instinct for now. Slowing his walking pace, he dropped away from the professor and fell into step with the patrician beauty at the back of the tour-group.
He’d just composed an EP-length articulation of adoration for this muse. Now, the mic needed to be handed off to her for the sweet feedback.
“Sorry about that," he apologised. "I lost track of time.”
“It’s fine,” she mumbled in her deep, sonorous contralto.
“The music kids here aren’t terrible.”
“Mhm.”
Henry paused to see if she might elaborate, might offer an unprompted remark of her own volition, her soul stirred up and loosened by his sensuous serenade.
She didn’t.
“Mastered any instruments?” he asked.
“Mm-mm."
“Me either. Hey, that’s something in common.”
She didn’t laugh.
And Henry received nothing else more from the beauty. The two of them walked along in what would have been an awkward silence if the chancellor wasn’t talking.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Internally, Henry, unable to believe this, turned to the heavens and raised his palms in exhortation to whatever entity had organised this Sisyphean torture.
What the heck, bro or sis? Was he being mocked? Was this one of those limp-armed nightmares where one’s stabs were too weak to pierce an enemy’s heart? For this chick, he’d composed a serenade—a full-blown, classical, multi-movement serenade—and it'd elicited merely two words and two grunts.
A peerless beauty should naturally demand a peerless sacrifice. However, wasn’t this effort-to-impact exchange rate a tad lop-sided? Surely, the love conquest should not be this difficult.
With this latest defeat, he reviewed the previous segments of the seduction campaign for any false assumptions or miscalculations that might've been leading him astray.
In the Tour II – Marcia Moderato phase, while being shown the university’s various learning spaces, he’d engineered a sequence of seven proving trials. Their tour-group had stumbled across a succession of hired puppets planted ahead in their path, each of whom were beleaguered by a moderate problem. An old lady’s cat was stuck up a eucalyptus; a sleep-deprived anthropology post-grad wept over the shoddy state of their thesis. Each issue, Henry casually solved with skills from past hobbies – climbing the tree like a ninja with Chayokan Canopywalking, copyediting hyper-fast with his giga-brain. Thereby, he'd generated mini-quests to make the beauty’s heart flutter and act as a staging ground for the demonstration of his multiple talents, his ethical commitment to humanism.
Every mini-quest had additionally had openings for collaboration with the beauty depending on her expertise(s). However, she’d abstained from participating in any of them. To his solving them himself, she displayed no surprise, no thrill, no happiness, no anything. Henry had been unable to take a single chip out of her marble heart.
In Tour III – Larghetto, at the aforementioned lunch with the department’s post-grads and faculty, he'd slowed the action down. Humbly, he listened to people's trash opinions and refrained from insulting them. The few monologues he delivered were virtuous and dignified, Henry even extolling the two or three merits of Contemporary Minimalism. There was but one subtle puppet play. Among the post-grads was a polyglot linguistics major (and Flaming Sun Scholar) who made a snide remark about the patrician beauty’s silence. Henry, sweeping into his mute lady’s defence, delivered a crushing, ten-language roast, each sentence a cheek-slap from a different-cultured silk glove.
The beauty, again, had had no reaction.
On further reflection now, the two theories he’d formulated for her incommunicativeness may have been flawed. Her being starstruck after reading 13 pages of his tome was always a little dubious - the significance of Infinite Leaves’ opening wasn’t made apparent until the book's closing, when the narrative looped back to the beginning. As for the Idiot-Genius Basic Communication Neglect theory, this had been contraindicated by him catching her conversing on a more voluble basis with the other members of the tour-group; her unresponsiveness was unilaterally employed in his presence.
Employed...her unresponsiveness was a conscious choice, a strategy...
The beauty may have been intentionally ignoring him.
But for which reason? he wondered.
The horrors of his not-so-ambiguous proposal? No, while her evasiveness had increased in amplitude after that incident, it’d preceded it, been there from the very start.
Perhaps, then, the fault lay with his obnoxious opener? He could have dug himself into a pit so deep that the beauty refused to give him a second chance.
Or she hated his arcane prose? It could have been beyond her comprehension, terrifying her as it had the rest.
