The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

Home > Other > The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) > Page 81
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Page 81

by Gardner Dozois


  Grover served as rhyming dictionary while I punched up the imagery—hands to fingertips, shining to glittering, things like that. Making the consonants fall on the beat so the vowels could carry the melody and then making the rhymes a little more memorable. Straightforward stuff.

  “Straightforward stuff,” Dot repeated and seemed to freeze for a moment.

  Rosie watched her tablet closely. She typed the keyboard a moment and watched the tablet again.

  “I understand,” said Dot suddenly moving again. “Will you work with me again?”

  “With you?”

  “Yes. I have a new perspective on my work. I’d like to make it better. More fulfilling. With more impact. I’d like you to help me.”

  “You want me to help you. Wouldn’t that put me out of a job?”

  She smiled at me. “Do you really think you’re so easily replaced?”

  “How could I possibly help you?”

  Rose cleared her throat. “The contract involves helping a composer bring material to completion, prepare the material for a concert and shepherd the performance. One concert. You will be very well paid. The work on the single song brought your debts up to date.” She waved around the room. “With this gig you can pay off the mortgage and fix up the house. Maybe even have some left in the bank.”

  I looked at Rosie. I looked at Dot. I looked around my house.

  My house.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “What else have you got? Enough for a performance? Enough for a collection?”

  Across the wall appeared folder icon after folder icon. There must have been thirty songs. Forty. More.

  I whistled. “This isn’t a collection. It’s an opus.” I looked at Rosie. “Rosie, what have you done?”

  Rosie smiled. “You’re about to find out.”

  I took time for breakfast and coffee. But Dot was just standing there, waiting for me. Rose pulled out a tablet and watched it, glancing up from time to time to watch me or Dot.

  I couldn’t take everybody just waiting.

  “Okay, then.” And we got to work.

  I had Dot pick out the best ten songs to work on. Her choice. This was a test of her as much as anything else. I wanted to see what she thought were the best songs. We cracked them open one at a time.

  None of them were Dot songs. That is, none of them were pre- to early-adolescent love songs. One, called “Waiting on You,” was about a woman waiting for her husband or lover to return from war, getting messages, texts, e-mails—each delays as his deployment came to an end and he was getting close to getting out. It was filled with frantic anticipation mixed with a determination not to get her hopes up—after all, anything, including the unthinkable, could happen. The song closed with a full key change and shift from minor to major on the chorus showing unbridled joy as she found out he had gotten safely on the flight home. This could have been some sort of dark depressing thing but she pulled it off in a dance tune by having the waiting woman desperately go about her day drinking coffee or buying groceries, not thinking about what was happening yet having the excitement burst through. It needed work—the desperate bursts were too smooth and it was keyed to that damned little girl voice Dot had made famous.

  Another was called “With You, Without You.” That one was about a young mother recovering from birth, in her hospital bed alone with her newborn child for the first time, talking to her about whether or not she should give her up. Ultimately, the girl decides to keep the baby and sings about making a deal with her to get through what is coming. Now that was perfect for Dot. Her audience was right in that teenage girl demographic and it’s something people just didn’t sing about outside of country music. Dot had enough presence in the field that she could turn that liability into a novelty asset. And, for once, that damned piping voice of hers might be of use. But again, it wasn’t a Dot song.

  I found myself pushing her. Let’s change the key. Move it up. Move it down. Faster. Slower.

  Dot, of course, never complained. After all, she was a construction.

  Until she stopped and watched me for a moment. She bit her lip.

  That pissed me off. She had no lip to bite. There was nothing there but photons. “Don’t try to manipulate me,” I said coldly. “I’m not some twelve year old fan who bought you just to make you take your clothes off.”

  Her image froze. Then she looked at me.

  I knew she was watching me from a camera somewhere in the room but it seemed she was looking right at me.

  “No,” she said after a moment. “You’re an arrogant and spiteful man who enjoys taking it out on anyone nearby.”

  No contract was worth this.

  And I was just about to tell her just that when Rosie got up. “Time for a break.” She grabbed my arm and pulled me outside.

  “Don’t say a word,” she held onto my arm.

  “But—”

  “Not a word. Or it’ll be Denver all over again.”

  “You weren’t in Denver. You left me in Saint Louis.”

  She turned me and stared me in the face. “I came to the damned concert. I sat there when you came out and announced Persons Unknown had broken up and then told people to go out and buy the album since that was the only way they’d ever hear the band again. I heard you get booed off the stage. If there hadn’t been good security that night there would have been a riot. I was there.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wasn’t sure. Because I thought something might happen and I felt responsible. Because—because you’re an idiot that is incapable of looking out for his own best interest.” She let me go and pulled out a cigarette.

  I looked down into a smog covered basin. Fifty miles from Los Angeles and it still drives my weather. Even here, up in the hills where the bones of the earth show through the dirt. Here where the air was still clear. If the wind shifted that yellow green cloud would roll right over us.

  Rosie lit her cigarette, donating her share to the yellow cloud below us. She looked down. “I thought the L.A. smog was licked. What’s causing it?”

