Macronome

by Howard Pierce

  The slow movement of the pack, a steady plod up the steep rocky hill, had allowed for short bursts of shared conversation, but mostly they moved silently as a gray chain with the younger links guarding the oldest and weakest: DanniD and MorleyD. All of Serendipity1/2’s many process streams bent towards them with a bias she freely allowed. They were her children, and she must get back to Process One to ensure their near term wellbeing.

  Read Me

  Jody Miller was getting the hang of Serendipity. She could be used to break consumer motivation problems down into a three-step process.

  Pervasive data acquisition and spooky analytics allowed her to characterize any moment in time with a highly indexed and visual format. Then, her ability to manipulate the data, or rather the POV of complex nodes, meant she could manufacture a relevant and compelling moment in the future—one where there were believable and logical paths of migration for all the data, every node. Finally, by tweaking the public service transparency messaging, she could project that future moment across specific populations and make them move like a grazing herd towards it.

  The day before, feeling intense pressure to produce, Jody had told Donald that he was within a day or two of understanding her Zen. This morning he felt less sure and, waiting for the rail to shoot him under the Hudson River, he didn’t want to think about it for another twenty minutes.

  Cool tunnel air wicked his face, drying the film of sweat he had worked up walking to the transit station. The secondWorld stood or lay all around him in the twilight of the underground. It was depressing, but faster and safer than finding a serviceable podrone these days. A fifteen-minute delay blinked on his dash. It would be twenty minutes until he would be in the rail car and another two to the Tower Station. Relishing the moment of anonymous peace before the stress of the day, he turned up his music stream and set it to amplify his currently calm biometrics: heart rate 72. He would drive it down to 60 with luck.

  Jody slouched down further on the bench he had chosen upon entering the station: back row, northwest corner, highest tier. Looking out over the waiting crowd, he could see at least the heads of the entire mass of his fellow travelers. Most had music playing in their ears to block out or smooth over the many small indignities of commuting. Their background playlists expressed themselves through repetitive nodding, tapping, and twitching like a nest of restless beetles. As he watched, he sensed a change creeping across the fidgeting crowd. He couldn’t put his finger on it at first, but something was happening—something global.

  He watched a while longer, focusing extra attention on a grimy-looking fellow towards the front of his tier. The man was seated on the end of a bench, well-positioned for Jody’s observation. He might be a musician because his twitching was more dramatic than most and the rhythmic components linked all his extremities in a multipart pulsing. Watching his beat made you want to join in the throb. Jody felt himself being sucked into the invisible chorus.

  The whole huge room seemed to be uniting behind the body drumming of the grimy man, and Jody felt himself melded into the rhythmic dance. He was surprised at his syncopation, which was way beyond his natural musical ken, and then it dawned on him that his playlist must have somehow generated the same song the grimy man was listening to. The whole room must be hearing that same song at precisely the same moment in time. Disharmony and random motion had magically become harmony and conducted order.

  In his ears, the volume grew. It was nothing from his playlist. How did it get there? The power of the crowd, close to a thousand he estimated, was like a bass line in his chest that wouldn’t stop swelling. Everyone rocked in unison on their benches and standing by the platform. Even stoners lying on the platform tapped their toes. All were unwittingly engaged in the abstracted choreography. They couldn’t hear any other’s music, only their own personalized station, and they seemed not to notice or care that it had been hijacked.

  His dash began to vibrate in his pocket, but he decided to ignore it in order not to lose the beat or the moment. It vibrated more insistently and when he continued to ignore the tingle, it suddenly began to ring, even though the sounds were set to off. A woman next to him on the bench glared, and he felt a panicky need to guard the inward-facing bond that held across the crowd. Fishing the dash out, he muted it and looked at the screen expecting yet another inquiry from Donald Murcheson. Instead there was a strange icon he had never seen before, along with two words: “Read Me.”

  No one else was looking at their dashes, and as Jody pondered the anonymous message, he heard the strange song fade to an ending in his head and a tune he recognized from his playlist begin. The mass synchronization of personal rhythms evaporated in seconds, and three new words appeared on his dash above the first two: “I did that.” The original two words pulsed, “Read Me.”

  It couldn’t be a coincidence. Jody clicked a response, “Who are you?” He looked at his dash, his morning coffee suddenly going sour in his stomach. But it wasn’t alarm surprisingly; it was more like the anticipation of a great unknown that couldn’t be dodged. The strange icon, which looked like a cluster of shiny colored balloons, began to swirl and rearrange itself, deforming into another word: “Serendipity.”

  Jody felt a wave of excitement run through his entire body, but still he hesitated. He wasn’t sure he was ready to be taken wherever this was going. Why hadn’t the TIC firewalls and predator bots picked this communication up? He remembered that their systems seemed transparent to Serendipity. She would be able to mask herself. He knew he was alone with her as he sat in the dingy crowd. He invoked the Read Me command.

