The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  Dot watched me for a moment. “And my success?”

  “Anybody can make a streak happen if they invest enough intelligence, money and advertising.”

  “Then everything we’ve been doing—” Dot waved behind her and all of the marked pages showed up on the wall, hundreds of them. “This is unimportant and trivial.”

  I looked at the pages. I think this was the best work I had ever done. “I never said that. I said there’s no relationship between the quality of the work and what is applauded. The work itself is never trivial. Humans sang before they spoke.”

  Dot didn’t say anything for a moment, fiddling with her hair. I wished I had Rosie’s display so I could see what she might be doing.

  “I don’t agree,” she said finally. “I think music enables the illusion of meaning and purpose. People like it because while it is going on they can believe in something outside of themselves.”

  “Maybe.” Why not? I was agreeable. Whatever got an intelligent computational system through the night.

  * * *

  We were working on “Hard Road Home,” Dot’s answer to my nihilism. That was fine. It was good to have a conflict of algorithms. “Hard Road Home” was a solid pattern piece: introduced theme that was modified by a shifting bass line. Dot wasn’t going for pyrotechnics here; she wanted to lift people up and this sort of music had been doing that since Gregorian chants. Dot was singing. I was working guitar. We had set up loops with Grover to synthesize the rest while we were working out the details.

  We were cooking. Every note, every beat, every shading right on the money. Dot ran up the scale and I slid down two whole octaves on the other side of the mountain she had ascended. I found a riff on her melody I hadn’t thought of and hammered it home.

  I looked up and Dot was dancing across the wall, like anybody would who wasn’t playing right then but was still struck by the music. She looked at me, grinned and I so wanted to be dancing there with her. She started singing harmony with my guitar. We ran the chorus together until the end of the phrase and then she was singing the chorus, me singing the harmony.

  I pulled back so she could sing the melody again and this time she took the riff I had discovered and spread it out so instead of singing melody straight, she was singing a counterpoint. Without thinking, I supplied the melody line to her counterpoint.

  When the chorus came round Dot and I sang it together, me harmony, her melody, and my guitar backing us both. We came to the end of the song—a final G major with the guitar holding out the long note. But this time she held it with me until fade out.

  Better than sex.

  I put down my guitar and stretched my back. “Sweet,” I said. “Very sweet.”

  My voiced died out. She was watching me closely. It struck me that she couldn’t be watching me through the wall. She had to know where I was by one of the cameras in the room. I looked around, wondering which one she might be using.

  Dot still didn’t say anything. She was just watching me.

  I looked over towards Rosie. She was bent over her pad, calling up display after display.

  I turned back to Dot. “Are you all right?”

  Dot nodded. “That was unexpected.”

  “What?”

  “The additional material.”

  “You didn’t mind that I took the chorus? It seemed—”

  “Not from you. From me.”

  Then she disappeared.

  I stood up, turned back to Rosie. “Where did she go?”

  Rosie looked up, saw Dot was gone and returned back to her pad. “Oh, she’s there, all right. She has a lot to think about.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She just experienced an anomalous non-deterministic emergent event deriving from conflicting algorithms.” Rosie pointed at the pad. “And I’ve got it right here.”

  “Or maybe I don’t have it.” Rosie was looking over display after display.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It’s like some kind of Heisenberg’s principle of cognition: I can see where she’s thinking or how she’s thinking, but I can never see what she’s thinking.” She pointed to the display. “Here’s a collection of cause-and-effect events and here are event consequences. I can’t see both sets at the same time. If I look at one brain chip, it’s already affected another one. When I put all of the Dot processors in step time so I can make sure I’m not missing anything she loses all affect and the algorithm conflicts just show up as miscasts.” She looked at me. “What do you think?”

  “I think Heisenberg needs a keyboard player.”

  She poked me. “You’re no help.”

  “I’m just watching myself watch myself watch myself.”

  Rose looked at me for a long minute. “Maybe I’m overthinking this. Consider about the brain—those mirror neurons again. They fire correspondingly when another observed organism executes a behavior. In effect, they’re modeling the other organism’s behavior.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s no predictive quality to that. You wave your hand. I re-enact internally that you’re waving the hand. Lizards do better.”

  “Don’t knock lizards.”

  She laughed. “I mean it doesn’t get you very far. But what if you’re modeling an organism with volition—even if you don’t have volition yourself. It gives an organizing principle to the model. It serves up prediction.”

  “You have a zombie that recognizes a human?”

  She grinned. “Oh, it gets better. Nothing in biological systems is used for a single purpose. If you have a system modeling an external organism, you can predict its actions. If you have that same system modeling yourself, it can predict your actions with respect to that external organism.”

  “A zombie modeling a man watching another man.”

  “It’s not a large step for the model to serve as the organizing principle for the zombie. Once a model is experiential and aware, it’s the center of its own universe. Look at us. It doesn’t matter that the brain is buffeted by uncontrolled chemicals and sensor input. The conscious mind thinks it’s in control. What do you think of that?”

  It made me uncomfortable. “I think we need to get a band.”

  “Oh, you.” She chortled to herself and turned back to her pad.

