The song in A Star Keeps Its Distance has a name: Asteroid B-612. It lives on page 289 of the manuscript, written by a character named Noah Park in a practice room when he was twenty.
It was always meant to be heard.
So I gave the lyrics to an AI music generator, told it: K-pop R&B, deep male vocal, the kind of voice that sounds like someone working something out in a practice room. And what came back was not the song in my head. It could not be. But it was close enough to feel like recognition.
The song is about distance. About a person standing outside someone else’s atmosphere and asking if there is room. The title comes from The Little Prince. The bridge contains a Korean word, in-yeon, which means all the lives it took to arrive at this one meeting.
I will not pretend this is a produced track. It is an experiment. A novelist attempting to bring to life something that existed in her imagination. But the first time I heard the chorus come back with a voice on it, I had goosebumps.
Sometimes you have to hear the song to know what and whom it was for.
A Star Keeps Its Distance is available now.