A. Reiter

1. What Could Be, Could Be

April 9, 2123

Here I am on the biggest stage of my life, still wondering if I'll ever be heard. 

“Any luck?” I pitch my voice out to 12,000 seats, because my microphone channel isn’t transmitting. If we can’t troubleshoot the bad patch, no one in this sold-out amphitheatre is going to hear me during tonight’s competition.  

The A/V tech says something I can’t hear. Frustrated, I turn to Soren, his lanky frame curled around an electric guitar as he bends to adjust a knob on his pedal board. “What was that?”

Soren straightens, raises his wristcuff, two matte crescents of PolyGlas with an imbedded transmitter strip. “Can you run her channels again, please? She’s closing the set.” His green eyes narrow, until he snaps, “Try something else,” and impatiently taps the implant behind his ear. “Sorry Valia,” he mutters to me, “They’re just button pushers back there.”

“Then I’ll fix it.” I run my hands down the rubber-sheathed black cable attached to my mic stand and follow it off the front of the crescent stage, my 3-D printed flats landing cat-like despite the five foot drop. “Gotta check the snake.” The audio system must have over a hundred cables bunched together, but tonight’s too important to resign myself into a background role. 

“You’re over your time,” an A/V tech hollers from the front-of-house, a sunken pit about midway through the moulded plastic seats. 

“So what?” I call back. “You want the other bands to have a dead mic, too?” The patch bay is a maze of lines, black input and outputs lined in fluorescent LED colour rings. With a little struggle, I maneuver my fingers through the tangle, careful not to lose track of my cable until I’ve followed the end to its jack. No colour. Sloppy. I pull it out, check the connector pins. Nothing’s bent, no dust I can see. For extra measure, I ball up the hem of my cotton blouse and swipe it around the contact, then re-insert the cable. Click. My efforts are rewarded with the telltale lime-green ring around the jack… 

© 2024 A. Reiter - The Resonance
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, shared or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the writer.