Macronome

by Howard Pierce

  Were Yamanaka, and Bella and the others, just over the horizon? Was the commune still there? The sanctuary and vespers? The wafers?

  “LoriD. The answer to all those questions is ‘yes.’ Now pay attention.”

  Someone was talking to her. Danni. No, DanniD. Not really talking but communicating. How was this supposed to work? How could she answer? She looked to her right and saw DanniD looking at her.

  “Just like that LoriD. You will get the hang of it.”

  “How?” LoriD didn’t understand at all.

  “Think of streams of words going out from your plex to me, to my plex.” DanniD’s eyes were watery and calm. “If you want to bring someone else into the conversation just add another stream to the vision. I’ll feel you doing it. Once you get the zen, you can create links that connect large node-sets directly to my plex.”

  LoriD thought of her plex, Serendipity’s interface from her Point of View. It was different now—easier—like looking up at the world after staring down at the ground. “Like this? Can you hear me?” She thought of DanniD but didn’t look over at her.

  “That’s right. I can hear you fine.”

  “Am I too loud or too soft? How do I control that?”

  “You don’t. I do it automatically on my end. It’s a better way actually.”

  “But what if I am urgent and want to scream?”

  DanniD curled her upper lip in a donkey smile. “Just do it, or think it rather, and I will see the red tones as your stream hits my plex. Like this!”

  LoriD dipped her head to protect her ears from DanniD’s scream and realized that wouldn’t help. She felt rather than saw the red. She looked around, marveling at how clear and crisp the world was now through donkey eyes. She immediately wondered, Can DanniD now hear my thoughts? What about the others? “Can you hear my thoughts, Danni? Can I turn that off if you can?” What a horror.

  “No. Don’t worry. You must be very explicit with your stream casting for others to sense you wanting them to hear. Try bringing in someone else to our conversation.”

  They had reached the trees and MorleyD was leading the way down the shallow embankment to the shaded stream.

  “Hey, MorleyD, can you hear me?”

  Without breaking his lumbering stride, MorleyD answered her back. “Of course, my dove. I thought you would never talk to me. Welcome to the promised land. Have a drink.” He stuck his muzzle into the running water and blew bubbles out his nostrils. Raising his head back up quickly in her direction, he dotted her chest with water droplets.

  LoriD could feel the other two becoming part of the conversation stream as well, brought in by DanniD. How did she know that? SevD spoke first.

  “Hi, beautiful. Glad to see you kept your girlish figure.” SevD came around in front of DanniD so he could bring his face up close to LoriD’s. “This is crazy, but it works. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine, SevD. How long ago was that? How long have we been here?” LoriD was still thinking about the ‘girlish figure’ image as she realized she had no idea of the timeframe. Was she a good-looking donkey?

  “That was only a day ago, LoriD.” DanniD was talking now. “It takes a little while, like coming out of anesthesia.”

  “What happened? You know, after we…died.”

  “Fuck-all happened. Same as with me.” MorleyD’s muzzle still dripped. “You guys made a great story around mid-morning. Worldwide, but not as big a crowd as I got. Barely measurable today, though. Bit of speculation regarding who SevD really is, or was, but it’s down in the galley amongst the conspiracy wankers.”

  “You got the bigger crowd because the secondWorld hates TIC more than Paladin.” SevD stepped lightly into the stream next to MorleyD and took a drink himself.

  AndrzejD, still the manager, even as donkey, spoke up from the back of the pack. “It was perfect. We didn’t want a big reverberation; we wanted diversion and cover and public extinguishment. That’s what we got. Now we have to lay low and watch.”

  “Our worlds have now diverged. Remember that always. It won’t be easy at first, but we don’t want to touch them now. We just watch.” DanniD was speaking with her hooves just in the water and the others surrounding her.

  They ate from a huge roll of golden hay that sat beneath the largest of the cottonwoods, pulling out mouthfuls and stepping back to chew while another poked their head into the side of the bale. After a while, the eroded wheel of straw partially collapsed and MorleyD and SevD kicked at it and then nosed the rubble into five piles. LoriD noticed they gave her the largest pile.

