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Baron Quits The Payloaders

By Renan Bernardo

This story starts with a gig. Half a million people from all corners of the galaxy, hands in the air, heads banging to our vibrant noise. You probably saw the venue on some feed already. It’s the Amplitude, our spaceship, stage #3, the one with an enormous radiation-shielding dome over our heads. Right now, the glass glistens with Marzanna’s tannish and gaseous massiveness outside.

This is also how the story ends for me. How I want it to end. With a blast and nothing more.

We’re the Payloaders, the Starry Four, the A-little-slower-than-light Vessel of Rock n’ Roll, eighty-three years (minus five) playing station metal across the galaxy and making folks go nuts. And for the first time in my career, I realize I’m done.

That man with a fauxhawk, a goatee, and a tattoo of concentric circles around his left eye is Baron. Baron is me. Vocalist, rockstar, twelve times Face of the Galaxy™, and… Well, that’s pretty much all that’s left of me. The woman a few steps from where I am on the stage is our multi-instrumentalist: Ana-Z89X—Ana for the close acquaintances; A82827-SZ89X for her technical assemblers. She’s an musicandroid, fabricated with that young rocker jargon in mind: Born to Be Wild. Her left arm converts into a six-string guitar, and she can play almost any instrument wirelessly to the amplifiers—sax, keyboard, violin, you name it. Back there with that neat close-cropped hair painted like blood, spanking cymbals, hi-hats, and smashing a double pedal, is Dakota, our drummer, my best friend and eternal sweetheart. We’ve been together for a few years. Sort of. We hang out together, make love, compose, and cuddle in after-gig exhaustions.

It’s solo time, i.e., my throat’s nap time. As Ana shreds her guitar-arm, I step back on the stage, fetch a bottle of water, and climb on the drum stand. I stare at Dakota. My face is probably revealing because they frown at me and even miss a beat, but they’re so good that they quickly realign with the solo.

When the song ends, I remain on the drum stand. It’s time for our encore, but I need to let it out of me because it’s clogging in my throat and it’s making my legs shiver. It can’t wait anymore.

“I’m gonna byte up, Dakota,” I say, leaning closer to them. They know the meaning of those words: removing my mind from my body and shelving it. For good.

“You—what?” Dakota yells over the crowd’s din. “You can’t do that.”

“You knew I could go down this road since you came into the band.”

Ana throws some picks toward the fans and the screaming recedes a little. It becomes easier to talk.

“We’re on a peak, Baron,” Dakota says. “Half a million people coming to our ship to watch us. Do you know other bands that can manage that?”

“No other bands.”

“No other bands.” They smash a cymbal as if to make a point. And it’s true, no other band has an entire spaceship of their own.

“And do you know which other singer has lost his family in a tragic accident and had his label byte down his mind to a new body for the sake of everlasting success?”

They get my point and break eye contact with me, throwing their sticks on the ground. I can see sweat droplets beading on their forehead. Ana shreds a final provoking riff with a hint of wah-wah to the cheering crowd. João walks forward in the stage, slapping his bass and headbanging, our usual show-offs before the encore. Oh, yes, João Barroso, our bassist. The epitome of all bass players: kind of forgotten and neglected, but a guy who loves just that. He’d certainly leave the band if we left too much spotlight for him. Native from a small town in Terceiro Recife, Earth Two, João hides from the world on stages. He says it’s his way of dealing with social uneasiness, and he’s often more at ease there than he is when we’re dining, partying or chilling out together. If João’s there, people fail to notice him, but if he’s not, everybody misses him. Just like a bass track.

The encore comes anyway. I owe that to them—to my friends and to the fans. I give all I can of my reconstructed body and augmented throat—three of the band’s best songs, the last one coming straight from our first record from eighty-two years ago. Up there on stage, I’m the Baron people love, the man who came back from the dead just because heavy metal never dies. All hair and energy and sweat.

I keep my eyes open, focused on the frantic mob banging their heads to Last of Those Who Last.

