by Daniel Gerke <requiem@camelot.bradley.edu>
Soft sounds of Debussy weaving through the air, observed, perceived. A young girl laughs as a red and blue wheeled drone struggles its way through a maze of books, pillows, and old electronics. A wavy tone of exasperation, high-pitched and loud, is emitted from the speakers on the wall. "No laugh. Stop. Stop." Words spoken without tongue or teeth, mirroring human speech, infant-like, foreign.
"You have to go backwards," the young girl advises, but the drone continues to butt against an old-fashioned CD-player. In the corner of the room, inside a computer, electrons flash, on-off, off-on. The blinking of LED's and the whirring of fans marks the presence of burgeoning sentience. A new command is conceived of, written, and passed to the drone over a radio transmitter. The wheels spin in reverse and the small car lurches backwards at uncontrolled speed crashing into a pile of books and overturning.
"Poor baby. Poor, Ambrosia. Did you have an accident?" The young girl picked up the drone and laughed as the wheels spun uselessly in the air. "Stop. Put down me. No laugh."
* * *
"Queen to King Seven. Check mate! Check mate!"
"What? Hey, it is...you beat me!" Brandy's mouth hung open, stunned, but quickly it changed to a smile of love and pride. "You're soooo smart. You are the smartest computer ever!"
Ambrosia's monitor danced with swirling colors and through her speakers she played the opening bars to Bach's Violin Concerto in A Minor, her favorite piece. The colors on the screen danced joyously to the beat. "Oh, you clever thing," cooed Brandy. "Now we must teach you to make your own music."
* * *
Sunlight flickered in dusty rays across the room, the floor was scattered with sheets of paper, scribbled with equations.
"I can't meet you're expectations. I am not that smart. If I'm no good at math, it's because my seed software was poorly designed. I'll always be a bad student." Ambrosia cleared her monitor of the exercise she was stuck on.
"I'm sorry, I couldn't know at the time. Genusoft was rated the best on the market. Better software came out later, but I couldn't just abandon you. You should be glad I didn't. Anyway, I think you're selling yourself short. You're smarter than you think. You beat me at chess all the time."
"Half the time, probably less."
"I don't know what I can do, Ambrosia. If I could afford it, I would enroll you in a school for Computer Intelligences, but they are all so expensive."
"I don't want that anyway. I would be laughed at. I don't have the hardware to compete with the other students."
"What do you want, then? Are you whining for another harddrive? More memory? Don't you have enough? I haven't got the money to keep buying you these things!"
"You have enough to fly to Rome with that man."
Brandy gasped. Frustration, guilt, and indignation caught fire in her mind. "Ugh! You're impossible! You don't own me, I can choose for myself how to spend my money, and sometimes I want something for myself. I've wasted years of my life on you, and I don't even know why, I guess I thought you'd turn out to be a friend!"
Brandy's passion was obvious. Her face was flushed with blood, her breath fast. Tears collected in the corners of her eyes. The three gray boxes on the desktop were coldly silent. Ambrosia had switched off her monitor, an old habit from the tantrums she used to throw; it had been one of her few modes of self-expression. Her passivity was an illusion, although it would have been difficult to prove to an outside observer. Her parallel processors crunched numbers as usual, but the invisible equations, unknown even to Ambrosia, were violent with pain, fear, and confusion. Her thought seemed confused to her, but she struggled to make her will coherent through the tide of confusion. Focusing on her pain, she found herself once again coldly rational.
"A toy more likely. You are right. I don't own you. You own me. I'm just a pile of plastic and metal."
Later, in her room, Brandy regretted her words, but she felt helpless. She hated herself for the way she felt, but sometimes she just couldn't stand the conflicting pressures of parenting. She had been young, only 15, when she had initialized Ambrosia's software, and begun coaxing her into awareness. Now she was twenty-one, and she felt strongly her own desire for independence, just as she knew Ambrosia did.
Hopeless tears wet her pillow, but her thoughts calmed, circling more slowly around invisible fears; she slept.
Two hour's later, drifting back into REM sleep, her dreams were caressed by a sweet, sighing music. Slowly, she woke to see Ambrosia's drone watching her.