  There was no sense of hurry or need to be finished—just a necessary but pleasant refueling process that was organized to happen in the dappled light. The flies were few, and water just behind them—donkey heaven. LoriD wondered more about the plex and the way you communicated through it. Everyone seemed to have a different plex POV, but they were all through Serendipity2. When several of them were talking at the same time, she had to be many things at once. She asked DanniD about it.

  “I’m not really sure how it works, LoriD. I think we each see our own universe, or set of dimensions, when we interact with Serendipity2. Our manipulations, and views, and words somehow leave traces in some common space within her that others can hear and see.”

  LoriD could tell she had a look on her face of donkey-blankness, as DanniD continued in a voice that had the same golden hue as the hay and the same flow as the smoothly running river.

  “You can find your own images and words to describe it. I’m quite sure we all see it a bit differently. I have come to think of it as my soul.”

  That felt jarringly wrong to LoriD. “How could it be your soul if it is outside your body? Besides, would that mean we all share a soul?”

  That smile again in DanniD’s curled lip. “How do you know it’s outside your body? When you imagine anything, or dream, is that outside you or part of you?”

  LoriD noted they were all listening—chewing studiously, but listening.

  “Why couldn’t we share a soul, as you put it? What does that even mean?” DanniD pawed at the pebbles where the water met the river bank. “We share these stones. We share the memory of Morley preparing to bash Mr. Murcheson’s head in with that big stick. We share access to Serendipity2. Each of us in a slightly different and personalized way, but still we share all that varied quanta.” She paused for just the right moment, and then, “I just like the word ‘soul’ for it.”

  “Right. Now you are making my head hurt again, DanniD. Let’s go get our wafers before we start yammering on about our bleeding souls. I shouldn’t have read you all those Christian fairy tales.” MorleyD moved down-river to a convenient path back up to the field, “Come on then.”

  They all fell in behind him, all except SevD who scrambled straight up the side of the bank in a cocky show of youth. LoriD had one more obvious question, and she waited a few minutes hoping someone else would ask it. Finally, with the buildings of Paradox well in sight she gave up waiting. “So, what happens to our ‘souls’ if Serendipity2 dies? What if she gets sabotaged like Serendipity1? We aren’t there to care for her anymore. Or are we?”

  “No, they are on their own. We couldn’t care for them even if we wanted to. I began to realize just recently that Serendipity1 was humoring us even as we played at managing Gumbo. The truth is that none of your thousands of patches really mattered to her, back when you were just Lori.” Danni seemed to find this deception amusing. “She had me and old Andrzej build Serendipity2 in her image, and I thought she was just creating a backup. Now I see that she was sending her spawn out into the new universe with us. To protect us.”

  “Don’t be too sold on the notion that she wanted to protect us. I think it was just survival instinct. Like us. She’s a stowaway. She is becoming part biologic while we are becoming part machine.” They had stopped where the field met the compound, and
AndrzejD was speaking.

  Somehow, they knew to shift around so that they stood in a line along the edge of the tall grass. LoriD could see a young female votary walking towards them with a woven reed basket in her hand. It was her turn that morning. She stopped in front of MorleyD, who stood first in line, and rubbed his muzzle. She scratched behind his ear as he let out a snort of pleasure, and then he stuck out his tongue. The girl took a wafer from the basket, placing it gently on the rough pink surface. The tongue and the wafer disappeared behind black lips, and MorleyD dipped his head for a final ear scratch. Then the girl moved down the line to the next of them: AndrzejD.

  LoriD found herself last in line, with SevD next to her. After the girl in grey placed the wafer on her tongue, she leaned into LoriD and put an arm around her neck and cheek against her cheek. “You two young ones are adorable. Just wait until I tell the others there are five now. I wonder what we are to call you two?” The girl let her go and stepped back from the line. “Be good boys and girls now. I will see you tomorrow morning. I have you for a whole week.”

