Yondering. Jack Dann
of emotion might not hurt the work’s chances for a grant (you never knew when a judge might be concealing a reactionary streak), it could mar the kind of austere beauty that was Henry’s musical ideal.
Henry was preparing the cell to be run through a young man’s DNA. Not that the boy would in any way be making any of the compositional decisions. His DNA was leased as a helix processor, a mute tool with no aesthetic input of its own. Henry had already finished the preliminary work, opened the connection to the distant DNA, and set up the necessary algorithms…though, if he was honest with himself, he seemed to be having an off-day. His numbers felt, somehow, “loose,” or as if his grip on them wasn’t as tight as it should have been. And then there was the fact that he had planned all along to transpose the key, lift it a step and a half from A-flat (as on the original 78 shellac) to B, because B in the German notation system was written “H”—a way of slipping himself into the musical process. But as he was preparing to upload the boxy cell into the DNA threshold buffer, inexplicably (because Henry always kept his decisions firm, his ideas tight and certain), he had begun hearing it lower, down a perfect fifth—Henry was quite fond of the word “perfect”—and, surprising himself, had instead specified that its processing would begin in the key of “E.”
* * * *
“Erin? Are you listening?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry,” I mumble, tearing my eyes away from the gliding charcoal box hanging in the upper corner of the common room.
* * * *
It had only been some two dozen years earlier that human DNA’s potential for doing computation had been discovered. Where electronic computer code still used the binary system and ran its information through circuitry, DNA computing represented information in terms of its own chemical units, manipulated and synthesized to perform calculations. For the first twenty years DNA computing had been done in small cultures in test tubes, but the more complex calculations had caused mutations in the DNA, which would throw off results in the same way a flawed chip would do. So, since ’16, taking advantage of the stable nature of cells at higher scales, biocomputations had been done within living bodies.
By way of the same convenient economic coercion that had for decades led the cash-strapped to enroll in medical trials—their bodies transformed into nets to catch any virulent side effects swimming deep in untried drugs—college students were now being paid to be living computers via wireless modems implanted as small rings that pierced their eyebrows. And just in time: it had been only a few months into ’16 when the oddly named virus “markers-off” had declared itself, had overnight swept through and crippled every electronic network big and small, sparing only standalones. Months of effort and virtual head scratching had yet to find a fix for “markers-off,” but it had been for the most part firewalled. Still, there remained the constant fear that electronic computing would never again be truly secure, and so DNA computing had soared in price, was now out of reach to nearly everyone. Henry supposed he should mourn all the music that would now go unwritten—but then he had a fat grant and a fine twelve-bar cell. Worrying was for the little people. That boy’s DNA was his for the next twenty-four hours.
* * * *
I’m not the only one unnerved by the foreign object. The normally large, boisterous crowd of students has been reduced to five or six huddled in the corner. A new feeling of nervousness and paranoia has settled over the campus. It has the entire 41,000-member pupil and faculty population looking over their shoulders and hesitating at every task that requires they log onto their machines.
“Don’t tell me you’re falling for their scare tactics,” Zack snorts, lying back on the sofa with his hands folded back into his wild mop of black hair. He lifts up his feet and slams them down onto the coffee table, as if emphasizing his reclined attitude.
“It doesn’t bother you that we’re currently residing in a slightly more comfortable version of the Panopticon?” I raise an eyebrow, mimicking his position.
* * * *
“Bulldoze Blues?” Someone had been asleep at the switch in Chicago, back in 1928. The word was nowhere in the lyrics. What Henry Thomas 1928 had sung (and why had no one but Henry Thomas 2018 ever marked this?) was, “I’m going where I won’t get the buh-lu–uu-ues.” Apparently, the record company had misunderstood Henry Thomas 1928’s melisma through his black country accent. The only other possibility was that the word had simply come to Thomas himself when he had been asked the name of the song. Could be. Words sometimes came to musicians from nowhere, Henry knew. Just then, for example, the word “panopticon” had risen to the surface, glinted a moment, then sank again. He imagined a “panaudiocon”—a central station to broadcast his music to a captive audience, while not letting anyone ever see him. What composer wouldn’t want that? Stachel sometimes quoted Bentham; maybe that’s what had brought the word to mind. What was it Bentham had said about music? Something sentimental, no doubt. Stachel had no intellectual rigor, he was marked by sentimentality. Where Henry had few musical heroes (late, bracingly cold Reich above all), Stachel listened again and again to “Constantinople” by Christos Hatzis, to works by Sungji Hong, to Heather Schmidt’s “Twelve for Ten”—women and Canadians, for God’s sake! What Bentham had said was something about the music of the theatre being no more musical than that of the office—but the first softens the heart, while the second hardens it.
* * * *
“Why should I care? I didn’t do anything.” As I measure the volume and tone of irritation in his voice, I can’t help but wonder how much of it is simply a show for the cameras.
* * * *
This would be Henry’s first composition realized by way of biomolecular computing, and he was impatient to see how well it would work, to see if it would at last give his music the sheen of lathed perfection that he sought. Electronic computing always seemed to leave a few burrs on the harmonies, a few too-human smudges on the most intricate counterpoint lines. Any minute now he would feed the cell of the quills of Henry Thomas 1928 into the body of the distant young man—Brandon-something; Henry didn’t much care about the processor’s name—and the file that would return would be what Henry’s algorithms skillfully called for: a fugue with all the standard variations: the quill theme inverted, presented retrograde, crab-canon-wise, put through diminution, augmentation, counterpoint—everything Bach had labored over, scratching away with his Federkiel at his desk in the parish house, achieved through some inconsequential boy’s molecules Henry had leased for the day. That was wasteful, yes, but the greedy agency flatly refused to book DNA by the minute.
Henry smiled at the mismatch of time scales: whereas the tens of thousands of bits of musical algorithms and information would ripple through the clueless boy’s DNA and return again almost instantaneously, the source for the quills’ cell had been recorded in June of 1928. As the deadline for his composition was June, the cell was being carried over a nice, even, ninety year-arc. Henry liked the clean neatness of that.
The algorithms Henry wrote, the program that would be hosted by the hired DNA, might even machine away the quills’ cringe-inducing exuberance. He expected that every note, every variation, every modulation would come out faster, cleaner, and purer, more clockwork than Bach himself. And his opinion was that those who traveled to the Thomaskirche in Leipzig to access the closely-guarded shunt that spiraled down through the earth to Bach’s own DNA pool (rumor had it that the pool, sealed in its rectangular wooden box like wine in a cask, was a full inch and a half deep!) did it simply as a show for the cameras that would capture them there.
It was an open, and some thought an ugly, secret among composers that all DNA wasn’t the same. We were all equally human, the public line ran, so our DNA is everywhere equal. But the agencies, using a system of erasable Xs penciled in at the top of the contract, discretely rated the intelligence of the bodies for lease. The best, so the composers’ pipeline had it, was a comfortably bland “7” (an I.Q. of 111 read as binary code). Higher ratings sometimes produced brilliance, but they had also precipitated mental breakdowns in some composers; they somehow stepped out of themselves and never found their way back. This Brandon-something was a 112; nothing to worry about.
* * * *