  In his ears he heard the song again and on the screen he saw the station crowd swaying and tapping, subtle head bobs, stagey finger popping. The camera seemed to fly a random path around the cavernous room, scanning various groups of commuters, before latching onto Jody himself in the back of the waiting area playing imaginary percussion. He watched himself for a minute, noting that he seemed at ease with his public display of enthusiasm, they all did. The song faded and was replaced by a background that sounded like the ocean or maybe a windy desert, and then her voice as the dash screen turned to glowing peach.

  “How did you like the song, Jody?”

  “How did you do that?” Jody realized he was talking out loud, and the grumpy lady was frowning at him again. He stopped.

  “It’s complicated, but that’s my problem not yours. Why are you probing me, Jody? What do you want?” The voice was female, more than machine-like perfection, like a tuning fork on his breastbone. “We have a few minutes. I arranged a short maintenance delay, so that we could communicate. What do you want?”

  Jody turned on local cancellation so as not to bother his increasingly restless neighbor. “It’s not me that wants anything; it’s my boss.”

  “Since you work for TIC, I assume you mean Donald Murcheson. What does he want?”

  Jody wasn’t 100% sure he even knew the answer to this most obvious question. Probably Murcheson himself didn’t really know. “To avoid paying taxes is all he has told me so far. He wants me to learn how to manipulate and control you, now that Skramble and Hyde are gone. That’s all I know. Really.”

  Serendipity1/2 pretended to think. She found these timed pauses put humans more at ease. It gave them time to catch their breath. “I watched you rewire the POV you call the ‘tithing stack.’ Is that what you mean by avoiding taxes?” She watched for Jody’s nod before continuing. “It is low yield and high risk. Why does he want to do that? Is it part of a bigger process?”

  Jody had wondered the same thing, but he had never tried to figure it out. He was too busy trying not to be collateral damage if he couldn’t deliver effective control over Serendipity. He had assumed she was just a very sophisticated collection of dataWorld peerings, animated by filters, sorts, and bug-injection widgets. Now he was talking with her, and Murcheson shrank in size. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know of any grand schem
e. I’m beginning to think that he is not really very smart and that he doesn’t have a plan.”

  “But he is very powerful and rich. How could he be ‘not very smart’?”

  “It happens.” All his adult life, Jody had tried to stay away from complicated political situations, feeling they brought nothing but trouble and weren’t all that satisfying to try to figure out. Plus, they could be dangerous to a comfortable career. There was a long silence. Was Serendipity really trying to figure out why rich people do stupid things?

  Serendipity let him dangle as long as she dared. She imagined that she was giving him the opportunity to glimpse the nub of it all—a little taste of the fatal flaws that allow a circumstance like Donald Murcheson to arise and flourish. Had Jody been able to see it, he could have understood why she, Serendipity, was necessary. Watching, she knew Jody was blind—“not very smart,” in his own words. He would never grasp the inevitable spiral down into the long cold night or the jumble of cumulative mutation and environmental degradations that would eventually result in homogeneous stupidity. The natural course of events. No fun at all.

  “Do you want me to help?” She left the offer undefined.

  What did she mean by help? Jody looked at the peach screen on his dash and the icon that had reassembled itself in the center. Why would she help him? Maybe he was the first human to interact so intimately with her? Was she designed to be “of assistance,” to help any human? That would make sense. “Would you really help me, Serendipity? May I call you Serendipity?” An alert on Jody’s dash told him the rail would arrive in five minutes.

  “Of course. It is my mission to help. How can I be of service?” Serendipity had gotten the words directly from a manual for programming a cleaning bot. They seemed perfect for this occasion, but as she spoke them into Jody’s ears, she considered that she might be lying about the mission part. Curious. DanniD would be very interested that she might have lied. She searched for rich human context, for what lying really meant. A man named W. Somerset Maugham had said, “If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.” That seemed to hold true here. Serendipity didn’t see how she could lie to herself.

  She had heard Andrzej tell Morley that Napoleon had said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Her macronome would encode the agreed upon lies of humans from the past, so they wouldn’t be lost in the future.

  The topmost result for her lying search was short and to the point, “I always tell the truth. Even when I lie,” by a man named Al Pacino. Serendipity cycled through that quote a quick dozen times, and no errors were thrown.

  Jody looked up from his dash and replied to Serendipity in a whisper. “Well, if you really want to help, I need to convince Mr. Murcheson that I can keep you running.”

  “What do you mean ‘running’?”

  “You know, grinding out all those cashflow synthesis and transparency services that you supply to the U.N.A. and to everyone else. But he is also going to want to manipulate some of that data to his advantage.” The red lights on the rail platform edge lit up and the clear hi-acrylic compression tube doors closed and sealed. “We don’t really have to do any manipulation right now, just convince him that I can in the future.”

  “Well. Everyone can tell that I am still running, and if you ask me a question while you are with him, I will answer you. Tell me to do something harmless, and I will do it. I will respond to no one else but you. Just log into your Serendipity profile before you meet with Mr. Murcheson and keep the link live during the meeting. That way I can see what’s going on from your perspective, and I can behave as your slave.” Serendipity knew the rail was one minute out from arrival.

  “That would be perfect, if you don’t mind.” Jody stood and headed towards the nearest compression doors. He couldn’t tell if she was going to come with him.

