I hadn't gone all the way downtown in absolute ages. I spent most of my time within the handful of blocks separating my apartment from my workplace and the grocery stores I tended to frequent. Recently I've added the nearest library into my rotation, but that was still within a twenty minute walk. An hour and a half on the subway? That was practically a trip to Mars.

But downtown was where the cool people were, I knew that much. The quirky-artsy-bohemian-hipster neighborhoods. The fancy street cafes where writers made their careers in decades past. I think most of those had long since closed by now, but newer, quirkier and artsier cafes had popped up to take their place. There was the CompanionBot cafe, a local chain that provided solo diners with a friendly robot to converse with while they ate. A gamer cafe with interactive touchscreen tables so you could eat and play at the same time.

And Jenni’s Joe, which was mostly known for having really good coffee and foamy, fluffy meringue cakes to go with it.

I'd heard of Jenni’s before, on one of those lifestyle PicShare accounts I ended up following just to keep up to date with the trends. It had a really cute teal color scheme and a coffee-colored cat mascot, and robot servers to deliver orders. I figured Mixie picked it for a meeting place because she lived nearby or something.

I didn't get as turned around coming out of the subway as I'd expected to, so I showed up at the cafe ten minutes early and grabbed a table by the window facing the sidewalk so I could easily wave Mixie over when she arrived. I brought my lyrics notebook with me just in case the change in scenery or coffee not made by my janky coffeemaker or talking to Mixie actually inspired me.

It was hot and sunny outside, but the cafe was air conditioned. The floor and lower half of the walls were tiled in a black and white pattern that seemed to be from the last century somehow, even though the cafe only opened a few years ago.

I wondered if I should go ahead and order first or wait for Mixie to arrive. But before I had to make that decision, she burst through the door, wearing the same black T-shirt on fishnet sleeves I remembered from our first meeting.

“Dessie! Hey!” Mixie waved at me. “What do you want to drink? It's on me.”

“Um, I'll take a…” I glanced at the menu and scanned for something that was neither the most nor least expensive option listed. “Cinnamon latte? I guess?”

“Great choice. Two cinnamon lattes then.” Mixie typed the order into a touch pad on the table. “And two creamsicle meringues. Trust me on that one.” She tapped a few more buttons, then slid the touchpad into the tabletop.

“Okay so! Music,” said Mixie.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling shy.

“How do you usually make your songs?”

“Usually I start with the instrumentals and then write lyrics or pull out old lyrics I wrote a while ago that fit my instrumentals,” I explain. “But I want to put together an album of Syren music, so I feel like the next Syren song I finish should be something that follows Ocean thematically and I've been having a hard time getting there, basically.”

“Then don't bother,” she said bluntly. “Write about what you're interested in right now, and then bridge them later. An album doesn't have to be a coherent narrative if you're not feeling it. And if you're meant to go back to that theme, you can always do it later and then arrange the tracklist in a different order than how you'd come up with everything on it.”

“That makes sense,” I said. I probably could've come to the same conclusions myself, but it was nice to hear someone else say it all out loud like that. “How do you write a song?”

“I do a lot of back and forth with Sera about what we want it to be about and the basic structure, and then I write the final lyrics. I have more of a sense for meter and rhyme. Better English grades in high school,” she added with a grin.

“Have you been friends for that long?”

“Girlfriends,” she corrected. “And no. We've known each other our entire lives, but we only became actual friends, and then eventually more than friends, when we both ditched our small town and moved here without realizing we were in the same place again.”

The server robot rolled down the aisle bearing trays of food and singing a jaunty little tune recognizable as Lorelei’s viral commercial jingle Beep-Beep. Both Mixie and I started humming under our breaths. We made eye contact and laughed.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“It's actually a pretty good story,” she continued. “Some of the songs on our first album were inspired by it. Make Up Your Mind, for one.”

“Oh, I really liked that one!”

Mixie nodded. “One of our most popular tracks.”

She took a sip of her latte, prompting me to try my drink too. It was, in fact, very good.

“So I actually wrote the first draft of that one when we were still in the mutual-pining stage of our epic romance, and then after we got together and got our Syren and started making music I tightened it up with Sera’s feedback. It's a really honest expression of my feelings at a very raw time in my life, and I think that's why it resonates so much.”

“Even if it's being sung by a robot?”

