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revealed that the bored woman had already gone, although the young couple seemed to be oblivious to the change in the weather and were continuing to take advantage of the cover.

  Ben averted his eyes from them in embarrassment and found himself looking into the shop behind him. His eyes passed over the wall-mounted televisors and the optical disc players and settled on a rack of synthesisers – the first time he’d really noticed them. Glancing one last time at the man, whose robot dog had now begun to whine in an approximation of harmony, he walked purposefully to the door of the store and strode in, the sound of the blues ringing in his brain.

  2

  The inside of the store was, like all other large electrical outlets in the universe, specifically designed so that all visitors are automatically guided to the most expensive items. As in many of these stores, the devices were in this instance large display devices, a product scientifically proven to exert an almost magnetic attraction on a large subsection of the customer base2. A good salesman knows they need only brush up on the latest in televisors and wait by the appropriate model in order to make a quick sale.

  Vid was a good salesman – it was the way he was designed. His face itself was a flat panel display, not one which would be particularly attractive to the average male on payday3, but it gave him the ability to display either a digital representation of facial expression or full colour videos from the latest sales brochure.

  He cruised past the display of televisors, checking the position of each was calculated with precision to draw the customer’s eye to the current jewel in the crown. The Nostram 78000, the latest in flat screen perspective sets, could produce a 780 inch picture from a 78 inch screen, using the latest in Distortiomax projection. At the moment, the televisor was showing a video of three moody boys standing behind a wall of synthesisers as their latest track On and on and on and on and on went just like it sounded.

  Vid discretely checked the front of the store; the new customer was male, so he changed the channel to display the new girl band Upfront, whose latest video involved the lead singer warbling something about love being pain, whilst being strapped to a wheel in a leopard-skin bikini. Her two band mates, wearing similar costumes, flicked her cinematically with whips as they chanted their repetitive yes it is lines in time to the beat. Vid himself was, naturally, completely immune to the poorly concealed charms of the singers but he understood the importance of such imagery in short-circuiting the average human male’s ability to make rational affordability judgements. Instead, he stepped just out of view and watched as the human approached, drawn with all the inevitability of a fly to a windowpane.

  Ben kept his eyes on the video as he crossed the store. By the time he arrived, it was beginning to puzzle him - he wasn’t sure if it was extremely repetitive or whether it had simply started again. A few days earlier he would have been considering only the shape of the singers, now it was the form of the music that caught his attention. It was dismal – overproduced, underperformed, and about as innovative as hitting a pig’s bladder with a larger stick. For the first time his eyes were opened to just how bland commercial music really was.

  Vid, somehow sensing the mesmerising effect of the onscreen talent was waning, approached from the shadows, rolling silently across the carpet on his single, spherical wheel.

  ‘I see you’re looking at the new Nostram,’ he intoned in a voice which centuries of salesman evolution, years of market research and two hours of fiddling with a voice synthesiser had determined as the correct one for commencing a sales pitch. It was exactly a fifth above middle C, with a hint of E on the wider vowels.

  ‘Actually I was looking at the picture,’ Ben corrected him. ‘I hardly noticed the screen.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Vid agreed, keeping the customer happy by not contradicting him. ‘It’s an unobtrusive set. If the picture wasn’t on, you wouldn’t know it was there.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the whacking great screen in the corner give it away?’ Ben asked, beginning to wonder if they were talking about the same thing.

  ‘If you wanted it to, certainly. What I meant to say was that the framing of the screen doesn’t distract you from the picture itself.’

  ‘Ah,’ Ben answered distractedly. He was still trying to decide if the video was repeating, or whether it was now running for a third time. The camera seemed to be continually following the whip towards the lead singer’s cleavage and then cutting away just before you could see if her breasts still had the manufacturer’s logo embossed on them. ‘It’s hard to believe they get paid a fortune for doing that, isn’t it?’ he observed.

  Vid surveyed the screen. He certainly didn’t know any robots who made their living tied to wheels with their chassis exposed. ‘Well,’ he admitted, ‘it’s not work in the same way as electrical installation, if that’s what you mean. Now, take these televisors for example…’

  ‘I wonder what you need to get into the business,’ Ben mused.

