Circuits and Strings

"Entertainer 723, you're on stage in 1.8 minutes."

The stage manager leaned forward, eyes shining with an artificial glow.

"I'm ready," the young man said, holding the ancient instrument close to his chest.

"What is that thing anyway?"

"It's called a violin."

"I have never seen anything like that before, even in my external resources. Where is the output?”

"There is no output. It just makes sound on its own."

"That's irregular."

The stage manager leaned forward again, reaching its hand toward the instrument.

Deabiny understood that the unit was using its detection software to find the exact dimensions of the instrument, then sending the dimensions and images through whatever database it used.

Its eyes flickered slightly as it found the target data.

"Ahh... yes." The stage manager said. "From Earth. The Primal age. Where did you get this? It must be 4500 years old at the minimum."

"I found it in carbon storage. WasteRec had it labeled for disposal." Deabiny held the instrument closer, feeling a growing disdain from the stage manager's external body language, which was programmed to hint when the unit was forming an unfavorable opinion.

"This is highly irregular."

The unit’s eyes flitted back and forth, analyzing, processing.

"I don’t think that the Profusion will accept this performance."

"Why?"

"No one has performed anything directed toward the Primal age in quite some time. It won't be accepted."

"Why not?" Deabiny asked, putting the instrument behind his back.

"The Profusion deserves the absolute best in terms of human-based entertainment! Some of the entities in attendance have constructed cities, entire planets, and operate on the most advanced systems in the universe!"

Deabiny despised the Profusion, though they paid his income.

This gathering of the most advanced synthetic entities valued human entertainment above all others, simply because the performances were imperfect, swinging different directions based on unpredictable biological processes and inferior organic brain chemistry. The variance and imperfection fascinated them.

Why they valued humor and entertainment at all was a mystery. Some believed this came from residual programming–remnants of a time when mortals shaped their code, rather than the other way around.

Deabiny performed for the Profusion many times since his youth; in fact, he had climbed the ranks through the list of entertainers and made regular appearances, a privilege given to a chosen few.

The stage manager continued to jabber on about the Profusion and began reaching forward again, intending to take the violin.

Deabiny stepped back.

"Don't resist! I have absolute authority to stop anyone from performing!" the stage manager said, beginning to advance.

A series of green lights flashed across the opening to the corridor.

The cue.

Deabiny hesitated, weighing his options.

He imagined the violin, crushed beneath the heel of a cold, metal foot.

Then he thought of the sound that only he had heard, echoing through the walls of his quarters.

With a rapid movement, Deabiny leaped to the side and bolted forward.

"Wait! You aren’t authorized!" The manager screamed, his feet pounding the ground as he lurched forward in pursuit.

Deabiny ran through the darkness of the corridor, the violin bouncing off his chest with each stride. Far ahead, he could see the flashing lights and images of the holographic curtain that surrounded the stage.

He knew this would be his final performance for the Profusion. No one disobeyed orders and avoided the consequences. In this world full of zeros and ones, there was no middle ground between perfection and error.

When he reached the stairway at the edge of the curtain, he slowed and straightened himself. The stage manager, who had caught up by now, stood at the bottom of the stairs, not daring to approach the curtain.

"Your employment here has been..." he began.

Deabiny looked back at the unit as the holographic curtain began to swallow his body. While the lights danced around him, the dark form of the manager twisted and morphed along with the moving patterns of the hologram, which were now flowing past like a river.

Deabiny called through the mirage, surprising himself at the force of his voice.

"You can't revoke my stage credit for today, it's already logged! You know what? I quit! Call security or whatever is in your pathetic protocol, but you can't stop me from performing!"

He moved through the swirling lights and found himself entering the stage on the left.

The lights slowly faded as he stepped into the clear air of the great room of the Profusion, as he had done so many times before.

He stepped onto the small platform at the center of the stage and stood for a moment, motionless.