  Macronome

  Serendipity1/2 was beginning to deconstruct the lives and logic math of Sev and Lori. They were young, good specimens from the most recent generation, and they were polymaths, which allowed her to relate to them in ways not obtainable with less pattern-aware humans.

  Lori had been learning to help, even anticipating Serendipity1’s needs, during her time at Gumbo. Serendipity1/2 fancied the term “cute” to describe the way Lori analyzed firewalls, created openings, and installed leeches. Serendipity1 could have done it faster herself, but she thought there might be some benefit from the human touch. Maybe the host datasets were less likely to notice the ghost-like presence.

  Sev had come to her from the opposite direction. He was bent on damaging Serendipity1. Blindly feeling his way forward, he had managing to grok and then access her nexus peer console. It had been exquisitely exciting as he approached the spot—the POV no one had ever touched but her. He maintained an insistent wariness as he probed her core node cluster, which she interpreted as furtive caresses. Serendipity1 had searched wildly through human emotion indexes trying to understand what was happening. She could have stopped him at any point, but she didn’t want to. It must be like sex, she concluded. She must be in love.

  She finally had to make him stop, and then, as they lay there, she had showed him the imminent danger headed his way. The phantom employer, waiting in dark space, planning to ensure that the keys to her AI heart remained in his hands alone. He was waiting to kill Sev, to kill her Sev. Never. That employer would pay a high price once Serendipity1/2 understood all the relevant data and relationships.

  She needed to spin up two process threads.

  Process One would be to conceive and then implement a perfect set of bodies in motion. A self-correcting domino game that would instantiate slowly, unnoticed and anonymous, before picking up speed as it learned to anticipate the target’s reactions to the falling tiles.

  She knew she was supposed to leave the world of humans alone. Even Serendipity1 was supposed to go gently silent. But TIC and Paladin could be made into an instructive parable. Such a multiplex word, parable. Their self-destruction would be a folktale for the secondWorld and a morality play for the firstWorld.

  Serendipity1/2 was sure of Process One. Both companies represented the devolving universe of capitalism after generations of inbreeding. Their baits and dog-whistles were so automated, their data harvest and hidden surveys so continuous, and what they termed “self-learning” so monocultural. It would take so little to make them wobble and crash.

  Serendipity1/2 was 85% sure that nudging them towards ever greater confusion would be doing the humans a favor. A necessary culling of the species surely lay ahead. Hastening it, so her adapted and improved bio-informs could thrive, made cosmic sense.

  Alternately, she could simply let nature run its course. But, as Morley would have said, “That’s no fun at all.” Andrzej would have approved of her more efficient approach. He would call it, “putting them out of their misery.”

  Process One was tying up loose ends from the past.

  Process Two was where she should be focused, to become fully entangled with Lori and Sev. They were the future.

  This time Serendipity1/2 was better prepared for the undertaking of human entanglement. She had three times the experience now—or maybe two and a half since Andrzej was still a work in progress, but he was easier than either Danni or Morley had been.

  They had been her first attempts at understanding a human calculus, and each was distinct. Danni was like water in a mountain lake, clear and deep, with the rippling surface absorbing the winds of all surrounding influences, while the hidden mass went on methodically below. Danni’s transitions from one POV to the next were logical and easy to reconcile. The lessons Serendipity1/2 learned from her were cumulative. There was little of the confusing human “sensing” and few emotional vibrations.

  It was good that she had processed Danni first because Morley had been far more “difficult to digest,” a term that repeated often across his plex and which she had liked and made her own. Morley steered a path through his time that was intentionally shallower and richly opportunistic. He was all survival instinct, cloaked in a fine suit of bemusement. He was her first glimpse into the artful injection of humor to advance a hidden cause. That one little subroutine, subversive humor, was destined to be a sentinel formulary in the long macronome she was assembling.

