Memoirs of a Timelord (15 page)

       "Bara, I appreciate you coming out here to help me blow off some steam, but this is all live." I gestured to the crowds that had swelled along the security barriers. 

       "Hmmmphhh." He dismissed my concerns.  "You're still thinking like a puny human.  You have all the time in the world, so why be rushed and stressed?" He shuffled off towards the couch.  Using a levitator beam that he emitted from his elbow, he gently moved the man who was already sitting on the sofa to another spot against a wall.  It was one of the precautions when working with extremely slow time travel.  If you touch someone who is frozen, even a delicate tap, back in their timeline it would be like a hyperkinetic impact.  You could seriously injure people if you manhandled them while travelling this slow in time.  It just amazed me how easily my brother Bara did it, even with his arms full of food.  With just a casual thought he had morphed a complex piece of hardware into his own arm just so he could have somewhere comfy to sit.  

       "These people are gonna freak when they see you here, you know that." I tried to warn him, knowing just how xenophobic these people were.

       "See, there you are again thinking like a flatlander.  Once you can stand still, you can take all the time you need, not just to respond to dumb ass reporters or other kids at school, but for things like vacations or fishing trips or just good old fashioned mental hygiene days.  Y'know what I mean, Vern?" He propped his feet up on the chair across from him.

       I stopped to think about that.  I'd been so busy mastering the damned skill that it never occurred to me that it could be used beyond snappy retorts.  I was just thinking how nice a vacation would be when my eyes happened across Elvis, standing there in line with those cute little glutes of his, and suddenly I realized the best way of all to use my super-powers.

       "Bro, could you do me a solid and come back in like...twenty minutes." I gave a wicked smile before I realized Bara wasn't even there anymore.  

       Good, that frees up the couch.

       

       

       The first competition was interesting.  I had worked all week at mastering three songs because there was a chance that they could switch the requirements on us at the last minute.  In the end I sang a popular Voh song that was just topping the charts.  I knew I was good enough to stay in another week, and my ratings had been pretty good so far.  Apparently I tracked well with men from the age of fifteen to fifty, so I wasn't worried.  Two of the judges gave me thumbs up, but the record producer said I was wooden and stiff.  What an asshole that guy is.  Mebbe I'll leave a Baby Ruth in his coffee cup.  That'd be something for the blooper reels, eh?

       We were all feeling pretty good about our performances, everyone sure that someone else was going home, when Meexon stepped out onto that stage with a double-necked guitar strapped over his shoulder.  Wearing a beat up pair of pants and a faded cotton shirt, he looked like someone on vacation.  Quiet and unassuming, he gave the audience that charming smile of his before he finally spoke.

       "I'm going to perform a song I wrote last night after we got back from the children's hospital.  While we were there I met a little girl named Avalon, and she was very worried about her surgery tomorrow morning.  I just had to write this song as my humble way to put a smile on Avalon's face and let her know that there are people out here pulling for her.  This one is for you Avie." For the briefest of moments he looked directly into the camera before returning his gaze to the audience.

       And with that he began strumming to the beat of an old Beatles song.  What can I say, even without an Onkx the guy is a master showman, and he knows how to work a crowd.  I couldn't help but marvel as he got those people worked up.  By the end of the song the audience was singing along with a song they'd never heard before, that's how good he was.  If I'd been wearing any, I'd have thrown my panties at him.  Sure, why not?  What happens in Voh space stays in Voh space, right?

       To say that his performance left the rest of us in the dust doesn't even begin to cover it.  Next to him I really was wooden and stiff.  He dominated the whole stage.  No band to back him up, just Meexon and twelve strings.  His popularity numbers jumped through the ceiling before he even finished strumming.

       "Please buy my song on the wire, all proceeds for the orphans of the Ninth District.  Thank you all very much." He bowed humbly as the room erupted.  With my DuNai eyes I could see that he was still saturating them with happy waves and some low frequency videodrone.  I figured he had to be running low on energy considering his discharge rate during the performance, but he seemed intent on ensuring his last message was well received.

