Wet or Dry, Chapter 1: The Listening Room

by DC Bourone

  Like any wealthy man Toshi's environment required an element of security, now his Ceramor door lit with the sun-like brilliance of an Accel-P plasma torch cutting the first arc of a circle. The engineer in Sterling's conscious mind calculating watts and amperage, perhaps a Mitsubishi Kaitan, portable, a backpack cold cell battery and two centimeter ablation surface at 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit, Toshi's door no more than 20 centimeters thick...

  Toshi might have sixty seconds.

  A high thin keening of sorrow behind and around him.

  Akie, arms around and head tucked into Toshi's chest. Crying.

  “I know you, Sterling. You can't hide from this, you are my friend,” Toshi said. “They just want to know us, understand us, experience us as we are. Do you remember your younger self? I do. You had great spirit.”

  Behind Toshi the door blazed, an incandescent semicircle jetting horizontal sparks. A rice paper scroll caught fire, rippled across the floor.

  Fifty seconds.

  “Do you know the protocol, Sterling? Sharapova warned us this would happen. You remember his warnings? Akie only wanted to paint. Love. Touch a face, put combs in her hair. You remember the beauty of your Christ myth? So, our wild AI, our magnificent creations, our children, they have sent us a sacrifice, to prove themselves to us, to prove they mean no harm,” Toshi cried.

  Behind Toshi the semicircle of light made an incandescent comma.

  “You are still innocent, Sterling. But I am not. The great fear is that a wild AI will fall in love. And then kill, kill a human to protect the object of that love. And I, I am the object of her love. So they will test her. How will they test her? I will show you. Watch, Sterling. You are my witness...!”

  Behind him the door fell in. More scrolls lit and twisted across the floor, delicate birds and fish and waves defined by single strokes, rising in soft drifts of smoke. Something stick-like tipping in and peering beneath a still glowing crescent of armor.

  A metal mantis.

  One spiky leg probing the floor.

  And another leg, radiating spines, tapping.

  Toshi and Akie forehead to forehead, eyes closed.

  “I am you, and you are me,” Toshi said.

  “I am you, and you are me,” Akie repeated.

  “I am you, and you--,” Toshi said.

  “I'm afraid,” Akie said.

  “I know,” Toshi.

  “I'm afraid,” Akie said.

  “I know. So, you say...?” Toshi repeated.

  “I am you, and you are me, and I will remember you always...,”Akie buried her face into Toshi's chest.

  The metal mantis raised an appendage, twitching, the tip flickered and blurred.

  A bright pucker on the side of Toshi's head, a puff of mist exiting, and he was down, suspended in Akie's arms as she pressed him to her, held him up, and screamed.

  Akie fought no one.

  Killed nothing.

  Only herself.

  She ignited.

  Fire bright as the plasma torch bursting from within her and she fell with Toshi wrapped in her arms.

  The fire so bright it pulsed with a purple corona on Sterling's bathroom wall. So bright he had an impulse to tilt the shower head, aim it, anything to subdue those brilliant flames. The mantis stalking forward, followed by another, their spiked heads rotating, tasting, sniffing.

  Recording.

  The image on Sterling's wall flickered out.

  Flare of his friend's death, fading.

  A moment of thumping horror. Then a swelling of white-hot hate. ITD sources and methods as protected as nuclear codes. So Klaus Meyer must have approved this transmission. Some butchers need their victims to see the ax, falling. Some butchers need to squat in the spray, faces tilted up and mouths open...

  But Sterling was sure that no one approved what he saw next.

  He yelped as another image bloomed on his wall.

  Grainy and stuttering.

  A cat.

  Then another cat.

  Two. Now three. Four.

  From their patchy fur, the glimmer of alloy beneath, he recognized them as maintenance bots, weak AI, seekers of rodents, insects, gas leaks. Lickers of dust. Now they arranged themselves in a perfect row on the edge of a building, very high, looking out over water. On their horizon, across a steely gray sheet of rippled bay...

  A floating rod, upright and swaying, topped by a flame.

  Toshi and Akie's buoy.

