SOME voices are copyrighted. You can’t be Beyoncé. But, for enough money, you can be just about anyone else.
Cadence has been saving up for this. They have been taking extra shifts at Scoops, the soles of their shoes rip-rip-ripping across the sticky floor as they scurry around behind the counter, serving ice cream to rich suburban kids with forked tongues and slitted pupils. Cold-blooded, primeval: this is the look. Wymie Park sent his models down the runway with serpent mods last spring, and now everybody who’s anybody is wearing them.
Cadence is not anybody. Cadence is just another teenage twink-dyke tripping over the dirty gray laces of their Converse sneakers. There is a scribble where their brain should be. But they need a new speaking voice, they are confident of this much, at least. They are not chasing a trend, they are righting a wrong.
No one seems to understand this.
If you’re going to drop all that money on a mod, at least get agood one, Cadence’s older brother said. Your voice is fine. Fix your face.
Everybody hates the sound of their own voice, honey, Cadence’s mother said. You can’t just mod your way out of every little insecurity. You have to learn to love yourself as you are.
No, Cadence’s father said.
And so Cadence made their appointment in secret and went to the mod center alone, and now here they are, preparing to listen to the voices of the dead.
“Do you have a preference for the age, gender, or accent of your donor?” the woman in white asks. She wears a lab coat like a doctor’s and holds a tablet. Her red-painted nails look as hard and shiny as the backs of beetles.
“Um,” Cadence says blankly. They have thought long and hard about all of this, of course, but now that the moment is here at last, they can barely remember their own name. It is too bright in here, and too hard, and too cold, all white glass and gleaming steel, like a hospital or an Apple Store.
The woman, who has some kind of derma-mod that makes her white skin glitter faintly, presses on. “Some of our most popular accents for English speakers are Southern American English, Eastern New England English, and Received Pronunciation, or ‘the Queen’s English.’ Our donors range in age from thirteen to eighty-seven years old, men and women both. Unless you want to take a look at our selection of custom voices, of course?”
That “men and women both” does not go unnoticed, but Cadence tries to ignore it and focus on the question being asked. The custom voices are the nonhuman ones, the cyborg warbles, the reptilian rasps. But Cadence wants to sound human, and that can only be achieved by borrowing another human’s voice. These are harvested from willing donors, like organs, digitally scanned and reproduced while the donor is still alive. It’s only once the donor is deceased that their voice can be used — taking on the voice of another living person risks interfering with voice recognition technology and the security it provides.
It is safe enough, though, to accept a gift from the dead.
Cadence is tempted to use this voice to take on a new personality entirely. A slurring surfer from California, a posh British exchange student, a crabby old grandparent asking after their iced tea. But that is not the point of this. At the end of the day, Cadence just wants to sound like themself: a mild-mannered kid from Missouri.
“If I get a teenager’s voice, will I sound like a teenager forever?” Cadence asks, finally finding words. They are eighteen and almost out of these particular woods. They do not want their voice to hold them back.
“No — without intervention, your new voice will age naturally. But we can do a follow-up in a few years to address that, if you want.”
That won’t be necessary. Cadence is excited for their new voice to grow and change with them, to become worn and comfortable. It is this first part they are worried about, when it will pinch like new shoes. All of high school has felt like that. Who would want that forever?
“I want a young adult voice, then, please, with a Mid-western accent. The gender doesn’t matter,” Cadence says, because it will not be a boy’s or a girl’s voice once it is in their mouth.
The woman presses her thin lips together. Cadence begins to sweat, shifting uncomfortably in the hard plastic chair. They know that there are unspoken rules to body modification, that you can become a different type of boy or girl as long as you remain either a boy or a girl. Cadence has a cousin who had her skin lightened, shares a locker with a white boy weeb who gave himself anime eyes. These things are allowed. But the modification industry has been careful to distance itself from “fringe” cultures that “abuse” the technology — and in this part of the world in particular, they are more conservative still. Legally, they cannot deny Cadence gender-affirming services. But they can wrinkle their nose at the idea.
“Right this way, then,” the woman says after a moment.
Cadence is suddenly very lonely. Their eyes burn with the threat of tears as they follow the woman to the sound booth. They wonder if they are doing the right thing. They wonder if it will hurt. But once they start listening to the voices, they begin to feel a little bit better. Excited, even. They have waited years for this. They will savor the moment.
