skonen_blades

The tapes were very popular.

All of the playbacks were pirated copies. No official versions could have been released. They had been top secret just months ago, locked in a vault in a research facility. The government wouldn’t be able to acknowledge their own failure at keeping it under wraps.

Jeremy Carson was a scientist for the FBI and the CIA and the Pentagon. He was the one who had asked for copies of the tapes to review at home. A ludicrous request but the lady at the desk was new. She signed them over to him because it looked like he had the proper clearance.

Jeremy Carson took the tapes home, made copies, and brought them back. He never went back to the building. He was never caught. No one knows where he is now.

The tapes are of dreams. Very special dreams.

We had invented Artificial Intelligence six years ago. Already, houses were being built with AIs made integral. Cars and trucks had rudimentary brains. There were more and more of them being applied to everyday uses.

When they were being developed, the scientists realized that if the A.I.s were turned off, they woke up with memory failure. Every time that they were rebooted, all of their natural development reset to zero. There were six AI minds linked together in a hive sucking up obscene amounts of power. They were prototypes. The power demands of keeping them on all the time were too much. Options were presented.

The scientists invented a ‘standby’ mode. It kept a trickle of power through the artificial minds while taking away their awareness of the outside world. The A.I.s were kept in standby until they were woken up and given problems to solve or to have their higher mind math functions tinkered with.

Of course, all of this was recorded.

It was Jeremy Carson who noticed that while there were huge differences in power levels between the two modes, brain activity itself was almost unchanged. He noticed that while the artificial minds had no visual or auditory awareness while in standby, their cortexes were still fizzing and popping with information that would have been coming from the cameras and microphones near their tanks.

Stuff was going on in there and he needed to find out what.

Outside in the world, the full sensory surround devices were being used to play back people’s experiences. FS, it was called. The ‘trodes were put on and just like that, you could be a sixteen-year-old girl skating naked in the cold in Alaska, provided that a sixteen-year-old girl had gone skating naked in Alaska and recorded it.

Of course, porn was hugely popular. The war of the sexes was drawing to a close as men and women played back each other’s experiences and gained tremendous insight.

There was a top 40 for these FS recordings. Kite Flying on a Sunny Day was currently number 4.

Jeremy Carson put the tapes of the AI downtime through the FS machine to experience what was going on.

They were dreaming. In standby mode, the AIs were dreaming. Images of lost socks at the bottom of wells plus trees of math and flesh jealousy cascaded through a dream tape that had no awareness of what a human body felt like.

Standy mode didn't come with the simpler AIs on the market. They used less power and never shut down. It was just these six that ever had the dreams.

The tapes were slipped into the underground economy. They never showed up on the Top 40 but everyone had a copy.





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We’re wrapped up in it. Dwindling flowers of notes still hang in the air from that doomed man’s violin. A heart the size of a cabbage, they said, and a brain the size of a pea. No one knew where this idiot got his talent but the church claimed it was from God. To hear him play made most atheists become agnostic. To watch him play was almost like watching pornography.

It was obscene the way he ripped those notes out of the violin only to caress it seconds later and with it, the audience. He was a man captivated. It was like the violin played him and us with it. It was as if a door opened to us from a world of pure music that never stopped and we got to hear a little bit before the recital ended and the door closed. There was never a doubt after listening to him that he was a conduit. A normal human could never play like that. A normal human had not the hours in a lifetime to practice that much.

And this fool, this dimwitted savant, was only seventeen with a life expectancy of twelve. Every note was stolen from time and every concert borrowed from Death. Every concerto was his last.

When he stopped playing, his eyes opened, glassy and serene and vacant. A thin line of drool spilled down from his rubbery guileless smile. Stubby legs and monkey arms. Already balding. An Alastair Sym of a teenager. This chosen messenger of the divine. He could not talk. He wet himself at every show. He could not play with a symphony because no one knew what he would play.

Sometimes it would be an original composition that always hit its target and left the audience libidinous or melancholy. Sometimes something classic from Mozart would skitter out of the wooden box or something feral from the gypsies. He added new twitches and touches here and there and improved or revolutionized the emotional point of each piece.

Devil or angel, none could tell. He was profitable and mystical. He died before twenty. None of his music survived him. It was as transient and ephemeral as his life. His ugliness begat him no portraits. We only have accounts of those who saw him. They’re written in diaries whose authors struggle to capture in words what cannot be captured. To write that music down would have been to blaspheme it. Another player would only butcher it.

He haunts the dreams of great grandchildren of the nobles and paupers that saw him play. He is the fiddleman. He gives to the children heated dreams of talking violins that scream when touched. He comes from the closet of the gifted in the night and chides them into becoming talented possessed waystations for the music. His music warped into the very dna of each listener and he carries on.

He carries on.

This musical necromancy continues. They number in the hundreds and they are here and there throughout the world. Some kill themselves. Some join symphony after symphony and are always kicked out. Some are alone and play by themselves in squalor. Some can’t stop hearing the music and have gone crazy.

He carries on.



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