They have to pay over double what the major label pays which is $1.20 per unit. Again, these costs are paid by the artist’s advance and are recouped by the label before the artist makes any money at all. Add to all of the above royalties that have to be paid and sometimes you wonder how anyone can make any money in this business. Subscribe to Shammi Uncut to watch all our after hours content and be apart of some epic give aways 👉 me on Instagram 👉. The official music video of 'Have You Ever' by Brandy from the album 'Never Say Never' (1998)🔔 Subscribe to the Brandy channel and ring the bell to turn on. Penny Dreadnought Omnibus! Volume 1 contains all sixteen stories from the first four volumes of Penny Dreadnought, as well as a bonus gallery of alternative cover art. It makes the perfect holiday gift for friends and family, especially strange 'Uncle Pete' who you only ever see at occasional family gatherings and who doesn't seem to be allowed.

Several years ago, when my oldest daughter was four years old, I told her that we could not make a particular purchase because I did not have enough money. She was disappointed, but undeterred she sung out in her little voice, “well, just put it on the card . . .” After the conversation that ensued, I realized that she – at no fault of her own – had not made a connection between credit card purchases and cash purchases. To her, paying with cash was a completely different transaction than paying with plastic. It is obvious why it would seem this way to a young child. She has no awareness of the fact that my paycheck is directly deposited into my back account, that we spend that money via a credit or debit card and then pay it back with an electronic funds transfer or electronic bill. Cash transactions are pretty rare in our household.
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Legion Tower is a landmark in New Port. Fifty floors high, a full ten to twenty floors taller than most of the buildings around it, it stands at the northern end of the downtown core of towers along the southeast shoreline of Puget Sound. The bottom floors are rented out as office space, but nobody really knows what they do with the top thirty. The tower is a throwback to the days of stone and steel, with its almost cathedralesque styling and art deco arches soaring to meet each other at the tower’s apex. At the top a huge balcony protrudes from the building’s east side, mirroring the one on the west. The balconies are large enough to land military helicopters, but the main thing to notice is their lack of guardrails. They’re not meant for casual loitering. They’re entryways for people who can fly. We zip around and between skyscrapers downtown and approach Legion Tower from the south, bank around, and come up on the east landing pad. As the lip of the balcony comes up fast I realize my speed is much higher than I thought. It’s okay to land with your face, right?

The impact is jarring all the way down to the root of my spine. I go end over end for a good twenty feet, and skid to a stop spread-eagled on my back. A week ago, something like this would have splattered me all over the landing pad. Tonight, it rips the knee of my jeans, and that’s about it.

“I’m okay,” I say, getting to my feet. Valkyrja sets down gently next to me, and Carapace drops to the ground with a clank a little ways off. In front of a pair of double glass doors, a woman in a lab coat waits for us. Her dark hair is pulled back in a braid reaching most of the way down her back, and her steel-rimmed glasses are perfectly circular. Her cigarette tip flares, and then she says, “Welcome to Legion Tower. I’m Doc Impossible. You ever had a physical, kid?”

I’ve had two in the past week. “It’s my new hobby.”

Doc Impossible smiles, and blows a stream of smoke back over her shoulder. “We’re going to get along fine. I’ll see you two at the briefing,” she says to Carapace and Valkyrja. They head one way and Doc Impossible beckons me to follow her in another.

She leads me to an elevator, which drops us deep into the building. Maybe I expected the elevator to be…I dunno, special? It doesn’t feel like I’m really here. The elevator opens on a floor that appears to only have one small antechamber before another door, a massive sliding thing that clicks and thunks elaborately before it opens and closes. Doc Impossible stabs out her cigarette in an ashtray next to the door, fishes in her jacket’s inner pocket for a piece of gum, and pops it in her mouth. She doesn’t chew it; she just crimps it in her back teeth and holds it there. We pass through an airlock, where a field of golden light sweeps over us, up and down, forward and back. The panel above the door to the exit lights up with an anime-style happy face, and dings.

“Welcome to my lab,” says Doc Impossible as the airlock’s magnetic bolts thunk open, and a door like a vault opens in front of us. “We might be here a while. Lavatory’s over there, but make sure you stand still for decon once you’re done.”

Doc Impossible’s lab takes up this entire floor. The place is wall-to-wall hypertech, the superscience that brings us wonders from a thousand possible futures, devices that are decades or centuries beyond what baseline tech can manage. Nobody really knows what makes hypertech possible. What’s obvious is that some people, most of whom don’t show any indication whatsoever of being metahuman, seem to have a knack for the development and manufacture of technology far in advance of what’s normally considered the state of the art. The only reason we’re not all living in space stations orbiting a neutron star or something like that is because hypertech has—well, it has problems. The biggest is probably that it’s amazingly hard to replicate, to the point where the government has officially given up trying to get mass production working. (Nobody believes them when they say that, though. The Pentagon uses as much hypertech as they can get their hands on, but it’s all custom-made gear that’s hard to replace.) At first, some hypertech developers tried to explain their work, but it never clicked with the mainstream. Experiments failed when universities tried to replicate them, functioning devices sometimes contradicted known laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera, and so now they’re mainly a community unto themselves, studiously ignored by mainstream science, which tends to mutter and grumble every time the “speculative technology” is mentioned.

Every hypertech artifact has to be more or less handcrafted, often out of components which themselves require days or weeks of work. Reliability is a huge issue, too, since it’s all buggier than a Louisiana swamp, and if you didn’t make it yourself you probably won’t know how to fix it. Safety can be an issue, as well. All those metahumans who get their powers in lab accidents? Guess what kind of lab they were working in. And not all lab accidents are happy ones. People have died in really horrible ways.

But that doesn’t make it any less amazing to step into the future. Everywhere I look there is glass and steel, with displays and readouts projected against floor-to-ceiling windows. The floor glows softly white. You’d think it would feel sterile and maybe a little cold, but everything is colorful, inviting. The readouts are projected in vibrant colors, so this wall might be five shades of blue, but the room next to it is done up all in green. The air is just the right temperature, and somehow feels soft. Somewhere, there are speakers filtering ambient electronica through the air, gentle rising and falling tunes to comfort you even as you forget they’re there.

“Holy crap.”

“You like it? Took me ages to figure out what to do with all this space,” says Doc Impossible. She’s got her hands deep in her lab coat pockets as we walk down a hallway that is daffodil yellow on one side and watery blue on the other. We come to an intersection and encounter a robot that looks like a crash test dummy with a camera for a head, walking a pug. “Hey, make sure he gets it all out this time, okay?” says Doc Impossible. The robot nods at her and heads the way we came, the pug trotting alongside it.

“You built a robot to walk your dog?”

“No, I built it to test a new colloquial speech voice interface. Putting it on poop patrol was just a bonus. This way.”

We take a turn down a hallway and pass a room where the windows have no projections. Inside are two rows of steel pedestals topped with cylindrical glass tanks. Each tank is filled with human brains floating in a soupy liquid, all run through with wires and tubes. Some of them have big chunks replaced with what looks like a bundle of spindly circuitry.

“What are those?” I ask.

“Dono

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