______________________________________________________________________________
Certificate of Arrest Charges: Conspiracy to Murder
Name: Lyra Stoan SS #463-89-8731
Suspect Pleads: Guilty Suspect #30523H
Date: 05.20.3010 Time of trial: 08,30
Official Government Judge's Signature: D. Law ______________________________________________________________________________
The Suit cleared his automatic throat, and the sound, as always, came only as amplified vibrations to Lyra's temples. The courtroom was otherwise empty, so any vibrations reverberated and tickled. She idly scratched at the skin surrounding her vibe amp implants as she and the Suit stared at one another. His otherwise expressionless face glowed a nervous, gooey pink. Maybe he thought he was in danger by being in the courtroom with her. Lyra studied him across the black plastic desk, resting her head on her molded chair's thin skull cushion. She had never seen an authentic Government Suit in person before, but she couldn't sate her curiosity with questions of her own at the moment. If she failed to act in accordance with the Law, even by speaking out of turn, she would probably be given some unknown amount of some unknown fuchsia fluid through the needle stuck in the numbed skin of her right palm. Lyra did not speak.
Begin at the beginning, please, ma'am, buzzed the Suit.
Instead of looking at the former human's plastic face, she looked down at the contraption holding the needle and wondered if a human mind decided whether to press the button that would inject the fluid or if it was decided by computer. She mumbled a distracted response. Her own familiar vibrations filled her head. "M'guilty. Don't see what this is supposed to prove."
I wish you wouldn't make this any harder than it has to be, Miss Stoan.
She looked up at him and wondered when he had first lost his humanity to become the Government's efficient Law-keeping machine man. His phrasing was casual, but it wasn't modern. He pronounced his I's, which was so far behind the times that soon it would be grammatically incorrect. He had probably been a Suit for longer than she had been alive. "Could tell you any beginning you like. Could even lie, but untruths won't do for me at the moment, so why bother? Christ on a crutch, what do you want me to say? That m'always been some sort of criminal? Hardly. M'like an effing girl scout. You can be more specific than that."
When did you first know about your talent? The tips of the Suit's ears had begun to lose the pink tone, and his face slowly drained to white like designer bath water that was clogging the tub with its dye. It was comical in a disturbing sort of way.
Lyra ignored the question, and looked down at the needle. The fluid had been injected, but she didn't feel any ill effects. It couldn't be something meant to cause her pain. She only began to feel slightly lightheaded. Truth serum, Lyra realized, and she nodded at the logic of the thought. Her own vocal cords' vibrations began to come, distorted, to her temples. Her tongue felt thick and rubbery. She was speaking, unaware of her own words. The room listened, listed, and turned gray.____
It was 7day, known long ago as Sunday. Lyra Stoan had just reached 23 years of age, and Darian decided to take her to feel a symphony. Darian was tall, kind, and had the title of "M.D." tacked on the end of his name. For some reason, he was in love with Lyra, who preferred her cat to human companionship. He was also unforgivably perfect. If she had been any other girl, she'd have been swept off her feet several months earlier. Darian said and did everything right. He was smooth, cool, complimentary, and never pressed her beyond her boundaries.
The problem that Lyra faced, concerning Darian, was his perfection. He understood that she was Hearing Incapable. He would murmur to her, during the quiet dark of courting hours, that the vibration-amplification implants in her temples didn't disturb him. He even kissed them sometimes, hummed into them, and it made her tingle all over. Even so, she gave him neither her heart nor her hand. He claimed to understand her reasons, but he could not.
Some people considered Lyra something less than human, not because of her incapability, but because of the way it had been fixed. Corrective surgery had been around for hundreds of years. Instead of paying for the operation, however, her single mother (now deceased) had the vibe amp implanted in Lyra when she was one year old as a cheaper alternative. Even this would not have been a problem but for the fact that Lyra, though now a successful coding instructor for grades 4-7, had still never gotten the operation. She was considered inhuman because, despite the incredible technological advances that had been made in the past thousand years, she had not chosen to be as close to perfect as everyone else. For this same reason, she considered herself one of the only humans left.
Darian was as physically perfect as everyone else. He could never be different. He could never quite understand. Somehow, Lyra doubted he would want to even if he could.
