Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  He started playing a simple bass line with his left hand. I tried to stop the part of my brain that kept analyzing the rates of attack and decay, translating piano into programming.

  “Play over it,” he said.

  I listened for a moment, then started to pick out a melody, adding chords for color, arpeggiating and inverting them as I grew more confident. We were playing in D. I liked D; D always resonated in my bones.

  “That’s music,” he said without stopping. “That’s friendship and music and love and sex. Don’t giggle, I can say the word. I’m old, not dead. One person can make music, too, but it’s better when it’s a conversation. Between you and another musician or between you and an audience.”

  I hit a wrong note then. He gave me a funny look, then incorporated my wrong note into his bass line, sliding past it and making it part of the song.

  Sixteen Years

  Pop was always right. I met Corrina when we were paired together in bio lab. The only other person in class from the same city, and we wound up being paired together. I don’t remember how we realized we both played music. Once we figured it out, it didn’t take too much convincing to get her over to my house with her violin. My house because she hadn’t even seen a real piano before.

  We didn’t have any songs in common, or even a genre, so we invented our own. I’m not sure they were any good, but they were us; and us had never happened before. I liked the way the sound filled the room, the way it became something more than both of us. Bodies and music, fingers and hands, we drew each other out.

  Eighteen Years

  At the age of ninety, my great-grandfather got his second tattoo. A piano keyboard, a single octave, the black keys obscuring the numbers that had been inked into his arm when he was a little boy. I took him to the tattoo parlor.

  “I thought Jews weren’t supposed to get tattoos,” I said to him.

  He said, “If I didn’t have any choice the first time, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get to replace it with something I won’t mind looking at.”

  Whenever I caught him looking at it, I thought of his stories, of the little girl with the flute and the way her offering transformed.

  Twenty Years

  Pop died playing piano.

  “It’s a shame he died alone,” a great-aunt said to me at the house after the funeral.

  “He didn’t.” I knew it was true. “If he was in the middle of a song, he wouldn’t have said he was alone.”

  I walked over to the piano bench, sat down. His sheet music stood open to the page he’d been playing. I rested my fingers on the keys in the same places his fingers had rested last. Looked at the page, a song called “Don’t Fence Me In.” After the first few hesitant bars, I recognized it as a song he had played when I was a kid, and I picked up the tempo a little.

  “You play so well, Katja,” said another great-aunt. “Why didn’t you stay in conservatory?”

  “I don’t know, Aunt Bianka. I guess I got bored.”

  I had gotten bored, it was true. Bored of playing and studying in nonexistent spaces, hundreds of miles from my classmates. And then I was booted, but I never knew which relatives had been told. My parents were still angry.

  Pop had been more philosophical. “You don’t need a school to tell you you’re a musician. You’ve got music coming out your ears.”

  I wanted his piano, but I had no room for it. I shared a house in the city with six others, writing earworms for online ads. The piano went to Great Aunt Bianka’s, though nobody there knew how to play. I considered getting a tattoo like his, but it wasn’t quite the memorial I wanted.

  I tried composing something for him, but nothing came. What I wanted to write was there inside me, somewhere just beneath my skin. The music I made didn’t say what I wanted it to say. He was right all those years ago. It didn’t have enough weight, but nothing I did fixed it.

  Twenty-One Years

  It took me six months to come up with the idea. The night it hit me, I couldn’t go to sleep until I had figured out the logistics.

  I stumbled down the stairs at four in the morning, triumphant, over-caffeinated, looking for someone to share with. I’d rather it had been Lexa or Javier; but Lexa had recently papered her windows and started working nights, and Javi was in bed already. Kurt sat at the table, a chipped yellow mug of black coffee in his hands, a notebook on the table. He was the only other musician living in the house, and we often ran into each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night when everyone else was asleep. Once I had made it clear I wasn’t interested in fucking him, we had settled into a friendship of sorts. I didn’t like him very much, despite our commonalities.

