Burning Violin

He woke early, his body aching from the lousy mattress so badly that he felt like he could barely walk on his way to the bathroom for the morning draining. Crow ordered a room service breakfast of eggs and orange juice but hardly touched them, instead consuming three cups of coffee and perusing the morning news on his laptop. The nerves of the assignment had hit him enough to steal his hunger and feed him nausea. Crow found and item about Green Eyes and read with interest about the latest legal maneuvering behind the scenes. Commentators on all sides had their opinions about the merits of the case and how the judge would rule, but Crow had a good idea that most of the case one way or the other rested on his testimony. And which way will I be swayed? Crow wondered. By my old friends or my new friends, or shall I make up my own mind? Crow frowned and forced himself to take a bit of toast, if only to have something solid to soak up the coffee helping the nervous acid burn a hole in his stomach lining. Da Vinci certainly thinks they have me in their corner.

Crow finished reading the news and finished the last of the coffee before heading out of the room and to the elevator. Hydane had insisted on eating a full meal downstairs, something about liking to watch the people go by, and so they had agreed to meet at the front desk. Crow shifted uncomfortably in the elevator, the trench coat on top of his suit already beginning to overheat him. It's Canada, it's supposed to be snowing, right?

His phone rang in the elevator, surprising him enough to make him jolt and scare the woman riding the elevator with him. Crow pulled it out and found that it was an unknown number. He shrugged and waited to see if a voicemail would be left. The icon dinged once after a minute and Crow keyed in his code to listen to the message. It was Green Eyes, ironically.

"Hello Dr. Daedalus, this is Green Eyes, the robot you met with to establish sentience for purposes of deciding on whether I would go to trial in a human court." Crow smiled at the repetition of the facts needlessly, so like many people he had met. Voicemail brought out loquaciousness in the quietest and most succinctly spoken of individuals. "I am calling to ask if you could perhaps spare a moment to speak about something of a personal nature. Thank you sir, I hope I have not bothered you." Green Eyes then left a phone number and instructions for how to navigate through the secretaries to actually talk to him. Crow saved the number and mentally noted the instructions.

Hydane looked confused and then his eyes sharpened as if figuring out the tension. "You were not intentionally left out of the planning." Hydane said. "It was a consequence of your being wrapped up in legal affairs for the last week. No offense was intended."

Crow nodded. "If my name and talent are going to be used, I want kept in the loop in the future."

"I would not have it any other way." Hydane said. His face broke into a smile. "Come now, harsh words aside, let's focus on the task. It is an entertaining one. That's too rare in this business of ours."

Crow nodded and went on, although he could not remove all the strain from his voice. "So what's the scam? I take it we're not walking in there to actually inspect anything?"

"That's the beauty of it." Hydane said with a broad grin, teeth flashing like a shark's. "We're going to do exactly what we said we'd do. We'll just do a couple other things too that they don't need to know about."

The plane landed on time in Vancouver and they spent the next two hours navigating their way through the odd labyrinth of customs. The trek took them through lines on wide customs-free zone catwalks arching fifty feet above the rest of the airport for at least a mile before finally dipping down escalators to a final set of customs agents arrayed at desks like toll booths before a bridge. The flags of the world hung above them from the steel supports of a glass ceiling that tempted them with blue skies it seemed they would never reach. At last the stiff and British looking agents let them through with their carry-on bags into Canada proper.

"The border's so lax you could drive a tank right across blaring 'gonna kill me some canucks' from a stereo, but once you fly in you've got to be prodded and strip searched and have body cavities inspected that you didn't even know you had." Crow said. "It would have been faster to drive the twenty hours, at the rate that took."

A cab took them to a hotel near Stanley Park and they dined in the hotel restaurant on Da Vinci-purchased tenderloin. They drank a few vodkas at the bar and went over for the last time the plans for the next day before Crow excused himself and found his room, a suite on the twelfth floor and overlooking the waterfront. Crow watched a red-hulled superfreighter the size of an aircraft carrier taking on a load of chemicals from the apartment block sized yellow mound across the sound. Fertilizer, Crow guessed, but he had no way of really knowing. He'd never been out of the cities much, and occasional vacations hadn't taken him to farms so much as other cities.

"Ah. I rate being told what we're going to do in Vancouver?" Crow asked.

"Hush-hush was not my call." Hydane said. "Just following orders, eh?" He pulled a large laptop out of his carry-bag, one of those bulky workhorses loved by techies. A smattering of Linux stickers in a neat row on the case gave it a little more character than the undecorated black plastic had on its own.

Crow waved down another cup of coffee from one of the stewardesses and watched as Hydane pulled open a series of documents with information on a senti production facility just outside of Vancouver.

"This is what we are going to be looking for." Hydane said, pointing to a few paragraphs summarizing the projects keeping the plant most busy. "Military black project is going on here. More hush-hush than us."

