Kay wound her way back through the clusters of pinball machines, ticket dispensers, video game cabinets, prize counters, co-workers, straggling customers trying to finish one last game before they closed the gates for the night, noise, lights, and general chaos, and made her way slowly to the back office. She opened the door just a crack, and knocked. "David said you wanted to see me?" she asked.
"Yeah, come on in," responded the voice on the other side of the door. Kay walked in, gave her boss a big smile, and immediately stopped to look at the new machine he'd gotten in today. He jabbed a stub of a cigar at it. "So, whaddya think?"
Kay looked at the machine for a few minutes. The cabinet was massive, and it had a touch-sensitive pad on the floor hooked into it. It looked something like a 'Dance Dance Revolution' machine, but someone had repurposed it, adding a large metal framework around the dance pad that formed a sort of cage-like dome. Across the top, a logo read, 'Jukebox Hero'.
She looked back at her boss. Mister Keeler looked like the kind of guy they warned neighborhoods about, a paunchy mid-40s man with greasy hair, greying stubble, and a seemingly-omnipresent smell of cigar smoke, but like all the employees at Keeler's Kastle, she knew his bark was worse than his bite. "It'll probably do well," she said. "Most of the dancing games do. Might take a while to take off, though, unless there's something that makes this one special."
Mister Keeler grinned, revealing a mouthful of yellowing smoker's teeth. "This is the latest thing, Kay. Once people play this, they won't even want to bother with that 'Dance Dance' crap. We'll have 'em lining up around the block. That's why I brought you back here. I know you love the dancing games, figured you might want the chance to try it out before I put it out on the floor."
Kay gave a little shrug. "Sure. Where are we putting it?"
"In the party room. I'm figuring, we rework the party room into the 'Jukebox Hero Room', charge admission to watch people play the game, and we'll section off an area of the arcade for the parties. Most of the kids don't like being cooped up in there anyway." He took a drag on his cigar. Kay had never actually seen him start one or finish one. They just seemed to be perpetually half-smoked. "Hang on, let me put some credits in there." He got up, unlocked the coin slot, and pressed a tiny lever inside the machine several times.
"Charge admission?" Kay stepped onto the dance pad. "I don't know if you can get people to pay to watch..." Suddenly, the framework lit up. At the same time, Kay's entire body was haloed in a soft glow of light.
"Trust me, kiddo," Keeler said, "this is the state of the art. It's not like that DDR thing, where it just measures where you're stepping, or whatsitsname, the one that you waved your hands around...Beatmania, something like that?"
"No," said Kay, moving her arm slightly and watching as the halo of light followed it perfectly, "Beatmania was the one with the record turntable. You're thinking of-"
"S'not important," Keeler said, waving his hand dismissively. "The point is, this thing has sensors all over, tracks every part of your body. Then it, I dunno, 'paints' that light shape in the air. Right now, it just kinda follows what you do, but when you're playing, you have to try to match the way it moves. So you really do a whole dance, not just moving your arms or legs. Trust me, it's gonna look awesome."
Kay nodded slowly, as she considered the notion. She looked at the screen, and tapped the small control pad to scroll through the list of songs. "Only fifty songs?" she said. "That's kind of small for a game nowadays. Most of the machines out there have way more than that."
"It's all linked to the Internet," her boss replied. "The manufacturers can keep adding songs, and the machine will just patch 'em right in."
Kay raised an eyebrow. "Some of these aren't even dance songs. 'Shameless'? That's the kind of thing you slow-dance to at weddings." She scrolled a bit further. "'Winter Wonderland'? What's that even doing in there?"
Keeler shrugged. "I dunno, just pick one and give it a shot, OK? I wanna see if this thing works."
Kay selected 'Tainted Love'. It seemed like a good starter-not too fast, but not too slow, either. The game brought up a screen with a wire-frame model of her, positioned just like she was. The wire-frame model turned its head to face her for a moment, revealing a simplified version of her own face. It winked at her. 'Do What I Do!' flashed up on the screen, as its lips moved, and it turned back to mimic Kay's position again. It raised its right arm. Kay started to raise her own-at first, she raised it a little too quickly, and she noticed her hand pulling ahead of the halo of light. The screen flashed red, and Kay felt a dizzying sensation pass through her body, almost nauseating. She slowed her movement down to match the light more closely. When her position matched the model again, encased in the halo of light again, the screen flashed green. 'Very good!' Kay felt almost absurdly happy. 'Now It's Time To Dance!'
The music started, and the wire-frame model gyrated in tune to the rhythms in a very 80s-inspired dance. Kay had a bit of trouble dancing like her parents at first, and she got several of the unpleasant red flashes as she tried to keep her body inside the halo of light. But by the time Soft Cell sang, "Baby, baby, baby, where did our love go?", she had gotten the hang of it, and was getting green flash after green flash. Each green flash seemed to send pleasant thrills through her entire body, and when the song ended, she realized with a start that she'd almost totally forgotten that her boss was in the room with her. "Wow," she said. "That was pretty cool. I think something's wrong with the screen, though. Something to do with the...I dunno, the brightness or something. It flashes really bright when you make a mistake."