  “What are you working on?” I asked, even though I knew.

  He flipped the notebook shut. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s hilarious you’re working on a concept album called the Great Upload but you write on dead tree paper. What I probably should have asked was ‘how’s it going’?”

  “It’s going okay song-wise. There’s still something missing in the actual arrangements, though. I go to record them, and they sound flat. Are you still willing to put down some piano parts for me sometime?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Say when.”

  I poured myself some cereal and sat down in a chair opposite him.

  “You’re welcome. Now it’s your turn to ask me what I’m working on,” I prompted him after a couple of minutes of crunching.

  He looked up again, looking slightly put out. “Hey, Katja, what are you working on?”

  “I’m glad you asked. As a matter of fact, tonight I figured out my first tattoo.”

  He still didn’t look all that interested; but I motioned him to pull up his hoodie, and I did the same, sending him a snapshot of what I’d been working on. He sat silent for a long minute.

  “It’s playable?” he asked at last, dropping the hoodie.

  I nodded. “Thirteen notes, thirteen triggers, thirteen sensors under the skin of my left forearm, plus a transmitter. After the incisions heal, I’ll have the keyboard tattooed over it. I just need to find someone willing to do the work and save up to pay for it.”

  “That’s an awesome idea, K.”

  We spent a few minutes chatting about tattoo artists and body mod shops. Eventually, the adrenaline that had kept me going all night started to ebb, and I headed back up to my room.

  It took me three more months to save the money to get the implants done, three months I spent writing commercial jingles on commission and searching for the right person to do the work. At night in bed, I’d spread the fingers of my right hand and lay them over my left arm. I gave it muscle, weight. Imagined wrenching songs from myself, first for my great-grandfather, who had always known I was full of music. It felt so right.

  Kurt hadn’t been around the house much lately, but he’d left a poster on the fridge with a note asking us all to come to a test show for his Great Upload song cycle.

  “Don’t make me go alone, Katja,” Javi had pleaded, and I had agreed.

  The club was a few blocks from our place, a row house basement turned illegal performance space. I’d played there a few times sitting in with various bands. It smelled like cat piss, looked like a place time had forgotten, but sounded decent enough.

  Kurt had a crowd, though there was no way of knowing whether they were there for him or another band. He had billed himself as “KurtZ and the Hearts of Darkness,” the Hearts of Darkness being a drummer and a guitarist. A second amp’s red eye glowed from a dark corner; a guest musician’s for later in the set, maybe.

  He looked nervous, buttoned up. He wore a three-piece suit, and his hair was plastered to his face before the first song. The songs were okay, nothing special. They sounded a little unanchored without bass. He had his eyes closed like he was reading the lyrics off his own eyelids.

  By the third song I had stopped paying attention to the stage, so it was my ears that picked up the difference. The third song felt rooted in a
way the previous two hadn’t. I looked up to see who was playing the bass part, but there were only the three of them, and Kurt didn’t have an instrument in his hands.

  Except he did. I saw it then. He’d taken off his jacket and pushed his sleeves up, and I saw it. My tattoo, my trigger system. He was playing his arm. People were eating it up, too, whispering, pointing. That wasn’t what I had wanted it for; it wasn’t meant to be a gimmick. I didn’t stay to see the rest.

  “You should be happy, Katja!”

  It was three a.m., and I had waited up like a pissed-off parent, chewing on my own thumb and thinking of all the things I’d say to him.

  He burst into the house drunk and giddy, bouncing right off my attempts to shame him. “Everybody loved it. It’s awesome. I’m already thinking of getting a guitar put somewhere, too.”

  “It was my idea, Kurt. My design. You had no right.”

  “Where’s the harm? You should be thanking me. I tested it for you. Imagine how heartbroken you would have been if you’d spent all your money on it and it hadn’t worked.”

  “But why?”

  “Why?” He looked confused.

