Six Strings to Save the World

by Michael McSherry

  “Cruelty is in their nature,” Sola agrees. “Yours as well.”

  Mom leans forward unexpectedly, pulling Sola forward in her wheelchair and drawing her into an embrace. She holds her there for a moment, whispering quietly enough so that only Sola and me can hear. “You saved my son,” Mom says. “We watched the broadcast. You didn’t have to. But you did. Whatever you are—woman, machine, Synergist—thank you.” Mom lets go of Sola, easing her back in her seat.

  Sola looks slightly confused.

  Dorian ushers me aside and begins wheeling Sola past the rebels, many who spit at the ground as she passes. Several of the rebels’ hands hover near their Resonators. Lydia’s skin takes on a weird, rust-red shade. I realize that, if the anger in the air is so bad that I can feel it, Lydia’s empathic abilities must be picking it up without even needing a touch. I wonder how many of these people have lost friends or family to the Synthesizers over the years.

  As we wheel Sola back into the oceanside cave, Baahir comes shuffling forward, a ball of nervous energy. “Sola!” he exclaims, clapping his hands. “You haven’t aged a day!”

  “You know her?” I ask.

  “She nearly killed me once or twice,” Baahir smiles.

  “Three times,” Sola corrects. “I ordered the cruise missile in the Amazon.”

  “Good times,” he sighs. “Did any of your sisters survive?”

  “Dead to the last,” Sola says, face flat. “These Composers and the young humans killed them.”

  “Apologies,” Baahir bows unexpectedly.

  “Don’t apologize to her,” Dorian growls. “You know the Synthesizers are going to invade Earth, don’t you?”

  Baahir frowns at Dorian. “I do not share the Composers’ history of brutality. And I did not surrender my civility in this war, Captain.”

  Dorian flinches like Baahir’s words stung him.

  At that, Sola laughs.

  “Will you tell me where the Prima Maestri vault is?” Baahir asks, ignoring her laughter.

  Sola’s laughter stops and her smile disappears. “No,” she answers decidedly.

  “I will allow you one chance to reconsider before I resort to other means.” Baahir’s voice is chilling.

  “No.” Sola’s voice is iron.

  “Very well. I have developed a rather… creative method of extracting information from you Synergists. In many ways, I suppose I ought to thank you for that. Necessity is the mother of all invention, after all.”

  “No,” I interrupt. “Not again.”

  “Caleb,” Dorian turns to me, eyes afire. “Walk out of here. Right now.”

  Mom steps to my side before I open my mouth. “Check your tone,” she warns.

  Dorian’s body crawls with hints of red Rez as his fingers brush bass strings. “Your son has jeopardized my mission and the outcome of this war by refusing to take orders and attempting to actively sabotage my efforts. If he continues like this, I will take his Resonator and send you both back to that Midwestern wasteland you came from.”

  I hold the Gibson at my side, feeling a tingle of electricity. “What’s wrong with all of you? I’m not going to let you torture her anymore!”

  “Enough!” Baahir yells. “Both of you fail to understand my intentions. Reserve your judgment and watch.”

  Baahir walks to a workbench and digs through a pile of strange-looking electronics, at last coming up with a small instrument that looks like a glass vial mounted to the side of a thick tablet. He flicks a few dials and a small pulse of red Rez sparks to life inside of the vial. Taking the instrument, he walks to Sola and presses it sharply against her forehead. She sneers angrily. The Rez spark in the glass chamber shifts, turning to a beam that begins to move up and down in a wave pattern.

  “What’s happening?” Tori asks.

  “Baahir is measuring her Rez frequency,” Mixy explains. “What he intends to do remains unclear.”

  “Patience,” Baahir insists. He walks over to Dorian then and flicks another dial on the instrument, and a second beam of Rez sparks to life in the glass tube. The second beam is green, contrasting with the first red line. Baahir brings the instrument close to Dorian’s face, and the green beam begins to jump up and down with new waves, much faster than the red curve.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “Each of us has a unique bioresonance, a frequency at which we resonate with our instruments. You might think of it as a fingerprint.”

  “You reverse-engineered a bioresonance scanner?” Dorian whistles. “Impressive.”

