Darcy had finally gone home, as had Damon Eddington. At last Michael Brangwen had the apiary and sound lab all to himself, and he intended to make full use of it. He’d been waiting for this quiet time all day, and now he dug into the crumpled paper bag that had contained his supper—two microwavable mini-cans of pseudo-beef stew and a bag of trendy blue potato chips—and pulled out the last thing inside. As Michael held the syndisc up to the console’s light and squinted at the fine print on the label, the technology that made it possible for something so small to hold such wonderful melodies stunned him, as it always did. His field was bioengineering—complicated, vast, life. For others to take inert materials like metal, plastics, and ceramic and turn it into music… that, to Michael, was sublime creation. Bioengineering? Bah; they worked with the materials that were already there, already alive, changing, replicating, healing. It was as though science had the supreme copy machine, complete with-touchpads for quantity, size, color, and alterations. Geneticists had yet to discover the secret of bringing life to lifeless flesh, but Synsound… the company brought the breath of music to inanimate and inorganic materials every day.
So much to learn, to memorize, Michael reflected as he carried his new syndisc to the testing console. He could barely keep track of all the steps needed just to have a minimum sound demonstration—anything more was Damon’s field. Knowing that Damon might have started setting up his recording preferences, Michael couldn’t risk fiddling around with too much. He could have taken the syndisc home—he’d actually created a fine setup that wasn’t too complex—but this seemed a more appropriate place for the music he was about to hear. The syndisc was used and quite rare, and Michael swore to his soul that the store clerk, a gum-chewing teenager with a half-buzzed haircut who couldn’t find his own zipper much less a laser tag replacement for the missing sticker on the case, had really screwed up by shrugging and saying carelessly, “Five credits.”
Michael turned the plasticized case over reverently and scanned the list of titles on the back. The syndisc was a rerecording of a 1989 CD titled “Chiller,” performed by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and some of the individual titles were familiar—“March to the Scaffold” from Symphonie fantastique, “Pandemonium” from The Damnation of Faust, the Overture to The Phantom of the Opera—all fitting selections to prepare him for the work ahead with Damon Eddington. Others, like “Three Selections from Psycho” and “The Light from Poltergeist” eluded Michael, despite his intense interest in music and extensive collection of syndiscs. After a few moments of study, he slipped the syndisc from the case and placed it on the player. A quiet whirring sound and a press of the ENTER key was all it took to start the computerized sound commands.
The booklet accompanying the syndisc was missing, of course, and there was nothing to forewarn Michael about the forty-eight-second “Opening Sequence.” Escalated high enough in volume to vibrate his teeth, the piece turned out to be a storm re-creation containing peals of thunder and cracks of lightning realistic enough to make his heart hammer. Hands still shaking from the shock, Michael grinned and found the volume control, dialing it down to something more reasonable before a security guard or some other mope came running. Wow! he thought. Now this was music—strong, cell-shaking sound. Still smiling, he sat back on one of the chairs, folded his hands behind his head, and let himself be swept away.
* * *
The “Chiller” syndisc was over in slightly under an hour— long by today’s standards, but nowhere near enough to satisfy Michael. Still, he pulled the syndisc out and put it carefully back in its case, then neatened up his work area and cast a last glance around the apiary. He had to go; if he didn’t cardkey out pretty soon, someone in Human Resources would look at his time log at the end of the week and start screaming about unaccounted for overtime. Obviously he wouldn’t put in a requisition for the time he’d just spent using the company’s equipment to listen to his music, and frankly, Michael didn’t care about getting paid for the overtime he put in on this project anyway. He was elated to have the job, thankful that his employment was going to last another few weeks or a month, or maybe more. And after that…
Michael pulled his coat out of the closet and shrugged it on, feeling suddenly very old. How much longer before he got that cheerful gold notice tucked into the envelope with his pay slip—We’re happy to announce your retirement! He was already six months past the corporation retirement elective age enacted by Congress in year 2113, and the only reason he was still in Synsound’s employment was because no one else had stepped forward and offered to work with the difficult Damon Eddington and the alien. Sure, the offer hadn’t been corporate-wide, but enough people had known of its availability that the company finally made it known to someone like Michael… who felt he didn’t dare refuse. Face it, old man, he thought sourly. It’s almost time to cut you out of the herd. You can barely keep up.
Michael sighed aloud and began making his way out of the building. Hearing his own plaintive sound made him alternately lonely and angry at himself—what good would it do to indulge in self-pity? People who did were perpetually angry, mean-spirited, and hated everything around them—Damon Eddington was a prime example. Speaking of Eddington, both he and Michael had seen the way Darcy ogled the hall’s construction and size. Eddington might not appreciate her awe, but Michael could understand perfectly the way she felt—sometimes he was still amazed at it, too. He just hid it better, thinking it would look silly for someone his age to gape like a child at the building’s architecture.
So many changes to keep up with in everyday life, much less in the field of bioengineering. Christ, sometimes the information seemed to fluctuate by the hour, like the hypermutant viruses it was rumored MedTech played with all the time. Everything moved too fast for Michael— viruses mutating, genetic engineering exploding into new realms, space exploration, and now alien experimentation— new information always popping up and needing to be memorized. The human race’s voracious appetite for knowledge would never be satisfied; as a young man, he would have thought that was a good thing. Now he wasn’t so sure.
So here Michael was, facing the end of his career with no particular specialty—bioengineers weren’t really all that rare—or body of work to leave behind except an apartment filled with thousands of syndiscs and a hodgepodge of sound equipment strung together with old-fashioned electrical tape and blind luck—and don’t forget the well-thumbed and expensive bioscience textbooks that were out-of-date almost as quickly as they saw print. No wife or girlfriend, no family. If he died today, not a single person would know or remember that he had possessed an insatiable appetite for all kinds of music—hellrock, classical, alternative, even the twangy country that was slowly dying out—everything. Again, he hated to let self-pity get to him, but Jesus! Sometimes he couldn’t help it.
And tomorrow would bring another day of the Eddington project. Exciting, different… terrifying. The thought of nurturing and raising an alien hatchling scared the hell out of Michael, but what choice did he have? He couldn’t refuse the assignment, or Synsound was sure to force him into retirement; the company—Keene—did not tolerate employees who bucked orders. A future with no job terrified him far more than the Eddington dilemma, which itself had implications reaching much further than the stolen egg and illegal hatchling. Retirement would mean a total upheaval of life as he lived it: he was already crammed into a small apartment, but he would have to move into one of those tiny retirement complexes on the far West Side, full of cockroaches and nosy, doddering neighbors who had nothing more to do than meddle in everyone else’s business. What would they say when he blasted music from the Dead Visuals or Webster’s Family Dummies at two in the morning?
On the other hand was the Symphony of Hate project. Michael himself had provided the supposed justification for the next step. But to sacrifice a person, religious fanatic or not, so that a creature that was little more than a wild, enormous insect could live… could their actions ever be absolved?
And there was Damon Eddington, of course, with whom Michael couldn’t help but sympathize. Still young and inflamed, filled with self-pity or not, Michael saw Eddington as Synsound’s victim, a man driven to the edge of sanity by uncontrollable creative impulses and Synsound’s nasty policy of dangling its support always just out of reach. That was only the beginning, too, because in the younger man’s music Michael heard everything missing from so many of the pieces recorded today— brilliance, passion, fury—all those wonders denied. No wonder Eddington was a dark and tormented soul.
But… what would be unleashed if Synsound continued to coddle its eccentric pet artist?