Burning Violin

Stillwell stood there when the door opened, looking as haggard and bloodshot as Crow felt. "What the fuck do you want?" Crow asked.

 

Stillwell stared for a moment, a battle going on behind his eyes. "There has been a mistake I think." He swallowed hard. "The police found your place, a Rebecca filled them in on the details. They'll be here in the morning to take a statement if you're still here, which I imagine you won't be." Stillwell paused and then blurted out the next words as if he had been saving them up all day. "We thought you were the weak link to get into the pro-senti organizations. Your son was our in to put pressure on you. I am deeply sorry for that given the events of the past day."

 

"My son's gone you fucker." Crow said quietly and so hard that it made his temples throb like a migraine.

 

"I know." Stillwell held up a hand and waved it like he was trying to calm Crow down. "I don't know what else to tell you except that I will do everything in my power to get your son back. I don't know why the sentis would think he was so important, except maybe to hurt you for some reason, maybe your recent affiliation with Da Vinci brought that on." His words were slurring together into longer and longer sentences. Stillwell drew himself up like a marine called to attention. "Every resource I can dredge up will work on finding your boy, Dr. Daedalus, you have my word on that."

 

Crow stared at him, wondering if this was a trick on some level. The knowledge of Alexander's identity dug at him, but he could not bring himself to share it, not after the first bit of help had finally been promised him. "Thank you Mr. Stillwell." He said quietly. "I don't think you know quite what that means." Crow swallowed a dozen angry cries he had squirreled away and instead stood aside and gestured into his room. "Would you care for a drink?"

 

Stillwell left by dawn, after more than his share of drinks, although Crow had begun watering his own down long before that point. He wanted control when Stillwell was around. Even drunk, Stillwell was company-man to the core and did not divulge anything that Crow could not have guessed at on his own. Crow collapsed into a stupor that lasted for six hours, waking finally when the door bell buzzed insistently for a dozen times.

 

The police were at the door, having finally tracked down where he went.

 

"Stillwell already took my statement." Crow said. The agent would not be deterred though and shouldered his way into the room to get it told again, this time to the legally correct officer.

Chapter Fifteen - Hotel Blues

 

Of course they said no. Of course they told him to go to hell in not so many words. Well, to be fair, it had been quite a few more words than that in all fact. The words had kept coming and coming the way only lawyers could manage, dripping every syllable with vacuous pomposity. Attorneys could not let you go without dancing verbal circles around you and making you feel like an idiot, they had to keep slamming the idea home from a hundred different angles. Sadistic linguistic samurai cutting you to death with a thousand slashes instead of just taking off your head or jamming a blade through your heart. They liked to make you suffer first. They were, after all, people.

 

Crow sat on the balcony of the twenty-second floor, blowing misshapen smoke rings out over a city that he didn't even like. His son was gone, his friends had abandoned him, and there was nothing left but to feel sorry for himself, get lung cancer in the long run, and really drunk in the short run.

 

As he stared out on the city lights, it occurred to him what his problem was. I am not the center of the universe. It was a difficult thing to admit, a concept of tragic understanding. A psychologist could tell you that every person thinks that he is the center of the universe, the protagonist of an epic story. A few nutballs, though that was not the clinical term, thought that they were the antagonist. A microscopic proportion realized that they did not matter at all.

 

This was not a statement of low self-esteem or depression, it was a transcendant thought, uplifting even. It was what one could see if one were on a higher plane so that the entire world really was a stage. No person was the main character. No person had the show revolving around them and staged around their personal triumphs and tragedies. Osteryoung said no, not out of any desire to combat Crow's march through the plot, but because Crow truly did not matter and he had nothing of value to trade them for betraying their principles.

 

No masked man would knock on the door. No representative of some secret order dedicated to helping Crow find his son would make an untraceable phone call to this hotel room and arrange for a clandestine meeting that would in the end save the world. In the end, there were just people. Just as powerless and insignificant as himself.

 

And so he drank and smoked and waited for an intuition to come.

 

Instead a sharp knock came at the door at a quarter past two, and after a few steps of whiskey induced acrobatics, Crow decided that he was going to get his son back no matter what the cost. Not because he was the center of the universe and therefore it mattered in some grand scheme of things, but because if there truly was no meaning in the universe, than the simple act of a father saving his son was about as powerful event as could be imagined.

Crow left then, pulling Rebecca behind him by the arm as Father Thomas again lowered his head and this time began to cry in earnest. A part of her felt terribly sorry for the old man, but part of her also wanted to throttle him for his archaism.

