I don’t have to be on that bus, I thought, sitting down at a cafe. I can drop the whole thing, slam cappuccinos till happy hour, then get smashed at a bar.

“You know, 80 per cent of success is not showing up,” he said. “For the bullshit, that is.”

THE ANDROID REBELLION BY NICOLAS GATTIG 34MAG 53

Bossman moved his massivity in the upholstered chair. As he was thinking, his fingers drummed on the desk in a loop of mogul impatience.

“He can’t play the song? That’s ass-cake.”

“Sometimes he mutters under his breath. Like he’s saying bobos.”

“Say what?”

“You know—dudes in the suburbs who think they are punk.” Steve Drt looked sheepishly round the throne room, the inner sanctum of G-nome Records, all glass and views up in the Embarcadero Center.

“What did Scoff say about this?”

“He’s in Wisconsin, hunting. Didn’t make it to practice.”

“Where does the bot get this stuff? He’s wired to play drums and keep his mouth shut.”

hERB had joined the band two years back—#heisthemetal was the hashtag on social media, dreamed up by Bossman like everything else—but still people asked, “So does the synthetic know he is a synthetic?” Of course, he did. We had no wish for some rogue replicant shit from a drummer clamoring for more lifetime. hERB was okay having only five years, which would be enough for us to milk the reunion and save a nice chunk for retirement. He even liked wearing the cap from the lab that read Punk Till I Die.

“We are wondering—” Steve Drt picked his forearm, scarred from the vision quests of his youth. “You know, the circuits.”

“System malfunction? In a drum unit?”

“He says he can’t play the beat.”

“Look—” Bossman snorted. “You want to stick with the bot, take him to Wolff-Nakamoto. Get him fixed so he can do the job. He keeps acting up, get yourself a new drummer. Before the tour. Before Scoff gets pissed.”

In a prominent spot on the wall, among rows of platinum discs amassed by Bossman throughout years of moneyed connoisseurship, hung the last effort by Snafu Siren. I looked up at the shimmering disc—a promise of bills paid forever.

We had to act after a line of depleted skinsmen, humans snapping their wrist joints at galloping speeds or losing their mojo in rehab. Punks are fragile, especially the drummers. Beside overuse injuries or choking on their own vomit shithoused after a show, there is the ennui of banging out the same three beats through a repertoire of two hundred songs.

hERB was the perfect solution. Designed like all humanoid music robots in the lab of Doctor Wolff-Nakamoto, a whimsical tinker in Silicon Valley and a maven on biomechanics, hERB was the drummer that never gave out, never flaked on a practice. A feat of modular functionality, he rocked on demand with no warmup needed.

“You understand—” Bossman looked up. “This thing leaks, your reunion’s in the toilet. We can have sloppy timing, peeing on groupies—hell, move to the suburbs and drive a Miata. That’s peccadilloes. What we can’t have is the lords of punk with a drummer who yelps they are sellouts. That’s ass-cake.”

He turned to his calendar. “You don’t need to respect me. But you need to respect my money. Go fix the damn bot, okay?”