by Rick Boling
Could you please put some clothes on?”
I was standing in the music room, just inside the glass doors to the patio, drying myself. I’d long ago stopped being embarrassed about Aurie seeing me naked, although this, I realized, was the first time I’d undressed in front of her since the transfer. “Why?” I said. “Nobody’s here to see me.”
“Oh, so I’m nobody,” she said. “How would you like it if I took off my clothes?” Seeing my smirk, she rolled her eyes. “Don’t answer that. The point is … well, frankly, I’m dealing with a bit of an overactive libido, at the moment.”
“A bit of an overactive libido,” I mused. “Are you trying to say you’re horny?”
“I’ve never much cared for that word. At least when it’s applied to me.” She looked away to hide her reddening cheeks. “It sounds so, I don’t know, irrational. But in this case, I guess … okay, the truth is I’ve been pretty seriously horny for years now.”
“You don’t mean to tell me you’ve been celibate all this time. I find that hard to believe.”
“What would make you say that?” she said. “Before I met you, I’d gone over a decade without having sex—without even wanting to have sex. And since you’ve been away I’ve been too absorbed in my work to give it much thought.”
“Apparently not,” I said, wrapping the towel around my waist.
“I didn’t mean … what I meant was … Oh, hell, it’s probably this damned age-regression thing. Not that I haven’t wanted you all along. But you know I don’t dwell on impossibilities. And right now neither of us needs the distraction. There are more important things going on in both our lives.”
“If you say so,” I said, sitting on the piano stool and shoving the towel down between my knees. “Is this acceptable, or are you going to make me go upstairs and actually get dressed?”
“No, no. That’s fine. Now let me bring you up to date.”
Aurie’s update was clearly intended to lift my spirits, and it probably would have if only I’d been able to get the word “impossibilities” out of my head. To make matters worse, she refused to discuss anything that might give me hope of one day having her with me in the flesh. Instead, it sounded more like she was delivering a scientific paper.
Although she admitted that things had continued to deteriorate in their dimension, other than being isolated, they were, she claimed, doing pretty well. The lab had always been a self-contained compound, generating its own power, while scrubbing and recirculating water and a breathable atmosphere. To that they had added a food-production operation that relied in part on the 3D printing technology she’d described to me earlier. They could now reproduce almost anything using the basic chemical building blocks found in nature, including structures as small as bacteria and viruses.
The Large Hadron Collider had long ago been shut down; however, their own accelerator was now self-sufficient, no longer requiring the sympathetic influence of the LHC. I hadn’t realized how important the accelerator was to their research efforts, thinking its main purpose was to facilitate the interdimensional transfer experiment. Turned out that was only one of its many functions, the most important being its contribution to basic R&D.
On our end, using their instructions, Sam had built a rudimentary 3D printer that was constantly being upgraded by printing the parts needed for each incremental improvement. The process was slow and fraught with technical problems, but progress was steady, with the hope of one day being able to duplicate organic structures and compounds that could help in the fight against disease, plus various nanoparticles and the basic components of quantum cybernetics, whatever that meant.
When it came to the foundation, as Ellie had said, its work had shifted from an exclusive focus on experiments concerning the impact of scientific innovations, to developing plans for strategic social and political intervention. These were being orchestrated and guided by computer-enhanced versions of Ellie’s algorithms, which would eventually lay the groundwork for predicting the potential ramifications of each carefully considered course of action.
“I know you don’t want to hear it,” she said, “but what Ellie said about our needing your help is true. It’s complicated to explain, and you’re probably not going to like it …” She waited, and when I didn’t respond she continued.
“What we’ve come up with is a long-term strategy that, among other things, involves subtly influencing politics by altering public perception. Some of this can be accomplished through traditional methods—information campaigns, money to support the right social causes, both domestically and abroad, international economic manipulations and the like. However, in order for these to work, there has to be a common thread that connects everything conceptually and reaches the broader populace on an emotional level.”
“Sounds to me like you guys have gone off the deep end,” I said. “I mean, sure, music might have played a small role in some social changes in the past, but those didn’t last. And we both know how much more influential money and political power will turn out to be. All you have to do is look at what the Koch brothers and Murdoch and a few other demigods did in your world. Besides, what about all the terrorists? Music is not going to change the minds of religious fanatics or their ignorant followers who believe in fantasies like the Apocalypse or the promise of seventy-two virgins awaiting them in heaven.”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “You have to stop thinking so narrowly about subcategories like terrorism or politics or economics. What we’re talking about is something much broader, something that not only includes those things, but transcends them. Think of it as analogous to the slow movement of tectonic plates as opposed to the localized phenomenon of earthquakes. Or maybe the difference between millennial climate change and seasonal weather patterns. It will require decades of subtle maneuvering, and the struggle will be ongoing. The first phase will be to build a base, a permanent, unshakable foundation from which we and our descendants can continue to watch over and support the metamorphosis. But for any of this to be effective in the long run, we first have to create a universal atmosphere in which such an emotional and psychological transformation can occur. And that’s where you come in.”