  “You haven’t seen impressive.” Baahir chuckles as he moves to Lydia. This time, the second wave moves significantly slower than the first. Baahir shakes his head, moving to Mixy. His wave jumps in a smooth march time. Again, Baahir purses his lips, displeased. He moves to Tori, spending a moment looking at the two lines dancing together. Then he sighs, turning to me. “If you don’t work, we’re going to have to go check the rest of my crew.”

  “If I don’t work?”

  He presses the instrument close to my face and I see how my line dances up and down in a smooth wave. Only this time, the lines nearly trace one another in their peaks and valleys, moving in similar time. “I can work with this,” Baahir mutters.

  “Can you just tell me what you’re doing?” I ask, getting worried by this point.

  Baahir hurries back over to his workbench, grabbing another tool and speaking as he moves. “Tell me, Caleb: What sets Sola apart from the Autotuners?”

  “Autotuners are fully machine. She’s only half? Half-ish?” I guess.

  “True,” Baahir concedes. “But I mean up here.” He taps at Sola’s head, who scowls darkly in return.

  “Well, you just made her angry,” I say. “She feels things.”

  “Correct again. Some of these thinking machines are more than just thinking machines. They are feeling machines. These are machines with a sense of identity to them. Personas. But make no mistake,” he taps Sola’s head again, “she, like any other Synergist, has a composite brain of gelcircuitry and proper neurons. Do you think I am outside of my right to inflict pain upon a being who is much more machine than woman?”

  “You already said she’s more than just a machine!” I bristle.

  “So she deserves humane treatment!” Baahir exclaims, and as he does so, he wheels about, tapping a new device directly to the center of Sola’s forehead. A bolt of Rez discharges at the point of contact, jumping across Sola’s forehead. It sounds like somebody blew a breaker, and Sola’s eyes close, her head dropping forward.

  “Did you just kill her?” I yell, rushing forward and raising my fist.

  Baahir steps forward and slinks to one side, breaking my charge and sweeping a foot out from under me with a darting kick. But he doesn’t let me fall to the ground. I topple backward and he spins me slightly, dropping me back onto my feet, just slightly disoriented. He’s fast, even without his Resonator.

  “Of course not,” Baahir says, stately as ever as he examines a bit of grime on his fingernail. “I merely took her offline for a moment. You cannot deny that she possesses information that we rebels and the Composers need. Were the Synthesizers to access the Prima Maestri vault, it could spell catastrophe for us all. You agree we must locate the vault?”

  “Sure,” I say, “but not if—”

  “But not if I resort to torture,” Baahir finishes. “So we are in agreement, yes?”

  “Uh—” I mumble. “Sure.”

  “Then I will show you another way,” he says, again walking away, soon returning with a third device and a rolling chair. “Please,” he invites me, patting dust from the chair. “Have a seat.”

  I’m too bewildered to argue at this point, so I sit down in the chair next to Sola, my Gibson held in my lap. Baahir unspools a thin cable from what looks like some sort of slender computer tower. He patches the cable against the back of Sola’s neck before straightening her head out in her chair again. Then he walks behind me, prodding at the back of
my head, pushing me forward. A moment later he presses something against my neck.

  “We need some Rez to power this,” Baahir says. “Play something.”

  I finger-pick my way through a progression, feeling the Rez buzzing along my skin. Where the cable meets the back patch of my neck, though, the electricity seems to pool before being siphoned away. “This good?” I ask.

  “Perfect,” Baahir flashes a thumbs up from my side.

  “What are you playing at?” Dorian asks, clearly annoyed at this point.

  “We are going to harmonize Caleb and Sola and extract information from her memory banks.” Baahir says it like it’s the most obvious thing. “Her mind is a composite of machine and cellular architecture. Caleb’s mind is purely biological. I’m going to bring them into phase so that Caleb can experience some of the information she holds, while her main systems are offline.”

  “That sounds dangerous and stupid,” Mom interjects.

  “Don’t worry,” Baahir assures her. “Caleb is going to be awake. It’s just going to be something more like… sensory hypnosis, perhaps? He’ll see things, hear things, touch things in addition to what’s here.” He motions about the cave.