The first voice belongs — belonged — to a nineteen-year-old from Chicago named Marcus Tomlin. His voice is deep, deeper than Cadence’s natural speaking voice, with a flat accent that’s a little stronger than Cadence is looking for. “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts,” he says. This is probably not something Marcus ever said in life. It is just a sample sentence, one that shows off the capabilities of the computer-generated re-creation. He says more things, like “The jolly collie swallowed a lollipop” and “Lesser leather never weathered wetter weather better.” It is a bold, brassy speaking voice. It exudes confidence, control. Cadence would like, desperately, to be that kind of person. But it would be the wrong reason to choose a voice. Confidence is not something you can just graft onto yourself; Cadence’s mother was right about that much. The confidence will come from having chosen the right voice, not from the voice itself.
They move on.
The next voice belonged to a fifteen-year-old from Ohio named Chris Li. His voice is higher, lighter, and it has a ringing quality to it, like it’s constantly on the edge of laughter. Something about this fills Cadence with an acute sadness. All the voices they will hear are from young donors, but fifteen is very young. They wonder how Chris died. They wonder if, when Chris got his parents to sign off on him being a donor, he had any idea he’d be taken so soon. And they wonder why he even became a donor in the first place. There is money in it — not much, but enough to make a difference for many people. For others, it’s about immortality. But for someone as young as Chris, it was probably for the status. If you can’t afford your own mods, saying you’ve donated one is the next best thing. Whatever the reason, Cadence cannot shake the feeling that they would be stealing something from Chris by choosing this mod — or maybe, more accurately, taking something that was stolen. And they cannot bear the weight of that.
They move on.
An hour passes. Two. Cadence can tell the woman in white is getting annoyed. If Cadence doesn’t pick a voice soon, they will have to reschedule the whole procedure. They do not know if they will find the courage a second time.
Maybe this is a sign. Maybe this is not meant to be.
“This next one strays outside your preferred regional accent, but we’re running out of options,” the woman says, somewhat stiffly. She taps on her tablet and pulls up the next profile. This one belonged to an eighteen-year-old from Dallas named Reina Pérez. “He thrusts his fists against the post and still insists he sees the ghost,” she says, like all the others. And the woman is right: this voice is not quite newscaster neutral. There is a taste of Texas here. But that is not what catches Cadence’s ear. It is the soft lull of it, low and deep, warm and strong, like sunlight, if it had a sound. There is a natural musicality to it, too. It would have been a good singing voice. It might still be. Cadence tries to picture the person it once belonged to, but instead, they see themself.
This is the one. Cadence knows immediately. They get the same feeling of rightness in their chest as when they changed their hair for the first time, or when they started wearing clothes from the other side of the department store. All day, they have been smiling fake smiles for others’ sake and not their own, but the smile spreading across their face now is real.
“I think that’s it,” they say quietly.
The woman seems almost as relieved as Cadence to be at the end of their search. She escorts them to an operating room, though it’s not actually called that — that would be too off-putting. Instead, it is a “reinvention room.” There’s soft music piping in and a television on mute, perhaps to distract from the fact that the countertops are covered with sharp, gleaming tools. There is a large contraption like a dentist’s chair in the middle of the room, made of gray-blue leather, like the back of a whale. Much like a dental cleaning, this procedure won’t take more than half an hour.
Cadence is beginning to feel afraid again. Now they are truly alone — even the woman in white has left, on to her next client. There is no one here to hold their hand. They climb into the dentist’s chair, lean back, stare up into the harsh white lights. Their throat catches when they swallow. It is such a vulnerable part of the body, they think. Cut the throat, and life pours out.
This time, though, life will pour in. They will wake new and whole.
The door opens, and three nurses swarm in, their faces covered by goggles and soft blue surgical masks. They prep Cadence for the procedure.
“Any last words?” one of them asks jokingly. Then she sees the terrified look on Cadence’s face and tries to take it back. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry — it was a joke. Because you’re getting your voice replaced. I didn’t mean . . .”
“Oh,” Cadence says.
“Everything’s going to be just fine, I promise. This your first mod?”
Cadence nods. Their head is beginning to swim, and they don’t know if it’s from the fear pumping through their blood or the sedative.