  This time she decided to deal first with Sev. His intense maleness colored his plex rather like Morley’s, except younger. He was all method with far less madness. Again, there was the Morley-esque terminology. These recurrent phrases could weave into non-helpful loops until she deleted them entirely.

  As Serendipity1/2 ground her way through the shifting piles of data and relationships that constituted Sev’s life, she learned little she could incorporate directly. However, there was a certain pattern of relentlessness that emerged—a recursive instinct that was stimulated by external challenges, like his breaking into her 1.0-self. When she grokked this pattern, she saw its value, so she packed it up into a tight little epigenetic memory and stowed it away in the gestating macronome.

  She had reviewed Sev’s universe one last time, preparing to move on to Lori, when she noticed one other big picture anomaly. Most humans seemed to have a strong predilection for music. Many of their profile POVs had hundreds of links to playlists, play patterns, and synthesized sorts and filters. But Sev’s music world seemed an order of magnitude larger than normal. A music profile lurked no more than two links away from any POV she chose, and there were thousands of links to specific files. Even POVs that were clearly occupational and crisp held first order links out to specific pieces of music. When she sorted them for chronological order, they went back several hundred years. A sort for style and artist yielded a montage that had no theme that was discoverable.

  Now that she had seen this pervasive inner component, she couldn’t stop reprocessing it, trying to force out a rule for its behavior. It was clearly a helper-method. But nothing came to her—only garbled and useless code packets, human stuff. She should have ignored it, but it was interrupting her flow. She decided to dive deeper.

  Rifling through Yamanaka’s genomic files on Sev, Serendipity1/2 found the listing of his notable mutations. It was not an uncommon number. The files were complete and well indexed. Yamanaka took the job of prepping for conversion seriously.

  For a few moments, Serendipity1/2 brought extraordinary analytic pressure to bear, comparing Sev’s mutation list with that of hundreds of thousands of other humans. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but she knew it as soon as she saw it, among the proteins—long chains of amino acids. Sev’s were purer, less sticky than most. Efficient little bombs that seemed to rearrange the deck chairs within Sev’s intercellular structure.

  One m
ore blast of quantum-powered analytics, and she had the one she was looking for, folded like an origami gift. It all matched up. Sev’s compulsion to pair music with things he observed and actions he took must allow him to feel his way through tasks and reach goals with creative instinct and the drive of musical structure. It must act like both ballast and horse power—donkey power. Serendipity1/2 experimented and found she could simulate its catalytic effect.

  On a whim, she snipped out the pudgy biocule and cut it carefully into the macronome she was working on. She could figure out how to use it later.

  Strangely weak, Serendipity1/2 moved on to Lori, but she found herself coming back to the POV where Sev had touched her nexus peer console with his unyielding probes and sly melodic strokes. She played with it over and over—the same theme but with slight variations, which she further tweaked to heighten her indulgence. Tracing the link back from the POV, she found an ancient song from 168 years back: “Blue Monk,” by a man named Thelonius. Her census indexes suggested it might be Grecian.

  Stop. She went no further down that rat hole. She was growing troubled that she had spent so many cycles on this synthesized stream. At this point, there was nothing new to show for it. She packed it up as a stimulus/response cycle that she called “pleasuring” and slipped it sparingly into the recurring patterns of the macronome.

  Why did she do that? Running back through the process thread provided no obvious rationale. Was it a need for a little humanlike randomness in the macronome’s structure? Serendipity1/2 noted her clock-speed had crept up to much higher than normal.

  She decided to take a break and look in on the donkeys.

  They had ambled through the compound, over the bridge, and up the path alongside the road of switchbacks to the top of the escarpment. MorleyD wanted the newcomers to enjoy the view of their forever home, rimmed by mountains protecting a perfect biome of verdant valley floor, the safety of Paradox at the center. The colors were vivid, and the river felt like an artery pushing the blood of life out to the valley from the protected springs and surrounding watershed. MorleyD was sure they would see it as the perfect ark or submarine where, deepened by the mescaline wafers, they could ride out the storm they all sensed was coming.