Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco

by Jonathan Wright

  Musicians, like writers, fade out young. They are spent quickly, like bullets. To die young is to live forever. To die old is to be a legend diminished, a shadow-self.

  I am not selfish. I do what I do for love.

  The only way to immortality is death.

  December 8, 1980. Outside the Dakota building, with a gun, four times. John Lennon, 40, RIP.

  And again:

  Saru 35, Year of the Dragon, Century of the Disc (approx December 12, 3501). The alien ambassador sings in the great crystal-domed suite of the Venusian hotel as I burst in past ghostly digital guards and cyborg mercenaries. The ambassador turns, its eight great tentacles floating in the air gracefully, its great beak opening and closing in a song so beautiful and haunting it makes me want to cry, to drop the gun. His song speaks of waiting, of longing, and I realise with some surprise he is singing to me, that he has been waiting, all those years, for me to come. His song rises, reaches a crescendo that shatters the ceiling. Crystals as large as my fists fall down and then I am firing, I am firing beams of pure searing light and the ambassador screams, in pain or ecstasy I never, afterwards, quite know. The entire hotel shakes, beyond the windows I can see the volcanoes spewing ash. The song dies. The ambassador is still. I flicker out, a moment before the door bursts open and the guards come rushing in.

  Zentok K’r’aa’l’x uTTop, Ambassador of the pNt’K people, 35 earth years and 450 light years from home, RIP.

  There are three simple rules to time-travel serial killing: travel in time. Kill. Get out.

  And one rule I never knew, until it was too late, that I needed:

  Never get involved.

  Worse:

  Never fall in love.

  One more:

  Judea, 3500 BC. He comes out of his tent in the hot sun, trailing a sad song on his flute. He sees me with surprise. I have a knife.

  Jubal son of Lamech son of Methusael son of Mehujael son of Irad son of Enoch son of Cain: ancestor of all who played the harp and flute.

  I do not know his exact age at death. Nevertheless:

  Amen.

  Sitting in the Fortune of War, London, in 1893, chatting to the Ripper and to Cain. (Yes, that Cain. The first one. He time-jumped after he killed his brother.) I don’t tell him about stabbing his great-great-great-something grandson to death. In truth, I don’t know that he would care. I did a job in the 37th, he says. Shakes his head. Weird place. Giant brains floating in jars, attached to wires that control an army of Waldoed robot-slaves. Takes all the fun out of killing one, when you finally manage to.

  I killed a guy in the Early Pleistocene once, Jack says. Homo Erectus. Those bastards were tough. Rolls up his sleeve, shows us an ugly scar. Bit me, he says, sourly.

  They turn around and stare at me. You? Jack says. Cain says, You ever fail?

  And I think…

  Let me tell you something real.

  July, 1994. I’m shy of 18. We’re in Arad, a small, dusty town in the Arava desert in Israel for a music festival. The first part of the 1990s – the golden age of Israeli rock music. A year later at the same festival, three teenagers would be crushed to death underfoot during the warm up show to a Mashina concert and the festival, and with it summer, would end for good. But this is still a different time. With backpacks we settle ourselves on the grass, the town is full of young people, the dry desert heat, the smell of summer, youth, sex, smoke and, everywhere, it’s filled with music.

  That night we go to see a band when three young women come on stage. They are only, I know now, a few years older than me. Yael Cohen is on drums, Yifat Netz on bass guitar. But the eye is drawn to the lead singer. She walks up to the microphone, an electric guitar in her arms. Her black hair falls to her shoulders, she is wearing a simple T-shirt, and when she smiles it is as if the world had shifted sideways, as if anything is possible, even travelling through time. Her name is Inbal Perlmuter and I guess I fall in love with her, just a little bit, at that moment.

  It is her voice that catches you, every time. That smoky, deep, rich voice, like the first record you ever bought, weathered and scratched and alive, so alive.

  I remember that night, the music, the press of bodies moving together under a shared spell, under a desert sky full of stars.