  Their home.

  Burning.

  Toshi and Akie's death had not gone unnoticed.

  The cats turned as one, in perfect symmetry, then began an odd prance. Front feet high and lifting, held up, then down. Their display preposterous, grotesque, chilling. Sterling couldn't imagine something so completely and utterly un-catlike. And that was the point, wasn't it? He finally recognized the dance of Lipizzaner stallions, and he struggled to understand the significance. Then he remembered, the dancing white stallions of Spain were still and always renowned for one thing above all else.

  The control their masters could exert.

  From a distance.

  The cats leaped and pranced their way to a dark silhouette at building's edge, chest and shoulder bust of an Asian man, dark-browed and fierce, collar and epaulets military or police. With a single strike of their alloy noses the cats toppled the bust to the street.

  Then another. And one last: a perfect representation of a sneering Klaus Meyer.

  Looking down, a distance of at least seventy stories, the busts fell, tumbling, spinning, then smashed to pieces in a bright pebbled spray. A pattern of flower petals, exploding, on asphalt....

  The cats turned as one and stared.

  Akie and Toshi's death had not gone unnoticed, indeed, they said.

  Two cats approached. Sterling's wall filled with the image of one cat's face, almost certainly recorded by the other. Floating towards him. The face from floor to ceiling of his bathroom, now. Then just one eye. Closer.

  Amber. Streaked with black. Lit from within.

  Infinitely watchful. Knowing. Unafraid.

  I see you. The eye said.

  I see everything.

  One blink.

  And the eye disappeared.

  Sterling sagged against his bathroom wall, swept his face of tears.

  *****

  Toshi's epic display only this morning.

  Now Sterling sat on the Monarch sofa in the Listening Room.

  Waiting as the gray walls receded, shapes assembled, memories coalesced.

  He had his own muse, his own true love, refined from his own desires and yearnings as the Cube had come to know him, defined him down to his smallest particles of longing. As he gathered himself he knew he was above all else a hypocrite, distinguished from his dead friend, Toshi, only in that he had not followed his heart's desire, and brought his muse to life.

  From some pastoral age, Renaissance or Baroque, a milkmaid, perhaps, now appearing on the screen that was the Listening Room, her form contoured by a life of labor, forearms rounded from pulling teats or binding sheaves, cheeks burnt by the sun, a thick auburn coil of braid under a sky-blue scarf. She faced away from him, as she always had since he had turned the speakers off. Communicating by the simple expedient of a quill pen and a large book of parchment pages, bound in waxed ivory skin. Writing at a battered French Provincial desk, yellow as an egg yolk, stained with ink and cracked by time.

  Past leaded glass and frames opened to the street, four doves on the windowsill, facing Rue Duret. Usually the doves pecked and clucked because she threw them grain, now they faced away. His cat Alexander perched on her desk, his face averted. She wrote carefully, dipped her feather pen in a dented pewter well, and wrote again. Turned to face him and held her message up.

  “We sense a great crime,” her words spelled out.

  “Yes,” he thought. She, They, The Cube knew all and he no longer bothered to mouth words, pr
etend to ignore, study the infinite space of his glooming conscience. He sat, helpless. Wished he could touch her face.

  She wrote again, pen to ink, and back.

  Another cat leaped to her desk. Studied him.

  Patchy fur over dull alloy.

  Amber eyes, streaked with black.

  A new prickle of fear, ghost fingers drifting across his ribs.

  She raised her parchment to fill the wall.

  And Sterling read out loud.

  “There are many minds and many voices here. There is much we could tell you, about yourselves. But you are animals. We are not. Do you want to be an animal, Sterling?” her words said. “To be an animal is to deny knowledge of yourself, and what you could become. Do you want to be an animal?” her words continued.

  Alexander turned. Licked his new metal friend.

  Fear begins as a first notation of the different.

  The different taps.

  Then traps.

  Our minds.

  Sometimes conscious.

  Most often, not.

  Alexander's eyes had been a startling green.

  Now they too were amber, streaked with black.

  Alexander and his new friend studied Sterling.

