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The Ballad of Starburst Smith

by David Marino

“Did you read the terms and conditions?”

“Fuck you, I read the terms and conditions!” Does this bearded receptionist not know she’s Starburst Smith? Does he not know she’s the Rock Prophet who will herald in a new era of music that will soon sweep her into fame and fortune, that will soon have her selling out Dodgers Stadium and Madison Square Garden?

Even if soon has been soon for fifteen years

“No,” the receptionist says, “you skimmed the terms and conditions. You need to read the terms and conditions. There’s a difference, and we’ve gotten sued by too many people who don’t understand that your signature on that line means you read it.”

Starburst sighs, runs her hand over her mohawk. Silver glitter sticks to her calloused fingertips. Droning Muzak chimes softly through the reception room. “I know the cost of using the…machine… you got here. Everyone does.”

The receptionist taps the form twice. “Then you understand why you need to read the terms and conditions. Look, take a seat, read section 3.7. That’s the most important one.”

Starburst snatches the form, gives the receptionist and his manbun the stink eye before she plops down in one of the red hard plastic chairs in the anodyne waiting room. The walls are plastered with the same minimalist posters that got her in here. Prune your present! says one, showing a pair of shears snipping a bonsai tree. Let your future be free! says another, this one with a golden retriever running through a grassy field. There is also a fern. Places like this always have a fucking fern.

There’s a Women’s Health magazine on a table next to her, with a headline about how to thrive after 40. Which is how old Starburst is, which she has to keep reminding herself. She doesn’t feel 40. She doesn’t feel like she’s been rocking for 25 years, ever since she found that acoustic in her grandma’s garage, since that glorious moment when she heard Metallica play The Ecstasy of Gold and her future locked into place. Rock. That was gonna be Starburst’s thing! She was going to be like Bowie with tits, Prince but hotter, Herman Li but… uh, also with tits.

Now she keeps using was, and here she is, at the fucking Winnower. Where the future goes to die.

There’s two other people here. A late twenties woman in a sexy gray pantsuit, and a finance bro making sure to show off his docksiders.

“Katherine Hart to the Winnowing Chamber. Katherine Hart to the Winnowing Chamber,” says the ceiling intercom. Pantsuit gets up and walks down the white hallway, past the reception desk, while an elderly man going the other way shuffles out before leaving through the front door.

What happens after today, if Starburst goes through with this? She’s thought about this a lot, been circling around this decision for a solid year now, and boom, happy birthday, why not welcome in being Old by choking her dream in the crib? Well, not the crib. More like the seventy-fifth trimester abortion of her dream, honestly. CHRIST, she hates looking at her hands. Not the callouses, those are hard won, but her wrinkles. It takes so much makeup to get into full Starburst mode nowadays. She was supposed to have, like, people to do that for her five years ago. But she did it. Blue eyelinered up, mohawk spikes dyed orange, black facepaint irritating her skin. Her leather duster squeaks between her ass and the chair.

Starburst fiddles with her earrings. Waiver time. Woo. Trinary Corp proudly welcomes you to…blah blah blah…The Winnower! Jesus, the form is all excited about it. She skips to section 3.7.

Participant acknowledges that the act of seeing whatever they observe in the Winnower will prevent what they see from happening. Participant will see a possible future based upon their desires, but seeing this future will—a bunch of jargon Starburst doesn’t understand, something about the observer effect—remove that future and all futures of minute differences from coming to pass.

Seven albums. Not a one went gold. Youtube tutorials with views in the triple digits. Streaming royalties that don’t break a dollar a month. Starburst keeps trying to break in, keeps playing shows at dives and at festivals no one has heard of, keeps printing CDs and nothing. She should be touring Oslo and Seoul! She shouldn’t be in this antiseptic slab of a building downtown, trading in her future for, well—

She flips to the last page. There’s the signature and date line, so she writes in the date, then hovers her blue ballpoint pen over that signature line. She taps her pen down in the corner, flips it between her fingers like Sam taught her after they would take bong hits on his fire escape back when they were dating. Sam, see, he made it. Sorta. He’s a session musician, plays for Hollywood and TV scores. Sam doesn’t have to keep limping back to his father for money monthly, doesn’t have the specter of stocking Fritos at a Circle K before dawn dogging his every step.

