Shine

by Jetse de Vries (ed)

  I gave a noncommittal shrug. "Guess I've come this far."

  Jake stopped at another white cabinet--this one turned out to be a fridge--and came out with a thigh-sized haunch of freezer-wrapped meat. "Carry this for me, buddy," he said.

  I took the meat, cradling it in both arms.We went out of the laboratory by a different door, then walked down a short corridor until a second door opened out into a dark, echoey space, like the inside of an aircraft hangar.

  "Wait here,' Jake said, and his footsteps veered off to one side. I heard a clunk, as of some huge trip-switch being thrown and, one by one, huge banks of suspended ceiling lights came on. Even as I had to squint against the glare, I mentally applauded the way Jake was managing the presentation. He'd known I was coming, so he could easily have left those lights on until now. But the impressario in him wouldn't be denied. These weren't simple spotlights, either. They were computer controlled, steerable, variable-colour stage lights. Jake had a whole routine programmed in. The lights gimballed and gyred, throwing shifting patterns across the walls, floor and ceiling of the vast space. Yet until the last moment they studiously avoided illuminating the thing in the middle. When they fell on it, I could almost imagine the crowd going apeshit.

  This was how the show would open. This was how the show had to open.

  I was looking at Derek.

  Derek was in a bright yellow cage, about the size of four shipping containers arranged into a block. I was glad about the cage; glad too that it appeared to have been engineered to generous tolerances. Electrical cables snaked into it, thick as pythons. Orange strobe beacons had just come on, rotating on the top of the cage, for no obvious reason other than that it looked cool. And there was Derek, standing up in the middle.

  I'd had a toy T-rex as a kid, handed down from my dad, and some part of me still expected them to look the way that toy did: standing with the body more or less vertical, forming a tripod with two legs and the tail taking the creature's weight. That wasn't how they worked, though. Derek--like every resurrected Rex that ever lived--stood with his body arranged in a horizontal line, with the tail counterbalancing the weight of his forebody and skull. Somehow that just never looked right to me. And the two little arms looked even more pathetic and useless in this posture.

  Derek wasn't the same luminous green as the baby dinosaur; he was a more plausible dark muddy brown. I guess at some point Jake had decided that colouration wasn't spectacular enough for the second batch. In fact, apart from the human hands on the ends of his forearms, he didn't look in any way remarkable. Just another meat-eating dinosaur.

  Derek was awake, too. He was looking at us and I could hear the rasp of his breathing, like an industrial bellows being worked very slowly. In proportion to his body, his eyes were much smaller than the baby's. Not so cute now. This was an instinctive predator, big enough to swallow me whole.

  "He's pretty big."

  "Actually he's pretty small," Jake said. "Rex development isn't a straight line thing. They grow fast from babies then stick at two tonnes until they're about fourteen. Then they get another growth spurt which can take them anywhere up to six tonnes. Of course with the newer Dereks we should be able to dial things up a bit." Then he took the haunch off me and whispered: "Watch the neural display. We've had implants in him since he hatched--we're gonna work the imaging into the live show." He raised his voice. "Hey! Meat-brain! Look what I got for you!"

  Derek was visibly interested in the haunch. His head tracked it as Jake walked up to the cage, the little yellow-tinged eyes moving with the smooth vigilance of surveillance cameras. Saliva dribbled between his teeth. The forearms made a futile grabbing gesture, as if Derek somehow didn't fully comprehend that there was a cage and a quite a lot of air between the haunch and him.

  I watched a pink blotch form on the neural display. "Hunter-killer mode kicking in," Jake said, grinning. "He's like a heat-seaking missile now. Nothing getting between him and his dinner except maybe another Rex."

  "Maybe you should feed him more often."

