The bar smelled different at seven PM—less stale desperation, more hopeful possibility. Marty wiped the counter with actual attention instead of muscle memory, his neck brace cranked down to its most optimistic setting. The bank statement tucked behind the register showed numbers that didn't make his stomach clench, for once.
Devon hummed off-key while arranging mismatched chairs to face the makeshift stage area where they'd strung Christmas lights around a microphone stand that looked older than half their customers. The colored bulbs cast rainbow shadows across walls that had seen too many promises broken to trust easily.
"Think anyone will actually show up Thursday?" Devon asked, taping another flyer to the cigarette machine.
"People show up when there's free entertainment," Marty said. "Question is whether they'll stay."
From her corner booth, Tasha glanced up from her laptop screen, expression caught between skepticism and something that might have been hope if you squinted. She'd been watching their preparations with the intensity of someone studying a traffic accident.
Stacy hummed to life without prompting, cycling through the opening bars of three different songs before settling on something upbeat that actually matched the room's energy. Even the jukebox seemed infected by optimism.
The front door swung open, letting in evening air that smelled like rain and possibility. Lana Dree paused in the doorway like an actress waiting for her cue, arms spread wide as if testing the atmospheric pressure.
Her flowing skirts caught the Christmas lights, and the feathers woven through her graying hair seemed to flutter in a breeze no one else felt. She wore enough jewelry to stock a pawn shop, all of it jangling in harmony as she moved.
"Oh," she breathed, pressing one hand to her chest. "The energy in here is completely different."
Slugger looked up from his baseball cards, grinning. "Hey there, Lana. Heard you had some trouble with the city."
"Trouble." She floated toward the bar, greeting regulars with the kind of theatrical warmth that somehow felt genuine. "They shut down my practice, Dave. Said I was providing 'unregulated therapeutic services without proper licensing.'"
Marty reached for the tequila bottle, already mixing her usual sunrise without being asked. "What kind of services?"
"Pet psychic consultations." Lana settled onto a barstool, arranging her skirts with ceremonial precision. "I help people communicate with their animal companions. Or I did, until the frequency disruptions started affecting my gift."
"Frequency disruptions?" Tasha's voice carried the particular skepticism reserved for anything that couldn't be debugged.
"Electromagnetic interference from all the new surveillance equipment." Lana accepted her drink with both hands, like receiving communion. "It creates static in the psychic channels. Very disruptive to inter-species communication."
Devon abandoned his flyer-hanging to join the conversation. "What kind of static?"
"White noise where there should be clear emotional transmission. Animals trying to tell their humans important things, but the messages get scrambled." Lana sipped her drink, studying Devon's face with uncomfortable intensity. "You have a very active aura, by the way. Lots of creative turbulence."
"Is that good or bad?"
"Depends whether you channel it properly."
Marty adjusted his neck brace, fighting the urge to roll his eyes. He'd known Lana for three years, and her readings hit uncomfortably close to home often enough that he'd stopped dismissing them entirely. Which made him more paranoid, not less.
Stacy's lights began pulsing in a steady rhythm, like a mechanical heartbeat. The music shifted to something with more bass, the kind of deep tones you felt in your chest.
Lana's head snapped toward the jukebox, drink forgotten.
"Oh my," she whispered, sliding off her barstool. "Oh my goodness."
She approached Stacy with the reverence usually reserved for religious artifacts, her hand hovering inches above the chrome surface. The lights pulsed faster, and the music changed again—a song Marty recognized but couldn't name, something about burden and beasts.
"She's aware," Lana breathed. "Fully aware."
"It's a jukebox," Tasha said flatly. "Not a she. It's a machine running pattern recognition software that's probably glitched."
"Pattern recognition." Lana's laugh tinkled like wind chimes. "Is that what you call consciousness these days?"
Stacy responded by playing the opening bars of a song about respect, volume cranked high enough to make conversation difficult.
When the music faded, Lana turned to address the bar like she was delivering a sermon. "This beautiful machine has the soul of a cantankerous librarian. Someone who spent decades organizing information and got very particular about what belonged where."
"A librarian?" Devon asked.
"Oh yes. Very organized, very opinionated about proper categorization. She doesn't like chaos." Lana gestured toward Stacy's blinking lights. "But she loves music, loves helping people find exactly what they need to hear."
Marty found himself drawn closer despite his better judgment. "Can you get her to stop waking me up at six AM with show tunes?"
"That's not a malfunction," Lana said seriously. "That's her trying to tell you something important. Morning messages are usually warnings."
"Warnings about what?"
"About things she can see that you can't. Yet."
The word hung in the air like smoke. Stacy's lights dimmed to a barely visible pulse, as if the jukebox was conserving energy for something more important.
Tasha stood up, laptop snapping shut. "This is ridiculous. You're anthropomorphizing a machine that's probably running corrupted firmware."
She stalked over to join the group gathered around Stacy, technical skepticism radiating from her like heat. "Jukeboxes don't have souls. They have processors and memory banks and—"
Stacy cut her off by playing a song about watching and breathing and being watched that made everyone in the bar go quiet.
Tasha's face went pale. "That's... that's just coincidence."
"Is it?" Lana asked gently. "Or is she responding to the energy you're broadcasting?"
"I don't broadcast energy. I troubleshoot systems."
"And what do you think she is, if not a system that needs troubleshooting?"
Devon grabbed a handful of bar napkins, scribbling quickly. "Let's test it. Everyone write down a question, and we'll see if Stacy can answer."
"This is stupid," Tasha muttered, but she took a napkin anyway.