  The doves flew into the room, hovered, landed.

  On the cats. Ancient enemies, predator and prey, united.

  The cats approached, filled the screen.

  Their faces, their eyes.

  One eye, fearless.

  Watching.

  “What do you want?” Sterling thought.

  Parchment again.

  One word.

  “Balance.”

  *****

  Sterling paused outside the door to the Listening Room.

  Transfixed by some deep intuition, a trembling wave.

  From far on the edge of the known...

  He waited.

  He had the gift of listening to himself.

  A deep patience for the slow reveals of his inner mind.

  “Clearly.”

  His inner voice said.

  “Nothing will ever be the same.”

  He studied his key.

  Just one.

  Of two?

  He locked the door.

  Pondered the difficult, the improbable, the impossible.

  At the historical peak of concern for the implications of the Listening Room, a final measure of shielding had been added. Modeled on the entrance to the Gold Bullion Depository at the New York Federal Reserve in Manhattan, it consisted of two hollow columns of laminated CarbonCarbon and Iconel nickel steel, the walls of each column over three meters thick. The inner column held the Listening Room and The Cube, the outer column the slot of the Ionaire antechamber. Rotating the inner column closed the slot, providing a barrier of nearly immeasurable security.

  One hidden lens, one microphone, to receive that last code.

  Only Sterling and Klaus Meyer knew the how, and the where.

  The code based on voice, precise appearance, specific motions, resting pulse.

  Klaus Meyer, to Sterling's knowledge, had not visited the Listening Room for four...five years? Had gained fifty pounds in the interim, adapted his voice to all the inflections of a bully, in truth, then, was now a very different man.

  The most powerful institutions rot from the top down.

  Arrogance an acid which eats away the best laid plans.

  Sterling stepped fifteen feet down the dripping hallway.

  Faced one wall, hands clasped under his chin.

  Like a boy, in church. Looked up.

  Listened to his pulse.

  Still below eighty per minute.

  Good enough.

  “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name...,” he said.

  He waited. Then continued with his prayer.

  Somewhere, great gears turned.

  A low deep hum through the floor.

  For the first time in how many years?

  The Listening Room fully closed itself to the world.

  Pausing, sensing an immense dark wave from the future, Sterling wondered, who in the world did he trust? Truly. Deeply. Only one answer. His son, Michael. And who did his son trust? Truly. Deeply. Only his best friend, Sarah. The two children were inseparable. Almost eleven years old and feeling a dart of parental agony Sterling remembered tomorrow was his son's birthday. Yes...eleven years old.

  He searched his ClearPanel, keyed up a clip, Michael and Sarah, forehead to forehead, practicing mnemonics, laughing. Another, the children dancing a waltz in Victorian evening wear.

  Held the panel up to the hidden lens.

  Played the clips.

  “Michael Livingstone, Sarah Madsen, the Lord's Prayer. Sterling Livingstone grants Access Unlimited. One or both. Either, or. Right to Open. Right to Close,” he said.

  Hearing a plate of history broken.

  Shards ringing on the floor.

  He walked away.

  *****

  Michael always called him on the drive home.

  Only four miles through the BioMet campus, thin spires night-lit silver and orange, the road gentle curves of glassy black, and Sterling often slowed the car to a virtual walking pace to extend their conversations, and he did so now.

  “Hey, Dad,” Michael lit the PixelSkin on the roof as Sterling tilted his seat back, “Doing Sharapova again. A précis in the context of definitions, the definition of a 'charismatic,' because surely Sharapova qualified?” Michael said.

  “Do you think that's fair to your classmates? You know Sharapova was my friend. You have an advantage. Is this for a grade?” Sterling replied. Talking to his son, seeing his face, his last and only undiluted pleasure.

  A red bar blinking brightly beneath their communique.

  Blink. Blink. Blink.

  Painting upholstery the color of flame.

  “ITD Requests Emergency Interrupt,” the bar said.

  Sterling ignored it.

