Okay, watching Glitch Princess live was almost awesome enough to distract me from wondering about what Naya’s whole deal might be. She had a full, complicated image projection system set up that cast beautiful, rainbow abstractions all over the room while she sang. Her voice was fine, but her production was the part that drew me to her music in the first place, the creativity and inventiveness in how she combined samples and sounds from all sorts of instruments and sources. She designed her video projections herself, too.

On stage, she shone.

Glitch Princess wasn’t a superstar headliner yet, but I knew someday, she would be properly famous, not just “your favorite musician’s favorite musician” famous. She had that raw magnetism to really sell some tricky, complex songs. She finished her opening number and the crowd went wild as pink butterfly-shaped confetti rained from the ceiling.

“Hi everyone!” she cooed. “It’s me!”

“It’s you!” the crowd shouted back. The call-and-response from her first song to make it moderately big.

Part of me wished I could perform like that, run around a stage in a pretty dress and sing my own songs over an adoring crowd. But I was made for blending in, not standing out. Not like Glitch Princess. Not like Naya.

I let loose in the crowd for her show and thought, as I listened to the live renditions of some of my favorite songs, that as a musician, I had a long way to go. My blood turned to fizzy sparkles as the good-music endorphins ran through my body at the loud, bright sounds.

By the time the walls of the Sparkplug shook with the echoes of the last song, I felt exhausted, but in a good way. Inspired, invigorated, even if I was too tired to do anything about that now. The crowd surged towards the exits and I weaved my way through to backstage, where I ran right into Glitch Princess and her crew.

“Oh, hey!” she said. Up close, I could see she was soaked in sweat, and her makeup was starting to smear a little. I remembered she’d asked me to call her Gina. From this angle, it was easier to see her as Gina and not as Glitch Princess, ruler of thousands. “Did you have fun?”

“I did, thank you!”

“You’re coming to the after party, right?”

“I’d love to, I just have to figure out where to put my stuff first–”

“Oh, we’re all leaving our equipment here, the guys said we could so long as we clear out by two. You could probably leave your stuff here too!”

2. A. M? I checked the time on my phone: it was just past ten o’clock. How long were they planning on partying?

“I guess I’ll do that,” I said. “Though I’ll probably leave earlier than that, since I’m working tomorrow…”

I expected Gina to laugh at my petty mortal concerns, but instead she nodded sympathetically and said, “I’ve been there, especially when I was just starting out doing shows. I just barely started making enough money to live off my music stuff.”

She looked me directly in the eyes. “It’s hard! But it’s worth it.”

“... I’ll do my best to get there,” I told her.

And then I left my equipment (and Naya) backstage and followed Gina and her groupies to The Pink Cat. I didn’t generally frequent Center City nightlife (Couldn’t afford it. Stuck to the cheaper places further out), but I’d heard of the Pink Cat before. They kept their own Syren, Melusine, to do lounge-singer standards in a slinky red dress.

It was a great gimmick back when Syrens were new and still kinda janky, but now, as I walked into the dimly-lit jazz club, I could only see how outdated Melusine’s model was. Her dancing was much stiffer than Naya’s, her rendition of “You Belong To Me” hard to understand. But there was some charm to it too.

“It’s almost, like, retro now,” Gina said, glancing at the Syren on stage. The after party had mostly coalesced around one overstuffed pink booth in the back and the table closest to it. I found myself seated towards the middle, surrounded on either side by musicians and producers I’d heard of online.

“Do you remember when they first launched Syrens?” Gina asked me suddenly. “You might be too young to remember that now.”

“I was in middle school! I remember the ad campaign all over the place. Why, how old were you?” Which was an awfully bold question to ask my idol, but I’d already had a French Martini and a half and was feeling bold. Ish. Bold-ish.

She laughed and said, “older than that, I’ll tell you that much!”

I remembered the ad campaign, but I also remember looking up videos of Lorelei’s live shows online, her five producers all dressed in black in the shadows behind her, and looking up the much bigger shows of her Japanese counterpart Mirako, and the first Robo-Ball, and just being dazzled by how much people managed to make these robots do. I wanted a Syren because I was enamored with them. Not just because Syrens were useful.

“These guys have a Syren too,” Gina said suddenly, gesturing to a pair of people in matching black T-shirts over fishnet sleeves before hopping into another conversation.

“Pooled our money and bought ol’ Lollipop together,” said the one on the right, the one with short black hair. “I’m Mixie.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Sera,” said the one with long blond hair. “We post online as Mixera featuring Lollipop.”

“Oh! I’ve seen your work before,” I realized. Not a lot, but I’d gotten a couple of songs recommended to me on SoundShare before. “You did um. Candy Hearts, right? It was catchy!”

“Thank you, thank you!” said Mixie. “Your set was pretty cool too. I liked the Syren song at the end.”

“Thank you! Yeah, I just got Naya last week, so I really wanted to try to make something with her in time for the show…” I studied the raspberry floating in the remains of my drink. I could feel my face growing warmer from the alcohol and the humid space around me.