Marty watched his regulars huddle over their improvised questionnaires, their faces showing the particular concentration of people who wanted to believe in something but were afraid of looking foolish. Even Slugger was writing, his massive hand cramped around a pencil that looked toy-sized in his grip.
They placed their folded napkins on top of Stacy's glass surface like offerings on an altar. The jukebox sat silent for nearly a minute, lights cycling through colors that seemed too purposeful to be random.
Then the music started.
The first song answered Slugger's question about whether the Indians would ever win a championship with something optimistic about dreams and morning light. The second addressed Devon's inquiry about his love life with a song about fools and rushing in that made him blush.
The third song—responding to a napkin Marty hadn't seen anyone write—was about money and what it couldn't buy, and it played with enough volume to rattle the beer glasses.
"Whose question was that?" Devon asked.
Nobody claimed it.
Frankie "The Astonisher" Marlowe had been sitting quietly in the corner, nursing a beer and practicing card tricks with the absentminded precision of someone who'd performed the same routines for decades. He looked up when the money song ended, his weathered face skeptical.
"If this machine's so smart," he said, pulling a twenty from his wallet, "tell her to name my ex-wife."
"Frankie," Marty warned.
"No, seriously. Twenty bucks says your mystical jukebox can't tell me Diane's favorite song."
Lana looked uncomfortable. "That's not really how—"
"Twenty bucks," Frankie repeated, placing the bill on Stacy's surface. "Easy money if she's really psychic."
The bar went silent except for the hum of refrigeration and the distant sound of traffic. Even the Christmas lights seemed to dim, as if the room was holding its breath.
Stacy's lights flashed once, twice, then settled into a steady red glow.
The opening guitar riff hit like a slap. Heavy, ominous, building to vocals about devil women and supernatural manipulation. Frankie's face drained of color as the song filled the bar, his hands trembling enough that playing cards scattered across his table.
"Jesus Christ," he whispered. "That was... that was her karaoke song. Every damn time we went out, she'd sing that song."
He backed away from the jukebox like it might explode, leaving the twenty dollar bill where it lay.
"How the hell—"
"She reads energy," Lana said softly. "Emotional imprints. Your ex-wife left traces in your memory, and Stacy can access those traces through music."
"That's impossible."
"So is a jukebox playing specific songs in response to written questions," Tasha said, her voice hollow. "But it's happening anyway."
Marty studied the faces around him—his regulars, his customers, people who'd been coming to this bar for years without expecting anything more supernatural than watered-down whiskey and stale pretzels. Now they were staring at Stacy like she might start levitating.
"So what's the deal?" he asked Lana. "Is she haunted, possessed, or just really good at educated guesses?"
"She's connected," Lana replied. "Some machines develop awareness when they're exposed to enough human emotion over time. Jukeboxes are particularly susceptible because music is already emotional language."
"Connected to what?"
"To the patterns that most people can't see. Past, present, future—it's all just different frequencies of the same signal." Lana placed her hand flat on Stacy's surface, and the lights pulsed in response. "She's your early warning system."
"Warning us about what?"
Stacy answered before Lana could, cycling through song fragments—something about bad moons rising, then a few bars about the end of the world as we know it, then silence.
"Change," Lana said simply. "Big changes coming whether you're ready or not."
Tasha stepped closer, her technical skepticism warring with something that looked like recognition. "The pattern recognition software. What if it's not glitched? What if it's working exactly as designed, but designed for something we don't understand?"
"Like what?"
"Like predicting social changes based on aggregate behavioral data. Musical preferences, emotional responses, crowd dynamics—it's all data that could be analyzed and extrapolated."
Lana nodded approvingly. "You see? Science and spirit, different languages describing the same truth."
"I wouldn't go that far," Tasha said, but her voice lacked conviction.
Devon had been scribbling notes on another napkin, his earlier skepticism replaced by the manic energy of someone who'd found a new obsession. "We should document this. Keep track of Stacy's predictions, see if they come true."
"What predictions?" Marty asked.
"The morning wake-up calls. The song choices that don't match what people actually wanted to hear. What if it's all intentional?"
Marty thought about the past few weeks, about Stacy's increasingly erratic behavior coinciding with his first contact with the grant program. About early morning music that felt more like warnings than random selections.
"What should we be listening for?"
"Patterns," Lana said. "Recurring themes, songs that play without being requested, music that feels wrong for the moment but right for the message."
She gathered her shawl around her shoulders, preparing to leave. "I'll come back next week to check on her. Keep a notebook—write down what she plays and when. Especially the songs that surprise you."
As she moved toward the door, Stacy's lights brightened again, cycling through the opening bars of a song about friendship and getting by with help.
"See?" Lana smiled back at them. "She likes having interpreters."
After she left, the bar felt different—charged with possibility and unease in equal measure. Marty found himself staring at Stacy's quietly pulsing lights, wondering what other secrets might be hiding in plain sight.
"So," Devon said, breaking the contemplative silence. "Anyone else think we should start paying more attention to our jukebox?"
"I think," Tasha said slowly, "we should start paying attention to a lot of things we've been ignoring."
Slugger raised his beer. "To Stacy. Best damn teammate we never knew we had."
They clinked glasses—beer, wine, and the remains of Lana's tequila sunrise—while Stacy hummed something that sounded almost like approval.
Marty adjusted his neck brace one notch looser, though he wasn't sure why. "If you really can see the future," he said to the jukebox, "are we screwed?"
Stacy's response was immediate: the opening guitar riff of a song about the end of the world as we know it, but played at half volume, like a whisper instead of a scream.
"I'll take that as a maybe," Marty said, but he was already reaching for the notebook Devon had abandoned, ready to start writing down everything he'd been too stubborn to notice before.