Henry, reconsidering the possibility of mistaken genius, snuck a peek at the beauty in her sunglasses. At once, in a heaven-splitting revelation, onto the beauty’s stone-cold, unresponsive features was transposed a memory-image from last evening of Silver Wolf.
Oh...
Oh, what a fool he’d been to have missed something so obvious.
“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t recognise you before.”
The young woman, her shoulders slumping and the charade carried on them spilling off, glanced away moodily, swearing inside.
What a jackass. If he was going to be oblivious, he should have had the decency to stay oblivious until the end. After she'd committed for this long, this was so embarr—
“To be honest,” Henry confessed, “I still don’t. Pop-culture’s not my field. Not to sound pretentious, but even Ray’s minimalism, which is technically fine fiction, is too low-brow for my palate. So, to clarify, I’m not a sleazebag fan feigning ignorance to hit on you.”
The sunglasses.
The sunglasses were the critical clue. Like Silver Wolf yesterday, this patrician beauty was wearing sunglasses to hide her celebrity identity, a fact that had been hinted at previously by Ray helping her stay anonymous. Development of this celebrity theory further yielded an answer for why she'd been stubbornly ignoring him. The beauty, with the paranoia of the famous, had erected a defensive wall to impede Henry’s advances, as she must against the countless sleazebags vying for her limited attention. At worst, she may have imagined him a stalker fan performing a Rose-style infiltration, pretending not to know her in order to grope and seduce her from the shadows. Hence, his clarification.
The young woman, reluctantly resuming her vigil, swore inside again.
What a jackass. Why did he have to be so oblivious? The most embarras—
But Henry wasn’t finished.
“No, Candace, I’m just an ordinary sleazebag hitting on you because you’re super hot.”
The young woman stopped, one foot hovering in the air. Little Liu, eavesdropping from Henry's arm, cringed at the obnoxious line.
Henry, The Cripple, held eye-contact as the patrician beauty brought her gaze back to him, her brow creasing deeply as the eyes behind the sunglasses assessed him and his confession more closely.
The young woman was indeed assessing him, but only in regards to what dimension she should be offended on, whether he was shamelessly hitting on her or her.
Henry pumped his eyebrows arrogantly. "Yeah, I'm hitting on you."
The Direct Confession: Women like men who communicate directly. Henry's intuition from angering the so-called fairer sex in his life when he didn’t censor himself suggested this was a deceptive platitude, there being a hidden caveat – ‘women like men who communicate directly what they like.’ However, his faulty intuition had also suggested to him that proposing to this beauty in the cinema had a decent chance of success. Perhaps, then, he was wrong again, and the love-context altered the efficacy of the honesty strategy. Either way, he didn't have the time for further subtlety.
“That impromptu concert?” He continued, laying his cards on the table so that there could be no remaining ambiguities. “Me hitting on you, musically. The bouquet that mysteriously fell from the heavens? From me, hitting on you, botanically. The ring in the popcorn…that was not me.”
He disavowed all association with the ring incident. After messaging Caramel for feedback, he'd been informed of the devastating idiocy of that move and strongly discouraged from proposing again.
The young woman decided she was offended on all fronts. “Shameless."
Henry, The Invincible Cripple, shrugged off the defeat. “As long as you recognise the type of shamelessness. Whether you believe me or not, it doesn’t matter. I’m still going to hit on you. Getting bounced from this lame joint for sexual harassment is also a win for me.”
The original goal had been, after all, getting his admission to this institution revoked. A sexual harassment complaint would do the trick.
Having pushed far enough for now, Henry made a tactical retreat. He caught back up with Ray and resumed his musical discussion, some of the other students jumping in, too.
His mind’s eye, however, stayed fixed on the romantic battleline, now clearly defined. As he himself, a secret celebrity, was fond of doing to others, this patrician beauty had put him on psychological mute because she wasn’t interested.
He supposed the playing field could be levelled by revealing that he was someone probably even more famous, The Tyrant. However, hadn't the whole purpose of today been dodging that reality and savouring his last moments of mundane, private normalcy? Also, he had a vague premonition of that move backfiring disastrously, worse than the aborted proposal.
Then, a teen trying to seduce a celebrity he didn't recognise and didn't particularly care to recognise...a teen trying to seduce another teen that wasn't interested...either way one framed the challenge, it was far beyond the level of a social neonate like himself. In such unfavourable circumstances, most young men would probably concede. It would be easier re-aiming his efforts upon a less hostile hotty.
