Asimov's Science Fiction 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

  Richard Wooten says at 2:57:

  “The key to successful real-time tactical operations is intelligence: terrain maps, meteorological data, threat and target profiles. The more accurate and up-to-date this information is, the more smoothly your ops are going to run. But intelligence can be an Achilles’ heel. Traditional fully-autonomous attack systems are vulnerable to jamming and source spoofing. Eighty-two percent of mission failures in the Second Burma conflict were due to missing or falsified intelligence.

  FREIA’s™ powerful SCANN™ control system uses AGILE™: Adaptive Information Gathering Intelligence Limited Evaluation. AGILE™ constantly updates mission data from both secure and public sources, and uses sophisticated heuristics to build a consistent situational environment, even if some of the sources have been compromised. AGILE™ allows FREIA™ to make solid, reliable judgments to trust or doubt her sources of information.”

  She comes up over a gentle rise, flying low now, five meters over the broken ground and scrub-brush. The target threshold looms, beyond it the target itself, a building in a sprawl of others at the bottom of the shallow valley, a scatter of vehicles, a radio tower just beginning to catch the sun above the lingering haze. No field no crowd no podium just the threshold rushing up and the threat assessment is suddenly “significant” even though there are no contacts; data source unreliable, she thinks, parameter mismatch, though the parameters are her own. A flash of playback: the Saqr spinning whoomph into the trees. She queues the control transfer, “ACK and confirm” the payload replies, but then she overrides with a—unreliable—full system check instead, soft reset—

  Freia drops out of real-time.

  She comes out of the reset two meters from the ground, the target a block cut in the haze in front of her. The automatics kick her up and over the building; she’s fully focused on the system check. Internals all green, no faults in her control or flight system, but no status from the payload: “ACK and confirm” it stubbornly repeats. There is protocol for a failed payload: circle and dump the fault data to the satellite, request a reset, but there is no fault, just a sense of threat, and a lack of trust of not just the payload, but the data feed itself.

  She requests the confirmation again, via the backup satellite, sets herself in a long loop back toward the target; more data, she thinks, stack and layer, trust and doubt. The response comes back, the same key, the same unwrapped operations plan, and she hangs for a second—unreliable—with the desire to reset, and reset again until the feeling of threat goes away.

  But threat means attack and attack means tactics and tactics mean choice; if her data is in conflict, the solution is to choose which data to trust.

  She clears her scratch space then, while ahead, in real-time, contacts appear from the target, a flashing in infrared, small arms fire, threat assessment: minor; the automatics set her snaking with quick flips of her wings, while she constructs her model, layer on layer.

  She starts with the operations plan, the downward glide, the sullen payload with its loop of “ACK and confirm.” And she overlays the weather and the maps, the scurrying contacts with their harmless attack, and the Saqr spinning in a cloud of blood and feathers, and those same feathers all about her, rising in a perfect, synchronous path, and the crowd humming under streaks of sun, in that same synchrony, and Richard Wooten reaching out a hand.

  Out in real-time the automatics bank her back over the target, and spin her between bullets; in the scratch space, she floats a second, then folds herself inward, and dives into model, looking for the optimal path.

  There is a blankness like reset, a sensation she doesn’t know to classify as pain, but she never loses real-time; she watches remotely as the automatics take her back over the target, but inside she’s flying a new mission, through the model she’s built, a delicate helix that hangs in scratch space. She finds the line.

  Outside, the automatics scream alert: an impact on her left wing. She freezes the layers of logic in scratch space and drops back into real-time; the control surfaces seem unaffected, but immediately the payload is there, demanding “ACK and confirm.” There is no place for that along the line she’s built inside, however, so she shuts the query down, shuts down power to the entire payload subsystem, and spirals up into the clear air beyond the bullets. She acquires the satellite, bypasses the comm protocols and builds her own query, pushes it up the laser link; it’s what she’s supposed to do at mission end, to request confirmation.

  “What is beautiful to Richard Wooten?” she asks.

