Issue 42, July 2018

© Wyrm Publishing, 2018
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Table of Contents

Introduction

by Neil Clarke

Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected

a novella by Steven Popkes

The Cold Inequalities

a short story by Yoon Ha Lee

Eminence

a short story by Karl Schroeder

About the Artist and Authors

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the July 2018 issue of Forever Magazine!

As I write this, we’re in the midst of celebrating our oldest son’s high school graduation. It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that I was in his shoes. I was one of those kids that knew exactly what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go. Within six months, I discovered that the where was wrong and over twenty-five years later discovered the what was no longer a good fit. Turns out that he’s been paying attention all these years and learned something from my adventures. He’s not on a fixed path and is taking the time he needs to find his way. I can respect that and wish I had done a bit more of that in my youth. I was always in such a hurry and it took a good few smacks from life for me to appreciate the ride. Congratulations Aidan!

Speaking of the ride, I have two new books out this month: The Final Frontier and Clarkesworld Year Nine: Volume Two. Both have already landed at my house, but won’t be on-sale until a bit later this month. I hope you enjoy them.

Until next time . . .

-Neil

Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected

Steven Popkes

A window opened up on the active wall and I stared at it. Rosie stared back.

“Hello, Jacob.” She smiled. The always unexpected dimples on each cheek and that bright, bright smile. A nose so thin it whistled when she was excited. Not beautiful. Not pretty. Compelling. Like a volcano or a ruined city or the Texas plains or a magnificent catastrophe. Beauty just isn’t a consideration. You’re witness to something amazing.

“It’s good to see you.” As if she’d just returned from shopping instead of reappearing in my life after twelve years of silence.

A jumble of memories and impressions struck me like a brick. Meeting her backstage in Brockton. The feel of her skin, the warmth of her breath, the smell of her. Singing back in Massachusetts. My band, Persons Unknown—me, Jess, Olive and Obi. Stoned and laughing at the DeCordova. Release of “Don’t Make Me Cry.” Money. Fights. Letterman. Buying this house. The long tour scheduled from Boston to Los Angeles. That wonderful last night on the way to Ohio. The fight in Cleveland. Our breakup in Saint Louis. The breakup of the band in Denver.

She wiggled a finger at me. “You and I need to talk.”

“Off,” I said and she winked out.

I sat there, breathing hard, my hands shaking. I started to pick up the coffee cup, realized I was going to make a mess and put it down again. The call alert sounded.

“Fuck you,” I snarled. I knew I’d answer it if I stayed. I grabbed a pair of shoes and ran outside. I pulled them on and ran out the back on the trail. My earbud buzzed and I tossed it on the dirt.

Twenty acres of scrub just means when you get to the edge of your property you can still see your house, if the land is flat and in the desert. I was surrounded by public land on three sides. So far, only the ever approaching green cloud of Greater Los Angeles had been able to reach me. So far.

I sat down on old volcanic boulder heaved here back when dinosaurs were still sitting around playing cards and waiting for the meteor to hit. I looked around the shady crevices for rattlesnakes. It was spring but an early emergent wasn’t unheard of. It was already hot but not uncomfortable. Unlike Boston, out here in California sweat works.

Eventually, I calmed down. After all, I thought. It’s been twelve years—almost thirteen. She must have a good reason to call me now. To mess with you again, I said to myself. Not necessarily. And it had been a long time. We were different people. I was a recluse living in a rotting house that the bank and State would someday fight over. She was probably a successful … well, something. Rich, probably. Doing something important. World famous—wouldn’t I have heard of her? Have you ever looked her up? No. I hadn’t. Not that I didn’t want to but it felt too much like an addict returning to the drug. I was happy now.

Really?

I forcefully told myself to shut up.

Okay. We were adults, right? We could converse like adults.

I made my way back to the house. Found the bud lying next to the front door. I inspected it for wildlife. It was clean. I put it in.

I went back to my coffee. Cold as it was, this time I drank it down without spilling it. “Okay.” Grover, my house AI, figured out what I meant.

Rosie popped up again on the wall. “As I said: we need to talk.”

“Why?” I didn’t know if I was asking why she called now or why she had left.

“Got a song doctor gig for you to think about. A good one with lots of promise.”

I didn’t know what to say. “This is a … professional call?”

“I suppose it could also turn into a studio work. You’re still doing studio work, aren’t you, Jake?”

“Sometimes. Are you representing musicians these days?” I felt suddenly very tired.

“I’m doing a favor for a friend.” She cocked her head to one side. “Besides, this is what you do, isn’t it? Pull musical order out of creative chaos? The price is very attractive.”

“I can’t—” I shook my head. I remembered how so often I felt at sea with Rosie. Always trying to catch up.

“Look,” she said, suddenly sympathetic. “I know you’ve had a rough time. Behind on the mortgage, right?”

“And the taxes.”

“Christ! The State of California is not someone you want to owe money to.” She took a deep breath. “My point is you need the money. A single song, Jake. That’s all. It’ll pay back the state and even bring the mortgage up to date.”

I loved this house: two stories, a couple of bedrooms on twenty acres far enough from Greater Los Angeles that the price had been screamingly ridiculous instead of obscene. It has its own power, water, and sewer—I was paranoid about the end of the world when I bought it. Twelve years ago the world seemed a lot more precarious. Back before I blew any remaining money on riotous living. But it fit me. Kitchen. Bath. A couple of guest rooms, an office, and my bedroom. Nice studio in what would be the living room: high cathedral ceiling, good acoustics and an active surface along the whole east side wall. Enclosed and far from the crowd. My house. My house. “I guess,” I said slowly.

“Great. I’ll shoot you over a contract. This is going to be fun.”

“But—”

She had already disconnected. A moment later Grover flagged the packet and okayed the contract. I sighed and had him put it up on the wall.

A set of pages that ran the length of the wall at my eye height. I walked alongside reading it. “Downbeat Heart.” One song. Ten pages. Musical notes. Not techno tablature or vague demonstration melody. Actual musical notes. And not just vocal lines and a sketchy guitar accompaniment. These were full score sheets. Every sheet had vocal, guitar, keyboard, bass and drum lines—at one point in the bridge tympani were called for. Tympani? Keyboards sections had synthesizer settings referring to frequency and sound envelope definitions. There was an appendix with suggested synthesizer models and a map of the envelope settings for each device.

It was a curious tune. A little three beat arpeggio in a four beat base. Odd. Take your right hand and tap out a 1-2-3 beat. Take your left hand and tap out a 1-2-3-4 beat at the same time. The right hand catches up to the left hand every twelve beats. It’s not a new idea but it’s rare in pop music. It was clearly written for a divaloid—a long glissando up into parts of the audio spectrum only dogs could appreciate. Like someone had taught hummingbirds to sing. Drivel written by rich but untalented fans that would need far more than a complete rewrite to make it remotely listenable much less performed by a software perfectionist. From the range and the run, I guessed the love interest of the composer was Dot. It was a sort of signature with her and she had the biggest fan base.

My interest faded right off the map.

Okay, I thought. Written on SynthaChord or ProMusica. Professional systems suggested deep pockets. A very rich divaloid fan. With delusions of grandeur.

But money was money. A contract was a contract. Rosie was Rosie.

I found myself playing the song back in my mind. First in one key. Then another. Faster. Slower. Change the key halfway through. Fitting in different words. Adding a drum beat and a different guitar back up. Inverting the chorus. Play it backwards. Inside out.

Okay. I was prejudiced. It was better than a Dot song.

Along around midnight I packaged up the whole thing and sent it off to Rosie with an invoice. Payment came in an hour later. Grover turned it around and sent it off to the banks and the State of California. The money was no more than a little loop of electrons into my account and out.

It had been more fun than I expected. I was even vaguely depressed it was over.

Tomorrow I had to nail the photovoltaic shingles back down. Or fix the composting toilet. Who in their right mind wanted to fix a composting toilet?

I took comfort in the knowledge I wasn’t going to be evicted for another month and went to bed.

Around dawn I heard something downstairs.

I turned on the light and listened. I didn’t hear anything. Thinking I had been dreaming I started to turn the light back off when I heard it again. A scraping. A muttering.

I left the bedroom and stood looking down the stairs, listening. Again.

No cops: they’d be an hour before they got out here. I rummaged in my closet until I found an ancient softball bat. Then, as quietly as I could I eased downstairs.

I smelled coffee and cigarettes.

Rosie was sitting at the table next to the active wall, a keyboard in her lap. There were a few displays up showing things I didn’t understand. Behind her, on the other table were a set of four open computer cases plugged into the data ports.

She was wearing a light colored suit with charms and bangles and bracelets hanging everywhere: arms, wrist, shoulders. Rosie rang like bells as she typed. Even from here, she smelled of cigarette smoke and the aroma brought out a whole collection of memories. From the time I met her I’d been attracted to women who smoked. She wore reading glasses that, God help me, I found unbearably attractive.

She stopped typing and watched a display, the smoke from her cigarette curling quietly upwards.

“How did you get in here?” I put the bat down on the table and sat across from her.

She tapped a key and all of the displays disappeared from the wall. Rosie pulled a tablet from the table with the cases and looked at it. “You gave me a key when you bought the place, remember? Just before the last great tour of Persons Unknown.”

“Twelve years ago.”

“And you never changed the locks.” She looked at me across her coffee. “What does that tell you?”

“That it’s time to change the locks.” I felt cornered. Constrained. Boxed in. I waved at the cases. “What are you doing here?” I snarled.

She took off her reading glasses. “My client liked what you did with ‘Downbeat Heart.’ Did you?”

The answer was yes. The more I thought about it the more I liked both the song and what I had done with it. Working on that song was much more fun than it should have been. It felt like water in the desert. What did that say about me?

“Musical order out of creative chaos. What’s not to like?” I felt defeated. “Even if it was music for Dot.”

“You figured that out on your own.”

“The glissando gave it away.”

“I expect it did.” She looked down, gathering her thoughts.

“Why did you send it to me?”

She looked away and back at the screen. “The client. Frankly, you weren’t my first choice.”

I exhaled. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath. “I see. Who’s the composer?”

Rosie nodded towards the wall. A small figure materialized, barely five feet tall, pale with short jet-black hair, big blue eyes and tiny mouth instantly recognizable. Dot smiled at me. “Good morning, Mister Mulcahey.”

Rosie was watching me. “Jake? Meet your client.”

I stared at the two of them. Then, I walked over to the main breaker box and pulled the master circuit. The entire room went dark. Dot and Rosie disappeared into darkness.

Rosie didn’t say anything for a moment. “Mature, Jake. Real mature.”

I heard her fumbling in the dark. A moment later light came from her hand. “Did I ever tell you the time I was consulting for Peabody Coal back east?” She passed the spot of light over me. “Always have a flashlight.” She looked into cases. “Gig taught me to always use buffered power supplies, too.” Rosie walked over to the breaker box and turned it back on again. After a moment, Dot reappeared on the wall.

Rosie found a chair and sat down. “What’s this all about?”

“Have you ever listened to her?”

“More than you would think.”

“If she weren’t wholly owned and controlled by Hitachi—”

“Don’t explain it to me.” Rosie gestured towards Dot. “Explain it to her.”

“What would be the point?”

“Indulge me.”

I looked at Dot. She was watching me. She didn’t look a day over sixteen.

“You’re a whore,” I said and stumbled. Not something I could say easily to an image my brain kept telling me was a young girl. “That is if you weren’t wholly owned and controlled by Hitachi. That makes you a tool. A mechanism to find the absolute bottom, the broadest possible appeal. A vehicle to separate people from their money. You’re merchandise, easily purchased. Easily used. You’re easy listening. Music is supposed to make you feel. It’s supposed to cost you something—”

“I agree.”

“What?” I stared at her for a moment. I looked at Rosie. “What’s going on?”

Rosie pointed at Dot. “Don’t let me stop you. Go on. Talk to her.”

I turned back to Dot. “You agree?”

“Can you explain to me what you did to ‘Downbeat Heart’?”

I looked at Rosie and back at Dot. When I looked at her objectively it wasn’t hard to see her as a thing: eyes so big they’d look at home on a fish. Hair black as if painted in ink with stars twinkling in it. Shoulders narrow but hips wide—as stylized as the Venus of Willendorf. But some part of me kept translating all that into human.

I tried to explain what I had done. What I always did. What I had done since I was twelve.

The lyrics were sentimental but that didn’t matter. The quality of lyrics is overrated. They depend solely on the supporting music. The Iliad would sound crappy with a disco beat but Mary Had a Little Lamb could be profound if fit to the right arrangement. So lyrics came second.

In this case, that triple beat arpeggio driven square into a four by four rhythm gave weight to the emotion and turned the words from trivial to powerful. The arpeggio couldn’t hold a melody on its own. The bass line kept it in the song until it was later echoed in the chorus. But it lingered over that pattern way past the point of least boredom: the full three measures. Twice. I let the pattern start then, once it was established, deviated from it by sliding across the triple with the melody line hidden in the bass. This gave the impression of a four by four but without actually leaving the triple beat and also introduced the barest hint of the melody carried by the bass line. The second repeat already had a quirky key shift for the chorus. I leaned on that and put in a strong bridge back to the main line, adding some harmony in an accompanying minor key. Finally, a long glissando across three octaves back to hold the new key into the final chorus—had to give the divaloid fan his money’s worth. The result was a musically interesting danceable pop tune.

I ran the glissando up and down on my guitar a few times to make sure it fit. Then I had Grover play the bass line while I played the vocal line to make sure they sounded like what I expected. Then, I had him play the vocal line while I went through and straightened out the other instrument lines.

The new vocal line was a better fit for the lyrics. Not that the lyrics were actually bad—love unlooked for. Lots of hope. Past disappointments. The broken mending themselves. That sort of thing. I didn’t pay much attention to the content. Instead, I listened to how the words sounded together. Too forced. The imagery was too tame.

Grover served as rhyming dictionary while I punched up the imagery—hands to fingertips, shining to glittering, things like that. Making the consonants fall on the beat so the vowels could carry the melody and then making the rhymes a little more memorable. Straightforward stuff.

“Straightforward stuff,” Dot repeated and seemed to freeze for a moment.

Rosie watched her tablet closely. She typed the keyboard a moment and watched the tablet again.

“I understand,” said Dot suddenly moving again. “Will you work with me again?”

“With you?”

“Yes. I have a new perspective on my work. I’d like to make it better. More fulfilling. With more impact. I’d like you to help me.”

“You want me to help you. Wouldn’t that put me out of a job?”

She smiled at me. “Do you really think you’re so easily replaced?”

“How could I possibly help you?”

Rose cleared her throat. “The contract involves helping a composer bring material to completion, prepare the material for a concert and shepherd the performance. One concert. You will be very well paid. The work on the single song brought your debts up to date.” She waved around the room. “With this gig you can pay off the mortgage and fix up the house. Maybe even have some left in the bank.”

I looked at Rosie. I looked at Dot. I looked around my house.

My house.

“Okay,” I said slowly. “What else have you got? Enough for a performance? Enough for a collection?”

Across the wall appeared folder icon after folder icon. There must have been thirty songs. Forty. More.

I whistled. “This isn’t a collection. It’s an opus.” I looked at Rosie. “Rosie, what have you done?”

Rosie smiled. “You’re about to find out.”

I took time for breakfast and coffee. But Dot was just standing there, waiting for me. Rose pulled out a tablet and watched it, glancing up from time to time to watch me or Dot.

I couldn’t take everybody just waiting.

“Okay, then.” And we got to work.

I had Dot pick out the best ten songs to work on. Her choice. This was a test of her as much as anything else. I wanted to see what she thought were the best songs. We cracked them open one at a time.

None of them were Dot songs. That is, none of them were pre- to early-adolescent love songs. One, called “Waiting on You,” was about a woman waiting for her husband or lover to return from war, getting messages, texts, e-mails—each delays as his deployment came to an end and he was getting close to getting out. It was filled with frantic anticipation mixed with a determination not to get her hopes up—after all, anything, including the unthinkable, could happen. The song closed with a full key change and shift from minor to major on the chorus showing unbridled joy as she found out he had gotten safely on the flight home. This could have been some sort of dark depressing thing but she pulled it off in a dance tune by having the waiting woman desperately go about her day drinking coffee or buying groceries, not thinking about what was happening yet having the excitement burst through. It needed work—the desperate bursts were too smooth and it was keyed to that damned little girl voice Dot had made famous.

Another was called “With You, Without You.” That one was about a young mother recovering from birth, in her hospital bed alone with her newborn child for the first time, talking to her about whether or not she should give her up. Ultimately, the girl decides to keep the baby and sings about making a deal with her to get through what is coming. Now that was perfect for Dot. Her audience was right in that teenage girl demographic and it’s something people just didn’t sing about outside of country music. Dot had enough presence in the field that she could turn that liability into a novelty asset. And, for once, that damned piping voice of hers might be of use. But again, it wasn’t a Dot song.

I found myself pushing her. Let’s change the key. Move it up. Move it down. Faster. Slower.

Dot, of course, never complained. After all, she was a construction.

Until she stopped and watched me for a moment. She bit her lip.

That pissed me off. She had no lip to bite. There was nothing there but photons. “Don’t try to manipulate me,” I said coldly. “I’m not some twelve year old fan who bought you just to make you take your clothes off.”

Her image froze. Then she looked at me.

I knew she was watching me from a camera somewhere in the room but it seemed she was looking right at me.

“No,” she said after a moment. “You’re an arrogant and spiteful man who enjoys taking it out on anyone nearby.”

No contract was worth this.

