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

by Gardner Dozois

  She stood, fiddling with the curl of her hair that fell over her left ear. Over and over.

  I looked over at Rosie. She was watching on her pad. “Big Watson query with heavy calculation. It’s not a loop. She’s thinking.”

  Dot started moving again. “How about this?” And she sang the first four measures with that triple in four beat I had come to like so much. This was an older voice, roughened over the years with whisky and coffee.

  I stared at her. She still looked sixteen. “Where did you get that?”

  Dot smiled. “I sampled Janis Joplin.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Lighten it some. It still has to be your voice. Work on it. Let’s leave that one for now.”

  The next one had the accompanying material already removed. Only guitar and vocal harmonies were intact. Had that been in E? Now it was in B-flat. “Did you change the key?”

  “Yes. I thought if I lowered the key I could stay within my normal range but give it a more mature quality.”

  Jesus, she learned fast. “Hold on to the original keys until we get to the material. Then, we can talk about it. Having it shift on me like that is going to drive me nuts.”

  “Of course. After all, you’re only human.”

  Rosie chuckled.

  I looked at Dot. Had she just made a joke? Her face betrayed nothing—which shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, it was just a broad expanse of eyes, nose and mouth. It only resembled a face because my brain insisted that anything with two circles and a line where eyes and mouth were must be a face

  She watched me.

  If she’d made a joke I might never know.

  We worked hard for the rest of the day. I was beat. Rosie had filled her ashtray and had circles under her eyes. Dot looked exactly the same.

  “I’m done,” I said.

  Rosie nodded and stubbed out her cigarette.

  Dot looked first at me then Rosie. “Good night,” she said and disappeared.

  Rosie shut down her tablet and put it on the table with Dot’s equipment. “I need a drink.”

  I went to the kitchen and brought back a bottle of wine and a glass. I put it in front of her.

  Rosie eyed it. “You don’t have anything stronger?”

  “This is for you. I don’t drink.”

  “At all?”

  “Not anymore.”

  She poured wine into the glass. “It feels weird to be with you and drink alone.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why did you quit?”

  “For about a year after Denver I snorted, shot, or swallowed anything I could find. One day I woke up in the ER staring at a scared intern with two electrical paddles in his hand and a deep pain in my chest. The money was gone.” I waved at the house. “This place was all I had left.”

  She picked up her wine and swirled it in her glass without drinking.

  I pushed the bottle towards her. “It’s okay. It doesn’t bother me at all. Honest.” I felt weighted with fatigue. “Grover? Put up the outside view, would you?”

  The wall suddenly transformed into a broad window outside into the clear night. There was a faint crescent moon just visible past Rocky Peak and the stars were fine points of light. South the lights of Greater Los Angeles glowed against the sky.

  Rosie gasped.

  “Yeah.” I patted the table. “I love this place.”

  She reached over and took my hand.

  It was like touching electricity.

  Then we were kissing. Then we were doing far more than that.

  I met Rosie after a gig in Brockton. This was before “Don’t Make Me Cry,” my one hit wonder. I never quite grasped how we ended up in bed together that night.

  Or this one.

  Afterwards, we were lying comfortably next to one another. I could feel the pendulous weight of her breasts against my side and belly, the warmth of her thighs against mine. Her head was snuggled against my chest so I could smell her hair but not see her face. I remembered how that had always simultaneously comforted and annoyed me. Nothing had changed there. I felt a warmth inside of me, a sense of something filled.

  I didn’t want it. I’d been doing fine on my own, thank you very much.

  “Rosie?”

  She made a sound.

  “Why are you here?”

  I heard her sigh and she rolled back so she was lying on her side. “Are we going to have this conversation now?” She stared at me levelly.

  “Seems as good a time as any.”

  “Fine.” She sat up and leaned against the wall to look down at me. “I needed someone to teach her. That’s the problem with subjective data like music: it lives in the heads of human beings and you’re the human being I need.”

  “I mean why are you here? Next to me?”

  She reached over to the side table and found her purse and rummaged inside until she found her cigarettes. She put one in her mouth and lit it.

  I looked at her.

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” she said in a half-apology. “I certainly don’t regret lying here next to your sweet but aging body. And I certainly hadn’t decided it wouldn’t happen. I wasn’t averse if it did.”

  “That doesn’t say a thing.”

  She laughed. “You’re right. Fact of the matter is I didn’t think about it all that much. One of the algorithms I developed was a drive to succeed and do well. As soon as I got that established Dot brought up your name. Dot has the resources to demand the best and that’s you. The two of us didn’t enter that part of the equation.” She inhaled and breathed out smoke. It wreathed her head. “Besides,” she said. “That’s not the question you want to ask.”

  She looked at me and I knew immediately what she meant. “Why did you leave?” I said.

  She inhaled again. The smoke escaped her mouth as she spoke. “That was a fight, wasn’t it? Starting on where to eat dinner and then ranging across everything we’d ever done together or to each other. I could just say that fight burnt our bridges.” She puffed on the cigarette. “But it would be a lie. There was no place for me. I didn’t want to be your mistress. I didn’t want to be your groupie. I didn’t want to be your concubine.” She glanced at me with slitted eyes. “You didn’t ask me to be your wife. You had zero talent for or interest in my work and I had no ability or skill in yours. You could participate in my life or I could participate in yours: we couldn’t participate in each other’s. So I left.” She looked at me. “You never saw that?”