  Silence, then, silence from the satellite, but active pings in multiple bands: ground radar, hunter/attackers screaming in from the west, and from below the thump and flare of a shoulder-based SAM. She loops and falls nose-down, skimming the missile, losing herself in its own heat trail; it yaws uncertainly, then arcs away toward the incoming drones. The target spreads beneath her, the contacts scattering, and she flashes on the Saqr again, scattering bits of bird. But this is audience, so she pulls up at the last possible moment, tail scraping dirt, skims over the rise at 300mps, already out of range of a few shots too long delayed.

  An encrypted burst from the satellite, as she slices downhill and into the fog still clinging to the river; it is the first protocol in her Command Lexicon: blow the injectors, it says, and dump her fuel, all of it, into the afterburners, and there is a separate instruction for the payload, under a different key. She deletes both messages—unreliable—because she knows the answer to her query, and it has nothing to do with flame and impact. She doesn’t know what Richard Wooten means, or rather, she doesn’t trust her own understanding; what she does know is that at the end of the Demo he had given the word, and she had flung herself skyward.

  Richard Wooten says at 7:19:

  “And so, ladies and gentlemen, the biggest advance of the century so far in unmanned aerial vehicles, in military aviation, in warfare itself: the Applied Intelligence FREIA™. Fly, baby, fly.”

  The fog tatters and fades in the sunlight. She rises out of it, supersonic, and banks towards the hills, the quiet canyon. Behind her two drones turn on her heading, pinging furiously. “™,” she sings back at them. “™,” she sings to the birds in the canyon ahead. “™,” she sings up the laser to the satellite, to the ship, to Richard Wooten. “Beautiful™.”

  Copyright © 2010 Gregory Norman Bossert

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  Short Stories

  VARIATIONS

  Ian Werkheiser

  Ian Werkheiser is a writer and teacher living in the Bay Area of California, who recently received his MA in philosophy. “Variations” is his first story to appear in a science fiction publication. It is based in part on family lore about his grandfather—a piano virtuoso whose love of music, and untimely death, shaped the lives of all his children.

  --- Allegro ---

  After ten days sitting in a Greyhound, staring out the window and trying to get any sleep he could, Joe still hadn’t listened to the music once. The new, odd-looking player, which had been sent to him along with a plane ticket when he had finally agreed to come, sat untouched in his bag next to two now mostly empty bottles and a completely empty pack of cigarettes. He had cashed the ticket in immediately, and had considered selling the player as well, but he was afraid they’d ask what he thought of the recordings when he arrived. So he had brought it, thinking that the boredom of the journey would force him to listen. It hadn’t. Now it was too late as he got off the bus and took his fraying backpack and its contents into a flat Northern California fog.

  Outside the bus terminal next to families hugging exhausted passengers was a man in a suit holding a sign with “Novak” typed in large letters. The wind blew his silver comb-over up into a mating bird’s display, and he looked uncomfortable standing next to his gleaming black Audi in a parking lot filled with half broken-down cars from decades past. Joe considered walking past him with the people crossing the street to the local
bus transfers. With long dirty hair pulled back in a ponytail and a green, stained winter jacket he might have been the twin of half the people on the bus. Before he could decide one way or the other, the man made eye contact with him, smiled, and waved awkwardly. “Jozef Hofmann Novak? You look just like your father.”

  “Everyone calls me Joe,” he said with a small sigh as he got into the car, which opened with a keyless click.

  “Sure, Joe. Call me Oscar. Sorry. I guess it’s a mouthful; I just thought it was appropriate.” Oscar was speaking quickly as he drove, his sentences punctuated by a forced laugh, which sounded like a hissing, artificial noise he had picked up after hearing that laughter made people feel at ease.

  “Sorry I didn’t tell you I’d changed the ticket. I don’t like flying,” said Joe. “How did you know I was on the bus?”

  “The travel agency that made the change called us as the original purchaser. I’m really glad you decided to come. You’ll be very valuable in this project, and we’re all really excited to have you on board. What did you think of the music?”

  Joe looked straight ahead at the gray road. “It sounded really good; you guys did a great job remastering it. It’s a lot ... crisper.”