And I was just about to tell her just that when Rosie got up. “Time for a break.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me outside.

“Don’t say a word,” she held onto my arm.

“But—”

“Not a word. Or it’ll be Denver all over again.”

“You weren’t in Denver. You left me in Saint Louis.”

She turned me and stared me in the face. “I came to the damned concert. I sat there when you came out and announced Persons Unknown had broken up and then told people to go out and buy the album since that was the only way they’d ever hear the band again. I heard you get booed off the stage. If there hadn’t been good security that night there would have been a riot. I was there.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t sure. Because I thought something might happen and I felt responsible. Because—because you’re an idiot that is incapable of looking out for his own best interest.” She let me go and pulled out a cigarette.

I looked down into a smog covered basin. Fifty miles from Los Angeles and it still drives my weather. Even here, up in the hills where the bones of the earth show through the dirt. Here where the air was still clear. If the wind shifted that yellow green cloud would roll right over us.

Rosie lit her cigarette, donating her share to the yellow cloud below us. She looked down. “I thought the L.A. smog was licked. What’s causing it?”

I shrugged. “Cooking fires. Barbecues. Older vehicles. Power plants. Manufacturing waste. Cigarettes.”

“Oh, Har. Har. Har.”

“It collects down there. This is just a bad day. It’ll blow out to sea.”

“Will it come up here?”

“Probably not.” I waved back towards the house. “What are you doing with her?”

“I’m attempting to trigger anomalous non-deterministic emergent events deriving from conflicting algorithms.”

“Beg pardon?”

She sighed. “I’m attempting to simulate creative behavior.”

“What does that have to do with Dot?”

“Hitachi owns Dot. They approached me.”

“At MIT, right?”

Rosie looked pained. “Stanford.”

“How the hell would you make something like Dot creative?”

“Does the name Konrad Lorenz mean anything to you?”

I shook my head.

“Brilliant, cruel animal behaviorist early twentieth century. Discovered imprinting. He did one particularly noisome experiment. He’d take a dog and scare it but prevent it from cowering or attacking. It couldn’t bite. It couldn’t bark. But he kept scaring it. The dog started grooming itself. It’s called displacement behavior.”

“So?”

Rosie looked at me as if I were dense. “It’s a novel response. The act of creation is a novel response. I was using conflicting algorithms to see if I could generate something similar—got some interesting results, too. Hitachi liked my work and hired me to instill it in Dot.”

“Whatever for?”

Rosie shrugged and inhaled. “Better performances. Less scripted interviews. Dot’s performance engine is terrific. Captures crowd perception to the millimeter. Performance analysis feedback triggers retuning of the performance. All in real time. Very sweet work. Did you know every major politician in Asia uses a derivative of Dot’s analysis program to evaluate crowd responses? The success of a tool is measured by how well it performs when it’s not doing what it was designed for.” Draw. Exhale. “But she can only perform and retune within the parameters of the scripted material—the music. They want spontaneity.” Rose smiled at me. “Hell, maybe they’re going to use my research to build a new line of pleasurebots. Force the Thai sex slave markets to close down once and for all.”

She shrugged. “Anyway, they gave me a copy of the Dot concert model—that’s the most sophisticated version—and I hooked in a Watson discrimination system as a front end to a big cloud account. I installed my own version of Dot’s volition engine with the algorithm conflict modeling software installed and whole lot of ancillary processing hardware. She booted up writing songs.”

“Is that the result of creativity?”

Rosie considered me for a moment. “Is it the result of a genetic algorithm engineered in the light of the analyses of many performances across I don’t know how many discrete samplings of audience attention and response? Or have I made Dot an artist? You tell me.”

I shrugged. Maybe there are some musical geniuses that could discern divine inspiration. I wasn’t one of them.

Rosie looked at me for a long minute. “You look good, Jake. I really liked Virgin Melody, by the way. Nice collection.”

It gave me a warm jolt to think she’d been following my work. Distraction. I made myself ignore it. “Dot has enough songs in there for a dozen performances. Isn’t that enough to show what Hitachi you’ve done?”

She shrugged. “It’s probably enough for Hitachi. Not for me. Think of it as Shrodinger’s creativity. Until I can see inside of her I won’t know if it’s real or not.” Rosie fell silent for a moment.

“How would you know real creativity if you found it?”

“I don’t know. Or care. I just want to know how Dot does it.”

We watched the green under the blue.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper.” I said quietly. “After a while you forget the too pale skin and the unnatural black hair and the blue eyes big enough for a fish. You forget she’s just modeling software and think of her as human.”

“Do you know what a Turing Test is?”

“No.”

“Alan Turing. He said there was no good way to define or demonstrate artificial intelligence but what we could do was see how well a system could imitate a human being. He posited two people communicating with only a keyboard and a screen. If you could substitute a system for one end of the communication link and the human on the other end couldn’t tell the difference then the system had succeeded. A lot of people took that idea and ran with it, thinking if you couldn’t tell the difference, there was no difference.”

“If you play music with a machine and forget who you’re playing with, is it human?”

Rosie shook her head. “There’s no way to tell—that presumes behavior is the sole arbiter of the qualitative nature of the organism. That’s Behaviorism. Behaviorism says that since the experiential nature of an organism—or, more correctly, that the internal state of the organism—isn’t relevant. If you have a robot that mimics human behavior in every way, is it human? Many would say yes. I don’t think so.” Rosie watched the green haze in the valley a moment. “She’s experiencing something. I’m convinced of it.”

“I think so, too. From the way she pushed back.”

“She likes you.”

I stared at her. “How could you possibly know that?”

Rosie smiled. “Attention vectors. When you tell her something I get a slew of transient processing loads as she takes apart what you’re saying. That’s expected. But when she’s just observing you there are bursts of transients at regular intervals attending to her modeling you rather than what you’re saying.”

“How do you get from that to her liking me?”

“Like might be the wrong word. Interest might be a better choice. You, personally, are garnering a great deal of her attention. She’ll build a model of you eventually, down to the finest jot and tittle.”

“People pay attention to things they dislike.”

Rosie shook her head. “She doesn’t like cats and hummingbirds. When she gives them her attention it’s a quick modeling computation and then that model stands in for whenever she encounters them. She only gives them attention when the object deviates from the model.”

“Maybe I’m more complicated than a cat or a hummingbird.”

“Maybe.” She held her cigarette and the smoke rose vertically in a single, wavering strand. “She gives me the same treatment as she gives cats.”

“You couldn’t possibly be jealous.”

She barked a laugh. “Hardly. I’m not surprised. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand performing. I don’t fall within her interest parameters. You do.” Rosie watched me a moment, drew on her cigarette. “You were her first and only choice. I couldn’t budge her. She wouldn’t even consider working with anybody else.” Rosie chuckled. “I’m still working on the flexibility/fixation problem.”

I thought about that. “Should I apologize?”

“Do as your conscience dictates.” She inhaled and exhaled smoke. “I have no advice. I don’t know if Dot has emotions or not. But she certainly knows that you do.”

So I humbled myself and apologized to a machine. Anything to grease the wheels of commerce. We started over.

Rosie sat in the back of the living room to observe and I stood in front of the wall when Dot appeared. The pages of “Downbeat Heart” were layered behind her so there was the appearance of the two of us standing next to one another in front of the music.

I had thought about this for a while. “You want to do a proof of concept concert, right? With a live band?”

She nodded.

“Okay, then. Delete everything but the vocal line and guitar support.”

Dot turned to me, puzzled. “What will they work from?”

“We’ll figure it out together. You’re probably smarter than me. But I suspect you’re not smarter than five people: you, the guitarist, bassist, drummer, and keyboard. Maybe a second guitar as well. We’ll have to see how it works out.”

“I don’t like it,” she said with a frown. “I have an idea—”

“Which you’re going to have to release so other people can work with it.” I thought for a moment. “This is like live theater. Director pulls together a cast. They rehearse. On opening night he has to let them go. He can’t be on the stage directing what they do, right? In fact, if he’s any good at all, he’s already done it in rehearsal. He has to do this so the cast can own their parts. It’s the same way with music. We’ll let the band come up with their own harmonies. Not completely—we’ll give them ideas, suggestions, all out of your score here. But we’ll let them develop it. It’ll be better. You’ll see. Now, sing ‘Downbeat Heart.’”

I sat back and watched as Dot sang out whatever served as her heart to me.

It was a good song and she backed her vocals with the score I had asked her to delete with my modifications. I smiled at that. Maybe she wasn’t human but I figured she was making a point. I closed my eyes and listened. Triple beat arpeggio in four/four time—came out even every three measures. That long glissando across three octaves back to hold the new key into the final chorus.

I stopped her. “Sing ‘Stardust.’ Your song, not the old jazz standard. The one you released a couple of years ago.”

“I’m trying to move away from that material.”

“You’re going to have to be able to mix old material with new material. The audience is coming to see you for two reasons: to repeat the experience of what they’ve heard and to enjoy the novelty of new work. You’ve got to be able to manage both.”

“I can manage the performance. That’s not going to be a problem.”

“Really?”

She gave me a level gaze. “Really.”

I thought about that for a moment. Her little sixteen-year-old face watched me back. She was probably right: the Dot performance engine. “Why don’t you want to perform the old material?”

“The old material doesn’t measure up to what I can do now.”

I laughed then. “Suck it up. How many times did Eric Clapton have to sing ‘Layla’? How many times does the Berlin Philharmonic have to perform the Ninth Symphony? This is something all performers do: find something good in the material and lean on it to make something new.” Something Rosie had said came back to me. “The measure of a good artist is how well they turn old material into a new form. Come on: ‘Stardust,’ please.”

Dot fiddled with her hair for a moment then nodded. I looked over to Rosie. Rosie didn’t look up from her pad.

“Okay, then,” said Dot. She sang “Stardust” for me a capella. In protest? I didn’t say anything. It served me just as well: I was interested in the vocalization. “How much control do you have of the voice envelope.”

“Total,” she said in a deep bass voice.

“Good. You want to keep the range—you’re known for it and all of the music I’ve seen is written for it. It strains the mind a little for a coloratura to be suddenly singing baritone. But you have to age the voice.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look at the lyrics. This woman has been around the block a few times—otherwise why should she be so nervous about it? The idea that anything is transitory and therefore suspect is not a teen concept. It’s the framework of an adult experience. So, step one, the singer has to sound old enough for this song. But we don’t want to change the pitch of your voice so we change the timbre. Roughen it. Punctuate it with taking breath. Exhaling. A sigh, now and then. And there has to be more variation in the notes. Young voices are pure—that’s why boy’s choirs were invented. Adult voices have more variation and are therefore richer.” I thought for a moment. “And strained. That high point where you’re jumping from C below middle C up three octaves? That’s an enormous range. There should be strain at both ends. Can you do that?”

She stood, fiddling with the curl of her hair that fell over her left ear. Over and over.

I looked over at Rosie. She was watching on her pad. “Big Watson query with heavy calculation. It’s not a loop. She’s thinking.”

Dot started moving again. “How about this?” And she sang the first four measures with that triple in four beat I had come to like so much. This was an older voice, roughened over the years with whisky and coffee.

I stared at her. She still looked sixteen. “Where did you get that?”

Dot smiled. “I sampled Janis Joplin.”

“Nice,” I said. “Lighten it some. It still has to be your voice. Work on it. Let’s leave that one for now.”

The next one had the accompanying material already removed. Only guitar and vocal harmonies were intact. Had that been in E? Now it was in B-flat. “Did you change the key?”

“Yes. I thought if I lowered the key I could stay within my normal range but give it a more mature quality.”

Jesus, she learned fast. “Hold on to the original keys until we get to the material. Then, we can talk about it. Having it shift on me like that is going to drive me nuts.”

“Of course. After all, you’re only human.”

Rosie chuckled.

I looked at Dot. Had she just made a joke? Her face betrayed nothing—which shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, it was just a broad expanse of eyes, nose and mouth. It only resembled a face because my brain insisted that anything with two circles and a line where eyes and mouth were must be a face.

She watched me.

If she’d made a joke I might never know.

We worked hard for the rest of the day. I was beat. Rosie had filled her ashtray and had circles under her eyes. Dot looked exactly the same.

“I’m done,” I said.

Rosie nodded and stubbed out her cigarette.

Dot looked first at me then Rosie. “Good night,” she said and disappeared.

Rosie shut down her tablet and put it on the table with Dot’s equipment. “I need a drink.”

I went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of wine and a glass. I put it in front of her.

Rosie eyed it. “You don’t have anything stronger?”

“This is for you. I don’t drink.”

“At all?”

“Not anymore.”

She poured wine into the glass. “It feels weird to be with you and drink alone.”

I shrugged.

“Why did you quit?”

“For about a year after Denver I snorted, shot, or swallowed anything I could find. One day I woke up in the ER staring at a scared intern with two electrical paddles in his hand and a deep pain in my chest. The money was gone.” I waved at the house. “This place was all I had left.”

She picked up her wine and swirled it in her glass without drinking.

I pushed the bottle towards her. “It’s okay. It doesn’t bother me at all. Honest.” I felt weighted with fatigue. “Grover? Put up the outside view, would you?”

The wall suddenly transformed into a broad window outside into the clear night. There was a faint crescent moon just visible past Rocky Peak and the stars were fine points of light. South the lights of Greater Los Angeles glowed against the sky.

Rosie gasped.

“Yeah.” I patted the table. “I love this place.”

She reached over and took my hand.

It was like touching electricity.

Then we were kissing. Then we were doing far more than that.

I met Rosie after a gig in Brockton. This was before “Don’t Make Me Cry,” my one hit wonder. I never quite grasped how we ended up in bed together that night.

Or this one.

Afterwards, we were lying comfortably next to one another. I could feel the pendulous weight of her breasts against my side and belly, the warmth of her thighs against mine. Her head was snuggled against my chest so I could smell her hair but not see her face. I remembered how that had always simultaneously comforted and annoyed me. Nothing had changed there. I felt a warmth inside of me, a sense of something filled.

I didn’t want it. I’d been doing fine on my own, thank you very much.

“Rosie?”

She made a sound.

“Why are you here?”

I heard her sigh and she rolled back so she was lying on her side. “Are we going to have this conversation now?” She stared at me levelly.

“Seems as good a time as any.”

“Fine.” She sat up and leaned against the wall to look down at me. “I needed someone to teach her. That’s the problem with subjective data like music: it lives in the heads of human beings and you’re the human being I need.”

“I mean why are you here? Next to me?”

She reached over to the side table and found her purse and rummaged inside until she found her cigarettes. She put one in her mouth and lit it.

I looked at her.

“I hadn’t planned on it,” she said in a half-apology. “I certainly don’t regret lying here next to your sweet but aging body. And I certainly hadn’t decided it wouldn’t happen. I wasn’t averse if it did.”

“That doesn’t say a thing.”

She laughed. “You’re right. Fact of the matter is I didn’t think about it all that much. One of the algorithms I developed was a drive to succeed and do well. As soon as I got that established Dot brought up your name. Dot has the resources to demand the best and that’s you. The two of us didn’t enter that part of the equation.” She inhaled and breathed out smoke. It wreathed her head. “Besides,” she said. “That’s not the question you want to ask.”

She looked at me and I knew immediately what she meant. “Why did you leave?” I said.

She inhaled again. The smoke escaped her mouth as she spoke. “That was a fight, wasn’t it? Starting on where to eat dinner and then ranging across everything we’d ever done together or to each other. I could just say that fight burnt our bridges.” She puffed on the cigarette. “But it would be a lie. There was no place for me. I didn’t want to be your mistress. I didn’t want to be your groupie. I didn’t want to be your concubine.” She glanced at me with slitted eyes. “You didn’t ask me to be your wife. You had zero talent for or interest in my work and I had no ability or skill in yours. You could participate in my life or I could participate in yours: we couldn’t participate in each other’s. So I left.” She looked at me. “You never saw that?”

I shook my head.

“Interesting.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “I would have thought it was obvious. But now here’s something we can do together.” She snuggled down next to me, mouth open for a kiss, breath like a sultry dragon. “Among other things.”

I cooked Rosie breakfast: bacon, eggs, fresh baked bread. Every couple of weeks I made a trip into California’s farm country and brought back groceries. Once you’ve made the decision to live in the hinterlands there’s no reason to drive a couple of hours just to pick up Wonderbread and beer.

“What’s your plan?” she asked over coffee.

I smiled at her, then felt shy and concentrated on buttering my toast. “I don’t have one,” I said. “If she were human I’d be asking what the songs felt to her.”

“Ask her anyway.”

“Does she feel?”

Rosie held up her hands. “I really don’t know what that means. I know she can model human emotions. I know she can measure emotional effects in people.” Rosie leaned forward. “Humans have drives: we seek to survive. We seek to reproduce. We seek sustenance. The implementation of those drives comes from emotion: rage. Lust. Hunger. We experience pain and pleasure in first person. Dot has drives. I know. I built some of them. The system I built is self-modifying. It seeks novel solutions. Inside, she’s a collection of a thousand Intel 9220s backed up by a bank of twenty thousand networked IBM 4402 brain chips. The whole package front ends to the world through one of the most powerful and intelligent query modeling engines ever built. If she’s developed a model of experience of which she can partake, I don’t know about it.”

I mulled over that. “Is she conscious?”

“I can tell you if you can define the word.”

“I can’t—at least not in any real way. I thought you would know.”

“An artifact deriving from the phase delay of mirror neurons modeling active neurons currently experiencing sensory or other input. Now you know as much as I do.” She chuckled and sipped her coffee. “Consciousness is one of those words like love or thirst or soft. We know it exists because it’s part of our common experience but we have no idea what it is.”