  ‘Presumably some transplants and a wheel,’ Vid suggested, feeling that he was losing the customer. His programming suggested trying to get back to the point. ‘I suspect it’s probably very expensive, although it could well be offset by the small clothing budget. Now, if you want a better way to spend your money…’

  ‘Some kind of instrument,’ Ben continued.

  ‘That might help, but it might also get you into trouble.’

  ‘Musical instrument,’ Ben corrected. ‘I thought I saw some keyboards on the way in.’

  Vid, realising that he wasn’t going to sell the Nostram, decided to accept the lesser of two evils and try to sell a keyboard instead of losing the customer entirely. Pivoting the upper half of his body, he rolled towards the keyboard display.

  ‘If you’d care to follow me, sir,’ he said.

  Ben took one last look at the unfeasibly large breasts on the giant screen and then turned to follow the robot. It wasn’t difficult: the robot was about seven feet tall and easily visible over the rows of white goods which funnelled the customers from the entrance to the televisors.

  The keyboards were displayed on a series of densely packed racks, seemingly designed to prevent anyone from playing any apart from the ones on top. The instruments were arranged such that only the most expensive was accessible, with the cheapest being only a few inches from the carpet.

  ‘Now,’ Vid began, ‘the Virtuoso 1500 is our top of the line keyboard with a five octave spread, five hundred voice memory and one hundred note polyphony.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Basically, if you hit all the notes at once it still plays them,’ Vid told him.

  Ben did a quick count. ‘But there’s only sixty one notes on it,’ he objected.

  ‘Yes,’ Vid explained, ‘that’s because it also has a full sixteen track sequencer with arpeggiator, rhythm engine and chord memory.’

  ‘What does it sound like?’ Ben asked and pressed one of the keys. There was a loud electric wail and he covered his ears. Vid pressed a couple of buttons and the noise stopped.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ben. ‘I didn’t realise it would set off the alarm.’

  ‘It didn’t. That was voice 237, I Predict a Riot. Would you care to see the instrument demonstrated?’

  Ben nodded – he doubted he’d get any indication of how it could sound without help. Vid swivelled on his base and looked around the store. A small robot (well, smaller than Vid, anyway) was drifting along a nearby aisle, floating above the ground on a gravimagnetic field. His four arms were swinging rhythmically by his sides, somehow managing not to tangle themselves up in the process. Seeing Vid looking in his direction, he approached.

  ‘Keys, this customer would like the Virtuoso demonstrated,’ Vid told him.

  ‘His name’s Keys,’ Ben remarked. ‘That’s original.’

  ‘His serial is KS-14, we shorten it to Keys,’ Vid explained.

  Keys floated over to the keyboard and his upper pair of arms swivelled noiselessly until they were poised over the notes
. He waited expectantly.

  ‘Please,’ Ben urged.

  The robot lowered his hands and began to play. He started with a simple right-handed melody and a gentle left handed counterpoint, playing something that seemed almost designed to sap Ben’s will to keep his money. He sighed and defocused his gaze, watching the soft white hands of the robot as they moved across the keys. The sound washed over him, repeating and gradually increasing in complexity until Ben could no longer follow the robot’s hand movements.

  This seemed more than a sales pitch – more than a sales chord, even – it was a kind of magic. And, from the way the robot’s head nodded in time to the underlying beat and the single blue strip which served as his eye pulsed with its own independent rhythm of its own, Ben could almost believe the robot was enjoying the spell.

  He shrugged off the thought and straightened himself up. Nonsense, he thought. Of course, robots were usually programmed with a facsimile of emotion, but this could hardly translate into actual musical appreciation. It stood to reason: most humans didn’t have that ability. He continued to listen, trying – and failing – to avoid sinking back into his daze.

  Eventually, Keys reached the end of the piece. The final notes faded away and only the memory lingered.

  ‘Amazing.’ Despite the fact the pianist was a robot, Ben couldn’t help the remark slipping out. ‘I’ve never heard