NaNoWriMo Excerpt: Chapter Five (Pt 2)

It took a moment, but finally Ghazali’s site finally appeared on the screen. At first glance the site appeared to be completely innocuous. The page design was functional but extremely plain: there were no advanced features, fanciful graphics or interactive interface. Instead, all that was available was a single page that contained a few photos of Ahmed, half a dozen paragraphs describing his music and philosophical viewpoints, and at the bottom of the page a few links to sample music tracks. Isaac read the text on the screen, but it was nothing more than a rehash of the diatribe Ghazali had delivered in the street, including the silly catch phrases like, “Without a counterpoint, what’s the point?” Isaac rolled his eyes.

“Computer, is that all there is to the website?” Isaac asked.

“Sir, the remainder of the web code is malicious or prankish in nature. We’ve already sequestered over two hundred megabytes of hostile script files, and the site has been continually bombarding the sandbox with intrusion attacks since the moment we made contact. Would you like me to display the malware code for you?”

“Thanks, but no. I'm sure I wouldn’t understand a word of it. Just tell me, are we still secure? Has any of the malicious software gotten around the sandbox security?”

“The system still appears to be secure. Of course, if this system had been compromised, it would likely be programmed to report that nothing untoward had actually occurred.”

“Yes, of course.” Clever, clever software, Isaac had to admit. “Emily is going to just love me when she gets home this evening and tell her what I’ve done to you. Well, it’s too late to go back now. Can we download the music files that Ghazali has linked?”

“Yes, but it will take a moment. They are heavily encrypted. A security scan will take some time.”

“That's fine. Just tell me when they've been successfully downloaded and scanned, okay?”

Isaac turned to walk away, but the computer chimed at him. “The files have been safely stored in your home music array, sir.”

“What?” Isaac blurted, confused. “I thought you said it would take some time?”

“It did, sir. Most compressed music files can be scanned by modern antimalware algorithms at a rate of several hundred gigabytes per second. The files posted on this particular site slowed the scanning rate to only a few hundred megabytes per second, a significant loss of speed. However, the downloaded files were only several hundred megabytes in overall size, so the scanning process, while inefficient, is now complete.”

“Oh, I see. So the download took some extra time, but only in bizarro computer world, eh?” Isaac asked, annoyed. He didn’t get a response. Sighing, he pointed at the screen and said, can I listen to the first file, please? There was a brief pause while his implants received the file from the home system. While he waited, Isaac could almost hear virtual rust falling off of the storage media on his Theme unit: downloading new music was an extremely rare act for him.

For the typical consumer, Theme provided music in any genre imaginable: rock & roll, hip-hop, country, folk, R&B, soul, etc. Most users listened to music from multiple genres, with one or two dominating the majority of their playlist. In addition to the varied genres, user preferences could control how often Theme would download new music for listening. Younger listeners tended to have a higher threshold for new music selections, while more mature listeners tended to stick with music they grew up with.

Isaac, however, was unlike most users. His taste in music was exclusively classical in nature. He rarely listened to anything new, and nowadays almost all of the music he listened to was his own compositions or variations thereof created for him by his accompaniment algorithm. The piece he was downloading now from Ghazali’s webpage was probably the first new piece of music he’d listened to in…years.

Once the download was complete, Isaac cued the first piece. He sat back down at the piano bench and opened up the lid to the keys. Then he commanded his implant to start playing Ghazali's introductory work.

While the music played, Isaac's eyes grew unfocused and distant. Every once in a while he would trace a few notes on the piano, echoing something he was listening to. His face was in a constant state of turmoil, smiling, frowning, arching one eyebrow. At one moment he snorted in disgust, at another a sharp bark of laughter. When the piece was finally over, Isaac sat very still, eyebrows knitted tightly across his brow, thinking.

He finally leaned back on the piano bench, stretched his arms over his head, and said, "Interesting." He tapped a few more keys on the piano. "Definitely interesting." Then, in a louder voice, "Computer, I'd like to perform an analysis of the piece I just listened to. Give me the staff notation, obviously, and overlay that with any embedded subliminal and drug tracks. Let's perform a melodic comparison analysis, as well. I'm almost positive that our friend Ghazali is borrowing his themes from someone else's work, but I can't quite place the source."

As requested, the computer populated the wallscreen with a scrabble of musical notation. Isaac got up and walked over to the wall, studying the information. He reached out and stroked his hand across a particular section, and the computer obliging played that part of the music for him. He nodded to himself, then moved on to other passages. He spent the next half hour poking, prodding, and analyzing the different musical sections of the piece.