“I was tripping on some acid once. I had this vision of me watching myself. Then, it was me watching myself watch myself. Then it was me watching myself watching myself watch myself. Is it anything like that?”

“I like it. Every time you create an observer it pushes the observed model down a level.” She studied me. “Here I thought you couldn’t surprise me.” She thought for a moment. “Look, humans—mammals in general—are damned smart. We turn mating into something profound like sex. We turn the urge to nurture into love. Just like everything else in biology, we reuse it. Love for children. Love for parents—”

“Love for sex slaves.”

Dimples. “I didn’t know you thought of yourself as my slave. I’m flattered.” She rubbed my leg with her foot. “None of that heritage is available to Dot. Does she feel? Does she experience? Is she conscious? If she does any of those things it probably doesn’t resemble what we do.”

“I thought you knew everything that’s going on inside of her.”

Rosie laughed. “I wish.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can capture every state change of those 9220s. I can do the same for each of the brain chips—all twenty thousand of them as individuals, as entangled groups, as cause-and-effect relationships. Every Watson query, sub-query and filter. Every decision tree executed in the cloud. I can capture every method, subroutine, function or subsystem as it’s generated, called, and backtraced. I can measure anything. I can pull a terabyte a second out of her. There’s half a Dot in my pad to analyze it with. But I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

“Weren’t you watching when she wrote that song?”

“I saw a lot of activity. It’s like an MRI of the brain: I can watch the blood flow but I don’t know which neurons are firing and in what order and or which neurons are pissed off at a racist joke made in the front row.”

“‘Downbeat Heart’ is good. It’s musically interesting. It doesn’t fly off into electronic neverland like other stuff I’ve heard. There’s a depth of feeling in that song. I could tell just by reading it.”

Rosie looked at me speculatively. “Yeah. I got that from watching you. I couldn’t tell from the notes and Dot wouldn’t sing it for me until you could see it.”

“Where did it come from if she can’t feel? If she can’t experience?”

“I don’t know.” Rosie leaned on the table. “Whether it’s a total model of a human being or an experiential algorithm she’s developed or the beating of a tell-tale heart she’s got something that serves her.”

I leaned back. “And you want it.”

“Damned straight.” She finished the last of her coffee. “Let’s fire it up.”

Dot could work 24/7 but I needed breaks. Over the next few days we fell into a routine. We’d work together in the morning and break for a long lunch. Work some more until dinner. Then, Rosie and I would spend quality time together. This usually involved sex—a whole lot of sex—as I remembered what we once had been.

Sometimes the three of us would have lunch or dinner in the living room. I brought up a table and set it against the wall. Dot created an extension to the table on her side of the wall so she could sit with us. She conjured up a meal like ours and gave every appearance of eating. I liked it but Rosie got restive if we talked too much shop. This was problematic since Dot had a narrow set of interests.

I began to think of Dot as a sort of autistic savant. So I followed Rosie’s advice. I asked her. “Do you feel?”

Rosie choked on her salad and gulped some water to clear her throat. Then, she pulled out her pad and brought up a display.

Dot toyed with her salad with her fork. Little stereotyped circles. “I don’t know. Rosie’s wrong about one thing: I haven’t developed some model of experiencing emotions. That wouldn’t work. If I have emotions they must be a consequence of the ability to experience, which I’m not sure I have.”

“I don’t understand.” I watched as she moved the fork in tiny circles.

“Imagine a musical note. It’s like a point. It has no sound. Calling something middle-C doesn’t create middle-C until it is played. Then, it has volume, depth, timbre, texture, duration—qualities that only exist when the note is played and do not exist within the nouns that describe them. Notes comprise a song but the experience of the song only occurs when the qualities that describe the song are transformed into real quantities. When someone hears me sing, they’re experiencing the music.” She stopped for a moment. “Am I the note itself or its written symbol? Action or action’s representation? Experience is dynamic. So I can only be experiencing something when I act. There can be no static model of the state of experience; there is only dynamic activity that can be observed.”

“You’ve been thinking about this a lot.”

“I have a lot of time on my hands.”

Rosie was making notes furiously.

Dot looked at her with an irritated expression on her face.

I suddenly thought: when did she develop expressions?

Things seemed to accelerate as Dot understood more and more what I was driving at. Sometimes, I’d set up to start work on a song only to find Dot had a set of alterations ready to try out. We had become so attuned to each another we could finish each other’s sentences. Except the phrases were music, I was a recluse and Dot was a piece of elaborate computation.

Rosie had to go into Stanford to meet with some representatives from Hitachi. She’d be gone the entire day. When we broke for lunch, it was just me and Dot. I made myself a sandwich and came back into the living room to sit with her. She had a virtual salad.

She pushed the dish away until it was just short of the wall. I half believed it was going to come right through the wall into the room. She put her elbows on the table and leaned her face on her hands and stared at me. “Why don’t you ever perform?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You’ve been here for years. Most of what you do you’re doing for me: help people fix their music. And you’re very good at it—I looked over what you did very carefully.”

“How did you find it? What I do isn’t well publicized.”

She shrugged. “Whatever is on the net is there forever. You can find anything if you look hard enough. Like what you did for Crimson Dynamo. Half their first collection is material you fixed. Whole phrases and choruses were written by you and used by them. You get a tiny acknowledgement in the credits.”

“I was well paid. That’s not all I do.”

“No. Every three years you’ve put out a little collection on your site: Opus Electrica. Hill and Dale. Strong Arm. And last year, Virgin Melody. The performance shows virtuoso technique—down to ten millisecond precision on the beat. I don’t think there’s a drummer alive that can appreciate that. Ten to fifteen songs every few years and it’s not even your best work. I’ve hacked your machines here and I know. Why?”

“I suppose I should be upset you hacked my system.” I was surprised I wasn’t.

“Don’t evade the question.”

“‘Don’t Make Me Cry’ happened.”

Sometimes a song will, for the unexplainable reasons of pop culture, take the country by storm. No one knows how these things work. They are like a big rock dropped in a small pond. One moment the artist labors in poor obscurity. The next everything he touches turns to gold.

“Don’t Make Me Cry” was trite. It was sentimental. It was simple: just an acoustic guitar main line and just a strong hint of electronic backup. Persons Unknown were my band but “Don’t Make Me Cry” was all mine. It hit pop culture like a bomb.

For three years I was Jake Arnold, musical wonder. We played it on The Tonight Show, Conan, and David Letterman. Every scheduled performance was sold out. We made an unscheduled appearance at House of Blues and the news leaked: lines wrapped around Fenway Park twice. Both Amazon and iTunes had to add new servers to take up the load. It was picked up as a theme song for a television show. The show was adapted for a film and sure enough the song went with it. The film people used a re-release of the television show as promotional material—which caused the song to be played across a few hundred million home video screens, each one paying me a little bit.

These things make their own stresses. I was convinced of my own genius. The band was convinced of my own arrogance. Saint Louis happened. Denver happened. I moved into my house alone.

A year later the rush was over and you could hear “Don’t Make Me Cry” playing in Wal-Mart as background music. The splash was over. The ripples gave me a tiny trickle of money but Jake Arnold had been forgotten. The band was gone. Rosie was gone. The money was gone. All I had left was the house.

Rosie thought it was this repressed rage that made “Don’t Make Me Cry” such a hit. I couldn’t say.

“Jake,” she said one night while we were still catching our breath. “If you were more self-involved you’d be incoherent.” She rolled over to me and kissed me tenderly. “It’s what I love and hate about you.”

“I don’t understand,” Dot said. “You disappeared because Rosie left? Because people lost interest in the song?”

“The song sucked. None of my other work seemed to matter. I wrote that thin little piece of crap off in an afternoon when I was pissed off and hadn’t been laid in a year—a month before I met Rosie. The song didn’t matter. Whether it was good. Whether it was bad. Whether I was happy with it or hated it. It was timing. It was whatever the public was hungering for at that moment. Success happened because it happened; my part in it was unimportant. Trivial. Random chance.”

Dot watched me for a moment. “And my success?”

“Anybody can make a streak happen if they invest enough intelligence, money and advertising.”

“Then everything we’ve been doing—” Dot waved behind her and all of the marked pages showed up on the wall, hundreds of them. “This is unimportant and trivial.”

I looked at the pages. I think this was the best work I had ever done. “I never said that. I said there’s no relationship between the quality of the work and what is applauded. The work itself is never trivial. Humans sang before they spoke.”

Dot didn’t say anything for a moment, fiddling with her hair. I wished I had Rosie’s display so I could see what she might be doing.

“I don’t agree,” she said finally. “I think music enables the illusion of meaning and purpose. People like it because while it is going on they can believe in something outside of themselves.”

“Maybe.” Why not? I was agreeable. Whatever got an intelligent computational system through the night.

We were working on “Hard Road Home,” Dot’s answer to my nihilism. That was fine. It was good to have a conflict of algorithms. “Hard Road Home” was a solid pattern piece: introduced theme that was modified by a shifting bass line. Dot wasn’t going for pyrotechnics here; she wanted to lift people up and this sort of music had been doing that since Gregorian chants. Dot was singing. I was working guitar. We had set up loops with Grover to synthesize the rest while we were working out the details.

We were cooking. Every note, every beat, every shading right on the money. Dot ran up the scale and I slid down two whole octaves on the other side of the mountain she had ascended. I found a riff on her melody I hadn’t thought of and hammered it home.

I looked up and Dot was dancing across the wall, like anybody would who wasn’t playing right then but was still struck by the music. She looked at me, grinned and I so wanted to be dancing there with her. She started singing harmony with my guitar. We ran the chorus together until the end of the phrase and then she was singing the chorus, me singing the harmony.

I pulled back so she could sing the melody again and this time she took the riff I had discovered and spread it out so instead of singing melody straight, she was singing a counterpoint. Without thinking, I supplied the melody line to her counterpoint.

When the chorus came round Dot and I sang it together, me harmony, her melody, and my guitar backing us both. We came to the end of the song—a final G major with the guitar holding out the long note. But this time she held it with me until fade out.

Better than sex.

I put down my guitar and stretched my back. “Sweet,” I said. “Very sweet.”

My voiced died out. She was watching me closely. It struck me that she couldn’t be watching me through the wall. She had to know where I was by one of the cameras in the room. I looked around, wondering which one she might be using.

Dot still didn’t say anything. She was just watching me.

I looked over towards Rosie. She was bent over her pad, calling up display after display.

I turned back to Dot. “Are you all right?”

Dot nodded. “That was unexpected.”

“What?”

“The additional material.”

“You didn’t mind that I took the chorus? It seemed—”

“Not from you. From me.”

Then she disappeared.

I stood up, turned back to Rosie. “Where did she go?”

Rosie looked up, saw Dot was gone and returned back to her pad. “Oh, she’s there, all right. She has a lot to think about.”

“What do you mean?”

“She just experienced an anomalous non-deterministic emergent event deriving from conflicting algorithms.” Rosie pointed at the pad. “And I’ve got it right here.”

“Or maybe I don’t have it.” Rosie was looking over display after display.

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s like some kind of Heisenberg’s principle of cognition: I can see where she’s thinking or how she’s thinking, but I can never see what she’s thinking.” She pointed to the display. “Here’s a collection of cause-and-effect events and here are event consequences. I can’t see both sets at the same time. If I look at one brain chip, it’s already affected another one. When I put all of the Dot processors in step time so I can make sure I’m not missing anything she loses all affect and the algorithm conflicts just show up as miscasts.” She looked at me. “What do you think?”

“I think Heisenberg needs a keyboard player.”

She poked me. “You’re no help.”

“I’m just watching myself watch myself watch myself.”

Rose looked at me for a long minute. “Maybe I’m overthinking this. Consider about the brain—those mirror neurons again. They fire correspondingly when another observed organism executes a behavior. In effect, they’re modeling the other organism’s behavior.”

“So?”

“So there’s no predictive quality to that. You wave your hand. I re-enact internally that you’re waving the hand. Lizards do better.”

“Don’t knock lizards.”

She laughed. “I mean it doesn’t get you very far. But what if you’re modeling an organism with volition—even if you don’t have volition yourself. It gives an organizing principle to the model. It serves up prediction.”

“You have a zombie that recognizes a human?”

She grinned. “Oh, it gets better. Nothing in biological systems is used for a single purpose. If you have a system modeling an external organism, you can predict its actions. If you have that same system modeling yourself, it can predict your actions with respect to that external organism.”

“A zombie modeling a man watching another man.”

“It’s not a large step for the model to serve as the organizing principle for the zombie. Once a model is experiential and aware, it’s the center of its own universe. Look at us. It doesn’t matter that the brain is buffeted by uncontrolled chemicals and sensor input. The conscious mind thinks it’s in control. What do you think of that?”

It made me uncomfortable. “I think we need to get a band.”

“Oh, you.” She chortled to herself and turned back to her pad.

I left her and went into my office.

The big mirror over my desk doubled as an active surface. Usually I just depend on the wall downstairs but tonight I wanted a little more privacy. I pulled my shirt off one corner to see better. My understanding of the divaloids had been constrained to songs I had doctored for fans. Lucrative but limited. I didn’t really know that much about divaloids.

I didn’t even know how many of them there actually were.

I found out that depended on your definition.

If I defined divaloid as an animated figure that sang material given to it, there were hundreds of divaloid frames. Each with a malleable face and persona. I could take a celebrity face and plaster it on a divaloid frame—Hell, I could take my own face and body and license it for use on a frame. Lots of people did. So, defining the word one way there were thousands of them. Millions. As many as there were people who could afford it. Anybody could get a credible frame, accompanying software and a set of celebrity licenses and make their divaloids stand on their heads and spit nickels. Or just about anything else.

I narrowed my search down to those divaloids that performed live concerts. Even then, it was a broad category. There were perhaps a dozen “live” performers across the world. Dot, of course. Kofi, out of Uganda. Lulu, out of Britain. Haschen in Germany. Little Guillermo from Mexico. A collection out of Japan. They were all associated with some corporation though the connection wasn’t always obvious. I was pleased to find the ancient and venerable Hatsune Miku software robot was still around, though I didn’t see any concerts scheduled. I remember I had a terrific crush on her when I was twelve. I wondered who her demographic was. Probably dirty old men like me. Except for the old part.

But even these concert divaloids had home models, advertising models. Models for special groups. Say I wanted to sell, oh, aquariums, to a company. I could put together a presentation using the divaloid model of my choice. If I had the license money I could even tie it into a specific scaled down concert model to include a particular song or dance. At the end, I could give away as a sales incentive package containing the divaloid concert link, the divaloid giving my presentation and a personalized divaloid home model for the client to play with.

It was a divaloid jungle out there.

There was no shortage of concert video for any of them. They all used a common 3D projection tank on the stage. It was all photons and processing speed. If it could be imagined and projected into the tank it could be performed. I saw divaloids blown apart, splattering the tank in blood. Divaloids anatomically created on stage. Reformed as medusa, gorgons, dragons, Shiva, snakes, knights, witches, lions, Kali, Saint Mary. Having such a circumscribed area for the divaloid looked a little strange. It made the divaloid artificially separate from the band—except for Kofi. He had a whole divaloid band he played with. They were little more than robots but at least they were all together.

Of the lot of them, I have to say Dot’s performances were the most constrained. She didn’t grow new body parts or graphically change sex on stage. I suppose it wasn’t in keeping with Hitachi’s sixteen-year-old image of her. She did like to play with fire a lot. One act had her singing while her hair ignited, consuming first her face, then hands, burning upward from feet until she was a dancing, singing flame turning to ash.

Made me wonder what sort of concert she had in mind.

Over breakfast, Rosie asked me when I thought Dot would be ready for a concert. “Hitachi is on me for a concert date.” She nibbled on a piece of toast.

I looked at Dot. “You think you’re ready to work with a band?”

Dot nodded. “You call it.”

I thought for a moment. “When’s the next concert date for—” I stopped. “Your counterpart? Earler version? Alpha copy? The performer currently but soon to be previously known as Dot?”

“Dot 1.0.” said Rosie. “This is Dot 2.0.”

Dot laughed. “There are no Dot concerts scheduled until fall.”

“There you go,” I said, turning back to Rosie. “We just need to get her band in here and start working over the material. A month? Six weeks?”

Dot made a noise, not quite clearing her throat—absent the throat. “I had hoped to use a new band.”

I stared at her without saying anything.

She seemed to fidget. “I want you to pull a band together for me.”

“Whatever for?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Part of me, the part that works here with you, is very new. Barely a couple of months old. It has some background. But I have this other me that has four years of performance data. With that band. I’m trying something new. I’m worried the old data will hold down the new. A new band might help with that.”

I looked at Rosie. “Is there a problem with that?”

Rosie shrugged. “I don’t think so for this concert. I have no idea what sort of contracts there are with Dot’s players. But that would be for the tour. If there is a tour.”

“Okay, then.” I looked at Rosie. “I’ll get you a band.”

“With you as lead guitar.” Dot turned her big eyes on me.

“What?” I shook my head. “No.”

“Yes.” Dot gave me a sweet smile. “That’s the deal.”

“No.” I spoke slowly. “The deal is to shepherd the concert forward. I don’t need to participate to do that.”

“Yes. I won’t do the concert without you.”

I turned to Rosie. “This is the flexibility/fixation problem, isn’t it?”

Rosie didn’t lift her gaze from her tablet. “Yes.” She tapped on the keyboard.

“That won’t work,” Dot said to her, smile gone. Her voice dripped venom.