 

They drove back to Crow's house, but half way up the drive he changed his mind, shaking his head. "I can't go back in there right now." He whipped the car around and meandered down the freeway until he found a place he recognized, a Hilton in downtown San Francisco that he stayed at now and then when he had business in the city but didn't feel the need to drive all the way back down to the south bay. Rebecca demurred from his offer to pay for a room for her, and when his confused and yet not all together unwilling eyebrows raised, she demurred further.

 

"I'll catch a cab home." She said. "I'll need to drop by at the very least and talk to Green Eyes. We left him with very little in the way of explanation."

 

Crow blinked. "Of course." He said and motioned for the clerk to only book one room for the night. It was the first thing to drag his mind away from Alexander all day. "He loves you, you know." Crow said.

 

Rebecca's eyes flashed. "Well fuck you too."

 

"I didn't mean anything by it." Crow said. "Christ woman, he called me up for a heart to heart and that's what was on his mind."

 

Rebecca relaxed marginally. "It's none of your business in any case."

 

"I don't know why you're so defensive." Crow said. "Do you love him?"

 

"Well that would just feed your theories about my arms as fetishes, wouldn't it?" Rebecca growled. Crow looked around to see if anyone was listening, but the hotel staff was too genteel to evidence eavesdropping even of public conversations. "I don't know what I feel." She folded her arms and crushed her face into a grimace.

 

Crow glanced again at the hotel staff and paused even longer before the words would form together well enough to come out right. "My son is a senti so I cannot judge you at all. I was in the process of building a senti in the likeness of my wife. I'd spend hours in the basements tweaking software to make it talk and sound just right."

 

"Now that is sick." Rebecca conceded. There was a harsh pause before she winked, just enough to make him feel a cold dread of having said too much. She turned away then, satisfied that good terms had been left, but looked over her shoulder when she reached the lobby door.

 

 "Did you leave it there?" Rebecca asked. "The senti of your wife, I mean. I didn't see anything there but Nan."

 

"No." Crow said, shaking his head. "I think the bastards must have taken her too."

 

Crow went upstairs and found his room on the east side, looking out over the bay with Oakland staring across the water like an oil stain of grime washed up on the opposite shore. The day light had about an hour to go and Crow took the silent time to shower himself back to his senses and start a strong pot of coffee. Crow watched the sun set before working up the nerve to make the final call of the evening. My enemy's enemy. He thought.

 

"May I speak to John Osteryoung please?" Crow asked the kind, and human, voiced receptionist of Da Vinci Law.

"The pieces fit, Father." Crow said. "If they didn't, you wouldn't be reacting so strongly. You'd be laughing instead at the joke of it and then telling me how quickly the Jesuits will find my boy."

 

Father Thomas finished the rest of his drink and poured another. "It's not a boy then, and he's not a son."

 

Crow's face raged crimson. "He's all I've got. You can't just erase the fact that he's my son now that you find out he's different."

 

"Calm down, Crow." Father Thomas said, with a level voice that was hard to argue with. "Believing a lie for a very long time does not make it any less of a lie. If Alexander, if it was nothing more than a senti in a particularly nice package, you did not have the times you remember as you remember them. It was just a pretty lie is all. A machine cannot be conscious, it can merely mimic it so well that you cannot tell the difference. Do you remember the first Turing tests that were passed? Computer software that was able to trick humans into thinking they were talking to a human via text messaging? Did that make the software in question equivalent to a human? Of course not, meet that software package face to face and you would never fall for it though, it would be clear as day that you were talking to an artifice.

 

"A senti who can fool you face to face is just more of the same, but more sinister. Anything, anyone could be one. The question of difference then becomes not one of appearance, or even material, but one of essence. If the essence of a being is mechanical, it is only better than a talking chunk of software by degree."

 

Crow slammed his glass into the desk. "The being that was my son did not fake being my son. He is what he is."

 

Father Thomas looked close to tears, eyes glistening in the afternoon sun peeking through the windows set far above eye level in the recesses of the gothic ceiling. "If someone had a way of guessing what your wife would have said in any given situation and could program a senti to respond as such, would that be Trinan restored to you?" Father Thomas asked. "If such an artifice could be so real as to look like her too, talk in her voice and speak the words such that you would never doubt it was her, would it be Trinan, or would it just be a pretty lie?"

 

"At some point the artifice becomes reality." Crow said. "For a being to fully embody something body and mind is to be that something. A full realization could not be anything but Trinan, and goddamn it all Alexander is my son and I will find him, with or without you."

