Chapter 1: Strangers Singing His Soul
The air in the bar was thick with the smell of synth-alcohol and recycled coolants. Holographic screens wrapped around the walls, pulsing with neon lyrics and tutorials for viral dance moves Michael didn’t recognize. The music was a brutal, arrhythmic thumping that made his teeth ache. He kept to the shadowed booth in the corner, a sanctuary of soft amber light, his fingers tracing the sticky grain of the table. The sunglasses were too big, the newsboy hat pulled too low, but they were necessary armor.
He’d been here for weeks, just watching. 2026 was a fever dream of advanced technology and curated nostalgia. They remembered his name, sometimes. It was a data point in a “music history” stream, a pixelated avatar in a retro-themed game. A product. Not a person. Never the feeling.
Then the beat changed.
A familiar, insistent bassline cut through the digital noise. Four on the floor. That iconic four-note pattern. His own breath hitched.
A group had swarmed the small stage—three kids, maybe early twenties, dressed in thrift-store jackets and smart-fabric pants that shimmered. One tapped the old karaoke console, pulling up a legacy file. The title flashed: THRILLER.
“Oh, this is gonna be embarrassing,” laughed a girl with cyan-tipped hair.
“Shut up, just do the thing,” her friend grinned.
And they did.
It wasn’t perfect. The girl’s zombie lurch was more of a tipsy stagger. The guy doing Vincent Price’s monologue forgot half the words and giggled through the rest. But the passion. Michael felt it in his sternum, a physical resonance. Their eyes were wide, serious, as they tried the choreography—the side-step, the head turn, the clawed hands. They’d practiced. They knew the shapes of the movements he’d invented in a studio forty-four years ago. No, not forty-four. That was another life. Here, now, it was just a song from the past. But to them, in this flickering light, it was alive.
He was crying. He didn’t realize until a warm tear tracked a path from under his sunglasses to the corner of his mouth. Salty. Real. He watched them collapse into laughter at the end, hugging each other, breathless. They loved it. They loved what he’d made. The world hadn’t forgotten. It had just… filed him away. These kids had dug him back out.
“Hell of a song, right?”
Michael jerked, his trainer’s reflexes pulling his posture straight. A man stood by his booth, holding two tinted glasses of something fizzy. Late thirties, kind eyes, a worn leather jacket.
“Sorry,” the man said, sliding one glass across the table. “Didn’t mean to sneak up. You just looked like the only other person here who actually heard it. I’m Luka. I run this noise-hole.”
Michael gave a slight, stiff nod. His voice, when he used it here, was pitched lower, softer. A habit. “It’s a classic.”
“Classic,” Luka snorted, sitting down uninvited. “That’s a museum word. That wasn’t a museum piece up there. That was joy. Messy, stupid joy. That song’s got ghosts in it. The good kind.” He took a long drink, studying Michael. “You’re here a lot. Never sing. Just watch. That’s cool. But you’re vibrating, man. Right now. Watching them.”
“It was moving,” Michael said carefully, sipping the drink. It tasted like sweetened electricity.
“You know the words?”
“Everyone knows the words.”
“Not like that,” Luka said, pointing a finger. “Not just the words. The grunts. The ‘hee-hees’. The little ad-libs in the second bridge. That’s fandom. That’s study.” He leaned forward, his voice dropping. “My system’s got the full catalog. The B-sides. The Off the Wall demos. The stuff that’s not on the public streams.”
Michael’s heart began a slow, heavy thud against his ribs. Destiny. Human Nature. Baby Be Mine. Chapters of his soul, locked in a machine in a scuzzy bar.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you need it,” Luka said, simply. “And I think you could do it justice. The stage is yours if you want it. No one here cares. They’re all absorbed in their own feeds. It’s the most private public place in the city.”
He stood up, clapping Michael on the shoulder. “Think about it. No pressure.”
But there was pressure. It was a tectonic pressure, shifting deep inside him. He watched Luka walk back to the bar. The kids who did Thriller were now watching a combat sports highlight on a floating screen. The moment was gone.
He stood.
His legs carried him to the small stage, a floating platform lit from beneath. The ancient wired microphone felt familiar in his hand, its weight a memory. The console was a touchscreen. His fingers, trembling slightly, navigated the menus. He bypassed Thriller. Too obvious. Too connected to the joy he’d just witnessed. He needed something… truer. Rawer.
He found it. Stranger in Moscow.
The opening synth pad, a cold, lonely drizzle of sound, filled the bar. A few people glanced over, then back to their drinks. It was a deep cut. Not a party song. Perfect.