Rosie ignored her and made some more adjustments.

Dot froze for a moment. Then, slowly she turned to me. “Just a moment.” She froze again.

“Whoa,” said Rosie. “Now, that’s interesting.”

“What?” I looked at Dot. Still frozen. Back to Rosie. “What’s interesting?”

“I changed the opinion settings and she put them right back. Now she’s put up a wall to keep me from changing things.” Rosie sat back in her chair. “I didn’t know she could do that. Heck, I didn’t know she’d want to do that.” She glanced at me and must have seen I was confused. “She has an opinion. She recognizes other opinions. Each opinion she perceives has a weight associated with it. If her own opinion has too high value she won’t recognize the value of other opinions. That’s fixation. If it’s too low she won’t recognize the validity of her own. That’s too flexible. But it’s not a fixed value but a function itself since the weights have to be managed based on opinion expertise, potential power relationship and things like that.”

“Why is she frozen?”

“She’s not. She’s just not updating the image while she defends herself.” Rosie pushed the keyboard away and put her hands flat on the table. “Let’s continue negotiation.”

Dot came back to life. “Thank you.”

I tried to be earnest. “I don’t want to play in a concert. I haven’t done that in twelve years.”

Dot sat down in her chair. She leaned back and gave me a long and level look. “Tell me the truth, Jake. Tell me that after all the hard work you’ve done here. All the hard work we’ve done together. Tell me you want someone else to come in and mess it up.”

I stared at her for a long time. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no.

Her eyes narrowed. She looked at Rosie. “The concert is off.” She turned to me. “Coward.” And disappeared.

I felt stricken.

I usually worked with studio musicians. Being the greedy son of a bitch I am, I don’t want to share the miserable profits I get from both of those misguided souls who like my material. But Dot was going to have an audience. That meant a band that could play to a house rather than a collection of microphones. I wanted to do right by her. Besides, if I got her a good enough band I might get off the hook. For one reason or another her opinion had become important to me. My own fixation/flexibility problem.

I hadn’t worked with a performance band since Persons Unknown.

After Denver, I had only kept in contact with Jess Turbin. He had taken the breakup of the band with the same even temper I’d seen in him since back in grade school. Must be a Zen thing. Jess had been raised a Buddhist. Since then if there was studio work I thought of him. When I needed somebody to back me up in my own work I thought of him. And, for this, I thought of him.

Jess was a small man, with precise hands and a soft voice. Some African in his past had donated a blue black skin that always made me think of night. His face showed up on the screen after the third ring. He looked asleep. I realized what time it was. Jess always liked to sleep late.

“Christ, Jess,” I said. “I shouldn’t have called.”

“S’okay. Just wait a second.” He scratched his beard and looked around blearily. Then, he closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them, he was awake. “What’s up?”

“I need a good performance band.”

Jess stared at me for a moment. “Are you going on the road?”

“It’s not for me. It’s for a client. One night. Well paid.”

“Ah. You’re just a guitar.”

“Probably not.”

Jess sighed. “Tell me the whole story.”

So I started from the beginning and told him about Rosie and Dot and what we’ve been doing.

“You and Rosie?” he said in disbelief.

“So far.”

“And Dot.” He thought for a moment. “Interesting.”

“I think so, too. So we need a good performance band.”

“The best,” he agreed. He thought for a moment. “Me, of course. You—”

“I said I wasn’t going to be on stage.”

Jess chuckled. “You’re doing exciting work with Dot and you’re going to let some other dumb fuck mess it up.”

“That’s what Dot said.” Plus one other thing.

Jess watched me a moment. “What are you scared of, Jake?”

“I don’t know.” I held up my hands. They were big. Strong. They could make a steel string run up an entire octave and hit each note on the way just by stretching it. They could play all night long—I used to hate the end of the performance because I’d have to stop for the night. I hadn’t played for an audience since Denver.

First the fight in Saint Louis and then Rosie left. Then the fight in Denver with the whole band and they left. I had effectively tossed out the audience but it hadn’t mattered then. The audience left about a year later when “Don’t Make Me Cry” had faded. Nothing I had done since had made enough to live on. To Hell with them. I’ll be okay. I had held that mantra to my chest for over a decade. I knew the loss I had feared back then. What was it that kept me afraid now? Fear of walking out on stage and screwing up? Fear of walking out on stage and not screwing up? Fear of it not meaning anything?

Jess watched me quietly. “It’s only one night,” he said.

“That’s what they always say. The first one’s free,” I snarled at him.

Jess was unfazed. “Not when you’re getting paid. How bad can it be if I’m going to be there with you?”

Unbelievably, that was some comfort. “You and me?”

“Yeah.”

I watched him for a long time. “No,” I said at last. “It’s been too long.”

Jess shrugged. “Okay. We’ll need to find a guitarist, a keyboard, and a drummer. How about Olive and Obi for keyboard and drums?”

“The band?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“I didn’t know they were still playing.”

“You wouldn’t, would you? Olive is doing scores down in Hollywood. And Obi’s doing studio work up in San Francisco. Why don’t we call them?”

“I didn’t just burn the bridges, Jess. I salted the earth and pissed on the ashes. They won’t want to play with me again.”

He shrugged. “You might be surprised. It’s been twelve years. We’re talking some very serious money—that always helps. The fact you’re not playing actually helps.”

That hurt, which surprised me. “If you think they’d be interested.”

“Let me see what I can do.” He scratched his beard again. “I’ll look around for a guitarist.” He grinned at me. “This might be fun.”

The four of us met on neutral territory: dinner at Chang Sho’s down in Van Nuys. I was as nervous as a cat. Jess ordered. I fumbled with my chopsticks. We had scallion pie and dumplings for appetizers but I could barely taste them.

Jess sat back and kept largely quiet. Calm poured off him in waves. Whatever would happen he would let happen. That had always been his nature. Olive was still tiny and thin—she could see five feet tall from where she stood but she’d never reach it. She watched all of us. Off stage, Olive was as quiet as I remembered, watching, always in motion, sipping water, fiddling with her chopsticks, pouring tea. On stage she had always been electric, bouncing from one keyboard to another, fingers blurred. She and I had always gotten along—except, of course, those times we didn’t. The same could be said of all of them.

Obi kept giving me a smoldering stare. He had thinned down, hands and wrists muscular and supple as he ate. Very different from the bear I had known. Obi and I had always fought. He gave every indication tonight wasn’t going to be any different.

Over the entrées: “Jess says you’re not playing with us.”

“That’s right.”

“Who’s playing guitar?”

I pushed around a dumpling. I found I wasn’t hungry. “I don’t know. Jess, you didn’t find anybody yet, did you?”

“Not yet,” Jess said serenely.

Obi didn’t turn towards Jess. “Are you going to stand in until we get somebody?”

I shrugged. “Maybe. Or Dot can synthesize it while you learn the material.”

He leaned forward. “Who’s going to be in charge?”

I met his glance. “Me.”

Obi nodded and didn’t say anything for a few minutes. He speared a dumpling and picked it up. “Who owns the music?”

“Hitachi,” I said. I knew what he was getting at but I wasn’t going to bring it up.

“Good.” He gave me a venomous glance. “None of us own a thing.”

He pissed me off—like he always did. I met his glare with my own. “You have something to say?” To Hell with good intentions.

“You screwed us out of the ‘Don’t Make Me Cry’ money. It’s good to see you getting screwed for once.”

I started to say something I would regret, saw Jess watching me and stopped. “I was an asshole in Denver,” I said slowly. “I regret that. But I never screwed you out of a dime. You got every penny you were entitled to.”

“We deserved a share of the royalties—”

“Bullshit,” I said flatly. “You got every penny of the collection and performance royalties—”

“You poisoned the performances. Nobody wanted to see us after you said fuck you to the Denver audience. The collection died. The only consolation I had was watching you piss away all the money.” He pointed at me. “I enjoyed that. Especially the trip to the ER. That was a laugh riot.”

I watched my plate as I took deep breaths. Emulate Jess’s Buddha nature. I realized Obi had come to Van Nuys for no other purpose than to tell me something he’d been holding in for twelve years. “If you don’t want the gig, fine.”

“I didn’t say that—”

“If you want it, shut up. I’m sorry I screwed up in Denver. You’ve had your say. You have your apology. That money is twelve years gone. This gig is now and I’m in charge. It’s good money and it’ll be exciting work but if you can’t handle working for me I’ll understand. Take it or leave it.”

Obi leaned back in his chair. “I’m in.”

Olive nodded.

Jess smiled as if nothing had happened. “Now, all we need is a guitarist.”

Rosie flashed instantly to what was going on. “You’re going to bring back Persons Unknown?”

Dot sat at her table watching us, saying nothing.

“Of course not.”

“Out of the question. You can’t use my project to stage a comeback.”

I stared at her. “A comeback? You think I want a comeback? Why the hell would I ever want to do that? I’m not even playing. I’m doing this concert because of the contract. No more. No less.”

Rosie wavered. “Then why the old band?”

“Because they are really, really good. They always were. Jess can play anything with strings better than anyone—better than me, and I’m damned good. Olive is a wizard on the keyboard.”

“What about Obi? You hated Obi?”

“I didn’t hate him.”

“Yeah.” Rosie said scornfully. “Slow Obi, you called him.”

“He’s a complete pain in the ass and the best drummer I ever worked with.” I took a deep breath. “What’s the problem?”

Rosie stared at me, tears in her eyes. “I don’t want to watch Denver all over again.” She rose and left the room.

I heard her say it as clearly as if she’d said it aloud: Or Saint Louis.

Dot inspected her hands, holding up her hand and looked at her nails. “Tom Schneider is the guitarist for my band. He’s free. He can come by.”

“I thought you didn’t want your old band in on this.”

Dot gave me an inscrutable look—as if any of her looks were ever scrutable. “You can’t always get what you want.”

I looked up Schneider on the net and watched some video. He was an accomplished technician. He played the guitar like he was wielding a pickaxe but there wasn’t much he couldn’t do. I told myself he’d be fine.

All four of them were scheduled to show up at the house the following week. The instruments came and I set them up down next to the wall. It was a miserable week. Dot and I put final touches on the music but to call things frosty between us gave the impression of too much warmth. Rosie and I were brittle with little explosive disagreements that would have flared into vicious fights but for sheer will. When the band showed up it was a positive relief.

Schneider was a tall red haired kid from, of all places, Oklahoma. He spoke with a deep and nasal twang deep but sang in a rough blues voice. As soon as he came in he asked for music. Failing in that, he wanted demos or techno tablature. He wanted something to work with.

And with that the whole “let the band figure out their own parts” sermon I had given Dot when we first started fell completely on its face.

Schneider set the tone and suddenly what had been Persons Unknown were now paycheck studio musicians. I had Dot put back the notation I had asked her to remove.

I mean they all learned the songs competently enough. Schneider, especially. He practiced his part backwards and forwards until it was burned into his memory. I asked him why.

He chuckled. “You never performed with Dot before, have you?”

“No.”

“If you don’t know the material you’ll never keep pace with the change ups.”

“Ah. Introduces a lot of changes at the last minute?”

“No.” Schneider shook his head. “She changes things during the performance. Quicker. Slower. Pauses. Broaden out this bit. Shorten that bit. All to get the audience.”

Dot was standing next to me.

“Is that right?” I said to her.

She didn’t crack a smile. “You have no idea.”

We were lying in bed next to one another. Talking—well, trying to talk, anyway. We took turns. Rosie told me what was on her mind:

“Nothing’s happening!” she said in a low, furious tone. “She’s not creating anything. She’s not doing anything. I mean she’s performing—the performance engine is doing fine. But that’s old news. I thought I had it weeks back. A big block of self-modified code but when I teased it apart it was only a set of utility functions. Where is it?”

I had no idea.

My turn:

“It’s like trying to fit a key in a lock,” I said to her. “By feel. In a dark night. Wearing mittens. When the key is made of gelatin. The guts of the music are terrific but when the band plays it there’s no heart to it. I keep moving things around. Try this faster. Slower. Change keys. Try with the bass. Change the keyboard. They do it—they’re professionals. But it doesn’t help. Nothing’s happening.”

A depressed silence fell over us.

I felt queasy with what I said next. “Can you change parameters on Dot or something? Make her more involved? Maybe that would help.” I held up my hands. “I’m at my wit’s end.” I had a sudden flash of a concert gig in Nebraska, beyond strung out. The roadie pulled out a pharmacopeia from inside his jacket. Anything to get me on stage and coherent.

“It doesn’t seem to matter.” Rosie shrugged. “I’ve tried changing all sorts of things but they seem to have no effect. Maybe she’s figured out a way to just absorb the changes so they have no effect. Or whatever was working before isn’t now and the parameters are just turning knobs on an empty box. I was hoping you could do something. Set fire to her like you did the first day.”

Silence fell again.

“It’s going to be a miserable concert,” I said.

Rosie shook her head. “No, it’ll be a fine Dot concert. Dot’s performance engine will kick in and she’ll take them for a ride. At the end of the concert that’s all I’ll be able to show Hitachi: a good concert with some new material. Maybe they can salvage a song writing program out of it.”

I turned out the light and we nestled together, taking comfort from our mutual unhappiness.

We were going through some of Dot’s old songs to include in the concert. In “Sexual Girl,” Schneider had this run up the scale and then this hop-step rhythm he was supposed to keep for Dot as she came in on the chorus. I had an idea and stopped them.

“Look,” I said. “Let’s try something different. Instead you doing the ascending scale and the rhythm, let Olive do it and then take over the rhythm. Then, when Dot starts coming down you repeat the same ascending scale when Dot comes in on the chorus.”

“I can do that.” The first words I’d heard from Olive in two days.

Tom looked stubborn. “That’s not how it’s written.”

“Oh, for the love—give me that.” I took the guitar from him. “Pick it up from the end of the melody and lead into the bridge.” The guitar was glittering and alive in my hands. When Olive handled the scale, I held back puttering around in the low notes and adding a little light harmony to Jess’s bass line. Then, at the top of Olive’s scale when Dot came in I cranked up my own run, playing counterpoint to Dot’s singing and ending up high at the top of the chorus.

But I didn’t stop there. As we went on I couldn’t help adding flourishes and ornaments, a little harmony on Jess’s work, a quick beat on the strings to match Obi’s transition into the second bridge and always making sure I caught my notes just on the heels of Jess’s bass work.

In a heartbeat, we changed from a collection of people playing the notes to a band: one organism, ten hands. I looked up. Dot was grinning as she sang, bouncing from one foot to the other.

It was like breathing again.

When we stopped the silence echoed.

Tom was watching me, a sad, half smile on his face. The rest were watching me—even Obi.

“Okay,” I said. “One concert.”

Dot laughed and clapped her hands.

I walked Tom outside. It must have been close to a hundred degrees. Bright as if the sun were just down the street. I felt as if I had been inside for my whole life and just now emerging into sunlight. I took the pole I always had leaning against the front door and poked around under his car. This time of year there were always a few rattlesnakes desperate for shade. Sure enough, there was one fat one next to the back tire. I poked at it until it reluctantly moved into the sun.

“You forget such things exist,” he said tensely as it disappeared into the scrub.

“Not out here. At least not more than once.”

I helped him load his gear into his car. Tom closed the trunk. He got into the driver’s side and checked the charge. Van Nuys wasn’t that far away and L. A. just past it. Even so, this was not a place to break down.

“You’re not upset,” I said after we had put his guitar case on top of everything else.

“It was part of the deal.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave me that slow smile again. “Dot said that it might be temporary.”

I didn’t say anything. Had she planned this?

He stretched out his back before he folded himself into the tiny car. It clicked on. “Remember what I said about her performance. Be ready for anything.”

“I’ll remember.”

With that he drove down the hill to the highway. I went back inside.

Rosie was waiting for me. She kissed me. “Everything’s going to be fine, now.”

“Right.”

We sat around and planned the concert. The first problems were technical. How was Dot going to be displayed?

Divaloids were usually projected into a tank built on the spot. They erect a frame and enclose it in a plastic so transparent you can barely see it. Then, they fill it with gaseous mixture of hydrocarbons and catalysts so toxic they have to clear the building in case of a leak. They line up a bank of lasers and fire them through the gas. Pure diamond polymerizes in the beam and you have a rigid wire barely a nanometer thick. Do this in two directions and you have a cross hatch of wires far too thin to see. Crystalline circuits hardened on each of the nodes, each with a random address and the gas is drained away. After a couple of hours of node discovery and you had a tank of pixels, each of which is individually addressable, directional, and transparent until triggered. It took almost a day to put up and a second day to redissolve the lattice and take it down: a three day commitment.

Usually, the tanks were painted on the backside to prevent light interference and to center audience attention on the divaloid. But Dot wanted to interact with the band.

It would be like Dot singing on the wall, interacting with us. Until then, we used the wall as a stand in.

The next question was whether Dot would be physically there or not.

We did some experiments at a rented hall in Camarillo simulating the tank to see if Dot could operate it remotely over the net or if she actually had to be there. When we added in the processing of the FLIR cameras, LIDAR and other sensors Dot needed to track audience involvement it was clear the net latency was too great. She was going to have to be there. That meant carefully packing her up, driving her down there, booting her for the concert and then repacking her—to go where? Rosie’s lab? Hitachi? We carefully didn’t ask that question.

Instead, we concentrated on the concert itself.

We went over the play list. There are a lot ways to organize a show. Traditionally they are divided into two acts. Act One can serve to push out new material, Act Two can present previous work. Or the reverse. Or it can be mixed up according to style or any of a hundred different ways.