“We’re never gonna last, we don’t mind. We’re never gonna mind being the last…”

When I stop to fetch a kerchief and wipe the sweat on my brow, I see my dead son waiting for me behind my eyelids. I grit my teeth, singing the next verse with an unexpected intensity, making people go even crazier.

Then the show’s over and tinnitus drills in my ears to remember it wasn’t all a dream.

I watch Marzanna turn into a small pebble outside my quarter’s window. I lie on my bed, surrendering to exhaustion and to my kid. With him comes that bead of guilt I carry with me that insists I could’ve saved him from the accident that took his and Jess’s lives.

Lucas lights on in full detail as I close my eyes and rest my head on the pillow. I know it’s him, and I know it’s nothing but my treacherous neurons. He’s smiling at me, one of his incisor teeth slightly crooked to the right. I draw a deep breath and see him running after a golden retriever on a park. That situation never really happened, but my mind makes it up anyway. I see Lucas guffawing, his cheap deodorant flaring up into my nostrils. If I look closer, I know which pores on his forehead are sweating, which muscles of his legs strain from the run. I can see things I didn’t even register when he was alive, like the tiny, clear spot he has on the back of his left knee.

“Dad, come here!” It’s not him at all, just something that my brain thinks he’d say in that situation. Still, it sounds in my ear as if he’s right there in my ship’s stateroom. My mind can pretend it’s as if Lucas is still alive and create any new scenario out of it.

I open my eyes and shake off the past, a bit indifferent to the tears that cross down my cheeks. Outside, Marzanna is no more. All that’s left is blackness.

The thing about touring throughout the galaxy is you’re almost never with your family. You’re always distant, crossing through wormholes to get somewhere and play your shit. But once in a lifetime, they’re there with you, for you, front row, all energy and jumping and headbanging, jawbones distended of singing and screaming. And that, of course, is when life decides to rip them off from you.

---

We’re in our zero-g studio, floating with the lumpy sensation brought by inevitable fates.

Yep, you know where this is going. Band talk. They all know it too.

The wintergreen of João’s cigarette clings to the air like a sticky movie theater floor. Ana is static in a corner, her magnetic feet stuck to the floor. Dakota is lost among the tom-toms and cymbals and drums of their orb-like kit, swirling a drumstick and wearing the kind of grumpy face they do when there’s “serious talk” coming in. Our eyes meet for a moment. The hint of a smile rehearses in their lips, then converts into a sigh.

“Friggin’ Dragon is gonna be pissed, you know,” Dakota says, each word punctuated with a soft tap on the snare drum.

“I say I wanna byte up, they’ll let it. The label doesn’t own me.”

“Up for debate.” Dakota shrugs. “What about us?”

I knew the question would come, and among the few things I want to do before byting up, leaving my bandmates in a good place is the most important of them.

I’m honest. “Dragon’s gonna send you all to hell. I love you guys and you’re the most talented bastards I ever played with in this band, but without me… without this… Baron figure… getting a label won’t be so easy. You know how the business stinks.”

“And us?” Dakota raises her brows. I bite my lips. I leave the question hanging.

The problem is, dear reader, that the Payloaders are important, but the Baron is a legend. The man I was and who I’m still supposed to be, who once had a wife and a kid and a dream of becoming a rockstar, is the only thing that’s left of a bygone era. Think of John Lennon still rocking in the 2030s. Would people like it? Hell yeah. Would he like it? I doubt it. And that’s who Baron is, a man who died and came back and forgot to die again.

“So we get unemployed?” Dakota snickers. The “us” is back to being the band. “Back to performing to miners and pirates in uncertified asteroids?”

“No—I…” I swivel, push my feet against the soft-padded wall and cling to Dakota’s drum kit. I touch their free arm, but they pull it back. “I’ll arrange so you’ll have another label after I byte up. One that wants the band and not the Baron. I’ll make sure it’s in the contract and the contract is made public so they’ll face backlash if anything goes wrong. And, of course, the Amplitude is yours, split by three. And all my money and shares. You’re everything that matters, guys.”