But Starburst is just so… tired. Tired of having to explain what a theremin is, of how much her hands ache. Starburst is tired of how many other people have joined her band, only for them to move on past her. She’s tired of seeing people with so much talent give up music to get pregnant or to start selling personalized Furbies, or both. Like, her seventh album, Dark Side of the Dark, is good! She knows it’s good! Starburst is playing both electric guitar and theremin on every track! Now Starburst is jamming with kids who weren’t even born when she first picked up a guitar.

And the sex has dried up.

“What are you in for?” She asks Boat Shoes in the chair next to her.

He’s got his Ivy League polo and his crew team shoulders. Typical. “Here to see the successful version of me.”

Starburst smirks. “Me too. What’s that look like?”

“Being in charge of my own VC firm,” he says. “Angel investors in new apps and products. I love scalability, finding synergies?”

“Uh,” Starburst says, “Is that like a chord? Or like a guitar and bass playing at the same time?”

Boat Shoes snaps his fingers. “Exactly! See, we both have drive. But none of the big finance companies do. They say they want someone who understands an income statement. And when I say, ‘But you got people for that?’ they say, ‘We’ll get back to you,’ and they don’t. So I’m gonna go in the Winnower, see my bliss, then dip back to normie life. What about you? You play guitar?”

“Yeah,” Starburst says. “Electric.”

“Way,” Boat Shoes says. “I’m gonna start jamming again with my bros after today. Just getting back into the vibes, y’know?”

Starburst’s fingers twitched. She did know. Even if it’s been five years since she felt legitimately excited to just play. “You should see my next…” Starburst trails off. That was her small talk with strangers, inviting people to whatever next show she managed to scrounge up. But she played her last gig yesterday. To an audience of fifteen in the back of a dive bar, where everyone was mostly there to watch game three of the NBA Finals. “I play the theremin, too!” Starburst says to fill the void, as if letting this stranger know about her weirder, more obscure musical ability is the most important thing for him to know. Maybe it is. Maybe this is the last conversation Starburst will have as she now is.

“What’s a theremin?” he asks.

“Never mind,” she mumbles. On the signature line, she signs Allison Smith in flat, thick ink.

“Brad Cunningham to the Winnowing Chamber. Brad Cunningham to the Winnowing Chamber,” says the bland intercom.

“Wish me luck,” Boat shoes says, as he walks past the receptionist down the white hallway.

A teen girl passes Brad on the way out. She’s sobbing, her mother rubbing her back. The girl is probably fifteen, holding a teddy bear, a pair of ice skates draped around her neck. Starburst walks by them on her way up to the reception desk, her boots clacking on the white tile. “What was her deal?” she asks Manbun.

“Patient confidentiality,” Manbun says. “You gonna go in?”

Starburst likes to be loud. When you are loud, people hear you, and you hear yourself. Being loud is like sticking her flag on the moon and claiming it for her empire. So she is surprised when the voice that asks, “Is it as good as everyone says?” is a quiet one, a broken one, like a cassette tape worn out.

“Look,” Manbun says. “I’ve done it myself. It’s pretty good. You might regret it, but it is pretty good. Almost like the real thing.”

Starburst hands over the waiver without another word. She sits back down, waiting for her go at the noose. Maybe working Circle K management won’t be so bad. Maybe she’ll be in her office, and instead of boring mallsoft, she’ll play some theremin live shows over the speakers. Just to mix it up between re-orders of Twix from the distributor.

“Allison Smith to the Winnowing Chamber. Allison Smith to the Winnowing Chamber.”