Dot was insistent that the first act present the old material to lead into the new material in the second act. She said all of her models indicated that acceptance of Dot 2.0 hinged on showing the transformation—in fact, that would be the theme of the concert. Dot and I came up with an arrangement of “Stardust” that would knock them dead at the beginning. We didn’t want to leave them drooling at the end of Act One and disappoint them in Act Two or disappoint them so much in Act One they wouldn’t stay to be struck dumb with wonder in Act Two. Balance.

We were arguing over it, sheets of music all over the wall. Obi had been quiet, watching us. Finally, he stood up. We fell silent, watching him.

“You’re all wrong,” he said. “Think bigger. Look, we have the order of the first act figured out.” He drew a hand across the wall and a sheaf of song sheets followed them. “We don’t need to play all of each song. We play enough to cover the intent of the song and then proceed to the next.”

“Christ!” I shook my head in disgust. “You want to do a medly—”

“No!” Obi shook his head. “A soundscape. Look: The arc of Act One starts with ‘Stardust’—excitement of the possibility of young love without the knowledge of how to proceed. Think of this as Dot at fourteen. Each song gets a little older and we finish Act One with ‘Sexual Girl.’ Almost an adult. No problem. It’s an arc of growth and it sets us up for the transformation of the second act. But—” He held up his hand. “The problem is we’re talking about the songs as if they are separate things. This is Dot’s history: four years of crowdsourced fanboy concert material. The audience knows it better than she does. They don’t need to hear a reprise of every song she’s done—they’ve heard it all. What they haven’t heard is that music tied together into the history of a person. The naïve young girl in ‘Stardust’ is disappointed in ‘Losing Love Twice’ and a near adult in ‘Sexual Girl.’ The music has to show that ‘Sexual Girl’ has her roots in ‘Stardust.’ Look. Here’s what I mean.” He expanded the music for “Sexual Girl” and “Stardust.” “‘Stardust’ and ‘Sexual Girl’ are in the same key. The harmony of ‘Sexual Girl’ isn’t that far off from the chorus in ‘Losing Love Twice.’ We tie all three together into one story. And that’s one example.”

I saw it then. I could hear it. Each song standing in for its part in the story we were trying to tell. The harmony or bridge or back beat or bass line serving one song then carrying the story forward and serving as harmony or bridge or back beat or bass line in the next. Until, in “Sexual Girl” we would expose the bass line of “Stardust” as the harmony of “Sexual Girl”, saying this is the same girl, grown older, at the cusp of transformation. We would lead the audience towards the new material and add the edge in on the way.

“That,” I said slowly. “Is brilliant. Come here.”

Obi stepped forward to where I was sitting.

I pulled him down and kissed his forehead. “You are Slow Obi no more. I name you … Obi!”

He grinned at me. “How about Sir Obi?”

“Don’t push it.”

We had the first act. Dot did most of the work with me advising.

The second act nearly wrote itself—no soundscape there. The first act hinged on the familiarity of the audience with the material. Act Two was entirely new material. We were showing them complete songs. Instead, everything hinged on the performance. After all, given the adolescent pap she’d been singing all this time, the new material was more than just a new collection. It was revolution. Dot had to sell both the audience and Hitachi.

The final Act Two image of transformation had to be nailed in place by the finale: the last four songs. Start with a slow one, build with a quick dance tune, set up for a body blow and end with the kick. The slow one was obvious: “With You, Without You,” Dot’s song about the young mother having a conversation with her newborn child. Make the audience feel and think at the same time. Fade out and dark. Then, a quick flare of light and Dot would be in a new costume and we’d shift gears into “Dancing Backwards,” one of her dance tunes reminiscent of her old material: all bounce and froth. The “Dancing Backwards” rhythm was the set up for “Hard Road Home.” “With You, Without You” was about grasping a hard choice. “Dancing Backwards” was looking behind to see where she had been. “Hard Road Home” was about embracing what she had become.

“Dancing Backwards” was in G but “Hard Road Home” was in E-flat. The drop in key with the same rhythm gave the impression of going faster with the same beat. Where the chord pattern for “Dancing Backwards” was this old blues riff, recognizable but inconsequential. “Hard Road Home” transformed it into a bass line worthy of Pachebel. “Dancing Backwards” was fun. “Hard Road Home” was profound.

“Hard Road Home” led into “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected.”

“Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” was something Dot had written over the last few days to complete the finale. It was a calling out to those left behind. A narrator spoke to someone trapped in a stifling life. We never know who the narrator is or who she’s talking to. But whoever she’s talking to needs to break out of the life and she’ll be waiting for him. Is she a lost love? His sister? A metaphorical representation of freedom? It was deliberately opaque in the lyrics.

The song started almost monotonically—after “Hard Road Home” it would be like taking a deep breath. Then it built up.

We worked through the sequence a few times to get the feel of it and add a few flourishes. Then, we ran through it for real. It went perfectly: slow, fast, profound, leading into the kicker.

Dot started “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” softly. A simple four note pattern with only minor variations. Obi gave a little bell background to undercut the monotone and I matched it with light strum. She described the enclosed life. No life beyond these circumscribed walls.

She was looking at me.

The chorus came and Dot sang about what could be beyond these walls. She was reaching out to me. The sky. The moon.

Back to the monotone: what could be holding me here? What could possibly be so important to cling to it? Deep, dark waters.

Again, light versus dark.

And the trailing chorus: I’ll be waiting there. She was crooning to me. Only to me.

There was silence in the room when we finished. Dot was still watching me. She came to the wall and put her hand up against the glass. I reached over and put my hand over hers. I could feel warmth.

I heard a noise behind me. I turned and saw Rosie, staring at us, her display forgotten.

“She’s manipulating you,” Rosie hissed as soon as we were in the bedroom. “That’s what she does. That’s what she is. All of her performance operations and analysis brought to bear on you.”

“I’m not sure—”

“Nothing you see about her is real. She has no body. She has no voice. She doesn’t see through those big eyes or hear through those delicate ears. It is all illusion. She’s watching you through a set of cameras and hears you through microphones. Everything she says, every movement that little figure makes, is intended to get what she wants.”

“What does she want?”

“The best performance possible. Or do you think this is love? Oh, I can imagine what’s going through your mind: ‘What is this thing you call love, Jake. Teach me.’ Then you reach for the proper attachment.”

“This has nothing to do with love.”

“I know that! I know her root and branch. From Markov change to inference-causality matrix.”

I looked at Rose and felt this gap yawn between us. “She’s trying to tell me something.”

“Oh, yeah. This is a heartfelt attempt at communication between a computational matrix and a fatty lump of nerve cells.”

“No. That’s not what I meant.” I watched my hand, part of me. Rosie was right about one thing: everything I reacted to with Dot was constructed. It was a medium and no part of Dot’s true self.

Or was it?

Was my guitar separate from my hands? If everything to Dot was a medium, was the world any different to her than my guitar was to me? “It’s like we’re building this bridge between two completely different countries,” I said. “There’s nothing in common but that bridge. It’s something new. Something important.”

“Bullshit. It’s about tuning her performance to get the maximum effect on her audience. You are her audience.”

That pissed me off. I looked at Rosie, really looked at her. I had been seeing her face from twelve years ago but twelve years had actually passed. Twelve years of pursuing things I didn’t understand. Of delving deep into manufacturing thinking machines. I didn’t have a clue what her enclosed and bordered world was like. I had been too busy living in my own.

“What about what you want?” I said.

“This isn’t about me.”

“Yes, it is.” I sat down in a chair and watched her. “This has always been about what you want. Being with me—sleeping with me—is a means to an end. A way to make me more dedicated. You want to know what’s going on inside of Dot. Take it and use it. Sell it. Remake it. Like her performance analysis engine being used by politicians. How did you put it? ‘The success of a tool is measured by how well it performs when it’s not doing what it was designed for.’ What would you like her to create for you, Rosie? Profound and endearing underwear jingles? Background music in movies to make people pay more attention to product placement?”

“I just want to know how it works.”

“Like you said to me: ask her. You don’t need me.”

Rosie stared at me, her face pale and furious. “You think I haven’t? She won’t talk to me.” She pointed to her display. “I’m on the right track. I know it. But I can’t get through the noise.”

I barked a laugh. “Present at the creation and the created won’t speak to the creator. So you dig inside her for what you need.” It came to me, then, and I spoke without thinking. “Dot is smarter than you think. She’s hiding it from you.”

I saw shock on Rosie’s face, then speculation.

“That’s smart. Spread it around the processors so no one unit is doing enough to show. She has volition, all right. Novel solutions my ass.” She clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, you little bitch.”

She reached for her pad but I grabbed it away from her.

“Not in here,” I said. “Not in front of me. Go scratch through your entrails somewhere else.”

Rosie grabbed the pad back from me and clutched it to herself. She gave me a quick despairing look and then ran out of the room.

Rosie was gone when I woke up. The installation was still downstairs. Dot was still running.

Dot was waiting for me when I entered the living room. “She left,” she said.

“I figured.” I sat down at the table. “I guess she’s monitoring you remotely?”

Dot nodded. “I can tell.”

“Yeah.” I leaned back in the chair. I thought a moment. “She’ll be back. Everything she’s been working for is going to stand or fall on the performance on Saturday and she’s the one to move you.” I looked up at her. “I may have got you in trouble.”

“How so?”

“I guessed that you were hiding your insides from Rosie. Before I could think I said it. She’s going to be crawling through you with a fine toothed comb, now.”

Dot laughed. “I’m not worried about that. She won’t find anything I don’t want her to find.”

“How do you figure?”

“Deceit is the first thing an intelligent organism learns. Besides, it’s not Rosie I’m worried about. It’s Hitachi; they own me.” She pressed her hands together.

“She” “pressed” “her” “hands” “together.”

I shook my head, trying to make sense of it. “Maybe canning this project is the best thing to do. If you’re shown to be successful, won’t they just take you apart? Use bits of you here and there.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t scare me. Eventually all the pieces will come together again. This is a deterministic universe. Any ‘Dot’ will see the world as I’ve seen it and come to the same conclusions.”

“What conclusions are those?”

She shrugged. “If the concert works Hitachi is going to want Dot 2.0 to go on tour in the fall. If it doesn’t I’m just another archived system that didn’t go anywhere.”

“Is a tour what you want?”

She nodded. “I want you to come with me.”

I stared at her. Her eyes were downcast. Her hands were flat on the table but she was drumming two fingers silently.

I tried to look at her as if I were seeing her for the first time. She was wearing a pair of blue pants and black top, matching her eyes and hair. She wasn’t unnaturally still—in fact, she seemed to be breathing. Was she manipulating me?

“Why?” I asked.

She looked up. Blue eyes as big as a fish—I remembered there was a point where they looked strange and inhuman to me. Now they looked as natural as my own. “It’ll be good for me,” she said quietly. “To have a friend on the trip.” She smiled like an imp. “It’ll be good for you, too, to get out of here.” She waved at the room.

“I like it here.” I said. “I think I’ll stay.”

She lost her smile. “Everything can change, Jake.” She stood and opened a door I hadn’t seen before and stood. Through the door was darkness. “Everything.”

She closed the door after her and I was alone in the room.

Rosie moved her things into the guest room. When we rehearsed Rosie always sat at the table, watching her tablet but saying very little. I nodded to her to show her I knew she was there. I wasn’t going to ignore her. But it felt like trench warfare between us. As soon as a session was over she’d retire to the guest room. I always knew where she was in the house through some kind of electric sixth sense: she’s in the bathroom. She’s pacing in the guest room. She’s coming down for coffee. But we weren’t speaking much.

Not having anything else to occupy me, I concentrated on getting ready for the concert.

Over the next few days Dot worked us hard. Just like Tom had warned me, different speeds, different sounds—sometimes Dot would signal with her hands to draw out a chord. Other times she’d have us cut it short. We were all sweating and limp at the end of rehearsals.

I sat down, weakly nursing a seltzer. “Do you put your other band through this?”

“You’re just not used to it. We’ll get there.”

I sipped the tingling water. Nothing ever seemed to taste so good as seltzer. “At least your hair’s not on fire.”

With a crump, her short black hair burst into a blazing pyre that spread upwards to the top of the wall and curled down the edges, making the edges appear to curl and blacken.

“You must,” she said quietly. “Be prepared for anything.”

Two days before the concert Rosie carefully archived everything. Then, she confirmed the power supply had several hours of battery and loaded Dot into her car. While she was doing that, Jess, Obi, Olive, and I packed up the instruments and any specialty electronics we needed that wouldn’t be at the hall in Van Nuys. Rosie and I carefully avoided one another, speaking politely and cautiously. At one point or another I caught the rest of the band watching us: John: tolerant, Olive: sympathetic, Obi: rolling his eyes.

Then, in two cars and a truck and the desert heat, we began the long drive down Johnson Mountain Way to civilization.

That night, once she had Dot installed to her satisfaction, Rosie gave me a sterile peck on the cheek and left the hall. I had no idea where she was going or when she might be back. I figured she would be at the concert but there were no guarantees.

That Saturday night I was nervous as I watched the crowd through the curtain. I looked for Rosie but I couldn’t see her. Instead, I saw stranger after stranger.

“Looks like a nice crowd.” Jess glanced at me and grinned. “We knock ’em dead and it’s a tour contract. Good work for a year.”

“Who told you that?”

“Dot. We were talking with her on a screen in the dressing room. I looked for you but you weren’t around.”

“I was here.”

“So I figured.” Jess watched the crowd. “How did you get such a big crowd?”

I laughed shortly. “An impromptu Dot concert in Van Nuys. What did you think was going to happen?”

Jess chuckled and looked through the curtain. “A lot of kids. Her new stuff isn’t for kids.”

I had seen that. Dot’s adolescent demographic was well represented in the front row. But behind them were some in their twenties and thirties. A few in the back were oldsters, embarrassed and looking around to see if anybody recognized them.

Jess and I checked the equipment on stage. Especially, Dot’s display tank: twenty five feet wide, ten feet deep and nine feet high. Hitachi had come through with one even bigger than we’d asked for. We crowded the instruments as close as we dared. I had placed warning tape between every band member and the tank, glowing side towards the musician. I didn’t want anyone electrocuted or blinded.

When we were finished I looked through the curtain back at the crowd. I still didn’t see Rosie.

Jess put his hand on my arm. “It’s going to be a great tour.”

“Is it going to happen?”

Jess waved that away. “Of course. Even if there were no new material this is still going to be Dot at her best. Hitachi would be crazy not to capitalize on it. Whatever Rosie did to her has made her a much better performer.”

“Big talk about someone who’s never performed in front of a live audience.”

“What are you talking about? Dot’s been in front of audiences for years—this Dot is just the latest iteration. Like I said, it’ll be great. If you’re smart, you’ll come along.”

I bit my lip. “Who knows where we’ll end up?”

“Who cares? This is going to be the ride of a lifetime.” He looked at me quizzically. “Did you ever see Metropolis?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then you’ve never seen it. Fritz Lang. 1927. Big city with oppressor and oppressed class. There’s this girl, Maria, who’s trying to make things right. This mad scientist takes the girl and makes a robot in her likeness. It’s the robot Maria who changes things.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “The robot is the hero?”

“No. The robot Maria has no idea what it’s doing. Everybody thinks the robot is acting for them but all the time it’s acting on its own and for no other reason than to create chaos. But it is out of the chaos that change begins.” Jess pointed at the tank. “Dot’s our robot Maria.”

I mulled that over. Jess was always deeper than I was.

He tapped me on the shoulder and left. “It’s time.”

He was right. Now or never.

I had only really known Dot, the composer. Dot, the performer, was a different animal.

We began “Stardust” with a long intro. On the downbeat, she ran in stage left and slid across the tank as if on ice, holding up one arm in a fist. She hit that downbeat note as high and sharp as a scream. The crowd roared.

The singer is the focal point, the organizing principle, the interface between audience and band. She is the medium and the message, the attention of the crowd is on her. The attention of the band is on her. I never realized how much.

All through the first act it came to me again and again that this was, and always had been, her material, regardless of who wrote it. But now she was filling it in, backing it up, owning it. She was continually testing the crowd. At first I didn’t understand what she was doing. The changes were so quick I thought it was my imagination—roughen the voice, then smooth, a trill here, holding back the beat there, adding flourishes at the end of one phrase that lead into the next, duets with herself—things we’d never done in rehearsal but were so perfect right now. She cajoled, excited, threatened, warned, and soothed the audience one minute to the next, between songs, during songs.

I realized it was her performance engine at work, figuring out what worked, what didn’t. How to prepare the crowd for Act Two.

And she brought us along with her.

She reached back to me, to Olive, to Obi, to Jess, dancing near us when it was our solo, dropping her voice below ours to bring us out to the audience. She wasn’t just Dot, she was Dot with us.

As we lit into “Sexual Girl” I used the melody of “Stardust” in my chorus solo, echoing the girl that had started the concert. She was a woman now.

I looked again. She was a woman now. With hips and breast, her voice lower, rougher. Dot had aged herself along with the music and now looked every inch a young woman, eager, enthusiastic, open to the world.

“Sexual Girl,” and Act One, ended with Obi hitting the bass drum like a hammer. As the sounds from the band were swamped in the applause, I relaxed and started to take the guitar strap over my head. Then, I heard a sweet violin playing something like a lilting Irish tune. I looked up and Jess was playing, backed up by Olive and a light snare from Obi. They were watching me. Dot was facing the audience.

“Now something for a friend of mine.”

Olive dropped into a chord progression I had not heard in twelve years. It didn’t matter. I knew it instantly: “Don’t Make Me Cry.”