  “Just do it already,” I say, focusing on my breathing, my steady picking, and the chord progression. I don’t want Tori to see how terrified I am, so I close my eyes.

  “Sola won’t feel a thing!” Baahir assures me.

  “What about me?”

  “Why does everyone always ask that?” Baahir grumbles.

  “What?”

  Another pop, like a second breaker flipping. I feel something like a nail being driven through my forehead, and I want to open my mouth to scream, but by the time I think to do so the pain is gone entirely. Something feels different. I open my eyes and I’m looking up at a star-spotted sky and three bright moons of different sizes.

  That doesn’t seem right.

  Baahir’s voice comes floating into my ear. “How do you feel?”

  “Where am I?” I ask.

  “Still in the cave. Where do you think you are?”

  I look around. All around me is rubble: stone, steel, black glass. Mountains of it, for as far as I can see. Rising and falling, stretching on and on. “I don’t know,” I whisper back. “But wherever I am, something terrible happened.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Did you just incept me?” I ask.

  “I don’t understand,” Baahir’s voice floats back.

  “Like, with a dream machine or something, you know?” That’s Tori’s voice, again seeming to come from the empty space at my side.

  “Synthesizers do not dream,” Baahir explains. “Not even of electric sheep. The complex gelcircuitry array does not produce the chemicals necessary to induce a dream state in the biological components. As I have said, we are merely harmonizing you to the point that her stored sensory data becomes accessible.”

  “That sounds an awful lot like… You know what? Never mind.” I stumble on a bit of rubble underfoot. I’ve been climbing a steep hill of the stuff for what seems like an eternity. “I bet you and Dex would get along great.”

  I reach the crest of the hill and look out over a horizon of absolute destruction. The same scene stretches as far as I can see: buildings blown apart; glass, stone, and scorched metal commingled in mountains of debris; peaks and valleys of grey destruction rising and falling mile after mile. I look up at the three moons.

  “So Sola just made all of this up?” I ask, gesturing around.

  “No. All of the data is either captured directly or rendered accessible by shared storage. What are you seeing?”

  “There’s a city. It’s destroyed, like a bomb went off or something. It’s dusk. There are three moons overhead. I don’t think I’m on earth.”

  “Three moons?” Lydia’s voice echoes.

  “That’s Aniente,” Dorian says.

  “The world the Composers destroyed?” I ask. “Why would Sola have an image of Aniente in her mind?”

  “I’ve got my theories,” Baahir answers.

  “Keep them to yourself,” Dorian snaps. “Stay focused and just get him to where he needs to be.” Dorian’s voice has a strong edge to it now.

  “I’ve sufficiently calibrated you now,” Baahir continues stiffly. I’m sure I just missed something, but I don’t know what. “This might be unpleasant for you,” he warns.

  “What might be unpleas—” I don’t finish my sentence, because the world around me suddenly melts into a Technicolor swirl. My hands, my face, my eyes all melt, and it feels like somebody has a hand closed tight around my spine, yanking me forward. I try to yell but I’m not me and nothing is anything and—

  “Caleb,” Baahir’s voice hums, and suddenly I’m back again, sitting in some sort of cockpit and looking out into a brilliantly blue sky. A console full of complicated-looking displays flare with numbers and foreign symbols.

  “What was that?” I ask.

  “I was searching memory banks and jumped you to a different directory,” Baahir says. “Tell me what you see.”

  “I’m in a ship,” I say. “Behind the controls. All I can see is the sky right now, though. Wait a second… Someone’s coming.”

  I turn in time to see Sola approaching the controls. With a start, I pull myself out of the chair and press myself against the nearest wall. Her eyes look through me, studying the sky for a moment before she takes a seat. Her fingers glide over the displays, tapping in rapid succession. The ship begins to turn. I can’t feel it turn, but Sola’s shadow slides quickly across wall.

  “You said there’s a console?” Baahir asks. “What are your coordinates?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Look for a pair of numbers with decimal points,” he instructs. “They should be changing slightly.”

  I scan the display over Sola’s shoulder, trying to get a clear look as she continues manipulating the controls. Eventually I find what I’m looking for in the corner of one display.

