Sentients in the Maze

by Chogan Swan

  “Sounds great,” Jonah said. “I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the rehab I didn’t have to do.”

  “All right then, next stop, the penthouse suite,” Major said as he turned and headed toward the staircase. They climbed to the third floor, passing work crews still heading toward the breakfast buffet.

  “You may not be doing the construction this time,” Major said. “But, you’ll have to live with it for a while. This is a big place and it’ll take time to finish, but I expect you know how that goes. At any rate . . . .” He opened the door to what had been the biggest bedroom on the third floor. “Welcome to the coolest data cave ever.”

  Jonah stepped inside. The east-facing door to the balcony was still there, as was the heart pine floor, now beautifully sanded and glossy with new finish. The oak double doors to the balcony and its sidelights were original but stripped, refinished and re-glazed with stained-glass art blending Tiffany styles with ocean motifs. On the outside of that door was a new full-panel outward-opening double door with louvered shades inside the glazing.

  Major walked over to look at the view of the river and the ocean beyond for a moment then came back in and shut the doors.

  Four fifty-inch monitors hung from the ceiling near the wall, and four stands held ergonomic keyboard/trackball combinations at almost any position or height imaginable. Two tables with dark glass tops, adjustable to any angle, stood on either side of the room, but there were no power cords or cables anywhere.

  “I like to stand up when I’m working, so I don’t miss chairs, but where do I work?”

  “Pretty much anywhere you want,” said Major. “… in any configuration. Just ask Minnie and she’ll take care of it.”

  Jonah laughed. “Okay, I’ll play the straight man. Who is Minnie, and if she has the day off, what happens then?”

  “Let me demonstrate.” Major said with a chuckle. He raised his hands like a wizard invoking the spirit world and intoned, “Minerva, I beseech thee, set up office in formation ‘Major One’

  A voice spoke from the ceiling, “Commencing formation Major One.”

  The monitors on the ceiling, moved, sliding across the ceiling as if they were gliding across ice. Keyboard stands rolled across the floor to match the screens, swerving to avoid Jonah and Major. Tables woke up and rolled into the new formation. The monitors powered on and lowered to eye level on telescoping arms. In a few moments, the room boasted two work areas, each with two monitors, a keyboard and a ‘table’. The tables—it turned out—were huge tablet-like screens that lit up with unfamiliar icons.

  “Wow! just. . . . wow!” Jonah said. “Majel Barrett is alive and living in my ceiling? When do the brooms and mops come out and dance around the floor?”

  Major chuckled. “Majel Barrett is the default voice. Minerva, can you clean the floor up, please?” A wall panel opened releasing a robot vacuum that rolled around the room looking for particles on the immaculate floor. Jonah noticed it avoided the area where he and Major were standing, probably to avoid interfering with work.

  “No power cords,” remarked Jonah.

  “No,” said Major. “It’s all done with near-field, non-radiating, inductive coils. The input units have backup battery power in case of power loss and generator failure, but they’re all powered by equipment in the attic above us. Everything you do on one unit is available on all the others or anywhere you might be with a mobile device. Everything connects with a central processor on site, but a lot of the computing happens on our cloud system—if you’re trying to crunch numbers on something big.

  “All these screens include touch control. They can emulate any operating system you’re used to, but our team designed this one and most people in our organization use it. A little work on the learning curve will be worthwhile. This system can do so much that other operating systems never accounted for that it would handicap you not to use it. We also have more input equipment stored in the utility closet if you are working here with a bigger team. I can show you other gadgets later. Oh, and if you want to bring in something to vary your position from standing, you can use big inflatable exercise balls or capsules. They won’t interfere with anything. They’ll just get bumped out of the way when the furniture moves.”

  “I’m so amazed I might need someplace to sit for a minute,” Jonah admitted.

  “Change, who gets used to it?” said Major. “Well, I’ll leave you and Minnie to get acquainted. She has good tutorials and walkthroughs. I imagine the two of you will have plenty to discuss.”

