by M M Buckner
In fact, the air grew sweltering, soon topping 90°F, and the water under the blue plastic simmered like a Jacuzzi. When Yue called a halt, CJ was too absorbed to stop. From the steps, Yue cast one last resentful glance at CJ’s narrow shoulders hunched over the equipment. Then she ordered Peter to drive her to the canal.
Gleam
Tuesday, March 15
2:00 PM
CJ slumped against the rail, baking her butt on the hot concrete by the lagoon, unwilling to give up. Sound waves propagated through the water, and sensors processed the feedback. In slow currents of heat, the skein revolved languidly, like a liquid crystal kaleidoscope. It accumulated new bits of toxic scum from the lagoon walls, but nothing else happened. No flashing lights. No pulsing magnetism. Gradually CJ began to consider that she might be wrong.
Then two events coincided. Her cell phone chimed, and Max appeared with a cardboard box. He was dressed in his usual sleeveless T-shirt, blue jeans, and leather work boots. He kicked sheepishly at the catwalk and murmured, “Thought you might want something to eat.”
Simultaneously, Roman’s voice rustled in her ear. “Good afternoon, little hen.” Her face reddened. She switched Roman off without answering.
Quickly, she rifled through a crate of lab equipment to hide the fact that she couldn’t meet Max’s eyes. “You’re not working with Rory today?”
“Got the afternoon off,” he said simply, not mentioning the long overtime hours he’d been racking up.
When she felt a little calmer, she faced him. He didn’t seem angry. His placid smile made her want to tear her hair out.
From the cardboard box, he handed her a plastic container and a spoon. Inside, she found a scoop of cold homemade blackberry bread pudding. His Aunt Roberta had picked and frozen the berries last summer, and this morning he’d blended a quart of them with bread crumbs, lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, butter, and eggs, then spiked the mix with his secret ingredient, Cointreau. He’d made this pudding for her once before, that time he took her fishing in the pirogue.
“Max—”
He touched her lips and looked away. Why wouldn’t he let her talk? She seized the spoon and stuffed her mouth full. The silence lengthened and grew awkward. When she forced herself to swallow, the half-chewed berries hurt her throat going down.
“It was a mistake,” she stammered. “I shouldn’t have gone with him.”
Max shifted to face the lagoon through the hot metal bars of the rail. He wore a clean paryaka tied around his head, although it was already dotted with sweat. Sunlight gleamed on his swarthy cheeks. He sat with his elbows resting on his knees, peering into the uncovered strip of water.
“Djab dile speak yet?”
CJ made a noise, half groan, half sigh. He wasn’t going to let her apologize. What a mess she’d made. What a royal mess. She turned and followed his gaze. The blue cover scintillated under the ruthless sun, and the air above it wavered with hot humid mirages, like invisible flames.
She tore off a broken fingernail. “We’re not getting any response. I don’t know what I expected.”
Max slipped the headset over his ears and listened to the audio signals she was transmitting through the water. She’d transcribed simple mathematical expressions as whole notes, and the synthesized tones chimed in a onetwo rhythm as steady as a metronome. Repetitive, ordered, lucid.
He scratched his ear. “Maybe . . .”
“What?” she said irritably.
“This beat is tiresome, Ceegie. Bing bing bing. How he tell us apart from a machine?”
She threw up her hands. “I’m trying to translate human language into signals a primitive mote computer can process. That means starting with basics. Syntax, lexicon, rules about meaning. You think that’s easy?”
“Don’ sound easy,” he agreed.
She eyed him. “Obviously, you have another idea.”
“Naw, it’s nothing. You go on with your bing bing.”
CJ clenched her teeth. “Max, sometimes you drive me batshit. Just say what’s on your mind.”
His golden brown eyes reflected the sun. Instead of speaking, he hummed an old ballad. His rich baritone rose through a melancholy crescendo, then slid sideways to a bluesy wistful close. When the song finished, he said, “You sav? Machine cain’ do that.”
CJ shrugged. “And your point is?”
He grinned and scat-sang a different song, lilting and playful, bouncing upward in G major. After that, he whistled a stalwart march in B flat. When he launched into a stormy overture, she interrupted.