“There’s a bit of a learning curve, working with Syrens,” Sera said. “They look so much like people, but they don’t learn the same way, so…”

“Yeah, that part was hard.” I nodded fervently. “And she didn’t like everything about my song either. But we worked out a system that made sense for us, and practiced a lot…”

“Wait, your Syren didn’t like your song? Are they even programmed to have musical preferences?” Gina interrupted, tuning back in from her other conversation.

“You might be anthropomorphizing it too much,” said someone else whose name I didn’t catch, a masculine-looking figure with a buzzcut and tight crop top. “Go through the Amatomizer Checklist before you do something crazy.”

“Brick’s right.” Sera looked at me, eyes full of concern. “Are you analyzing a neutral android face plate for imaginary microexpressions? Are you asking your Syren for input before making decisions involving it? You might need to take a step back.”

I shrank back in the plush booth seat, burning with shame. They didn’t get it. They didn’t know my Syren was special, and sentient, and could actually have opinions in her little artificial head.

I chugged the rest of my drink. Checked the time. I’d been there for more than an hour, which meant the subway was going to stop running soon enough. “It was really nice meeting all of you, but I have to get going. I’m taking the subway, and I have work tomorrow...”

“Oh, I’m taking the subway too,” Brick said suddenly, standing up from where they were at the end of the horseshoe-shaped booth. “I can walk with you to the station.”

The thought of trying to explain Naya traveling as a passenger and not disassembled in a box to someone who’d just told me to do the Checklist on her made me want to throw up. Or maybe that was the second French Martini, I hadn’t eaten much all day. “I uh, have to get my stuff from The Sparkplug first, so...”

“Gotcha, no worries.” They stood up. “At least let me walk you out.”

I nodded. We bid goodbye to the group, and my phone buzzed with notifications of all these super-cool musicians following me (a lot of whom I was following already!)

“I didn’t mean to jump on you like that, by the way,” Brick said. “It’s just... I got really attached to a Friendbot, when I was a kid. We’d just moved to a new area and I was having a hard time making friends at school, so my parents got me Polly, and then...” They laughed bitterly. “well, I had to go to therapy for a long time to get unattached from a hunk of metal that would never love me back.”

“Oh.” I didn’t think the situation with Naya was very similar, but they had no way of knowing that. “I’m sorry you went through so much pain.”

“Eh. We all got our own shit to deal with, you know?” They grinned at me, and it occurred to me that they might have been flirting. Or hovering on the edge of flirtation. “So what’s your shit, Dessie?”

“I...” my throat felt tight. I had no idea how to boil down all of my many little hurts into a punchy little story like Brick just did. “I don’t know if we’re close enough for me to just tell you about that, sorry.”

“Fair ‘nuff.” They took a step back from me. “Sorry if that went too far.”

“It’s okay.”

We stopped outside The Sparkplug.

“Get home safe, okay?” Brick said. I nodded.

The unlocked door swung open automatically for me, and I made my way through the dark front rooms to backstage.

Naya was standing where I’d left her, the leftover glam of her stage outfit mostly covered by her hoodie. Her eyes were closed. I think she’d entered sleep mode. When I said her name, though, her eyes flew open.

“Welcome back!” She smiled at me. I felt a flash of guilt again, for leaving her, and for kind of talking about her back, in a way.

“Thanks.” I pulled out the handcart with all my stuff on it. “You ready to go?”

“Sure!”

I turned around to leave, and she grabbed the hem of my shirt just like before.

It felt a little scarier doing this at night. The streets weren’t empty— it was a Saturday night in the city center, after all. But the people who were out and about were rowdier, louder, and the streetlights didn’t manage to chase all of the darkness away. Still, the subway station wasn’t too far.

“Are you ever going to tell me why you didn’t want to be seen on stage?” I asked as we went into the station.

“I just didn’t want... everyone to see me,” she said eventually. “It’s... I’m not ready to tell you about it yet, okay?”

“I guess I have to be,” I grumbled.

“But you know,” Naya added, brightening, “it looks like the curtain thing went over pretty well! According to the recently added posts in the Center City Concerts SuperBoard, the audience was intrigued by the mystery behind our presentation.”

“Huh.” I put one hand on the pole and pulled out my phone with the other, scrolling to the correct feed. That’s when I noticed my follower counts on the SuperBoards, PicShare, VidShare, and SoundShare all went up— by a lot.

And people were tagging my account!

“Great show tonight at @SparkplugCC with @Dess-C and @GlitchPrincessOfficial !!!”

“Never heard of @Dess-C before but she’s definitely an up-and-comer in the Syren scene imo, that last song CLEARED”

“LOVED @GlitchPrincessOfficial tonight! The opener was ok too”

“Is this what fame feels like?” I whispered.

“I don’t know if you can call a couple dozen new followers ‘fame’,” said Naya. “But it’s definitely a start!”

My chest felt warm. I tapped out a quick thank-you post and hid my phone in my pocket again. “I guess we can keep performing with you hidden and then do a big dramatic reveal at some point?”

“Maybe at some point, yeah!”

The train car was mostly empty, with everyone else following the city dweller conventions of studiously ignoring their surroundings. But I was still thinking about how everyone reacted to the idea of me interacting with Naya.

“What if,” I said in a low voice, “we start pretending you’re a Cupid in public?”