“Our descendants?” I said. “Does that mean—”
“Sorry. Slip of the tongue. What I meant was that, for now at least, we are in this together. Heyoka and I are dedicated to the project, and as long as we’re still around, we’ll be doing our best to help out. Hopefully we can train other researchers in your dimension to replace our team, and if all goes as planned, the young Heyoka can eventually take over leadership of the technological branch. But that’s beside the point. What I was trying to get across is that each facet of the project is important—indispensable, actually. Without everything working together, it falls on its face. And whether you want to believe it or not, music is one of those facets, a powerful one that all the money and science and political maneuvering in the world cannot hope to duplicate.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “This is a little much to take in all at once. I need a drink.” I was preparing to argue my case when she surprised me.
“Okay,” she said, “but not that crap you’ve been drinking. There’s a bottle in the cabinet above the fridge. It’s been there for months. We had Sam put it together just in case you decided to go off the deep end.”
Capitulation
The intriguing thing about Aurie’s sales spiel was how much it reminded me of a sexual seduction. Not that there was any suggestion of such a possibility; only that all the elements combined to resemble a scenario not unlike those I’d relied on in my first life to help me worm my way into the pants of several young girls.
First, there was the innate but unspoken desire a randy young man can sense in a reluctant virgin. The analogous urge for me lay in a long-suppressed desire for another taste of the recognition I’d once enjoyed—for public acknowledgment that my musical talents were appreciated and respected.
A second enticement—f
or the girls—was the promise of a new kind of pleasure. For me, this was echoed in the prospect of doing what Jackson had referred to as something pure, something I’d seldom experienced in my first life because I’d been too tied up in the quest for fame and monetary reward. Of course, it was absurd for Aurie to suggest that my participation could serve as anything more than an insignificant adjunct to their grand plan. Still, the possibility of doing something even minimally altruistic was intriguing.
Finally, there was a third similarity: the compelling desire to please someone I loved. In the girls’ case, this would have been due more to a naïve infatuation than anything approaching what I felt for Aurie. But the same imperative applied: when asked to surrender by someone with an almost mystical power over your emotions—someone whose disappointment you wished to avoid at all costs—refusing became nearly impossible.
I can’t say for certain if her platonic seduction was planned or if she was even consciously aware of the power she wielded over me, but there was no denying her sincerity. Before she was halfway through with her presentation, my previously impenetrable wall of resistance had begun to crumble, the only thing left to shore it up being fear. As irrational as it seemed, I was terrified by the prospect of exposing my deteriorating skills on the public stage.
After I retrieved the bottle of fake Jack and donned a terrycloth robe, we moved back to the patio, where the constant whine of a thousand tree frogs provided a backdrop of mind-numbing white noise. The soothing, almost hypnotic sound, like a coating of auditory honey, further softened my resolve, leaving me grasping at flimsy straws of rebuttal that snapped one by one under the onslaught of her carefully constructed argument. Even my fear did not escape her notice.
“I know you’re scared,” she said when she concluded her speech and I remained silent. “But I also know your fear is based on emotion, not logic or reality. As far as I can tell, you haven’t lost a beat when it comes to performing, though I’ll admit I’m not musically competent enough to notice any minor flaws. What I do know—what we both know—is that even if those flaws exist, they can easily be eliminated with a little practice. You still have a beautiful voice, Rix. And if Jackson is to be believed, your guitar technique ranks above almost anyone’s. Not only that—and most importantly—you’re an incredible writer, adept at turning ideas and stories into soul-stirring, commercially viable songs.”
My surrender had evolved so slowly I wasn’t aware I’d begun to capitulate until I heard myself say, “So what exactly do you want me to do?”
“First,” she said, “you have to become a superstar.”
After another quick round of feeble objections, I gave up and let Aurie explain the plan Ellie and Jackson had devised. Jackson had actually mentioned it over a year ago, during what I’d come to think of as the ‘Intervention,’ though at the time I’d been so dead set against performing it hadn’t registered. Now, however, I saw that, from a promotional and marketing standpoint, it just might work. The strategy involved introducing me to the public as the writer of a couple of dozen top-ten hits—songs first recorded by some of the most famous artists in pop music. These included several number ones, a few Grammy winners, ten gold records, and numerous popular cuts on platinum albums. Aurie referred to it as the “Taylor-King” plan, in reference to the way James had transformed Carole from an obscure songwriter into an international superstar by introducing her on his now-legendary You’ve Got a Friend tour. For my introduction, we had the triple whammy of Jackson Browne, Patsy Cline, and the one and only Miss Sarah Love.
Jimmy had already committed to act as my producer, and Geffen—who had recently agreed to take over logistics for the charity tour—would handle promotion and distribution of my records. The plan was to introduce me during the tour’s final concert, which was scheduled for September at Watkins Glen, a venue that still held the all-time concert-attendance record of 600,000 at its 1973 Summer Jam.