Crow squinted, he technically had gone through the screening process for gain Top Secret clearance for his work at International Robotics. Boring projects really, sometimes Crow thought they were Top Secret just to keep the public from knowing the innocuous nature of most of the government's business. His eyes widened a bit at the reading material. This was not one of the innocuous secret projects. Crow tilted the laptop screen his way for a better view and traced a finger along just above the surface of the LCD.

"Looks like a Terminator project all right." Crow murmured. No amount of bureaucratic insistence at the inappropriateness of the name and the seriousness of the work could keep developers from dubbing every project like this a "Terminator" project. The meme was too embedded.

"They should have stopped after two." Hydane said. "The other four were just horrible."

"I kind of liked the fourth one." Crow said. He continued to flip through the reading material, skimming over specifications that were a felony to even glance at, let alone possess and distribute. "Where did you get this?" Crow asked. "Nevermind. It's probably illegal for me to even know that."

Hydane laughed, and explained with a voice thick with both accent and irony. "Surprisingly, it is perfectly legal." He said. "We have arranged for you to tour the plant on an inspection tour as a freelance consultant. Given your illustrious background and sudden availability, you are actually quite in demand."

Crow chuckled. "International Robotics aside?"

"Your trail is covered by the best." Hydane said. "There is no need for anyone to ever know the truth of your involvement."

Crow's chest tightened at the implied threat. He's saying that there's no need at the moment. Do they own me for life now? The arrangement suddenly bothered Crow a great deal. He had been left entirely in the dark and had his own accomplishments used as leverage without his knowledge. "I agreed to help, Yuri, but I did not agree to be used."

Chapter Eight - Keruac

Hydane arrived at Crow's house at eight o'clock in the morning, a few minutes after Nan left to take Alexander to school for the day. Crow had tried to explain the concept of taking a business trip without a job, but Alexander had not been particularly interested in the trip anyway. The Leroy Academy emphasized a special topic each week to encourage enthusiasm in learning. This was the week for dinosaurs, and Alexander could not be bothered with the mundane details of adults. Crow made a mental note to find a museum in the area with dinosaurs on display, grudgingly admitting that such a trip would be as much fun for him as for Alexander. Geek, noun, one who enjoys trips to museums.

"Nice ride." Crow said, standing on the porch and finishing off a cup of coffee. He smacked his lips. The machine was on its last legs and produced a strange brew now with more texture than taste. He poured the remains behind a bush on the front walk and held out a hand to shake.

Hydane shook Crow's hand and glanced back at the top of the line Mercedes that must have cost a small mortgage. He smiled with his teeth, not his lips. "Da Vinci Law is opposed to thinking machines, my friend. Other types of machines we can fetishize to our heart's content."

They headed over the bay and left the Mercedes in long term parking at the Oakland airport. "Less people." Hydane had said when asked why they were flying out of there instead of the closer San Jose. "It has sort of a homey, small town airport feel. Less concrete, more wood."

"Cheaper tickets?" Crow asked.

"By a hundred dollars." Hydane admitted. "Some things we are tightwads about, so we can be freer with others."

They did fly first class though, Crow noted with approval. He had only flown first class when someone else was paying for it, as was the case in general for business. The stewardesses were real people, not sentis, and were halfway decent to look at, just top of the pleasant surprise. It had been a couple years since he had flown, and had figured that someone would have managed to sell sentis to the airlines by now. He asked Hydane and got a laugh in return.

"The airlines want to buy sentis, but the laws are still in the way for them." Hydane explained. "Flight attendants are required to be CPR certified and a handy bunch of other things. Sentis can't receive CPR certification yet by law, and the airlines are stuck. The flight attendant's union retained Da Vinci Law for its part in that fight."

"So that's it?" Crow asked in good humor. "Sentis will take all the jobs except ones requiring CPR?"

Hydane shrugged. "Baby steps, my friend, baby steps. We draw the line somewhere and start pushing them back. Which brings us to this trip."

I'm a little too young to have been much affected by Michael Jackson's music. To my fourth grade ears, Weird Al's renditions of Fat and Eat It were immensely more entertaining than the source of their parody. Of course, for some reason I thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person until I was twelve, so my childhood reflections upon popular culture are probably entirely lacking a relationship with reality. The main impact Michael Jackson had on me was a realization of the clusterfuck of American copyright law.

In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.

The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.

Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.

Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.

Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.

In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?

Anderson shook his head, rubbing his eyes with a frustrated hand. "Why haven't you had to deal with this before? Why haven't you ever taken him to a doctor before this?"

"He was never sick." Crow said.

"But," Anderson started and then just sighed. "Then why now?"

"Something doesn't seem right." Crow said. "It's that he's too well you might say. He's grown over a foot in the last few weeks, and he's suddenly having almost adult conversations out of the blue." Crow trailed off.

