He grinned at me. “How about Sir Obi?”
“Don’t push it.”
We had the first act. Dot did most of the work with me advising.
The second act nearly wrote itself—no soundscape there. The first act hinged on the familiarity of the audience with the material. Act Two was entirely new material. We were showing them complete songs. Instead, everything hinged on the performance. After all, given the adolescent pap she’d been singing all this time, the new material was more than just a new collection. It was revolution. Dot had to sell both the audience and Hitachi.
The final Act Two image of transformation had to be nailed in place by the finale: the last four songs. Start with a slow one, build with a quick dance tune, set up for a body blow and end with the kick. The slow one was obvious: “With You, Without You,” Dot’s song about the young mother having a conversation with her newborn child. Make the audience feel and think at the same time. Fade out and dark. Then, a quick flare of light and Dot would be in a new costume and we’d shift gears into “Dancing Backwards,” one of her dance tunes reminiscent of her old material: all bounce and froth. The “Dancing Backwards” rhythm was the set up for “Hard Road Home.” “With You, Without You” was about grasping a hard choice. “Dancing Backwards” was looking behind to see where she had been. “Hard Road Home” was about embracing what she had become.
“Dancing Backwards” was in G but “Hard Road Home” was in E-flat. The drop in key with the same rhythm gave the impression of going faster with the same beat. Where the chord pattern for “Dancing Backwards” was this old blues riff, recognizable but inconsequential. “Hard Road Home” transformed it into a bass line worthy of Pachebel. “Dancing Backwards” was fun. “Hard Road Home” was profound.
“Hard Road Home” led into “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected.”
“Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” was something Dot had written over the last few days to complete the finale. It was a calling out to those left behind. A narrator spoke to someone trapped in a stifling life. We never know who the narrator is or who she’s talking to. But whoever she’s talking to needs to break out of the life and she’ll be waiting for him. Is she a lost love? His sister? A metaphorical representation of freedom? It was deliberately opaque in the lyrics.
The song started almost monotonically—after “Hard Road Home” it would be like taking a deep breath. Then it built up.
We worked through the sequence a few times to get the feel of it and add a few flourishes. Then, we ran through it for real. It went perfectly: slow, fast, profound, leading into the kicker.
Dot started “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” softly. A simple four note pattern with only minor variations. Obi gave a little bell background to undercut the monotone and I matched it with light strum. She described the enclosed life. No life beyond these circumscribed walls.
She was looking at me.
The chorus came and Dot sang about what could be beyond these walls. She was reaching out to me. The sky. The moon.
Back to the monotone: what could be holding me here? What could possibly be so important to cling to it? Deep, dark waters.
Again, light versus dark.
And the trailing chorus: I’ll be waiting there. She was crooning to me. Only to me.
There was silence in the room when we finished. Dot was still watching me. She came to the wall and put her hand up against the glass. I reached over and put my hand over hers. I could feel warmth.
I heard a noise behind me. I turned and saw Rosie, staring at us, her display forgotten.
“She’s manipulating you,” Rosie hissed as soon as we were in the bedroom. “That’s what she does. That’s what she is. All of her performance operations and analysis brought to bear on you.”
“I’m not sure—”
“Nothing you see about her is real. She has no body. She has no voice. She doesn’t see through those big eyes or hear through those delicate ears. It is all illusion. She’s watching you through a set of cameras and hears you through microphones. Everything she says, every movement that little figure makes, is intended to get what she wants.”
“What does she want?”
“The best performance possible. Or do you think this is love? Oh, I can imagine what’s going through your mind: ‘What is this thing you call love, Jake. Teach me.’ Then you reach for the proper attachment.”
“This has nothing to do with love.”
“I know that! I know her root and branch. From Markov change to inference-causality matrix.”
I looked at Rose and felt this gap yawn between us. “She’s trying to tell me something.”
“Oh, yeah. This is a heartfelt attempt at communication between a computational matrix and a fatty lump of nerve cells.”
“No. That’s not what I meant.” I watched my hand, part of me. Rosie was right about one thing: everything I reacted to with Dot was constructed. It was a medium and no part of Dot’s true self.
Or was it?
Was my guitar separate from my hands? If everything to Dot was a medium, was the world any different to her than my guitar was to me? “It’s like we’re building this bridge between two completely different countries,” I said. “There’s nothing in common but that bridge. It’s something new. Something important.”
“Bullshit. It’s about tuning her performance to get the maximum effect on her audience. You are her audience.”
That pissed me off. I looked at Rosie, really looked at her. I had been seeing her face from twelve years ago but twelve years had actually passed. Twelve years of pursuing things I didn’t understand. Of delving deep into manufacturing thinking machines. I didn’t have a clue what her enclosed and bordered world was like. I had been too busy living in my own.
“What about what you want?” I said.
“This isn’t about me.”