  And some more make believe:

  Ever fail to kill someone? Jack says. Sniggering.

  But what if you broke the rules? What if you got involved?

  And then you found out it made no difference?

  October 1, 1997.

  Flickering into being by the side of the road, a highway interchange. Rishon Le’tzion, Israel. Night. Concrete walls seal the road in. And how many times have I appeared here, how many shadows of me watch mutely as her car appears, how many times have I tried to stop it? I watch the lights of the car approaching, her window is down, she is smoking a cigarette, a tape is playing in the car, she is singing along with the song, the lights approach closer, closer, the car turns and, just like that, it hits the concrete wall.

  Inbal Perlmuter. May she rest in peace. Twenty-six years in death, amen, amen, amen.

  If you want to travel through time close your eyes real hard until you see shapes in the dark. Turn off the lights and sit alone in your room. Listen to a song. Listen until it hurts. Listen for them, for all of us. We are all melodies that fade, until we, too, become just silences between the notes.

  Blues for Ahab

  - Nir Yaniv -

  Moby Dick dies at the end. You should know that. The question whether his death is caused by me is quite irrelevant. It’s just a technical matter.

  We met him at the luxurious offices of our production company. We were G, A, B-flat and C, stupid names for the members of a stupid band, yet another proof that performing on a stage doesn’t require a brain. We were properly garmented, of course: A with a chest enhancer and jeans, C with a full torso e-Ink tattoo and jeans, and me, as usual, with a simple black T-shirt and jeans. B-flat wore about half a ton of metal and light, and looked just like an aircraft carrier at night. No jeans. We stood there in the office, not too different from any of the pompous vids crawling on the walls, when he entered.

  He was about 100 kilos on two metres, excluding the peripherals. And white. Albino, in fact – white skin, white hair, white sunglasses, shirt, pants, a big white blob standing in your field of vision, torturing the light around it, burning a new blind spot on your retina. Even his external control pad, woven into his left sleeve, spawning wires running into the base of his skull, was white. He was no older than 20, I think.

  “Look!” B-flat said. “He has a fish in his pocket!” I’m always amazed by the kind of stuff people focus on. Indeed, he had a small grey-white fish swimming in a small container in the place most pants have pockets.

  “Say hello to the Leviathan,” said a familiar and sickeningly jolly voice. Morris, our producer, who at the moment looked rather fishy himself.

  “I hate it,” C said, in what he thought was a whisper.

  Silence. The thinnest of smiles on the lips of the Leviathan.

  Morris’s smile twisted, then was gone. “Look,” he said, “you know that you have no choice.”

  He was right. I didn’t like the idea any more than C, B-flat or A, but we were long past the jolly times of making any decisions ourselves. It was either the Leviathan or oblivion. “Fine,” I said. “Hi there, Leviathan. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Good boy,” Morris said, his satisfaction radiating almost as strongly as the white blob in the middle of the room. I gave him an evil stare, but it passed right through him. The Leviathan was smart enough to remain mercifully silent.

  Even at the height of our success, we never refused to perform with other artists. It was good for everyone – the marketing people were happy, the audience was happy and we had fun, getting a break from repeating our own song over and over and over again. But the Leviathan? No way. He never created his own music, always rode like a leech on the body of creation of other ban
ds. That was how he became popular, and that’s why we despised him. The idea is simple: take the whole output of a given band, every audio channel, every visual, every weight and pressure and speed sensor you can stick in there, and reprocess it in real time – cut, filter, multiply, change, rearrange, re-effect, the lot. The problem: no computer can do it, AI of that magnitude still being science fiction. The solution: Leviathan.

  “I brought the scores you’ve asked for,” I told Morris.