“These sections here, are they reminiscent of a particular musical style or influence?”

The computer chimed. “Yes, the melodic signatures bear remarkable similarities to compositions of several musical groups from the mid 80s that were part of the dream pop and shoe-gazing movements.” Isaac wasn’t familiar with that style, but it didn’t really matter. What did matter is that Ghazali was plagiarizing most of his melodic content from earlier works. Just as he suspected.

Satisfied, Isaac next examined the Theme implant overlays. The subliminals were about what he expected: crass suggestions meant to badger a weak mind into certain emotional states. They relied on brute force rather than subtlety for their effectiveness. Shaking his head, Isaac dismissed them from the overlay.

The drug injection schedule on the screen was more puzzling. Isaac scowled as he studied the screen. "Computer, I don't understand some of these notations on the nervous system manipulation overlay. Why are some of these symbols highlighted in red?"

"Sir, your current medipatch configuration is unable to provide the appropriate inputs for those passages."

"Well, that’s not particularly surprising." Isaac had been composing music since he was eight years old. He embraced the drug culture wholeheartedly in his teenage years, but nowadays he kept his medipatch drug selections pretty tame. Some heart and blood pressure prescriptions for obvious reasons, plus a few very mild stimulants and sedatives. Nothing special. Not that he couldn’t have gotten his hands on more extreme drugs for his patch had he wished.

The drug war, at least in the United States, had been over for years now. The Feds had finally realized the futility of the exercise – and more importantly, the exorbitant expense – and had given up the effort. Only the most dangerous drugs were still criminalized. Everything else was regulated and heavily taxed. The result was that the selection of drugs available to an interested buyer was quite extensive, and the quality and safety of those drugs was greatly improved due to regulation and improved processing methods. In addition, the government collected a sizeable portion of the sales price of all the drugs that were sold, resulting in the first balanced national budget of the 21st century. It was a win-win for everyone involved, and it made a lot of people wonder why the decision to legalize drugs hadn’t happened a lot sooner.

Isaac held a liberal view towards drug use, but his compositions always stuck to conservative medipatch protocols. He wanted to make his music as accessible as possible to all Theme subscribers. It was constraint that Isaac viewed as a challenge: it forced his music to be that much more evocative on its own, without chemical enhancement.

Looking again at the screen, Isaac asked, “Are the drug inputs dangerous? Or illegal?”

“The prescribed patch would employ many homeopathic herbs and cutting-edge designer drugs that have been untested and unsanctioned by the FDA. While not technically illegal, their efficacy, as well as the possible dangerous side-effects they may cause, cannot be estimated with any great certainty.”

“Can you show me whatever research is currently available on said substances?”

The screen filled with pages of medical jargon. Isaac scanned through it, trying to get an idea of what type of effects Ghazali was trying to achieve with his unusual drug mix. Most of the substances in and of themselves didn’t seem all that special. Most of the herbal substances were just alternatives to traditional substances with subtle differences: they were more powerful, or longer-lasting, or had less linger aftereffects. Some of the designer drugs might be more interesting, but Isaac had his doubts. More than likely, Ghazali was just another hack composer with delusions of grandeur, just as Isaac had suspected.

“Computer, let me guess: All of Ghazali’s compositions follow the same pattern, don’t they? Quirky drug recipe, heavy-handed subliminals, and genre-stereotypical melody structure?”

There was a pause before the computer answered. Analyzing music was still, for a machine, a challenging task. Eventually it said, “Sir, one piece does not seem to fit your characterization.”

Isaac was honestly surprised. He expected Ghazali’s work to be one note. “Really? Can you show it to me?”

The computer displayed a series of charts on-screen. They in no way resembled a musical composition, or at least not one Isaac had ever seen before.

“What are you showing me?” he asked. “What is all of this on the screen?”

“Sir, the style of this piece is…unique. According to the file’s metadata, Ghazali describes it as a navigational composition. Traditional notation would fail to capture the composition’s structure, and without another template available, the only recourse was displaying the raw data.”

“Navigational composition?” Isaac raised an eyebrow. “What on Earth is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m quite sure I don’t know, sir.” The computer actually sounded miffed by its own response, causing Isaac to smirk.

“Well, that makes two of us, computer. Let’s see what we can do about changing that, shall we?”