The night of her 23rd, Darian and Lyra dressed in their most expensive white evening attire (she wore a pure cotton gown, while he wore a suit of silk and chiffon). They headed three minutes across town by the superway, and took their place in very nice and very costly box seats. After a bit of trite conversation and discussion of how much more atmospheric the classical concert hall was compared to the more modern X-MIA, the lights dimmed and the symphony began.
At once, the audience was enthralled. Lyra watched Darian's eyes go glassy and dazed, and his lips were rounded as if he were a babe cooing to its mother. This was no piece by Bach or Brahms or Lizst. Such a classic would not make the woman in the row behind them weep openly, or the man sitting in the center of the hall stand up and sway, smiling placidly. Lyra looked down at her program. No wonder. This was the Musicology Symphony Orchestra. The first number was a 2793 original called Booze Rhapsody No. 2 by a man whose nom de plume was Franz L. Schnapps. It was one of the first successful songs labeled by the press as "participatory sound."
Lyra leaned back and wondered, as she always did, what the hearing-capable audience members were feeling. All she could get out of the concert were amplified vibrations that pleasantly caressed her temples and danced along her skin. Yet she honestly didn't mind. The show associated with these concerts was well worth it. She watched the semiconductor, like a team captain, replace members of the orchestra according to whose tolerance was lowest. Every now and again, the vibrations would fall out of pitch due to a besotted clarinetist or violinist who'd stop playing correctly and start to faintly giggle. Even the orchestra's conductor was not immune. It was the semiconductor's job to switch them as quickly as possible with a member from the pool of backup musicians, each wearing a set of headphones that constantly played sobriety music. If the backup proceeded to become too drunk to play, they were switched once more. After a while, just by watching the proceedings, Lyra was laughing as hard as the most inebriated third-row listener. Darian was content to stare at her partially exposed breasts with beer goggles. Granted, "beer goggles" was a misnomer. "Sound goggles" would have been more appropriate.
The first movement ended, and the entire orchestra stopped to listen to sobriety headphones. A few of the audience members clapped, but most yelled expletives, "woo," or "you suck!" Finally, the orchestra was pulled together and began to play the second piece, a more recent meditative composition labeled "Clay Waltz" by Karma Frost. The audience calmed and begin to think. Darian stopped staring at her bosom. Though the vibrations were soothing, they did not incite her to think. They only inspired her; she began the process herself, and used her own mind instead of melody and harmony and baseline to reflect on the situation.____
Not even the historians were sure precisely when the change began. The most popular theory that Lyra knew of dealt with an event in the year 1999, a full millennium ago when people still had cancer and AIDS, when there were still different and specific races. No one back then had yet to deal with issues like CAS (Corpus Abhorrence Syndrome) and a 30% suicide rate among children under twelve. Not surprisingly, the event in question was a concert itself, of sorts. The concert was named after a small yellow cartoon bird named Woodstock. A band called "Soggy Muffin" or "Floppy Bagel" or some such was playing a violent song for an audience which was mostly under the influence of burned leaves, and the violence of the song seemed to strike a chord within certain audience members. A small riot ensued.
A few hundred years later, an Internet-schooled history major and music minor named Yssubed Edulac came upon this incident while researching bands made famous by using expletives. Edulac realized that the music industry was becoming larger and larger, as if an invisible hand were leading consumers to purchase ZDs for a reason other than the pleasure of listening to music. At first, he assumed it was a government conspiracy like the Watercress scandal of 2123, but then he slowly developed a theory that, perhaps, music was beginning to effect people more than it ever had in the past. He turned this theory into his teacher, who promptly declared Edulac "off his bloody rocker." Defeated, Edulac took the research into his own hands. It took months, but he finally found every song behind press-worthy, music-related incidents. After picking these songs apart, Edulac went insane and bit the head off a dove.
Despite early cynicism, Edulac was discovered to be right. By the year 2550, a new branch of science called Musicology had been born and grown up. Specialized Musicologists found that, in fact, human beings were slowly evolving in a way that no one had ever thought possible. Instead of growing nine legs or three noses, human beings were now more affected by what they saw and heard than ever before, particularly by music. A well-crafted song could, in fact, cause the listener's mind to alter in such a subtle way that said listener would actually feel what the music meant without thinking about what he or she was listening to. Once the correct combinations of pitch and rhythm were formed and played in a very specific way, nearly any emotion (with a bit of experimentation on the part of the composer) could be elicited. Very little music previously written contained the correct combinations or pitch, however, so special synthesizers were developed with the new "participatory sound" in mind.