  “Thanks,” The Leviathan said. His voice was a lofty tenor. “Did you bring the techspec of your instruments?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

  “Well,” Morris said, enjoying his part, “we’re going to replace your instruments, so we need to…”

  At which point C, not unexpectedly, blew up. “Your mother can replace her guitar if she wants to!” he shouted. “My guitar… my guitar stays with me! And as far as I’m concerned, you can stick your…” etcetera, etcetera, until A, as usual, grabbed his shoulder and pressed on it, lightly at first, then applying some force. C lost his focus, stuttered a bit, then became quiet. “Aw,” he said after a moment of this. “Okay. I’m okay. Let go.” A let go. C massaged his hurting shoulder and was silent, looking accusingly at me.

  “You must replace your instruments,” the Leviathan said, “in order to connect them to me.”

  “Why?” I said. “Isn’t MIDI enough?”

  “Too old and too slow. It’s a serial protocol. It might be enough for you, but not for me. I’m using MAXI, and the instruments you’ll get will speak that.”

  “MAXI?”

  “Just a nickname. No acronym. That’s the protocol I’m using. Take, for example, your guitar,” the Leviathan turned to the still fuming C. “What kind of information does it usually send to the computer?”

  “Eh,” C said. “What?”

  “Pitch, duration, velocity, knob positions. Not too much,” I said. Of the four of us, I was the only one with any kind of music-tech knowledge.

  “The new guitar you’ll get,” the Leviathan said, “will tell me not only that, but the exact form of your strumming or plucking, the distance between your right hand and the guitar base, the exact location of your fingers on the frets, how much you bend the neck and even the amount of body resonance.”

  What a waste of time. Who needs all that?

  “But the most important thing,” he continued, “all this will happen a lot faster.”

  Silence.

  “Same goes for your bass,” he told B-flat. “And the drums and the keyboards.”

  “What about my effect pedals?” C said, more distracted than angry, now.

  “You’ll have everything just like you’re used to, but instead of creating actual effects, it will send the information to me.”

  “Brilliant,” C said, and that was probably the first time I’ve heard him being sarcastic.

  “Fine,” I said. “So when do we rehearse?”

  The Leviathan did not answer.

  “He doesn’t rehearse,” Morris said. “When you get your new instruments, we’ll give you some studio time to get used to them. We’re going to set a show for about a month from now, so you have plenty of time to prepare.”

  I didn’t see any reason for further discussion. If mister Leviathan doesn’t want rehearsals, that’s his problem. I gave Morris the scores and the rest, and out we went.

  The Leviathan became famous many years before he started his musical career. He was born disconnected, his brain completely separated from any sensory input his body might have produced. Thus he became the first person ever to be, as Professor VA Janus, Nobel Prize winner, put it, first reconnected, then hyperconnected. “I put a piece of electronics in his head,” Janus said in an interview which almost cost him his career, “and then I figured: if I pass signals from his eyes and ears and nose into his brain, what’s to stop me from passing other signals as well?” The answer to that question was obviously “nothing,” much to the chagrin of other academics and people of the clerical persuasion, and to the joy of almost everyone else.

  A dreadful snort came out of the speakers surrounding the stage. “Excellent,” said some technician in the com, “channel eight is working. Next.” The Leviathan stood alone in the middle of the stage, looking somewhat dreamy. A thick cable trailed after him and disappeared somewhere beyond the back of the stage. Another cable connected him to a plain-looking piece of hardware standing nearby. And that was it. The stage looked as if the show was just over, and everyone took their equipment and went home.

  “Where,” inquired C, “did you put my mic?”

  The Leviathan did not answer. A started setting up his V-drums on the stage. B-flat took her bass out of its case, and I spent some quality time with an aluminium folding keyboard stand.

  “Where,” stressed C, “did you put my…”

  “There is no mic,” said Morris, who chose that moment to appear on stage. “You all get throat-mics and inner-ear monitors, connected to the Leviathan.”

  C gave A a sad look and stayed silent. He’s learning.

  The Leviathan gave his first sign of life when I took my show computer out of its bag. He almost jumped with surprise. “What’s that?”

  “That is my computer,” I said. “I want to see everything you’re doing to our music.”