  I tried to tell him, but nothing breached his mood or his self-righteousness. And what could I do? I’d shown him the design. I hadn’t patented it or copyrighted it or whatever you did with inventions. Seething was my only option, so I seethed. I lay in bed furious with myself, tired and hurt, but mostly furious. We all knew what Kurt was like. I should have known better.

  At some point in the long night, a calmer voice took over my head. My grandfather, calm and philosophical, like when Corrina had moved away. “You can’t help what other people do, Katja. Learn from the experience and decide what you’re going to do next.”

  What had I learned? Not to trust Kurt Zell. What else? How did it sound? The song had needed bass, and the tattoo-keyboard had fit that spot well. The tone was decent but not great; I could have done better. A single octave would have worked as a tribute to my grandfather’s tattoo, but it was limited as an actual instrument. Maybe multiple octaves would be better, but I’d still be stuck playing with one hand if I placed it on the opposite forearm. It was like a logic puzzle. I lay awake poking at it until the pieces came together.

  Kurt was right: I should be thanking him, though I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. I’d been thinking within the lines. If he hadn’t stolen my idea, I wouldn’t have had a better one.

  Twenty-Four Years

  Saving for my second plan took longer. I bided my time, testing designs on a model, not sharing them with anyone except the body-mod artist who did the implants.

  The same club Kurt had played opened their doors to me. I called the project “Weight,” left a note telling my roommates to come, told Kurt he owed me and he ought to show up.

  I’d borrowed a bassist and a drummer. They were comfortable with the structure I’d given them. I let them start the first song, set the receiver to interpret everything within the key of D, and hit the stage.

  Four to the floor, anchored, insistent, a beat that made people want to move. Everybody was watching me. I touched a spot on my left forearm, a nondescript spot, no tattoo to mark it. A note rang out, clear and pure, interpreted into key by the receiver on my amp. Then I twitched my right wrist, and the gyro beneath the skin took the note and spun it. I played a few more, shaping a melody. Pressed the spot that locked the notes in as a sample, sent them to the receiver to repeat over and over.

  I wore a tank top and shorts, so everything I did was evident. Kurt’s keyboard—it had almost been my keyboard—was so limited. I slammed my palms into my skin, leaving pink spots, leaving musical trails. My hands were hammers hitting strings. The notes were hidden everywhere. There was no map anyone else could see. I was the instrument and the chord and the notes that composed it. A song transposed to body.

  When I stepped off the stage into the audience, I had to show them how to touch me. They were gentle, much gentler than I had been, at least at first. Hands pressed into my arms, my shoulders, my thighs. Everywhere they touched, my skin responded. It sent signals to the receiver, to the synth, to the amp, and the sounds were broadcast over the PA. I’d set it to translate this first song into a single key, so the notes built into chords, then broke apart. I had ways to distort, to sustain, to make a note tremble as if it were bowed. It was me: I was playing me; they were playing me. I was the instrument, the conduit, the transmutation of loss into elegy, song into prayer, my own prayers into notes, notes into song. Body and music, fingers and hands, they drew me out.

  Water

  Ramez Naam

  The water whispered to Simon’s brain as it passed his lips. It told him of its purity, of mineral levels, of the place it was bottled. The bottle was cool in his hand, chilled perfectly to the temperature his neural implants told it he preferred. Simon closed his eyes and took a long, luxurious swallow, savoring the feel of the liquid passing down his throat, the drops of condensation on his fingers.

  Perfection.

  “Are you drinking that?” the woman across from him asked. “Or making love to it?”

  Simon opened his eyes, smiled, and put the bottle back down on the table. “You should try some,” he told her.

  Stephanie shook her head, her auburn curls swaying as she did. “I try not to drink anything with an IQ over 200.”

  Simon laughed at that.

  They were at a table at a little outdoor café at Washington Square Park. A dozen yards away, children splashed noisily in the fountain, shouting and jumping in the cold spray in the hot midday sun. Simon hadn’t seen Stephanie since their last college reunion. She looked as good as ever.