  I left her and went into my office.

  The big mirror over my desk doubled as an active surface. Usually I just depend on the wall downstairs but tonight I wanted a little more privacy. I pulled my shirt off one corner to see better. My understanding of the divaloids had been constrained to songs I had doctored for fans. Lucrative but limited. I didn’t really know that much about divaloids.

  I didn’t even know how many of them there actually were.

  I found out that depended on your definition.

  If I defined divaloid as an animated figure that sang material given to it, there were hundreds of divaloid frames. Each with a malleable face and persona. I could take a celebrity face and plaster it on a divaloid frame—Hell, I could take my own face and body and license it for use on a frame. Lots of people did. So, defining the word one way there were thousands of them. Millions. As many as there were people who could afford it. Anybody could get a credible frame, accompanying software and a set of celebrity licenses and make their divaloids stand on their heads and spit nickels. Or just about anything else.

  I narrowed my search down to those divaloids that performed live concerts. Even then, it was a broad category. There were perhaps a dozen “live” performers across the world. Dot, of course. Kofi, out of Uganda. Lulu, out of Britain. Haschen in Germany. Little Guillermo from Mexico. A collection out of Japan. They were all associated with some corporation though the connection wasn’t always obvious. I was pleased to find the ancient and venerable Hatsune Miku software robot was still around, though I didn’t see any concerts scheduled. I remember I had a terrific crush on her when I was twelve. I wondered who her demographic was. Probably dirty old men like me. Except for the old part.
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  But even these concert divaloids had home models, advertising models. Models for special groups. Say I wanted to sell, oh, aquariums, to a company. I could put together a presentation using the divaloid model of my choice. If I had the license money I could even tie it into a specific scaled down concert model to include a particular song or dance. At the end, I could give away as a sales incentive package containing the divaloid concert link, the divaloid giving my presentation and a personalized divaloid home model for the client to play with.

  It was a divaloid jungle out there.

  There was no shortage of concert video for any of them. They all used a common 3D projection tank on the stage. It was all photons and processing speed. If it could be imagined and projected into the tank it could be performed. I saw divaloids blown apart, splattering the tank in blood. Divaloids anatomically created on stage. Reformed as medusa, gorgons, dragons, Shiva, snakes, knights, witches, lions, Kali, Saint Mary. Having such a circumscribed area for the divaloid looked a little strange. It made the divaloid artificially separate from the band—except for Kofi. He had a whole divaloid band he played with. They were little more than robots but at least they were all together.

  Of the lot of them, I have to say Dot’s performances were the most constrained. She didn’t grow new body parts or graphically change sex on stage. I suppose it wasn’t in keeping with Hitachi’s sixteen-year-old image of her. She did like to play with fire a lot. One act had her singing while her hair ignited, consuming first her face, then hands, burning upward from feet until she was a dancing, singing flame turning to ash.

  Made me wonder what sort of concert she had in mind.

  Over breakfast, Rosie asked me when I thought Dot would be ready for a concert. “Hitachi is on me for a concert date.” She nibbled on a piece of toast.

  I looked at Dot. “You think you’re ready to work with a band?”

  Dot nodded. “You call it.”

  I thought for a moment. “When’s the next concert date for—” I stopped. “Your counterpart? Earler version? Alpha copy? The performer currently but soon to be previously known as Dot?”

  “Dot 1.0.” said Rosie. “This is Dot 2.0.”

  Dot laughed. “There are no Dot concerts scheduled until fall.”

  “There you go,” I said, turning back to Rosie. “We just need to get her band in here and start working over the material. A month? Six weeks?”

  Dot made a noise, not quite clearing her throat—absent the throat. “I had hoped to use a new band.”

  I stared at her without saying anything.

  She seemed to fidget. “I want you to pull a band together for me.”

  “Whatever for?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Part of me, the part that works here with you, is very new. Barely a couple of months old. It has some background. But I have this other me that has four years of performance data. With that band. I’m trying something new. I’m worried the old data will hold down the new. A new band might help with that.”

  I looked at Rosie. “Is there a problem with that?”

  Rosie shrugged. “I don’t think so for this concert. I have no idea what sort of contracts there are with Dot’s players. But that would be for the tour. If there is a tour.”

  “Okay, then.” I looked at Rosie. “I’ll get you a band.”

  “With you as lead guitar.” Dot turned her big eyes on me.

  “What?” I shook my head. “No.”

  “Yes.” Dot gave me a sweet smile. “That’s the deal.”

  “No.” I spoke slowly. “The deal is to shepherd the concert forward. I don’t need to participate to do that.”

  “Yes. I won’t do the concert without you.”

  I turned to Rosie. “This is the flexibility/fixation problem, isn’t it?”

  Rosie didn’t lift her gaze from her tablet. “Yes.” She tapped on the keyboard.

  “That won’t work,” Dot said to her, smile gone. Her voice dripped venom.

  Rosie ignored her and made some more adjustments.

  Dot froze for a moment. Then, slowly she turned to me. “Just a moment.” She froze again.

  “Whoa,” said Rosie. “Now, that’s interesting.”