“So is this the end?” Dakota’s drumstick glides away from their hand. They don’t make an effort to get it back. “Let me put it in a headline-ish way: This is the end of the Payloaders.”

I gulp. That’s it, isn’t it? Putting it differently would be softening up things for them.

“Say something, João.” I stare at our bassist, wanting to evade the question a bit more. The smoke puffing out from his mouth coils up to the studio’s filters.

“Let’s play on Earth,” he says, casually scratching his long black beard.

“Earth One?” I laugh, pivoting toward him.

“Why not?”

“You’re stoned, man.”

“No, really.” He shakes his head. “Didn’t you always want that? Didn’t your…”

“Lucas…”

“You told me Lucas wanted to go there, and you never…”

I close my eyes and bite my lips. Lucas is always the worse, the most painful. I’m what many teenagers would give money and blood for: A 105-years-old dude with the body, vigor, and voice of a 40-years-old rock legend. But most people fail to look at me from the right angle: a man with a 105-years-old mind and a 62-years-old trauma. Who would have thought that having your mind stored then moved to a new body (byted up and down) would award you with hyperthymesia of the life you led before? Lucas, dead at 19, and Jéssica, dead with our unborn baby in her womb, percolate my mind as if my grey matter is made of sponge. I can recall… No. I can see them, from Lucas’s cuddly hands and Jéssica’s cracked lips during his birth, to their O-shaped mouths when the rumble of the explosion shook everyone in the stage at Kupuri Station.

“I’m with João.” It’s Ana who says that. Dakota is still a bit shocked, though I’m not sure if by João’s suggestion, by the Payloaders splitting up, or by my chosen demise. Probably, all of the above.

“Earth One is a protected environment, guys,” I say. “All that talk about it being a closed system since our great-granddaddies fucked their climate is real. The bureaucracy involved is huge.”

João flips his pad to me.

“You don’t look at our feeds, dude,” he says, blowing his wintergreen onto my face. “Earth One folks want to see the Payloaders since you brought this band up. A lot of people there don’t want to cross the stratosphere for a gig, get it?”

I lick my lips. Earth One is sacred ground. Rebuilt from the ground up, the place is a lush garden filled with domes and crystalline oceans like nowhere else across the known galaxy. A paradise rebuilt from ashes. Lucas dreamed of it, showing me his comic books set on Number One. He spoke of it during dinner as if it was a magic land. And, hell, it is. I promised to take him there one day. Told him with all the words. We all died before that day ever came.

“Think of it as a memorial,” Ana says from her corner. “You never had a memorial service for your family.” Unlike Dakota and João, Ana-Z89X doesn’t need—or can’t—measure her words. I dig that on her.

I nod, slowly, taking it all in. A last gig on Earth One, a farewell to the Baron. More than that, a memorial for my boy and my Jéssica. Since I stayed dead for five years after the accident, the two were no more than two symbolic urns set on the Kurupi’s Remembrance Museum when I came back.

Jéssica barges into my mind, wrought in details up to every eyelash, a curl from her cloudy, woolly hair falling over her right eye. For a moment, it’s just that, a bittersweet reconstruction, one of many my brain has been making since I byted down, but then it’s a memory, of the last conversation we ever had—and that’s what breaks me.

Jéssica comes into the dressing room, waving from behind our roadies and managers. Biff’s wearing a t-shirt of our most recent album at the time—Fires of the Luxons—filling up some form on his pad. Patrícia’s getting a sound mixer plugged in to test. Its crackling noise fills up the room. Akenatosh is at the back, tuning a guitar, the laughter of my former bandmates (RIP) backstage. The place smells of snacks and of the incense-outlets that hide on the station’s walls. And so much more. If I want, I can grasp a hundred different scents and sensations in that room during the span of a hand wave. Of course, it’s the soft floral notes of Jéssica’s lipstick that clutches to my nose when she kisses me. It’s a brief smack, a “hey” kind of kiss. Yet, I can remain there for hours, reliving everything of that day, feigning it’s all happening again while knowing it’s all a lie.