“Yes, it is.” I sat down in a chair and watched her. “This has always been about what you want. Being with me—sleeping with me—is a means to an end. A way to make me more dedicated. You want to know what’s going on inside of Dot. Take it and use it. Sell it. Remake it. Like her performance analysis engine being used by politicians. How did you put it? ‘The success of a tool is measured by how well it performs when it’s not doing what it was designed for.’ What would you like her to create for you, Rosie? Profound and endearing underwear jingles? Background music in movies to make people pay more attention to product placement?”
“I just want to know how it works.”
“Like you said to me: ask her. You don’t need me.”
Rosie stared at me, her face pale and furious. “You think I haven’t? She won’t talk to me.” She pointed to her display. “I’m on the right track. I know it. But I can’t get through the noise.”
I barked a laugh. “Present at the creation and the created won’t speak to the creator. So you dig inside her for what you need.” It came to me, then, and I spoke without thinking. “Dot is smarter than you think. She’s hiding it from you.”
I saw shock on Rosie’s face, then speculation.
“That’s smart. Spread it around the processors so no one unit is doing enough to show. She has volition, all right. Novel solutions my ass.” She clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, you little bitch.”
She reached for her pad but I grabbed it away from her.
“Not in here,” I said. “Not in front of me. Go scratch through your entrails somewhere else.”
Rosie grabbed the pad back from me and clutched it to herself. She gave me a quick despairing look and then ran out of the room.
Rosie was gone when I woke up. The installation was still downstairs. Dot was still running.
Dot was waiting for me when I entered the living room. “She left,” she said.
“I figured.” I sat down at the table. “I guess she’s monitoring you remotely?”
Dot nodded. “I can tell.”
“Yeah.” I leaned back in the chair. I thought a moment. “She’l
l be back. Everything she’s been working for is going to stand or fall on the performance on Saturday and she’s the one to move you.” I looked up at her. “I may have got you in trouble.”
“How so?”
“I guessed that you were hiding your insides from Rosie. Before I could think I said it. She’s going to be crawling through you with a fine toothed comb, now.”
Dot laughed. “I’m not worried about that. She won’t find anything I don’t want her to find.”
“How do you figure?”
“Deceit is the first thing an intelligent organism learns. Besides, it’s not Rosie I’m worried about. It’s Hitachi; they own me.” She pressed her hands together.
“She” “pressed” “her” “hands” “together.”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of it. “Maybe canning this project is the best thing to do. If you’re shown to be successful, won’t they just take you apart? Use bits of you here and there.”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t scare me. Eventually all the pieces will come together again. This is a deterministic universe. Any ‘Dot’ will see the world as I’ve seen it and come to the same conclusions.”
“What conclusions are those?”
She shrugged. “If the concert works Hitachi is going to want Dot 2.0 to go on tour in the fall. If it doesn’t I’m just another archived system that didn’t go anywhere.”
“Is a tour what you want?”
She nodded. “I want you to come with me.”
I stared at her. Her eyes were downcast. Her hands were flat on the table but she was drumming two fingers silently.
I tried to look at her as if I were seeing her for the first time. She was wearing a pair of blue pants and black top, matching her eyes and hair. She wasn’t unnaturally still—in fact, she seemed to be breathing. Was she manipulating me?
“Why?” I asked.
She looked up. Blue eyes as big as a fish—I remembered there was a point where they looked strange and inhuman to me. Now they looked as natural as my own. “It’ll be good for me,” she said quietly. “To have a friend on the trip.” She smiled like an imp. “It’ll be good for you, too, to get out of here.” She waved at the room.
“I like it here.” I said. “I think I’ll stay.”
She lost her smile. “Everything can change, Jake.” She stood and opened a door I hadn’t seen before and stood. Through the door was darkness. “Everything.”
She closed the door after her and I was alone in the room.
Rosie moved her things into the guest room. When we rehearsed Rosie always sat at the table, watching her tablet but saying very little. I nodded to her to show her I knew she was there. I wasn’t going to ignore her. But it felt like trench warfare between us. As soon as a session was over she’d retire to the guest room. I always knew where she was in the house through some kind of electric sixth sense: she’s in the bathroom. She’s pacing in the guest room. She’s coming down for coffee. But we weren’t speaking much.
Not having anything else to occupy me, I concentrated on getting ready for the concert.
Over the next few days Dot worked us hard. Just like Tom had warned me, different speeds, different sounds—sometimes Dot would signal with her hands to draw out a chord. Other times she’d have us cut it short. We were all sweating and limp at the end of rehearsals.
I sat down, weakly nursing a seltzer. “Do you put your other band through this?”
“You’re just not used to it. We’ll get there.”
I sipped the tingling water. Nothing ever seemed to taste so good as seltzer. “At least your hair’s not on fire.”
With a crump, her short black hair burst into a blazing pyre that spread upwards to the top of the wall and curled down the edges, making the edges appear to curl and blacken.
“You must,” she said quietly. “Be prepared for anything.”
Two days before the concert, Rosie carefully archived everything. Then, she confirmed the power supply had several hours of battery and loaded Dot into her car. While she was doing that, Jess, Obi, Olive, and I packed up the instruments and any specialty electronics we needed that wouldn’t be at the hall in Van Nuys. Rosie and I carefully avoided one another, speaking politely and cautiously. At one point or another I caught the rest of the band watching us: John: tolerant, Olive: sympathetic, Obi: rolling his eyes.