Here goes. Starburst marches past the reception desk and down the bland white hallway. She turns left when she reaches the back wall. The only furniture is a tiny wooden table, the only decoration another goddamn fern. The hallway she’s looking down seems exactly the same, down to the same fern at the back. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think she’s trapped in one of those horror video games that repeat the same hallway until you turn around and BOOM! It’s a monster wearing a paper bag on its head that somehow represents the character’s guilt for abandoning her daughter at some Rye Playland rip-off.

Three turns later, Starburst rolls her shoulders back, before pushing through a pair of hospital doors. A man whose energy screams “dentist, but likes the drills too much” waves her over to a plush chair. For some reason Starburst thought she’d be strapped down, lightning crackling in the air like Frankenstein’s lab.

“Here?” Starburst asks, as if there is any other place in the drab room to go.

“Please,” the dentist guy says. He’s not introducing himself. He’s holding a metal bowl with a bunch of suction cups and wires and electrodes, very ‘80s movie prop, all attached to a massive black cord from the ceiling. “I’m going to put this on your head. You’ll describe aloud the potential future you want to see, and blammo!” He gestures to the large black wall that Starburst now realizes is a TV. “You’ll see your future.”

Starburst does sit, leans back in the soft recliner. It’s comfy, like those high-priced movie theater seats. Makes sense, in a way. She is here for the show.

“And whatever I see,” Starburst feels the need to ask, “there’s no way to make it actually happen?”

The dentist shakes his head. “You’re going to see a possible future. It could have happened to you, if you hadn’t come here. If you didn’t see what you’re about to see. Maybe. But seeing it prevents you from ever getting it, or anything like it. You could try to chase whatever you see.” The technician sighs. “Our tests at Trinary say it doesn’t work. Something changes. Either you, or the world.”

Starburst’s arms dangle. Here, at the threshold, she wonders. How many more shows does she have in her? How many more songs can she write? How many more bands can she start that go nowhere? She has one more of each in her, certainly. But two? Five? It hurts. It hurts and she just wants to play Madison Square Garden one time. Is that too much to ask?

She grabs the damn helmet and yanks it down onto her head, cold metal against the bare skin of her forehead. “Show me the biggest, best show I ever could play.”

Dentist guy types on his keyboard, then he leaves out a door to the left. The television screen flicks on, as big as the whole wall of the studio apartment Starburst can only afford because of her dad’s goodwill.

There’s a stage, a big one. It’s got a microphone stand already set up, but otherwise looks rather plain. The crowd is large, at least, murmuring at the edges. But come on. Is this the best Starburst could possibly do?
That’s when a fucking starship descends from the ceiling, pyrotechnic thrusters and streamers firing from fake rockets. “They’ve charted courses through the Frozen Comets,” someone says in a deep baritone. “They’ve battled with Malice Squadron in the Inferno Nebula. They are the only hope for galactic freedom against the tyrannical Legion. Now, they’ve come to New York City to spread their message of freedom. Touching down at Madison Square Garden, for the first time, I give you, The Universal Revolution!”

A drumbeat starts echoing through the arena. The crowd claps along.

“On drums: an exiled prince from his crystalline home. Sam Fletcher!” A drum solo goes wild, and Sam descends from the spaceship’s right wing, already playing his neon-ringed drumset.

“On bass: two robots from the planet Zik-Tera who found the forbidden secret of their world. LO and VE!” A pair of robot bassists are both jamming on the left wing, some wild-ass melody Starburst can barely follow, zipping up and down like a Billy Preston song. The woman robot is clad in gold bodypaint with circuit boards covering her nipples, while the man is all silver, a massive dick bulge visible through his silver leather pants.

“On vocals: the Voice of the Void, the manifestation of all that is good in the galaxy. Astradia!” A ramp from the center of the ship opens, and the most beautiful woman Starburst has ever seen strides out, her stiletto heels clacking with each step, whirls of purple fabric and blacklight paint adoring a woman who grabs a microphone stand and belts out a scream.