  I shook my head.

  “Interesting.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “I would have thought it was obvious. But now here’s something we can do together.” She snuggled down next to me, mouth open for a kiss, breath like a sultry dragon. “Among other things.”

  I cooked Rosie breakfast: bacon, eggs, fresh baked bread. Every couple of weeks I made a trip into California’s farm country and brought back groceries. Once you’ve made the decision to live in the hinterlands there’s no reason to drive a couple of hours just to pick up Wonderbread and beer.

  “What’s your plan?” she asked over coffee.

  I smiled at her, then felt shy and concentrated on buttering my toast. “I don’t have one,” I said. “If she were human I’d be asking what the songs felt to her.”

  “Ask her anyway.”

  “Does she feel?”

  Rosie held up her hands. “I really don’t know what that means. I know she can model human emotions. I know she can measure emotional effects in people.” Rosie leaned forward. “Humans have drives: we seek to survive. We seek to reproduce. We seek sustenance. The implementation of those drives comes from emotion: rage. Lust. Hunger. We experience pain and pleasure in first person. Dot has drives. I know. I built some of them. The system I built is self-modifying. It seeks novel solutions. Inside, she’s a collection of a thousand Intel 9220s backed up by a bank of twenty thousand networked IBM 4402 brain chips. The whole package front ends to the world through one of the most powerful and intelligent query modeling engines ever built.
If she’s developed a model of experience of which she can partake, I don’t know about it.”

  I mulled over that. “Is she conscious?”

  “I can tell you if you can define the word.”

  “I can’t—at least not in any real way. I thought you would know.”

  “An artifact deriving from the phase delay of mirror neurons modeling active neurons currently experiencing sensory or other input. Now you know as much as I do.” She chuckled and sipped her coffee. “Consciousness is one of those words like love or thirst or soft. We know it exists because it’s part of our common experience but we have no idea what it is.”

  “I was tripping on some acid once. I had this vision of me watching myself. Then, it was me watching myself watch myself. Then it was me watching myself watching myself watch myself. Is it anything like that?”

  “I like it. Every time you create an observer it pushes the observed model down a level.” She studied me. “Here I thought you couldn’t surprise me.” She thought for a moment. “Look, humans—mammals in general—are damned smart. We turn mating into something profound like sex. We turn the urge to nurture into love. Just like everything else in biology, we reuse it. Love for children. Love for parents—”

  “Love for sex slaves.”

  Dimples. “I didn’t know you thought of yourself as my slave. I’m flattered.” She rubbed my leg with her foot. “None of that heritage is available to Dot. Does she feel? Does she experience? Is she conscious? If she does any of those things it probably doesn’t resemble what we do.”

  “I thought you knew everything that’s going on inside of her.”

  Rosie laughed. “I wish.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can capture every state change of those 9220s. I can do the same for each of the brain chips—all twenty thousand of them as individuals, as entangled groups, as cause-and-effect relationships. Every Watson query, sub-query and filter. Every decision tree executed in the cloud. I can capture every method, subroutine, function or subsystem as it’s generated, called, and backtraced. I can measure anything. I can pull a terabyte a second out of her. There’s half a Dot in my pad to analyze it with. But I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

  “Weren’t you watching when she wrote that song?”

  “I saw a lot of activity. It’s like an MRI of the brain: I can watch the blood flow but I don’t know which neurons are firing and in what order and or which neurons are pissed off at a racist joke made in the front row.”

  “ ‘Downbeat Heart’ is good. It’s musically interesting. It doesn’t fly off into electronic neverland like other stuff I’ve heard. There’s a depth of feeling in that song. I could tell just by reading it.”

  Rosie looked at me speculatively. “Yeah. I got that from watching you. I couldn’t tell from the notes and Dot wouldn’t sing it for me until you could see it.”

  “Where did it come from if she can’t feel? If she can’t experience?”

  “I don’t know.” Rosie leaned on the table. “Whether it’s a total model of a human being or an experiential algorithm she’s developed or the beating of a tell-tale heart she’s got something that serves her.”

  I leaned back. “And you want it.”

  “Damned straight.” She finished the last of her coffee. “Let’s fire it up.”

  Dot could work 24/7 but I needed breaks. Over the next few days we fell into a routine. We’d work together in the morning and break for a long lunch. Work some more until dinner. Then, Rosie and I would spend quality time together. This usually involved sex—a whole lot of sex—as I remembered what we once had been.

  Sometimes the three of us would have lunch or dinner in the living room. I brought up a table and set it against the wall. Dot created an extension to the table on her side of the wall so she could sit with us. She conjured up a meal like ours and gave every appearance of eating. I liked it but Rosie got restive if we talked too much shop. This was problematic since Dot had a narrow set of interests.

  I began to think of Dot as a sort of autistic savant. So I followed Rosie’s advice. I asked her. “Do you feel?”