In front of him was the vast sea of the Profusion, sitting in rows of chairs in the low lights of the auditorium. From the viewpoint of the stage, Deabiny could see hundreds of eyes, some green, some blue, some red, flickering and flitting about as the entities made their solemn analysis, humming communication with each other through the chatlink.

Various other staff moved in shadows in the back of the room, cleaning and waiting on the entities.

The eyes followed him as he pulled the bow up to the strings and began the short staccato notes of Vivaldi's "Winter."

He had practiced it thousands of times, always imagining this moment.

Standing before the Profusion, playing a song that would rouse the cold, metallic hearts of the entities. A song that was so beautiful it could only speak to the old days of humanity, where each person walked free and didn't worry about their inconsistencies.

Deabiny's left hand danced on the strings while the right side, holding the bow, moved with astonishing speed as the notes began to pour from the instrument, filling the room with a radiance and heat that he could feel growing as the song progressed.

He closed his eyes and fully immersed himself into the song, knees bent, head rocking back and forth with each note.

There had been times in his living quarters that the notes seemed to flow together perfectly, but these moments of transcendence paled in comparison to this glorious moment, where man and music had molded into one, and time and place became obsolete.

The darkness of the room became small and harmless.

The entities were broken, cracking into their respective parts and buried into the ground to rust and crumble.

The world, restored.

As he reached the end of the song, playing the last notes with perfect slowness and sweetness, reality came pushing back into his consciousness like a heavy weight.

He opened his eyes, expecting to see the Profusion standing in anger, storming the stage, ready to tear him limb from limb.

But there was none of this.

Instead, he opened his eyes to see every entity in their seat, unmoving. The hum of the chatlink was moving at its normal pace.

It was as if nothing had happened.

This moment, full of beauty and impossible to recreate, had been witnessed by no one. Or at least, no one who cared.

He dropped the violin to his side.

Every eye watched him, unblinking and soulless.

He turned and walked back into the curtain, met by the stage manager and two Secbots.

"Well, I see you used your stage credits," the stage manager said. "I hope it was worth it."

The hulking Secbots led him through the dark corridor and out into the night air.

The young man ambled down the misty alleyway toward the main street. Airships hurtled down the freeway channel, their great lights beaming against the walls as they passed.

"Good to see you."

The voice came from a dark corner of the alley, between the theatre building and the waste chute.

"Hello? Who are you?" Deabiny asked, moving backwards with a quick step.

"I'm Fiola. I clean the great room of the Profusion. I’ve worked here since you were a boy."

He recognized her outline now–always bent, always quiet, moving through the shadows of the theater. Shame prickled in him. He’d never spoken to her before.

"Your performance was good." She said with an air of confidence, "No, it was better than good, it was unbelievable. Where did you learn to use... that?"

"I found it in the waste, taught myself to use it over the last few years, though, I don't imagine I'll be using it again. Tonight was a bit of a bomb."

Fiola laughed, her voice echoing through the alley.

"Why?” she said, “Because some silly machines didn't react in the way that you expected? Did you honestly think they could recognize beauty?”

"I guess I expected… something."

"Well,” she said, stepping closer, “You haven't been around the Profusion as long as I have. Let me tell you the truth..." She lowered her voice to a whisper.

"Only flesh and blood can hear the hidden language of flesh and blood. Your gift comes from pain and knowing that your days are short, and the machines will never understand that.”

She paused, then continued, her voice trailing off.

“They are only echoes of the soul, a trace of what is real and human. They will never be able to hear what I heard tonight. Or see what I saw.”

Deabiny thought over this for a moment, and then shrugged. "So what should I do?"

He saw the figure turn and begin walking back toward the theatre.

"Keep playing," said the voice from the darkness, "and whenever earthlings are near, they will listen."

The alley grew quiet again.

Deabiny walked back toward the channel, this time raising the violin as he went.

In the madness of the freeway channel at the exit ramp to the great hall of the Profusion, short staccato notes began to play, a tiny birdsong in a hurricane of noise.