After participatory sound (nicknamed P.S.) was finally perfected, its self-fulfilling prophecy of an industry overtook and soon dwarfed all other mediums of entertainment. Recreational drug music was legal and non-addictive, and caused the actual narcotic business to drop dramatically both locally and abroad. Soundtracks to movies were interwoven with P.S. as a way to cause horror, tears, or laughter at just the right moments. The background music to pornographic film was no longer "bow chick-a bow bow," but a carefully arranged P.S. that caused near-immediate orgasm. Recorded lullabies could put whole households to sleep.
The only problem with this incredible advancement was the creation of the P.S. compositions themselves. Though a song composed on a Musicological synthesizer could, in fact, cause any feeling, mental or physical, to be elicited through the ears of the audience, it had first to be composed. The composer, however, was more prone to his own song's effects because the notes could not be random, but had to be a chosen pattern based on the background dynamics of Musicology. Therefore, any composer of P.S. would be affected by the next note even before playing it. Before a laughing piece could be put together, for instance, the composer would begin to laugh so hard that he'd finally fall on the floor, unable to control himself. He would have to wait for the fit of laughter to pass before continuing. On the other side of the spectrum, depressed musicians who took it upon themselves to write music that would depress an audience essentially pushed themselves over the edge and killed themselves before the song could be completed. It took Karma Frost very little time to write his mesmerizing, thoughtful "Clay Waltz" since the music he was writing gave him a greater depth of concentration than he had ever experienced. It took Franz L. Schnapps years to write "Booze Rhapsody" because after two minutes of work, he'd either pass out or pound on the keys of the synthesizer without reason, giggling and hiccupping and having a marvelous time.____
Lyra sighed, and looked at her wristwatch. It was 20,48. The concert was nearly over, and really, she'd had enough. She wanted peace and quiet, wanted to turn off her vibe amps and sleep. She wanted to be alone, away from these children who let themselves be taken over by someone else's mind's creation. She wanted to feel her antisocial cat Hermes purr in his sleep and comfort her while he pretended with a cat's pride not to care.
Perhaps, Lyra reflected as the last few minutes dragged on, this participatory sound idea wasn't so bad. If she could pet a cat and feel safe and warm because of those natural vibrations, then there could be something to Musicology the hearing capable didn't realize. Or maybe she was fooling herself. Or maybe...
Lyra smiled and applauded the worn-out orchestra along with everyone else, thinking thoughts she considered silly but fun. There was a wad of credit burning a hole in her Fed account. After Darian brought her back home, she'd get online and order a synthesizer. It couldn't hurt. It would just be something fun with which to play.____
The sun was about to set when Lyra's doorbell rang the Friday after the concert. A beige-suited teenage delivery person stood outside, bathed in dying rose-colored light. He looked bored and fish-eyed through the peephole, easily holding a large package that looked too heavy for him. Lyra opened the door and smiled as she accepted the package. It proved to be just as heavy as it looked when she put it down just inside the door, leaning it against the wall. Hermes padded to the package, decided it wasn't edible, and left in his usual snit. Meanwhile, the delivery person watched her with slight trepidation and held out a sensory data pad.
Have to get your thumbprint, Ma'am, buzzed the boy. His vibrations seemed almost frightened, worried, or perhaps confused. Either there was something terribly unusual about buying a synthesizer, or she had something on her face. Lyra blinked, then realized that she was smiling at a complete stranger. The expression dropped, and immediately the boy seemed more at ease.
"M'thank you," said Lyra as she pressed her thumb to the data pad. She watched as the boy picked up a large sack of packages, likely three times his weight all told, to carry around the rest of the housing complex. "He must have augmented muscles," she murmured to herself, and went inside.
The synthesizer wasn't difficult to figure out. It took her an hour to do such routine assembly as fitting part A into slot B, then a few more hours to read the instructional data pad and actually understand what she was about to do. After taking a break to eat dinner, she sat before the synthesizer and contemplated what to do. It was only logical that Lyra would never have touched a musical instrument before, since she was a bit beyond Tonally Impaired. For a moment, she felt ridiculous and silly for even having bought the thing. What could she do really hope to with it? In frustration, she dropped her hand down and plunked a note.