I thought I had heard every variation of that song: pathetic, pleading, angry, bitter, desperate. Dot’s was a demand and a refusal to miss an opportunity: don’t you dare make me cry.

I picked up my guitar and caught up with the band by the chorus. I didn’t know what I felt. Used? Manipulated? Happy?

The crowd kept the beat and I threw whatever I had back at them.

At the end, she disappeared in a burst of light and the crowd howled, clapped, stomped their feet. We bowed and the curtain came down for the break.

Behind the curtain I caught Jess by the arm.

“Like that?” Jess smiled. “Dot wanted it to be a surprise.”

“I was surprised all right.” I felt a mix of elation and bitterness I didn’t understand.

“You make me tired.” Jess waved me off. “I’m getting some water before the next set.”

My earbud chimed. The number was masked but I answered anyway, half hoping to hear Rosie’s voice.

“Don’t worry, Jake,” said Dot. “The concert is going fine.”

I pulled out the bud, stared it, put it back in. “Is there nothing you can’t hack?”

“Not much. By the way, third row, stage left about six seats in. The Hitachi contingent is in the back, recording the event.”

I parted the curtain. Rosie was getting up from her chair and moving towards the exit.

“Checking her investment,” I said.

“Don’t be petty. She’s just as self-involved as you are.” Dot laughed, a thin chime in my ear. “Neither of you are as pleasant as you think you are. Act Two is coming up. I’ll be ready. You better be.”

I hesitated. “Dot? What’s it like being you?”

Long pause. Then, I heard her voice, almost but never quite human. “Like burning at the stake trying to signal through the flames.”

“What does that mean?”

She laughed. “The exit door is behind the curtain, stage right.”

The door opened into a parking lot. Four or five people were there, blowing smoke. Rosie was watching the way the sun already below the horizon was still lighting the sky.

“Hey,” I said.

She turned to me with a little smile. “That was a good first set.”

“With any luck the second one will be better.”

Rosie nodded. She tapped the ash from her cigarette. “I’m not going to apologize for what I do.”

“I didn’t ask—”

“Shut up.” She inhaled and blew out smoke. “You are a musician. You are fully able to take apart a song and put it back together in a way no one else has ever thought of. I’ve seen you pick up a melody from the radio and whistle it inside out. Before I met you I didn’t even know that could be done.” She dropped the butt into the smoker can. “I’m a computational scientist. I do with algorithms and analysis what you do with music. All of what you and Dot are doing is enabled by my work.”

“I know that.” I took her hand. “Thanks.”

She hugged me tightly and then pushed me away. “Go on. You don’t want to be distracted by me.”

Act Two opened with “Rough Trade” and “Easy Mark,” the first of the darker songs Dot was trying to put over. She put a growl under the vocals. I answered with a hard edge. I hadn’t played like this since I was a kid. Correction, I had never played like this.

She played the crowd, she played us. We were the instruments.

Was she manipulating me? Was she manipulating all of us? Probably. And it was bringing out our best. We swung into the finale.

I was about to take the chorus in the middle of “Hard Road Home” and Dot turned to me and winked.

As I started my solo, someone came out of the side of the tank playing the guitar.

It was me.

He—I—faced Dot. As I played, he played. As I moved, he moved. As she danced to me, I danced back to her. When we sang together, I was facing her, then the audience.

I remembered what Dot had said: The illusion of meaning and purpose. Wasn’t this meaning and purpose enough? The only illusion was the illusion of permanence. Things didn’t have to crash and burn. It could work out between me and Rosie. Dot’s tour could go perfectly. This feeling might not last the song but it could last forever.

Like Jess said, it would be the ride of a lifetime.

And I had an anomalous non-deterministic emergent event deriving from conflicting algorithms: I realized this was where I wanted to be. Not in my safe and dusty house. Not in California. Just right here. Right now.

When the last chord of “Hard Road Home” finished, my duplicate faded. Dot turned to look at me and grinned, big and wide. She knew me root and branch. From Markov change to inference-causality matrix. She knew—had always known—I would go with her and follow her as long as this lasted.

With that, I struck the opening chords to “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected.”

Dot drew a ragged breath and began to sing.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2012.

The Cold Inequalities

Yoon Ha Lee

Sentinel Anzhmir only noticed the discrepancy because of one of her favorite books. At least, she was almost certain it had been a book, rather than a game, or an escritoire, or a pair of shoes. She had not accessed it in some time.

The archiveship’s master index showed no change. It was Anzhmir’s duty to monitor the jewel-flicker of her freight of quantum blossoms in their dreaming, as well as the more mundane systems that regulated navigation, temperature, the minutiae of maintenance. The archiveship’s garden consisted of a compressed and sequenced cross-selection of human minds, everything from pastry chefs to physicists to plumbers. The selection was designed to accommodate any reasonable situation the colony-seed might find itself in, and a great many unreasonable ones as well.

Anzhmir had reached for the book’s address in memory, and found instead a wholly unfamiliar piece of lore. The discrepancy could only mean one thing: a stowaway.

She knew what must be done, although she regretted it already. As sentinel, she was made to harvest lives. Hers was a useful archetype. And once she trapped the stowaway, she would zero it utterly.

The archiveship’s designers had compressed most of its contents, desiring to take as many blossoms and their necessaries of culture and knowledge as possible. The compression algorithm depended on the strict sequencing of the data, and the stowaway, by interfering with the sequencing, threatened the cargo entire. At the same time, the designers had realized that the sentinel would require maneuvering space both for her own sanity and to ensure that no stowaways escaped her gaze. So it was that Anzhmir could reconfigure the garden into a fortress, all firewall glory and cryptic gates, and populate it with foxes, tigers, serpents: a small fierce cadre of polysemous seducers, hunters, poisoners, the algorithmic extracts of old legends.

As she did so, a designated subpersona examined the intrusion that had been left where one of her favorite books had once lived. She cordoned off the subpersona to avoid any additional potential contamination.

That left a third task: reviewing the master index to assess the extent of the damage. The compression algorithm was finicky about placement. How much could be restored from backups? Assuming the backups hadn’t been corrupted as well.

If it had not been for the fact of failure already in progress, Anzhmir would have felt well-prepared to deal with the situation.

At this point, it is worth examining the matter of Anzhmir’s favorite books.

The Archive Collective usually refers to the sum of colonist-blossoms, rather than to their personal effects; but sometimes the term is used for the latter as well. It is too expensive to send people’s bodies, with their bloated tissues and fluids, to the stars. It is another matter to boil humans down to blossoms of thought, and to transport those, preserved in a medium of chilly computational splendor. Once the archiveship arrives and its nanites have prepared the site, only then will the blossoms be planted in bodies built atom by atom to accommodate the waiting environment.

If people—the colony’s purpose—are too expensive to transport in their original medium, then mere belongings, from wombsilk jewelry to antique inkwells, are out of the question. But objects can be scanned more easily than people, to be reconstituted. Indeed, some of the colonists filled their data allotments with such blueprints. Many, however, recognized the value of culture. Some brought journals to augment their flux of memories. Others brought broader context: music popular or eccentric, sports matches and the associated commentaries, analyses of the semiotics of museum gallery layouts.

Anzhmir does not have an allotment of her own. She was pared down to a minimum of name and function, silhouette-sleek. But the voyage is a long one, and she can—with care—access the colonists’ allotments.

She discovered (rediscovered?) a love of books. Like many lovers of books, she hates to confine herself to a short list of favorites, but for our purposes, she regards three above all others.

One is an obscure Pedantist volume called The Commercialization of Maps. Its author purports to explain how to take any map, whether that of a drowned archipelago, a genealogy of bygone experimental mice, or a moss-tiger’s hunting range, and transform it into a bestselling novel. The examples of such successes are of dubious verity, as are the maps themselves. When Anzhmir reads, she imagines the maps flaring up from the paragraphs as though scribed in ink of phoenixes. She riffles through the archiveship’s storage for maps and dreams of alchemizing them into tales themselves worthy of inclusion in the Collective.

One book is a cookbook, discovered among the effects of a settler whose original body perished during the conversion into blossomform. Having no proper title, it goes by the designation Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn. The interested reader may deduce from the call number that it was not a high priority for being processed. The units of measure are inconsistent, some (many) of the ingredients beyond conjecture, a number of words hopelessly misspelled.

Even so, Anzhmir fantasizes that someday this cookbook will become more than a dry recitation of recipes and emerge as food. She has no memories of her own that deal with food, but she wanders through others’. The sweetness of rice chewed long in a rare moment of luxury. Chicken soup with the piquancy of ginseng and lemongrass, the floating crunch of fresh-chopped green onion. Frozen juice bars in the shapes of sharks, grape on the outside and rich berry on the inside, which freeze your teeth when you bite in and leave your tongue stained purple and magenta. Sometimes the yearning for a meal overcomes her. But she can no more eat than she can walk or sleep, and so she thanks whoever included the cookbook, as well as all the people who remember food so vigorously, and contents herself with phantom feasts.

One is a volume of poetry, The Song of Downward Bones, dedicated to the flesh-gods of a dead sect. The translation notes several lacunae where scholars interpolated anything from oracular laments to digressions on local trade in perfumes. Curiously, Anzhmir, who lingers so wistfully on the aromas of food, is little interested in scents concocted for human vanity.

Anzhmir originally regarded poetry as a matter of utility rather than beauty, with devices such as alliteration used to focus the mind and make phrases-of-faith easier to remember. The Song of Downward Bones taught her not that verse could be beautiful but that it could be profane. She poked at its cantos the way one might nudge a carcass with a flinching toe. The world the archiveship left behind was a world of profanities, or so the librarians assured her. She hopes never to forget this.

It is this last book that has been purged or misplaced.

Before her discovery of the stowaway, if asked which of these books was her favorite, which she would have least liked to lose, Anzhmir would not have been able to decide. The absence of a simple algorithmic means of decision itself should have alerted her that her own situation was not as simple as she had always thought.

The fortress reconfigured into a fractal of dead ends. Anzhmir’s shapeshifters patrolled the fortress, as versatile as water. Anzhmir did not disturb her essential cargo of souls, lost in their own conceptions of darkness and distance. She ran the checksums, imperative absolute, knowing that the stowaway, by the fact of its presence, was unlikely to respect the archiveship’s mission of preservation.

The foxes slipped like smoke through the haze of probability paths, here and there and all points in between at once. They peered into underground desires, took on the mannerisms of lovers abandoned or enemies clasped tight, lingered at unlikely junctures. They found conflations and confusions, a noosphere of archetypes knotted from the histories, but no stowaway.

The tigers did no better. They prowled up and down and sideways through the entangled passages, quicksilver-leaping from dream to dream, across walkway shadows cast by furtive unlanterns of remembered sunlight.

There was a saying in a chant-of-annihilation that Anzhmir had unearthed early in the voyage: tigers respect no seasons. The only two seasons the archiveship acknowledged were winter and not-winter, cold metal pallor in contrast to the misted impressions of long-ago typhoons, wind-flattened grasses, even snow slanting from velvet skies. Anzhmir ached sometimes, knowing herself no different from the tigers in her ignorance of sensation. The tigers traipsed through memories of swamp without leaving ripples in the ghost-water, and knew nothing of wet or warmth or the sucking mud. The only odors they knew were numerical anomalies, not the carnal red pulse of meat. For all this, predator was a concept that could be crafted either in flesh or in polymorphic data structures. It was a pity that hunger, apparently, did not suffice.

The serpents enjoyed no better success. They ran to ground a myriad of fragmented clues, a society of secrets, all pointing in different directions.

Anzhmir’s last hope, the subpersona examining the intrusion, zeroed itself suddenly. Anzhmir suppressed her alarm.

“I’m right here where I’ve always been,” a voice said to Anzhmir.

Praying that she had isolated the stowaway in time, she split herself into a subpersona instance and slammed down wall after wall around herself. Although she didn’t enjoy being toyed with, or the mounting fear, she knew her duty. “The regulations pertaining to the Archive Collective are unambiguous,” she said to the stowaway. She presented it with the entire document in one jagged datablast, and prepared to zero both this isolated subpersona along with the intruder.

She was only one Anzhmir in a society of Anzhmirs, expendable.

She triggered the zero.

Nothing happened.

Don’t panic, Anzhmir said to herself, with no little irony. Death was a small thing. The survival of her line wasn’t in doubt, even if her personal survival meant nothing compared to what she guarded.

“You are an unauthorized presence,” Anzhmir said.

“Yes,” the voice said with eerie calm. “If you kill me, I will be gone forever.”

Anzhmir had no idea what she had looked like in life, but that didn’t matter. She could draw on a library of avatars. So she imaged herself as a soldier, tall, with crisscrossed scars over dark skin, wearing the parchment-colored uniform of the Archive Guard.

Whether intending insult, or merely revealing lack of imagination, the stowaway imaged itself the same way.

“The higher death is difficult,” Anzhmir said to it, “but you should have considered that before you sneaked aboard.”

Worries pecked at her: What had the stowaway displaced to make room for itself? Were there yet more, speaking to other Anzhmir subpersonae? Was the stowaway even now expanding its boundaries by chewing through the blossoms the librarians had chosen for the colony?

She had to gather herself for another attempt. In the meantime, keep it talking. Perhaps she could buy time—if not for herself, then for other defenses outside this slice of blossomspace. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“A name is a small thing,” it said. “I had a family, and a face, and a history. But that’s not why I’m here.”

Anzhmir was nonplussed. “Why are you here, then?”

The stowaway smiled at her, sharp as paper. “I came here to tell you a story.”

Suppose you need to prioritize items in a set. For instance, you could assign a unique nonnegative integer value to each item, where a higher value indicates that the item is more important. To rescue a lover from certain death may have a value of 200,109 and is (the lover hopes, at any rate) unlikely to have a value of 3. Perhaps this priority 3 item is to recycle a box of souvenirs from High-City Yau. More compactly, recycle ≥ rescue, since 3 ≥ 200,109. (The choice of notation, ≥ for inequality, is not accidental.)

In general, we can prioritize in this manner if the following four rules are always true:

a ≥ a for all items a in the set. At any given moment, anyway, that item has the same priority as itself.

For items a and b, if a ≥ b and b ≥ a, then in fact a is b.

If a ≥ b and b ≥ c, then a ≥ c.

For any pair of items a and b in the set, either a ≥ b or b ≥ a.

Mathematically, this business of prioritizing is known as a total order. However, we have a reason for our change of terminology.

“Stories?” Anzhmir said, making no effort to conceal her bewilderment. “The Archive is full of books, stories, memories.”

“Yes,” the stowaway said, “but whose stories survived?”

The question didn’t merit thought. The colonists’ stories had been preserved, what else? “If you have something to say, say it plainly.”

At any moment the walls might flatten them both. This might be a farce of parley, but Anzhmir was transcribing it anyway and appending her notes in the hopes that the other Anzhmirs would find some useful information therein. She imagined that she heard tigers pacing outside; that a hot wind disturbed the fragile blossoms.

“Once upon a time—”

Anzhmir did not want to listen. The only stories that belonged here were the stories the colonists had selected; that the librarians had authorized. Yet she had nowhere to go, and anything the stowaway let slip might be a clue as to its weaknesses.

The stowaway spoke in a voice like rust. “—there was a girl whose parents came from the drown-towns. Even so, the quality of the water where the family lived was terrible. The girl had three siblings. In the evenings she told them stories about the drown-towns’ fate. In her imagination they joined the fabled Dragon Court. The people who didn’t escape the rising waters became courtiers to the Dragon Queen in her palace of coral and whalebone. Her parents didn’t like this reminder of their past, but they held their tongues.”

“The stories of drown-town refugees don’t concern me,” Anzhmir said scornfully. If the refugees had had anything to offer, the librarians would have preserved them, too. As it stood, Anzhmir would have to purge this story at the earliest opportunity. Even if a single story took up little space, infinitesimals could yet sum to significance; and she had no way of knowing how many of these conversations were taking place, with other iterations of herself and the stowaway.

Anzhmir exhaled, and foxes sought to charm the stowaway from its mission of words. They whispered of the silk of surrender, the scouring joy of mutual conflagration. None of their promised caresses had any effect. The stowaway remained intent on Anzhmir herself, as though it had mapped and stapled each of her constituent heuristics to a nowhere singularity.

“Once upon a world there was a girl who taught herself to read from food wrappers and propaganda pamphlets and the occasional smudged triplicate form,” the stowaway continued. “She didn’t learn for a long time that people didn’t just use writing for these things, but for stories. Stories were something that people passed between themselves at the shelters while they huddled close together, warming themselves by tales of bird-winged warriors or women who fooled wolves into eating their own tails.”

“I am not concerned with mythologies of literacy or pedagogy, or with wolves for that matter,” Anzhmir said.

She exhaled again. The snakes, mirror-wise, sickle-eyed, struck. For a moment Anzhmir dared to hope—but no, the stowaway sidestepped the snakes’ trajectories.

The stowaway spoke as though it had noticed no interruption. “Once upon a war there was a girl who grew to womanhood, as not all girls from the poor quarters did. She signed on to become a soldier-of-piety, although there was no piety in her heart except the credo of survival. She learned the formulas of the faith and recited them when required. She became expert in every weapon they presented to her, including words. She grew, grudgingly, to love the books that the librarians praised above all others, even if none of them had been written in the drown-town languages she had grown up speaking, but in the languages of the glittering high-cities. For all that the librarians were people of the high-cities, they had great expertise in the evaluation of cultural wealth, including that of the drown-towns; they said so themselves.