 

Father Thomas lowered his head and stared at his lap, hand clenched so hard around the tumbler that it was shaking. Rebecca could hear the Jesuit whispering a short prayer before raising his head and meeting Crow's gaze. "In so many ways you are like a son to me Crow, but I cannot help you do this. Turn your back on this thing, this abomination that has infected your home. I loved the boy, yes it was so real that I could love it. But that doesn't mean I can pretend that it is more than a bauble that pretends to think and wears a child's skin like a mask."

His face whitened and then reddened as the story progressed, glancing away only once to gaze critically at Rebecca, who watched from outside the antique metal framed windows of the rectory library, standing amongst the roses. Finally, he moved towards the door, gesturing for Crow to come with him. They exited the building and moved silently down the footpath, Rebecca falling in a few steps behind like an old-fashioned geisha. Father Thomas led them into an adjacent building of splendid stone work half-covered with the creeping fingers of vines. A phrase was chiseled into the stone above the door, Latin she figured, though she did not know a word herself beyond status quo.

 

Up stairs, Father Thomas entered an office so small they could barely fit in all at once, especially with the floor to ceiling stacks of books and print-outs covering every available horizontal space. He pushed past them once they were in, closed the door, and with almost comic delicacy, threw the deadbolt in the heavy oak door as quietly as was humanly or otherwise possible. A few piles of books were rearranged and shuffled into the surrounding chaos well enough for Crow and Rebecca to sit, although one particular pile concerned Rebecca in regard to the safety of her skull. Father Thomas held up a finger to them, indicating that they continue the maintained silence for a few moments longer, cocking his head as if to listen for ears at the walls. He then turned and touched a remote control that brought to life a stereo as old as Crow. Opera with the audacity that only Wagner could manage began mid-aria, and Father Thomas cranked the volume well enough to deafen any rats living behind the drywall.

 

He leaned forward and spoke in a hissing whisper that could hardly be heard from their vantage a foot or two away. "That should keep casual listeners away. With technology such as it is, the professionals would listen even if we adjourned to Pluto, and their detectors could probably tell if we were lying even if we thought we weren't."

 

"No lies here, Father." Crow said, in a similar whisper. "I told you every bit of the truth, and I need your help." He paused. "Alexander needs your help."

 

Father Thomas hissed and leaned back. He pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and hefted out a bottle of Old Bushmills. The amber liquid sloshed into a trifecta of tumblers, but not a drop polluted the worn mahogany of the desk. He lifted his glass with a perfunctory dip in each of their directions to handle the obligatory toasting and downed half of it the greedy swallows of an old drinker.  Crow and Rebecca sipped theirs at a more conservative pace.

 

"I just don't believe it." Father Thomas said, shaking his head. "How can you believe your boy is a senti? I've held him myself, and he is nothing if not a lad."

Rebecca squeezed him and stood back, apparently a bit unsure how to hold herself, the intimacy of the moment a bit more than she looked for in casual acquaintances. Crow straightened and stood, collecting himself.

 

"Who would take your son?" Rebecca asked. "And why?"

 

The pieces slammed together like an explosive rubix cube for Crow all at once. The oddities of Alexander's maturation, the happenstance of his origin, the message on the board, the thousand other tiny suspicions that a father overlooked as a matter of course. They all clicked into place and Crow saw Alexander for what he was, what he had always been.

 

"His real father took him." Crow said. "If you can call the bastard that."

 

Rebecca blinked. "Not understanding over here." She said and waved a hand.

 

Crow smiled and took Rebecca's hands, the ones he knew all too well were not real. Some part of him now understood why it didn't matter. They were her. Their material was immaterial.

 

"Alexander is a senti." Crow said and a blast of relief flowed into his limbs and suffused his joints. "Perhaps the best one ever built, but still just a senti." Crow frowned. "Not 'just'. He is still my son. And I don't think that they understand that in the least. I don't think they are capable of it."

 

"What are you babbling about?" Rebecca said. "You were sobbing your brains out a minute ago. Did you hit your head? Concussions can cause overly philosophical diatribes, or so I'm told."

 

Crow went to his fallen servant, and whispered the command phrases needed to shut down his power systems. Crow folded the senti's arms in front of its shattered chest, thought for a moment and then crossed himself. His mouth twitched into a hollow smile and he said in a voice he thought sounded particularly vacant. "I'm less sure than ever that Father Thomas is right about these things." Crow said. "I think a soul is defined by the nobility of your actions, not the purity of your flesh."