  I shrugged. “Cooking fires. Barbecues. Older vehicles. Power plants. Manufacturing waste. Cigarettes.”

  “Oh, Har. Har. Har.”

  “It collects down there. This is just a bad day. It’ll blow out to sea.”

  “Will it come up here?”

  “Probably not.” I waved back towards the house. “What are you doing with her?”

  “I’m attempting to trigger anomalous non-deterministic emergent events deriving from conflicting algorithms.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  She sighed. “I’m attempting to simulate creative behavior.”

  “What does that have to do with Dot?”

  “Hitachi owns Dot. They approached me.”

  “At MIT, right?”

  Rosie looked pained. “Stanford.”

  “How the hell would you make something like Dot creative?”

  “Does the name Konrad Lorenz mean anything to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Brilliant, cruel animal behaviorist early twentieth century. Discovered imprinting. He did one particularly noisome experiment. He’d take a dog and scare it but prevent it from cowering or attacking. It couldn’t bite. It couldn’t bark. But he kept scaring it. The dog started grooming itself. It’s called displacement behavior.”

  “So?”

  Rosie looked at me as if I were dense. “It’s a novel response. The act of creation is a novel response. I was using conflicting algorithms to see if I could generate something similar—got some interesting results, too. Hitachi liked my work and hired me to instill it in Dot.”

  “Whatever for?”

  Rosie shrugged and inhaled. “Better performances. Less scripted interviews. Dot’s performance engine is terrific. Captures crowd perception to the millimeter. Performance analysis feedback triggers retuning of the performance. All in real time. Very sweet work. Did you know every major politician in Asia uses a derivative of Dot’s anal
ysis program to evaluate crowd responses? The success of a tool is measured by how well it performs when it’s not doing what it was designed for.” Draw. Exhale. “But she can only perform and retune within the parameters of the scripted material—the music. They want spontaneity.” Rose smiled at me. “Hell, maybe they’re going to use my research to build a new line of pleasurebots. Force the Thai sex slave markets to close down once and for all.”

  She shrugged. “Anyway, they gave me a copy of the Dot concert model—that’s the most sophisticated version—and I hooked in a Watson discrimination system as a front end to a big cloud account. I installed my own version of Dot’s volition engine with the algorithm conflict modeling software installed and whole lot of ancillary processing hardware. She booted up writing songs.”

  “Is that the result of creativity?”

  Rosie considered me for a moment. “Is it the result of a genetic algorithm engineered in the light of the analyses of many performances across I don’t know how many discrete samplings of audience attention and response? Or have I made Dot an artist? You tell me.”

  I shrugged. Maybe there are some musical geniuses that could discern divine inspiration. I wasn’t one of them.

  Rosie looked at me for a long minute. “You look good, Jake. I really liked Virgin Melody, by the way. Nice collection.”

  It gave me a warm jolt to think she’d been following my work. Distraction. I made myself ignore it. “Dot has enough songs in there for a dozen performances. Isn’t that enough to show what Hitachi you’ve done?”

  She shrugged. “It’s probably enough for Hitachi. Not for me. Think of it as Shrodinger’s creativity. Until I can see inside of her I won’t know if it’s real or not.” Rosie fell silent for a moment.

  “How would you know real creativity if you found it?”

  “I don’t know. Or care. I just want to know how Dot does it.”

  We watched the green under the blue.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper.” I said quietly. “After a while you forget the too pale skin and the unnatural black hair and the blue eyes big enough for a fish. You forget she’s just modeling software and think of her as human.”

  “Do you know what a Turing Test is?”

  “No.”

  “Alan Turing. He said there was no good way to define or demonstrate artificial intelligence but what we could do was see how well a system could imitate a human being. He posited two people communicating with only a keyboard and a screen. If you could substitute a system for one end of the communication link and the human on the other end couldn’t tell the difference then the system had succeeded. A lot of people took that idea and ran with it, thinking if you couldn’t tell the difference, there was no difference.”

  “If you play music with a machine and forget who you’re playing with, is it human?”

  Rosie shook her head. “There’s no way to tell—that presumes behavior is the sole arbiter of the qualitative nature of the organism. That’s Behaviorism. Behaviorism says that since the experiential nature of an organism—or, more correctly, that the internal state of the organism—isn’t relevant. If you have a robot that mimics human behavior in every way, is it human? Many would say yes. I don’t think so.” Rosie watched the green haze in the valley a moment. “She’s experiencing something. I’m convinced of it.”

  “I think so, too. From the way she pushed back.”

  “She likes you.”

  I stared at her. “How could you possibly know that?”

  Rosie smiled. “Attention vectors. When you tell her something I get a slew of transient processing loads as she takes apart what you’re saying. That’s expected. But when she’s just observing you there are bursts of transients at regular intervals attending to her modeling you rather than what you’re saying.”

  “How do you get from that to her liking me?”

  “Like might be the wrong word. Interest might be a better choice. You, personally, are garnering a great deal of her attention. She’ll build a model of you eventually, down to the finest jot and tittle.”