  “Thanks, Major. Did I mention I’m glad I took you up on your job offer?” Jonah said with a grin.

  Major slapped him on the shoulder. “Me too. I’d better go check on the breakfasting hoard down there. If we run out of biscuits things might get ugly.”

  Jonah worked with Minerva, learning her capabilities and options, like how to set up his own office layouts and use the tables—collaborative work surfaces— for projects. The satellite map imagery on the 4x7 HD table was amazing. He loved giving voice commands while doing something else with keyboard, trackball or touch screens as what he’d ordered verbally waited for him.

  Jonah looked out the window; it was late afternoon. His stomach rumbled. He stretched and told Minnie to save everything and go on standby then left in search of food.

  As he came down the stairs, he heard the unmistakable sounds of a piano being tuned. The house was quiet, except for the pitch adjustments and rhythmic key striking. Major must have sent the workers on a break so the piano tuner could work in the quiet.

  Jonah had played a few bars on the Steinway baby grand. Though it had been a fine piano once, it suffered from years of neglect. The action and sound were disappointing. He and Tiana had discussed having it renovated, but Major had asked them to let him take care of it.

  Another flight of stairs closer, and it became obvious it wasn’t the baby grand—even if renovated The power of the sound was amazing. The piano tuner played chords up and down the keyboard, testing the intervals. As Jonah descended the final flight, he paused—shocked. The chords included notes below A0 and above C8. The sound was from an acoustic piano, but. . .

  Jonah rounded the corner to the dining room and stopped, transfixed by the vision of sunlight from the window falling across the concert grand’s brilliantly figured East Indian rosewood.

  Given his fascination with pianos as an art form, he immediately recognized the piano and the man making adjustments as its creator. The most magnificent piano in the modern world stood between him now. Even without Jonah’s enhanced memory, he would have known its specifications from spending time on the website listening to its music and admiring its artisanship. A marvel of engineering, she was the product of decades of curiosity and innovative thinking—102 keys, 2.9 meters long.

  The tuning paused for a moment; the man at the keyboard turned when Jonah gasped.

  “Hello,” he said. Then, seeing Jonah’s wide-eyed expression, “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

  “Number 48, right here in front of me,” Jonah breathed.

  “Well, her sister anyway,” said the piano tuner. He walked over and introduced himself.

  “I know who you are, Mr. Stuart,” Jonah said. “It’s an honor to meet you. Did you bring her all the way from Australia?”

  “Well, she arrived a day before I did, but I’m finishing the set up now. I need to catch a flight back home in a few hours. I’m checking to make sure everything is stable before I leave. Ms. Archer is the new owner, I understand, but if you are Mr. Brandyr, I have a few minutes to answer any questions. We've scheduled another tuning in a few days, and trained technicians will be following up with you this week, but she's ready to go now.”

  “I wish I had the talent to show her off,” Jonah said. “But I don’t expect she would be disgraced by Erik Satie.”

  “Certainly not! We'd be honored to have her inaugural debut from a work of his genius.”

  Jonah sat on the bench and began the st
roll through the Gymnopaedia trilogy, letting chords and melody ring, linger and call to the places in his heart. When the last chord faded, the piano maker put his hand on his shoulder and gave a quick squeeze. “It looks like the two of you will get along fine,” he said. “I wish I could stay longer, but I do have to catch a flight.”

  Jonah walked with him to the door. Daniels, in the SUV, waited in the driveway. In a moment, the car was gone with a faint screech of the wheels.

  Daniels. Heh.

  Jonah hurried back to the piano.

  As he played, he noticed the way his mind responded to what Tiana had done to his brain. The eidetic function continued to get stronger; he could recall the sheet music from his library as long as he'd looked at it once. The memory boost also helped his sight-reading incredibly. He identified complex chord progressions without struggling and the hand positioning and the sense of where he was on the keyboard was much stronger. Now, he could play with his eyes closed. Though he still had trouble with jazz, at least he wasn’t mangling it anymore.

