I came home around the same time I usually did, listening to Glitch Princess’s most recent album (“Butterfly Rendering”) on my walk back and thinking about what I could make that would complement her work well. It was summer, and the sweaty smell of the city stuck to me as I walked through the sunny, humid streets. Good thing my employee-discount sweats were made for sweating.


    I grabbed something easy at the convenience store on my way for dinner. I wasn’t much of a cook, and didn’t exactly have the budget to really do anything nice more often than once in a while anyway. The thought flashed through my mind that I should get something for Naya, before remembering she didn’t exactly eat food. For a second there I thought of her as a regular human house guest, like a friend visiting from out of town for a bit.


    Weird.


    Anyway, when I got back to my place, the elevator was out of order, again. So I sighed and walked the eleven flights up to my floor, telling myself this totally counts as exercise and taking a break on the landing at the halfway point. I flicked forward to the most high-energy song on Butterfly Rendering to give myself motivation to keep going up. I didn’t really consider myself to be out of shape, but I probably should exercise more than I do now.


    When I finally made it through my front door, sweat pouring off me in buckets, Naya was sitting quietly in a stool by my kitchen counter, watching Angie walk circles around the unopened mail I had piled on one end of it. The evening sunlight streamed through the windows, making her fake skin and hair glow.


    Angie hopped off the counter as soon as I opened the door. “Welcome home, Dessie!” she purred.


    Naya smiled at me. “How was your day?” she asked.


    “Fine,” I panted. “Normal. You?”


    Naya shrugged. “I listened to music for most of it, so, pretty good!”


    “Right, that reminds me.” I dropped the insulated reusable bag containing my dinner on the counter and searched my drawers for a clean fork. “My friend got us a gig on Saturday. We have three days to come up with a half-hour set to open for Glitch Princess.”


    “I remember seeing that name in your likes, but I hadn’t had a chance to check her stuff out yet,” said Naya. She closed her eyes and went still. I couldn’t hear anything, but I assumed she was listening to Glitch Princess in her head. Either that or ran out of battery mid-sentence.


    I shrugged and shoved my convenience store meal in the microwave. When it dinged, Naya snapped out of whatever trance she had gone into.


    “Interesting,” she said. “A lot of uh... sounds.”


    I frown. “Not a fan?”


    “I’m not... not a fan,” she continued cautiously, “I haven’t really had a chance to listen to a whole lot of different kinds of music yet. Most of what ApolloCorp trains us on is mainstream international pop, so that’s what I’m most familiar with. I’m sure if I listen to more different stuff I’ll like more things...”


    “I didn’t realize having preferences was included in your programming,” I said, stabbing the plastic covering on my microwave dinner.


    “It’s an experimental feature of my model,” she explained. “They’re trying out a new feature: Syren as a collaborator, rather than a mere instrument. So I have more intelligence than previous models had. I did tell you, I’m new,” she added.


    “You did say that. But it’s going to be hard to work with you if we don’t, like, vibe creatively, you know?” I did not want to have to track down that sketchy Marketplace seller again and return Naya. Or worse, put her up for sale myself and get arrested.


    “I believe my preferences are supposed to be easily affected by exposure to new stimuli, so I can learn and grow with you. Like I said, if I listen to more stuff, I’ll like more stuff.” She closed her eyes and went still again.


    I ate my dinner, wondering what she was listening to. It felt strange to be sitting and eating dinner in silence when someone who looked like a human person was sitting quietly right next to me. “Glitch Princess is one of my favorite musicians,” I said, unprompted. “So I want to make a new song for the show with you that sounds like a good lead-in for her new album.”


    Naya blinked again. “In three days?”


    “We can do it,” I said, with probably more confidence than was actually warranted. “I already have most of the instrumentals down, and lyrics drafts. We just gotta put something together, polish it up, and have you practice singing it. That can’t be that hard, right?”


    “Right,” Naya said, sounding as unconvinced as a robot could sound.


    So after dinner, we crowded into my walk-in closet of a studio and got to work.


    Or, tried to.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    “So we can probably get away with instrumentals for most of the set, but I really want at least one song with vocals to kind of introduce you to the world, you know?” I opened a few work-in-progress files. “I think these are good candidates for a full song. We could combine these two and then you could sing over it...”


    “What about #32? The one I liked?”


    I winced. “I just don’t think it’s a good fit with GP’s sound. We want to be a good opener for her, you know?”


    Naya sighed.


    “We can use that one for a later song, okay?” I say, trying to sound reassuring. “Anyway, for lyrics, I was thinking... maybe this?” I flipped open my lyrics notebook to a page I’d dogeared earlier. Butterfly Rendering was an album about change, transformation, and transhumanism, and I had a draft of a song that was... kind of about that. Well, mostly it was about how terrified I was of getting older, but I could make it more about embracing that fear and charging ahead into the unknown... Not that I had a lot of time to fiddle with the lyrics. I guess it was okay if they didn’t make any sense, songs didn’t always make sense anyway.