  Rosie choked on her salad and gulped some water to clear her throat. Then, she pulled out her pad and brought up a display.

  Dot toyed with her salad with her fork. Little stereotyped circles. “I don’t know. Rosie’s wrong about one thing: I haven’t developed some model of experiencing emotions. That wouldn’t work. If I have emotions they must be a consequence of the ability to experience, which I’m not sure I have.”

  “I don’t understand.” I watched as she moved the fork in tiny circles.

  “Imagine a musical note. It’s like a point. It has no sound. Calling something middle-C doesn’t create middle-C until it is played. Then, it has volume, depth, timbre, texture, duration—qualities that only exist when the note is played and do not exist within the nouns that describe them. Notes comprise a song but the experience of the song only occurs when the qualities that describe the song are transformed into real quantities. When someone hears me sing, they’re experiencing the music.” She stopped for a moment. “Am I the note itself or its written symbol? Action or action’s representation? Experience is dynamic. So I can only be experiencing something when I act. There can be no static model of the state of experience; there is only dynamic activity that can be observed.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this a lot.”

  “I have a lot of time on my hands.”

  Rosie was making notes furiously.

  Dot looked at her with an irritated expression on her face.

  I suddenly thought: when did she develop expressions?

  Things seemed to accelerate as Dot understood more and more what I was driving at. Sometimes, I’d set up to start work on a song only to find Dot had a set of alterations ready to try out. We had become so attuned to each another we could finish each other’s sentences. Except the phrases were music, I was a recluse and Dot was a piece of elaborate computation.

  Rosie had to go into Stanford to meet with some representatives from Hitachi. She’d be gone the entire day. When we broke for lunch, it was just me and Dot. I made myself a sandwich and came back into the living room to sit with her. She had a virtual salad.

  She pushed the dish away until it was just short of the wall. I half believed it was going to come right through the wall into the room. She put her elbows on the table and leaned her face on her hands and stared at me. “Why don’t you ever perform?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You’ve been here for years. Most of what you do you’re doing for me: help people fix their music. And you’re very good at it—I looked over what you did very carefully.”

  “How did you find it? What I do isn’t well publicized.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever is on the net is there forever. You can find anything if you look hard enough. Like what you did for Crimson Dynamo. Half their first collection is material you fixed. Whole phrases and choruses were written by you and used by them. You get a tiny acknowledgement in the credits.”

  “I was well paid. That’s not all I do.”

  “No. Every three years you’ve put out a little collection on your site: Opus Electrica. Hill and Dale. Strong Arm. And last year, Virgin Melody. The performance shows virtuoso technique—down to ten millisecond precision on the beat. I don’t think there’s a drummer alive that can appreciate that. Ten to fifteen songs every few years and it’s not even your best work. I’ve hacked your machines here and I know. Why?”

  “I suppose I should be upset you hacked my system.” I was surprised I wasn’t.

  “Don’t evade the question.”

  “ ‘Don’t Make Me Cry’ happened.”

  Sometimes a song will, for the unexplainable reasons of pop culture, take the country by storm. No one knows how these things work. They are like a big rock dropped in a small pond. One moment the artist labors in poor obscurity. The next everything he touches turns to gold.

/>   “Don’t Make Me Cry” was trite. It was sentimental. It was simple: just an acoustic guitar main line and just a strong hint of electronic backup. Persons Unknown were my band but “Don’t Make Me Cry” was all mine. It hit pop culture like a bomb.

  For three years I was Jake Arnold, musical wonder. We played it on The Tonight Show, Conan, and David Letterman. Every scheduled performance was sold out. We made an unscheduled appearance at House of Blues and the news leaked: lines wrapped around Fenway Park twice. Both Amazon and iTunes had to add new servers to take up the load. It was picked up as a theme song for a television show. The show was adapted for a film and sure enough the song went with it. The film people used a re-release of the television show as promotional material—which caused the song to be played across a few hundred million home video screens, each one paying me a little bit.

  These things make their own stresses. I was convinced of my own genius. The band was convinced of my own arrogance. Saint Louis happened. Denver happened. I moved into my house alone.

  A year later the rush was over and you could hear “Don’t Make Me Cry” playing in Wal-Mart as background music. The splash was over. The ripples gave me a tiny trickle of money but Jake Arnold had been forgotten. The band was gone. Rosie was gone. The money was gone. All I had left was the house.

  Rosie thought it was this repressed rage that made “Don’t Make Me Cry” such a hit. I couldn’t say.

  “Jake,” she said one night while we were still catching our breath. “If you were more self-involved you’d be incoherent.” She rolled over to me and kissed me tenderly. “It’s what I love and hate about you.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dot said. “You disappeared because Rosie left? Because people lost interest in the song?”

  “The song sucked. None of my other work seemed to matter. I wrote that thin little piece of crap off in an afternoon when I was pissed off and hadn’t been laid in a year—a month before I met Rosie. The song didn’t matter. Whether it was good. Whether it was bad. Whether I was happy with it or hated it. It was timing. It was whatever the public was hungering for at that moment. Success happened because it happened; my part in it was unimportant. Trivial. Random chance.”