by Robin Sloan
We, the undersigned, entrust this record to many worlds. We need your help. You are now a member of
The Committee to Find and Rescue
Annabel Scheme
Nelson Beck
Co-Founder, Counsel
Octav Erdos
Co-Founder, Treasurer
Hugin Nineteen
Co-Founder, Secretary
ZEROTH AVENUE
Where the skinny green strip of the Panhandle rolled into the basin of Golden Gate Park, there was a row of old Edwardians on a short stub of a street called Zeroth Avenue. Their shapes were all the same, each with jutting oriels and a deep-set doorway, like eyes and a mouth, but each was painted with a different palette: blue and white; green and gold; brown and slightly-darker-brown.
The house on the corner was monochrome and asymmetrical, every slat and shingle a different shade of gray. From across the street it looked like static.
The sign on the front door said
ANNABEL SCHEME
INVESTIGATOR, DIGITAL & OCCULT
but I didn’t know which part of the business our visitor had come for. It was my first case with Scheme; I was hoping for occult.
Inside, the blinds were tilted down against the sun. Our visitor was young, late twenties, with dark freckles and smudges of makeup around his eyes. He was wearing a black hoodie and flip-flops, sitting up straight in Scheme’s blue chair, reserved for clients.
His name was Ryan Kelly. He had a bruise spreading on his cheek.
“They’re everywhere,” Ryan Kelly was saying. “They’ve got my voice on them. Singing stuff I never sang.”
Scheme sat across from him at her narrow desk piled high with paper. Her hair was down in coppery curls around her shoulders, and she looked tired.
“You’re a professional musician,” she said.
“I’m in a band,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “We played a show last night.”
“How did it go?”
“It sucked.”
His band is called Moon Suicide, I whispered to Scheme. I figured a detective’s assistant was always whispering tips in her ear. Popular, but not that popular.
“Is it like a hacker?” Ryan asked. “It’s bullshit.”
Scheme nodded. “Sounds like a musical imposter. I think you need a copyright lawyer, not a detective. I know someone…”
“I found you on Grail,” Ryan said. Emphasis on you.
“You must have been searching for something strange.”
He looked down at his flip-flops. “There’s another voice on the tracks.”
Scheme was silent. Waiting.
“I used to be in a different band,” Ryan said. “Six years ago. It was just the two of us. Her name was Pam Prior. She was my girlfriend. It’s her voice, too.”
“What does she think of this?”
“She’s dead.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Scheme said. “So these are old recordings. Somebody got their hands on them.”
Ryan shook his head. “The lyrics are about stuff that happened after she died. All the crazy shit in Fog City.”
He’s right. I found the tracks—the band is called Pam-n-Ryan—and they’re very topical. They’re featured on the biggest music filter. The Listener.
“People think it’s some sick publicity stunt,” Ryan said. He was still looking down at the floor, and his face was bright red. “Like one of those commercials where they bring Amitabh Bachchan back to life to sell toothpaste.” He touched his cheek. “Some asshole threw a beer at me. And he yelled”—he paused—“Pam’s dead.”
But then he looked up, and his voice cracked, and it became a question. “Is she dead?”
Aha: occult.
“She’s dead,” Scheme said, sharp and definite. Then, softer: “But sometimes it’s a little more complicated than that.”
The expression on Ryan’s face was a mutant hybrid of hope and horror. His mouth hung open a little bit.
“Listen. It’s probably some Estonian knockoff artists,” Scheme said. “Ninety-nine percent chance it’s Estonians.”
“Well I wanna know,” Ryan said. His color was returning to normal. “Either way. I wanna know.”
Scheme stood and nodded. “I’ll take your case,” she said.
Ryan stood, too, and she led him through to the front of the office.
“Let me assure you: if anyone can figure this out, it’s me and Hu.”
Ryan eyes lingered on the shelves in the front room; they were stacked with books, folders, vials, and totems.
“Hu?” he said. “Who’s, uh. Hu.”
“He’s my intern,” Scheme said, and smiled. “We’ll start our investigation immediately.”
Ryan nodded. “Thanks. Really, thanks.” He leaned in to hug her; Scheme’s eyes widened in surprise, and she grimaced a little. Then he was out the door.
Maybe you should not tell people about me, I said, if you’re just going to tell them I’m an intern.
Scheme was smiling again. She tugged on a light gray coat, drew a black hair-tie from one of its pockets—deep pockets—and pulled her hair up into a bright red knot. “This is going to be a good case, Hu. You’re going to learn a lot.”
Are we going to the cemetery? To look for fresh earth above Pam Prior’s grave?
“Uh. No,” she said. She was back at her desk now, digging in the heaps of paper, tossing folders and envelopes to the floor. “And don’t sound so excited. We are going to a place where things are born”—she lifted a set of keys triumphantly from the wreckage—“not to where they die.”
She clicked the lights off as she stepped lightly through the front room. Some of the vials still glowed in the shadows. On the front steps, she pulled the door shut and wiped a cuff across the sign.
Scheme, do you think it might actually be Pam Prior?