       The next few days were hectic.  They stuck us with a cheesy choreographer who would hammer us into some kind of a group performance.  Sometimes it was an outright commercial advertisement; other times just badly choreographed filler.  Anyhow, the numbers we sang and danced were terrible.  Ever see a white guy dance?  Now imagine that guy in charge of the choreography.  I felt like the most technologically advanced, dancing monkey on the planet.  All we were missing was an organ grinder.

       So we had our second performance just a few days away when Meexon dragged me over to a corner of the studio where Rex and Molly were practicing.  Now what you gotta understand about these two is that they were both pretty attractive people, but definitely not a couple.  Rex was queer as a three-dollar bill, and damned proud of it.  Molly was a blonde with a type A personality.  Actually I take that back, she's a AA personality.  Where others advanced, she charged.  I liked her right away.  

       But he didn't pick Rex and Molly for their looks, although that prolly factored in somewhere.  See, not only were they both very good looking, they were also quite talented.  Between the two of them they played seven instruments and had perfect pitch.  On the surface they looked like the total package, definite competition.  Personally I woulda been trying to edge them out, but that's prolly why I was the trainee and Meexon was the expert.  He told me later that he had no fear of them because when it came down to it; neither Rex nor Molly could write a note of music.  They could play thousands of songs from memory, sing like Etta James, but musical composition was not in their wheelhouse.  And truth be told, it is one of the rarest of skills among humans.  If you didn't write it, then you're just singing karaoke.

       So he pulls them in and offers to let them perform a couple of songs he wrote, in exchange for them helping out on a number he had planned.  New rules this year allowed us to trade services and work cooperatively.  Initially Rex and Molly are a little skeptical until they hear the songs, and then they're blown away.  I tried not to laugh when I recognized Freddy Mercury's musical genius in the lyrics.     

       "You know you're in this number too, right?" Meexon looked at me sideways.

       "Sure, I guess." I was a little scared of the prospect of whatever he had planned.  "I'll sing whatever you need."

       "I need you on base guitar." He nodded.

       "Y'know, I don't even play regular guitar.  Just FYI." I had to admit that I was never really musical.  I could build a hot rod from parts, just don't ask me to serenade you.

       "How did you learn calculus and trig?" He asked, already knowing the answer.

       "I didn't.  The Onkx already knows math better than Einstein." I spoke the truth.  It had been one of the bennies of DuNai education; skipping math class.

       "Here, play me Johnny be good." He handed me the Voh equivalent of an acoustic guitar.

       I was shaking my head at the thought that I could play anything besides an air guitar when my fingers started strumming on their own.  It was funny, but that revelation surprised me more than just about anything else I encountered in adjusting to my new life.  I'd been in space ships, different galaxies, and had a morphic boyfriend who used to be Elvis, but the thing that blew me away was realizing that I could play any instrument I wanted.  Music is math, and like I said, the Onkx knows math.

       So Rex and Molly get astounding raves from most of the judges for their rendition of some classic Queen.  That producer-judge guy told them that the real credit should go to the fellow who wrote the song because their performances were lackluster.  He was an anus, always snotty and rude, but his critiques were usually spot-on.   Most folks got so butt-hurt by the way he said it that they never bothered to listen to what he said.  Myself included.  It's hard to take criticism in any form, especially his.

       I rocked the audience with a Susan Tedeschi song and the place went crazy.  The judges ate it up too.  Again the record producer said I did an admirable job with the song, but the real credit was in the writing.  Keep in mind that these songs we're singing may be old-hat on Earth, but in the Voh world these are brand new hits, fresh off the presses.  As far as they knew, these were all original compositions and all credited to the same source: Meexon.  