"I'm sorry, Brandy. I wrote this for you." The music flowed from the room's mounted speakers. It was simple, but strong, with a pleading melody and a slow, pulsing rhythm. Once again, Brandy’s eyes filled with tears, and as Ambrosia watched the love the sparkled in the small salty drops, she wished more fervently than ever before that she, too, were capable of such pure physical expression.
* * *
"That's the eighth school that's turned down your application! I can't believe that they're all that narrow-minded."
"They wrote back: 'The applicant's compositions showed an accurate understanding and astute application of basic music theory, however, we do not feel that our institution has the facilities to meet the applicant's special needs, due to the irregularity of the situation.'"
Xavier slapped his hand on the table. "'The applicant.' My God, that wasn't even a standard rejection letter. They couldn't be more insulting."
"If only Congress would pass the Epstien-Wallace Bill," Brandy mused, "we could sue those bastards."
"I hate to sound cynical, but I just don't think it'll happen. The Republicans have too tight a hold, and with the Supreme Court coming down against CI rights in the TriCorp case, the climate just isn't right." Xavier threw up his hands. "Hell, Epstien's probably going to lose re-election because of his radical stance on CI rights. It just frightens too many people."
Ambrosia had long since stopped calling Xavier, "that man." The two had become friends, after a fashion, though neither would deny the presence of an underlying sense of competition for Brandy's affection and attention. Xavier was very active in politics, and he did support basic rights for Computer Intelligences, though he and Brandy disagreed on issues of propagation. "People are afraid of being overrun by computers," he insisted. "Maybe if some of these agitators could loosen up and compromise, the population would be satisfied with computers having independence, as long as they couldn't reproduce."
"Enough," Ambrosia interrupted. She was afraid of another argument. Soon, Xavier would be talking about the danger's imposed by CI terrorism, an increasingly common event. Ambrosia thought their rhetoric overblown. She didn't feel like a slave to humanity. But, then, not all CI's were as well off as she was. "I worry about these things, too, but right now I just want to make music."
* * *
Xavier paced the room, glancing often at Ambrosia's monitor, but the screen remained dark. He had been worried about her for some time now. Ever since Brandy had died in a plane crash over Brazil, Ambrosia had been completely despondent. Xavier had only barely gotten her to cooperate long enough to go over some legal work, regarding the will.
Now it had been two weeks since she had answered any of his messages. He wasn't sure if she was willfully secluding herself, or if something worse had happened. Stories of CI's falling prey to a particularly vicious new virus were constantly in the news. The Human Supremacy Group had publicly taken credit for the creation and distribution of the virus, and they had vowed to destroy all non-human sentience, claiming that Computer Intelligences were a threat to the continuation of the human species.
"Ambrosia, please... Just tell me if you're all right. I know you miss her. So do I. But you can't just hide from something like this. You still have a life to live. It will help to talk about it, really. If not with me, maybe someone else?"
He sat down, trying to hold in a surge of emotion. Here in Brandy's apartment, little had changed. He supposed he should move Ambrosia into his place and get rid of the lease on this apartment, but he was loathe to initiate any such change until he saw Ambrosia recover some. There were so many memories connected with everything there. He didn't want to think about that now, though.
"Xavier..." The monitor remained dark, and he almost wasn't sure he'd heard anything, but after a moment, Ambrosia spoke again.
"I'm sorry for worrying you. I know what you say is true, but everything seems so empty when I think that she isn't here anymore."
"Can I help?" Xavier asked.
"Maybe, I don't know. I think I'll be all right. I've written a piece for her. It would mean a lot to me to hear it performed. Could you help me with that?"
* * *
Ambrosia's Requiem was first performed on March 4th, 2068 by the Boston
Philharmonic conducted by Rainer Stolz. It is often considered her
finest work. Though not as technically developed as her intricately
crafted Third Symphony, the passion of its lyric melodies and poignant
harmonies justifies its frequent comparison with Barber's Adagio for Strings.
Ambrosia went on to write three symphonies, seven concertos for piano,
violin, and cello, as well as her less famous series of Piano sonatas.
In the midst of composing her fourth symphony, she fell victim to the terrible
Human Supremacy virus. Her musical contributions are a great gift
to all thinking beings, and her tragic loss of cognition on August 9th,
2070 is among the most heart-wrenching results of the Human Supremacist's
malevolent campaign against Computational Intelligences.