Macronome

by Howard Pierce

  © Howard Pierce 2019

  Print ISBN: 978-1-54396-500-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-54396-501-8

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Wendy and Haleigh

  and Liu Liu

  This story is the second in a trilogy.

  2128

  She danced down the descending arc of the worn wooden treads, her personal tap step skipping to the same old song in her head, the peachy red glow of the sulfurous sunset over her shoulder. Eyes closed, no need to count the steps, the creak meant three more to the landing. A light elbow brushing of the curved concrete wall positioned her head just so, with her eyes opening to allow the scanner a half second to know her geometry.

  Touching the door’s silver hand pad, she heard the dull snap of the bolt withdrawing and sensed her private world coming to life inside, all systems whirring into process as she entered through the doorway and into the tiny foyer. Spinning on the ball of her foot as she swept the door closed, the end-of-day choreography concluded with a shoulder shrug that dropped her pack onto the chair and a two-part hop as she stepped lightly out of her clogs.

  Lori Norton’s apartment was efficient and soothing, with walls lit in sandy tones and honey colored wood floors that radiated warmth up through her bare feet. It was her private retreat, old and anonymous from the outside, where she felt hidden in plain sight. There was one more step before she could sink into tranquility, one final check of her messages. Her dash unfurled from nothing to shimmer in the air before her as she stepped towards the kitchenette.

  But, instead of message nodes, Lori’s eye caught sight of a large mouse lying cold and dead at her feet, its fuzzy gray form magnified and distorted by the dash’s floating translucent frame.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  She resumed breathing, imagining how it would have felt to have stepped on the mouse. Maybe it wasn’t fully dead, and its needle teeth would have sunk into the side of her foot as she squashed its little body. Would it be better to finish it off with extra squishing, or to kick her foot wildly to dislodge the disgusting bite? There had been no movement despite her scream, so it must be dead.

  Lori refocused. She was holding dinner in a small bag and on top was a ziploc holding fresh salad greens, the perfect body bag. Shaking the greens into a bowl she grabbed a pen from the counter and, kneeling with arms at full extension, rolled the limp body into the clear damp tomb. Tossing the pen in on top she drew the seal and turned back into the kitchenette, opening the disposal door and committing the rodent to eternal atomic redistribution.

  Her appetite was gone so she put away the few groceries, poured herself a glass of yesterday’s red wine, and just stood looking over the raised breakfast counter into her livespace. Lori tried considering the day. Nondescript, nothing to consider really. With glass in hand, she padded five steps over to her antique reclining chair and settled in. It was dusk outside, as seen through the two projection windows that had lit and centered on the blank subterranean wall as she sat. She could see a man from the neighborhood walking his old dog slowly along the weed-cracked sidewalk. The dog was clearly looking for a place to shit, which Lori really didn’t want to watch, so she brought up her dash again and touched the coport for Gumbo.

  Instantly, the old dog, the early evening street scene, and her apartment were gone. In their stead, Lori looked down from a scrubby hillock towards a long stretch of beach carving an arc against sparkling green-blue water. To her immediate right, standing on a rocky outcropping with its black mane flickering stiffly in the wind, was a scarred and greying donkey. It looked unwearyingly beyond her, towards the cactus studded foothills behind them.

  Why? She wondered, why always the donkey? What was it about it, or them, that Danni loved so much?

  Sitting on a pile of sandy rocks, she decided to ignore the donkey and let the breeze waft over her. She could smell the combined odors of Gumbo—barely salt air mixed with donkey and wild onions. She could see Danni’s cabin a quarter mile down the trail, halfway to the beach, and she wondered if she should bother her with a visit. Despite her many visits over the past two years, it still seemed an imposition. Dozens of people probably wanted to see Danni at any given moment, not to mention the constant pressure of the millions using her Dworld as their escape.