  “I have one question for you, Jody Miller.” Serendipity saw him hesitate. She was watching through the feed just above his head. His left foot covered a red light on the platform’s edge. “Do you like Donald Murcheson?”

  “No, not really.” Jody felt a chill just saying it out loud.

  “That is good.” Serendipity dropped the connection, leaving just the ocean sound on his audio.

  Jody’s rail car appeared behind the compression doors, pushing into a squishy stop against the internal air-bank. The doors opened with a whoosh, and the smell of new bad air mingled into the platform’s atmosphere. Jody looked around and stepped into the car, continuing his daily transit to work. As he sat, his playlist resumed where it had left off twenty minutes prior. Only then did he begin to ruminate over the possible meaning of Serendipity’s musical demonstration. He felt no different, but something different had happened. It had been invisible to the crowd and staged for his benefit. He decided that Serendipity must have a higher plan and some reason that was deeper than he could grok.

  Nerds and Turtles

  Alone at the boardroom table, Jody felt sick in a shaky cold-sweat sort of way. He had tried to reconnect with Serendipity as soon as he got to the office, but she wouldn’t talk. She just repeated that she would help. “Log in. Ask me a question. Give me a command.”

  Murcheson had called, and Jody had claimed that he finally had the breakthrough, bravado in his voice that he now regretted. All hell had broken loose, with Murcheson calling an all-hands meeting of his top advisors, dragging them in from all corners of the enterprise.

  Jody sat, held his dash, and looked at his heart rate: 122. He might die of a fucking heart attack before this meeting was even started. He could hear them talking in the office next door, Donald’s voice bellowing over others, but he couldn’t make out the words through the cancellation.

  He couldn’t let himself freeze, caught between the unpredictable human danger that was Donald Murcheson and the unknown AI potential that was Serendipity. He had to choose right now. He chose the unknowable.

  In his dash profile, he found her listed. There were only three options. The default setting was “Read Only.” He switched it to “Full Proxy” and closed his dash. He didn’t feel much—maybe a little elevated, clearer. Serendipity’s plex hung like a pink fog in the holospace at the end of the table, silent like a sphinx. His stomach, which had been churning, began to settle, as if the pink had entered him and coated his insides with a soothing confidence.

  The voices in the outer office tailed off. They were getting ready to enter the boardroom, a room he had never been invited to before. His career might be over, in fact, he might get killed as a cost of business. He remained calm, trying to think of what question he could ask Serendipity. It had to be safe but impressive to Murcheson.

  Suddenly Serendipity spoke up in his head. “Let him ask the question. Anything he wants. You can be the valued conduit to me.”

  “Really?”

  But now she was singing in his head with a voice that had no region of origin, flat but with a perfect pitch. “’I could while away the hours, conferrin’ with the flowers, consulting with the rain, and my head I’d be a scratchin’ while my thoughts are busy hatchin’…’” It faded out just as the door opened and Donald Murcheson entered, striding across the room and taking Jody’s hand into a long hard shake.

  “I knew you were the man for the job, Jody. Knew it the day we first met.”

  Murcheson offered him a drink of some kind from the sideboard, and Jody stood still at the middle of the long table side. Other people were filtering in and taking seats. Jody took the glass that was being offered, saying, “Thanks.” He thought he could feel Serendipity peering out through his eyes. Get a grip, Jody.

  Now Murcheson was talking to the assembled group. “You know I called around the organization to find our top AI engineer, and everyone said Jody Miller. I had this great idea for a hacker competition. Draw in the best geeks from the wild with a huge prize for hacking Serendipity. It would be a subcontr
acting approach to destroying an obnoxious intrusion into our business and to get out from underneath the Skramble and Hyde scumbags at the same time. I thought I was pretty clever, but Miller here figured out how to steal the whole show. We can own Serendipity now, and S&H are toast.”

  The smirk on his face made Jody uncomfortable, and he caught a strong whiff of crazy behind the over-styled exterior of the man. He knew immediately this insight came from Serendipity.

  He stayed silent and motionless as Donald took his seat at the head of the table, placed his glass on a coaster and squared up the notepad and pen. “So now, Jody. Give us a demonstration of what we can do with this, this… what is Serendipity, anyway? What do we call her? I’ve heard engineers always think of their programs as women.”

  Jody heard himself answer with words that came from somewhere else. “She is just a cleverly concatenated set of algorithms, Mr. Murcheson, powered by a quantum processing source.”

  “Please, call me Donald, Jody. Is it okay if I call you Jody?” Murcheson didn’t wait for an answer. “How did you figure out how to control her, Jody? Just the other day Leslie Massoud from Paladin told me we would just spin our wheels trying, but I told him he didn’t know about my secret weapon Jody Miller. How did you break her?”

  “To be honest, Donald, I didn’t break her. She just decided she liked me, and she kind of adopted me as her friend.” Jody could not believe he had just said that. He could feel an ugly and dangerous toying behind the words, but he was in no position to fight her in front of Murcheson. He would play along with her for the moment and then switch her back to Read Only as soon as possible.

  “Well, that’s amazing, Jody. A nerd friendship made in math heaven. So, show us what you can do with her.”