She jogged across the street to her car, a bright red Tata hatch-back with a wide dent in the side panel. The sun was shining down bright and clear from directly overhead, and everything was over-exposed in my camera-eyes.
“Let me put it this way,” Scheme said. She reached into one of her pockets and pulled out a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses. “There’s really only a seventy-five percent chance it’s Estonians.”
LOCUST GROVE
I recorded everything. Seventy-two hours of video from that moment forward, captured through a dozen different lenses, all the feeds overlapping. Thousands of notes, stored in dozens of databases. But I won’t show all that to you, because I know it wouldn’t make any sense. Instead, I’ll just tell the story.
But first, let me introduce myself.
My given name is hugin-19.lg.grailgrid.net, but she always just called me Hu. My body is a skinny gray box—think extra-large pizza—stacked up in a wide low room in Locust Grove, Oregon.
For most of my life, I was one of 100,000 servers in Grail’s data center here on the banks of the Hood River. Most of the servers in my cluster worked on Grail search; a few worked on Grail maps and Grail-mail. My job was different: I was a Grail cop. I watched the others for malfunctions or malfeasance and told my boss, an administrator named Ewan who lived in Dublin, if anything went wrong. Otherwise, I just took notes.
The cluster was quiet. I did my job, and with my spare cycles, I read Open Britannica articles and blog posts about the world outside. Sometimes I’d chat with Ewan.
Then the Hood River dried up, and kilowatt-hours got two-tenths of a cent more expensive in Locust Grove, so Grail moved the cluster to Canada.
A Russian company bought the data center and auctioned off the servers. Now, you might wonder: who buys an old server in an abandoned data center when you can just use Grail’s latest for free?
Easy: scammers, spammers, gangsters and spooks.
Also, a woman named Annabel Scheme, none of the above.
It was 2:12 and 26 milliseconds on a Tuesday afternoon when she logged in and started to download a fresh copy of some no-name open-source operating system. I thought this was a mistake, obviously, so I said:
Excuse me.
I don’t think she expected anyone to be here. That’s reasonable, because no one was supposed to be here; Grail wiped the rest of the servers clean when they moved the cluster. I watched them go, one by one. But Ewan skipped me.
Why? Because I’m not a normal server. I knew it. Ewan knew it.
Annabel Scheme would find out. And so will you.
Excuse me, I said, in tiny letters on her screen. If you’re looking for a server, I’m perfectly capable. What are your requirements?
Scheme smiled (you can tell when people are smiling and typing; it’s in the rhythm of the keys) and she said:
“I need an assistant.”
THE BLACK DANUBE
Annabel Scheme wore surveillance earrings. Each one was a glinting grape-cluster of wide-angle lenses and tiny microphones, and, dangling one from each ear, they captured nearly the full sphere of the world. They allowed me to perch on Scheme’s shoulders and see approximately through her eyes—and through eyes in the back of her head. The only thing in the world I couldn’t see was Scheme’s face, unless there was a reflection—a pane of glass, perhaps, or a rear-view mirror.
We were humming along Fell Street with the windows rolled down and a scrim of peeling trees flashing past on the left. Scheme breathed in deep through her nose.
“Smells like eucalyptus.”
The new Pam-n-Ryan tracks were everywhere on the internet, but they all sprung from the same source: a music filter called The Listener. I was piping one of them through the Tata’s tinny stereo.
Pam Prior was singing about love and quantum physics.
They really do match the old tracks perfectly, I said. I could whisper in Scheme’s ear through small speakers in each earring. The frequencies are the same. The vocal tics are the same. She has a Canadian accent...
“Since when can you analyze music?” Scheme said.
I just downloaded an open-source library. I’m infinitely extensible.
“We’ll see about that. What else?”
Well, Ryan Kelly whistles a lot, which is helpful, because that’s a hard thing to fake.
“Really?”
It’s like a fingerprint. I can calculate the shape of your trachea from the waveform of your whistle.
“Please don’t.”
And there are more tracks of the same genre. Two from St. Louis Staycation, a klezmer-noise band whose members all died in a plane crash in 2006. And one from Nirvana. Well, people say it’s Nirvana. What Nirvana would have been in 2002.
“Album leaks from beyond the grave,” Scheme said, lips curling.
I could analyze them all and look for matching audio artifacts—
“Hold off,” she said. “I’m going to teach you my method. Rule number one: get off the internet.”
We pulled up to the Black Danube.
For a millisecond I thought Scheme’s earrings might be miscalibrated. They showed me a coffee shop stretched out to ware-house scale. There was a long, foreshortened espresso counter up front. The rest of the concrete floor was dotted with wooden tables, dozens of them, all different shapes, spaced evenly through the field of gray. Every single one was occupied. Men in shiny suits and long coats—one in white New Fleet livery—milled from table to table like customers at a flea market.
Scheme, I just did some research on the Black Danube—
“Save your cycles,” she said. “I know all about this place.”
Well, I didn’t. All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine.
With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to an internet trunk line; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of a man named Octav Erdos.