“I get it. Sure. Music is not math. It conveys—what?—a mood? But you’re talking about dense acoustic detail. Shifting frequencies and amplitudes, harmony, melody, syncopated rhythm. That’s too much complexity for a mote.”
“Ceegie, little children know what a song mean. Even animals know. Music don’ require translation.” Max’s sonorous baritone crooned again, and this time he sang the zydeco chorus that first made the frozen pond vibrate in sync.
CJ watched the water. She seized his arm. “Could it work?”
His biceps hardened at her touch, and he patted her hand. “Take a look at what ol’ Max brought.”
His cardboard box held dozens of CDs, collected over the years from yard sales and bargain stores. Aboriginal dreaming songs from Australia, traditional Hawaiian slide guitar, Andean Mountain flutes, Creole séga from the isles of the Indian Ocean. He’d brought Tajik rap, Tibetan throat-singing, and West African kora, along with Debussy’s “Reverie,” Duke Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” and of course, plenty of pure classic zydeco.
“Something in here bound to interest djab dile,” he said.
She opened random jewel cases to read the liner notes, and in her excitement, she shuffled the silvery disks like a deck of cards. Max’s hands closed over hers and stopped her. Reverently, he replaced his CDs in their cases, arranged them in the cardboard box and covered them with his paryaka to keep out the sun. His naked black curls glistened with moisture.
“First, something easy.” He pulled out an old Casio portable keyboard, stained with tobacco smoke, wine, coffee, and the fingerprints of many hands. After connecting it to the amplifier that fed the Lubell speakers, he played a soft scale. “Show me how you catch what djab dile say back to us.”
CJ worried with the controls of her feedback monitors. “We’re tracking changes in the EM field, wavelength, frequency, power level.”
“And sound?” he asked.
“Liquid can’t make sound.” She raised her eyebrows, doubting. “I’ve been here the whole time. I didn’t hear anything.”
She listened to the fizzy splash of water against the underside of the plastic cover, the quiet swish of tiny ripples, the susurrus of steam. She flicked her thumbnail against her teeth. Then she exploded into activity, tearing through the crates of equipment, knocking everything into disarray.
“Here it is.” Max pulled an old hydrophone out of his duffel. He’d bought it at a flea market so he and his cousins could listen to beaked whales in the Gulf.
She seized it and rushed to the water’s edge, then had to ask him how it worked. Once Max connected it, they listened to the rich sloshing babble in the lagoon. Quickly, she coded one of the computers to display the feedback as a wave form, like an oscilloscope. Then she angled the screen so Max could watch.
But he didn’t need it. He sat cross-legged, balancing the keyboard in his lap, playing soft simple scales in 4/4 meter and listening to the noise from the hydrophone with his eyes closed.
She scraped a folding chair across the concrete, sat in front of the computer and slotted a fresh disk to record Max’s improvisation—and, she hoped, the colloid’s response. But signals from the lagoon remained mixed. Overlapping waves jittered across the screen from left to right, without pattern or form. The water noise duplicated all the other feedback monitors. It was inconclusive. Another useless test.
Her attention kept wandering to Max’s fingers sweeping o
ver the black and white keys. How fluently he played, as easily as other people talked. Fresh guilt assaulted her as she watched him improvise a lyrical riff, a languid trickle of melody, a spill of half notes and a somber swell of bass.
Almost by accident, she noticed the first pattern. Max had stopped playing. He sat rigid with his eyes shut tight, head cocked toward the hydrophone receiver. She was thinking how much better he looked without the bandana, how sweetly his black curls framed his face, when a single coherent wave emerged from the static and bounced across her computer screen.
She saw it from the corner of her eye. Then it vanished, and there was only static. Monitors registered a slight turbulence, maybe a passing breeze. Certain regions along the gooey skein were generating ions, but Yue had already documented that. Molecules were randomly losing and gaining electrons, shifting their electrical charges to and fro and creating tiny pockets of polarization in the water. But that had nothing to do with music. Yue had also noted concentrations of heat and acidity at one end of the skein—a by-product of microbe activity.