  "There's no such thing as a sated Rex. And I do feed him. How else do you think I get him to work for me?" He raised his voice again. "You know the deal, ain't no free lunches around here." He put the haunch down on the ground, then reached for something that I hadn't seen until then: a remote control unit hanging down from above. It was a grubby yellow box with a set of mushroom-sized buttons on it. Jake depressed one of the buttons and an overhead gantry clanked and whined into view, sliding along rails suspended from the ceiling. The gantry positioned itself over the cage, then began to lower its cargo. It was a flame red Gibson Flying V guitar, bolted to a telescopic frame from the rear of the body. The guitar came down from a gap in the top of the cage (too small for Derek to have escaped through), lowered until it was in front of him, then telescoped back until the guitar was suspended within reach of his arms. At the same time, a microphone had come down to just in front of Derek's mouth.

  Jake released the remote control unit, then picked up the haunch again. "OK, buddy, you know what you need to do." Then he pressed one of the other buttons and fast, riffing heavy metal blasted out of speakers somewhere in the room. It wasn't stadium-level wattage--that, presumably, would have drawn too much attention--but it was still loud enough to impress, to give me some idea of how the show would work in reality.

  And then Derek started playing. His hands were on that guitar, and they were making--well, you couldn't call it music, in the abolutely strict sense of the word. It was noise, basically. Squealing, agonising bursts of sheet-metal sound, none of which bore any kind of harmonic relationship to what had gone before. But the one thing I couldn't deny was that it worked. With the backing tape, and the light show, and the fact that this was an actual dinosaur playing a Gibson Flying V guitar, it was possible to make certain allowances.

  Hell, I didn't even have to try. I was smitten. And that was before Derek opened his mouth and started singing. Actually it would be best described as a sustained, blood-curdling roar--but that was exactly what it needed to be, and it counterpointed the guitar perfectly. Different parts of his brain were lighting up now; the hunter-killer region was much less bright than it had been before he started playing.

  And there was, now that I paid attention to it, more than just migraine-inducing squeals of guitar and monstrous interludes of gutteral roaring. Derek might not be playing specific notes and chords, and his vocalisations were no more structured or musical, but they were timed to fit in around the rest of the music, the bass runs and drum fills and second guitar solos. It wasn't completely random. Derek was playing along, judging his contributions, letting the rest of the band share the limelight.

  As a front man, I'd seen a lot worse.

  "OK, that'll do," Jake said, killing the music, pressing another button to retract the guitar and mike. "Way to go, Derek. Way to fucking go."

  "He's good."

  "Does that constitute your seal of approval?"

  "He can rock. I'll give him that."

  "He doesn't just rock," Jake said. "He is rock." Then he turned around and smiled. "So. Buddy. We back in business, or what?"

  Yeah, I thought to myself. I guess we're back in business.

  I'm making my way back down the Antonov, thinking of the long hours of subsonic cruising ahead. I pass Jake's desk again, and this time something on the ancient, battered, desert-sand camouflaged ex-military surplus laptop catches my eye.

  The laptop's running some generic movie editing software, and in one of the windows is a freezeframe from tonight's show. Beneath the freezeframe is a timeline and soundtrack. I click the cursor and slide it back along to the left, watching Derek run in reverse on the window, hands whipping around the guitar in manic thrash overdrive. The set list is the same from night to night, so I know exactly when Extinction Event would have kicked in. I don't feel guilty about missing it--someone had to take care of the Budokan accounts--but now that we're airborne and there's time to kill, I'm at least semi-cur
ious about hearing it properly. What exactly was so great about it tonight, compared to the previous show, and the one before that?

  Why was it that Jake didn't want to hear that Extinction Event was even more awesome than usual?

  I need earphones to hear anything over the six-engine drone of the Antonov. I'm reaching for them when Jake looms behind me.

  "Thought you were checking on the big guy."

  I look around. He's still got the bottle of JD with him.

  "I was. Told him I heard he'd done a good job. Now I'm just checking it out for myself. If I can just find the point where..."

  He reaches over and takes my hand off the laptop. "You don't need to. Got it all cued up already."

  He hands me the JD, punches a few keys--they're so worn the numbers and letters are barely visible now--and up pops Derek again. From the purple-red tinge of the lighting, and the back-projection footage of crashing asteroids and erupting volcanos, I know we've hit the start of Extinction Event.

  "So what's the big deal?" I ask.

