Christopher Corn's Arc

Chapter 14 of 15

A week passed. No signal came from Earth. Christopher sat in the studio garage with a blank page on his knee, waiting for a hook that wouldn't arrive. Their song still climbed the chart. Fred kept asking about the follow-up. Christopher had nothing. A weak second song would sink them faster than silence. He tried a riff on the electric blue guitar. It sounded like something he'd already written. He tried another. Same problem. Every melody landed on a shape people had heard before. He set the guitar down and put his head in his hands. RJ came in through the side door, holding two mugs. He set one on the desk and looked at the crumpled paper on the floor. "Stuck," RJ said. Not a question. "Everything sounds borrowed," Christopher said. "Guitar, drums, bass. All of it. I can't beat our own song with the same tools." RJ nodded once. He walked to the corner of the garage and pulled a canvas sheet off a low table. Under it sat a cracked analog synthesizer. The casing was split along one side. The keys were yellow at the edges. Colored sliders sat crooked in their tracks. "Found it in the shed behind Fred's place," RJ said. "Powers on. Half the knobs still do something." Christopher stared at it. "Does it work?" "Only one way to find out." Christopher plugged it in. A low hum filled the room. He pressed a key and the sound bent sideways, thick and warped, like a voice speaking through water. He pressed another. The tone cracked and folded on itself. Nothing on the chart sounded like this. Nothing he'd ever played sounded like this. He moved a slider. The pitch dropped into his chest. He moved another. A high, broken shimmer came out the top. He laughed once, sharp. "Play something," RJ said. Christopher found a three-note figure. Simple. Ugly at first, then not ugly. He looped it and added a fourth note that shouldn't have worked and did. The room felt different. The hook was there. He could hear it before he finished playing it. RJ leaned against the wall and watched. He didn't smile. He just listened, the way he listened to his own songs. "That's the one," RJ said. "That's the one," Christopher said. He wrote the figure down. Four notes. A shape no chart hit had used. He played it again to be sure, and it held. He picked up the guitar and layered it under the synth line. The two sounds fought, then locked. The hook doubled in weight. Christopher grabbed a fresh page and started writing verses against it. By the time Fred knocked on the studio door, Christopher had the spine of the next song and a sound Earth had never heard. He handed Fred the page. "Tell the chart people we're not done," Christopher said.