“Just count backward from one hundred, Cadence,” the nurse says. “You’ll be on the other side of this before you know it.”
One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven . . .
“Cadence? Cadence, it’s Dr. Chase. You’re in the recovery room. How are you feeling? Easy, now, your throat’s going to be a little sore. Just a thumbs-up or thumbs-down will do. Perfect. Now, open your mouth for me, let’s have a look. Great — it’s healing up great. You did a great job, Cadence. I’m writing you a prescription for some hydrocodone for the pain. You’re going to want to rest your voice completely for the next forty-eight hours and continue to treat it gently for the next four to six weeks: no whispering, no shouting, no singing, no prolonged conversations. It’s all written down on your discharge form. But before I go, I do want to hear you try and say something, just to make sure everything’s sounding right. Go on, now — it can be anything. ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ ”
Cadence’s brain is still heavy with fog. They barely remember what words are. And yet, suddenly, there are some forming on the tip of their still-numb tongue.
“Ask me again tomorrow,” they say — and at the sound of their new voice, they weep with joy.
Aaliyah has come to the park to get away.
In fact, Aaliyah has moved her entire life to the great state of Missouri to get away. She is staying with her grandmother, sleeping on the floral-printed guest bed, finishing up high school five hundred miles away from where she started it. It is not far enough: the grief has followed her. She feels it crowding in on her in the already-cluttered living room, where the coffee table is piled high with loose-leaf homework assignments and old cereal bowls crusted with milk and little orange pill bottles filled with antidepressants. The blinds have been opened to let the white winter sunlight in, and her grandmother has the Luther Vandross Christmas album playing through the house, but none of it is enough to chase away the shadows that close in whenever Aaliyah sits still for too long.
And so she has come to the park to get away from her getaway, even though it is colder than a witch’s tit out here, as her grandmother would say.
She is not the only one here. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and there’s still snow on the ground from earlier in the week. Kids are sledding down the big hill until it’s bald with dirt, ducking out from behind dead trees to throw snowballs at each other. There’s an ice-skating rink, too, and a cart that sells apple cider and hot chocolate, and a towering Christmas tree strung with colored lights and ornaments as big as a grown man’s head. Aaliyah is careful, as she walks the path that winds through the park, not to slip on the patches of ice or step in the frigid puddles of melted snow. She’s not wearing snow boots, doesn’t own any, never needed them before now.
All of this hurts to see: the little kids playing hard with their best friends, the couples clinging to each other on the skating rink, and the snow, which Reina had loved so much but never got to see like this. Aaliyah doesn’t know why she thought it would be a good idea to come here. She feels hollowed out, rotten. She belongs somewhere dark and quiet, not here in all this hard, glittering brightness, this celebration, this noise. She resents these people for their happiness. It is offensive. It is not right that they should be here when Reina is not.
Aaliyah lets out a heavy breath that frosts in the air. She is about to turn around and go home.
It is then that she hears Reina’s voice.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind . . .”
Aaliyah stops cold. At first, she assumes it is someone else’s voice, that, in her sorrow, she is hearing Reina in every minor key. But no — that is her. Aaliyah would recognize her voice anywhere. She has heard it almost every day of her life since she was eight years old.
Aaliyah is suspended, weightless, the ground suddenly gone beneath her.
She begins to run.
“Watch it,” a man growls when Aaliyah shoves past him. She does not stop to apologize, even as she plows through another knot of people. She does not slow down, even as her shoes slip on the slick pavement. She is getting closer. She is almost there. She can hear Reina’s voice, high and clear on the wind.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne?”
Aaliyah reaches the quad where the Christmas tree is set up. There is a kid about her age sitting at its base, a beat-up black guitar in their lap. They are long and lanky, like a bundle of crazy straws, and brown-skinned, with snowflakes caught in their twists. Their fingers move quickly over the frets. The guitar case is at their feet, its red mouth open for tips. The kid is singing.
They are singing with Reina’s voice.
Aaliyah has slowed to a walk, but she cannot stop herself from approaching. One foot falls in front of the other, inexorably. It is as if she’s in a trance.
It’s . . . a mod, Aaliyah realizes as the singing continues.
She doesn’t know what she expected to find. Reina, alive somehow? Her ghost, in a park in the middle of Missouri? She hates that she hoped for these things, ...
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