“Hey, man.” Dakota’s voice. “You blacked out again.”

I blink back to life, parts of me still trying to reach for those floral notes.

“Damn, let’s do it,” I say, lips dry from the lack of a kiss now lost. “We deserve nothing less.”

When I’m impelling myself toward the door, Dakota slips out of their orb kit and pulls my arm, gently.

“Why, Ricardo?” they say, rubbing a hand on their hair. Only Dakota calls me by my real name.

“Because I still live with my family.”

They frown.

I tap my head. “They’re here. All the time. And still they’re unreachable. I can’t cope with it anymore.”

“Is it the hyperthymesia?”

I nod. The band knows about it, though they can’t grasp the full implications since I rarely get into the details.

“People call it that, but there’s more to it. The few minds byted down to bodies… Four or five in the whole galaxy, maybe? They all have to live with that. Intricate memories of the time before the byting process and a capacity to recreate full scenes with people they once knew. I can just… watch an entire movie with my boy right now. The way I want it to. Seems lovely, don’t it?”

“Ouch.” Dakota flinches. “Not at all. Seems hurty.”

“It is. It helped me dealing with grief back in the day. But now?”

“We don’t need to do another gig if you don’t feel up to it…” Dakota squeezes my hand.

“Hell if I don’t. Earth One it is. The fans deserve a proper Payloader farewell. It’s not always you can get it.”

---

There’s a Death Clause in my contract, so I know this time I’ll go down for good. It’s a paragraph stating that the label will cover only one resurrection since the costs of storing and rebuilding a mind are prohibitive, not even counting the process of labgrowing a similar body. Besides, they don’t want me living a reckless life, dying and coming back as I see fit. I’m gonna tell you the main reason, though: death is profit. A dead Baron is a legend that sells music, even without festivals and interstellar gigs. One resurrection is good, prophetic, makes people talk. But two comebacks? It gets banal, gets comic book-ish. Each extra day for the man is one day fewer for the legend.

I tap my pad to send my intentions to the label (Ophidian Sounds, Inc., which we appropriately call the Dragon, since it’s the most powerful record label in the galaxy): I’m severing the Payloaders’ contract with them; I’m paying all expenses and fees and whatnot that need to be paid; I’m going to Earth One; I’m playing one hell of a gig; then, I’m byting up. At last, I speak to the Amplitude’s cap and set a course to Earth One, something we couldn’t do if we had ties with the Dragon since they were forbidden of doing any businesses on Earth One due to a truckload of illegal practices in the past.

Dakota waits for me in the Invisible Room of our Inspiration Deck. The place’s ceiling, floor, and three of its four walls are comprised of x-resist glasses.

“You said you wanted nothing but blackness,” Dakota shrugs, nodding at the vastness of space around us. We are en route to Earth One at 75% of lightspeed.

“What’re you up to?”

Dakota is strumming a nine-string guitar. It’s a beautiful horseshoe-shaped piece scrimshawed with blue motifs of walruses.

“Don’t know yet.” They hit a chord that gets amplified by the room’s speakers. “Let’s think of something nice.”

“Hm. I’m not in the mood for composing.” I sit on the stool in front of them. Dakota loves that room, finds it inspiring. I always thought of it as dizzy. “I’ve killed the Dragon.”

“We’re on our own, then.”

“Yep.”

“And all the bureaucracy to play on Utopia?” They grin at me, eyes fixed on the strings, delicately plucking a few notes, experimenting.

