Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

So I followed him.

The fabbers on the floor were deathly still—a dormant network of machinery stretching far enough for the deck to curve with distance—except for one, its lights blinking, quietly humming to itself down near the port bulkhead. I headed toward it.

Doron jumped out of the shadows.

“What the fuck—”

It was strange, hearing us blurt in sync like that.

He recovered first. “What are you doing down here?”

“I thought you were crypting.”

“I am. Just had an idea for the Tidhar piece. Wanted to enter the specs while they were fresh in my mind.”

“Uh huh.” I glanced back at the thing he’d been lurking behind: one of the matter hoppers. Lithium store.

“What were you doing back here?” Stepping towards it.

“Just, you know. Poking around while the numbers crunched.”

Faint stat ic on my BUD.

“Really.” Around the corner of the hopper, deep shadow.

“Yeah, but it’s probably done by now. So I guess I’m…”

I stepped into eclipse. My BUD went out.

“What the fuck.” This time I spoke solo.

All icons, reduced to faint wavering phantoms. Zero network access.

Doron came up behind me. For once, he had nothing to say.

“You’re making blind spot s,” I said.

“Sunday—”

“You’re building signal jammers.” I wondered how. Wouldn’t the builds show up in the fab logs? “You’re jamming the Chimp.”

Was he building them by hand ?

“Sunday, please don’t tell him.”

“Of course I’m going to tell him. You’re deliberately fucking with ship’s comms. What are you up to, Doron?”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, back again. “Please, Sunday. We don’t have much time.”

“Less than you think. What the hell do you expect to accomplish with this penny-ante—”

“The first step is to gain our freedom,” he said. “Lots of time to figure what to do with it afterward.”

“Wait, what—”

“More to life than living like a troglodyte for a few days every couple thousand years, knowing that I’m never gonna see—”

“How do you know —” I began, and stopped as my BU Drebooted and a roach slid into view around the edge of the hopper. I realized that I’d been hearing the hiss of its approaching wheels for some time.

“Hello Sunday, Doron,” the Chimp said in our heads. “Is there a problem?”

Neither of us spoke. It seemed like years.

Finally: “Nah. Doron’s just tweaking his project before we go down for the night.”

“By the way,” Doron said ,“you hear about our Music Appreciation Club?”

“What, you too?”

“I think you’d like it if you gave it a chance. It’s not just appreciation. It’s critique. ”

“Critique.”

“You get to shit on people. You’d like that.”

“I don’t know anything about music.”

“No time like the present. Park’s been working on something, weird Bohlen-Pierce scale, doesn’t even have octaves. But he’s having problems with it. We’ve all been chipping in. Maybe you could take a look. I think he left the score in his quarters.”

“I told you, I don’t—”

“He says the eighth notes in particular are giving him trouble. Plus he thinks maybe a G major chord, but I think C works fine. C major chord at low C. Have a look yourself, maybe—gotta do something with those Sunset Moments of yours, eh?”

He stepped onto the waiting roach. “To the crypt, Chimp.”

The roach rolled away.

Another Sunset Moment. Alone again with my old friend.

Not quite s opeaceful this time, though. Something unspoken in the air. An undercurrent.

Bohlen-Pierce scale. Voices from the dead. C major. Signal jamming.

Music fucking appreciation.

I was back in quarters. Not mine. Not anyone’s, now; nobody kept dibs on a bed between shifts, nobody cared which identical suite they crashed in while on deck. But this one had been Park’s, not so long ago. If I hadn’t already known that, the sheaf of paper—pinned to the table by a fist-sized chunk of rock chipped from Eri ’s mantle—would have clued me in.

A musical score. I knew that much, anyway.

Something dropped from its pages as I gathered them up, a little cylinder that soundlessly hit the carpet and rolled a few centimeters. A pen. An actual analog pen, filled with ink or something like it. Park must have custom-fabbed it.

He’d written all these notes by hand .

“Chimp, is—” this digitized?

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

Now I was holding back. Doron’s mistrust—whatever it was—was catching.

All right, music. Make me appreciate you.

I flumped onto the nearest pseudopod, called some up introductory theory from the archives. Sharps and flats, treble clef and bass. Fundamental frequencies. Steps, intervals, scales.

Bohlen-Pierce: there it was. Obscure thirteen-note scale out of North America, already ancient when the Diaspora was new. Tritave interval, “justly tuned,” whatever that meant.

So what?

I ran it through the player. It sounded like shit.

The eighth notes are giving him trouble . Even embedded in the middle of Doron’s strange spiel, that line had seemed just a little off.

Eighth notes. The short guys, only last an eighth as long as those fat ovoid whole notes . Okay.

I played it again, ran my eyes along the score as my ears parsed the sounds. The eighth notes were especially crappy. Almost sounded like some of them had been shoehorned in from another compo—

I took a breath. Thought a moment.

Took my BUD offline.

Park’s pen had appeared in my hand. I was hunched over his pages, my back to the Chimp-eye up in the corner of the compartment. I wasn’t especially comfortable; the ’pod, reflexively compen sating for bad posture, shifted under me.

Low C. The note that anchored the chord, and the scale. Let’s not call it C, though; let’s say it anchors an alphabet instead.

Call it A .

So D-flat would be B. Only thirteen notes in the scale, so roll it over into the next octave—sorry, tritave : middle C equals N.

Eighth notes.

The first few sounded fine; it was the fifth that really jarred, an F.

Call that E .

A few more decent bars—nothing to get stuck in your head on endless replay, but melodic enough in a forgettable sort of way. Followed by a couple of consecutive clangers that just sounded flat somehow. Flat was what they were, in fact: B and D. And then, a couple of lines later, a middle C that didn’t belong.

L.O.N.

Turn the pag e.

The manuscript grew messier the deeper I got: notes scribbled out and replaced, key signatures taking new forms and then, with a few strikethroughs, reverting to older ones. Cryptic acronyms crept in around the margins, initials and numbers I couldn’t begin to decipher. It was as though the very process of writing was driving Park slowly around the bend, as if his notes were somehow bleeding entropy onto the page. But the eighths persisted—every couple of lines, every page, maybe every two or three. Now and then I’d get a reprieve but then there’d be another one, some stupid eighth note clanging against the ear. B D-flat F A MORA, B-flat F G-flat LES. I didn’t get it perfect the first time, it wasn’t all in the eighth notes after all; there were rests for spaces, time-sigs and high notes for numbers. It took a couple of passes to get it right. But eventually I had it, scrawled out in unfamiliar longhand letters almost too small for even me to see; and a moment later, s cribbled over and scratched through and blacked out so that no one else ever would. That was okay, though. It was a short message. I couldn’t have forgotten it if I tried.