There is no such thing as a part time job that is both meaningful and well paid. Most aren't either. Including his stints as a gas jockey during high school, Alan Lilly has held nineteen positions in at least seven separate fields, so his expectations are as low as mud. Driver, pressman, salesman, waiter, phone rep, cashier -- he rarely stays more than twelve months and several times he's quit after one shift.
He is not a slacker, thief or trouble-maker. He's a musician. He has better things to do.
Processing overflow and night-drops at FastFoto offered neither purpose nor money. What it did provide was the opportunity to listen to mini-Ds and think, alone, while earning enough to cover his rent. He bought groceries and beer with the money he made off his music, all themes for corporate presentation videos and CD-ROMs so far, at no better than three hundred dollars a shot, but Alan believes that cream inevitably rises to the top and that he is cream.
He's only thirty-two.
The 100 prints wouldn't normally have caught his eye. Most people who use cheap film take shots of their friends standing in a row and smiling. The rest snap pictures of their cats or cars.
These photographs are of a computer print-out marked only in one narrow vertical column.
Two days ago, Alan underbid an iGames.net spec assignment and he's spent every spare moment since then reworking Mozart into heavy metal for their new Blammer sequel. Typical crap, not much of a challenge. But the IVS-550 photo processor is an incredibly diligent percussionist, and the endless four-four beat of its print stacker disrupts his concentration again and again. He's staring at the ceiling when the glare of white turns his head. Even black-and-white photos aren't typically so bleak. He strides over, drumming his pen against his leg, to make certain the 550 is operating correctly.
It is. The entire roll of thirty-six prints is close-up after close-up of the strange text.
Alan thinks it looks like music.
The nudie pictures on the next roll do not distract him as he stands right there at the processor, wondering over handfuls of the unusual shots. For the first few nights on the job, he considered skin shots a perk, but it's a rare set of jugs that hold his attention now. Most people are too fat or pale or hairy, and everyone seems to use the same four poses.
Every job has its unique benefits and tortures, of course -- often they are one and the same.
Working phones in the Classified Ads department, it was the idiots who wanted to complain about the delivery boy. Why are you calling me? Alan asked them, at first with a smile, at last with deadly boredom. Running a cash register at 7-Eleven and the bus station, it was the lonely folks who stayed to chat, sometimes even through a wall of security glass. At first he thought he found gems of wisdom in their late-night ramblings. At last he realized it was all desperate cliches.
Alan is not a people person. Human beings are mean and stupid and greedy too much of the time. He prefers the clean evocative world of music. All that Alan has ever wanted is to own and be owned by that beauty, to wield the magic.
Plus it would be nice to be neck deep in money and chicks.
Or even ankle deep. It wouldn't take much to free him from the crappy jobs that are wasting half of his life -- one big break, one hit, one catchy original combination of sound.
The bizarre text in the photographs consists of just two spidery shapes, one stout, the other slim, but they're arranged in no less than seven angles as well as three left-middle-right positions. Like chords. Sharp, normal, flat.
But if the text is music, it's composed in two-five time as best he can tell, which is almost meaningless.
Is it an opera score? It's definitely mega-ballad length, running for thirty-plus pages, although at least two of those are repetitions. A chorus. The bass line is sporadic but Alan's starting to hear it in his head, which makes up for the lack.
Why is it in code? And given that it must be stored on a computer, why take pictures rather than printing out more copies?
The illogic of it is compelling and Alan shuts down the IVS-550 so that its chatter won't distract him as he sketches out the beginnings of a translation. He knows he'll fall behind and hear about it from his boss if he leaves the processor off for more than a few minutes, but so what?
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