The Tin Whistle

by Erik Hanberg

  “That’s the exact population of the Earth,” Nosipho said.

  Grace and Nosipho looked at each other significantly.

  “What?” Shaw asked.

  They didn’t answer.

  He peered more closely at the spheres and tried to imagine what they must look like, covering the Earth the same way they were covering the small terrace. The spheres were the size of golf balls now. “Are you really telling me that there are going to be ten billion of these things all over the planet?” he asked. “Just lying round on roads and fields and rooftops?”

  “Yes,” Aquinas said.

  “Are they solid or hollow?” Nosipho asked.

  “Hollow,” Aquinas answered.

  Nosipho shook her head. “And they will start growing when they hit water? Disgusting.” When Shaw gave her a blank look, she said, “Don’t you see? They’ll be in the ocean for years! Washing up on beaches every time the tide comes in.”

  “It’s an ecological nightmare,” Grace whispered. “What could Taveena have possibly been thinking?”

  The spheres were now nearly the size of a baseball. Shaw finally asked the question he’d been most wondering about. “Are they safe to touch? There’s not a nanoshock in there waiting for me or anything like that?”

  “No,” Joan of Arc answered. “In fact, we are all keenly interested to see what happens when you pick one up.”

  Shaw exchanged a glance with Grace. He reached down for the sphere. “It really does look like you could just pick it up and throw it to first base.”

  At the moment he touched it, his world changed.

  Byron Shaw was in a jump.

  The experience was nearly the same as when he jumped with a ring. His avatar was standing on a long sloping veldt, with low brush and a few sparsely populated trees. To his right was a village—a combination of grass huts and concrete buildings. A church with a bell tower stood at one end of town. Africa.

  All around him, the entire landscape was dotted with black spheres. One every few feet from another one. But Grace need not have worried about the ecosystem. Boys and girls were already running around and picking them up through pieces of cloth in their hands and putting them into baskets. A few were laughing and giggling together as they held the spheres in their hands, delightfully enjoying their jumps. Their smiles were infectious.

  Men and women from the village plucked spheres out of the baskets and tried holding them as well. Their faces melted as they were transported to somewhere very different from the place they had spent their entire lives.

  Suddenly Grace and Nosipho’s avatars were standing next to Shaw in the jump.

  They were looking around at the ebullient villagers as they explored their first time with the Lattice.

  Nosipho looked deadly serious, but the tremendous laughter from the village pulled Grace in almost immediately. She was laughing right along with them and soon Shaw was as well.

  “She really did it,” Grace said in wonder. She sighed.

  “I am still not sure what she did exactly,” Shaw said.

  “I will need the engineers to tell me for sure, but I think I can tell you what happened,” Grace said. “We built the new Lattice on the back of her molecular machines. The same machines that built everything she used, including the Walden. We were in such a rush when we launched the Lattice… you remember. It would not surprise me at all if even the famed Ada Dillon missed the fact that all of Taveena’s molecular machines are entangled together with the Lattice somehow.”

  “You mean that she could have destroyed it at any point over the last few months?” Shaw asked.

  “No,” Grace said. “Nothing like that. That would have taken something entirely different, and maybe not even technically possible in the end. But every Lattice reader works because it has an atom entangled with the Lattice. So if her molecular machines were along for the ride, if they were in fact foundational to the new Lattice, then she’s had the ability to create new Lattice readers for months. And she did—ten point three billion Lattice readers to be exact. She’d just been so focused on destroying the Lattice, she never even thought to do so… until you suggested it to her.” Grace’s avatar looked at Shaw significantly.

  “She made free Lattice readers?” Shaw asked. “For everyone on the planet?”

  “One for every man, woman, and child,” Grace said. “It’s like the tin whistle all over again.”

  Shaw made a curious face. “A what?”

  “An instrument from the eighteenth century in England,” she said. “Imagine music at the time—everything was handcrafted by artisans. So musical instruments were incredibly valuable and incredibly expensive. They were only enjoyed by the rich or enjoyed at church. Maybe the poor had a rare few handed down from generation to generation, but you get the idea. Then this man named Robert Clarke used the tools of the Industrial Age to roll a piece of tin into a flute shape and punch some holes into it. Voila. They were also called the penny whistle, because they were available to the mass-market for a penny. It transformed music—practically overnight.”

  Grace made a sweeping gesture at the children and families playing with the spheres. “Do you see what I mean? Taveena created a tin whistle. She cracked open the cartel and flooded the market. This was her answer to the problem: to stop the Lattice reader companies from preying on the poorest of the poor, Taveena gave them as much access as they could possibly want.”

  “You sound like you admire her for it,” Shaw said.

  Grace smiled mysteriously. “Admire? No. She was a terrorist for too long for me to admire her. But I respect a woman who thinks big. Look at her. While deep in meditation, she figured out a way to create open-source access to the Lattice without breaching the core code, so we don’t have to worry about the Lattice being destroyed by her research. If she were still alive—and not a wanted fugitive—I might have tried to hire her.”