He kept his head down, the hat a dark brim over the sunglasses. The first words were a whisper, almost spoken.
I was wandering in the rain…
Then the chorus built. His voice, hesitant at first, found its muscle memory. The breath control, the aching fragility, the sudden soaring into the plaintive cry of “How does it feel…” It was all there. The technique, perfected over decades in another world. But so was the emotion—the isolation, the paranoia, the longing for a connection that always seemed to short-circuit. He wasn’t performing a song. He was testifying.
He forgot the bar. He forgot the year. He was in a Helsinki hotel room in 1995, pouring this pain onto a tape. He was in a courtroom in 2005, dying silently. He was a boy in Gary, listening to the rats in the walls. The music was the only thread that tied all his selves together.
As the final, mournful “here abandoned in my fame…” faded, he opened his eyes.
The bar was silent. Not the usual indifferent silence, but a stunned, total vacuum of sound. Every holographic screen was dark. Every head was turned.
Luka was staring from behind the bar, his mouth slightly open.
The girl with the cyan hair had her hand over her lips.
Then, a slow clap from the back. One. Then another. Then a scatter of applause, growing into a warm, confused wave. Not the screaming adoration of a stadium. This was quieter, more profound. Recognition.
He gave a quick, stiff bow, his mind screaming to get out.
The applause was a wave of heat against his skin. He turned, placing the microphone back in its cradle with a tenderness that felt like a farewell, and moved toward the edge of the stage. His movements were efficient, a dancer’s economy. Step down, keep your head down, move for the door. The amber light of his booth seemed a mile away now, a forgotten sanctuary.
He wove between tables, eyes fixed on the exit sign’s faint red glow. The bar’s normal chaos was slow to return; the holographic screens stuttered back to life, casting blue shadows across stunned faces. He could feel their eyes on his back, like points of pressure. A man at a high-top chair opened his mouth as if to speak, but Michael slid past him, a shadow in a hat and sunglasses.
Almost there. The door was ten feet away, a heavy-looking thing with a battered push bar.
“Hey, wait up!”
A hand touched his elbow—light, but it sent a jolt through his system. He flinched, pulling his arm in.
It was the cyan-haired girl from the Thriller group. Her friends were right behind her, a semi-circle of eager, bright-eyed faces. The guy who’d botched Vincent Price’s laugh was grinning.
“Dude,” the guy said, shaking his head. “What was that?”
Michael kept his voice low, muffled. “Just a song.”
“Just a song?” The girl’s eyes were wide, earnest. “No. That was… you unlocked that song. I’ve heard it a hundred times. That was the first time I felt it. In my chest, you know?”
He nodded, edging sideways. “Thank you. I have to go.”
But a woman from a nearby booth stood up, blocking his path to the left. She was older, maybe fifties, with sharp glasses and a data-pad tucked under her arm. “Your vocal control. The phrasing. That’s not karaoke. That’s archival-grade performance. Who are you? Are you a voice actor? A simulation?”
Her questions were technical, probing. Michael shook his head. “Just a fan.”
More people were rising now, drifting over from the bar, drawn by the commotion. Luka was watching from behind the counter, wiping a glass with a slow, thoughtful motion. He didn’t intervene.
A small crowd solidified around him, six, seven people, cutting off his route to the door. He was trapped in a loose ring of genuine, buzzing admiration.
“That was heartbreaking, man,” a young guy in a service uniform said, his cap in his hands. “Seriously. I called my ex. I don’t know why. It just made me feel like I had to.”
A woman with a sonic-tattoo humming on her neck leaned in. “You sound like him. I mean, really like him. Not the impersonators. They’re all edges. You had the… the ache. How?”
Compliments lapped at him from all sides. They weren’t screaming; they were speaking, intensely, personally, as if he’d given them a gift they needed to acknowledge.
“You made me remember my dad. He played that album every Sunday.”
“The way you held that last note—it wasn’t showy. It was just true.”
“Do you perform? Like, professionally? Where can we hear you?”
Their words were a shower, warm and insistent, each one a tiny weight on the delicate facade he’d built. He stood very still, his hands clenched at his sides. The sunglasses felt like a fragile barrier. Inside, a tempest—pride, fear, a dizzying longing to say I know, I wrote it, I lived it, I am it. And beneath that, the old terror, the memory of a world that loved you to pieces until it decided to take you apart.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He just stood there, accepting the shower of compliments, a ghost in plain sight, trembling beneath the gentle storm of their gratitude.