  “Besides,” Stephanie went on. “I’m not rich like you. My implants are ad-supported.” She tapped a tanned finger against the side of her head. “It’s hard enough just looking at that bottle, at all of this …” She gestured with her hands at the table, the menu, the café around them. “Without getting terminally distracted. One drink out of that bottle, and I’d be hooked!”

  Simon smiled, spread his hands expansively. “Oh, it’s not as bad as all that.” In his peripheral senses he could feel the bottle’s advertech working, reaching out to Stephanie’s brain, monitoring her pupillary dilation, the pulse evident in her throat, adapting its pitch in real-time, searching for some hook that would get her to drink, to order a bottle for herself. Around them he could feel the menus, the table, the chairs, the café—all chattering, all swapping and bartering and auctioning data, looking for some advantage that might maximize their profits, expand their market shares.

  Stephanie raised an eyebrow. “Really? Every time I glance at that bottle I get little flashes of how good it would feel to take a drink, little whole-body shivers.” She wrapped her arms around herself now, rubbing her hands over the skin of her tanned shoulders as if cold in this heat. “And if I did drink it, what then?” Her eyes drilled into Simon’s. “Direct neural pleasure stimulation? A little jolt of dopamine? A little micro-addiction to Pura Vita bottled water?”

  Simon tilted his head slightly, put on the smile he used for the cameras, for the reporters. “We only use pathways you accepted as part of your implant’s licensing agreement. And we’re well within the FDA’s safe limits for …”

  Stephanie laughed at him then. “Simon, it’s me! I know you’re a big marketing exec now but don’t give me your corporate line, okay?”

  Simon smiled ruefully. “Okay. So sure, of course, we make it absolutely as enticing as the law lets us. That’s what advertising’s for! If your neural implant is ad-supported, we use every function you have enabled. But so what? It’s water. It’s not like it’s going to hurt you any.”

  Stephanie was nodding now. “Mmm-hmmm. And your other products? VitaBars? Pure-E-Ohs? McVita Burgers?”

  Simon spread his hands, palms open. “Hey look, everybody does it. If someone doesn’t buy our Pura Vita line, they’re gonna just go buy something from NutriYum or OhSoSweet or OrganiTaste or som
ebody else. We at least do our best to put some nutrition in there.”

  Stephanie shook her head. “Simon, don’t you think there’s something wrong with this? That people let you put ads in their brains in order to afford their implants?”

  “You don’t have to,” Simon replied.

  “I know, I know,” Stephanie answered. “If I paid enough, I could skip the ads like you do. You don’t even have to experience your own work! But you know most people can’t afford that. And you’ve got to have an implant these days to be competitive. Like they say, wired or fired.”

  Simon frowned inwardly. He’d come to lunch hoping for foreplay, not debate club. Nothing had changed since college. Time to redirect this.

  “Look,” he said. “I just do my job the best I can, okay? Come on, let’s order something. I’m starving.”

  Simon pulled up his menu to cut off this line of conversation. He moved just fast enough that for a split second he saw the listed entrees still morphing, optimizing their order and presentation to maximize the profit potential afforded by the mood his posture and tone of voice indicated.

  Then his kill files caught up and filtered every item that wasn’t on his diet out of his senses.

  Simon grimaced. “Looks like I’m having the salad again. Oh, joy.”

  He looked over at Stephanie, and she was still engrossed in the menu, her mind being tugged at by a dozen entrees, each caressing her thoughts with sensations and emotions to entice, each trying to earn that extra dollar.

  Simon saw his chance. He activated the ad-buyer interface on his own implant, took out some extremely targeted ads, paid top dollar to be sure he came out on top of the instant auction, and then authorized them against his line of credit. A running tab for the new ad campaign appeared in the corner of his vision, accumulating even as he watched. Simon ignored it.