Winter Synth
by Jamey Toner
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Helen led her into a tidy, glass-walled room, sat down at her desk, and gestured Neave into the chair across from hers. “Miss Qaanaaq,” she said, still in a rather excessively cheerful voice, “you must understand, we don’t normally handle sums of this size. But surely you see that we can’t authorize a withdrawal of funds when you are in default of more than one and a half million dollars.”
Neave was silent for a long moment. Helen watched her anxiously. “You mean,” she said finally, slowly, “my supposed debt to the Unified Confederation of Lepidopterists.”
“Yes, the-ah-Unitary Confederation.”
“I never signed any promissory note. I never heard of these people until one of them broke into my apartment last night.”
“I see. Of course. Well, ah... I do have some good news!” She had ascended from mere cheer into active chirping. “Per the UCL’s request, the Bank of Greenland is happy to offer you a position in our IT department. You’ll receive a living allowance, and you can pay off your debt in... er, about twenty years.”
Neave jerked to her feet, and Helen practically jumped in her seat. “Stuff your IT department.” She strode out of the bank and went straight to the cops.
The desk sergeant was a short, broad-shouldered fellow with a moustache. “Yes, hello,” he said gruffly as she came in.
“Hello, Officer. I’d like to report a break-in.”
“What’s your name, ma’am?” he asked, producing a pen.
“Neave Qaanaaq.”
“Oh. Um, yes, well, here’s a form to fill out.”
“Thank you.” She filled it out rapidly, handed it back, and waited.
“Very good. We’ll send someone around when our caseload permits.”
Neave stared at him. “Your caseload? A man came into my apartment and threatened me in the middle of the night. Aren’t you at least going to come dust for fingerprints or something?”
“Yes, we’ll send someone around.” He began shuffling papers.
What in God’s name is going on here?
She left the police station and found a lawyer. When she had finished explaining the situation, he steepled his fingers and said, “Absolutely. I’ll look into this and get back to you as soon as can be.”
“When?”
“Eh, well, eh... very soon indeed.”
She went to another lawyer. And another. She got the same answer, with the same strange air of forced courtesy and trepidation.
By this time, the sun was heading west. Neave went back to her apartment and rummaged through her duffel bag for whatever cash might be in there. It wasn’t much, but before anything else, she wanted to go and pay her one actual debt.
Back at the store, Atka accepted her payment with an impassive nod. She hesitated. “Atka, have you ever heard of the Unitary Confederation of Lepidopterists?”
He shook his head.
“How about a guy called Mr. Brown?”
He shrugged.
“Okay.” It was a solace to believe someone. “Thank you.”
Back to her apartment again. This time, she went through the duffel bag for her hidden stash of bourbon. She couldn’t concentrate enough to compose music, so she did the next best thing.
When 3:00 in the morning rolled around, Neave picked up the phone. It was 6:00 in Denmark, and her parents would be up.
Her mother’s strong, gentle voice: “Hello, little narwhal.”
“Hi, Mom. I need some help.”
“What is it, my love?”
“I got robbed. I don’t have any money.”
“Neave! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, I just need to come home for a while.”
“Of course. I’ll wire you whatever you need.”
“No, don’t send money. Just go on the Air Greenland website and buy me a ticket. I’ll pick it up at the counter.”
A few hours later, she was packed, hungover, and headed for the airport. The ticket was waiting for her. They told her there was a problem with her passport and she couldn’t fly.
Back to her apartment yet again. Sofie was brewing the first pot of coffee and starting in on the pastries as Neave came in. “Hey, Sofie, you don’t need any help around the kitchen, do you? You wouldn’t have to pay me anything. Just maybe room and board?”
The grandmotherly face filled up with sadness. “Oh, darling, I’m barely making ends meet as it is. I’m so sorry.”
“No, no, it’s okay, everything’s fine. I’ll figure something out, don’t worry about me.”
Upstairs, she sat down on her mattress and stared at the wall. I guess... I guess I can work in IT, just for a little while. Just till...
Alone in her dark room, Neave started to cry.
* * *
Third floor cubicle. In at 8:00, out at 4:00. Instant coffee in a paper cup.
Outside of music programs, Neave’s computer literacy was below average. There was no way she would have been hired for this job in a rational universe. But it made little difference, because the computer did everything anyway. Neave just gazed into the chasm of the screen, watching the cursor blink, and entered data when the pop-ups told her to.
After the second day, she stopped even trying to pay attention to what she was doing. Yes, a monkey could’ve done the job, but she was less than that: a simian homunculus cobbled together from bits of monkey corpses.
Helen Hawersaat gave her an advance on her first paycheck for living expenses. According to the paystub, her salary was actually rather generous, but of course it went almost entirely to the UCL. Helen emphasized that Neave’s supervisor was very, very happy with her work.
A week went by, then another. She’d explained the situation to her dad, and he had a Danish lawyer working on the case (apparently not everyone in the world was under the UCL’s thumb quite yet), but he warned her it would take time to sort through the international red tape. Time, in this context, being measured in months. Meanwhile, Neave did her best to adjust to the new schedule. She was now starting her day at about the time she was accustomed to going to sleep.
On her second Friday, she came back to the café after work and slumped into a booth. Sofie brought her some decent coffee. “How’s the bank?” the old lady asked sympathetically.
“It’s a bank. I haven’t written a note of music in two weeks.”
“You can sleep in tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
Neave went upstairs. She sat in her chair. She gazed into the chasm of the screen, watching the cursor blink.
“Damn it,” she muttered. It was barely 4:30, but she felt tired and drained. It was too late to hike out to Mt. Sermitsiaq, too early to wrap herself in the silent darkness of the night. Her room was dim and quiet, but her heart could sense the streetlit bustle outside. And by the time Nuuk was truly asleep, she’d be snoring in her chair just like everyone else.