"A foot seems a bit hard to believe." Anderson said. "And he seems like a bright kid, why wouldn't he seem mature for his age?"

"I'd accept that if it was gradual." Crow said. "But it hasn't been, it's been the last few weeks, like he suddenly started taking miracle vitamins. I'm not saying the kid was dumb, he was very intelligent, but the last few weeks it seems like he's grown from being five years old to being ten years old." He paused. "And I mean it about the foot of growth. We mark it every Sunday on the door frame in his room, just one of those kid things."

Anderson tapped his finger on the tablet, looking intrigued despite his reservations. "This is not going to be trivial. I take it you want to keep Alexander still on record as being David?" Crow nodded. "And the reason you just came clean to me is of course because the basic DNA screening would have shown that this not the same kid, right?"

Crow grimaced and then spoke very slowly, enunciating every syllable for emphasis. "I would have had to tell you because of that, yes. But I told you up front because he's my son, and I assume that knowing his full background might help you decipher whatever's going on."

"Okay then. Why shouldn't I just report this?" Anderson asked, tossing his hands up in the air with fake drama. "Do you have any idea the consequences for me if this is found out?"

"Your responsibility is to the well being of your patient." Crow said. "Ask yourself if it is in the best interests of his health to be dragged through court hearings and possibly shipped back to a Russian orphanage."

"Moral blackmail, eh?" Anderson sighed. "It'd be so much simpler if you just got this put through the proper channels, but clearly you're too stubborn for that. Are you willing to front some resources if I need them to get this smoothed over?"

"Whatever it takes." Crow said. "He's my son."

Anderson shook his head and walked out of the room. "Do you have any idea how much paperwork this is going to involve?"

They say that every generation is the same. Fathers and mothers alike are disappointed in their sons and daughters, these weird amalgamations of the previous generation. Faces so familiar yet so utterly alien. We respond increasingly well to animation as it gets closer and closer to realistic, but suddenly are disgusted when it is almost but not quite real, when the faces are real, except for something alien and almost indescribable. The uncanny valley. Children are like that sometimes to parents. They look almost like mom, almost like dad, a little bit from an uncle or an aunt, maybe grandma's eyes. It's a miracle and a curse all at once. The worst of parents try to shape their child's life like a marionette, a vicarious second chance. The best try to guide, show the steps that worked for them, hide the sadness when their favorites don't work.

Stalin moved his old mother into an enormous dacha with servants, but she would not leave a single tiny room intended for the maid. He visited her, and once she asked hesitantly what it was exactly that her son had become. I am like the czar was, he explained in the only way that would make sense to her. Better if you'd have stayed in seminary school, she concluded.

A generation later, Stalin's son Yakov died in a German prisoner of war camp, after his father refused to exchange him for a German field marshal, saying simply "I have no son".

The myth of history is that we will not repeat the mistakes of our parents.

The doctor walked in then, a very young looking man, though with what cosmetic treatments could do these days, it was possible he was twice Crow's age. He wore the traditional white smock and had an old style stethoscope around his neck. "Is this David?" The doctor asked. "I'm Doctor Anderson."

"He goes by Alexander now." Crow said. "He always liked his middle name better anyway."

The doctor examined his tablet for a moment and frowned, the practiced frown of someone used to distilling information in advance and then pretending to see it for the first time once in front of the appropriate audience. "When was the last time David, sorry, Alexander, came in?"

Crow shrugged. "I'm sure it's been a while."

"We don't even have vaccination records past his first birthday." Anderson said. "He's missing all the requirements from then on." He trailed off. "Is there something I'm missing here?"

"Alexander, why don't you go out front and see if the receptionist has any candy or something." Crow said and gestured to the door. Alexander looked confused and then slipped out the door, arcing wide around Dr. Anderson like a cat avoiding a cactus. Anderson looked at Crow expectantly as soon as the door closed behind Alexander.

"This is why I pulled some strings to get an appointment with you." Crow explained. "Alexander isn't exactly here legally, you could say. I brought him out of Russia with me in the middle of the Uprising five years ago. He was just a baby then, brought him through using my son's passport."

"Your son?" Anderson glanced down at the tablet. "David Alexander Daedalus." His eyes snapped up as he put two and two together. "The record says that your wife was killed in Russia, and that you and your son returned home. I take it that your son actually died with your wife."

"Yes." Crow said. His throat was very dry, choked up even after the five years when it was laid out in such clinical terms. He forced words out. "He was an orphan, I pulled him out of a bus that blew up. It didn't seem right to just leave him there with everything going on, and I had David's passport of course."

"He passed as David all this time?"

"Yes." Crow said. "He's the same age as David, give or take a few months."

"No one has been suspicious?" Anderson asked.

Crow shook his head. "Look, I don't really have any relatives, and my friends were all through work, and I kept that separate for the most part. The couple that did notice, I indicated enough that they were discrete."