  “Not that it matters,” Nosipho said. “Our company is functionally bankrupt as of this moment. Same as Dvorak and LRI and Kanjitech and T-Six. Why rent time in a jump box? Why buy one for your home? Why buy the ring you invented—already the most expensive way to connect to the Lattice—when you can just reach down, pick up a sphere, and jump for free? We’re dead in the water, Grace.”

  Grace laughed from deep within her belly. “People will buy rings because they’ll be better than jumping with a sphere. That’s why. They’ll have to be if we want to succeed. Come, love, didn’t you eventually get tired of selling rings as part of a monopolistic cartel? I don’t need someone with your brain and skill for economics to make that company work. There was no sport in it. We were always better than the rest of the companies, and that made us complacent. But can we be better than free? That sounds like a challenge I can get behind.”

  Grace’s avatar kissed Nosipho and they embraced. When they were done, Grace turned to Shaw. “Well, you destroyed my company, saved it, destroyed it, and now made my life a lot more interesting. I have no idea how I should feel about that. So I’ll just say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye,” Shaw said, nodding to Grace and Nosipho in turn.

  They disappeared.

  Shaw played around with the sphere, learning how to navigate with it and move himself around in a jump and to change jumps. He eventually integrated the sphere with his temple implant and he began giving voice commands, which made operations much easier. (Grace, even after a few minutes of using the sphere to jump, was right about that, he saw. Over time, he would rather pay for the user-friendly benefits of an Altair ring than use the free sphere. But for now, it was a pleasure to just explore the technology and the world.)

  Everywhere he jumped, he witnessed people playing with the spheres, many of them clearly getting to experience a jump in the Lattice for the first time. They didn’t fight over the spheres because they were abundant. There was always another one.

  On the ocean beaches, the hollow spheres were washing up in the surf as Nosipho had predicted. But there were nearly a
s many people gathering them for themselves as there were spheres. Taveena had created a sphere for every man, woman, and child, but in practice not everyone needed one at the same time. The abundance of spheres was overwhelming, but even in places where there were more spheres than people—like the beach, where spheres washed up on the shore—helpful citizens were stockpiling the spheres in massive piles away from the waves. The spheres wouldn’t likely be confused for food by birds or sea life, and their inert surface meant they wouldn’t react with the environment around them. Far from being an ecological disaster as Grace had predicted, it was already appearing as if they would quite easily find their way out of the environment and into human society.

  And in city after city, town after town, village after village, Shaw saw the same thing when the spheres came into contact with humans. Delight. It was a toy for the very young, the very old, and everyone in between. Shaw had never been more cognizant of how few people had been able to pay for jump boxes or rings until he saw the joy they felt with the spheres. He remembered the first time he’d jumped as a child—he’d gone to see Caesar and Ancient Rome. At the time, he didn’t realize how lucky he’d been, and it had taken him nearly thirty years to realize how few other children had been afforded the same experience. To these people who had never used them before, the spheres were more valuable than the richest mineral on Earth, and yet they were lying about the surface of the planet as if they were common pine cones or leaves blown out of the trees by a fall storm. Of course they were joyful.

  Shaw also saw—couldn’t help but see, really—that it wasn’t always so rosy. He saw it when parents in jumps ignored their crying children. He saw families sitting around the dinner table, each transported to their own world and ignoring each other. There was probably far worse that he didn’t see in his jumps as well.

  Eventually, it was time to go.

  He released his sphere and left the jump. The little black sphere rolled around on the terrace before coming to a stop against the railing. He bent to pick it up and take it with him and then he realized: there would be many more waiting for him at home.

  “Well?” Aquinas asked. The saints had clearly been waiting to hear from him. “What do you think of the new world Taveena created—with your prompting, of course?”

  Shaw took a deep breath. What did he think now? “The Lattice is still the Lattice. It is equally awe-inspiring and terrible. Watching people try it for the first time… It was wonderful, in its way. But… I guess in the end, it was sad too. They were all so happy, and I just wanted to go around and tell them there were good things in the real world, too.”

  Aquinas nodded. “What will you do?”

  “About what?”

  “About the Lattice. Will you try to make it better? Did seeing the people ignoring their families make you wish you could destroy it? Some are already trying to create a movement to shut down the—”

  Shaw shook his head adamantly. “No. I’m done. Keep me out of it. I’m through making decisions like that for the entire planet. I’m going home.”

  He was looking forward to seeing Ellie more than anything. There was just one thing he needed to tell her, and he still had no idea how she would react when she heard it.

  Shaw opened and held the apartment door for Ellie. She carried Jane through and surveyed the apartment. After being rescued from the park, she’d been in the hospital for nearly a week until she and Jane were cleared to come home.

  “It’s all cleaned up,” Shaw said proudly. “All the damage to the building from the Dark Eighteen is gone. And let me show you the nursery!”

  “By—” Ellie whispered.

  “It’s all decorated—well, maybe a few things still need your touch. But we have a crib and a changing table and a rocking chair for you and Jane when—”

  “By,” Ellie said more loudly, and he stopped talking. “She fell asleep. I don’t want you to wake her up.”