  But Danni didn’t seem to notice any pressure and always told her to come by any time—unless the door was closed or she saw snakes on the path. Right now, the door was open and there didn’t seem to be any snakes, so it was probably okay. The sun was well on its way towards the mountains to the west, and Danni would be sitting under the dry vine covered portico on the far side of the cabin. She would be looking east over the sweeping bay, barely cooled by the onshore breeze, while she worked on whatever it was Danni worked on, prepared to offer Lori sweet tea over a short chat.

  A sudden jolt from behind rolled Lori off her rock perch and she looked up from the ground into damp donkey nostrils. She could feel the wet imprint between her shoulder blades. The donkey’s brown eyes were impassive, unhurried, and unwavering, looking past her down the path. Lori got the message, and standing, she began to stride down the dusty track. The donkey followed behind slowly, picking its steps carefully, distended belly swinging side to side.

  Danni looked shockingly old, as if she had aged fifty years in just the two days since Lori had last visited. Her cream brown skin had somehow darkened into mottled age spots, and the taut smoothness was now a ruined map of wrinkles. Her hair, always a rich and lustrous gray, was wispy thin and blown like an abandoned nest around her head. Body flash-desiccated, but with eyes somehow still bright despite their newly clouded lenses.

  Lori hadn’t made a full transition yet, so she watched herself from that weird coport observer status. She was standing frozen in the doorway to the trellised patio, a shocked expression on her face, looking down at the ancient woman who was clearly Danni. The impoliteness of staring from the outside made Lori flush, and she quickly gained full transition as Danni recognized her and smiled.

  Lori sat, saying nothing, and for a short while they just listened to the rustle of the dry vine leaves in the wind. When Danni finally spoke first, her voice was a weak reed, clear enough if you sat close but with little force behind it.

  “Good afternoon, Lori. Don’t be alarmed by my appearance, I will explain that in a few minutes. Tea?” When Lori nodded, Danni sighed. “I’m afraid you will have to help yourself. Pour me some as well if you don’t mind.” Lori filled the two glasses on the tray before them and watched as Danni reached slowly for hers and brought it with a tremor to her lips, smiling to herself at the taste before setting the glass back down carefully.

  “How have you been, Lori? It’s good of you to visit me, particularly today.”

  Lori was suddenly mindful of another disquiet that lay beyond her shock at Danni’s physical transformation. It hinged off the words “particularly today.” Danni didn’t bring conversations in that close. She tended to live and communicate from within the objectivity of her colossal Dataspace, Serendipity. She was a sage who spoke sparingly and taught by way of parables, stories usually expressed as elegant little spacetime loops projected within Serendipity’s interface. Serendipity was her many-dimensional kingdom, and its public face, Gumbo, was the most important and popular of the Dworlds.

  Lori loved working part time at Gumbo. It was a lifesaving counterbalance to her uninspiring day job, and she still always feared that her access to the staff entrance might suddenly be denied—that it would g
o back to displaying a gnarly math question that had to be answered while a screen clock ticked towards zero.

  How many times had it taken her to gain entry that first time? The tenth was the charmed one, the Lonely Runner Conjecture. A peach colored track glimmered in the center of her dash with a partial formula waiting for completion at its center. The track had spun, sucking her carefully structured submission into its graphical vortex, and slowly the magic words appeared on the quieting surface of her dash. “Proof by Lori Norton 2126”.

  Then she was suddenly there for the first time, standing on the hilltop looking down at the little cabin and the sea beyond, with only the sound of the wind in her ears until a voice spoke, “Welcome to Gumbo, Lori.” But there was no one there, just the donkey.

  “I’m fine Danni, other than the occasional dead mouse and my mom giving me too much advice on nutrition and life.” She was watching Danni’s slow progress towards a second sip of tea. “How are you? Have all your interns been wearing you out with constant visits? I’m sure we must be an annoying swarm.”

  With an untroubled laugh and small shrug of her shoulders, Danni considered the obvious. “Well, I have let myself go a bit, but it’s not because of you interns. In fact, you are the only one left, Lori, so we had better come up with a different title.”