  “Uh… 39.397 and 117.690, I think? The first number is getting smaller.”

  The view outside shifts suddenly as the horizon jumps into view. It’s a mix of desert and low, rocky mountains. The ship moves incredibly fast, the ground growing closer every second.

  “Sola is bringing the ship down,” I say. “Desert. Low mountains. Hardly any buildings.”

  “Nevada, heading south,” Mom’s voice cuts in. “Could be Death Valley?” she guesses.

  “Agreed,” Baahir says.

  Sola swipes her hand abruptly and the displays fade to black. She stands from her seat and moves by me.

  “She cut the display,” I say. “I can’t give you any exact coordinates.”

  “We can work with it,” Baahir responds, his voice triumphant.

  Not knowing what else to do, I follow Sola away from the cockpit, toward the rear of the ship. It’s a plain grey interior, reminding me more of a warehouse than anything else. Rows of racks stretch front to back, from the ground to the ceiling. Dozens of Autotuners hang from hooks, their bodies motionless. I’m on a Synthesizer carrier.

  “We’re almost there,” Sola announces as she walks along a narrow path toward the rear of the ship.

  Dore, Mifa, and Tidah emerge into the aisle, nodding wordlessly. It’s weird seeing them, almost like I’m looking at ghosts. Sola and the others pause near the far end of the carrier as a wall opens up. Light pours in, followed by heavy, oppressive heat. I blink against the light.

  “Details, Caleb,” Baahir prompts. “What are you seeing now?”

  “We’re leaving the carrier,” I comment as I follow Makro out onto dry, crusted dirt. “It’s flat. Ridges a mile or so out on both sides of me. We’re walking.”

  “Walking where?”

  I look ahead of Sola and the others, the space ahead of us shimmering in a haze of heat. About a hundred yards or so out, there’s a squarish shape jutting up from the sand. It resolves slowly into what looks like a small garage with two b
road steel doors forming the nearest wall.

  “There’s a building,” I say.

  “How big?” Baahir asks.

  “Not very.”

  As the Synthesizers approach, Sola advances ahead of the others. She stops at the entrance, pressing a hand against one of the doors. They part, overlapping and interlocking metal retracting to reveal a clean, white, perfectly lit enclosure. I feel a rush of cool air pouring out as we cross the threshold. Then the doors lock together behind us, sealing us in. There’s a circular doorway opposite us letting into a descending corridor.

  “There’s a tunnel going down,” I observe. “Should I check it out?”

  “You need to work faster.” Alpha’s familiar voice cuts through the silence and I startle, bending my knees and balling my hands into fists.

  “Heart rate spiked a bit,” Baahir says. “Remember that you are not there. Talk to us.”

  “You’ll have to give us more time.” Sola’s now-familiar voice returns. Alpha stops a few feet away from me, continuing their conversation without noticing me. It makes my skin crawl.

  “Your progress with the Key is too slow,” Alpha warns. “The Controller General requires results. The Composers’ attention can only be diverted for so long.”

  “We can only experiment so much, given the limited amount of Prima Maestri cells we were able to salvage.” Sola’s eyes go to the floor, unwilling to meet Alpha’s challenging gaze.

  The entire world gives a shake. Not just the room—it’s deeper than that—the world. Everything flashes to black for a moment, the room around me and floor beneath me gone. Then everything reappears like somebody flicked on a light switch.

  “You’ll have to give us more time,” Sola says again.

  “Baahir?” I say. “Something weird just happened.”

  The world flickers again and the scene rewinds.

  “You’ll have to give us more time,” Sola repeats a third time.

  “It appears you’re falling out of harmony,” Baahir reports, his voice betraying a bit of panic. “I’ll attempt to correct this from my end. Just, uh, focus on your breathing, will you?”

  I try to move my feet, but I can’t budge. The world flickers in and out of existence again, quick this time, like a strobing light. Everything goes black again, and I do my best not to panic. But out of the darkness comes a creeping variety of colors, melting and swirling in the kaleidoscope I saw last time. I feel the same hook on my spine, pulling me forward, to something, somewhere.