  “The kid was going eighty kilometers per second in an escape pod and slept through the whole thing. Do you really think my voice will wake her?”

  On cue, Jane let out a little snort and started to fuss in her sleep.

  Ellie gave him an annoyed look. “Here,” she said, moving closer to Shaw so he could accept Jane. “I’ve got to pee like crazy. You get her back to sleep.”

  Ellie and Shaw put their shoulders together, and made the transfer. When Jane was safety cradled in his arms, Ellie scurried away in the direction of the bathroom.

  Shaw had held Jane several times when they were in the hospital. But this was the first time he’d been alone with her. There, he had always had Ellie or a nurse around. He didn’t realize until now how much he had relied on the fact that people who knew what they were doing were there to make sure he didn’t screw anything up.

  But now he was on his own, and he felt the responsibility acutely.

  Jane was fidgeting and Shaw tried to speak to her. He didn’t know what to say and his mind went blank: he couldn’t think of any children’s songs except the alphabet song and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” He sang those, and when those ended, he discovered (quite to his surprise) that some part of his brain still remembered the tune Dr. Coronovschi had sung during Ellie’s labor. He hummed the melody, since he didn’t know the words or the language, and watched in amazement as Jane quieted down.

  He felt as if he’d picked a lock and revealed some hidden secret of the universe.

  Taking exaggerated soft steps, Shaw carried Jane to the nursery he’d been working on for the last week. He reached the small crib and momentarily froze.

  “On her back,” Ellie whispered from behind him.

  Shaw didn’t stop to wonder how long she’d been watching him learn to be a father. He gently set Jane down and slid his arm and hands out from under her. She gave a small whimper but then fell asleep.

  They both slipped out of the bedroom and went into the kitchen. The husband and wife stared at each other, the kitchen island between them.

  “How are you feeling, By?” Ellie asked.

  “Good. Mostly.”

  “It’s been a week or more… are you still craving the raw feed?”

  “You said time would help, and I think it has. I forget about it sometimes, and then it comes roaring back and I’m… intoxicated by the idea,” Shaw said. He found he couldn’t look up from the island. “Having something to do helped, like getting the nursery ready while you were at the hospital.”

  “And so will talking to me,” Ellie said. “We didn’t talk about it in the garden. But if we’re going to make this work, you have to talk to me. We came back from the brink, but you and I have plenty of rebuilding work we need to do. If our marriage hits another hard patch—that’s the time to talk to me about this. No matter what’s going on between us.”

  “I will,” he said, his eyes still on the countertop.

  “Look at me, By,” Ellie said.

  He did. She was still deadly serious.

  “I need you to understand that even if you aren’t addicted to the Lattice, that doesn’t mean it can’t destroy lives and relationships. I know what Peter said to you. And he was right: when we were on the Walden, you slipped off into jumps because it was easier than working on your relationships with the real people in front of you.”

  “I saw parents doing that when they first got their spheres. I don’t want to do that to you two,” he said.

  “Then don’t,” she challenged. “That’s about being a good husband and father. I will hold you to account.”

  Shaw nodded. “I’ll do better. For you and Jane.”

  Ellie smiled, “And listen. I had an idea when I was in the hospital. Come to work with me.”

  “At the OJ clinic?”

  “Yes. Come see what it’s like. Assuming I still have a job there, that is… I haven’t exactly been around since last fall.” She laughed to herself and shook her head.

  “You want to work together?”

  “Sure, why not?” Ellie said wi
th a shrug. “We never had enough men on staff. And you’re out of the military, so you can do anything you want. If you’re still worried that you might be addicted to the Lattice, why not help some addicts. Plus I hear the head of counseling there is quite the looker.” Ellie smiled softly.

  It struck Shaw that she was right. He hadn’t really thought about what he would do. But that offer didn’t seem half-bad. And working with Ellie after their separations—both physical and emotional—didn’t seem like such a bad idea, either.

  Shaw put his Altair ring back on and Ellie glanced at it. “If you were quitting the Lattice for good… I would have missed our jumps together,” she said. “Old baseball games. The rings of Saturn. We did some amazing exploring together.”

  “We did,” Shaw replied.

  Ellie clapped. “So. We probably have about forty minutes until Jane wakes up. I can pump and then maybe we can go to the moon of Dimidium.”

  Shaw cocked his head forward. “What are you talking about? What is the moon of Dimidium?” Shaw asked.

  “You haven’t heard?” Ellie asked. “Are you kidding me?”

  “It’s an entirely new word to me.”

  “Two days ago an astro-archaeologist discovered the first confirmed alien civilization. It existed two billion years ago on a planet’s moon more than fifty light years away. Everyone’s been talking about it.” She stared at him. “Have you been living under a rock?”

  “I’ve been busy in the nursery,” Shaw mumbled.

  “I guess it’s nothing like what we have on Earth.” Ellie said. Her eyes sparkled with anticipation. “What do you say, Byron Shaw? Care for a jump?”

  THE END

  Author's Note

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