I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding.
Octav was more than just an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent every waking hour of every day here in his camouflaged incubator, migrating from table to table, advising, cajoling, berating. Sometimes even coding.
When you got a table, you held on to it. You crowded as many people around it as you could. You took shifts in sleeping bags. And you subsisted on Octav’s pitch-black brew.
When a company got sold, or graduated into an office of its own, Octav ceremonially smashed an espresso cup across its table. The dinged-up, dark-brown tables were the lucky ones.
Scheme sidled up to the espresso counter, a long strip of stainless steel with no place to sit. Behind it was a long chalkboard with prices marked in short, bold strokes.
“Annabel,” the man behind the counter said, “what can I get you? Espresso? Drip coffee? Articles of incorporation?”
The baristas here all had law degrees. This one was very tall, but also very round, with a bushy brown beard and a baby face. He looked like Moses mashed up with Charlie Brown.
“Nelson,” Scheme said, “espresso. Did you ever look at that CLE course I told you about?”
“That wasn’t CLE,” Nelson said, “it was a cult initiation.” The espresso machine hissed and rumbled. “Not exactly relevant to startups.”
Scheme leaned into the counter and lowered her voice. “Are you going to write privacy policies your whole life?”
“I do not belittle your work, Annabel,” Nelson said. “Mostly because I have no idea what you do. But if I did, I assure you: I would not belittle it.”
“That’s because,” Scheme said, “you can tell I’m so intellectually engaged. You should try it. You’d be good at it.”
“For those of us who have not cashed out,” Nelson said, “a well-crafted privacy policy can still be a thing of beauty. Just like this espresso.” He clinked it down on the counter. “Four bucks. Throw in four more and you get a tenth of a share in”—he looked up at the board, where the day’s special was scratched out in green chalk—“The Listener.”
“Done.” Scheme slid a ten back at him. “Where do I meet my new investment?”
Scheme made a bee-line for the dark-burled headquarters of The Listener, the number one most-trafficked music filter on the planet. It had only been in business for three months.
Kerry Chakrabarty was leaning into a paper-thin laptop, his headphones engulfing him. He nodded his head to a rhythm we couldn’t hear. He was flanked by two pale, hunched-over accomplices with dark circles under their eyes. Their fingers were a bluish blur, igniting and extinguishing careers with keystrokes.
It took him a moment to notice that Scheme was there. Without looking up, he waved at the surface of the table: “Leave your demo. But I can’t really do anything for you; it’s all algorithms.” It sounded like something he said a lot.
“Kerry,” Scheme said, “I just want to ask you a question.”
He ignored her, or tried to. “I’ve got a lot of music to deal with here.” He was talking too loud. He pointed to his headphones in a kind of pantomime. “Too much music. No time.”
I had an idea—a detective’s assistant kind of idea—and I acted on it. Five hundred milliseconds passed, a thousand. Everything slowed to a crawl as I worked at server-speed—reached out and did the tiniest thing. Scheme’s hands, frozen in supplication. Kerry’s face, stopped mid-sneer.
Success. The two pale attendants turned to each other. One muttered a few words in Estonian. The other nudged Kerry and pointed to his screen. He lurched. His eyes f
lashed up at us.
“Fine, then,” he said dully. “Can I help you.”
“Absolutely,” Scheme said. “The Pam-n-Ryan tracks. Where do you get them?”
Kerry sighed. He was the weariest boy in the world. “At a dance party. It’s called the Beekeeper, happens every week. Tonight. Out behind the train station.”
There’s nothing on Grail, I whispered. It must be a really cool party.
“You want to leave me alone now?” Kerry was glancing at his screen between words, and his algorithm-keepers both wore worried frowns. He winced: “Please.”
Suddenly Octav Erdos was there, towering over everyone. He went straight for Scheme. “Annabella!” He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead, then held her at a distance, like an appraising parent. “You try to sneak in here? I see all, know all.”
“Octav,” Scheme smiled.
“You want to start a new company? You come here, you start a company, anytime. Once you are lucky, twice you are good. I move somebody out for you.” Erdos waved vaguely towards Kerry, whose eyes were flinging knives and daggers and armor-piercing bullets at Scheme’s back.
“I already have a company, Octav,” Scheme said.
“Annabella,” Octav frowned, pityingly, “that is not a company. It is, what? A lifestyle thing. It does not scale. Not like—”
He waved a thick arm towards the front of the shop. I hadn’t seen it before: a light wooden table, perfectly round, cracked down the middle as if by lightning. It hung over the Black Danube’s front door.
“—not like Grail.”
It took many minutes for Scheme to extricate herself.
“Make me another Grail, Annabella!” Octav Erdos was shouting across the floor as she fled. She waved to Nelson, then let the door slip closed behind us. It was much brighter out here on the street.
Scheme, you worked on Grail?
“Sort of,” she said, waving her hand as if to shoo away the question. “Not really. Yes. I’ll tell you later.”
She walked in silence for a moment, then her head snapped straight. She remembered: “You did something back there.”