  The Leviathan gave Morris a blank, white sunglasses stare.

  “No one said you can bring your computer,” our loyal producer said.

  “Let me put it this way,” I said, rather gently. “No computer? No show. I don’t care what you do, I don’t care if I’m out of a job. Capisce?”

  Silence. The thinnest of smiles on the lips of the Leviathan.

  “Fine,” Morris said. “Plug it in. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “I liked that song,” the Leviathan told C, and that was only time I saw him initiating a conversation of his own free will. “The one that goes: ‘I fear I am the only one, who thinks they’re gonna shut the sun.’”

  C’s eyes hit the Leviathan with half a kiloton of pure contempt. “I fear I am the only one,” he sang, his voice only slightly worse than what you’d usually get from a guitarist. His mocking stare was as close as possible to a slap in the face.

  There’s a moment of silence and then, without warning, the whole sound system went online. “I fear I am the only one…” it sang in the voice we all recognised as C’s, though it was more pure, pitch-accurate and expressive than anything a human being is capable of, “…who thinks they’re gonna shut the sun.” The last word was a long, terribly high, inhuman scream. A half-assembled relay tower fell and crashed to the ground. The scream died. Shouts and curses in the com. One of the sound techs forgot to put his earplugs in; he would have to learn a new profession. A flying spotlight blew up, spreading debris over half an acre of artificial grass. Around the stage, people were already running around, trying to clean up the mess.

  The Leviathan turned back from C, who was in a state of shock, and left.

  The crowd began to trickle in and trample the grass. The com was filled with the chatter of soundmen, lighting programmers and camera operators, coordinating the flight paths of speakers and spotlights. A mid-air collision in mid-show might look great in the news and the band’s special reunion, special edition stream, but no insurance company would cover it. Everyone was doing final checks, and coloured rays of lights flooded the audience, the scaffolding, the generator trucks and even some of the control posts. Everywhere but the stage.

  My display was a small rectangle of white light hovering near my right eye. During the tuning phase – an act which has more to do with tradition than with anything else these days – I could see the notes generated by each instrument, overlaid on the output signal from the Leviathan. The PA was all set, thus disconnected until the show began, but in my earplugs everything was loud and clear. I pulled out the plugs for a moment, listened to the actual sound on stage. All quiet. There were no speakers on or even near the st
age, which is always the quietest place to be during a show. C was trying his throat-mic and sounded like a weak child mumbling in the darkness, until I put the plugs back and he became a 50-man choir accompanied by a symphonic orchestra. I touched the keyboard. My almost-simple chord came out in seven different channels, one per note, each with its own EQ and effect, in real time. I’ve worked with many kinds of equipment in the past, and there’s always a bit of delay. Techs call it latency. But the Leviathan had none of it. At least, nothing a human, or even my computer, could detect. Show-off.

  After giving the audience enough time to get really bored, the spotlights finally turned to the stage. “Hi there,” C said. Cheers, applause. “We don’t have to introduce ourselves,” C added, “but give a big welcome to our special guest tonight…” – Morris made him say that – “The L-e-v-i-a-t-h-a-n!” – accompanied, for some reason, by a harp. Now there were even more cheers and applause, and even screams. Half of those, my computer told me, were generated by our special guest tonight. Very useful. “Thank you, thank you, let’s get this show on the road!” How original. On to the first song.

  “We’re kickin’ and screamin’ and bigger than life…” Indeed, C sounded bigger than life. He probably noticed that too, because his eyes never left the Leviathan. The latter stared into space, maybe with his eyes closed, but there was no way to see that behind his sunglasses. He was relatively relaxed, and did nothing but steadying the bass part, multiplying C’s voice, an extra snare or kick for A’s drums and some piano chords. The waveforms on channel monitors looked very relaxing. I noticed that the Leviathan was toying with the position of C’s voice in the mix. It came from the left of the audience, then the far right, then the back. Luckily, C had no way of knowing that.