CJ kept watching. She tugged at her damp cotton panties that had bunched between her legs. Perspiration streaked her hair. Under her thin T-shirt, salty droplets collected between her breasts and rolled down her belly. She fantasized an icy bottle of Coca-Cola. She could almost taste its foam.
“Hear that?” Max opened his eyes and smiled. He played another simple riff, then paused and leaned toward the hydrophone, listening.
CJ watched the oscilloscope. Another perfect wave bounced across the screen. Then it broke into a jittery row of sine curves, like a heart monitor tracking cardiac arrest. She sat on the edge of her chair. Max played another few bars, then listened.
That’s when she noticed the ion data on one of the other screens. Ordinary molecules were taking extra electrons, then letting them go, popping from neutral to positive, positive to neutral—in rhythm. She pounded the keys to create a graphic map—and there it was, a coherent line of sine curves. In the bright false hues of the graphics program, her computer painted standing waves of ionization in 4/4 time.
Rapidly, she checked other sensor feedback—pH, photometrics, turbidity, turbulence—all the columns of data were dancing in rhythm.
“Molecular music.” Her voice came out hushed.
“Oh yeah, he got sync.” Max pressed his ear to the receiver. “He playing back my rhythm, beat for beat.”
She bounced in her chair and squealed, “He’s composing music from chemistry!”
“Composing? Naw, girl, he just copy me.” Max’s cheeks dimpled. “He play bèl, very precise, like an echo.”
“He echoes you? But I thought—” She scrolled through a column of figures. “I thought he was answering.”
Max bit his lip. “Ceegie, ma chagrenne. You discover a very excellent music machine made of water and trash. Tha’s no small thing.”
“Right.” She tried to laugh, but her face had a grayish cast. She’d been working too long at too intense a level. Max couldn’t guess what she hoped for, but he realized a music machine wasn’t it. He’d blundered again, nothing new. He felt like a gnat.
“Djab dile learning,” he said. “Take time to learn music. You wait. We give him a composition lesson.”
“How?”
Max repositioned the keyboard across his knees. “Start with G major.”
He sounded the chord, first with all the notes together, then each separately in ascending order. After that, he played simple melodies in G, mixing and rearranging the handful of notes in various patterns. CJ checked her disk drive to make sure she was recording what Max played. Her screens showed the skein altering its kinetic energy to imitate the notes.
“We do this till he learn,” Max said.
CJ sat on the rough warm concrete and watched raindrops bouncing on the lagoon cover. Then she got up to check her screens. Impatience drove her back and forth from the workstation to the water, while Mac played the soft plain notes of his music lesson for a beginner.
Swig
Tuesday, March 15
3:50 PM
Across town in his cloistered office, Hal Butler took a swig of Dixie beer. Loose slips of paper, flash drives, magnetic disks, fast-food wrappers, and several well thumbed paperbacks littered his desk, not to mention his size-eleven loafers filled with his sockless sweaty feet. At the center of the chaos lay his tape recorder, chock-full of hearsay, gossip, and distorted speculation about the Watermind.
The news scoop of his life had finally materialized. Riches, glory, long lines of succulent young women, his own personal nirvana lay within reach. This story merged all the best qualities of his favorite films, Swamp Thing, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and that stirring 1958 classic, The Blob, where an alien dollop of raspberry jam tried to eat a small town. Hal could almost taste his Pulitzer. The Watermind would sail him into the Journalism Hall of Fame. But regrettably, he had no facts.
The Reilly chick was waffling. She wouldn’t commit to the interview, and she kept ducking his phone calls. He upended his aluminum can and let the cold beer roll down his throat. Lovingly, with a razor blade, he squared up a line of cocaine on a mirror. Then he snorted the white dust through a straw.
Seconds later, he experienced a sudden blinding epiphany. What this story needed was a picture—something memorable and graphic that would resonate in the reader’s mind. On a legal pad, he roughed out a conceptual sketch—a sort of howling liquid genie with fangs—not unlike the machine-generated monster in The Forbidden Planet, a motion picture he greatly admired.