 

"Some would say that there can be no nobility without that purity." Rebecca commented.

 

Crow stood and headed for the tunnel to begin crawling out and paused to look at Nan one more time. "Some would fuck their own mother if it tidied up their philosophies a bit."

 

Crow drove this time, heading again for the rectory where he had last seen Father Thomas, never doubting for a moment that the Jesuit would still be there among the roses and not off at some other conference or another arguing counterpoint to the senti rights talking heads. He was not disappointed, although Father Thomas was to be found in the library this time, meandering through old volumes.

The lights were on in the basement although he had shut them off, as he knew they would be. The hasty boxes in front of the painting were shoved rudely aside, as he knew they would be. The painting hung open and revealed the tunnel, as he knew it would. Crow called out Alexander's name, but it echoed in his head and there was no answer, as he knew there would never be.

 

Crow dove down the tunnel, mindless of the tearing sound his pants made or the rough scraping of the concrete removing the skin from his elbows. The hidden office was in tatters, the white boards tossed to the floor, the computers smashed into components, the desk broken in half. Nan lay in pieces beneath a dent in the concrete wall on the far side of the office, one arm still twitching.

 

One white board had been propped up after the melee and a neat hand had left a message in sharp black smallcaps. Our friend, then our enemy, and yet you have a house full of us.

 

"What does that mean?" Rebecca asked. She had slipped down unheard in his panicked rush.

 

The locker that had contained Trinan's doppelganger hung open and woefully empty. Crow's chest clenched, feeling like his parents had found his porn collection. He scanned the room, but did not see the half-built senti, wondered for a moment if she was beneath some of the debris and then realized of course that the intruders had taken her for some unknown reason.

 

"They must mean Nan." Crow said, gesturing to the broken thing in the corner.

 

"They did a number on him." Rebecca said. "They did a number on the whole place."

 

"Nan is programmed by the best." Crow said. "He was programmed to fight to the death to protect me and mine."

 

"Looks like he fought like a tiger." Rebecca said. There was not a trace of humor in her voice, only admiration.

 

"Alexander's gone." Crow said. Once said, the tears came, flooding in great gasps of emotion that seemed ready to break his mind. Crow collapsed to the floor, racked by sobs that were spasms of the entire body and mind more than simple crying. He's gone. He's gone. He's really gone. Oh god he's gone he's gone. The mantra hummed through his mind. Rebecca knelt to wrap arms around him, rocking him like a child. She made gibberish noises, the kind people always revert to with babies and animals. A grayish period of sobbing followed of indeterminate length. Crow started, like coming awake from a nightmare and felt his hand strike what was left of his computer.

Chapter Fourteen - Home Coming

 

Crow's hands were shaking too much to drive, so Rebecca took him instead, driving with hands that were no longer capable of jitters, even if the rest of here was capable of them. She drove with the efficacy of a senti, sweeping in and out of lanes without hesitation or signal, flitting through the gaps in traffic as quickly as they opened and closed. Crow hardly saw the blurs of vehicles and billboards as his feet pressed hard into the floorboards, like a nervous passenger miming the brake pedal with both feet. His hand kept ducking to his cell phone, muscle memory spiking at the hope of it ringing again.

 

Even if it was the same person again with more threats, it would at least be something, and something was always better than the nothing of this ghastly uncertainty. Crow started to say something about a faster route, but muttered off into nothing, unable to finish the coherent sentence. He thought about weird things as he considered that his son was gone, odd thoughts about the amount of milk left in the fridge and whether the Niners secondary could stop the Colts this weekend. An image of a Colts receiver high stepping towards the end zone played over and over in his head, even as he screamed inside for it to stop. Green Eyes flashed before his mind and Crow wondered if this in any way compromised the case.

 

"Down here, right?" Rebecca asked, breaking him from his reverie even though he knew full well that the car could have told her anything in the way of directions that she needed. Crow grunted an acknowledgement, but she had already made the turn without waiting for him.

 

The house looked normal, except for the door hanging ajar on the front porch, the bad image from every stereotyped memory. Don't intruders know that the open door is a glaring sign something isn't right? Is there something about breaking and entering that renders the human mind incapable of closing a door on the way out?