“Especially because it's being sung by a robot,” she said firmly. “Some truths are easier to tell through the cover of fiction, you know?”

“So it’s not weird to write Syren songs about like. Having a body, and like flesh and blood and stuff? I have a line in a song about holding a heart in two bleeding hands, but I wasn’t sure if my ‘Syren would be able to sell it.”

“A Syren can sell anything. Music doesn’t have to be literal. That’s the whole point.” She bit into her meringue cookie, and it crunched.

Now that I thought about it, not every Syren song was from the point of view of the Syren as a robot. Some songs cast their singer in the roles of entirely fictional characters, like a three-minute musical. There was one popular concept album that was kind of like a musical, featuring several different Syren voices to tell a story of the rise and fall of a fairytale kingdom and its royal family. A bunch of producers contributed to that one, as I recalled.

“I do think of songwriting as a kind of poetry,” Mixie added thoughtfully. “So I try to pull in a lot of sensory details, and wordplay. Like, I don’t want to just evoke an emotion, I want to anchor it to imagery, locations, and snappy rhymes. Like in Candy Hearts, it’s a pop song, yeah, so it’s not exactly the most complicated lyrics of all time, but I still talk about how the candy hearts feel physically, and that they’re kept in smooth glass jars.”

“And if I can’t talk to you, I’ll just give you a chalky-flaky chatty-catty candy heart,” I couldn’t help singing. It really was a catchy as hell song.

“Exactly!”

“So what are you working on now?” I asked, both to be polite and because I was genuinely interested.

“We’re doing a collab with a friend— you know Stevie Starburst? He asked us to write some songs for a new kid’s cartoon he’s doing the soundtrack for. I think the voice actress they got for the main character is going to be singing them, but I’m supposed to write the lyrics and Sera and Stevie are going to work together to do the composition and production.”

“What! That’s so cool!”

“Eh.” She sipped her coffee, looking bored. “I can’t say I ever expected to be writing songs for eight-year-olds at this point in my career, but the network’s paying really well, and there’s only so many job opportunities in music these days...”

“Right...”

“Do you want to do this as a career, or are you in it for the love of the game?” Mixie asked me suddenly, looking me dead in the eyes.

I looked right back. “I want this to be my career.”

“Then you’re going to have to take some jobs that are less ideal than others, if you really want to live off music.”

I realized then that in the long game of fame and recognition, Mixie and Sera were closer to me than to any of the top five Syren producers, the ones that worked directly with Lorelei herself.

“It’s not all bad though,” she added. “Stevie’s a good collaborator. It’s fun to work with your friends.”

“I bet, yeah.” I thought of working with Naya, which was both more and less collaborative than I wanted in a working relationship.

“And hey, if you ever want to try it out, just give us a call and we’ll see if we can fit it into our schedule.” She winked.

Eventually, Mixie had to go pick up her laundry, and I started the long subway ride home. I thought about walking— the weather was nice, the summer heat dropping with the sun, and I hadn’t seen much of this part of the city before. I knew some people who’d walk miles and miles in a single day, but I was honestly pretty out of shape. I didn’t want to wake up with sore feet the next day.

At any rate, by the time the subway pulled into the station closest to me, the sun had begun to set, and I stumbled out of the station into the bright golden rays of late afternoon. I wasn’t exactly thinking of lyrics on my way back, but I was getting some ideas, maybe. I thought about what Mixie told me about her and Sera’s process. Sensory details, wordplay, emotions, abstraction.

I ended up walking east towards the sea instead of towards my apartment. I didn’t go to the beachfront often, because it was cold and gray and corroded by whatever was leaking out of the factories further south, but it seemed as good a place as any to try and write my follow-up to Ocean.

I found a bench right between the pebbly beach and the boardwalk, and settled in with my little notebook and pen. I looked at the water, glimmering in the light of the setting sun. I could hear waves crashing against the rocky shore, seagulls cawing and picking at slimy washed-up seaweed. Joggers sprinted along the boardwalk behind me. Some kids were building towers out of the warm, round rocks by the edge of the water, dressed in swimsuits even though a bunch of signs around the beach all said “No Swimming”.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Salt, rotting seaweed, chemicals that would probably give me cancer in a few decades. The air felt warm, with a slight breeze. Dry. It’s been a pretty dry summer so far. There were a lot of wildfire warnings going around.

I opened my eyes. Opened my notebook.

I wrote down something. I’d edit it later.