Ah yes. The drawing revitalized his energy. He squared up his keyboard, flicked his fingers and punched in the URL for the Holy Trinity discussion forum. In a trice, he transmogrified from dedicated newshound Hal Butler into his secret alter-ego, Jeremiah Destiny, apocalyptic blogger extraordinaire. Soon, he was instant messaging his muse.
Hal aka Jeremiah knew very little about his faithful online pen pal, Soeur Rayette, only that she lived somewhere in Baton Rouge, wrote antebellum prose, and agreed with him on every topic. He envisioned her as a fair Acadian goddess, his own Evangeline, a wise and soulful little hottie. Tonight, as usual, they bared their hearts about the Watermind.
In the past few hours, hundreds of people had responded to Hal’s blog about the artificial intelligence coalescing from Mississippi River trash. Though skeptics whined, most respondents believed his blog implicitly. A smart water-based computer made of floating rubbish, why not? Hal/Jeremiah’s online readers had their own misty methods of verifying the truth. For them, a machine-being born from the poisonous effluent of Western civilization seemed not only true but inevitable.
Hal spread his laptop on the floor between his knees, stroked his copper hair and asked Rayette to give him more facts about the Watermind. But Rayette, as usual, demurred.
“Let us turn to the Lord for an answer,” she messaged.
“Yes, dear. Consult your Bible.” Hal snuffled another white line of coke. Rayette had once described to him how she solved life’s riddles by opening her King James at random. He found her spirituality charming. He also knew that whatever verse her fancy happened to light on, he would be able to spin it. He picked white crumbs from his nostrils and ate them.
As usual, Rayette forwarded the Lord’s answer in red italic:
“And in the fourth watch of the night, Jesus went unto them, walking on the sea. And when the disciples saw him, they were troubled, saying, It is a spirit; and they cried out for fear.”
Hal quickly replied, “Alas, sweet Soeur, as the disciples witnessed this mighty wonder and cried out, so you, too, must cry out and tell the world what you’ve seen. That is the Lord’s commandment to you.” He bold-faced the last sentence.
“Verily, I am sore afraid,” she answered.
Hal cracked his knuckles and keyed, “Yes, miracles are frightening, but how can the Lord be wrong?”
A long interval passed before her next instant message arrived. “Good night, d
ear friend. I must pray.”
“Shit.” Hal watched her click off. Then he scribbled on the back of an ad circular. “Nothing strikes more fear in the human heart than a miracle. . . . Hmm, good line.”
Bubble
Tuesday, March 15
7:07 PM
At the Gulf-Pac dock, Peter Vaarveen grumbled under his breath, “Fuckin’ boat anchor.” The portable battery for his multichannel analyzer weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and Peter was not accustomed to heavy labor. But Roman had ordered them to move immediately off the Gulf-Pac dock because a lawsuit was brewing, and Hammer Nesbitt’s hospitality had come to an end.
Peter stretched and arched his back. In the sky, he saw a flock of dark birds wheeling like a liquid wave. He watched them turn and plunge, and suddenly, they seemed to change color as their speckled underwings caught the slanting light. Ornithologists once believed that flocks communicated through electromagnetic emanations. But Peter knew their charming aerobatics emerged from the same simple rules which drove his computer boid: Stay close; follow your neighbor; go with the flow.
He scowled at the heavy battery. “Help me with this,” he called to the knotty, walnut-colored man in the gray work shirt.
But Rory Godchaux made no move. Rory had been running crews for too many decades to take orders from a chemist. Besides, Rory was not in good spirits. The blue gates were sealed up tight, but the boys on the Refuerzo couldn’t get their collar in the right place. The magnetic water kept creeping along the canal bed, slipping away from them.
On top of that, Rory couldn’t fill his nightshift. Three of his best workers called in sick, and one quit. Mr. Meir kept approving overtime, but Rory couldn’t find anyone to hire. And he was getting damned tired of eating soggy takeout from the Shrimp Hut. He wanted to go home to his wife’s fried catfish and spoonbread. He wanted to sink between her hot creamy thighs and rub his nose in her plump belly. He could almost taste her pickle brine.