    Also, Syren singing was harder to understand than human singing. Something about how the syllables connected to each other made them sound less like speech and more like sound, a quality I always found really fascinating.


    “‘Waves crashing against the hard shore of my heart’?,” Naya read out loud in a monotone. “And how did you want me to sing this?”


    I felt my face heat up faster than my microwave dinner. When someone else read my words out loud like that, it was incredibly embarrassing. Especially since I wrote songs to express my feelings more than anything else. Having someone else sing them helped put some distance between me and the music, at least. “Um, just... like.” I sketched a kind of graph out with my finger. “Actually, I might end up changing that part.”


    Naya raised her eyebrows.


    “Here, I’ll play the instrumental again.” I hit play on the rough cut of my two untitled songs crudely smashed together into something that sounded more like a normal song.


    “That doesn’t really tell me how to sing it. I need more input than that.”


    “Well, I can’t sing it, I can’t sing in tune!” I wasn’t exactly tone-deaf (I could hear that the notes I was singing were not the notes I should be singing, at least), but the score-keeping karaoke machines gave me some pretty dismal ratings last time I tried. “If I tried to sing the melody that’s in my head right now it’s going to sound wrong.”


    “Here, try to do something like this,” I said, tapping out the melody on my synth.


    Naya stared at me. “I don’t... I’m not sure how that translates to singing. I can do this,” she said, and then out of her mouth came the exact sounds I just produced on my synth— like she’d recorded me playing and just played it back to me. “I have your lyrics too, but I don’t have the ability to synthesize them together this way.”


    I sighed, pacing in a circle in my walk-in closet-studio that definitely was not big enough to accommodate my pacing. “Okay, how about you just focus on memorizing the words right now and I’ll troubleshoot this online.”


    So Naya took my notebook and went into my bedroom to read my lyrics while I frantically searched the Syren SuperBoards for information on how to teach a Syren a song from scratch.  The Syren I borrowed from the library was pretty much impossible to work with, but I should be able to make a file and insert it into Naya’s control panel, right?


    The posters on the SuperBoards had a lot of different methods, but the easiest for beginners was, apparently, to create a Vocal Sequence File in the Syren computer interfacing program by creating a MIDI of the notes you wanted your Syren to sing, adding a syllable to each note, then saving it onto a file transfer tool you can plug into the Syren. Didn’t sound easy at all to me, but sure, why not try it.


    I eventually figured out how to get a Vocal Sequence file onto a flash drive, but by the time I managed that much, hours had gone by without me noticing. I opened the door of my studio and my room was pitch-black.


    “Naya? You there? I got a VSF for you,” I called. “I’ll just plug it in and you’ll be able to sing the song.”


    My eyes adjusted, and I could see her sitting by the window with my lyrics notebook still in her hand. She probably didn’t need light to read them as she turned back to face me. “Plug it in? At least buy me dinner first.”


    “What? You don’t eat dinner.” Where’d she learn that from?


    “I know, it’s just the principle of the thing.” She stood up. I flicked the light switch next to my studio so I could see her face better.


    “What principle? What thing?”


    She sighed, the sound like someone breathing into a phone receiver. “Like. You know I’m more sentient than most Syrens, right? I’m capable of moving independently. So... plugging in a program for me is a little... Consent-violate-y?”


    “You’re the one who said you were having trouble figuring out how to sing my lyrics. You’re a Syren. That’s how I can get you to learn the song.”


    She looked uncertain. “Can we try something else first? I don’t want to be treated like a machine.”


    “But you are a machine.”


    “I’m sentient,” she insisted. “I’m more like you than a toaster.”


    “Look, can you just write out some sheet music for the melody and give it to me? Will that work?”


    I sighed and pulled out a pack of staff paper from under a pile of CDs on the corner of my desk. “We can try.”


    It’s been a while since I’ve written out sheet music by hand, but I managed to get the first verse and the chorus sketched out before too long. Angie reappeared in my room, meowing about how it was almost eleven at night again and that, even though I was off tomorrow, I was working on Friday so it wouldn’t do to throw my schedule off too much now. I mumbled assent and handed the sheet music off to Naya.


    “Can you read this?”


    She looked at it, robot eyes analyzing my scribbly little eighth-notes and rests, then sang the first line. Perfectly accurately, hitting every single note exactly how I wrote it out, but with no inflection. Like a robot.


    I took the sheet music from her and pulled out a pencil and an eraser.


    “Do that again,” I said.


    She did. Some of the words were hard to understand when she said them, and a few notes turned out to be higher than I’d intended. I made some corrections and handed the sheet back to her. “Try now.”


    She did. It sounded better.


    Now we were getting somewhere.