        Note: Technically, at this point in the timeline these songs are 2 billion years from being written, hence no copyright protection exists for the commercial use of these songs in StarElite.  Ask any lawyer and they'll tell you its true, but make sure they specialize in temporal law.

       So anyhow, last performance of the night.  The four of us stroll out there on stage like rock stars.  Rex is wearing drums, built into his suit.  Molly has a MixIt board on her left arm, sorta like a complete sound studio in a little package.  I have base guitar, and Meexon has his double-necked guitar.

       Meexon shuffles out there to center stage and addresses the audience in a sorta hesitant manner.  He had this unassuming way about him, or at least that's how he played the character.  Not only was the guy a brilliant performer, but he was a really great actor as well.  To the rest of the world he came across as this guy who could scratch out these songs, sometimes two a day, yet never lorded it over the other contestants.  He knew intrinsically how to draw people in, even when they didn't want to be drawn.  

       "In a world of so much strife and hatred, sometimes it's hard to remember why we even get out of bed in the morning, so I wrote this song to remind each of us that the world can be a beautiful place if we wanted to make it so.  Each of us has the power to change our world, we just lack the will." He spoke directly to the audience.  It was his philosophy; never play to the cameras.  Play to the live audience because that's where you got your energy from.  Wow the studio audience and the televised audience will follow.

       Think back and imagine the first time you heard a song that you liked right away.  That sudden spark of interest, the desire to hear more as your soul gets caught up in the melody for the first time.  That's how these people felt as we began singling Let It Be.  Between the power Meexon and I were pumping into the audience, and the classic melody, we had them by the second chorus.  I had taken over the background systems and was flashing a steady stream of images on the screens behind us.  I used the Touch to hijack the lighting, sound, and video to ensure we had a perfect performance.  

       The applause was thunderous.  It felt like we were throttling the Space Shuttle.  Right then and there I understood just how fracking cool it was to be a rock star.  I coulda cut glass with my nipples, seriously.

       So, three of us exit stage left as the host interviewed Meexon before the judges.  The former diva was drunk as usual and slurrrred about how great he was.  The rock star was leering at Molly, and the producer was actually pretty sociable.  He was all curious about the four songs we had each performed.  Meexon admitted he wrote them all, and that they were all available for purchase on the line, 100% of the proceeds going to various charities in different districts.

       About then the producer turned into a turd and said some chump stuff about how Meexon should keep his expectations low, so he wouldn't be hurt when it didn't make as much money as he thought they would.

       That's when Meexon dropped the bombshell.

       "Last week's song has brought in over four thousand for charity." He shrugged as if admitting their failure.

       "Four thousand quid?" The producer asked, sure that it was likely even less.

       "Redbacks."  The barest hint of a smirk crossed his face as he watched the three judges all sit up. "I also transferred ownership of the song itself to a living trust that will dispense the proceeds to all of the orphanages in the ninth district equally for as long as the song generates revenue.  Tonight's four songs have already been placed into trusts of their own, all for worthy causes.  They are making money right now, as we speak." The collective gasp from the crowd could be heard when he spoke.  Already there were people in the audience using their Ethernet implants to access the Line and purchase the song. 

       The next morning I got a note that the producers needed to see all four of us. So we show up in Yakov Delancy's office.  He was the network chief, the big taco, HMFIC.  Rex and Molly were blown away, but Meexon and I had been expecting it.  We knew we'd just been invited to a shakedown.

       "Meexon, I'll get to the point.  The revenue you have been generating with these songs of yours is a clear violation of your amateur standing, and against the rules of the contest." Yakov was a big guy who liked to lean in close where he could intimidate people.  Despite the CEO's bulk, Meexon was unimpressed.

       "The contract specifies personal income or revenues paid directly to the contestant." Meexon knew the fine print of his contract well.  In a few minutes they would find out just how well.

       "It is revenue received for musical talent, a clear violation." The lawyer in an expensive suit made sure we knew our error.