The vibration sounded clear and easy against her temples. Curious as to how these "tones" worked, she pressed a note above it. A slightly different vibration. It wasn't sound, certainly but it was...something. It was interesting. It was hers.
Lyra's hands took over, and she began to play with the synthesizer as if it were a new toy, with the data pad in front of her for reference when she didn't understand what in the blue blazes she was doing. Here a chord, there an arpeggio. Her fingers seemed to know what they were doing, mastering trills and minor sevenths with ease. She lost track of time, and the red digital display flipped to 02,30. She was still playing, letting the synthesizer's built-in recorder keep track of her progress, when, quite unexpectedly, something peculiar happened.
Another vibration, distinct and particular, distracted her from the synthetic sounds she was producing. But this one touched her temples only faintly. Instead, Lyra felt this in her calves. She looked down. There, Hermes the Untouchable was purring and rubbing against her legs with a manner in which she'd never seen him to behave. She reached down, and he not only deigned to let her pet him, he pushed his head into her hand. He was...affectionate! Lyra was amazed. She saved the composition, and went to bed with a smirk, thinking of her "date" with the relentless Darian the next night. He was coming to dinner. Time, she thought, for a little experiment.____
Here, let me do it. You just sit there and stay beautiful, ma belle. Darian's wine-pouring skills were as annoyingly flawless as the rest of him. He did not spill, his hands did not shake, and the wine he brought always tasted crisp and refreshing and slightly tangy.
Lyra hated it when he showed off like that. Hermes had no such pretensions, and neither did she. As the date proceeded, she realized why she preferred her cat. She simply couldn't understand this...person. Perhaps his indulgence in participatory sound was nearly a fault, but then, everyone who could hear indulged equally, as if it were nutritious food and not music. Such a mini-fault did not help his perfection any. Lyra halfway wanted to call off the rest of the night, but she suffered through his company, as usual, with a placating smile. Then she remembered dessert.
"I've got something for you," she said, and stood up to fetch chocolate icecake and a home-recorded ZD from the kitchen. In two smooth movements, she'd placed the icecake on the dining table and popped the ZD into a player that hung on the wall. As soon as the music started, Darian stood and asked her to dance. A little surprised, but obliging, she stood and let him start to lead her about the room. That was yet one more count against him: he was an excellent dancer.
As they danced, she began to think that, perhaps, the music itself had only worked on Hermes. Maybe it hadn't even worked at all, and she'd somehow gotten catnip stuck on the bottom of her shoe that day. She was even about to tap Darian's back and tell him to sit down to eat the icecake, but as the chorus swelled, he pulled her tighter, nearly crushing her body to his.
Lyra's eyes widened. She tried to pull away, but he held her tight. When she looked at him, his eyes were glazed by fire, and he crushed her mouth to his before pulling away and panting, I love you, I love you, I love you. Marry me, Lyra. Please. He kissed her again before she could squirm away, but squirm she did. She raced over and hit stop on the music. Darian rushed at her for another embrace, and she cringed back--
But his steps slowed, stopped. He looked at her, his eyes wide and confused, the eyes of a little boy who's lost his way back to housing. Lyra...? he buzzed. What happened?
"Aphrodisiac P.S. Remind me never to play that recording again." She sat down at the table, took a moment to recover from her burst of uncharacteristic panic, and began to eat her icecake as Darian stood behind her, stunned.____
Composing became Lyra's new favorite hobby. She never told Darian about it, but then, she wouldn't have told anyone even if anyone else cared about her. Every evening after class, she came home and wrote. It not only passed the time, it was truly fun. Though she still couldn't enjoy the full effects, the rhythms became magical to her, and the effects on Hermes could be hilarious. He'd jump in the air, playful as a baby kitten, or else he'd lie at her feet and sleep. Sometimes, he'd sit looking forlornly out of their window, and then she'd stop and make sure he was all right before letting him out.
One day, what she was doing seemed to have no effect on Hermes at all. Just after lunch on Saturday, he was lying down a few feet from her, watching what she was doing. She swept her fingers over the plastic modeled keys of the synthesizer, then hit record, and began to play, letting the notes and rhythms come as naturally to her as if she'd been born for the job. Hermes did not move. It was nothing of merit, of course, since he was inclined to hold a statue-like position for hours, so she kept playing, wondering what sort of a piece exactly this was. After a while, though, it was getting boring, and just a bit...creepy, really. She didn't like what she was playing, whatever it was, really. After hitting stop, she turned on her stool and looked down at the lazy old cat. "Hermes, want to eat?" Hermes did not move. Lyra blinked, and clapped, trying to wake him up — but wait, his eyes were open. He couldn't be asleep. Maybe in a trance?
