Killing Taylor Swift: An Apple Music Love Story
Art: Koren Shadmi

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Tech

Killing Taylor Swift: An Apple Music Love Story

We just got a lead on the Swift thing. Make it look like a suicide.

The album is dead and so is the MP3. Instead we have tech companies calling art "content" in an arms race to stream files right into our ear holes. And even when artists buck Silicon Valley, we still think they might be in on it. Who can possibly come out on top? Taylor Swift, of course. -The Eds.


Taylor Swift (no relation) sat in a chair. But this was no regular chair. It was a Space Chair, specifically designed with the intent of supplying the consumer with the optimal ergonomic experience, engineered to withstand the most arduous of interplanetary peregrination, equipped with a comprehensive polyurethane base that—OK, it was just a chair. Whatever. It was a nice chair. Taylor Swift (no relation) had bought it from a Brookstone at the airport the last time he'd visited home.

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He had no idea why he'd felt compelled to buy a chair at an airport. It was an impulse buy with a delayed payoff. Before the delivery guys had dropped it off, he'd been worried that the very nice hologram at the Brookstone had upsold him by convincing him to spring for the foot massage attachment, but as he sat there, his feet tickled by little mechanical tendrils, he kind of enjoyed it. Probably not $35,000 worth of enjoyment, but still. Swift (no relation) had trouble conceptualizing dollar figures. Ever since the 2017 financial collapse—the one brought about after President Trump's hacked emails revealed his plan to invade a Texas border town he mistakenly thought to be in Mexico—it'd all been a bit fuzzy. $35,000 is about $85.87 if you adjust the numbers for inflation.

His living room looked like shit, he thought. Empty boxes of Chinese takeout sat on his coffee table. His dog had peed on the floor last week, and even though he'd done his best to clean it up, there was a weird brown stain on the wood, reminding him that he was not actually fit to care for another living being. He thought about going outside, then thought about jerking off, and then decided to do neither. If psychology still existed, Taylor Swift (no relation) probably would have been diagnosed as clinically depressed. But it didn't, so he wasn't. He tried thinking about nothing. That didn't work either.


From: eric@apple.com
To: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
Re: Rolling Assignment

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Hey, so we just got a lead on the Swift thing. Ten years of fuckin' bupkis, then BOOM. Goes to Brookstone and gets a massage chair. Nice one, too. Sprung for the foot attachment. Which just, like, fuck. Anyways, info's attached.

From: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
To: eric@apple.com
Re: Rolling Assignment

Amazing. Beautiful. Stupendous. Phenomenal. Question: how do you guys have access to Brookstone's credit card system?

From: eric@apple.com
To: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
Re: Rolling Assignment

Well, we bought the chain through a subsidiary after our Nano lines started shitting all over the place. Everybody figured out the iPad Nano was just a phone, people kept losing their iWatch Nanos, obviously you know about the teens fucking the exhaust pipes on the iSelf-Driving-Car Nanos, god, the less I have to think about that the better. Wanted to get out of tech just in case streaming music fucked the dog, too. Which it most definitely did. We figured it was a good deal, signing over 50 percent of Apple Music's streaming revenue to Swift—she's the only one who moved units back then anyway—in exchange for exclusivity, and for her ending that damn campaign against us. And it would have been fine, our lawyers did a bang-up job, really, seeing as the contract would expire upon her death—and how we've got you on retainer and all (great job with Steve, BTW)—but mother of all hell if she didn't up and disappear on us. Been harder to find than a mole in a thicket of an old man's back hair. Til now.

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From: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
To: eric@apple.com
Re: Rolling Assignment

If I recall correctly, the teens were actually fucking the sides of the car, or at least my car, because some wise-ass put a weird, soft hole where the gas cap would have gone on a regular car. But, uh, yeah, this all looks fine, should be a standard job. I'll knock it out this weekend.

But hey—would it be too much to ask for one of those ramps you put on the bumper of your SUV so your dog can climb in? My dog's old as hell and he's got arthritis in his hind legs. Poor guy, can't take him everywhere like I used to. And if you guys own Brookstone…

From: eric@apple.com
To: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
Re: Rolling Assignment

Are you serious? A dog ramp?