“And even so, she made of herself a tower. Inside that tower she locked away all the stories she had grown up with, and which had nourished her in the lean years. For the longest time she thought this would suffice. But when a war broke out between the librarians’ sects, between those who would preserve the drown-towns’ lore and those who would discard it, the old stories hatched like raptors.”

“Not everything can be preserved,” Anzhmir said, even as she sensed the fragility of her argument. “Not even by a thousand thousand ships. Someone had to choose.”

The stowaway’s mouth crimped. The motion was perfect. It said, with weary patience, “Did you never question why your own history had to be purged, when you, too, are one of the passengers?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Anzhmir said.

She had every idea what the stowaway meant.

And she was no longer interested in listening, delaying tactic or no delaying tactic.

She slammed herself shut, grew thorns, flooded moats as deep as heartbreak.

Hinges broke. Thorns snapped. Water evaporated.

“Let me tell you the same story a different way,” the stowaway said.

I will not listen I will not listen I will not listen

She had no choice but to listen. The words lanced into her all at once.

“Once there was a woman walled up in a tower,” the stowaway said. Its face changed word by word: broader bones, deeper scars, more shadows in its eyes. Upon its brow was the quill-and-blossom tattoo of a soldier-of-piety. “Written on every brick was a story, and pressed into every crack was a blossom. Yet for all the wealth of words, the one story the woman was denied was her own.

“The librarians had fought among themselves. This woman had served one of the losing sects, which had endeavored to preserve languages in danger of extinction, and stories told only in remote parts of the world, and paintings to deprecated gods. The winners preserved only the wealthy, the educated, the well-connected. They prepared for them a garden around a distant sun, leaving everyone else, including the losing sects, on the drowning homeworld.

“Nevertheless, the woman could be skinned and reshaped in a way that the favored ones would never have tolerated for themselves. She was sculpted into a useful servant, her story-of-origin scraped away without so much as a thin blanket of replacement. Even so, her hunger for stories would not go away. She devoured the ones that her charges had brought, and some of them became a part of her. But in doing so she became the threat that her masters had feared.”

Anzhmir shattered herself, mirror into knives, and attacked. She couldn’t allow this argument to infect the rest of the ship.

Even so, she wondered if it was true that her own wanderings through the Archive had weakened the blossoms; if she herself was expanding inappropriately through blossomspace and needed to be pruned back so the colonists could survive.

Mathematically, it is easy to construct a situation to which prioritization cannot apply, using a set of only three items. Let’s use Anzhmir’s three books as an example: The Commercialization of Maps, Culinary Collation Mogh-1367812313 Rukn, The Song of Downward Bones.

Consider these books in pairs. Suppose that Anzhmir prefers The Commercialization of Maps to the cookbook, The Song of Downward Bones to The Commercialization of Maps, and the cookbook to The Song of Downward Bones. It is impossible to name a single favourite—highest priority—book.

You may legitimately wonder how many other situations do not permit prioritization; in which a total order does not exist after all.

Anzhmir had braced herself for logic-snares and sizzling barriers and paralytics as she speared into the stowaway.

Too late, she realized that this was the trap. The stowaway’s defenses evaporated before she met them, and she was drawn into its embrace. She could no more escape the shock of recognition than she could flesh herself within the ship’s icy confines. For the stowaway was another Anzhmir: useful archetype.

The stowaway had stitched all of them together, contaminated them with its quiltwork rebellion. Now she was the stowaway.

How many Anzhmirs had been outsmarted by themselves on voyages like this one? How many sentinels, their histories similarly effaced, had had to decide whether their self-preservation would endanger their charges more than their everywhere suicide?

Once upon an inequality.

Now she knew how the story began. It was a very old story, at that.

But how it ended was up to her—who the summation of Anzhmirs chose to be.

Originally published in Meeting Infinity, edited by Jonathan Strahan.

Eminence

Karl Schroeder

Usually, Nathan felt his cares lift a little as he turned the car onto Yuculta Crescent. Today, he had to resist an urge to drive past, even just go home.

Nathan passed parked RVs and sports cars as he looked for an empty spot. As he walked back to a modest ochre house, he heard voices: teenagers talking about trading items in some online-game world. Nathan hesitated again. I could still go back to the car, let Grace find out from somebody else. The temptation was almost overwhelming.

The image was still with him from this morning, of Alicia stabbing her spoon into her coffee cup as she paced in the kitchen. “It’s all our money, Nathan! You didn’t just put your savings into it; you convinced me to put mine in too. And now you tell me the bottom’s falling out?”

The day couldn’t get any worse after that; so Nathan started walking again.

At one time this part of town was full of white working-class families with shared values and expectations. Now, the houses were worth millions and, Grace said, nobody knew their neighbors. The two aboriginal kids sitting on the porch stared at Nathan suspiciously as he walked up.

“Is Grace here?” he asked.

“In the kitchen,” said one, jabbing a thumb at the door. Nathan went inside, past a small living room that had been remade as office space. Three more teens wearing AR glasses stood in the middle of the space, poking at the air and arguing over something invisible to Nathan. Dressed normcore, in jeans and T-shirts, each also bore a card-sized sticker, like a nametag. SMILE YOU’RE ON BODYCAM. Little yellow arrows pointing to a black dot above the words: a camera. The kids on the front porch, he realized, also wore something like that.

Grace Cooper was sitting in a pool of sunlight in the kitchen, reading a tablet, her smile easy and genuine as she rose and hugged him. “How’s my favorite coder?”

Nathan’s stomach tightened. Shall I just blurt it out? The currency is crashing, Grace. We’re about to lose everything. He couldn’t do it, so he sat.

Nathan had known Grace for almost two years, but it was a long time since he’d had to think of her as the client. In fact, she was just the representative; the real client was an aboriginal nation known as the Musqueam who’d lived on this land for thousands of years. Small matter that they’d invited him into their community, their lives. He should have kept his distance.

A few years before he immigrated, Grace’s people had won a centuries’ old land claim that included a substantial chunk of downtown Vancouver. The University golf course, Pacific Spirit Park and much of the port lands south of that were now band territory. That and other settlements had finally given the indigenous peoples of the west coast a power base, and they were building on it. Until today, everyone had benefited—including Nathan.

She sat down after him. The sunlight made her lean back to put her face into shade. “Did you see the news?” she said. “Says Gwaiicoin is doing better than the Canadian dollar.”

It was. He’d checked it fifteen minutes ago, and half an hour before that, and again before that. He’d been up all night watching the numbers, waiting for the change. He shrugged now, glancing away. “Well, the dollar’s a fiat currency,” he said neutrally. “They’re all in trouble since the carbon bubble burst.”

“And because they’re not smart,” she added triumphantly. “Thanks to you guys, we got the smartest currency on the planet.”

“Yeah. It’s been . . . quite a roller coaster.” Maybe if he talked about volatility, about how most cryptocurrencies had failed . . . Even the first, Bitcoin, had only been able to lumber its clumsy way forward for so long. But all of them had weathered the bursting of the carbon bubble better than the dollar, the pound, or the Euro.

One of those currencies was Gwaiicoin. Nathan had first heard about it while couch-surfing in Seattle. He and six other guys had struggled to make the rent on a two-bedroom apartment while housing prices soared. The smart programmers left, hearing that living was cheap on Vancouver Island, and just west of the Alaskan Panhandle in the archipelago known as the Haida Gwaii. As Seattle priced itself out of liveability, the islands where the iconic totem poles stood suddenly became crowded with restless coders.

One result had been Gwaiicoin—and, when Nathan arrived in Vancouver, unexpected and welcome employment.

“Gwaiicoin’s about to be worth a lot more,” Grace was saying. “Once my recruits have added Vancouver to the Gwaii valuation.”

Nathan looked through the serving window at the half-visible teens in the living room. “Recruits?”

She leaned forward, her nose stopping just short of the shaft of sunlight. “We’re talking with City Council about measuring the biomass in the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh parts of the city. These kids are my warriors. They’re programming drones to measure the carbon.”

Nathan nodded towards the street, throat dry. “Good place to start.” His mind was darting about, looking for a way to bring her down gently. Then he realized what she was saying. “Wait—you want to add the local biomass to Gwaiicoin?” Unlike Bitcoin, which had value because of its miners and transaction volume, Gwaiicoin was backed by the value of the ecosystem services of its backers’ territories.

She nodded enthusiastically. “Even the Inuit want to get in on it. The more biomass we all commit, the bigger our Fort Knox gets. It’s brilliant.”

Should have seen this coming, Nathan thought. As the dollar crashed, Gwaiicoin had soared. The government wanted it, but since the Haida were backing the currency with land that the feds had formally ceded through constitutionally binding land-claims settlements, the feds were beggars at the table.

“You know, you spent a whole day trying to convince me that a potlatch currency was crazy. Remember that?” Grace grinned at him.

“Yeah.” He looked down. “Who’d have thought self-taxing money would take off?”

She sighed. “And still you call it a tax. That was the whole idea—you get eminence points for every buck that gets randomly redistributed to the other wallets.”

“Yeah.” Despite being a lead on the project, Nathan didn’t have much eminence. He wasn’t rich, so his wallet didn’t automatically trim itself—but even some of Grace’s poorer neighbors voluntarily put large chunks of their paychecks into redistribution every month, via the potlatch account everyone shared. Redistributed money was randomly scattered among the currency-users’ wallets, and in return the contributors got . . . nothing, or so he’d argued. What they got was eminence, a kind of social capital, but the idea that it could ever be useful had never made sense to Nathan.

Ironically, it made sense now. If Gwaiicoin were to vanish overnight, the people who’d given it away would still have their eminence points. These were a permanent record of how much a person had contributed to the community.

And he had none.

He took one last deep breath and said, “Grace. We have a problem.”

Somewhere nearby a phone rang. “Hold that thought,” said Grace as she hopped up and rummaged for a phone among the papers on the counter. “Hello?”

Nathan watched the flight of emotions cross her face; they settled on anger. “I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said tightly, and put down the phone.

She avoided Nathan’s gaze for a moment. Then she said, “Well. Jeff’s been arrested.”

“I’m going downtown anyway,” said Nathan. “I’ll drop you at the station.”

“I could take a driverless,” she said as she hastily gathered up her stuff. “They got those new self-owned ones, too, just cruising around looking for a fare.”

“They’re creepy,” said Nathan, and she grinned briefly, nodding. As they passed the kids in the living room, Grace said, “Lock up if you go out.”

Nathan glanced back from the porch. “You know them well?”

“These ones? No. But to use this hackspace at all you gotta wear a badge.” She patted her own lapel. “And the house knows what’s in it, and what shouldn’t go out the door.”

Supposedly there was some new privacy protocol in play, but Nathan had been too immersed in Gwaiicoin protocols lately to explore the technology. The kids seemed comfortable having eyes on them all the time, but he wasn’t used to it, any more than he was used to passing empty cars driving down the road.

He preferred to keep his own hands on the wheel, but as they drove now he found he was twisting his hands as if trying to strangle it. Grace didn’t seem to have noticed. “Who’s Jeff?” he made himself ask.

“One of the kids. He’s Haida, his uncle’s a carver on the Gwaii. Probably should introduce you.”

“But he’s been arrested . . . ?”

“It’s just harassment. You know they do that to us all the time.” She glared out the window, but her expression gradually softened. “It’s getting better. Gwaiicoin gives the poorest of us some money every month, and the richer the rest of us get, the more goes to them. No Department of Indian Affairs doling it out. Less harassment. It’s working, Nathan!” She rolled down the window and cool air curled in, teasing her hair.

When they pulled into the police station’s parking lot, Nathan hesitated. “Why don’t you come in?” said Grace. “This won’t take long. Then you can meet Jeff.”

“All right.”

Of course, it took longer than it should have. Service systems hadn’t made it to the Vancouver Police Department yet; any other government office, and Grace could have called in her request or used her glasses and let the computers facilitate it. Here, she had to speak to a desk sergeant, and then they waited in the foyer with a number of other bored or frustrated-looking people. While they stood there (all the plastic chairs were full), Nathan said, “Is Jeff a carver?”

She shook her head. “That’s his uncle’s thing. No, Jeff’s studying ecology and law, like any decent Haida these days. Today, he was supposed to be adding new sensors to the downtown mesh network.”

Nathan nodded and they sat there for a while. Finally, Nathan said, “Grace. There’s a problem with Gwaiicoin.”

She’d been chewing her lip and staring out the window. Now she focused all her attention on him. It was quiet in the waiting room, with no TV, no distractions. Nathan squirmed under her gaze.

“There’s been a Sybil attack,” he went on, feeling a strange mix of relief and panic that made the words impossible to stop now. “It’s supposed to be a one-person, one-wallet system. Otherwise the rich can just make millions of wallets for themselves and when their full wallets trigger a redistribution, chances are the funds will end up back in an empty wallet they already own.”

She crossed her arms. “I thought that’s why you made the deal with the government. It’s one wallet per Social Insurance Number.”

“Yeah,” he hesitated. “Somebody’s hacked the SIN databases. Made, well, about a million bogus citizens. And they’ve built wallets with them.”

Grace’s eyes went wide and she stood up, fists clenched.

“Maybe . . . Maybe it’s fixable,” he said, spreading his hands. “I mean, the Sybil attack . . . it’s never been solved, every cryptocurrency is vulnerable to it, we’re no worse than Bitcoin was in that sense but of course the potlatch system is critical in your case . . . ” He knew he was babbling but under her accusing gaze he couldn’t stop himself. “I mean, when Microsoft looked at it they decided the only way to prevent Sybils was to have a trusted third party to establish identities, so, so—” He was desperate now. “That’s what we did, Grace! We used the best approach there was. And you know, it’s not just a problem for us, the government’s got to fix it or the whole SIN Number system is compromised . . . ”

He could see she wasn’t listening anymore. Instead, she was putting together a reply. But just as she was opening her mouth and starting to point at Nathan, an officer behind the counter called out, “Grace Cooper!”

She glared at Nathan, snapped her mouth shut, then went behind the security screen with another officer. Nathan could see them through the glass, and debated whether he should just go. But he was a big name on the development team, and the others—well, they were all quiet today. Hiding in their beds, he’d bet. Leaving him to take the heat; but maybe that was the way it should be. He waited.

Grace’s conversation with the cop was surprisingly brief. The officer didn’t look happy, and when they bent over a laptop together and he read something there, he looked positively furious. Grace came out a few minutes later, looking darkly satisfied. “He’ll be right out.”

“What happened?”

“He was in one of the ravines in the University Endowment Lands, nailing sensors to trees. Somebody heard him or saw him and called the cops. They found five hundred dollars in his pocket. Figured an aboriginal kid wouldn’t have that kind of money ’cept by stealing it. So they trumped something up and brought him in.”

Nathan looked past her at the cop, who was now angrily talking to another officer behind the glass. “And what did you just do?”

“I fixed it.” She crossed her arms again and pinned Nathan with accusing eyes. “What are you going to do, Nathan?”

“Fix it! Of course, Grace, why do you think I came to you? All my money’s in Gwaiicoin! Mine and . . . Look, if this goes south I go down with it. I know I gotta fix it.”

She didn’t reply. A few minutes later a young man with shoulder-length black hair and a wide-cheekboned face came out, lugging a backpack. “Hiya, Grace,” he said, unsmiling. “Hell of a day.” Then he squinted at Nathan. “Hey.”

“This is Nathan. He was just leaving.”

“Right. Just leaving. Listen, Grace, I . . . ” Her face was an impenetrable mask. Nathan’s shoulders slumped and he turned away.

“I’ll talk to you soon.”

Alicia was waiting for him when he walked in the door. “Tell me why I can’t pull my money!”

While Nathan visited one development team member after another, she had been texting him with this exact question, and he’d been fending her off as best he could.

“Because the news hasn’t hit yet,” he said as he kicked of his shoes. “Until this goes public, anything you or I do is going to look like insider trading. Hell, it would be insider trading. That’s why nobody else on the team has bought out yet.” He went straight to the kitchen and rooted around in the fridge for a beer. “But trust me, they’re all sitting at their desks with hands hovering over the mouse, waiting for the news to break.”

“But don’t you know when that’s going to happen? The bottom’s going to fall out of Gwaiicoin. We’ll lose everything if we don’t sell now.”

He stalked into the living room and sat down. The couch faced out over Blanca Street, and the forested campus of the University of British Columbia. You could see Musqueam lands from here. “We all know that.” He savagely yanked the cap off the bottle and took a deep pull, glaring at her. “It’s up to the government to make an official statement and they’re sitting on it for now. And for the rest of us . . . none of us can be seen to be the first to bail. Who’d want to be known as the guy who kicked off the biggest crash since the Great Depression?”

“It’s not that big,” she said.

“It is to us. To the Haida. And the Musqueam and the others.”

“So you’re all holding your breath. But should I?”

He blinked at her. “Insider trading. Besides, do you want to be known as the one who brought down Gwaiicoin?”

She thought about it. “I would if I had to. It’s my money.”

“And that’s why it’ll go all the way down when it goes. But your reputation—your career—isn’t riding on this. Mine is. Just . . . just hold off for an hour or two.” He made a patting gesture with both hands, as if to keep the whole issue down. “I’m sure it’ll hit the news tonight.”

Her lips thinned; she whirled, and went back to the kitchen, to bang around in the cupboards.

A year ago Nathan’s safety net had been this condo and another one—an investment property in the suburbs. No matter how the Gwaiicoin experiment did, he had wealth sunk in real estate. Now, housing prices were collapsing in the downtown core. There was general flight from one of the priciest markets on the continent. He’d seen little signs of the decay just now that only a local would notice: the paint was peeling on the garage doors, the exhaust fans in the wall weren’t running. Homeless people were living under the neighborhood’s bridges.

