Tony Daniel (21 page)

Another grist-based attacked, this time against a free-convert algorithm.

We’re not ready for how bad this is going to get, Sherman thought.

Nobody could be.

Within two weeks of Claude Schlencker’s father’s death, Claude was on Mercury, studying at the special school. His scholarship offer had expired, but in view of Claude’s orphan status, the Asap Gymnasium accepted him without tuition on a provisional basis. And for the remainder of Claude’s life, which would be a long one, the particular part of his personality that resided in Claude Schlencker’s body would never leave Mercury again.

His classes at Asap were much more difficult than they had been back in the armature. For the first time, Claude found himself challenged by the schoolwork. He did nothing but study the first month he was there, going to class and returning to his dorm to do catch-up work that the teachers had assigned him. He took things a little easier after his first tests came back with high marks, but he never forgot the fact that he was at the gymnasium provisionally and, if his scholarship were not renewed, he would have absolutely nowhere to go but to his old job back in the armature.

The Asap students were a smart bunch, and all of them were from what, to Claude, seemed rich families. He felt a slight pang of regret, because there was really no one dumb enough at the gymnasium for him to punish and show the error of his ways. At least, no one he had found yet.

In his second semester, Claude had a new class, which he’d never taken before, music. The teacher’s name was Eynor Jensen, and he was a no-nonsense sort from the very first day of class. He taught music as if it were a science, and Claude liked his strictly logical approach. The man, himself, seemed without emotion, other than an occasional twitch of irritation. He assigned Claude to learn the piano, and Claude took to it quickly. By the end of the term, he had become an excellent sight reader, and his memorization skills were legendary among the other students. Claude found himself spending more and more time practicing at the piano. He even constructed a special virtual instrument and playing room in the grist. There he could sit and work away at scales and bits of pieces until his fingers bled, and he wouldn’t have to worry about staining a real piano’s keys. He had long ago learned how to strip the feedback monitors off of virtuality simulations and feel the grist with maximum intensity.

It was so ordered, music was. They had begun with traditional Western theory, although Jensen claimed this was only a necessary stage the students must eventually pass through to arrive at the truest wonders of atonality and dissonance. The tone of what is called low C vibrates in an e-mix of gases at sixty-four times per second. At the same time, if the tone is made in a pipe or struck upon a string, the
portions
of that length vibrate as well, producing overtones. The overtones go on to an infinity in geometric progression. Half of a pipe vibrates, a third, a quarter, and onward. At one-half the length of the pipe—say, an organ pipe—you get the same note, only an octave higher. This “half-pipe” is vibrating at 128 undulations per second. At one-third the length, you get the second most powerful overtone. This is the G above higher C. It is a fifth above and is called the dominant, because it’s the dominant overtone, after C itself. The first C is the tonic.

If you then take that G and make it the tonic—play it on another pipe, say, which is shaped to make a G note, its dominant overtone will be a D, which is a fifth above the second G overtone that the pipe will be producing along with the primary sound. If you continue doing this, you will work through precisely twelve notes in all: C, G, D, A, E, B, F sharp, C sharp, G sharp, D sharp, A sharp, F and then C again.

To Claude, this all came as a revelation. The beauty of the system was directly tied to its physics and, for Claude, more importantly, its algorithmic language. Music happened because the world was arranged in a certain way. It arose out of the world. And then Jensen played Mozart for the class, and Claude realized that, though music arose from the world, it was not necessarily of it. There was something else happening. Something better. Something above. Using the precision and order of nature, beauty could be produced, could come into being. If you began with a set of unifying principles that were all consistent with one another, you could work variations upon them that participated in that consistency and precision, but which were novel.

It was exactly the opposite of everything his life had been so far. For the first time, Claude felt a bit of the anxiety that gripped his stomach loosen (he had never even realized it was there before). There was something that could be done about the mess of life. Claude signed up for Jensen’s advanced class, and found himself devoting most of his free time to practicing the piano and working on theory and composition.

