Macronome Read online

  Danni went silent for a moment and Lori couldn’t tell if she had lost her train of thought or simply needed to think carefully before continuing with the story. But Danni was having another of those “before death” moments that seemed to be creeping into her days more and more—moments where simple things suddenly grew unbearably ripe and precious. They came over her from nowhere. Right now, it was the perfection of the fish taco and the receptive moment it helped to create, as juice ran down the side of Lori’s hand while she, Danni, prepared to alter her life forever.

  She could tell Lori later about how she and her husband Simon had established a team of scientists who patiently learned to uncoil and recoil the map of all a cell’s potentials—how they painstakingly acquired the techniques to rearrange the trigger markers—how they elaborated until they could alter the cell forever. The idea was to temporarily reverse biological time for the cells, and Simon had carefully published papers on how their experiments had failed. The truth had been more ambiguous, but now wasn’t the time for the distraction of that micro world.

  “Every day, as you help out here in Gumbo, you must catch little glimpses of how the same cluster of facts can look very different from one perspective to another. That malleability of potential exists in our cells as well.” Danni caught herself and refocused again. “You work hard, Lori, and already you are adept at maintaining many of the systems that allow Serendipity to breathe in the data exhalations of the world. I like to think of them as measured gulps.” Lori was nodding so Danni pushed on. “And I believe you have spent some time working with the personalization algorithms that lie behind the average consumer’s view into Serendipity. You know, the little maps we give them showing the persuasion patterns behind every request for their money or their vote.”

  “That’s probably the part of working here I like best. I have a hard time imagining what it was like before Serendipity appeared. She keeps most everyone at least semi-honest. People trust Gumbo because of her.” In truth, even though Lori herself used and worked on Gumbo, she didn’t really trust it. After two years working at UNworld, she had seen far too much of what had to be done to manage populations in this era.

  Danni managed a quiet chuckle before continuing. “Thanks for the endorsement, but I’m guessing you have experienced at least a few unsettling moments in which it dawns on you how delicately subjective the personalization weighting within those algorithms is.”

  Danni needed Lori to re-index for personal honesty, and she hesitated before continuing. “Just a small change in Serendipity’s Realtime Snapshot of the history of a request or note, maybe just a small shift in the viewing angle, can sell a car or elect a president. Right?”

  Danni fixed Lori with an ageless stare, and the warm taco juice on Lori’s hand turned cool with the slight breeze. “You must have sensed something a bit dodgy beneath all the public service patina of Serendipity and Gumbo. Am I correct?”

  Lori first looked away, then at her hands as she wiped them with the faded black and white cloth napkin. Well, of course. She could admit that it was one of the reasons she spent so much time in Gumbo. The relaxed atmosphere of undifferentiated power somehow made up for the powerless cog-like life she led back in D.C. “I guess that is true, but I don’t really think about it. I like the problem solving and seeing the things that I fix work as designed. I feel like Serendipity is important on some big global level, and I’m kind of proud that I passed a hard test to qualify for working on it.”

  “As well you should, Lori. Almost fifty thousand people have tried, and only seven ever passed that test. You made it through, and you have been good enough to spend almost half your waking life helping these last two years.”

  As Danni spoke, Lori was acknowledging to herself how much she depended on Gumbo for her present quasi-contentment.

  “But now I’m asking you to come over to our world completely, with no going back. I wish there was a gentle way of persuading you and drawing you in slowly, but there isn’t.” Danni’s smile went impish again. She added a bit of stage drama by slowly finishing off her tea. “It’s really a classic blind-branching-dilemma. I can’t tell you much more about what we are up to, unless you are completely on board. As Morley would say, ‘Beaucoup committed.’ You simply have to decide with that polymath gut of yours.”

  Danni held out the open palm of her left hand, and Lori imagined the withered arm within the faded blue jumpsuit she always wore. “Do I leave behind my plodding but safely plot-able trajectory through the known world,” and then her right palm extended, “in exchange for an unknowable path through an entirely new dimension?”

  “You want me to decide right now?” Lori knew the answer.

  “I’m afraid so. No sense dithering.” Danni had steeled herself for this. Knowing how much Lori loved working within Gumbo made her feel badly about using it as leverage, but it couldn’t wait. She needed to find new blood, and she had decided to place her bet on Lori.

  “Does Morley want me, too? I’ve never even met him in person. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

  “Say ‘yes’ and I will introduce you straight off. And yes, he thinks you are the right person as well.” Danni didn’t let Lori escape from the narrowing track.

  Lori had already thought about what she would be leaving: her nice apartment, her grandmother’s antique recliner chair, her quiet neighbors and their happy shitting dogs, her safe but mostly dreary job, her mother as well, she guessed. Danni had just confirmed that she would have to trust the tiny glimpses she had been given of what lay below Gumbo’s skin.

  She knew this moment would never happen again. Time would flow on, and she would be swept downstream with it, which seemed like such a sad ending written before she was even twenty-one. But why the fuck not? She knew her mom would be sad, but Lori knew she would have done it herself given the chance. This was everything she had taught Lori about the persistence of an unpredictable fate in a data-driven world. “Okay. I’ll be your apprentice or whatever, and, yes, I get that there is no going back.”