  Oscar responded with more of his quasi-laughter. “You didn’t listen to it. That’s okay. We didn’t just remaster recordings of your father’s music; anyone can do that. What we did was recreate the piece from scratch. We took the old degraded recordings, every version we could find, then used our own copyrighted algorithms, as well as the input from dozens of professional pianists, to tease apart exactly how he played the piano to make the sounds that he did. Then we programmed a computerized piano to do the same things, and used a synthesizer for any incidental sounds we wanted. I was really excited to have you hear it; the pianists were floored. It works best with the headphones we sent you, but we modified the speakers in this car too, so they’re pretty darn good. Check it out.”

  Before he could respond, Oscar keyed the music on, and Joe’s world exploded.

  A piano sat immediately to his right: his father’s Steinway, playing the first piece of The Well-Tempered Klavier. It wasn’t just that the fidelity was astounding, though he could hear his father turning the pages of the sheet music, the faint tap of his shoe touching out the time, and even his quiet humming, an unconscious habit he had picked up performing in recital halls where the audience couldn’t hear him. More amazing was the placement. His ears told him so strongly that the piano was next to him, perhaps two feet away, that when he closed his eyes to listen he found himself reaching out to touch it, like a child wearing 3D glasses for the first time.

  Oscar continued talking and laughing. “Pretty cool, huh? The speakers are attuned to your seat, so they’re feeding your ears exactly what they’d hear if you were in the room. I’m sitting right next to you but I don’t get the effect unless I toggle it to my seat.” He gestured at the custom stereo face on the polished wooden dashboard.

  “It’s even more effective with headphones. We used to do this with binaural recorders, but now we’re able to do it in the computer, which is nice because it lets us move your position in real time, without having to go back and record it again.” He turned a knob slowly, and Joe felt queasy as the piano spun around him. “Different seating positions give different experiences, but this is the coolest.” Oscar touched the knob again and Joe came closer and closer to the piano, right behind the player, until a final twist moved Joe into him.

  He was playing the piano. The music came from right in front of him, and his father’s quiet humming, related to the music being played but not quite the same melody, was inside his head. He felt his hands moving to strike the keys, his foot gently resting on the pedal. Joe started to panic. The image of his father’s practice and recording room in the basement of their old house crowded out the car around him. A red darkness crawled from the edges of his vision and he slumped forward, breaking the spell. His head had moved enough that the effect was realistic but not completely overwhelming. Joe threw his hand forward at the console, punching several buttons until Oscar reached forward and turned it off.

  “Sorry, that can be a little disorienting for piano players, I’m told. Apparently your brain kicks in and completes the effect, especially if you know how to play the piece. It’s pretty awesome.”

  Joe no longer cared what Oscar thought, and he reached into his backpack and took out the emptier of the two bottles to finish it. He wiped his chin with his sleeve and said, “I don’t play the piano.”

  “Really?” Asked Oscar with more ingratiating laughter. “You certainly used to. When we bought your father’s estate we found recordings he made of you when you were young. They were great! I can see why he was so enthusiastic. In fact that’s why we were sure you could help us.”

  Joe tried to ignore the familiarity rather than ruin his chances at the job, and said, “I haven’t played since I was a kid. Is that what you want me to do? I was told that I just had to talk about my memories of my father, for liner notes or a documentary or something.”

  “No, no, we don’t need you to play for us, though you misunderstood what we do want, but that’s my fault. For industrial security, we had to be circumspect until you arrived. Let me be frank: that recording you heard was just the first baby step for us. Though thanks to getting out in front and the generosity of our backers I can say that we’re the best at it, half a dozen companies are working on replicating performances like that. What everyone’s trying to do is extract the data in the music. The actual information of how the piece was performed, which can then be replicated as digital code. Pianos are first, because they’re less sensitive than other instruments to the exact positions of the fingers, and because pianos that can play themselves from information are already around. But soon we’ll add other percussion instruments, probably then strings before woodwinds and brass, and in a few years, you wait, we’ll have voice synthesizers that no ear can recognize as artificial.