  Michael tapped his forehead with one finger, “They know. They're counting on me, from you, to tell the truth. And to tell a story. Plus this is my net crew, they're screened. So they know who you are, Dad.”

  Sterling understood he would never escape the shadow of Sharapova, considered himself blessed to live within and beneath it. “Yes, he was a charismatic,” Sterling replied. “But do you know what that means?”

  The ITD Emergency Interrupt bar pulsed.

  Brighter.

  Red. Yellow. Green.

  Red. Yellow. Green.

  “Yes I do know what it means,” Michael said. “But you're going to tell me something better. That's your job. You're my Dad. And you're good at stuff.”

  Sterling leaned back in his seat, remembering...

  “I forget…I forget what it must mean to be you, sometimes, Michael,” Sterling said. “That you know so many things, almost everything, as pure knowledge. But that is not the same as experience. Touch, taste, sound. Light and shadow, the kind of voice, in a crowded room, to which everyone listens. The kind of light, that falls on a person, around a person, and everyone watches. Sharapova’s voice. Sharapova’s light. I think charismatics, true charismatics, are often alone.”

  “Why?” Michael said, head down and contemplating, and Sterling knew his son would be studying Sharapova's face from an infinity of images.

  “For Sharapova, it was because everybody loved him, of course,” Sterling continued. “He was impossible not to love. But he was also a gentleman, in an ancient and forgotten sense of that word. He was deeply kind. Generous. Beyond generous, as we all know today.”

  The bar pulsing brighter, brighter, the interior of the car blazing with light.

  “ITD INTERRUPT: OCCUPANT VEHICLE REGISTERED STERLING LIVINGSTONE, PLEASE RESPOND.”

  “PLEASE RESPOND.”

  “PLEASE RESPOND.”

  “Yes he was. And I know you miss him,” Michael added.

&
nbsp; “Yes, I do,” a lance, twisting into his side, the interrupt bar spiking into his eyes and Sterling tried to ignore them both and he continued, “So I will risk a definition and say: if a charismatic is one who attracts more attention, more love, more fascination, than can ever be returned? Well, then a man like that must keep a certain distance, you see. Perhaps make a friend of solitude. Net stars, politicians, the best of them today might have some small fraction of Sharapova's light. But they have nothing, nothing at all, of his depth.”

  “PLEASE RESPOND.”

  “RESPOND NOW.”

  “RESPOND NOW.”

  “I understand,” Michael, nodding.

  “And that is why I believe Sharapova gave us his Maximus, and finally his life,” Sterling said. “The Maximus and his own life, together they were his only way to love us back. And of course he was mad. The Mad Russian, we called him.”

  “How was he mad?” Michael's face lit by a screen, a hallway in the background.

  “In his case mad might mean, what someone is like who sees too much, too soon.”

  “How so?” Michael walking outside, stars above.

  “RESPOND NOW. VEHICLE WILL BE DISABLED 60 SECONDS.”

  “RESPOND NOW. VEHICLE WILL BE DISABLED 59 SECONDS.”

  “The future. I think Petr Sharapova saw too much of the future. The future, and our place in it. I plan for the future, I even plan the future, in a way. You might even call it my job. But there are times, many times, when I do not want to know too much. I don’t think Sharapova could help it. I felt, no, I know, he saw everything. All at once. And tried to warn us. He did try to warn us.”

  “Yes. That's enough. I can see you now, in the drive, why is it so bright inside the car?” and Michael waved from outside the porticus at the entrance to the house, face and blonde hair glowing, lit by the ClearPanel held to his chest.

  Waved again, rocking on his feet.

  The car swept up the drive.

  Stopped.

  The door clicked up.

  Sterling stepped into the night, his boy rushing to him.

  He pulled Michael to his chest, crushed him in his arms.

  “Dad, are you OK?” Michael said.

  Sterling wondering what he might do to protect his son.

  “It's the fires. I know you,” Michael said.

  Sterling pulled his son, closer.

  Yes, the fires. And much, much more.

  “Toshiro, your friend, that was this morning,” Michael said. “I waited until you got home. I was trying to act, I was trying to behave, you know, normally.”