She went to her fridge and grabbed ingredients for a ham sandwich. She ate it, paced for a bit, then went back downstairs for another cup of coffee. Pulling up her playlist and putting in her earbuds, she broke the metaphorical emergency glass on her inspiration toolkit and started listening to Paysage d’Hiver’s seminal Winter Synth album, Die Festung (The Fortress).
With some calories, an extra hit of caffeine, and her “only in the case of severe writer’s block” music, she finally pushed through the mud wall of inertia from the past fortnight and found her inner tundra. She wrote far less than she’d been hoping to, but any act of creation was better than none. At least she was back to work. Her real work.
Saturday was more productive, and Sunday even more so, as she gradually shook off the tepid miasma of IT. She even began to feel that perhaps she was being overly dramatic about the whole thing. Many, perhaps even most, great artists had held day jobs. And the nightmare of the UCL was hardly supernatural, after all, just another Kafaesque vicissitude of life in the modern world. It would get sorted out soon enough. Everything was going to be fine.
Then Monday came.
Helen greeted her with her usual nervous affability. “Hello, Neave! Good weekend?”
“Yeah, thanks. Nice and cold.”
“Oh, dear. We can turn up the heat in the IT department.”
Neave gaped at her. “What? No, don’t do that. I was just—”
“Don’t worry, it’s no problem. We want you nice and warm.”
“But—”
“I’ll let them know upstairs. Anyway, I’ve got a meeting, have a good day!”
She returned to her desk and stared into her monitor. In only two days, she’d forgotten what that monitor was like. Not sinister, not brooding, just milquetoast. As mosquitoes inject diseased saliva to force out their victims’ blood, or as flies puke acid onto their food to make it digestible, Neave felt as if that monitor was excreting banality into her mind to suck something out of her. And now the air in her department was two degrees warmer than before.
That night, she failed to write anything at all. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday shuffled past with their heads down, leading her ever deeper into a wilderness of Post-It notes.
On Saturday, she hiked back out to the mountain. It was mid-December now, and the freezing winds blew unceasingly through the thriving desolation of the land. Neave had often said — as a joke, of course — that the wind came from inside of her; but she’d said it so often that some part of her had started to believe it. The reminder that the icy spirit of Greenland was undiminished in her absence made her feel superfluous and lukewarm.
On Sunday, she made a resolution: she would bloody well stay up and write until she finished a song. At 7:00 in the evening, she drank three cups of coffee and did a hundred jumping jacks. “All right, you bastards,” she said aloud, “let’s do this.”
And, somehow, she did it. It was far from her best work, and the ending trailed off instead of finishing strong; but by 7:00 in the morning, she had a completed draft. Then she fell asleep and got to the bank four hours late.
Neave was braced for official reprimands or, worse, a firm but gentle talking-to. But the consequences of her tardiness were... nothing. No one looked askance as she went to her desk and resumed her position as a monkey homunculus. No one said a single word about it.
For the next three days, she went in on time. By the time her shift was over, she was too beleaguered to do any writing, but she promised herself she’d make it through the week and get back to her real work on Friday evening.
Friday morning, however, a perverse curiosity got the better of her, and she deliberately came in at noon. And once again, not a breath of remonstrance was uttered by anyone. At the end of the day, she went and found the smiling branch manager.
“Helen,” she said, “this job is a waste of a decent salary. I come in late and sit in front of a computer that does all my work for me. Why don’t you fire me? Why did you hire me in the first place?”
Helen kept smiling, but behind her eyes, a curtain seemed to flick open for a moment. Neave found herself looking down twin hallways of cheap pine doors and peeling paint, lit by buzzing fluorescents, smelling of damp wall-to-wall carpeting, extending into a liminal infinity. The tone was perfectly neutral, perfectly calm, but half a decibel too quiet, as Helen responded, “Green.”
Then she turned and walked away.
When Neave got home, she sat down to listen to the track she’d recorded on Sunday night. Immediately, she realized she had been wrong. It wasn’t merely, as she had thought at the time, not her best work. It was her worst work. There were hints of order, whispers of beauty — the talent that defined her still glimmering through — but most of it sounded like random notes from someone using a synthesizer for the first time in her life.
It was then that the Idea began to form. Helen’s cryptic one-word answer must have been a reference to Mr. Brown’s threatened boogeyman, Mr. Green. And whatever this chthonic shadow might be, Helen was so afraid of it that she wouldn’t even mention Neave’s tardiness, let alone rebuke her for it. Therefore, the possibility of termination was completely off the table. Clearly, what this situation called for was five unexcused absences per week.
Heartened by the Idea, Neave returned to her labors. It was easier to repair an existing work of art than to create one out of nothing, after all; and thanks to Sunday’s efforts, she did have at least the palimpsest of a Winter Synth track to tinker with. She worked all evening, and the Idea lasted for about ten hours.
At 3:00 in the morning, still sitting in her chair, Neave snapped out of a doze to find a man standing in her room. His face bespoke solemnity, even sorrow. It looked like the face of a man of honor, but his eyes were the bright, sharp green of a poisoned needle. He was perfectly balanced on the balls of his right foot, his torso parallel to the floor; his left leg was thrust out behind him like a stiff tail. His arms were spreadeagled, high over his head, in a frozen balletic pose, and not a muscle of his body betrayed a hint of strain.
Neither of them spoke. They stared at each other for a long, long moment. Then, though already awake, Neave woke up. The empty apartment was cold, and it smelled like an old damp sock.
Monday morning, bright and early, she was back in her cubicle.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Jamey Toner