Lyra jumped down from her stool, sending it flying, only to give herself a good-sized bruise on the tailbone. Hermes did not move. She pet him, picked him up. He was limp, and did not move. He did not breathe. She put her temple to his stomach, but his heart was not beating. Lyra began to shake. She whispered his name, her throat feeling hoarse. Though she could only imagine it herself, at least he knew the sound of her voice...the sound of her voice. The sound of the synthesizer. It was her fault. All her fault. Still holding the limp cat, her left hand shaking, she stood on wobbly feet and looked down at the thing. All her fault. Her hand shook as she pet Hermes' eyes closed. Poor Hermes...poor little thing. All her fault. All her fault.
In a fit of frustration that was something like rage, she knocked it over, then walked backwards into a wall, confused and nearly hysterical. Hermes wasn't a very loving cat, but he was hers, and he kept her warm at night. He was as close to kin as she could have. And she'd written the piece that killed him.
After one last stroke to send him off to whatever the afterlife held for good and faithful animals, Lyra forced herself to wrap him up in plastic. Not knowing what else to do, since backyard burial had become illegal, she placed him in the garbage chute and let him disappear.
She returned to her front room, numbly, and sat on the couch to stare at the synthesizer. It held in its plastic and metal depths something deadly that she herself unknowingly created. Lyra shivered. If that recording got into the wrong hands, it could be one of the easiest weapons ever yielded. If even knowledge of it were brought to light, the Government would certainly be very happy. She could imagine the repercussions. No one before had ever written such a song because whoever tried would die himself. Yet she couldn't even hear her own work. It was so pathetic it was almost funny.
"Let them come," she thought. "Let them figure it out and find me somehow. It'll never happen. Even if it did, Hermes is already dead." She stood, righted the synthesizer, and stared at the button that would delete the deadly song.
Then she paused. Why couldn't she keep it for herself? If anyone ever came to bother her, she could simply press a button and they'd die. She could stay here, safe, with vibrations that never affected or bothered her keeping her safe. She'd have a wall of sound surrounding her as palpable as steel. She'd be holed up in a four-room housing area with no way to get groceries, killing anyone within hearing range, with no friends, no life, and no cat.
Lyra pressed the delete button and went to bed.____
The end was both simpler and sooner than she'd expected it to be. A woman in the housing next to hers had come home to an aviary full of dead birds, and screamed very loudly. Though she reported it to the local police, the Law became suspicious about the lack of breaking and entering. When agents of the Law found a Hearing Incapable woman with a Musicology synthesizer in her front room, suspicions became palpable enough for them to form a certificate of arrest based on conspiracy to murder. She was brought on trial, set down before a Government Judge, asked irrelevant questions, and given a truth serum. She began to speak, unaware of her own words. The room listened, listed, and turned gray.____
Mushy gray shadows faded from Lyra's vision, slowly became transparent, and revealed shapes that were real and fully resolved. The world became hard and contoured once more. Her testimony was apparently over. She flexed her left hand. The needle had been pulled out, but the skin and muscle was left sore. Her neck ached from the slumped position she'd been left in. When she looked up, the Suit's glass eyes were pinned on the wall behind her, his plastic face of the Suit was ever motionless as he processed the case in his secondary computer. Maybe he used to have a mind of his own.
Lyra leaned back, arms folded. "Well," she asked, "what's my verdict?"
The Suit looked up at her colored an annoyed sort of green. There are two options. The first is a plea bargain. You are to remain here, he vibrated, within a soundproof room. You are to rewrite this composition for us. If you do not agree, you will be put to death based on the charges brought against you by Ms. Terri Applesmith. I realize that these charges do not amount to the death penalty, but I'm sure you understand, Miss Stoan.
"I understand," said Lyra. She thought she saw the plastic mouth twitch with amusement.
______________________________________________________________________________
Certificate of Guilt
Name: Lyra Stoan SS #463-89-8731
Suspect Pleads: Guilty Suspect #30523H
Date: 05.20.3010 Time of death: 13,32
Physician'sSignature: Darian E. Faurlites, M.D. ______________________________________________________________________________