But was Henry most young men? Earlier this real-life week, merely for a chance at a shot at The Cap of a Thousand Dreams, he’d spent half a year sleeping on snow-covered branches while being hunted 24/7 by hundreds of thousands of wolves. Others might go insane under that pressure. For him, though, it’d been the most rejuvenating rest he'd gotten in a long, long while. Compared with what he’d endured, a couple hundred romantic rejections, a couple thousand even, these were insignificant.
Music, he considered, he’d just failed with that climb, its methods assuming compliance between parties.
Refusing to concede yet, he began rummaging through his former conquests for analogues to the present challenge. Love was giving him no solution? He would find it elsewhere.
Manga…the quiet dandere archetype could be fitting, but mangaka had the same social IQ debilitation as himself, their self-inserts lacking genuine merits and winning solely due to narrative-bias. Good literature...almost exclusively depressing content about losers in dysfunctional relationships. Bad literature...the male-author branch was interpersonally-speaking identical to mangaka…as for the female-author branch, the male leads won through the two Rs of instantaneous attraction: rich and ripped...although Henry possessed filthy riches, designer roids would need months to bulk out his scrawny teenage form. Computational archaeology…modifying a Dujardin model to project the location of hidden enticement sites would take months, too. Pharmacology…illegal. War…sieges were—no. Duelling…
Henry, contemplating his days in the arena—analogous in the 1v1 aspect and adversarial dynamic of his current sticking point—devised a method to by-pass the beauty’s guard.
The Provocation...
Twenty Tools – Provocation of The Injudicious Heart (Love-Responsivity Variation)
This was an extended play formed through the improvisation and weaving together of many, many smaller plays.
Separating from the chatting group, he slid back in step with the beauty. “The acoustic design of this place is fascinating. I think they purposefully allowed part of the noise to bleed out to produce a constant sense of human presence.”
The young woman was flabbergasted, none of her annoyance having subsided since barely a minute had elapsed. Shameless…
“Do you listen to music?” he prodded.
The young woman, cautiously, nodded.
“What about poetry? Read it? Write it? Recite it?”
She shook her head thrice.
“Psst, Candace, check out the wares.” He unzipped his daycare bag and angled it secretively.
The young woman saw the contents before she could avert her gaze; the bag was filled to the brim with snacks.
“Help yourself,” he smiled innocently.
The Classic Candy Bribe: Food was a fantastic tool for tricking people into liking you, an ancient social tactic employed against the youth by parents and manipulative uncles since before antiquity.
The young woman, having a traumatic flashback of the popcorn, shook her head.
“Go on,” he insisted. “Take anything you want. I promise, there’s no ring this time. Haha.” (Technically, there was another ring in the bag, but not in the same compartment. While he'd accepted Caramel's advice against proposing again, he wouldn't eliminate the option completely.) “Go on, Candace. Have a snack.”
Notably, he avoided saying 'Have some candy', The Lame Pun play being an error at this stage of resistance.
“No." The young woman refused the bait.
“Suit yourself.” He grabbed a packet of seaweed-liquorice for himself and began shovelling pieces down. “Burden of a massive noggin,” he explained between bites. “Have to stuff about 13k a day down my gullet. What’s your average caloric expenditure like?”
A minor Sympathy Play: the resonance of a common struggle could draw souls closer. Part of that figure was the accelerated cognitive strain of Saana’s time-dilation, but Henry was also a mutant. If this patrician beauty, too, had similar mutant powers, then she might empathise with this plight.
The young woman was unable to deduce whether the bizarre question had any purpose beyond being a humblebrag. She shook her head in ignorance.
“Sorry,” Henry pretended to have been distracted searching for Little Liu’s favourite piece. “Whatchu say, Candace?”
“Never measured.”
“Really?” He rubbed his chin in profound confusion. “Doesn’t it take fastidious nutritional micromanagement to achieve such a healthy figure and glow?”
The young woman glared.
Henry, tying-off that section of The Provocation with a smooth Compliment Play, broke away. Utilising the students and professors to generate space as before, he chatted with a kid who’d been writing a novella in the Neo-Techno-Gothic style.
But he would be back for more very soon.