Something Real Read online

  *~*~*

  It was the music Sean missed the most. Life on ISC2 was exciting, to be sure, and there was always work to be doing and something to occupy his busy little fingers if they got twitchy in their time off. But it was a bit quiet inside the dome, a little muted, and there wasn't much to be hearing anyway but the clang of construction and the whirring and thumping of the transports zooming around. Sedge had explained it to him once, how the makeup of the gases in the air inside wasn't quite the same as Earth's and how the sound waves traveled a little differently because of it, but half of what he'd said had gone over Sean's head and the rest in one ear and out the other. That's what Sedge got for trying to tell him something while Sean had a computer in front of him in a room full of other bodies holding other conversations. And the music inside the buildings was all recorded and piped through speakers. It wasn't bad if a guy could find the right station, but after months of listening to the same versions of the same songs, Sean would have dropped to his knees for the first man who offered to play some live music. Even the shite open mic music he used to suffer through at Sandy's Grille in college would have been a welcome change.

  Pulling his hands away from the keyboard for a moment, he wiggled his fingers while he stretched his arms up over his head, back arching until it let out a satisfying pop. He groaned. "Oh yeah, that's the stuff."

  A snort sounded to his left. "If you're watching porn over there, don't let Byrd catch you."

  "Come on, Giz," laughed Sedge a few work stations down. "You know Sean doesn't need porn. He gets off on 1's and 0's."

  Sean nodded, blinking innocently. "The sight of all those big, stiff 1's and those hot little 0's just waiting to be filled gets my dick so hard I have to convert to hex just to keep from embarrassing myself." Giz snorted.

  "Gets him thinking about throbbing manhoods and quivering flowers of pleasure, or whatever that shit is his sister reads." Sedge closed his eyes and sighed. "Mallory. Now there is a hot little number to get a guy's dick up." Giz made a sound of agreement.

  "Yeah, well, Mal's got more sense than to ever let either of you two idiots touch her, so keep it in your pants, and keep your hands to yourselves." Sean narrowed his eyes threateningly, though he knew with his freckles and round baby face, it made him look about as menacing as wet kitten.

  Giz raised an eyebrow, glancing down at the expansive width of his own chest and then at Sean's narrow shoulders.  

  "Just because I can't hurt you in a brawl, that doesn't mean I can't still make your life miserable," he grumbled, attention returning to the screens in front of him. When Giz replied, it faded into the background, Sean's mind totally focused on the lines of code he was modifying.

  By the time Sean came out of his haze, Sedge had already left and Giz was shutting down his station for the night, tossing a quick wave and a head nod in Sean's direction before departing. Aaron was settled at the tech support desk for the overnight shift, the light shields entirely closed overhead. Yawning, Sean logged off and got to his feet, stopping by the beverage station to refill his coffee mug before exiting through the heavy doors. They closed behind him with scarcely audible thump, dampening the slightly tinny music wafting down from the miniscule overhead speakers. Aaron had already switched the station to something massively processed with a heavy beat that Sean was happy to leave behind.

  Trudging back toward his dormitory, Sean softly whistled one of the tunes he remembered his gran singing to him during the nights Mama had to work and Pops was on call at the hospital. He drummed the rhythm lightly on his thigh with his fingertips as he walked, daydreaming of Gran's coffee and her almond cookies with the pecan halves pressed in the center while he drank the bitter sludge ISC2 served up all across the dome.

  Abruptly he stopped when the door at the bottom of his stairwell slid open. Someone was playing the violin. Not playing a recording of a violin, but actually playing it. Whoever it was sounded absolutely god-awful, and some long dead classical composer was undoubtedly rolling over in his grave as he attempted to plug his ears, but it was real live music. Sean couldn't stop the grin spreading across his face, and his feet followed his ears down the first floor hallway to the left.

  Just as he was trying to decide which of two rooms held the mysterious violinist, a particularly sour note evoked a quiet curse from behind door number twenty-one, followed by a squawk like he hadn't heard since Mallory had graduated from her fiddle phase nearly twenty years earlier, and then another curse. Chuckling, he raised a hand and knocked.

  A moment of shuffling sounds, and then the door opened to reveal a man of about Sean's height, though with a little more meat on his bones, blinking at him in confusion.

  "Hi!" Sean smiled brightly. The man in the doorway continued to stare, though the blinking slowed to a more normal rate. "Was that you I heard playing?"

  Dark eyes snapping wide for just a moment, the man ducked his head, but not before Sean caught a slight flush to his cheeks. "Sorry, I didn't mean to disturb anyone. I'll pack it up."

  "Oh, please don't!" Sean's hand stretched out before he knew what it was doing, grabbing the man's arm before he had a chance to turn away and shut the door. "Honestly, I just wanted to know if I could sit and listen for a bit."

  Once again with the speechless staring. Well, perhaps Sean had been a bit … oh, what did Mama used to call him when she was teasing him about the way he scared people off? Abrupt? Impulsive? Tactless?

  All right, he should probably at least introduce himself. That was what most people did first when they encountered someone new. He cleared his throat, released the man's arm, and stuck out his other hand. "Hi, I'm Sean. I live up in 503, and I was just coming off work at the IT center, though I don't do any technical support, so don't ask me to fix your computer. I hate that. Anyway, I heard you playing, and it's been such a long time since I heard any live music that I just had to trace it back to the source. Seriously, man, it's been such a long time since I heard anything real that I was starting to get a bit desperate. I don't even care that you're awful."

  A slow blink. "Umm, hi." Tentatively he shook Sean's hand and then swiftly let it go. "I'm Evan."

  Sean waited a moment, but no more appeared to be forthcoming. Evan was still looking at him like some sort of alien life form, so Sean stuck his hands back in his pockets and smiled, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet. "So? Can I come in and listen?"

  A perfectly symmetrical crease formed between Evan's eyebrows. "You really want to sit here and listen to me massacre Bach?"

  "Oh, is that what that was supposed to be?" Sean took Evan's question as an invitation and stepped past him into the room. It was neater than a pin, but it seemed pleasant enough. There were a couple of dust-free picture frames on top of the dresser and another on the other side of the standard issue squat, turd-brown lamp all the ISC2 residential suites contained. Automatically Sean walked over to them and picked one up. A pretty woman with the same dark eyes and hair as Evan smiled from the close-up photograph, hands full of flowers, an oval faced man with fine lines around his eyes and mouth standing beside her. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Evan's hands twitch as though he wanted to snatch the picture back, so Sean set it back on the dresser as close to where he'd taken it from as he could. Of course, without any dust, it was hard to tell exactly where it had been before. Trying to keep his hands to himself, Sean bounced on his toes once before deciding the bed was really the only place in the room to sit. "So, are you going to play?"

  Evan hovered by the door, watching wide eyed as Sean made himself comfortable. "You're really just going to sit there on my bed and watch me fumble my way through a partita?"

  Sean shrugged. "Whatever floats your boat. I just want to bask in the sound of music that still has some element of humanity and creativity left in it. I miss hearing the mistakes." He leaned back, arms folded behind his head. Mmm, Evan's bed smelled pretty good. Of course, given the rest of the room, it was likely he'd washed the sheets in the last
few days, which was more than Sean could say for his own.

  "Okay," Evan said, though he shook his head and sounded skeptical enough that Sean wondered, just for a moment, if he really meant the opposite. "Just be warned that I'm really terrible, and with someone watching, I'll be nervous, and then I'll play a thousand times worse than usual. But it's your ears. Assail them if you must, I guess."

  Reassured, Sean wiggled his way into the pillows. "Thanks. I will."