  “That’s very good to hear, Lori. Thank you.” Danni reached out and took Lori’s hand like a tiny grandmother offering congratulations. “Now would you like to meet my friend Morley?”

  “Sure. I mean, yes, please.” Lori wasn’t ready to be on the other side of the river just like that. Shouldn’t there be some special process that would show her how to enter some deeper hidden level within Gumbo?

  Looking over Lori’s shoulder, Danni spoke to someone who must have been standing in the cottage doorway behind. “We have our young apprentice, Morley. Come say hello.”

  Lori stood and turned, surreptitiously giving her sticky hand another wipe on her pant leg. She caught a strong whiff of donkey at the same moment she saw it clomp out onto the patio and heard it speak around her head.

  “Cheers, Lori. Welcome to the real Gumbo. I hope Danni hasn’t scared you with all her talk of death.”

  Dimensional Static

  “Let’s go down to the beach where we can find a comfortable spot to get started.”

  Lori was having trouble getting used to the donkey talking. “Giving you just enough of the past history behind our little project seems to be what Danni wants me to do—equip you but not overwhelm you.”

  Moist black eyes and long lashes working sympathetically with the scarred ears and lips. Lori heard a bemused languor in the voice. Was it just in her head or could others hear the donkey as well?

  “Fair warning, this may take a bit of time and finesse.” Morley flicked his ears and tail simultaneously, seeming to swat at flies Lori couldn’t see. “Wise old Simon used to go on about how too much clarity could bugger up your fundamental appreciation of what was really happening.”

  Lori had made the jump back to her apartment, staying just long enough to register for an unspecified medical leave from her job, pack a small bag, and get a few hours’ sleep.
She had been mysterious with her mom—just vague enough to ensure that her mom was hoping the coming disappearance was due to some exciting new lover. It kept her from asking too many questions.

  Snapping back to Gumbo, she had found Morley as donkey waiting for her on the hilltop portal, and he immediately started them down the steeper path leading directly to the shoreline.

  “You should be thankful it’s me giving you the background and not Danni. She is a woman of few words—too few when it comes to helping make sense of such a peculiar expedition. Eighty years can just fly by. I’m more of a story teller by nature.”

  Lori was glad that Morley was leading the way, since his four loosely connected hooves were triggering small rock slides with every step. As they reached an especially sharp switchback, he stopped for a moment and looked back over a shoulder at her. “I guess it would be polite of me to ask if you have any burning questions I can answer before we reach our peaceful lecture hall and get to work.”

  Lori had been looking at the donkey’s shambling ass for the last five minutes, so the first question out of her mouth was not really the most burning one on her mind. “How come you always appear as a donkey, Morley?”

  “Oh, it’s simple actually. You know how old I actually am, right?”

  Lori didn’t see where this was going and suspected she was being distracted from a real answer but figured it was best to play along. “Well, given that Danni mentioned you were a little older than her, you must be about one hundred and fifteen or so.”

  “One hundred and twenty to be precise. Danni and I have been using the same custom methylation techniques to stay young, the ones she has recently stopped. They are pretty effective.” The ears suddenly went flat against the back of his donkey head. “But somewhere around one hundred, I began to show my age and my back began to act it, so I decided I needed a new form. I wanted four legs and a horizontal spine to ease the memory of an old man’s vertical back pain. It was just a simple mechanical trick to eliminate gravitational compression.” The ears stood back up, and he smiled. “Plus, I didn’t want to have to ever worry about whether my choice of clothing made me look old. Anyway, I woke up one morning and the first thing I saw was a donkey out my window, so I chose that. Why, don’t you like them?”

  With that, the Morley-donkey Lori was talking to faded quickly to nothing and an old man appeared in its stead. Tall but somewhat bent with thinning blond-brown-grey hair, deeply tanned skin, and a face strikingly handsome despite the lines and crags, without elaboration Morley pulled a brimmed cap from the back pocket of his shorts and snugged it onto his head, faced back down the hill, and continued on with a battered walking pole in his left hand.

  Lori felt a deep pang of guilt, even as she realized he had drawn it out of her with droll purpose. “No, I love donkeys. Really, you can go back to being one.”

  “No, you don’t. They smell and they’re stubborn, just like you learned as a child. Very useful if you mostly want to be left alone. Anyway, it’s good for me to practice walking upright.”

  Ten minutes later they were sitting under a thatched roof fifty meters back from the high tide line, with Morley futzing with his dash while Lori took stock of the subtle appointments within the seemingly rustic cabana. It was a structure she had never noticed during her many trips to Gumbo. Noise cancellation imposed a hushed muffling of the waves and sea bird screeches. Spectrum filtration brought down the glare of the outside sun to the level of early dusk. And there was the telltale taste of dimensional static that told her they were sitting in an active hologram.