“Utopia…” Lucas called Earth One that. It was something he read on his comic books about the 2150s, when Earth One was starting to close itself to the rest of the galaxy and turning itself into a planetary reserve. I can see Lucas propping his elbow on the kitchen table, sliding across the pages of Solarfuture Adventures. It’s issue #87, serial number 38371738-2. Hell, I can read the page that’s he’s reading if I want to, but my eyes are on my undying, non-growing kid. I know later that day we’ll go—we went to a pizza place where I talked with Jéssica about how happy I was for the Payloaders’ first gig on Titan. If I linger too much on that memory, I can relive everything, up to the moment when we kissed good night and slept with a rare kind of lightness.

“What do you think?” Dakota brings me back.

I stare at them, befuddled.

“You were somewhere else, right?”

I nod. Not sure if there’s a scientific explanation for this, but the more I get older in this body, the more I drown into the details of my own pre-byting memories.

“Can I ask you a question?” Dakota lays the guitar face up on their lap. “I know you don’t like to talk much about this, but since we’re…” The sentence lingers between being comfortable and uncomfortable. What are we, anyway? “Did Jéssica and Lucas byte up their minds before the…”

“No. They didn’t want to.” Jéssica didn’t want her mind broke into yottabytes and scattered in a decentralized storage over four planetary systems. Lucas went along with her. They had the right to be byted up, being my family, but Jéssica wanted to die very old, in a solitary house on the terraformed pastures of Io. Why abdicate of something only humans have? Jéssica used to say. “One day we’ll want peace and nothing else.”

“What’s that?”

“Just something Jess used to say. I was indifferent to it at the time. I wanted to play, compose, and show the world my music and art. I loved the money that was flowing in too, of course. I became one of the richest men of the solar system back then. Can you imagine? I thought I was immortal. Didn’t really care about mind uploads and the such. But, hey… Contracts, right? It was a non-negotiable condition. So here I am… alone with my over-detailed memories.”

“You’re not alone.” Dakota says, picking back the guitar and strumming a few chords.

I try to smile, but probably what comes across is a grimace. If not for Dakota, I’d probably be byted up already. I only never explored strengthening our connection because deep down I always knew I had the option to byte up, but we’ve been dating for four years, almost since I byted down to this new body, when the label judged my mourning process had finished and Dakota and the others were hired for the band.

“All of our pains…” I sing, trying to fit a poetry I wrote a while ago into Dakota’s melody, “…can be found in every corner.”

“All of our delights,” Dakota says, picking up a rhythm, finding something. “Let’s try it. I think it fits better. Go on.”

“All of our delights can be found in every corner.” I start tapping my lap, going on with it, a joyful sensation snaking up through my belly. I stare into Dakota’s eyes, which are fixed on the guitar. I keep at it, purposely enthralling myself. I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want to see my family. “Turn right, turn left, turn yourself in to the dusk.”

“To the beat.”

I laugh. “You’re trying to adapt it to the melody or turning my poetry into something cheery?”

Dakota shrugs, their smile adrift in a quick, clean riff that’s not exactly outrightly happy, but lively like the more peppy, party-like songs of the Payloaders’ first years.

We sink into this state—‘cause it’s a state we’re in, lost in ourselves and our music in that pitch room—for two hours. In the end, we have my poetry all twisted and distorted and morphed into the sketch of a beautiful power ballad.

“Are you going to record this?” I ask. “I mean… A new album? After?”

They shake their head. “This one is for me.”

After another minute of silence in which I try to stay out of my mind, Dakota starts packing up their guitar on the case.

“Can we do it?” they say. “Get a permit to play on Earth One?”

“João can.”

“Even without any label?”

“João is a bureaucrat disguised as a bassist.”

Dakota roars up a laugh.

Labels are old-fashioned things brought back to life (not unlike myself). Most of them went extinct after the 2150s, but became relevant again once there was a demand upsurge for shows on moons, stations, and spaceships. They’re the ones who put all the bureaucracy together for those things to happen. And though they have no rights over creative work, they have over bands. It’s hard to set up a good gig without them unless you dream small.

But João has a thing for paperwork. He’s one of those guys people call Antiquated Intelligence, meaning he likes to do the work that can be mostly done in automated fashion.

When he walks into the room with the green Earth One miniature shining on his pad, I almost don’t want to byte up.