Toward the end of the term, Jensen called Claude into his office. The room was as orderly as the man. Then Jensen lit a cigarette. When he saw Claude’s surprise, he cracked a thin smile.

“My cigarettes are like Western tonality,” he said. “A bad habit I can’t seem to get rid of.”

He motioned for Claude to sit down, and Jensen remained standing next to his desk, without leaning upon it for support.

“I have a bit of a proposition for you, Claude,” Jensen said. “As you know, we’re somewhat forward-looking here at Asap. Willing to try new things. We want the best for our students.”

“Yes, sir,” Claude replied.

“You’re on scholarship, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“The point is this.” And now he did lean against his desk slightly. “The gymnasium has been approached with an idea for teaching. It’s a new idea, and I think it has some merit. So does Headmistress Volars, for that matter. We thought, before we implemented it with the regular students . . . I mean, the other students, we might try it out on someone who had . . . a special ability, but someone whom . . . well, if the idea doesn’t work out, it would be better if the student’s parents did not complain to the board, or even withdraw their child. If you see what I mean?”

“I understand, sir.”

“Well, then.” Jensen ashed his cigarette, took a short drag, then ashed it again. “What it comes down to is that this new stuff, this nanogrist, has allowed the computer programmers to do some rather remarkable things with what is called artificial intelligence.”

“I know something about that,” Claude said. In fact, he had several a.i. programs as serving algorithms in some of his virtual constructions. He had not been particularly impressed with their real intelligence, except for doing complicated arithmetic and playing games that were based on complications of adding and subtracting.

“In fact,” said Jensen, “some of these computer geniuses in the lab here in Bach have come up with . . . something that is causing quite a stir. It’s a music composition program called Despacio.”

“I’ve heard of it,” said Claude. “But I haven’t heard any of the music it makes.”

“Well, I happen to have some of the files available. Desk, would you play one of the Despacio pieces? The portion of the piano sonata?”

“The one called A4?” said the disembodied voice of the office desk.

“That’s the one.”

They were silent, with Claude sitting and Jensen standing. After a moment’s pause, the room filled up with music.

For a moment, it seemed ugly to Claude—perhaps some of the dissonance school works that Jensen had played samples of in the advanced class. And then something happened, the atonalities came together, and Claude could have sworn he was hearing a rainstorm. He could even picture it, although he’d never seen actual rain before. Then came low thunder, sonorous and warm on the horizon. A couple of bolts of lightning. Then the storm passed. The music beat quickened and the key—if that’s what you could call it—changed. The smoke-stale office suddenly felt freshened, full of life. The music faded, off, faded, then returned to medium intensity and ended, not with a flourish, but with a final statement, as if to say: This will continue, this
freshness,
whenever you remember this song.

“File A4, complete,” said the desk. Claude and Jensen did not speak for a moment, then Claude said, “It’s wonderful. Are you sure a computer program wrote that?”

“It’s well documented,” Jensen replied.

“I’m impressed, sir,” said Claude, wondering if that’s what Jensen wanted to hear. Perhaps he was trying out the Despacio on a scholarship student before springing it on a class of rich kids who might get offended and run tell their parents that Mr. Jensen was making them listen to corrupting stuff.

“The thing is,” Jensen said, “that this Despacio program is not really a program at all. Not in the way we think of programs.” Jensen ground out his cigarette and immediately lit another. “You see, they’ve managed to copy a human being. That is, copy over the human brain. Into the grist.”

“So this Despacio program is a copy of a person?”

“Not exactly,” said Jensen. “These a.i. people wanted more. They wanted to go one better, they claim. It’s actually several people—several prominent composers and performers—sort of mixed together. With added programming of their own. They claim to have run the program through a sort of simulated evolutionary process. It’s all very complicated and has lots of quantum things involved that perhaps you understand, but which I do not. The upshot is, they claim this program is conscious. They claim it knows that it is writing music, that it understands what music is.”

“What do you think, sir?”