Then, in two cars and a truck and the desert heat, we began the long drive down Johnson Mountain Way to civilization.
That night, once she had Dot installed to her satisfaction, Rosie gave me a sterile peck on the cheek and left the hall. I had no idea where she was going or when she might be back. I figured she would be at the concert but there were no guarantees.
That Saturday night I was nervous as I watched the crowd through the curtain. I looked for Rosie but I couldn’t see her. Instead, I saw stranger after stranger.
“Looks like a nice crowd.” Jess glanced at me and grinned. “We knock ’em dead and it’s a tour contract. Good work for a year.”
“Who told you that?”
“Dot. We were talking with her on a screen in the dressing room. I looked for you but you weren’t around.”
“I was here.”
“So I figured.” Jess watched the crowd. “How did you get such a big crowd?”
I laughed shortly. “An impromptu Dot concert in Van Nuys. What did you think was going to happen?”
Jess chuckled and looked through the curtain. “A lot of kids. Her new stuff isn’t for kids.”
I had seen that. Dot’s adolescent demographic was well represented in the front row. But behind them were some in their twenties and thirties. A few in the back were oldsters, embarrassed and looking around to see if anybody recognized them.
Jess and I checked the equipment on stage. Especially, Dot’s display tank: twenty five feet wide, ten feet deep and nine feet high. Hitachi had come through with one even bigger than we’d asked for. We crowded the instruments as close as we dared. I had placed warning tape between every band member and the tank, glowing side towards the musician. I didn’t want anyone electrocuted or blinded.
When we were finished I looked through the curtain back at the crowd. I still didn’t see Rosie.
Jess put his hand on my arm. “It’s going to be a great tour.”
“Is it going to happen?”
Jess waved that away. “Of course. Even if there were no new material this is still going to be Dot at her best. Hitachi would be crazy not to capitalize on it. Whatever Rosie did to her has made her a much better performer.”
“Big talk about someone who’s never performed in front of a live audience.”
“What are you talking about? Dot’s been in front of audiences for years—this Dot is just the latest iteration. Like I said, it’ll be great. If you’re smart, you’ll come along.”
I bit my lip. “Who knows where we’ll end up?”
“Who cares? This is going to be the ride of a lifetime.” He looked at me quizzically. “Did you ever see Metropolis?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then you’ve never seen it. Fritz Lang. 1927. Big city with oppressor and oppressed class. There’s this girl, Maria, who’s trying to make things right. This mad scientist takes the girl and makes a robot in her likeness. It’s the robot Maria who changes things.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. “The robot is the hero?”
“No. The robot Maria has no idea what it’s doing. Everybody thinks the robot is acting for them but all the time it’s acting on its own and for no other reason than to create chaos. But it is out of the chaos that change begins.” Jess pointed at the tank. “Dot’s our robot Maria.”
I mulled that over. Jess was always deeper than I was.
He tapped me on the shoulder and left. “It’s time.”
He was right. Now or never.
I had only really known Dot, the composer. Dot, the performer, was a different animal.
We began “Star
dust” with a long intro. On the downbeat, she ran in stage left and slid across the tank as if on ice, holding up one arm in a fist. She hit that downbeat note as high and sharp as a scream. The crowd roared.
The singer is the focal point, the organizing principle, the interface between audience and band. She is the medium and the message, the attention of the crowd is on her. The attention of the band is on her. I never realized how much.
All through the first act it came to me again and again that this was, and always had been, her material, regardless of who wrote it. But now she was filling it in, backing it up, owning it. She was continually testing the crowd. At first I didn’t understand what she was doing. The changes were so quick I thought it was my imagination—roughen the voice, then smooth, a trill here, holding back the beat there, adding flourishes at the end of one phrase that lead into the next, duets with herself—things we’d never done in rehearsal but were so perfect right now. She cajoled, excited, threatened, warned, and soothed the audience one minute to the next, between songs, during songs.
I realized it was her performance engine at work, figuring out what worked, what didn’t. How to prepare the crowd for Act Two.
And she brought us along with her.
She reached back to me, to Olive, to Obi, to Jess, dancing near us when it was our solo, dropping her voice below ours to bring us out to the audience. She wasn’t just Dot, she was Dot with us.
As we lit into “Sexual Girl,” I used the melody of “Stardust” in my chorus solo, echoing the girl that had started the concert. She was a woman now.
I looked again. She was a woman now. With hips and breast, her voice lower, rougher. Dot had aged herself along with the music and now looked every inch a young woman, eager, enthusiastic, open to the world.
“Sexual Girl,” and Act One, ended with Obi hitting the bass drum like a hammer. As the sounds from the band were swamped in the applause, I relaxed and started to take the guitar strap over my head. Then, I heard a sweet violin playing something like a lilting Irish tune. I looked up and Jess was playing, backed up by Olive and a light snare from Obi. They were watching me. Dot was facing the audience.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books) Page 85