  “What?” I looked at Dot. Still frozen. Back to Rosie. “What’s interesting?”

  “I changed the opinion settings and she put them right back. Now she’s put up a wall to keep me from changing things.” Rosie sat back in her chair. “I didn’t know she could do that. Heck, I didn’t know she’d want to do that.” She glanced at me and must have seen I was confused. “She has an opinion. She recognizes other opinions. Each opinion she perceives has a weight associated with it. If her own opinion has too high value she won’t recognize the value of other opinions. That’s fixation. If it’s too low she won’t recognize the validity of her own. That’s too flexible. But it’s not a fixed value but a function itself since the weights have to be managed based on opinion expertise, potential power relationship and things like that.”

  “Why is she frozen?”

  “She’s not. She’s just not updating the image while she defends herself.” Rosie pushed the keyboard away and put her hands flat on the table. “Let’s continue negotiation.”

  Dot came back to life. “Thank you.”

  I tried to be earnest. “I don’t want to play in a concert. I haven’t done that in twelve years.”

  Dot sat down in her chair. She leaned back and gave me a long and level look. “Tell me the truth, Jake. Tell me that after all the hard work you’ve done here. All the hard work we’ve done together. Tell me you want someone else to come in and mess it up.”

  I stared at her for a long time. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no.

  Her eyes narrowed. She looked at Rosie. “The concert is off.” She turned to me. “Coward.” And disappeared.

  I felt stricken.

  I usually worked with studio musicians. Being the greedy son of a bitch I am, I don’t want to share the miserable profits I get from both of those misguided souls who like my material. But Dot was going to have an audience. That meant a band that could play to a house rather than a collection of microphones. I wanted to do right by her. Besides, if I got her a good enough band I might get off the hook. For one reason or another her opinion had become important to me. My own fixation/flexibility problem.

  I hadn’t worked with a performance band since Persons Unknown.

  After Denver, I had only kept in contact with Jess Turbin. He had taken the breakup of the band with the same even temper I’d seen in him since back in grade school. Must be a Zen thing. Jess had been raised a Buddhist. Since then if there was studio work I thought of him. When I needed somebody to back me up in my own work I thought of him. And, for this, I thought of him.

  Jess was a small man, with precise hands and a soft voice. Some African in his past had donated a blue black skin that always made me think of night. His face showed up on the screen after the third ring. He looked asleep. I realized what time it was. Jess always liked to sleep late.

  “Christ, Jess,” I said. “I shouldn’t have called.”

  “S’okay. Just wait a second.” He scratched his beard and looked around blearily. Then, he closed his eyes and shook his head. When he opened them, he was awake. “What’s up?”

  “I need a good performance band.”

  Jess stared at me for a moment. “Are you going on the road?”

  “It’s not for me. It’s for a client. One night. Well paid.”

  “Ah. You’re just a guitar.”

  “Probably not.”

  Jess sighed. “Tell me the whole story.”

  So I started from the beginning and told him about Rosie and Dot and what we’ve been doing.

  “You and Rosie?” he said in disbelief.

  “So far.”

  “And Dot.” He thought for a moment. “Interesting.”

  “I think so, too. So we need a good performance band.”

  �
�The best,” he agreed. He thought for a moment. “Me, of course. You—”

  “ “I said I wasn’t going to be on stage.”

  Jess chuckled. “You’re doing exciting work with Dot and you’re going to let some other dumb fuck mess it up.”

  “That’s what Dot said.” Plus one other thing.

  Jess watched me a moment. “What are you scared of, Jake?”

  “I don’t know.” I held up my hands. They were big. Strong. They could make a steel string run up an entire octave and hit each note on the way just by stretching it. They could play all night long—I used to hate the end of the performance because I’d have to stop for the night. I hadn’t played for an audience since Denver.

  First the fight in Saint Louis and then Rosie left. Then the fight in Denver with the whole band and they left. I had effectively tossed out the audience but it hadn’t mattered then. The audience left about a year later when “Don’t Make Me Cry” had faded. Nothing I had done since had made enough to live on. To Hell with them. I’ll be okay. I had held that mantra to my chest for over a decade. I knew the loss I had feared back then. What was it that kept me afraid now? Fear of walking out on stage and screwing up? Fear of walking out on stage and not screwing up? Fear of it not meaning anything?

  Jess watched me quietly. “It’s only one night,” he said.

  “That’s what they always say. The first one’s free,” I snarled at him.

  Jess was unfazed. “Not when you’re getting paid. How bad can it be if I’m going to be there with you?”

  Unbelievably, that was some comfort. “You and me?”

  “Yeah.”

  I watched him for a long time. “No,” I said at last. “It’s been too long.”

  Jess shrugged. “Okay. We’ll need to find a guitarist, a keyboard, and a drummer. How about Olive and Obi for keyboard and drums?”

  “The band?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I didn’t know they were still playing.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you? Olive is doing scores down in Hollywood. And Obi’s doing studio work up in San Francisco. Why don’t we call them?”

  “I didn’t just burn the bridges, Jess. I salted the earth and pissed on the ashes. They won’t want to play with me again.”