“You heard the piece. Unless this is some elaborate hoax, I’m inclined to agree. It may not be a human being, but it certainly is a musician. And a great one.”

“I still don’t see what this has to do with me, sir.”

Two quick drags, ash, ash. “Yes, well, Mr. Schlencker, I am getting to that. These a.i. people are the ones who approached the school. They say they are not content for the program to merely compose. They want it to interact with other musicians. To teach. They have offered to take on several Asap students as pupils. Or, I should say,
it
has.”

“It?”

“Despacio.”

“And you want me . . . to—”

“Take lessons with it. Three times a week, two hours a session. It would be what you could do next semester instead of taking independent piano with me.”

Claude thought about it a moment. Lessons from whoever or whatever wrote the A4 Sonata he’d just heard. The sonata was amazing. It would be like taking lessons from Beethoven. Or Mozart.

“I’d really like to do that, sir,” he heard himself saying.

Jensen crushed out his second cigarette. “Good then,” he said. “You start tomorrow.”

It was a virtual sitting room with the most amazing re-creation of a grand piano that Claude had ever seen. The big letters above the keyboard read:

BERKHULTZ

He later learned that this was the name of a famous programmer of virtual instruments. The sunlight streaming through the heavy curtains of the window was low and of a wan character, like a sunrise in winter on Earth might have been.

“So,” said Despacio, when Claude appeared, “you are the one they sent to try me out.”

“I don’t imagine that I am trying you out, sir,” said Claude.

“What is it you imagine then?” Despacio appeared today as a middle-aged man with a goatee and a monocle. He was dressed in simple black and white. Claude was to learn that this was only one of several manifestations, and that Despacio did not picture himself—he was definitely male in all his appearances—as a particular person in a particular body at all.

“I think that I am very lucky to have an amazing chance,” Claude said. “Maybe a historic one.”

Despacio gazed at him through his monocle glass for a moment with a cold, blue eye. “Even if you are a young man who is full of shit,” he finally said, “you are probably right. Let us begin. Sit at the piano with me.”

And with that, the lessons commenced. At first they worked on nothing but technique. Despacio was appalled at Claude’s and set him to doing a complicated series of exercises for several weeks. The music was pretty enough, but it was only a means to build Claude’s finger strength and dexterity.

Claude went at it with intensity, nonetheless, and one day after a particularly complicated run Despacio grunted, sat back on the piano bench beside Claude, and said, “Yes, well, enough of that.” And then he began to teach Claude how to play music.

They worked through piece after piece in what, to Claude, seemed an entirely random order. First Bach, then some blues, then Debussy followed by a Zipper tune-wander from the twenty-third century. Contrapuntal early music. Rezik’s
Clabberwerks.
But in each piece, Despacio challenged Claude to feel the music, to learn to see through the notation, to even see through the touch of his fingers against the keys.

“You have to go inside the piano,” Despacio said. “You have to respond to it before it even makes a sound.”

“But—”

“But, nothing, young man. We’re not talking mysticism. Not yet. We’re talking about understanding what music is. It isn’t what you play. It’s what you find. Like mathematics. Exactly like mathematics. It’s out there, and all you do is explore it.”

Claude didn’t really see what Despacio was getting at, but he applied himself diligently, tried to
perceive,
at least, if not to feel.

Then, as abruptly as he’d ended the finger exercises, Despacio called a halt to the learning of new pieces.

“My version of the
Well-Tempered Clavier
has certainly shown its worth,” he said. “Now we at least know what we’re dealing with. Go away, now, Claude. I have to think.”

“But, I don’t . . . are the lessons over? Have I failed?” Claude suddenly felt the old anxiety clench its fist around his gut again. For a moment, he prepared himself for Despacio to hit him.

“No,” replied Despacio. “Please be at your next lesson on schedule.”

“Are you sure. I could—”

“Good-bye, Claude. Day after tomorrow.”

“I’ll . . . all right. I’ll be here.”