And then we immediately made the song of the summer an hour later, and the most viral album of our generation, inventing a whole new genre of electronic music— no. God no. As if it would be that easy.

No, what happened next was that we sat in my shitty walk-in closet studio and argued about where to start for like, twenty minutes at least.

“Ocean was really good,” Naya said. “Maybe you should keep building off of that and developing that theme, and we can make that into an EP?”

“Building off what, exactly?”

“The, um...” Naya trailed off. Syrens had many capabilities, but thematic analysis of music seemed to be a stretch for her. “The... the feelings you’re conveying! The ones you wrote down for me in the margins. You could make a new song that uses similar ocean and water imagery to keep exploring those feelings!”

“I mean, I guess I could do some kind of conceptual narrative thing, but that seems... hard.” I wasn’t really a narrative kind of writer. Each song was kind of its own universe, for me.

“Do you want me to write a whole new song from scratch just because this one song was kind of a hit?” I groaned, staring at the poorly-labeled .wav files littering my desktop. “Starting completely new songs from scratch is a lot more work than going through my existing stems and unfinished projects and combining them together, which, by the way, is also what I did for Ocean.”

“I mean, you can do whatever you want,” Naya said, “but maybe you could make a better song from scratch instead of from scraps. I mean, ultimately it’s up to you.” She looked down at the floor. “Since I can’t really make songs myself.”

“Do you want to try it?” I handed her a pen and my lyric notebook.

“I don’t know how to write by hand,” she said.

I rolled my eyes and pushed my keyboard over to her instead, opening up a word processor. “Here, try typing... how you felt about performing last night.”

Naya nodded, eyebrows knitting together in a look of intense concentration. Then she snapped open the panel on her stomach and pulled my phone off its charger, instead connecting herself to my laptop.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice vibrated and echoed, like there were three or four of her speaking at once. “I don’t know how to type either, but if I link my system to your laptop, I should be able to—”

Text appeared in the blank document, a few words at a time, like an article loading slowly on a website.

“Finally, I get to perform my purpose!

Though I must hide behind a curtain, people will see me be!

I am doing my best to perform to my producer’s specifications! I am doing!

I am singing! I am dancing! I am being!”

“And that’s what last night felt like, to me,” Naya concluded, yanking the cord out of her stomach. She looked down at the floor again.

“Hm,” I said, staring at the lines. “Not very... catchy, like this. Still, let’s save it for now, and I’ll see if I can rewrite it into something resembling a song.” I glanced at her, trying to assess if she seemed crushed by the critique.

“That was what I expected,” she said instead. Her voice sounded only slightly dented rather than crushed. “You’re the creative half of this partnership. If Syrens could make their own songs too, no one would want us to exist. We’d be too much of a threat to other musicians.”

“I do think a song about how a Syren feels to be on stage has potential,” I said slowly. “There’s some producers who really like to write songs from their ideas of a Syren’s perspective— Hanseul Kim, he does a lot of stuff for the K-pop industry but also has his own Syren called Hana, and he kind of treats her like another K-pop idol? It’s neat conceptually, but I’m not really into that kind of sound so I don’t listen to most of his songs...”

If I were to write a song like that, I’d probably lean more into my electronic influences, and my piano background. And I’d have to take Naya’s input too. I couldn’t make her sing something about her own experience that didn’t feel true to her.

“Do you want to work on this song now, then?” I asked, scrolling down to a blank line in the document.

“Maybe later. After we’ve done a few more shows and I have more input to synthesize. I might be able to write more precise text then.” She ran her plastic finger tips along my keyboard keys, uncertain. Maybe I should teach her how to type. Maybe Syrens were physically incapable of doing so.

“Okay. Then, for now, let’s see what I’ve got already that we could use for something new.”

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“I think untitled_27 and WIP_09 might be worth combining,” Naya suggested tentatively.

“Great.” I slapped them both into my music program.

Layered directly on top of each other, the two melodies produced an incredible cacophony of discordant noise. But WIP_09 also had a bassline, so I isolated that, repeated it, and then cut up the melody to use it as a counterpoint to the melody from untitled_27.

In a matter of minutes, I had the beginnings of a track! It still needed a heck of a lot of work, of course. But it sounded kind of like a song, now.

Naya was flipping through my lyrics notebook, reading lines out loud. “I don’t know if any of these really fit the rhythm of this new song. I still think writing something new is the best choice.”

“Ughhhh,” I groaned again. “Songwriting is hard! Lyrics are hard!” I was confident of my sounds, but not so much my words. Too many bad grades in high school English class. I wasn’t a Leonard Cohen singing poet type, even though my parents were really into folksy singer-songwriters when I was growing up. I tended towards instrumental-focused tracks mostly because it was easier for me.

“You’ve done it before.” Naya picked up the notebook and waved it back and forth. “You can do it again. And because you’ve done it before, it will be better this time.”

“But what if it’s worse? What if I’ve forgotten how to write lyrics well?”