“So you’ll have at least nine months to scrape off the rust and start writing,” she said. “The initial phase will be to establish your new career, and Geffen feels sure we can do that based on your previous writings, with perhaps one or two new songs. After that, we’ll be working closely with you to develop material that will complement our ongoing efforts. The reason your participation is so important is that even if there were some other artist with your musical talents and songwriting abilities—which there isn’t—we couldn’t approach them with our own ideas for subject matter. We have Jackson, of course, and he’s already working on some things, but we need a fresh face, someone who can explode onto the scene and capture the attention of a worldwide audience.”
“So, you’re going to tell me what to write?” I said, trying to quiet the anger that suddenly arose in my chest.
“Not exactly what to write,” she said. “If we could do that we wouldn’t need you for anything more than performing. What we want to do is provide you with some concepts, ideas that will integrate with and support what we’re trying to accomplish. It won’t be easy, Rix. You’re going to have to suppress that ego of yours—stop thinking about yourself and start worrying about the next generation, the one your daughter and her kids will be struggling to survive in. And if you want to accuse me of laying a guilt trip on you, go right ahead, because that’s precisely what I’m doing.”
It took me a while to calm down and let Aurie’s words sink in. Thankfully, she seemed to sense my growing angst, and instead of pressing the matter, she remained silent while I tried to straighten things out in my head.
I definitely wasn’t convinced about the viability of the Grand Social Experiment—it sounded impossibly complicated and the expected results were, I thought, naïvely optimistic. But I had already committed to my small part in it, and I realized she was right about the selfish way I’d been thinking. I hadn’t given much thought to a future I didn’t intend to stick around for, nor had I considered the possibility that Ellie and Jackson might have a family, in which case I would have to think of my grandkids’ quality of life, not to mention that of my friends and their families.
I still had many questions. So while I silently worked on my grumbling ego, I grilled her about the other facets of the project. I did my best to play devil’s advocate, though now it was more an attempt to understand and point out flaws than to shoot the whole thing down. My main concern had to do with money: even with the foundation’s substantial resources, I knew it didn’t stand a chance pitted against the enormous fortunes of ultra-conservative billionaires and the tyranny of international corporate power.
“The foundation is only in its embryonic stage,” she told me. “As I mentioned, Heyoka is already working with his counterpart in this dimension to get a head start on some of the inventions that made him a multi-billionaire in our world. We’ll be setting up a base of operations soon, a massive complex that will include space for an investment arm, a technology incubator, a social sciences and media center, and, eventually, a duplication of our lab and the accelerator. The income potential is astronomical, not only from the products and processes we generate in-house, but from our investment strategies. Obviously, we will have an advantage there, though we’ll have to be careful because the existence of Blue Note Enterprises has already had a significant economic impact on the future, as will the activities of the foundation itself. Unfortunately, the plan has become so vast and multi-faceted it has outpaced Ellie’s ability to precisely calculate specific long-term results. Consequently, we’re having to rely more on historical evaluations and computer modeling than algorithmic predictions alone.”
“So,” I said, “we’re going to have a lot of money to work with. That’s good. But I still don’t get what makes music such a vitally important part of this huge, multifaceted scenario.”
“Neither did we at first,” she said. “In fact, we didn’t even consider it. But when we started brainstorming on how to manipulate societal and cultural trends, Ellie rewrote her algorithms and programming to look for even
the most subtle historical influences. Eventually this led to an in-depth study of the evolution of human communication, from the earliest Stone-Age storytellers, to the Internet. And the one thing that consistently stood out—the kind of communication that most effectively carried ideas and beliefs from generation to generation—was music.”
“I thought that was supposed to have been the evolution of writing and the invention of the printing press,” I said. “And what about the great philosophical and political orators?”
“They were historically important, but over time the spoken word and even writing were subject to alterations in meaning and interpretation, both inadvertent and deliberate. However, when written stories and ideas were simplified and put to music, they became memorable in a way that bypassed the intellect and spoke directly to the collective subconscious. Think about it—how many people remember all the words of a speech or the rhetoric of even the most famous politician? They may remember a few sound bites, or lines from the Gettysburg Address, but how many can sing from memory songs like Amazing Grace, or Blowin’ in the Wind, or even Sunday Morning Sentinel?”
She had a point, but I still wasn’t convinced that music could be all that important in redirecting the course of history. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll grant you that music has a way of making things stick in the mind, but that’s mostly because of its repetitive nature and simplicity. And, dare I say it, catchy tunes and hook lines. I still don’t see how any of that could have an earthshaking influence on worldwide society.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “In fact, when it comes to music’s influence on cultural evolution, not only did it facilitate some of the most important social changes in modern history, it augmented and enhanced the most pervasive philosophical movement the world has ever seen.” She raised an eyebrow, waiting for the dawn to break in my mind. Unfortunately, it didn’t.