“We have an Earth One gig,” he says, almost murmuring, a sweet smile hiding feebly underneath his beard. It’s like he’s announcing something as trivial as eating salad.

We applaud, jump and hug each other as Ana’s voice cracks in the speakers.

“I watch everything and want some of that hug too.”

---

Kurupi Station explosion was a mess, the most impressive and appalling mess in the history of space structures. The gigantic ring station that orbited Albion was famous for its music subculture centered around heavy station metal. According to multiple sources, the genre had been born in Kurupi’s cargo bays and hangar decks, an evolution of heavy metal mixed with spacetrance and wormhole-punk. It got its name because the first bands used to hop from station to station across the systems to play their music. That started many years before the Payloaders acquired their own cargo-hauler and turned it into a massive interstellar concert hall/cruiser.

So festivals in Kurupi got crowded. Really crowded. There were days we managed to gather 800,000 people from seven systems to see us rocking and screaming. If there’s any comfort in this story is that when the tragedy happened we weren’t playing for a full house. Still, 200,000 people watching us and three million throughout the station had perished.

Terrorism? A design failure in one of the hundreds of fusion reactors? There was never a conclusive answer. Barely anything was salvageable. Lives were lost. The station metal cradle was no more. The Payloaders were lost. Baron was dead.

I got back to life five years later. It was watching documentaries and reading the news from the time that I saw what I really meant to a lot of people all across the systems. That’s what kept me going after the comeback. I had no obligation to remain active, despite all the Dragon’s hope—and veiled threats, of course. But I wanted to go on. I wanted to bring back the Payloaders and rock the galaxy. Jéssica and Lucas helped me moving on. The thorough memories and the reconstructions my mind made of them were more than welcome at the time.

Cap’s voice crackles in my pad.

“ETA is two hours.”

I’m sitting on my bed, listening to the demo version of Dakota’s song. They called it Dusk Delight With You. A duet. Dakota’s singing is gravelly and sometimes fall into a pleasing hum that weaves perfectly with my higher-pitched tones. Should I mention I’m crying while listening to it? I am, though it doesn’t say much. I’ve been crying a lot lately.

All of our delights can be found in every corner

Turn right, turn left, turn yourself in to the beat.

Let it flow, let it glow, don’t be such a mourner.

“You’re distant these days.”

I startle and lift up my head to look around. Jéssica’s on my desk, right below the Iridium Discs for Fires of the Luxons and Breathing Us. It’s the first time I’ve seen her as a memory projected in the real world. At least one of the other byted down people mentioned phenomena like that in the papers I’ve read.

“I’m talking to you…” she says, a deep frown on her brow.

“You’re just my mind using my overly precise memories to fabricate this.”

“Say what you want.” She stands. All the hairs on my body bristle. “But I’m pregnant with your kid, and all you do these days is think of music and composition and this damned Earth One gig. I’m not one of your mics to be discarded after a few uses.”

It’s not even the realistic quality of Jéssica that boggles me, but that she’s using a perfume she never did in real life, something crisp and dry. More than that, I can feel an uncomfortable warmth in my room.

“Just go away,” I say.

“I won’t go away until you cancel that gig and acknowledge that you have a family.”

“You always supported me.” Now it’s me who stands. My legs are wobbly. “I never abandoned you or exchanged you for gigs, dear.”

She chortles with scorn. “But now you are doing just that.”

“You… ended in that dressing room where we kissed for the last time, Jess. I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?” She’s almost yelling now. “Are you sending me away?”

I gulp. The word is clogged down my throat, but I manage to spit it out. It comes out almost as a cough.

“Yes.”

She’s crying now, and if I extend my thumb I can prevent the tears from reaching her lips like I did when she shed them in joy at the moment she announced she was pregnant with Lucas. But I don’t. I want to, more than anything. But I don’t.

“Can I ask you why?” she says.

“I’m in love with someone else.”

I close my eyes and breathe in Dakota’s song.