  “Just me?” Lori heard the wind get louder in her ears again.

  “Yes, just you.” Danni was looking out to the bay as she spoke, but she seemed to force her attention back on Lori. “I find I need to focus carefully over the next few months Lori, and I am looking for someone willing to absorb some of that focus. I guess you could call it an apprentice, only it’s a good deal more than that.”

  Now, looking only at Lori and fully in the moment, she continued, “You have been a clever and dedicated supporter, Lori, and you have helped out in many ways, but we now need someone who is prepared to bind their entire life into this particular Dworld.”

  Lori noted that sudden age and frailty had not blunted Danni’s single-minded directness.

  For her part, Danni watched carefully as shadows of anxiety played across Lori’s face. “You see Lori, I am going to die soon, and we—Morley and I—would like you to take over the stewardship of Gumbo. Our little Dworld still has a way to go before it concludes, and someone needs to manage it forward. It’s not that difficult really. It mostly operates itself, but now and again some creative entanglement or disentanglement is required.”

  Lori couldn’t picture in her mind how this could be happening. She was an everyday polymath working in the bowels of UNworld, coming and going quietly from the little home she had taken over from her mom and grandmom. It was true that she had a private passion for the puzzling yet exalted Dworld of Gumbo and her admittance into its inner workings was her most proud achievement, but she didn’t think she had ever added much of importance there.

  “But, why me? Me, out of all the thousands of polymaths who must want to be part of Gumbo?” And as the first shock caught up to the second, “And why are you dying? You aren’t, or weren’t, that old.”

  This brought a different smile to Danni’s face, youthful conspiracy under the wrinkles and age spots. “Well, the truth is, there were only a total of seven of you student helpers to ever gain access—not many proofs over all these years. Only three ever really got the Zen, and only one who accepted it as a reality, came in regularly, and just did the work. Plus I liked you best, so I chose to ask you.”

  Danni seemed to take a deep breath while Lori tried to adjust to a very different picture of Gumbo. She had always imagined a large staff of underlings like herself, walled off from one another for security reasons, each working diligently as part of a massively choreographed corps de ballet.

  As Lori was trying to imagine the vast service called Gumbo as the private hobby of Danni, the invisible Morley, and maybe a few others, she heard Danni continuing, “As far as the dying part goes, it is quite simple. I’m one hundred and twelve years old now, and I’m ready to die. I have other things to do so I stopped trying not to die, which turns out to be a very effective approach when you are this old.”

  Lori’s confusion became a metallic taste in her mouth, and a filter of tears covered her eyes. “How can you do other things if you die? I can’t run Gumbo. I don’t have any idea how it works.”

  “You don’t have to know how it works. We have a team that takes care of the mechanics, and it’s very well endowed. My late husband, Simon Rosenthal, created the architecture and the supporting operations around it many years ago. It was the first Dworld ever built, and it is still the best. I expect you know enough about him and his company Obfuservice to understand how durable his creations tended to be, especially his favored children like Gumbo.”

  Danni Kuiu drew herself together, organizing the frame of an offer she had been preparing to make for over a week now. In a perfect world, her apprentice would be older and wiser than Lori Norton, but Lori did share one important characteristic with Danni. She was social spectrum narrow, a 0.12 on the Sloberg Scale. At twenty years old, already over-focused on the constant interlocking problems and patterns of her job and the world, oblivious to the surrounding potential for interlocking relationships with people, Lori had the mind and the temperament Danni needed. A fast learner with a natural sense for where the best view of any problem might lie, Lori had already adapted to the life of a true polymath, agreeably shipwrecked on her private island of perception.