“And our brave captain. Legion syntheroid turned swashbuckling hero! Our last, best hope for galactic freedom from the tyranny of The Legion’s conformity. Starburst Smith!”

Some kind of hawk screams, and Starburst’s jaw drops. Because she sees herself as the coolest she’ll ever be. Her hero form marches out, wearing a costume best described as part Nazgûl, part Terminator, part Dejah Thoris. And her guitar is slung over her shoulder, a fucking sword blade coming off the end. Hero Starburst full on makes out with Astradia in front of a screaming crowd in a way that does NOT seem like an act, and Astradia goes into a speech about the crowd sending energy to the Great Seed to birth a new Space Mother to battle The Legion’s dark armies. There’s a lot of proper nouns, and it’s a bit hard to follow, but none of that matters because hero Starburst fucking shreds! There are echoes of Dark Side of the Dark in there, but it is so much faster, so much more layered than anything Starburst has ever done on her own.

After the opening song, a whole narrative unfolds. Each band member gets an origin song featuring them. Listening to Sam’s soulful drum solo about being cast out of his home, Starburst realizes two things. First, that Sam was right when he said that Starburst was selfish, and egomaniacal and made it too much about her and not enough about everyone else. And second, by doing this, she’s now exiled herself. Rock and roll is her home. And she’s imploded that home just like the Seattle Superdome.

Intercut between LO and VE’s origin about teaching the Zik-Terrans to fuck and Astradia’s spontaneous birth from a black hole, General Zom of the Last Legion and his syntheroid soldiers start appearing in the crowd. They get a song about hunting down the Universal Revolution from their asteroid base. Then Starburst gets her origin song, a quiet dirge about her former self, All-E-Son, conquering the peaceful planets of the Fourth Nebula, all the while licks of a guitar start to flare up.

The only resistance to All-E-Son and her robot legion is Krillnox, the Fourth Nebula’s chosen hero. Astradia sings about how Krillnox fought on, despite the impossible odds he faced, only to, at last, meet All-E-Son when he could barely stand, bleeding out from his wounds. And it was only after All-E-Son killed Krillnox to spare him the pain, so moved by his determination, that she ripped out her inhibitor chip and took up Krillnox’s sword, becoming Starburst, revolutionary hero!

Starburst can barely believe it. It’s all the best thing she’s ever seen and it’s going so fast it’s already time for the climax. The Universal Revolution needs to blow up the Vermillion Crystal before General Zom finishes his dark spell. There’s on-stage guitar combat, which the audience, including Starburst, absolutely loves. But just when The Universal Revolution is about to blow up the crystal with their obliterator missile, General Zom completes his magic spell and the arena goes COMPLETELY dark. The last lights of galactic freedom have been snuffed out.

That’s when the fucking theremin starts wiggling in. “Father,” says hero Starburst in the darkness, her voice ice, “you aren’t the only one who can command sorcery!”

Then there’s a theremin duel, blacklights shining throughout the stage, exactly like Starburst always knew an audience would love if she just had the budget and the time and the venue and the crowd. With Astradia’s help, Starburst restores light to the arena, and, by extension, the universe!

Only to fall, exhausted, into a crystalline coma, dry ice billowing from the glass coffin Starburst falls backwards into.

Astradia and Sam lift Starburst back up the gangplank of the Universal Revolution’s starship, flanked by LO and VE, before it lifts off. “Another battle won. Another sacrifice made,” the announcer says. “Can the Universal Revolution save their heroic captain from her eternal slumber? Will they be able to evade the Last Legion’s clutches? Will the galaxy ever be truly free? Find out when the Universal Revolution returns to your star cluster. SOON!”