“You haven’t,” Naya said, voice calm and patient like a kindergarten teacher soothing a sobbing child. “You can write a new song, and it will be better than any of your old songs. You had to rewrite the lyrics you’d started with to make Ocean work anyway, didn’t you?”

“Yeah...” Not a lot, but I did end up having to rework some lines, and change the last verse to end on a more optimistic note to help lead into Glitch Princess’s opener.

“Then you can write something totally new! I believe in you!”

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. “Is one of your roles as a Syren to act as the producer’s creative muse or something?”

She shrugged. “I think so! It’s a secondary purpose, though. My primary purpose is to perform.”

“Makes sense, I guess. You inspire the producer to make new songs for you to sing. Like an artist’s muse.”

I stared at her, her aesthetically perfect body perched on the edge of my folding table, legs balanced in a way that kept them from swinging back and forth and accidentally kicking something. If I looked closely, I could see the segmentations at her joints that showed she was assembled.

How was I going to write songs for her? About her? About me, through her?

She still had the orange hair plate in from the night before, and was still wearing the tennis skirt and tank top I’d decorated for her performance. The decorations that no one ended up seeing. I fought back another flare of irritation.

I could switch her hairplate out with her default hair, but I still needed to buy a more Cupid-like replacement. I could put her into a T-shirt and sweatpants I’d bought as loungewear when I was buying the tanktop and skirt. “Do you want to change clothes?”

“I don’t particularly need to change clothes every day, since I don’t produce fluid emissions like sweat or tears or anything,” she said. “And I don’t feel physical discomfort.”

“Still.” I left the studio-closet and went over to my actual clothing rack, at the bottom of which sat my pile of discount purchases from the athleisure store. “Change into these.”

“You will have to assist me,” she said primly.

“Fine. Arms up.”

I got her changed into comfortable clothes, which at least made me feel less weird to look at her.

“Now are you going to work on your song lyrics?” Naya asked.

“Now I’m... going to upload Ocean to SoundShare,” I said instead, and finally went through the steps to complete the upload.

I noticed my follower count had gone up to a couple hundred, which was a huge leap considering where I’d started. I wondered if I should change my display name to reflect the addition of Naya. Most producers who used Syrens posted as “ProducerName featuring SyrenName”, so no one got confused and started thinking the Syren was the one who did all the work.

After a few moments of contemplation, I changed my display name from Dessie to “Dessie featuring Naya.” I added her to my bio, too. “Naya is a Syren who prefers to sing from behind a curtain.” That sounded mysterious enough to get people interested, I hoped.

I hopped over to The Sparkplug’s official venue page on SoundShare to look at photos from the show. They were mostly of Glitch Princess’s set, of course, but there were a few shots of Naya, silhouetted against a curtain with a projection of ocean waves overlaid on top of her, and a few shots of me frowning at my mixing tables. I didn’t look super hot in the shots of me— a complete disregard for wearing makeup meant my features dissolved into the shadows of the stage, and my hair had frizzed up more under the lights than I’d thought it did. But Naya looked great as a silhouette. The translucent overdress I’d put on top of Naya’s outfit for visual interest came through as a faint outline surrounding Naya’s body as she moved gracefully from choreographed pose to choreographed pose.

I shared the Sparkplug post on my feed and copied a few of the photos to add to my bio. Our bio.

“Do you make a lot of social media posts?” Naya asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Not really,” I said. “That’s probably why I don’t have that many followers...”

In casual clothes, she looked more like an impossibly beautiful girlfriend— or Cupid. Except for the stage makeup. Which I’d worked so hard to apply and didn’t end up being actually useful, again. And I’d probably have to redo it to a more toned down style if I wanted to pretend she was a Cupid.

“Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t want to be seen on stage before I did all that work to get you dressed up for being on stage?” I asked.

Naya looked sad in a way I didn’t know Syrens were capable of. “I didn’t know,” she said softly. “Being on stage and performing is my purpose. I wanted to do it so much I couldn’t imagine anything getting in the way of that... until...” She trailed off.

We were so, so close to a breakthrough, I could feel it in my throat. “Just tell me already. Stop dodging the question.”

“I don’t want to worry you with this. You should be focusing on your music.”

“I can’t make music until you tell me what your deal is.”

“You’re just trying to procrastinate on the lyrics some more.”

I flinched. “Actually, it’s getting kind of late, maybe we should just pick this up tomorrow.” Even though I’d taken a nap and had coffee with my dinner, specifically so I could keep going for a while.

Naya flattened her expression into the kind of unimpressed face Angie gave me when I tried to avoid buying vegetables. “Just write whatever and then edit it into something good later. According to the internet, that’s one of the most widely-agreed upon pieces of writing advice.”

I sighed tragically. “Fine. I’ll write something.”

“Something developing the themes in Ocean?” she asked hopefully.

“Maybe.”

And then it was once again me with my purple notebook, and my ballpoint pen.