  Morley looked up from his dash with an eye roll of mild annoyance. “True to form, Danni has taken it upon herself to help out with our history lesson by sending along a couple of her own histograms to add to the ones I have already built. May produce a few minor POV conflicts, but nothing a smart girl like you can’t factor for.” He walked over to a cooler box in the corner of the open floor and pulled out two bottles of beer, which he brought back to the table between the two lone chairs that were set in the middle of the otherwise empty space. They sat, and Morley kicked off his dusty shoes and spun the neck of his beer to open. “Okay then, get comfortable, Lori. There are more beer and snacks in the cooler whenever you want them. Don’t ask—just take. We are going to walk through eighty years of alternate history by way of a string of Serendipity-driven histograms assembled by yours truly, with a few last-minute insertions by Danni. They are multiplex in viewpoint but highly indexed for the perspectives of me, Danni, and a small cast of characters who are all now dead but who played important roles along the way.”

  He took a drink from his bottle and seemed to sigh despite a smile. “The whole performance will stretch over a couple of days, so we will go until dinner time. Then I’ll take you up to the cabin and get you settled in your rooms. It’s hard for me to tell how intense this is going to be for you, so I’m just going to watch you and listen to your questions.”

  He tipped the neck of the bottle towards her, “It’s an arbitrary path through history, and only one of many to boot. Are you ready?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “We are going to start with the year 2048 and some events around a U.S. presidential election that rudely interrupted my early retirement.”

  Lori wasn’t close to being ready, but that didn’t appear to matter. “Could I use the bathroom first?”

  Random Slug

  “Well, love,” Morley began, “we start with a moment of great danger—one well known in history but destined to be exquisitely misperceived for all time.”

  He drank from his beer and seemed to talk to the air in front of him as the histogram took control of the space and Lori felt herself absorbed into it. She had been in many streams but never one like this. The power of so much compressed data, which she could sense surrounding them across every quadrant, seemed to hold her fixed in an irresistible grip. An initial vibration subsided quickly as the positioning in time resolved, and she felt her entire being lurch as the histogram’s stream began to roll.

  “We were so close to walking off into the sunset.”

  Lori could hear Morley but couldn’t see him anywhere. She was in a crowded room, in front of the crowd, who seemed to be looking at her and a handful of others behind and around her. A big man dressed in quaint business/religious garb, walking towards her in a line of well-wishers, suddenly pulled an ancient gun from his coat and pointed it right at her face. Another man lunged at him, but the gun flashed as the histogram slowed time to a crawl and she watched the small dense slug emerge from the barrel.

  She thought, This is the assassination of Curtis Dresden and the start of the War of Facts. She knew the few seconds being allowed for the slug to make its path was her history lesson’s starting point.

  There was one face in the crowd that stood out, over-saturated with the density of data endorsement. He was behind her, or rather behind Dresden, unnaturally heavy with thinning oiled hair and a look on his face that now captured her whole attention, even as she sensed the bullet easing through the air towards where her forehead would be momentarily.

  The man was taking it all in and processing the scene faster than the others. The room was still getting ready to react while he was already plotting the way forward from a moment he hadn’t seen coming.

  In her head, Lori heard Morley’s voice again: “That’s Rudolph Murcheson. Do you know who he was?”

  “Of course, I know who he was. He was the head of one of the Comms that controlled the data flows back then. Wasn’t he also the head of Unity in Christ?” Lori felt the atoms in the air around her head gathering force as she turned her face back towards the slug. The air and the histogram were now adding color and understanding to the moment at a rate that was almost too intense. The man with the gun was named Wain Robbe, and he was disconnected from the main flows of data relationships that painted the room. She could see a chandelier above his reddened face, and she cou
ld feel what must be the passion of dutiful righteousness when she looked at his eyes. Lori had never felt that before, and it jolted her.

  She knew somehow the lesson here. It was simply that randomness still exists, even amongst all the high-level plotting and intent in this room. Implacable math dictated by the arrangements of so much data, plot lines calculated to make their way into the history flows read by children like her eighty years later; even then randomness can slip into any spacetime to reshuffle the cards.

  With a feeling akin to blood flowing back into a leg that has been badly asleep, emotion overtook the lesson. First, a deep sadness. Friends and a loved one scattered about this room would be blinked out forever in just a moment. Then, deep calm. They would go on, and each would eventually blink out on their own. Only cairns of information would remain, and the shape of their paths through spacetime would always persist.

  “You know, Lori, Danni named her Serendipity about a hundred years ago now, and it’s still bloody perfect. Never been able to come up with shorter nick name that sounded right.” Morley’s voice was behind her and the slug hung in the air so close to her forehead that she had trouble focusing on it. Her eyes hurt and almost crossed. But at the perfect moment, the slug began to lose its lead gray density and everything in the room seemed to dissipate.

  Lori felt more than saw a shift in the light towards red. Red at night sailor’s delight, red in the morning sailor’s take warning. She looked quickly at the window behind her, just in time to see that it was night time.

  And then the room was gone with a departing hiss and she found herself back in the cabana. She looked at the little table beside her with Morley’s empty bottle and hers still full and halfway warmed. She looked at Morley and saw that he was studying her for any warning signs, so she picked up the wet beer and took a drink.