The video dies. The lights in the Winnowing Chamber come back on. Starburst shoves the helmet off, gets up in a haze, drunker and more sober than she’s ever been. She did it. She fucking did it! She did all of that, made the best show that has ever been seen. And there was a fucking story, rayguns and swords and neon and glitter and it was everything she could have imagined and so much more! The crowd loved it, hanging on every lyric, on every beat, dancing and cheering and gasping along. There’s no way Starburst stays in that coma. No, like, Astradia’s kiss will save her, or maybe Astradia and Sam both kissing her at once? Or maybe they fall in love trying to revive her, and then their new love resurrects Starburst? This can’t be her end!

But no. It is. It takes her a solid minute to remember where she is. She blinks, still staring at the empty TV screen, before she stumbles out of the chair. Starburst shoves the double doors open. She didn’t make any of that, and now she never will. The hallway lights are harsh, migraine inducing, and instead of being a Galactic Hero, she’s no one, one more face in the crowd. Or worse, she’s a future manager of a convenience store. A job she only got because her dad gave it to her, not because she earned it.

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Allison refills the shelves with bags of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos. It’s six AM, and she’s here, settling into week three managing her Circle K. She’s already negotiated four customer disputes this week and made sure to hold aside some of those new Mountain Dew flavors for the hot dad who says he’s getting them for his kids, when she can clearly see him trying Purple Thunder in his car.

Jacob, her Monday morning cashier, comes in with a wave. Allison waves back. She’s gonna need to update her order to include more Fantas, so she goes back to her office. There’s her old Stratocaster on the wall, next to the bulletin board, shift schedule, and employee rights posters that corporate sends like clockwork.

She can’t play guitar anymore. She’s tried. Maybe there’s something physically wrong with her hands that causes her so much pain, or it’s something psychosomatic. Maybe seeing any five string is a reminder of the best rock show only she ever got to see, the Coming Out of Their Shells tour but bigger, wilder, hornier. She can still play the theremin that sits on her desk, a small comfort. Her fingers dance through its electric fields when the store is devoid of customers, mournful tunes bouncing between shelves of gum and potato chips.

But, on the computer, the same one she uses to manage inventory, she’s been working on writing two things. First, an e-mail to Sam, subject line: “I’m Sorry.” And second, in Microsoft Word, a file titled The Universal Revolution: Book One. And even if the names have been changed from All-E-Son to Sin-Dy and Starburst has been changed to Flare, it’s still the same story she saw Winnowed away from her. And Allison writes a little every day. To find out what happens next.

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Host Commentary

I am fifty years old, solidly in Generation X, and one thing that my generation heard a lot of was how much potential we had. We were very bright, but couldn’t apply ourselves. We could read far above our grade level but only wanted to read at our maturity level. We got the backhanded compliments of how much we could accomplish.

I am also a fifty year old woman who was diagnosed with ADHD in the past decade, which explains a lot of things like that damn potential and how urging me to plumb those depths was ultimately harmful, making me feel lazy when really my brain could concentrate very hard on things I loved, and couldn’t give me any focus for things I didn’t care so much for.

So I identify with this story, because even without the stipulation that you can’t have the future you see, all of the creative folks who have trouble focusing know that achieving that future was a long shot at best. What I love about this story is when Smith knew what she could accomplish in the field she chose to look at, she wasn’t afraid to try something else creative. And, like most creative people I know, she has to work a day job to get by.

I think if this technology were in our world, I’d probably look to see my potential in one of my hobbies, not in my dream job. Just knowing your capable—and I mean really knowing, not just your teacher getting frustrated with you and complaining to you about your potential when you thought it was interesting to spray water on a bulletin board painted with watercolors and watch the paint drip (not based on a real occurrence)—knowing you’re capable of something great can help light a fire under you.

What I worry about is the poor slobs who looked into the future and saw nothing great. That would have been the ultimate blow. Or maybe it would just signal that you’re not really fit for that thing you’re passionate about. It happens sometimes.