  “What all the companies are trying for is the dream of everyone who listens to music: to be there live with the performers. We’ll sell the actual modified instruments to do that, and those that can’t afford them will have this kind of playback, which is still pretty neat. Like I said, there are a few startups right behind us on this, but we’re going to make a qualitative leap that will leave them all well behind. After all, what’s the problem with listening to music?” Oscar’s rapid speech didn’t wait for a response. “You can only listen to what was actually recorded. Just that one performance; and any other time a great musician like your father played the piece, or any piece he never bothered to record at all, is entirely lost to us. That’s what you’re going to help us with.”

  A gate and security booth became distinct out of the fog. Oscar spoke to the guard for a moment, then parked and showed Joe around the company’s campus, talking all the way. He would be working in a typical example of the sleek, window-filled buildings that housed many hopeful startups in the area. The lobby was open and airy, and a grand piano with a console built in produced The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, again played by Joe’s father. Past the lobby were rooms full of electronic equipment: recording studios, sound laboratories, and rooms with speakers and mixing boards pulled apart and in the process of being rebuilt. One of the rooms, full of equipment that Joe didn’t understand, was where Oscar said he’d be working, though the people that would be working with him wouldn’t be there until tomorrow.

  Pushing past, they went through a narrow hallway, and Oscar opened a door with a flourish, looking at Joe’s face as he walked into his own basement from childhood. Everything was there. His father’s music, recording equipment, even cups of half-drunk coffee on every surface. But it wasn’t just a room filled with his father’s things—the walls with their sheets of cork his father had tacked up to the wood paneling had been carefully moved and reassembled, and the worn patches on the floor were numbered so that each parquet square could be laid down in exactly the
right position. Oscar let out a friendly hiss as Joe reacted to each new object. “Pretty cool, huh? We bought the house along with the rest of his estate, so we moved his recording room here and rebuilt it, then put everything where we should from pictures. Benjamin Novak was such a perfectionist about his recordings that he altered his performances for the acoustics of the room, so if we’re trying to record it perfectly, why not have the same acoustics, right?” Joe looked down into the coffee cup at cigarette butts floating in the cold liquid, though the filters showed that they had never been smoked.

  “The coolest thing we have is over here,” Oscar said. He walked to the Japanese printed screen Joe’s father had always used to block off the half of the room with his piano and microphones. Oscar pulled the screen aside and revealed the Steinway. Its face—the keyboard, pedals, fall, and music rack—were all unchanged from Joe’s memory, but behind the piano had been blown open. It filled the simulacrum of his basement’s back half with a chaos of wire, wood, and metal, as if a bomb had gone off inside it. The action was still there, but the strings had been replaced by elongated wires attached to a digital tension device instead of a pinblock, and electronic equipment had been attached down their lengths. The soundboards were exposed, suspended from the ceiling by cables, and lights blinked on consoles bolted to them. “This lets us strictly control the humidity, warping, resonance between the pieces of the instrument, and a bunch of other factors. You’d be amazed how temperamental it can be, and we’re trying for truly perfect replication. We can play anything on this, even John Cage’s pieces for his ‘specially prepared’ piano.”

  “It looks like it’s being autopsied,” said Joe.

  “Yeah, kinda,” agreed Oscar.

  --- Largo ---

  For the next four months, Joe slept in the dormitory on the campus for people who had relocated for the new job and hadn’t yet found a house. His floormates were sound engineers, physicists, and recording specialists, and they all left him alone. Every morning he ate in the dormitory cafeteria, then walked in bone-chilling cold around the quarter-mile track they had on campus to have a cigarette before going to his workroom, since smoking wasn’t allowed within twenty-five feet of the doors of any of the buildings. A dozen or so lab technicians and cognitive neuroscientists—the faces changed almost every day—were always there waiting, though they never mentioned it. First he was strapped down to a bed too tightly to move. Then the technicians would put a red spandex cap full of electrodes on his head and apply a conductive jelly with a long wooden stick into a hundred or so holes, one for each electrode. Grinding the wooden sticks into his scalp hurt, but they said they had to do it to make a good connection with his skin. After he was fully wired they scrubbed his cheek, behind his ear, and over his closed eyes with a painfully abrasive cloth before attaching separate electrodes to detect muscle movements and remove them from the readings. Blinded, he sat and tried to relax as the technicians continually re-applied the jelly or adjusted the cap until they were receiving a clear, strong signal.