If you let it flow and let it go,

You know the world’s gonna glow.

When I open my eyes, I’m alone with a taste on my lips. Not floral.

---

OH YEAH! THE PAYLOADERS HIT EARTH

Legendary and Resuscitated Singer Says It’s His Final Gig

Earth One is everything people say and much more. João says it resembles nothing of the underground cities of his Earth Two hometown. After we descend the elevator from orbit, we take a train through the dart-rails to our hotel. We go across a dense forest underneath a set of domes. I always thought of Earth One like Mars, where the Payloaders performed for the first time: lots of green parks mingled with skyscrapers and artificial rivers and lakes. But it’s nothing like that. There’s a… sludge quality to the place. Everything seems soft, natural, and silty. It makes me think of the vintage apples sold in the fairs of Enceladus.

“Do you think it was like this before the Big Collapse?” Dakota says as we marvel at the train’s windows.

“I heard it was pretty bad,” I say. “Lucas read a lot about it. He used to call pre-restoration Earth the Land of Big Waves. And I don’t think he meant synthwave musicians.”

“Splendid work they did here,” João says, and by the look in his eyes, I think the Payloaders found an Earth One aficionado. Took long enough. It’s said every group of three or more people has at least one.

“No wonder they protect this place from the likes of Ophidian Songs.” Dakota laughs.

Our gig is set to happen in Verde Hall, an open space outside of a dome underneath a clear, blue sky. During our soundcheck, we’re still lost in the wonder of that place. Afterwards, Ana and our technical staff set up everything we need.

And it starts!

We open up with a fast-paced song about fast skiffs traveling through the void—the kind of silly lyrics from the Payloaders early days. Earth One’s audience feels like any other place, but there’s an extra intensity in them. There are times I can hear them louder than my own voice. And that’s great. That makes a thrill course through my body, the kind that I don’t feel for a long time.

I look at Dakota. They look back at me. We exchange that smile, adrenaline mixed up with satisfaction, but there’s something else in it. They roll multiple strokes and we dive fast into the second song, Wings of the Drone.

He arrives during our last encore.

I thought it could happen after my meeting with Jéssica. And he’s always the strongest, most pervasive memory, the one that comes with that tinge of guilt I can never single out. I just didn’t expect it would happen during the gig, the only moment I can keep myself off my mind.

He peers at me from the backstage. He’s beside a curtain, just beyond where João slaps his bass. He seems irritated, lips pressed tight, as if I shouldn’t be there. I look to the audience, singing the best I can. I miss one or two words. Ana stares at me with her analytical glare. I wave her off and go on.

But I can feel his stare, even though I’m ignoring—trying to—him. A led lights up on Ana’s shoulder, indicating that Dakota wants to speak with me. I sing another two verses and step back on the stage, eyes on the floor, not wanting to see my son there in the back.

“You’re acting weird,” Dakota yells over their drumming. “Get some water.”

That’s when he comes at me. Despite all the screams and the noise, I can hear him as if we’re alone in a silent room. He stops before me.

“You let me die.”

Somewhere in a world left behind, Dakota mentions something about missing lines.

I did let him die, yes.

I do remember that now. Only now.

When I was byted down to a new body, at least five doctors explained to me that some memories might be lost or buried deep in my subconscious mind. I thought they didn’t know exactly what they were talking about since I could remember almost everything of my pre-life in their most intricate details, mainly when it concerned my family.

But now I see there are things I forgot, perhaps as a self-defense mechanism from this strange brain of mine. I let my son die at Kurupi Station. In my gig, in the front row, singing my songs. Lucas never wanted to go. He had a con at the same day. Jéssica would certainly go to the Kurupi show, but without Lucas? The last time he went to one of the Payloaders’ gigs the band couldn’t manage something so impressive as what we’d planned for Kurupi. That hurt both my father pride and my rockstar pride. So I made him go. I scolded him. There will be tons of cons to go. Your mother needs you there. We’ll be there as a family. I want you to meet the band.