  "Put the phones on."

  I put the phones on. Jake spools through the track until we hit the bridge between the second and third verse. He lets the movie play on at normal speed. Drums pounding like jackhammers, bass so heavy it could shatter bone, and then Derek lets rip on the Flying V, unleashing a squall of demented sound, arching his neck back as he plays, eyes narrowing to venomous slits, and then belching out a humungous, larynx-shredding roar of pure theropod rage.

  We go into the third verse. Jake hits pause.

  "So you see," he says.

  I pull out the phones. "I'm not sure I do."

  "Then you need to go back and listen to the previous performance. And the one before that. And every goddamned rendition of that song he's ever done before tonight."

  "I do?"

  "Yes. Because then you'd understand." And Jake looks at me with an expression of the utmost gravity on his face, as if he's about to disclose one of the darkest, most mystical secrets of the universe. "It was different tonight. He came in early. Jumped his usual cue. And when he did come in it was for longer than usual and he added that vocal flourish."

  I nod, but I'm still not seeing the big picture. "OK. He screwed up. Shit happens. Gotta roll with it, remember? It was still a good show. Everyone said so."

  But he shakes his head. "You're not getting it, buddy. That wasn't a mistake. That was something much worse. That was an improvement. That was him improvising."

  "You can't be sure."

  "I can be sure." He punches another key and a slice of Derek's neural activity pops up. "Extracted this from the performance," he says. "Right around the time he started going off-script." His finger traces three bright blotches. "You see these hotspots? They've come on in ones and twos before. But they've never once lit up at the same time."

  "And this means something?"

  He taps his finger against the blotches in turn. "Dorsal premotor cortex. That's associated with the brain planning a sequence of body movements. You slip on ice, that's the part that gets you flapping your arms so you don't you fall over." Next blotch. "Anterior cingulate. That's your basic complex resolution, decision making module, right. Do I chase after that meal, or go after that one?" He moves his finger again. "Interior frontal gyrus/ventral premotor cortex. We're deep into mammal brain structure here--a normal Rex wouldn't have anything you could even stick a label on here. You know when this area lights up, in you and me?"

  "I'm not, strangely enough, a neuroscientist."

  "Nor was I until I got involved with Derek. This is the sweet spot, buddy. This is what lights up when you hear language or music. And all three of these areas going off at once? That's a pretty unique signature. It doesn't just mean he's playing music. It means he's making shit up as he goes along."

  For a moment I don't know what to say. There's no doubt in my mind that he's right. He knows the show--and Derek's brain--inside out. He knows every cue Derek's meant to hit. Derek missing his mark--or coming in early--just isn't meant to happen. And Derek somehow finding a way to deviate from the program and make the song sound better is, well...not exactly the way Jake likes things to happen.

  "I don't like improvisation," he says. "It's a sign of creative restlessness. Before you know it..."

  "It's solo recording deals, expensive riders and private tour buses."

  "I thought we got away from this shit," Jake says mournfully. "I mean, dead bodies, man. Then robots. Then dinosaurs. And still it's coming back to bite us. Talent always thinks it knows best."

  "Maybe it does."

  "A T-Rex?"

  "You gave him just enough of a mind to rock. Unfortunately, that's already more than enough to not want to take orders." I take a sip from the JD. "But look on the bright side. What's the worst that could happen?"

  "He escapes and eats us."

  "Apart from that."

  "I don't know. If he starts showing signs of... creativity... then we're fucked six ways from Tuesday. We'll have animal rights activists pulling the plug on every show."

  "Unless we just... roll with it. Let him decide what he does. I mean, it's not like he doesn't want to perform, is it? You've seen him out there. This is what he was born for. Hell, why stop there? This is what he was evolved for."

  "I wish I had your optimism."

  I look back at the cage. Derek's watching us, following the conversation. I wonder how much of it he's capable of understanding. Maybe more than we realise.

  "Maybe we keep control of him, maybe we don't. Either way, we've done something beautiful." I hand him the bottle. "You, mainly. It was your idea, not mine."