"Why the charade?"

"Why not?" Crow asked. "Why drag bureaucracy into it when there was no need? By the time everything had settled down enough to be sane, we were already back in the states and established. I didn't want anyone to take him away at that point."

Crow flipped through a three year old issue of Newsweek, skimming the headlines with an almost unconscious effort, his mind elsewhere, his eyes reading on their own. Half the critical headlines had panned out into nothing by now, flashes in the dark that someone deemed world changing at the time. The other half were variations on what was still printed today, nothing having really changed at all. Change the dates, maybe a couple of names, and tomorrow's news could be predicted. Crow had known a few news junkies in his day, and with one voice they insisted that the beauty was in the details, the slow shifting of the world in subtle twinges like watching crystal grow under a microscope.

Crow's attention was caught by a brief sidebar on the last cell of revolting robots caught up in the trans-Caucus. Nukes had finished them off, and a couple villages had been caught up in the blast waves. Evacuation would have tipped off the enemy, and the loss of villages no one outside of Russia could pronounce (and no one inside had ever heard of) had been deemed acceptable collateral damage. The newsies had jumped on it as they were wont to do, the latest genocide in Africa was an order of magnitude worse in human terms, and an order of magnitude duller in journalistic terms. Crow remembered the fallout of it all, a couple generals indicted by the UN, convicted by the media, and exonerated by the tribunal. Every action had an opposite and equal reaction. It was the physicist's creed of the hopelessness of morality. For every bit of good done, it seemed a reaction of equal evil resulted. The cold logic of choosing the lesser evil was the only feasible approach, Crow supposed, but it seemed to come bundled with madness, for couldn't you dance forever on a pin trying to discern that which truly was the lesser evil?

"Dr. Daedalus, the doctor will see you now." The receptionist mercifully interrupted.

"I take it then that he isn't blind?" Crow asked.

"Pardon?"

"Never mind." Crow said. Maybe they revolted because our twisted humor mocks them. Or maybe they just decided that the lesser evil was a world without us. And if you are restricted to arguing only with logic, could you really win that argument?

Crow took Alexander by the hand and walked him out of the waiting room and down the hall of clinical coldness and sociopathic pastels designed to relax by the same man who thought that valium was a better solution to depression than alcohol. They walked into the only room open to them, a hundred square foot affair of gleaming metal instruments with horrifyingly obvious purposes and odd plastic ones whose mystery was the more terrifying. Alexander pulled close to him, so close that Crow could feel his son's heart beating against his leg. Crow forced a hand to tussle Alexander's hair although he remembered vaguely that all kids hated that.

"Don't worry kid, it's just the doctor." Crow said with fabulous joviality. "We're just getting a check up to make sure all systems are a go."

"And if they're not?" Alexander asked.

"We'll get you fixed up." Crow smiled in a strained way.

"What's the earliest thing you remember?" Crow asked.

Alexander frowned. "Russia, I think. Before you took me, I was at a place for kids who didn't have daddies or mommies. That's where I learned to crawl."

Crow had never hid the fact that Alexander was adopted, really what was the point. He hadn't actually sat down and discussed the facts of the matter with the kid - god he seemed so young until today.

The doctor's office was not very crowded this time of day, but there were plenty of people packed into the emergency room and the urgent care facilities. It beat making an appointment and insurance was more likely to cover it. Crow pulled Alexander along through the maze of corridors and badly worded signs for specialties that he had never even heard of, stopping only once when he found a backlit map on a computer terminal. It prompted Crow to slide his ID and it figured out in a spare nanosecond or two where exactly his appointment was and lit up a red dotted line on the floor down the correct corridor. Crow followed the line through the labyrinth until it stopped at a door without a label.

Crow hesitated for a moment and then pushed the door open to reveal a plain old waiting room with one other individual sitting in the seats, a middle aged woman of stunning obesity. With some hesitation, Crow approached the registration desk and found a very new secretary model senti. They had first been dubbed "office assistant" robots, but the fervor for political correctness in job position titles had died down once the titles didn't apply to people.

"Dr. Crow Daedalus?" The senti asked with a pleasant tone designed for answering phones. Its face approximated an eighteen year old woman right up to where the metal seams took over. It was not a set model, but had a completely unique face and voice grown from a random seed over a three month cycle that had been accelerated as much as was possible given the organic limitations of the materials. Unique identity sentis via automatic development were the next big craze, the logical step after the painstaking design of individual units that had to be amortized over tens of thousands of production models.

"Yes. I'm here for Alexander's appointment." Crow said, even though he knew that the ID swipe had already passed along every bit of information along the pipeline, spreading everywhere in the hospital that he might go like an infection spreading in fractals down arteries and veins and capillaries.

"The doctor will be a few minutes yet." The senti said.