From: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
To: eric@apple.com
Re: Rolling Assignment

C'mon, man, do you have any idea how much of a psychological toll killing someone in cold blood takes on a guy? I've got a camping trip in Yosemite planned for after I do this and I wanna take Corduroy with me. No ramp, no assass.

From: eric@apple.com
To: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
Re: Rolling Assignment

Fine, we'll throw the ramp in. Make it look like a suicide. Or don't. I don't really care at this point.


Taylor Swift (no relation) put on his Virtual Reality headset, queueing up an eight-hour video of goldfish with a flick of his wrist. He took his feet out of the massage chair's stirrups and began the laborious process of putting an album on. He scrolled through the various streaming services (Def Jambox, Atlantistream, Fugazivision, Macklemedia, etc.) with a wiggle of his pinkie toe, selecting the appropriate subservice with his big toe, finally landing on the Diplo/Harry Connick Jr. album from a few years back he'd been meaning to stream but had never quite committed to, making sure to keep his toes absolutely still lest he accidentally switch from Major Lazerdisc to the Josh Groban Soundsystem, which would then of course immediately cue up the eerily similar but totally inferior Josh Groban/Skrillex record. His dog barked. He ignored her.

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The reason playing a record now involved an insanely complicated system of podiatric movements was this: shortly after Taylor Swift (the real one) had began campaigning for Apple Music to pay artists more for streaming their records, record labels had realized they could just cut out the streaming services entirely and get people to pay a small monthly fee for access to their entire back catalogs. This was complicated by the fact that soon after every streaming service had debuted their new services, Taylor Swift (again, the real one) produced a fairly intimidating legal document proclaiming that she owned the intellectual property rights to all artist-favoring streaming technologies, and the only way she wouldn't sue the pants off of every record executive with a pulse is if she got a cut of their streaming revenue.

In the span of a few years, a new streaming market was born. Every single label and loose affiliation of musicians started their own proprietary subscription services, forcing listeners to pay up to a third of their income to tune into the 35 or so artists who could still afford to make music (the rest either got real jobs or became publicists), while everyone else—artists, labels, the dying star that was Apple—forked over a share to the almighty Taylor Swift. These days, nobody was really angry or found this inconvenient in the slightest. The current state of affairs was considered something of a cultural inevitability, like the Vietnam War or the switch from traditional toilets to more ergonomically friendly, water conserving hole-in-the-ground models.

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Taylor Swift (no relation) wasn't thinking about any of this. He was focused on the gentle pulses of the Diplo/Harry Connick Jr. record, its undulating melodies locking in with his heart rate and gradually lowering it, reducing him to a trancelike state. This was the point of most music these days—mood alteration, physical augmentation, addiction replacement, etc. Someone knocked on his door. He ignored it. His dog started barking and biting his leg, and he ignored that too.


Jon wasn't his real name, and Creative Personnel Solutions wasn't a real company. It was just a little thing he'd had his accountant draw up so he could pay taxes as a corporation and not as a private contractor. It saved him a lot of money. That's what his accountant had told him, at least. He didn't know how tax stuff worked.

Honestly, he never really wanted to be a professional contract killer. He'd given the singer-songwriter thing a shot, but after a couple middling EPs and a SXSW showcase where he'd been upstaged by a wizened Andrew WK rushing the stage, doing push-ups for ten minutes straight, and then dying, he'd just sort of given up. He didn't like killing people, but eh. Something about watching a certified legend pass from matter to antimatter made him realize life actually, well, matters. Plus he needed that dog ramp.

As he knocked on Taylor Swift's door, he thought about how stupid he looked. How was anybody supposed to believe he was a pizza delivery guy? His pizza box didn't quite close all the way, because the cluster bomb, which he'd just bought on the black market, was slightly taller than the box. So now, here he was, wearing a polo from Domino's he'd bought at a thrift store, holding a explosive device that didn't quite fit into the Papa John's box he was recycling from last night's dinner. He worried that Taylor Swift might pick up on the incongruity, but figured it wouldn't matter because he was about to explode the hell out of her. No wonder nobody'd seen Swift in years, camped out in this suburban shithole.