  But this deterioration of body, the biological catch-up that Danni herself had triggered, was progressing faster than she had expected. The pace of aging was increasing and increasingly erratic, with spurts of what felt like rampant cellular death and then days of calm. Danni would need to keep marching forward without second thoughts or recalibration, and Lori would need to decide quickly. Danni didn’t feel any real remorse—it offered the best possible path for Lori. Still, she knew she was asking Lori to jump off the cliff and into the deep and mostly unseen lagoon, through the surface of Gumbo and into the dense under-plume of Serendipity.

  “How much time do you have at the moment, Lori? Did you leave anything on the stove when you jumped here? Are you expected anywhere in the next couple of hours? Have you eaten?”

  Beginning to sense the urgency behind Danni’s frailty, Lori shook her head. “No. I just got home from work and it’s Wednesday, so I have all weekend free. I haven’t eaten since breakfast though. I was just planning on saying hello to you and maybe working on a few non-functional relay tickets.”

  “Good. I will get you something to eat while we talk. You like fish tacos, right?” Danni’s dash appeared as a small pad, and she squinted as she touched a few commands. “Are you in view mode or full integration?”

  Lori realized she had switched over to full integration just as she sat down for tea. “I’m all here. Something must have told me this wasn’t a normal after-work jump.”

  “That was probably seeing my sudden decline into oldness, so let’s get that out of the way first.” Danni took a second’s hesitation for a mindful but shallow breath. “You are now looking at the rapidly progressing restoration of an unmanipulated Danni Kuiu. This is what I should have looked like at one hundred and eighteen. Would have, if I hadn’t played risky games with some of the methyl-based information structures idling within my epigenome. Does that mean anything to you?” Danni sat back in her chair, looking at Lori as Carita stepped onto the patio carrying a plate of warm corn tacos smelling of chili and fish. Carita set the plate down in front of Lori, and both women thanked her as she smiled and left silently, disappearing back into the cottage.

  The smell made Lori realize how hungry she was. The image of the dead mouse was gone, and the process of eating would allow her to put off coming to grips with Danni’s disorienting request. Life had been simple for the two years since she started working at UNworld—maybe too simple. But working for Danni on the side had added
all the complexity she wanted, even though all she had been doing was Gumbo grunt work. Mostly she worked on the never-ending queue of broken programs that mirrored relentless streams of data out of heavily protected warehouses and DataBlocks, from the obvious to the obscure and across the entire web, relaying it all back into Serendipity.

  To Lori, Serendipity was a mesmerizing ravenous beast, whose purpose she didn’t quite fathom. She was Danni’s, a vast and borderless quantum farm of undifferentiated data along with all the manifests of historical relationships between that data. Combined in Serendipity’s visualization plex, they allowed Serendipity to recreate extended moments in time extravagantly over-saturated with information and insinuation. They could be played as streams which one could pause and study from any angle, exposing any intelligence with higher definition. Danni referred to the really interesting ones as multiplex.

  The work made Lori feel like a chess hustler down at the park near her house. Each target’s firewall took a seat across the board from her. People, corporations—they all paid a lot of money for the newest privacy apps that threw up gleaming fortifications around their DataBlocks and linkProfiles. Lori would quietly burrow in beneath the walls and attach a leechTransmitter. She would look for a nearby external interface to zombie, and voila the target became an insatiable feeder source—another tiny part of Serendipity’s sprawling world. “Another one bites the dust” was how Danni said Morley described it.

  “Not really. I mean, I know generally what the epigenome is, but I don’t know what it means to play games with it.” Lori raised a taco to her mouth and bit off an end, slurping fish chunks and spicy juice into her mouth. She felt funny eating tacos in front of Danni while avoiding dealing with the apprentice thing, but she needed time to get her bearings here.

  “Well, to make a rather long story short, many years ago I became aware of people experimenting with ways to alter epigenes and thereby the activity of genes themselves. It turned out that by erasing certain chemical marks within the epigenome, one could erase a cell’s history, allowing it to revert to a more youthful and flexible state. The whole process seemed weirdly and beautifully similar to the early games I was playing with Serendipity back then.”