So he went and ended up having a good time. His last.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the image of Lucas in front of me, that sliver of my brain that was always there after my comeback, but that is now complete. Ana, João, Dakota, and the audience are mere blurs now. “I understand I shouldn’t have forced you to go.”

“But you did and killed me. Come, Mom needs you.” He beckons me to the backstage as if there’s somewhere to go. As if we can catch a skiff and go back to our old home in Charon. I’m tempted to accept the offer, whatever that means.

Lucas walks a bit further on the stage. “C’mon, Dad. I have a new Solarfuture Adventures issue to show you.” He stops in front of the drum and that’s what saves me. I catch a glimpse of Dakota’s gaze, even blurry and messy as everything except Lucas is right now.

“No,” I tell him, stepping back. “Go away.”

“Dad. We need you.”

“I was there when you did. Now you don’t exist.”

Lucas opens his mouth and just hangs there, immobile, staring right through me with a shocked expression, his incisor tooth crooked to the right.

“Dakota…” I make an effort to steer my gaze away from him, even knowing that’s probably the last time I’d see him. I need only to accept his offer and make my dear son a perennial part of me.

There’s silence in the stage. Everybody’s looking at me, at Baron, Face of the Galaxy™. Dakota, Ana, João, the audience, a lot of Earth One people watching from their homes. They demand something from me, and rightly so. They’re not fabrications of a mind.

I step back and climb on Dakota’s drum stand.

“Dusk Delight With You…” I say.

“That’s supposed to be for me. To keep as a … remembrance. For when you…”

“Trust me, please.”

Lucas is still there when Dakota steps out from the drum and grabs a guitar. He’s still there when we start the song, and he remains there when we leave the stage. I like to think he stayed to watch the show that never ended in Kurupi. I like to think he smiled in the end, but I never looked back to check. When Dakota strummed the first chords of their song, I realized there always could be another comeback.

“All of our delights can be found in every corner…”

---

THE PAYLOADERS ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM

Dusk Delight, The Band’s First Album in Years, Will Be Released A Few Days Before Baron’s Wedding With Drummer

---

Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was Baron Quits the Payloaders! by Renan Bernardo, narrated by Ben Gideon

About this story Bernardo says:

As a rock/metal listener for 24 years, I was thrown into the genre because of fantasy. I was amazed when I found out there were bands out there making music about The Lord of the Rings. Eventually, metal music threw me back into fiction. My first contact with Dune was listening to song based on it. Since then, music and fiction have co-existed in my brain as a pleasant symbiotic relationship.

I always wanted to write a story centered on a band, and after years I came up with this one, which is far more than about music: it’s a story about overcoming grief, found family, found love, predatory companies making artists’ lives harder, and hyperthymesia, which is a real condition. It shows us that a “healthy” memory isn’t only remembering stuff. Sometimes, it’s forgetting too.

And about this story, I say: In addition to loving the vibrant, rock music feel of this story, I also really liked the turn at the ending on this one. I was suckered into believing that our narrator’s happy ending would be what he had decided: one last concert and then the 105-year-old rocker would finally fade out to peace. I can see how 60 years of rock music fame would have a certain price–for one, they would probably be stuck playing the same hit songs over and over at every single concert, right? For the fans? You know, the Phantom of the Opera finally closed on Broadway after 35 years, and I read an article about how some of the orchestra musicians had been with the show the entire time it was running, since 1988. I can absolutely see how you wouldn’t want to give up that steady paycheck and security. And also, I don’t know if I could take 35 years of playing the exact same music every night. 

At any rate, back to our rocker, who clearly had other issues he was dealing with besides just what songs to play. I did not anticipate but really loved the turn this story took, into him finding a new chapter of his life and a new way to move forward. It was clear he had more songs left in him, both literally and metaphorically. I am currently beaming good vibes this this completely imaginary musician and hoping that his fans celebrate this new turn in his life and career.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from David Bowie, who said: “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.