  A soft sound alerted him that Tiana had come into the room. Jonah turned, pivoting out of the seat and held out his hand inviting her to take the bench. He tried to think where he'd heard the soft noise that had alerted him. It wasn’t a human sound.

  Then he placed it. She'd made the same sound when he'd found her erogenic zone after sharing her past memory of sex. It was a good sound—one he wanted to encounter more often.

  Tiana took a hesitant step then almost leapt to the seat. She played each key, working from the lowest—the C below A0 to the F above C8—allowing each string to ring, savoring every note. The string engineering seemed to make the sustain last forever.

  When she finished her test, Tiana launched into the first of the twelve Etudes of Alkan’s Opus Thirty-Nine. She added extra measures to extend runs into the higher and lower keys, savoring the added harmonics from the base when playing in the middle register. The extra pedal gave her no trouble, but she favored the action-movement pedal for striking fewer strings, changing the color and volume rather than the pedal for decreasing the hammer action. She was achieving the same muting effect by softening the stroke to the keys, so it made little sense to do both, but she experimented with it anyway. After thirty minutes, he knew she would play straight through all twelve etudes. He’d seen a video of Vincenzo Maltempo performing the same program in Japan, but hearing it while in the same room was different. Jonah leaned against the wall and settled into enjoying two hours of the most amazing performance he’d ever experienced.

  When she finished with the Feast of Aesop in E minor, Tiana lifted her foot from the sustain pedal and stroked the figured wood rail below the music shelf.

  Jonah stepped up and sat on the bench next to her. “It looks like the patterns on your skin,” he said. He put his hand on the wood next to hers, noting the differences between them: the joints, the chocolate and cherry markings next to his light olive shade. “I guess this is what Major meant when he said he'd take care of it.”

  Tiana put her hand on his. “Jonah, what is it that makes them so loyal, so constant? Why do they love me? They haven’t seen me for over a century, and there is slight resemblance to what I looked like then for them to transfer those loyalties. It’s unusual among your kind.” She laughed, a quick short sound. “Unusual anywhere. I’ve been on your world a long time, longer than any other nii has been separated from our kind. I've become more like your people as time has passed, but there is still so much I don’t understand. Why do some among your species have a capacity for greatness while others are vicious brutes who surpass even the niiaH in their drive for domination?”

  “Well, that’s a lot of questions,” Jonah mused. “Perhaps men like Major and Max are loyal to who you are, not for what you can do for them. Is that a strange notion for you?”

  “The notion, no, but the reality. . . it’s not a common thing. It would be hard to say if I have ever truly encountered it, but they make it hard to argue.”

  Jonah nodded. “Also, there’s been over a century for them to think it through and develop habits and traditions to span the decades. They come from a family with a culture of honor.”

  Tiana nodded. “I was lucky to fall in among them. Honor and loyalty are more beautiful and precious than all the treasures of the universe, even compared to this masterpiece.” She patted the piano and stroked the keys, bringing forth an arpeggio that hung in the air.

  She turned to face him. “The legal team and I finished up the project ending your financial connection to your ex-wife today. The alimony ends,” she said.

  Jonah’s hand reflexively gripped the piano.

  Free at last.

  “How did you do it?” he said.

  “I told her the truth. If she didn’t stop, I would sink her in legal bills. I also made sure she didn’t get bad advice. If you wish, I’ll tell you everything, but you’d be better served dwelling on more constructive thoughts.”

  “Okay, I will pause the questions about what happened for now. I trust your judgment on what tactics you used. What she did was both illegal and wrong, and she was getting away with it. If you had to get tough, she had it coming and then some, but what more constructive thoughts do you mean?”

  Tiana smiled. “It’s been several weeks since you’ve had time to play the piano until today. Did you detect any difference in your mind?”

