Lead Singer of Indie Rock Band: Everyone has a different dream of New York City, right?
Lead Singer of Different Indie Rock Band: You wouldn’t believe how beautiful the Statue of Liberty looks with water pooled around her feet.
Lead Singer of a Third, Separate Indie Rock Band: So people warned us about coming to New York, ok? It’s a hard scene to make it in. There’s so much competition, rent is crazy, trash everywhere. And even though 75% of the city was underwater and there was a new overclass of sentient vulture overlords, we had to try it out for ourselves.
Lead Singer of Indie Rock Band: I have no regrets.
Lead Singer of Different Indie Rock Band: RIOT was the band everyone was talking about. They were the band to see.
RIOT Guitarist, Bruno: By the time I got here in 2051, 2052, Crystal was already out here.
Crystal: I’d gotten really lucky. I found an apartment that used to be one of those luxury buildings floating in the East River. Only 4,000 fishbones a month. No one would be able to find a deal like that now.
RIOT Bassist, Max: We’d all met when we shared a collective unconscious in the Metaverse. Crystal, Bruno, and I.
Crystal: But things really got cooking when each of us moved to New York City – well, it wasn’t exactly called New York City at that point. It was called the New Vulture Republic of York City. But that’s when we met Carl.
Max: Guy is an absolute beast on the drums.
Bruno: He’s a literal beast. When the climate crisis pushed a pack of rabid vultures towards Old New York City, they started turning humans into a sort of zombie vulture hybrid.
Max: That was when we found our sound.
Carl: Unintelligible screeching.
Lead Singer of Third, Separate Indie Rock Band: One time I saw him bite off a guy’s head halfway through a set. Rock and roll.
Crystal: It was a really exciting time, because we were young and because we felt really fortunate to be alive.
Bruno: The crowds were really small at first – New Vulture Republic of New York City wasn’t known for its music scene and the ratio of vultures to humans was pretty disproportionate. Everyone was fleeing the city in droves. But we were true NVRYCers. We were sticking around.
Crystal: You couldn’t go below 14th street back then! Because it was underwater.
Max: We did so many stupid things in those days. We’d walk around after sundown with our ears unprotected.
CDC Scientist: We are still working to discern the connection between vulture-human hybrids and their predilection for ears as a main food source.
Bruno: We wanted to do something special. Something that people would remember in the six months we all thought we had left to live.
Crystal: We broke into the mayor’s office and took over the state-sanctioned vulture airwaves. It was so badass.
Lead Singer of Different Indie Rock Band: Let me guess. Crystal didn’t mention she’s a nepo baby?
Crystal: Yes, my dad was the vulture/human mayor of NVYRC, but I don’t see what that has to do with anything. I still had to work really hard to forage for food and desalinate my own drinking water. For most of my life, he was just a regular guy, not the human-vulture hybrid mayor.
Max: After that, forget it. We were on top. Literally. The vultures who nested above Central Park West let us share their nest with them.
Bruno: What can I say? When you’re the biggest band in the city because there’s only four bands in New York City, egos start to get in the way.
Max: Crystal and Carl had broken up at that point, and I’ll just say, it wasn’t pretty.
Crystal: I tried to make it work, really. But he was impossible to communicate with.
Carl: More unintelligible screeching.
In 2055, the U.S. government managed to wrestle back New York City from the grips of the vulture human population and implemented climate resiliency strategies to extract the overflowing waters and mitigate sea-level rise. Some vulture human hybrids still remain.
Crystal: The city is so sanitized and hospitable to living things. Last week, I saw a fancy tree go up on 2nd Avenue.
Bruno: These kids now…they don’t really know what it’s like to make art and struggle. I mean, based on what I can see from the nest I got grandfathered into on Central Park West.
Carl: Unintelligible screeching. “Gentrification.” Continued unintelligible screeching.