Chapter 1 - How to Get Into the Music Industry Without Talent

There was a hole in his chest.

Not a physical one, but it felt just as naked, just as gaping. If he breathed, it felt like his heart would fall out with a plop onto the bed he was lying on.

Perhaps, Uari thought as he held his breath, perhaps he was having a heart attack.

Unable to hold on for long, he took an unwitting, unsteady breath and opened his eyes. His ceiling swam into focus, the edges of his terrible ceiling fan rotating at the periphery of his sight.

He was alive.

Faintly, he registered the sound of rain drumming on his window. He was sticky with sweat and his limbs were numb, and he vaguely remembered a nightmare but couldn't recall what it was about.

A heavy, shaky sigh left his mouth as he covered his face with prickling hands. What an awful feeling. He had to get his shit together, had to get up and earn some money. There was no time to be all emotional about some nightmare. Once he regained the feeling in his hands, he slapped himself twice on the face to rid himself of the yawning maw he felt in his chest.

It did not go away, but Uari had always been better at working based on motion rather than emotion. He ignored it and swung his feet off the bed to make himself a cup of instant Lightspeed, pulling a cup and his instant mix from the wooden cabinet installed in his kitchen.

He watered his plants before turning to face the Interface front-and-centre of his tiny, cluttered studio apartment.

There was a giant machine sitting in the middle of the apartment - a low-end one by the standards of everyone else. It was a series of monitors and humming receptors, a tangle of wires, lights, and cold plastic angles rounded at the edges like a design afterthought. The spinning rainbow engines—he would insist till he died that it was a nice touch—indicated the machine's waking as he approached and slid himself into the seat.

An ad immediately began to play, the only light in his dim apartment. "Fucking hell," he rasped, and fell resentfully silent. Uari Orthen hadn't ever paid to have those ads removed and he wasn't going to start now. He would bear with the lost time.

The ad ended and finally, he logged into his Interface, patiently waiting for the lengthy load times of his ancient Interface. He pulled up the software he was using the day before, waited agonisingly for his dashboard to appear, and clicked on the first file that appeared. The machine-generated music file began to play, and he forced himself to listen to the entire five-minute piece before decisively choosing not to recommend it.

While it was his job to sort through the trillions of artificially-generated music to find potential hits, he hadn't been able to find any new pieces that excited him recently, or that he felt would be successful in the current music market. No recommendations meant no money.

The day continued mostly in this fashion. The rain continued to fall. He prayed the apartment wouldn't flood again.

Towards midday, when the gaping hole in his chest was beginning to vie for its space with rumbling protests from his abdomen, he got out of his chair to grab lunch (and probably dinner) from the VendoStor down the street. He grabbed his shabby coat, keys, and wallet, paused for his umbrella and opened his front door.

There was a plant at his doorstep.

That was illegal.

Uari immediately took a deep, calming breath before any panic could overtake him, and then poked his head outside to see who had left the plant there. What the fuck? They didn't even have the decency to cover it in a container or something. It was just out there where anyone and their mom could see it.

No one was in the hallway.

He picked the plant up gingerly, the hammering of his heart having briefly replaced that gummy, wide-open feeling, and then slammed the door in front of him.

What the fuck was he supposed to do with a plant? This shit was illegal, he would be sent to jail, why did he ever bring it into his apartment, he should've called the police! The corner of his eyes caught another hint of green and—

Why was there another plant in his apartment?

Wait, no. That was his plant. He—he watered it before sitting down this morning. Why did he have plants? He watered eight plants this morning and now he had nine.

Who had dropped the plant off? Was he some kind of a refuge for plants? If he was, why couldn't he remember any of it?

Uari was aware that he was slipping into some form of mild panic. He needed to calm down and figure out what to do next. He set the plant down on the only available surface—next to the control panel of his Interface—and fled the apartment to calm down while he got some food.

Cold, soaring steel greeted him outside of the apartment complex, and all of a sudden he became very conscious of how warm his apartment was behind him. An unknown chill passed over his skin and buried itself in the base of his neck as he took in the view of the ghetto and the city.

It was, somehow, newly unfamiliar. He knew where the VendoStor was and how to get there, knew that Old Nine lived two blocks away, knew that he lived in the outskirt ghetto of shining, elitist Gildest, but it didn't feel like his.

The city in front of him was of a masculine, angular architecture, surrounded by sharp, gleaming lights. Rain fell in sheets and blanketed the city in freezing fog, shrouding the slums and ghetto below, covering the evidence of city-stretched poverty.

Shining, translucent lustre threads hung everywhere, connecting buildings - wires conveying information via light, beautiful and shimmering in the night.

He knew this view, but he didn't.

This place was his, but it wasn't.

The gaping of his chest returned, stronger than ever. He was missing a part of himself, and he finally understood.

Ah. He didn't belong here.

Uari knew only of one procedure, heavily regulated and privatised to hell and back, that could fiddle with memories and identity like this: memory wipes and implants. Who had done such an awful job of it that it left him with such an open, jammy feeling that something was wrong?

There were too many questions, and he didn't have any of the answers. He needed some energy, so he stopped standing in front of his apartment, staring in the distance like a madman, and he made his way towards the VendoStor.