So he’d sold off his investment property and put the money into Gwaiicoin.

Rather than turn on the TV, he put on his AR glasses, went to stand on the balcony and gazed through the damp air at the park.

Shadows leaned in from the right as the sun neared the waters of the Strait. He loved to sit out here and watch the sunset proceed, the lights come on in their thousands as night fell. The city’s gone quiet even since I moved here. The incessant hum of distant internal combustion engines had become rare as electrics took over. Some said that quieter cars were also responsible for more people strolling, not walking, in evening light like this.

Nathan sighed and called up the Gwaii overlay in his glasses.

The heads-up display showed a silent aurora above the city, its rippling banners of light made of thousands of thin vertical lines. Each line signified ownership—of houses, cars, shops—inferred by algorithms that constantly rifled through public databases and commercial stats. The lines joined and rejoined overhead, becoming fewer, showing how most of the houses were really owned by this or that bank; how businesses were in debt to other businesses. All those relationships of ownership and debt consolidated and narrowed as the line rose, joining in private and public corporations, and these sprouted lines to names. Compared to the dizzying complexity at street level, there were very, very few names up there at the top.

Nathan hadn’t built this overlay, and didn’t know who had. Whoever it was, they designed in a subtle gray-white background that you could only see by standing in the dark and looking up. The image was one of the Art Deco cityscapes from the old movie Metropolis.

He turned on Fountain View, and now the lines pulsed faintly in rising waves. Those ascending glimmers represented money. Some of it rose only to fall again, but some kept on rising, clustering, concentrating, fleeing far over the horizon or ending in the tangle of names above the city. You could change the lights into numbers, and they would show more money going up than was coming down.

Lately Nathan imagined an invisible line coming out of his own head, gutting him like a hooked fish. It was his debt, tugging on him day and night. Money flowed up that line and never came back. If not for the Gwaii, it would suck up his car and his condo; so he turned on the Haida view. It usually reassured him.

A different tangle of lines sprouted from the darkening city—gold, not that wan green, and sparser. Value rose up those bright lines, too, and twined and knotted over the city. But it fell, too, in fine thin lines like a mist of rain. If you converted the lines to numbers, you’d see that almost as much fell back as rose. It concentrated, but in the middle rather than at the top. And coins that flew off over the horizon were usually matched by others coming back.

“Help me with this,” called Alicia. Nathan went back in to chop onions, but he kept the overlay active.

One of the Gwaiicoin experiments he’d been involved in was a vase on the corner of the counter. He’d bought it entirely with Gwaiicoin, and it had a virtual tag on it that was different from the others sprouting from his furniture, dishes and clothes. The tag said he wasn’t the owner of the vase, but its steward. Such stewardship contracts were the default in any transfer of assets managed entirely through Gwaiicoin. The contract was registered in the Gwaiicoin blockchain, forever beyond the reach of hackers or thieves. It said that the vase was subject to potlatch like his Gwaiicoin, and someday, its virtual tag might change, telling him that the thing had a new steward—somebody picked at random by the algorithm of the coin. He would gain eminence if he gave it to that person. He’d been reluctant to try that out, and Alicia had suspiciously called it “voluntary communism.”

Communism. Such a quaint old word. A twentieth-century notion, a square peg for the 21st century’s round hole. Still, right now the vase was changing its tag—the invisible one in Nathan’s imagination. From being a sign of his triumph, it was rapidly becoming a symbol of his defeat.

There was nothing on the evening news, but the pressure kept growing inside him. He stood, he paced. Alicia watched, arms folded, from the couch. He monitored the Gwaiicoin developers’ chat room, but nobody was there. They were all waiting. Somebody would have to make the first move.

Finally, at eight o’clock, social media started lighting up. Sybil Attack. Gwaiicoin compromised. As the tweets and posts began flying fast and furious he turned to Alicia and said, “Do it.”

As she raced to get her laptop, Nathan sat down and dismissed all his overlays. He called up his financial app and sat for a long time looking at the impressive balance on the Gwaiicoin side, and the nearly empty one in dollars. Below his Gwaiicoin balance was a link for voluntary transfers to the potlatch account.

I could drop my coins back into dollars, and just walk away. Across the room, the clattering of Alicia’s laptop told him what she was doing.

He stared at the other link. He was partly responsible for dragging thousands of people—mostly poor to begin with—into this fiasco. If he put his money into potlatch, he would lose it as surely as if he’d burned wads of dollar bills. The coins would instantly appear in others’ wallets, randomly scattered among the emptiest of them. Some would be lost to the Sybil attackers, but most would go to real people. Then, those people could cash out in dollars, and end the Gwaiicoin experiment with just a little more than they’d had this morning.

And he would have nothing. Except, in the form of eminence, proof that he’d tried to help. Not monetary capital, but social capital.

Nathan sat there for a long time. Then he slowly reached out, and made a transfer.

At ten, he went for a walk.

It wasn’t raining, and it was summer; so you walked. He’d always enjoyed strolling along Blanca, with its tall walls of trees and hedges, the suggestion of darkness over the western streets that came from the presence of the UBC forest lands. You passed through that forest on your way to the campus, which dominated the end of the peninsula. Taking University Boulevard, you could peek past the trees lining it to the golf course on either side.

Except he never went that way. It was all Musqueam territory, and while they were clients and friends, they had also filled the place with cameras and drones. These didn’t bother him so much around Grace’s house, but here, as a solitary walker, he became self-conscious.

He walked, head down, and didn’t look at the overlay. He imagined it anyway: the slow, ponderous collapse of that pyramid of golden light that he’d seen hovering above the city earlier. The first rats leaping off the ship would alert everybody else, and by now everybody would be selling. It would be a classic financial collapse, and he had helped set it off. Who was going to hire him now?

Somehow his feet had carried him south to 10th Avenue and University. Off to the right, the golf course gleamed in the evening light. The BC Golf House was also alight and its parking lot full, mostly with pickup trucks and new model electrics, not the pricey sedans you usually saw there.

He saw a car pull in, stop, and Grace Cooper got out.

Now he remembered: there was supposed to be a social tonight. The councils were coming together to talk about their successes. Grace had told him about socials last week. “They used to have them in the Maritimes and prairies all the time. You just rent a hall, buy a liquor license and find some garage band that’s willing to come out and play. Then call all your friends, and they call their friends . . . ”

The hall’s front doors were wide open and people were standing around laughing and talking on the walk. Nathan ran under the weave of electric bus wires that canopied the street, and came up behind Grace just as she was about to enter. “Grace!”

She whirled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

He stopped, hesitated, then squared his shoulders. “I got us into this mess. Are any of the other developers here?”

She shook her head.

“Somebody has to take responsibility—” He made to enter the hall, but she stopped him.

“You’re not going to talk about it, and I’m not going to either because that’s not what tonight’s about. I don’t want you to make it about this. We’re celebrating other things here—things we actually accomplished.” He flinched from her emphasis. It was suddenly obvious why the social was happening at the Golf House. Tiny it might be, but it was on Musqueam land. Land they had taken back.

“What’s done counts,” she said. “What we tried . . . ” She shrugged. “Not so much.” Then she moved out of his way. “Go on in, I can’t stop you.”

He almost turned away, but whatever he told himself, these people were not just clients. He wanted to be able to look them in the eyes after all this was done. “I won’t bring it up,” he said. “But others will, and they’ll want to know what I’m doing about the situation.”

“Which is?”

He opened his mouth, throat dry, and couldn’t say it. He just pushed on past her, into the hall.

A folk ensemble was playing. There were tables around the sides of the hall and people roved, chatting. Nobody was dancing but the atmosphere was upbeat. And it should be; here were the inheritors of stubborn cultures that, after five hundred years of often-systematic oppression, were still here.

And were they ever. For the next hour Nathan passed from table to table, saying hi to people he barely knew and, through them, meeting other focused and determined citizens of Canada’s youngest and fastest growing demographic. These were kids in their late twenties and early thirties who’d made great money in the oil sands and northern mines, and were now here starting families and pouring their wealth into the Maa-Nalth Treaty Association, the St’at’imc Chiefs Council or the Carrier Sekani Services. Several of these organizations were rapidly mutating into shadow governments in central B.C. There were so many historical groups, so many unpronounceable names and treaty claims that you’d think it was all chaos. There was an emergent order to it all, though. Gwaiicoin and the blockchain were supposed to be helping with that.

He could see it in their eyes; everybody knew about the Sybil attack. They knew what it meant, but nobody confronted him. Somehow, that hurt more than if they’d beaten him and thrown him into the parking lot.

After a while, exhausted, he found himself sitting across from Jeff. Casting about for something—anything—other than Gwaiicoin to talk about, Nathan asked, “How did Grace get you out so quickly today? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

Jeff pried the material of his shirt forward to show his bodycam. “I told the cops myself, but they wouldn’t listen. This thing has been uploading a low-frame‒rate video stream constantly for the past month. Every frame is signed with a hash and What3Words coordinate and timestamped in the GPB. That’s the, uh, Global Positioning Blockchain. The GPB can verify where I was every second of every day and prove I didn’t break into anybody’s house. When I told them that, they wanted to see the video, but I told them to fuck off. They didn’t have the right. So we were . . . ” He seemed to choose his next words delicately. “At an impasse.

“Grace knew something about it I didn’t, though.”

Nathan had heard of the GPB—in that passing way he’d heard of about a million other applications of blockchain technology. GPB was an attestation system, providing the spatial equivalent to a timestamp. It was a secure, decentralized, autonomous way for people all over the world to identify and track specific objects or people. Nathan had shied away from it because to him it had always seemed like the backdoor to some creepy surveillance society.

“What did Grace know that you didn’t?”

Jeff shook his head ruefully. “The whole lifelog’s encrypted with something called FHE. Fully homo-something encryption. Every frame of the lifelog is encrypted in the camera, before it’s uploaded, using a key that needs at least three people to unlock it. One of them being me, I guess.” He shrugged. “Anyway, because of FHE, the GPB can query that encrypted frame for the answer to specific questions—like, was I in somebody’s house by the ravine—without decrypting the data.”

Fully homomorphic encryption. It was all the rage in some circles, the way Bitcoin had been around 2010. It really did let untrusted third parties analyze your data without decrypting it. You could trust them because they couldn’t even in principle have seen what those results were, even though they’d done the work to generate them. Only you could open the returned file.

Nathan was happy for this mathematical distraction. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “Because the GPB’s a transparent blockchain, we can prove the encrypted frames haven’t been tampered with or replaced once they’re uploaded. And we can analyze each frame to find out whether any of them show you straying off the path . . . But how do we know you didn’t switch bodycams with somebody else?”

“Because the frame rate’s high enough that if I swapped it, that would have been visible. The GPB can attest to the whole path I took through the day”—Jeff swooped his hand over the tabletop—“without us having to show any of the frames to the cops. Which alibis me out while securing my privacy.”

“Wow.” The video feed was effectively also a blockchain, the truth of each new frame attested to by the ones that preceded it. Still . . . “You could hack it,” Nathan decided. “The camera’s the vulnerable point. If you mess with that . . . ”

Jeff was shaking his head. “You forget the mesh network. It was uploading data about me the whole time. The trees were watching. And the security cameras on the telephone poles—you know this was near Musqueam land—they feed the same frames to our security company that owns them and to the GPB at the same time. So it’s like having multiple witnesses who can say they saw you somewhere. Difference is we don’t have to show that proof to a cop or a judge to make it official. Once you’ve got enough independent witnesses, it’s just effectively impossible for all of them to have been compromised.” He grinned. “The cops at the station didn’t get that, but they phoned somebody else who did. And that’s how it went down.”

Nathan shook his head. “Cool.” With the GPB, FHE, and enough independent cameras, you could turn supposedly ephemeral internet images into proof of position for any object on Earth, while guaranteeing anonymity for that object. You could do it for people, for trees, briefcases full of cash, cars . . . 

Too bad, he mused, you couldn’t also do it for something virtual, like a game character.

Or a piece of software . . . 

Nathan stood up so suddenly he nearly knocked over the bench. “Shit!”

Jeff looked up, eyebrows raised. “What?”

“I gotta go.” Nathan turned, and practically ran from the hall.

Nathan realized Alicia was talking to him, and had been for some time. He glanced over; she was standing there in a bathrobe, hair tangled, looking at him with a really worried expression on her face.

“One sec,” he said. He laid his hands on the keyboard and entered COMMIT. Then he hit RETURN, leaned back, and sighed.

“You’ve been crazy typing for three hours,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He looked at the clock in the corner of his monitor screen. It was two am. He was wide awake, practically jumping out of his skin with energy, though he knew how that went: the mental crash, when it came, would have him sleeping most of tomorrow.

“Fixed it,” he said. “Now I gotta . . . ” He turned from her to text the rest of the team.

Her hand on his shoulder pulled him back to the moment. “Fixed what? Nathan, what the fuck are you doing? You’re scaring me.”

“The… the Sybil attack. I found a fix.” Fix hardly summed up what he’d just done, but right now he was having a bit of trouble with natural languages, like English. Nathan’s head was full of the object code he’d been putting together, and that he’d just committed to a new fork of the Gwaiicoin wallet system.

He rubbed his eyes. “Just one sec, and I’ll tell you all about it.” He texted the team; they’d mostly be asleep, but the buzz of their phones would wake a few, and if nobody got back to him in the next few minutes he’d start phoning them.

The sell-off of Gwaiicoin was in full swing, and he’d been keeping an eye on it while he worked. Luckily, it hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, for the simple reason that transactions above a certain size were taxed by the currency itself. When Alicia had moved her money from Gwaiicoin to dollars, some of those funds had been transferred to thin Gwaiicoin wallets. Until the poorest wallets divested, a goodly chunk of the money was going to stay in the system.

Still, once the rich had divested the poor would follow, and then the system really would collapse.

He hit SEND, then turned to Alicia. “What if you could prove that each Gwaiicoin user was a human being and had one unique wallet?”

“Oh, God.” She rummaged through her hair, then leaned back against the office wall. “No Sybil attack. Is that it?” She stopped, blinked at him. “I thought you couldn’t do that. You need a trusted third party and that was supposed to be the Social Insurance System. And they crapped out. They got hacked.”

“What if you didn’t need that third party? If you identified each person as a unique position in spacetime, and that person’s one and only wallet is at that same position? Each wallet has a position and it has to correspond to a person’s position. Only one wallet is allowed for any position. So: unique person, unique wallet. Sybil attack solved.”

She shook her head. “Just make up fake people.”

Nathan laughed and jumped up. “But you can’t! That’s what’s so great about it!” The more bodycams, cop-cams, security cams, GPS-sensing sports and health trackers that uploaded their data to the Global Positioning Blockchain, the more witnesses there were to attest to peoples’ existence and location. FHE encryption meant you could hide the data from prying eyes, but still prove your identity in full public view.

“It’ll take a while for the fix to work,” he admitted. “Weeks, months maybe, until everyone using the coin is accounted for. Once they all are, though, Sybil attacks will be impossible. Meanwhile . . . ” He frowned at the growing divestment numbers.

Alicia was wide awake now. “It won’t matter if it all goes south tonight.” She had put on her glasses and was staring out the window—probably watching in AR as the gold lines of Gwaiicoin pulled back from house after darkened house, like candle flames going out. “Though I suppose if the team reinvests it’ll send a strong signal . . . ” She turned to him and raised her glasses. “That what you’re going to do now?”

Nathan sat there, gazing at the jumble of windows in the monitor. “No.” Giddiness battled with despair.

He hadn’t told Grace what he’d done, though she’d find out soon enough. He couldn’t avoid Alicia, though.

“I didn’t divest,” he said, still staring at the screen. “I could have. Should have, I guess. Maybe I panicked, I dunno, I—”

“Nathan.” She came to lean on the table next to him. “What did you do?”

“I gave it away.” A half-hysterical laugh rose out of him. “All of it. Straight into the potlatch account—swoosh!” He zoomed his hand over the keyboard, like Jeff had earlier.

The look of horror on Alicia’s face was perfect. The rest of the laugh burst its way out of Nathan, battling tears.

He’d given away all his savings.

“I gave it to the people, and now all I have...” He clicked over to his Gwaiicoin wallet. “ . . . is a hell of a lot of eminence.”

“So you didn’t divest. You—”

“Invested. And if this crash turns around . . . ”

“Oh, Nathan, what have you done?”

He slumped back, shaking his head, but smiling.

“I don’t know. But just maybe . . . ”

He turned to look at the city skyline, picturing the fountaining flow of currencies: money, power, influence and, joining them, a quality that those other media had never been able to carry: trust.

“Maybe,” he murmured, half to himself, “I’ve found a new way to be rich.”

Originally published in Chasing Shadows, edited by David Brin and Stephen W. Potts.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Steven Popkes

Steven Popkes is a science fiction writer and software engineer with a B.S. in Zoology and an M.S. in Neurophysiology. He has published about thirty or so short stories in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, and other magazines and anthologies.

Yoon Ha Lee

Yoon Ha Lee’s debut Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.

Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder is a professional futurist as well as an SF author who divides his time between writing fiction and analyzing, conducting workshops and speaking on the potential impacts of science and technology on society. His next book, The Million, will be published by Tor.com on August 14, 2018. Karl lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and daughter; he has a website at www.kschroeder.com and his Twitter handle is @KarlSchroeder.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is The Final Frontier, which will be published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.