LF Friends, Will Travel

Our Clockwork Children: Chapter 7

Tumaini held the violin on her shoulder, fingers masterfully playing the stringed instrument, creating a soft mournful sound after years of practice and playing. She didn't notice her new audience as she continued the performance of the piece; a sad slow composition written over a hundred years before, a song for a different time when Terrans had reached the stars and found it empty: found themselves alone.

Ramsey stood still, transfixed by the sound, held in place by the music. The AI of course knew what music was, it was a mathematically simple concept, of sound waves representing harmonies and pleasing combinations that complimented each other; every culture had music. In the databanks back on the now destroyed Tritian warship, they had had plenty of digital instances of music.

But Ramsey had never heard it being played before. His creators had not given thought towards sharing their own musical creations with their AI children, and all other organics were in a state of conflict, not musical creation, during the Tritian's interactions with them. Somehow when the notes moved from the digital ones and zeros that represented the data to being played in person in such a flawed way... somehow that changed everything.

Flawed it was. Your average Terran would call Tumaini's playing masterful, but to an AI the mistakes were obvious and glaring: A note held too long here, a tone slightly off there, a movement played just a little too loud. Details that were only detectable by a digital intelligence, but details that existed nevertheless.

But somehow these flaws gave the piece... meaning, each mistake its own addition to the story being told through song, a story specific to this performance alone, never to be played or heard again. Like the shattering of a pane of glass, each shard suspended in an instant of destruction and creation, dancing in the light before collapsing in on itself, never to be seen again.

Ramsey had never felt or seen such a thing, and as the song finished the AI felt a disappointment that it was over. The moment having somehow both filled a part of his aimless soul and left an empty hole behind. Tumaini took a moment to fiddle with a screen, holding the instrument with one hand as she moved through her collection of sheet music, before seeming to notice her audience.

"Awww, you like my playing little Ramsey?" she asked with a small smile, jokingly referring to the cleaning droid that was sitting in the middle of her room, the smile turning to a frown as the Roomba seemed to... spin in response? The Terran shrugged and pushed any thoughts of suspicion away as she turned to the screen showing her next piece: A happier, more technical and upbeat composition written in the last twenty years.

With her new little robot audience listening, she continued to play.

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The room was alive, tendrils and vines made up every surface, flowers and leaves plastering every 'wall' and 'floor'. Queen Saelihn moved along the corridors, or rather the corridors moved her along, the barefooted figure being passed from leaf to leaf as she controlled the living tissues that surrounded her with a mere thought.

Describing a Uhae is an impossible task, as it's simply a monument in altered perceptions and various nouns. Elegant, godly, perfect. It was inconceivable to describe them in any other way, as those ideas would be implanted into the minds of anyone perceiving them. The Hatil see them as four armed representations of their old gods, cruel and magnificent. The Zorthians see them as aquatic mythical creatures, dressed in silver and gold. Terrans... Terrans perceive them as perfect beings, dressed in white, bipedal elegant figures, like elves and gods of legends. They were all of these things and none of them at all.

Saelihn joined the war room, her three court advisors staring back at her as she entered. The ground itself rose up into a living chair at the Uhae's psychic command, as the queen used her mental connection to adjust the organic matter as she saw fit. Annoyance irradiated through her figure, as she placed herself upon the seat, not even the flowers and greenery of the palace did much to soothe her rage.