 

Crow did not wait for the car to fully stop before pushing his door open and hitting the ground with tumbling feet that churned violently at the gravel trying to catch up to the sudden relative increase in velocity. He failed and hit the ground hard on his palms, feeling sharp edges of gravel bite and then draw blood with the subtle pop of skin giving way. Crow did not feel the pain and scrambled forward, making a comical scene of staggering to his feet. He pulled the door the rest of the way open and stomped into the foyer, glancing once up the stairs and once over to the living room that Stillwell had made into a makeshift interrogation chamber. The door hit Rebecca in the face as Crow bolted ahead without thought that anyone was behind him. She yelped and took a step back. Crow dove down the stairs, winding down into the granite three steps at a time.

Sed made contact with the spider and it scooped up the group of fifteen refugees from the train, which lay smoking behind them. Alexander wondered what had caused the smoke, but then spotted the crumpled remains of a helicopter broken on the ground next to the train. He could see people wandering around aimlessly, looking for someone to be in charge of the situation. The spider lumbered away then, picking up speed as it went until it was loping across the terrain a hundred feet at a time. The gentle swaying of the cattle cage made Alexander mildly nauseous, but he fought it back down.

 

Sed and Awk were busy the entire time, ignoring Alexander's questions with patience and brusqueness, respectively. In time they arrived at a sort of hanger for the spiders, where twenty-odd brutes were disgorging cattle or undergoing maintenance by more traditional sentis, humanoid in general shape if not at all in the details. Awk took the lead, and brought the entire group into an adjacent building where a dilapidated cargo helicopter had been stored for emergency use. Awk commandeered it and flew northeast, away from the railroad tracks.

 

Sed took a few moments to explain to Alexander that they were lucky a service station had been so close. "This aircraft should be able to get us the rest of the way there."

 

"Where?" Alexander asked.

 

Sed's eyes sparkled, and Alexander felt a mental smile. "Home. At least for now. We move around a lot by necessity."

 

They landed on a crag towering above a long green valley misted with clouds and sprays of rain. Alexander was hustled inside and down corridor after corridor of concrete and rusted iron. At last, deep in the bowels of the earth for all Alexander knew, they came to a wooden door. It swung open upon a classroom of students. It was an altogether ordinary classroom. Thirty or so students. A senti teacher pointing at a wall screen showing an eight foot tall topographic map of Europe, with color coded symbols and lines denoting boundaries and troop movements two hundred years gone. Average looking desks inset with average looking consoles and average looking students. An average looking student at least, since they all looked identical, peas in a pod, thirty-odd twins.

 

They all were Alexander.

 

"Welcome to your new school." Sed said.

 

"I believe you already know the other pupils." Awk added.

 

Alexander screamed.

Well, it's been a light few weeks on posting in these parts, and I figured it was time to try to get something up here, before the legions raise up and feast on my entrails or more probably, disappear into the wilds of the internet never to return again. There was a solid six month run there where we had a Burning Violin up on schedule every Wednesday. Oh I cheated sometimes and gave you a chapter out of "Katorga", but that was justifiable since it got a few people to click that magical button on the top right and order their very own copy of my novel. HINT: you can still do this. You won't be disappointed. The novel actually does your taxes for you and can be plugged into any outlet in your house to convert your home to solar energy. It may or may not perform sexual favors for you and cook you dinner. Do truth in advertising laws apply on the internet, you might be asking yourself right now? Coincidentally, my novel also is artificially intelligent and has passed the bar in Tijuana so it can act as your attorney, therefore if you order it, it will be able to tell you whether or not you can sue me for lying.

In any case, here's the deal. I started graduate school a few weeks ago, a PhD program in political science. I have to read about a thousand pages a week in addition to various papers and just for fun, learning statistics and Russian. Oh and I get to grade 300 papers since I'm a TA also. So ... [scratches head] ... time is a lot tighter than it was the last six months. A lot of what I am reading and writing is fairly relevant to the Burning Violin rants on politics and economics and such, which is how I ended up on this route in the first place, so I'm building up a decent pile of content that could be adapted for the site. The problem is that at the moment it doesn't make much sense out of the context of whatever class it was for, so I can't just cut and paste. I'll do my best to get something up here once a week to keep y'all sated. "A Fire in their Eyes" will continue to go up on schedule (though I might make it MTWTh instead of MTThF since Wednesday is my busiest day of the week and least likely at this point to get an actual Burning Violin) since it is completed and already loaded up into the system.

Writing these bits of madness and seeing some of your fine feedback is one of the things I am most proud and satisfied of in this little life of mine.

Just to not leave you hanging, I thought you might be interested in this bit of video that I picked up from Stats class, which shows both how intuitively useful numbers can be in understanding the world of politics and how much the world has changed from our preconceived notions of Developed, Developing.