  Jonah nodded. “The eidetic function is a huge help, but there’s more. I only started playing a few years ago, so I notice more strongly the challenged parts of my brain. Now, I get the sense I’m exercising something different or deeper. I haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “Good,” Tiana said. “I suggest you play at least an hour a day. Push yourself. I can help you improve in the technique proper for your anatomy, but the important part is to work toward complexity and bandwidth of mental resources required. You can play for fun too, but not at the expense of exercising your brain. Figuring out what it is will take care of itself. It hasn’t decided what it is so far. Whatever it becomes will be unique.”

  “You talk about my brain as though it has a mind of its own.” Jonah widened his eyes in mock concern.

  “Essentially that’s correct, brain and body,” she said, rubbing her temples as though in thought. “True for both of us. This new body reminds me of that every day.”

  “Well, I don’t know about you,” Jonah said, “but my body is telling me it’s hungry. Furthermore, it says it very much wants to do that thing your body and my body do together that I consider sex and you consider something else.”

  “Good. Because I’m hungry too,” Tiana said with a grin. “Let’s see if we can get snack from the kitchen and find a bedroom in this old dump.”

  Note: The original version of Chapter 14 includes descriptions of physical interactions that are explicit and detailed.

  The uncut versions can be reached by clicking HERE

  On the Hot Peppers scale, Chapter 14 (below) is still about 3.5 out of 5 peppers, and chapters in the appendix are @ 4.5 peppers

  Chapter 14 (A Growing Boy)

  Jonah woke in the position in which he’d fallen asleep, deep inside Tiana with her on top and deep inside him, front and back. He almost moved to stretch, but a moment before he did, he realized she was still asleep. Her cheek rested on his chest, and her soft breath whispered across his nipple, making it stand at attention. They hadn’t uncoupled last night while she’d stayed up late working on her masterpiece. While, after five orgasmic episodes, he’d fallen asleep . . . make that unconscious.

  He was hard inside her again as she rocked against his pubic bone, making soft cooing sounds deep in her throat as she moved. With mixed shock, excitement and worry, Jonah remembered the sounds she’d made when he’d experienced the memory of her having sex. These were very much like, but softer as though they came from afar.

  Deep inside herself, she was stroking her erogenic node across the tip of his glans.

  Without thinking
, he tilted his hips to improve the contact. Her vocalizing intensified, and she moved harder against him. Jonah held still—best not succumb to the urge to move. He tried to meditate and relax, suspecting she needed this, but wouldn’t want him aware of it. He relaxed as much as possible as she continued dreaming. If she woke, she would know. But, if he found his way back to that lucid dreamstate, he wouldn’t need to fool her.

  For all you know, you might be dreaming now..

  If he fell a little deeper . . .

  ~~~Tiana~~~

  Tiana was on Beauchene Island. She pulled herself out of the waves and climbed the smooth rocks lining the shore. The grass and bushes were blooming, and her skin dried as the sun and the breeze off the ocean brushed across her skin. As she reached the highest rocks, she met Jonah, reclining, nude on a smooth flat stone. His luscious, spicy scent washed over her, and a tingle of desire ran up her legs and settled at her erogenic node. Tiana covered the distance between them in a leap and sheathed him between her legs, sending her filaments questing to connect to every nerve cluster she could reach. His pleasure at the connection ran through her as though it was her own, and she rocked her node against him. It was right and as it should be. Jonah smiled as he kissed her and held her breasts as she climbed to orgasm.

  As she reached the pinnacle of pleasure, the Jonah on the rock changed to Jonah on the bed. Tiana swam up from the dreamstate, still rocking against him, still in the mindset of the dream where everything was right. Jonah wasn’t fully awake, and Tiana slowed her movements while the orgasm fired bolts of pleasure through her body. She wasn’t in danger of losing consciousness, but then, he hadn’t ejaculated onto her sensitive spot either. Her body stayed in the pleasure cycle for another quarter of an hour before subsiding.