  "Took the two of us to make it fly," Jake says, before taking a gulp. "And hell, maybe you're right. That's the glorious thing about rock and roll. It's alchemy. Holy fire. The moment you control it, it ain't rock and roll no more. So maybe the thing we should be doing here is celebrating."

  "All the way." And I snatch back the JD and take my own swig. Then I raise the bottle and toast Derek, who's still watching us. Hard to tell what's going on behind those eyes, but one thing I'm sure of is that it's not nothing. And for a brief, marvellous instant, I'm glad not only to be alive, but to be alive in a universe that has room in it for beautiful monsters.

  And heavy metal, of course.

  Sarging Rasmussen:

  A Report (by Organic)

  Gord Sellar

  In most of the Shine stories the positive change that happens is implemented through actions of individuals, groups or companies (and eventually, one hopes, the people), who often have to fight--apart from the barrage of real-world problems--the political powers that be. In "Sarging Rasmussen" Gord Sellar proposes--maybe only partly tongue-in-cheek--that it might be better to, well, go with the flow.

  This may be true (I suggest with one cheek bulging) for Gord himself: after venting his frustration that a certain Australian stole his ideas before he had them (see "The Egan Thief" in FLURB #4), he saw his stories published in Asimov's, Interzone and The Year's Best SF (and other fine venues). So maybe at the next SF convention we all should be 'Broing Sellar'...

  Were people really so - alone, granpa? /

  disbelief in her deep brown eyes /

  Yes, dear, said I /

  Old friends laughing in the back of my mind

  --David Heijl--

  "I Don't!" Hunter screamed, tears trailing down his cheeks, lit by the trendy piezoelectric floor-powered club lights pulsing to the fashionable heart-attack thump of Malaybeat techno. "I let Bagheera amog me and fuck it all up! I don't got shit!"

  I managed to fight my urge to start calling him by his real name--Wilfred Chan--but I made the mistake of reasoning with him. "What? Listen, you do. You got game. Trust me. I've seen your work, Hunter, ever since you first came to Den Haag. I watched you amog Marko Rechschild, and co-bro Park and Almeira into signing that Pacific RI treaty, all in three hours! You even banged that hot little attachÈ from the IECWP before the committee went i
nto session! Shit, man, you got so much Game you're a legend! Game 1.0, Game 2.0: new guys dream of being like you... what're you crying about?"

  A smile almost cracked his face in half as he remembered bonking that secretary, but then reality flooded back, slamming his frown back into place. He'd been amogged--knocked right out of his synthetic alpha male mindframe, reduced to inaudible mumbling. Once again a low-status, never-gets-laid, can't-save-the-world loser. The club noise swallowed his broken little voice.

  But his words flashed boldly across my comptact lenses: What about the Reefs? The IPBR display in the corner of my right lens showed his body temp running high, though so was everyone's in that place, but his pulse rate and respiration were all in the red. Then MuggleCC kicked in, blaring terse, blood-red warnings across my comptacts: Hostile. Unbalanced. Tox?

  You can always trust software to tell you the truth you're trying to ignore hardest.

  The MuggleCC app was one of the finest tools in the Game 2.0 kit. It told you which chicks really just wanted to be left alone, and when a suit had been rubbed the wrong way beyond the point of no broability. For analyzing people you didn't know, possible targets, it was the most kickass app around, like a wingman who was never scared to realityslap you upside the neocortex. But Hunter had been my mentor once; I felt a stab of guilt about what I'd have to do to him. My doubts swirled momentarily, and the comptacts picked that up--my system was monitoring me, too--and flashed me emphatically: Totally Fucking Hostile, Dude. A moment later came the default addendum, built in to urge restraint: Sorry.

  I embraced my guilt for a second--I figured it kept me human--and then I shoved it aside. Compassion for fuckups and flakes is what crippled the green movement so badly that Game 2.0 became necessary. Besides, I've worked too hard to burn off the residuals of my own Average Frustrated Environmentalist Crusader mentality. I didn't have time to be an AFEC anymore. There were protocols for handling backslides like this.