The vandalised jukebox is where you left it, looking slightly more dispirited on second visit.

The vandalised jukebox is where you left it, looking slightly more dispirited on second visit.

TAKE HEART, MUSIC BOX. YOU WILL BE A BEAUTIFUL COG IN A SHINING MACHINE.

If things don't go according to the plan.

Load 'Superbloc, Baby'. (Plan for the bomb.)

The disc slots into place with a satisfying click. The trigger is primed.

ALL THAT I HEAR LATELY, IS MY SUPERBLOC BABY!

This is a very good plan, operant. Very well thought out. There is only one minor concern...

And that is?

Who is going to play the song that triggers the bomb?

Maybe I can bribe the conductor?

So this has become a suicide assignment, then?

Obviously not. I'll figure it out.

Giving your life for the assignment, a certain way to prove your worth... undoubtedly brave.

Brave enough for a parade?

No, just brave enough to be denounced as a terrorist and used as an object lesson at the Opera's Greenhouse.

Who will denounce me?

The entire Developed World, naturally. All decent and principled persons. Those who talk a lot about how things must be done and very little about why they're doing it.

Best of luck with the bomb situation, operant.

What's the lesson?

Plan better.

I'll figure it out later.

You are running out of 'later'.

Big finale, no encore.

I'm making it up as I go along, get off my dick. (Go back.)

Looks like it'll be one of the Crew...

It'll have to be me.

There's a way to pull this off, I just haven't thought of it yet.

I'm aware, no need to remind me.

Load 'You But From A Dream'. (Plan for a metaphysical wipeout.)

You slide the cartridge into the first slot and shiver as you hear the click of the machinery snapping into place.

A voice rises from a room you know to be empty. Immaterial and absent power. Ten thousand celestial limbs.

Load 'Cover the Moon When I'm Gone'. (Plan for a melancholic shootout.)

Ultra Violeta can sing you into war.

What's coming will be ugly. You deserve something beautiful, here at the end of all things.

Load the untitled Blood Golem album. (Plan for a plague-metal shootout.)

The local scene's last gasp is more of a scream. Hardcore.

Force your body into fight mode with an epidural of adrenaline, straight to your spinal cord.

Fuck it, I'm going out to Music for Trams Volume 7.

There are worse things to go out to. They are few, but they exist.

What's on the lone disc?

'Music for Trams Vol. 7'.

Where are Volumes 1 to 6?

Gone. Vandals have ransacked this tram's music library.

Gleaming discs fall like a strange plague upon the city below. The sun blooms little rainbows between them. From the tram windows, children laugh.

Also, no guarantee at all that Vol. 7 is the final one. It may continue for many volumes hereafter.

Must be the worst one.

Not even the teenage ransackers had any use for it.

Left behind on purpose. Lone survivor. A warning.

You recognise the name on the disc -- Eloísa Alba -- from the 'Weaponised Boredom' section of Petre's music stall. In other words: 'free jazz'.

Criminally underappreciated. Retrospect will vindicate her.

The name on the disc -- Eloísa Alba -- seems vaguely familiar. You're pretty sure she was an experimental composer -- some sort of 'free jazz' artist?

Whose idea was it to put a jukebox on a tram?

A cultural manoeuvre from the president of the tram company -- who incidentally has been missing for the last two months.

Ran afoul of the Azzurri mob, as rumour has it.

Teenagers no longer have to bring their own music to play obnoxiously loud -- privatisation has provided the 'means of sonic production' for them.

As the ideas of 'cultural manoeuvre' and 'letting teenagers inflict their music onto everyone' pass through your head, it suddenly seems obvious:

The Luzians put this jukebox here!

Ubiquity of mass media -- no space left unpenetrated by coded audiovisual stimuli...

Each Portofiran youth a potential cultural assassin-in-waiting.

All the trappings of a minor component in the Cultural Victory scheme.

Clever. They really are two steps ahead of us.

Far more than two.

We should have come up with that first.

The Opera has never considered mass psychic interference on the scale Luz is actively involved in.

Morally good. Practically moronic.

This may, perhaps, prove to be the Superbloc's final and most dramatic own goal.

Even their minor schemes are devious and sickening.

But effective. So, so effective.

But teenagers also... destroyed it?

Turned on it almost immediately.

Teens do not like being given things. They prefer to take.

It was a nice idea, shame it didn't last.

Don't worry -- you're about to bring it back. In style.

Does it still work?

The damage is mostly surface level -- the obvious mutilation of the dome and theft of the discs, the graffiti scratched into the plastic. Beneath that, the machinery is intact.

Alternative wording

The conductor was right -- the damage is mostly surface level. Beneath its cracked dome and the scratched graffiti, the machinery is intact.

The greatest advantage a machine has over man: the will to live is not required.

It will do for your purposes.

THE AUGMENTOID LARVAE WILL NOW SERVE THE PEOPLE.

Its body has been broken, but its soul lives on.

Open the jukebox.

The dome lifts easily. Its shattered lock jangles as it rises.

A smell of fresh plastic and aluminium coating, still contained within the transparent hemisphere, rises to your nostrils.

The ghost of new music.

like the very moment you rip off the cellophane that envelopes a brand new disc... Or even better, a repressed colour variant disc.

Breathe it in, hard.

For a moment, life feels worthwhile and everything seems right with the world.

Time to select the Song of Death. Or the many Songs of Death -- you can always decide on the most fitting one when the time comes.

If it comes.

Better to be prepared. If you have only one choice -- you have zero choice.

Okay, now what?

Picking a disc to play in here feels like a big decision...

Now that you're actually here, you see every detail of your plan up to this point with new eyes.

I'm feeling pretty dubious about this plan, actually.

It's too late for those considerations now.

This is a precautionary measure, just a precautionary measure...

It doesn't matter. What's done is done, now I have to see it through.

I'll come back to this. [Leave.]

Alternative wording

I'm done here. All set. [Leave.]

The jukebox isn't going anywhere.

Alternative wording

The orchestra is cued and ready.

Beyond the auditorium doors, you hear whispers from the waiting crowd.

Ashamed of its single disc offering.

Embedded in the tram's back wall, a cracked plastic dome encases a single disc surrounded by empty slots.

The lock that was holding it closed has been bashed, broken.

Etched jaggedly into the plastic: 'FUK MUSIC'.

Someone's done the hard part for you. The way is open.