While it wasn’t quite right, there was no more time to mess with the skinny red tie.
The last song had been written, recorded, and released 17 years prior. The last commercially relevant song had come out 14 years prior to that, as supply far outweighed demand, and no marketing could overcome the iron grip of nostalgia, precedence, and mass consensus. They were almost entirely remixes, whether man made or forged by neural nets, as the prior generation had looked at “real” instruments as being just as irrelevant a source of expression as the never decomposing plastic peripheral carcasses that followed the Guitar Hero/Rock Band revolution of the early 2000s. He saw the extinction level event retold in a senso while ignoring 7th grade holo rigging class. It became a source of regular nightmares.
After 8 years of night terrors, over a long night of the lowest grades of spirit that could be acquired on the black market, he finally told Arby. Whether by luck or virtue of revealing the worst kept secret of the collective subconscious, he had similar dreams. It began a longer quest of inquisitive intoxication, but within the year they had rounded out their band.
It would be another year of antique markets and researching lost trades of point to point circuitry to put together the gear. During a night of soldering there was an interesting realization that dependence on atomic level printing for virtually all electrical work really left the world vulnerable to an apocalypse.
He didn’t get a chance to test his post-society bonus skills. The asteroid was adequately destroyed by the missiles, and the drone swarms were steadily cleaning up the sky darkening particles that led had turned daylight into a sepia tone. In the face of the end many people shared their nightmares, and found they shared graveyards of fender headstocks. They were waiting for him to get out into the yard so they could become an audience for the first time.