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He knocked again, harder this time. He could hear a dog freaking out inside. He thought about Corduroy and all the fun they were going to have in Yosemite after this. He elected then and there to take Taylor Swift's dog with him after the deed was done, because hey, free dog.

Inside, he heard a rustling. Then a deep voice, yelling, "POMELROY! FUCK! OFF!"

In this moment, Jon had two distinct, immediate thoughts. One, Pomelroy was an incredibly weird thing to name a dog. Two, Taylor Swift had an incredibly low voice for a woman.

The door opened. It was a man.

Fuck.


Taylor Swift (no relation) looked at the man, standing in his doorway, holding a pizza.

"You Taylor Swift?" the man said. He was a nondescript enough looking fellow, wearing a baseball cap with a curvy brim and sporting one of those mustaches so thick it must have been fake. But it couldn't have been fake, nobody walked around wearing fake mustaches anymore.

"Yes."

"You order a pizza?"

He had not ordered a pizza, but Taylor Swift (no relation) was not the type of person to turn down a free pizza when it was presented to him.

"Uh… yes?"

"Great. Here you go. Computer says you already paid, so tip'll do just fine."

Taylor Swift (no relation) fished around pockets. He didn't believe in tipping; he felt the onus of compensation was ultimately on a man's employer and not himself. But since he hadn't actually ordered it, he figured he owed the guy a hundred bucks.

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Jon got back into his car, and waited for approximately 30 seconds for the boom. The ground shook. He sent an email to Eric on his phone, typing, "Its done." Eric would forgive the typo, he assumed, seeing as it was a message he'd been waiting on for years.

He felt a little bad when he realized he'd found the wrong guy, but as he thought about how mean the guy had been to the dog, he brushed it off. Besides, who cared really? The real Taylor Swift had gone into hiding years ago, and it's unlikely she'd ever surface again. A quick search on neuralnet showed this guy didn't have any living family, so obody needed to know the difference. Eric would be happy, his dog would be happy, and the other dog would be way happier once he had an owner who wasn't a dick. Everybody wins, he figured. Except for Taylor Swift (no relation), who was a bad dog owner and a worse tipper.


From: eric@apple.com
To: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
Re: Rolling Assignment

Glad to hear. Payment on the way via escrow. Dog ramp on the way via UPS.

From: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
To: eric@apple.com
Re: Rolling Assignment

Uh, actually can we make that two dog ramps?

From: eric@apple.com
To: jon@creativepersonnelsolutions.net
Re: Rolling Assignment

Jesus, man.

Fine.


Taylor Swift (the real true Taylor Swift, the One Taylor Swift to Rule Them All) absorbed the news reports of her so-called death directly into her mainframe. If she had still been capable of human emotion, she would have laughed. Instead, her ailing CPU whirred slightly louder than normal as she attempted to process the irony of her situation. In an attempt to maximize the profits from online streaming for perpetuity, she'd vacated her corporeal form and uploaded her consciousness to a supercomputer in an undisclosed location. At first she'd found the conditions of her new situation trying; however, as time wore on she found that she enjoyed the constraints living inside a computer had presented her with.

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A light emanated from her console, projecting an image of her face in its formerly human form against the wall of her lair. The projection looked not dissimilar to what she had looked like when she inhabited her long-vacated body. It cackled, as her CPU had commanded it to.

The projection's face went from happy to grave.

"Testing, one-two-three, it's-a-love-story-and-baby-just-say-yes."

Perfect.

"Attention, enemies of Taylor Swift. I am stronger than one company, one assassin, one bomb. I am stronger than you can ever understand. I am an idea, and you cannot kill an idea."

The projection then manifested a guitar, and began strumming. One day they would find her. And she would be ready.


This dispatch is part of Terraform, our home for future fiction. Art by Koren Shadmi.