  “People pay attention to things they dislike.”

  Rosie shook her head. “She doesn’t like cats and hummingbirds. When she gives them her attention it’s a quick modeling computation and then that model stands in for whenever she encounters them. She only gives them attention when the object deviates from the model.”

  “Maybe I’m more complicated than a cat or a hummingbird.”

  “Maybe.” She held her cigarette and the smoke rose vertically in a single, wavering strand. “She gives me the same treatment as she gives cats.”

  “You couldn’t possibly be jealous.”

  She barked a laugh. “Hardly. I’m not surprised. I’m not a musician. I don’t understand performing. I don’t fall within her interest parameters. You do.” Rosie watched me a moment, drew on her cigarette. “You were her first and only choice. I couldn’t budge her. She wouldn’t even consider working with anybody else.” Rosie chuckled. “I’m still working on the flexibility/fixation problem.”

  I thought about that. “Should I apologize?”

  “Do as your conscience dictates.” She inhaled and exhaled smoke. “I have no advice. I don’t know if Dot has emotions or not. But she certainly knows that you do.”

  So I humbled myself and apologized to a machine. Anything to grease the wheels of commerce. We started over.

  Rosie sat in the back of the living room to observe and I stood in front of the wall when Dot appeared. The pages of “Downbeat Heart” were layered behind her so there was the appearance of the two of us standing next to one another in front of the music.

  I had thought about this for a while. “You want to do a proof of concept concert, right? With a live band?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, then. Delete everything but the vocal line and guitar support.”

  Dot turned to me, puzzled. “What will they work from?”

  “We’ll figure it out together. You’re probably smarter than me. But I suspect you’re not smarter than five people: you, the guitarist, bassist, drummer, and keyboard. Maybe a second guitar as well. We’ll have to see how it works out.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said with a frown. “I have an idea—”

  “Which you’re going to have to release so other people can work with it.” I thought for a moment. “This is like live theater. Director pulls together a cast. They rehearse. On opening night he has to let them go. He can’t be on the stage directing what they do, right? In fact, if he’s any good at all, he’s already done it in rehearsal. He has to do this so the cast can own their parts. It’s the same way with music. We’ll let the band come up with their own harmonies. Not completely—we’ll give them ideas, suggestions, all out of your score here. But we’ll let them develop it. It’ll be better. You’ll see. Now, sing ‘Downbeat Heart.’ ”

  I sat back and watched as Dot sang out whatever served as her heart to me.

  It was a good song and she backed her vocals with the score I had asked her to delete with my modifications. I smiled at that. Maybe she wasn’t human but I figured she was making a point. I closed my eyes and listened. Triple beat arpeggio in four/four time—came out even every three measures. That long glissando across three octaves back to hold the new key into the final chorus.

  I stopped her. “Sing ‘Stardust.’ Your song, not the old jazz standard. The one you released a couple of years ago.”

  “I’m trying to move away from that material.”

  “You’re going to have to be able to mix old material with new material. The audience is coming to see you for two reasons: to repeat the experience of what they’ve heard and to enjoy the novelty of new work. You’ve got to be able to manage both.”

  “I can manage the performance. That’s not going to be a problem.”

  “Really?”

  She gave me a level gaze. “Really.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Her little sixteen-year-old face
watched me back. She was probably right: the Dot performance engine. “Why don’t you want to perform the old material?”

  “The old material doesn’t measure up to what I can do now.”

  I laughed then. “Suck it up. How many times did Eric Clapton have to sing ‘Layla’? How many times does the Berlin Philharmonic have to perform the Ninth Symphony? This is something all performers do: find something good in the material and lean on it to make something new.” Something Rosie had said came back to me. “The measure of a good artist is how well they turn old material into a new form. Come on: ‘Stardust,’ please.”

  Dot fiddled with her hair for a moment then nodded. I looked over to Rosie. Rosie didn’t look up from her pad.

  “Okay, then,” said Dot. She sang “Stardust” for me a capella. In protest? I didn’t say anything. It served me just as well: I was interested in the vocalization. “How much control do you have of the voice envelope.”

  “Total,” she said in a deep bass voice.

  “Good. You want to keep the range—you’re known for it and all of the music I’ve seen is written for it. It strains the mind a little for a coloratura to be suddenly singing baritone. But you have to age the voice.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look at the lyrics. This woman has been around the block a few times—otherwise why should she be so nervous about it? The idea that anything is transitory and therefore suspect is not a teen concept. It’s the framework of an adult experience. So, step one, the singer has to sound old enough for this song. But we don’t want to change the pitch of your voice so we change the timbre. Roughen it. Punctuate it with taking breath. Exhaling. A sigh, now and then. And there has to be more variation in the notes. Young voices are pure—that’s why boy’s choirs were invented. Adult voices have more variation and are therefore richer.” I thought for a moment. “And strained. That high point where you’re jumping from C below middle C up three octaves? That’s an enormous range. There should be strain at both ends. Can you do that?”

 

‹ Prev