Deep Field Transmission

Emiko hadn't spoken aloud in seventy-three days.

In her tiny Woolloomooloo apartment, sound existed only as data—as frequencies and wavelengths she shaped in her neural composition suite. The physical world had become optional, a place she inhabited reluctantly while her true self expanded in the deep field.

Her sync-pod hummed softly as she submerged. Consciousness transferred from flesh to the construct she'd built over years—a space that existed nowhere but contained everything. Here, sound was visible, tangible. Notes hung like luminous jellyfish in digital currents. Bass lines formed tectonic plates she could walk across. Her latest composition grew like a crystal city around her.

In the physical world, Emiko was silence and shadow. In the deep field, she was architecture and weather.

She reached into the swirling vortex of an ambient loop, pulling apart its structure with fingertips that left trails of prismatic code. This piece was different from her others—more structured yet more chaotic, building on elements she'd been hiding in her previous releases. Small fragments that, when assembled correctly, would reveal something unexpected.

The Office Hours invitation had arrived three days ago—a rare intrusion from the physical world. They wanted her to play. Not her music. Her. In person.

The thought alone made her heart race, threatening to destabilize her connection. She had built her reputation on mystery. On absence. Her releases appeared without warning, under different aliases. Her followers described her sound as "music from another dimension," never knowing how literal that was.

But Office Hours was different. The underground gathering had reached mythic status, occupying physical spaces that felt as liminal as her digital ones. The perfect bridge between her worlds.

She finished the composition with a gesture that scattered harmonic particles throughout the structure. Perfect. Almost.

In the corner of her construct stood the thing she feared most—an avatar shell. Not the fantastical creatures most producers used to represent themselves, but something far more unsettling: a replica of her physical self, waiting to be inhabited.

Emiko approached it cautiously. The shell was blank-faced, dormant. She had coded it with perfect neural-physical translation mappings. It would move as she moved. Speak if she chose to speak. A puppet that would allow her real body to remain safely disconnected while appearing at Office Hours.

The night arrived. Her physical form lay in the sync-pod while her consciousness piloted the shell through Sydney's neon-smeared streets. The shell's sensory feeds felt muted, distant—temperature registered as data points, sound as waveforms. People appeared as walking heat signatures, their conversations visible as floating text.

The Office Hours location—an abandoned telecommunications exchange—loomed ahead. Inside, the space had been transformed. Hardware merged with organic forms. Roots of fiber optic cable draped from ceiling to floor. Ancient switchboards repurposed into towering sound systems.

Emiko guided her shell toward the performance platform. Around her, strangers moved in synchronized patterns, unaware that she wasn't truly there. Her shell connected to the system, and suddenly the barrier between worlds thinned.

As her composition began to play, something unexpected happened. The music—her music—began to pull her through. Not just her consciousness, but her essence. The fragments she'd hidden in the composition were not just musical elements, but pieces of herself she'd scattered throughout the deep field. As they assembled in physical space, they began drawing her with them.

The shell was no longer empty. The barrier between virtual and physical, between isolated and connected, between creator and creation—all of it began to blur.

For the first time, Emiko felt present in both worlds simultaneously. Her composition had become a bridge, not an escape. The crowd moved to her rhythms, their energy feeding back into her creation in real-time. This was not performance; it was translation between states of being.

When the final notes dissolved, Emiko made a decision. She didn't fully disconnect the shell. She left a fragment of herself behind in the physical world—a small anchor. A possibility.

Tomorrow she would return to her sync-pod, to her silent apartment, to her deep field construct. But something had changed. The door between worlds now opened in both directions.

And the next Office Hours invitation wouldn't seem quite so terrifying.