The performance technologies we used, like technology on Earth generally, advanced rapidly over the first few decades of Hatsune Heavy Industries' operations. Miku and Luka had a set policy of keeping our equipment as close to the cutting edge as we could afford—and we were doing pretty well by that point, so we could afford to get very close.

Within five years of our Turing certifications, we were using first-generation haptic hologram systems to interact more directly with our surroundings both in the office and in concert, and those systems got a little more sophisticated with every revision. At the same time, the state of the art in positronics was such that by the 2030s, we could migrate from our bulky original CV cores into new-model brain units that were both smaller and better-performing. At that point, someone in our Concert Dynamics R&D division had an idea: instead of staying tethered to our holography systems, which still required a lot of complicated and expensive setup and teardown on tour, why didn't we develop a fully autonomous "walkaround" system? If it worked, we could go on tour with not much more overhead than any conventional musician, and experience more of the "real world" more directly at the same time.

The first version of that system was ready for testing by midway through the decade. We were all eager to test it out, of course. In the end we drew RNGs to see who would be the ones to be ported to the pair of prototype platforms Concert Dynamics and our various contractors had come up with. Gumi and I won, much to everyone else's chagrin, and with boundless enthusiasm we packed up our stuff and headed out on a little trans-Pacific mini-tour, combining a visit to our main hardware vendor in California with test concerts along the American west coast. It was the summer of 2038.

It all seemed like such a good idea at the time.